“THE ARC OF THE MORAL UNIVERSE IS LONG BUT IT BENDS TOWARD JUSTICE” --- OR MAYBE IT DOESN'T
In these trying times, is there a force on which we can anchor our hopes?
We live in times when despair comes easily. As an empiricist, I look for concrete signs of hope, but come up almost empty. Most urgent is the end of American democracy, which may collapse with the next election. It will not plummet in its entirety all at once. But it is plausible that its structures will be so greatly eroded that it will mark the beginning of the end. Correctives may be too weak and American democracy could hobble to its demise within a decade or two.
I need to be clear. America will not disappear like the Ottoman empire. Rather, it will increasingly resemble contemporary Hungary, a nation its president Viktor Orban shamelessly labels an “illiberal democracy.” Increasing power will be concentrated in the executive branch. The legislature and judiciary will continue to exist, but as virtually empty shells, rendered impotent under the dominion of the executive. They will legitimate the pretense of democracy without its substance. Elections will be manipulated with outcomes determined in advance. The press will be centrally controlled and serve as little more than a propaganda arm for those wielding power.
This framework will be sustained and given support on the ground as popular sentiment grows increasingly dark. Liberalism and secularism, however vaguely defined, will become catchalls and convenient scapegoats for castigation and hate. Such worldviews will be increasingly portrayed as inimical and subversive forces corrupting social purity. Such concepts as diversity, cultural autonomy, and personal expressions that do not conform to traditional masculinist stereotypes will be condemned. As darkness thickens, gays will be anathematized and increased misogyny will become normative. The prevailing value system will support a “blood and soil” sensibility with a distinctly fascist resonance. The values we identify with liberal democracy will increasingly fade from public consciousness.
This is an apocalyptic vision to be sure. But if I am to be loyal to the facts, I do not see many hopeful signs pushing in the opposite direction. I look to the threat to democracy as our most urgent problem, but there are others that can readily compound our despair. The most comprehensive, needless to say, is climate destruction. I need not go there at this point.
Is there a deeper source of optimism that lies beneath the manifest phenomena that suffuse our current circumstances? Some believe that there is.
Barack Obama seems to be a perennial optimist and asserts his optimism even in the current moment. Martin Luther King was arguably an optimist as well, but his views of a more just future were severely tempered by a sense of realism and became increasingly tested and qualified in the last stage of his career.
Both King and Obama were inspired by the same adage, which lies engraved on the King monument in Washington, and Obama had sewn into the carpet in the oval office. As a result, it has become well known and I want to analyze it to discern whether we can legitimately employ it as a source of optimism. It reads: “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.” It is a beautiful phrase, to be sure. But is it true and worthy of our belief?
Common understanding attributes it to King, but that is incorrect. Its author was the Unitarian minister and firebrand of abolition, Theodore Parker. Parker was theologically further to the left than any religious thinker in antebellum America. His thought went through three identifiable stages. He began his career as a conventional Unitarian. While never formally abandoning Unitarianism, he adopted a transcendentalist philosophy and became a member of Emerson's circle. Parker ended his career espousing his own philosophical worldview which he termed “Absolute Religion.”
Parker's views were sufficiently radical that he was brought before his Unitarian colleagues to stand trial for heresy, and his peers refused to exchange pulpits with him. Yet so captivating was his appeal, that more than 3,000 followers would come out to hear him rail against the evils of the day when he addressed the public at the Boston Music Hall. No preacher of that era had a larger following.
The basis of Parker's hope is revealed in the epistemology that informs the aphorism under examination, but it is essential to quote it in full. In a speech given in 1853, Parker said the following:
“I do not pretend to understand the moral universe. The arc is a long one. My eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by experience of sight. I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends toward justice.”
Parker's original rendering is more complex than King's elision. It affirms the existence of moral ambiguity that impedes what we can know with certainty. The trajectory of the arc is not only long but characterized by obscurity along its route. Vision and experience cannot bring us certainty. But Parker can rest his security in truths distilled by conscience.
Here Parker's transcendentalist epistemic idealism comes into play. He affirmed that the human mind is structured in such a way that it possesses what he referred to as “facts of consciousness” that are prior to, and exist outside of, human experience. Parker affirmed that such “facts” (we may refer to them as “ideals”) need to inspire and guide our behavior. Among such ideals are Justice, Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and others that comprise the pantheon of moral virtue.
Parker upheld a type of secular eschatology, so that progress in the empirical world, at some point in an indefinable future, will cohere with the truths inherent in the foundational facts that comprise the structure by which mind operates. In short, facts of consciousness, the aforementioned ideals, comprise the lodestars to which human endeavors in the realm of time and space are moving. At some unknown future time, they will converge and a more beneficent and just society will be ours. Though not starry-eyed, Parker's view of the human prospect was assuredly progressive and his orientation to the future securely optimistic.
