The Juilliard Public Forum
as we are calling it is a way for us to bring
together thinkers and leaders in various fields
to engage in important conversations about
America’s social, cultural, and political
systems.
This afternoon we plan to address the intertwined
nature of artistry, empathy, character development
and diplomacy. I’d like to thank the Fletcher
School for their collaboration in envisioning
and organizing this program and to welcome
all the Fletcher alumni who are in the audience
this evening.
Now I’d like to invite to the stage two
exceptional individuals – Admiral James
Starvidis and New York Times columnist David
Brooks.
Wonderful to have both of you here, we’ve
been looking forward to this.
A few details that I could just address quickly
– you have full biographies in the program,
but Admiral James Stavridis has held the position
of the dean of the Fletcher School for nearly
three years now. Prior to this post, he spent
over 30 years in the US Navy, achieving the
rank of four-star admiral and four of those
years as 16th supreme allied commander of
NATO, overseeing operations in Afghanistan,
Libya, Syria, the Balkans and the cost of
Africa.
David Brooks has been a distinguished op-ed
columnist for the NY Times since 2003. He’s
a commentator on PBS’s News Hour, NPR’s
All Things Considered, and NBC’s Meet the
Press. Wonderful to have both of you here.
At first blush of course it might be seem
a little strange to you out here as to what
the three of us have in common, a journalist,
an admiral and an arts educator. And yet we
have a shared goal, which is how can we develop
knowledgeable and empathetic leaders and world
citizens. So in the time ahead, we’ll explore
the intersection between politics, the arts,
and the human experience.
Over the past few months, I’ve been thinking
for obvious reasons if I may say so, what
our world might feel like without empathy,
without civility, respect and a sense of common
good in our leaders. So David you’ve written
widely about this specifically on the notions
of character in the New York Times, and in
your recent book, The Road to Character, you
really delve into it quite deeply. Could you
tell us a bit about what you mean by character
and what role it plays in leadership?
First I want to apologize for not wearing
a tie. I thought, “Hey, I’m coming to
Juilliard. They’ll be wearing leotards and
a beret and I can get away with it.” Sorry.
Second, how much I’m looking forward to
this. I actually did a theater panel about
7 years ago, which had a pivotal effect on
my life. I was living in Washington DC at
the time, which is the most emotionally avoidant
city on the face of the earth, and I did a
panel at the Public Theater downtown with
Anne Hathaway and Bill Irwin who is this great
clown. Back stage we did this big group hug
it was like a whole theater experience, and
then they had tissues on stage in case we
started crying, which is not what we did in
Washington. And then afterwards, we did another
group hug, so I thought I have to come to
New York more and get my emotions out.
To answer your question, I’ll list five
traits where I think character intersects
with leadership – the first is humility,
which I think is the queen of the virtues
and humility is not thinking lowly of yourself,
it’s radical self-awareness from a position
of other-centeredness. The ability to step
outside yourself and to look at yourself with
extreme accuracy. The second is self-confrontation.
A great leader has the capacity to see his
or her core weakness and to combat against
it every day. So in the case of the military,
Eisenhower’s core weakness was he was a
man of great temper and rage, and he knew
he could not lead from that position, so he
created this false persona of country club,
garrulousness, and optimism. And that was
not natural, that was a creation.
The third is the capacity to make deep commitments
to things. To me, a commitment is falling
in love with something and then building a
structure of behavior around it for those
moments when love falters. And the ability
to stay locked into a commitment for a long
time. The fourth is beauty, a capacity for
beauty. To me, moral senses are all aesthetic
senses, they hit us the way the arts hit us.
And so the capacity to perceive the beautiful
is the capacity to desire the right things.
There’s this famous Plato passage from the
Symposium, which is “young people should
be confronted with beauty.” And first they’ll
like the beautiful form of someone of the
opposite sex or their own sex or whatever,
and then that love of that beauty will turn
into a love of ideas, which is a higher beauty,
and that will turn into a love of justice,
which the well-governed community which is
a yet higher beauty, and then that will turn
into a love of the beauty to which nothing
to be added and nothing can be subtracted,
which is transcended beauty. And so the capacity
for that is part of desiring the highest things.
The final thing I’ll mention and here I’m
coming back to my emotional avoidance and
emotional openness, is love. The capacity
to deeply love. There was a study I read recently
of soldiers in World War II in the army and
they were all drafted some stayed privates,
some rose into high rank of major, and they
did a study after the war – what explained
why some men rise and some didn’t. And they
thought it might be IQ, no correlation. They
thought it might be social status. No correlation.
Physical bravery, no correlation. The biggest
correlation was relationship with mother.
And that the people who received great floods
of love and joy from their mother were capable
of giving it to their men. And so even in
the case like the military, something which
is hard and seems disciplined, the capacity
for love and to be soft and squishy is a great
leadership capacity.
And Jim, with your book—one of your many
books—The Accidental Admiral, which is a
memoir of your leadership and life lessons,
you’ve been looking at things like “smart
power” which is a mixture of soft power
and hard power. We talked about that a little
bit last year when we had the honor of having
you here talking about cultural diplomacy
and ways of ideologically dealing with various
cultures in a sensitive way. And also open
source security, international interagency
collaborations for strategic communications.
