Lessons from M.L. King by MT Nguyen, NYC

Last week marked the 40th anniversary of M.L. King’s death. Virtually every newspaper ran some piece or other praising King, his movement and its accomplishments. Most writers wanted to tell a success story, connecting King’s actions with the increasing economic prosperity of African-Americans. The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson, an otherwise sober writer, pointed to Stanley O’neal (former CEO of Merrill Lynch) as the ultimate proof of progress. It would have been ‘unimaginable’, Robinson boasts, for a black man to attain such a grand position in King’s time. Or perhaps, to use another of Robinson’s examples, progress is to be measured in terms of the increasing number of blacks who enjoy houses in a suburban cul-de-sac. Be that as it may, are we really to understand the significance of King’s movement in terms of how many potential Wall St. CEO’s it paved the way for or how many cul-de-sacs it paved?

I don’t want to minimize the significance of economic opportunity and success as measures of a society’s justice, but it is myopic and distorting, both of the image of justice and King’s movement, to make economic prosperity the representative expression of an ambition much larger and less individually focused.

What then is King’s focus? Who is King talking to and what does he ask of them? In this context, it is instructive to study and take lesson from King’s incendiary 1968 speech, ‘Beyond Vietnam - A Time to Break Silence’. Understanding the aims related in this speech as the benchmark, a sober person would conclude that we Americans have made little progress and that the most important things are left undone.

One of the central aims of this speech is to articulate what King sees as alarming feature of the American ethos. He uses Vietnam as a lens through which to critically examine ourselves. He says, “The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit.” And he diagnoses our illness in the following way: “When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.” And “The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.” Here he outright rejects a Robinsonian conception of progress. Instead, the measure of progress towards justice is to be found in nothing less than an ethical transformation of national character.

Who is King addressing? Who bears the responsibility to effect this transformation?

It is a difficult problem to pinpoint who King aims to address and hence what he is trying to do when he confronts America’s racism, extreme materialism and militarism. There are at least three different possible interpretations. First, one can say that his activities are expressions of moral outrage addressed to all Americans, aiming to open dialogue between him and them. Specifically, King hopes to appeal to the moral sensitivities of those bearing the objectionable ethos. In doing so, he hopes to effect change through persuasion. The success of his movement is measurable then, in part, in terms of the persuasive force of its moral argument. This view holds that as directed at members of a shared moral practice the argument succeeds when the moral deliberations of the racist, extreme materialist and militant are transformed by it. This assumes that the invitation to moral dialogue is accepted and those who accept are susceptible to moral change.

This view can be challenged on the grounds that it perilously assumes that dialogue and argument alone can touch, let alone transform, the 3 characters in question. This is perilous because, arguably, such characters are insusceptible to dialogue. Those who genuinely believe they alone can teach and have nothing to learn are hardly the ideal candidates for public moral discourse.

A second view of King’s target audience is more plausible. His audience consists of those who can grasp the content of his message but who are, nevertheless, unmoved to act on it. This view is supporting by his assertion that, “It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch antirevolutionaries.” The problem is not the absence of moral knowledge, but the absence of willpower. Thus, the purpose of reaching out is not so much to persuade the persuadable of truths they fail to recognize, e.g. that racial, economic and global injustice exist. The purpose is, against their inertia, to move such persons to action.

Action against what? King’s skepticism about the effectiveness of moral dialogue, at least as the only avenue to take, led him to see confrontation as necessary. What differentiated others from King was not moral knowledge but rather the commitment to reject the status quo. While others preach patience by citing ‘progress’, presuming that things would eventually, somehow, change, King committed himself to eliminating racial injustice. While those others deplore confrontation, King rejects the viciousness of the racist, materialistic and militant and the institutions supporting and supported by them, and he sought in a lifetime’s work to stand up, resist and eradicate them. It was not due (only) to the moral persuasiveness of his argument, the message of King’s vision came out of the power of his determination and his ability to move others to join him in confronting the viciousness of the American ethos. It is easy to forget amidst the frequent concatenation of King with peace that he was an incendiary figure. Many people hated him. This is not merely because he disagreed with them; rather, as Socrates did, he got in their faces and in their way.

King’s aim and his message then cannot be defined so narrowly in terms of economic prosperity. He asks for nothing less from his intended audience than to put themselves on the line, confronting the objectionable American ethos, in the service of justice, not only for Americans but for all the world’s citizens. He was in that way a cosmopolitan.

Finally, if King’s death reminds us of anything, it reminds us of the perils of his ambitions. He didn’t just die, he was murdered. In that light, one may wonder whether it reasonable to ask that others risk their lives or livelihoods for the sake of justice. It is important here to see King as not preaching, as many other moralists do, a rigid form of moral obligation. He does not speak of duties owed to others, but rather the responsibilities of individual choice, in particular, responsibilities one has to oneself. It is up to us as individuals to make up our own minds as to whether we will continue to remain silent in the complacency of our comfort or whether, in making the right choice, as King concludes, “we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our world into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.”