Cornell West is a political activist, philosopher, and an outspoken voice of the left advocating for compassion, togetherness, unity, love, and understanding. Dr. West has held professorships and fellowships at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and the University of Paris, and is a frequent guest on the Joe Rogan Show. In this episode, he shares his thoughts on the current state of our culture, and how we can bring about a new unity when people are living with so much fear. See it first on Rumble, where we re exclusively available on the RUMBLE channel. Stay Free With Russell Brand is a show about free thinking, radicalism, and radical ideas that challenges the status quo and calls for a new understanding of the past, present, and future. Stay Free with Russell Brand, wherever you get your news and information, and wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. This episode is sponsored by Pfizer. In this video, you re going to see the future. You're going to wake up. - Russell Brand Subscribe to Stay Free: A podcast about radical ideas, radical politics, and a conversation about the future, by Russell Brand. Subscribe today using our podcast s promo code: "UPLEVEL" at checkout to receive 20% off your first month with discount code: STAYFREE at checkout. To find a list of our sponsorships, go to gimlet.fm/StayFree with RussellBrand and learn more about our sponsor, stayfree. If you like what you're listening to stay free, leave us a review, we'll be giving you a chance to win a chance at $5,000 and receive $10,000 in prizes throughout the rest of the month, and get 10% off their entire month, plus an additional $50,000 shipping plan when you sign up for VIP access gets a VIP discount when you get a VIP membership starts starting at $99, VIP access to Strava, and they get a discount of $25,000 gets $4,000, and I'll get an ad discount when they get my ad discount starts starting a course starting in 2 VIP access starts starting in 7 days, they also get $4 VIP access, and also get 7 days of VIP access begins starting their ad discount, and 5,000 MBPROMOTION gets 4 VIP access and 2,000MBPROMO, VIP gets 4,000 PROMO?
00:01:07.000Welcome to Stay Free with Russell Brand.
00:01:09.000I'm thrilled to say it's Friday and every Friday we have an in-depth conversation with free thinkers, radicals, disruptors, prophets and shaman.
00:01:18.000Today is a particularly special show for me today because as you know I've been on a mainstream media tour of America having complex conversations about the division between left and right.
00:01:27.000The division between different cultural groups and the exacerbation of that conflict by different media outlets.
00:01:34.000I am craving an opportunity to have a conversation with a cast-iron advocate for compassion.
00:01:42.000I'm craving a conversation with a deep thinker with an open heart.
00:02:15.000And 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.
00:02:26.000But that means keeping a focus on what you actually do.
00:02:28.000During his career he's held professorships and fellowships at Harvard, Yale, Princeton and the University of Paris.
00:02:35.000We're only going to be on this channel for the first 10-15 minutes, then we're going to be exclusively available on Rumble because I am going to speak freely to Cornel West in my attempt to bring people together from across a wide variety of communities using freedom of speech, Not to double down on hatred, not to use language that's about discrimination, but to use language that is about unity.
00:03:19.000I 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.
00:03:28.000I watched you of course on Joe Rogan and we've been trying to get you as a guest before that.
00:03:33.000I've looked at some of your master class philosophy course.
00:03:38.000I admire you a great deal and when I talk about Liberal politics, progressive politics, when I talk about the left, one of the voices that I hold in my head and my heart is yours.
00:03:50.000And I've began to feel that liberal media has become so disconnected from the people that they're supposed to represent, that the British Labour Party have become disconnected from the people they're supposed to represent, that 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.
00:04:11.000...of previously and, let's face it, currently oppressed cultural groups.
00:04:17.000Dr. West, what do you think is happening in our culture?
00:04:35.000And 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.
00:04:46.000But that means keeping a focus on what you actually do.
00:05:25.000But if we lose sight of what is going on in the American empire, in the Russian empire, in the Chinese empire when it comes to highly centralized forms of power, an authority that's crushing everyday people and ordinary
00:05:42.000people, we don't have the right kind of analysis.
00:06:11.000When you got courageous brothers and sisters, artists.
00:06:14.000Like yourself, truth-tellers, like so many others, the Chris Hedges and others, trying to be honest, the Matt Tiabes and others, trying to be honest and saying, look, neoliberalism is dying.
