Episode 1: "The Philosopher and
the Humanist."
Guest: Clay Jenkinson
Original air date: February 8,
2009, 5 p.m. central.
Why? -
Philosophical Discussions about Everyday Life
is produced by the
Institute for Philosophy and Public Life. A partnership of Prairie Public, The
North Dakota Humanities Council and The University of North Dakota, College of
Arts and Sciences.
Visit us at
whyradioshow.org
[Music playing 00:18 – 00:28]
What is the purpose of Philosophy? What is the
place of the humanities in day to day life? Why ask why in the first place?
Join me, Jack Russell Weinstein, my guest, Clay Jenkinson and hear a listener
essay by North Dakota native and law student, Megan Compton on the very first
episode of Why? – Philosophical Discussion about Everyday Life, broadcast live
right after the news.
[Music Playing 00:52 – 01:02]
Jack:
Welcome everybody to the premiere episode of “Why?” I’m your host
Jack Russell Weinstein. I’m glad you could all join us. There’s been a lot of
excitement and a genuine sense of anticipation about this show in our little
corner of the world and I want to thank everybody who’s been sending us emails,
well-wishers, journalists, all the bloggers who have bent over backwards to
really get people listening across the country and especially in North Dakota. I
need to thank obviously, the folks at Prairie Public Radio who are taking a shot
with us, The North Dakota Humanities Council, Executive Director, ___ (01:35)
who’s in the studio and the University of North Dakota College of Arts and
Sciences have all been particularly supportive. Special greetings go out to the
folks at Archives Coffee House in Grand Forks who are hosting the first “Why?”
listening party and to Nancy Devine, teacher, author and poet who is live
blogging this episode at NancyDevine.blogspot.com, that’s Devine with an E,
D-E-V-I-N-E. Thanks Nancy and I look forward to reading your script afterwards.
In a few minutes, you too can participate in the conversation. Call us at
888-7556377, that’s 888-7556377 or email us at AskWHY@UND.edu.
We’ll be turning to
our guest, Clay Jenkinson shortly but you know I’ve been pre-occupied by a
couple of events, unrelated events in fact, in the news lately. They’ve gotten a
lot of press. Rush Limbaugh, famously, was talking about Barrack Obama and claim
that he hoped that Obama failed; and then Christian Bale, an actor, engaged in
an obscenity filled tirade, an attack on the Director of Photography for his new
movie, The Terminator. And I’m not sure why I associated the 2 together but I
did and they bothered me and I spent a lot of time thinking about it and trying
to pull that thread, wondering what it was that I objected to. Was it the ___
(02:55), the sense of pleasure in other people’s pain, that wasn’t quite right,
was it? The fact that both acts were just plain old mean but that wasn’t quite
right. Was is the fact that these 2 people, claiming the moral high ground,
wealthy, coddled celebrities that people bend over backward to cater to? And
that wasn’t quite right either. I also felt that the acts and the statements
weren’t really well thought through; that what it means for the President to
fail is of course, what it means for the country to fail. Does he want another
attack on the United States? Does he want a 25% unemployment rate? And as I
began to pull the thread, I began to think about this in terms of the lack of
respect about the way that we treat other people in a civilized society; about
the sense that the people they were talking about weren’t really real to them,
the unemployed, the artistic partner, all of the people who are engaged in joint
projects and I thought particularly shocking was the way that Christian Bale’s
tirade escalated, that at first he started talking angrily and using
inappropriate language but then he threatened violence and eventually he
threatened to fire the guy; and that is a permanent piece of damage. And as I
thought more about it, I realized that what I really was objecting to was the
lack of civility, this loss of a sense of civility in our culture, in our public
culture, in our political culture but also in our work culture.
In the end, I
wondered what happened to the sense of the joint project of truth, justice,
beauty and I was forced to think about Socrates as we philosophers often do and
the sense that people are engaged in a joint project of learning; and Plato, if
as much as we can know what Plato thought, had Socrates mouth the opinion that
when people acted immorally, they were acting out of ignorance and that the job
is to teach them, not to berate them, not to punish them, not to hurt them. The
term civility comes from Latin civitas and that’s the word for
citizenship. The Latin word for citizenship that applies to the Roman Empire and
what struck me in particular was that by using those words, Rush Limbaugh
removed himself from being a citizen, he was saying, “I don’t care what happens
to this country.” and by removing himself from the partnership of the artistic
endeavor that Christian Bale was working through, he removed himself from that
joint project. He removed himself from that sense of self-knowledge, that
pursuit of greatness, that pursuit of human participation as a joint project.
Our guest, Clay
Jenkinson always begins his radio shows with the greeting, “Hello, citizen!” and
so I thought it was a particularly interesting and a particularly good entryway
into our discussion today. I thought the actions were particularly shocking for
someone named Christian, inappropriate to say the least and we’re here with a
guest who’s name Clay, suggest that he too molds into many different forms, many
different figures; and I guess Clay, welcome first, that was a terrible segue.
(Laughs)
Clay: I always took my name to mean I’m of the earth from the planes of
Dakota but you can mold me as you please.
Jack: You know it’s one of the wonderful things about names. We grow
into our names and our names grow into us.
