Transcript
Thank you for that generous introduction. I'd like to thank each and every one of you for coming out again, of those coming for the first time. I want to reflect on the decline of prophetic thought this afternoon, give you some idea of what I mean by prophetic thought, and give you some idea of what the nature of the decline is. And I want to do it by telling two kinds of stories, two kinds of tales, two
historical reconstructions of us some sense of where we are now in the present. Some definitions are needed before I begin. By the waning of the prophetic and contemporary thought, I mean the relative decline of credible utopian aspirations and effective strategies that motivate and guide fundamental social change. To what degree is the very notion of fundamental social change, not in Eastern Europe, not in South Africa, but in the United States? To what degree is that very notion
on the decline? A credible notion, believable one. I understand the prophetic to be enactments of critique and resistance of prevailing status quos that project democratic, libertarian, and egalitarian possibilities that guide action in light of interpretations of religious, and or secular traditions. That's the working rather loose definition of what I mean by the prophetic. Though I assume that all prophetic projects are imperfect, and this is a very important point to make. Martin Luther King Jr. was a
great prophet, but he had little to say about the dehumanization of women. He had little to say about the marginalization of gays and lesbians. He had little to say about ecology, but he was a great prophet in fact in many ways. He's a towering prophet of our time. All prophets and all prophetic projects are imperfect, but all such projects are always against the odds and against the grain. Therefore, my conception of the prophetic is principally a
form of left romanticism. Left romanticism. What do I mean by that? Left romanticism is a mode of thought and action that projects possibilities of the self, society, and the world that are different and better than those of the present. It acknowledges the radical contingency and changeability of the present. Most importantly, it accents the capacity of ordinary human beings in commonplace familiar and quotidian settings and convinces them that they make a difference and that their actions can
make a difference in the world. In this sense, all left romantic projects, all prophetic projects have to be linked to existential empowerment. We talked about this last night in terms of self-regard and self-esteem and self-respect and self-worth as well as critical intelligence. Of course, this is my link to the prophetic, to the pragmatic tradition, the use of critical intelligence linked to existential empowerment and of course inextricably bound to moral action. I consider
the prophetic to be left romanticism in that better human beings and better societies and a better world of those that fulfill the potential of unique individuals in the most democratic, free, and egalitarian conditions humanly possible. This is always a regressive ideal, never to be achieved, which means that betterment is always a possibility, amelioration is always a possibility. It's a regressive ideal. It's always worth striving for, never reach. The first story I want to tell is one
about the prophetic and contemporary thought in light of these explicit definitions. Implicit in my project, which I'll talk about in the last lecture, is the need for a fundamental moral and cultural revolution that allows ordinary people to feel in corporate America that they do make a difference, that their galvanizing, mobilizing, and organizing can make a difference and bring power and pressure to bear on the powers that be. And what role will prophetic Christianity play if such
a moral and cultural revolution is to take place? Why? Because I believe this moral and cultural revolution is requisite for any talk about social action and social motion and momentum in the 1990s. And this is a tremendous problem. Why? Because I'm going to argue later on that our very values are now so thoroughly saturated and permeated by market sensibilities and market mentalities that the idea of ordinary people organizing, making a difference, more and more seem far
-fetched from their point of view, or I should say, our point of view. But let me first begin with this first story. The waning of the prophetic in contemporary thought is primarily attributable to the pervasive cynicism and skepticism regarding any romantic projects in the modern world. This is quite understandable after the heart-tearing atrocities of Hitler, Stalin, Tito, Mussolini, Jairohito, Franco, the often overlooked barbarities committed in Asia and Africa and Latin America, usually under European and
