Two pairs of intellectual sparring partners meet in this special tag-team edition of The Glenn Show. There’s me and John McWhorter, of course, and our guests, Robert George and Cornel West. Robbie and Cornel just published a book based on some of their debates, Truth Matters: A Dialogue on Fruitful Disagreement in an Age of Division, and on this episode you can see what makes them such excellent models of productive friction. They differ in their religious, political, and philosophical beliefs, but they share a powerful commitment to the search for truth via reasoned argument. Without that commitment, they say, belief means little, just as reason means little without the underpinning of belief.
Cornel and Robbie criticize the dual assault on universities’ commitment to truth. The Trump administration threatens institutional independence from without, while political and intellectual dogmatism threaten the pursuit of truth from within. Robbie suggests that starting new “para-academic institutions,” like research centers and scholarship funds, may be one way to inject diversity of thought back into institutions. But does a commitment to truth potentially compromise a commitment to diversity of thought? If one side of a debate is simply wrong, are we still obligated to put them on the debate stage? Balancing faith and reason turns out to be a tricky thing, especially when passions flare up around a sensitive issue, like the Gaza War. John avers that, while he’s all for reason, he cannot understand the role of faith and spirituality in intellectual life. That leads to a very interesting concluding section, in which Robbie and Cornel—abetted by me—try to persuade John that he does have a spiritual side, and his patron saint is Stephen Sondheim.
Though we bust through the hour mark on this one, I don’t feel like we had nearly enough time to explore everything we wanted to talk about. I hope to have these two back soon.
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0:00 Intro
1:12 Attacks on the university from within and without
9:50 Ground News ad
11:43 Reshaping institutions by force and by argument
20:56 Critiquing the Gaza War without antisemitism
22:30 Reforming para-academic institutions
32:07 Is there a potential conflict between commitments to truth and commitments to diversity of thought?
39:19 Caught between “casual relativism” and “fierce absolutism”
52:18 Cornel: There is no “mic drop” argument on Gaza or anything else
55:19 The straight-jacket of emotional over-investment
1:00:36 The role of faith in the search for truth
1:10:19 Finding faith beyond reason in Stephen Sondheim
Recorded April 12, 2025
Links and Readings
Robbie and Cornel’s new book, Truth Matters: A Dialogue on Fruitful Disagreement in an Age of Division
Thomas Kuhn’s book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Eugene Genovese’s book, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made
Antonio Gramsci’s book, The Prison Notebooks
William Blake’s poem, “London”
Pope John Paul II’s encyclical, Fides et Ratio
Genesis 22, King James Version
Glenn’s memoir, Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative
Mandy Patinkin sings “Finishing the Hat” from Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George
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