Why Cornel West is hopeful (but not optimistic)

Do you ever look back on something you posted on the Internet and think, well, that was cringe? Yeah, I mean, I look back at that stuff and I'm just like, it's so emblematic of the era. And it's also just like, why did I think this would age well like in the slightest? This week, unexplain it to me from Vox. What to do with your online regret? New episodes on Sundays wherever you get your podcasts. I'm a Stead Herndon, and this week on TodayXPlay, I traveled to Minneapolis to speak with Attorney General Keith Ellison, who is suing the Trump administration over ICE descending on his state. It would mean that we had federal active duty troops patrolling our streets, which is concerning because the way ICE does its business is then proven over and over again to be deeply problematic. New episodes of TodayXPlay drop every day of the week wherever you get your podcasts. And you can now watch our Saturday interviews at youtube.com/vox. But hope is something else, you see, because hope is not spectacular, it's participatory, you're already in the mess, you're in the Trump. What are you going to do? Hope is a verb as much as a virtue. Hope is as much a consequence of your action as it is a source of your action. Hope is something that you find in your immersion and you decide you're going to fight until the end. Hey, I'm Sigal Samuel, co-host of the way through. Summer, Sean Iling and I are taking turns talking to philosophers and spiritual leaders who can help us navigate all of our current struggles against COVID, economic collapse, racial injustice, and maybe even find something meaningful along the way. My guest today is Cornell West. For decades, he's been one of America's most prominent and provocative black intellectuals, known for calling out racism, predatory capitalism, and unjust policies wherever he sees them. He wasn't shy about critiquing President Obama over his drone policies, and he's definitely not shy about critiquing President Trump now. West is a professor of the practice of public philosophy at Harvard. And he's also got a brand new podcast called The Tightrope, so check that out. In this conversation, West and I talk about the pandemic and white supremacy and some potential tools for dealing with them. We discuss black liberation theology, which took off in the 60s, and basically emphasized that God's number one concern is for people who are being oppressed. West is a Christian who's really steeped in that theology. Just a quick heads up, throughout the conversation, he repeatedly returns to the idea of chesaed. So FYI, that's Hebrew for loving kindness. It's a pretty central theme among the prophets in Hebrew scripture, and West really draws a lot on that prophetic tradition. But West is also steeped in a bunch of secular philosophical traditions, from Marxism, to existentialism, to pragmatism. So I ask him what those traditions can teach us about how to handle our current crisis. We cover questions like, how can philosophy help us confront our fear of mortality? Is the pandemic weakening or strengthening white supremacy? What's the difference between hope and optimism? And why does West say he's not optimistic, but he is super hopeful? By the end of this conversation, I actually felt more hopeful myself, because West is obviously an intellectual guy, but he's also just really fun and joyous. So I hope you'll enjoy this as much as I did. Here's my conversation with Cornell West. Dr. West, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I'm really excited to have you today to talk to. Well, I'm just blessed to be here, and I tell you, your reputation precedes you as one of these high quality intellectual sites on this massive social media that we have these days. You're very kind. We're really excited to have you. And I want to just dive right in. Let's dive right into the hard stuff. Absolutely. We've been through some really, really hard months. And I wonder if you could just start by giving me your kind of top level analysis. How would you diagnose the crisis that we see convulsing American life right now? Well, I want to begin by first just noting the passing of my dear brother, Michael Brooks. I know you all know him as well. I was just on his show, a plan to be on his show in August. I was just shocked when I heard that he had passed and he was in so many ways, such as serious organic intellectual. I think things are getting so bad that we have to focus on what fortifies us. It's not even a question of thinking about victory in any serious way, but as a matter of how do we sustain the struggle? And there's a certain victory and sustain a high quality struggle that's founded on integrity honesty, decency, and service to others. So what are the layers? Well, on the one hand, you've got an empire that is experiencing spiritual decay, more decline driven by greed, especially in high places, hate being used as a divisive way of pitting citizens against one another. And then you got corruption, not just in the White House, but it's corruption really throughout our institutions and so on. So then with the pandemic hit, and we began to see just the raw reality of the empire, and began to see the indifference toward the vulnerable. You began to see the healthcare system and all of its frailty with my dear brother, Bernie Sanders was pointing out with such a courage, just a few months ago during the campaign. You began to see the wealth inequality, you began to see the white supremacy, the male supremacy that the Me Too movement among other movements appointed out, you began to see the ways in which precious trans people are perceived and devalued and gazed and lesbians being dishonored, and we just began to see the ugliness, but you also see resilience, people in the streets, people waking up, some people even recognizing, lo and behold, America is an empire, it's just not a democratic experiment. It's a democratic experiment, precious against the backdrop of imperial expansion, especially a dispossession of land of indigenous peoples, built on both that land and the general side of the tax and the enslavement of Africans and on white brothers who are working with no property, women in private households domesticated, no access to public life, and we began to see these chickens are all coming home to roost, all at the same time, you know, so you got these depression-like levels of unemployment and under-employment, you've got the geo-fashioned gangster in the White House, and then you got the history coming back on us and the pandemic all at the same time. That's what I meant when I said America, we were witnessing America as a failed social experiment, which was not to say that there are some other grand experiments out there that are so highly successful, it's just our conception of ourselves of being so exceptional is being shattered. Our conception of ourselves is somehow being innocent, is being radically calling the question. It's a hell of a time to be