Q: Is the United States a republic or an empire?
A: It’s both. We’re in the moment where the American empire
is devouring American democracy and we have to fight it. But
it’s both. The United States has 650 military facilities in
132 countries, a ship in every major ocean, a presence on
every major continent other than Antarctica, and 1,450,000
soldiers around the globe. It is the uncontested military
power and the cultural mover in terms of shaping people’s
utopian desires and ideals and so on. Starbucks and Wal-Mart
and McDonalds, you go right across the board because the
dollar is the currency other nations invest their financial
resources in for security. It is an uncontested empire and
yet, at the same time, domestically, there are democratic
procedures and processes that are not dead. They’ve been
deeply assaulted, but they’re not dead. And so we’ve got
this simultaneity: Democratic practices constituting still a
kind of republic representative government and at the same
time this empire. And they’re in deep tension—both creative
and destructive tension—right now the Bush administration of
course is the deep imperialist strain that is claiming to be
the defender of democracy.
Q: Do you think that the present Bush administration is
an example of very bad political luck, or is it indicative
of something much more endemic to America?
A: Oh, no, it’s endemic because America has always had this
deep battle between imperialist strands and democratic
strands. America was born as an empire on indigenous
people’s lands and on indigenous people’s backs, with the
use of African labor constituting a slave, not just class,
but a slave foundation—an economic foundation of the nation.
The same would be true for Mexican laborers with the moving
border. There is the American manifest destiny, which is
nothing but imperialist ideology to justify expansionism for
resources and for land and so forth. The same would be true
for Asian workers being brought in and ordered to perform
certain kinds of cheap labor and then sent out. So you have
this long history of American imperial expansion and
alongside that you have what I call a deep democratic
tradition.
Q: But don’t you think that the hard power is going to
overwhelm the so-called soft power, when you have an annual
400 billion dollar investment in the world’s largest
military-industrial complex?
A: Here I think Sheldon Wolin is very important. Democracy
is always a matter of ordinary people taking back their
powers and targeting consolidated elite power. And no matter
how much money and how many cannons or missiles the elites
might have, they still have to, in the end, deal with the
incorporation of the demos, of we plebeians, as it were. And
so in an ironic way, what appears to be weak can turn out to
be very strong, which has to do with democratic energy from
below. The question is how long it can be contained. How
long it can be amused and mischanneled and so forth. And
that deep democratic tradition, really, that goes all the
way from both the founding fathers who had a revolutionary
energy that was quite impressive against the British as just
as many were fearful of unruly demos once they pushed the
British out. But that’s part of a deep tradition. And I
think when you look at Emerson, when you look at Melville,
when you look at Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, when
you look at the best of the populace, the best of the
progressivist movement, the best of the feminist movement,
and, most importantly for me, the struggles against white
supremacy.
Q: Is there a relationship between pragmatism as a
philosophical spirit of the United States and U.S.
imperialism?
A: Well, again, pragmatism here, I think, is a very
complicated intellectual tradition because there is no
one-to-one correspondence between pragmatist views on truth,
knowledge, and so forth, and pragmatist politics. You can be
left, center, or right and that’s very important. One has to
be very Gramscian about this in terms of what the context
is, in terms of what the temperament is of the particular
pragmatic philosopher. But pragmatism, I think, is on the
one hand very much a part of the democratic spirit in terms
of its deep suspicion of authority, in terms of its
preoccupation with preserving individuality—very different
than “possessive individualism,” now—but which is a
democratic individuality, self-interrogation, self-scrutiny,
and so on. The problem with pragmatism has always been that
it has no significant understanding of the role of
structures and institutions, not just within nations but
across nations. So that even William James’s exemplary
anti-imperialist critiques were moralistic critiques, you
see. There’s nothing wrong with moralism; we want to be
certain kinds of persons. Paidea does matter. But there’s no
understanding of the structural, institutional practices
linked to these imperial projects. Especially of his day.
Especially of our day. So that pragmatism can actually end
up being used by elites to contain democratic energies, even
though it does embody in its own views of the world deeply
democratic sensibilities. It’s a fascinating kind of
juxtaposition there and I’ve always felt that about
pragmatism—years ago and I see that now.
Q: A parallel question: Do you think pragmatism was, is,
a nationalistic philosophy in the ways that Hegel and Kant
and in the 20th century Scheler and Heidegger’s philosophies
were nationalistic? Was Dewey nationalistic? Was James
nationalistic?
