We should salvage universal humanity- perfection is impossible, we should be hopefully about democratic institutions

(Susannah, JewishStudies@Dartmouth What Manner of Man Is the Prophet? Cornel West, Abraham Heschel, and the Hebrew Prophets Prophetic Leadership and Visionary Hope New Essays on the Work of Cornel West Ed. Will)

Are there dreams left to us in an era when racism is so relentless that it seems unconquerable, and authoritarianism seems, to too many people, preferable to democracy? Is there an answer to Afropessimism? Has racism made real the warning on Dante’s entry to hell, “Abandon hope all ye who enter here”? Political theorist Susan Buck-Morss has written of the collapse of modernity’s dream of utopia, a dream that had driven both capitalism and socialism. Neither succeeded and the end of the twentieth century has left not only political and economic systems in chaos but crushed our hopes as well. BuckMorss speaks of “a utopian desire for social arrangements that transcend existing forms,” betrayed by “global systems that exploit both human labor and natural environments . . . [with] a panoply of phantasmagoric effects that aestheticize the violence of modernity and anaesthetize its victims.” She is not nihilistic, however; drawing from Walter Benjamin’s notion of “dreamworld,” she calls on us to “salvage modernity’s universal intent” in the face of the exclusivity of nationalism: “political collectives proclaim themselves champions of human rights and the rule of law and then deny these to a whole list of enemy exceptions, as if humanity itself were the monopoly of their own privileged members.”84 To some commentators, the present day has lost the capacity for the radicalism of the prophetic tradition. James Darsey writes, “[Todd] Gitlin and [Billy] Graham may be worlds apart in their evaluations of what has been lost, but there is a high degree of consensus that it is gone, and that we have found nothing yet to replace it. Radical discourse understood in terms of biblical prophecy has no potency in such a world.”85 Here is where Cornel West’s contribution intervenes. He points to the “rich prophetic legacies of Sojourner Truth, Walter Rauschenbusch, Dorothy Day, Abraham Heschel, and Martin Luther King Jr., [that] now lay nearly dormant—often forgotten—and the possession of a marginal few.”86 Yet, like Darsey, West agrees that “American religious life is losing its prophetic fervor.”87 He calls instead for a “principled prophetism.”88 Hope is not the domain of political promises, nor of Christian missions to unite all humanity in the baptismal font, nor is it the avant la lettre effort of a universalist “Marrano strategy,” as Agata Bielik-Robson argues.89 For West, it is the prophets who give us the dream and the voice: “Prophetic pragmatism, with its roots in the American heritage and its hopes for the wretched of the earth, constitutes the best chance of promoting an Emersonian culture of creative democracy by means of critical intelligence and social action.”90 What is that principled, prophetic pragmatism? Is it not, as Richard Rorty has argued, a contradiction in terms, that pragmatism needs prophecy like fish need bicycles.91 Here Rorty fails to understand what West means by the prophetic, namely, Heschel’s understanding of prophetic passion. In responding to Rorty, West presents an elucidation of Heschel’s importance as well as that of prophecy. He explains that philosophy without prophecy is like bodies without souls, and that without the prophetic dimension, philosophy cannot understand the passions that motivate, inspire, and console human beings and will ultimately fail to be meaningful. Black musical traditions, especially Blues, West emphasizes, convey an aesthetic appreciation of the prophetic by giving voice to intense suffering and yet offering hope as a redemption from suffering. Here he echoes a comment by Toni Morrison, “For a long time, the art form that was healing for black people was music.”92 Just as the prophet hears and gives voice to the silent agony of the oppressed, so too the Blues give voice to precisely those within the “democracy” who have been enslaved, brutalized, and at times denied the right to live. Yet hope arises: the civil rights movement offered the United States the possibility of becoming a democracy by granting the right to vote to all of its citizens. Black Americans rescued American democracy, and by redeeming America became the messianic figures of prophetic hope. Today, of course, it is not clear that the United States wants to be a democracy, as the courts and state legislatures eviscerate voting rights legislation. Still, there is an important caveat to be raised here. West, like King and many other Black theologians and intellectuals, is cautious about claims that Blacks can “redeem and transform the modern world through the truth and clarity of perception that emerge from their pain.”93 As Craig Evans argues in his book The Burden of Black Religion, there is a long tradition of white assumption that Blacks are innately religious, a claim used by abolitionists to counter beliefs in Black savagery. After the Civil War, the rhetoric shifted, and Black religion was blamed for the alleged inability of Black Americans to modernize. During the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and ’30s, Black intellectuals like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston valorized the “primitive” spirit and emotional expression of Black religion as antidotes to stultifying bourgeois society, paralleling the European Orientalism