Land of Lime

What joy do you find in service to others and not merely in the pleasure that connects you to your body?

Last night, Cornell West left us thinking about this question, in an inspiring talk on the relationship of morality to power. I do not remember the last time I felt this way at the University of Chicago. Rajeev and I truly enjoyed the content of his speech but it was the spirit that was moving, as West rocked an unusual audience at Mandel Hall, full of community members and faces that one wouldn’t’ see at any University of Chicago event.

The occasion was the annual George E Kent lecture, organized by the Organization of Black Students, University of Chicago. The title of the talk was Democracy Matters. In thinking about morality and power, West’s two other questions were the two bookends for his talk: ‘where do we find ourselves’ and ‘who do we choose to be’?

West sharply pointed out something that the advocates of democracy often forget in their certainty of its virtues: democracy’s fragility. He began by alerting us to a lack of and perhaps even the difficulty of Socratic questioning in contemporary America; a questioning that ought to form the core of democratic practice. This lack, for West, is a civilizational problem, for it characterizes the nature of American civilization, which is a ‘hotel’ civilization, where lights are always on and the quest is to deny and dodge death. America is not a civilization that wrestles with self-questioning and self-criticism.

The metanarrative of democracy that West offered has this civilizational critique at its core. Not surprisingly, he characterized American democracy as immature and lacking in integrity. West produced a stinging critique of the post-9/11 obsession with terror by mocking it as the Negroization of America. The question that every American seems to be asking now has been a historical question for every African American: why am I being hated for being who I am? What Black people have confronted in the form of psychic, physical and political terror in their every day life has now become the reality for all Americans today.

Yet, what has been the Black response to American terrorism, to acts of violence perpetrated by White Supremacists? Is there a lesson for America? West located the African American response in the intersections of Socratic questioning and a prophetic vision. He argued that African Americans forged a distinctive form of Socratic questioning, without giving into a Nietzschean ‘ressentiment’, even when the American Constitution too approved of slavery; revenge and hatred were not the motivating forces in their demand for justice. The source of the prophetic vision, West argued, comes from a tragicomic sensibility, where one is neither optimistic nor pessimistic, where the insight that disappointment is a constant companion is never forgotten. In that deep flow of tears, in a deep sadness was born the capacity to withstand barbarity and violence, especially in the 19th-20th centuries, when the dominant were speaking of Progress of mankind, while perpetrating acts of violence.

The legacy of African Americans to America to build a broader vision of democracy is this combination of Socratic questioning and prophetic vision.

West contended that democracy is fragile and civilization is thin. They need to be forged, renewed and strengthened in what will be an everyday endeavor, by each of us. Hence, I think the opening question is the key question of democracy. Gandhi also in redefining the project of democracy through his notion of swaraj shifts the focus to self realization, putting the onus on ‘determined effort’ by each of us and not accepting liberty as either Almighty’s gift (as George Bush does) or imposed from above (again as George Bush does). While West didn’t go as far as Gandhi does in this regard, he forcefully demanded: who do we choose to be? what causes are we serving and what legacy do we want to leave behind?

West asked: How are we preparing for death, a question philosophy meditates on.

Listening to West was important for me. In my report on the SAGSC yesterday, I shared my uneasiness about the nature of our intellectual inquiry and the questions we ask; that uneasiness found a voice in West last night. There is an urgency with which we need to engage with the critical political questions of the day much more self consciously.

Two days ago, I heard Tariq Ali speak and came away very disappointed about radical left. West in some ways restored my faith in the possibility of radical dissent and in the role of public intellectuals.