A: Well, you know it’s interesting. I think that in the
great pragmatists Pierce, James, Dewey, you have a
cosmopolitanism there. Now, it is a cosmopolitanism that
often times is Eurocentric. It’s like Goethe, it’s like
Matthew Arnold, it’s like Wieland, who were the creators of
a notion of this world literature. And by world literature
they still meant the best of Europe across national
boundaries in Europe, for the most part—with a few
exceptions of maybe Persia, and one or two poets in the East
or something, you know what I mean. But what’s fascinating
about James and Dewey is that James’s preoccupation with the
democratic individuality and Dewey’s preoccupation with
democratic community led them to an allegiance to democratic
ideals that could easily have taken them beyond national
boundaries. That’s what I love about them. That’s part of my
own internationalism as a democrat—that you can tease that
out of there. And in some ways, it goes back to Emerson,
really. I think Stanley Cavell is probably right that
Emerson is American in terms of his roots, but he’s
international in terms of his routes. They take him out, you
see. And I think Dewey and James, especially in their essays
on Emerson, had this sense of democracy, of individuality.
That cuts across. And so, again, there is an ambivalence
there, I think, when it comes to the national character.
Q: Do you think that a judicial pragmatism, of the kind
espoused by Richard Posner and Justice Stephen Breyer, is a
liability or an asset in the Supreme Court?
A: In the Supreme Court itself?
Q: Yeah.
A: Well, I think Breyer is a very brave man, a very decent
man. I thank God he’s on the court, but that’s a relative
judgment. You measure him against Scalia and you want to
have a party, right? [laughter] At the same time, I think
that when it comes to the larger issues regarding the
philosophy of law and so on and so forth, I’ve always viewed
pragmatism in its relation to the law, going all the way
back to Holmes, as [on the one hand] liberating—in terms of
getting beyond certain narrow forms of legal positivism, and
trying to take history and experience seriously, and the
dynamism of the law I like. But [on the other hand] I always
thought there was a certain parochialism to pragmatic
thinkers reflecting on the law, because, you see, [when it
comes to] the relation of the law to economic structures,
the relation of the law to power dynamics in the
nation-state, in foreign policy as well as domestic
policy—there is very little talk about that when it comes to
pragmatism and law. They carve out their little domestic
space, criticize their positivist interlocutors, and so
forth, and you get the feeling “thank God they’re doing that
kind of thing,” but in the end it’s just so limited. When I
think of people who think seriously about the law, in that
broader sense of Roberto Unger—people who have a vision of
the complex relation between legal practices and economic
structures, and foreign policy as it’s linked to the
nation-state and it’s bureaucracy (State Department,
Pentagon, and CIA). These are very important kinds of issues
that we ought not leave to journalists and there’s a sense
in which a lot of philosophers of law left it to journalists
to tell those stories.
Q: Do you think there is anything worth preserving in
patriotism?
A: Oh sure!
Q: Is patriotism a form of virtue?
A: Absolutely. I believe that piety is an appropriate
virtue.
Q: So patriotism is a form of piety?
A: Oh absolutely, absolutely. We have to pay debt to the
sources of our being. That includes mom and dad. That
includes the community that shaped you. That includes the
nation that both protects you as well as gives you some
sense of possibility. And for religious folk, of course, it
includes God. Now, the problem is there has to be some
Socratic energy in one’s piety. Piety ought to be
inseparable from critical thinking, but the critical
thinking is parasitic on who one is and where one starts.
And who one is and where one starts has to do with what has
shaped you from womb to tomb. Part of the hollowness and
shallowness of some of modern thinking is to think that
somehow one gives birth to oneself and therefore one has no
debt to anybody who came before—as if you can have a
language all by itself, as if you could actually raise
yourself from zero to five, and so forth and so on. So that
I look at my beautiful daughter and I give her all the love
that I can and as she gets older, she is going to feel a
certain kind of relation to me. In the end, she may
characterize that as a debt that she feels to me because of
the love that I gave her. I think that’s appropriate. I
don’t do it for that reason, but I think that’s appropriate.
I certainly feel that with my parents and I feel that with
my neighborhood. I feel that with my Black church. I feel
that with the nation and I also feel that with my
intellectual ancestors. I think I have a deep debt to
Chekhov and a deep debt to Coltrane. I have a deep debt to
Hilary Putnam and Stanley Cavell, and these people who were
so very kind to me. That doesn’t mean I uncritically accept
what they have to say. I wrestle with them, but I’m thinking
of a kind of critical, Socratic patriotism. Let’s call it
that.
Q: What’s the difference between patriotism and
nationalism?