Clay:
Absolutely! And names are a very important part of the philosophical
discourse but Jefferson, you were absolutely right, I believed that civility was
the very basis of a republic and that’s a really important concept for
Jefferson.
Jack: I wonder if we as a culture have a sense, not just of
argumentation or evidence or self-conscious, critical reflection but if we have
any sense left of what it means to be a citizen, of what it means to be an equal
participant in a project that allows us to be represented but also to be
pro-active and participatory.
Clay: Well that’s – I mean it’s a good question. I think Barrack Obama
is asking the United - the people of the United Stated to return to citizenship
and whether he is able to do that is really an open question but I think that
the idea of the citizen has eroded for lots of important reasons for – I’m 55
years old and the Vietnam, Watergate, the disillusionment of the 1960’s, the
cynicism of that has set in the body of politics but it’s also I think, an
educational question. We spent 13 years educating our children and civics has
wholly disappeared from the American curriculum and Ethics too so you wonder
what’s the purpose of public education? For Jefferson, it was to create
citizens. If you’re not creating software, a curriculum of citizenship training,
then how do you expect people to emerge from their formal education knowing what
it is to be a citizen?
Jack: I think one of the things that happens certainly in middle school
and high school is that there is this bizarre category called Social Studies and
Social Studies encompasses History, it encompasses Politics, it encompasses a
whole host of other things. Now, in a certain sense, this is reminiscent of
political economy, the 18th century subject but what it ends up being
is a field so large that the students don’t get a sense of really being able to
refine what they do and what they think about and then they go on to college and
then everything gets divided up into incredibly discreet chunks and there’s no
Social Studies and there’s history of eras or particular years or particular
wars or particular regions and then they lose all the sense of the whole.
First, all you have is the whole without pieces and then you have pieces without
wholes. But (coughs) excuse me, I want to take a step back and ask you a
particular question. You know, you’ve been doing this a long time and…
Clay: Doing Jefferson?
Jack:
Doing Jefferson a long time, not the show, although it may seem like that
already and you’ve portrayed a lot of different characters, you’ve been in a lot
of different places, you’ve been in small towns, you’ve been before congress,
you’ve been on cruise ships in all manner of dress, in all manners of style,
before all manners of audience and I apologize to the listeners that this is the
first real question I’m asking but why? Why do you do this? What do you hope to
accomplish and what motivates you in a form that at least from the outside seems
a drop in an ocean of impossibility?
Clay: Well, there’s no question that what I do is miniscule and
probably insignificant. We all lead our lives whether we’re insurance adjustors
or hardware store owners or work in a florist shop or are teachers or
philosophers. We all lead our lives and presumably everybody tries to do
something that is a benefit to those around them and that’s what I try to do. I
was fortunate in that ___ (10:07) predecessor, Everett Albers, the Founding
Director of the North Dakota Humanities Council asked me to take on as Thomas
Jefferson. He could’ve asked me to take on Buffalo Bill Cody. He could’ve asked
me to take on virtually anybody, George Armstrong Custer. He asked me to take on
the character of Thomas Jefferson. I didn’t know very much about Jefferson when
I began but it’s been the single most important thing that’s happened in my life
except for the birth of my child. I mean the thorough says, “How many a man
dates a new era in his life from the reading of a book?” A new era of my life
began when I started to put on a wig and tights and be Thomas Jefferson and I
had no idea when I began how important Jefferson is. It’s a text, not only a
text for this country, a text for an idea of the republic, a text for America’s
continuing debate with itself but he’s been the central text of my life. It’s
been a marriage, in a certain sense it’s been the most sustained relationship of
my life and I’ve been in love with Thomas Jefferson, I’ve disliked him, we
quarrel. There are times when I fall in love with him as I’m performing him but
in my view and I think you agree if there were only 1 historical figure from
American life, everybody else had to go, I think you have to keep Jefferson. I
think Jefferson laid down the idea of America. He also embodies the paradox and
the inconsistencies of America, that strange mix of pragmatism and idealism in
our character. Jefferson is America’s enlightenment exemplar with all of the
strengths and weaknesses of that model.
Jack: Your words are so passionate and I know from your other work
that you’re a man who’s being in love is very visible. You’re in love with North
Dakota, you’re in love with Jefferson, you’re in love with literature. Your
movie which we’ll talk about hopefully later, “When the Landscape is Quiet Again
- The Legacy of Art Link” award winning I might add is a movie of a man who has
renewed his romance, who is in love with North Dakota once again after being
parted and yet I wonder where does this end and where does Clay Jenkinson begin?
When do you feel that you are authentically speaking in Jefferson’s voice? When
do you think you are speaking in Clay Jenkinson’s voice? One of the things I’ve
noticed, certainly in the last 6 months to a year is that the Thomas Jefferson
hour has been infused with more politics, with more of your own voice. I know in
my own life, my student evaluations this year could - were a little negative
because the students accused me of talking too much about the election. Now,
thankfully they didn’t accuse me of supporting one candidate over the other.
They just said, “Look, this is ancient philosophy, we’re not interested in the
election.” but for me, I couldn’t resist it. I had to talk about it and I think
that’s the same thing that’s happening with you but yet I wonder, where do one
identity end and one begin and before you answer that question, I do want you to
know that we’re hoping to get some phone calls so if anyone feels like calling,
call at 888-7556377; 888-7556377. We’d love to address your questions or your
comments. Email as well AskWHY@UND.edu.
