LOS ANGELES TIMES INTERVIEW : Cornel West : Seeking to Expand America’s ‘Public’ Conversation

Cornel West is an intellectual, but he’s no Brahmin. Of course it’s prestigious to give keynote addresses before historical societies; it’s satisfying to lecture as a professor of religion and director of Afro-American studies at Princeton (he was lured there from Yale). But West knows to get a message across in a big way takes mass media. So he is on a different circuit now, decidedly plebeian, as he crosses the country.

West, 39, is promoting his latest book, “Race Matters,” a current analysis of race and its implications in America. But perhaps even more important to West is the “public conversation” he seeks to spark among Americans too often locked in ideological straitjackets represented by liberals and conservatives. The narrow labels and the reactive finger pointing are keeping America from dealing honestly with race, class and gender divisions, he says.

The Tulsa-born, Sacramento-reared philosopher has the manner not of an Ivy League professor but of a down-home preacher. Grandson of a Baptist minister, he marries the moral traditions of the black church with the radical impatience of the Black Panthers. The self-described “intellectual counterpart to a jazz musician” cites influences as eclectic as the music itself: Walt Whitman, John Dewey, W.E.B. DuBois--with some James Baldwin thrown in for syncopation.

Already he has been compared to Reinhold Niebuhr, the influential theologian who fused religion and politics so that politics seemed a natural outgrowth of a belief system that condemned U.S. isolationism in the face of Nazi tyranny and embraced the concerns of working people when such causes went unaddressed by politicians. Neibuhr helped shape the public conversation in the 1930s and ‘40s, says West, and he’s attempting to do no less in the 1990s.

Question: You’re a philosopher, which has been described as a person in search of wisdom, one who analyzes principles of underlying conduct, who studies human morals, character. What can philosophers offer American society?

Answer: To be a philosopher in a society that understands itself to be democratic puts a special kind of burden on (you), because . . . you want to hold that society to its own self-understanding, its own ideals. The real benchmark of democratic ideals is the notion that ordinary people ought to live lives of decency and dignity. So you’re forever examining the various ways in which ordinary people are, or are not, living lives of decency and dignity--which leads you to the question of whether ordinary people’s voices are actually being heard in decision-making processes in institutions that guide and regulate their lives.

So as a philosopher, you’re involved in a quest for wisdom, you’re grappling with the question “How to live?”--which is that three-word question each and every one of us have to ask as we move from womb to tomb. And in raising that question, it’s a personal issue as well as a communal one. Because how to live has to do with the choices we make as individuals, but it also has to do with the circumstances and conditions under which those choices are made. All of us re born into circumstances not of our own choosing, as part of a kind of natural lottery, as it were--to be born into a family, a neighborhood, a gender, a race.

Q: You’ve talked about the extreme hopelessness that plagues young people in ghettos and barrios. How does that hopelessness manifest itself and what is it that these young people need?

A: I think young people need love, care and concern; on the other hand, they need economic opportunity, jobs and decent education. Those two are not identical but they are inseparable. You simply cannot live a life of any meaning and purpose without effective ties and supportive networks in your life. The hopelessness is often tied to a sense of rootlessness, no connections, no linkages. That’s the cultural side. The economic side is when there’s massive unemployment, when there’s decrepit education, the very notion of there being some sense of possibility, opportunity, wanes.

The combination of these produces a level of self-destruction we’ve never seen in this country. It takes the form of a cold-hearted and mean-spirited disposition toward the world, toward one’s own self. If one’s self has no worth, then others have no worth. If one has no property, then other people’s property has no worth.

And so we see a kind of gangsterization of both the spaces in which persons live but also in terms of how they understand themselves. And it reflects much larger tendencies in our society. We’ve had a kind of gangsterish mentality that’s more and more pervasive. Oliver North could just do whatever he wanted to do, by any means necessary, to pursue his own little private agenda--even though he was within public space. Or we see it in corporate America with the levels of greed. And you say, “My God, this is at a time when they’re closing plants, laying off workers, slashing payrolls, benefits, yet they’re still stuffing this money in their pockets.” That’s a certain kind of piracy, that’s a certain kind of gangsterish notion that you can just do whatever you want to do, for you.

What we see on the streets, in much more dire circumstances, is a reflecting or refracting of this much more pervasive sense in our society that we’re all in it for our own individual selves. In a society in which markets and guns are the two basic pillars of how people conceive getting about--a job on one hand, protection or security on the other--the notion of public life, people acknowledging interconnections, tends to be pushed aside.

Q: So what changed? For that poor black kid you talked about earlier, what changed between 1973 and 1993?

