{"id":90019,"date":"2017-04-10T12:00:46","date_gmt":"2017-04-10T11:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=90019"},"modified":"2017-04-06T12:06:05","modified_gmt":"2017-04-06T11:06:05","slug":"righteousness-and-dignity-thoreau-malcolm-x-and-the-crisis-of-leadership-in-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2017\/04\/righteousness-and-dignity-thoreau-malcolm-x-and-the-crisis-of-leadership-in-america\/","title":{"rendered":"Righteousness and Dignity: Thoreau, Malcolm X and the Crisis of Leadership in America"},"content":{"rendered":"

5 Apr 2017 – <\/em>One rarely hears words like righteousness<\/em> and dignity <\/em>in conversations among those on the secular, progressive left.\u00a0 Unfortunately, in sidelining those words, along with honor, virtue<\/em>, and even goodness<\/em>,\u00a0with their serious religious and moral overtone, we have demeaned exactly the human qualities needed to respond to the dire and threatening times we live in.\u00a0 While we are urged over and over by the those willing to report to us the full ongoing catastrophe, to take to the streets and protest, there is a prior action needed if the response is to be more than a return, politically, to \u201clesser evilism,\u201dto the emptiness of so much of \u201cprogressive\u201d politics.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Malcolm X Civil Rights Rally<\/p><\/div>\n

We, the \u201cbourgeois\u201d ones with access to higher education,\u00a0 were supposed<\/em> to know the system has failed us, to be counter cultural. Thus, there is<\/em> something of the chickens coming home to roost in this current abominable incarnation of national leadership.\u00a0 We are the ones who could have understood the system in the way that leads one to act because one understands the system<\/em> \u2013 in our case the neoliberal corporate capitalist system, the military industrial complex \u2013\u00a0 is injurious to the humanity<\/em> of all of us.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve heard the warnings, from Dr. King, from Eisenhower\u2019s farewell address,\u00a0 from James Baldwin, from Cornel West, from Noam Chomsky, from indigenous peoples.\u00a0 We are supposed to have this understanding, and we did not get it.\u00a0 We did not truly educate ourselves.\u00a0 It was up to us, the educated and better off, to understand the system is corrupt, cannot be reformed, is harmful to the common<\/em> good, and we evaded our responsibility.\u00a0 Not with a shrug, perhaps with a sigh, we\u2019ve said, Let someone else lead, I have my work and my family<\/em>.<\/p>\n

When the system has gone off the deep end, revolution is one option.\u00a0 On the other hand, disobedience, in the manner of Henry David Thoreau\u2019s act of opposition to slavery and to war with Mexico, is another.\u00a0 Thoreau stated: \u201cKnow all men by these presents that I, Henry Thoreau, do not wish to be regarded as a member of any incorporated society which I have not joined.\u201d\u00a0 That is, when your country is \u201cno longer itself,\u201d such an act of self-alienation<\/em> is the justified action of a righteous man.<\/p>\n

Thoreau\u2019s act of disobedience, as Curtis White points out in The Spirit of Disobedience <\/a>(2006)<\/em>, was not revolutionary.\u00a0 It is rather, refusal:\u201dI will live as if your world has ended, as indeed it deserves to end.\u00a0 I will live as if my gesture of refusing your world has destroyed it.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 Thoreau\u2019s self-imposed exile to Walden was based, says White,\u00a0 in \u201cthe need to create a society\u2026. that he could willingly join.\u201d<\/p>\n

That is, it was based first in a quite astonishing (if you think about it) level of trust in his own self worth. It was a moral position taken not in submission to a religious rule or shared understanding,\u00a0 but in concert with his own instinctual being.\u00a0 For first he had to make a choice independent of everyone else, including his friend, mentor and fellow Concord person of genius, Ralph Emerson, to do as his conscience bid.\u00a0 Each of us has this option, as long as we can find in ourselves t<\/em>he place of righteous refusal in the manner of Thoreau.\u00a0 We can participate in the building of the new world to replace this failed one.\u00a0 Conscientious disobedience coming from one\u2019s self-acknowledged dignity as a human being, is a very different act than that of partisan fighting over the Russians influencing our politics, absorbing as that is, or identity politics that depends for its energy on the victim condition of the individual or group.\u00a0 It suggests that the important and necessary work for men and women is to locate our innate righteousness so we can turn to creating a society \u201cwe can willingly join.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is the work to be taken up once we have turned our servile, prostrate will away from its habitual customary deference to the given standards of \u201cgood behavior,\u201d which, after all, are really no more demanding than do your job, don\u2019t make waves, collect your salary and benefits, buy stuff, let your pesky passion be satisfied with deciding between android vs iphone, or Wall St.-approved Democrat vs. Wall St.-approved Republican<\/em>.\u00a0 Creating the new, human-worthy society awaits us once\u00a0 we\u2019ve confessed our powerlessness over our addiction to TV and mass media, an industry flourishing<\/em> in the age of Trump, a bizarre celebrity who holds peoples\u2019 fascination in the same way as do car wrecks or burning buildings.\u00a0 When we avidly follow a national news that matches, in its effect on our adrenal system, the lurid \u2018scoops\u2019 promised on the covers of magazines at the checkout line at the supermarket,\u00a0 we can be sure it is not information we\u2019re after as responsible citizens, but a \u201cturn on\u201d to feed our addiction.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Henry David Thoreau<\/p><\/div>\n