You’ve often talked about, if I may say,
instead of building walls you talk of building
bridges, another germane point I suppose these
days. How do—you’re now in charge of a
school, you’re in charge of an enormous
military operation. How do you educate leaders
who will have this sense of collaboration
and adaptive capacity and maybe as David said,
this sense of hardness and softness at the
same time.
I want to apologize for wearing a tie. I want
to pick up David’s points, which I think
are spot on. I was telling David I spoke to
about 600 high school students from all around
the country. The 4H club, if you remember
the 4Hs, and the one book I recommended to
them was David’s, The Road to character,
it’s quite a good book.
I want to pick up on that last virtue of love
and make the point that it is part of the
military culture and if you walk back to the
ancient Greeks, and I’m Greek-American so
I’m allowed to use this example, go back
to a wonderful novel by the way called Gates
of Fire, which is about the stand of the Greeks
against the Persians against the Gates of
Fire at Thermopylae and one of the lines that
comes out of that is that in battle, the opposite
of fear is not courage, the opposite of fear
is love. It’s love for those with whom you
have entered this fight, it is the love you
carry into the world, and it is love of your
nation. Those are fundamental values in the
military and they translate pretty well.
So to your excellent question about hard power
and soft power, which I think picks this up
as well, I would not want to confuse anybody
with the idea that we live in a world where
we can never use hard power nor should we
ever use hard power. Let’s face it, we’re
not going to negotiate a solution to the Islamic
State, they are psychopathic thugs. You need
hard power at the front end of an operation
like that. But the real question is to create
security in the 21st century, is hard power
sufficient? It is not, it’s necessary at
times, but the long game is in the soft power
side. It’s creating the right conditions
and opportunities and education perhaps above
all. Those are the most important bridges
we can build.
If you look back on the 20th century, and
I say this as a security professional, the
20th century was a complete failure of security.
60 million people died in two epic world wars,
and then we almost blew up the planet in the
Cuban Missile Crisis. Huge failure of security.
Why? Because in the 20th century, we tried
to create security by building walls: the
Maginot Line, Schleffen Plan, Iron Curtain,
Bamboo Curtain, most iconically the Berlin
Wall. Walls will not create security in the
21st century, you have to build bridges. And
the qualities David talks about are central
to doing that, both at a personal level and
I would argue at a national and international
level as well.
Here at Juilliard of course we have about
850 extraordinary young artists who are actors,
dancers, and musicians. And I teach a course
called “The American Society in the Arts”
for that small group of students, we talk
about the relevance of being an artist within
a world of terrorism, of war, of refugees,
and the question of whether the arts really
matter in this severe context. David, perhaps
I’ll just start with you – you recently
wrote something that says “By arousing the
senses, beauty arouses through the spirit.
A person who has appreciated physical grace
might have a finer sense of how to move with
graciousness through the tribulations of life.
A person who has appreciated the Pieta has
a greater capacity for empathy, a more refined
sense of the different forms of sadness, and
a wider awareness of the repertoire of emotions.”
In this sense, can artistic engagement develop
a stronger leaders and citizens, or is this
way too soft for what we’re talking about
in the 21st century?
Well, that’s my answer, you just read it!
I do think…I have mixed emotions about artistic
engagement and politics. I spend a lot of
my time as a political pundit and when I confront
artists who want to be engaged politically,
I think “why do you want to come down to
my level?” Because there’s a great couplet
from Samuel Johnson, “Of all the things
that human hearts endure / how few are those
that kings can cause and cure?” That’s
about the limits of politics. Politics—believe
me I think it’s very important I dedicate
my life to it—it has limits. The things
that shape society are pre-political. They
are about the emotional perceptions, they
are about the conditions, about relationships
between people and the quality of relationships.
And those are shaped powerfully about the
arts, and so like I wrote there, what the
arts can do is educate your emotions. A) So
you desire the right things and B) so you’re
subtle and sensitive in your capacity for
desiring.
We have a sense that the emotions are opposite
to reason, but there’s a guy named Antonio
Damasio at USC who studies people with brain
lesions and they can’t process emotion.
Such people are not super smart Mr. Spocks,
they can’t make decisions. There was one
of Damasio’s patients, he would come back
every week, he could not process emotions.
He knew what he was supposed to feel, but
he just couldn’t feel anything. And so Damasio
said to him do you want to come back next
Tuesday or Wednesday, and the guy spent 30
minutes trying to recite—well Tuesday would
be good for this, Wednesday would be good
for this. Tuesday bad for this, Wednesday
bad. He couldn’t make a decision. And that’s
because the emotions do is they are evaluations
mechanisms. They assign value to things. And
the more subtle your emotions are, the more
subtle your valuations of what you want and
what you don’t want.
And I think part of that is innate, but most
of that is trained. And I think artistic experience
and living through other people’s artistic
experience is one of the things that train
the emotions. And so to start right at the
top, 60 Minutes did an interview with Taylor
Swift. And they asked her about sadness. And
she said, “I know about 13 kinds of sadness.