alive, really. It certainly is a hell of a time to be alive, and yes, I think we're seeing the shattering of American exceptionalism, we're seeing this sort of spiritual decay, we're seeing the racism, we're seeing the collapsing of the health care system, all of these chickens coming home to roost, as you say, and at the same time, we see some public waking up, we see some resilience, we see some imagination and courage, and so I want to talk about how to really tap into the ladder, and I think there are a bunch of different faith traditions and philosophies that we can draw on for wisdom in a moment like this, and I'd love to really talk about black liberation theology in particular, which really drew on the thought of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and others, Dr. James Cohn, who I know is a great friend of yours, you know, my dear brother, your dear brother, the theologian who founded black liberation theology in the 60s, he described this theology as an interpretation of the Christian gospel from the perspectives of people who are at the bottom in society, the lowest racial and economic groups, and he encouraged Americans to reimagine Jesus as black, and he drew parallels between the crucifixion of Jesus and the lynching of black Americans. So talk to me about black liberation theology and the role that you think it can play in today's fight for racial justice. Do you think it's providing or it can provide the spiritual scaffolding for this movement? It could certainly be one dimension in the leaven, in the loaf, in the democratic loaf, and by democratic loaf, I mean any ideology that keeps track of humanity of people that believes in their power and those slash don't cause everyday people raising their voices so they can shape their destiny. But when you talk about Jim Cohn, you know, I met Cohn 1977, he was one of the great giants of the 20th century, the founder of liberation theology in the midst of the American empire in the belly of the beast, he comes out of Jim Crow, a good bucket Jim Crow Arkansas, and made his way to Ph.D. at Garrett at right outside Chicago, North Weston, and then for 50 years was the theologian at the Union Theological Symminary, one of my dear institutional homes. But I think in order to understand Jim Cohn's two things, one is we got to go back to Hebrew scripture, because Hebrew scripture itself was one of the great moments in the more revolution of the species. Unlike the Greeks, unlike empires and dynasties, the Hebrew scripture comes along and says to be human is the spread headset to spread steadfast love to spread a loving kindness to the orphan, the widow, the motherless, the fatherless, the poor, the persecuted, the oppressed, and that I am going to be a god of the oppressed, of a hated people, a haunted people, of Jews under vicious domination and oppression. But I make a covenant with you, do justly love mercy, walk humbly with that god. Now Jesus comes right out of that prophetic Judaism that was at work in that covenant. And so when Cohn talks about this particular Jew, Jesus of Nazareth, who is building on a conception of being human, I want you to be in the world, but not off the world. The kingdom of God is within you to never where you go, you're going to leave little heaven behind, you leave that heaven behind because you're leaving some love, you're leaving some justice, you're leaving some sense of service, you are giving yourself, you're denying yourself, you're donating yourself, you are sacrificing yourself for something bigger than you in a covenant with a god that says what you do unto me, you do unto the prisoners, what you do for the poor you do unto me, what you do to your oppressed you do unto me. Now James Cohn then comes along in the most barbaric century, the 20th century, hundreds of millions of folk here. Hit a Stalin, European colonialism. Cohn comes along and says, lo and behold, there's also no press people in the midst of the American empire, who have made a covenant with a god, who have fallen in love with a Palestinian Jew named Jesus. In this Jesus, when he makes his way, he's a country boy, when he makes his way from Galilee into Jerusalem, what does he do? He waits for the rules alone. Jesus waits, Socrates never waits. He argues, he's got intellectual integrity, he ain't got a lot spiritually going on. If he never cried, you never loved Jesus weeks like Jeremiah and make his way to Jerusalem, what does he do? He runs a money, changes out of the temple. Serious business. You don't see that on the walls of churches. Not that Jesus. No, no, no, no, you get a domesticated, deodorized Jesus. That's the Constantinian Christianity that becomes Christianity as a state religion. But the Jesus that Cohn is talking about is running out the greedy, the indifferent, the callous, the powerful who are using their wealth and power to oppress poor people. He says, now look at it from the vantage point of African slaves in the United States. Look at it from the vantage point of Negroes under Jim Crow. Look at it from the vantage point of Black folk on the New Jim Crow that there is a morality and a spirituality that we must stay in contact with if we're going to deal with the variety of catastrophes that we're confronted with today, ecological catastrophe, nuclear catastrophe, economic catastrophe of wealth and equality, political catastrophe of corruption at neo-fascist gangsters like Trump and others. This idea that we need to fight for the wretched of the earth, the least of these, the orphans, the widows, the oppressed. And Cohn, in particular, he based a lot of his theology on your mentioning Hebrew scripture on God's deliverance of the Israelite slaves from Egypt. And he compared the US to Egypt and he said the same God that freed the Israelite slaves from Egypt is working for the oppressed black people in the US today. But here's a theological thought experiment for you. Yes. When the Israelites were freed from slavery in Egypt, they went into the desert. And finally they were free. And yet they complained and they expressed a yearning to return to Egypt. I'm curious what you think would be the equivalent now among today's campaigners for racial justice of that yearning to return to Egypt. Well, I think we really we get it from the the genius of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. He used to say if you view life with the gold rush, you're going to end up worshipping a golden calf. And so under commodified conditions in which you view yourself as wanting to win the rat race, the winner of the rat race is still a rat. You have an attend to your soul. You haven't carried and nurtured something deep inside of you in terms of character and virtue. So you can under what end up with all the money in the world, all the mansions, all the trophies, spouses and so forth and still be as empty as can be very much like the Israelites who got fearful. We understand. I mean, you know, 40 years long time and you wonder what's going on and you want to