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Good evening. I’m Margaret Hoover.
In honor of Thanksgiving, we’re revisiting one of my favorite Firing Line episodes: a conversation between Dr. Cornel West and Dr. Robert George—two scholars with starkly opposing views who share a remarkable friendship. Recorded four years ago, we often return to this episode on Thanksgiving because it embodies the spirit of the holiday and Firing Line’s mission: fostering civil discourse across divides.
George: And I don’t like that big government up here
West: No I don’t want too big a government, I just want to make sure we don’t have poverty…
They’ve been described as the ideological odd couple
“Cornel West being led away, under arrest”
Dr. Cornel West, a radical philosopher, socialist, and political activist, and Dr. Robert George, a socially conservative Christian thinker. But they are friends, teach together and even travel the country making the point that opposites don’t have to be enemies.
West: The important thing of course is that I love this brother, and love is not reducible to politics
With so many fault lines in the country deepening, what do Cornel West and Robert George say now?
‘Firing Line’ with Margaret Hoover is made possible in part by: Robert Granieri, Vanessa
and Henry Cornell, The Fairweather Foundation, and by the following… Corporate funding
is provided by Stephens Inc.
INTERVIEW
HOOVER: Welcome back to Firing Line Dr. Cornel West and Dr. Robert George.
GEORGE: Thank you
WEST: Thank you, and we salute you for your show, building on the great legacy of this historic Firing Line show.
HOOVER: Well, I am honored because you are both celebrated scholars and public intellectuals who come from remarkably different worldviews and profess different perspectives. Dr. West, you are a professed non-Marxist socialist. And Dr. George, you are a leader in the theo-conservative movement.
GEORGE: Not sure I’d say that, but at least I’m not a Marxist. I’m like Cornel in that perspective.
WEST: And we’re both Christians. We’re both Christians.
HOOVER: You’re both Christians. And you respect each other enough to disagree and to engage in serious and rigorous contest of ideas in a civil and respectful way. And you also have in common that you were both guests on the original Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr.
GEORGE: It’s a very great honor. Very great honor.
HOOVER: Well what’s clear is as you nod, when you speak you’re nodding and visa versa, you’re leaning into one another. There’s a clear affection between the two of you. Which I —
GEORGE: He’s so loveable.
HOOVER: And I’m so glad that you got to go to lunch first.
WEST: It’s true. In fact, I think it’s, it’s deeper than civility and it’s even deeper than respect. I think we’ve got a genuine love for one another. I love this brother, I revel in his humanity.
HOOVER: And it seems to me, I’ve heard you say the common denominator is love.
WEST: Absolutely. There’s just so many aspects and facets of who we are as human beings that cannot be subsumed under politics. So when you love somebody you love their qualities, their character, their laughter, their gestures, the things you have in common that don’t always fall into politics. We can argue over Aquinas versus Kierkegaard. Or we can argue over his bluegrass versus my funk rhythm and blues. You see, there’s things that bring us together then we reach politics and we say, ‘oh my god I think you’re dead wrong, my brother’, ‘I think you’re dead wrong my brother.’ So that human connection, that rich, deep human connection, that’s what’s so very important.
GEORGE: The other thing Margaret that we were talking about is the importance of honesty and integrity and those sort of virtues. Well, I not only love Brother Cornel, I admire him and I admire him for those virtues, for honesty and for integrity. He sets an example for me. He’s inspiring to me. We may disagree about politics, but I do admire integrity — a person who says what he means, means what he says, who does not succumb to peer group pressure. Cornel has been under pressure from the progressive side sometimes to do things or say things that he actually doesn’t agree with and he refuses to yield. I try to do that on my end and I look to him as a model for that.
HOOVER: And so the viewers know you both do that in 2016 where you refused to support Hillary Clinton, even there was enormous pressure from you on the Democratic side to support Hillary Clinton and for you as well, Dr. George, to support President Trump and to vote for him and to throw your weight behind him. So both of you have really walked that walk. Dr. George, you’ve said of Dr. West, ‘Cornel is someone I have been learning from since the moment we met. Even if I thought he was getting the answer wrong, I noticed he was always asking exactly the right question.’ Can you give me an example of something he gets wrong when he’s asking the right question?