There’s the kind of sadness when your boyfriend
dumps you. (And she plays a little song) That’s
that sadness. When your parents are mean to
you. That’s what that sadness sounds like.
When your dog dies, that’s that sadness”
She’s an expert in sadness! And so she can
communicate that through her music. And we
learn that.
The final thing I’ll say is one of the things
especially the narrative arts, but also the
musical and theatrical arts do, is refine
your capacity to see. And we think that seeing
is obvious, you just look out and see the
world. Bu the capacity to see clearly is a
refined skill. There’s a 19th century art
historian named John Ruskin who said, “the
more I think about it, the more I realize
that the capacity to see clearly and explain
what you saw in a simple way is the central
fact of life. There are thousands of people
who can speak for one who can think, but there
are thousands who can think for one who can
see.” When you think about how George Orwell
saw the world or Tolstoy there’s just a
clarity of sight there that has to be practiced.
Can I pick up on that? I absolutely agreeing
with that completely, I’ll see you all those
good points and I’ll raise you two that
I think are important in terms of the arts
and my world, both as a previously as a senior
military officer and currently as dean of
a graduate school of international relations.
One is the near-universality of many of the
performing arts. That’s not uniform, but
the fact that we admire music, we admire playwrights,
we loved that presentation we just heard before
coming out on stage. The more we see each
other as humans who participate and engage
in the arts, the more in my view, we are at
least able to conceive of empathy, to conceive
of similarity, to conceive of stepping across
and having a conversation with the other,
because the other appreciates the arts.
The second point I would make is a more prosaic
one, which is the kind of cultural exchanges
that can be generated. I think are important
and they build. And so because we send an
orchestra to Pyongyang, we’re not suddenly
going to see foreign policy shift, but I think
over time those kind of cultural exchanges
matter in a prosaic way, as a way diplomats
can exercise a tool of statecraft. And they
are enjoyable (see paragraph 1 on the empathy
gathering aspects of this.)
And I’ll conclude with a practical example
of this, if I could. We were in the president’s
office earlier and we saw a Louisville Slugger
baseball bat from Keith Hernandez. We should
remember that sports played at a high level
is a performing art in my view, once upon
a time when I was prior to being the European
leader of military operations, I had charge
of Latin America and the Caribbean. And we
were seeking ways to portray the US in a different
way in Latin America and the Caribbean, where
we are often seen (correctly) as an imperial
power that has invaded many times. We’ve
invaded countries in LA and the Caribbean
dozens of times. So instead of sending planeloads
and shiploads of troops down there, we sent
baseball players. They were military petty
officers and sergeants and very good athletes
who had played at an intercollegiate level,
we were able to send them down to put on clinics
and work with young children. And put a very
different face on the military. And that’s
soft power, and I think the arts, both sports
and all the performing arts that are so magnificent
here at Juilliard can be part of that in a
prosaic way.
Let me follow up with both of you, particularly
you had mentioned ISIL and the issue of their
terrorism and really that’s only a response
that can be stopped by military means. Below
that, there is a great deal of discussion
to show how American culture does work in
its best ways and how we can get those messages
out. I personally don’t think the state
department has had an extraordinary track
record of doing that, unfortunately. But we’ve
also heard from the public forms that have
been taking place with the primaries, the
absolute opposite. Carpet bombing or coming
up with policies in which individuals are
not allowed in the US. How do we address this
intelligently in a way that can put some rationality
behind it? Because after all of this is said
and done, and there is an election, we’re
going to have to go on with governing.
Well, I think that if someone wrote a stern
column in the NY times against Donald Trump,
he would probably collapse. No, it’s disheartening
what’s happening. And I think partly for
this reason, you know, I missed the Trump
phenomenon entirely and I’m remorseful about
that, that I just didn’t understand America.
I knew the social segmentation was such that
people were angry, pissed off, apolitical.
I didn’t think they’d think Donald Trump
was the solution. I’ve got to figure out
how I missed this gigantic story. But to me
what’s remarkable about the Trump phenomenon
in regards to this institution is that it’s
a revolution of manners more than a revolution
of policy. The guy has no policy, he doesn’t
understand policy—except for getting rid
of NATO, I’m surprised he’s heard of it.
Maybe we should get rid of NATO, I don’t
know.
But it’s a revolution of manners. To me
the key moment was in the first Republican
debate, he’d already insulted Carly Fiorina’s
face, if you remember, and then he looked
at Rand Paul and said “I’m not going to
insult your looks, but I’ve got a lot to
work with there.” And so that was a moment
when all the normal ways you talk in a political
debate, all the taboos fell away and suddenly
we were in a new world. And the reason we
have rules of civility and rules of conversation
is that so that we can talk to each other
across differences. And when you take away
those rules, the normal standards of politeness,
it’s just dog eat dog. And he immediately
turned it into a dog eat dog, professional
wrestling context.
And then I wrote this in today’s column,
he is strangely loveless in his worldview.
