 Good evening. Because of his wide-ranging interests, prolific writing habits, and skill at presenting his views to both academic and popular audiences, Amitai Etzioni was once labeled a one-man profession by a writer for Time Magazine. That appellation was given more than 20 years ago, and he has yet to temper that frantic pace or limit his scope of inquiry and analysis. Amitai Etzioni was born in pre-war Germany, and his memories of youth include, quote, being beaten up on the way home from kindergarten by a group of boys who found out I was Jewish. His family fled Germany in 1936 and settled in Palestine. At an age when contemporary Gustave students are busy earning their degree, Dr. Etzioni was a fighter in Israel's War of Independence, an experience which would become the basis for his first book, Diary of a Commando Soldier, published in 1952. After emigrating to the United States, he earned his doctorate in sociology from Berkeley in 1958, just 18 months after beginning the program. He is the author or editor of 19 books, including Winning Without War, The Hard Way to Peace, The Spirit of Community, Modern Organizations, War and Its Prevention, The Limits of Privacy, and The New Golden Rule, Community and Morality in a Democratic Society. I learned just two weeks ago that Princeton University Press will be publishing his 20th book, The Monochrome Society, in May 2001. Among his numerous appointments, Dr. Etzioni was professor of sociology at Columbia University for 20 years, an advisor to the White House, a visiting scholar at the Brookings Institution, a Ford Foundation professor at Harvard Business School, and in 1980 he was named the first university professor at George Washington University, a position which he currently holds. The communitarian movement of which Amitai Etzioni is the founding father, and some would say it's driving force, holds that a good society seeks a carefully crafted balance between individual rights and social responsibilities, between liberty and the common good. In the moral dimension Dr. Etzioni writes, the neoclassical paradigm is too simple. It does not include a pivotal distinction between the sense of pleasure derived from consumption of goods and services and the sense of affirmation attained when a person abides by his or her moral commitments. What are our individual and collective moral commitments in a supposed international community if indeed the pleasures of consumption serve as the fuel of globalization? How might we create, to borrow from the title of one of his books, a moral dimension which moves us toward a new economics? Dr. Etzioni has graciously agreed to take questions following his presentation this evening. Members of the Gustavus community, members of International Society, it is my pleasure to introduce to you Dr. Amitai Etzioni. Dr. Litz, thank you very much for a very, very generous introduction, and for a very educational ride from the airport. So I'm ahead in political theory quite a bit. I delighted to be back here a second time and to learn that after some fairly bad buffeting by nature, you did this fabulously building and it's really a joy to see you new and improved campus. But one thing I was told about that disaster impressed me more than any new building I've seen, and that is that you had classes up and running in a very short period of time after the hurricane hit. We too often don't realize the signals we are sending when we close schools at the first snowflake, not here, but in my part of the country. When any strike of janitors or any other difficulties led us to cancel classes. I think it's important to do what you're doing is to show, not just talk about the fact that you're taking education very seriously. I tip my hat to you on that. Now, when you do what I need to do tonight, share a presentation, share some ideas, many of you do that, you kind of face a choice basically. Either you're gonna talk about something which you have often talked about before, you may be slightly bored, but at least it's well-prepared and reasonably polished and you know where it's going. Or, which I'm gonna do tonight, try ahead of the new topic and you'll hear me hesitating, halting, getting stuck because I believe the question of globalism, what I'm gonna approach it, is at least for me a new topic. And there is one last reason, you'll hear me halting and hesitating. There's some very, very eminent, world-wide recognized economists right in front of me and the scared the daylight out of me. Now, with these introductions out of the way, I'm gonna put before you a very simple, elementary, challenging and difficult thesis. And that is, we need globalism, we need globalism badly of social, moral and political institutions. We should think about moral globalism right parallel to the phrase which is today so often associated with economic globalism. That's gonna be my thesis. Why we need it and how we may get there. Basically what happened, so too much of our history, that economic and technological forces which we unleashed, which we prepared, which we funded, which we studied, and let loose, overpowering us and we lost our ability to guide and direct them and line with our values through our political institutions. And the lag of our capacity to be on top, to guide rather than being overwhelmed is going ever more, falling ever more behind as these technological economic hurricanes become ever fiercer, ever more rapid in the way this world around us. That's all we're gonna be talking about tonight. Now, to get there, I need to go back for a moment. Now, I do not agree with Mark's that in the early days, before modernization, before industrialization, the people had this happy life. He had that image of the artisan who are unlike Adam Smith's person who does a one job, a piece of a job, somebody else does a piece and somebody else does a