Now you’ve had a full 14 seconds to think about it. Where does Thomas Jefferson
end and Clay begin?
Clay: Well, I mean that’s a good question and I’m not sure if I can
give a definitive answer to that because I think that as in a good marriage, as
in a great friendship, things blend and it’s the boundaries begin to become
porous but I do a number of different characters and they’re quite different.
Theodore Roosevelt is different from Thomas Jefferson, is different from Jay
Robert Oppenheimer, as distant from Mary Weather Louis and I try to make all of
them speak for themselves; in other words, it would be very easy to load them
with me but that would be a mistake. It would be a betrayal of the humanities;
it would be a betrayal of the idea of inquiry. I’m not doing it to showcase
myself, I’m doing it to explore them with the public, with an audience and so I
try to let Jefferson be Jefferson. I frequently disagree with what comes out of
my mouth as Thomas Jefferson. I’m frequently perplexed by Thomas Jefferson but I
try not to make him into kind of a Jeffersonian embodiment of my own philosophy
of life. I think that would be a really fundamental mistake but it’s a danger,
it’s a danger in anything we do, when you teach Plato, that’s a danger; if I’m
teaching Jane Austen, it’s a danger. Each generation reads the great texts
according to its own capacity to read them and always is engaged in a very
complex read. There’s never a simple read, there’s no – you can’t take the
essence of the Book of Job and say this is what it means for all time. It now
means what it means in a post-holocaust world and it can’t mean anything else so
its complex but I know who I am and I know who Jefferson is and I’m painfully
aware of the difference. I don’t live in splendor, I’m not - I can’t do latitude
and longitude; if I designed a university, it would not be a spectacular pay-on
to neo-classical order. I’m not - I don’t have Jefferson’s rage for order, I
don’t have his punctiliousness and on and on and on but I’ll tell you this,
being able to channel Jefferson to a certain degree has lifted my life beyond
anything that I could have ever anticipated. I am whatever I am, an exceedingly
imperfect human being, but whatever I am has been made better by the fact of
Thomas Jefferson.
Jack: Is that something that you can say about the country as a
whole? Is there a sense of “Can someone really talk about national identity?”
As I’ve traveled across the country and as I’ve taught in different places
whether California or Kentucky or New Jersey or what have you, I don’t know if I
have a sense that there is a United States, that there is national identity.
The legacy of Thomas Jefferson is one of the elements that would hold us
together. Is that a strong enough element to give us the sense of community?
Clay: No. Jefferson, I think is in disarray, I think we have betrayed
him to a certain degree, we found out enough that he doesn’t quite work for us
anymore or he’s a slave holder, he’s a sexist, he died hopelessly in debt, he
had an attitude towards Native Americans that we no longer fully accredit and so
the demons of Jefferson or the dark side of Jefferson are the unresolved
energies of Jefferson have now gotten in the way. And I think, Jefferson is in
some sense demoted, I don’t think he could be put on Mount Rushmore if that
project was being designed today. We’ve forgotten him in some really important
ways but I think frankly that what’s happening with Barrack Obama, this moment
that we’re in, we’re in one of the most interesting moments in American history,
Barrack Obama saying, “We could be America with a capital A, the America we all
dream of when we think of America. We could still be that nation.” And he’s
basically amalgamating Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson and it will be very
interesting to see whether he can re-invigorate those energies or whether he
will be regarded as sort of a wonderful lone wolf in a very cynical world. I
think the ___ (17:41) incident is an example, a very fine example of what we’re
up against, the degradation of American life that is now routinely a source of
cynicism for citizens.
Jack: You mentioned in a recent episode of the Thomas Jefferson hour,
in the voice of Thomas Jefferson that his actions are more moderate than his
ideology.
Clay: Jefferson?
Jack: Jefferson, yes.
Clay: Yes! Yes indeed, always!
Jack: And I’m struck with the question where does history end and
where does philosophy begin? You are engaged in a historical analysis of a
philosophical figure and we can talk about Jefferson in context, we can talk
about Jefferson’s flaws. Philosophers love to site the ___ (18:26) that
regardless of what a person is, their truth is truth; and so if an obese doctor
tells you you’re supposed to lose some weight, it doesn’t matter that he or she
is obese. If a 2-pack a day cigarette smoker tells you you’re not supposed to
smoke, that’s true. So to what extent can we look at Jefferson and say forget
about the figure, let’s talk about ideas, let’s talk about concepts, let’s talk
about the ambiguity of the phrase, “The wall of separation between the church
and state.” let’s talk about self-evident truths? To what extent can we engage
in Jefferson as a philosopher rather than a historical figure
Clay: Well, I would like to just hold up the mirror and make you
answer that question because this is really a serious philosophical question. I
mean there are 2 views of this. One is that Jefferson is the obese doctor, that
he’s a slave holder, he had relations with Sally Henning, he’s a
miscegenationist and so on and so forth but that his vision which is
really an articulation of the enlightenments principles, that vision is eternal,
it’s ideal, it has universal application not just to the people of the United
States but to the people of Sri Lanka and Angola and that as John Locke put it,
“In the beginning, all the world was America.” meaning a forest; in the end,
says Jefferson, “All the world will be America.” that every nation will live
according to constitutional forms and bills of rights and so on. That’s one view
and I hold that view in most of my moods. The post-modern view is that those are
just a set of abstractions dealt out by a power elite, they never really meant
what we say they mean, that Jefferson’s own incapacity to live even minimally
according to those ideals, not only discredits him, it discredits those ideals
that if, when you say something like, “All men are created equal.” and there has
never been an instance of this in the history of the planet.” you’re saying
nonsense so you face this every day. What Jefferson is arguing, the sort of
universal, free speech, free press, freedom of religion, habeas corpus, the
right not to incriminate oneself, the intolerance, forbearance in foreign
policy, mutuality and civility. Marvelous things to say but if it can’t be
realized even by our best individuals, then maybe they are cracked at their core
and I think that’s the debate that we are having. I think the Cultural Studies
Movement has gone too far with this but I think it is rightly asked whether the
obese doctor isn’t just a sham
Jack: You know we’re starting to get questions which is wonderful so
I want to… Scott, listening in North Dakota, sorry, North Carolina online wants
to ask a question about Christian Bale and before we turn to him and I’ll let
him ask his own question, does this mean then, the fact that Christian Bale is
the exemplar of lack of civility, doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter who it is,
the real issue is the concept of civility itself. Let’s turn to Scott and see
if his question connects at all with what I think he might ask. Scott?
