In this episode, Dr. Cornel West joins Russell Brand to discuss the need for compassion, togetherness, and unity in political and media spaces. Dr. West is a writer, activist, philosopher, and speaker who has been a long-time friend of mine and someone I've long admired. He's a force to be reckoned with, and I'm honored to have him as a guest on my show. I hope you enjoy this conversation, and that it encourages you to do what you need to do in order to make a difference in the world and in your own political and cultural spaces. See it first on Rumble. Stay Free with Russell Brand! See it FIRST on Rumble Subscribe to Stay Free With Russell Brand on iTunes Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices. If you like what you hear here, please consider making a five-star rating and a review on Apple Podcasts! or wherever else you get your media choices, using the promo code "UPLEVEL" to receive 10% off your first month with discount code "UELESS" at checkout. You can also become a supporter of the show by becoming a patron of Upleaf.org and receive 5 stars, and get 20% off the entire month for the rest of the month, plus free shipping when you sign up for a year, plus a free ad discount when you become a patron! you shop through Upleaf becomes a patron, too! of course, you'll get 5 stars and get an ad discount! You'll get access to all premium memberships, free shipping, and a complimentary copy of the Audible course, and all other perks, and we'll get a complimentary shipping throughout the show, and other perks throughout the world, too get VIP access to the service I'm listening to stay "upfront pricing, they'll get full access to his or her choice, and they'll receive all that means more of his or his choice, too say so, and he'll get the best of this deal, too can choose what he gets to choose, too will get all that's best of the service, and you'll also get a chance to access all that'll get all of that guy gets a discount, and access all of his best of his ad choices, too, too says "the best of your service, he gets a good deal, plus he gets it, too gets all that, he'll also gets a whole deal, and she'll get it, plus all of your chance to speak to you, too he gets all of this, and more of your guy, and so much more, he's also gets to hear how he's going to get a discount on the best deal,
00:00:01.000Welcome to Stay Free with Russell Brand.
00:00:03.000I'm thrilled to say it's Friday and every Friday we have an in-depth conversation with free thinkers, radicals, disruptors, prophets and shamans.
00:00:13.000Today I'm joined by Dr Cornel West, whose voice perhaps is peerless in this space, advocating for compassion, togetherness, unity, love Oh my dear brother, I want to begin by saluting you.
00:00:25.000but also in a political space and political spaces.
00:00:48.000You got the courage to be yourself, and you got the courage to take a risk, but most importantly, you're a truth teller and a witness bear.
00:00:58.000I was a little bit scared to meet you because I've been going on a lot of right-wing media, what are called right-wing media outlets.
00:01:08.000I watched you of course on Joe Rogan and we've been trying to get you as a guest before that.
00:01:12.000I've looked at some of your masterclass philosophy course.
00:01:17.000I admire you a great deal and when I talk about Liberal politics, progressive politics.
00:01:24.000When I talk about the left, one of the voices that I hold in my head and my heart is yours.
00:01:29.000And I've began to feel that liberal media has become so disconnected from the people that they're supposed to represent.
00:01:36.000That the British Labour Party have become disconnected from the people they're supposed to represent.
00:01:40.000That the Democrat Party is no longer a voice of bringing people together but, in my view, uses cultural issues to drive people apart and are disingenuous even in their apparent support of previously and, let's face it, currently oppressed cultural groups.
00:01:56.000Dr West, what do you think is happening in our culture?
00:02:14.000And the analysis has to be one in which it focuses on the precious lives of poor and working people, no matter what color they are, wretched of the earth from around every corner of the globe.
00:02:25.000But that means keeping a focus on what you actually do.
00:03:50.000When you got courageous brothers and sisters, artists.
00:03:54.000Like yourself, truth tellers, like so many others, Chris Hedges and others, trying to be honest, trying to be honest and saying, look, neoliberalism is dying.
00:04:12.000The American empire is wrestling with spiritual decay and moral decrepitude in part because centralized power at the highest levels of our economy and tied to military with its politicians bought off by big money and war profiteering elites are making citizens feel as if There are nothing but consumers, nothing but commodified entities.
00:04:35.000So that truth telling and the visionary work becomes crucial.
00:04:39.000And that's what I've seen you do over these years, though, brother.
