share interactive transcript request transcript/captions live captions
download
|
MyPlaylist
JENS OHLIN: Good evening, and welcome to the fourth installment of the Peter and Marilyn Coors Conversation Series. My name is Jens Ohlin. And I am the Allan R. Tessler Dean of Cornell Law School.
Thank you to all who are joining us today in person, as well as to the many of you who are joining on live through our Cornell live stream. It's my privilege to introduce tonight's discussion, because I firmly believe that the need for civility increases proportionally as our disagreements become sharper. Indeed, civility becomes easiest when we largely agree. It is when we disagree that we must strain to engage with each other in ways that are both productive and broad minded.
This series is aptly named Civil Discourse, because it was created with the intent to provide the Cornell community with a model for engaged but respectful disagreement. This series offers a forum for intellectual discourse on a range of difficult yet timely issues and allows us to challenge our own assumptions regarding contentious topics. I'm exceedingly grateful to Pete and Marilyn Coors, both of whom are Cornell graduates from the class of 1969, for their thoughtfulness in endowing this series. It greatly enriches our conversations on campus by allowing us to bring prominent figures and distinguished speakers to Ithaca from across a range of viewpoints and ideological perspectives.
As we listen to their dialogue, we are challenged to continue our own discussions on important and challenging issues with the same level of humility. Our hope through hosting these conversations is not to get to a point of forced or insincere agreement, but rather that we can learn to listen to one another and foster greater understanding across difference. And so without further ado, I would like to launch tonight's conversation by introducing our distinguished guests, who will be discussing truth-seeking, democracy, and freedom of thought and expression.
They are public intellectuals in the truest sense, prominent scholars, whose work has had wide influence beyond the walls of the academy. Joining us from Union Theological Seminary is Professor Cornel West, where he serves as the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Professor of Philosophy and Christian practice. Dr. West teaches on the works of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, as well as courses in philosophy of religion, African-American critical thought, and a range of subjects, including, but not limited to, the classics, philosophy, politics, cultural theory, literature, and music.
Professor West has written 20 books and has edited 13. He is perhaps best known for Race Matters, Democracy Matters, and Brother West, Living and Loving Out Loud. And his most recent book, Black Prophetic Fire, examines the enduring impact of 19th and 20th century African-American leaders and their visionary legacies.
Joining Professor West in conversation this evening we're pleased to welcome Professor Robert George, the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. In addition to his responsibilities at Princeton, Professor George has served as chairman of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom and also served on the US Commission on Civil Rights. His essays and reviews have appeared in the Yale Law Journal, the Harvard Law Review, the Columbia Law Review, the Review of Politics, and the Review of Metaphysics.
His books include Making Men Moral, Civil Liberties and Public Morality, in Defense of Natural Law, the Clash of Orthodoxies, and Conscience and Its Enemies. And finally, moderating our discussion this evening will be Cornell Law school's own Sheri Lynn Johnson, the James and Flanagan Professor of Law. In addition to regularly teaching and writing about constitutional law and criminal procedure, Professor Johnson also supervises the post-conviction litigation and capital trial clinics.
In 2019, Professor Johnson argued and later won the case of Flowers versus Mississippi before the United States Supreme Court. Please join me in welcoming Professors West, George, and Johnson. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
SHERI LYNN JOHNSON: The topic for tonight-- the topic for tonight is a broad one, a truth-seeking, democracy, and freedom of thought, and expression. And it's close to the one that the two of you have talked about in a number of venues. And I'm going to be-- it's somewhat surprising that how much the two of you agree on, because in many substantive areas, you disagree, but I think you agree on some matters about the very topic that we're talking about tonight.
So I was hoping to let each of you explain why you appear together and what you share and then I think I will ask you about some things that you may disagree about some concrete applications. So Professor George, why don't you start with, why you want to appear with Professor West and what the two of you agree on.
ROBERT GEORGE: Well, thank you very much Professor Johnson. And thank you, Dean. Also, I know I speak for Brother Cornell, as well as myself and thanking Pete and Marilyn Coors for this series. It's really an honor to be a part of it.
And the goal of the series is one that we deeply share. It's very relevant to the work that we do together. And what a privilege it is to be back together in person, again, after a year and a half with my dear brother Professor West. Cornell and I have been teaching together, speaking together, writing together, singing together, praying together for more than 15 years now.
Now it's not that we don't have some differences of opinion. We do. It's that we're united on some very important principles and values. And that's really what Professor Johnson asked us to open with our thoughts about.
But before doing that, I want to say, on a personal note, why I so value opportunities to appear with Cornel West and I feel so deeply blessed by our relationship. And that is teaching with Cornel, writing with Cornel, working with Cornel, he has shown me what it means to be a truth-seeking scholar and a non-indoctrinating teacher. And I think those are very important principles for anybody who aspires to lead a life of the mind and for any institution that aspires to fulfill the mission of colleges and universities. That mission is truth-seeking scholarship and non-indoctrinating teaching.
I also admire Cornel for his inspiring witness, not only for causes he believes in some of which I share, but also for the integrity that he models for his students and for the entire country. A lot of us in the academy would do very well to do better in following the example of Cornel West for seeking the truth, honestly in a spirit of openness, a willingness to learn, a willingness to be challenged, and then speaking the truth courageously, boldly as best one understands the truth. Back in 2017, you may remember that an incident occurred at Middlebury College, which got national publicity.
The controversial social scientist Charles Murray was invited to appear there. Murray is the author of the Bell Curve, very controversial book. He wasn't there to talk about the Bell Curve. He was there to talk about a more recent book on culture and poverty.
He had an interlocutor, someone named Allison Stanger, a very prominent professor at the college, whose main field was international relations. She had a political viewpoint very different from Charles Murray's. And she was there to be Murray's critic.
Well, when the event began, it was almost immediately disrupted. And the disruptions became worse and worse and people began to fear violence. Finally, Murray and Stanger had to retreat to another room from which they tried to broadcast their talk.
And someone pulled the fire alarm that forced everybody out of the building. A mob chased Stanger and Murray as they tried to get into the car to leave. She was pulled by the hair, thrown to the ground, suffered a concussion from, for which it took two years for her to recover.
Shortly after that incident, Cornel and I, who had been teaching together, trying to model the ideals and principles that we stand for, as truth-seeking scholars, as non-indoctrinating teachers, when this event happened, Cornel and I got together and said, we've got to say something about this together. We've got to defend what we do in the classroom together. We have to stand for the principles of truth seeking, and democracy, and freedom of thought, and expression that we have dedicated our lives to. And so we posted a statement called truth-seeking, democracy, and freedom of thought, and expression and invited students and scholars from around the country to join us by signing it.