piece and everybody's more efficient but nobody gets to do the whole job and then somebody comes and pieces it together. Mark said this wonderful image of this Silver Smith or a shoemaker who does the whole thing from A to Z and in the minute they enjoy their work and finds meaning in their product. Well, there may have been some such people in the Middle Ages or late Middle Ages, but most of these people had a very short lifespan. Many of their children died young. They had no protection from disease. They were often exploited and were in plain English miserable. So now I'm not talking about going back to the happy artisan days or any one of those happy savage who saw kind of stories. But if you look what happened from that point on, is we first develop an enormous capacity to increase our muscles. Really, industrialization, if you put it all together comes down to the fact that we can lift objects heavier, we can hold them to the moon, that we can push around tons of steels, we can make giant reactors, we increased our muscle to leverage our power in that sense to completely unprecedented levels. And then more recently, so the development in communications and computers, we kind of also extended our nervous system when we cannot send signals, as we all know in seconds around the world. But what had kept no pace at all, as in nowhere paralleled, this enormous expansion in power and capacity is our capacity to decide which of these developments we find beneficial and we form deeply trouble ourselves. We are not asked, there's no opportunities and no occasions. I'll come back to this again and again, where we can come together and say, this is in line with our traditions, that's in line with our preferences. And this must stop, we don't have that capacity. So what is lagging if you wish to stay with the image? We have enormous muscles, we have enormous nerves, new nervous systems, but our heart remained lagging and weak. Now, what happened here? In part, well, you see, I promise you I'm gonna be halting. Let me illustrate this problem, so an area in which the developments already causing us considerable loss of control, but we're just at the very beginning of the curve, because what's gonna happen next, so to developments in biotechnology, make everything which preceded it from a moral and human challenge look like a preparation, like an introduction. Because we're gonna take now all the issues we could take for granted till now. What our children look like, what gender do they have, how do they relate to each other, and we're gonna all open that up again to some new technological developments. And we have to make decisions such as, are we going to allow a family to have an extra child in order to harvest the parts of their child for one of their six children? Are we going to allow people to clone each other in their attempts to transfer to future their own existence? Are we going to allow on gene shopping? Are we going to allow people to go to a store and order the profile of their children, blonde, whatever, blue-eyed, six foot 20, whatever. All these things which until recently were in the hands of nature are now gonna come up again to human decision, individual, and collective, and we do not have the instruments to make those decisions. There's no way in the end, and that's really my point. If you or I, all of us in this room, all of us in this country, or all of us in this world will say, this we don't want, we do not have the instruments to stop or direct or deflect any of these developments. Let me make this a little more concrete. Many months ago, I had three wonderful sons, wonderful sons. By the way, they're not born wonderful, but they became wonderful. In my wife and I wanted to have a girl, and so I went to the library that's, you know, relatively comfortable, and start reading up on all the literature of what you can do to have a girl. By the way, if you want to know the ultimate illustration of loss of control, I had two more sons since then. But I've written an article. I mean, you don't get the children who want to get an article about it. So I've written an article about what would happen if everyone in society could, as we're very close to be able to do now, it choose the gender of their child. And I found actually surprisingly strong data that at least in terms of the values which exist in those days, I mean, as back, there's gonna be a very significant surplus of boys. Now, some of my economist friends will say, don't worry about it, then the value of girls will rise, and then after a while, the equilibrium is going to reassert itself. But, you know, it takes 15 years before you notice that there's a shortage of girls. And then you grow them, and it creates at least a certain amount of upheaval. If you have, and if you wanna see an example, go to Alaska. And so the question concerned me and I saw I did an article published in Science which was called Sex, Science and Society. And because it had sex in the title, not gender, this was before we knew to call it gender, every newspaper in the world copied the article and reported my findings. And that resulted in me being invited to an international conference on bioethics. In 1970, of researchers who worked on new biological technologies. And they were talking about growing fetuses in the laboratories as part of the in vitro fertilization experiments and what they're gonna do with them. And when they turned out not to grow the very water, they would flush them down the sink, let's say. And then they talked about experiments they were doing on children were born without immunological defenses, Godfrey's host. And they start talking about cloning in those days. And I was just absolutely horrified. And I wrote a book called Genetic Fix in which I summarized what I learned in those days. But the thing which drove home to me, that's where