Transcript
WEST: Thank you so very much. It's so kind of you all to continue to come. Many of you are even more loyal than I am in terms of -- I look forward again to our conversation and discussion. I'd like to reflect this evening on the decomposition of prophetic politics, and I first want to begin by highlighting three fundamental processes. They are historical processes which take shape
in our social institutions and structures, but three processes which serve as impediments for the kind of prophetic project that I have been sketching in the last few days. The first process, best highlighted in Georg Simmel's text entitled The Philosophy of Money, it's a classic published in 1900, consists of transforming human beings
into manipulable objects. It promotes the notion that people's action have no impact, or very little impact, on the world, that we are but spectators, not participants in making and remaking ourselves and the larger societies, and we'll call this the increasing objectification in the modern society. And I want to add
it also is at work in our post-modern moment, the perception of ourselves as being spectators rather than participants. The second process, initially examined in the seminal works of Max Weber that Weber called rationalization, it expands bureaucratic hierarchies that impose impersonal rules and regulations in order to increase efficiency, be that efficiency
defined in terms of better service or be it defined in terms of better surveillance. And this process of rationalization raises a fundamental question of how in fact will the value of efficiency be balanced or imbalanced with the value of equity or even the deeper values of social and cultural stability. This rationalization process leads not only to a disenchantment with the
mythologies of old, but also a deadening and flat and banal way or ways of life. The third and I suggest is the most important historical process that serves a major obstruction of the kind of prophetic project I'm trying to put forward is that of commodification, best examined in the works of Karl Marx, of György Lukács, and Walter
Benjamin. This commodification augments market forces in the form of oligopolies and monopolies that centralize resources and power and promote cultures of consumption that view people as passive citizens and spectatorial consumers. These three particular processes at work, again, inseparable but not
identical. Objectification occurs at the level of how we conceive ourselves as human beings, whether as objects of history or subjects of history. Do we stay in contact with our own subjectivity, or are we in fact distant from it to such a degree that we're simply manipulated objects, be it objects of advertising industry, in mass media, or be it objects in terms of our self-perception?
The rationalization has to do with this expansion of bureaucratic hierarchies, but it also has to do with constructing subjects who view themselves as deferential, view themselves as defensive, making it very difficult to reach out to commune, to interact in a humane way with one another. And commodification, which is the most important I want to suggest, is this exponential expansion of market forces associated with the kind of market mentality
and market morality that I was suggesting yesterday. These processes I want to submit cannot be eliminated. I think we are stuck with them. The question is what are the conditions under which they continue to exist? So that they cannot be eliminated, but their more pernicious effects can I think be substantially, though not thoroughly, alleviated, you see. The audacious attempt
to alleviate these efforts, which is to say to preserve people's agency, their sense of being subjects in the world, of making a difference in the world, to increase the scope of people's freedom and expand the operations of democracy is the fundamental aim of my prophetic project or what I've been calling the cultural politics of difference. This is why the crucial question becomes in many ways what is the moral content of one's conception of one's self? Now in
our day, of course, it tends to be defined in terms of nation oftentimes, in terms of race, in terms of gender, in terms of ethnicity, in terms of sexual orientation. These issues of difference and identity are also here to stay, but the fundamental question is what is the moral content of this identity? It's not just a question of trotting out one's blackness or one's gayness or one's genderness and so forth. The question is what is the ethical substance of it?
And what are the political consequences of this moral content in cultural identity? Granted in the recent past the dominant cultural identities have been circumscribed by immoral, patriarchal, imperial, and jingoistic, and xenophobic constraints, and the political consequence has often been a public's fear regulated for and by well-to-do white males in the name of freedom and democracy. But the kind of prophetic project that I'm trying to put forward exposes and
explodes this past and calls for radical libertarian and democratic perspectives that proceed from the exclusions, the blindnesses and silences of this past, in order to create a better present and future. In this sense my project is neither an ahistorical Jacobin program that discards tradition and ushers in new self righteous authoritarianisms, nor is it simply a guilt ridden leveling that justifies an anti-imperialist
guilt, that celebrates token pluralism for smooth inclusion. Rather the project acknowledges the uphill struggle of fundamentally transforming highly objectified, rationalized, and commodified societies and cultures in the name of individuality and democracy. This means keeping track -- excuse me -- of the structural causes
of unnecessary and undesirable forms of social misery without reducing all forms of human misery to historical causes. It means depicting the plight and predicaments of demoralized and depoliticized citizens caught in market-driven cycles of therapeutic release, the drugs and alcoholism and consumerism and orgiastic preoccupation in our culture. It also means projecting alternative visions,
analyses, and actions that proceed from particularities, which is to say those identities but link those particular identities to an all-embracing moral vision and political connectedness. This political connectedness is not a homogeneous unity, but rather a contingent, fragile joining together to pursue common goals of prophetic action.
