Tomorrow the US celebrates a vacation in honour of Martin Luther King, Jr. Boston College, the place I work, is at all times desperate to remind everybody that King obtained his doctorate there. They don’t seem to be at all times as desperate to remind you that King studied on the Faculty of Theology – and clearly realized his classes there nicely, for he was not merely an awesome activist however an awesome thinker.
I’ve come to know King’s thought by the programs I’ve taught in BU’s philosophy division – despite the fact that the programs have been on Indian philosophy. I’ve nonetheless included King on the syllabus for that class, with visitor audio system introducing him to the scholars, as a result of I needed to point out college students the up to date relevance of Indian philosophy. Particularly, King drew a substantial amount of his concepts from Gandhi – who was a philosopher-activist like King, and in flip drew on earlier Indian thought like Jainism and the Bhagavad Gītā. It appears to me on reflection, although, that the scholar surpassed the pupil: that what King mentioned and wrote with Gandhi’s affect was profounder and extra beneficial than Gandhi’s personal thought was in itself.
The core concept that King drew from Gandhi, in fact, was nonviolence – which Gandhi used to translate the Jain vow of ahiṃsā. Ahiṃsā extra actually means “non-harm”, which isn’t precisely the identical factor. Gandhi’s main achievement is to show ahiṃsā into the thought of nonviolent motion: altering unjust social circumstances by way of peaceable mass protests that decision consideration to them. This concept was not in conventional Jainism, which like its sister custom of Buddhism, was not politically lively; nor was it within the Gītā, a extra political textual content whose explicitly acknowledged message is the alternative of nonviolence. However Gandhi put it to highly effective impact, drawing monumental sympathy for the reason for Indian independence, which ultimately grew to become profitable.
King realized from Gandhi and used the identical techniques, equally profitable, to finish the official régime of racial segregation within the American South. Of their activism – deploying nonviolent resistance to finish an unjust state of affairs – they have been very related. The place they actually differed was of their political thought. King had philosophical coaching the place Gandhi didn’t – and it exhibits.
Gandhi pushed his concept of nonviolence a lot additional than King, right into a form of anarcho-libertarianism that thought of state motion an unacceptable type of violence. He proclaimed that “I shall be no occasion to dispossessing the propertied courses of their non-public property with out simply trigger” – and offering meals and livelihood to the poor and hungry didn’t depend, for him, as simply trigger. As a substitute he inspired a voluntary redistribution, the place “the wealthy ought to regard themselves as trustees for the entire of society fairly than as homeowners of the wealth they may possess.” Gandhi’s followers, like Vinoba Bhave, made a honest effort to persuade the wealthy to share their land and wealth with the poor – however it didn’t work. A couple of noble souls have been satisfied, however not sufficient to make any significant dent within the poverty of the villages the place it was tried. And on a extra elementary stage, Gandhi by no means appeared to object to the state violence concerned in protecting property in its present fingers, by legal guidelines in opposition to theft.
King had a way more life like view. Like Gandhi, he believed that guarding energy was unhealthy for the highly effective: segregation harmed the white man’s personal soul. However from his different nice affect Reinhold Niebuhr – coiner of the Serenity Prayer – King realized to reject a “false optimism”. Niebuhr, drawing in activate Augustine, knew that the darkness in human nature runs deep. Voluntary modifications of coronary heart profit everybody and they’re to be celebrated. However they aren’t enough to result in social change. Thus King’s Poor People’s Campaign demanded a extra commonplace type of social democracy, the place the federal government would tax the wealthy to fund housing and revenue for the poor.
I tremendously admire King’s political imaginative and prescient as a result of it kinds an admirable synthesis of two essential political currents. I believe that James Doull is correct to bemoan a politics of “division” through which the pursuits of various human teams and people are basically set in opposition to one another, with no bigger image of a standard good. Such a division obtained a lot worse within the many years after Doull’s loss of life: my Fb feed within the mid-2010s (pre-Trump) was filled with feminist recommendation not to say that patriarchy hurts males too (despite the fact that it absolutely does), as a result of the battle in opposition to patriarchy ought to solely be for ladies and never males. Such views of intrinsic antagonism set in movement what Hobbes referred to as a war of all against all – and in a battle of all in opposition to all, all will lose.
Doull frequently criticized Marx as one liable for selling that division. However Marx, I believe, noticed what Doull and Gandhi didn’t: that energy constructions are usually captured and serve the pursuits of the highly effective. Public shaming can finish such apparent injustices as colonialism and segregation – however even there, it does so by a change within the state and its equipment of coercion. Furthermore the highly effective are sometimes blinded to the unjust operations of their energy. One can see that blinding simply by studying Doull’s personal heroes, Aristotle and Hegel: one can’t think about Aristotle writing of “pure slaves”, or Hegel writing that slavery “causes the rise of human feeling among the many Negroes”, had they ever been slaves themselves. Appeals to the frequent good can all too simply develop into appeals to the great of the highly effective.
And I can’t title any thinker from any period who navigated this downside higher than Martin Luther King. King refused the naïveté that trusted the wealthy to surrender their land voluntarily. And but he by no means stopped believing within the frequent good. Segregation did damage white folks because it damage black folks; it’s simply all too troublesome for white folks to see that. When the highly effective wield energy unjustly, one should take a few of that energy from them by drive – however in a manner that in the end makes a greater world for everybody.
Pleased Martin Luther King Day.
Cross-posted at the Indian Philosophy Blog.