go back because they want to security. They want to comfort. They want to certain safety. You see religious faith is not about safety. It's about living dangerously. It's about living against the grain. It's about looking at yourself through the lens of something bigger than just your peers. You're looking at yourself through your peers. You're always going to suffer from anxiety and insecurity in various kinds of fears because we human beings are mortals and we're always fearful in some way. We're thrown in space and time. We all have a death sentence in space and time. Nobody gets out of space and time alive. That creates anxiety. So you have to have something that's deeper that allows you a certain source of being fortified so that you know you're always already in battle, but you feel as if you have a calling a vocation, something that's tied to something bigger than you. Now, also, of course, see, first of all, they're brother Jim Cohn. He comes out of a tradition of black people where the first public gathering of free Negroes, 1830s, Henry Highland Garnet. He had one leg. He set it up on one leg. He said he tells him he's one of the great, great prophetic figures. He tells him black people never confuse yourself with that of the Israelites in the Old Testament. For us, Pharaoh is on both sides of the bloody Red Sea. That's a different twist. Every morning, you wake up. You will be in some pain because there's no way of conceiving of how you're going to overthrow this white supremacist regime. It's slaveocratic form, predatory capitalist form, and so forth. So you're going to have to learn how to be a person of integrity, honesty, decency, and serving others with no real guarantee and hard to believe that you're ever really going to win. And we see that, of course, in Hebrew scripture because when our Jewish brothers, when the Israelites got the Canaan, it was already somebody there. Right. So what happened to the Canaanites? Well, you see, from the vantage point of the best of prophetic Judaism, the Canaanites have the same value in the eyes of God that the Israelites do. You see, that's what that's what Heschel's wrestling with in the prophets is great classic, the prophet. So how are you going to actually have a hypersensitivity to the suffering of every body? Now, just your group, not one to just look like you believe the same way you do, have your sexual orientation, have your national identity now. We're talking about every human being made in the image of God and having a certain kind of preciousness and pricelessness and sanctity and dignity across the board. So the director of the year includes all groups, all genders, all sorts of orientations of various ways. I grew up in the Orthodox Jewish tradition and you're reminding me of one of my favorite stories, rabbinic stories that says that when Moses parted the seed to free the Israelites' slaves from Egypt, the Egyptians were drowning in the sea and the Israelites started singing with joy and God said, "No, no, no. Why are you singing while my creations are drowning? They're also precious." That's a powerful moment though. That's a powerful moment I'm talking about. That's exactly right. So that's that prophetic tradition that I think you harken back to, but you know, it sounds from what you're saying, like you mentioned the golden calf in the desert that the Israelites had, you know, that yearning for Egypt in our case would be a focus on capital, sort of comfortable retreat into neoliberalism and that's something that I know you've critiqued a lot. You have a very class conscious race analysis compared to a lot of mainstream intellectuals, including black intellectuals. Do you think that the current protest movement is spending enough time talking about class? Well, you know, it depends on who you talk to, my dear sister. You know what I mean? That I, anytime I get a chance to speak, I always make the connection between police power, police murder on the one hand with Wall Street power and Wall Street crimes on the other. It was Pentagon power and Pentagon crimes. So do you get the connection between white supremacy on the ground, predatory capitalists, especially the financial services class, especially the oligarchs and Pluto Cratch, and then you got imperial policies. And this is very important, this is why I think with brother, a Jammu Baraka and the Black Alliance of Peace and Glen Ford and Margaret Kimberley, a Black Agenda report, they represent the Black tradition in its most genuinely radical analysis and critique. And it's always hard for Black radicals that have a prominent position within mainstream black movements. You see the Black Panther Party League of Revolutionary Black workers, the Black World for Rights Organization, Fannie Lou Hamer, that there was a moment in which they had a prominence. They were never at the center because they're just too much of a threat. The FBI is going to try to kill them. The FBI is going to lie on them. Character assassination despises are going to create divisions to try to demonize them and so forth. Because those of the major threats. So you can talk all you want about neoliberal Black politics and electing X and Y and even overthrowing certain monuments. I mean all of those things, the concessions of the status quo and I'm not against them. But at the same time, I know they fall far, far, far short of any serious talk about Black freedom for the masses of Black people and for the masses of people. So I love your question. See this class question is in no way a luxury. I was talking about the Carl Dicks, Revolutionary Communist Party, if I'm faking it others who I get in trouble sometimes because I spend so much time with it. But I love those brothers and sisters. I don't agree with all of them. But I don't agree with anybody. I don't agree with my church. The Muslims, the Buddhists, Bell Hooks, my dear Buddhists, I love it a death. We don't agree. But the thing is we have strong overlap. Very strong overlap. But of course, I've got to be true to myself. And being true to myself is that genius of Hebrew scripture, that flow of hesit and knowing that anybody who's on that love train, people are trying to wreck it all the time. Because it really is a serious threat. It just isn't really what love looks like in public. Then you're looking at the world through the lens of the earth, through the lens of the poor, through the lens of the prisoner, and so on. That I sit among my strong leftist brothers and sisters. Any justice that's only justice soon degenerates into something less than justice. So you can be self-righteous in your social justice work. And you end up dehumanizing, devaluing, and even demonizing some of your own comrades that you don't agree with, because you don't have the deeper connection, which is what I'm not just love, but a solidarity that embraces their fallibility, that embraces the fact that you are going to disagree with them. And there's not going to be any way in which you can deal with that