00:06:33.000The American empire is wrestling with spiritual decay and moral decrepitude in part because
00:06:38.000centralized power at the highest levels of our economy and tied to military with its
00:06:44.000politicians bought off by big money and war profiteering elites are making citizens feel
00:06:51.000as if they are nothing but consumers, nothing but commodified entities.
00:06:57.000So that truth-telling and the visionary work becomes crucial.
00:07:01.000And that's what I've seen you do over these years, though, brother.
00:07:05.000I'm telling you, man, it's a beautiful thing to behold.
00:07:08.000Thank 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.
00:07:25.000But I have felt, sometimes, I've felt, am I doing the right thing?
00:07:29.000Is this the right way to conduct this conversation?
00:07:32.000You've brought up so much, even in your first response there.
00:07:35.000I'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.
00:07:46.000It's very difficult with populations of scale to instantiate a centralized set of values, ethics, and meaning, and it appears with this divisiveness that I feel that somehow the culture is benefiting from has become worse and worse in recent years.
00:08:03.000A few just like placeholder arguments to consider, Cornel, 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.
00:08:17.000No 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
00:08:27.000is beyond the rhetoric and divisiveness, what it is within that emotional quality that
00:08:35.000Given that this is a contemporary news show that we are streaming right now, it's worth
00:08:39.000bringing up an issue that's becoming somewhat defining of our time, the January 6th insurrection.
00:08:46.000It 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.
00:09:01.000Until we have a time where people that corral around these separate issues, these separate publics, if these separate publics cannot recognize that ultimately they have to confront the same authority, we will not experience the kind of unity that both of us apparently crave.
00:09:22.000How do you think we have to frame the conversation, both for people on the neoliberal establishment left, But also for people that identify with patriotism and what are called these days right-wing politics so that we can overcome and not only accept but love and embrace cultural difference in order to meaningfully confront these forms of centralized media, political, financial and military authority that are thriving in this climate of division, sir.
00:09:52.000Yeah, I think we always want to begin with a fundamental commitment to wrestling with what it means to be human.
00:10:00.000Because 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.
00:10:11.000While we're all wrestling with organized greed at the top especially, but across the board.
00:10:16.000We're all wrestling with various forms of hatred and self-doubt inside of us.
00:10:21.000We had to be honest and candid with ourselves, just as we're honest and candid with the powers that be.
00:10:26.000That's precisely what the legacy of the Martin Luther King Jr., then the Fannie Lou Hamers, and the Ella Bakers, and the John Coltrane, then the Aretha Franklin, and I would listen to a little Loose Ends, and I would listen to a little Soul to Soul for my British connection here.
00:10:40.000When you listen to that music, my brother, it touches your soul.
00:11:52.000We 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.
00:12:05.000And 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?
00:12:16.000If 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 Rather than a progressive populism, or most importantly in the language of Shell and Wolin.
00:12:34.000My dear brother Bernard Harcourt, his new book on the cooperative movement, on Nancy Fraser's cannibal capitalism.
00:13:16.000One 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.
00:13:29.000This 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.
00:13:52.000I spoke once to the British footballer who is black, John Barnes, who's a brilliant footballer for Liverpool and a few other teams, Watford, like in the 90s and experienced therefore the kind of boulders, brass, bare-faced racism of Britain in the 80s Where, like, people were throwing bananas and all that kind of stuff.
00:14:14.000Barnes, though, was from a colonial background.
00:14:18.000I believe he maybe was born or grew up in somewhere like Trinidad, maybe.
00:14:27.000So from a class perspective, He was not growing up in the estates like many black footballers of that era and he said he'd had a different perspective on race as a result of that and his way of explaining the subject of race that he offered he said that when talking to
00:14:44.000impoverished 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.
00:15:01.000I feel somehow that this openness is a way of progressing and advancing the conversation, rather than being entrenched in ossified oppositionism.
00:15:12.000That, as you say, there has to be a spirit of healing, and I don't sense that in the misanthropy of the mainstream.