And some 5,000 did from the spectrum, from across the political and ideological spectrum. People on the right, people on the left, people in the center, people are simply not classifiable. And in that statement, what we defended were freedom of thought and expression, freedom of inquiry, freedom of discussion as conditions for, a, truth-seeking and, b, self-government.
We invoke John Stuart Mill's argument in on liberty in chapter 2 in which he made the point that a person who understands only his own side of an argument doesn't even understand that, that we can only pursue truth if we do so with an open mind and with a critical and self-critical spirit. We've got to not only be willing to be challenged. We have to challenge ourselves.
We have to be not only open to criticism, but willing to be our own best critics, not because there is no truth. Any effort to make an argument for freedom of any sort, including freedom of speech, including freedom of thought, by appeal to moral relativism, is going to collapse on itself. It will refute itself.
So Cornel and I made the case for freedom of speech and freedom of thought, not because we think there's no truth, but precisely because we think the truth is so important. And nobody is going to be able to get to the truth, unless we are open to criticism and discussion. Let me put it to you this way.
Every single one of us in this room, every single one of us in this country, every single human being, who has ever lived, and I dare say we'll ever live on this planet, hold some ideas in his or her head, some beliefs that are wrong. If I ask you raise your hand if you believe that none of the beliefs you have right now are false, not a single hand would go up. It's because you are self-critical and understand that you're fallible.
And as fallible human beings, there are some things you believe right now that aren't true. And if I said, well, are you wrong about some things, only though the insignificant, superficial, not very important things, or is it possible that you're wrong about some very important things, deep questions of morality, justice, human rights, the common good? Are you sure that all your beliefs are true and none are false?
And, again, knowing our own fallibility, all of us would say, no, we could be wrong about some very important things after all. Brilliant and well-intentioned people throughout history into the 20th and 21st century have been wrong about some profoundly important things. And we know that we're made out of the same stuff, the same flesh and blood that they were made out of.
All right. So then we might ask, well, since we know we're wrong about some things, why don't we just swap out our wrong beliefs and swap in right beliefs? And the obvious answer to that is, because we don't know which ones we're right about and which ones we're wrong about. We're trying to reason our way to get to the truth of matters, especially the most important matters, matters of human dignity, human rights, justice, the common good.
But questions are hard. We know we can get them wrong. So since we can't just walk them out like that, how are we going to figure out which ones we're right about and which ones were wrong about so that we can get rid of the wrong beliefs to the extent possible and swap in right beliefs?
I submit to you, it's not going to happen if I don't allow myself, if you don't allow yourself, if we don't allow ourselves to be challenged and criticized. It's not going to happen if we simply allow ourselves to be reinforced in the beliefs we already have. If all I do is watch Fox News and read the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal and read National Review, or if all I do is watch MSNBC and CNN and read the New York Times editorial page in the nation, I'm just going to be reinforced in my own beliefs, whether I'm on the right in the one case or on the left in the other case.
I'm not going to be challenged. There's not going to be anything that moves me to actually examine the beliefs that very well might be wrong. So I've got to be challenged for the sake of the truth. I've got to be open to it.
And I have to have available to me competing points of view. This is why it's very important for universities, not only to value freedom of thought and expression, but also to value viewpoint diversity, making sure that faculty members engage with fellow faculty members with whom they disagree on important things, making sure students here and engage different points of view. And when we get it right, when it really works, then we grasp what I might call the Socratic brass ring.
And that's when we have gotten ourselves to the point where we can be our own best critics, where we don't have to simply rely on people who disagree with us to challenge us. We can ourselves challenge ourselves by thinking of the best arguments that could be made against views that we hold. And that's the ideal. And when education works, that's what it achieves.
And I'll close simply by saying that everything I have just said about the importance of freedom of thought and expression, being willing to be challenged, being open to criticism, everything I've just said about the conditions of truth-seeking is also true of the conditions of democracy, of self-government, government not only of the people and for the people, but by the people. If we shut that down, if we go into our silos, if we're unwilling to hear criticism, if we take it all personally, we will not be able to sustain a democracy. We know there are challenges.
We know that we human beings, fallible frail creatures that we are, tend to fall in love with our own views. We know as human beings we don't want our most deeply held, most cherished, our identity-forming beliefs to be challenged. We don't like that at all. We know we're prone to tribalism, that we'll circle the wagons to defend our group, the people who believe as we believe, breaking through that, grasping the Socratic brass ring is critical not only for truth-seeking, but also for democracy.
SHERI LYNN JOHNSON: So do you disagree with any of that Professor West?
CORNEL WEST: I don't think so. I don't think so, but brother Robbie and I have been at it for almost 20 years. So I tend not to just highlight though the agreement. And I think you're so right to do this.
I want to begin by saluting my dear brother, Dean, though he ends in a [INAUDIBLE]. I know you got a big job. And the man to do it. I think right now we salute you, indeed, indeed, indeed. And also, you, my dear sister, Professor Johnson, brother Curtis Flowers and his precious family, put a smile on their face.
That's serious business that's on the ground, very much so. That's on the ground. No, but Robbie and I come together, because even given our deep disagreements, we accept the notion that we're living in such a frightening moment in which the American empire is undergoing such a massive spiritual decay with levels of callousness and indifference toward the weak and vulnerable. It is undergoing levels of more decrepitude with forms of lies, and crimes, and mendacity, and criminality that are being normalized and routinized so that we begin with a commitment to honesty.
Now I love this brother, not just because he's honest, but because I love him, and his humanity, and so forth, but he says what he means and he means what he says, even when he's wrong, even when he's right. That's very important, because we're living in a moment now where in the professional managerial classes is so much about posing and posturing because of careerism, and opportunism, and fitting in, and ending up maladjusted to injustice and the planet about to go under. That's the fundamental question.
Do we even have the capacity as a species to avoid self-destruction? That's not academic question. That's serious. Does the American empire have what it takes to cultivate the capacity to even regenerate some of the slices of Democratic possibility, given its hegemonic presence on the globe? That's not academic question.
And then for me, and I'll come back to Cornell, and Cornell, this is where alphas were founded. Now you all know who the alphas were. 06, 06. I hear the sister say 06.
And alpha are not no fraternity of the socialites. We're talking about WEB Du Bois. We talking about Martin Luther King Jr. You're talking about Thurgood Marshall.
You're talking Donny Hathaway. Folk who don't know Donny, listen to some Donny Hathaway tonight and you understand what I'm talking about. You're talking about Duke Ellington.
You're talking about my father Clifton West. Those are serious human beings. They are exemplars of integrity, and honesty, and courage in willingness to cut against the grain, because they live in frightening times in their situation, in their context, and they were true to their calling.
They were not perfect. They were not pure. They were not pristine. They were not free of spot, a wrinkle, but they were human beings of honesty and integrity. And they all didn't have the same ideological orientation.
