To Make Ourselves More Efficient For Good

Later this month, with the Oxford New Histories of Philosophy series, I will publish two co-edited volumes with Jan Stievermann of Heidelberg University and Caitlin Smith of St. Bonaventure University on the 19^th century abolitionist, James W.C. Pennington. He was the first African American to receive an honorary degree from Heidelberg, and his life was simply fascinating. He published The Fugitive Blacksmith detailing his escape from slavery in 1849. And the two volumes detail his writings and consist of essays about his life’s witness.

But I have been thinking a bit more about Pennington lately – about his claim that slavery “mal-created or mal-formed” those committed to the institution and the country that relied so heavily on it. I keep thinking that the soul of America has been corrupted by slavery and its afterlives, and by the nation’s refusal to admit that it has saddled generations with the burdens of tragedy.

It led me back to The Fugitive Blacksmith and a moment with profound resonance for those who seek to be better people in an unjust world. For me, as I argued in We are the Leaders We’ve Been Looking For, we must work on ourselves and the world simultaneously. An unjust world impinges on efforts to reach for a higher self. So, in my view, the fight for justice and the act of ongoing self-creation go hand-in-hand.

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In his book, The Fugitive Blacksmith or, Events in the History of James W.C. Pennington, Pennington clearly illustrates the connection between resisting unjust practices and the hard work of self-cultivation. He wrote,

There is one sin that slavery committed against me, which I never can forgive. It robbed me of my education; the injury is irreparable. I feel the embarrassment more seriously now than I ever did before. It cost me two years’ hard labor after I fled, to unshackle my mind; it was three years before I had purged my language of slavery, and now the evil that besets me is a great lack of that general information, the foundation of which is most effectually laid in that part of life which I served as a slave. …If I know my own heart, I have no ambition but to serve the cause of suffering humanity; all that I have desired or sought, has been to make me more efficient for good…. [B]ut I shall have to go to my last account with this charge against the system of slavery, “Vile monster! Thou has hindered my usefulness, by robbing me of my early education.

Slavery denied Pennington the ability to cultivate his mind. It arrested his development as the institution brutally reduced him to mere chattel with no civic standing outside that of his master. We see the shame and self-loathing that spurred him to be better and supplied the substance of his ethical criticism. We see the insidious workings of the lack of self-trust. It was against the evil practice of slavery and the world that justified it, which deposited these feelings in his gut, that Pennington sought to reach for a higher self and to make himself “more efficient for good.”

Among the darker souls of this nation, that struggle for a higher self under captive conditions can be seen across generations—from James W.C. Pennington to those of us struggling today in a world where concentrated power has distorted so much of what is meaningful and obscured so much of what is possible.

What I call Black democratic perfectionism insists on the role and place of this individual quest as a core feature of a creative democratic practice and radical politics that foreground the transformative power of everyday people. We are not slaves or the mere objects of anti-blackness. We are more than dire descriptions of a world predicated on our degradation and death with no room for redemption.

We are the inheritors of a grand tradition, people, confronted with a world on the verge of collapse. What we do in the face of the evils that threaten to consume us all matters for a new world desperate to come into being and it matters in our individual efforts to reach for a higher self to be the kinds of people that the world needs.

We must work on the world as we work on ourselves. With the battle against greed and racism comes the battle against selfishness and narcissism. They are intimately connected. We must work hard at becoming the kinds of people democracy requires and that involves working hard at making the world more just and loving. Because, as Pennington showed us, that world can leave its mark on our souls and get in the way of our effort to make ourselves more efficient for good.

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