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Cornel West
Professor of Religion, Princeton University; Author, Democracy Matters and Race Matters
You know, honestly, I must say that I think we are living in one of the most difficult moments in the history of the precious experiment called democracy. It is a dark moment, and in such a moment it is so easy to remind each other of the darkness as opposed to trying to specify the sources of the light. So I'd like to begin today by trying to accent three distinctive features that constitute who and what we are when we are at our best. To put it another way, what the past has bequeathed to us that allows us to accent the best of that past.
I want to be begin on a Socratic note not a rant against the Bush administration; that's too easy. And not a celebration of a milquetoast candidate from the other party; that's too depressing. I have my choices, there is no doubt about that. And this election is one particular moment in which the choice is crucial. Many of you know, of course, that I supported Ralph Nader in 2000. This time I plan to pray for Ralph but not vote for him. But I'm not excited about either candidate. The aim for me is to try to get at a deeper level, the deeper recesses of the democratic experiment, and that's why I go back to the Greeks. I go back to Socrates. I take quite seriously that line 38a in Plato's Apology, "The unexamined life is not worth living." And, Malcolm X adds, The examined life is painful.The Greek actually says the unexamined life is not a life of the human. Our English word human derives from the Latin humando, which Vico, in the twelfth paragraph of The New Science, defined as burying. I come from a tradition of a particular peoples who have had to come to terms with forms of dehumanization such that they began with: What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be a featherless, two-legged, linguistically conscious creature born between urine and feces who often buries one's dead in order to acknowledge the fact that who one is is intimately connected to who came before one? Socrates himself raises a question: How does one care for one's soul? This Greek notion of paideia that the formation and the cultivation of a self and the maturation of a soul in one's brief move from womb to tomb, and the acknowledgment, the consciousness, of the fact that our bodies will become the culinary delight of terrestrial worms very soon gives an urgency and an intensity to the question of who we really are as persons. And the best for me, wrestling with what it means to be a citizen, is the question of: What does it mean to be a decent human being and a passionate person in this very dark moment, in this difficult moment in American democracy?
Socrates himself says in his trial, in Plato's Apology: Parrhesia is the cause of my unpopularity. What is parrhesia? It's the benchmark of any serious democratic project. It is frank speech. Plain speech. Fearless speech, un-intimidated by the powers that be. And open to revision. I believe we are living in a moment where we don't have enough parrhesia, we don't have enough frank speech. Why? Because Socrates acknowledges you have to muster the courage to think critically for yourself in order to exercise frank and plain speech. And of course the history of the struggle for black freedom in America has been characterized by Socratic figures like Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer who did what? They exercised frank speech regarding the anti-democratic dogmas operating in the heart of American democracy a dogma like white supremacy, or male supremacy, or vast wealth, inequality, or homophobia, or any ideology that loses the sight of the humanity of other persons.
Today dogmas of free market fundamentalism the fetishizing of the unregulated, unfettered, unedited market, privatized are the mantra vis-ΰ-vis almost every major social problem. Resulting in what? Unbelievable levels of productivity, efficiency no doubt. But unbelievable levels of wealth inequality: One percent of the population owns 48 percent of the net financial wealth and that was before the tax cut. It means the most vulnerable among us are pushed to the margins, beginning with the precious children.
Twenty percent of America's children living in poverty in the richest nation in the history of the world. That is a moral disgrace. Thirty-nine percent black, brown children; 46 percent of our red young brothers and sisters on reservations and in other places are living in poverty in the richest nation of the world. Can you imagine what historians are going to say about Americans 150 years from now? Why the sleepwalking? When did it become fashionable to be indifferent to the suffering of the most vulnerable? Why are the priorities tilted toward privatizing and yet public life: health care, 46 million no access; child care, millions of young children left alone as their mothers are now forced to work, given welfare reform, with no job skills or job centers to ensure that they have a secure foothold in the labor force. Decrepit public schools; not the private ones in vanilla suburbs they are doing very well. In chocolate cities: decrepit schools.
Dogma you see, dogmas of aggressive militarism. Not simply colonial invasions of Iraq in the name of the liberation of Iraqis. I say: Mr. Rumsfeld, when you shook hands with Saddam Hussein and offered him golden spurs as a gift from the Reagan administration, you didn't have your mind on the suffering of Iraqi people. You've changed your mind since then. When Saddam Hussein was America's gangster he was fine. Some of us marched against Saddam Hussein in 1979 when he was installed by the CIA. He was a gangster then.