00:04:43.000I'm telling you, man, it's a beautiful thing to behold.
00:04:46.000Thank you for saying that, because your praise is a meaningful balm at a time where I've felt, if not attacked, because I also get a lot of love, I come from the world of entertainment, so I'm somewhat praise-oriented, I have to be honest.
00:05:04.000But I have felt, sometimes I've felt, am I doing the right thing?
00:05:08.000Is this the right way to conduct this conversation?
00:05:10.000You've brought up so much, even in your first response there.
00:05:14.000I've been considering for a while that materialism, rationalism and post-enlightenment values have led inexorably, even if inadvertently, to a state of nihilism such as you describe.
00:05:25.000It's very difficult with populations of scale to instantiate a centralized set of values, ethics and meaning.
00:05:33.000And it appears that this divisiveness that I feel that somehow the culture is benefiting from has become worse and worse in recent years.
00:05:41.000A few just like placeholder arguments to consider, Cornell, as we hopefully advance our conversation, sir, is my friend Adam Curtis, the documentary maker, who said, no one ever made a left-wing case for Brexit.
00:05:55.000No one has, and I would add to that, no one has ever considered what the emotional timbre of Trump was, what it is that he reaches in people, what it is beyond the rhetoric and divisiveness, what it is within that emotional quality that is reaching people.
00:06:14.000Given that this is a contemporary news show that we are streaming right now, it's worth bringing up an issue that's becoming somewhat defining of our time, the January 6th insurrection.
00:06:24.000It seems impossible to say that both those events and the Black Lives Matter uprisings in the summer of the murder of George Floyd are in a sense a demonstration of the problems that centralised authority will always bring about. That until we have a time where
00:06:41.000people that corral around these separate issues, these separate publics, if these separate
00:06:48.000publics cannot recognise that ultimately they have to confront the same authority, we
00:06:54.000will not experience the kind of unity that both of us apparently crave. How do you think
00:07:01.000we have to frame the conversation both for people on the neoliberal establishment left, but
00:07:07.000also for people that identify with patriotism and what I recall these days as right-wing
00:07:13.000politics, so that we can overcome and not only accept but love and embrace cultural
00:07:19.000difference in order to meaningfully confront these forms of centralised media, political, financial and
00:07:26.000military authority that are thriving in this climate of division, sir?
00:07:31.000Yeah, I think we always want to begin with a fundamental commitment to wrestling with what it means to be human.
00:07:39.000Because when you get to our deep humanity, that functions at a level that is much more profound than what color, than what gender, what sexual orientation.
00:07:50.000Why we all wrestling with organized greed at the top, especially, but across the board, we all wrestling with various forms of hatred and self-doubt inside of us.
00:07:59.000We have to be honest and candid with ourselves, just as we're honest and candid with the powers that be.
00:08:04.000That's precisely what the legacy of the Martin Luther King Jr., and the Fannie Lou Hamers, and the Ella Bakers, and the John Coltrane, and Aretha Franklin.
00:08:13.000And I would listen to a little Loose Ends, and I would listen to a little Soul to Soul for my British connection here.
00:08:19.000When you listen to that music, my brother, it touches your soul.
00:08:22.000The soul is always deeper than what color you are.
00:09:31.000Even Brother Tucker, with all of his challenges and so forth, he's right about that.
00:09:37.000But the question becomes, we got to bring serious critique to bear on any kind of white supremacist, male supremacist, homophobic or transphobic sensibilities that they might have, but also recognize they are human beings just like us.
00:09:51.000And the fundamental question is the question that you've wrestled with, and I've wrestled with, What does it mean to be a wounded healer rather than a wounded hurter?
00:10:03.000If you're wounded and then you're going to somehow demonize the vulnerable rather than confront the most powerful, you're going to end up with a right-wing populism.
00:10:15.000Rather than a progressive populism, or most importantly in the language of Sheldon Wolin, my dear brother Bernard Harcourt, his new book on the cooperative movement, on Nancy Frazier's cannibal capitalism.
00:11:02.000One of the things I enjoy about learning from you, Doctor, is that your analysis and discourse begins at a point of good faith, not from a point of misanthropy.
