TV Note: Cornel West and Robert George on PBS "Firing Line with Margaret Hoover"
David Shasha
The episode of PBS "Firing Line with Margaret Hoover" with Cornel West and Robert George is available for on-line viewing:
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/firing-line/video/cornel-west-and-robert-george-zaegrp/
The Current State of Our Public Intellectuals: Robert P. George and Cornel West at Grand Valley State University
Back in 2012 Michael Eric Dyson and Boyce Watkins conducted a very spirited public debate on Hip-Hop culture at Brown University:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/davidshasha/watkins/davidshasha/7ukJpjVEHxI/34U6-GGeSyIJ
The two men wrestled with the many problems presented by the violent rhetoric that has permeated Corporate Hip-Hop and its deleterious effects on the African-American community.
As would be expected, Professor Dyson sought to deflect negative criticism of the genre, and attempted to affirm its cultural integrity and artistic bona fides. Professor Watkins took a very different tack on the matter and made the argument that violent words have more than a benign rhetorical effect; such words have serious consequences in the real world and the ways in which violence has impacted impoverished minority communities.
It would be good to keep this exchange in mind when we look at another conversation between two public intellectuals, this time an encounter between frequent sparring partners Robert George and Cornel West, both eminent professors at Princeton University:
http://www.c-span.org/video/?325287-1/conversation-cornel-west-robert-p-george
The conversation between the two men took place at Grand Valley State University in its Hauenstein Center for Presidential Leadership which appears to have a markedly Conservative orientation:
http://hauensteincenter.org/mission-statement-of-the-hauenstein-center-january-21-2015/
http://hauensteincenter.org/ask-gleaves/
With a tribute to the arch-Conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr. and prominent discussions of Ronald Reagan and the Conservative tradition in America, the general orientation that we see presented at Grand Valley State is one of certain circumscribed principles presented in the wider context of Eurocentric civilization and a pronounced Whiteness.
The meeting of Professors George and West is consistent with the open process of the Hauenstein Center and its promotion of free discussion and inquiry. The two eminent professors would on the surface appear to be polar opposites, one a radical-Progressive Christian Socialist, the other with strong ties to the Religious Right and its institutional network:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornel_West
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_P._George
Their conversation forcefully sets out to refuse the usual stereotype of Left-Right political hostility and incivility. In this sense it hearkens back to a different era that we once saw on Mr. Buckley’s PBS program Firing Line:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firing_Line
Beyond the often sharp political divisions in our culture, the tone of many current discussions has been deeply acrimonious; leading to heightened partisanship and alienation which has been reinforced by a media and Infotainment landscape that revels in conflict and confrontation.
In this benighted context, it is most welcome to see political adversaries speaking civilly to one another in a public setting.
But we must also keep in mind that such conversations between American public intellectuals have been limited to elite academic institutions and to non-commercial media outlets like C-Span with a much smaller viewership than the commercial networks.
This being said, the intellectual openness and academic rigor of the conversation were refreshing. It was an opportunity to hear two very smart people discussing the issues of the day without the false vanity, vain showmanship, and hyper-partisanship that is routine in our media landscape. The general tone was both civil and restrained.
Both men emphatically acknowledge that we are in the midst of a serious cultural and political crisis related to a widespread ignorance which is being promoted by the Infotainment industry and its commercial-marketing strategies.
Watching the discussion, which has been posted to the C-Span website, we can see the different ways in which the two men bemoan the state of the culture and their attitudes towards a political system built on corruption and dysfunction and Corporatist values. There is a good deal of concern with ethical issues like integrity, dignity, courage, and compassion. The discussion reflects an important concern for basic human values in the American tradition.
The themes being raised are those that I have repeatedly presented in the SHU. These concerns relate to the breakdown of our social order as reflected in Wall Street rapaciousness and the culture of mercenary greed that has taken the place of the most basic American Humanism.
Special emphasis is placed on entertainers and their place in the socio-cultural hierarchy. Contrasts are made, particularly by Professor West, of our great cultural figures in the past and the current enfeebled state of Poptrash and Hip-Hop. His masterful takedown of Beyoncé is particularly rewarding as is his promotion of “Old School” artists like Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield, and Nina Simone who represent a very different set of values than the current crop of entertainers.
This being said, it is very important to note that the conversation takes place in a framework that completely valorizes the Western cultural tradition. I believe that it is a critical error to leave unexamined the very troubling legacy of Plato and the ways in which his philosophical system laid the groundwork of European totalitarianism.
