Speaker 1: Pushkin. This is Talk Easy. I'm Samforgos. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1: Hey everyone, thank you so much for being here today.
Speaker 1: I want to start with some questions. How are we
Speaker 1: holding up? Are people okay? Is your family okay? Are
Speaker 1: you okay? Those aren't theoretical questions, By the way, I'm
Speaker 1: curious about how you, a listener of this podcast, are
Speaker 1: doing right now. I don't just care because you're a
Speaker 1: listener of the podcast. I realize it sounds like that,
Speaker 1: but you know what I mean, And should you want
Speaker 1: to share how you're doing, please drop us a line
Speaker 1: at talk easypod at gmail dot com. Not for any
Speaker 1: particular reason, just you know. This is a space for
Speaker 1: you and I both, a place to drop our guards
Speaker 1: and sort out what's what. So, whoever you are, wherever
Speaker 1: you are, I'd love to hear from you. I can't
Speaker 1: promise any help or wisdom, but I can promise to
Speaker 1: hear you out. But I also want to take the
Speaker 1: temperature of the room because on this week's episode, we're
Speaker 1: sitting with doctor Cornell West, and when the pandemic began,
Speaker 1: doctor West was one of the first people we thought
Speaker 1: of to invite on the show. We wanted to hear
Speaker 1: his perspective what he's seeing in this country right now.
Speaker 1: As some of you may know, he's been sharing his
Speaker 1: vision of the world for over forty years now as
Speaker 1: a professor at institutions like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and then,
Speaker 1: of course as an author of several best selling, critically
Speaker 1: acclaimed books like Keeping Faith, Race Matters, and Black Prophetic Fire.
Speaker 1: He's one of the foremost public intellectuals we have living
Speaker 1: and working today. He's also a dazzling public speaker, as
Speaker 1: you're about to hear in this talk for curious minds,
Speaker 1: I've put together a short list of references doctor Wes
Speaker 1: makes in this episode on our website at www dot
Speaker 1: talk easypod dot com. He's the only man I know
Speaker 1: who can somehow connect John Coltrane to Martin Luther King,
Speaker 1: to a nineteenth century Italian poet philosopher, then somehow circling
Speaker 1: back to the Eisley Brothers, it seems him, but conversations
Speaker 1: with doctor West often feel that way. Watching him speak,
Speaker 1: it's like poetry in motion. It's Jordan hitting the shot
Speaker 1: over Craig Yilo, It's Aretha singing Natural Woman at the
Speaker 1: Kennedy Center. To Carol King. It's every word and every
Speaker 1: sentence by Baldwin, Paley and Fitzgerald. It's Ingrid Bergmann and
Speaker 1: Casablanca staring off into the distance as Dooley Wilson sings
Speaker 1: as time goes by. Or maybe it's just Cornell West,
Speaker 1: so here he is taking the time, in the strangest
Speaker 1: of times, to sit and talk. I hope you enjoy
Speaker 1: doctor West. Thank you very much for being here, dear brother.
Speaker 1: It is truly an honor to sit with you, especially
Speaker 1: in this precarious time of ours. And it's in this
Speaker 1: time that I wanted to start with. When you rise
Speaker 1: in the morning, as you go through your days, what
Speaker 1: are you seeing in this country right now? But I'm
Speaker 1: seeing a lot of resilience and a resistance. I'm seeing
Speaker 1: a lot of decay and decline simultaneously. It's very clear
Speaker 1: that we're living in an empire that is imploding, that's
Speaker 1: unable to respond to the variety of catastrophe. The ecological
Speaker 1: catastrophe that's hunting us down and haunting us down every day,
Speaker 1: the possible nuclear catastrophe, the economic catastrophe of poverty and
Speaker 1: wage dignation, of wealth, inequality, political catastrophe, of just the
Speaker 1: most corrupt and leadership open the House Senate as well
Speaker 1: as especially in the White House, Supreme Court, the civil
Speaker 1: and the social catastrophe of shattered relationships, shattered friendships, shattered
Speaker 1: families and communities. And then there's a spiritual catastrophe, which
Speaker 1: is just a country where greed is good and might
Speaker 1: makes right becomes so dominant that those who are critical
Speaker 1: of it feel as if you can't find a way
Speaker 1: out of it, and hit the streets and go to
Speaker 1: jail because the system is so hemorrhaged, and we wonder
Speaker 1: whether the system can reform be reformed. And yet people
Speaker 1: are fighting. It's a beautiful thing to see. And you,
Speaker 1: in fact, are still fighting. Well, you're fighting two brothers,
Speaker 1: stand you fighting well, I'm honored to be fighting with you.
Speaker 1: And as I'm looking at you right now over zoom,
Speaker 1: of course, I can see you're wearing that black suit
Speaker 1: of yours. And in wearing that suit, I know you
Speaker 1: are paying homage Tomasha, the heroine of your favorite playoffs
Speaker 1: Three Sisters. For context, in the story, she always wears black.
Speaker 1: Her father has just died, she's stuck in a pointless
Speaker 1: marriage with a boring man. You've said, the heart of
Speaker 1: this play is around this central question, how do you
Speaker 1: make disappointment a constant companion and still persevere? That question,
Speaker 1: of course, feels especially timely in twenty twenty, a year
Speaker 1: full of disappointment? Have you answered that question for yourself?
