Cracks in Postmodernity
on prophecy, subsidiarity, and the errors of expediency for its own sake
I wrote in my article on the 20th anniversary of Lauryn Hill’s MTV Unplugged 2.0 album that Kanye West is (after Hill) the closest we’re going to get to a John the Baptist-type prophet today. What inhibits him from fully achieving prophet status is his overly friendly and naive attitude toward the Herod’s of our day: corrupt corporate and political elites.
West indeed has prophetic proclivities: he is unafraid of speaking uncomfortable truths, calling out the evils in our society, and proclaiming the love, justice, and mercy of God. But his ego clearly taints his prophetic message and gets him tangled with questionable figures and movements.
West recounts texting Hill that he was “the leader” of his generation. She responded saying “you’re a leader.” This, and other statements, like “I’m not one of the people who…says, ‘hey, I want to stop anybody from making money.’ To the people who make money and the powers that be, I am your true Nikolai Tesla,” are leading him closer to something along the lines of the Prosperity Gospel than to the Gospel of the Cross and Resurrection.
He expressed some powerful hot takes during his interview on Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News which are worth listening to. But despite the fact that the left-wing media refuses him the space to express such views, his reactionary and facile dalliance with right-wing figures like Carlson and Candace Owens makes it hard to take him seriously. He passed off his recent gestures of wearing a “WHITE LIVES MATTER” shirt and posting cryptic tweets threatening Jews as gestures of provocative performance art and artistic freedom. Even if this is the case, it’s a testament more to his egotism than to any transcendent truth claims.
Lauryn Hill never turned her witness to the Truth into a worldly “project”…she was never audacious enough to claim to possess the Truth, but rather let herself be possessed by it. For West, Christianity has become an “agenda” of his own making. It’s more expedient to ally himself with powerful elites in order to get his message out, rather than to rely on divine providence and to spread his faith encounter by encounter, as Jesus himself did.
Hill emphasizes that real change begins at the most basic level possible: with the conversion of an individual’s heart as a result of an encounter with God, who is the ultimate source of both mercy and justice…Hill’s music encourages us to sharply critique social entities—governments, corporations, broad social trends—that operate at a far remove from our families, neighborhoods and local communities. The church’s principle of subsidiarity makes the same case for rooting social power, wherever appropriate, at the most local level possible. It is in these contexts, the places we live and the people we live with, that an individual’s particular needs are met or not met. The greater the distance an earthly authority or power operates from a local community, the greater the risk that that institution will use its power inadequately or violently. If they don’t know us, how can they truly serve us?
Relegating a work that is meant to be carried out on the most basic level possible to bureaucratic global powers runs him the risk of capitulating to the temptation that Jesus was too wise to fall for while fasting in the desert for 40 days. The devil understood this well when offering Christ the chance to rule the kingdom should he bow down and worship him. Perhaps if he took a moment to read the works of Pope John Paul II rather than ironically wearing a picture of him on the front of his WHITE LIVES MATTER shirt, he would understand this issue better.
So is Kanye a hateful antisemite who needs to be silenced…a man struggling with mental health who is “off his meds”…a victim of MK Ultra whose programming is glitching…a puppet being humiliated and figuratively slaughtered by the media cycle as a part of an esoteric mega-ritual…or just a psyop being used to garner clicks amidst the barrage of internet content? Perhaps all or none of these things are true.
All we can be sure of is the fact that Kanye’s an example of why those who wish to witness to the Truth must prioritize conforming their lives to it over talking about it. We never hear figures like John the Baptist, Isaiah, or Lauryn Hill bragging about how God chose them to speak the truth…rather, they lived it and set an example for others.
That being said, his egotism, inflammatory remarks, and mental health issues should not excuse us from engaging with his ideas seriously. Jonathan Pageau makes a compelling argument for Kanye as the embodiment of the “fool for Christ” archetype. Marc Barnes analyzes West’s insightful presidential campaign platform here and here. I also recommend reading the platform itself, which offers a compelling vision for supporting black communities, rooted in the oft-overlooked principles (even by West himself) of subsidiarity and solidarity.
I also recommend checking out his first Drink Champs interview (which went much better than the second one), and my past comments on Kanye in my discussions with Marc Barnes and Brennan Vickery of the Iffy podcast.
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