In 2017, Cornel West delivered the convocation address at Harvard University. The following excerpts are from that address. I was going to save them for a “Sunday Sermon,” but then I remembered “the fierce urgency of now”.
Here, then, is Dr. Cornel West:
The moral catastrophe is real, what I'm calling the relative eclipse of integrity, honesty, and decency, not just in this empire, but around the world. And what do I mean by moral catastrophe? We’re not talking about politics, we’re not talking about ideology. We’re talking about the kinds of human beings being shaped by the weakened institutions in our world. We’re talking about spiritual blackout.
Spiritual blackout is the normalizing of mendacity, to make lives appear as if they’re a part of the normal order of things. For example, we believe in justice, but not a justice that sends the Wall Street executive who engages in the massive criminality of insider trading, market manipulation, fraudulent activity, and predatory lending to jail. Spiritual blackout is the naturalizing of criminality, when crimes against humanity become part of the natural order of things. One out of two black children under six years old live in poverty in the richest nation in the history of the world. That’s not just wrong, that’s not just unjust, that’s a certain kind of crime against humanity. Where is our public discussion about it? Where are the voices? Where is the moral outrage? Where’s the righteous indignation? No, we just fit in, it’s just business as usual.
Drone strikes have been killing innocent children for the last ten years, and yes, they were happening under our dear brother Barack Obama whom so many fell in love with becoming blind when it came to his complicity in war crimes. We normalize criminality. So this normalization is not just a matter of the new occupant of the White House. It’s too easy to fetishize Donald Trump. But he is as American as apple pie, he just represents the worst of America. Don’t isolate him. Don’t act as if he dropped out of the sky. No, no, he comes out of very deep, organic traditions in the country. Phobias that make us lose sight of our precious trans brothers and sisters, of our bisexual folk and lesbians and gays, black people, indigenous people, Latinos, working people. Across the board, moral catastrophe.
Spiritual blackout not only normalizes mendacity and naturalizes criminality, it also encourages callousness, it elevates machismo identity, and it rewards indifference. William James, the greatest of all public intellectuals, used to say indifference is the one trait that makes the very angels weep. Rabbi Heschel says indifference to evil is more insidious than evil itself. Encouraging indifference where machismo identity is defined in terms of being manly and mature rather than cowardly and insecure is a sign of a spiritual blackout.
So, when we look at Donald Trump, we ought not to engage in the sophomoric name-calling and finger-pointing that we get too often from the corporate media—the very corporate media that, in one sense, helped produce that Frankenstein, given their obsession with money and revenue and profit. I think it was the CEO of NBC that said we understand that Trump’s bad for America, but he’s good for us. So much for public interest, so much for the common good. We see what’s really running things, this market-driven, predatory capitalism that’s obsessed with short-term gain, that’s obsessed with superficial success. What about spiritual issues, where greatness has to do with he or she who is serving the least of these, rather than just the smartest in the room?
That neo-liberal soul-craft has become hegemonic across ideologies, across politics, across color, across sexual orientation, where the very end and aim is to focus on smartness, dollars, and bombs, rather than wisdom, and compassion, and service to the least of these. That’s a sign of spiritual blackout, so when we look at brother Donald Trump, we ought to also look inside of ourselves. There are elements inside of us that need to be wrestled with.
We need more than just courage. We need spiritual and moral dimensions that are tied to that courage. We need fortitude, we need greatness of character, we need magnanimity, and that fortitude that embraces the courage that provides us with a kind of moral and spiritual orientation. We can hold off the obsession with short-term gain and hold off the obsession with raw ambition and self-promotion, but it’s part of the civil war raging inside of each and every one of us.
That’s what I love about the great legacy of Athens, learning how to die in order to learn how to live, trying to fight off those narrow prejudices—that parochialism, provincialism, hedonism, narcissism, and narrow individualism—that try to hold us back. We have to understand the difference between the quest for individuality in community and the narrow, rugged, rapacious individualism that leaves us isolated and deracinated and rootless and unable to connect in such an atomized world.
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West’s phrase “individuality in community” strikes a chord with me, as I have been reading recently about the Russian ideal of sobornost’, which Ivan Kireevsky defined as:
“The wholeness of society, combined with the personal independence and the individual diversity of the citizens, which is possible only on the condition of a free subordination of separate persons to absolute values and in their free creativeness founded on love of the whole…”
What Cornel West was talking about was our need for sobornost’, a need which has not diminished in the three years since he spoke.
The complete convocation address is at this link and it is worth your time:
https://hds.harvard.edu/news/2017/09/08/transcript-cornel-wests-2017-convocation-address#
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