00:11:16.000This idea of acknowledging personal vulnerability as a starting point for our conversation, I feel, facilitates a more fruitful and potentially Beneficial conversation around the necessary cultural issues that you've identified around race and misogyny and exploitation.
00:11:39.000I spoke once to the British footballer who is black, John Barnes, who's a
00:11:44.000brilliant footballer for Liverpool and a few other teams, Watford, like in the
00:11:48.00090s and experienced therefore the kind of boulders, brass, bare-faced racism of
00:11:55.000Britain in the 80s where like people were throwing bananas and all that kind
00:12:00.000of stuff. Barnes though was from a colonial background, I believe he maybe
00:12:06.000was born or grew up in somewhere like Trinidad maybe or maybe Jamaica I'm not
00:12:09.000quite sure, he played for England, he was English, but his father was in the
00:12:13.000military so from a class perspective he was not growing up in the estates like
00:12:19.000And he said he'd had a different perspective on race as a result of that.
00:12:23.000And his way of explaining the subject of race that he offered, he said that when talking to impoverished white people in the UK, he said that in addition to the suffering that you experience as a result of inequality and poverty, Black people, as we still say in this country, of your class face additional suffering.
00:12:48.000I feel somehow that this openness is a way of progressing and advancing the conversation rather than being entrenched in ossified oppositionism.
00:12:58.000That, as you say, there has to be a spirit of healing, and I don't sense that in the misanthropy of the mainstream.
00:13:07.000I think the starting point for both sides is, you know, whether it's a Christian idea of the original sin, which I've heard a few commentators use, actually, Cornell, in your country, Or a kind of more atheistic, materialistic perspective of damnation, derived, I suppose, from the nihilism that individualism ultimately leads you to.
00:13:28.000If our consciousness is just a side effect of biochemical processes, then nothing means anything anyway.
00:13:36.000This idea of infusing vulnerability and love, and indeed spirit, into the conversation is necessary, but sometimes it can feel, by its nature, Ineffable, and in a time where there are less and less traditions to lean into.
00:13:51.000You know, New Ageism can sound diffuse and ersatz.
00:13:55.000How do you give it the cojones, the necessary stones that spirituality has to bring to the conversation?
00:14:04.000The kind of God that we need right now.
00:14:06.000How do you stop it sounding New Age, limp, and lacking in the potency we require?
00:14:11.000Mm, what a beautiful question, though, brother.
00:14:14.000Good God, you have a way of asking these profound queries, and I appreciate it, too.
00:14:20.000That one, I do begin on a very, you know, blue note, because I'm coming from a blues people, you know what I mean?
00:14:26.000And the blues is catastrophe lyrically expressed.
00:14:30.000So you begin with catastrophe, but I don't allow it to have the last word.
00:14:52.000Every generation has been a group of people that have said that, in fact, in the name of integrity, honesty, decency, generosity, courage, vision, we're not going to allow domination, subjugation, hatred, greed, and resentment to have the last word.
00:15:07.000Those are the ones Who have been the unacknowledged legislators of the world that use the language of Shelley.
00:15:15.000Those poets who use, and by poet I just mean any human being who uses imagination and empathy to authorize a better future than the nightmarish present.
00:15:26.000And presently, in our own particular moment, where the nihilism is so real, with so much of secularism.
00:15:33.000And secularism at its best has been very important.
00:15:36.000It brought critique to bear on forms of authority.
00:16:12.000So what do we do when we say, okay, how do we become and remain clouds of witnesses
00:16:17.000in our own day based on those who came before?
00:16:21.000We can go back to the Greeks with Antistines against slavery,
00:16:25.000Diderot and France against imperialism.
00:16:28.000It could be Miles Horton, white brother, vanilla brother with Martin King and Rosa Parks, struggling against white supremacy and American apartheid.
00:16:36.000It could be, we go to Britain, look at Ruskin.
00:16:45.000We can do the whole Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy.
00:16:49.000There's always been a cloud of witnesses saying, let us try to ensure that there's possibilities of solidarities against these structures of domination And in our day, it's the nihilism the great Rabbi Heschel used to say the largest movement in the modern world is nihilism.
00:17:18.000And what he meant by that is meaninglessness, hopelessness, lovelessness, touchlessness, all of the things that numb us, all of the things that reinforce callousness, all of the things that reinforce indifference, and indifference to evil is more insidious than evil itself.
