Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…I value all of those things that you just mentioned, all of those scenarios that you just mentioned. I think they’re very valuable. And they have made America a great place. We can’t throw out the baby with the bathwater. Those ideas and ideals have served this country very well. I don’t think we need to abandon them. We just have to find a way to extend them to all segments of society. Two thinkers I want to bring up who share some biographical commonalities with you but came out with very different points. Amiri Baraka, originally LeRoi Jones, he converted to Islam, was an intellectual, a great poet, extremely talented. Like you, very much a polymath. But he stayed very radically left. He had a black nationalist period, he had a communist period, went through a lot of transformations, but no one would really describe him as any kind of conservative. You, like Baraka, converted to Islam but have a very different point of view. What accounts for that difference in the two of you? I believe you knew him, even. I did know Amiri. I think the difference is I believe in what happened in Europe during what they call the Enlightenment. That needs to happen to black Americans, absolutely a type of enlightenment where they get a grasp of what is afflicting them and what the cures are. I think that the American model is the best in the world but in order to get everybody involved in it we have to have it open to everyone. That hasn’t always been the case.…

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