THE ASPEN IDEA

The woman at the desk of our hotel in Agrigento, Sicily, (a nice hotel, but, still, a somewhat remote corner of already-remote Sicily) saw that we were from Aspen and looked up with a bright smile. “Aspen!” she said. “Yes, yes. Very famous.” She paused to search her limited English vocabulary and said, “Ski!” Then she paused again and added, “Movie stars.”

Everybody, it seems, knows Aspen.

But most of them — even those with a much better command of the English language than our Sicilian desk clerk — may not know much beyond skiing and movie stars. To most people, Aspen is just a glittering (for better or worse) resort-town playground for the rich and shallow. And if that’s what you think, it’s time to talk about the Aspen Idea.

In the late 1940s, a Chicago industrialist named Walter Paepcke rolled into the near-ghost town of Aspen, liked what he saw, tucked the little town under his arm and ran with it. Paepcke thought big — and his big thought was the Aspen Idea: Aspen as a place to nurture the mind, body and spirit. In short order, Paepcke founded the Aspen Skiing Corporation, which took care of the “body” part of the plan; the Aspen Music Festival, which fills Aspen’s summers with world-class musicians and music students and certainly nurtures the spirit; the Aspen Institute, fills Aspen with big ideas and big thinkers, nailing down the third leg of his triad.

Sixty years later, those big ideas can get pretty big.

Two summers ago, during one afternoon at the Institute, I heard Alan Greenspan — just a few months after stepping down as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board — declare that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was
all about oil. Later that same afternoon, Sandra Day O’Connor — recently retired from the U.S. Supreme Court — discussed the reasoning behind her vote to award the 2000 U.S. presidential race to George W. Bush. Not exactly small talk.

Rounding out that afternoon’s program were a physics professor, an evangelical minister, the recently retired chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service and a trio of top Hollywood writers and directors including Nora Ephron and Norman Lear. The week-long 2006 Aspen Ideas Festival also featured Colin Powell, Madeleine Albright, Her Majesty Queen Noor of Jordan and some 200 other speakers. This year’s Ideas Festival will follow the same high-profile pattern — yet it’s overshadowed by the summer’s hot ticket, a late-July symposium featuring the Dalai Lama.

From the very beginning, a major focus of the Institute has been its Aspen Seminars designed for leaders of business and industry, who need to immerse themselves in the great ideas of human civilization. (Or, as I used to characterize it when I was young and cynical: Humanities 101 for those who skipped all that soft stuff in their rush to get their MBA and start making money.) Today, the seminars (which are not cheap) bring groups together to read and discuss authors ranging from Aristotle and Plato through Confucius and the Buddha to Martin Luther King, Jr., Simone de Beauvoir, Vaclav Havel and Aung San Suu Kyi.

Inside a room, participants gather to, very simply, talk. The topic is always important, but in a sense it doesn’t really matter. What matters is the discussion itself. The thoughts it triggers. The sparks that fly. It’s always worthwhile.

A decade ago, I suffered through a seminar discussing the then popular book “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital.” Frankly, I was a little bored. And yet, some 10 years later, I still think about topics that came up in that discussion.

I remember a more recent seminar that I attended when I was editor of The Aspen Times. The group included a number of local officials — the chief of police, a county commissioner and several others. We talked about the nature of community. At one point, the officials all ganged up on me, insisting that, as editor of the paper, I had the real power in town.

“But you get to make the laws,” I protested. “And enforce them.”

 They weren’t buying it. “You get to set the topics and shape the town’s discussions,” one of them insisted. “And that’s the real power.”

By Andy Stone