E-mail a friendDavid Kyuman Kim
original airdate December 20, 2007
David Kyuman Kim has been called the leading philosopher of religion and culture of his generation. Previously at Brown University, he's now Director of Connecticut College's Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity—a hub for researching and teaching race and ethnicity across the disciplines—and assistant professor of religious studies. Kim has written on Asian American diasporas and the Asian American religious experience and holds a Th.D. from Harvard. His new book is Melancholic Freedom.
David Kyuman Kim
Tavis: David Kyuman Kim is the director of the Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity and assistant professor of religious studies at Connecticut College. His new book is called "Melancholic Freedom: Agency and the Spirit of Politics." Professor Kim, nice to have you on the program.
Professor David Kyuman Kim: Thanks, Tavis.
Tavis: Good to see you.
Kim: Good to see you too.
Tavis: Let me start with this book's title. I should start by telling the audience that I had the pleasure of being invited to speak at the American Academy of Religion at this massive national conference of all these religious scholars. How I got invited, I do not know. (Laughter) But I went to do a few things at this conference and I had a chance to really delve into your text as one of the books that were featured at the American Academy of Religion.
But I said to you, when I asked you to come on the program, that we have to explain what we mean by agency because if my mama don't get it, nobody gets it.
Kim: Absolutely.
Tavis: So when you say agency, my mom was thinking travel agency, insurance agency, maybe Central Intelligence Agency. So I want to talk about agency in just a moment and what that means, but let me start with that title, "Melancholic Freedom." Because it's an academic text that I was inspired by, but I want to break it down. What do we mean by "Melancholic Freedom"?
Kim: Well, really what we're talking about here are forms of - it speaks to a condition in contemporary culture where we still value freedom and yet we've lost a sense of the urgency and need to fully understand and live that life of freedom. And so melancholy speaks to a condition of loss. So tied to our contemporary experience of freedom, tied to our contemporary understanding of living freedom, is this experience of loss and a lost kind of love that defines that freedom.
Tavis: Does one have to experience loss? Is the argument that one has to experience some sort of loss to value freedom? And if answer is yes, contextualize that for me in terms of what we're dealing with as a country today.
Kim: Right. That's a great question. The argument really is a kind of diagnosis of the moral and political culture we're living right now. So that for example, in a post-civil rights era, how do we understand things like freedom and justice? And it seems to me that we affirm freedom and justice, we affirm the achievements of the civil rights era, and yet we've lost a sense of urgency about it.
And so one of the main arguments of the book is to say, well, look, how do we regain that sense of conviction and commitment to freedom in a time where people still value it and yet somehow don't understand or cannot fully grasp its urgency?
Tavis: One could argue, though, since you used the civil rights movement as an example, one could argue that the whole country didn't quite get that anyway. And if the country did get it, they had to be pulled kicking and screaming to get that. One could argue, quite frankly, that the country still doesn't get the worth and the value and the lessons learned from the civil rights era and the movement. So when you say we've lost that sense of urgency, how do you respond to folk who say that the country as a whole never had it to begin with?
Kim: Well, I would say that - if you look at the kind of valorization of figures like Dr. Martin Luther King, someone I know that you hold in the highest estimation -
Tavis: Absolutely.
Kim: That we have gone so far as to say well, look, we'll build a memorial to him, we look to the '63 speech, "I Have A Dream" speech, and say, well, here is the hallmark of who we are as a nation. So that even though critics may say, “Well, look, the civil rights movement itself was not universally embraced by the country.”
And yet it was a leading moral-political statement to say this is who we should be as a country. Now what happens after the civil rights movement? There are all sorts of achievements that happened in terms of policy, in terms of institutionalization, and part of that is that those are victories on the one hand, and yet it disengaged all sorts of folks from seeing themselves involved or seeing the necessity to involve themselves in the calls of the civil rights movement itself, in terms of racial justice, social justice, and so on.
Tavis: So when we say agency, do we mean to suggest, then, that everybody possesses it? And if everybody possesses a sense of agency or a notion of agency, how do we know what that is, how to engage it, how to make it come to life?
Kim: My sense is that all of us possess the potential to have agency, which is to say that we all have the potential to be self-determining. We have the potential to engage in moral choice. On the other hand, we live under conditions where our freedom is compromised and conditioned. And so the second part, that compromised, conditioned freedom, keeps many of us from fully seeing ourselves or fully acting in the world so that our intentions have these consequences in the world.
Tavis: So we mean what, then, by compromised and - I don't mean to be naïve in asking this question - but what do you mean by conditioned and compromised freedom?
Kim: Well, that there's a kind of gap, as it were, between people's deepest moral convictions and their ability to realize those convictions and ideals in the world. And so the compromise there is, well, if I value freedom, if I value social ideals of love, and yet I cannot realize those in the world, those are compromised by all sorts of things.
They may be problems of the way people don't legitimate that language any longer, they don't legitimate those ideas any longer. And the challenge then becomes, well, how do you make the shift from seeing freedom in compromised terms to robust terms? Compromised terms to meaningful terms.