American imperialist auspices. And in our own time, the ascendancy of Khomeini in Iran and Pinochet in Chile and Moi in Kenya and Mengistu in Ethiopia and Shamir in Israel, all deeply conservative elites with control over the military and the administrative apparatuses of these nation-states. Bureaucratic henchmen in the Second World who have recently been undermined, but whose legacies live on. Of course, these societies are in very delicate moments at present, trying to democratize but also up
against the international world in economic order. The IMF and the World Bank and big business waiting anxiously for new markets. And in our own context, of course, the age of Reagan and now Bush of Thatcher in Britain and so on. But a larger historical perspective is required if we are to better understand this waning of the prophetic in light of these larger forces. There's a broad consensus among most people, and this is what's interesting, even among
conservative intellectuals, Christian and non-Christian, there's a consensus that the first wave of left romanticism was desirable. There's not too many people around who would argue that the American Revolution was a bad thing. I talked about Buckley last night, I'll invoke him again. He thinks that revolution was fine. Not Sandinistas, not so-and-so, but George Washington and his Sandinistas, fine. Organize, get the guns out, fight those imperialists, push out the British colonialists. It's interesting. They
want to freeze that romanticism there, you see. This first wave, best manifest in the American Revolution, but also in the French Revolution. French Revolution is more controversy these days. American Revolution, not too much. This first wave unleashed unprecedented human powers and capacities. It fundamentally changed individual selves, as well as societies and the world. And it projected human aspirations and aims toward the precious ideals of democracy and freedom, equality, and fraternity. Two exemplary figures of this first
wave of left romanticism, Thomas Jefferson and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, put forward prophetic social visions and practical arrangements to give some intelligibility, some legitimacy, and credibility to these subversive energies and revolutionary hopes. These visions and arrangements curtail the institutional power and cultural influence of Christian churches, yet significant numbers of prophetic Christians supported the first wave of left romanticism. Yet despite the great human progress initiated and promoted by first wave left romanticism, some of the concrete effects of
its visions and arrangements reproduced and reinforced barbaric practices. White supremacist practices associated with African slavery, as well as, of course, the imperial conquest over indigenous and Mexican peoples. Thomas Jefferson, in this sense, is both prophet in his critique of also slaveholder and one ought not lose contact with neither one of those sides of Thomas Jefferson. He's not solely a slaveholder. He had great ideas in the Declaration of Independence, but he's not solely a freedom fighter because
he did, indeed, own human beings as property. There's other stories about Mr. Jefferson we need not get into at the moment in relation to possible abuse of women and slave women and so forth, or what the nature of his relation was with Sally. But I'll leave that on the table at the moment. But I'm enumerating these barbaric practices which occurred alongside one of the great moral experiments of the modern world, which is that of this country.
The second would be male supremacist and homophobic practices inscribed in familiar relations, cultural mores, and social restrictions. And there was excessive business control and influence over the common good as seen in the high profits and low wages as the laws against unions and property-based franchisement, not being able to vote unless you had a certain amount of property and so on. This underside of first wave left romanticism was often overlooked by its proponents, by those who
favored it, promoted it, as if it was a given or natural. That is, realities assumed to be necessary in inverted commas for human progress. Now the second wave of left romanticism, following the pervasive disillusionment and dissatisfaction with the American and French revolutions, focused on aspects of the underside of the first wave of left romanticism. The two great prophetic and figurative North Atlantic persons were Ralph Waldo Emerson and Karl Marx, two of my favorite figures of the
19th century in North Atlantic societies. Two names that are rarely invoked at the same time, I should say, but it seems to me there's a real need of a rapprochement between Emerson and Marx. They both could have learned much from each other, just as we can learn much from both of them. Both were concerned with the problematic of revolution. By revolution, they meant projecting their own sense of left romantic possibility. Both had a profound faith in