Scott: Well, I don’t want to comment on Thomas Jefferson, I’ve been
saying since tenth grade, the man’s a hypocrite and I don’t want to go any
further on that. I am calling about Christian Bale. I don’t think you’re can
overlook that he is a dramatic actor, a dramatic ___ (21:53) trying to execute
an award winning performance and I don’t think he should be judged on that. I
think he was well in his rights to yell at the DP and the DP should be fired
Jack: I think that this is actually a really important question
because it connects to the central question that I’m asking Clay as well as to
where the actor ends and where the concepts begin. Is it excusable to be unable
to step outside of a role? I’m thinking of a not at all analogy situation but my
best friend, Gale is in the New York State Police and her analysis if our
listeners would call “The Rodney King episode” where Rodney King was taken out
of his car and beaten by many Los Angeles Police Officers and when she describes
the problem; she describes the problem as a problem of leadership. She says, “No
police officer after being in a high speed chase for hours and hours can control
his or her adrenaline and therefore what was missing was a leader to take – to
get them to step back and breathe deeply.” so maybe the problem is that if
Christian Bale is immersed inside his figure for artistic reasons, that no one
was taking the leadership responsibility to say, “I’m the Director, you need to
walk away!” and then again that’s that flipside of civility. Where is the
leadership? Where is that sense of responsibility that we have for other people?
Why weren’t there other people on the set who were saying, “Mr. Bale, take a
walk!” How do we connect that with Jefferson’s sense of leadership because I
know that Jefferson and Adams had a huge debate about the limitations of human
nature and Adams seemed to think that the government’s role was to control the
uncontrollable human nature whereas Jefferson had faith in the possibilities of
self-restraint, collective as well as individual? Is Christian Bale an episode
of the failure of Jefferson’s views on human beings?
Clay: Well, maybe, maybe not. I mean this goes back far beyond
Jefferson. It goes back into Greek culture and the Oresteia is about the
replacement of lexta liounis of replacement of a retribution culture with
the due process culture and western civilization’s genius has been to create a
series of
processes which filter human passion and what Jefferson had in mind in
his own role in the founding of the United States was that our
processes, the constitution, our court system, democratic elections and
so on would have a filtering effect of whatever dark energies are left in human
nature. He did a marvelous job with it so I think that the enlightenments
principles are the ones that should be governing this situation but this factor
has not been trained in self-restraint. It’s really a question of
self-restraint.
Jack: We’re going to have to take a break. When we get back, we have
an email question from Joyce in Washington, DC who actually wants to ask why
Jefferson is so important in America. She doesn’t quite get it. So let’s take a
break and we’ll come back with Clay Jenkinson and Why? in just a moment
[Music
playing 25:13 – 25:35
You’re listening to Prairie Public, a news information and music service, in
partnership with the University of North Dakota and North Dakota State
University.
[Music
playing 25:45 – 26:03]
Jack: We’re back on Why? –
Philosophical Discussion about Everyday Life on Prairie Public. I’m Jack
Weinstein and I’m talking with Clay Jenkinson. And right before we broke, we
had a question from Washington, DC about the importance of Jefferson, and let me
frame that question in a different question as well because Jefferson was an
enlightenment thinker and he was very connected to the Scottish enlightenment
and one of the issues that you’re bringing up is the fallibility of Jefferson
and the inadequacy of our realization of that vision and so is this a larger
question. Is it not just, does he represent an idea of America but is the
enlightenment ideal in the sense that we can be governed by reason, by math, by
science that there is this notion of progress. Is that still viable today?
