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09/12/2004:
"'Democracy Matters': Plenty of Blame to Go Around"
Ah well another stupid hatchet-job on Cornel West. We loved him better when he was more 'middle of the road,' when he didn't speak with pain about Israel, when he limited 'nihilism' to blacks...The only 'whining' here is that of the author of this dreadful review.by Caleb Crain
Of democratic ideals, Cornel West asks rhapsodically ''how can we not fall in love with them if and when we are exposed to them?''
Actually, I can imagine resistance. Democracy is unpleasant and hard work. It isn't enough to hold the right opinion. You have to speak to those who hold what you believe to be the wrong opinion in such a way as to convince them. Who wants to convince a horde of greedy, fearful, television-watching philistines they ought to give up their fantasies of strength and righteousness? Who volunteers to take the lamb carcass from the hyena? Let's just go back inside and whine about how terrible hyenas are. Unfortunately, whining about the hyenas is, for the most part, what occupies West in ''Democracy Matters.'' I agree with his sense that ''we have reached a rare fork in the road in American history.'' But I am not sure this book will be much help.
In this it is unlike his 1993 best seller, ''Race Matters.'' There he appealingly combined the style of a radical intellectual with a message that was middle-of-the-road. Writing in the aftermath of the 1992 riots in Los Angeles triggered by the Rodney King verdict, West was concerned about what he called black nihilism -- ''the profound sense of psychological depression, personal worthlessness and social despair so widespread in black America.'' He felt that the psychology of despair was a better way of explaining the black predicament than either ''liberal structuralism'' (i.e., blame socioeconomic conditions) or ''conservative behaviorism'' (i.e., blame lapses in morals). West's language had a Marxian flavor, but his answer was predominantly Christian: he proposed a ''politics of conversion.'' And he seemed uninterested in playing the race card. He made a point of disowning misogynist and anti-Semitic strains in black political culture, unsqueamishly contemplated black and black-and-white sexuality and criticized what he called the ''closing-ranks mentality'' threatening to homogenize black political thought.
In ''Democracy Matters,'' which he calls a sequel, West worries that nihilism has now spread to Americans of all races. ''Many have given up even being heard,'' he writes, and have succumbed to ''sour cynicism, political apathy and cultural escapism.'' West's political insights tend to come in threes. American democracy, he feels, is threatened by ''free-market fundamentalism,'' ''aggressive militarism'' and ''escalating authoritarianism.'' It will be saved, if it can be, by recourse to ''the Socratic commitment to questioning,'' ''the prophetic commitment to justice'' and ''tragicomic hope.'' West believes that in the fight against imperialism, the black experience may be a crucial resource, because blacks relied on tragicomic hope in their struggle for freedom, and it remains legible in their history and audible in black music, from the blues to hip-hop.
New York Times Book Review
According to West, the political nihilism of the nation's elite also comes in three varieties, to which he gives names of his own. ''Evangelical nihilism'' is the belief that ''we wouldn't be so powerful if we weren't right.'' It has nothing to do with evangelical Christianity. West calls it evangelical because those who believe that might makes right ''tend to become militant, broaching no dissenting views.''
The second variety is ''paternalistic nihilism.'' West credits Dostoyevksy's Grand Inquisitor, willing to burn the returned Jesus at the stake, with ''the canonical articulation'' of this. ''There is no more ceaseless or tormenting care for man, as long as he remains free, than to find someone to bow down to as soon as possible,'' the inquisitor explains. And so, because he pities the masses, he deceives them. Much like Hillary Clinton and John Kerry today, West writes. Call me a political nihilist, but I wonder if it's prudent to write about the Democratic nominee this way, especially if you hope, as West says he does, that Democrats like Kerry ''will play an indispensable role in the crucial anti-Bush united front.'' The comparison may be a little unfair, too. Myself, I don't really see Kerry as the sort who would deprive people of a chance at eternal salvation to spare them existential dread.