Thurgood Marshall couldn't stand Martin Luther King Jr. He was suspicious of mass movements. He thought the whole thing could be done through the legal system. OK, Thurgood, fine, go on and do your thing brother.
We love you, but some of us hitting the streets and going to jail why you doing your thing on the inside. But what brought them together was there attempt to hold on to a quest for truth. And the condition of truth is always to allow suffering to speak. And what brought them together was a quest for integrity.
And so the 20 years or so that we have spent together, even given our political and ideological differences we can get into, has been one in which we've tried to cultivate our commitments to the quest for truth and goodness. And I would add beauty, because the arts are going to be at the center of this thing in terms of dealing with denialism that we are up against right now, the hopelessness, the helplessness that we are up against right now. The artists will play a fundamental role.
Brother Robbie is a serious artist. I'm not going to ask him to bring out his guitar and his banjo, because we don't have time for that. But the important point is this, that you have to make connections with people who are honest and concerned about being for real. This is not the moment for simulacra and symbolizes and mask wearing.
And in that sense, I'm very, very blessed, because we don't have just a friendship. We've got a brotherhood. Our families are close.
I love his wife. He loves my wife and so forth and so on. And yet, on various issues, we go going at-- I won't go on and on in this regard, but I appreciate your first question.
SHERI LYNN JOHNSON: Well, I don't know that I disagree with any of that. But I'm going to say, I'm a small thinker. I'm not a big thinker. I think about specifics. That's probably what makes me still a lawyer.
So I want to ask you about some specific applications of what each of you have said and then see whether you agree on those or if you don't. That's interesting too. The first thing I wanted to ask you about was the comparison between what happened with the assault and the person being hurt, the Professor being hurt, and what happened at Harvard, when Ronald Sullivan was I would say pretty unceremoniously dumped out of his deanship of a Harvard residential college, because he was a part of the team representing Harvey Weinstein.
And so that's a little bit different. We're not talking about assaulting anyone, but what students were saying that they did not feel safe with talking to someone who was representing Harvey Weinstein. So I'd like to hear your thoughts about that or if you prefer your thoughts about taking professors out of the first year who say racially problematic things. So there are things short of assaulting people that might be responses to their problematic beliefs. And I wonder if you could start Professor West by talking about what you think about either one of those.
CORNEL WEST: I mean, it's a bit unfair to talk about Brother Sully, because he's my very, very dear, dear brother. We have a reading group. We've been meeting for years now.
And then we read Toni Morrison, Love Songs, WEB Du Bois's and Jeffers' book. We read the Power and The Glory. We just read The Dead by James Joyce.
So I've known him for many, many, many years. He's my partner. He's my brother. He's done some things I disagree with, no doubt about that, you see. So that it'd be hard for me to just zero in on his particular defense of what appears to be a gangster named brother Harvey Weinstein.
Now I believe gangsters ought to be protected in the legal system. And I'm talking about myself. I got a lot a whole lot of gangster in me. I need protection, because I'm about to do something ungodly any minute, god dang it. You don't know, but I believe that every citizen deserves a vigorous defense in a system.
That's true for Harvey Weinstein's. That's true for anybody else. I disagreed with the fact that he chose, but the principle I fundamentally agree with, because if that were the case, then my brother Huey Newton wouldn't have had any lawyers. Charles Garry and William Kunstler wouldn't have touched him with a 10 foot pole, because 89% of folk in the society thought Huey Newton had lost his mind. And all he was doing was loving Black people, but we know Black love is a crime in a white supremacist civilization anyway.
So you're going to be criminalized. Go on and keep loving them. So when it comes to legal defense, I'm a radical libertarian, a person gaining high quality defense across the board, but then particular lawyers have to make the choice.
So when I talk to Brother Sully, I said, how come you got to do it? Somebody else can do it. I mean, brother Harvey deserves defense, but how come you got to do it?
Now what is he doing right now? Now he's in Milwaukee dealing with a Black sister. A lot of times progressives say, oh, that's a wonderful thing he did.
How come you had to do Harvey? Well, he has principles that cut across the board in terms of citizens gaining access to fair representation. I think that's very important, very important indeed, but as I said before, I know there's a kind of existential dimension for me, because I've known him for so long coming out of Morehouse.
SHERI LYNN JOHNSON: Should he have been dumped out of his position?
CORNEL WEST: Oh, no, no, not at all.
SHERI LYNN JOHNSON: OK. That's what I want to hear.
CORNEL WEST: Oh, but the students got a right to get upset and still be wrong. You know, they got a right to do that. There were students in my class who did. And I tell him they were wrong, but the passion that they had in terms of ensuring that women are treated with dignity is very important, very important indeed, but they're just wrong.
And you tell them, here's the arguments. Let me hear your arguments, weak is pretty sweet in Kool-Aid, from my point of view, but let's argue. Let's give reasons in it.
SHERI LYNN JOHNSON: OK. So I'm going to I'm just-- one more follow-up on that, which is so 25 years ago, we had a professor here, who is long gone, just letting people know, at this law school who would not call on African-American students. He didn't.
CORNEL WEST: He's got to.
SHERI LYNN JOHNSON: Wait, wait, wait, wait. Well, you I think that-- so what happened was not that he went, not then, but the law school compromised by not putting any Black students in his classes. And so we-- wait. So we can think about that as compromise. We can think about another compromise that's similar is something that's happened at UCLA, something that's happened now at Penn, where the compromise with student complaints about the views of professors is to say, if we're talking about a mandatory course, you don't have to be in the section of that in that section. What do you think about that, that we can let students not take them out, but let them opt out of a particular professor, because they don't like that professor's views?
CORNEL WEST: That's different kind of question. I'm going to let Brother Robbie answer this, but let me just say this, that if we can't create context in which we have basic respect, then you're not going to have any high quality quest for truth and goodness.
So you got somebody who's just saying, I'm not choosing Black people. I'm not choosing Muslims. I'm not choosing Jews. I'm not choosing Arabs.
I'm not choosing gays. I'm not choosing lesbians. I'm not choosing non-binary. The faculty needs to have a special meeting and say, we have an identity as an institution.
We're fundamentally committed to truth-seeking. And therefore, we're going to have robust and uninhibited conversation, and dialogue, and inquiry, and is not going to be discriminatory against any group. And that to me is just basic.
That's what I mean by, he's got to go. You can't have folk-- after 400 years of treatment of Black people, you're going to have them at Cornell Law School and he says, I'm not going to choose Jamal or Latisha. Lord, have mercy.