that started staying with me. That there was no way on earth you could have stopped any of this. If our government will not allow, I would not talk about if that's the right or the wrong thing to do, maybe stem cell research is the perfect thing to do. Actually, I think it is. But it doesn't matter. That's what I want to say. It doesn't matter. If we would all say like one person, we don't want that. Then it would be done in Mexico or in Switzerland or, or, or. And if you say, well, these other countries don't have the kind of money, it's enough of one billionaire to fund it. And there are plenty of them today. And that research will be done somewhere. We do not have the mechanisms for stopping technological, social, economic forces that we find dangerous. And for the last time, that the threat is accelerating as more and more innovations, especially in the biology area are gonna come online and we haven't come to terms with the last ones. Until nuclear weapons came on the scene, we thought naively that science men progress. But we, nuclear weapons were the first to call our attention to the fact that science technology can cut both ways and we need to learn to come to term with dead action. And it cannot be done nationally. It cannot be done one country at a time. The only way we can come to terms is an extremely, let me be the first to say it, the extremely challenging proposition. If you would talk to me a few years back and said we need a world community, we need a world government, I would have thought, you know, one of the United Federalists, you know, I mean, well-meaning souls, but, but there is no choice. There's no alternative. There's no way to do this country by country. The capacity to develop, to promote is today all over the world. And if we don't do it in one place, we do it in another. And the only way we can ever get on top again, if we make this extremely difficult leap, start moving toward finding institutions which would be as encompassing as the threats are, as reaching as the technological and economic forces are, we need to deal with. Take up a discussion of flight of capital. I just came back from a party, the meeting of the Labor Party in Brighton in England. And they are struggling with the question of why do we tax labor one way and capital another way? Labor, we just hold taxes at the source as we do. And therefore, most people who have wages have no choice but to pay more or less the taxes due. Those who get their payments and interest in dividends, we do not just hold the source, we tried once and got our finger burned. And therefore, they're much more likely in the end not to pay what's due. Now, there's a whole wonderful theoretical debate if we should tax dividends and interest in the first place. That's for another day. But it's clear that from a social justice viewpoint, labor cares a burden with those who have what's called an iron income, do not. Well, you come to the Labor Party, you will not take them more than five minutes to convince them that why don't we do the same for dividends and interest? But I mean, we hold the source. You know why? It's a short sentence. They, banks can take their money and move to another country. You can tax labor because it's not mobile in the end. People won't not gonna dump their communities, their country because taxes have it's held the source. But the investment funds, they at the two second wire will disappear on you. And the flight of capital is just to mention it. And it's enough to close any conversation of trading capital the same way we treat labor. The only way that can happen, I think on that point, some people may think we shouldn't do it, but I don't think there's much disagreement on the point. If you're going to do that, the only way it can be done. If it's done, maybe not for every little country in the world, but OECD, Japan, United States and Europe at least would have to come together. I'm not interested in the specifics of should we or should we not tax capital or should we or should we not resolve. I'm trying one more time to illustrate the point. But if you're gonna try to do it country by country, we just not gonna get there. Now, there are those, and I suspect you heard some of them early in the conference, which I'm very sorry to have had to miss because I did go to another country. Who will argue that we should slow up high national barriers, high local barriers to prevent global forces from buffeting us, from churning us, from imposing their will on us? I don't think this is such a lunatic way of thinking. I think record shows that there's limits to some extent that can be done. It's not, the game is completely over that nations no longer have any leverage. Just to give one example of that course, so it's not the main one I'm going to recommend. During the last financial crisis, quite a few countries were very seriously damaged and the economies were put to kind of ringer Indonesia, Latin America and such. But Malaysia said very moment, they put up high tax on hot money and they said we're not gonna allow that to happen to us. And some of my colleagues in economics said, well, that's the end of Malaysia. Nobody's gonna ever invest again in Malaysia because they know that they may get locked in there. Those of you who follow that story know two things happened. First of all, Malaysia did much better than other countries. And second, when they finally lifted the tax, hot money flew in and I like that was not tomorrow. So I'm just trying to give this one example to say, I'm not saying because no nation or no group of individual nations can be the main carrier of what needs done that there's nothing can be done locally or nationally. But clearly, clearly from what I just said earlier, the forces of economy and technology are so huge, so strong that that is not the main basis on which we can get our values