disagreement other than either a democratic cooperation or an authoritarian coercion. And that's part of the authoritarian elements within our own left movement that we have to be highly, highly critical of. A lot of us have spent a lot of the last week watching videos of what's happening on the streets of Minneapolis. And understanding what it is that we're seeing, but also what's real and what isn't, and what's AI, and who is taking these videos, and how we're supposed to understand the source, feels harder than ever. So this week on The Vergecast, we're talking about what's happening in Minneapolis, how information moves in an AI age, and what it means to make sense of it all. All that, plus what's new with the new TikTok, why everything feels like it's falling apart on TikTok, and more on The Vergecast wherever you get podcasts. It may not feel like it, but Trump's approval rating is some of the lowest and recorded history, and it's fallen to new lows in recent weeks, as the nation reels from recent killings of two anti-ice protesters in Minnesota. But not everyone thinks he's failing. This week, we're hearing from Trump voters. It is very unfortunate that it happened, but it's also unfortunate that the ice is being blamed for just murdering somebody who is just so innocent, which isn't the case whatsoever. A, they were provoked. B, he got ran over, and it's hard to tell what's real and what's not anymore. He's delivered on virtually every promise he's made. The economy is booming right now. He closed the border. We're not getting any more illegals in. That has been done. That was a major promise that's been done. Today explained. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. I've always appreciated a lot your emphasis on fallibility on the one hand, and at the same time, the importance of intellectualism. You've written a lot about what it means to be an intellectual, especially a black intellectual, but there's so much anti-expert, anti-intellectual sentiment in the U.S. So what role do you see for intellectuals now in responding to the pandemic and the protests? One thing to point out is that America's always been a profoundly anti-intellectual civilization. Richard Hofsteader pointed this out with great profound insight in his classic anti-intellectualism in America. Remember there, he draws a distinction between intelligence and intellect. He says Americans love intelligence because it's a manipulative function that allows them to do well, especially in the marketplace because the business of America's business, Calvin Coolidge says, is one of the few times he's right actually. So intelligence is something to be used as a calculating orientation to make certain kinds of discerning insights to make more money with mobility for the American drink intellect is an interrogation of the most basic assumptions and presuppositions. Intelligence makes immediate evaluations, intellect evaluates the evaluations. That's how Hofsteader puts it, but it's a deeper move. There's never been space in American civilization, American empire for a serious intellectual presence. Never. That's why our poets, like Emily Dickinson, how can that gene just be able to. That's why our greatest novelist in the 19th century, Melville, nobody cares. We go on and on and on. Elliot, right? Wing self, but still a poet of genius, he's got to leave the country. I mean, you saw that it is hard for any intellectual to get a gain of footing. And of course, for black intellectuals becomes even more challenging because I mean, you know, black folk enslaved Africans are not even allowed to learn how to read right. 1861, only 4% of black folk had literacy under those vicious forms of barbaric white supremacist slave, you see, so that when we do emerge with the word, the question becomes, can we be as enabling and empowering as the musicians are? Because if there's really intellectuals who have been most effective in American culture, there's been much more musicians than academician. Because the musicians have been able to count stories, narratives, ideas, visions in forms that everyday people in a business-centered civilization having to struggle to survive, they can take it in and be empowered. Whereas the academicians, though, we so worried about our ranking and what traditions we're going to be promoting, these are the other traditions intellectually that we can't dig deep inside of our own selves and give of ourselves in such a way that our fellow citizens will look at a intellectual and say, "My God, I need that intellectual the way my mother needed Louis Armstrong." It sounds like you're saying part of this is on the intellectuals themselves to a little bit step out of purely ivory tower concerns and adopt more of a pragmatic approach to the social, cultural, economic concerns. I know you yourself are steeped in the American tradition of pragmatism and philosophy, which really tries to do just that, tries to focus on the social, cultural, economic concerns, not just more abstract epistemology and metaphysics. But you're also steeped in so many other different philosophical schools, like existentialism and Marxism. I'm curious which philosophy you think has the most value to offer us all right now. Well, I appreciate the question. I think we have to be jazz men and jazz women. We have to be improvisational. I think we have to recognize at one, the abstract has its role to play. The general has its role to play. The academy has its role to play. But there's a whole host of other dimensions that have their role to play. See, I believe in engaging the public. That's what it is to be an intellectual who has a calling to engage public life. I think it's no accident that when you actually look at Ralph Waldo Emerson, he is the great Democratic public intellectual of the 19th century. He is the godfather of the American pragmatism that you talked about, that I tried to talk about 30 some years ago in American evasion of philosophy. So is it pragmatism that you would hold up as the philosophy that has the most to offer us right now? Because pragmatism has its blind spots, just so that when you're jazz like none of these schools ever provide enough, they all fall short. They all fall short. You need existentialism because you got to deal with death, dread, despair, and disappointment. You're not going to get that pragmatism. But the most part. So John, do it on death. You don't hold your breath. Like Marxism on death. Marxism is indispensable as an analysis of capitalist modes of production and the relation between production and distribution and consumption and the circulation. Marxism on death, dread, despair. Where do you go when your mama dies? Carl doesn't have to much to say about that. In fact, when he was alive, what did he do? He wasn't walking in the Alps with a picture in the back. Ingalls had to hunt him down. He's ready to die. Oh, Carl. Oh, Carl. You know somebody, we're praying for both of Carl because he's great prophetic secular figure in 19th