the capacity of human beings to remake themselves and society in more free and democratic ways. In their respective critiques of Christian churches, for example, the progressive role of science, the critical sensibilities that could flow there from, and the ways in which this new cultural authority, science, this new cultural authority on knowledge, on truth and reality, could help aid and the remaking of cells, society, and the world. The second wave of left romanticism was guided by Emersonian
ideas of America, of experimentation, of mobility, of dynamism, of self-creation, of what I would call, in fact, of improvisation and protean identity creation, the inventing of one's self on the road, as it were. Emerson used to talk about everything good is on the highway. What he meant by that is that a self is created only by means of improvisatory resources available to one always in process. In that sense, the Emersonian sensibility and the great American
art form jazz itself have very deep and profound continuity, since Afro-Americans are a self-invented on the move over against forms of oppression, but also in and of themselves projecting possibility. So this legacy of Emerson on the one hand, and on the other hand, Marxist conceptions of socialism, class struggle, of capitalist exploitation, of workers insurgency, and economic democracy, would play a fundamental role in reshaping the way the world, the directions the world would move, and
reshaping the way in which the world would be reconstituted between 1860s to the 1940s. In fact, during this period, human desires and hopes for democracy and freedom, for equality and fraternity around the world were roughly divided between the legacies of Emerson and the legacies of Marx. Of course, European nation building and empire consolidating efforts violently opposed Emersonian and Marxist legacies. These European efforts could be loosely called the major exemplars of second wave right romanticism, couched in
nationalist ideologies. I'm going to say more about these civil wars in Europe that would serve as responses to what would become the overarching legacies of Emerson and Marx. Yet by the end of the Second World War, what the defeat of Germany's bid for European and world domination at the hands of allied forces led by U.S.A., Emerson, U.S.S.R., deformed, truncated and distorted, vulgarized Marxism, that the second wave of left romanticism began to wane. The dominant version of
the Marxist legacy, the vicious and pernicious Marxist Leninism at the time led by Joseph Stalin, was perceived by most left romantics as repressive, repulsive and retrograde. The major mode of the Emersonian legacy and its distorted versions, its vulgarized versions of Americanism led by President Truman, President Eisenhower, was viewed by most left romantics as racist and empty. The third wave of left romanticism proceeded from a sense of deep disappointment with Marxist Leninism on the one hand and
Americanism on the other. The exemplary stirrings could be found in the Third World and among people of color in the First World. Gandhi in India, Jose Carlos Mariete in Peru, Nasser in Egypt, Martin Luther King Jr. in the United States, trying to create some middle way between the Marxist Leninism on the one hand and the Americanism on the other, providing critiques of both from their own perspective context. Yet, mainly to the tragic facts of survival, the
myopic leadership and limited options, most of Third World romanticism swerved away from the third wave of left romanticism and into the traps of either a regimening Marxist Leninism or a pernurious Americanism. In fact, most of me, the figures that I invoked most of course into tragically, assassination, murder, be it either the agents of one or the other or just mad men and women. Both the vulgar Americanism and the vulgar Marxist Leninism providing very little space for
prophetic projects to take off, to have a life. The major attempts to sidestep these traps in the Second World, Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in '68, Poland in 1970 and 1980, Chile under Allende, Jamaica under Michael Manley in the '70s, Grenada under Maurice Bishop, Nicaragua under the Sandinistas have been crushed or encountered formidable, usually insurmountable obstacles owing to these two major forces, Marxist Leninism on the one hand and the vulgar Americanism on the other. The two great
secular figures and the one grand religious thinker of the third wave of left romanticism, namely John Dewey, Antonio Gramsci and Reinhold Niebuhr of the 1930s are still in the process of being understood and appreciated in our own time. Of course the battle over Niebuhr in many ways is a battle over the legacy of these two in terms of both his early work as well as his later work. The Niebuhr of the '30s as democratic socialist and
