Not long ago, I lamented the fact that although I've been following David Brooks since 'Patio Man', I had never heard him mention Oakeshott and like conservative thinkers. Today as he speaks of those and others, I remember something about my own journey that puts me in the conservative camp.
When I met the man who would be one of my closest friends we clashed almost immediately. The year was 1983 and I was a sophomore at State. I was a fairly newly minted leader in NSBE, the National Society of Black Engineers, a hugely successful undergraduate organization. The occasion was the annual Camping Conference at which we would perform a kind of drop squad maneuver on a couple hundred inner city youth. That year I had been elected to be Head Counselor and I was holding a meeting to discuss themes and agendas. My idea over which I and 'Moleman' collided was 'Engineers of Black Society'. Moleman looked at me like I was some alien species dropped on his lap, oddly fascinated but truly disgusted. I compromised.
But I did not compromise my belief that we were indeed working out those things that all us Talented Tenth had been put on this earth to do, which was to lead the masses of underprivileged blacks out of the ghetto and into the Promised Land. And of course there was no controversy in the aim at all, but the ethics of the situation demanded that we didn't just blurt it out so obviously. Nobody expected that black ghetto kids would amount to anything if other ex-black ghetto kids didn't lavish so much attention and other people's money on them. This was why it was and is so easy to get such funding that mere undergraduates can do community service on a part-time basis and get props. I was a community organizer, you were a community organizer - we all were community organizers, except I was alien and disgusting enough, as a college sophomore to call it the engineering of black society. I do have that ability to be blunt.
As most Cobb readers recognize, all of this energy and motivation came to a screeching halt as I recognized in microcosm that there was no black orthodoxy. My soul bled out as it was metaphorically pierced by Mishima's own sword at the failure of my culture to save itself through the ministrations of such neo-nationalist organizations as NSBE. I found peace finally in defying the practice of black unity in 1986 and true solace in even abandoning the concept of black leadership in 1992 and now approach the bliss & responsibility of rejecting blackness altogether. All of these revelations are related to a sane and sensible epistemological modesty, and so Brooks' words bear repeating as I join the company of his leading lights in concept..
We are strangers to ourselves and American black society is an immeasurably complex organism. Therefore we should tend to be skeptical of technocratic, rationalist planning and suspicious of schemes to reorganize American black society from the top down.
There is an implication by default that there might be some reorganization from the bottom up. I am even more dubious of that. As well there will be no spiritual, humanist planning for American blacks either. There's just no herding those cats, except for the lame ones who lack the energy and spirit to escape the corrals of stereotypes.
So I bear witness to a certain deflation of myself, of thousands of hours spent in the faithful rendition and interpretation of a lost civilization, like some old cloistered fanatic scribbling out sentences and wrangling out rap couplets. But the echoes and ghosts of that Struggle are still with us and people still find ways to attribute their condition to shackles of old arguments and disproven identities. We live in the past's future, ignorant of our own presence. Strangers to ourselves.
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