MORAL
CRISIS
REVISITED
F
loyd Hayes and I share a strong interest in Richard Wright’s legacy, especially in how Cross Damon, the protagonist of The Outsider (1953), often articulates philosophical ideas in the novel more powerfully than Wright could in his non-fiction. It seems that fictive propositions which can’t be fact-checked have greater appeal than those refuted by evidence of what has happened in reality or actuality. For this reason, several million Americans believe in 2018 that Donald Trump tweets “the truth” daily as he propagates tiny segments of the great American novel. Does fiction confirm the death of the Truth and the immortality of the Lie? I will not stay for an answer. I’ll just assert that fiction enables Hayes and me to enjoy productive disagreements about how the human mind constructs knowledge. The brief email exchange we had about my blog on “Moral Crisis in New Orleans” (see Appendix A) is a capital example of what I wish would occur more frequently among cultural critics:
******* Dear Floyd, Thanks for the Facebook rejoinder and this passage from The Outsider. Great food for thought. Jerry
From: Floyd Hayes Sent: Friday, August 10, 2018 10:19 AM To: Jerry Ward Subject: Re: Are human being degenerating? Hi Jerry, I wrote a rejoinder to your response. Over the years, I have been guided by one of Wright’s passages in The Outsider: “Knowing and seeing what is happening in the world today, I don’t think that there is much of anything that one can do about it. But there is one little thing, it seems to me that a man owes to himself. He can look bravely at this horrible totalitarian reptile and, while doing so, discipline his dread, his fear, and study it coolly, observe every slither and convolution of its sensuous movements and note down with calmness the pertinent facts. In the face of the totalitarian danger, these facts can help a man to save himself; and he may then be able to call attention to others around him to the presence and meaning of this reptile and its multitudinous writhings” (1953: 367). For me, this statement provides the reason for speaking out about the various contradictions and dilemmas we face in “this place called America,” as Sonia Sanchez says. As always, Floyd
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On Fri, Aug 10, 2018 at 7:14 AM Jerry Ward wrote: Dear Floyd, I appreciate your posing a very tough question about degeneration in your response to my “Moral Crisis in New Orleans” blog. It moves me to think very deeply about the possible rhetorical consequences of my speech act and about the nature of evidence I should use in saying “Yes, humans are degenerating” or “No, humans are not degenerating.” It is obvious from the reply I made on Facebook that I will be thinking about answers in the coming weeks as I move forward in analysis of Wright’s thinking. Your question doesn’t allow us to have a definitive answer. Time, ambiguity, and location just allow us to make qualified speculations. Have a good weekend, Jerry
******* The August 10 exchange reminds me that genuine human communication is predicated on accepting that the political, the aesthetic, the literary, and the philosophical are flashes of thought that appear and disappear endlessly in a continuum or in a four-dimensional Venn diagram. We have maximum entanglement. My faceto-face conversations with very smart adult male inmates at Orleans Justice Center (the jail in New Orleans) are immensely more human, honest, and important in terms of knowledge than what I (or any reader) comes to know about evolving or degenerating American masculinity from reading Gregory Pardlo’s Air Traffic: A Memoir of Ambition and Manhood in America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2018) or John Edgar Wideman’s Brothers and Keepers ( New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984) or Walter Mosley’s John Woman (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2018). The conversations with inmates destroy the walls that metaphors and literature (fiction and faction) create around the subject matter of American manhood and social justice; the conversations make looking into the eyes of the “horrible totalitarian reptile” that is society and systems of criminal justice a pure moment of dread and recognition. It is this moment that must be used in the act of reading for the purpose of understanding American culture(s). The conversations expose what is undeniably artificial about literature and culture and criticism. And if we did not have such artifice, we would likely be paralyzed by mindless silence or greatly more enslaved than we already are by reprehensible noises! My email exchange with Hayes did necessitate revisiting what I wrote about moral crisis and resolving to resist, more strongly than before, the “romance” that academic theory and criticism tempts us to accept. My efforts to construct knowledge will always be marked by errors of one sort or another. So be it. But my future errors must be informed by critical engagements with inmates and by what David Faust examined with remarkable conviction in The Limits of Scientific Reasoning (Minneapolis: University
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