00:17:40.000So what has happened, especially in the American empire, is The professional managerial class, which cuts across conservatives, liberals, right across the board.
00:17:51.000They are not only the winners, they've become so arrogant.
00:18:28.000There's ordinary people out there, and they're suffering.
00:18:31.000They have been the major losers across race, across gender, across region, and across national lines, because we know this is a global capitalist project that we're bringing critique to bear as it connects to American Empire, Chinese Empire, Russian Empire, and so forth.
00:18:50.000And we have to be very honest about it.
00:18:51.000What I love about you, though, brother, is that You tried to be morally consistent that you can be in solidarity with the Ukrainian brothers and sisters and still have a critique of the U.S.
00:19:03.000empire vis-a-vis NATO and what the United States would do if missiles were in Mexico and Canada.
00:19:09.000You know, they would blow it to smithereens in a minute.
00:19:13.000And you say, well, Putin's a gangster.
00:19:16.000But American gangsterism is also part of the story.
00:19:22.000And the question is, how do you be consistent in that regard?
00:19:25.000Now, as you know, you know, that's what got Brother Martin King in trouble.
00:19:28.000That's what got Big Gregory in trouble.
00:19:31.000That's what got Moms Mabley in trouble.
00:19:33.000I'm thinking of the artists as well as the spokespersons.
00:19:36.000And you say, okay, you know, bring the trouble on.
00:19:40.000You come from Sister Barbara, your precious mother, strong, strong as she can be.
00:19:46.000She brought in the world this young brother, Russell.
00:19:48.000Strong as he can be, up and down, on the mountaintop, in the valley, but still fortified, still ready, still humble, still learning, still growing, still maturing.
00:20:22.000It is humbling to be reminded that in the end we are just our mother's children and that not everyone knows the privilege of love A mother's love, in particular, that need be transcendent of race or class or nation or language.
00:20:46.000Mammalian at its core, beyond even our particular species and right back into our genus.
00:20:53.000Sometimes these systems, Cornell, of taxonomisation, it seems to me, are what need to be shed for the forward motion to be Enjoyed when you talk about Martin Luther King, I think, too, of the imperature of that movement, Mahatma Gandhi, and how when he spoke politically, it came always from a place of great spirit and embrace of Islam and Hinduism and
00:21:25.000Christianity and how his political views in particular the post-colonial vision for a unified yet somehow it sounds to me at least anarchic India and I mean it obviously in the literal sense autonomous self-governing communities maximum democracy maximum freedom All of these things seem impossible even to envisage if we don't have principles.
00:21:52.000And the principles are not accessible if we don't have love.
00:21:56.000And the love is impossible when you're immersed in nihilism, when your life becomes all but numb screens and the potential of purchase.
00:22:05.000When that's all that you are offered, or even Cover in that if you're not in an economic class that can afford it, or if you're in the economic class that's mining the cobalt for it.
00:22:16.000There has to be, I think, recourse, as you say, to genuine principles.
00:22:22.000I feel it must be significant that these leaders have always had some kind of access to God,
00:22:30.000even amidst their fallibility for to be human is to be flawed.
00:22:34.000And like you said, we are all cracked vessels and as Leonard Cohen would say,
00:23:19.000That which is measurable or the felt ineffable.
00:23:22.000And as soon as this stuff has to be politicized, manifest, organized into systems, of course it has to become rational and logical and material at that point.
00:23:31.000We know that politics ultimately is about resources, but how can you make decisions about resources without some kind of recourse to the spiritual?
00:24:06.000And it's also hard to popularize ideas that can seem esoteric.
00:24:10.000One of our duties, I suppose, isn't it, Cornell, is to, those of us that have a facility for language and evidently a facility for thought, to ensure that we remember where we're from and where this message is most needed and how they will receive it.
00:24:28.000To always attempt to exemplify what one is enunciating.
00:24:34.000You see, examples are the go-kart of not just judgment, but the lens through which one views the world.
00:24:41.000That's why it's very important in my own language, I always talk about John Coltrane's Love Supreme, not because it's a great song solely, but because it specifies a way of life, not just for him, You know, the great James Lawson used to say, he's still 94 years old, he was very close to Martin King, and he said, here we got a black freedom movement that never uttered a word of hatred for over 20 years in the face of institutionalized hatred.
