Morning Wire
Truth Over Tribe: An Interview with Cornel West & Robert George | 3.15.25
Sat, 15 Mar 2025
Progressive scholar Cornel West and conservative philosopher Robert George discuss their book "Truth Matters," sharing insights on fostering unity, fruitful disagreement, and trust across partisan lines in a polarized America. Get the facts first on Morning Wire
Chapter 1: Who are Cornel West and Robert George, and what is their new book about?
It's Saturday, March 15th, and this is an extra edition of Morning Wire. Joining us now to discuss their new book and to comment on the current state of the parties is scholar, Democratic presidential candidate and self-professed progressive Cornel West and current Princeton professor and conservative political philosopher Robert P. George. Cornel and Robert, thank you both for coming on.
Absolutely. Thank you so very much for having us. Yeah, thank you, Georgia.
So first off, I'd like to hear an overview of your book before we get into some of your perspectives on some current things. Robert, let's start with you.
Chapter 2: What is the significance of truth in a divided society?
The title says what the book is about. The title of the book is Truth Matters, a dialogue on fruitful disagreement in an age of division. So Brother Cornell and I are both dedicated. It's our vocation to get at the truth of things, to try to get in touch with reality. At the same time, we recognize that we, like every other member of the human family, is fallible. We get things wrong.
We never know the truth perfectly. We never know it fully. Nevertheless, it's our calling as professors, but it's also the calling of every member of the human family. to try to get at the truth of things, not to live in error, not to live with lies, not to live with falsehoods, but to try to get the truth of things. It's intrinsic to our flourishing as human beings.
So in this so-called post-truth society, or this society in which people think there's my truth and your truth, but really no such thing as the truth, Cornell and I are putting forward the proposition that, in fact, there is a truth. It's hard to get to sometimes, can never know it perfectly, but there is a truth, and we should be about the business of knowing it, and knowing it really matters.
Absolutely. I think that Brother Robbie and I view ourselves as being part and parcel of great traditions, the Socratic legacies of Athens, where we try to muster the courage to think critically for ourselves, to examine ourselves, examine our society and world, do it in the spirit of intellectual humility, but also tenacity.
So we're in pursuit of the truth, but also the prophetic legacy of Jerusalem, the courage to love. And because justice is what love looks like in public, to actually be justice seekers. But we recognize that truth, capital T, and justice, capital J, they're bigger than any of us, any of our groups, our tribes, our nations, our races, our genders, our sexual orientations.
So we have a certain sense of acknowledging we're both fallible, but we do believe that we've got to get beyond any kind of narrow relativism and any kind of sense of not being deeply concerned about courage, courage, courage to think, courage to love.
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Chapter 3: How can we foster fruitful conversations across partisan lines?
So just getting to the brass tacks of it, what are some of your top suggestions for actually getting to those fruitful conversations in an age like this?
The first point I think that it's important to understand is we think you need to get beyond tribalism. You need to abandon tribalism. You need to think for yourself.
And anybody who thinks for himself, although he may, by virtue of his views, belong to a certain community of conviction, there will always be points on which he disagrees, where he's critical of his own tribe, his own ideological group, his own comrades in arms in political and cultural struggles.
Chapter 4: What are the challenges of tribalism in politics?
And you need the courage to be able to and willing to dissent when you think your team has gone wrong on this point or that point. Number two, you need to be open to the possibility that your side isn't always in the right. Your side can be wrong about things. You can be wrong about things. So you need intellectual humility and a self-critical attitude. That's all part and parcel of truth seeking.
And then the third thing, and this is so very important today, is we need to get beyond the idea that if someone disagrees with me, they are waging an assault on me personally. In this identitarian age that we live in, people confuse their beliefs, their convictions with their very selves.
And so if you challenge someone's view on something, that person will perceive it as a personal insult, a personal attack, but that is toxic to truth seeking. And it just further deepens us in the mire of ideology. So we need to be willing to be challenged, open to be criticized.
We need to be willing to engage others, yes, with the spirit of trying to teach what we think we know, but also with the spirit of trying to learn from our critics.
Yes, I would just add that I think we're living in a moment of such spiritual decay and moral decrepitude. What is not just polarization, what is gangsterization, obsession with the 11th commandment, thou shall not get caught, rather than the 10. And so Robbie and I are simply trying to make the case that integrity
honesty, decency ought to be at the center of our sense of what it is to have civic virtue. And civic virtue is about public interest in common good. That, again, like Robbie says, goes beyond tribe, goes beyond region, race, gender, or what have you. It's something profoundly human. And we are missing that in this moment.
Now, I want to ask both of you some questions about current events, just to hear your perspective. We'll start with this last election, and we'll start with you, Robert. What are some of the takeaways for you just watching this past 2024 election?
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Chapter 5: How do Cornel West and Robert George view recent political events?
Well, the goal of a political campaign is to win, but my worry is that, and this last election is a very good example of it, people are willing to win at any cost, and truth can simply be thrown out the window. And so often in this past campaign it was, and you could both point to examples on both sides.
But I think what we have to demand of our politicians is at least some minimal threshold level of truth telling. We have to make sure that politicians pay a price when they just egregiously lie to the public. And we've seen this time and time and time again. Now, all the polling data, Georgia. show that there's a massive loss of trust by the American people in their institutions.
That's not the fault of the American people. That's the fault of the institutions, which means it's the fault of the people who lead and run these institutions.
They earned the distrust that they now have, whether we're talking about the media, whether we're talking about government and politics, whether we're talking about the judiciary, whether we're talking about the presidency itself, whether we're talking about religion, Look at all the great institutions on which we rely for a healthy society who have lost the trust of the people.
And as you know, I actually ran for president, so I have a particular kind of bias here. But it has to do with the lens through which I look at the world. You see, as a Christian and a black freedom fighter, I look at the world through the lens of morality and spirituality. And what I saw was corruption in both parties.
mendacity in both parties, hypocrisy in both parties, big money playing a disproportionate role in both parties. And I'm concerned about the moral quality and the spiritual content of our citizenry. And if they're feeling cynical, if they're feeling nihilistic, if they're feeling as if they're choosing Thrasymachus over Socrates, might makes right rather than right having its own gravitas.
then it means we're sliding down a slope toward chaos in terms of both our society and culture as a whole.
Now, Cornell, you mentioned that your identity as a Christian is at the forefront of how you approach these things. I just want to get your opinion on this. Do you think there's still a place for Christians on the left?
I mean, as a Christian, I'm always tied to ways of spiritual awakening, which have to do with how do we get beyond our egoism and narrow tribalism and be tied to a love with the blood at the bottom of a cross that can transform our lives so we recognize the ways in which we are all connected.
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