Here the work of Karl Popper has proven to be immensely helpful:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Society_and_Its_Enemies
In his classic 1945 book The Open Society and its Enemies, Popper began with an extensive and merciless critique of Plato as a central player in the larger anti-democratic tradition which has led to Imperial aggrandizement and elite social formations. Popper tracks this tradition through to Hegel and Marx, showing us the inherent dangers of Western hubris and epistemological certitude.
In the course of the discussion we see the casual deployment of a “Great Books” mentality that advises us to partake of the great European thinkers without seriously considering the ways in which we need to access other traditions and to look critically at the way in which we read the iconic European thinkers.
Perhaps it was due to the superficiality of the conversation in strictly epistemological terms, or maybe it was due to the limitations of the Left-Right confrontational format of the discussion, but the exchange remained civil to the point where the actual methodological divisions between the professors was left unexamined. The conversation never got to the real nitty-gritty of the matter.
It is of course important to read deeply in the history of Western civilization, but it is equally important that we do not present these thinkers and their history in an uncritical fashion. In this sense how we read is just as important as what we read.
Given the impoverishment of the current cultural discourse, such a point might be easily overlooked. But what we saw in the discussion was a very subtle revision of the 1980s polemic between the so-called “Chicago School” led by Allan Bloom, and that of the Multiculturalism presented by figures such as West and his former Harvard colleague Henry Louis Gates Jr., a matter discussed in the following article from The New York Times Sunday magazine back in 1990:
http://www.nytimes.com/1990/04/01/magazine/black-studies-new-star-henry-louis-gates-jr.html
Much indeed has happened in the past 25 years and the Gates project has moved from Cornell and Duke to Harvard where he attempted to assemble a “dream team” of African-American scholars at the newly-created DuBois Institute. As we have seen, this noble effort has been subverted by academic politics, social breakdown, and cultural collapse. Professor Gates has become a media celebrity whose PBS programs lack intellectual heft and who has recently been accused of tampering with the facts on behalf of the actor Ben Affleck:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/22/opinion/frank-bruni-hollywood-trumps-harvard.html?ref=topics&_r=0
The well-publicized break between West and Harvard has recently been intensified by West’s public feud with Michael Eric Dyson and the pro-Obama Left:
Divisions between these prominent African-American academics largely takes place in elite circles, out of the view of most Americans who have no real sense of the intellectual and political issues at stake.
The battle in the 1980s between Multiculturalists like Gates and West and the reactionary forces of the Reagan-inspired Right now seems to have largely been won by the Right Wingers. The idea that we must contest the supremacy of Plato, Augustine, and Mill has been lost in the static of cultural dysfunction and American ignorance.
It is not that we should remove the “Dead White Males” from our discourse, but that we should read them more critically.
I have discussed the matter in two articles related to Judaism and Western civilization:
http://www.edah.org/backend/JournalArticle/3_2_Shasha.pdf
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/davidshasha/hazony/davidshasha/r3Kb6Cw3wOs/BHyWzkL7pFkJ
In my discussion of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’ book The Dignity of Difference I present the dangerous idea of Western Civilization and its inherent Monolingualism that has been analyzed by Arnaldo Momigliano in his classic 1975 work Alien Wisdom: The Limits of Hellenization:
http://www.amazon.com/Alien-Wisdom-The-Limits-Hellenization/dp/0521387612
As presented by Jose Faur in his 1986 book Golden Doves with Silver Dots, the concept of Monolingualism has been deleterious to the search for truth in Western Civilization. The fusion of Platonist elitism and Christian exclusivism has led to a persecuting society. Monolingualism seeks a single, universal truth which denies the possibility of different cultures and languages to be part of a larger mosaic.
It is a problem tied to the idea of cultural diversity that is often made more difficult by the issue of moral relativism; something I have discussed in some detail in my article on Rabbi Sacks’ Dignity of Difference. The Western epistemological tradition, as famously asserted by Jacques Derrida, has more often than not mistaken its own cultural categories as singularly definitive and denied the legitimacy of other cultures in the search for truth.
It is worthy to note that this Eurocentric elitism has often been adopted by many Ashkenazi Jews.
Indeed, the figure of Yoram Hazony presents us with a set of problems that are connected to Right Wing Zionism and Orthodox Judaism which serve to problematize the many innovations and insights of the classical Sephardic tradition and expose the problem of Western civilization in a Jewish framework.