of the same era that turned to Eastern religions. Yet during the same period, there were white intellectuals, such as Gunnar Myrdal, who depicted Black religion as dysfunctional. By the civil rights era, Black religiosity became a reassurance to whites that Blacks demanding an end to segregation were pastors and churchgoers; religion was thought to mitigate the danger of Black rage. At the same time, Black piety was invoked as inspiration for civil rights with a promise to “save the soul of America.” In each era, the formula suggested that slavery, racism, and oppression generated intense emotional piety in Black men and women, and the very intensity of their piety would in turn redeem their white oppressors. That is the “burden of Black religion” whose logic Evans outlines in his book. Where does Cornel West’s analysis fit into this schema? The Socratic and prophetic are shared with whites, as is the democratic. The fault line is exemplified by the Blues: can white people understand and be inspired and transformed by Black aesthetics, able to sense the hope that can nonetheless be embedded in the pain and suffering that are resonant in the Blues? The literary critic Stanley Crouch polemicized against presentations of Black suffering as a martyrdom that would then convey a kind of “moral magic.”94 If that is the message of the redemptive nature of Christ’s crucifixion, the Christian cross as a promise of hope after death, does the Blues, in West’s terms, function as its substitute, as the expression of suffering—and even death— as the necessary martyrdom for a hope that redeems? Thanks to West’s decades-long engagement with the prophets, his answer is no. Without repudiating the redemptive death of Christ, West nonetheless shifts attention from the Jesus as the Son of God to Blacks as God’s prophetic witnesses. Here we see a dif­ferent sensibility, and West’s understanding of the redemptive nature of Blues stands in that context. The promise of the prophet lies not in a text nor in a death, but in a voice, and it is a voice carrying the compassion of God. Sound is the medium, whether prophetic words or Blues music. The prophet is not simply a mouthpiece for God, but a person imbued, as Heschel writes, with sympathy, attuned to God’s own pathos that is shaped by God’s emotional response to the suffering of human beings. Heschel draws on an ancient Jewish understanding, expressed in biblical and rabbinic texts, that there is a zorech gavoha, a divine need: God is in need of human beings, receiving strength from our good deeds and in pain when we harm one another. Anguish for the silent agony of the oppressed is expressed by the prophet because it is the suffering of God. The prophet’s expression of anguish is itself a balm for those who suffer, and the Blues offer a similar balm, in West’s presentation. Not the suffering, but the expression of it creates the hope that emerges from the Blues; redemption does not come from death or pain, but from suffering’s prophetic resonance and empathic expression. West writes, “Black bonds of affection, black networks of support, black ties of empathy, and black harmonies of spiritual camaraderie provide the grounds for the fragile existential weaponry with which to combat black invisibility and namelessness.”95 West’s theology is not in quest of prophetic states of ecstasy, convulsions, or irrational states, nor has he any inclination to belittle the Bible or Judaism or paganism. His is the rare Christian theology that does not ride a seesaw of self-elevation by denigrating another faith. Nor does West look for voices of calm reason, rationality, and self-importance as a source of religious inspiration. His spirit, like the prophets, turns to the artists who give voice to the silent agony; he writes of Anton Chekhov, for example, “Like the best blues and jazz artists, he enacts melancholic yet melioristic indictments of misery without concealing the wounds inflicted or promising permanent victory.”96 The prophetic spirit for West is not only an expression of the horrors of the world, it is also a rousing call to justice. “To prophesy,” he writes, “is not to predict an outcome but rather to identify concrete evils.”97 It is in this role that West reminds us that we hold up crucial principles of social justice in the United States yet fail to live up to them. Perfection is not possible; West knows from Reinhold Niebuhr that man may be moral, but society is inevitably immoral. Yet in that immoral society there must be a prophetic voice to chastise us—indeed, to condemn us—and never permit our immoral society the excuse of original sin. The prophets’ condemnation of their societies seems to us extravagant; were things really that bad or did they have unrealistically high standards, as Kenneth Seeskin has asked.98 For Heschel— and West, in this respect, is his disciple—the exaggerated prophetic response is a sign of the passion that the prophet brings by viewing human beings from God’s perspective. Heschel writes, “The prophet’s words are outbursts of violent emotions. His rebuke is harsh and relentless. But if such deep sensitivity to evil is to be called hysterical, what name should be given to the abysmal indifference to evil which the prophet bewails?”99 West reminds his readers that “The black church tried to hold together both the dignity and depravity of persons in such a way that God—like Yahweh with the children of Israel—identifies with the disinherited and downtrodden, yet even the disinherited and downtrodden are sinners in need of conversion and sanctification.”100