to control what we are doing and what's done to us. In the next level is that of building regional bodies. The most obvious one is that they attempt to create a European community. And the idea is when you take a large number of countries, especially countries which are affluent and developed and you bind them together and you create a larger body, the very created United States, then you get a more heavier player, somebody who can better stand up to these global forces. And I think to the extent that you can do that, indeed you get some additional leverage. So let me point you to a detail which will be very, very important for our followers. I'm said to say, and I said that the book called Political Unification 25 years ago, I don't see any reason to change my mind. The European community I'm said to say will fail. Precisely, precisely because it's trying to have economic unification without political unification. It again, it created a larger market but it's, and it beginning to create some true European institutions, a parliament and a kind of an executive and courts and such. And there is some attempt, but the speed, the pace is such that you get much more rapid economic integration than you get political integration and there's quite explicit resistance or in fact, growing resistance on the next level and you cannot stand between two steps. You cannot have half integration. That's the sad lesson here. I don't like it. I wish we could do with this partial arrangements but if you studied European community, there's a lesson for all of us. And unfortunately, if you are gonna create a kind of fabric of institutions, we can do the mission I think we need to give them. They cannot be done halfway. Here's the reason why. When you have joined economic policies across countries, these countries are in different state of development, different state of need. Spain and Portugal and Ireland and Finland are doing particularly well. Greece is not doing so well and so on and so on. Some have recessions, some have higher employment, some have overheating. If you're gonna have a joint policy, the way we have, we also have difference between the states but we have one policy for all 50 states on these things is because we have a commitment to our larger community as a nation and we in effect say, not on those in these words, that some of us are willing to suffer for another part of the country because we are one nation, because we are one family. And so we don't say, you know what? Mississippi has these problems but New York, let's do it for New York but not for Mississippi. We have one federal reserve system, one treasury, one taxation system on the federal level. In the European community, things called lovely as long as everybody benefits but the moment one of the countries is out of step is the others for one reason or another and it now needs in order to be treated cause significant pain to all the others. There is no that loyalty, there is no loyalty to Europe which is strong enough to say, I'm willing to put up as a fairly hefty cost pain in order to accommodate my sisters and brothers in the other countries. But the point more technically, unless loyalty and commitment and identity will be transferred from the, to in part from the nation state to these new larger regional bodies, they will not have the normative, the emotive, the political leverage they need to do what they need doing. I wanna be careful here. I'm not talking about wiping out the nation state. I'm not talking about replacing it with some kind of a global community. I wanna introduce here this one concept that sociologists make their living by making funny distinctions and I don't want to tax your patients, but I just need one. I wanna talk about layered loyalties. What we have in this country is we allow, we understand that people have more than one level of commitment. So I'm sure, I don't know, but I assume there's some commitment to St. Peter. Maybe some people have feeling about Minnesota, about the nation and that's about the way it is. So it's the fact that you are a good American, doesn't mean you have to be a bad Minnesota or disloyal to Minnesota. So we stagger, we split our loyalties. The most interesting example of this and very important to understand the American genius, something most countries have not learned yet to do is what we call the hyphenated Americans. We have what I think more precisely should be called not diversity, not pluralism, but pluralism is in unity. And since this is essential to all that follows, let me explain a little more what I mean by that. We tell our fellow Americans, it's perfectly fine for them to pray to whatever God they want to pray. We don't have a uniform church or a requirement. Let's say a Scandinavian used to have and Britain used to have. We allow people to be proud of the heritage they brought from their country of origin. We don't mind at all if they keep their music and their dancing and the cuisine from their mother country. But we want them to accept that these are subcultures within a larger community. And so if you go to one of those endless ethnic meetings, that's made up of Polish Americans, Italian Americans, or Swedish Americans. There are always two flags, one of the country of origin and one of the United States. And when they sing the songs, there has to be both of them. And if you ever go to one of these meetings, somebody will forget to bring the American flag. You're gonna get an earful, why? Because that symbolizes that, yes, we came from different places. We have different subloyalties, but it's hard, there are Chinese nestling boxes within a larger loyalty, which allows us to maintain a larger family while we recognize also our separateness. The debate we have sometimes is not about the basic concept that we have layered loyalties, that we have some commitments