the Niebuhr of 1948 with his picture on Time magazine becoming the establishment theologian of Cold War America. Which Niebuhr is the real Niebuhr? No such thing as the real Niebuhr. He's many. He's that complex and that rich and that confused all at the same time. Tremendous terrain for resources for those concerned about prophetic project in the 1990s. Yet presently there simply are no major left romantic visions or strategies that can withstand serious scrutiny, respond with subtlety
to the complexities of our present postmodern moment, and most importantly gain widespread acceptance among ordinary people. And this is true in the first as well as third worlds. It's no longer true in the second world as ordinary people organized have made a difference. A fundamental difference in light of, as I noted yesterday, the dissolution of that empire that understood itself as the exemplar of Marxist Leninism, namely the Soviet Union. Plausible candidates indeed include feminism, ecological perspectives
within churches, liberation theologies of various sorts. These are the beacons that attempt to make there be it as it were. But they require much more development and maturation to become major prophetic projects outside certain narrow pockets throughout the world and especially in the U.S.A., especially in In this sense, the waning of the prophetic and contemporary thought primarily is a matter of the relative eclipse of left romantic options in a world dominated by legacies of Marxist Leninism
and Americanism with both undergoing decline and decay. It's no accident that pre-modern sources of hope and possibility have fused some life into our situation. And by pre-modern sources, I mean religious sources. I mean ways of life and ways of living, of ideologies in the neutral sense of that term coming back with tremendous vitality and vibrancy. Prophetic religion in Brazil, Poland, South Korea, and South Africa, of course, are major examples in this regard. Yet minimal
results are apparent in the United States. And in all honesty, these pre-modern sources have been far more explosive and effective when fused with right romanticism with chauvinistic perceptions, nationalistic perceptions, races, sexes, homophobic perceptions becoming more and more widespread in our society and most frightening among young people. So that this first story that I'm telling about the waning of prophetic thought has to do with the decline of left romantic options, the decline of the idea in
this country that ordinary people can project their aspirations and act on those aspirations in order to create a more democratic, free, and equal society. It then leads me to look back on three major projects of cultural critics who are speaking to the crisis in their own day. And I mentioned yesterday the three critics are Matthew Arnold, T.S. Eliot, and Franz Fanon. And to what degree have their projects become as truncated as any left romantic project
in our day? What can we learn from these three critics? And to what degree do they represent the most fundamental historical processes that circumscribe our postmodern moment? Those three processes being, on the one hand, the end of the age of Europe and what the ramifications and repercussions have been, the second, the ascendancy of the United States to uncontested world power, and third, the decolonization of the third world and the paralysis felt in the third world in
terms of ordinary people there projecting some sense of possibility and feeling that they can be organized and mobilized and make a difference. And let me begin with Matthew Arnold. One of the reasons I've been teaching Matthew Arnold now for the last three years in religion departments, and people often ask me why Matthew Arnold, a fascinating cultural critic, one who believed one had to outgrow one's religious skins in order to be involved in the crisis of one's
day, was quite critical of the biblical criticism of his day, was quite critical of religious practices of his day, but always had a deep religious residue in his own secular project and was struggling with the role of religion under modern secular conditions. What's most fascinating about Matthew Arnold was that he recognized that religion, the glue that had fragile held together the old aristocratic led regimes of the 18th and 18th centuries in Europe could not do so
in the 19th century. Like Alexis de Tocqueville in France, Arnold saw that the democratic temper was the wave of the future. Wasn't that crazy about it, but he saw it moving and he wanted to promote it in his own way as he articulated his version of what that democratic temper ought to be. He proposed a new conception of humanistic culture that could play an integrative role in cementing and stabilizing an emerging secular bourgeois and capitalist society.