Speaker 1: In this moment? We certainly live in the age of
Speaker 1: chekhofs since he is the great poet of catastrophe, but
Speaker 1: also the great court of resilience, of perseverance, of stamina,
Speaker 1: keep going on. I can't go on. I will go
Speaker 1: on as Checkhoff alongside Samuel Beckett. I don't think there's
Speaker 1: an answer to the question in terms of what it
Speaker 1: means to make disappointment your constant companion. I think there's
Speaker 1: a response. It's like the conclusion of a practical Aristotilian syllogism,
Speaker 1: which is not a proposition or a theory, but it's
Speaker 1: a life lived. Is to response that we make embodied
Speaker 1: and enacted in our deeds, our practice, our ways of life.
Speaker 1: And it's very very Checkhoff, like you used to say,
Speaker 1: philosophers are like the great generals. They all want us
Speaker 1: to enlist in their army. I refuse to enlist. And
Speaker 1: I'm with Checkhoff in that regard. Similarly so with theology.
Speaker 1: Now we know Checkoff, of course was not a Christian
Speaker 1: like myself, but he was so deeply shaped by the
Speaker 1: best of Christianity, which was the very core of the
Speaker 1: best of orthodox Russian Christianity. Absolute condemnation of no one
Speaker 1: in brace of everyone across the board. And in that
Speaker 1: sense he accepted Christian compassion while he rejected the Christian consolation.
Speaker 1: He accepted Christian love. He rejected to Christian conclusions about
Speaker 1: resurrection and deliverance and salvation and so on. You know,
Speaker 1: the age of Chekhov is one in which through our
Speaker 1: artistic expressions, through our acts of kindness and solidarity, we
Speaker 1: can express a freedom and a love and a democracy
Speaker 1: that is not realizable at the present given the structures
Speaker 1: of domination in place. Absolute condemnation of no one that
Speaker 1: has been tested over the last four years under this administration.
Speaker 1: How have you avoided absolute condemnation of this man. Well,
Speaker 1: we tell the truth of him being a neo fascist gangster,
Speaker 1: we tell the truth of him being pathological liars enofold
Speaker 1: racist and the whole host of other things. But he'll
Speaker 1: acknowledge his humanity. You acknowledge that he's on a continuum
Speaker 1: with you. You acknow he's not the cause of those
Speaker 1: things in the American Empire. He is the expression, the symptom,
Speaker 1: the symbol, the crystallization of those things. And therefore Chekhov
Speaker 1: did have a certain kind of charitable Christian hatred, which
Speaker 1: you hate to sin and steel try to stand contact
Speaker 1: with the humanity of the center. It's like standing in
Speaker 1: contact with the humanity of Natasha in the Cherry Orchard,
Speaker 1: even though you know she's gangster like, even though you
Speaker 1: know she's taken over, you know, you know she's not
Speaker 1: just territorial, but she's colonizing in that way. Chehov has
Speaker 1: a certain patience and even compassion for all of his characters.
Speaker 1: Is over eight thousand characters, and Chekhov's corpus. He's not
Speaker 1: engaging in the kind of easy, absolute condemnation of them.
Speaker 1: He's condemning what they do, how they think, their ways
Speaker 1: of being in the world. But he knows that as
Speaker 1: human beings, he still connected with them, and there's something
Speaker 1: inside of them that is inside of us and inside
Speaker 1: of him. And yet we've given different degrees and gradations,
Speaker 1: conquered that worst side of us better than others. So
Speaker 1: that you, for example, you conquer whatever gangsters inside of
Speaker 1: you much better than Trump. I've trying to conquer the
Speaker 1: gangster inside of me much better than Trump. But it's
Speaker 1: not as if there's not a certain kind of civil
Speaker 1: war taking place on the battlefield of my own soul
Speaker 1: that's similar to the civil war taking place with his.
Speaker 1: It's just that the Confederacy wins daily, weekly, monthly, yearly,
Speaker 1: every decade. But I do believe human beings have the
Speaker 1: capacity to change. Even if they manifest no proclivity towards
Speaker 1: changing at all, they still have the potential to change
Speaker 1: and be transformed. You've often described your child self as
Speaker 1: a gangster, absolutely, and you had this kind of fighting,
Speaker 1: irrepressible spirit growing up in the fifties and sixties in
Speaker 1: Clan Elder, Sacramento. Your father would tell you can't fight
Speaker 1: other people's battles. Your mother said of you at school
Speaker 1: that you would take things from somebody who you thought
Speaker 1: had too much and give it to somebody who didn't
Speaker 1: have as much. How do you think those childhood experiences,
Speaker 1: that childhood mentality has shaped your views on equity and
Speaker 1: fairness as an adult. I appreciate that question or brother. No,
Speaker 1: it's still very much inside of me, both the gangster
Speaker 1: on the one hand and the robin hood like sensibility
Speaker 1: on the other that I try to hold on to
Speaker 1: a unbreakable and undeniable solidarity with the vulnerable. It partly
Speaker 1: comes out of the genius of Hebrew Scripture, where you
Speaker 1: spread histedness, that fast love, the loving kindness to the weak,
Speaker 1: the vulnerable, the orphan, the widow, the fatherless, the motherless,
Speaker 1: has something to do with with with with Jesus as well.
Speaker 1: I have come to set at liberty those who are oppressed.
Speaker 1: What you do to the least of these, the prisoners
Speaker 1: and the elderly, and the children and the poor, you
Speaker 1: do unto me. I run out the money, changes out
Speaker 1: of the temple. What does that temple look like in
Speaker 1: twenty twenty? White House, Pentagon, Wall Street, Hollywood, Harvard, Yeah, Princeton,
Speaker 1: Silicon Valley. All of the elites at the highest level,
Speaker 1: who are often too disproportionately driven by greeding status. Doesn't
Speaker 1: mean that the individuals who in habit those spaces are
Speaker 1: in any way beyond change, but the dominant culture of
Speaker 1: those places generate the kind of righteous indignation that led
Speaker 1: a Palestinian Jew named Jesus to run those money changes out,
Speaker 1: and then of course it led directly to his crucifixion.
