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No light in his attic | page 1, 2
He proceeds to go on and on about his "Chekhovian Christian viewpoint," whatever that means. But looking for tangible meaning in West's prose is a terminally discouraging quest, a bit like looking for a breath of fresh air at the bottom of the sea. There is no "there" there, except perhaps the tedious injection of more religious sentiments into Marxist cant: If we ask why Chekhov (and not, say, Tony Kushner or Spike Lee), however, all we get is a blast of hot air: "I find the incomparable works of Anton Chekhov –- the best singular body by a modern artist ..." Or, as specifically as West can manage: "[Chekhov's] magisterial depiction of the cold Cosmos, indifferent Nature, crushing Fate and the cruel histories that circumscribe desperate, bored, confused and anxiety-ridden yet love-hungry people, who try to endure against all odds, rings true to me." Well, duh. What has this to do with identifying Chekhovianism as a genus of Christianity? It is beyond West's mental reach to address the question his juxtaposition begs: How can a Christian universe informed by love and the prospect of redemption be squared with the cold Chekhovian Cosmos, an "indifferent Nature [and] crushing Fate?" Don't spend too many gray cells attempting to answer that one. Throughout, the intellectual superficiality is accompanied by an intellectual status-seeking worthy of a character out of Molière: "Despite my Chekhovian Christian conception of what it means to be human –- a view that invokes pre-modern biblical narratives ..." "I stand in the skeptical Christian tradition of Montaigne, Pascal and Kierkegaard ..." "My Chekhovian Christian viewpoint is idiosyncratic and iconoclastic. My sense of the absurdity and incongruity of the world is closer to the Gnosticism of Valentinus, Luria or Monoimos ... My intellectual lineage goes more through Schopenhauer, Tolstoy, Rilke, Melville, Lorca, Kafka, Celan, Beckett, Soyinka, O'Neill, Kazantzakis, Morrison and above all, Chekhov ... And, I should add, it reaches its highest expression in Brahms's 'Requiem' and Coltrane's 'A Love Supreme.'" Notwithstanding the intellectual jive, comedy would be an inapt term to describe a yearning like West's, which has been socially constructed and is entirely unnecessary. For his intellectual charade reflects the political sickness of the modern academy, which has thrown over its traditional calling to the "disinterested pursuit of knowledge," and assumed a new institutional identity as an "agency of social change." West's plight is that of a paradigmatic affirmative-action baby, whom the good wishes of his "oppressors" have elevated so far beyond his merits that he has lost sight of terra firma below. As a result, he has been condemned to a life of suspended animation, his entire being addressed to the impossible task of proving that he is someone he can never be. Although West is almost incapable of writing a concrete sentence, he shows just enough autobiographical skirt in "The Cornel West Reader" to betray the source of this dilemma. Growing up as a precocious black child in the radical 1960s, West became a black militant activist, president of his senior high school class and an inevitable target of liberal uplift. At 17, he was recruited to Harvard where his political militancy convinced him that he had more to tell his professors than they had to teach him. He was determined, as he informs us, to press the university and its intellectual traditions into the service of his political agendas and not the other way around: to have its educational agendas imposed on him. "Owing to my family, church, and the black social movements of the 1960s, I arrived at Harvard unashamed of my African, Christian, and militant de-colonized outlooks. More pointedly, I acknowledged and accented the empowerment of my black styles, mannerisms and viewpoints, my Christian values of service, love, humility and struggle, and my anti-colonial sense of self-determination for oppressed people and nations around the world." This was a crucial moment for what could have been a promising student -- the confrontation of a brash but also impressionable youth with a 300-year-old educational institution dedicated to passing on the intellectual traditions of a 3,000-year-old civilization. It was a system that had shaped generations before him. Yet, it was a system that failed West, as its liberal ramparts collapsed before his militancy, backed by the cultural radicalism of the age. In the years West was a student at Harvard, traditional disciplines were being broken down and destroyed, intellectual authority assaulted and deconstructed, and the university transformed into a quasi-political party. New disciplines and even entire institutions were created -- ideologically committed black studies and women's studies departments, paganized theology schools, Marxist and post-Marxist curricula in the fields of English and the humanities. The old and tested rules of scholarship were rejected. Instead of educating and disciplining their intellectual tyro, Harvard and its liberal faculties merely encouraged him. It was the PC thing to do for the oppressed. Cornel West's aborted education was a case of what Shelby Steele has analyzed as liberal whites looking for moral absolution and radical blacks looking for the easy way up -- and who could blame them or West for that? As a result, the once-promising student never learned the difference between an intellectual argument and a political attitude, between the pursuit of an intellectual inquiry and the search for "answers" that were ideologically correct. "The Cornel West Reader" is a testament to the intellectual vacuum that a progressive education creates. The trappings of intellect are in place, the canonical names invoked, the capsule histories recalled, the theories broadly rehearsed. But behind the footnotes and the latinate prose, the vulgar mind of the activist is feverishly at work. A "discourse" is produced in which political postures invariably substitute for thought. The intellectual ruin of West is not an isolated case. There is a whole generation of racially favored intellectual water flies -- Bell Hooks, Michael Dyson, Robin D.G. Kelley, Patricia Williams, to name a few -- whose cultural elevation is not only unrelated to any serious intellectual achievement, but has eliminated the possibility of one. For them, as for West, the pathos lies in what might have been. The left-wing university culture has stripped them of an educational opportunity that is given only once per individual lifetime. Meanwhile, the self-appointed social redeemers, whom West thanks for helping him along, are in reality the very people who deprived him of a chance to learn the hard, old-fashioned way, and thus helped to destroy whatever intellectual potential he may once have had.
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