Hanover
“I have no monopoly on truth. As you can see,” he said, grinning to reveal a bright set of buck teeth through his bushy beard, “I have no monopoly on beauty. But I am engaged in a quest for beauty and goodness.”
West framed his talk, which was attended by more than 500 people who spilled out of Filene Auditorium into two overflow rooms, with questions from W.E.B. Du Bois, the scholar and civil rights activist. During a residence at Dartmouth this summer, West is scheduled to teach a course titled “The Historical Philosophy of W.E.B. Du Bois.”
The first question: “How shall integrity face oppression?”
After this election, in which America was riven by disputes over race and economics, West said it was time to “return to the source” — to look at what spiritual, ethical and political resources are available to progressives and where those came from. He reminisced about his own roots, recalling as a child attending a black church in Sacramento, just next door to offices of the Black Panthers.
His upbringing and his surroundings gave him spiritual fortitude, he said, and guided his studies in religion at Harvard University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1973. After completing his studies at Princeton, he now teaches at Harvard Divinity School.
“The first challenge is spiritual integrity,” he said, defining that term as a way of being that is more than an intellectual exercise, “not a proposition but a life lived.”
Although Thursday’s talk was titled “Intellectual Vocation and Political Struggle in the Trump Moment,” West urged listeners to think of the 45th president and his brand of populism not as a unique phenomenon, but as a consequence of a long history of American racial and economic resentment.
“We shouldn’t begin with Donald Trump,” he said. “We don’t want to fetishize Donald Trump. We don’t want to ascribe magical powers to Donald Trump.
“Donald Trump is as American as cherry pie,” he said, speaking faster, his voice rising, his gestures growing more urgent. “Comes out of a long tradition of white supremacy and male supremacy and homophobia. Comes out of a long tradition of spiritual emptiness and moral vacuity. Comes out of a long tradition — ”
He paused, seeming to catch his breath. “He’s a human being. He’s on a continuum with us. I’m here to remind you; oh, yes.”
And considering their chops as performers, West might be viewed on another continuum with Trump — two freewheeling, charismatic populist preachers, one who calls for a wall and makes allusions to Breitbart and InfoWars, and another who pleads for tolerance and throws out references to Emerson, Socrates, Gramsci and William James.
West also saluted a third populist, Bernie Sanders, “my dear secular, Jewish, Brooklyn, Vermont-living brother,” whom he endorsed during the Democratic presidential primaries. West went on to back Jill Stein, of the Green Party, over Hillary Clinton after Sanders conceded.
“He had more integrity,” West said of Sanders. “He refused to sell his soul for a mess of pottage,” and warned of Trump’s “pseudo-populism” and “escalating neofascist sensibilities.”
Sanders was one of many examplars of this quality — integrity — that West offered, likening the consistency of the Vermont senator’s message through any obstacle to the stamina of a marathoner.
“Will you be a long-distance runner in your calling, in your vocation?” he said. “In this particular bleak moment where it looks as if all hope is being cast aside?”
He paraphrased another question from Du Bois: “What does honesty do in the face of deception?”
“Just to be honest,” he said, “we live in an age of massive mendacity and criminality.”
Fake news has received much attention of late, he said, but it is only part of the problem: “It’s very misleading. It gives you the impression CNN has been telling the truth. It gives you the impression The New York Times has been telling the truth.”
The distortion of facts on the part of the alt-right or the far left might indicate — falsely — that the center, the crumbling neoliberal order, is the only safe place, West said. He urged the crowd to abandon the intellectual elitism that he said has infected liberal politics, and think more of the example of Du Bois, who was one of the co-founders of the NAACP.
“What Du Bois was talking about has nothing to do with the land of scholars and smartness,” he said. “It has to do with about compassion and wisdom. Let the phones be smart. We got to be wise and compassionate.”
A final question from West, paraphrasing Du Bois: “What does virtue do in the face of brute force?”
Although he expressed concern that the forces unleashed in the 2016 election represented one more step in a historical American decline — “Does America have what it takes?” he asked. “It’s an open question” — he applauded those who have already mobilized against Trump: the 500,000 people in the Women’s March on Washington, and the millions who joined similar protests around the world.
“That’s all we can do as human beings,” he said. “That’s all we can do during the Trump era, to come together, interact and tell the truth.”
West’s talk was sponsored by the college president’s office and the office of the associate dean for the arts and humanities. It came as part of a series called “Why the Humanities Matter in the 21st Century.”
Rob Wolfe can be reached at rwolfe@vnews.com or at 603-727-3242.