Joint.

Morrissey, from Autobiography, recalls an unchanged classroom ...

With no identifiable human being behind their agonized persona, teachers are restored only by the general truth that the trapped audience before them cannot squeal, for no one would listen. The classroom is their stage, and each day is their theatrical execution — to our joint disadvantage. 

The physical threats of the past have been replaced by a tyrannical insistence on conformity to the prescribed intellectual pattern.  As with much of our culture, the spotlight remains tightly focused on a narcissistic tug-of-war, combatants making peacock pronouncements rather engaging in a clash of ideas.  

How is anything of importance achieved?

Ignorance of the arguments of intelligent dissenters will prevent them from understanding the truth as deeply as they should.

Robert George, from Truth Matters: A Dialogue on Fruitful Disagreement in an Age of Division 

The Reverend Dr. West and Dr. George recently discussed their book ...

Control.

Personal authenticity, in the classical understanding of liberal-arts education, consists in self-mastery—in placing reason in control of desire. According to the classic liberal-arts ideal, learning promises liberation, but it is not liberation from demanding moral ideals and social norms, or liberation to act on our desires—it is, rather, liberation from slavery to those desires, from slavery to self.

Robert P. George

Spirit.

Anchored host Jeremy Tate discusses friendship and fruitful disagreement with Robert George and Cornel West ...

Education is always a battlefield, spiritually, intellectually, politically, and because we're so politicized, we miss out on the movement of spirit. You remember Russell Kirk says in the very last chapter of Conservative Mind that conservatism is the regeneration of spirit and character -- of spirit and character with its morality and spirituality.  Once you accept that it's a whole new world with all kinds of different political conflict and ideological conflict, but it's character, it's integrity, it's honesty, it's decency, it's courage at the center and that's a different level of living.

An excellent book ...

Considerations.

Dr. Robert George against the world.  Who ya got?

On the Monday before the event, the college sent a campuswide email promoting the lecture. Shortly after, James Hall, an associate professor of English, emailed a student a link to George’s accountability profile from the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, or Glaad, which features several examples of his anti-LGBTQ remarks.

Information about George’s beliefs quickly began circulating across campus. The next day, a group of students distributed fliers promoting a protest.

Noelle Punte, a junior at Washington College and president of Encouraging Respect of Sexualities, a student group supporting the LGBTQ community, emailed Sosulski and called for the college to cancel the event.

Punte, who did not attend the lecture or protest, said in an interview that regardless of the lecture’s content, inviting George to campus undermines the college’s commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion — at a time, she added, when anti-LGBTQ laws are on the rise. Engaging with diverse perspectives is important, Punte said, but that can be complicated for queer students, who often feel their identities are attacked in the process.

“I’m not saying freedom of speech should be restricted,” Punte said. “But at the same time, in cases like this, there needs to be serious considerations about the ramifications and potential harm that inviting someone like Robert George on campus could cause.”

The day before the lecture, Sosulski sent out a campuswide email announcing that although he understood students’ concerns, canceling George’s lecture would contradict the college’s commitment to “liberal learning.”

Uncomfortable.

The Rev. Dr. Cornel West and Dr. Robert George discuss the purpose of a liberal education ...

While college should prepare graduates for careers, the more important purpose is to provide students with an opportunity lead the examined life and be open to new ideas. To lead truly a human life in highest sense, means to be uncomfortable.

Understand the value of truth for its own sake. That is the vaccine to prevent you from falling so deeply in love with our own opinions.  That is the recipe for avoiding dogmatism. Be engaged, but don’t be dogmatic. Demand that ... university challenge you.

A variety of voices need to be heard ... academic freedom belongs to people on the left and the right – everybody, and everybody equally. Challenge is central to education.

Dr. Robert George

Lettering.

George, Lettering Poster Design for Pen or Brush, 1956

Courage.

Drs. Cornel West and Robert George discuss maintaining a close friendship despite having significant political disagreements ...

Here's a problem I see with the younger generation.  They haven't been taught the virtues of intellectual humility ... They've failed to have modeled for them the kind of openness to other people as truth-seekers that they're going to need if we're to overcome this terrible polarization.

Nobody has a permission slip not to be courageous ... we'll have nothing but victims unless somebody is willing to step up and exemplify some courage.

Connector.

James George on awareness ...

What I’m coming to lately is an end-of-life conviction that there is more to consciousness than what is produced in my little head, or yours. Both of us have the capacity, at times, mysteriously, to get beyond whatever this small consciousness is doing and telling us. When we are able, when we are sufficiently still and relaxed—letting it happen, not doing it—we can receive a resonance from a greater consciousness.

Many spiritual masters I’ve known, and also eminent scientists like Carl Jung, echo this belief. Just before Jung died, the BBC managed to interview him. And he was free enough at that stage of his life to say things without looking over his shoulder and worrying about his scientific reputation. He said: “Man cannot stand a meaningless life. Something in us sees around corners, knows beyond time and space, so may continue in that state after our physical death. Those who fear death as the End, die soon. Those who think they will go on, die old.”

Fear is constricting. In fact, so are all those self-concerns for one’s reputation, for one’s ideas, even for what the next association is telling me. For example, am I just thinking of what I should say to you now? Or am I open to something that could be quite new, that is not really coming so much from me as from this source consciousness that many traditions have called “I”? I’m referring to the consciousness that manages to see what things are, what I am, and to not get caught in the next reaction or judgment or association—because all of these are functions; and consciousness is not a function.