A: I think patriotism works at that psychic, existential
level in terms of debt. I think nationalism is a particular
ideology that was forged as the European empires began
disintegrating. You needed different units to be constituted
to deal with the dynamics of power, so you ended up with
these nation-states with their institutions of
administration and their control over the instrumentalities
of violence. And it has become the most powerful modern
ideology in some ways. As the empires underwent
metamorphosis, some of them collapsed, some of them
reconstituted and so on. A very powerful ideology.
Q: Is there a link between Black Nationalism and U.S.
nationalism?
A: Absolutely. Absolutely. It’s ironic because nationalism
itself is a European construct, and we get Black folk—who
are victimized mainly by Europeans tied to vicious notions
and practices of white supremacy—using a European ideology
to counter. I can understand that; we have to use any weapon
we can, but we have to be cognizant of its limitations, how
tainted it is, and especially how morally tainted it is in
terms of not allowing our internationalism and universalism
to become more pronounced. But, of course, the problem has
always been that the Black Nationalist movement has no land,
no territory, and so it becomes symbolic. A way of trying to
organize…
Q: Cultural?
A: A cultural nationalism or a kind of psychic nationalism.
A control over community in terms of the flow of capital, as
opposed to having one’s own nation-state that you can
control the boundaries and borders and so forth. People like
Elijah Mohammed—I have great respect for him in terms of his
willingness to live and die for Black people. I have a
devastating critique of him in terms of the limitedness of
his vision: the xenophobia, the uncritical appropriation of
a nationalist ideology that has wreaked havoc on so many
other peoples. And similarly with Louis Farrakhan—I have a
great love for him in terms of his love for Black people and
his willingness to live and die for Black people and yet at
the same time—and he’s still alive, thank God, so we can
argue about these things, about my critiques of his
nationalist projects and the patriarchy and the homophobia
that often go with nationalist ideology: You need some other
human to be, if not demeaned, then certainly to be defined
over against. You see, as a radical democrat I am very
suspicious of it.
Q: Are you suggesting that Black Nationalism has become
historically obsolete?
A: No.
Q: Is there a role for it still?
A: Absolutely. As long as white supremacy is around, there
will be Black Nationalism—and progressive Black Nationalism
will be more common. I think that’s true for any kind of
nationalism. I’m critical of a Zionist project because it is
a form of nationalism of oppressed people just like Black
Nationalism is a form of nationalism of oppressed people.
But progressive Zionists are my comrades, because as long as
racist forms of anti-Semitism are around, then you’re going
to have nationalist responses to it. Zionist responses
vis-à-vis anti-Semitism, Black Nationalist responses
vis-à-vis white supremacy, and so forth and so on. When I
said “progressive” what I mean is those particular
nationalists who accent the democratic dimensions of their
projects—and there are significant democratic dimensions of
the Zionist project, of the Black Nationalist project, of
the American nationalist project. Ralph Ellison, I’m going
to lecture on him today. This man is a thoroughgoing
American nationalist—patriot to the core. You know, one of
the great geniuses of the American literary tradition—much
too nationalist for me. But the democratic dimension of his
American nationalism is very rich.
Q: Do you think that the African-American reaction to 9/11
was different from that of Anglo-Americans, or does it make
any sense to talk about this split?
A: It was very different. It was very different. To be a
nigger in America meant to be unsafe, unprotected, subject
to random violence, and hated. America experienced that as a
nation for the first time on 9/11, so the whole nation was
niggarized. Black people began to say “you beginning to get
the sense now what it is I have to deal with”—this
terrorized condition, you see. And I think that Black folk,
therefore, were less likely to engage in an adolescent lust
for revenge, because they’ve got long traditions of
overcoming that kind of spiritual immaturity. Well, you say,
revenge is an instinct when you’re terrorized. But when you
come out of a people who have been terrorized, over time you
recognize that your survival will not be procured by
revenge. If we had the voice of a Martin King or the voice
of a [?], as the dominant responses to American terrorism,
you wouldn’t get the Lone Ranger, cowboy-like attitude of
George Bush and others.
Q: Do you think, notwithstanding that difference, that
African-American intellectuals and spokespersons have been
cowered into silence and acquiescence for fear that they
might be called unpatriotic?
