Aspen’s Meadows Become a World Stage
By Sam Perry
Senior Correspondent
Conferenza Premium Reports

Aspen Ideas Festival 2005
July 5-10, 2005
Aspen Institute
Aspen, Colo.

Key Points

• Seeking election in America? Speak with people who may never support you. That frequently-unheeded advice comes from none other than a former President.
• According to America’s top diplomat for the past  four years, America’s leadership hasn’t resonated with European public opinion and the Muslim community. Our leaders need to curb the volume, hubris and arrogance of our proclamations. But, he cautions, we shouldn’t forget the United States of America is still the same country that’s offered inspiration to much of the world for years.
• Our understanding of human nature has become a tug of war between the philosophical tradition dating back to Plato, and the latest brain research discoveries. While classic philosophy may retain its place with rigorous intellectuals, we’re challenging our most basic assumptions by literally looking inside the mind.

Executive Summary
The inaugural Aspen Ideas Festival was a phantasmagoria of contemporary political, cultural, scientific, theological and academic debate, jammed into the week following this year’s Independence Day. Participating in numerous sessions broken down into eight tracks and ten different formats, speakers prominent in politics, law, the media, science, the arts, business, academia and business were consistently engaged and accessible. The many-faceted stream of ideas meant we were able to participate in three dozen seminars and presentations, along with countless sidebar talks throughout the four and two half days of the conference. Major domo Kitty Boone and her team did a masterful job of interweaving complementary sessions, and taking advantage of prescient timing, such as when an “Evening Exchange” had Supreme Court interlocutors David Boies and Ted Olson of Election 2000 fame discussing the new Supreme Court – the same week that Justice Sandra Day O’Connor announced her retirement.

The conference often offered multiple opportunities to see the parade of household names. For example, venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers’ John Doerr, who vacations in Aspen, spoke on three panels: “Energy Innovation and the Role of Renewables,” “The Internet’s Impact on the Global Economy” and “Global Scenarios and Their Scenarists.”

Several recent conferences covered by Conferenza have been positively compared to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, long held to be the gold standard in high-wattage events. Because the Ideas Festival was in a retreat location, and brought together so many well-known names from the world stage, it may be the closest to thing on U.S. territory. “It’s like Davos, only better,” proclaimed one attendee, who felt the inaugural Ideas Festival was far more personable and free-flowing than its Swiss counterpart. CleanTech analyst Joel Makower called it “Davos meets TED at 8,000 feet.”  Others simply thought the parade of celebrity politicians, academics, policy makers and other media stars was reminiscent of the Greek gods jousting amongst themselves on Mt. Olympus, the legendary home of the Greek gods – fittingly of similar altitude to Aspen.

Given the broad range of onstage perspectives, the organizers achieved a remarkable degree of even-handedness and goodwill between political factions, working hard to ensure a receptive and respectful climate for varying opinions. For example, the audience at a Jim Lehrer-moderated panel identified themselves by a hand tally as roughly equal parts liberal, conservative, and middle-of-the-road. Yet a few onstage comments highlighted some underlying Red State/Blue State polarity. Some pro-choice remarks in seminars prompted audible gasps, presumably from participants with strong anti-abortion sentiments. And Hillary Clinton’s closing-day analogy – labeling George W. Bush’s administration as being imbued with a kind of “What Me Worry?” attitude reminiscent of Mad magazine’s freckle-faced Alfred E. Neuman – prompted subsequent editorial comments from highly partisan Republican ranks.

At times, the conference served as a platform for politicians current and past, some of whom seemed to aspire for higher office. Host state Colorado’s Republican governor Bill Owens seemed to be honing for a run for national office, proclaiming himself “a conservative internationalist” and hitting the party line “talking points” of the GOP. Recently-elected Illinois senator Barack Obama, referenced Abe Lincoln frequently while deploring the growing partisan chasm in Washington, a sentiment echoed throughout the week by Republican Alan Simpson, the former Wyoming senator who thankfully brought his first class wit along with him.

We’ve selected a distilled view of many of the most memorable sessions from the conference, most of which were dealing with “big issue” topics explored by big names.

Evil Is as Evil Does
A standing-room only session on “Evil,” attended by luminaries like Simpson and former Secretary of State Colin Powell, elicited general agreement about humans’ essential imperfection. At the center of the debate were Harvard’s Rev. Peter Gomes and Pastor Rick Warren, author of The Purpose Driven Life, which has been the world’s best selling book over the last two years with total sales recently on the verge of topping 25 million copies. (This is the book that Ashley Smith, taken hostage in March in Atlanta by a man who had earlier killed four people on a shooting spree, had famously read from to convince the fugitive to give himself up.) But while Warren labeled “compartmentalizing” as a source of evil, he later contradicted himself by saying that one could condone the despicable use of torture to fight the evil of terrorism. Rev. Gomes called it “a copout” for Warren to imply that only non-Christians do evil, and asked whether Adolf Hitler or Osama bin Laden thought of themselves as evil. Instead, he suggested, each of us is potentially complicit in evil, because “that which alienates us from our better angels sometimes deludes us into thinking we are doing the right thing.” Gomes said recognizing evil and acting to suppress it is a constant battle which required “a perpetually-uneasy conscience” to wage.