And Arnold, of course, is writing in the middle of the great European Empire in the 19th century, the British Empire, control of India, parts of Africa, and so on. Arnold's famous castigation of the immobilizing materialism of the declining aristocracy, the vulgar Philistineism of the emerging middle classes, and most importantly, the latent explosiveness of the working majority from his point of view. This project was motivated by a desire of creating new forms of legitimacy and new forms
of authority and new forms of order in a rapidly changing moment in late 19th century Europe. For Arnold, this new conception of culture, as he articulated in Culture and Anarchy, his attempt to put forward his own kind of prophetic project in the midst of the British Empire with tremendous blindnesses and exclusions. He said, it seeks to do away with classes, this is Arnold in 1869, seeks to do away with classes to make the best that has
been thought known in the world, current everywhere, to make all persons live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light. Intelligence and beauty, the Swiftian slogan. This is the social idea, he said, and men of culture are the true apostles of equality. The great men of culture are those who have had a passion for diffusing, for making prevail, for carrying from one inner society to the other, the best knowledge, the best ideas of their time. Those who
have labored to divest knowledge of all that was harsh, uncouth, difficult, abstract, professional, exclusive, this is still Arnold writing, to humanize knowledge and make it efficient outside the clique of the cultivated and learned, yet still remaining the best knowledge and thought of the time, and a true source, therefore, of sweetness and light. As an organic intellectual of an emergent middle class, Arnold was inspector of schools, the Latin Expanding Educational Bureaucracy, was professor of poetry at Oxford,
the first non-cleric and the first to lecture in English rather than Latin, and an active participant in a thriving magazine network to communicate with the literate audience. Arnold defined and defended a new secular culture of critical discourse lodged in the educational and periodical apparatuses of modern society's fundamental aim to contain and incorporate the frightening threats of an arrogant aristocracy on the one hand and an anarchic working majority on the other. Arnold's ideals of disinterestedness, of
dispassion, and of objective inquiry would become the master terms in discourses of the cultures of as well as seminaries even, you see, balance, distanciation, distancing oneself from one's passions and one's biases and one's prejudices, creating a space for dialogue, but a dialogue that would take place only among those who Arnold defined as alien, those who are willing to shed their parochialism and come and be homogenized in this new community of learned, gentle men, as it were.
There's a fascinating sentence in Arnold's text. He reads as follows. He says, Through culture seems to lie our way, not only to perfection, but also to safety, but also to safety. This notion of culture as a fortress that brings people in over against a chaos reigning on the outside, a safe, delicate, genteel, tactful space over against the barbaric masses, fundamental notion, fundamental metaphor in Arnold's thinking that will have tremendous impact on both how one thinks about
the prophetic and ways in which intellectuals themselves remain inscribed in places that make it difficult for them to take seriously the prophetic in relation to the masses of whom uncouth, uncultivated, barbaric, uncontrollable, ignorant, superstitious, and so forth and so on. All of the different characteristics and features described to the rabble since the Enlightenment. For Arnold, the best of the age of Europe, modeled on Periclean Athens, Elizabethan England, and late Republican, early Imperial Rome, could be promoted
if there was an interlocking affiliation, the emerging middle classes, an homogenizing culture of critical discourse in the universities and schools, and most importantly, the state. Needless to say, Arnold's project still informs much of the academic practices and cultural attitudes today. Our dominant view is about the canon, the debates about the canon, both in seminaries as well as in universities, in many ways proceed either on Arnoldian turf or over against Arnoldian assumptions. What is the best that
has been thought and said? By whom? By what standards? How do we go about debating about these standards? How do we understand the very notion of the canon and canonicity? What are our models of canonicity and so forth? And of course, this has repercussions all the way down to our admission procedures and collective self-definitions as academicians and intellectuals. You know, Arnold's project was disrupted by the collapse of 19th century Europe, World War I. This unprecedented
war, the first of the bloody civil wars within Europe, brought to the surface the crucial role, not the violent potential of the masses that Arnold feared, but rather of the very state that he valorized. It was the nation states that were responsible for that human carnage that brought an end to the age of optimism and progress and inevitable amelioration in 19th century Europe upon the ashes of the vast human carnage emerged T.S. Eliot. Eliot's image
of Europe as a wasteland, a culture of fragments with no cementing center became predominant for post-war Europe. And though his early poetic practices were more radical, open, international than his Eurocentric and sometimes xenophobic and downright anti-semitic moments in his criticism, Eliot posed a return and revision of tradition and capital T as the only way of regaining European cultural order and political stability. Eliot's project of reconstituting and reconceiving European culture after the internal collapse of
imperial Europe can be viewed as a response to the probing question posed by Paul Valeré in The Crisis of the Spirit, published immediately after World War I. Valeré writes, he says, this Europe, will it become what it is in reality, i.e. a little cape of the Asiatic continent, or will this Europe remain rather what it seems, i.e. the priceless part of the whole earth, the pearl of the globe, the brain of a vast body?