to smaller circles and some to larger. But the debate we have is on the boundary. What belongs in the larger box? What belongs into the diversity? So for instance, it's clear that the Bill of Rights applies to everybody. It's not for one community, it's not for Swedish Americans. It's right all Americans have, and no community and no subgroup can deny its members the right to free speech, the right to free assembly, so on and on the line. We do not treat the democratic system as an alternative. You like authoritarianism, you like tyranny, you like theocracy, some of us like democracy. That's not negotiable. Even the notion of mutual tolerance and respect is a core value we all share. And something we don't talk about enough, that we heard about it a lot in the last years, is we have what I think are correctly called a constitutional face. We believe firmly in the government of laws rather than of people. And when people try to put themselves above the law, they hear plenty from us because that's something we all share. So there's a clear layer of things we share. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the government of laws, tolerance, probably the English language, so that's more controversial. And then there's a whole bunch of things. We allow people to have sub-loyalties. For the last time, we have sometimes debate about the line which separates. For instance, one of the Native American churches used peyote, a narcotic, for its religious services. And so they said, look, that's part of our community. And another voice came from the national level, said, wait a moment, is the law of the land that you cannot use peyote. And there was this fight about who will win, in this case, our nation-wide commitment or our local commitment. And after a complicated story, we allowed Native Americans to proceed. In other cases, we went the other way. When they tried to have polygamy in Utah, we said, I'm sorry, that goes beyond what we allow people to do. So we always have some tension about the marking line which separates the universals from the particulars. But clearly, the basic underlying structure is this two-level division and what we need to do next. And the good news is that the beginning to do next is create more layers about not to replace local ones, not to replace the nation ones, but to make them part of yet a larger family. And that is precisely what is running to trouble now. Right. Because for 200 years or more, we have learned and other people have learned to invest their identity, their sense of self, who they are, and many of the communal bonds in the state. What a nation really means is a combination of a sense of community married to a particular piece of territory and government. And what we need to do now, what we need to do now, is find ways to maintain our identity and to maintain our particularisms and to maintain our distinctiveness while we are allowing pieces of sovereignty and government and control to move to the next highlight. And that is what the Danes just objected to, where they did not want to turn over, disappear, in kind of what they call Basel, which is the symbol for the new Europe right bureaucracy, because there was no sense that you could maintain your Danishness while you allow some controls to be moved to the next level. On the way to Britain, I stopped in France. That's the number one debate in France. Should we allow ourselves in any way to turn over powers which belong to the nation, to this larger entity, or as Gerard insisted, we will coordinate among nations, but we will not have a family of nations. That's the issue in Britain. The hottest issue in Britain is, not are we gonna join the euro or not? That's a highly technical debate. But the euro, the Brits understand correctly. Stands for a much larger question. If you're gonna join the euro, you will have to join a shared decision making. You'll have to transfer. This will not happen until we do just the opposite. We kind of unravel this combination which we're so proud of, that we married our identity to a particular piece of land and to a particular government, and learned that you can be a French-American or whatever, or a good Brit or good Scott while still maintaining membership in larger and ever larger communities. And that is probably the most difficult question and it is surprisingly little. How we can create institutions which allow people to maintain community without maintaining government. Here is an example of the issues in which this comes up. This comes up, for instance, around the issue of cultural exception. The Canadians say they are about to be lost. They're gonna be treated or are treated like a 51st state. What they would like to do is to limit the import of American movies, Time Magazine and such, and they want to subsidize their own movie, their own theaters, their own magazines. That's what the French want to do to protect their culture in the international trade world. And here is a wonderful, wonderful example I'm talking about. Here's a direct clash between global economic forces, for whom is a magazine, is a magazine, and Turkey's a turkey, and they all need to abide by the same economic forces that reduce the prices, we sell them, international treaties will not allow you to make cultural exceptions. Or we're gonna send, wait a moment, that's a wonderful example by exempting whatever 2% or less of the total flow of products and services, those which allow people to maintain their cultural identity from all this internationalism, you make it easier for people to maintain their identity and give up on the notion that all the governmental controls have to be the international. And that cannot move up to the next level. Now, I talk plenty about the challenge and how difficult it is, how reluctant and resistant people are to go where we need to go. And I'll be the first