Deep Dive: Race, Culture, Jazz, and Democracy

John Vervaeke and Greg Thomas

This weekend, the first episode of a three-part series titled “Deep Dive: Race, Culture, Jazz, and Democracy,” was released on cognitive scientist and philosopher John Vervaeke’s program, Voices with Vervaeke. I proposed the series to John in January of this year.

Those of you who have been reading our blog for several years may recall that John has been featured on several occasions, for instance “Jam Sessions of the Mind: Democratic Conversations” and “Brief Intro to the Blues Idiom Wisdom Tradition.”

I’ve followed John’s work for several years, from his 50-part “Awakening from the Meaning Crisis” and “After Socrates” series, reading several of his scholarly papers, and viewing dozens of his interviews. He combines deep erudition with intellectual curiosity and a compassionate heart. John is striving to present ways to increase the embodiment and actualization of wisdom in the West via a renewed Neoplatonic perspective that incorporates practices of meditation, contemplation, and an ecology of practices in which groups of people can enhance their understanding and realization of wisdom—all to counter what he calls the meaning crisis.

So my admiration and respect for John’s work and his big mind and open heart led me to propose that we enact a three-part series with these titles:

I.   Jazz as Embodied Art and an Ecology of Practice

II.  Democracy as Antagonistic Cooperation for E Pluribus Unum

III. Race vs. Cultural Intelligence: The Agent-Arena Relationship

These themes are all critical to my work as an entrepreneur, writer, educator, and civic and cultural leader. I invite you to watch the first session of the series here. In it, you’ll find my most extended argument to date for the blues idiom as a wisdom tradition and for jazz as an ecology of practices that can lead to not only organizations, but perhaps even the United States of America, becoming more aligned with its promise and its horizon of democratic aspiration.

Although it’s difficult to summarize what turned out to be almost five hours of conversation—John’s aspirational phrase is dialectic into dialogos—I’ll attempt to do so:

The blues idiom, while existing as a musical form and the foundation for American Jazz and Gospel music as well as R&B and Rock music, is also a cultural lifestyle and philosophical tradition that interpenetrates the sacred and the secular, is both rooted and cosmopolitan, and conjoins the tragic dimensions of life with the comic.

In so doing (and being), the blues idiom can achieve what Zak Stein calls a post-tragic awareness. A post-tragic sensibility is in my estimation akin to what Victor Frankl and Stanley Crouch called “tragic optimism.” Since this tradition, originated and innovated by Afro-Americans, began amid unfreedom in the United States, it fights against injustice while aspiring toward freedom and the realization of the Omni-American promises of the nation’s motto, E Pluribus Unum—out of many, one.

As such, the tradition wisely de-emphasizes race while emphasizing cultural intelligence. An aspect of such intelligence, which, as a cognitive scientist Vervaeke calls “collective intelligence and distributed cognition,” is applying and embodying the values and virtues of what I’ve deemed Democracy 3.0, a generative intersection of Power, Participation, and Wisdom. To that end, the work of The Wise Democracy Project and Dr. Danielle Allen, author of Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship Since Brown vs. Board of Education, Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality, and, most recently, Justice By Means of Democracy should be brought to bear.

You can watch the first session here; please consider sharing it with others. Part 2 will be released on Friday, August 18th, and Part 3 on August 25th.