For Valeré, this was going to be the center of the problematic, you see. How long could those nations between Atlantic Ocean and Euro mountains, whole center stage, or at what point would their civil wars just be civil wars rather than world wars? What made them think that a war between themselves was a world war, as they did in World War I. Eliot's contemporary history, especially European history, had become, as James Joyce and Stephen noted in Ulysses
of 1922, a nightmare from which he was trying to awake, an immense panorama of futility and anarchy, as Eliot put it in his renowned review of Joyce's modernist masterpiece in the Dial of November of 1923. In Eliot's influential essay, Tradition and the Individual Talent, published in 1919, Eliot stated, and I quote, yet if the only form of tradition of handing down consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us, in a blind or timid
adherence to its excesses, tradition should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the sand, and novelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance, Eliot writes. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it, you must obtain it by great labor. Tradition going to be the major means by which this center that seemingly cannot hold, as Yeats put it, would indeed be held together. After his conversion
in 1927, Eliot found his tradition in the Church of England, a tradition that permitted him to promote his Catholic caste of mind, his Calvinistic heritage, his puritanical temperament, and his rebullient patriotism for the old American South. Of course, Eliot was born in St. Louis, raised in St. Louis. Like Arnold, Eliot was obsessed with the idea of civilization and the horror of barbarism. Echoes of Joseph Conrad's Kurtz in the Heart of Darkness, of course, is seen in
the poem itself, The Wasteland. More pointedly, he was obsessed with the notion of the decline and decay of European civilization, and with the advent of World War II, Eliot's obsession became a reality. Again, unprecedented human carnage, 50 million, including, of course, the indescribable attempt to exterminate Jewish human beings. And Europe became the devastated and divided continent, the last nail in the coffin of the Age of Europe. It took place. We then moved into the second moment,
which in many ways for us is more important in some ways in the end of the Age of Europe, and that is the ascendancy of the United States to the center of the historical stage. What prophetic possibilities loom within this move of America to the center? In the words of André Marot, the first nation to do so without trying to do so, become a world power. Can this America move from perceived innocence to corruption without a
mediating stage of maturity? That would be the question. It remains a question. The U.S.A., within the phrase of Henry James, its hotel civilization, a unique fusion of the centrality of the market with a stress on the warmth and security of the home, both highly privatistic phenomena, both highly distrustful of notions of the common good and public interests. You see, this America was unprepared for world power status, yet with the recovery of Stalin's Russia, a legacy exemplar
of that vicious and pernicious Marxist Leninism with 20 million dead, of course. The recovery of Stalin's Russia, the U.S.A. felt compelled to make its presence felt around the globe. The Marshall Plan to strengthen Europe against Russian influence and provide new markets for U.S. products, the 1948 Russian takeover of Czechoslovakia, the 1948 Berlin blockade, the 1950 beginning of the Korean War, and the 1952 establishment of NATO forces in Europe, it was very clear that the United
States could not escape from world power obligations. The United States had become an empire. There would be two great empires. What possibilities for prophetic projects loom in a world dominated by these two empires. The post-World War II period in the United States, the first decades, the so-called American century, but only the last 28 years, was projected as American century. It was one of the incredible economic boomers I noted yesterday, but also cultural ferment. For
the first time, the effect of the decentering of Europe was the slow but sure decentering of male, white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant hegemony in the cultural sphere and the political sphere in the States. Many holding on to their Arnoldian model. You saw this slowly but surely in universities. Of course, the major entree was first Jewish Americans as they began slowly but surely to be included within the formerly thoroughly anti-Semitic structures of the institutions of higher learning,
of the Harvard's and Yale's and Columbia's and Princeton's of course. We're talking about the larger university in this context. This unraveling would be basic for the United States opening given the creation of this mass class that I talked about yesterday with the GI Bill, with the supportive networks from the government, which is to say from citizens taxes and so forth, which would play such a fundamental role. What would occur would be the creation of on the
one hand mass culture and on the other hand in the '60s a possibility of a new radical politics. A new radical politics owing to the fact that a middle-class leadership in the belly of an apartheid-like south, a black middle-class leadership led by courageous petty bourgeois preachers who had privileged vis-a-vis their own parishioners. Just as privileged students in black colleges, only eight percent of black students college age attended college in the 1960s.