In a world in which most of the resources of wealth and power are centered in huge corporations in support of political elites, this prophetic project may appear to be solely visionary, utopian, and fanciful. Recent cutbacks in social service programs, business take backs at the negotiation tables of workers and management, speedups at the workplace, and buildups of military budgets reinforce this perception. And surely the growing disintegration and decomposition of civil society,
of the shattered families, neighborhoods, and schools adds to this perception. The fundamental question for me is can a civilization that evolves more and more around market activity, the buying and selling of commodities, expand the scope of freedom and democracy? Or do we simply bear witness to its slow decay and doom, a decay and doom prefigured already in many poor black
and brown communities and rapidly embracing all of us? This haunting question remains unanswered, yet the challenge that it poses must not remain unmet. This is why we must muster all of our imagination and intelligence and courage and sacrifice and care and laughter that we can, grounded on -- my own
case -- a Christian faith, to project a possible better future in light of what we are up against. In talking about the decomposition of prophetic politics, I want to highlight the role of law in progressive politics. Why? Because the last wave of prophetic engagement in any serious collective sense in the 1960s evolved around
legal activity, and the role of law is so fundamental in terms of how we think of social change, and because I hold at arm's length any serious talk about violent, effective violent activity, the role of law will be central. So the crucial question becomes what is the role and function of law in prophetic politics? Are legal
institutions crucial terrain upon which significant social change can take place? If so, how? In which way? I want to respond to these urgent questions, and I think this is very important because I was mentioning before about critical legal studies movement being a kind of counterpart to liberation theology subgroups in this seminary, and we need more dialogue between these two. In fact, I find myself spending more time in law schools than in
seminaries these days, and I say that quite apologetically, because I spent twelve years in seminaries and I never want to get too far from seminaries, which means while I'm here at Princeton I'm not going to get too far from this seminary, because there are fascinating things here just as there are fascinating things there. But the law school has been pulling me. Why? Because the critical legal studies movement, not only is it deeply linked to religious sensibilities -- most of you know Roberto Unger, the leading figure in critical legal studies, himself was a deeply religious person being trained by Jesuits in Brazil --
but also that they are trying to learn from the liberation theology movement in the context of their own law schools, in terms of dealing with issues of race and gender and class, reading some of the same sources, but within the context of the legal discourse, you see. Now, in response to these questions we'll try to carve out some vital democratic left space between the Scylla of an upbeat liberalism that harbors
excessive hopes for the law and the Charybdis of a downbeat leftism that promotes exorbitant doubts about the law. My argument rests upon three basic claims. First, the fundamental forms of social misery in American society can be neither adequately addressed, nor substantially transformed, within the context of existing legal apparatuses. Just a radical moment in the project.
Yet serious and committed work within this legal context remains indispensable if prophetic politics is to have any future at all. Second, this crucial work cannot but be primarily defensive unless significant social motion, extra-parliamentary social motion, meaning by extra-parliamentary I mean from outside of the electoral political system, you see. To bring power to
bear on the prevailing status quo, such social motion and movements presuppose either grassroots citizens' participation in credible progressive projects or rebellious actions of desperation that threaten the social order. That's the second assumption. The third assumption is a difficult task then of prophetic activists within the legal system is to link their defensive work within the system to possible
social motion and movements outside. Again, an inside-outside strategy. Any argument regarding the role of law in prophetic politics must begin with two sobering historical facts about the American past and present. First, American society is disproportionately shaped by the outlooks, interests, and aims of the business community, especially that of big business.