A: Early on that was the case, absolutely. Barbara Lee, my
dear sister, stood up—all by herself and under death threats
for weeks—before congress to vote against Bush pushing that
through immediately after 9/11. Part of the problem is that
the market-driven media is just not interested in some of
the more significant truth-tellers coming out of the Black
community. So if you actually look at the Black press, the
Black radio, or even Tavis Smiley’s C-SPAN show on the Black
response to 9/11: You probably had more truth-telling on
that show about America than you had on any other show. And
it’s mainly because Black people been dealing with American
terrorism for hundreds of years. So we could trash, call
into question, all forms of terrorists—be they American, be
they Islamic, be they Christian, be they Jewish, be they
whatever. Whereas America became so obsessed with this
particular terrorist attack, which was vicious and wrong and
cowardly, but didn’t want to look at itself, and therefore
fell into that typically adolescent pure victim/impure
victimizer, us versus them—the Manichean vision that we hear
Bush articulating day-in and day-out.
Q: We’ll come back to that Manicheanism later on. Do you
think there’s a continuum between the slave plantation, Jim
Crow the ghetto, the ethno-racial prison and the present use
of the death penalty as a form of “legalized lynching,” as
Jesse Jackson calls it?
A: Yeah, I think Angela Davis and others have been quite
brilliant on this issue. What we’re talking about is the
excessive use of repression and violence to contain and
control significant slices of the Black community,
especially, more and more these days, the poor Black
community. And that Black encounter with the violent face,
with the repressive face of the American state has played a
crucial role in shaping Black people’s perception of
America. And it goes from the whip on the plantation, to the
lynching of the lynching tree, to the trigger-happy
policing, on to the death penalty and the criminal justice
system and the prison-industrial complex. Absolutely.
Absolutely. A number of mediations: shifts in space from
rural to urban, shifts in class location from pre-industrial
labor to industrial labor to post-industrial labor, shifts
in educational sites and so on. But the progress goes hand
in hand with the underside of the progress, which is what
you’re actually…
Q: Right. Now you might know these lectures from 1976,
which I think you actually anticipated in Prophecy and
Deliverance, on the genealogy of racism: Foucault’s lectures
of 1976, which are called Society Must Be Defended. There he
talked about racism for the first time very explicitly. He
talks about racism as a racial war against a biological or
social threat. That’s why society must be defended. Now, if
we keep that in mind, can we say that in fact if we look at
these institutions—the plantation, the ghetto, the lynching,
Jim Crow, and today the death penalty—what we’re facing is a
racial war against African-Americans?
A: The problem with the metaphor of war, and this goes back
to Clausewitz, is that it tends to put a premium on the
point at which contestation is accented, whereas Black
people’s labor, Black people’s bodies, Black people’s styles
are preconditioned for the American project. So the given
impression that is first and foremost of war is that they
want to annihilate Black people. They can’t annihilate Black
people. If they had annihilated 22% of the inhabitants of
the 13 colonies who are keeping the thing economically
afloat, they would’ve undermined themselves. If they had
annihilated Black people during Jim Crow, who was going to
do the labor? And if they had annihilated Black people in
the 1960s? We’re in too many crucial places. So, you see,
there is a war-like dimension, but there are these other
dimensions that those, from Clausowitz to Foucault, that
invoke these kinds of metaphors might easily downplay. Now,
I do believe that in the end we are on a battlefield, but
the battlefield is not one in which you’re at that point of
contention primarily or exclusively. You’ve got a life to
live, labor to render, songs to sing, people to love, and
that’s as important and as much a part of our talk about
living a life in which white supremacy, male supremacy, and
others are coming at us. So it’s like Lefebvre, my dear
brother, I don’t want everyday life to be slighted by these
metaphors of war, though in the end there is certainly a
war-like quality to what we’re dealing with.
Q: If we include all the people in the prison system and
those under the control of the penitentiary and correctional
institutions, which is almost 4 million people, and we know
that one of the largest industries in the United States is
the prison-industrial complex—California’s largest industry,
for instance—don’t you think we have become a carceral
society, a nation of prisons?
A: Well, look at your question here in terms of industry.
The biggest industry in California is the entertainment
industry. I think that’s bigger than the prison industry.
Q: Okay.
A: See what I mean? Aerospace is major industry. That is to
say that we’d have to examine the scope and scale and
breadth and depth, so that the carceral industry, which has
been expanding exponentially, every 5 years it seems, but it
is not as central as the entertainment industry. Now of
course the irony is that many of the top performers in the
entertainment industry are the same color as those in the
carceral industry, you know what I mean? But one’s
international, it’s global. Hip-hop is one slice and that’s
billions and billions of dollars, right? We’re not even
talking about music as a whole, or TV and sports. My God,
this country couldn’t survive without Negroes and sports.
They’d go crazy—wouldn’t know what to do on the weekends. So
you get the Black presence in all these different instances,
but back to your question: the carceral industry certainly
is an industry. It’s a growing industry, but it’s primarily
one that tries to target the working poor and very poor,
given the fact that the society finds it difficult to find
spaces for them, some significant value and use for them.
