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CHAPTER EIGHT
THE WRISTON LECTURE: AVENUE FOR IDEAS
David Frum
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Walter Wriston must be a very confident host. I once caught sight of him just
a few hours before one of the lectures named in his honor. I was walking up
Fifth Avenue; he was sitting at the window of a club, reading the newspaper
as calmly as if he were expecting one person to dinner instead of 500.
Perhaps Mr. Wriston was so calm because he knew that the most difficult work
on his series lay behind him. There must have been 100 lecture series already
in business when the Manhattan Institute’s Wriston Lectures launched in
1987. How absurd to imagine that this new series could ever become a significant
intellectual venue—that the ideas expressed by the lecturers could ever
make an impact on the culture and governance of a city as vast, noisy, bureaucratic,
and self-satisfied as New York. But by the time I walked past Mr. Wriston’s
window, his lecture series had done all of that.
The story of the Wriston Lectures is a demonstration of the power of ideas—and
of the boost that good ideas can get from a (usually) fine meal in a beautiful
room.
The Changing Fortunes of New York
Fifteen years is not really such a long time. But for the city of New York,
the decade and a half since the first Wriston Lecture has been a time of transformation.
In 1987, New York was riding a Wall Street economic boom, but it was one that
made even many of its beneficiaries uneasy. Wall Street and the Upper East Side
might be pulsing with easy money and lavish display, but the city around them
was visibly rotting. As Tom Wolfe reminds us in his great novel of the 80s boom,
The Bonfire of the Vanities, even the city’s Masters of the Universe
knew that one wrong turn could send them into a neighborhood where law and order
had collapsed. The financiers of New York were hauling American business and
industry into a new era of techno-progress, but their own town was apparently
tumbling backward into a chaos of crime, drugs, corruption, and racial hatred.
And now? Financial New York has experienced its most prolonged and severe recession
since the oil embargo of 1973. Lower Manhattan is a gaping ruin. The city knows
itself to be the prime target of the most cruel and ruthless foreign enemy America
has faced since the Third Reich went out of business. Yet New Yorkers, I think
it’s fair to say, feel more confidence and more optimism than they ever
did in the gaudy years of the 1980s. They know that their city is governable,
that crime and drugs can be conquered, that a boom in the financial markets
does translate into jobs and prosperity for all—and, most important, they
know that when it matters most, New Yorkers of all races and backgrounds become
one united people: Americans.
The Wriston Lectures can shed a little light on this history. In 15 years,
the lectures have hosted the powerful and the honored: two Nobel laureates,
a billionaire businessman, a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, the National
Security Adviser to the President of the United States. Yet some of the most
memorable lectures (as with any lecture series, of course, not all the talks
have been of the same caliber) have come from people who have no authority other
than the power of their arguments: writers, teachers, and the pastor of an inner-city
church.
The range of opinion presented has been wide: former Manhattan Institute chairman
Roger Hertog one year welcomed to the lecture “admirers and skeptics, respected
liberals, muddling moderates, pushy libertarians, libertines for that matter,
those who are pro-choice, those who are anti-choice, those who choose to waffle,
and those who are merely leaning; silent majorities, boisterous minorities,
vegetarians, flesh-eaters, humanitarians, animal rightists and animal companions;
devolutionists, evolutionists, strict constructionists, and the home constructionists;
fellow-travelers, stay-at-home moms, people of color, people of power, pinkos,
reds, conservatives of every stripe and hue.” Some of the lecturers have
indeed been conservatives by anybody’s definition, others have politics
that elude definition, and one—Philadelphia mayor Ed Rendell—would
go on to serve as a future chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
Some of the lectures have been startlingly personal; others have dealt with
large social forces. But they have on several occasions given us new understanding
of our times and insight into what’s ahead.
A Lens on Our Age and on the Future
Probably the very best prediction offered in any of the lectures came courtesy
of Carver Mead, co-founder of Intel, in the first Wriston event, all the way
back in 1987. At the time, the tech industry had collapsed into one of its cyclical
slumps. Many feared that the whole semiconductor industry would soon pick up
stakes and move to Japan, or maybe Taiwan. Mead sketched the technological possibilities
that still lay ahead and then urged the audience not to give up yet on high-tech
in America: “We’re not going to need the federal government to come
in and bail out our electronics. We’re going to do just fine, thank you.
There’s as much or more innovation and creativity in this industry as I
have ever seen, and there’s a lot of places to go in the future.”
That, as it turned out, was putting it mildly.
Rupert Murdoch proved equally prophetic in 1989, when he offered this assessment
of the potential political impact of cable television: “The American media
elite is a fairly tight-knit group that is significantly further to the left
than the overall population,” he observed. “But in television, the
increase in the number of channels that’s coming will allow a much wider
range of voices on the air, although that certainly isn’t evident yet.”
It would become evident, however, when Murdoch launched Fox News a decade later.
Václav Klaus, then prime minister of Czechoslovakia, anticipated in
1996 a question that carries even greater resonance today, as America accepts
large new responsibilities in the Middle East. “The relative weaknesses
or strengths of institutions of a newly formed free society are only one aspect
of the whole issue,” Klaus observed. “What about the people? Are they
ready for such rapid change? Does a free society presuppose…some set of
values or moral standards that would properly anchor that society? Do the people
need an interim period of schooling? Is such schooling realizable? Are there
teachers for such procedure? Are the people willing to be educated? My answer
to these and similar questions is rather simple. My answer is that the people
are always ready and that they do not need a special education. What they need
is a free space for their voluntary activities, the elimination of controls
and prohibitions of all kinds.”