Privileged students out of great courage and sacrifice would attempt to break the back of an apartheid-like rule of law in the south, which would unleash new left romantic sensibilities that would seize the imagination of bourgeois students in the most elite institutions of higher learning in this country, beginning with Berkeley in '64 and University of Michigan with the founding of students for democratic society in Columbia and Harvard. Hit Princeton a little later, but when it hit
it had an impact. These left romantic sensibilities initiated by of course the movement led by Martin Luther King Jr., the Montgomery Improvement Association, and all of the various sparks that that created on into the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, on into the anti-war movement, feminist movement, and so forth. The 1960s remains the starting point for reflection about prophetic projects, what the blindnesses were, mistakes made, but also the values projected deeply, deeply left romantic values of possibility,
the notion that ordinary Americans could in fact make a difference. These sensibilities are associated with the third moment in my second story, which is a decolonization of the third world. There are no 1960s in America without the history of colonized people struggling against imperial rulers around the world. Martin Luther King looks to India, he looks to Gandhi's prophetic project over against British imperialism, for example. He is there in 1957 when Nkrumah is made president of Ghana.
It seemed as if a very new kind of globe, a decolonized globe, was in the making, in the very way in which decolonization took place, usually by means of conscientization, which is to say the conception of oneself as a subject in history, making a difference rather than an object or a victim in history being played upon and acted against. A different sense of one's identity, of construction of new identities, and also in a situation of violence,
of institutionalized violence, as well as counter violence against that institutionalized violence. Put forward new attitudes and perspectives on the long underside of not only the age of Europe but also that of the economic boom in the United States, upon whom's backs European progress and European order had been built, upon whom's backs American prosperity in the 1950s had been built. And talking about upon whose backs, I'm not talking solely about working people in the United States, I'm
not talking solely about black laborers in the house, but I'm also talking about, of course, U.S. hegemony in Latin American markets in the 50s, and the over 45 interventions and invasions by U.S. soldiers to ensure the large corporate profits that would help boost up this unprecedented economic boom unknown in the world, unknown in the modern world, to create this mass middle class that many of our parents were trying to get in on. And some
black folk, for the first time, having been here for 370 years, got a small slice of after blood, sweat, and tears. The impetuous ferocity and moral outrage that motors the decolonization process is best captured by Frantz Fanon in his 1961 classic, The Wretched of the Earth. And one can see, of course, echoes of liberation theology being articulated in Fanon's decolonization project. And he writes, I'm going to read a little bit of Fanon, he says, decolonization which
sets out to change the order of the world is obviously a program of complete disorder. It's a complete reversal of the notion of Arnoldian order, because Arnold's conception of order was based in part on ensuring the thorough going disorder of those upon whose his order was based. So that Fanon says one can see indeed a disorder emerging over against this order, because that's what it is. Fragmented identities, told they're not part of the human family, told
they have no intelligence, told they have no beauty, told they have no moral character, told that their communities have no history, told that themselves have no heritage. How could that but be thorough going fragmentation along with the subordination over against European order, over against American white highbrow order? Yes, different styles articulated, different resources mustered because of resources denied. The nature of the confrontation. Fanon goes on to say, he says, the first encounter of the situation of
colonies between colonizer and colonizer was marked by violence in their existence together. That is to say the exploitation of the native by the settler was carried on by dent of a great array of bayonets and cannons. Decolonization is therefore the need of a complete calling and question of the colonial situation, if we wish to describe it precisely we might find it in the well-known words, this is still Fanon, but the last shall be first and
the first last. Decolonization is the putting into practice of this sentence. The naked truth of decolonization evokes for us the searing bullets and bloodstained knives which emanate from it, for if the last shall be first this will only come to pass after a decisive struggle between the two protagonists. Fanon's words in the 1990s may sound a bit distant, you might say well this is rhetoric coming out of a situation of yes dire and excruciating circumstances and
so forth, has very little relevance today for us. We've seen what has happened in the third world, we have seen how third world neo-colonial elites have repressed and regimented their own populations and tied their own projects with those of economic interests in the west, created austere policies for their people in order to gain IMF loans and world bank support and so forth and so on. We can tell that story, but the important thing is that
first Fanon's strong words do still describe certain parts of the world, the occupying British army and colonized Irish in Northern Ireland, the occupying Israeli army and subordinated Palestinians on the west bank in Gaza Strip, the South African army and colonized black South Africans in the townships, even after the release of Mandela, most South Africans are still not free, the Japanese police and Korean communities, very little people talk about the plight of Koreans in Japan, it's atrocious.
