The King We Need: Martin Luther King Jr., Moral Philosopher

[G_j]

https://www.lionsroar.com/the-king-we-need-charles-r-johnson-on-the-legacy-of-dr-martin-luther-king-jr/?utm_content=buffer1d361&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

CHARLES R. JOHNSON| JANUARY 15, 2018

He was more than just the civil rights leader he is remembered as today. Martin Luther King, Jr., was one of America’s greatest moral and political philosophers, his life founded on deep, sophisticated and courageous spiritual convictions. Charles R. Johnson looks at King’s teachings and example and why they are important to all Americans.

Have we misunderstood Martin Luther King, Jr.?

When most of us think about that American apostle of nonviolence and peace, Martin Luther King, Jr., even some who marched beside him in demonstrations nearly fifty years ago, we do so with an almost deliberate forgetfulness and precious little understanding of the specific “content of character” (to borrow one of King’s most famous phrases) displayed by a man who insisted in his sermon “Three Dimensions of a Complete Life” that, “Somewhere along the way, we must learn that there is nothing greater than to do something for others.”

Despite the overwhelming presence of this man in our lives, King in his magnificent fullness—as this nation’s Socratic “gadfly of the state” and our most prominent moral philosopher of the second half of the twentieth century—is strangely absent. Too many of us, especially those born after his assassination thirty-seven years ago, see him only in the oversimplified terms of race-as an eloquent, segregation-era “voice of his people,” frequently and falsely compared in political conversations with his very different (and philosophically antithetical) contemporary, Malcolm X, whose daughter’s observation in the 1980’s about her father’s popularity applies equally as well to King: “He’s getting attention, but I think he’s misunderstood… Young people are inspired by pieces of him instead of the entire man.”

King once stated: “We shall have to create leaders who embody virtues we can respect,” and also counseled, “We must be sure that our hands are clean in the struggle.”

In other words, these two iconic and long-dead Americans suffer from the curse of canonization, which progressively over four decades has airbrushed away the sweat and scars, the pores and imperfections, and the polyvalence both men exhibited during their highly influential journeys among us. This is tragic, for it is in such personal minutiae that we find the very foundations from which a memorable public life arises. Moreover, this forgetfulness is a tragedy for all of us as Americans, because not only questions about race relations are at stake in the Martin Luther King, Jr., story but also deeper issues, older conundrums, about what it means to be civilized in the political and social world, about how one confronts social evil without creating further evil, division and enmity, even questions about what Buddhists call pratityasamutpada (dependent origination) that resonate beneath the surface of King’s remarkable and too brief thirty-nine years of life.

[G_j]

1. kick