SHERI LYNN JOHNSON: So what do you have to say about that Professor George, either about Ronald Sullivan or about moving students out of classes, where mandatory classes, obviously, if you teach another kind of a course, it's an upper class course, you just don't have to sign up for that course, but moving students out of mandatory assignments when they have issues with the professor's views?
ROBERT GEORGE: Well, first, let me say that I think every single law student in a classroom has the right to be called on and grilled by his professor. That's number one.
SHERI LYNN JOHNSON: I do think we are past that point. I hope we are past that point.
ROBERT GEORGE: Yeah. We're past that point. When the concept of safe spaces first began to appear in university discourse, I heard Cornel West say to a class we were teaching together, if you are looking for a safe space, you are in the wrong place. And then Cornell went on to say to those students, our students, the whole point of an education is to unsettle you. It's to disturb you.
And Professor George and I are going to spend this semester unsettling you, and disturbing you, and unsettling each other, and disturbing each other, and unsettling ourselves. Education works that way. There is no alternative to it, certainly not in humanistic fields, where we're going beyond simply transmitting information or certain intellectual skills, where we're exploring deep issues, issues of meaning, and value, the sorts of things that we do in liberal arts programs and in law and similar professional programs.
So we need to be willing to have our most cherished deepest held beliefs, religious, moral, political, social challenged. That's what you're buying into. There shouldn't be safe spaces. If that's what you mean by a safe space, a place where our will not be challenged, where my identity is going to feel unsafe, because things I believe at the most fundamental level that make me me are going to be challenged, that's the Socratic ideal. And Cornell and I are just deeply committed to that.
So what are the ground rules then? In truth-seeking, democracy, and freedom of thought, and expression, Cornell and I argued that the standard should be this. We are willing, we should all be willing to entertain any discussion, any argument, any point of view advanced by anyone so long as business is conducted in the proper currency of intellectual discourse.
What does that currency consist of? Reasons, arguments, evidence. Free speech doesn't mean hurling epithets at each other, calling each other names. No. The kind of free speech we're interested in is really unrestricted, but it's when business is done with reasons, with arguments citing evidence.
Now to Sullivan. Now I can be a little more objective here, because I don't know Professor Sullivan personally. I didn't have him when I was a law student at Harvard. And I didn't get to know him when I was teaching there, as I have on several occasions in the law school.
But it seems to me that the students were very, very wrong to demand disciplinary action against him or removal from his position in the Harvard house. And I understand that it was his wife as well who was subjected to this. The students were very, very wrong.
And what that reflects, we can admire their passion, but it was a misguided passion. What that reflects is a failure to actually explore the reasons that Sullivan and other lawyers are willing to represent, sometimes even feel they have an obligation to represent unpopular clients, even clients who are bad guys, gangsters, as Cornell says, even clients who are guilty. It was just a failure to appreciate that at all.
Now as I understand it, Professor Johnson, the Harvard Law School did not disgrace itself. It did not take action against Professor Sullivan, but Harvard University officials, in removing Professor Sullivan and his wife from their role in the houses, I think sinned grievously against, not only the general principle of academic freedom, but the principle to which we lawyers are committed that everybody deserves representation, that radical libertarianism that Cornell rightly called it.
Neither Cornell and I counts as much as a radical libertarian in general purposes, for general purposes, but we're civil libertarians. And it's an essential principle of civil liberties, that any accused person as has the right to qualified competent representation. And that's what he was doing.
Weinstein seems like a terrible human being, but even the most terrible human beings deserve their day in court, deserve to be adequately represented. And that's what Sullivan was doing. Final point on removing professors from mandatory classes, well, if a Professor says I'm not going to call on any particulars, whether it's one individual or its some class, that's absolutely unacceptable.
But if the Professor is doing business in the currency of reason, reasoned discourse, but giving reasons, making arguments, providing evidence in his or her scholarship, then I think it is another sin against academic freedom to remove that person from teaching mandatory courses. If students don't like what they're hearing from that professor or don't like what that professor has said in a law review article or in a speech, let them challenge it. Let them criticize. Let's have a conversation, but to stigmatize some positions that can be defended with reasons and arguments in the way that removal from first year of teaching does, I think damages the educational and intellectual enterprise. And to valorize and turn into orthodoxy other positions equally damages the educational and intellectual enterprise.
SHERI LYNN JOHNSON: I'm guessing there are going to be some follow up questions when we get to students turn, but I'm going to turn to something else now. And that's the first part of this topic, the truth-seeking. So I think in post-Trump America, the press has been more willing to label things as lies.
The mainstream press has said, that falsely claims, or lied and said, which they didn't used to do-- and I think we're not experts on the press, but we are experts maybe on when we need to call out our allies for what they have done that is not truthful or disingenuous. And so I thought I would ask you first, Professor George, about something that I'm thinking your sympathies are going to be different on two different questions and see what you have to say about that. So quite recently the Supreme Court denied a stay on the Texas abortion law.
It seems that any reasonable person would have to acknowledge that the Texas abortion law under current law is unconstitutional. It may be that the law is going to change, but under current law, it would be very hard for a lawyer to say that that's a constitutional law. But they denied a stay. Last night, they granted a stay in another case.
And the case that they just granted a stay in was that of John Ramirez, who is a texted death row inmate, who said I want to-- in the death chamber, I want to have my spiritual advisor, my pastor put his hands on me as I leave this world. And I want him to utter a prayer out loud. And Texas said, no, you can't do that. We don't allow either one of those things, no audible prayers and no touching.
And the Supreme Court granted a stay on that. Now my guess is that you have sympathy for the abortion law that Texas passed and that you also have sympathy for the claim of John Ramirez. Is that right?
ROBERT GEORGE: Yes. That's right. And as a matter of fact about two years ago, when the Supreme Court went in the opposite direction, and denied a stay of execution when a Muslim prisoner had requested an imam, I was severely critical of the Supreme Court majority for doing it. The majority was formed by the so-called conservative justices.
And the so-called liberals actually did what I thought was the right thing to do in that case or would have done in that case. And so I think that they were right to grant the stay in the Ramirez case, because I think you do have a very serious free exercise of religion claim there that Ramirez if it goes to the merits will win. And he's going to be allowed to have pastoral care.
SHERI LYNN JOHNSON: And I'm not surprised that you said that, but now I want to hear what you have to say about the other half of it, the Texas abortion stuff.
ROBERT GEORGE: The Texas case. So the Texas case, of course, is a case in which the state law is designed to make it impossible or at least very difficult to have pre-- to have challenges before the case is actually litigated on the merits. It takes advantage of principles that have been used for a long time in civil rights laws and environmental laws and in Rico cases to in effect empower citizens as private attorneys general. And that means you don't have a state official and therefore state action for the court to enjoin.
So the net result is that the cases would have to go forward as civil cases, not as criminal cases. They go forward as civil cases brought by private citizens. And then in the state courts, the defense would be the constitutional defense.