The Russian army and colonized Armenians and others in southern and eastern the USSR as they attempt to bring their prophetic critique over against the xenophobic Russian elite that imposes its will upon subordinated peoples. His words also partly invoke the sense many black Americans have toward police departments and urban centers. In other words, Fanon is articulating centuries-long heartfelt human responses to being degraded and despised, hated and hunted, oppressed and exploited, marginalized and dehumanized at the hands
of powerful xenophobic European, American, Russian and Japanese imperial countries. And for a brief moment prophetic projects did take off in the United States but were quickly and effectively crushed and not just by means of repression, but most importantly because in 1973 there was only 0.4 percent increase in productivity in the U.S. economy and that for prophetic projects to actually take hold in the United States it usually presupposes economic growth by means of corporate priorities.
There was unprecedented economic growth in the '60s, 2 percent inflation, 3 percent unemployment for the general population though 10 percent for black population. The pie was getting bigger quickly, not being redistributed but getting bigger. In '73 there was no longer the case. Contraction set in and this is what I want to argue is the major impediment of a prophetic project getting off the ground given the market values, the market mentalities and market moralities that I've talked
about before. It is the contraction of growth after 73 with the deep crisis in the international world economy, America's slump in productivity, the challenge of opaque nations, the North Atlantic monopoly of oil production, increasing competition in high-tech sectors of the economy from Japan and West Germany, the growing fragility of the international debt structure. The United States entered a period of waning self-confidence compounded by a water gate. It's very clear that the United States felt
as if its world position was no longer uncontested. There's nothing more dangerous than an empire in slow decline. It brings out some of the more nasty features of its history and its present as history. As the standards of living for the middle classes declined, owing to runaway inflation and the quality of living for most failed due to escalating unemployment and underemployment and crime, secular neoconservatism and religious conservatism emerged with power and potency. This fusion of fervent
neo-nationalism of traditional cultural values profoundly sexist and deeply chronically xenophobic. And free market, I'll put free market inverted commas, policies served as the groundwork for our present era, an era in which it is very difficult to take seriously the notion of prophetic project as I defined it in the early part of this lecture. Our present moment is best understood in light of the cultural context with the one hand diversity plurality as a legacy of those
voices that spoke with such power in the '60s. We cannot not talk about diversity and heterogeneity but is within the context of a deep political conservatism and in the context of an ongoing economic crisis in terms of America's ability to compete with other nations in the I'm not referring to the economic recovery that Mr. Reagan and Mr. Bush talk about because as we know it's an economic recovery that is so class skewed that 40 percent of
the jobs are the casualization of employment, they're contingent jobs, they're part-time jobs, they're working at Burger King and McDonald's and so forth with no benefits, low wages and for those other 60 percent it is for the well-to-do. Those who are educated, those who did seize those unprecedented opportunities that opened as a result of struggle in the '60s, '70s and '80s so that a devastated industrial working class as well as an expanding underclass and
working poor goes hand in hand with the economic recovery. So it's a strange recovery in that sense but it's still very real because of economic growth every month for seven and a half years one has to acknowledge that. What is the nature of the growth and how does it impact the persons who need access to the resources? We'll say more about that in coming lectures but this is the context in which it seems to me as
a cultural critic who tries to pull from the Christian tradition one has to look if we're going to take seriously any substantive talk about a prophetic project in the 1990s. Thank you so very much and we'll open it up for questions.