Transcript: Is there anything one can do – one’s self – to advance the idea that a culture of liberty and personal freedom is the highest human value? That in freedom there’s strength. That in . . . Not in a sort of mindless July 4th stuff, but that in point of fact, no matter what tradition one comes from – whether Islamic or Jewish or Christian or Hindu – that if we’re made in the likeness and image of God, if we live in . . . If we’re part of a divinely ordained – or at least a world in which there is a predominant myth of divinity and divine providence – how do we best play our part in that __________? And is maximizing the ability of you to do what you want or me to do what I want, as long as it doesn’t pick your pocket or break your arm, is that . . . is there something we can do to do that?

Recorded on: 7/3/07

Transcript: I grew up on Missionary Ridge which is a Civil War battlefield. It’s how Sherman basically got to Georgia by breaking Braxton Bragg’s lines there at the end, as you say, of the active civil rights period. So there were two pieces of history unfolding when I was growing up more or less in the ‘70s. One was the omnipresence of the Civil War; and the other was the difficult after pains of the Civil Rights Movement. I was a child in Chattanooga when there was a race riot there. I remember watching smoke come up from buildings burning downtown. So things that were large and national and historic felt quite personal to me. And I think that tactile sense led me to an interest.

Recorded on: 7/3/07

Transcript: Literalism. Literalism. Yeah, that’s good a moment ago. Islamic literalism. It’s Christian literalism. It’s this idea that we have access to the complete truth and all the answers, and that those who do not agree with us are somehow subhuman, are infidels, are justifiable targets. And we got in trouble in epically tragic terms in the 20th Century when various people, various systems dehumanized others, and that’s essentially what we’re living with now. And the engine of that dehumanization is a fundamentalist view in one’s own virtue and one’s own . . . the correctness of one’s own.

Transcript: 7/3/07

Transcript: Churchill once said, “Man may believe or disbelieve, but it’s a wicked thing to take away one’s hope.” You can’t explain the United States except as an exercise in optimism – realistic optimism – because it’s fundamentally a deposit of faith in the ultimate republic and our virtue of the people. It is an investment in the idea that we are on a journey that is in fact a linear one. And to use Churchill again, “The road is not always even, but in general the path is upward.” So I think that’s the . . . that’s the engine. Otherwise you have a kind of “Hobbsian”, closed-minded view in which so many possibilities are automatically foreclosed. And so I suppose I would argue that I think the guiding philosophical idea of America has been one of hope and increased, expanded, liberty. And that has been something that we have successfully exported. Sometimes we’ve done it unsuccessfully; but it’s not a bad bet. And given all the other bets its one I would take.

Recorded on: 7/3/07

Transcript: I think that literalism – fundamentalism – is the refuge for people who are fearful. I think that it’s much easier to put on a coat of amour and stand still, or to fight blindly or reflexively, than to judge the slings and arrows of fortune as they come because that part’s scary. It’s hard to try to reconcile . . . I believe in a god who ultimately is a force of love and justice, and yet children have cancer and children starve. I mean that’s an utterly . . . they seem utterly incompatible. And that’s very hard, and it’s a mystery, and I have no earthly idea how to reconcile them; but I’m gonna try because to be fundamentalist on either side is to foreclose whole realms of experience, and thought, and potential illumination. If one’s entirely secular, then you foreclose the possibility of the miraculous. If you’re entirely fundamentalist in Christian terms, then you are accepting as inerrant a book and a tradition that is clearly the product of human hands and hearts. So that, to me, is an irrational reaction to scripture. Scripture is fascinating, but it’s a historical document; and it’s as flawed as any other historical document. So my sense of fundamentalism is people who want a comfortable way to react to an ever-changing world tend to seek refuge in a more fundamentalist world view than I’m comfortable with.

Literalism. Literalism. Yeah, that’s good a moment ago. Islamic literalism. It’s Christian literalism. It’s this idea that we have access to the complete truth and all the answers, and that those who do not agree with us are somehow subhuman, are infidels, are justifiable targets. And we got in trouble in epically tragic terms in the 20th Century when various people, various systems dehumanized others, and that’s essentially what we’re living with now. And the engine of that dehumanization is a fundamentalist view in one’s own virtue and one’s own . . . the correctness of one’s own. So to me the largest story of our time will be a reformation, a moderation of forces of extremism around the world, including some at home, but chiefly around the world. Because people are sometimes a little, I think, too sanguine about terrorism. The idea is, well, al-Qaeda is “small beer”, I think the Economist put it recently. Yeah, unless you lost someone, or unless there’s a weapon of mass destruction that falls into the wrong hands. So whatever we can do to reduce the oxygen flow to those pockets of hate and destruction, I think we’ll be what this generation is remembered for or not.