GEORGE: This sort of thing: asking about, say, an economic system. Not, or not exclusively, does it work to elevate overall prosperity, but is it just? Does it honor the principles that we ought to honor, given that human beings have a profound inherent and equal dignity? Now we reach different conclusions about that. Cornel leans in the direction of a more socialistic sort of system. I’m more in the direction of the free market sort of system. But he’s only going to give two cheers for socialism because he sees the downside and the danger as well. And I’m only going to give two cheers – I’m like Irving Kristol – two cheers for capitalism because I realize it’s a system that will sell you anything if it’s not constrained by moral principles, that are themselves reflective of understanding, understanding we should have of the dignity of the human person. There’s certain things that shouldn’t be for sale. So I believe in the market, but just two cheers. Cornel believes in the socialist system, but just two cheers.
WEST: Both of us acknowledge that there’s got to be some public regulation of markets.
GEORGE: Yeah.
WEST: There’s got to be fair regulation of markets. It’s gonna be a matter of degree. It’s going to be a matter of gradation. It’s the predatory capitalism in which greed runs amok. Brother Robbie is against greed whether it comes in the form of corporate greed, poor people’s greed, working people’s greed, white greed, black greed, brown greed, isn’t that right?
GEORGE: Yeah. I want a–
WEST: He’s against greed.
GEORGE: Like Cornel I want a system that works for the common good, works for people, and especially those who are at the lower end. I think the market system has lifted millions and millions of people out of poverty. So I’m for the market system. I’m very skeptical of big government programs. I wanna empower the institutions of civil society: families, and churches, and voluntary associations. I want them to carry the bulk of the load when it comes to health, education, and welfare, and transmitting to each new generation the values and virtues that are necessary for people to lead successful lives and to be good contributing citizens. But I know that a market that’s unleashed without regulation, without moral constraints is going to do much more harm than good.
HOOVER: So have either of you moved the other closer to your position, in any issue?
WEST: I think there’s been some movement
GEORGE: Yeah, I think so.
WEST: I think we’ve taught Hayek together, Friedrich Hayek and his critique of–
HOOVER: Did it make you, bring you closer to the road to serfdom?
WEST: Well, I was against serfdom from the very beginning. I’ve become more intensely– I’m glad you mentioned that, that 1944 classic of his, A Road to Serfdom. I think there’s been movement but a lot of our movement has to do with also intellectual movement, that is to say reading great texts. It could be a John Stuart Mill, it could be a W.E.B. DuBois, it could be a Hayek, it could be a Leo Strauss. Our conversations are often times intellectual, and we wrestle–
HOOVER: Are you saying he expanded your reading list?
WEST: Well, no we’d, we’d read the text together but it’s how we read em’, it’s how we read em’. I think we’ve.
HOOVER: You’ve said, both of you, that the examined life is constantly being unsettled.
WEST: Absolutely.
HOOVER: And that this is the challenge– in the course that you teach to your students, your challenge to them is to unsettle their ideas so that they examine their assumptions. Where has Dr. West unsettled you?
GEORGE: I’ll tell you where. On issues of race. My inclination prior to our deep engagement on these racial issues was to suppose that the fundamental problem is that people are race conscious. They think of themselves as white or black when race is really something ephemeral, something that, strictly speaking, doesn’t even exist. It’s a kind of artifact of culture. Wouldn’t it be better if we just were colorblind completely in all of our dealings. And that sounded to me like a very good solving of the problem. What Cornel has driven home with me is, yes, there’s a sense in which we should relegate racial categories to the ash heap of history. And yet we have to deal with the facts of history, which include the emergence of cultures based on, quote, race, unquote. So that a program in African-American studies is, is for example, studying a tradition, one that makes sense. Cornel sometimes refers to African-Americans as a people. He says, I come from a people that has suffered for 400 years, been treated unjustly, been hated and yet has taught the world so much to love. I now understand in a way that I didn’t, I think, previously, the sense in which it makes sense to refer to, let’s say, African-Americans as a people.
AFFIRMATIVE ACTION
HOOVER: I mean, there’s a policy prescription that encompasses many of the problems that you’ve just outlined, and that’s affirmative action. And you have said that, Brother George. I’m sorry, that Professor, that Dr. West, you have said that Dr. West–
GEORGE: Brother Cornel!
HOOVER: You have said that Dr. West has really influenced the way you thought about affirmative action. Let’s take a look.
GEORGE: Cornel asked a set of questions that made me think a lot more deeply about that.
Would our campus be– not be worse off by virtue of the effective absence of people from the African-American community? And when you think about that question, the answer is, of course we would be worse off.
HOOVER: So how do you handle the policy prescription then? I mean, have you thought about what the next step is? You’ve conceded that he really affected the way you think about the issue. Have you thought about the policy prescriptions?