Speaker 1: Now none of us are Jesus, none of us should
Speaker 1: have any Messianic aspirations or any kind of salvific sensible
Speaker 1: of powers. But we're followers, were disciples. We take seriously
Speaker 1: the plant of the vincible. In any end. Of course,
Speaker 1: we're all vulnerable, but especially the poor, especially they hated,
Speaker 1: especially the rebuke and the scorn. It could be dollars
Speaker 1: in India. It could be the Roma in Europe. It
Speaker 1: could be landless peasants in Brazil. It could be Jews
Speaker 1: in Russia or France or Pittsburgh. It could be Palestinians
Speaker 1: under Israeli occupation. It could be those brothers and sisters
Speaker 1: in Tibet and Cashmere under occupation. It could be indigenous
Speaker 1: peoples in the United States, black folk in hood's, brown
Speaker 1: folk in bar rio's white brothers and sisters locked into
Speaker 1: impoverished conditions and appellation and other places. These are human
Speaker 1: beings the deepest level. We're calling for help, and it
Speaker 1: seems to me that it's a beautiful thing to find
Speaker 1: joy in fighting with oppressed people who are aspiring the
Speaker 1: lives of decency and dignity. And so going back to
Speaker 1: my years in Glenn Eldo on the charcol side of Sacramento,
Speaker 1: those elements are still there. I just try to have
Speaker 1: much more love and justice than I did hatred and
Speaker 1: revenge when I was very, very young. I think that's
Speaker 1: a sign of a quest towards spiritual maturity. You cast
Speaker 1: it in the form of love and justice rather than
Speaker 1: hatred and revenge. And that's a lesson that we learned
Speaker 1: from Martin Luther King Jr. By Abraham Joshua Heschel, Edward Zieve.
Speaker 1: We learned it from John Cochrane, Love Supreme and Chekhov.
Speaker 1: Why can't caring for the vulnerable and as you say,
Speaker 1: of course we are all vulnerable eventually in the end,
Speaker 1: that's right. Why can't that be a bipartisan issue? It
Speaker 1: should be. It should be a humanistic issue, absolute thing.
Speaker 1: I mean. The challenge is that there's a Dostoevsky formulation
Speaker 1: that says that we human beings are really not uncapable
Speaker 1: of bearing witness based on a love and justice. That
Speaker 1: we're too frail, too finite and fall, and we're too decrepit.
Speaker 1: There's too much envy and resentment in us. As part
Speaker 1: of what the Brothers Care of Masov is all about.
Speaker 1: The great novel Dostaevsky wrote Before We Die that the
Speaker 1: standards are too high. We all need grant inquisitors. We'd
Speaker 1: rather follow pie pipers. We'd rather be manipulated than laid
Speaker 1: and dominated, rather than free and deliberate in our conception
Speaker 1: of ourselves independent of the authorities that would ask us
Speaker 1: to defer to them. So that Dolshovski says, what we're
Speaker 1: looking for, what we're calling for, is beyond the reach
Speaker 1: and capacity of human beings. That's a deep philosophical question
Speaker 1: and raised the issue, you know, whether we have the
Speaker 1: species have what it takes to avoid self destruction given
Speaker 1: the ecological catastrophe coming our way. I asked brother Chomsky
Speaker 1: that question the other day on my podcast The type
Speaker 1: Rope was, says a Tricia. You know Chomsky, he's all
Speaker 1: the greatest public intellectual of our time, but he didn't
Speaker 1: really want to hit it head on. You know, he
Speaker 1: kind of wanted to, well, oh, we just got to fight,
Speaker 1: We just got I understand, I understand indeed, indeed, but
Speaker 1: he's got a certain rational Still in regards to Professor Chomsky,
Speaker 1: He's come on this show and I've asked him this before,
Speaker 1: you ever worry that these questions too often become theoretical
Speaker 1: quandaries that don't deal in human day to day life.
Speaker 1: In reality, that we expanded so much to the theoretical,
Speaker 1: to the literary that it no longer accounts for the
Speaker 1: complexity of the human condition. Oh, absolutely, there's no doubt
Speaker 1: about it. I think one of the reason why brother
Speaker 1: g Nom is reluctant to want to engage in abstract
Speaker 1: theoretical formulations he knows they become forms of distraction that
Speaker 1: can diminish our spirit and downplay our capacity to engage
Speaker 1: in serious thinking, acting and feeling to change the world
Speaker 1: in the fundamental way. I think he's right about that
Speaker 1: very much so. I mean, in some ways it's similar
Speaker 1: to Voltaire's response to the earthquake in Lisbon. One of
Speaker 1: the theologized and philosophize and was just the will of God?
Speaker 1: And why did the earthquake crushed the churches and leave
Speaker 1: the brothels untouched? And so forth? Laire was saying, well, no,
Speaker 1: the real response is very dead. Take care of the living.
Speaker 1: Make sure the medicine has distributed in such a way
Speaker 1: that people can go on, so that there was a
Speaker 1: certain kind of sense of the need for intervention without
Speaker 1: having escape hatches like theologizing and philosophizing, that becomes an
Speaker 1: excuse not to engage, becomes a form of cowardliness. And
Speaker 1: I think that nom is right about that. I think
Speaker 1: Voltaire is right about that. But in the end, there's
Speaker 1: always going to be certain questions that the curious are
Speaker 1: going to raise. But he just wonders, God, we human
Speaker 1: beings do tend to be so tied to self destruction.