century. But every school of thought has its own limitations at blind spots, its shortcomings. And the question becomes exiting the best in each one. Well, existentialism really emphasizes that it's up to each of us to make choices and take responsibility for our lives and make our own meaning in a world that doesn't come with meaning inherent in it. What do you think that that philosophy can teach us about how to handle this current crazy moment? Well, one is, and this is very much richer right. The first great black literary figure that the white mainstream had to take notice of. Richard Wright was an existentialist at the very deep level. And for him, it was always about digging deep and finding out who you are manifesting the choices that you make and then owning those choices, being responsible, being accountable. What does it mean to live a life of answerability? That's inseparable from responsibility. It's the exact opposite to that. You see, when you look at a nail gangster, like Trump, he thinks he can live his whole life with no answerability, no responsibility, no accountability. Say anything he wants to get away with it, do anything he wants to get away with. That's he's been able to make it. The exact opposite. So the existentialism at his best reminds us, responsibility, answerability, accountability at the center, but that also means what? It's going to be painful since the say got very painful, because we are really responsible accountable to yourself and all your thoughts, your deep, summer and public, your private. That's very, very tough. It's very, very difficult. Do you think that responsibility today in our current situation is inevitably going to have to do with solidarity, both in terms of social distancing, to prevent the pandemic from spreading in terms of solidarity of protest, maybe allyship between non-black Americans and black Americans? Oh, absolutely. Actually, you have to have solidarity all the way down. And for me, it's just fundamentally human solidarity. I'm not sure I like the language of allies. With John Brown and allies for the Black freedom movement, the brother gave his life and his sons calling my allies kind of be little, his sacrifice. Rabbi Hesha was not an ally among the King of the Union. There were two brothers, one from the Jewish tradition, other from the Black church tradition. They came together as human beings in the name of integrity, honesty, decency. Hesha says, "I want to be a decent human being, and I understand that my Jewish tradition to be decent is to be in solidarity with people who are suffering." Not just black, to be indigenous peoples, it can be the Goyang. I mean, whoever it is, right? It's a human decision that you're making. Same as true, as a straight brother. Am I just an ally when it comes to gay brothers and lesbians, sisters and trans? Now, I want to be a decent people. I want to make a person. I want to make sure that their humanity is being affirmed. If they're being mistreated, I've got to speak out. It sounds like you really believe in the power of broad coalitions. Absolutely. In fact, if we don't have it, we are all going down because they'll divide in conquer. It will be weaker, feeble, and when the backlash that's in, and it is going to set in, the right-wing white backlash, the neo-fascists clamp down, it will be weaker, it will be more feeble. So, we must have human solidarity with the political and ideological lens in place, but also the moral and spiritual lens that allow us to make contact with each other as human beings, even as we have foes politically. Let me ask you this. Yes. It's both. Both at the same time. Tell me how? Because on the one hand, it is revealing just how ugly the combination of predatory capitalism driven by Wall Street greed and the collapse of so much of the civic life and public life, and so people are not just polarized, but they're also gains derived. Well, one of the long traditions in America, if you're going to join a gang and join a gang for protection, white supremacy is waiting for you. And so, we've seen the increase in white supremacist activity. The right supremacy being decreased is, wow, this is beautiful, this majestic, marvelous militancy of brothers and sisters of all colors, especially young brothers and sisters, and one more largely vanilla. They have been after Americanized by the music that they listen to, by the culture that they're exposed to. They've also awakened in terms of the lies that their parents have told them about America and about black people and so forth. That's increasing. We've got both happening simultaneously, and that's what makes our terminal times also such fascinating times to live. Right. There's a kind of paradoxical relationship going on. Absolutely. You've mentioned a couple of times the predatory capitalism that you've often diagnosed in the U.S. To what extent do you think that America's fixation on capitalism, on prioritizing a reopened economy, has messed up our national response to this pandemic? Well, you know, I tried to tell that story of democracy, Matt, it's almost 20 years ago. You know, I could already see the market fundamentalism taken over. I could see the militarism taken over, the authoritarianism taken over, and the connection between the 800 military faces around the world, the United States has. That's what it gives to have an empire, the Africa, that's expanding in Africa. The subversive counteractivity is going on in Latin America. That's what it is to have an empire, but it's silent in the sense that our press won't say a word about it. And the politicians have a bipartisan support up. Most of the democratic politicians still support the big military increase of Trump, as much as their anti-Trump and other spheres, you see. So you get this bipartisan support to all of that kind of imperial policy. You see the same thing with Wall Street domination on the economy. And therefore, what is required is some kind of strong presence of visible voices that tells America the truth about itself, that the bombs that we drop in the Middle East, the bombs that we drop in Asia, land in the United States, 53 cents of every dollar goes the military budget. So we got 47 cents to deal with education, health care, jobs with a living wage, adequate housing. So we're already got one arm around our backs before we even had a discourse on deep crisis in our society, so that the militarism cannot be separated from domestic policy. This is what Martin King was pointing out. That's one reason why they killed it. He understood. It reminds me of when he said, you know, I am not going to segregate my moral interests. What's happening in Vietnam, from what's happening in America, right? But do you think that this American attitude and all are ideological focus on economy at all costs? We have to protect the economy. Has that set us back in terms of our pandemic response? I think that's certainly the case in terms of Trump and company, that they're willing to sacrifice the precious