Recorded on: 7/3/2007 at The Aspen Ideas Festival

Transcript: I don’t see faith and reason as being incompatible. John Paul the II once said, “They’re the two wings on which we rise on the contemplation of truth.” Very grand image. But the final leap of faith in monotheistic terms – to limit the conversation somewhat – is in fact irrational. As Henry. . . as Coleridge said, “It’s the willing suspension of disbelief.” So yeah, at the end of the day I make a leap into the irrational. But all the way up to that point, I think that my own particular religious faith is as well grounded in history and argument as anybody else’s, and sometimes perhaps more so than in other traditions. I like to think that the coherent element, if there is one – the common dominator – is a kind of hopefulness that whether one is intensely secular or intensely religious, one hopes for . . . presumably hopes for something better tomorrow than one has today. And how we get there is often what the fight is about. I have no interest in evangelizing. I have no interest in converting anyone to anything except one hopes a kind of matasonian appreciation of the fact that there are many conflicting forces all of which should be heard. And then we work out what we need to work out; but we have to do it with some sense that we’re doing it not simply for our appetites of the moment, but to make the world a better place in the sense that we will be more secure. We would be happier. We’re doing so for our children. And so I think hope is the linking . . . the linking factor because reason is not a particularly useful faculty if it’s not leading to something. And faith is not a particularly useful faculty if it doesn’t shape one’s behavior in ways that make one less likely to . . . As Thomas Jefferson once said, makes ones less likely to “pick someone’s pocket or break their arm.”

Recorded on: 7/3/07

Transcript: It’s an art not a science is the first thing. We pay attention to what we call the “rotation”. That is, if we have a cover on a health issue one week we’re more likely than not to do politics or Iraq or something the next week. So that the person who writes us a check every year and gets 50 issues feels they’re getting a full variety of experience. In terms of page-for-page, it’s a matter of where can we add value? Where do we have something to say? Where if we found something out that other people don’t know? Where can we say something on a subject when a lot’s been said but not everybody’s said it? And so the test really is . . . what I’m trying to think about is six days from now, what’s gonna make you stop on that page? And how do you communicate in display type, and pictures, and graphics that this is worth stopping on? And so that’s the weekly battle.

Given what I do day-to-day, as you say, if I’m gonna do a book it has to be something that I’m never going to think, “Oh god. I gotta go work on that,” because life’s way to short. I have two little kids; it’s just not worth it. In the case of Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill it’s just a great human saga. It’s a great love story and there’s nothing not to love about it. The religion book I wrote because I was angry about . . . There were perhaps easier ways to express that anger, I admit. My wife pointed that out several times because I . . . there was one addition in the New York Times, literally in August of 2005, where on the front page there was a Nobel Laurent saying you could not be a believer and be a scientist. And inside the paper Pat Robertson issued his fatwa against Hugo Chavez. And I thought, you know, we’re all on A9. So what does the world look like on A9? I’m doing Andrew Jackson now, and I chose that because it occurred to me that if we’re going to recover all the founding fathers – which we’ve now pretty much done – Jackson is a far more representative figure than say George Washington or John Adams in both his vices and his virtues. If you look at Andrew Jackson, you see a figure who is at once kind and cruel. He was a figure of grace and viciousness. He can be an incredibly benign figure. He can also be violent and willing to tolerate things that we would not think we would. The problem with that is we are in fact a country that lives with horrible inequalities, that still commits horrible injustices, that in the fullness of time we’re gonna look back on and say, “How exactly did we sit around while “X” happened in Rwanda or “B” happened somewhere else?” So I think if we understand people who represented those dichotomies in the past, we have some chance of being aware of those dichotomies now, and perhaps solving them before they’re allowed to be completely . . . Is “dichotomous” a word?

Recorded on: 7/3/07

Transcript: There is a proliferation of outlets, obviously. This is all painfully cliché. Everyone is a pundit. Everyone has become a publisher. Everyone’s become their own editor. And if you believe in democracy and you believe in the first amendment you have to applaud that. The First Amendment’s not just for people who pay other people to gather news. I do think that there is a function for editors. There’s a functions for reporters who are committed to a craft in which they do the best they can at taking information in as clinical a way as possible. Not necessarily a neutral . . . you know we all have our biases, we all have our prejudices. We all bring whatever we bring to the process; but we do make the best effort possible at presenting information in a clinical way, and then people can do with it what they want. And that model is under great economic stress. I don’t think it’s under great audience stress. I think people are adding to what they do, not subtracting, if that makes sense. And so how we convince advertisers, frankly, and people to pay subscription rates for the news we gather is the great challenge of the next 10 years. And the moment we figure it out, 20 minutes later it will change again. But I’m fairly bullish about it because I think that the story will out. It’s always about good stories. It’s always about, as Horace once said, “both delighting and instructing”. And that’s been true for a long, long time. And the advent of prose didn’t kill poetry, and so I think we’ll be all right.

Online we move faster. It actually has been liberating in print because we’re able to assume that people know just about everything that happened by the time they come to us. So it enables us to step back even farther to some extent and really tell a story in as . . . in as inventive a way as possible. And so it’s increased the amount of overall product we put out there, but it’s changed the weekly product in ways I think are actually good for it.

Question: Are conglomerates a threat?

Leaving aside Mr. Murdoch, I think that actually flies in the face of what’s happening. You can’t have a proliferating media universe where everyone can have their own publication, and then worry too much about concentrated power. Is it a threat? Certainly. Everything’s a threat; but my sense – and I work for, I guess, a media conglomerate – I’ve never had a conversation with our owners about we should do this or not do that. I think that most conspiracy theories are wrong for a reason. And I stay up at night about how do we bring in a new generation of people who would be interested in the kind of analysis and news we offer as opposed to worrying about the top down. I’m more worried about the bottom up right now.

Recorded on: 7/3/07

Transcript: Phil Graham, who was the founder of the modern Newsweek, said that “Newsweek should be the first rough draft of history.” Sometimes is rougher than others, but it is that.

Recorded on: 7/3/07