It is important to note that there is an alternative tradition to the Platonic-Christian synthesis as we see it formulated, for example, in Augustine; that is the concept of Religious Humanism as preserved in the Sephardic heritage:
I have repeatedly referred to a paper I submitted to Yeshivah Chovevei Torah’s literary journal whose rejection shows us the contentiousness on the Right over the concept and its place in our religious life:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/davidshasha/yct/davidshasha/JPZFturnQkQ/FX8HLC0KgtoJ
Not once during their conversation do either George or West make use of the term “Religious Humanism” though there is a good deal of reference to the “Great Books” canon and the place of the Liberal Arts in our culture.
And while it is true that technical-vocational study has usurped the place of the Humanities in our academic institutions, and that Wall Street and Corporatist values have led to a mercenary attitude in many college students, we must remember that the basic curriculum of a Liberal Arts education is not in itself value-neutral.
Indeed, how texts are read and how we approach history are just as important as making space for the Liberal Arts and Humanities in university curricula.
Authoritarian modalities of reading continue to permeate the Orthodox Jewish world, as I have shown in my discussions of the late Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein:
It is not enough to present religious values and the Liberal Arts in some amorphous context to get the job of cultural reclamation done. Reactionary values can serve to undermine the most important cultural-ethical ideals of our civilization and deny the possibility of cultural diversity and multiplicity in a global framework.
It is therefore critical to present ideas in a precise historical context and in a rational epistemological framework.
In this sense, the role of classical Andalusian civilization and its values of Religious Humanism are critical in our appreciation of the Western tradition.
Maria Rosa Menocal and Richard Rubenstein have guided us to a better appreciation of the old Arab civilization and its place in Western culture:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/davidshasha/menocal/davidshasha/A1LYuo-BcVU/pinZH5S_zzEJ
In books like Menocal’s The Ornament of the World and Rubenstein’s Aristotle’s Children we can see how Europe influenced Arabo-Islamic civilization and Sephardic Judaism and how this influence was brought right back into European Civilization.
I have prepared a short reading list on Sepharad/Al-Andalus for those who want to better understand this vital cultural history:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/davidshasha/andalus/davidshasha/WOdpr_JC8bI/zmIQ62hT8O8J
How we read and how we see the historical ordering of culture and epistemology can seriously affect our ideological models and the way in which we approach contemporary problems.
Wars of Religion have permeated Europe’s rocky history. From Crusade to Inquisition we have seen how violence can become an extension of authoritarian values in culture. The battle over the scholarship of the great Americo Castro has taught us just how strongly philosophical and religious authoritarianism has remained a problem in our culture. Castro sought to restore what the late Menocal called the “Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History”:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Am%C3%A9rico_Castro
https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Arabic_Role_in_Medieval_Literary_His.html?id=aEnF_ggo_ZQC
I have discussed a number of these vital issues in my Huffington Post article on Anthony Mann’s classic 1961 movie epic “El Cid”:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-shasha/charlton-hestons-el-cid-a_b_679711.html
Professor George remains mired in a Religious Conservatism whose Whiteness remains deeply problematic. I was very troubled by his name-dropping of the prominent scholar Yuval Levin who has been touted as the next great Right Wing intellectual force:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuval_Levin
A good deal of this is warmed-over hash that has been gussied up with new buzzwords and clever marketing strategies, as can be seen in the following 2014 column by David Brooks:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/10/opinion/brooks-the-new-right.html
Many of these revised Reaganite ideas are stale and spent. The current political landscape has been corrupted by the imposition of such ideas while the Progressive values of Religious Humanism have been occluded. The history of American civilization is in fact rooted in such ideas:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/davidshasha/seixas/davidshasha/WZhqOVEhCTQ/O7XVlPrZzooJ
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/davidshasha/seixas/davidshasha/0YE5suTvNtc/uKe-ZgWuIJUJ
It is no coincidence that we see Ashkenazi Jews figure prominently in the current discussion. West has pointed to the figure of Abraham Joshua Heschel who does in fact represent the values of Religious Humanism:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/davidshasha/heschel/davidshasha/iiLqx7JJ3sM/RPBJh28fO-UJ
But all too often Heschel has been deployed in a Whites-only Ashkenazi Jewish context as was recently the case in two conferences, one at UCLA where West was the keynote speaker, and another at Israel's Van Leer Institute:
Today Jews and Judaism are seen as an Ashkenazi-only affair which is not simply a matter of racism, but something that seeks to stifle and remove the classical Sephardic heritage and its tradition of Religious Humanism.