And of course many make bad choices and decisions in the
context in which they find themselves. And I think for me,
again, the issue of linking struggles in everyday life to
the various kinds of industries, structures, institutions,
and the economy, especially, looms large here. There is a
backlash right now. I mentioned Angela Davis. You can talk
about the anti-death penalty movement. You can talk about
the courage of the ex-republican governor of Illinois
recognizing just how unfair and racist the death penalty
was. That kind of movement is significant. I think we are
going to see more of it.
Q: In fact, that is where my next question was going. In
light of the Rehnquist Court, which is against the equal
application of rights, what should we do about the death
penalty, this mechanism for legalized lynching?
A: We have got to reshape public opinion, and I give a lot
of fellow citizens credit for that. They’ve helped reshape
the climate of public opinion. Hugo Bedau, who is my dear
friend and a philosophy professor down at Tufts for many
years. He has been struggling against the death penalty for
almost 30 years. We would have gatherings 20 years ago and
there would be seven people. We’d have gatherings 10 years
ago and we’d have 70. Now we have a gathering and there are
400. He is the same person, same view, and part of the same
movement, but it’s expanding. He is one among many and I
give a lot of credit for that.
Q: What do you think of the new abolitionist movement?
A: You know, I listen carefully and I learn much. I don’t
think I have fundamentally reached their conclusions yet.
I’d love to see more education, rehabilitation, and what I
call Paideia. I’ve taught in prisons now for 19 years and
some of my best examples of Paideia—that kind of formation
of attention on crucial issues, cultivation of the self,
self-criticism, and maturation of the soul that really comes
to terms with reality and history and mortality—I’ve seen in
prisons and that’s part of the rehabilitation that ought to
take place. Whether in fact you end up abolishing is
something that I’ve yet to be fully persuaded on.
Q: Now shifting to the question of religion. You have
been particularly preoccupied with the problem of evil. In
fact you think that prophetic pragmatism is distinctively
concerned with questions of evil and the tragic. Do you
think that the events of 9/11 should be talked about in
terms of evil?
A: Oh, sure, because evil for me is unjustified suffering.
It’s unwarranted misery and that’s certainly what it was.
Now, of course, that also means you have to talk about
what’s going on in Colombia and Guatemala and El Salvador
and Iraq also in terms of unjustified suffering and
unnecessary social misery as evil. The question then
becomes: What is our response to it? How do we understand
where and why it emerges? How do we try to wrestle with it
and overcome it? And that’s a very complicated process. That
has to do with both structures of institutions as well as
the choices and decisions that agents make, that particular
people make. There’s a dialectical interplay between
structure and agency here that we must never lose sight of.
But to be preoccupied with evil is really, to me, just the
attempt to be a decent and compassionate person who is
concerned about other people’s suffering and also trying to
find some joy in the world. In some ways that is the best of
a humanist tradition that goes from Amos to Socrates to
W.E.B. DuBois, and yet we also know that the same tradition
can hide and conceal certain forms of unjustified suffering.
There is evil shot through all of our traditions.
Q: Following up on this question, I know that you have
been teaching a freshman seminar called “The Tragic, the
Comic and the Political.” Now let me ask you, the word evil
doesn’t form part of the title there, but what is the
linkage that you’re trying to make between evil and the
tragic? If we think of evil in the Augustinian sense, it’s
about human will—it is the human will that is the cause of
evil in the world. Whereas the tragic is about the forces
beyond the human will, so you’re bringing together two
philosophemes, which seem to be anathematic to each other.
A: That’s a very good question. Now, I do believe, following
Dewey, that we are acculturated organisms in transaction
with our environment and there are natural forces that can
be stronger. When the cancer hit me, linked to a genetic
inheritance that goes all the way back to whatever, I had to
respond to it. There is no way that I can completely
extricate it. I might get lucky and control it for a while,
but there are forces that are far beyond human will. When a
planet clashes with this planet sooner or later, there’s not
a whole lot human beings can do about that. You know what I
mean? When you talk about human suffering being caused by
something greater than human beings, we got natural evil.
The Lisbon earthquake that Voltaire and Kant and others were
so shaken by. That’s very real, but on the other hand there
are things we can do a hell of a lot about—like trying to
understand the comet when it’s coming, or trying to get some
sense of when the earthquake’s coming given that we can’t
control it and so on. We’ve done a better job now than we
were able to do in Lisbon, no doubt, and you’ve lived in
California, so you understand that better than most people.