Calvin Coolidge said the business of America is business. We should have added he meant big business. He didn't have in mind the entrepreneurs on the streets and the shopkeepers and the small businessperson attempting to make it every day. He had in mind big business, and this is the 1920s. You can imagine what it's like in the 1990s given all the swallowing up of the smaller businesses that's going on in the last 25 years or so. The sheer power of corporate capital is
extraordinary. This power makes it difficult to even imagine what a free and democratic society would look like or how it would operate if there were publicly accountable mechanisms that alleviate the vast disparities in resources, wealth, and income, owing in part to the vast influence of big business on US government and its legal institutions. This is
why those of us who focus on forms of social misery, who focus on the ill-fed and the ill-clad and the ill-housed must think in epochal not apocalyptic terms. I love the autobiographical -- the title of Michael Harrington's autobiography, called The Long-Distance Runner. I think that's quite appropriate, because if you're talking about prophetic projects in this country, you have
got to be a long, long, long-distance runner, and if you're looking for change overnight you will be deeply disappointed and disillusioned. The second brute fact about the American past and present is that this society is a chronically racist, sexist, homophobic, and jingoistic one. The complex and torturous quest for American identity, from 1776 to our own time,
has produced a culture in which people define themselves physically, socially, sexually, and politically in terms of race, gender, sexual orientation, and anti-American activities. From skin color to the circulation of sexual desire, to what neighborhood you live in, to who you choose to marry, to who you congregate with socially, to where you go to church, all of
these factors fundamentally shape how we relate to one another, and I'm talking descriptively. I'm not saying this is -- we'll talk about it being a bad thing later. I'm just talking descriptively, you see. This is a given. It can be changed, but it is a given. It is what has been bequeathed to us as inhabitants of this particular country. The uniqueness in many ways of the country, among other modern nations, with
the embarrassing exceptions of South Africa and Hitler's Germany, is that race has served as the linchpin in regulating this national quest for identity. A detailed genealogy, for example, of American legal discourse about citizenship -- when does America raise the question of what it is to be a citizen? When it has to come to terms with what to do with these ex-slaves. It's not a question of marginality, of being ghettoized
within the history of the country. No, it's at the very center of the most precious notions in its political discourse and legal discourse. What it means to bear rights, what it means to be a person before the law, and so forth and [so on?] have been shaped in part on trying to come to terms with at that time 22 percent of the population were people of African descent. We're down now to 11.8, and it looks like in the year 2020 we'll be about nine percent given the death rates
and the high mortality rates in the black community. The historical articulation of the [experential?] white then, of African slavery and Jim Crowism, deformed of US patriarchy and homophobia and anti-American sensibility, yields a profoundly conservative country. That may sound like a strange thing to say. How could America, with all of its dynamism and all of its technological innovation, be viewed as a profoundly conservative country?
You see. And there is an irony of this cultural conservatism, because it does try to preserve a dynamic, corporate-driven economy, and it has produced the highest levels of productivity known to humankind, with its mild distribution of wealth and resources, but tremendous levels of productivity. It also preserves a stable election-centered democracy
and a very precious liberties-guarding rule of law. See, you have all of these related to one another. It's cultural conservatism on the one hand, a conception of democracy in which the exercise of one's civic virtue is primarily in terms of the casting of a ballot, as an insurance that democracy is still going on. It's very important, but it's a minimalist conception of democracy. And then there's the rule of
law that attempts to protect and preserve liberties, however imperfect and often imperfect that is. This irony constitutes a distinctive hybridity of American liberalism in its classical and revisionist versions, as well as a debilitating dilemma of American radicalism in its movements for racial class and sexual equality. In other words, American liberalism
diffuses the claims of American radicals like myself by pointing to long-standing US democratic and libertarian practices, despite historic racist, sexist, class, and homophobic constraints, you see. Hence any feasible American radicalism seems to be but an extension of American liberalism. Needless to say the sacred cow of American liberalism, namely economic
growth achieved by corporate priorities, is neither examined nor interrogated, and those that do examine and interrogate this sacred cow are relegated to the margins of the political culture. My first claim rests upon the assumption that the extension of American liberalism in response to racial class and sexual equality is desirable, yet insufficient. This is so because the
extension of American liberalism leaves relatively untouched the fundamental reality that undergirds the forms of social misery, the maldistribution of resources, wealth, and power in American society, you see. That is ultimately the bottom line, that 45% of Americans own two percent of its wealth, one-half of one percent own 18 percent of its wealth, one percent own 29 percent of
its wealth, and by wealth I'm of course not talking about income, I'm talking about holdings. There's just not enough resources for poor people and working people, it's really that simple, even though it's so difficult for them to gain it. The extension of liberalism in regard to race, labor, women, gays, and lesbians appears radical on the American ideological spectrum, principally because it goes against the deeply entrenched cultural conservatism
in the country. In fact, this extension as seen for example in the 1930s to 1960s takes place by means of insurgent movements convincing political and legal elites to enact legislation or judicial decrees often over against and imposed on the majority of the population. And this is quite important I think when you look at Afro American history, you see, that if Lincoln had actually put the Emancipation Proclamation to a vote,
it probably never would have passed. Or in May of 1954, if Brown vs. the Board of Education had been put to a vote to the American people, it never would have passed. Deeply conservative when it comes to this issue of race, but not only race, the other issues as well. So what often happened, the extension of American liberalism occurs when political elites are affected by movements and in fact imposed their
liberal views on a conservative populace and tried to bring them along, as it were, even when it's an intransigent populace, as it has been since 1954 in terms of de facto desegregation. As we know, de facto desegregation hardly exists in our public schools. De facto segregation is the rule, so May '54 is still subversive in 1990 in terms of the actual practices.