The third political despair in West's catalog is ''sentimental nihilism.'' The guilty party here is the news industry, willing to ''bludgeon the truth or unpleasant and unpopular facts and stories, in order to provide an emotionally satisfying show.'' Here too West deploys a literary reference, Toni Morrison's portrayal in ''Beloved'' of 19th-century abolitionists who spoke some but not all of the truth about slavery. But why turn to historical fiction to make a point about journalism today? There are examples closer to hand, like the spin initially given Jessica Lynch's story. In any case, the last six months have brought new levels of skepticism to newsrooms.
Faced with these three nihilisms, what does West propose? He is a professor of religion, and the spirit of his answer is academic. He offers to remind readers of democratic resources in America's cultural heritage, assess the obstacles and contributions to democracy of Judaism, Islam and Christianity and suggest ways of reaching young people. But he doesn't subject the concept of nihilism to further analysis. If you accept his descriptions, the argument is won. But he makes no effort to persuade anyone not yet a believer.
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On the contrary, he is sloppy about facts. For example, in one of the book's many capsule histories, he writes: ''The British empire, first shaken by the South Afrikaner anti-imperialist victory at the turn of the century and hobbled by World War I, pulled back financially and militarily in Latin America and Asia.'' The Boer War pitted British mining interests against settlers of Dutch and French descent, many of whom were white supremacists; to call the outcome ''anti-imperialist victory'' is a bit optimistic; the British won. It isn't true that Herman Melville's father-in-law ''decreed that the fugitive ex-slave Anthony Burns return to his owner,'' though he was trying a murder case in the same courthouse. Why contrast V. S. Naipaul with writers ''sympathetic to the Islamic sources of their modern identity''? He comes from a Hindu family. Each misstep is small; together they tell against West's judgment.
Then there are West's eccentricities of tone. For the ''soul murder'' of American youth, West blames cocaine, Ecstasy, oral sex and --Weblogs. He writes, somewhat cryptically, that ''Since 9/11 we have experienced the niggerization of America.'' He seems to mean that the terrorist attacks left all Americans feeling as vulnerable and hated as blacks have felt for most of our history, but the analogy is not explored. In a catalog of ''democratic artists, activists and intellectuals,'' West includes only three filmmakers; it's wince-making that two of them are the Wachowski brothers, who cast him as ''Counselor West'' in the ''Matrix'' sequels
West disapproves of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians and of America's implication in the treatment, and here his tone is at its wildest. The Israel lobby, he writes, ''has led many misinformed Jews down an imperial path that suffocates their own prophetic heritage.'' He assures the reader that ''the powerful Jewish lobby'' is ''far from monolithic and certainly not an almighty cabal of Zionists who rule the United States or the world.'' But then he notes that Mortimer Zuckerman owns U.S. News & World Report and The Daily News, Martin Peretz runs The New Republic and the Sulzbergers control The New York Times. The Sulzbergers are implicitly rebuked for harboring Thomas Friedman, ''whose misrepresentations of the Middle East are legion.'' But then Friedman is praised because his ''call to pull back on Israeli settlements is courageous.'' In a final burst of evenhandedness, West cites the pro-Israel stance of ''the non-Jewish Rupert Murdoch.''
It's a deeply confused paragraph, and a somewhat troubling one. If West does not believe in a Zionist cabal, why list these magazines and newspapers? Just two pages earlier, he recognized that many Jewish-run publications and organizations are forcefully critical of Israeli policy. The to-and-fro suggests that West was nervous about the paragraph. He should simply have omitted it.
West's intellectual catchment area is enormous -- he touches on topics as disparate as rap history, the Islamic novel in the 20th century and the latest thinking on postmodern Christian theology and the public sphere. But if he wants to address the people, he needs to give them more than just unfamiliar facts. He needs to give them reason to believe him, even if they don't really want to. At the perilous task of disillusionment, journalists, however sentimental, have been doing a better job.
