Professor of Philosophy and US Presidential candidate Cornel West spoke at the University of Edinburgh earlier this week
For well over a century, they have been a hugely prestigious opportunity for major thinkers to set out their intellectual stall. He doesn’t just regard that tradition for its superlative virtuosity and invention. He claims these very qualities are themselves a kind of moral action – a template for a higher way of being in the world.
“In a situation of no way out” – for example, the continuing oppressions of 20th-century Jim Crow America – these musicians “found a way through, and beyond”, continues West.Yet they are also, and equally, a celebration of love, vitality, and community. One which “overflows from the chocolate side of the city”, as West earthily calls it, to raise up the cause of the poor and the dominated, of all colours and states.
From the start of his campaign in June 2023, West has been rendered as a “spoiler” to Biden and the Democrats’ potential electoral victory this November. And another religious reference: “When I look at Trump, I see Civil War II. When I look at Biden, I see World War III. That’s Pharaoh on both sides of the bloody Red Sea. is the history of me and my people. You don’t sell out, you don’t give in. How else are you supposed to live?”The religiosity of American political culture is a long-standing given, right across the ideological spectrum. So West is only continuing what Martin Luther King Jr took to a new level.
That theology can provide the foundation for our civil and ethical actions is something that West exemplifies.