to admit, while I know direction we have to go, I don't have a roadmap how to get there, but I wanna suggest to you some hopeful signs. Some beginnings, first stars in the wind. That we are beginning to develop the foundations, the building blocks for what is extremely challenging dream that of a world community. One of the things which happened and people don't like to talk about it and maybe discuss as well. English is becoming the world language. People get their back up when we say that and maybe we shouldn't say too often. But you know, when there's a meeting in the Balkans and the Hungarians and the Armenians and the Russians and the Poles meet, what do you think they talk to each other? Most of the time they talk to each other in English. Whereas the meeting in Asia or the younger the people are and the more into sciences, English is the world language. It's the language of the internet. If you wanna try an airplane, you have to learn English. This is the international language of airports. So this is not a small step. If you think about historically, what emotional, powerful fights we had over the question, what's gonna be the language of this new territory? Is it gonna be German or English or Hebrew or German or whatever? The culture comes all centered around this question of language. Well, without a lot of parades, the beginning, beginning to solve that problem. People wanna keep talking Hindu and Swahili and all the other things. But in addition, most of them increasingly gonna have a shared language, worldwide, English. We have, of course you all know, instant communication worldwide, which allows us to share information, to organize people within seconds. It's not only economic information, which flows on the internet. It's the people who protested meetings in Prague and in Seattle, they also using the internet. We have the beginning of creation of additional cost national bodies, not international bodies. We always had bodies where different nations came together and negotiated an arrangement, the League of Nations or something or the radio frequency. But they, of course, were built on the assumption that the major powers are gonna reside within its nation and then they're gonna make arrangements among them. That's what technically the word international means. But if you look at the international court in Hague, you see something very different. Here people from one country went to another country. Took some people, these people were not from that country, said criminals, grabbed them by their neck and brought them to a third country to be tried by judges from a fourth country. Well, that's a lot of cost nationalism. And we're having a debate now about which United States, unfortunately, is not, they support evolve, of creating an international criminal court. So in the future, if they're gonna be another Milosevic, long before he will commit another ethnic cleansing, they'll put him on notice and say, if you ever leave your little country, that's for gonna end up before an international criminal court. And many other such beginnings, maybe the one which is a little less kind of core issues than all those courts. Bob Cohen did a wonderful study of the community of people from different countries who are in charge of the environment. From all over the world, there are ministers, assistant ministers, civil servants, whose job is to care about the environment in their country. And they all know each other, they go from meeting to meeting to conference, and they're on email with each other, and they form the community. And now often they do things to take slightly twist and slightly deflect what the government would like them to do because all their best friends and all the people that they respect are all these other environmental civil servants from all the other countries. So we have the beginning of an international community, cost national community, of people who care about the management of the environment who see each other not simply as representing their country, but also representing a larger entity that of the whole globe. And then we come, finally, maybe to the most difficult challenge of them all. And that is, if you are going to have global institutions and arrangements, some governance, we'll need to talk about shared global values. And at that, I've been texting your patients, it's a particularly important topic to what all that's gonna, we need to think about. So bear with me. I want to introduce here the notion of moral dialogues. Those of you, I know some of you on political science, in political science, people talk about reason deliberation, so deliberative democracy, and that's this image of people coming together in a town meeting, and they're all very cool and collected, and there's a problem in the town face, so they're bringing facts and logic and reasonings out, and they come to a new shared understanding where we ought to go from here, and that's what happened next. This is not what I'm talking about. I'm not denying that occasionally something like this happens, so I think it's surprisingly rare, those of you who saw Jane's Man's Bridge study, she went to some of those, and they ended cool as we believe, and those of you who go to meeting of scientists, I guess you just said some here, they don't all completely greet each other or use only cool logical and empirical arguments, I think, but what happens really, and is of tremendous importance, is that communities engage in dialogues in which they bring their values to the table. They do not leave them at home, the way Bruce Ackerman argued. They don't bracket them and say, well, at home I can be a follower of this or a follower of that, but in the public space I'm just a neutral, or I can talk about his traffic arrangements. What happens is that people learn to engage in your other, about conversations, profound