Here I think, as has been pointed out by a number of commentators, here I think what you see are the consequences of the complicated and rather abstruse standing rules, especially in the context of the private attorneys general statutes. And so I wasn't surprised at all by the outcome. And I think if we're going to-- we're going to have to decide whether to go in one direction or another, clean up the standing rules to go one way or another.
If we think that these sorts of cases ought to eventuate in injunctions, we're going to need to do that across the board. We're going to do it in the abortion area. We've got to do it in the environmental area. You've got to do it in civil rights area.
You've got to do it in Rico. If not, then the abortion decision was-- the refusal to grant the stay was wrong. And the court should fix it.
Now, the real issue, of course, is not this. This is a sideshow. The real issue is the Dobbs case coming up out of Mississippi, where the court is going to have to decide whether to--
SHERI LYNN JOHNSON: Well, the real issue for Texas women may be the issue that was decided in denying the state, but I think I heard you say then-- and this is what I wanted to hear you say is they were wrong to deny the stay. They were right to give the stay in Ramirez, and they were wrong to deny the stay because the standard for a stay is whether there's irreparable harm. And there's irreparable harm.
ROBERT GEORGE: No. You've got the stay action problem. That's what the law was custom designed, taking advantage of private attorneys general. You may not like this, but what the law was custom designed to make possible. So you avoid the injunction, preventing the law from going into force prior to an actual case arising.
SHERI LYNN JOHNSON: Well, I don't want to argue too much law, but I do want to point out that certainly was encouraging private action and one prong of state action doctrine is when you encourage illegal private action, but I guess my question isn't what the ultimate determination should be, but whether there shouldn't have been a stay, given that the effect of the law is a radical departure from what we've understood to be the rights of women?
ROBERT GEORGE: Well, the question is where the Roe versus Wade will be invoked? Will it be invoked at the injunction level? Will it be invoked in the state court actions that will be brought under the civil causes of action? And that seems to me a matter on which reasonable people can disagree.
SHERI LYNN JOHNSON: Perhaps. So I am going to ask you about--
ROBERT GEORGE: I take it you have a view on this.
SHERI LYNN JOHNSON: Not time for my views on this. So Professor West, I wanted to ask you about two things that you did differently and how you might explain them. So when Hillary Clinton was running for president, you not only criticized her in criticism, which I would generally agree, but also did not vote for her and really encourage people not to vote for her.
And when Joe Biden was running for president, you criticized him as well on not completely different grounds, but you told people that you were going to vote for him. And you did vote for him. And so can you explain how that fits with truth-seeking, because in both cases you disagreed with them I think I'm pretty similar grounds?
CORNEL WEST: Yeah, no, I appreciate the question. My argument was there is a difference between a neoliberal disaster and a neofascist catastrophe. And with Trump, it wasn't just him. It's this particular moment in the American empire in which the elites at the top who are hidden and concealed, who have a disproportionate amount of wealth and power are rarely highlighted, because the mass media is obsessed with, not just making money, but with sensationalizing civic discourse so that the gangster Trump could gain every minute of his speeches from the very beginning.
We couldn't get Brother Bernie on television at all. He had bigger crowds, but he wouldn't make the money. And he was pointing out the fundamental sources of power in our predatory capitalist civilization, you see. So that with Trump, it was a different matter.
The principle was the same. The principle was the same. I had already called Brother Barack neoliberal disaster. War crime, drones, innocent people, surveillance expanded, security state deepened, wealth inequality, and escalating child poverty in Black communities increase, doesn't touch the new Jim Crow. That doesn't sound like success to me.
That's neoliberal smile and brilliance, which he is. And he's a Black man, which is beautiful. He's a beautiful Black man, but he's in a White House built by enslaved Africans. They set the standard, not him.
The poor and working people set the standards, not the Black successors at the top of the empire, not the great breakthrough of the professional managerial classes and all of their celebrity status, you see. That's the legacy of Martin King, Donny Hathaway, WEB Du Bois, those particular brothers. We got Fannie Lou Hamer.
So that all I was doing is and all I've ever tried to do is be true to the best of what has gone into the shaping of who I am as a free Black man and as a Jesus loving-free Black man, because I'm a revolutionary Christian, meaning what? Meaning that what whoever the candidate is, it could be just a Kamala, support her when I think she's right, another neoliberal. Neoliberals not just some cliche.
It's a deep callousness and indifference toward poor and working people. And it is a massive accommodation to Wall Street Pentagon, Silicon Valley, and fundamental sources of power in a capitalist society that is undergoing disintegration. So that was at stake in that regard, very much at stake.
And so you're right. I had to pray, drink cognac, pray and say antifascist vote, Brother Biden, you got it. But what else did I say? You still a architect of mass incarceration. That's a crime against humanity.
You still supported the invasion and occupation of Iraq, where half a million precious brothers and sisters from Iraq were killed, and we won't even talk about it in the press as if an Iraqi life doesn't have the same value as a life in Ithaca. What kind of morality is that? Please brother Biden, I know what I'm doing in this practical situation, but I'm not going to downplay my own conviction.
Brother Robbie does the same thing in his own contact. That's why he was against Brother Trump, right? You went against the brother, gangster. But so what? The whole country has been founded on a lie.
Ask Indigenous peoples. Ask enslaved. Asked white workers with no property. The empire is founded on a lie.
Then there's another point to make. Every nation state we know is founded on some kind of barbarism. Can anybody trot out the 191 findings with all the myths of origins that hide and conceal the crimes that generated just like the Roman Empire Romulus? That's a human thing.
So the quest for truth is self-critical, but it's an attempt to make sure that we do not engage in easy complicity, and complacity, and conformity to what is in place, status quos, that will not tell the truth. So that, for example, when you talk about the press, CNN, CNN has been peddling neoliberal lies ever since it was founded. It was a state propaganda mechanism for the Democratic party.
SHERI LYNN JOHNSON: I'm going to concede that you criticize your allies too. How about that?
CORNEL WEST: Well, everybody is my brother and sister.
SHERI LYNN JOHNSON: I want to ask one more question. Then I do want to have time to turn it over--
ROBERT GEORGE: Before you do that Professor Johnson, can I just ask Cornel a question? Sorry. So, Cornell, just to be clear, we've never gone wrong, have we, by an excess of zeal in our commitment to America's founding principles? Where we've gone wrong is when we have been unfaithful. It's been infidelity.
So if we say we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, they're endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, among these are life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, that's not a lie. That's a no.
CORNEL WEST: Oh no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
ROBERT GEORGE: It's that we--
CORNEL WEST: I'm talking about the crimes and the lies versus the ideals and the--
ROBERT GEORGE: But this is the principle, the principle of America. There is no-- I'm not here trying to just--
CORNEL WEST: No. No.