Speaker 1: Are we really going to allow people to blow up
Speaker 1: the planet before we can engage in forms of solidarity
Speaker 1: to preserve the planet. He knows that's the possibility. Do
Speaker 1: you believe that's what's going to happen? I don't know.
Speaker 1: I think open ended. I think history is always in
Speaker 1: complete and unfinished and open ended. But I think there
Speaker 1: is a good change. Yeah. The gangsterization, from the beginning
Speaker 1: of human beings emerging out of Africa has been a
Speaker 1: common strand in streach in our species. At fourteen, you
Speaker 1: picked up a copy of k Guards, Fear and Trembling.
Speaker 1: It was potentially the piece that made you want to
Speaker 1: do what you do. Here's what you've said about it.
Speaker 1: After reading it at fourteen, you thought, in the end,
Speaker 1: we're beings headed toward death. I was convinced for the
Speaker 1: most part that we don't have any control. So you
Speaker 1: really have to make a leap. You have to acknowledge
Speaker 1: the magnitude of the mystery. We have two hundred and
Speaker 1: ten thousand people now dead because of COVID nineteen. The
Speaker 1: question of mortality is ever present, it always has been,
Speaker 1: but now it right here on the surface for us.
Speaker 1: Has this been on your mind in the past six months.
Speaker 1: I think I didn't need a pandemic to be reminded
Speaker 1: of mortality. I think is one of the fundamental questions
Speaker 1: of wrestling with what it means to be human. We
Speaker 1: know kind of featherless, too legged, linguistically conscious creatures, born
Speaker 1: between urine and feces we are, and that there's no
Speaker 1: eschepe from our bodies being the culinary delighted to restial
Speaker 1: worms one day, and so the question becomes, well, there
Speaker 1: is the issue of collective death, ecological catastrophe. There's the
Speaker 1: issue of social death, which is always already operating given
Speaker 1: the predatory capitalist civilization that renders so many precious human
Speaker 1: beings into non persons or just objects to be manipulated
Speaker 1: or figures to be subjugated and exploited for deed profit.
Speaker 1: So that all of these forms of death go hand
Speaker 1: in hand with wrestling with what it means to be human.
Speaker 1: And of course they're inseparable from the forms of dog
Speaker 1: one that often constitute lives that hide the crimes, and
Speaker 1: the forms of domination that are structural and institutional, and
Speaker 1: especially those of empire. That's probably the most invisible and
Speaker 1: overlooked form of structural domination as empire, even though in
Speaker 1: the end it's probably the most important one. So all
Speaker 1: of these I think we have to be cognizant of,
Speaker 1: we have to be conversant with in our trek from
Speaker 1: womb to tomb. And the question becomes of what will
Speaker 1: be the sources and resources of our joy, our strength,
Speaker 1: our determination, our integrity, our honesty, our decency, our generosity.
Speaker 1: And it could be religious traditions, it could be secular traditions,
Speaker 1: but it's got to be certain traditions in the history,
Speaker 1: in the past of our species that they have ushered
Speaker 1: out and pushed out and unleashed. That can help us
Speaker 1: make our trick from womb to tomb. And if we
Speaker 1: reached a point where we run out of resources and
Speaker 1: run out of resources, and that can allow us to
Speaker 1: be human and it becomes solely a matter of mic
Speaker 1: makes right, of indifference to suffering is rewarded, of greed
Speaker 1: is good, then you end up with just you know,
Speaker 1: the survival of the slickers, and everybody obsessed with the
Speaker 1: eleventh commandment thou shall not get caught, And that just
Speaker 1: strikes me as just modes of I would say subhuman,
Speaker 1: but I don't want to put it on the animals
Speaker 1: lying and the hippoponamus and a crocodile and an alligator
Speaker 1: very dangerous, but they don't engage in gratuitous You don't
Speaker 1: you have this high level of pleasure out of inflicting
Speaker 1: pain on people. That's a human thing. So I would
Speaker 1: even say subhuman as if the animals are worse. Often
Speaker 1: in US, there's ways that we humans have come up
Speaker 1: with being in the world as much worse than the animals,
Speaker 1: and that just means we need more cultivation, We need
Speaker 1: more ways of acculturating ourselves that accent the best of
Speaker 1: who we are as humans, and not the worst, because
Speaker 1: the worst of humans is much worse than the worst
Speaker 1: of animals. But most of that violence between people or
Speaker 1: between nations is born out of fear. Do you feel
Speaker 1: we've grown more fearful as a country in recent years? Oh? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think so definitely. We've always had fear. We've always
Speaker 1: had ugly domination and hatred, resentment and envy. But I
Speaker 1: think with fascism, you see fascism as a particular way
Speaker 1: of galvanizing fears and weaponizing fears. But America is at
Speaker 1: its worst, has never been one in which a full
Speaker 1: fled fascist project becomes concrete and real in the way
Speaker 1: it has been under the Trump administration. I have a
Speaker 1: personal question for you, because so much of our dialogue
Speaker 1: and past dialogues you've had are steeped in politics. But
Speaker 1: I wondered, after three four five decades of writing, almost
Speaker 1: as an act of public service, about what you've had
Speaker 1: to sacrifice at the expense of all that work. And
Speaker 1: in your memoir Brother West, Living and Loving out Loud,
Speaker 1: you write a passage that I want to go to.