Tavis: See, one of the things that got my attention about the text, to your point a moment ago, about people in our society not legitimating any more certain ideals, one of the things that got my attention was how you put love at the epicenter of what it means to use agency. To value freedom, to engage your freedom, to be a citizen of the country or the world, at the center of it, at the epicenter, you put love.
Now that is in keeping most directly with Dr. King, who you raised earlier. Dr. King, Mandela, Gandhi. See, my problem has always been that we live in a world where we want to elevate - indeed, celebrate - the men, but dismiss it from their methodology. You can't celebrate Martin or Mandela or Gandhi or Bobby Kennedy or Mother Theresa - run the list - you can't celebrate these folk for what they accomplish and somehow pooh-pooh or dismiss love at the center of what they did.
In academia, it's not so often that I hear somebody courageously talk about love at the center of our agency, love at the center of our freedom, and yet, with all due respect to your text, it's just not something, again, that is as universal as it should be, maybe even once was.
Kim: Yeah. Obviously, I couldn't agree with you more, right? But this idea that we seem incapable, particularly in the academy, but even in public discourse, to say love in a kind of unworried way. To me, this is very telling about who we are as a people right now. What kinds of moral culture we live in. So that when you talk about King and Mandela and Gandhi, you're talking about founders, or if not founders, the great movers of social change.
And we tend to look to those figures as somehow being representative of ideas and not looking at the harder work of what it is to live those ideas and ideals. And where love is concerned, that requires us to engage in certain kinds of risk, which is to say to open ourselves up to new kinds of possibilities.
Tavis: So whatever happened then - how do I want to phrase this? Whatever happened, then, to the notion of love in our public discourse? Because if you argue - our friend, your teacher at Harvard back in the day, Dr. Cornel West, West says this: that you can't lead people if you don't love people, and you can't save people if you don't serve people. You can't lead if you don't love, you can't save if you don't serve. So at the center of our agency has to be a notion of love and service to other people.
Kim: That's right.
Tavis: Love and service. So the question, then, with regard to "Melancholic Freedom," is whatever happened to the notion of love and service at the center of our public policy conversation? Because Bobby Kennedy injected it, Martin injected it, Mandela injected it, Gandhi. So clearly, those who we've been talking about it put love and service at the center of public discourse and made, as a result, better public policy. Whatever happened to that in America?
Kim: Well, but think about the formulation you just used from Dr. West, right. That there's this connection, an innate connection, between love and leadership and service. And so it seems very clear to me that it's not just an issue of whether we're willing to serve, but it's also an issue of whether we're willing to lead.
So Bobby Kennedy can make a call to the nation and rouse young people all over the nation. And that inspiration will be felt as a call to follow. The question then becomes, is it also heard as a call to lead? So that if it isn't heard as a call to lead, then what kinds of capacities then do we have to love others, to serve others?
Tavis: Is Obama on the Democratic side, or maybe even as unlikely as it may seem, a Ron Paul on the Republican side, are they inspiring people, young people, to use their agency, to value their agency, to embrace, to activate their agency?
Kim: I think someone like Barack Obama has the tremendous potential to inspire that kind of action among young people. To my mind, the question becomes whether he'll realize that potential to speak in more fulsome terms.
Tavis: Oh, now you sound like Maureen Dowd. (Laughter) Her piece the other day raised the same issue, yeah.
Kim: Yeah, that's right. I have tremendous respect for Senator Obama, and tremendous hope that he'll come through. But there is a - in many ways, I feel like his candidacy represents the kind of moral hesitancy, the kind of tentativeness that we're experiencing as a country as a whole, so that we don't feel like we can fully throw ourselves with conviction into public life, we can fully throw ourselves with conviction in serving others. There's a kind of tentativeness. And if you've tentative, it's hard to love others.
Tavis: Let me offer this as an exit question. It's not lost on me, obviously, or our audience, your heritage, your background. Just to ask a personal question, how does your heritage, that background, impact your notion of love and service? How does it impact the writing of a book like this, about getting Americans to value their agency, to engage their freedoms?
Kim: I was raised in a household that was infused on the one hand by Confucianism and on the other hand by Christianity.
Tavis: So you were confused, in other words. (Laughter) You had a very confused childhood.
Kim: That's right, that's right. Well, but what are the things that those two heritages share? They share a commitment to reciprocity. They share a commitment of respect of others. And that it's not just a superficial respect, but it's a deep respect. So with growing up in a Korean household, it's about respecting your elders, it's about respecting younger people.
Because you know that you did not proceed in life by yourself. You know you don't proceed in life on your own, despite what you may think as a teenager, despite what you may think as a young man or a young woman, right? But that there is a network of mutual dependence that sustains all of us, even if we don't acknowledge it. Even if we don't acknowledge it.
Tavis: He is one of the country's up and coming young academics, and I love when I get a chance to meet these young persons who are making their mark on the world. He has a new book out. It's called "Melancholic Freedom: Agency and the Spirit of Politics," a name you will come to hear time and time again. David Kim, professor, again, at Connecticut College. David, nice to have you to the program.
Kim: Thanks so much, Tavis.
Tavis: Congrats on the book.
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