00:25:09.000You know how hated black people have been in America?
00:25:13.000What kind of spiritual formation goes into a movement that says, we refuse to hate you back?
00:25:20.000How come we don't want to get in the gutter with the gangster?
00:25:23.000How come we don't want to reinforce the cycle of hatred?
00:25:26.000How come there's enough hatred in the world, we don't want to make a contribution to it?
00:25:31.000Not because we're cowardly, we're willing to live and die, but rather because we want to take it, as Sly Stone would say, higher.
00:25:48.000Because as we move toward ecological catastrophe, nuclear catastrophe, it becomes a matter of life and death of the species, of how do we shatter cold hearts and chilly souls and numbed minds that are so egotistical and narcissistic, concerned only with now, Only with the next moment, only with power and saying no, there's got to be something deeper and all you got to do is say, well, look in the eyes of your daughter.
00:26:20.000Remember the smile of your grandmother.
00:26:37.000Let it soak your soul and say, isn't that Touching something deeper than just the titillation of the protons and neutrons that are bouncing up against your body.
00:28:24.000And I was talking to your wonderful producer, Brother James, before you came on, and he was raising the issue of, uh, the issue I had raised about freedom.
00:28:33.000Now, do human beings really want to be free?
00:28:35.000This is Dostoevsky's challenge in the Brothers Karamazov.
00:28:38.000Maybe freedom is too much a, uh, it's too heavy a burden.
00:29:39.000I am continually aware of my ongoing complexity, the compromises that I make with myself, the conflict that I feel in myself, how hard I find it to live by the book sometimes, in major ways, in minor ways.
00:29:55.000I find it hard to remain in a transcendent yet connected state.
00:30:45.000Lewis and his journey from atheism to a loving Christ.
00:30:52.000Briefly, as you touched on Baldwin, I felt like what I enjoy is the, why would you create, what does it indicate about a culture that it creates the category of the, in his words, Negro?
00:31:08.000So I wonder if you can talk to us about the sort of the archetypes that might underlie divisiveness, condemnation, and othering in a culture.
00:31:16.000Also, sir, what, in particular, the refuge, In my own case, you know, it has to do with being a particular human being shaped by a particular West family coming out of Shiloh Baptist Church on the Choctaw side of Sacramento, California.
00:32:24.000He went into that temple, ran out the money changers, 400 Roman troops protecting that temple,
00:32:31.000the largest edifice west of Rome, ragtag disciples, most of whom betrayed him,
00:32:38.000and the major one denied him three times.
00:32:41.000Peter, whose body is the basis of the church, who denied Jesus three times.
00:32:46.000So you don't have high expectations of an institution whose foundation denied Jesus himself, even though he bounced back in his own way and himself was executed.
00:32:55.000But all it means here is that you find a particular example.
00:33:00.000This is why the great Spinoza, one of the great intellectual explosions
00:33:04.000early European modernity, Jewish brother, it's communicated from the Jewish community.
00:33:15.000Because he just sees something in this example.
00:33:18.000Now, Jesus, I don't think, or we Christians, never have a monopoly on truth or beauty or goodness and so forth.
00:33:25.000There's a lot of other examples that we can invoke in this regard, you see.
00:33:30.000But that's the particular one I was exposed to, and that's the one that sees my soul, and that's the one tied to my vocation.
00:33:40.000That's the one tied to my calling, that I made a promise 62 years ago I would be faithful unto death and being a follower of this Jesus, and it's inseparable from the love of my mother, the love of my father, the love of family, so that then Jesus is within that larger matrix.
00:34:02.000What Edmund Burke, one of the great conservative philosophers and theorists, called one's platoon.
00:34:09.000So that one's orientation for life is not just one of cognition, but it's one of affection and conviction.
00:34:18.000So when I think of Jesus, it's not just cognition.
00:34:21.000It's not a game you play about whether you believe in God and whether you believe in Jesus and whether you can find evidence that allows you to infer that you have a logical conclusion.
00:34:30.000Okay, the evidence is always underdetermined.
00:34:33.000But when you're talking about Jesus with me, you're talking about the songs that I heard in Shiloh.