But there are some other forms of suffering that we can do a
hell of a lot about: suffering that has to do with corporate
power, that has to do with narrow interests among elites in
the nation-states, that has to do with xenophobic citizens
attacking other citizens, especially our gay brothers and
lesbian sisters these days. Those we can do a lot about, so
that you’re actually right, the comic tries to understand
what it is that we acculturated organisms that transact with
our environment can bring to minimize and alleviate the
suffering, knowing that we will never have full control over
it.
The comic allows us to look at those
limitations and all the incongruities and hypocrisies of who
we are, what our society is, and still smile through the
darkness. The tragic fights all it can and then it runs up
against the [?], the limits, the constraints, and goes down
gloriously, but also recognizing a certain hubris, a certain
kind of defective self-knowledge that may have been in part
responsible for running up against that limit, the Oedipus,
but there are different forms of the tragic and different
forms of the comic and as somebody like Chekhov, who other
than Shakespeare, I think, has the most profound conception
of the tragic-comic. And it’s interesting because there is
no real philosopher that constitutes an analogue to Chekhov.
I think the greatest comic philosopher was David Hume, who
was preoccupied with the incongruities and limitations of
not just human reason, but human beings and yet still trying
to get us to proceed in post-skeptical space, as it were.
But his sense of the tragic, I think, was
in part underdeveloped. The tragic-comic go hand in
hand—some of the deep passion, the willingness to be moved
by the difficulty of walking that tightrope. You know, when
Hume goes back to play backgammon, you get the sense that he
is really suppressing all of this anxiety, which he is,
since he is neoclassical figure in that sense: It’s about
stoic self-mastery and so on. Whereas Chekhov is a bit
more—he is so moved by the heartbreak and the heartache of
humankind that he can’t be restrained like Hume in a
neoclassical way. He is the grandson of a slave. Yet he
knows he needs to have some self-control as the medical
doctor that he was and the great liberator figure that he
was, reading philosophy all the time but also concerned
about science—and agnostic, like Hume. Hume was probably
agnostic too. So there is no easy religious solution for
Chekhov. For me, you see, that’s the real challenge: how do
you keep the Socratic, critical energy flowing and the
prophetic witness linked to compassion and the tragic-comic
hope all intertwined for radical democracy.
Q: This is what you’re discussing in Democracy
Matters…
A: Yes, in my book, Democracy Matters, I lay all this
out.
Q: What do you make of President Bush’s apocalyptic and
messianic rhetoric?
A: There is a long tradition of such rhetoric in American
history and Bush is just an instant in that tradition. He
does view America in a Manichean way, as this pure city on
the hill. It’s an “us against them” stance. He finds it very
difficult to ever be critical of America, not just publicly,
but I think also in his own private space. He is part of
this sense of America as being this land of Edenic
innocence, which has very deep roots in the country. There
are other roots in the country that are more mature and more
critically engaging of the complex reality of America’s past
and present, but he is part of the Manichean impulse in the
tradition of innocence.
Q: And this messianic role of carrying the banner of
democracy even if requires the use of military violence,
torture, and repression?
A: Of Christianity and democracy in the vulgar sense of
both. Absolutely, but he is the exemplar of Constantinian
Christianity and imperial America. Constantinian
Christianity has deep roots in America and so does
imperialism. There is also a prophetic Christianity and a
deep democratic tradition in America that cut against both
of these, but they have always been in some ways weaker even
though they made a difference in the making of the country.
Q: Now I don’t want to give any credence to Samuel
Huntington’s idea that we are facing a clash of
civilizations, but one could say that there are conflicts
today, conflicts of religions. Against this background, what
would you say about the role of religious talk today? Does
it complicate or does it help when we talk about a
confrontation of religions?
A: Well, I think that any time you have religious conflict
you also have something else going on in addition to the
clash of religion. There’s always a social dimension, an
economic dimension, and a personal dimension going on. I
think right now we’re experiencing a profound crisis of
Christian identity in the country. There has always been a
strong fundamentalist evangelical presence in the country
that was highly suspicious of modern modes of skepticism,
secularism, and criticism. Ironically, since Martin Luther
King Jr., the Christian right began to learn lessons in
terms of political organization and using their clout to
bring power and pressure to bear because they saw the Civil
Rights movement doing it on the other side of the
ideological line. So they actually learned from brother
Martin, the Jerry Farwells, and others and then received, of
course, unbelievable economic support from many corporate
elites. And it became clear that if there was going to be a
realignment of American politics—a kind of Southernization
of American politics using racially loaded terms, from
busing to crime to welfare to prisons and so forth, to
realign the American public—then the Christian right could
be a major organized pillar for this. They were, in fact,
brought in in a significant way to do that, and not simply
because the elites themselves were Christians. Sometimes it
was outright manipulation because you’ve got Machiavellian
calculations going on at the highest levels of certain
deeply conservative circles.