young students and the teachers and staff and what have you to get the economy going to make sure we become another exemplar of not just a strong economy, as unequal the wealth is distributed. When he talks about the Congress, there's vast wealth inequality being reproduced, but at least it provides some kind of showcase for his election possibilities or re-election possibilities, but it's not just Trump. You see, Trump is not to be fetishized. He is a particular American brother of Sikh, soul, and a profound narcissistic proclivity. I think he probably suffers from the what Dostoevsky called hell, which was also suffered from the inability to love in the brother's care of myself, but that's just a gesture, but that's a very sad affair. You suffer from the inability to love. There's no joy. There's only pleasures in your life. In every moment, moment is a moment of your self-promotion and self-engranditement, but he's not alone. That is a profound feature of American culture as a whole. I would say another profound feature of American culture is this sort of libertarian strain and American thought. This focus on individual freedoms, individual liberties and autonomies. Has that hampered our pandemic response in terms of people refusing to wear masks and all of that? You know, again, this Janice face, it's a good thing and it's a bad thing because you can see a relationship between certain Emersonian strands of being non-conformist, the distrust of the elites because they might be lying to you, but you have to be able to be discerned. If the elites tell you the earth is flat and you're distrustful, then that can be a good thing. They tell you it's round and you're distrustful. You got to back off because the evidence is overwhelming, right, so that it can go either way so that the libertarian, because I have strong libertarian implications. That's why I believe that Rush Limbo, brother Rush, I fight for his right to be wrong. He's got a right to be wrong, but he doesn't have a right to engage in serious harm, and he has to be rendered accountable. You see, so that the right wing and the left wing, I'm definitely fighting for my left wing brothers and sisters to say what they want to say. We're the ones who have been victimized by massive repression in the 20th century. It has to be an odd act. We go on and on and on, and we see it now with Snowden and Julian Assad and so forth, either under even under neo-liberal democratic, so that libertarian sensibilities, I think, can be very important. I talk about this might be about the rabbi George, who was conservative, brother, but we both kind of gathered on strong support of civil liberties. This is cruel, very crucial, but when it takes the form of, I don't believe Dr. Fauci, I don't believe the CDC and so forth so, and he said, "Well, no, there's evidence here." You see, so libertarianism can't just go off into fantasy. You've got to be tied to certain kinds of evidential credit forms of evidential credibility. In terms of evidence, what do we do with the deep abiding American resistance to evidence-based policies that have proven very effective elsewhere? Like government-provided basic income, public investment in health care. There's this resistance still to that, even now, during a pandemic, under the most extreme circumstances. How do we understand that? Yeah, and that's a tough one because, you know, in the one hand, you want to respect people's right to be wrong, but on the other hand, they're right to be wrong, can lead toward your death. Yes. In terms of spreading of the viruses. And of course, I mean, you know, the fundamental lies, the white supremacist lies that has permeated every nook and cranny. How do you get people to somehow quit denying that reality and understand that that lie has had legs and has now been able to shape and reshape America's past and present and after it shapes the future, it may not be in America. But I would say the same thing about male supremacy. I would say the same thing about any form that dehumanizes, it could be Mexicans, it could be Muslims, it could be Jews, it could be El Salvadorian, it could be Kenyans and so forth. That's a philosophical question, not just a historical one, because we human beings are constituted in such a way that we're going to channel our fears and anxieties in certain venues. And the question is, will they be democratic venues, or will they be anti-democratic ones? Now, Rano Nibir used to say democracy as an approximate solution to insoluble problem. And I think he's right about that. We'll never be able to get at the deep roots of our screen. Use the wonderful language of Lorica. And what is the deep roots of our screen? It's the call for help. What Kafka called the death sentence, the sense of feeling that we have to justify ourselves because we're thrown in time and space and we know we're going to die and our mom is going to collapse and our daddy's going to collapse and we're going to undergo this pain and to be human is to undergo this pain. Who put us in this condition? Was it a fall? Was it, whatever it is, whatever story you have, that story is going to cut deeper than just the political story. Because in any political regime, you still going to have to come to terms with the death of mother and father, the death betrayal of friends and so forth. So those deeply human issues. But the question is, can we use that, that energy that flows from wrestling with those anxieties into democratic, or that's the relation between the so-cratic energy of questioning, which is very important. The prophetic energy of bearing witness to hasake, which is indispensable. But then the democratic experiment of accountability, especially of elite on the top. All three of those moments become very, very important ones. And all of us, you know, fall short. We all fall short. We really do. I wonder if philosophy can help us with this. You know, Montaine said to philosophize, it's to learn how to die. Can philosophy help us now to deal with our fear of mortality, which I do think is the undercurrent running through so much of our anxiety these days during the pandemic? It's so true because all the forms of death that are coming at us, the physical death, the social death, the psychic death, the spiritual death, all coming at us. You are absolutely right. And philosophy is one of the great, you know, treasures of the species from Africa, where we all began in the rich tradition of Africa and Asia and in Europe and Indigenous peoples and so forth. And this is where again, we have to be in improvisation. We have to be conversant. We are the best in any of these various traditions, wrestling with what it means to be human, wrestling with death and dread and dogma and domination and so forth. But when you encounter great examples like Montaine, like Shakespeare, I think the greatest of all in many ways is checkoff. But like Tony Marsa, like Richard Wright, who we talked about before, like Maria Rookheiser, like I wish I was singer. I