conversations, about what's right and wrong. Well, I think our first instinct is to say, well, I can see how that can happen now on a dinner table in a family, maybe in a small community, but how can you have a moral dialogue on a nationwide level, not even talk about global? Well, let me tell you, let me first start with an example. In the 1950s, the environment was not on our moral map, it was not on our moral agenda. Nobody thought about that they had any moral obligations to the environment. I mean, maybe some one professor ought to paper about it, but as a community it was not an issue. We dumped things into the air and into water without any hesitation. Then Rachel Carlson wrote a book, Silent Spring, by the way these dialogues often start this way, it's a book, a thesis. There was an oil spill and demonstrations and Santa Barbara, they buried a new car alive and a lot of drama. So the first step is a message, then we get drama in which we engage our people. And there follows what I like to call a billion hour bus. The people are the water cooler and pubs, they commute, calling shows, and over dinner table, talk to each other, cause all kinds of lines, what are our obligations to the environment? And when you're in the middle of that process, it sounds unwieldy and confusing meandering and disorderly, it has no beginning, it has no end, COVID is here, doesn't like what I have to say. When you're in the middle of this conversation, it looks like there's no beginning, no end, just a lot of screaming. If you come two and five years later, you see something very special. First of all, most times we do form new shared moral understandings. We did come out of that conversation with the sense that we have a moral commitment to Mother Earth. We still argue at the margins, we still argue about loggers is against spotted owls and such, but about the basic question, I don't know anybody wants to go back to the 1950s, conservative or liberal, we all recognize that we have a profound new moral commitment, shared one. I mean, one of the interesting little signs, how deeply shared it is on the one hand, of course, we have this policy that we're not supposed to teach values in public schools, the liberals fear religious indoctrination, the right fears that children be taught liberal values, so at least officially we're not supposed to teach values in schools with a very odd consequence that when we have sex education, we treat it as a plumbing issue or not a question of social responsibility and personal responsibility. But when you come to the environment, those of you who have young children or like me, grandchildren, they, public school have no hesitation. They drill into them, environmentalism in the most systematic and profound manner, because this is now basically a shared moral commitment and a shared value. Very Fridaire in 1963 wrote the famous book, The Feminine Mystique, and it started the women's movement and the fierce, complicated, painful debate about the relationship between men and women. It's not over, we didn't do all the changes, but it had very profound effects. We changed the way we treat each other. But that's really a crucial point here. It's not that we simply change our opinion, our beliefs, they're very important, but we change the habits of our heart. We change the way we conduct ourselves. Environmentalism let people to conserve more, to ride bicycle more, use this funny paper. All kind of changing, actually implementing the new moral commitment, and laws followed. Laws did not lead. They reflected the new shared understanding. The same happened in the relationship between men and women. People, married couples, people to be married, went to very complicated, painful dialogues, drawing on this nationwide conversation. And out of this came, by many standards, not sufficient change, but not insignificant change. The same, of course, holds for the civil rights movement. Let me give a smaller example. During the Thomas Hill hearing about the allegation that Judge Thomas engaged in sexual harassment, at the beginning, all the men I know, including a major, major newspaper, said that there wasn't an issue, right? It's gonna be a joke, sexual harassment, you know. Let me talk about that. Men knew there was no such thing. We had a two-week national seminar on sexual harassment, a lot, a lot of conversation, a lot of boardrooms and corridors and such. And I think by now, most men know that when women complain about sexual harassment, they have plenty to complain about. And we change the way we conduct ourselves. We change our laws and our policies. It's very far from perfect. Now, this is not just the past. At the moment, we have at least two difficult moral dialogues. One about the death penalty. And the other about gay marriages. It doesn't matter to me now, which side on this you take or I take. What I'm saying is, watch these conversations. At the moment, they just look like everybody's staring at everybody and everybody's putting a different direction. Watch them two years, five years, in effect, you already see very significant changes in our heart and conduct ourselves in our institutions. As we get closer here to the close, what we need to do now, what we are doing now, is having moral conversations as fancy as they may seem on the global level. We are talking to each other now, cross nations, not so governments, people to people, about landmines. We get together to fight landmines. There's a new shared understanding that we should do without them. We have a global environmental movement which found its expression real, which the United States was very uncomfortable with. It was uncomfortable because there's a worldwide outcry that we need to protect the environment better. We have a difficult, complicated conversation which moves forward about veils, about ivory, about sex