Six years after Klaus spoke, Condoleezza Rice’s Wriston Lecture inscribed
the faith that “the people are always ready” into the foreign policy
of the United States: “We reject the condescending view that freedom will
not grow in the soil of the Middle East or that Muslims somehow do not share
in the desire to be free.”
Of course, the lecturers have not always agreed with one another in the way
that Klaus and Rice did. There have been conflicts and contrasts, explicit and
implicit. In 1992, the Reverend Johnny Ray Youngblood came to talk about his
innovative approach to public housing—and to fire a blast at those who
believe in private-sector-led growth: “In American cities, the public and
private sectors are coming together to build convention centers, baseball fields,
overgrown fish tanks, harbor and river and ocean places. More low-wage, no-benefits,
part-time jobs are sure to follow.”
The year before, though, Milton Friedman had warned against putting too much
trust in the public sector: “If a private enterprise is a failure, it is
closed down—unless it can get a government subsidy to keep it going. If
a government enterprise is a failure, it is expanded.” Thomas Sowell took
up the argument again in 1998, summing up the Left’s view: “The freedom
of individuals must be overridden if social justice is the overriding goal.”
Overarching Themes
Yet as one rereads these lectures by these very dissimilar lecturers, several
shared themes emerge.
The first—despite Klaus’s admonition—is an emphasis on the preeminent
importance of culture and values. “We are entering the last years of the
twentieth century,” James Q. Wilson said in 1994, “with every reason
to rejoice and little inclination to do so.” He continued: “We feel
that there is something profoundly wrong with our society. Not with our own
lives, mind you; the majority of Americans are satisfied with their own conditions.
They are dissatisfied with the conditions and prospects of their communal life….
What these problems have in common in the eyes of most Americans is that they
result from the weakening of the family.”
Cultural problems may seem intractable. But another theme
of these lectures is the determination not to be controlled
by fate—to solve problems rather than be overmastered
by them. Thus, Mayor Rendell explained in 1993 how he had
persuaded Philadelphians to accept his reforms in city work
rules: “I started during the [election] campaign and
I never stopped from the day that I took office. We communicated
two very, very sound and correct facts: One, that we were
out of money—no joke, we were out of money. Two, that
the benefit package compared to what the average Philadelphian
got was out of control.... [The workers] went on strike and
in 16 hours the strike folded.” Thus, too, Irving Kristol’s
assessment of the future in 1995: “For the past three
centuries culture has trumped religion. It is now conceivable
that religion will once again trump culture. The challenge
for some of us sympathetic to this revival of religion may
yet turn out to be how to preserve the cultural heritage of
Western civilization within a new religious context—a
context that is not all that friendly to culture per se.”
Behind this theme of determination is a third theme: universality.
Human beings, these lectures often tell us, are at bottom
more alike than unlike. The values on which American greatness
has been built are not the exclusive property of Americans
or of white people, but are available for the benefit of all.
John McWhorter in 2001 urged black Americans to lay aside
their sense—diagnosed by W. E. B. DuBois—of belonging
to two cultures, one black, the other American. “We must
realize that for [DuBois] the double-consciousness was not
a status badge of pride. It was a problem to be gotten beyond.
As he put it, it was the longing to attain self-conscious
manhood to merge the double self into a better and truer self.
There are many signs that this merging into a better and truer
self is an ever-nearer possibility for black America.”
Or as V. S. Naipaul observed in 1990’s lecture, though
he was born to a Hindu family in Trinidad, it was Western
culture “that both gave the prompting and the idea of
a literary vocation; and also gave the means to fulfill that
prompting; that civilization that enables me to make that
journey from the periphery to the center.”
A fourth great theme is awareness that we live in a time of technological transformation—that
the machines we have invented are changing our society and our economy at a
pace that can only be compared to the Industrial Revolution itself. George Gilder
offered an arresting statistic to illustrate the transformation in his talk
in 1999: “Between 1977 and 1997,” Gilder observed, “the value
of GDP per American citizen rose from just over $19,000 to just under $27,000.
But the weight of the output, the mass of the output, dropped by 23 percent,
or nearly half a ton a year per capita and its value per pound doubled.”
Yet another important theme is the celebration of commerce—as something
valuable in itself and as something indispensable to the health of great cities.
“I am here to proclaim,” said Norman Podhoretz in 2000, “that
the American economic system and the American culture on which it is rooted
have created a society in which there is more liberty and more prosperity than
human beings have ever enjoyed in any other place or any other time. I am here
to maintain that these blessings are more widely shared than even the most visionary
utopians ever imagined possible. I am here to submit that this is an immense
achievement and that it is what entitles the United States of America to an
honored place on the roster of the greatest civilizations the world has ever
known.”
A Coherent Vision
Together, these five themes add up to a something approximating a coherent
point of view. It’s an optimistic problem-solving point of view. It defends
the American tradition against its critics and champions bourgeois, commercial
culture against its enemies. The point of view argues that in a time of rapid
change, freedom is still the answer to our gravest problems, from economic growth
to education. And it shows that a commercial society is not just a prosperous
society but a good society.
These are the principles of the Wriston Lecture. They are the principles of
the Manhattan Institute. They are the principles that saved New York City in
the 1990s. And they are the principles that we are once again called on to defend
in the great war in which the United States is now engaged. That war began with
an attack on New York, and understandably so. As Tom Wolfe said in his lecture
in 1988, “To people all over the world, New York City is the very apex
of the American century. And for better or for worse, this has been the American
century.”
Wolfe is a novelist with the gift of foresight, and the ominous undertone of
his assessment of late-century New York carries redoubled power today. But just
as New York was the first target of the war, so the New Yorkers at the Manhattan
Institute have forged weapons for victory in that war. All the rest of us are
in their debt—and especially in the debt of that generous, unflappable
man in the clubhouse window: Walter Wriston.
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