To his credit, Warren bemoaned the trend toward demonizing people different from us. “Tolerance used to be, ‘I respect you as a human being,’” he said. “It has changed to, ‘Every idea is equally valid.’” Yet, he maintained, “The person who believes everything really believes nothing.”

U.S. Leadership in the World
On the subject of leadership, the Ideas Festival offered two engaging examples at the moderate ends of the political spectrum. Colin Powell, appearing remarkably frank and relaxed on stage with his family, said that while America’s founding fathers were all men of tremendous faith, they also understood the country could not be established on religion alone. In the strongest public statements to directly imply criticism of his former chief, Powell lamented his belief that U.S. leaders run into trouble when casting their ideas in an evangelical tone, with “a slight hint” of hubris and arrogance. But Powell encouraged the audience not to “sell America short” on what the country has done over the course of many years to inspire the global community.

Former president Bill Clinton stopped in for an hour-long interview with Aspen Institute president Walter Isaacson in front of a packed house of 500 people, offering a range of perspectives on recent political issues. For example, Why in his opinion did Kerry lose? Clinton said he was surprised that when he returned to stump for Kerry after Clinton had recovered from heart surgery, even Kerry’s own supporters didn’t know his stance on critical issues such as why he would make us more secure as a nation – an issue that proved decisive, according to Clinton.

But the most critical mistake, Clinton said, is that Kerry simply failed to win respect from people unlikely to vote for him, especially in rural communities where a handful of votes would have made the difference. He recounted a discussion with a Pentecostal minister who said he had a confession to make – which caused Clinton and the audience to chuckle when the former president noted the irony of a clergyman offering to confess to “the world’s biggest sinner.” The minister said that though he hadn’t agreed with Clinton’s views on a number of social issues, “’I never thought you disrespected mine, and I thought at the core we respected the same things.’” The minister said he’d voted twice for Clinton – and subsequently voted for Bush.

According to Clinton, the next successful Democratic nominee – and many in the audience clearly saw the speaker’s wife as a serious prospect despite having some outspoken detractors – will have to speak with conviction about national defense and the military. “Talk to Red America,” he said. “The American people will not vote for anybody they believe cannot be trusted to defend the country.”

On Malignant and Malevolent Threats, Terrorism, War Games and the Problem of Evil
The news about the recent London bombings came just hours after a panel on “Malignant and Malevolent Threats,” and shortly before attention turned to a session on “Challenges to Global Security.” These sessions drew some of the world’s foremost experts on security, including Rep. Jane Harman of California, the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence and Homeland Security committees; former arms negotiator Ken Adelman; former CIA director James Woolsey; and Harvard professor Graham Allison, an expert on nuclear terrorism. “The argument that we can fight them in Iraq and they won’t hurt us here,” proclaimed Harman, “is over.” Jim Steinberg, a Brookings Institution foreign policy expert, predicted the terrorist threat would last for decades.

One of the most exceptional examples of the serendipity and “embarrassment of riches” of the Aspen Ideas Festival were simultaneous inquiries into human nature and the understanding of the human brain held by noted philosopher and former Balliol College Master, Sir Anthony Kenny of Oxford and Dr. V.S. Ramachandran of University of California San Diego, respectively. While Sir Anthony delved into generations of philosophy on human nature since Plato and Aristotle, Ramachandran shared his exhilarating research demonstrating for the first time what makes a human brain unique. While Kenny was describing how Descartes and the Cartesian ego defined the concept of human consciousness as distinct from domestic animals, Ramachandran was demonstrating medical results on how the human mind works. “This is truly going to be the greatest revolution of them all,” said Ramachandran, whose research explores the sites of metaphor, abstract thinking and humor among the human brain’s 100 billion neurons. “The number of possible brain states exceeds the number of elementary particles of the known universe,” he said. Some participants wondered how long it would be before the medical findings would render much of the philosophical considerations all but superfluous.

Whither the Media? Are They Broke, and Need Fixing?
As New York Times correspondent Judith Miller spent her first night in jail after refusing to reveal sources from the Valerie Plame/CIA leak, a late night “Culture and the Media” session starred right-leaning New York Times columnist David Brooks; Newsweek’s Evan Thomas; James Fallows, national correspondent for festival sponsor Atlantic magazine; and The New Yorker’s Ken Auletta. Brooks initially asked to keep his comments off the record regarding his colleague’s case, only to later go on the record saying, “If I thought my source was putting a CIA agent’s life at risk, I’d burn him.”

