Du Boisian Lucidity for Post-9/11 America

I may say frankly that I am unable to follow the reasoning of people who use the word "spirit" and "spiritual" in a technical religious sense.


It is true that after any great world calamity, when people have suffered widely, there is a tendency to relapse into superstition, obscurantism, and the formal religion of creeds in a vague attempt to reassure humanity, because reason and logic seemed to have failed. This instead of being a spiritual "awakening," is to my mind, an evidence of ignorance and discouragement.

On the other hand, among some people, there comes in time of stress and depression, an increase of determination to plan and work for better conditions. This is not usually called a "spiritual" awakening, but it is apt to be condemned by the ignorant as "radicalism" and an "attack" upon the established order. It is, however, a manifestation of the spirit in the highest sense...

--W.E.B. Du Bois to George Vaughn in The Correspondence of W.E.B. Du Bois, vol. 1, ed. by Herbert Aptheker (1978), pp. 477-478.