How Jazz Can Help Us Confront our Existential Risks
In December 2021 I had a conversation with Carter Phipps, host of the “Thinking Ahead” podcast. Here’s his description of what we discussed:
How do we think about race in America today? This question continues to be core to the evolution of our national experiment. And it has come even further to the forefront in recent years, as the progressive social justice movement in American politics has gained more and more prominence. In this episode of the podcast, I was thrilled to be able to explore this subject with Greg Thomas—musician, intellectual, Integralist, journalist, spiritual practitioner, and co-founder of the Jazz Leadership Project. Greg, like myself, is a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Cultural Evolution, and we share a deep appreciation for the wisdom of integral philosophy and the perspectives it offers on issues of culture, evolution, and history. But what I enjoyed so much about this conversation were the unique and different perspectives Greg brought to bear on the subject, both from his personal experience and his impressive and eclectic scholarship. Greg is an expert in the intellectual currents that have arisen around the art of Jazz—a tradition that is far outside my wheelhouse—and in this conversation we explore some of that history, covering writers like Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray, and what Greg feels they can offer to the current conversation around race. Race has always been one of the most challenging and complex but also important topics for anyone trying to make sense of our national politics and where culture might be headed. I hope this episode may contribute, in some small way, to that conversation.
Here’s an outline of our discussion, with a few hyperlinks to supplement.
3:30 Greg’s background with the movements of the 1960s as backdrop
4:40 High School Stage Band experience and connection to puberty
7:00 Playing “Squeeze But Please Don’t Tease Me” with the legendary Clark Terry at Hamilton College
9:15 The intellectual track of jazz and Wynton Marsalis
10:20 Stanley Crouch, Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray
12:20 Steams of Black American Thought: an Afrocentric turn and the Blues Idiom
13:00 Post-modern and post-structuralist theory in grad school at NYU
14:00 Critical Race Theory and its critical stance on power relations
15:00 Greg’s Christian background
16:45 Ken Wilber and Integral Theory (A Brief History of Everything)
17:45 Critiquing the critical stance of post-modernism
18:45 Ellison on “our sacred documents” and redressing the downside of the human condition
19:40 How Black Americans used the sacred and the secular for freedom
20:45 Wokeness and anti-wokeness since George Floyd murder
22:00 How do you situate your own thought? As a third way? True but partial
22:45 Anti-racism and Ibram X. Kendi
23:55 History of Critical Race Theory
24:20 Marginalization and Agency
26:00 I, We, and It; Personal and Individual Responsibility
28:00 Interpersonal skills
29:00 Integral Perspective: Personal, Interpersonal, and Structual Dimension
31:30 Centrality of Black Americans to American Culture (Ralph Ellison’s Time magazine piece, Sterling Stuckey’s Slave Culture)
33:50 Antagonistic Cooperation and the paradox and irony of history
35:50 Tragi-comic view of Ralph Ellison and the tragic optimism of Stanley Crouch and Viktor Frankl
37:20 Albert Murray on Antagonistic Cooperation
38:10 Post-modern marginalization of the heroic; the Heroine’s journey as counter-statement
39:30 The Blues Idiom as a philosophy of life and living
40:00 Classic liberalism of Coleman Hughes, Glenn Loury, and John McWhorter
41:55 The Blues Idiom and Rooted Cosmopolitanism as a Third Way to transcend limits of modernism and post-modernism
42:30 An Evolutionary Perspective
44:30 “Don’t evolve, overthrow”
45:20 Harold Cruse on armed revolution (Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual)
46:30 Ta-Nehesi Coate’s response: Fatalism
48:30 A Vision of Possibility amid the Meaning crisis
51:50 Post-progressive political perspective
53:00 Cultural Evolution: from literacy to intelligence to wisdom
55:00 Intergenerational trauma and our “optimal zone”
58:30 Existential threats and our ten-year deadline
59:30 Duane Elgin on the 2020s: Breakdown or Breakthrough
1:00:40 Rethinking Humanity: Collapse of Age of Freedom?
1:03:00 Psycho-Social-Cultural Development vs Technological growth
1:05:30 Rev. Michael Beckwith and the Agape International Spiritual Center
1:06:20 What’s the essential message of Jazz to America today?