Speaker 1: You said, because I've never been an advocate of psychotherapy
Speaker 1: as a path of self understanding. I'm not sure I
Speaker 1: know myself well enough to share my whole self with others. This,
Speaker 1: in part, might explain my volatile relationships with women. One
Speaker 1: might argue that because I don't know myself, the more
Speaker 1: time I spend with a woman, the more various parts
Speaker 1: of my self emerge, parts that are in fact foreign
Speaker 1: to me. In short, my whole self surfaces, and it
Speaker 1: is precisely my whole self that strikes me as a stranger.
Speaker 1: To maintain a long term and long lasting bond with
Speaker 1: a woman may require the kind of soul sharing or
Speaker 1: self sharing that's beyond my capability. Do you really believe
Speaker 1: at this point in your life that kind of soul
Speaker 1: sharing is beyond your capability? Now, I think it's just
Speaker 1: a question raised, you know, It's like the species just
Speaker 1: raise these counterfactual, hypothetical questions and over the sharpen what's
Speaker 1: going on in the present. But I'm a prisoner of hope.
Speaker 1: You know. I don't believe in syre coming to any
Speaker 1: kind of pessimism and cynicism. But I do believe in
Speaker 1: very real and raw criticism realism. So no, I don't
Speaker 1: think I'm incapable. I think the evidence is such that
Speaker 1: I have to continually undergo change, transformation, strong effort in
Speaker 1: order achieve that kind of in the name that I'm
Speaker 1: talking about long term relationship or whatever it is you see.
Speaker 1: So those words, I think we're really just you know,
Speaker 1: socratic moments of self examination, trying to be transparent with
Speaker 1: one's soul and light of one's failures. But simply because
Speaker 1: you're honest with one's failures doesn't mean that there's no
Speaker 1: possibility of making some kind of breakthrough. Jack Off says,
Speaker 1: what the fundamental aim of life in the end is
Speaker 1: breaking out of the rut, breaking out of the routine,
Speaker 1: breaking out of the cycle which you seemingly find yourself.
Speaker 1: So you never give up on the effort. But I'm
Speaker 1: Sam Rebecca try again, fail again, fail better, try again,
Speaker 1: fell again, failed better. I'm always looking forward to that better,
Speaker 1: even if it's still a fail heame because, let's be honest,
Speaker 1: a lot of people who are in long term relationships
Speaker 1: who are failing, actually they're just still in the mess
Speaker 1: of and it's better to fail and be in them
Speaker 1: than to fail and be outside of them. So that's
Speaker 1: not as if there's great success, it's just that they're
Speaker 1: able to sustain it, and I give a lot of
Speaker 1: credit to sustain the longevity of the relation without the
Speaker 1: relation itself being thoroughly fulfilling the way that they would like.
Speaker 1: I tend not to settle for that though. I think
Speaker 1: I tend to be one who who refuses to simply settle.
Speaker 1: But actually it's continually trying to achieve something different and
Speaker 1: something that is more in the end fulfilling. Basically, what
Speaker 1: I'm hearing is, once you sense failure, you have a
Speaker 1: tendency to move on. Well, no, it's not failure. It's
Speaker 1: that once I sense something that is dampening my spirit
Speaker 1: or undercutting my capacity to be true to who I
Speaker 1: am and be true to my calling. I don't think
Speaker 1: that's failure. I mean think a certain kind of lack
Speaker 1: of compatibility. I don't think failures the right word. Really,
Speaker 1: it's just the inability to find that kind of a
Speaker 1: very difficult and delicate companionship that allows one to soar
Speaker 1: like an eagle as well as be as humbled as
Speaker 1: a dove. In twenty twelve, you said, last month I
Speaker 1: did seventeen lectures. That's too much for a brother almost
Speaker 1: sixty years old. At the same time, if I'm able
Speaker 1: to touch a whole lot of lives and get them
Speaker 1: to rethink, organize, mobilize, is that better than sitting in
Speaker 1: the library and writing a magnum opus twelve years from now. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's one of those Socratic moments again. No, brother,
Speaker 1: You're absolutely right. But I mean, if we had a
Speaker 1: wonderful discussion on Dante on Sunday on Trinity College. Each night,
Speaker 1: I still try to read about three or four hours
Speaker 1: to be able to stay up on what's going on
Speaker 1: in the world of ideas, in the life of the mind.
Speaker 1: But I would rather just be of service in a
Speaker 1: variety in different ways. I could do a dance music
Speaker 1: record with my dear brother Brandon Lucas that we just dropped,
Speaker 1: or with brother Keith Benson work with Teddy Pendergrass that
Speaker 1: we just dropped the music, a record having to do
Speaker 1: with voting. All of those are different forms of communication,
Speaker 1: and writing books is simply one form of communication. Now
Speaker 1: we got zoom, So my god, I've got all kinds
Speaker 1: of community groups and my moss temples and synagogues and
Speaker 1: churches and communities, sending colleges and what have you that
Speaker 1: facilitate communication. In the end, you know, it's it's being
Speaker 1: a jazz man. You know, a jazz man is a
Speaker 1: jazz woman. You're trying to be flexible, fluid improvisation or
Speaker 1: keeping the swing grounded in the blues and communicating every
Speaker 1: where you can in order to uplift, enable, and unsettle others.