ROBERT GEORGE: Sings my praises over other nations.
CORNEL WEST: No, no. Absolutely. Absolutely.
ROBERT GEORGE: But we are a very unique nation. This is the concept of American exceptionalism. We're not founded on blood and soil or throne and altar. We come from many different ethnicities, races, religions, and so forth.
But our unifying commitment is to a principle, the basic American constitutional principles. And I we should be able to affirm those and then criticize our failings as failings to live up to the principle. Am I right?
CORNEL WEST: Yeah. I see what you're getting at, brother, but you would agree with me that US is a pro-slavery document in practice, right? No matter what words are on the paper, no matter what words are on the paper, that the Democratic experiment was unable to break the back of the white supremacist slavocratic realities so that those ideals that you were talking about could not transfer and be translated. So in practice, from 1789, or so up until that ugly barbaric war, it was still--
ROBERT GEORGE: But the practice was a violation as the founders themselves understood of the principle that all men are created equal. I agree we needed the 19-- we needed the--
CORNEL WEST: The 14th.
ROBERT GEORGE: The 13th, 14th, 15th Amendments. So they perfect the Constitution, but they do it not by overturning a previous principles but by going back to the principle of the Declaration so that now the Constitution can more fully effectuate the principle of the Declaration.
SHERI LYNN JOHNSON: I think the two of you were not in agreement about this. And I happen to have to stand closer to Professor West than I am to you, Professor George--
ROBERT GEORGE: I am shocked.
SHERI LYNN JOHNSON: --on what the principles under which the country was founded, but I want to ask one more question before I turn it over--
CORNEL WEST: But the ideals-- I mean, human dignity is not an American principle. It's a human principle. And America is a particular version of that that holds for people all around the world. And you agree with that too.
ROBERT GEORGE: I agree with that.
CORNEL WEST: Absolutely.
ROBERT GEORGE: In practice, in history, it has not been the common understanding.
CORNEL WEST: Oh I know.
ROBERT GEORGE: And what did greatness concede, for most of history, for most cultures from most places? Why do we call it Alexander the Great Great? Because of conquest and domination.
CORNEL WEST: That's right.
ROBERT GEORGE: Greatness consists in conquest and domination. So where did we get the idea that true greatness does not consist in conquest and domination, but in humility, compassion, generosity, care for others? I would submit to you that it has something to do with the concept of the human being made in the very image and likeness of God, that therefore each human being is the bearer of profound inherent and equal dignity and that domination and conquest or a violation of that principle.
CORNEL WEST: Oh, no, no, I would agree with that, but the challenge is this, though, my dear brother, that there are prophetic interpretations of that that actually have to do with highlighting the praxis. There are abstract interpretations of that, which sound well on paper, but people still catching hell as the structures of domination are crushing them. And you would agree with that.
ROBERT GEORGE: I agree with that completely.
CORNEL WEST: So we're not that far as you think then.
SHERI LYNN JOHNSON: All right. So now I'm going to sneak in my last question, because I do want to ask one more. And then I want to open up the student questions. And here's my last question.
So both of you are people who both are people of faith. And who also have written about a religion. And so I want to ask you about the role of religion in democracy and particularly for political thinkers. And I want to confess my own different reactions to two uses of religion and then like comment on them.
So when President Trump brought the Bible and displayed it upside down, at St John's Church, I had a very negative reaction that was using religion for a profane purpose. When President Obama started singing "Amazing Grace," at the funeral in Charleston, South Carolina, I thought that's my President. But, of course, both of those presidents are speaking to Christian audiences.
And so was one of my reactions wrong? Were both of them wrong? What do you think about that?
CORNEL WEST: You got a right to your reactions. You know, I've heard "Amazing Grace" sung by some folk who--
SHERI LYNN JOHNSON: Who can sing better than he can? Answer that.
CORNEL WEST: Well, it's not just better, but it comes from the soul. It's not a PR operation.
That's a different thing. That's a very different thing. You know, what I mean, that's a whole different thing.
That's like John Coltrane and Kate. On the one hand, it's the dignity in that sound. There's the struggle in that sound. It's a blood-drenched sound in Coltrane's sound, when Aretha sings Amazing Grace to have the head of an empire with seven wars going on, hasn't said a mumbling word about the levels of poverty and so forth and so on in a particular moment in trying to assert his connection and organic link to a Black community that he's already in many ways betrayed, then he sings.
Bill Clinton used to play the saxophone when he was in trouble. And that vanilla brother could play some serious saxophone, but we would say, what? Put your saxophone down and fight for freedom. This is not a PR operation so that you have a right to your response, but I was very upset, because when you got white supremacists, a terrorist killing Black people, and you got Black people singing "Amazing Grace," grace ain't got noting to do with it.
That's the wrong song anyway. We got some songs in the Black tradition that you can sing, but not "Amazing Grace." So you got the wrong song anyway. So I was very upset in that sense, and I went on TV, and people called me, oh, Brother West, you still upset.
That's right. You got the right Black man. I'm still mad. I'm still upset. Why? Because I come from a great people with a great tradition, who've been telling the truth and seeking justice at the risk of blood.
So we ain't playing games with no PR operations, you see. Now with Trump, I wasn't surprised. I have never been surprised by any form of evil. That's part of my Christian sensibility, but I'm not a religious person.
You see for me, the Christian way of life is not a religion at all. Religion is a 19th century construct that comes out of the liberal Protestant discourse that has to do with barbarian differentiation of spheres in which religion is over here.
Ethics is over here. Epistemology over here. New physics over here, and they don't connect to one another. It's like constantly critiques. Here's a new science and a critique of knowledge.
Here's your ethics over. Here's your art over here. Here's your religion over here. That's not my tradition. at all. That's truncated European modernity understanding of religion.
That's why my dear Sister's, Leora, book, Judaism is Not a Religion, it's a brilliant book. She's absolutely right. Don't try to snuff all that rich Judaic tradition into these categories.
These are modern categories that are connected to ways in which domination is reproduced, ways in which knowledge is produced and so forth and so on. And so in that sense, for me, we're talking about ways of life that generate certain kinds of willingness to live and for something. And religions are not known for that. Religions usually are tied to ideological rationalization of accommodations to domination.
Was Jesus religious? Hell no. He was committed to a certain way of life of love that's different. Amos, are you religious? Are you a follower of Judaism? Esther, are you religious?
Those are categories we impose. These people are living their lives. And, yes, they include God talk, where everybody who includes God talks religious. Oh, must be teaching a class at Princeton Columbia, Cornell or somewhere. Make sure your syllabus is in place.
