how
does it feel to be
one
of the beautiful people
now
that you know who you are?
what
do you want to be?
--Lennon/McCartney,
“Baby You’re a Rich Man”
To complement and enliven my teaching at
Vermont Technical College, I was privileged to attend the 2012 Aspen Ideas
Festival (session one). Aspen itself is worthy of far more discussion than
presented here, as was my experience attending programs and conversations. What
role may a festival of ideas play in a democracy?
Aspen is nestled high in the Rockies, at such an altitude as to render its
status as a tourist destination unique: the air is thin, the fuel and food are
expensive, and the roads in and out of town are scarce. I arrived on the third
day of the Waldo Canyon fire, crossing into Colorado from the brittle and dry New
Mexico desert, up and over Independence Pass on Route 82 by midnight local
time, and descending the two-lane snake of a road down into Aspen. The sudden
apparition of civilization—streetlights, shops, wide avenues and
sidewalks—establish a sense of oasis, even in the middle of the night. The
tranquility and unique arid climate of the high Rockies establishes a landscape
of retreat, of introspection, and the contemplation of the deepest of issues:
real meaning-of-life, future-of-the-world type stuff. A Bonnaroo of Ideas, a
blizzard of intellectual curiosity?
Larger principles and tenets of civil discourse pervaded my schedule
(delivered by a customized Android/phone application, as well as by a massive spiral-bound
binder). Beginning in a session on recent cultural exchanges between the United
States and China, the premise that ‘Washington is in a state of paralysis’ was
an unfortunate assumption that riddled all topics: central to the discussion
was a short video clip of Yo Yo Ma and Meryl Streep, in a celebrated
collaboration onstage during which Ma improvised as Streep read poetry, and the
Chinese audience roared in appreciation. At the conclusion of the performance, Streep
bowed; Ma bowed lower. The responsive act of humility between the two artists—bowing
lower and lower—continued until both were on the stage floor, in awe and praise
of one another. Rightly, an attendee asked the panel if cultural exchange is
actually effective: what does the exchange of art, and the shared experience of
performance, accomplish?
I walked through the resort town,
breathing in the money, and the thin mountain air. The first person I
encountered was an eight-year veteran of the Ideas Festival—a supporter since Walter
Isaacson and others began the gathering of great minds, in partnership with the
Aspen Institute. I asked him how the Festival had changed: he said the ability
to “have a spirited debate” may have been compromised by the participating
interests. While the Festival’s mission aligns with the Institute’s (“to foster
values-based leadership, encouraging individuals to reflect on the ideals and
ideas that define a good society, and to provide a neutral and balanced venue
for discussing and acting on critical issues”), I could understand the
gentleman’s observation regarding the evolution of an intellectual and
ideological think tank, nestled carefully within the social fabric of one of
America’s most affluent communities. Not associated with any educational
institution except itself, the Aspen Ideas Festival’s underwriters are likely
those who helped make possible these presentations—and they (Mercedes-Benz,
Allstate, Shell, Bank of America’s Private Wealth Management among them) may or
may not have played a role in the extent to which “spirited debate” would take
place: the security of ‘soft’ questions. Isaacson’s keynote address named “balance”
as the greatest original idea in the United States, between, among other
dichotomies, our “divine providence and our own rationality.” Atlantic magazine editor David Bradley avoided
any allegations of ‘soft’ questions completely, in his keynote, which was all
about the bears and increasing bear attacks in the Roaring Fork Valley, where
the wild animals have become “no longer afraid of human contact.” Short of a very
cheap joke about hiking the Aspen Trail with Governor Chris Christie, Bradley’s
speech appeared to demarcate the blurry line of content and context, an exaltation
of form—a bland jubilance that we all arrived—over using his minutes to
identify and construct any argument at all.