Speaker 1: As you empty your soul and touch other souls before
Speaker 1: the words get your body, that's a jazz man. Earlier,
Speaker 1: you know, you've mentioned Coltrane a couple of times on
Speaker 1: this podcast, and I think someone like Coltrane, or James
Speaker 1: Brown or Prince, they all practice what you call canosis,
Speaker 1: which is more of a theological term than an artistic one,
Speaker 1: but it's essentially the act of emptying oneself on stage
Speaker 1: in song through words and expression, something you have been
Speaker 1: doing for many years, laying everything on the line. Prince
Speaker 1: danced and performed so vigorously he needed painkillers towards the
Speaker 1: end of his life. Coltrane played to the very end.
Speaker 1: So for you, doctor West, do you feel compelled at
Speaker 1: age sixty seven to keep working searching almost as an
Speaker 1: act of service? Oh? Absolutely absolutely, But keep in mind, no, brother,
Speaker 1: you see that it's a joy. I mean the reason
Speaker 1: of the reason why you know, Ruth Franklin or Hutchinson's
Speaker 1: sister of the emotions, we just lost sister Pam, but
Speaker 1: Sheila and wander steal strong. The reason why they give
Speaker 1: it all, they give everything. The reason why Gladys Knight
Speaker 1: gives everything is there's a joy in that Gibbs. It's
Speaker 1: not a burden in that sense, and so why would
Speaker 1: I give up that kind of joy? A love driven
Speaker 1: love center canosis is a joy, and it's different than pleasures.
Speaker 1: It's not to just tellation stimulation. It's a certain kind
Speaker 1: of carrying and nurturing that allows an uplifting of others
Speaker 1: inseparable from a joy in one's own soul and one
Speaker 1: wants to be faithful unto death or that kind of calling,
Speaker 1: that kind of love, that kind of joy, that kind
Speaker 1: of service, that kind of solidarity with the wretched of
Speaker 1: the earth and in my own concept and of the world.
Speaker 1: You know, life itself is a gift, it really is.
Speaker 1: And your death ought to be a gift too, but
Speaker 1: it ought to be a gift that is grounded in
Speaker 1: a joy. And I always in my class with the
Speaker 1: caravan and love by the Isley Brothers, a genius so
Speaker 1: from Cincinnati who then moved to te Neck. There's caravan
Speaker 1: and love that we talks about. That that the Isley
Speaker 1: Brothers are talking about is rooted in this canosus, this
Speaker 1: joy at this service. Never in the modern world or
Speaker 1: have there been a people so chronically and systemically hated
Speaker 1: for four hundred years. And that's what that's what the
Speaker 1: Isley Brothers are talking about. And I just want to
Speaker 1: be a part of a small part of that tradition
Speaker 1: of love warriors. Malcolm was part of it. Martin was
Speaker 1: a part of it. Fanny lou Ham was a part
Speaker 1: of it. Billy Holliday was a part of it. And
Speaker 1: it doesn't mean that we're pure, doesn't mean that we're
Speaker 1: better than anybody else. It just means that we had
Speaker 1: the vision and imagination to dish out unbelievable forms of
Speaker 1: love while being so thoroughly hated for so long. And
Speaker 1: I would say the same thing about being terrorized for
Speaker 1: a hundred years of teaching the world so much about
Speaker 1: freedom and the radical love and freedom, the radical freedom
Speaker 1: and love is a gift. It's a last thing to
Speaker 1: be part of that tradition and every human being can choose.
Speaker 1: You know, Bob Dylan, the Jewish brother from Minnesota, Bruce
Speaker 1: Springstein decides to do that. Barbra streisand decides to do that.
Speaker 1: Derighteous brothers decide to do that. Hammer Steward with the
Speaker 1: average white band decide to do that. M and M
Speaker 1: decides to do that, hanging out with Drey and allowing
Speaker 1: his genius white brother genius from Detroit tied to the
Speaker 1: doctor Dre and all of the great genius drains Snoop
Speaker 1: and the others. So it's not a matter of skin pigmentation.
Speaker 1: These are choices human beings make to be in on
Speaker 1: the love, in on the joy. As what Sonny rawlins
Speaker 1: we're talking about the other day, though, Brother, when you
Speaker 1: heard him on the podcast on the tight Rope, he's
Speaker 1: Sunday ninety years old. Brother got so much vision, joy
Speaker 1: and love in him that three lifetimes of evil cannot
Speaker 1: crush because he looks Castrian face and he doesn't allowed
Speaker 1: to have the last words. It's funny you mentioned joy
Speaker 1: because in the New Yorker three months ago, George Saunders
Speaker 1: wrote a short story called love Letter, and I wanted
Speaker 1: to present a passage to you. I don't know if
Speaker 1: you've read it, but I'll present it to you. No,
Speaker 1: I haven't read it. Thanks so much for Shannon's He wrote,
Speaker 1: when you reach a certain age, you see that time
Speaker 1: is all we have, by which I mean moments like
Speaker 1: those overhead geese this morning, and watching your mother be born,
Speaker 1: and sitting at the dining room table here waiting for
Speaker 1: the phone to ring and announce that a certain baby
Speaker 1: you had been born. Or that day when all of
Speaker 1: us hiked out to Point Lobos, those baby deer, the
Speaker 1: extremely loud seal, your sister's scarf drifting down down to
Speaker 1: that black, briny boulder, the replacement you so generously bought
Speaker 1: her in Monterey. How pleased you made her with your kindness.
Speaker 1: Those things were real. That is what that is all
Speaker 1: one gets. This other stuff is real only to the
Speaker 1: extent that it interferes with those moments. So for you,
Speaker 1: doctor West, on the subject of joy, what are those
Speaker 1: small human moments in your day to day life. I
Speaker 1: don't think it's just a matter of when you reach
Speaker 1: certain age. It's just when you reach a certain state
Speaker 1: of maturity. That's a very important distinct, you see. And
Speaker 1: Keith is dead at twenty five, he'd been wrestling with
Speaker 1: it for many years. And Shelley is dead at twenty nine.