No. These things are so intertwined and interconnected. And it have to do with just structures of feeling and structure of the being and structures of valuing that's very, very different. Now it would take much longer to try to flush all of that out, but that's why I'm resisting your questions, because of are certain background conditions that I'm highly suspicious of. Do you agree or disagree with some of this?
ROBERT GEORGE: Say a word about faith though. Don't talk about religion. Talk about faith.
CORNEL WEST: Well, you see faith, there is a fiduciary dimension of every human life of trust. You could be the most radical atheist in the world. What is the fiduciary dimension in your? You believe in quantum field theory, in waves, and fields, and particles, and that's only 5%. The rest is dark energy and dark matter.
SHERI LYNN JOHNSON: And now I'm kind of sorry I asked that question.
CORNEL WEST: No. So that everybody has a faith element in who they are.
SHERI LYNN JOHNSON: Maybe Barack Obama too.
CORNEL WEST: No, but Barack is a Christian. He's not a Muslim. He's a Christian, but he's a neoliberal head of--
SHERI LYNN JOHNSON: All right. So we should have some student questions. And I think-- he has the mic.
AUDIENCE: Thank you so much for being here today and for all of your honesty. I think that's something that I really appreciate as well. I guess I want to ask, from your points of view, you would say that the threats to freedom of speech are applied the same or exist the same for people across the ideological and political spectrum? So would you say that folks on the radical right and the radical left or also across different demographics and races in our country really faced the same backlash and consequences for expressing honesty and freedom of speech?
CORNEL WEST: It's yours to tell. Was that correct?
ROBERT GEORGE: So I think it's the both of us, but let me begin. And you can and you can say a word. Yeah. I think that threats to freedom of speech, especially in academia, are coming from both directions. There are efforts to ban even at state universities the teaching of critical race theory.
That's a direct attack on freedom of speech, whether you like critical race theory or don't like critical race theory, whether you're critical of critical race theory, critical race theory is a theory. It's exponents, some of whom are quite distinguished law professors and others do business in the proper currency of intellectual discourse. They give reasons. They make arguments. They cite evidence.
Any effort to ban that is just a straight out attack on civil liberty. And it's got to be opposed. That wasn't the precise issue that you had in the Nikole Hannah Jones case at the University of North Carolina, but on that case, I weighed in against the decision to deny her or not offer her tenure, because it seemed to me that the board had overstepped in contradicting the faculty's judgment that she was entitled to tenure. And it looked to me like political considerations had intruded.
There was a case of the threat coming from the right against the left. Now on the other side, there are plenty of cases of the left coming against the right. You read about those now in the newspapers all the time. And Cornell and I together, along with 200 other academics, earlier this year founded an organization called the Academic Freedom Alliance, which is an organization devoted to providing moral support and financial support for legal services, legal representation, and advice for professors, whether they are on the right, left, or in the center, or unclassifiable, who, while doing business in the proper currency of intellectual discourse, have been disciplined, or punished, or denied teaching opportunities, or in any way censured by their universities for their speaking or for their teaching.
Our group is very ideologically diverse. It's really across the spectrum. Orlando Patterson, Phyllis Chesler, it's a people over on the conservative side, James Caesar. And we have already been representing clients that are on the right, left, and center. So I think that a firm commitment to free speech has to be ideologically non-partisan, and also has to recognize that threats come from both directions. And we find victims in all the different ideological camps. Cornel, did you want to add to that?
CORNEL WEST: No. [INAUDIBLE].
SHERI LYNN JOHNSON: Just a minute.
AUDIENCE: Hello? Yeah, hi. Thanks for the talk today. It's very, very helpful for someone who's not a lawyer. I want to bring the discussion back to Professor Sullivan's case at Harvard. What I was thinking and I looked at it while we were speaking is that how Professor Sullivan wasn't renewed as a dean of Winthrop House, an undergraduate house at Harvard, thanks to many things that went into the decision.
And so I kind of want to hear you speak a bit about when someone has responsibilities, not just to their law profession, but all sorts of things, like running an undergraduate house at Harvard, because I don't think the conversation that we had earlier really took into account how Professor Sullivan wasn't just going for his priorities as a lawyer. He had to act as a dean for an undergraduate house at Harvard and if you had any opinions on that as well.
CORNEL WEST: I think I answered the question, my brother, that what kind of transferable properties do you imagine would be operative in the one tree as opposed to the other? Is it possible for a lawyer to be fundamentally committed to fair representation that we're talking about and then still go live in a neighborhood with their own other civic responsibilities. And what kind of tensions do you have in mind? And what kind of principles would regulate the clash or conflict between those?
Because he's a lawyer and he's going to his home. And his home is mast-- well, they called it-- it used to be master. I think they call it head now-- head of Winthrop, where he's been all this time. He's represented a variety of different kinds of people, many of whom have done all kinds of things, some of whom are guilty. So it seems to me the real danger, I think, was when people were saying, well, Ronald Sullivan somehow must be someone who has absolutely no concerns whatsoever for the women who were viciously treated by Harvey Weinstein.
Those claims were bombarding he and sister Stephanie and his kids and so forth. So that's another factor. As you can imagine, we don't have time to go into all that. But just to have a conversation, I'm just wondering what was going on in your mind in terms of what kind of other obligations would he have to bear.
AUDIENCE: Yes. So I'm aware that professors who are Dean in these colleges have many hours of their day where they have to set up meetings with students, make plans, just a whole bunch of these things, like, I guess, weren't reported in the media at the time-- which running a very elaborate and media heavy legal team or being part just being part of just didn't gel with very well. And the resulting backlash among students also didn't gel well with running an undergraduate college with peace, with space for people to study, and all of those things.
It just seems that one can be committed to legal responsibilities but acknowledge that you have professorial dean roles to do first.
ROBERT GEORGE: Could I say a word about that, Cornel.
CORNEL WEST: Yeah, sure.
ROBERT GEORGE: So this doesn't seem to me to be too complicated. It comes down to a question of what may and may not be taken into account in considering whether to appoint someone or reappoint someone to an administrative or decanal position. If the knock against him genuinely, sincerely, not as a pretext, not as a pretext, but sincerely is he is so occupied with his legal work all the time-- they say this about Alan Dershowitz.
So occupied by his legal work all the time that he's not fulfilling the responsibilities. He doesn't have time to fulfill the responsibilities. That's legitimate as long as it's not a pretext.
But it seems to me that to the extent that the complaints against Professor Sullivan had to do with his representing a despicable client, they were illegitimate. And it was wrong to take them into account in the slightest. And I would say the same thing about the substantive views of a professor.
I've defended my colleague at Princeton, Peter Singer. Peter and I disagree far more profoundly than Cornell and I disagree. It's hard to imagine how we could disagree more. And yet, every few years when disability rights activists come to the university, often chain themselves in their wheelchairs to the gates of the university and demand that his tenure be revoked and that he'd be fired, I jumped to his defense.