In these times when we are cut off from a context or a genuine culture that could\u00a0 nourish and encourage our humanity, many of us get trapped into taking what the consumer culture offers.\u00a0 Captive in a dehumanizing culture, this is the way we take care of ourselves.\u00a0 It is not the way free, dignified, sovereign people answer their rightful wants and needs.<\/p>\n

Thus the first task is the daunting one; ending our existence as servile addicts and finding in ourselves the worthy and righteous man or woman who can refuse this<\/em> America, and create the America (or more locally, our own town or city or farm, or home on the edge of a pond) worthy of our souls, and of the souls of all of us including those fervently joining in the politics of hate.\u00a0 This is not survivalism; it cannot be undertaken in order to be among the post-apocalyptic remnant.\u00a0 Being righteous is not being \u201cmore righteous than thou.\u201d It is serving the greatness inherent in the lowly individual soul, acting as the expressive organ for its aberrant goodness,\u00a0 a morality always checked against ego inflation by the \u201cimpossible\u201d demand that one is \u2013 bottom line \u2013 supposed to counter and vanquish the crushing sense of personal unworthiness.<\/p>\n

This weekend, thanks to nearby Hamilton College,\u00a0 we got to see a production by The Acting Company of the play X, or Betty Shabazz vs. The Nation<\/em>, by Marcus Gardley.\u00a0 Seeing this outstanding production of a really excellent play, I was reminded of the passion I\u2019d had for Malcolm X as a great man and a great leader after reading The Autobiography<\/em> back in the 90\u2019s.\u00a0 In the play, Malcolm gradually and with difficulty reaches his decision to leave the Nation of Islam and his spiritual father Elijah Muhammad who had mentored Malcolm\u2019s transformation from petty criminal to powerful leader.\u00a0 We witnessed the struggle of the righteous man who must stand up for his righteousness even at the risk of opposing \u201cGod,\u201d or he who, in one\u2019s own mind, has occupied the place of perfection for so long it has become accepted truth.\u00a0 It has become \u2013 in effect \u2013 dogma.<\/p>\n

Being finally presented with incontrovertible evidence that Muhammad was not perfect, by means of his meeting, at his wife Betty\u2019s urging, with several young women who\u2019d been impregnated by the Nation\u2019s leader,\u00a0 Malcolm was forced to make a break that he did not want to make.\u00a0 Loyalty to The Nation and to Elijah Muhammad was the guiding principle of a principled man; Malcolm\u2019s personal popularity, which exceeded that of Elijah Muhammad \u2013 the celebrity which means so much in public life today \u2013 meant relatively little to him\u00a0\u00a0 He chose to separate himself when the organization had become unrecognizable to him; it was \u201cno longer itself,\u201d or what he had understood it as.\u00a0 The action would not make him popular; it guaranteed he would be an ambivalent figure in history, as indeed he already was.\u00a0 He was one of those geniuses whose path is not straight, but whose efforts to \u2018self-correct,\u2019 to challenge his own current dogma, never ceased. He did not understand himself as \u201cperfect\u201d and did not hold himself to that impossible standard, the trap in which Elijah Muhammad got caught.<\/p>\n

Not his charisma or his eloquence, but his adhering faithfully to his own righteousness, to the inner moral compass, is what made him great (or honorable<\/em>, as his wife calls him in the play), a great leader, and made his death \u2013 as well as that of ML King\u2019s \u2013 a loss from which, in the area of leadership, America has never recovered. That I see these qualities in Malcolm X\u00a0 may seem speculative to some, but perhaps they are difficult to see when we have learned to honor not virtue, not honor, not righteousness,\u00a0 but those who can convince us that being crude louts \u201cjust like the rest of us,\u201d lets the rest of us,\u00a0 so reduced in our sense of personal worth, off the hook.<\/p>\n

Obediently we have kept questions of moral and character development, the traditional realm of religion, at the fringe of our concerns.\u00a0 We have been obediently religiophobic in a way that is not simply a critique of institutional religion but which frees us from any sense of a moral obligation to our own inner being, leaving it sequestered in shame. The success of Trump is attributable to our failure to understand and appreciate true greatness out of our sheepish inclination to be let off from our personal responsibility to realize the true genius each is born with and \u2013 in a human-worthy society \u2013 supposed<\/em> to manifest. That our society has failed to teach us this means, as Thoreau and Malcolm exemplify, it is time to create the one we can willingly join.<\/p>\n

____________________________________<\/a><\/p>\n

Kim C. Domenico<\/em>, reside in Utica, New York, co-owner of Cafe Domenico (a coffee shop and community space), \u00a0and administrator of the small nonprofit independent art space, The Other Side. \u00a0Seminary trained and ordained, but independently religious.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 counterpunch.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In these times when we are cut off from a context or a genuine culture that could nourish and encourage our humanity, many of us get trapped into taking what the consumer culture offers. Captive in a dehumanizing culture, this is the way we take care of ourselves. It is not the way free, dignified, sovereign people answer their rightful wants and needs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-90019","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-in-focus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90019","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=90019"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90019\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=90019"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=90019"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=90019"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}