Speaker 1: He'd been wrestling with it for many years. It's a
Speaker 1: certain mature way of seeing the world and looking at
Speaker 1: the world and all of its ugliness and still mustering
Speaker 1: the courage to try to tell the truth and try
Speaker 1: to pursue beauty and embody a love as Beethoven's formulation
Speaker 1: of it. And I think older people can miss out
Speaker 1: on it. Younger people can grasp it much earlier because
Speaker 1: maturity is not tied to chronology at all. It's tied
Speaker 1: to struggle and rustling, with suffering and transfiguring suffering into
Speaker 1: forms of creativity and hoping that you have impact on
Speaker 1: others as one struggles, as one stays in a high
Speaker 1: quality emotion and movement. So for me, it begins with
Speaker 1: the continue, you know, I'm very Immasonian about this. Everyday,
Speaker 1: everyday life on the corner, walking the streets, interacting with
Speaker 1: people with a grand with a conversation, Those to me
Speaker 1: are the Cairo's moments. They are moments that have a deep,
Speaker 1: deep meaning within the chronos, within the everyday routine. For me,
Speaker 1: it's a lot of music, music, plays a lot. This morning,
Speaker 1: when I got up, I listened to Dorothy Love Coats
Speaker 1: holding onto my face. I listened to James Cleveland and
Speaker 1: Wretha Franklin's Precious Men, Maorie listening to Walter Hawkins. What
Speaker 1: is this this fire inside of me that won't allow
Speaker 1: me to hold my piece? Those are moments ever epiphany
Speaker 1: that helped preserve sanity, and dignity, and tenacity, the most
Speaker 1: importantly humility. We recognize that we're in circumstances none of
Speaker 1: our own choosing. We have to wrestle with him, try
Speaker 1: to transform them, but we'll never, never in full control
Speaker 1: of them. And then, of course there's a cause you know,
Speaker 1: to my loved ones from mom and family and beloved
Speaker 1: ones and so forth that make big difference. Conversations with
Speaker 1: my brother Clifton and make all the difference in the world.
Speaker 1: And then they struggled, oh brother, when we hit the streets. Man,
Speaker 1: those are Caroll's moments. For me, I'm a revolutionary Christian,
Speaker 1: so it is very much time to being a follower
Speaker 1: of Palestinian June name. Jesus left certain legacy of love
Speaker 1: that we are to revel in, paid whatever costs are
Speaker 1: required to hold on to that discipleship. You speak of humility,
Speaker 1: and yet I hate to do this to you, but
Speaker 1: I am going to ask you to play the role
Speaker 1: of the oracle as people have called you in the past.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you like that term, but people
Speaker 1: have said that of you. Well, I mean, yeah, I know.
Speaker 1: Roll Obama introduced me as an oracle, that the apollo
Speaker 1: when I introduced him when I was doing sixty five
Speaker 1: events for him in two thousand and eight, and I
Speaker 1: thought that was going a little bit too far. I'm
Speaker 1: not really in an oracle, but I certainly try to
Speaker 1: say what's on my heart, mind and soul, and if
Speaker 1: in fact it has a dose of truth and wisdom
Speaker 1: in it, then I say, wonderful. Let's use it as
Speaker 1: a man, as a person in the world, which is
Speaker 1: the most accurate. Right. What do you see when you
Speaker 1: imagine our country in twenty twenty one, Well, that's a
Speaker 1: good question. I think we're unfinished. It depends on what
Speaker 1: we do in the next few weeks. You know. I'm
Speaker 1: trying to push brother Biden, says the Harris, across the
Speaker 1: finish line, so we can stop this march toward the
Speaker 1: vicious American fascism. We'll see whether the election is one
Speaker 1: that has any results at all, or whether there'll be
Speaker 1: a kind of coop against democratic procedures and processes. If
Speaker 1: in fact, Biden and Harris do take office, I will
Speaker 1: be glad that brother Trump is gone. Your fashioned gangsters
Speaker 1: got to go. But there will still be the rule
Speaker 1: of big money. Pentagon will still being the driver's sea.
Speaker 1: Africa will still be expanding, Yeah freaking continent. Drones are
Speaker 1: still being dropped in different places all around the world,
Speaker 1: killing innocent folk. Ball streets still in the driver received wealth.
Speaker 1: Inequality will still be escalating even under Biden and Harris.
Speaker 1: Mass incarceration system, decrepit schools and inadequate healthcare and indecent
Speaker 1: housing and not enough jobs, but a living wage will
Speaker 1: still be operating. So we'll have to remain very vigilant
Speaker 1: and resilient against the neoliberal rule of Biden and Harris.
Speaker 1: But who knows, Brother America may take a whole seale
Speaker 1: fascist turn. That's the real possibility. Depends on what we do,
Speaker 1: how strong we fight, what kind of resistance and opposition
Speaker 1: we put up over against that possibility. Full of hope
Speaker 1: and I have no optimism whatsoever. We just hope is
Speaker 1: a verb as much as virtue depends on what we
Speaker 1: do with kinds of forms of solidarity we keep in motion,
Speaker 1: kinds of powers and pressure we keep in motion, but
Speaker 1: also very importantly give them. The massive failure of the
Speaker 1: intellectual class and the professional class and the American empire
Speaker 1: depends on our integrity in terms of the truths we tell.