While Theodore Parker's Absolute Religion placed him outside the Christian consensus, Martin Luther King's remained well within it. I conclude that King's deep immersion in the Christian faith, together with the oppression of the Black experience in America, ensured that his optimism was severely qualified by the reality of despair. For King, more than for Parker, hope and despair are in continuous tension. In the final analysis, hope triumphs over defeat, but it is very hard-won and the product of continuous struggle. But as with Parker, inspiration and hope emerge from a reality that transcends the suffering inherent in our condition. For Parker that source was impersonal. For King it is the personal love and grace of God that ultimately bends the arc.
Barack Obama was a professing Christian as well, who was influenced by the Christian realism of Reinhold Niebuhr. As with Niebuhr, he affirmed that there is true evil in the world, and, as such the use of force can be justified. Obama was an optimist, but given human nature, would have denied that his optimism was facile or glib.
Yet, in affirming the moral arc and the ultimate triumph of justice, I conclude that the source of his inspiration differed from both Parker's and King's versions. Obama's optimism is not vested in the transcendent but in his interpretation of history's trajectory. Obama is not an idealist, but a pragmatist and empiricist. He finds real progress in American history and would frequently reference his own life story as a case in point.
Can we share in the optimism of these venerable thinkers and activists? Implied in the triumph of the moral arc, whether expressed in Parker's transcendentalism, King's Christian hope, or Obama's reading of history, is that there is a force, standing outside of human activity alone, that directs the course of human affairs to ensure a particular outcome.
It is significant that all three are religious thinkers, though one need not be such to affirm an analogous belief. A noted critic of Obama's faith in the benevolent triumph of the moral arc is the Black writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose background is notably irreligious. Taking Obama to task, Coates has explicitly stated that the moral arc does not bend toward justice. Rather, he proclaims that it bends toward chaos, which is another way of negating the existence of the moral arc altogether. Karl Marx, assuredly an atheist, but nevertheless a determinist, identified the class struggle as the agent that propelled history toward its ultimate phase of communism at which point history would cease.
What are humanists to believe? Is there an inherent optimism implicit in humanism, or does humanism bring us closer to Coates' perspective?
In the first instance, humanism suggests that the future is an open future. By contrast, in a hard sense the future of the fundamentalist Christian is a closed future, as foreordained in scripture. The world will end at Armageddon which will usher in the Second Coming.
The optimism implicit in the moral arc bending toward justice seems to suggest that Parker, King, and Obama are determinists, at least in a soft sense. But a pitfall of so believing is that it can undercut human agency with regard to sustaining the struggle against oppression and injustice. If the moral arc ensures that justice will eventuate, why should we commit ourselves to the effort? Yet, there is no doubt that Parker, King, and Obama affirmed that human agency is essential to the effort.
Perhaps Theodore Parker's view is essential here. One can affirm the ultimate triumph of justice, but accept that ambiguity as to the details of its realization requires human agency in striving to bring it about. Both things can be true.
This leaves us again to question whether for humanists belief in the moral arc is justified.
I do not hold that there is a force extrinsic to the actions, decisions, and strivings of human beings that preordains the human future. In brief, such “realities” can take one of two related forms. I understand fate to be a dynamic that hovers above human activities and ensures that a specific future will eventuate. By contrast, determinism is a force within and is inherent in the human condition that vouchsafes a specific outcome. In a strict sense, I believe in neither, though admittedly the reality of fate foreshadowing outcomes has some unverifiable appeal.
While I reject belief in the moral arc, as stated by our luminaries, I do affirm a weak force in human affairs that allows us to have faith in a long-range, optimistic future. But any such belief must be tempered by the reality that human progress is by no means unidirectional. While I affirm, along with the Harvard psychologist, Steven Pinker, that the human condition, over its career of many millennia, is improving when measured by many major indicators, its trajectory is characteristically wavering. Decades of advance are followed by periods of horrendous darkness and oppression. There is intrinsically, nor above human affairs, any one grand arc, but descriptively there is a multitude of mini-arcs, so to speak, moving in different and contrary directions.
Yet there are factors lodged in human nature that can serve as a source of long-range optimism. Among them is the enduring and ineluctable yearning in human beings for freedom. While, as the social psychologist, Erich Fromm, elaborated, there exists a propensity in human beings to internalize authoritarian structures and “escape from freedom,” there is reason to believe that the yen to throw off the shackles of oppression is more deeply rooted and enduring.
If we are looking for a source of optimism and hope in these troubled times, I affirm that we can find it in the perennial struggle for freedom, for which there is ample evidence in the career of humankind. In short, we can anchor our hope in the conviction that in the long range freedom will have the last word.
Joe as usual --- brilliant. The recognition that the yearning for freedom will bend the arc of history towards humanism is a starting point. What is essential is a species-wide mission to strategize, organize, and mobilize whenever we are faced with existential threats, including wide-spread fascism.
Thoughtful analysis, Joe. I hope you are right.