But legally it initiated a whole new discourse in terms of the inability to justify tax-supported legal education -- tax-supported public education, excuse me. In short then the very extension of American liberalism has hardly ever been popular among the masses of American people, primarily owing to a pervasive cultural conservatism. The law has played a crucial role in those periods in which liberalism has been extended, precisely
because of the power of judicial review. And, of course, judicial review is the notion that a group of legal elites can actually legislate policy over against the views of the larger majority. It's a counter-majoritarian notion built into the Constitution, and this is why any talk about democracy must always be looked at against the backdrop of a constitutional system. Of course,
the most scary thing is to put the Bill of Rights up for referendum to the American people. Many associate that with subversive doctrine, which it was and is, but thank God that cannot be put up, it seems to me, to public referendum. People like me might be in jail about certain sections of this country. The effects of these laws and policies have over time attenuated some of the more crude and overt
expressions of cultural conservatism, yet the more subtle expressions of this conservatism still permeate the culture. The existing legal apparatuses cannot adequately address or substantially transform the plight of the racially and sexually skewed ill-fed, ill-clad, and ill-housed, not only because of the marginalizing of perspectives that highlight the need for a redistribution of resources by means of progressive taxation, by means the workers control over investment decisions and so forth, but
also because of the perception that the extension of American liberalism is the most radical option feasible within American political culture. See, this is in many ways the bedrock, which is to say that those persons who want to be part of prophetic projects believe that the only workable option is an extension of American liberalism. That's as far as one can go. And this is a question which now
sits at the very center of not just this country but Europe as well. Is social democracy the most radical option workable within the constraints of our international economic system, and our nation state, and our system of nations state? A fundamental question. Is it the case that all workable, feasible, credible,
radical alternatives must presuppose economic growth achieved by corporate priorities? If it is, then my project remains solely a rhetorical project. It only has critical implications. It cannot become substantive because it cannot get off the ground given the constraints already in place, you see.
So I'm really talking practically about an extension of American liberalism. This is what I'm trying to resist; this is what I'm struggling with, you see. These questions are especially acute given the collapse of social Keynesianism in the 1970s, which is that magic Ford formula of mass production undergirded by mass consumption alongside government provisions to those with no access to resources that sustained economic growth in the post-war period. The conservative
project of Reagan, the supply-side economics, and military Keynesianism of the '80s yielded not simply a larger gap between the haves and the have nots, but also a debt-financed public sphere, and a more corporate-dominated economy, all in the name of free enterprise. So ironically you end up with a larger state because your military budget increases, even though you're arguing against this state.
You end up with a public sphere that is in deep debt because you don't have a large enough tax base, partly because corporations are only paying 6.6 percent of that tax base. In 1952 they paid 32.6. There's been a decline ever since, which means working people and middle class people pick up the tax bill, and it is enormous given that those who could help more are not doing their share, one could argue.