GEORGE: I have. And my judgment of it is we certainly don’t want to lower standards, so we’ve got one set of standards for African-American or Latino students and another set of standards for those who don’t fall into those categories. We don’t want to do that. I don’t think we want to give preferences based on race. That sounds too much to me like the disease as cure. But it does mean that we need to make an effort to make sure– a serious effort to make sure that minority students feel they are welcome at Princeton University. There’s a place for them at Harvard University or Ohio State or anywhere else. We need to be reaching out and looking for the talent in those communities that maybe, had history been different, would have been in those institutions. But because history is as it is, are not in those institutions. That seems to me to be the way to go.
HOOVER: Dr. West, were you to change his opinion or just help him arrive closer to the truth as you see it?
WEST: You know, my dear sister, I come from a tradition of lifting every voice. I don’t want anybody to be an echo. I want people to find their own voice, just like a jazz woman or blues man. And my brother’s got his own voice. So I want him to find his voice and he’ll land where he lands. When I see my brother, I don’t have to eliminate his constructed whiteness. He’s a human being in a particular body, but he’s made in the image and likeness of God. He has something there that is worthy of a certain kind of treatment, no matter who he is. And so the history is there. White privilege is there, and white supremacy is there. All these things. The same is true with gender and so forth. Right. But it’s that human connection that’s crucial. And when it comes to affirmative action, the question becomes, we want to make sure our students connect at a human level, but we want to make sure it’s fair. The conditions under which they enter a college is fair, and it’s just. And we know what all these institutions of higher learning have traditions that were deeply racist, sexist, and anti-jewish, anti-Muslim and a whole host of other things, they were anti-Catholic in terms of the Harvards
GEORGE: Oh, sure.
WEST: and the Yales
GEORGE: Princeton.
WEST: and so forth. And Princeton too, absolutely.
HEALTH CARE
HOOVER: Let me ask you about another policy, health care. You’ve been on the record that health care is a human right.
WEST: Absolutely.
HOOVER: Why is health care a human right?
WEST: Because I think that human beings are so precious and priceless that they ought to have access to the highest quality of health care in their short move from momma’s womb to tomb. And that is something that so many other nations already have been able to institutionalize. The United States is very far behind in this regard.
HOOVER: That’s a preference in terms of how the policy should be applied to every individual. Explain to me the right, the human right part. Do you believe in health care is a fundamental human right in the way that freedom of speech and freedom of assembly and freedom to practice your own religion that are enshrined in the First Amendment. Is health care a fundamental right in that way?
WEST: I think it is. I think health care is fundamentally a human right. It’s being born warrants a certain kind of treatment that society can provide, especially for the children, especially for the vulnerable, especially for the elderly. But I think it holds across the board.
HOOVER: Dr. George, I know you’ve been on the record saying you don’t believe that health care is a fundamental human right.
GEORGE: Well, not if by fundamental human right we mean an obligation that the government provided\ it. No. There is a looser sense in which I’m perfectly happy to speak in the language of rights when it comes to health care. That means I think human beings have profound inherent and equal dignity. And we should work for a system that may have some public elements, but may also have private elements that will make health care affordable to as many people as possible. I think there should be a safety net, if necessary provided by the government. But on the whole, I would much rather rely on the market. I don’t like government running things unless it’s absolutely necessary; no one else can run it. Don’t want a private military. Don’t want the government running that. But what can be done by private initiative, private action, voluntary work, I think should be. And I believe in the magic of markets. The good thing about markets, properly regulated, is they push quality up and they push price down. Because I think the best way to get healthcare to as many people as possible, is to drive quality up and prices down.
WEST: And you see now the overlap here because at the moral level, we’re very similar.
HOOVER: What you’re both saying is, there’s an obligation of civil society to provide.
WEST: Somehow that society ought to provide to the best of its ability because morally and spiritually, human beings have something precious that needs to be attended to, that results in how they behave.
HOOVER: And your difference is how it’s provided.
WEST: But then at the level of policy, then you say, oh, well, let’s see which way is the best way of going about doing this kind of thing. And it’s that kind of discussion that we need more of in the country, so that we’re not at each other’s throats, but rather at the subject matter, trying to deal with the suffering and social misery that’s out there.
GEORGE: When it comes to positive goods like healthcare, like education, there are different ways of providing, different mixes of private and public. And reasonable people of good will can disagree about what is best.