So you end up with not just Constantinian
Christianity, but the Christian Right being a fundamental
pillar for imperial America. Look at the relation of the
Christian Right and conservative Jews in America. This is
what is intriguing about the Mel Gibson film, you see,
because you get the erosion of that. People know that
anti-Semitism has always been part and parcel of the
Christian right’s perspective and all of a sudden you get an
alliance with conservative Jews defending Israel, based
almost on blind faith, and now they discover, my god, our
allies are anti-Semites! You don’t say. I could have told
you that a long time ago. Pat Robertson has publicly said
things far more Anti-Semitic than most. How is he going to
be your ally? Well, because he supports Israel! Well, I
thought that coalitions had something more substantive to
them than merely a stance. The same is true with cutting
back on domestic policy when it comes to social services,
healthcare, jobs, education and so on. No, it’s pro-defense,
no it’s pro-imperial expansion. The Christian Right, right
now, is both powerful and dangerous and yet we know—and this
is something we don’t like talking about in the academy—that
if 72% of Americans view themselves as not just Christians,
but believe in Jesus Christ son of God, then the fight for
democracy in America is partly a fight for democratic
possibilities in the American Christian tradition. If you
lose the latter, you can forget the former. You can come up
with the most sophisticated theories of democracy in the
world, but if you’re not affecting the climate on the ground
in such a way that certain Christians can think
dem-o-cra-tic-ly and proceed politically under a radical
democratic vision, then we’re not going to get anywhere. In
fact, you end up just giving more and more over to the
Christian Right and Christian centrists.
Q: Many liberal intellectuals have argued that the war on
terrorism is a just war—and this relates to the other
question because just war theory emerges from Christianity,
Augustine, Aquinas—liberals like Jean Bethke Elshtain, Paul
Berman, and to a certain extent Michael Walzer. Do you think
these wars against Iraq and, of course, Afghanistan were
just wars?
A: No, not at all. They were illegal, unjustified, and I
think unnecessary. I think there are ways of trying to gain
access, to hunt down gangsters and terrorists, without
invading countries. This plundering of the livelihoods of
thousands and thousands and thousands of innocent people,
with very little regard for their welfare and well-being,
has symbolic purposes—getting back to issue of the lust for
revenge—letting the country know we’re not going to take
this; to let the country know we’re macho and we’re tough
and so on. And the result is what? More instability and more
insecurity, because that’s what that kind of posing and
posturing of a macho identity does. It just reinforces the
whole cycle of anxiety and insecurity that is tied to all
the bigotry and hatred and revenge and resentment that fan
and fuel the worst of who we are as human beings. I think on
the international front you’ve got to deal with multilateral
institutions and international law: I don’t think
international law can justify it.
Then there is a deeper, moral question in
terms of what kinds of costs there are and who is bearing
them. When you have an invasion and you’re unwilling to even
count the number of innocent civilians you kill—I don’t
understand how any of these people can conclude that this is
a just war. I mean, the Catholic tradition and others always
talk about their caution and their preoccupation with not
just minimizing, but keeping track of what the costs are, so
you can argue ex post facto what happened. They don’t even
want to show the bodies of the American soldiers; that’s
cost too on the American side. So it pains me to see a lot
of fellow philosophers, social theorists, and what have you,
caught within the legitimation machine of the larger
imperial project. They may not share all of the imperial
ambitions, but they can be easily used and deployed by those
who are running that machine. That gross kind of seduction,
I think, is highly unfortunate. I’ve seen some very decent
and brilliant people who were easily used in that way.
Q: So do you think terrorism is the largest threat the
United States faces in the 21st century or…
A: No, the largest thing America faces in the 21st century
is internal decay and decline, with us turning on each other
unable to generate the web of trust requisite to keep the
democratic experiment alive. Very much like the communists
in the 1940s and 50s, who constituted a kind of external foe
to hold America together, I think the Bush people are trying
to constitute Islamic terrorists as an external foe to hold
us together. But America has always had high levels of
violence: from cars, to everyday violence, to domestic
violence, to violence against workers, to violence against
black people, brown people, and so on. And we’re not even
talking about genocidal attacks on indigenous people. As
important as it is for the United States to do all that it
can, in terms of not being attacked externally by gangsters
from wherever, we’ve got so many everyday attacks that are
taking place in this country that…
Q: Forms of state terrorism, economic terrorism…
A: Well it’s hard to even come up with a category, because
there are so many different forms. Just look at the
healthcare system. We spend more money than any other
country, any other developed country, and yet we’ve got
thousands and thousands of people who die because they don’t
have access. That’s a kind of killing that is taking place.