Even though the United States is the lowest-taxed nation among modern nations in the world -- Sweden, Britain, and so forth. Now if the extension of American liberalism is the only feasible option, then the role of the law becomes even more important. Their work constitutes one of the few buffers against cultural conservatism, that recasts the law more in its own racist, sexist, anti-labor, and homophobic
image. Furthermore, the work within the existing legal system helps keep alive a memory of the social traces left by past progressive movements, a memory requisite for future movements. This defensive work that proceeds from within the legal system preserved the effects of former victories threatened by the conservative offensive. Yet this same work has tremendous radical potential,
especially within the context of vital oppositional activity against the status quo. This is why the distinction between liberal and radical legal practice is now sharp or rigid, rather it is fluid and contingent due to the ever-changing larger social situation. Needless to say, the crucial role of this kind of legal practice, of defending the rights of poor people, defending the rights of activists, securing permits to march, dramatizing an injustice
within a class suit and so forth and so on, is indispensable for my prophetic project. Yet in cold moments in American society, when cultural conservatism and big business fuse with power and potency, the law has little option other than to serve the terrain for defensive work. This work is often demoralizing, yet it serves as an important link to past victories and a basis
for the next wave of radical action. In our present period prophetic practice takes two basic forms: first theoretical critiques of liberal paradigms in the academy itself, and second, participation in organizations that engage in extra-parliamentary social motion. It's no accident that the first form consists of a pedagogical reform movement within
elite institutions of the academy, and especially the legal academy with the critical legal studies. I think it's no accident that so much of the energy during this [cold?] moment has focused on pedagogical reform. And it's no accident that the university and colleges and seminaries have been major sites for the playing out of politics,
because it's one of the few public spaces where critical exchange takes place, and it's one of the few public places where people feel they can be political and there will be consequences that flow, you see. Other spheres seem to be exhausted, and the casting of the vote doesn't seem to make a difference, given the nature of the candidates who themselves are beholden to two parties which themselves are in part beholding to those who
pay the money, and those who have the money are the big corporations, for the most part, not solely, for the most part. The critical legal studies movement is symptomatic though of a pessimism regarding feasible radical options in American political culture and a distance between legal action vis-à-vis the courts. It remains within the academy and doesn't speak oftentimes in a concrete way about what the implications
are of their scholarship for those lawyers who are out dealing with cases every day. This sense of political impotence and gulf between professors and activists, in this case professors of law and lawyers, results not because the critical legal studies movement consists of insular theorists with little grasp of political reality. In fact, their understanding of this reality is often acute. Some of the
critical legal studies trashing -- what they call trashing -- of liberalism, which is to say trying to undermine it and show the degree at which it can never serve as an agent for any form of substantive social change, and there's a trashing wing of the critical legal studies movement, but some of this trashing spills over to practice, and I want to suggest that this spilling over is myopic. It's shortsighted, if it trashes the only feasible practice
for lawyers vis-à-vis the courts. This myopia becomes downright dangerous and irresponsible when aimed at civil rights lawyers for whom the very effort to extend American liberalism still may lead to injury and death in conservative America given the recent attacks of this new group called a group for a competent judiciary, which is of course a cover for some xenophobic
group upset with civil rights decisions. Many of these are white lawyers, as well as black lawyers and judges. Is there any way out of this impasse? Can prophetic practice be more than defensive? My second claim holds that there are but two ways out in situations there's sparse resources, along with degraded self-images and depoliticized sensibilities, which holds for most poor people in America, very little
access to resource, very low self-perception and self-esteem, and very little sense of being politically organized. One avenue is sheer existential rebellion and anarchic expression. The capacity to produce social chaos is the last resort of desperate people, and we see social chaos escalating every day, not in a political form, but in a form of ugly criminalities, ugly forms of
criminality. It results from a tragic quest for recognition and for survival. The civic terrorism which is in many ways what it is, a civic terrorism that haunts our city streets and the criminality that frightens us is in part poor people's response to political neglect and social invisibility. It's not a justification, it's a description of the conditions under which they labor. Like most behavior in American society,
it's directly linked to market activity, the buying and selling of commodities, in this case the commodities tend to be drugs, alcohol, and bodies, especially women's bodies. These tragic forms of expression have yet to take on an explicitly political character. It's an open question as to whether they will. For my project they must, it must take on a political character such that they can be channeled in such a way that
the energy would have positive impact on the powers that rule. If and when it has an explicitly political character, the prevailing powers will be forced to make political responses rather than simply repressive ones, which is primarily, of course, the expansion of prisons and the profits made by funeral parlors given the growing number of coffins used for
black bodies. One major challenge for progressive prophetic politics is identifying this way of channeling the talent and energy of poor people in the forms of social motion that can have impact on the powers that rule. This second way out of the impasse is the creation of citizens organized participation in credible prophetic projects. Yet the American political culture mitigates against this. The status quo
lives and thrives on what one could call the dilemma of disbelief, the fact that it's hard for ordinary citizens to believe that their actions can make a difference in a society whose resources, wealth, and power are disproportionately held by the big business community. And tomorrow I will try to project a future of prophetic politics in light of
this rather tragic moment, post-modern moment. Thank you so very much.