There’s not a lot of reciprocity, there’s
not a lot of love, there’s not a lot of
trust, there’s just winners and losers,
conquerors and conquered. And the relationship
between genders is conquerors and conquered,
and men are the conquerors and women are the
conquered. And so the misogyny there is of
a piece with someone who lives in a universe
that’s entirely loveless.
And so what Trump represents is the stripping
away of all the civilization of refinement
that has been slowly built up in our larger
culture and was existing in our political
culture. And that’s why I think he’s such
a menace, and for Republicans, the ones who
when he becomes the nominee, it’s not morally
right to support him, someone who talks about
women in this way, he’s not a normal candidate,
he’s something abnormal, and deeply subversively
destructive. … I’m brave enough to say
that on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
Hard to top that, I’ll simply say if you
dropped a plumb line from our first president
to George Washington to today’s campaigns,
it’s awfully hard to see the straightness
of that line. The point about civility – if
you haven’t read it since you were in grammar
school, go back and reread Washington’s
“Rules of Civility” it’s a small pamphlet
he wrote on this topic and it echoes loudly
in its irony today, and that’s the tragedy.
We ought to also remember a point I’ve been
trying to make a lot these days, in this winter
of our political discontent. We ought to look
in the mirror and recognize as Ross Perot
said, we’re the owners of this country,
why don’t we fix it? De Tocqueville, who
wrote magnificently about democracy in the
1840s, largely laudatory account of democracy,
but his cautionary note was that the tragedy
of democracy is that in the end you will elect
the government you deserve. We ought to contemplate
that and look in the mirror and fix it. And
that is not beyond our grasp as citizens of
this country.
Actually, a segue to that is something I want
to read you from a new report that just came
out from the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences that is titled “The Heart of the
Matter” and deals with the importance of
the study of humanities and social sciences
for the future of our nation. I’d appreciate
if you’d both comment on this short paragraph
as to how we can make this better, because
this is an issue. This is the introduction
to the report, it reads: “Who will lead
America to a bright future? Citizens who are
educated in the broadest possible sense, so
that they can participate in their own governance
and engage with the world. An adaptable and
creative workforce. Experts in national security,
equipped with the cultural understanding,
knowledge of social dynamics, and language
proficiency to lead our foreign service and
military through complex global conflicts.
Elected officials and a broader public who
exercise civil political discourse, founded
on an appreciation of the ways our differences
and commonalities have shaped our rich history.
We must prepare the next generation to be
these future leaders.”
Where have we gone wrong? Have we gone wrong?
Are the roots uprooted entirely? Within the
context of the arts, which is what we’re
all about here at Juilliard, we know that
the arts are not taught the way they were
taught in the 50s and 60s in public schools
around the nation. So we are literally reaping
what we have sown in that area, and there
are audiences that are getting older and smaller
audiences, who know less about what the arts
are all about. But it’s perhaps the same
with the Constitution, with our traditions.
I was on the commission that wrote that report…
I can tell you it’s possibly the most boring
report ever issued by a commission in the
history. I actually didn’t like it, so I
have issues with this. And partly it’s arguing
for the humanities because it will make more
employable college grads and a better society,
and that’s not to me why we come to the
theater or why we listen to music. It’s
not for public good, it’s for something
more important, which is the formation of
the inner spirit. And we do it because it’s
fun, and to turn the arts into a utilitarian
outer thing when it should be a fun inner
thing and a deeply pleasurable thing is to
give away the game in my view.
The reason the humanities are declining as
a major in college is because even when I
went to college, my English teachers and my
western civ teachers thought these books hold
the magic keys to the kingdom of truth and
they will make you a better person and you
will get deep pleasure out of it. And now
if you turn everything into a social problem,
you’ve given away the turf the core turf
of the humanities, which is what goes on in
the spirit and the soul and the heart. I can
think of all sorts of examples of people I
know who are deeply immersed in the humanities.
Let’s take Yo-Yo Ma, if anybody knows him,
he’s a guy who just radiates joy. He’s
this weird mixture of extreme wisdom and extreme
childlikeness, and I think it’s because
he takes innate simple pleasure, deep pleasure
in music. And that music infuses him with
gracefulness, and I go over to a friend’s
house every Thursday night and her kids are
17-year-old African American kids with horrible
backgrounds but they are all into music and
they are DJs and a couple of poets and two
are painters. And they found their identity
and their joy in that. And so if we start
thinking of the arts as broccoli for social
improvement, we’ve taken away the fun of
it, and if you take away the fun of it, you
take away the core of it.
I’m going to make the case that it can be
a bit of both. And that you can enjoy it deeply.
It’s kind of like broccoli with olive oil
and lemon and roasted and is actually really
good. I think of the arts work as something
delicious and wonderful, and I think also
the arts, very broadly, back to not only performance
and dance and opera and music but theater
and fiction and sports. Those are the arts
of life, I think they do make you a better
citizen and a more complete person. And perhaps
it’s partly the discipline of them, partly
it’s the empathy of it, the connectivity
it makes for you.
And I think also in that, if I remember the
paragraph well, … were languages in there?
I believe strongly in the study of languages.