A flurry of ideas followed the pair of
theoretical/entertaining introductory remarks. Among these: the development of our
moral imagination, and thus the generation of empathy in society, through arts
education—the leaderless nature of online communications and the subsequent
revolutions—the need for a ‘TiVo of ideas,’ a coordinated effort to gather our
virtual and electronically-derived thoughts—further investment in mobile device
applications to increase willpower-training, towards a ‘quantified self’—the notion
of films, and extended visual narrative, as “weapons of mass construction”—a
41-live-bodies rule, restricting the use of Senate filibusters, thereby
blocking excessive uses of Congressional power and voice—digital citizen
journalism, and its threat to traditional media, and the advocacy for mandatory
Journalism 101 for high school seniors (a crowd favorite, it seemed)—contextualization
for the metaphor ‘if a project were a jet, its story would be the fuel,’ that
pride in ownership may return to the marketplace (and that we may “start
keeping things longer and we might start loving the things we own”)—a paraphrase
of the old talking dog joke, naming the need for humor in conversation. An
executive from PepsiCo, also a major sponsor of the Festival, described his
company’s plight as having 300,000 employees at present, and that success in
this economy may depend on their conversion: into one critical mass of 300,000
inventors.
Events took place on the campus of the
Aspen Institute, the ballroom of the Hotel Jerome, and a handful of other
locations. One may find a belabored description of who attends the Aspen Ideas Festival easily rendered: within the
quaint storefronts, I never found an “Occupy Aspen” sticker. I did see signals
of status and luxury amongst participants—clothing that costs as much as my
beloved used car; watches of gold and silver that glinted at audiences from
beneath stage lights; unspeakably-sized diamond jewelry. Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO,
included in his presentation on design a snapshot of the original masked Occupy
marchers—because the leaderless movement represented not a successful catalyst
to a struggling economy, or even the
galvanization of wealth, but because that movement had no leader. Historian Robert Putnam advocated for the creation
of what one organization has named “bridges out of poverty,” carefully framing
an argument for the shared experience of society, and the investment in social
capital—for this, Putnam gained much esteem and respect from the erudite crowd,
and wins my award for advocating the best idea towards the improvement of our
economy, our values, and our quality of life. Using Port Clinton, Ohio as an
example, Putnam described a loss of opportunity across lines of class, not race:
the evidence for early childhood education’s efficacy was “incredibly hard,”
yet such investment is critical to the continuation of our social capital. “I
am really worried,” Putnam said, “about how much the new upper class has
contact with the rest of America.” For naming this fear, Putnam became my Aspen Ideas Fest superhero, identifying economic inequality not seeking its source but to discern its ramification.
From the stage constructed in the Hotel
Jerome, I heard someone else say that they “blame the public a lot,” while
advocating for ‘the Romney notion’ that an emergency hold on all payouts based
on derivatives-trading from U.S. banks are suspend until further notice. The
illumination of specific policies was rare, compared to discussion of larger,
theoretical frameworks for the improvement of society: blaming “the public”
helped reinforce the exclusivity in the room.
Yet not everyone in attendance was an
educator or talent-hungry CEO. Jane Shaw, director of Grace Cathedral in San
Francisco, rephrased Martha Nussbaum’s argument in support of the humanities,
fearing greater commoditization of ourselves, not as humans, but as a specific
kind of means-of-production: the notion that one today may be more likely to
claim that their religion inhibits an inherent grace in its truth compounds and
invites such a brutal landscape. Calling for the specific and intentional grasp
and expansion of communities, Shaw challenged the crowd to cultivate “imaginative
love for people we don’t know or know very little.” The orderly representation
of morality in Christianity and elsewhere does not prohibit the sharing of art,
though it may, and may have already: the diversity of the crowd that assembles
to examine a painting, or to hear a work of theater or music, may reflect on
the art’s actual ability and effectiveness. As illustration, Shaw posed: how
can we save the environment, if we don’t know or can’t comprehend what exactly
it is we’re talking about?
Does the inclusive slogan of Grace Cathedral
in San Francisco (“feel free to belong without believing”) apply to the
populations that attend the Aspen Ideas Festival? In principle, the event does
not seek to exclude specific groups; the target audience for many proposals was
the general consumers of education, art, and media. Education threaded most
discussions, and perhaps most useful was the summation that however schools have failed children, we (that is, those in the room) have
failed to adequately support the schools.
