Hate Tyrants
And dismiss whatever insults your soul. Four hopeful theories to help us imagine a future for America.
Cornel West
Having discussed at length the sinister and fatuous ideas that sterilized American minds during the long intellectual Dust Bowl of neoliberalism, I keep promising to give you some of the good ones. It’s high time. We were deprived of numberless interesting philosophies because of the broadly successful efforts to shunt real intellectuals off the main stage by the global kleptos who prefer reheated fascism to actual mental challenges. I will finally make good on this promise.
The following ideas come from the humanities and social sciences, fields that don’t stake claims to absolute truth, unlike science or pseudoscience or microeconomics or god help us “business.” From the social sciences, I have excluded mainstream economics, which, in 1969, having suffered from acute physics envy after conservatives were left high and dry by the thrilling poetry of Marx and Keynes, started awarding themselves the Nobel in “Economic Sciences,” and thus graduated out of the debate, irony, dialectic, grace, collegiality, humor, and good faith of the great eternal philosophical discourses; pretended thenceforth to be math; and began anointing as infallible high priests blowhards with Epstein ties (Larry Summers, et al.).
The good ideas I will put in bold and call theories, lest they be mistaken for pieties. The first such theory comes from philosophy, notably the homegrown American philosophy of pragmatism.
Pragmatism’s modern exponents include Cornel West and the late Richard Rorty. Pragmatism is deeply American. It involves, above all, a hard separation of ecstatic private religion and communal public responsibility. Private religion can mean houses of worship, if you like, but also poetry, dialects, self-invention, kinks, and the spontaneous or diligent crystallization of one’s being in language or art. Public responsibility includes the forming of solidarity with a broad base of your fellows to reduce suffering in the world. No effort is made by the pragmatist to marry her private and public projects. To paraphrase Matthew 22:21: Render unto the soul the things that belong to the soul, and unto the community the things that belong to the community.