I think they have both an internal component
that’s extremely enjoyable for me and others
I know and they also allow you to build bridges.
And again, where we get into trouble in our
personal lives and national life and international
world is when we try and build walls around
ourselves. I think the arts are kind of a
bridge that can help connect us. I agree with
David, but I think there’s goodness in both
ends of that argument.
Can I be a little negative here? I just wrote
this book and there’s all of these characters
who exemplify good character and they were
all pathetic at age 20 by magnificent by age
70 – they really built themselves into something.
And in the military it was not hard to find
people to fit this category and the two I
chose are George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower.
And I wanted to have a writer, and I said
let me find a writer with really good character
and that was a multiyear search. They tend
to be self-absorbed and narcissistic and rotten
to people around them. I was going to do Bernard
Malamud because he seemed to be a good guy
and I settled on George Eliot because she
went through some turmoil and was capable
of amazingly strong love. Sometimes the people
who perform the best arts are the rottenest
human beings.
The other phenomenon you see, there’s a
poet at Yale, Christian Wiman, who writes
about this, there’s sometimes a quality
of self-emptying that comes from being a performing
artist, that you give it all away and there’s
a dryness inside and everyone gets something
out of it except you. And so as a poet he
describes how sometimes the expression of
poetry leads to an emptiness within because
you’re just a vehicle for something that’s
going through you. I firmly believe that the
arts improve you, but you wouldn’t know
it when you meet a lot of artists sometimes.
You could say that about Wagner and Beethoven
and not be too far afield. But just going
back to the point that both of you were making.
From my perspective I suppose one could argue
as the president of Juilliard is that art
for art’s sake is the way to go and I think
a little bit of what you’re saying is that
direction. But on the other side, I think
that especially in 21st century America and
the K-12 systems we have around the country,
there’s such lack of arts education. There
are hot spots, you go up Columbus Ave here
on the west side and 73rd street has one of
the greatest music programs you’ve ever
seen, and you go up to 80th street and there’s
nothing. And that doesn’t work in a public
education system of 1.1 million children in
NYC so what can we do to bring that back and
convince politicians.
I’ve been looking at social and emotional
learning—which I think you’ve been writing
about too. I guess they told me if you’re
a liberal it’s social emotional learning,
if you’re a conservative it’s character
building. But either way it’s the ideas
of diligence, of resiliency, focus, joy in
the experience. And one great way of matching
that with academic subjects is music and dance
and drama instruction. Where you work on cooperative
efforts, you work on seeing how other people
respond to your own actions. So I’m still
trying to find some hook to get music back
and drama and dance back into the school systems
of NYC at least, and that seems to be a way
to go. So I don’t think it will diminish
the art.
I’m having a flashback memory. I went to
a conference of the Castle of the Social and
Emotional learning conference. This is a very
huggy group of people, we had to get up and
turn to the person seated next to us who we
didn’t know and put our arms around them
and go nose to nose with this complete stranger.
That was harsh, that was a tough moment for
me.
Was it all that huggy? There was a lot of
staring into each other’s eyes.
I will say two things: I was in Sacramento
CA with the superintendent of schools there,
she told me that the reasons kids stay in
school is the ABCs: athletics, band and cheerleading.
There are a lot of students that don’t think
in normal academic terms and they need some
reason to come to school, and the arts are
a different way of processing reality. I’m
sort of involved in an organization called
Turnaround Arts, which basically takes…the
story I heard this morning was in Bridgeport,
Connecticut, the worst school in Bridgeport,
it looked like a military fortress with magnetometers,
and five big security guards that were running
the school because they were afraid of discipline.
And a new principal came in, took away the
magnetometers, fired the security guards,
and hired five art educators. And it had this
amazing effect right away because people had
something positive to look forward to. There’s
verifiable evidence that these turnarounds
do work if you give people a desire to come
to school rather than something to fear.
Let me ask one last question and then we’ll
turn to the audience for their questions.
I’m going to go back to the general election
if you don’t mind. You’ve touched upon
it already, in each you’ve been extraordinary
leaders around the world representing the
values of the US. What’s the scenario you
see coming down the pike and how do we deal
with it?
I think we’ve had a pretty good riff on
the putative Republican nominee. I’m a recently
retired military officer, senior 1, I’m
apolitical, I’m registered as independent.
I’m not here to endorse anybody, but I will
tell you a couple of qualities I have admired
in people that I think are good leaders around
the world. And it kind of lines up with a
number of things that David has said. First
of all I think a leader needs to be calm.
The ultimate outcome of good leadership is
bringing order out of chaos. That means if
you lose your temper, if you react too quickly
if you lead the nation into war when the first
thing that crosses your desk catches your
fancy, you move too fast. That’s dangerous.
I’m looking for a leader with balance and
temperament.
Secondly, I’m going to sign up with humility.
