Jeremiah Wright meets "The Suicide of Reason"

I've been struck, by the relative vacuum of commentary following Bill Moyer's interview with Jeremiah Wright last friday. Given the inordinate amount of attention that has been paid to angry snippets and loops taken from Wright's past sermons you would have thought that this one hour discussion, which gave a more comprehensive picture of the man, his thoughts and the reactions of his parishioners, would have elicited more thoughtful analysis from all quarters. It never happened. 

In his new, best selling, book "The Suicide of Reason", Lee Harris puts forth some provocative ideas which may shed  some light on these matters. Harris juxtaposes two widely held ways of interpreting and responding to the world, two very different "Cultural Traditions", if you will. Simply put: there is the relatively recent, in human history, rational, reasonable, tolerant style that derives from both the period of the  "Enlightenment" and the stubborn independence of Protestantism's focus on the individual.

Secondly, and this is the much more widespread "Cultural Tradition" that has a much longer history going back to our very beginnings. This derives from the demands of sheer survival and relegates the individual to an insignificant role vis-a vie the "groups survival". Groups who feel besieged by constant threats of attack and domination by "enemies" from without are characterized by values shared absolutely, intolerance of foreign traditions, fanatically pursued goals, and an attitude that "if you're not with us you're against us". 

Reverend Wright himself has made the point that the Prophetic Liberation Theology that he speaks for and the European American tradition have very little in common. They are distinctly different in many ways but neither is superior. These two traditions have almost no methods of communicating with one another. Well, last fridays cordial discussion was a seeming attempt at doing so. Bill Moyers is an exemplar of reason while Rev. Wright, is at times, a powerful, sometimes angry, spokesman for oppressed group grievances. He was not at all angry with the tolerant Bill Moyers. Thats because Moyer's was really just giving Wright an uncritical platform to correct possible public misperceptions.

Now what about the media's shunning of the programs full content. They like Moyers are reasonable members of the first Cultural Tradition and they just couldn't handle it. Some were locked irreversibly into the stereotypical implications drawn from the previously aired loop-de-loops. For others, Wright's dredging up of and eloquently delivered laundry list of grievances against America, not only of his oppressed people but of many other mis treated groups and peoples including Native Americans and victems of our foreign policies overseas , was too much to swallow in one gulp.

Tolerance has it's limits. Understanding why people feel victimized will only make a difference if there is confidence that something meaningful can be done. What is America supposed to do about that unbelievable burden of guilt that the Pastor would have us assume and undo? Especially when we are already mired in feelings of skepticism that our government can successfully address a multitude of other pressing problems.  

There just wasn't a straight forward, easily grasped, front page campaign story in Moyer's interview, for the otherwise, voraciously hungry media. What they really would have devoured eagerly was something tangible that could have changed the course of the campaign, say for example, if they had discovered that Rev. Wright wore an American Flag lapel pin.