Cornel West: Be Ready to Die

Dr. Cornel West came to Asheville last night and spoke at UNCA. His talk was an inspiring mix of philosophy, spirituality, and political activism.

He started with the admonition he gives his students at the beginning of every school year at Union Theological Seminary: be ready to die. What he means by this is be willing to question your beliefs. When we swallow the beliefs and preconceptions of our family and culture we are nothing more than sleepwalkers. Instead, Dr. West told us, we should be critical thinkers and question everything. He approvingly quoted a black woman at the 1964 Democratic National Convention saying, “I question America.”

This resonated deeply with Arthur and me, because survival is at the foundation of our philosophy (see this blog post by Arthur). When you look at what’s going on in the physical world all around us, it’s clear that all physical form attempts to survive unchanged from one moment to the next. Everything tries to maintain its existent structural identity through time. But the forces of change work on everything, from a bacterium that lives and dies in 20 minutes to a star that is born and goes supernova in 100 million years. Nothing physical stays the same.

But thoughts and beliefs are non-physical forms. Because they’re forms they’re bound to attempt to survive, but because they are non-physical, they’re immune from the physical forces of change. A belief, like “America is the best country on earth—love it or leave it” can survive unchanged across generations of believers. Unless it’s questioned. The only thing that can kill a belief is questioning by the believer.

In addition, we identify with our beliefs. They define who we are. The belief “I’m an American and that makes me superior to other people around the globe” becomes part of my identity. So if that belief is threatened, it feels like I’m being threatened. When that belief is “killed,” that is, when I no longer believe it, it feels like part of me has been killed.

Dr. West asserted in his speech that this willingness to question and die is absolutely essential to a democracy. Slavery is an example: our country was founded with the belief that it was acceptable to own human beings. This meant that for seventy-five years a significant percentage of the population of the country were not citizens and could not participate in civic society and in government. This meant we were not fully a democracy. Through the questioning and killing of the belief “slavery is acceptable,” which took a Civil War and the Civil Rights movement to fully accomplish, our democracy has gotten stronger.

Bringing this principle into the modern day, Dr. West questioned the priorities of not just the Republican Party, but the Democratic Party as well (which clearly stunned many in the crowd, there wasn’t much applause for that line). He questioned the cupidity of our culture, the greed and grasping, the elevation of the financial sector over all others, the increasing income divide between the wealthiest 1% and the rest of us. He questioned President Obama’s priorities, which, he said, has brought him a lot of criticism as a black man.

Unfortunately, Dr. West said, our present culture feeds the tendency to sleepwalk with somnolence-inducing television, movies, and the Internet.

Get out of your comfort zone. Take risks. Challenge your holy cows. Question everything. Think for yourself. This, Dr. West says, is the only hope for the future of democracy. Without the willingness of each individual to die, our fragile, precious democracy will die.

Politics Isn't a Blood Sport

Bill Clinton gave an awesome speech at the Democratic National Convention. There was plenty of powerful material in there, but one phrase in particular stood out to me: "Politics isn't a blood sport."

I think this speaks to what is wrong with the Republican Party—and this isn’t something that has just happened in the last few years during the TeaParty-ization of the party. Clinton praised Obama for being committed to “constructive cooperation.” He cited as examples the fact that Obama brought into his administration Republicans (Secretary of Defense, Army and Transportation) and two former opponents from the 2008 Democratic primaries (Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden). Clinton went on to say: 

And the signal that sends to the rest of the world, that democracy does not have a -- have to be a blood sport, it can be an honorable enterprise that advances the public interest.

It’s obvious from the Republicans’ actions in the last three-and-a-half years that they no longer believe in constructive cooperation, but people act like this is something new. However, there is an ugly side to the right-wing that has existed for a long time. In fact, I think there is a large contingent in the right-wing who believe that only Republicans should be in the White House.

When Bill Clinton took office in 1992, conservatives immediately went into attack mode, devoting enormous resources in the attempt to discover anything, no matter how insignificant, they could use to discredit Clinton enough to defeat him in 1996.

When the election of 2000 was being disputed in Florida, mobs gathered outside the Vice-presidential residence in Washington, D.C. (where Al Gore and family were living) yelling, “Get out of Cheney’s house!”

The attempts to delegitimize Barack Obama are legion, and I don’t think it is all about race. It also stems from this underlying belief that the White House belongs to Republicans, and any Democrat who has the temerity to be elected is, by virtue of being a Democrat, an illegitimate president.

This is the thinking of authoritarianism: there is one legitimate political entity. It is very dangerous for the future of our country.

Americans Are Not Stupid

Newsweek recently published an article called “How Dumb Are We?” about Americans’ ignorance of our own political system—38% of the 1000 people polled failed the US Citizenship Test (take the quiz). Although it’s easy to tut-tut over how awful things are, and the magazine encouraged that thinking with the inflammatory subtitle "The country's future is imperiled by our ignorance," I thought the very last paragraph of the article (which most people probably didn’t make it to) was very revealing.

Stanford communications professor James Fishkin has been conducting experiments in deliberative democracy. The premise is simple: poll citizens on a major issue, blind; then see how their opinions evolve when they’re forced to confront the facts. What Fishkin has found is that while people start out with deep value disagreements over, say, government spending, they tend to agree on rational policy responses once they learn the ins and outs of the budget. “The problem is ignorance, not stupidity,” Hacker says. “We suffer from a lack of information rather than a lack of ability.”

The American people are not stupid. As I said in an earlier blog post, the more information people were given during the health care reform debate, the more they supported single-payer plans. But our politicians do not want an informed populace. They want an ignorant populace so the people don't get in their way. Political campaigns are not about issues and ideas, they are about the manipulation of voters' emotions by PR masters. Noam Chomsky has quite a lot to say about how democracy is impossible with this kind of manipulated populace in his new book "Hopes and Prospects." He observes that the public relations industry, in Advertising Age, named Barack Obama the marketer of the year for 2008:

The industry’s regular task is to create uninformed consumers who will make irrational choices, thus undermining markets as they are conceptualized in economic theory, but benefiting the masters of the economy. And it recognizes the benefits of undermining democracy in much the same way, creating uninformed voters who make often irrational choices between the factions of the business party that amass sufficient support from concentrated private capital to enter the electoral arena, then to dominate campaign propaganda.

Our ignorance serves the interests of the plutocratic elite who control this country. The Newsweek article has some other explanations for American's ignorance, given by Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker. He argues that our political system is quite complex compared to most European countries' parliamentary system, so it's inherently difficult to understand. Mr. Hacker also blames the high level of poverty in this country--poor people are poorly educated. His last point is that our ignorance of politics stems from our reliance on market-driven television programming rather than public broadcasting, which “devotes more attention to public affairs and international news, and fosters greater knowledge in these areas.”