Hot summer and comity

I had an experience that has parallels to the drafting of the U.S. Constitution.

I was one of six men, at the peak of the hippy revolution from 1971 to 1974 who tried to make sense of the revolution going on around us.  We were in the physical heart of revolution, in the San Francisco Bay Area, with our gatherings ranging from Palo Alto to Bolinas. We were the Board of Directors of the Point Foundation.  Point received the royalties (well over a million dollars) from the most hippy of all institutions, the Whole Earth Catalog.

 What is so stunning in retrospect is the comity.  We always had a seventh member, Elijah, an interesting invited guest, who, for the first year, was given the power to spend money (that power was revoked after it was abused).  There were many shades of political persuasion in the room: a professional environmentalist, a Marxist, Stewart Brand, me a Republican banker, a leader of the computer explosion and our version of George Washington, the moderator.

The six of us had a dozen day long discussion of our granting work and supported each other's projects enthusiastically.  The comity was only visible twenty years later when we had a 20th year reunion and we couldn't agree on anything. We no longer had our lives connected in any meaningful way.  At the reunion we were on opposites of every issue we discussed (yes multiple opposing sides).  We were also living our lives on opposite sides.

I think the early comity was the result of two things: we knew we were in the middle of a revolution to build a better world based on cooperation and good will (basic hippy principles). We also accepted full responsibility and serious commitment to our work and for our behavior.

That is what makes me think of the smoldering hot Summer of 1787 in Philadelphia, with the shades drawn and 39 men, the finest men in the 13 colonies, struggled, compromised and argued to create the U.S. Constitution, the most powerful document of modern times. They had the sense of their time being a key point in a revolution and they had a personal sense of responsibility.  There was comity there. 

 Fifteen years later virtually none of the founding fathers could speak to one another.