Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?
A moral philosopher and a walking trove of literature’s wisdom walk into a radio conversation together. The question for one hour is the bleak time we’re all living in, this sea of troubles we don’t have a name for. The violence is shocking: the war far away, the shots close to home; the spectacle of kids, like ours, running for their lives. The pandemic is still pestilential. The climate crisis is still existential. Our guests are the philosopher Cornel West at Union Theological Seminary, who has styled himself a blues man in the ivory tower, and David Bromwich, Sterling Professor of English at Yale, ranging wide in recent books titled Moral Imagination and American Breakdown. Cornel and David are dream diagnosticians of the American condition, in good times and bad. In this installment of In Search of Monsters, a limited series collaboration between QI and Radio Open Source, host Christopher Lydon asks our guests where do they go — in history, in themselves — for a firm footing and guidance in a storm?