Someone who is not an overweening ego. Thirdly,
look at the team and each of these candidates
in every election, you can start to see the
shape of who’s around them. I think that’s
extremely revealing and important. And fourthly,
I look for someone who has a sense of humor,
we haven’t talked about it although I think
we’ve exhibited a little here. I think the
ability to see the humor in life, to realize
things are not going to go perfectly, there’s
a news flash, and you can laugh a bit and
move on. There are times when things are deadly
serious, but so often in life, tied to that
humility is the ability to step back and sense
a way to lighten the atmosphere, I think good
leaders do that as well.
When you put all that together, you have to
ask yourself, “does the system we have today
present us with candidates who provide those
kind of qualities?” Again, we ought to ask
ourselves if we’re satisfied with that system.
Let me start off on that same—the one note
that the gradualism and incrementalism is
something I believe in. Another Greek friend
of mine, Thucydides, wrote that in politics
the lows are lower than the highs are high.
When you screw up, you really screw up, if
you do everything great, you move up a little.
So caution is the watchword. Eisenhower had
a phrase, “let’s make our mistakes slowly”
and he always felt his way in. One of the
speeches I love of Eisenhower’s is his farewell
speech, which used the word “balance”
19 times. And that his basic view was that
politics is a competition between partial
truths, between security and freedom, between
achievement and equality, and you’re trying
to figure out where you are in balance. It’s
like you’re sailing a ship and trying to
keep it balanced and go forward.
As for where the country is headed, first
of all, I’ll do a reverse Oreo. On the good
side, it’s really hard to think of a country
better positioned for the 21st century than
the US. I still think you look at our education
system, you look at the creativity of our
economy, you look at our capital markets,
you look at the magnet we are for talent—and
you look around the world at all the other
countries, none of them are quite as well
positioned. That’s a basic fact. The dark
side, we were talking about this backstage.
The world is darkening. The Freedom House
rates democracies, how whether they are moving
towards democracy or against freedom, and
for the last 8 years, the world has been moving
significantly away from freedom and democracy.
Authoritarianism is on the rise, ethnic nationalism
is on the rise, religious fundamentalism is
on the rise—all because of structural flaws
in the global economy, which don’t reward
work with assets. And so that’s the negative
side.
The positive side is that we all get to work
with young people. And if you want to feel
good about the country, go out drinking with
a bunch of 21 year olds. Not 20, 21! But so
all the social indicators that went south
in the 60s are now moving in the right direction:
teenage violence is down, suicide is down,
pregnancy is down, abortion rates are down
by a third, domestic violence is down. My
joke is that when I teach at Yale, I ask what
you’re doing on spring break – I’m unicycling
across Thailand while reading to lepers. It’s
amazing stuff, and they are all going to have
the biggest midlife crisis in human history
in about 10 years, but right now they are
leading a period of general social repair
and it’s great to be around.
The other point we were making backstage in
we are all cognizant of this kind of darkening
and the rise of authoritarian regimes is right
– we should always put things into perspective
and think about what this conversation would
have looked like if we were sitting here,
say in 1916, the world was engaged in the
center of the first world war. On this day,
17,000 would have been killed in battles in
central Europe, on that day. We have seen
many challenges in our current times, but
I think we are improving, it’s a terrific
book by Pinker, Our Better Angels, looks at
this as well. In the midst of all this, I
like to think a place like Juilliard can sharpen
the good side of what David correctly points
out. And I’m not a triumphalist for the
US, but I am an optimist for this country.
Thank you …. Opening up for questions.
Hello – first of all thank you so much for
being here and thank you for the conversation.
My question comes from things that I’ve
been wrestling with as a musician as I think
about next steps. One of the themes that emerged
from this conversation was how we can particularly
through the arts, how we can build bridges
rather than barriers. One of the areas of
growing barriers or distance between people
in our country right now, as you know is inequality.
We’re seeing levels of wealth and income
inequality that we have not seen in 100 years,
since the early 1900s. This factors into many
areas of life, including for instance the
rise of Donald Trump and some of the anger
behind that. At the same time, there seems
to be a widespread perception, even perhaps
more now than 50 years ago, that much of what
we do at this school—classical music—is
an art form for the privileged few. As a musician,
I of course vehemently reject that notion,
but I still recognize it as a perception.
What can and should we be doing as artists
and as people who care about the arts to make
sure that our art really is for everyone so
that as Mr. Brooks said, all might be confronted
by beauty through what we do…both in concrete
practical terms, across the street, at the
Met, ticket prices are for instance prohibitive
for many people. Mozart in his later years
would not have been able to see his own operas
performed. Both in practical terms and also
in terms of broader perceptions about the
arts. How do we make sure art is for everyone?
I’ll start off – Jun Luke is awonderful
pianist in our master’s program – first
of all in terms of elitist experience, 91%
of students at Juilliard and schools like
Juilliard qualify for federal financial aid
this year. So that means that they do not
come from families with significant financial
resources, quite the contrary. And if you
look at other distinguished liberal arts institutions
you’ll get a much lower level percentage
than what happens here. We’re not sending
off the message well about who the artists
really are, and we have to do better in that
way. The reason there’s a perception of
elitism is exactly as you said, the ticket
prices for these events are so high that only
people with enormous resources can get there.