slaves, about exploitation of children. Succeeding in taking the same processes which serves us so well in our local communities and our nation, and we lift them to the next level to create the kind of shared values which will need to guide us if you are going to have the beginning of a global community without which none of the issues are listed will be controllable. Bring this to a close, allow me to tell you a one brief story from the Jewish scriptures from the Talmud. It's a story about two students of a rabbi who were arguing when the night is over and the day begins. And one of the students said, if you look over there and you see a tree and you can tell if it's a fig tree or an olive tree, then you know that the night is over and that they began. The other student said, no, no, no, no, no, that's not the way it works. If you look over there and you see a little animal and you can tell if it's a goat or a calf then you know that the night is over and the day begun. So they went to the rabbi and said, rabbi, what say you? No, no, that's not the way it is. If you look over there and you see a woman and you can tell if she's black or white and you call her my sister and if you look over there and you see a man and you can tell if he's an Israeli or a Palestinian and you call him my brother, then the rabbi said, the day, a new day begun. Thank you. Dr. Rezioni will take a couple of questions and I think I'll do it if somebody raises their hand, whoever's first. And I promise my answer's been less than one hour and 45 minutes. We have any questions? Oh, we have a microphone even. Technology does tabler the best. Hello. My name is Twyla Brays. I'm from Citizens Council on Healthcare and I've read some of your things about privacy but I really, and I wanted to say that I appreciate the moral dilemma that you're talking about and what's growing. I have two concerns. One has to do with what comes out from consensus building. I believe with the World Health Organization that says that the United States is 37th best in the world and when you look at the report it says it's because we don't have explicit rationing policies. The second is that a friend of mine was asked by a federal committee to be on the commission except she had to go through a questionnaire and when it was all done they said, I'm sorry but we want to build consensus and you won't work. And so, you see my concern when you have these global communities is who's going to be on them and will it really be the consensus of the people or will it be the consensus of those who call the meeting together? Thank you. Well, it is excellent, excellent, excellent, excellent question and I'm tempted to go back on my promise and not to make the answer less than, let me allow me to make it briefly. I didn't use the word consensus. I said there arise new shared moral formulations. The technical reason is because I believe they don't come simply from consensus. They come that there are certain profound moral values in us and the conversation allowed them to bubble up to the surface and scrape away cultural and historical residues which hide them because otherwise we would not need a moral dialogue if you want to be even more technical. I'm talking about a deontological approach that there's certain things, certain moral causes that speak to us in unmistakable voices. But they doesn't take away your question. When we have a moral dialogue in our country, in a local community, in a family, there's no guarantee it's going to come out the way I want it or line with my values. So my family can decide that they want whatever. And I may go along because at the end, I feel committed to the family, but they will not always come out the way I wanted it. Otherwise I will be deterrent if you have a conversation in St. Peter's. I don't think it will always come out the way any of us will want it, but that is the nature of building communities. That we, in effect, take each other into account. Now, it does not always work on some issues at the end of the day, we're still conflicted. And then, in effect, cause a lot of grief as our debate about abortion is. But very often, when there is a genuine conversation which requires it to be a new shared understanding do bubble up and most people find them sufficiently compelling that they change their own conduct in line with these new shared understandings. They're not a guarantee, it's just the best days. I teach, I figured I could talk long enough for everybody to hear me. Houston Smith in his fairly recent reissue, I guess I would say of his 1950s classic, the world religions, in his epilogue made a comment that sounds fairly consistent with what you're saying. I'm interested in your comment on it. He said that the 20th century, he feels will not be noted for the atom bomb, the automobile electricity, et cetera, so much as it will be noted for one thing in the long-term future. And that is that it was the first century in history where everybody in the world had to take everybody else seriously. I'm interested in your thoughts on that. Well, I think it's extremely well put. And that's really my point, we have no choice. That's our best guide, that if we are in any way to tackle these accelerating threats, we'll have to take everybody seriously, which is a hell of a challenge. I do not want to minimize it. We have difficulties in reading consensus within an affluent society of 260 million people or shared understandings, sorry, I slipped. And so if you wanna talk about six billions at a moment, much larger diversity, it's a challenge of several orders of magnitude higher. By the way, therefore, I would not think we should throw everything into that basket. Things we can keep locally or nationally, we definitely should. But we'll have to learn on some key issues. The are learning, they'll have to be done on the highest level.