mean, all of these are great examples of persons who must have encouraged to think for themselves, to think for themselves. Now, they knew they had to use parts of a tradition, but they usually use parts of a tradition against other parts of tradition. Because all of us are tied to tradition, very language we use, very language we dream is, there's a tradition that we're part of. So, the we need fresh encounters with great figures, great movements and great institutions. And for many of us begins with family. I mean, with me, it begins with mom and dad. I would just bless beyond measure to come from Irene and Clip. So, from the very beginning, they taught me that this love thing is not a play thing. Love is a form of death. It's something that's got to die in you in order for the best to be reborn. And there's so much gangster envy and so much thuggishness envy and so much evil in me that I've got to wrestle with this civil war on the battlefield of my soul every day. I'm hearing a few things in what you're saying. I'm hearing that to learn how to die, we can look to philosophers and artists who came before us and use their models of living with integrity and thinking critically for themselves. Exactly. But at the same time, you know, we want to even think critically, separate from them. We want to lift up our own voice. And that is part of learning how to die in the normal sense in which we mean death, but also how to let die within ourselves our prejudices, our preconceptions so that we can keep moving forward in this fallibleist mode. Is that right? Absolutely. Absolutely. And it also means, you know, you have to be willing. I know we just lost John Lewis and C.T. Vivian, he's a towering figure who always put primacy on morning spiritual. They're part of not just my tradition, but any tradition that puts primacy on morning spiritual. But it means that we're willing to get in trouble, to take a risk. You see, one of the things about a business culture is it tends to put such a stress on money making rather than so shaping. And to shape your soul, you got to be willing to take a risk. I mean, key to understood this so well. And the great letter to his brother, the whole forms of soul making and so shaping, that negative capability, being in the midst of facts and reason, but that falls short without any irritable reaching for some kind of easy authority to live in that tension. That's what the great Keith was talking about. And that's precisely where philosophers at their best, you're going to get in trouble. I mean, you know, you're going to talk about American empire. You're going to talk about Africa. You're going to talk about British trans, you know, you're willing to deal with the delicate issues, the Middle East. How do we talk about that in such a way that we don't fall into the easy traps? Well, Montagne teaches us, live in the tension. You see, be able to be willing to be misunderstood by a variety of different sides as you stand on your own integrity and select, nobody's going to attempt to force me or push me into hating Jews, hating Palestinians, hating Arabs, hating indigenous people and so forth. But I hate occupation. It can be cashmere, it can be Tibet, it can be sub to Africa, that Morocco now dominates all of those forms of domination. I'm calling in the question. You talk often about the value of moral consistency or constancy. And you know, I'm glad that you mentioned John Lewis, you know, we just lost this civil rights movement icon freedom writer, one of the big six who marched alongside MLK. And I think in the wake of losses like that and in the wake of the protests, a lot of people are wondering how we can make real lasting substantive progress in this country. You know, how do I make it so that the US doesn't just return to status quo around race in a year from now? How do you think we can achieve that kind of broader change? Well, one is that we have yet to have a serious discussion of what the status quo was, which is to say we haven't had a serious discussion about the Obama administration. The Obama administration looks just so wonderful when contrast to the neo-fascist gangster in the White House. But we have to come along and say it was not wonderful at all you are. Wall Street made big money, tree ends of money coming directly, coming out of the Federal Reserve. That norm must see, needs to be radically called in the question. The child poverty rates still, I still drop in drones in Afghanistan and live you overthrown and Yemen and so forth. So Latin America is still undergoing all kinds of vicious kinds of CIA operations that people really don't want to talk about during the overtouring of democratic regimes like Honduras. That's the start that happened since the Hillary and Obama, you see. And how do you get a Black Lives movement on the Black President, Black on that security bit, cabinet member, and Black Attorney General? Yes, Obama was better, but better in relation to what? And when we go back to normalcy, that normalcy was shot through was tremendous suffering. And there is a connection between that suffering and the left, of course, being unable to generate a concrete alternative. And so people look to a pseudo populist but neo-fascist and sensibility Trump, who's not the ordinary politician, he's certainly not. No, he unsettles the old school conservatives. He unsettles the neoliberal. He leads both of those schools of thought he unsettles, but he is so much more vicious and so much more atrocious in a whole host of different ways. People were looking for an alternative. And of course, most of what is the 46% of our fellow citizens don't vote at all. So they just completely dropped down to the civic voting, which is, that speaks quite loudly too. It sounds like you're saying that if we want to see lasting change with the status quo, we first have to really interrogate what was that status quo all along. That might mean getting into some, as John Lewis would say, good trouble, that would be very trouble by questioning even those on the left. And questioning ourselves. That's back to your point about fallibility. You see, that's Emerson and Dewey and James and Elaine Locke, that's centrality of questioning oneself. I mean, I just viewed it so practical, but no one civilization has a monopoly on it. There's a whole host of great figures from different cultures who talked about self-examination. But in terms of the impact on the shaping of the West, it really is Socrates. And this socratic example is a terrifying one, not just because he ends up drinking the emla. Not just because when you follow food in a socratic way, there's a good chance that you'll be misunderstood and convicted or crucified or shot down or whatever it is. Those are just, that's part of the tragic comment character of our human condition. That we mortals tend to be on the one hand deeply attracted to socratic and prophetic figures. And on the other hand, we're scared to death because they're forcing us to think about some