FREE SPEECH ON COLLEGE CAMPUSES
HOOVER: Well, a subject that you do agree about is free speech. And free speech on college campuses. Has it become even more difficult in recent years to speak freely on college campuses?
GEORGE: Oh, oh yes.
WEST: Absolutely.
GEORGE: No question that it has. Cornel kindly praised me for my witness and work on behalf of free speech. But I want to say it’s easy for me now, as a conservative, because right now the conservative side, being so often the victims of repression of speech, is in a high free speech mode. Conservatives weren’t always so jealous and protective of free speech.
WEST: When communists, socialists-
GEORGE: That’s right.
WEST: -anarchists were being repressed.
GEORGE: Today, the difficulty, and this is why Cornel deserves more praise than I do, today, the difficulty is on the progressive side. There are lots of progressives who aren’t so excited about free speech, who want to restrict it, who think there are good reasons to restrict what they call hate speech and so forth, and Cornel has stood up in the face of that and said, ‘No, free speech is for everybody and it’s important and it’s got to be honored on our university campuses and in our society more broadly.
HOOVER: Dr. West, why that shift that progressives seem to be in a place where they’re shutting down free speech more now than before?
WEST: That’s a good question. It’s hard to say. It’s really hard. I think it’s partly generational. There is, in fact, also a certain kind of orthodoxy that sets in to any group. And that’s why Socratic energy is very important, no matter what the context is. You have to have an acknowledgment that not only you could be wrong, but you can learn something from someone who you have deep disagreements with. So that any kind of orthodoxy of an adolescent or an underdeveloped form just doesn’t want to listen or hear from anyone they disagree with. Now, keep in mind, you got a lot of progressive young folk who are very Socratic. So I don’t want to engage in generalization. But I think that in part, it has to do with a generational issue and the second has to do with the increasing orthodoxy.
GEORGE: I want to emphasize, Margaret, that when Cornel and I defend free speech both on campus and in society more broadly, we’re not defending it as a mere abstract right, just a right that falls down from heaven that exists because it exists. No. We’re defending it because it’s essential to truth-seeking and to running a republican democracy. You cannot be a truth-seeker if you’re in groupthink. You cannot be a truth-seeker if you’re unwilling to be challenged. Because of human fallibility, we are all wrong about some things. There is nobody whose head is filled with nothing but true beliefs. All of us have some false beliefs in there. And if we’re going to move from falsehood to truth with respect to any subject, we’re going to need somebody poking and prodding and challenging and engaging us. And we need to be willing to listen, and we certainly can’t shut them down. The same for running a Republican democracy, a constitutional democracy like ours, because we’re running a great experiment in democratic order and democratic liberty and self government. And you just cannot do that if some people get to suppress the speech of other people.
WEST: Yeah, I think we’re living not just in a highly polarized moment in this society, but it’s a ‘gangsterized’ moment in our society. And by gangster–
HOOVER: What do you mean by that?
WEST: Gangster, what I mean is the eclipse of integrity, honesty, decency. A hypocrite, hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue. So when you’re a hypocrite, at least you still have standards, you’re just falling short. A gangster has no standards at all. ‘I do what I want to do’, impunity, lack of accountability. And that is the most dangerous thing no democracy can survive.
HOOVER: Sounds like you’re describing President Trump.
WEST: Well, I mean, he’s one example, but he’s not the only gangster around. All of us have some gangster inside of us. So gangsterism is not just a right wing thing. It cuts across our human condition.
GEORGE: Progressives have enormous cultural power. Progressives dominate in academia, in journalism, in the professions. We’ve got a problem across the board, and the progressives can’t point fingers at the conservatives and the conservatives can’t point fingers at progressives when it comes to this. Everybody’s got to stop and start showing some respect, respect for each other as human beings and respect for each other’s rights to disagree.
HOOVER: OK. So I think, I mean, as regular viewers take heart and inspiration from the model that you demonstrate, how do they also apply it to their own lives, to their own families and Thanksgiving dinner tables, right? Where, you know, they have a deep love and shared history, but often fundamentally disagree. And that can get in the way of the love that you all have discussed that ultimately needs to triumph in order for us to be able to really move forward in this experiment of representative democracy.
GEORGE: Let me tell you, Margaret, what I think the first and most necessary thing is. And it begins with each of us. And that is recognizing our own fallibility. We are frail, fallen creatures.
HOOVER: Humility?