I've published articles in defense-- not in defense of the positions that the disability rights people are complaining about or worried about. I share their view on those positions. He has a particular view of what gives human beings dignity. And on that view, severely cognitively disabled people would not be persons, wouldn't have dignity.
So I radically disagree with that. And yet, I've argued and would argue to the mat that to take that into account in assigning him classes, opportunities for engagement with students outside of the classroom, or if he were under consideration to be appointed to our equivalent of a head of house at Princeton, I'd be up there defending him against that. So it's a question of what the reasons are and whether the reasons are legitimate or illegitimate.
And we deal with that in the law. Those are your law students. And we deal with that in the law all the time.
Sometimes you can't say whether this or that is OK until you know what the reasons are for this or that. I mean, just take an elementary example. Someone slaps somebody else really hard on the back. You don't know whether that's an assault or saving a person choking just from the physical behavior.
You need to know what the reason was. Well, that's just a mundane example of what I have in mind here.
SHERI LYNN JOHNSON: I'm hoping we're going to squeeze in one more question because we're really actually out of time. But she's been waiting. So how about you get the last question?
AUDIENCE: Yeah. First of all, thank you very much for the discussion and for being here. I've been following your work for many years. My name is Yasmin and I'm from Germany. I'm an MPA student. Dr. West, you talk a lot about speaking truth to power.
And I sometimes found myself in these situations where I could have spoken truth to power directly or I could stay quiet in this moment and use my influential position, for example, within an organization to induce change from within. My question is, do you recommend doing the later one. And how do you decide to really do it, like publicly speak truth to power in a very open and public way or to stay quiet and try to do it like from within the organization? That's my question.
CORNEL WEST: I appreciate that question. That's something that I wrestle with all the time. I try, given my own fallibility and finitude, to speak truth across the board. I try to speak truth to the relatively powerless. That's very important.
So to speak truth to power only means your point of reference is just a powerful. No. No, no, no, no. Truth is all-embracing. So that has to do with the moments in which you choose to try to speak truth in such a way that it can illuminate, it can unsettle, it can unhouse. But that's true to everybody.
That's getting up tomorrow morning and speaking truth to myself. Pray for me. It's true. So the truth-telling is so much bigger. And it unsettles all who have the courage to enact this-- what the great Alfred North Whitehead called "noble discontent" in Adventures of Ideas. "Noble discontent." He associated that with Socrates, got him in trouble. Yep. Associate with Hebrew prophets, got him in trouble. Jesus, got him in trouble. Muhammad, got him in trouble.
So then the question becomes, how do you exercise phronesis? How do you exercise practical wisdom? And this is where you have to be jazz-like. You have to have your timing right.
So with this particular battle, I'm not letting this one go even for the powerless. For this particular context, I'm not letting this go as it relates to relatively powerless, in terms of your own group, your allies, or those in solidarity with you and so forth and so on. And we have this in our own families.
Are you going to speak the truth at November Thanksgiving dinner? No, let the turkey go on and hide and conceal all of our differences. I'm just trying to be kumbaya at the moment. Grandma needs a little sensitivity.
Well, that could be a good thing. You know, grandma deserves some freedom from Socratic inquiry at the table. You know what I mean? But that doesn't mean you accept her own prejudices and presuppositions even though you love her like a heart attack and would take a bullet for her.
That's phronesis. That's practical wisdom. How do we exercise practical wisdom?
We go back to Aristotle, Aquinas. You got a whole tradition in the West. You got traditions from Asia, traditions from indigenous people, traditions from a whole host of different-- but practical wisdom is crucial. And the timing is so very important.
So there I think you can't make it by yourself. You got to have some close friends, got to have people you trust. You have to have real comrades, not in a narrow ideological sense, but in this deeper existential sense, the folk who you really care about. They care for you. And they say, well, sister we think it's time for you to throw down.
You've been holding out, speaking truth to power. This is the time. Boom, you hit it.
This is the time to speak truth to power to your own friends because they got some power. The relatively powerless-- they always have some kind of power. They need to hear the truth too. So in that way, you have to have community.
And this is one of the real challenges of our precious moment. This is one of the reasons why so often truth-tellers are assassinated, incarcerated, misunderstood, misconstrued-- because they're isolated. They're estranged. They're alienated. They're pushed aside on the fringes feeling so lonely.
And it's hard to sustain communities over there because either you got state repression coming at you, you got state lines coming at you, got friends who's supposed to be supporting you, but they so concerned about their careers they're not going to go so far, leaving you dangling all by yourself. Am I making some sense? Which is to say, I'm not giving you a definitive answer. There's no such thing.
There's no such thing as a definitive answer. It's a process. It's a process. And one of the things Brother Robbie and I do all the time-- struggling together, singing together, praying together, disagreeing at a deep level, that when you actually do have somebody who will be there at the hospital, be there when your mama dies, be there when you're betrayed and so forth, that when I hear what he has to say, it's not just ideologically filtered. There's something existential at a level of human connection that makes a difference.
And you all have already experienced what I'm talking about because nobody in this room only trust the people who you have full-fledged ideological and political agreement with. You've got some friends and family. You've got some loved ones who have met the test, but who are wrong politically on a whole host of issues.
And so you have to be able to keep track of those different registers and dimensions as a full human being given the fact that the globe might go under, the empire's collapsing, the poor are being crushed, and all the realities. The pandemic's still in place. Can't get vaccines in Iran.
You've got the gangsters in China, the gangsters in the Middle East on various-- all sides-- and so forth. How do you keep track of all of those lies and crimes? That's a full-scale activity, a full-scale activity.
SHERI LYNN JOHNSON: And I've got to stop this full-scale activity right now because the dean has given me the eye. And this shows that I cannot cut off professors the way I can cut off students. So thank you all for coming. Thank you both so much.
[APPLAUSE]
Robert George and Cornel West discuss Truth-Seeking, Democracy, and Freedom of Thought and Expression as part of The Peter ’69 and Marilyn ’69 Coors Conversation Series.
The Peter ’69 and Marilyn ’69 Coors Conversation Series will provide a forum for intellectual discourse on difficult yet timely issues facing the nation. The series aims to foster greater understanding across differences by bringing together speakers with a range of political viewpoints.
Robert P. George: McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence; Director, James Madison Program, Princeton University Program in Law and Public Affairs
Dr. Cornel West: Union Theological Seminary, Professor of Practice of Public Philosophy at Harvard University and Professor Emeritus at Princeton University
Moderator: Professor Sheri Lynn Johnson, James and Mark Flanagan Professor of Law, Cornell Law School