You’ve got workers who don’t have access to safety who die.
There’s no talk about them, but that’s a kind of killing.
That can be avoided just like we would have liked to avoid
9/11. You’ve got young kids in poor communities whose souls
are murdered, who don’t have access to any quality
education, no sense of significant safety, and so forth.
They’re dying all the time. Those are deaths too, and a lot
of that stuff can be avoided. So that when I look at the
obsession with this particular attack, which was vicious, I
see the downplaying of all these other deaths that are
taking place. I say something’s wrong. I take the tears of
George Bush seriously when he cries for the victims of 9/11,
as I take my own tears seriously, but then I wonder why he
does not cry for Louimo, when he is shot down by police as
an innocent civilian? And I say to myself, if you cannot
connect the tears for Louimo with the victims of 9/11, then
you’re missing something. I cried for both. Bush only cried
for one. Guiliani cried for one—you know what I mean?
Something is wrong. Something is missing there. And then I
began to wonder: well wait a minute, are these tears highly
circumscribed? Are they forced? And again the Socratic,
prophetic tells me if I can’t be morally consistent, I need
to check myself. I think that’s the kind of challenge we
need as thinkers, philosophers, citizens, and human beings
put forth to each other.
Q: I have one last question and it’s a question that I
think we should always be asking. I ask myself this question
as a Latino. It’s been 101 years since W.E. B. DuBois said
that the problem of the 20th century would be the problem of
the color line. By 2050, about 25% of U.S. citizens will be
Latino. We’re talking about the browning of United States:
What will happen to the problem of the color line in the
21st century?
A: That’s a good question. That’s a very good question.
Q: It worries me that the so-called “browning” of America
might submerge the question of the African-American, the
black…
A: You know, I think that because we deal with the legacy of
white supremacy that affects brown and black and yellow and
red and, in the end, it actually affects whites—they’re all
race concepts—as long as we keep the focus on the
institutional and personal manifestations of that particular
evil, then I’m not so sure that the numbers will make as big
a difference. I think when DuBois talked about the color
line he was really taking about this legacy of white
supremacy. He goes on to say the way in which it affects
Asian and Latin Americans and so forth. You can have a
legacy of white supremacy at work with no white people
around—just between blacks and browns. If we draw each other
through that white supremacy’s lens, then that legacy is
still very much alive and we can’t relate to each other’s
humanity. So it’s not going be so much a matter of numbers,
I think. It’s going to be how we respond to that legacy in
such a way that we can begin to dismantle some of the
stereotypes, some of the prejudices, some of the
institutional discriminations, some of the xenophobic
perceptions, and so forth.
I think in the end, though, the major
battle of the next 100 years is going be the battle between
the deepening of democracy and the dismantling of empire.
The degree to which blacks and browns decide to go, as a
large majority, one way as opposed to another—those
coalitions will probably be more important than simply how
we divide up a particular pie within the domestic context,
you see. And I think the brown brothers and sisters bring a
depth and wisdom and experience of what it’s really like to
be colonized—in Texas and California and what is now New
Mexico. That history is something that is very rich and that
is different than black folk. Black folk being enslaved and
Jim Crowed is different than being colonized, having your
border moved by soldiers by force, and so on. Coming from
Mexico, coming from El Salvador, coming from another country
and seeing America from the outside, gives one a
cosmopolitan view—for Puerto Ricans the same way as for
Dominicans. That gives a cosmopolitan view that a lot of
Black Americans don’t have. From Alabama? Well, that’s part
of the country… well, most of the time. From Mississippi?
Georgia? California? Yes, that’s still within continental
imperial U.S.A. You look at America from Mexico, from El
Salvador, from Puerto Rico—it’s like C.R.L James and Stokey
Carmichael, who are supposed to come from the Caribbean:
They’ve got very different views of this country and a lot
of Black people in America miss that.
Q: It’s another form of double vision.
A: Yes! Absolutely, but linked to this battle between the
deepening of democracy and the dismantling of empire.
This interview with Cornel West was conducted by Eduardo
Mendieta at Cornel West’s Office at Princeton University on
April 6, 2004.
Printer Friendly
Format