Clay: I think so. First of all, I don’t think that Jefferson is a
hypocrite. I think that Jefferson has a lot to answer for and that he’s
extremely vulnerable on race and other questions and that we would be terribly
mistaken to conflate Jefferson’s own incapacities and failures as a human being
with a discrediting of the philosophy of the enlightenment. If you and been a
prisoner at Guantanamo, you’d wish you lived in the enlightenment; if you were
living in poverty in New Orleans, you wish you lived in the enlightenment. The
enlightenment may have some philosophical failures at its core and there’s a lot
to question in the enlightenment but it is the best practice that the world has
ever shown for the dignity of mankind, the rights of man, our capacity to be
engaged in our own self-government, our capacity to keep taxes and our dollars
and to have some control of where they’re spent. You can look at any other
alternative and the enlightenment comes out looking good. There are many holes
in it. I think its greatest hole is that it has de-spiritualized culture but I
would give the enlightenment the best score of any system of social intercourse
that has ever been devised and just because it’s not without philosophical
weaknesses, I think it would be a terrible mistake to think that we’re somehow
in a post-enlightenment era. I like to know that if the police come to my house,
there are rules of engagement and if they break them, my lawyer will get me off
and will force the police to back down. I want to live in a world of due
process.
Jack: So let’s take this notion of sort of objective moral truth and
let’s put it center stage because I’m going to do what philosophers do and I’m
going to thrust a philosophical problem at you.
Clay:
Good!
Jack: And in order to do that though, you’re going to have to tell a
story. I’ll be yet a little briefer than you tend to tell it because you tell it
so wonderful. You tell a story about Lincoln and Frederick Douglas at Lincoln’s
2nd Inaugural Address and I want to offer a counter example but it
you tell our listeners briefly what that story is because it’s an incredibly
powerful story and then I want to use this enlightenment framework to give a
counter example.
Clay:
I‘ll give it in the shortest compass that I can. Lincoln’s 2nd
Inaugural Address occurred on March 4th, 1865, his 2nd
Inaugural Address is in my opinion, the greatest thing ever written in the
United States but later that day he had a reception at the White House and 5,000
people came to shake the hand of Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln; and of the 5,000
people who came to the White House there was 1 African-American. That
African-American was Frederick Douglas. Frederick Douglas was an old friend of
Lincoln’s. Frederick Douglas comes to the gates at the White House and he’s
turned away by the guards and he’s turned away because he’s a Negro. And he
says, “I think Mr. Lincoln would want me here if he knew!” and the guards say,
“Tough, get lost!” Well fortunately, somebody carried in the notion to Lincoln
that a black man was at the gate and Lincoln said bring him in. So Frederick
Douglas, America’s greatest civil rights leader of the 19th century
comes into the East Room at the White House and there’s Abraham Lincoln shaking
the 5,000 hands of these well-wishers. And Lincoln speaks loudly, over the heads
of the whole crowd says, “Ah, Mr. Douglas, my dear friend. I’m so glad you’re
here. I’ve been waiting for you. Thank you for coming tonight! I want to ask you
what did you think of my inaugural address. I saw that you were in the audience
today.” and Douglas is embarrassed and wants to hide in the corner and Lincoln
makes sure that everyone in that room gets it. That he, Abraham Lincoln, prizes
this man and his blackness is not an issue with Abraham Lincoln and that he is
not going to allow this crowd be effectively in a ___ (30:21) crowd in the White
House in 1865. It’s one of the most moving single moments in American History.
Jack: It’s a tremendously powerful story and I think, a moment when
all of us want to be Lincoln. You know, it’s that sense of our President as an
ideal, that this is the kind of President that we want to look up to and I’ve
just received a note that your essay, “Abraham Lincoln in the text of America -
How Lincoln saved Jefferson.” Is going to be on the Why? Radio Show…
Clay: Oh my goodness!
Jack: … website so you know, I don’t know what’s going on! (Laughs)
Clay: I wrote it for the Humanities Council for ___ (30:52) but we
can post it; but its - his inaugural address, his 2nd Inaugural
Address is just a world class literary document.
Jack: So let me throw something at you which has always been a
problem for me and I call this the problem of Malcolm X’s teacher. When Malcolm
X was in 2nd grade, when he was still Malcolm Little, he was the
most popular kid in the class, he was the only white kid in the class if not the
school, if I recall correctly and as Alex Haley tells the story, all the kids
are talking to the teacher about what they want to do when they grow up and you
know, one wants to be a carpenter, wants to be a doctor, whatever; and Malcolm,
who is on the top of the class and is brilliant, goes to the teacher and says,
“I want to be a lawyer!” and this is the early 1930’s if I remember correctly,
perhaps even 1920’s and the teacher says, “That’s wonderful, you’re a smart man
but you are a young negro boy and you’ll never be a lawyer and you should strive
for something more appropriate for you. You should be a carpenter or something
along those lines.” Now Malcolm’s response to this was violent, internally
violent. He left school, he became a problem to society, a drug user, a grafter,
all sorts of things, and he eventually ended up going to prison where he found
Islam and became for my money, one of the great American leaders; but there’s a
problem and the problem is I’m not sure that the teacher was wrong. I’m not sure
that the teacher was wrong to say, “Look, its 1922 or whatever it is and you are
in the South and you are a young black boy and you will never get to be lawyer.”