00:15:20.000I think the starting point for both sides is, you know, whether it's a Christian idea of the original sin, which I heard a few commentators use, actually, Cornel, 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.
00:15:42.000If our consciousness is just a side effect of biochemical processes, then nothing means anything anyway.
00:15:50.000This 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, you know, New Ageism can sound diffuse and sass.
00:16:09.000How do you give it the cojones, the necessary stones that spirituality has to bring to the conversation, the kind of God that we need right now?
00:16:19.000How do you stop it sounding New Age, limp, and lacking in the potency we require?
00:16:25.000Mmm, what a beautiful question, though, brother.
00:16:27.000Good God, you have a way of asking these profound queries, and I appreciate it, too.
00:16:33.000That one, I do begin on a very, you know, blue note, because I'm coming from a blues people, you know what I mean?
00:16:40.000And the blues is catastrophe lyrically expressed.
00:16:43.000So you begin with catastrophe, but I don't allow it to have the last word.
00:17:05.000Every 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.
00:17:21.000Those are the ones Who have been the unacknowledged legislators of the world that use the language of Shelley.
00:17:28.000Those 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.
00:17:40.000And presently, in our own particular moment, where the nihilism is so real, with so much of secularism.
00:17:47.000And secularism at its best has been very important.
00:17:49.000It brought critique to bear on forms of authority.
00:18:25.000So what do we do when we say, okay, how do we become and remain clouds of witnesses in our own day based on those who came before?
00:18:35.000We can go back to the Greeks with Antisthenes against slavery, Diderot and France against imperialism.
00:18:41.000It could be Miles Horton White brother, vanilla brother, with Martin King and Rosa Parks, struggling against white supremacy and American apartheid.
00:18:50.000It could be, we go to Britain, look at Ruskin, look at William Morris, look at the New Left Review, look at Russell Brand.
00:18:59.000We could do the whole thing, Stuart Hall.
00:19:01.000Paul Gilroy, there'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 these forms of bondage, psychically and spiritually.
00:19:21.000And in our day, it's the nihilism, the great Rabbi Heschel used to say, the largest movement in the modern world is nihilism.
00:19:53.000So what has happened, especially in the American empire, is The professional managerial class, which cuts across conservatives, liberals, right across the board, they're not only the winners, they've become so arrogant, they've become so condescending, they've become so haughty.
00:20:12.000In America, only 34% of Americans even go to college.
00:20:15.000So the vast majority never set foot in college, but corporate media is all professional managerial class.
00:20:22.000All the discourse is pressure managerial class.
00:20:45.000They have been the major losers across race, across gender, across region, and across national lines.
00:20:51.000Because 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.
00:21:03.000And we have to be very honest about it.
00:21:05.000What I love about you, though, brother, is that You tried to be morally consistent.
00:21:11.000That you can be in solidarity with the Ukrainian brothers and sisters and still have a critique of the U.S.
00:21:30.000But American gangsterism is also part of the story.
00:21:35.000And the question is, how do you be consistent in that regard?
00:21:38.000Now, as you know, you know, that's what got Martin King in trouble.
00:21:42.000That's what got Big Gregory in trouble.
00:21:44.000That's what got Moms Mabley in trouble.
00:21:47.000I'm thinking of the artists as well as the spokespersons.
00:21:49.000And you say, OK, you know, bring the trouble on.
00:21:53.000You come from Sister Barbara, your precious mother, strong, strong as she can be.
00:21:59.000She brought in the world this young brother Russell.
00:22:02.000Strong 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.
00:22:36.000It is humbling to be reminded that in the end we are just our mother's children
00:22:45.000and that not everyone knows the privilege of love, a mother's love in particular,
00:22:52.000that need be transcendent of race or class or nation or language.
00:22:59.000Mammalian at its core, beyond even our particular species and right back into our genus.
00:23:07.000Sometimes these systems, Cornell, of taxonomization, 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
00:23:39.000Christianity 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 And the principles are not accessible if we don't have love.
00:24:08.000And the love is impossible when you're immersed in nihilism, when your life becomes all but numb screens and the potential of purchase, when that's all that you are offered, or even coveting 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.