Speaker 1: That's what we continue to deny, just how deep white
Speaker 1: supremacy cuts, and yet a white supremacy that is inseparable
Speaker 1: from the predatory capitalist processes and forces in the society.
Speaker 1: So we don't end up talking loosely about identity without
Speaker 1: connecting it to deeper forms of solidarity. But working in
Speaker 1: poor people and deep reforms of integrity have to do
Speaker 1: with calling in the question these individuals who go up
Speaker 1: the class and imperial hierarchy and then celebrate their diversity
Speaker 1: and celebrate their success, and has nothing to do with
Speaker 1: moral and spiritual greatness. Here she is great who loves
Speaker 1: most intensely, and justice is what love looks like in public,
Speaker 1: and therefore loves publicly in seeking justice, and tenderness is
Speaker 1: what love feels like in private. So one is tender
Speaker 1: and kind and sweet and gentle to people to the
Speaker 1: best of one's ability. That's what greatness he is. And
Speaker 1: for me, all those things are at stake in the
Speaker 1: next few months, in the next few years as we leave.
Speaker 1: We've been talking a lot about greatness in this talk.
Speaker 1: And if you take a look at your computer, you'll
Speaker 1: find a poem on the screen. It's called Wild Broom
Speaker 1: by Leo Party, a nineteenth century Italian poet philosopher. I
Speaker 1: know you admire. It's also a piece that includes some
Speaker 1: of your mission statement, and if you wouldn't mind, I'm
Speaker 1: sure people would love to hear you read it. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: The world we live in couldn't encompass all this. The
Speaker 1: creatures wiped away by a single shaken wave of the sea,
Speaker 1: snatched off by a sudden, wicked gust, the wind so
Speaker 1: annihilated by an underground tremmor, there'd be little or nothing
Speaker 1: left to remember that man has a truly noble nature, who,
Speaker 1: without flinching steel, can face our common flight, tell the
Speaker 1: truth with an honest tongue, admit the evil luck we've
Speaker 1: been given and the abject impotent condition we'rein. Who shows
Speaker 1: himself great and full of grace, under pressure, not adding
Speaker 1: to his misery the hating hostility of his fellow men. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is the great Leaparte, favorite of Schopenhau, the favorite
Speaker 1: of all of those who can look unflinchingly at our
Speaker 1: grimness and steel come up with ways of keeping that swing.
Speaker 1: It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing.
Speaker 1: Lea Party finds a swing in his land, which and
Speaker 1: this magnificent linguistic expressions. Duke Gallington can find it on
Speaker 1: the Pano, Martin King can find it in the speeches
Speaker 1: and in his sacrifice for justice. We can find it
Speaker 1: in our relation, our love, our encounter with others, the
Speaker 1: track of all of their richness and complexity. Given the
Speaker 1: back drop of catastrophe, Lea Party for abver. That's why
Speaker 1: I vote Leo Party in my reason book, Black Prophetic Fire.
Speaker 1: He's got the epigraph, people, how could Lea Party have
Speaker 1: the epigraph for Douglas and the Boys? And I to
Speaker 1: be Will's Barnett an elevator understand the centrality of catastrophe
Speaker 1: and all of their works, and then understand how Lea
Speaker 1: Party dealt with the wounds of the unrequited loves that
Speaker 1: he can never ever fulfill and yet continue to work
Speaker 1: to write. You talked about that swing finding in a
Speaker 1: also's disciplines, and I think you found it on this
Speaker 1: podcast today. Swing Wisdom of Love is one of the
Speaker 1: best interviews I've had my brother. I appreciate you, Doctor
Speaker 1: Cornell West, Thank you for your time. Please stay safe,
Speaker 1: You stay safe, my brother. That salute you, mane. And
Speaker 1: that's our show special thanks this week to Maria Cole
Speaker 1: and doctor Cornell West. To hear more of him, be
Speaker 1: sure to check out his new podcast called The Tight Rope.
Speaker 1: It features talks with everyone from Noam Chomsky to Rock
Speaker 1: Kim to doctor Anthony Faucci. To learn more about doctor West,
Speaker 1: visit our show notes at www dot com, easy pond
Speaker 1: dot com. If you're new what we do here, I'd
Speaker 1: recommend checking out past conversations with Professor Chomsky, Run the
Speaker 1: Jewels Better, Rooric Representative Ilhan Omar, Claudia Rankin, fran Liebowitz, Roxannegay,
Speaker 1: Dolors Wreth, that Glorious Ninem, Ted Danson, and that's just
Speaker 1: from twenty twenty. You can find all of those and
Speaker 1: more on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, wherever you do your
Speaker 1: listening If you'd like to join our mailing list, drop
Speaker 1: me a line at talk Easy Pod at gmail dot com.
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Speaker 1: at talk easy Pod. It takes a village every damn
Speaker 1: week to make this podcast. Those people in no specific
Speaker 1: order include our executive producer Janick Sabrava, illustrations by Christia Schanoy,
Speaker 1: associate producer Nikki Spina. Our lead editor is Andre Lynn.
Speaker 1: Our assistant editors are David Harding, Rina's Young, Kevin Corer,
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Speaker 1: Our interns are Julianna Erector, Gray Perkins, and Ian Simmons.
Speaker 1: Graphics by Derek Gaberzak and Ethan Seneca, and the show
Speaker 1: is produced by Caroline Reebuck. I'm Sanforco, so thank you
Speaker 1: for listening to Talk Easy. We'll be back for a
Speaker 1: bonus episode on Thursday with writer and critic Aunt Twine. Sergeant.
Speaker 1: Until then, stay safe and so on.