But it's not just aggressive militarism outside, it's the militarization of everday life: machismo identities, cowardly brothers of all colors engaged in vicious assaults on sisters of all colors, and domestic violence. Young people having machismo identities posturing as if the only way they can make it from womb to tomb is by imitating Melville's Ahab, in the greatest novel ever written by an American, that 32-year-old Herman Melville in 1851. Ahab says, I'll dominate my way, I'll conquer my way through my move from womb to tomb. Melville says, the worst of the American imperial mentality. What's the best of it, Melville? I believe there is a best. There is Ishmael. There is multi-racial solidarity, there is learning from others, there is humility and magnanimity very different from American success.
I always remind young people everywhere I go: One of the worst things the older generation did was to tell them for 25 years, Be successful, be successful, be successful, as opposed to Be great, be great, be great. There is a qualitative difference. Success is very individualistic, privatistic, concerned only with one's one upward mobility.
For the great, I go back to what I call the Jewish invention of the prophetic, fused with the Greek invention of the Socratic. The Jewish invention of the prophetic, in those profound Hebrew Scriptures, defines greatness as he or she who is willing to serve others, be kind to strangers and widows. To fundamentally believe that what it means to be human is to be compassionate, because there is no self without an other and there is no self understanding without you understanding that other. If you demonize that other, you actually degrade yourself. See it in Proverbs 14:31, "He who oppresses the poor, degrades one's Maker, he who is in solidarity with the poor exalts one's Maker." Micah 6:8, "Do justly, love mercy, walk humbly with thy God." The fifth chapter of Amos: "Let justice roll down like water, righteousness like a mighty stream."
I'm not preaching to you all, I know this is lunchtime. I'm reminding you of one of the greatest traditions that has been bequeathed to us. And how we fuse Socratic questioning and the exercise of parrhesia the fearless, frank and plain speech of unpleasant truths having to do with anti-democratic dogmas that are arresting the development of the democratic project with this Jewish invention of the prophetic that has to do with mustering the courage to care.
This fusion is a fascinating one, and it has much to do with the black freedom struggle. Why? Of course Socrates, like Jesus, never wrote one word. If it were not for Plato and Xenophon and Aeschines, we would know nothing about Socrates. But in all the various renderings of Socrates, we never ever see Socrates shedding a tear. He never cries. So even given the centrality of exercising parrhesia and speaking frankly, I think there is a defect in the Socratic level of wisdom. Because anybody who has never cried or shed a tear, for me, has never really loved. And if you never really loved, it's unclear whether you ever really lived unless you've tried to live within the confines of your mind and held your soul at arm's length. Some people say, Was Socrates married? Yes, he was. Did he have kids? Yes, he did. So maybe he stole away and cried. But we don't get it in the three sources.
When you talk about the Jewish invention of the prophetic, it begins with the tears, the cries of a hated people, a despised people, an oppressed people in the face of an imperial Egypt and a higher power that hears their cries and afflictions. The agony and anguish of the least of these becomes the lens through which you view not just yourself, because you're never a victim one should not believe the conservative discourse about oppressed people viewing themselves solely as victims. The same is true in the Hebrew Scripture. Jewish people were never solely victims; they were victimized by imperial elites called pharaohs. And they responded with unbelievable imagination, courage. I do not believe, especially in America but I think this is true for democracies across the board it is possible to engage in the kind of democratic awakening necessary, which is not just about the next election, but about a deeper paideia, a deeper kind of informed and critically engaged person and citizenry. It's no accident that Judaic effort to create a whole new way of life, rooted in tears and cries the exercise of intelligence and compassion is always in service of justice, justice, justice.
Since 9/11 there is a fundamental sense in which, for the first time in the history of the American democratic experiment, all Americans feel unsafe, unprotected, subject to arbitrary violence and hated. And yet to be a nigger in America for 350 years is to be unsafe, unprotected, subject to arbitrary violence and hatred. There is a certain sense in which the last three years we have been wrestling with the niggerization of America as a nation. How is that now to come to terms with a feeling of relative helplessness, insecurity, anxiety, feeling that there are forces coming at you that you have no control over and a feeling of being hated for who you are? My white brothers and sisters come up to me: Brother West, they say, I just can't get over this sense of being hated, it's hard to get out of bed in the right way because I just feel it's so unjust. I say, You don't say. Really, that's new huh? There is a people in your midst that have been wrestling with that ever since they got off the slave ships.