things that we don't think we can deal with. See, that's the Episcopalus Caramazal. You say you want to be free. You don't really want to be free. It's too much burden. Give me a pie, Piper. Give me the magic. Give me the authority so I can defer. It makes me so happy that you're mentioning Brothers Caramazal. That is my all-time favorite book. Oh, you've got profound judgment and taste. There's nothing like, but I will tell you this, if you read In the Revee, the Bishop, the student, by check off. He's going to take you deeper places than even those they're asking. He's one of the few. He's taking deeper places. Okay. They'll take you where those they ask you've been through, but then he'll take you right back to the every day. Because we don't still ask his novelist of ideas and his the clash of ideas where it's check off is in the Quartet, he's in the commonplace. He's in every day life. And then the steady ache of misery, the wrestling with that good morning heartache, blues like pain. That's a little bit different. That's not rustling coffee. You see it on the edge, committed something on the run. And so this is every day, the check off has those CFD elements shot through the every day. That's why he's a comic writer. Those CFD is a tragic writer, you see. I think I need to read some check off after this call. Oh, you love Anton. Nobody like it. Nobody like it. Let's close by. I want to just talk about the importance of hope versus optimism. I think this is something people are really hungry for right now. And you define optimism as rational and evidence-based, whereas hope is for you an act of courage and imagination that looks beyond what the existing circumstances tell us we can be optimistic for. So for you, what roles do hope and optimism play now in this situation where the pandemic requires an emphasis on evidence, but so much feels unknowable and demands this very high level of hope from us? Well, one is that we must accent the crucial role that science must play. And science has a scientific temperament, not just scientific method, because the method can become dogmatic too. But the temperament is forever so credit, forever questioning based on evidence, but the evidence is never fully determinative. It's always under-determined to some degree. So science must play fundamental role, but there are certain issues that science itself is relatively helpless about. See, and that has to do with the meaning of life. Why is there something rather than nothing? Why not commit suicide tomorrow? Why do you love in this way? Why are you so attached to your mama, when you know she's wrong on so many issues, but you take a bullet for her and our heart, I don't talk my mama, but anyway, but when about mama, you don't measure your mama based on scientific evidence. You based it on a love that's a kind of evidence, but that love cuts so much deeper as visceral. It's not just cerebral in that way, you see. So we have to be able to acknowledge the roles that each one of these play. And so when you talk about hope for me, I mean optimism for me has never been an option. I mean, you can read candy by the great Bolteran, you see. You see, optimism is gone. So you view the world as long as always been long gone, because there's too much suffering in the world. Those who ask you to write about that, you know, you've got the young kids, the two-years-old, not just dying, but killed by dogs and so forth and so on. Then you've got so many human beings who live lives with so much waste of potential. You can never get it back. Look at all, think about all of the African bones and bodies that at the bottom of that Atlantic ocean with slave trade. So we go on and on and on. Jewish brothers and sisters in the concentration camps. And I just, in Germany, but the whole history of pogroms and attacks and so forth and so on, the kitchen, if we go on and on and on, the Roma, if knowledge, and India, and what have you, none of that can generate an optimism for me ever. But hope is something else, you see, because hope is not spectaculario. It's participatory. You're already in the mess. You're in the form. As Roberto Hungary always says so that hope is something that you find in your immersion and you decide you're going to fight it till the end, no matter what. When you say hope is also a consequence of your action, do you mean that by choosing to act now in this incredibly stressful time with integrity, with accountability, with responsibility, our actions themselves can nurture and fuel hope in us? That's right. I mean, that's eloquently put. Hope is about everybody trying to contribute to the push and the motion, the momentum, the movement for something better than them. That's better. The good, the beautiful truth for myself as a religious person, the holy God. But if you're not in motion, you're a spectator. Well, it doesn't seem to me like you're being a spectator these days. One new project I see you engaged in is you and professor Trisha Rose have this new podcast, The Tightrope. It's called. That's true. But one and only professor Trisha Rose, I think again, she's just extraordinary. We've had a good time. We're taking off on Thursday with us this day. I'll see. I'm telling you, when the interview with Trisha something else, it's just truth tell them, business, parents, justice, seeking, but also joy because it's joy in what we do. You got to find joy in spread and hesitate. See, a spread and hesitate is always just a negative burden. You're not going to be a long distance runner. You're spread for a little while, didn't you go back into the norm, and you suffer from the conformity and complacency of the cowardliness that we associate with the mainstream that just wants to feed in and be well adjusted to injustice. No, no, no. We're talking about a joy that will sustain you over against the grain until the worms get your body. That's what we're talking about. And this particular podcast, and it is attempt to broaden the discourse, get beyond the two-party dialogue, get beyond the liberal versus conservative, but also keep track of the arts, the centrality of the moral centrality of the spiritual and the beautiful. We need to lift each other up and be, but it has been a lifting to be in conversation with you. You too. I really appreciate you taking time to be with us and our listeners. Thanks so much. Thank you. Salute you now. Stay strong. Listeners, thank you so much for joining us. If you liked today's episode, make sure to catch the next ones by subscribing on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen. And please share this with your friends and family. If you have feedback about this podcast, I'd love to hear from you. You can send me a message on Twitter @SigalSamuel or you can email me @[email protected]. Our editor and producer is Jackson Beerfeld. This show is edited by Albert Ventura. Our executive producer is Liz Nelson. And this show is part of the Vox Media podcast network. Visit Vox.com/podcasts to find more of our shows.