A subsequent roundtable on “Media and Democracy” Fallows and Aspen Institute’s Charlie Firestone included journalists Auletta, author Kurt Andersen, NPR correspondent Juan Williams, and Jim Lehrer, along with Lyric Hughes Hale, who runs China Online, and Young and Rubicam Brands CEO Ann Fudge. Fallows set the stage by arguing that the U.S. media today has more experts with more robust skills than perhaps at any other time in history – but that traditional media companies also have a more concentrated business base. Fallows argued that the distinct communities of information consuming media from different sources has created a situation where the U.S. polity is severely divided into “different fact universes,” making even the slightest compromise elusive. For example, Williams noted that some 80% of those watching Fox News TV believed in Vice President Dick Cheney’s insistence – for which no evidence has yet been uncovered – of a link between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks. However, Lehrer said, only 6% of PBS viewers believe Cheney’s assertion, quoting a line from Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan that was repeated several times during the week: “Everyone is entitled to their own opinion – but not to their own facts.”

The pressure from advertising departments itself is changing media rapidly, claimed Fudge. In the age of blogs, “…readers are empowered,” she said. “The truth of the matter is, advertising in its own sense is going the way of the dinosaur.” Fudge and Lehrer both noted that consumers are now often leading the industry as re-creators of information in new and different ways, and this in turn will alter the whole business of media.

Science, Global Scenarios and the Environment
Sessions focused on energy brought a variety of opinions about solutions. Kleiner Perkins’ John Doerr argued there will be 400 more cities of 10 million people by 2050, driving demands for clean water, clean air and more energy – and also driving innovation around these technologies. Doerr’s venture firm has invested in seven energy entrepreneurs since 2000, despite an investment market of only $1 billion in energy. John Calaway, a Texas oilman turned wind farmer, claimed that wind could generate 25% of the nation’s electric needs, yet its development has been burdened by inconsistent federal policies. And Both former CIA director Woolsey and Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute argued that improving vehicle efficiency and fuels could help diminish the impact of global warming, increase national security and save an additional quarter to half of the oil we use even at significantly lower oil prices.

Memorable Quotes

• “I think political leaders can run into trouble when they are so sure of their position that they put an evangelical cast on their position and exclude the views of others.” Former Secretary of State Colin Powell
• “He is tough, he is strong, he is very, very smart. [But] he has certain attributes to the way he does business that did not make him very suitable to being the ambassador to the U.N.” – Powell, when asked why he had not endorsed the choice of John Bolton for U.N. ambassador
• “One of the most powerful things the Internet is doing is the perfection of information. If in the old world it was possible to fool consumers, it’s not going to be in the new world. What the Internet really does is reveal everything.” Amazon founder Jeff Bezos
• "The average tenure on the Supreme Court now is 19.5 years. That’s five presidential terms. There have been 43 presidents in U.S. history and only 16 chief justices. They have an influence on everything we do in life.” Ted Olson, former U.S. Solicitor General
• I don’t have any problem with God. I do have a problem with religious people…I’d rather be on the inside dealing with religious people than on the outside.” – The Rev. Peter Gomes, Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister at The Memorial Church, Harvard University

Summary
It’s hard to find much if anything to fault about the Ideas Festival, from the clear mountain air, alpine meadows and the Bauhaus architecture favored by the institute’s founder, to the obvious attention to detail of the organizers. The conference was a Cornucopia for the mind, for the soul, and – for those who partook of a track at the health center – for the body.

However, there were some mild grumblings. A few participants found it difficult to get to some public sessions held in the town of Aspen. Others felt uncomfortable during the opening session when the octogenarian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. – presidential adviser, historian, professor and unrepentant liberal – spoke haltingly and read from cards. Yet these moments were few, and failed to impinge much on the exuberant spirit of the conference.

Under the leadership of Walter Isaacson, as well as Seminars and Public Programs EVP Elliot Gerson, Aspen Institute has forged ahead with plans to spread its mantra of “timeless values, enlightened leadership” to new communities around the globe. The Ideas Festival managed to combine a healthy cross-section of the accomplished and well-to-do, while respecting the parallel and noble aspirations of its many presenters, to enable a true discourse to unfold.

We understand it will be two years before the Aspen Meadows sports a new building which might expand the conference’s 500-person daily capacity to 750. Meanwhile, we’re happy to help spread the word, forward the agenda, help everyone envision the scene and tout the audio repeats of many of these terrific panels. We’ll even show you where to sign up for email updates on the Ideas Festival as they work out its future. But when it comes to Ideas Festival 2006, you’d better not hesitate if you want to land a spot.