00:34:39.000You're talking about my mother's prayers in the midnight hour.
00:34:43.000You're talking about my own crises, and how I make it from day to day, and the prayers that I sit up on horizontally to that Jesus, and I tried him out, and I found him strong enough to sustain me.
00:36:47.000Do you hold yourself accountable within a community, within your family, in prayer?
00:36:54.000This idea of archetypes that underlie known and measurable reality, accessible there perhaps through prayer, perhaps.
00:37:03.000Is this where you find fuel and is this where you Find succor and refuge.
00:37:13.000This ongoing negotiation with selfishness.
00:37:19.000That raid on the ineffable man, that's blown me away.
00:37:21.000Raid on the ineffable, that's really blown me away.
00:37:24.000Because I guess where I am now, Cornell, is I've just like...
00:37:28.000Like, where I find myself is trying to have conversations that are complicated conversations, but I know that what underwrites it is something that's quite simple.
00:37:38.000I know that there is a message that can be heard.
00:37:42.000And I suppose, do you feel like it's being played out internally?
00:37:46.000Do you think that it can be handled simply?
00:37:48.000It can't just be a coincidence, can it, that many of these great people we've mentioned devoted themselves to simple routines, ceremonies and rituals through family, Through the love of children, through the love of animals and nature.
00:38:01.000Is it to be found mostly in our quotidian behaviour rather than in our high ideals?
00:38:08.000Does it matter less where we find ourselves in the abstract than where we find ourselves behaviourally day by day?
00:38:15.000I felt sort of served by that, you know, when I was talking to people that five, ten years ago I thought I wouldn't have conversations with on news networks that I thought I'd never go on and I felt Christian principles and Christian spirit and humanity there.
00:38:31.000And like to, as they say in the 12 steps, to look for the similarities, not the differences, to be able to accept differences between people as a sort of a, as a starting point to find joy, true joy in diversity, not to weaponize it or turn it into a badge that can be used to underwrite financial and commodifying endeavors.
00:38:55.000I suppose what I'm, you know, it's really encouraging and beautiful to talk to you, I suppose, because I know as much as I can, though.
00:39:02.000I know where you're coming from and I know what you're not.
00:39:05.000And it's nice to hear my mother's name said, you know, in a conversation.
00:39:09.000It's nice to hear my daughter's recall.
00:39:15.000And it's a beautiful, beautiful thing.
00:39:19.000And for so many of us, we don't want to be honest and candid in the ways in which the best of who we are is often manifest in what has been put in us, what has been poured into us, in contexts people know not of.
00:39:37.000But those are the things that we also fall back on in our darkest hour.
00:39:45.000And we know that without those, that kind of pouring in of Irene and Clifton and me and your mother and father, all of those things that go, it's not just mom, but mom's at the center of it.
00:39:58.000Because you got friends who make a fundamental difference.
00:40:02.000And you've got ancestors, not just relatives.
00:40:07.000That is to say, you've got Lenny Bruce in you.
00:40:13.000You've got those you choose your ancestors to fall back on that you never really knew.
00:40:28.000It's in the preciousness of those sliced stone called everyday people.
00:40:34.000Different than the abstractions, different than all of the obtuse academic formulations that are tied to professional managerial jargon, professional managerial smartness.
00:40:48.000No, we're talking about the wisdom of everyday people.
00:40:50.000We're not talking about the superficial smartness of the professionals or the experts, most of whom are willing to sell their souls for a mess of pottage in a minute.
00:41:02.000Because they don't have a spiritual backbone.
00:41:13.000There sometimes seem to be some dreadful ingenuity in the system, how the spirit of the 60s and those civil rights movement and all that optimism somehow got distilled down into individualism.
00:41:26.000I wonder, Cornell, how we wrestle with this culture.
00:41:29.000I wonder if we, for simplicity's sake, say that there is something deep rather than inert at work in there somewhere.
00:41:41.000The ingenuity of it, the way that it can sort of somehow reform, like Mephistopheles, every little moment of hope once more into commodity.
00:41:51.000I wonder how we recapture that spirit.
00:41:55.000I wonder how we resurrect our shared mythology and our shared ancestors.
00:41:59.000How we respect individual identity, cultural difference and community.