A: In 1973, the poor black kid would have more institutional buffers. Stronger family, more closely knit neighborhood. Keep in mind they live in a society that has a history of despising black folks. So you need for people to tell you, people you love and trust, that you are somebody, that you’re beautiful, that you’re intelligent and so forth--the family, the church, the civic organization, the teacher, the Little League coach. What we’ve seen between the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s, up until our own time, is the shattering of those institutional buffers. So the same kids today have very few folk telling them that. That’s what I mean by the loss of effective bonds.

Q: So you agree with many conservatives who say that what a poor ghetto kid really needs is the strong family, the church?

A: Conservatives do have one insight in that regard. But I criticize the very market--the one that they celebrate--as contributing to the shattering of the family and neighborhood. It was the logic of capital that led to the industrial jobs leaving. Because profit was somewhere else. Those industrial jobs that had served as the backbone for the families that were strong during the ‘60s and ‘70s are long gone. They’re gone for one reason--because they couldn’t make a profit.

On the cultural level, the culture industry bombards young people with stimulation of body and titillation of body; convinces them that the good life is a life in which your body is stimulated, titillated. It’s the market that does that, it sells.

But the conservatives don’t want to be critical of the market in terms of it contributing to the very loss of the institutional buffers that they--and I--agree are necessary for a healthy black life or a healthy life for anybody. In that sense we have that very brief overlap and then fundamental disagreement.

Q: What about liberals? Have liberals failed America, failed black America?

A: People concerned about the lives of ordinary people have to look for allies wherever they can get them. Liberals have been allies usually when they’re pushed. But there’s a variety of circumstances under which they’re highly unreliable allies at times, and that cannot be overlooked as well. Liberals, to me, are to be faulted because they don’t really want to talk seriously about the maldistribution of wealth in our society and the presence of corporate power that reinforces that. Liberals want to create various programs, but programs that in no way ask for deep questioning about corporate power in America.

And liberals don’t want to talk about culture at all, because to talk about culture is to be cast as a conservative. I say, “No, not at all. You talk about meaning of life, you talk about family, about church, about mosque, about synagogue.” Therefore, I do join with conservatives in being concerned about those issues, even though I give it a twist.

Q: A Greek philosopher said, “Know thyself.” Do Americans know themselves?

A: Not at all. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Conversation is our account of ourselves.” And when you look at the health of the public conversation in America about itself, it gets a low rating. Which means that we haven’t mastered the art of public conversation. That’s part of the example of our impoverished public life. We’re coming out of a period where the “private” is sacred, the “public” is associated with squalor, so it’s not just public transportation and public housing and public health care that are being downplayed, but also public conversation.

Q: Why is that important?

A: It’s very important because a democracy cannot rejuvenate itself without some self-critical and self-correcting activities, and conversation is about some criticisms and about some correction. So what happens? We get locked into some narrow frameworks. We need to get beyond this narrow liberal-conservative framework. Most of public conversation in America is name-calling and finger-pointing.

Q: How do we change that?

A: We just have to keep at it. We have to keep being critical of the frameworks in place, acknowledging the need for public conversation, acknowledging the need to confront the tragic facts of past and present.

Q: But are Americans uncomfortable with self-criticism?

A: Yes, very much so. America is the land of comfort and convenience. Criticism is about discomfort--it’s unsettling, it’s about being transgressive in the sense of calling what one has assumed into question. America does not take well to that.

Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living. But we could say the examined life is painful. America’s always been in flight from pain. We’re very spoiled people, historically privileged people. And when you think of pain, as well as when you think of neglect and defeat, you may think of the South, and (Southerners are) probably viewed in the eyes of many Americans as the most un-American of white America because they’ve had pain, they’ve been defeated in a war.

Of course, black people and indigenous peoples and brown peoples have borne the brunt of the pain in the building of American society--and we’re viewed as the most un-American. Some of us aren’t even viewed as Americans.

The association with pain and that sense of tragedy and suffering is always something that is on the other side of town, as it were, and the real Americans are on this side of town. Real Americans are about pleasure, comfort, convenience. Yes, winners! Even if they’re underdogs in the beginning, they win in the end, like Rambo, that’s very American.

Those who are going to be public intellectuals or activists are very much cutting against the grain. That makes it a bigger challenge, but necessary if we’re serious about the plight of those who will come after, let alone if we’re concerned about, to use the language of the Founding Fathers, our sacred honor after we’re gone. Can you imagine what they’re going to say 100 years from now about Americans living in the 1990s? How did they put up with the levels of social misery that black and brown and working people were going through? How did you not do anything about it as a society? The same way we look back and talk about slave holders and say how did this happen before their very eyes? What was going on in this country? Well, private comfort, convenience.