Cornel West claims the biggest threat to the disadvantaged people of the West is nihilism – the lived experience of meaninglessness, hopelessness, and lovelessness, crushed under systems perpetuating the hardships at the heart of what makes nihilism so intractable. Adopting a position triangulated through Christianity, through historicism and moral non-absolutism, and through a desire to rationally justify moral progress in a world forged through historically contingent forces, West believes he’s able to offer the meaning, hope, and love that those at the bottom of society lack, through undermining the privileged status of the social, economic, and political norms which he believes underpin nihilism. His motivation is Christian, his tools are historicism and non-absolutism.
I argue through close textual analysis that West’s historicism is a broken tool, his position descends into unregulated moral relativism, and that it’s of no use in combating the inequalities he targets. Where West contends that his non-absolutism challenges the grounding for inequality, I show that it equally undermines his own solutions. Where he asserts that Christianity provides a grounding for justice, I show that his historicism removes those grounds. However, I demonstrate that his critiques of unregulated relativism – and so, unwittingly, of his own position – are unsuccessful, and a non-absolutist historicist position can indeed be sustained, through hermeneutic, universalised, democratic discourse. I then highlight a danger of unequal power dynamics within such discourse, but by developing West’s Christianity, reconstructed as a form of virtue ethics, these inequalities can be avoided. West’s Christianity, I argue, can provide a universally available, culturally-neutral, regulative norm permitting the historicist to evade the power inequalities that could jeopardise moral progress, while maintaining a non-absolutist position. West may, through such a reconstruction, retain his historicism, Christianity, and desire for justifiable moral progress, without the internal contradictions that had previously plagued him.
