The Pursuit of Happiness - JEFFREY ROSEN - President & CEO of the National Constitution Center

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What is the true meaning of the pursuit of happiness? What can we learn from the Founding Fathers about achieving harmony, balance, tranquility, self-mastery, and pursuing the public good?

Jeffrey Rosen is President and CEO of the National Constitution Center, where he hosts We the People, a weekly podcast of constitutional debate. He is also a professor of law at the George Washington University Law School and a contributing editor at The Atlantic. Rosen is a graduate of Harvard College, Oxford University, and Yale Law School. He is the author of seven previous books, including the New York Times bestseller Conversations with RBG: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Life, Love, Liberty, and Law. His essays and commentaries have appeared in The New York Times Magazine; on NPR; in The New Republic, where he was the legal affairs editor; and in The New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer. His latest book is The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America.

"Well, it's important that although you can disaggregate them, they're really clusters of the same quest that they're all glosses on the four classical virtues of temperance, prudence, courage, and justice. And they're all attempts to achieve self-mastery, and in that sense, tranquility, moderation, these are different ways of expressing the ideas of prudence and temperance. It's striking that Adam Smith translated the Roman word temperance with virtue as a kind of tranquility of the soul.

When I was rereading the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, I was struck by the idea of the environmental crisis being a kind of self-executing divine retribution for disturbing the harmonies of the universe. There are so many passages in the scriptures which talk about the plagues and fires and punishments that come from failing to respect our place in the universe and having the hubris to imagine that we can transform and thwart the laws of nature. These punishments are self-executing, and we are experiencing them. The way to restore harmony is the way that harmony has always been restored, which is by restraint, humility, and living according to nature. "

https://constitutioncenter.org/about/board-of-trustees/jeffrey-rosen
www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Pursuit-of-Happiness/Jeffrey-Rosen/9781668002476
https://constitutioncenter.org/news-debate/podcasts

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