Discourse.

Professors Robert George of Princeton University and Cornel West of Harvard University meet with Dr. Scott Powell, Director of the Aquinas Institute for Catholic Thought at Colorado University for a discussion about friendship, faith, and the state of civil discourse ...

GEORGE

If conservatives are doing nothing but listening to Fox News and reading National Review and the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal and progressives are watching MSNBC and reading The New York Times and reading The Nation, all that's going to happen there is something that Cornel and I abominate, that is everybody being reinforced in what they already believe, nobody being challenged nobody being unsettled, and they're being taught that people who disagree with them are one of two things: either they are bad people or ignorant people. Either they are frauds or they are fool. Either they are bigots or they are stupid or both, and that is just a recipe for cultural disaster.  It's exacerbating this terrible polarization and the demonization that we are seeing.  We've got to get out of these silos.  In part, it's the product of technology that enables us to hide in our own spaces and only hear people online you know.  You know where your Facebook friends are, all people who agree with you.  Your Twitter followers, all people who agree with you, and we're just simply being reinforced.  You know what we're being reinforced in when we allow that to happen?  Prejudices.  Some of them might be right, some of them might be wrong, but they're not actual thoughts.  They're just prejudices we happen to believe.  If we're lucky, they happen to be right. We haven't thought our way to them because we haven't engaged the reasons they might be wrong.  You're really only entitled to count a view as a true opinion if you reason your way to it; if you think about it, if you consider what's to be said against it, as well as what's to be said in favor of it.  Otherwise it's something that happens to you.  It's not like an experience.  It's not something you actually do.

WEST

The three of us actually, in our own calling as teachers, are fundamentally wedded to The Negro National Anthem, The Black National Anthem, "Lift Every Voice."  Not lift every echo.  You see, echo is just an extension of an echo chamber.  It's a copy, it's the imitation, it's the emulation.  We all begin with imitation and emulation, but in the end like our fingerprint, we want each student, each human being, to laugh for themselves. Don't laugh for somebody else.  Don't love for somebody else, and you can't think for somebody else.  

The only way you find your voice, and this is, of course, the language of the jazz world and the blues world, you can't be a jazz man or a blues woman unless you find your voice.  Quit imitating.  Aretha quit imitating Marion Williams.  John Coltrane quit imitating Johnny Hodges.  Russell Thompson of The Stylistics, quit imitating Eddie Holman.  The important thing is, Robert Zimmerman, you can't imitate Robert Johnson.  You're a Jewish brother from Minnesota.  Rename yourself Bob Dylan.  That's fine, but now you got your own voice.  Dylan, you just know your voice is one that is in conversation with a genius from Delta named Robert Johnson or a genius from the vanilla side of town named Hank Williams.  Both of them deeply American, deeply southern, but they found their voices and so that becomes a crucial thing in terms of breaking from the the narrow tribalism.