And on the one hand we have this enlightenment promise that Lincoln represents
so well, which is the truth is the truth. Human beings are equal and if we
acknowledge that respect, if we acknowledge that dignity, we can promise
goodness. On the other hand, we have the reality which is, if you promise
something that kids can never achieve, at least in your vision of what kids can
achieve, then you are destroying the children. How do we approach that __
(33:00)? How do we balance that the enlightenment desire for progress and truth
with the need to be honest about our kids’ limitations. You know, “I will never
be an NBA star. I am awkward and I’m certainly not tall enough and I have
terrible vision.” If someone said to me, “Work hard and you will be in the
Knicks!” they would be lying to me. How do we balance that?
Clay: I think these listeners – I don’t want to criticize a
philosopher but I’d say it’s a false analogy (laughter) because if the person
said, “You could never be a Supreme Court Justice.” that’s quite different from
never being able to run the mile in 4 minutes but let me say, Lincoln had the
answer to this. Lincoln re-read the Declaration of Independence in 1854 and he
continued to write about it until the end of his presidency and he said, “We
don’t know what Jefferson meant when he wrote all men are created equal but we
can’t go on unless we read that sentence in the widest possible way.” And so
Jefferson, here’s why he’s so essential, this answers I think the woman in
Washington, DC. Jefferson laid down these principles. We hold these truths to be
self-evident that all men are created equal. He probably didn’t really mean that
in the fullest sense of the term but that sentence is so filled with aspiration
and impossibility that our national project has been to tease it out and to ease
it out and to widen it and extend it further until we have really, almost
achieved universality in our time. It took agonizing events, the Civil Rights
Movement, the Civil War, the Suffrage Movement, American Indians being
pauperized by this culture. This is a highly imperfect culture but it has been
straining towards this universal ideal and it will achieve it. The fact that we
have made the progress that we have and proves that it is right to pitch the
debate very high and to say these ideals are not to be sneered at, even if we
human beings screw up and are failures over and over again; so I think that
Lincoln had it right that we have to keep re-reading American History by using
these foundation text but demanding more of them at every era.
Jack: So
Aristotle when he talks about explanation. He talks about the ___ (35:12) and
the goal, the purpose of an act, in this case the ___ (35:15) of humanity and
what you seem to be suggesting is that the Jeffersonian ideal, the Jefferson
myth actually is, Crystal from Grand Forks is writing from an email, the
Jeffersonian myth provides national ___ (35:29), a national goal, something to
aim for even if Jefferson himself couldn’t do it which brings us back to the ___
(35:36) argument, which is Jefferson as a person is less important than
Jefferson as an ideal.
Clay: But it does somehow – it doesn’t discredit the idea but it
doesn’t do the ideal any good that Jefferson was a slave holder. Samuel Johnson
in Great Britain who hated America said, “Isn’t it interesting that those who
yelped loudest for liberty are also the drivers of Negro slaves?” That sense
that – that kind of got you a sense that America is always less than it pretends
to be. We’ve been hearing it for the last 8 years; we will hear it through
eternity. If you pitch your ideals that high, you inevitable create the problem
of ___ (36:11) and you should. If Jefferson had not owned slaves, we would take
him more seriously than we do but we still have to take that sentence seriously,
that’s what Lincoln taught us. We have to take that sentence universally, even
if the people who articulated it were rotten human beings because it will make
us better to read that in the universal way. What do we substitute for that? Let
me ask you, if you take out all men are created equal, if you take out due
process, habeas corpus, what do you substitute for these that is more grounded
in realism that can still lift the culture?
Jack: Well, this of course is one of the great problems of
contemporary philosophy, whether realism is itself defensible, whether all we
have are cultural norms; whether the only thing binding North Dakotans together,
is the fact that we claim to be North Dakotans and we subscribe to an agreement
of some sort, a social contract. Our student, our listener essay, Megan Compton
is going to talk about this in a little bit in her essay about North Dakota and
Philosophy. What happens when all we have is what we agreed to? What happens if
we appeal to nothing other than our desires? This brings us to another question
also from Grand Forks. Kim who is again asking about Christian Bale and it’s a
very, very interesting, I think, contrast because it really is about the person
versus what we expect from people and she pointed that right after the tirade
and I don’t know how aware of this you are, it became an Internet ___ (37:42).
There were dance mixes and all sorts of very, very humorous things about using
the curses and using the rhythm and really sounding like a club mix and
incredibly well-produced and Kim is asking, “How do we raise a child when even
the lack of civility isn’t taken seriously?” At no point does someone say or at
least does the culture not condemn him. Some people make excuses, some people
will try to offer psychological justifications but it becomes a joke rather than
a serious problem. How do we raise our children? How would Jefferson or anyone,
I mean, you’re a father, right? How do you raise your daughter in the phase of
the society that seems to disrespect civility so much that even lack of civility
itself becomes a joke?
Clay:
Well, we are living in a post modern world and we’re also a deeply
disillusioned people. I think there’s a certain ___ (38:43) at the core of our
culture but I don’t want to go so far as to condemn all of this out of hand,
there’s a playfulness in some of this in these iterations and variations that
are occurring on the Internet. I was at the inaugural of Barrack Obama and when
George Bush was introduced, a large number of people in the crowd at one point 8
million of them all singing, “Na, na, na, na, na, na, na, goodbye!” and it was
rude and awful but in a certain sense there was a genius in it. I mean I wound
up liking it because I thought the American people have a kind of – a core
unwillingness to be bought and they are going to express their angst and they’re
going to express their sarcasm and their cynicism and there was something
creative in all of that; so I think that maybe Christian Bale can’t bear the
burden we’re placing on him for this incident. Remember, we’re still in a
post-romantic age, where we prize the artist and we almost want her or him to
have hissy fits because that’s part of the cultural privileging of the artist
that comes from the romantic view. Jefferson didn’t hold that view, artists for
him were makers, they were ___ (39:51) but our world, a world of words, ___
(39:54) and ___ (39:55) and Goethe still exist, still have cultural valiancy and
we want the artist to be a prima donna from time to time to remind us that
they’re artists.
