King and Tradition
In the last decades, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s life has been pigeonholed in a way precluding a true understanding of his legacy. A radical, thoughtful, and purposeful life of action has been whittled down to one or two statements from one speech. This is not simply a disservice to posterity, but almost an insult to King's life and thought. Dedicated to understanding the basic equality of humanity and nonviolence as a morally necessary tool to insure democratic equity, King's life is instead squeezed into an emasculated and nebulous politics of selfism, a politics detrimental to understanding King's means and ends.
FT has an excellent piece focusing on King's extensive intellectual heritage. Dr. King was one of the most educated and powerful intellects of his era. In 1961, King took a few months away from the successfully expanding Civil Rights Movement to teach a course at his alma mater, Morehouse College. The course consisted of,
“Plato’s Republic and followed by selections from Aristotle’s Ethics and The Politics. Then came Augustine, Aquinas, Machiavelli and Hobbes, before moving on to Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and “the Utilitarians” Bentham and Mill. His students did not exaggerate when they remembered “an immense amount of reading” for the class.”
After his death, a misguided identity politics, that in many ways evolved from the Civil Rights Movement, would not only reject King's intellectual tradition, but vilify it. In short order, the Western historical tradition was removed from many university curricula. “The trend picked up steam in 1987, when students at Stanford University protested against a requirement in Western Civilisation that they, along with some faculty members, criticised as being racist, Eurocentric and colonialist.”
King was not only educated, but completely immersed in this “racist, Eurocentric, and colonialist” tradition. He became one of the most radical political actors and thinkers of American and world history not by ignoring and prosecuting this history, but embracing every facet. The only way history can in anyway hoped to be understood.
The article's author, Roosevelt Montas, makes the argument better than I can,
“As an American man of colour who has benefited from the legacy of the civil rights movement and whose political consciousness has been formed by the canon King taught at Morehouse College, I am stung by the irony — and indeed the tragedy — of steering contemporary students away from that textual tradition. Rather than empowering them or uplifting them, this robs them of the most powerful intellectual tools we have to advance our ideals of social justice.”
He concludes,
“Faced with ideological polarisation that threatens the foundations of liberal democracy, it behoves us to recover the political tradition embodied in King’s syllabus. It represents the connective tissue of our politics, the discursive bridges by which we may work out solutions to our thorniest problems. We must challenge the simplistic mentality that casts this tradition as irredeemably patriarchal, white, and elitist, and which, by doing so, makes students more provincial and less effective actors for social change.
“It is precisely because the tradition reflects an unfolding struggle for justice that it provides us with potent sources of argument, strategy and vision for addressing the inequalities and abuses that persist in our society.”
Great stuff!
Today, at every level, we witness the failure of identity politics. Most immediately and distressingly apparent by turning on a television or browsing the internet and watching sunshine patriots — black, white, brown, man, woman, gay, and transgender — ghoulishly pounding the drums of war. With heads filled with criminal ignorance and hearts filled with despicable hatred, they rhetorically wallow in the luxury of violence.
Dr. King's most profound legacy is that of nonviolence, a school of action he learned from Mohandas Gandhi and the Indian Independence Movement. Exactly a year before his death in an invaluable and too little remembered speech, King warned against the American war in Vietnam, a warning that instead became the prescience of decline, a most unwanted political legacy. King said,
“We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood -- it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, 'Too late.' There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. Omar Khayyam is right: 'The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on.'”
With his imperative embrace of nonviolence, King squarely placed himself not just against the Western tradition, but all human tradition. His ability to do so was only made possible by his knowledge of both — in all their glories and all their horrors.