Can a blues nation learn something from a blues people? Emmett Till's mother had to deal with terrorism. Her only baby, 14-year-old Brother Emmett, was killed by American terrorists. She brought his body back to Chicago, kept the coffin open against the claims of the authorities that be, when 50,000 fellow citizens of various colors walked through that black church in Chicago to see his body. What did she have to say, what response did she put forward against American terrorists? Against being niggerized and looking at her baby whose head was five times the size of his ordinary head? She stepped up and said, "I don't have a minute to hate. I'm going to pursue justice for the rest of my life." What a standard: moral maturity, spiritual strength. When she talked about justice it had to do with ensuring that she would not re-contribute to the cycle of gangsterization that characterizes terrorist attacks on innocent people.
What did Brother Martin have to say when he had to give his eulogy when four precious girls in Birmingham died in September 1963? It was the only time Brother Martin cried in public. Tears flowing, he looks at the family in the front row. Four precious babies friends of the great Angela Davis, she is from Birmingham, Alabama, lived right around the corner from 16th Street Baptist Church. Martin, what are you going to say to the world? Somehow we've got to muster the courage to use the armor of love and justice, justice, justice.
Where is the discourse of that level of Socratic and prophetic depth when America is niggerized when terrorism now attacks all of us? Is it revenge hunt them down like cockroaches, lone ranger's strategies, cowboy's sensibilities? To demonize the other? Is it reaching out even for the very other that has demonized you? It's hard to find. The analogy is imperfect, there is no doubt about that. One is white supremacists coming at the others, one is Islamic gangsters coming at us. But where is the high quality of public discourse so that we don't find ourselves in a deeper quagmire, in a bottomless pit, especially sending an army that is disproportionately lower middle class, working-class, and black and brown? I'm glad Brother Michael Moore reminds us of the number of congressmen and women whose young people are fighting in the war. We are going to use the working-class kids as the army for the empire while you are at home talking about how pro-war you are. Something is wrong with that, deeply wrong.
In addition to the Greek invention of the Socratic questioning and the Jewish invention of prophetic witness, there is the black invention of the blues, the tragicomic. The tragicomic goes far beyond mellow dramatic narratives of all the good on one side and all the evil on the other, pure heroes and impure villains. It goes far beyond conceptions of democratic experiments as some grand city on the hill, which is a moral exemplar with direct access to purity and innocence. Tragicomic says, No, the good and evil is so interwoven in each and every one of us and interwoven in every democratic experiment known to mankind, forms of barbarism shot through every democratic experiment. Of course, we know that without indigenous peoples' lands and bodies, without enslaved Africans, without women in patriarchal households, there would be no American democratic experiment, even though those realities are anti-democratic realities. That's why every democracy is incomplete and unfinished. That was part of the genius of the Founding Fathers they included a Socratic dimension to the Constitution amendments and they allowed for parrhesia, the Bill of Rights under certain circumstances. 1798, the Alien and Sedition Acts going to suspend it. World War II going to suspend it. World War I we're going to suspend it. COINTELPRO, Black Panther Party, Fred Hampton going to suspend it. But basically we believe in it. But it's on paper, it's precious and it's up to us fellow citizens to make it real, because these rights and liberties are hard fought.
You've got to sacrifice for them, but tragicomic hope is qualitatively different from American mainstream optimism. Anyone who looks at the world through the lens of one's sensitivity to suffering can never be optimistic. You don't need to read Chekhov or Kafka or Beckett (even though it helps) to understand what I'm talking about. Remember that line in "Waiting For Godot." He talks about the "constant quantity" of tears and "the air is full of our cries," says one of his clowns. People say, I'm so despairing now with the debates being so disillusioning. Goethe says, He or she who has never despaired has never lived. To be human is to make despair a constant companion but hold it at arm's length the way Ma Raney and Bessie Smith, and Louis Armstrong, and Sarah Vaughan and Curtis Mayfield and Luther Vandross do as artists. You only think that despair is something alien to you if you're residing in some realm of purity.
In the U.S. experiment, the grand practitioners of democratic individuality are blues artists and jazz musicians. Why? Because they must find their voice, imitation is suicide; emulation is the sign of an adolescent mind. How do you mature? You don't just grow, you got to grow up. Will America grow up and have for the first time a tragicomic hope that it can learn from its blues people and its myth? And by blues I'm not talking about skin pigmentation. There is a white brother born in Mississippi named Tennessee Williams. He is a white literary blues man; it was no accident that his first collection of plays was called American Blues. And the American "Hamlet" and Blanche DuBois, "A Streetcar Named Desire," she is a blues sister. It's not a question of skin pigmentation, it's a question of: Do you have the courage to think for yourself, care for others and still have the courage to hope but recognizing you are always radically cutting against the grain?
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