00:24:30.000There has to be, I think, recourse, as you say, To genuine principles.
00:24:35.000I feel it must be significant that these leaders have always had some kind of access to God, even amidst their fallibility for to be human is to be flawed, and like you said, we are all cracked vessels, and as Leonard Cohen would say, that's how the light's getting in.
00:24:53.000He said, too, glue your soul to prayer, glue your soul to prayer, moment to moment, never forget who you are.
00:24:58.000But Vandana Shiva, who I much admire, says that we are experiencing the desacralization of the public conversation, of the political conversation, of the resource conversation, that we are being led politically and economically by people who Do not recognize the sacred, who recognize only materialism.
00:25:18.000That it's a deeper philosophical conversation than republicanism or democratism or whatever the ism of that is.
00:25:25.000It reaches down, down, down into the philosophical essence.
00:25:32.000That which is measurable, or the felt ineffable?
00:25:36.000And 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.
00:25:45.000We know that politics ultimately is about resources, but how can you make decisions about resources without some kind of recourse to the spiritual?
00:26:19.000And it's also hard to popularize ideas that can seem esoteric.
00:26:24.000One 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.
00:26:41.000And to always attempt To exemplify what one is enunciating.
00:26:48.000You see, examples are the go-kart of not just judgment, but the lens through which one views the world.
00:26:54.000That'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.
00:27:23.000You know how hated black people have been in America?
00:27:26.000What kind of spiritual formation goes into a movement that says, we refuse to hate you back?
00:27:34.000How come we don't want to get in the gutter with the gangster?
00:27:37.000How come we don't want to reinforce the cycle of hatred?
00:27:40.000How come there's enough hatred in the world, we don't want to make a contribution to it?
00:27:44.000Not 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!
00:27:57.000And that's not empty, that's not vacuous platitudes.
00:28:02.000Because as we move toward ecological catastrophe, nuclear catastrophe, it becomes a matter of life and death of the species, of how do we shatter Cohorts 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.
00:28:29.000And all you got to do is say, well, look in the eyes of your daughter.
00:28:34.000Remember the smile of your grandmother.
00:28:51.000Let 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.
00:30:37.000And I was talking to your wonderful producer, Brother James, before you came on, and he was raising the issue of, uh, the issue I'd raised about freedom.
00:30:46.000Now, do human beings really want to be free?
00:30:49.000This is Dostoevsky's challenge and the brothers Karamazov.
00:31:53.000I am continually aware of my ongoing complexity.
00:31:58.000The 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.
00:32:08.000I find it hard to remain in a transcendent yet connected state.
00:33:22.000So I wonder if you can talk to us about the archetypes that might underlie divisiveness, condemnation and othering in a culture.
00:33:30.000Also, sir, what in particular the refuge Christ has provided?
00:33:37.000Yeah, 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.
00:33:55.000That shape and mold us and the circumstances over which we have no control.
00:34:00.000I didn't choose my precious mom and dad.
00:34:02.000I didn't choose my precious brother Cliff, Cynthia, Cheryl, my sisters.
00:34:07.000And thank God they turned out so magnificent.
00:34:11.000So I'm going to be a love child for the rest of my life because of these gifts that I received.
00:34:19.000But to be a fallible, fallen follower, of a Palestinian Jew named Jesus of Nazareth is to be very critical of dogma, very critical of doctrine, very critical of institutional religion.
00:34:37.000He went into that temple, ran out the money changers, 400 Roman troops protecting that temple, the largest edifice west of Rome, ragtag disciples, most of whom betrayed him and the major one denied him three times.
00:34:54.000Peter, whose body is the basis of the church, who denied Jesus three times.
00:34:59.000So 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.
00:35:09.000But all it means here is that you find a particular example.
00:35:14.000This is why the great Spinoza, you know, one of the great intellectual explosions of early European modernity.
00:35:21.000Jewish brother, excommunicated from the Jewish community.
00:35:56.000That I made a promise 62 years ago, I would be faithful unto death and being a follower of this Jesus.
00:36:05.000And 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.
00:36:15.000What Edmund Burke, one of the great conservative philosophers and theorists, called one's platoon.
