Truth, Power, and Justice

On Monday the United States honored “Martin Luther King, Jr. Day,” celebrating King’s remarkable role in the civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s. It’s a day worth commemorating, for a lot of reasons – the millions of lives being better off for his own topping the list. But King’s mode of moral leadership is worth our attention, too. His cause was the righting of injustice, a cause claimed still today by any number of political activists. But where King rooted his notion of justice diverges dramatically from where they often root theirs, and the consequences are worth weighing. 

For King, there were explicit realities that determined what is right and what is wrong. His speeches were filled with passages from Scripture, but they weren’t meant as arbitrary proverbs. He was often defending the existence of a natural law, deriving from an eternal law, to justify his (peaceful) disobedience of discriminatory man-made laws: when disregarding what is true, such laws – to his perspective – are not laws at all, and therefore they do not warrant our obedience. On the other side are many of today’s activists, whose concern is principally upending hegemonic power. They feel themselves to be on the downside when they want to be on the upside, and that’s the injustice, rather than that an objective, eternal law has been violated. 

The problem is that this kind of approach has the odd effect of justifying all the injustice that’s been done – if there’s no real truth, and it’s all a matter of groups vying for power, then the group on top does just get to harm the other one.

That might seem to take such activists’ logic too far – saying that one group gets to harm the other – but that logic made headlines this week when a climate activist, Andreas Malm, gave an interview to The New York Times Magazine on his provocative book, How to Blow Up a Pipeline. For him, it’s the planet that’s on the downside; he wants it to be on the upside; and so he spends the interview defending the use of political violence to get it there. His interviewer, perplexed, puts the problematic point behind the moral vision he’s proposing plainly: “We can’t say we’re for [political violence] when it’s something we care about and against it when it’s something we think is wrong.” Malm responds, “Of course we can.” 

This relativistic stance could seem liberating, at first blush. Except that the interviewer, as he puts it, couldn’t help but “blurt out” this question as the interview progressed: “Could you give me a reason to live?” Malm tries to shrug him off; even thinking of his children is haunted by the specter that their lives will ultimately, well, just end. It’s a telling moment, because what’s been forgotten by those who take up moral causes like Malm’s is that worthy moral frameworks ought to point us to the reasons for holding to them, too – reasons for living in the way we do. King would have answered this interviewer’s question in his own way. But certainly he could have given some of his most famous words as an answer, words that insist on the eternal reality motivating his pursuit of justice and, even more, words that insist on a hope worth living for: “I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; ‘and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.’”

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