Jack: Where is – what’s the place of humor in inquiry. I mean,
seriousness, drama, earnestness, which we all know is important. These are the
hall marks of what the artist is for us. Yet the comedian is the most incisive,
comedian is the most cutting edge. I’m thinking of the television show 30 Rock
which every joke walks on the edge of being unbelievably racist, unbelievably
sexist, unbelievably offensive but never pulls it off or rather never crosses
that line because they pull it off so wonderfully because Tina Fey and her staff
are so incredibly funny. Is humor under-rated in our culture? Is humor as a
part of inquiry under-rated in our culture?
Clay: I couldn’t live without humor. Humor allows us to get by, humor
is transgressive, it’s a way of crossing a boundary, seeing how far you can get
before you are burned. We need it; you know Mark Twain said, “Laughter is the
tool by which we will remove tyranny from the earth.” We need him or we need
more humor and I think humor – Freud teaches us in jokes and their relation to
the unconscious that humor points put where the trouble spots are, where the
wounds are in the culture and so humor is way of national processing, it’s one
way of national processing of these things. A philosophical discourse can do
that, an essay can do that but humor is one way of teasing out the areas of the
culture that are up for grabs and are still highly problematic and I think we
need more of it. I think it’s a sign of health of a culture, not of its
ill-health.
Jack:
Did – this is 2 parts – did Jefferson have a sense of humor?
Clay:
No.
Jack: Okay, that’s the shortest! (Laughs)
Clay: He had 4 or 5 humorous moments in his life but he was not a
teller of jokes.
Jack: Well what is interesting and we have another caller from
Brevard, North Carolina. Sean wants to talk about Christian Bale and what is
interesting about Christian Bale is a couple of days ago, he apologized and I
actually think that his apology was disingenuous but that’s another issue. His
apology – what he said was, “Feel free to make fun of me as much as possible, I
was horrible!” And so he was acknowledging at least ostensively acknowledging
that what he did was so beyond the pail that the only way we can deal with it
was make fun of him.
Clay: Make fun of him.
Jack: Yeah, yeah! Sean, are you there?
Sean: Yes! Listen, Christian Bale is the hero; he perhaps chastised the
Director of Photography who probably has done this repeatedly and cost
production companies, millions of dollars, who knows? He may have saved jobs by
correcting this Director of Photography but I’m sure he’ll never do that again.
He’s the hero in this and nobody’s recognizing that. It’s rather disappointing
in this day and age and I’ll hang up so I can listen.
Jack: Thank you Sean! Okay, so what does the term hero mean? We have
this question earlier on about, from Crystal in Grand Forks, about the myth of
Jefferson and I didn’t read the text but she was asking about the reality of the
myth versus the actual person. We have the question from Washington, DC of
Joyce, about why is Jefferson so important? Jefferson has become a hero, yet a
tremendously flawed hero.
Clay: He’s a fallen hero in our time. Lincoln is not a fallen hero.
Martin Luther King is not a fallen hero. There are heroes that are holding up
and both Lincoln and Martin Luther had just enormous flaws but their heroism is
holding up. The culture has decided to hold them up.
Jack: Don’t we need fallen heroes? I mean, isn’t our national
theologies and I say that multiple, aren’t many of them based on an ethic of the
fall? I mean can’t we identify with the true hero? Why do we need a fallen hero?
Clay: I think right now we need fallen heroes. Let me tell you why and
then I really want your reaction to this. I think that we are denigrating
Jefferson now, partly because he deserves it. I mean if he hadn’t said all men
are created equal, he’d be in a lot better shape. If he just said, “We’ll free
people as we can, we’ll bumble along here and try to do the right thing but I’m
not making any promises.” He didn’t do that, he set the bar as a Universalist
bar, of course, we have to condemn him in our time but I think that we are
disillusioned as a people and so it’s in our interest to tear down our cultural
heroes because if we do, then we don’t have to lead lives of integrity and
idealism. If we can show that Jefferson was a hypocrite and Lincoln was a racist
and Martin Luther King was a womanizer. If we do all that, that lets us off the
hook of our own quest for the ideal and I think it’s a terrible, terrible
mistake.
Jack: But
isn’t there a flipside and that is that if we tear down our heroes, then we are
responsible for being the heroes. I mean that’s a sort of Freudian parent move
that we have to separate from our parents in order to and recognize their
fallibility in order to recognize our own agency, if we are all observing – if
we all rely on heroes, then where are we?
Clay: No, I certainly hear that but I’m thinking that Bill Clinton, his
behavior is sort of, “Well, that’s what you expect from a political figure.” But
that actually just tears us down. I don’t think it empowers us to be better.
Jack: Well
that is a powerful way to end an interview that was way too short. Clay, I hope
you come back soon.