00:42:03.000While acknowledging the necessity for new confederacy, new unions, if we're ever to confront the centralised power that you and I have been discussing through this conversation, it seems that we need to bring forth a new universal while recognising now that within the culture, diversity Like, identitarianism and individuality have come to the forefront.
00:42:30.000How do you think that we, how can we respect this?
00:42:34.000The individualism is out of the bottle now and it's not going back in.
00:42:37.000People are never again, I don't think, going to see themselves as members of a parish.
00:42:45.000Where do you think is the interface for New Union and how do we present that necessity in a culture that seems to be again and again doubling down on the division within diversity rather than communion within it?
00:43:03.000Part of it is the individualism is very different than individuality.
00:43:09.000The individuality for me has to do with the Hebrew Scripture.
00:43:13.000Each and every human being made in the image and likeness of God.
00:43:17.000I would even go as far as to say sentient beings need to be respected in serious and substantive ways as well, so that our conception of the sacred has to be one that's over against the market, over against transaction, as my brother would say, over against manipulation.
00:43:35.000Individualism was always already co-opted by the market.
00:43:39.000It's possessive individualism, the language of C.P.
00:43:42.000McPherson, the great political theorist.
00:43:44.000Possessive individualism has always been tied to the market.
00:43:48.000And that's the commodification of everything.
00:44:11.000But there's also the tribalisms that we have to have to pierce.
00:44:15.000You see, this is why even during the time of Brother Obama, people were coming at me so harsh.
00:44:20.000How could I be so critical of a black president?
00:44:22.000Hey, if he's dropping drones on innocent people, he's a war criminal.
00:44:26.000If he's tied to Wall Street and allowing homeowners off, then he's justifying a certain kind of crime against humanity.
00:44:34.000Wall Street Embezzlement, all their crimes, not one go to jail, and let everyday people get caught, they go to jail, you have to pierce it.
00:44:42.000Same would be true with our Jewish brothers and sisters.
00:44:44.000Their critique of Israel's treatment of Palestinians.
00:45:01.000And they're killing these precious young Muslims.
00:45:05.000We have to have a moral critique that pierces through our tribalisms and our clannishness, as it were, and be in contact with the humanity of folk.
00:45:19.000And that's why, again, though, brother, you know, voices like yourself, man, it's a beautiful thing to behold, because, you know, when you talk about hope, Hope itself has been co-opted by the market.
00:45:34.000So there's a sense in which we need a moratorium on talking about hope, but we need to stress on being a hope.
00:45:42.000You see, you are a hope in your example.
00:46:23.000Something tied to a community, a conviviality, a fellowship, and a sistership that accents the best of who we are as human beings.
00:46:38.000Not just as tied into the identity categories that are weaponized by neoliberal policies that reinforce careerism and opportunism and make the empire more colorful from top to bottom and make the hierarchy more colorful and more gender Yes, we agree with that.
00:46:58.000But if it's the same system, if it's still centralized power, if it's still a hierarchy imposing itself from below, then folk are still catching air.
00:47:42.000Yeah, I think that one, that's always going to be the case, so that one's never surprised by evil outside or inside oneself.
00:47:53.000One's never paralyzed by despair, be that despair response to what's external or internal.
00:48:00.000So the last thing you ever want is paralysis, but you do want honest analysis and that lust, that desire.
00:48:07.000I mean, this is why You know, Dorothy Day, the great Vanilla sister, Catholic sister, wrote a eulogy for Martin Luther King, Jr., for the Catholic workers.
00:48:16.000She's one of the great left-wing Catholics of the 20th century.
00:48:20.000She wrote a eulogy for Martin Luther King, Jr.
00:48:38.000Radically trying to reconquer every day the hatred and greed and envy inside of oneself so that one can move day to day and week to week a little stronger, more fortified with a fuller armor.
00:48:54.000But that dying daily is a perennial process.
00:49:05.000All of us are, in some sense, in what Samuel Beckett called the mess, or what I would call, following George Clinton and Bootsy Collins, the funk.
00:49:30.000If you're not humble, that's already a sign that you need more spiritual work.
00:49:35.000That is a more optimistic take on the idea of original sin, that it doesn't feel mired in pessimism or a kind of fatalistic, humans are broken, like the serpent has already won, we unwound from that reptilian helix and we're nothing but mouth.