NBC played a role in the moderation of
forums on education, including a panel featuring AFT President Randi
Weingarten, and a professor from Stanford, enumerating the school’s embrace of
no-cost, no-credit online course offerings. Acknowledging the value to not only
being a provider of course content, but a moderator to the informal and social
interactions that take place in schools, higher education’s ability to achieve excellence
within its populations depends on its flexibility and its embrace of new
pedagogy. “Most of the jobs our kids are going to have haven’t been invented
yet.” Asked how Stanford’s implementation of online education differs from The
University of Phoenix, the prof provided slightly different ratios of
faculty-to-students (one for every twenty at Stanford, one for every twenty-four
at U. of Phoenix), and sought explanation of how “live professors add value”
while defending computers for having “the patience” to deliver course content
at a pace established and endorsed by the learners themselves. His one wish was
for a new system of “one-on-one, personalized access to tutoring” through the
current evolution of our digital pipelines.
The future of education may rest as much
in the hands of software designers as educators: how have video games—from Pac-Man
to World of Warcraft—captivated the imaginations of our K-12 populations? One
session sought to make public new collaboration between Electronic Arts, the
Institute of Play, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Gates Foundation, to
discern how a new market for the ‘game-if-ication’ of our concepts, curricula,
and—to some extent—our challenges may be solved through the employ of virtual
environments. If game-obsessed youth are successful at consuming knowledge
through the captivating and data-rich platforms, the manifestations of video
games we have experienced previously may enable new approaches to complex
problem solving and “model-based reasoning.” While I may have experienced the
first generation of educative video games (‘electronic worksheets’) during the
1980s, the Games and Learning Assessment Lab seeks to reinvent the
interactivity and collaboration available in classrooms.
The development of character and “values-based
leadership” became the unstated thesis of many presentations, whether the topic
was arts education, categories for character building and assessment, or the
culture of celebrity we have let pervade our society: one discussion sought to
identify how a combination of extreme will and extreme humility may together
form a new code of character (Dorothy Day served as a primary example). Good
advice, rendered from this frame: keep a list of five admirable people in your
field, in case you get depressed, that one may bear in mind examples of “impressive
people in a rotten business.”
While one panel on entrepreneurship described a
bleak culture of 21st century perseverance (describing how, among
Internet startup companies, Google Analytics may “track how you’re feeling that
day”), one of the largest buzzwords in Aspen is empathy, or the ability to place oneself into another’s shoes. From
this, some arguments were made in support of liberal arts education, widespread
mentorship, and the libratory implementation of technology beyond intended uses
(“we are recovering,” one successful inventor said, “from the fact that we
still call these things phones”).
In one conversation following a
presentation, someone asked me to be in touch: “let me know if you do anything
with empathy” in my teaching at Vermont Technical College. Driving back across
the center of the United States—with Aspen, and the rising smoke of wildfires
at my back and in my rear view—I identified two means of engendering empathy;
thankfully, there are more as well.
In teaching an Introduction to Cultural
Anthropology course, I discovered new purpose for a collection of
black-and-white photographs, found at a flea market in New Jersey. After spending
a fifteen-week semester discussing the creation and sustaining of culture,
kinship, and a general curiosity in human activity, I produced this collection
of photographs, challenging the class—as one team—to establish what knowledge
may be available about the people pictured in the photographs. Who were they;
where did they live? What relationships were made clear; what was left
uncovered? I have executed this activity twice, and both incidents ended in
students suggesting we locate and contact some photographed relative via
Facebook; both classes concurred, that if we did hear back, we would be ethically
bound to offer to return their family photographs. Neither family returned our
Facebook messages; the photographs still live in my office.
My second method of engendering empathy
jives with pop star Moby’s two rules for urban and suburban development,
delivered during a conversation in Aspen’s only pop music venue: no stadiums,
and no “big box retail” (one could have heard a pin drop, within the smallish
rock venue Belly Up). In traveling from Vermont to Aspen, I sought to
financially support as few chain stores, restaurants, hotels, etc. as possible:
this premise has led to rewarding and cherished interactions, with real people
who work hard (these include the Hillside Motel near Skyline Drive, Virginia; a
thrift shop in Shamrock, Texas; a Kodak, Tennessee mechanic with a yard full of
dismantled Subarus; a family-run oil change business in western North Carolina,
whose second location has been open nearly a dozen years). The promotion of
empathy may come only through one’s experimentation, literally, with their
interactions with the world: how gently, and with what model of care, may one
communicate, employ, and work with and for, those of us with which the planet
is shared?