One of the themes we have at Juilliard is
talking about asking artists to function beyond
the stage, to take a responsibility after
their performances. And this has been happening
a good deal through the outreach, community
outreach programs we’ve had and it’s also
happening in schools like Juilliard around
the US as well. What has to happen though
is that young artists have to have that sense
of mission and have to be capable of being
articulate in explaining what that mission
is to a population that often doesn’t understand
what the arts are at all. And in some ways
sees it as a source of evil doing. If you
go back to the 1989 Mapplethorpe controversy
with the NEA, I don’t think Jesse Helms
strategically decided to attack the NEA the
way he did, but it was one of the most effective
attacks on the arts within government parlance
in probably the history of the arts in government.
We have to still fight against that perception
that the arts are not always a positive element,
that they do in some cases they do represent
all sorts of issues that are troubling. That’s
what the arts are about I think—literature,
and music, and dance, and drama and the visual
arts, Picasso and Guernica. These are images
that are troubling but also tell us about
our own humanity. And that’s what I think
the message has to be.
I should point out that Jun Luke laid down
a good foundation at Yale before he came here.
I guess I would say a couple things. There’s
a Dorothy Sayers essay and what she says,
when you think you’re doing your art you
want to serve the community, but if you think
about serving the community, you’ll screw
up your art. Because you’ll be thinking
about the audience, what she says I you want
to serve the work. You want to do the best
you can for the work, if you pay attention
to doing the work well, the community will
be there for you.
I don’t have an art, but I have a craft
of column writing and the first six months
on the job, I was paralyzed by self-doubt.
I got 290,000 emails, I remember I deleted
my email box after six months, and the core
message was “Paul Krugman is great, you
suck.” It was only when I stopped asking
myself “how am I doing?” I could at least
enjoy the job. Once I stopped asking that,
I could focus on the stuff I was writing about
rather than how I was doing. I still think
that the job of somebody playing piano or
violin or dance is to serve the work first.
Roger Scruton, this great philosopher of culture,
says that when we communicate these things,
we’re not serving the audience, we’re
serving the culture itself. We’re trying
to live up to the great things that have been
left to us. As to whether it’s affordable
or not, I agree with going out into the communities
and teaching this stuff, but new technology
it seems to me at least provide access. Maybe
people can’t afford the opera, I can barely
afford the opera, but there’s YouTube and
you can go to your local movie theater.
That’s actually the point I was going to
make, agreeing entirely that it’s a marvelous,
priceless, exquisite experience to go over
there and be in the house for an opera. I
would say so much art is available for relatively
low cost through the technologies David mentions.
I would guess you have many free events right
here—over 700—the Kennedy Center every
day has a free live performance. I think if
you want to fill your life with the arts you
can probably do it on a relatively low cost.
The point you made is dead on is the pernicious
effect of rising levels of inequality in the
country, that’s mirrored globally and that’s
unsustainable over time politically.
I didn’t think I’d do this, but I’m
going to disagree with you on this. The nature
of young artists is to obviously to develop
technique, then to cross that bridge to develop
artistry. Technique alone is nothing it’s
only through communication that you have art.
I find that, and many of my colleagues do
as well, often in a pressure cooker environment
like Juilliard the artists become isolated
within the work, and yes they may serve that
art, but it’s only—and I’ve seen this
over and over again—that when they get into
hospices, hospitals, schools, nursing homes,
AIDS centers—that they see how the art works
in a different context, in a different venue
and it often is revelatory for them. I’ve
seen this over and over again how the students
change in terms of being communicative artists.
Because initially when you say somebody’s
talented, a child is talented and they are
8 years old or something and they are playing
a piece they shouldn’t be able to play at
8 years old—which we see a lot at Juilliard
in our pre college—generally we’re talking
about technique. We’re not necessarily saying
that they are extraordinary communicative
artists, it’s later when that expression
comes. It’s better that they forget about
the right notes and go to the communication.
The story of Rubenstein when he was doing
recordings and he released a recording that
had a lot of mistakes in it and somebody said
to him, “why are you doing this maestro”
and he said “because the music is so good.”
I think that’s what artists have to get
over. Often, if you take them out of the traditional
venue of this stage and put them in a 3rd
grade school or a geriatric care unit, they
see another part of it. So I would disagree.
I’m not going to disagree back but I’m
going to ask you a question – I’m curious.
So you’re training artists who are a certain
age and they are at the cusp of adult life.
And I totally buy that when they are out in
the community getting reaction, it changes
the way they think of the art, it’s a form
of communication. What about having life experience
and suffering? Do you think you have to go
through that to achieve a level of depth of
performance? I’m thinking of a KD Lang version
of Hallelujah (go to YouTube and watch it)
her first performance in a Canadian awards
show. The depth of the suffering she’d experienced
comes filtering out through the music. Presumably
as they get older, that experience can funnel
in and feed into how they perform…what are
we expecting of a 21 year old or a 22 year
old?