In the environmental movement that I’ve been part of for thirty years, I’ve been saying that the problem is not just in our technology or in our corporate system, but inside ourselves. What has to change more radically is my whole attitude to nature, from one of domination to an attitude of stewardship. It’s a hard sell these days, though the need for such a radical change has been laid out in all of the great traditions.

When we talk about the need for a less self-centered attitude or for waking up, it’s a change of consciousness, a change of mind from an identified mind that is just presenting its next automatic association—and assuming it can control our entire life that way—to a mind that is still and open and able to receive something from this greater mind that Carl Jung was invoking earlier. Like you, I am searching for who I am, and by now I know that I am not going to find an answer in my functional machinery, ticking away automatically, but in my essential mind, just aware attention, watching.

As the Dalai Lama has been pointing out in recent years, the Tibetan language has two words for these two very different kinds of “mind”: The ordinary automatic mind that they call Sem; and this other receptive stillness, which has no judgments, no associations, that they call Rigpa and translate as awareness. It’s a beautiful statement in a few sentences of what has previously been a very secret Tibetan practice called dzogchen, closely allied to what Gurdjieff and others have taught as the wordless way of being totally present now, in this moment.

We’re all designed with this possibility. But what is obstructing the realization of that human potential ... it’s me. This narcissistic preoccupation with my story, my difficulty, which always has a kind of negative touch to it because I am complaining about what is wrong with me either physically or mentally. And the quiet, impartial, impersonal mind, consciousness, with which I could be connected, is blocked by that.

It is so important to understand awareness as a connector to something greater than me, to my source, really. My presence is the doorway to that, even at the moment that I acknowledge that I don’t know who I am and I see my lack of presence. But that is the beginning of a real wish for it, a wish to be.

CONNECT

Timely.

Timely thoughts from Dr. Robert George ...

• Some advice for my students, myself, and everyone …: When you feel the temptation to “go along to get along,” resist it. (You may find the words “get thee behind me, Satan” helpful.)
• So they’re trying to shut you up: How to defend yourself in a free-speech crisis, whatever your politics: Remember that in standing up for your own rights to think and speak freely, and to seek the truth and speak the truth as best as you understand it, you are not only protecting yourself; you are also defending the rights of other scholars (and students) and the integrity of the academic vocation. When you prevail in upholding academic freedom for yourself, as you will do when you stand fast and get good advice, your victory redounds to the benefit of the entire academic community — a community in which the freedoms that are the oxygen on which it thrives are very much in jeopardy today.
• A moral voice: We have, to one degree or another, embraced the ideology of individualism. As a result, we have lost our sense of the importance of the common good—of we, ourselves, and us—and the value (and values) of the communities to which we belong and in which alone we can find our true fulfillment. We must move from what Sacks calls our “I society” back to a “We society.”

Goal.

Dr. Robert George discusses the goal of debate ...

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.

Effort.

Shelby Foote on the misidentification of the Confederate flag ...

Dean Knight of the Museum of the Confederacy explains some relics of the Civil War on C-SPAN's American Artifacts ...

If you have free speech but you don't [make] any effort to be sensitive and respect people, then free speech becomes associated with just a weapon to hit people upside the head [with].  When you enter the public square, you're going to have such a distrust and suspicion that somebody can use their free speech and say something that appears to you to be disrespectful. And you think it's a direct attack on you. Because now there's no trust.

Reverend Dr. Cornell West, in dialogue with Dr. Robert George from "Honesty and Courage, Humility and Hope"

He who is unaware of his ignorance will only be misled by his knowledge.

Richard Whately

Fact.

One day while David Lloyd George was making a political speech before a big crowd, a heckler yelled, “Wait a minute, Mr. George. Isn’t it true your grandfather used to peddle tinware around here in an oxcart hauled by a donkey?” Lloyd George replied, “I digress just a moment and thank the gentlemen for calling that to my attention. It is true, my dear old grandfather used to peddle tinware with an old cart and a donkey. As a matter of fact, after this meeting is over, if my friend will come with me, I will show him that old cart, but I never knew until this minute what became of the ass.”

Respectfully.

Firing Line's Margaret Hoover hosts Dr. Cornel West and Dr. Robert George, the “ideological odd couple,” as they discuss the importance of civil discourse in this era of polarization.

CONNECT

Attend.

Soulcraft is the formation of attention that gets us to attend to the things that matter, not the things on the surface. It’s the cultivation of thinking critically for yourself so you’re willing to speak in such a way that you exercise what Socrates called parrhesia, which is clear speech, frank speech, fearless speech, unintimidated speech, speech that flows from your soul not to show that you’re clever and smart, but to show that you’re courageous and wise.

There is a qualitative distinction between success in the mainstream and greatness from the vantage point of a freedom movement and we have reduced all talk about greatness to just success in the mainstream.

Rev. Dr. Cornell West

Robert George and Cornel West on C-SPAN's In Depth (I found the section on "Soulcraft" from 13:00 - 23:00 very interesting) ...



Personal authenticity, in the classical understanding of liberal-arts education, consists in self-mastery—in placing reason in control of desire. According to the classic liberal-arts ideal, learning promises liberation, but it is not liberation from demanding moral ideals and social norms, or liberation to act on our desires—it is, rather, liberation from slavery to those desires, from slavery to self.

Robert P. George

George and West discuss The Examined Life and the value of a liberal arts education ...