00:49:53.000The idea that While there might be a wound and a flaw, while we may have been cast out of the garden, the garden is still within us.
00:50:05.000There's still the possibility of redemption.
00:50:07.000And so much of our puritanical culture, and I like to hear you decry that puritanism, is stripped of redemption.
00:50:15.000Stripped of the necessary fulfillment that that idea of original sin must entail in order for it not to be an incredibly pessimistic worldview and almost self-hating and self-denying and ascetic view.
00:50:31.000I enjoy the voluptuousness of your rhetoric and Warmth and inclusivity of the love, but still not letting people off the hook.
00:50:53.000It's in the positive negative charge that's necessary for all energy to exist anyway.
00:50:59.000And it seems like people are denying the starting point.
00:51:02.000How can we have the same conversation when people can't accept The starting point, the starting point of sort of optimism, wounded optimism.
00:51:10.000Like you said, a wounded healer rather than a wounded hater, I think is what you said.
00:51:18.000A distinction, my brother, between optimism and hope.
00:51:21.000Now, this is my own Christian sensibility.
00:51:23.000Because as you know, the virtues of faith, hope, and the greatest is love.
00:51:27.000But optimism is still a bit too tied to the evidence.
00:51:33.000Optimism is subject to a certain kind of secular appropriation that's solely about evidence, evidence, evidence, given the authority of science.
00:51:42.000Science has this very important role to play, but it can't answer the why question.
00:51:49.000Hope is something that is inside of you, so that no matter what the evidence says, Russell's gonna be this loving person no matter what.
00:52:00.000Brother West is going to try to be this loving person no matter what.
00:52:06.000It creates its own evidence by trying to be in the world over against the darkness.
00:52:12.000It tries to cast a light in that darkness, not because the evidence leads toward optimism, but because the hope itself creates its own evidence by being an example of what it prefigures in the end.
00:52:27.000And that blues, though, brother, because the blues is not pessimistic.
00:52:55.000You can hear Bessie Smith in his guitar.
00:52:58.000The tradition is inside of him, just like that rich tradition inside of you and inside of me, inside of all of those who are listening, if we would be attuned to it.
00:53:09.000That's hope for me at its deepest level.
00:53:11.000And that's why I'm a little suspicious of pessimism or optimism.
00:53:21.000I suppose even syntactically and semantically, etymology of optimism is like optimal.
00:53:31.000It's about utility and use and function.
00:53:35.000And I feel that if you can find utility in love, it's The truth in love, the truth of a unitary force, which is even cosmologically true in the most moot myth of our physical conception, the Big Bang, which contains all unity in the head of a pin.
00:53:54.000Me, you and everything once contained in the smallest, spaceless of spaces.
00:54:02.000And then all you have to accept is, is there something atemporal and aspatial beyond the framing of our animalistic experience, likely born somewhat of biography and our understanding of inception, conception, expiration.
00:54:17.000If once you reject that there isn't only the animal, there isn't only the limitation of senses, that our potential for knowledge is curtailed and contained, but knowledge itself is limitless, then once again hope has to be invited back in, faith has to be invited in.
00:54:33.000These are not cavalier values, these are not superstitions, they are blunt cosmological realities that have to be accepted unless you're saying that we live within the tiny That's exactly right.
00:54:54.000My brother, it is just a joy to be in conversation with you because you grasp on a very deep level what I've been
00:56:31.000White House, crack house, your friend's house, Fox house, CNN house, MSNBC house, left-wing house, and still be the Russell who you are when you enter and when you leave.
00:56:44.000But you're listening, and you're trying to grow, and most importantly, you're true to your calling.
00:57:39.000You can find more about Cornel West's work by going to CornelWest.com, where you can learn, as I have done, how to incorporate high-minded philosophical principles, the great swathes of academic knowledge, into heartfelt Well, spiritual rhetoric and indeed that most craved of modern words, principles, principles.
00:58:00.000Next week on the show, my guest is Graham Hancock.
00:58:03.000Sign up to Locals to be in with a chance of joining me live at Stay Free Studios for a live recording with Graham Hancock in person next week.
00:58:10.000My stand-up special is available right now for a limited time on Rumble for $20 or if you join our annual membership you get it of course for free included.