Well, I think it was Proust who said that
only through suffering do you realize real
art. Not that I want our students to suffer,
but I do think, especially on the creative
side, many times I think a deep introspection
about humanity does in fact create better
art. When you’re a performer and you’re
playing second bassoon in the NY Phil, it’s
a different type of experience. That human
introspection that we’ve been talking about
is absolutely necessary for an artist and
I think for a country—or else everything
else we experience seems so superficial, so
wrong, so badly thought out. I think that’s
one of the experiences of being an artist,
and teaching others how to be artists, or
at least to attempt to address the arts.
Thank you for your well thought out comments
– admiral mentioned the George Washington
and his manners. I recall that David Brooks
wrote an article about 7 or 8 years ago, but
you talked about hopefully the new president
Barack Obama could bring that feeling back
to our country as a problem solver and produce
some better feelings in our country. We’ve
seen instead more and more narcissism and
the fight between different sides of the political
environment---no one feels that we solve problems
together. What do we as citizens, journalists,
as artists, how do we help our country review
how we solve problems together? It’s a wonderful
virtue and it seems on the political level
we seem to have lost that.
I would start by going back to education and
the values that we communicate to our children.
And that’s done partly in our classrooms,
it’s done in our homes, it’s done through
exposing our children to real life scenarios
and exposing them to literature and fiction,
which allows to put yourself in a different
time and a different place. Education shaped
largely by families, but there is a role for
our state education systems to do that. Secondly,
we should be unafraid to be involved politically,
to let our voices be heard, to select candidates
who are in fact exemplifying the kind of virtues
David has written about, we need to make good
choices. Just like we tell our children to
make good choices in their lives, we need
to make good choices as voters—where we
put financial commitments, where we do volunteer
work, we need to do that and not become cynical
and walk away from it. Those are the two principal
aspects of what has to happen. And thirdly,
all of us need to practice the virtue of empathy,
to try and put ourselves in the other’s
position. David Foster Wallace, another tortured
artist, gave a commencement lecture at the
university of Virginia on this subject—how
we feel when we stand in a grocery line and
someone ahead of us is slowing us down. His
entire speech was not about follow your dreams,
make sure you wear sunscreen, all the clichés
and usual tropes, it was a commencement speech
about the internal dialogue we ought to feel.
St. Augustine said be kind to all you meet
for you know not what burden they carry. That’s
a pretty good philosophy, we need to inculcate
that, we all have a responsibility to do so.
There’s a thing about grocery lines, there’s
a psychological concept called the fundamental
attribution error—never ascribe to character
what can be explained by context. And so if
you butt into a supermarket line you think
I’m in a hurry I have to get home, if somebody
else does it, you think what a jerk.
I would say two things: One) I do think humility
we keep coming back to it, there certainly
has been a rise of self-esteem in this country,
of unearned self-esteem. And if anyone knows
about it, it’s a New York Times columnist.
But just two data points – in 1950, the
high school seniors were asked are you a very
important person, 12% said yes. They asked
a similar question in 1990s and 80% said yes.
And the other thing, psychologists have a
test they call the narcissism test and they
read you statements and say does this apply
to you. Statements like “I find it easy
to manipulate people because I’m so extraordinary”
or “There should be a biography about me”
or “I like to look at my body” and the
mean narcissism score has gone up 30% in the
last 20 years. And they do this test all around
the world, the US we’re number one, I think
Serbia is number 2 and Israel is number 3.
And with that comes a great deal of confidence
in your ability to know the truth. All conversation
is based on the idea that you might be wrong
and you might have something to learn from
the people you disagree with, but if you think
you know the truth, then what do you need
the people you disagree with.
The second thing I’d say is social segmentation
– there’s just a lot more of it. The number
of democrats move to democrat areas, Republicans
move to Sugarland, Texas, and the number of
counties in the country where one party or
another has a landslide majority has doubled
in a generation. And with that goes this deepening
of politics becomes not only a political viewpoint,
but it becomes a tribal identity. Once it
becomes a tribal identity it becomes hard
to compromise. Another bit of data, in the
1970s, a number of Americans were asked, “Would
you mind if your son or daughter married someone
who was a member of the opposing party?”
Back then 5% would mind and now 40% would
mind, that’s because politics has become
tribal. If you compromise your politics, you
compromise your identity and its almost dishonor.
And so, we’ve got to diminish the importance
of politics in this country. I hope if your
children or grandchildren come home and say
I want to marry to so and so, I hope you don’t
think “Democrat or Republican” that should
not be your first question.
I want to pick up because we’re here with
David from the media, I think the segmentation
in the media has profoundly influenced this.
If you are a very conservative person you
can get on Fox and listen to that endlessly
or you can get on radio talk shows and you
are self-reinforced, you’re not hearing
the opposing view. If you’re on the liberal
spectrum, you’re on MSNBC or the shows that
personify that. That kind of segmentation—there
are so many means where we can get our information,
that has a polarizing effect, and it’s compounded
by the rise of the social networks which allow
you to gather in these groups and again self-reinforce
your views. To your question sir, we have
a lot of work to do as a society.
Wish we could take more questions but we can’t
because we have to move on. I want to thank
David and Jim for taking time from very busy
schedules to talk about something that’s
so important to us and quite honestly is not
talked about enough, so bravo.