It is therefore critical to see that the inability to precisely identify and deploy the term “Religious Humanism” and the critical reading practices it has maintained over the course of many centuries has served to undermine the larger project of cultural renewal in our society.
Ashkenazi Jews have been responsible for promoting Jewish sectarian divisions and extremist values. The close ties between Ashkenazim, the political Right, and Christian extremism can clearly be seen in the tendentious work of David Brooks:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/davidshasha/afBCArSBi5o
It is vital that we call out this extremism and the dangerous epistemological and religious values that underlie it. Reading in this context is a critical factor. We must re-examine the way in which we read and how the history of culture has impacted us through the authoritarian values of Monolingualism, intolerance, and violence.
The discussion between George and West provides an important airing out of the many problems we currently face. But there is in the conversation an inability to precisely identify the epistemological issues that have led to the current cultural breakdown.
It is interesting that in the wake of the 9/11 attacks the great African-American scholar David Levering Lewis sought to return to the world of Andalus as a way to process the tragedy. In his wonderful book God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe 570-1215 he has added his voice to those that promote the old Andalusian model:
http://books.wwnorton.com/books/Gods-Crucible/
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/02/04/a-better-place
Unlike West, Professor Lewis has sought to connect his scholarship in African-American civilization to the old Sephardic-Andalusian world which promoted the open values of tolerance and Religious Humanism.
Such an approach can free us from what Harold Cruse in his discussion of Jews and Blacks in the Communist Party in his classic 1967 book The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual as “white intellectual paternalism.”
Ashkenazi Jews have directed their cultural elitism and hubris at Sephardim in a way that has valorized the German intellectual tradition, as I point out in my article “How German Is It?”:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/davidshasha/german/davidshasha/LmSxFJBZ0XY/X4U2QJs7bqIJ
This Teutonic primacy has not just injured Jewish Studies, but in its ethnocentric chauvinism has led to an intellectual stranglehold on American culture as it has reinforced elitism and arrogance in our institutional world.
It is critical that we identify the Religious Humanist model in a way that highlights Multilingualism and Multicultural openness. Our reading practices must value pluralism and tolerance in a way that does not reify Platonic-Christian models of Western Supremacy. The voices of the marginalized and dispossessed needs to be given the proper weight in our American discourse. It is an urgent desideratum without which our culture will continue to totter and where our socio-economic downfall will only continue to intensify.
David Shasha
From SHU 692, July 1, 2015
TV Note: Robert George and Cornel West on C-Span’s Book TV “In Depth”
Cornel West is certainly no stranger to SHU readers:
Back in 2015 I posted my take on a lively debate shown on C-Span between West and Robert George:
I was very impressed by the placid civility and sturdy academic tone of the encounter between men of very different political persuasions, but felt that it never really got past the usual issues that separate Left and Right today.
The two men were back this week on C-Span, this time appearing on the monthly series “In Depth”:
https://www.c-span.org/video/?437551-1/depth-cornel-west-robert-george
“In Depth” usually hosts a single author who discusses the body of their written work. In this case George and West have never written a book together, but have had a long and illustrious history of public discussion, mostly on college campuses.
The 2015 program often forced the two men into their political ghettoes, but for the first hour of the “In Depth” program, I am happy to say, they left the political differences and the conventional wisdom of the pundit class, and had a freewheeling intellectually-charged discussion of a very high order.
My sense is that the election of Donald Trump helped bring the two men closer together, as they both fight against the malignant spirit of Trumpworld Fascism.
The discussion was rooted in the themes and values of Religious Humanism. Dealing with philosophy, literature, music, politics, culture and history, the back and forth centered on morality, character, courage, justice, and compassion; values that have become a central feature of my own work in the SHU.
The discussion provided a rare moment of clarity in an age of Poptrash cultural vulgarity. Without the baggage of political division, the two men were able to come together and lay out the most basic principles of American Democracy as it has been processed through the values of Religious Humanism.
Once the first hour and 15 minutes was done, host Peter Slen opened the phone lines and the discussion returned to the usual divisiveness, and the men returned to their political orthodoxies.
But for that very inspiring first hour we were treated to a very precious lesson in the basic elements of our American Democracy and its roots in the thinking of the Greco-Roman and Hebrew cultural tradition(s).
It was a conversation of rare intensity and candor which served to confirm so many of the ideas and values that I regularly present in the pages of the SHU.
It is definitely must-see TV.
David Shasha
From SHU 824, January 10, 2018