Russo-Ukrainian War — Cornel West's observations about spiritual decay and mirrors

© 2022 Peter Free

 

10 March 2022

 

 

Theme

 

Wrongdoing lurks, especially, in oblivious souls.

 

 

Introduction

 

When I am looking for traces of meaningful substance in corporatism-captured America, I often go to what Professor Cornel West calls "black prophetic fire".

 

I did this even as a many decades-ago young adult. Malcolm X and Black Panthers were people I respected.

 

This morning, a recent comment of West's caught my eye. Largely because I think identically.

 

 

West's pertinent observation — runs deeper than one might think

 

Regarding the Russo-Ukrainian War and its reflection upon the United States, West said that:

 

 

[E]verybody knows if Russia had troops in Mexico or Canada there would be invasions tomorrow.

 

[Biden] sends the Secretary of State, telling Russia, “You have no right to have a sphere of influence,” after the Monroe Doctrine, after the overthrowing of democratic regimes in Latin America for the last hundred-and-some years.

 

What kind of hypocrisy can anybody stand?

 

That doesn’t mean that Putin is not still a gangster . . . .

 

But so were the folk promoting the Monroe Doctrine that had the U.S. sphere of influence for decade after decade after decade after decade, and anybody critical of you, you would demonize.

 

Yet here are you, right at the door of Russia, and can’t see yourself in the mirror.

 

That’s spiritual decay right there, brother, it really is.

 

[W]hen you really scratch beneath that surface, you can still see just how empty and decrepit, spiritually and morally, both the neo-Fascists are, with all of their ugliness, and the neoliberals, with all of their hypocrisy.

 

And that’s why we have to be committed to being certain kinds of persons, no matter what the possibilities are for triumph.

 

We have a chance of a snowball in Hell of fighting for freedom.

 

We fight anyway, because it’s right and because it’s just.

 

And we just get crushed when we get crushed, but we get crushed with a smile.

 

© 2022 Vinson Cunningham, Cornel West Sees a Spiritual Decay in the Culture, New Yorker (09 March 2022)

 

 

West's closing observation is a distinctively Christian (sacrificial) one.

 

You do what you do because it is right and not because you will win.

 

The difference is enormous. It spans the distance between figurative Heaven and Hell.

 

 

Being crushed . . .

 

. . . is why I linked to Dmitri Lovetsky's photograph of a young woman being arrested, smiling, during an anti-invasion protest in Moscow at the beginning of the Ukrainian War.

 

 

Notice West's — "everybody knows"

 

Of course we do.

 

In our uncultivated states, we just don't want to drag our own dreck into consciousness.

 

This is why the cultivation of psychic self-awareness is important.

 

Interconnections between 'beings' (and their environments and contexts) are, in truth, grander than personal grasping.

 

 

The moral? — I am That and not this?

 

The "I am that" phrase comes from Nisargadatta Maharaj, a non-dualist.

 

Non-dualism is a step too far for most people. Nevertheless, the interconnecting aspect of the non-dual concept is comparatively easily translated into other spiritual traditions' terms.

 

Mirror is 'the' place to begin.

 

Most people will not. Which is why history's Cycle of Pain repeats itself.

 

One despairs, resists and — at our best — keeps smiling.