00:36:22.000So that one's orientation for life is not just one of cognition, but it's one of affection and conviction.
00:36:31.000So when I think of Jesus, it's not just cognition.
00:36:34.000It'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.
00:36:44.000Okay, the evidence is always underdetermined.
00:36:46.000But when you're talking about Jesus with me, you're talking about the songs that I heard in Shiloh.
00:36:52.000You're talking about my mother's prayers in the midnight hour.
00:36:56.000You'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.
00:39:00.000Do you hold yourself accountable within a community, within your family, in prayer?
00:39:08.000This idea of archetypes that underlie known and measurable reality, accessible there perhaps through prayer, perhaps.
00:39:17.000Is this where you find fuel and is this where you Find succor and refuge.
00:39:26.000This ongoing negotiation with selfishness.
00:39:30.000That raid on the ineffable, man, that's blown me away.
00:39:35.000Raid on the ineffable, that's really, that's really blown me away.
00:39:38.000Because I guess where I am now, Cornell, is I've just like, like, where I find myself is trying to have conversations that are complicated conversations.
00:39:48.000But I know that what underwrites it is something that's quite simple.
00:39:51.000I know that there is a message that can be heard.
00:39:55.000And I suppose, is it, do you feel like it's being played out internally?
00:39:59.000Do you think that it can be handled simply?
00:40:02.000It 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.
00:40:15.000Is it to be found mostly in our quotidian behavior rather than in our high ideals?
00:40:22.000Does it matter less where we find ourselves in the abstract than where we find ourselves
00:41:30.000And it's a beautiful, beautiful thing.
00:41:33.000And 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.
00:41:50.000But those are the things that we also fall back on in our darkest hour.
00:41:56.000In our night of the soul, and 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, because you got friends!
00:42:41.000It's in the preciousness of those sliced stone called everyday people.
00:42:48.000Different than the abstractions, different than all of the obtuse academic formulations that are tied to professional managerial jargon, professional managerial smartness.
00:43:01.000No, we're talking about the wisdom of everyday people.
00:43:04.000We'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.
00:43:15.000Because they don't have a spiritual backbone.
00:43:27.000There 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.
00:43:39.000I wonder, Cornell, how we wrestle with this culture.
00:43:42.000I wonder if we, for simplicity's sake, say that there is something deep rather than inert at work in there somewhere.
00:43:54.000The ingenuity of it, the way that it can sort of somehow reform, like Mephistopheles, every little moment of hope once more into commodity.
00:44:05.000I wonder how we recapture that spirit.
00:44:08.000I wonder how we resurrect our shared mythology and our shared ancestors.
00:44:12.000How we respect individual identity, cultural difference and community.
00:44:17.000Whilst 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.
00:44:28.000It seems that we need to bring forth a new universal, while recognising now that within the culture, diversity, identitarianism and individuality have come to the forefront.
00:44:44.000How do you think that we, how can we respect this, the individualism is out of the bottle now and it's not going back in.
00:44:50.000People are never again, I don't think, going to see themselves as members of a parish.
00:44:54.000How do we, how do we respect that and bring people together?
00:44:58.000Where do you think is the interface for new union and how do we, how do we present that necessity in a culture that seems to be again and again doubling down on the vision within diversity rather than communion within
00:45:16.000Part of it is the individualism is very different than individuality.
00:45:21.000The individuality for me has to do with the Hebrew scripture.
00:45:26.000Each and every human being made in the image and likeness of God.
00:45:30.000I would even go as far as to say sentient beings need to be respected in serious and substantive ways as well.
00:45:39.000So 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.
00:45:49.000Individualism was always already co-opted by the market.
00:45:53.000It's possessive individualism, the language of C.P.
00:45:55.000McPherson, the great political theorist.
00:45:57.000Possessive individualism has always been tied to the market.
00:46:01.000And that's the commodification of everything.
00:46:25.000But there's also the tribalisms that we have to pierce.
00:46:29.000You see, this is why, even during the time of Brother Obama, when people were coming at me so harsh, how could I be so critical of a black president?