Clay: I’d love to.
Jack: This has been really wonderful and for the first interview, very
powerful and I certainly have learned a lot. Consider joining us on February 25th
at the Empire Theatre in Grand Forks for viewing of Clay’s film, “When the
Landscape is Quiet Again - The Legacy of Art Link” we’ll have a discussion
afterwards. Clay will be there and in Velva on February 22nd, where
we’ll be talking about Clay’s film again and the book Coyote Warrior by Paul
Venda, pardon me, VanDevelder. When we come back we will have the first listener
essay and we’ll talk just a bit more, you and I and then we’ll call it a night.
[Music playing 46:31 – 46:53]
You’re listening to Prairie
Public, a news information and music service, in partnership with the University
of North Dakota and North Dakota State University.
[Music
playing 47:02 – 47:16]
Jack: We’re back with Why? –
Philosophical Discussions about Everyday Life. I’m your host, Jack Russell
Weinstein and today we have the first of a series, we hope, of guest essays,
submitted by listeners, future listeners and this one is by Megan Compton, a
North Dakota native and current law student at the University of North Dakota.
Megan wants to talk about the experience that she has had with Philosophy and
the way it affects her life.
Megan:
My name is Megan Compton and for me philosophy is more than just a subject
taught in a classroom or a way at looking at the world. Philosophy is about
growth, growth in humankind, in our political world, in societal change. It is
also about personal growth and that is where it has changed my life. Philosophy
taught me to connect the dots, professionally, spiritually and in my
relationships with other people. It gave me the ability to look at issues with
a new set of eyes, challenging my beliefs and my understandings of the world
around me. I grew up in the mid-west, more specifically, in North Dakota and
although the region offers many benefits, being challenged isn’t one of them. A
large part of the mid-western culture is about respect but we have transformed
this principle into something outsiders may not understand; something that looks
more like silence, conformity and complacency.
In contrast,
philosophy has taught me to become more comfortable challenging my own beliefs
and practices. I don’t mean that philosophy is about changing people’s values
or ways of life. It’s about questioning them in a way that it makes them
stronger. It forced me to dig deeper than I might have been comfortable with at
first but in the end it made me more confident in what I knew and what I
accepted as truth. In particular, it gave me a better perspective in how people
label themselves such as religiously and politically and how those terms affect
us all. Philosophy is about understanding those differences on all levels and
finding the commonality that makes us all human.
I am currently in my second year at the University Of North
Dakota Law School and my path here would have been very different without
philosophy. It has helped me see strengths and weaknesses and arguments and
taught me that there’s not always one right answer but that there may still be
wrong ones, nonetheless. It has taught me to acknowledge and accept my own
strengths and weaknesses, to reach my full potential and to better understand
how people grow and change, and how to handle those transformations. Looking
forward, both my personal and career goals will accept the possibility of
growth. Philosophy allows me to choose to be Megan and gives me the tools to
learn what that means while I choose.
Jack: Thank you very much, Megan. You know, I was very deeply affected
by her use of the term respect in that contest and I spent a fair amount of time
thinking about that since she first recorded the essay and it certainly informed
the way that I thought about how to begin this show.
If
you have any comments for Megan, send it to the website at WhyRadioShow@UND.edu and if
you would like to submit your own essay, please let us know, we’d love to have
it. Let us know at WhyRadioShow., sorry, WhyRadioshow@UND.edu
and we’ll be right back to wrap up the show after this.
[Music
playing 50:58 – 51:12]
The Institute for Philosophy
and Public Life bridges the gap between Academic Philosophy and the General
Public. Its mission is to translate between academics and non-academics,
cultivating discussions between Philosophy professionals and others who have an
interest in the subject regardless of experience or credentials. The Institute
is conceived on the premise that anyone can do philosophy and that the subject
relates to everyone’s daily lives.
Visit us on the web at
PhilosphyinPublicLife.org.
The Institute for Philosophy
and Public Life – because there is no ivory tower
[Music
playing 51:50 – 52:04]
Jack: We’re back and our first episode of Why? – Philosophical
Discussions about Everyday Life is coming to an end, thank you Clay for taking
the time to do this, coming all the way from your side of the state; thank you
Megan Compton for presenting your thoughts. It’s always difficult to be first
and we hope that she’s inspired others to write similar essays. We’ll be back
next month on March 8th at 5 p.m. when our guest will be Lawrence
Cahoone who’s going to talk about the Philosophy of Hunting – The Search of the
Meaning of Life in Hunting. Skip Wood is our Producer, Rochelle Schnapps is our
Intern. Why’s theme songs, all of them are of the album ___ (52:38) by Mark
Weinstein who in fact is my father and you can get more of his music at
jazzfluteweinsteinmusic.com. Come participate in the Why? Community and learn
more about us at WhyRadioShow.org. Visit the Institute for Philosophy and Public
Life at PhilosophyandPublicLife.org and consider reading, writing or talking
about philosophy, it will make your life better. The University Of North Dakota
is a good place to do Philosophy. Visit us on web but Philosophy is everywhere.
You make it and I hope that we have inspired you with some of our thoughts today
because philosophy is a day to day activity. As we say at the Institute: there
is no ivory tower. Thank you very much! I’ll talk to you next month and see you
soon