GEORGE: Yeah. Intellectual humility. Recognizing that we could be wrong about things. And someone we regard as goofy or misguided or bigoted might actually be right about those things. It’s easy to acknowledge that we might be wrong about things that don’t matter that much to us. The hard thing, but it’s necessary, is to understand the complexity and difficulty of great questions and to understand that I could be wrong about deep, important things. I could be wrong about values I cherish. I could be wrong about identity-forming beliefs for myself. But the only way I’m going to figure out whether I’m right or wrong is to listen to somebody who has a different point of view, and challenge. I’m not going to learn anything from somebody I’m shouting at. I’m just not. There’s not going to be any learning in that conversation. I want to learn from Cornel. He has things to teach me, I have things to learn. Even when he’s wrong about some things, I want to know what his reasons are because they’re gonna deepen and enrich my understanding, even if he’s not actually correct. So if we’re shouting, if we’re not listening to each other, there’s not gonna be any learning.
HOOVER: Do you think people are less likely to listen on the issues and the beliefs they hold most deeply?
GEORGE: Of course. Of course they’re going to be less likely to. And we do wrap our convictions, wrap our emotions more or less tightly around our convictions. That’s just the human condition. And so we then perceive challenges, not as intellectual or moral challenges, but as assaults on us personally, because now our very identities are caught up in what we believe.
WEST: Of course, we want to be improvisational, and being improvisational doesn’t mean you give in. It just means you’re starting from a certain standing point and then you’re seeing whether there’s wiser, more persuasive arguments put forward for you to move in a place where you stand on something stronger. That’s all.
HOOVER: Well, I’d like to sort of wrap this up by taking you on a trip down memory lane, Dr. West. And ask you to reflect on your former self from 1993.
WEST: Really?
HOOVER: Let’s take a look.
WEST: Well, no, I think we recognize at Princeton that it’s always been difficult to make the life of the mind attractive in American culture. We’re simply trying to acknowledge the fact that there is this very rich tradition in which the attempt to delight and instruct and inspire and inform ought to be at least made available. We recognize it will appeal only to a small number of students, but to ensure the quality of those students who make that kind of choice.
HOOVER: You both teach students. How many students are you finding these days are interested in the life of the mind?
WEST: We got a good number.
GEORGE: Yeah.
WEST: We got a good number. It’s a good slice.
GEORGE: But we have to inspire more. We have to inspire more.
WEST: Absolutely. That’s true.
GEORGE: See, there’s a lot that you’re competing with when you’re trying to preach the gospel of the examined life, the life of the mind.
WEST: That’s right.
GEORGE: You’re competing with status, power, money, prestige.
WEST: Absolutely.
GEORGE: Those are just means. They are secondary things. They’re good because of the good things you can do with them. But they are not what really matters. The things that really matter are things like faith, family, friendship, love, compassion, reaching out to other people, exploring the great mysteries of life and of the universe. What summarily we call the life of the mind, which we might also at the same time call the life of the heart, they’re what really matter. But there are competing values. And selling kids on what Cornel and I think are the right values is a challenge because you’ve got a lot working against you. You’ve got a whole culture working against you.
WEST: But I mean, I think the point I was trying to make 27 years ago there – it’s amazing to see me so young – that love of truth, goodness, beauty has always been that of a critical minority because you have to pay a heavy cost. And so it’s no accident that often it’s the great artists who have been the vanguard of the species willing to pay that heavy cost. It could be a Coltrane, a Beethoven, it could be a Toni Morrison or Virginia Woolf. That’s what it is. That’s how we’re constituted as human beings. We’d rather take the easy way out – status, money, wealth and so forth. And yet the real spiritual and moral wealth that really does provide a deep joy, not just a superficial pleasure, is something that we provide as a door opening for young folk who want to enter this love of truth, beauty, goodness, and then as Christians, even love of God. But that’s always a critical minority, but that’s all right.
GEORGE: In our classes, Cornel will often tell our students that you may not understand it, you might not even believe it, but let me tell you, the real reason that you have come to Princeton or Harvard or whatever university it is. The real reason you have come is to learn how to die. Because if you don’t learn how to die, you’re not gonna be able to know how to live. We learn how to die in order to learn how to live. And it’s only in the perspective, up against the horizon of our own death, that we can really get our values straight.
HOOVER: I mean, I can’t end it any better. It’s been one heck of a bromance. Thank you for modeling how to do this.
WEST: Thank you. Thank you.
HOOVER: And thank you for coming to Firing Line, both of you. Thank you for returning.
GEORGE: Thank you Margaret, it’s a great pleasure.
HOOVER: Thank you.
WEST: Thank you so much.