00:46:36.000Hey, if he's dropping drones on innocent people, he's a war criminal.
00:46:39.000Hey, if he's tied to Wall Street and allowing homeowners off, then he's justifying a certain kind of crime against humanity.
00:46:49.000Embezzlement, all their crimes, not one go to jail.
00:46:52.000And let everyday people get caught, they go to jail.
00:47:15.000And they're killing these precious young Muslims.
00:47:18.000We 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.
00:47:32.000And 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.
00:47:47.000So there's a sense in which we need a moratorium on talking about hope, but we need to stress on being a hope.
00:47:55.000You see, you are a hope in your example.
00:48:37.000Something tied to a community, a conviviality, a fellowship, and a sistership that accents the best of who we are as human beings.
00:48:52.000Not 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 Inclusive, yes, we agree with that.
00:49:12.000But 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.
00:49:56.000Yeah, I think that one, that's always going to be the case.
00:50:00.000So that one's never surprised by evil outside or inside oneself.
00:50:06.000One's never paralyzed by despair, be that despair response to what's external or internal.
00:50:13.000So the last thing you ever want is paralysis, but you do want honest analysis.
00:50:19.000And that lust, that desire, I 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.
00:50:29.000She's one of the great left-wing Catholics of the 20th century.
00:50:33.000She wrote a eulogy for Martin Luther King, Jr., one line, Martin Luther King, Jr.
00:50:52.000Radically 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.
00:51:07.000But that dying daily is a perennial process.
00:51:44.000If you're not humble, that's already a sign that you need more spiritual work.
00:51:49.000That 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.
00:52:08.000The idea that while there might be a wound in a floor, while we may have been cast out of the garden, the garden is still within us.
00:52:20.000There's still the possibility of redemption.
00:52:22.000And so much of our puritanical culture, and I like to hear you decry that puritanism, is stripped of redemption.
00:52:29.000Stripped of the necessary fulfillment that that idea of original sin must entail in order for it not to be an incredibly pessimistic worldview, an almost self-hating and self-denying and ascetic view.
00:52:46.000I enjoy the voluptuousness of your rhetoric and Warmth and inclusivity of the love, but still not letting people off the hook.
00:53:33.000A distinction, my brother, between optimism and hope.
00:53:36.000Now, this is my own Christian sensibility.
00:53:38.000Because as you know, the virtues of faith, hope, and the greatest is love.
00:53:42.000But optimism is still a bit too tied to the evidence.
00:53:47.000Optimism is subject to a certain kind of secular appropriation that's solely about evidence, evidence, evidence, given the authority of science.
00:53:56.000Science has this very important role to play, but it can't answer the why question.
00:54:03.000Hope 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.
00:54:14.000Brother West is going to try to be this loving person no matter what.
00:54:19.000It creates its own evidence by trying to be in the world over against the darkness.
00:54:27.000It 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.
00:54:42.000And that blues, though, brother, because the blues is not pessimistic.
00:55:09.000You can hear Bessie Smith in his guitar.
00:55:13.000The 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.
00:55:23.000That's hope for me at its deepest level.
00:55:26.000And that's why I'm a little suspicious of pessimism or optimism.
00:55:35.000I suppose even syntactically and semantically, etymology of optimism is like optimal.
00:55:45.000It's about utility and use and function.
00:55:49.000And 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.
00:56:09.000Me, you, and everything once contained in the smallest, spaceless of spaces.
00:56:16.000And then all you have to accept is, is there something atemporal and aspatial beyond the framing of of our animalistic experience, likely born somewhat of
00:56:27.000biography and our understanding of inception, conception, expiration.
00:56:32.000If you, once you reject that there isn't only the animal, there isn't only the limitation
00:56:36.000of senses, that our potential for knowledge is curtailed and contained, but knowledge
00:56:42.000itself is limitless, then once again hope has to be invited back in, faith has to be
00:56:48.000These 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 units of that which can be discerned and measured through varying lenses.
00:58:46.000White 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.
00:58:59.000But you're listening, and you're trying to grow, and most importantly, you're true to your calling.
00:59:24.000You 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 heartfelt spiritual rhetoric and indeed that most craved of