Ink Tea Stone Leaf

It matters why we do things.

This is not because good deeds are less helpful when motivated by selfishness, or because bad deeds hurt less when carried out with the best of intentions. On an individual basis, a deed is only a thing done, for better or worse. Our motivations matter because they shape the course of our actions over the long term. Plenty of selfish people have made positive contributions to the lives of others on occasion, but over the course of a lifetime they have always done their best to guide the bulk of the benefit toward themselves, and left the rest of the world poorer for it.

Am I generalizing, making broad statements I can’t possibly prove? Yes I am. I must rely on simple logic to validate my intuition that people will accomplish what they try to accomplish more often than they will do the opposite.

Martin Luther King Jr’s philosophy of non-violent resistance was rooted in his Christian faith, and his beliefs about a God whose will governed the arc of the moral universe. But it was also inspired by the philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi, whose roots were in Hinduism and the language of karma. What Dr. King saw in Gandhi was not a dogma to be adhered to, but an ethical principle that could be grasped by any person, regardless of their background, and employed in any context where the demands of justice were unmet.

The arguments around Dr. King’s legacy and philosophy tend, too often, to be bogged down in tangential questions, such as “is it ever morally acceptable to perform acts of violence?” Often the subject of violence is mistaken for anger, or condemnation, or outspokenness, while the subject of non-violence is conflated with forgiveness, or appeasement, or complacency. When Dr. King faced the challenges of segregation and Jim Crow, subjecting himself to brutality and incarceration, he could not possibly have been without anger; and the record certainly shows he was outspoken in condemning the evils of racism. As a minister he knew the value of forgiveness, but his way was never about appeasement, and he was not complacent about the challenges he faced. It was not a lack of fire, or an excess of softness, that led him to advocate and practice non-violent resistance.

At the risk of speaking for the man, who knew much more about the working of his own mind than I ever could, Dr. King’s commitment to non-violent resistance was based on simple recognition: the struggle to achieve social justice never ends. In his most famous speech, he said this:

There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, “When will you be satisfied?” We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities.We cannot be satisfied as long as the negro’s basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their self-hood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating: “For Whites Only.” We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until “justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

It would be bleak and pessimistic to assume that Dr. King believed there would never be progress on any of these issues, or otherwise why would he have tried? But it would be foolish and naive to believe that, by making a few speeches, leading a few marches, and championing a few pieces of legislation, these problems would all be fixed forever by a mighty stream of righteousness. As long as there are people, there will be efforts to perpetrate injustice. It is incumbent on us, as human beings, to never be satisfied with the way things are, or to say that we have achieved “enough” progress, or to pretend that the demands of justice have been met, once and for all.

So if the struggle never ends, and the movement will always be in motion, it is necessary to consider in what direction it will be moving toward. If we look at the state of the world and the injustice fills us with anger, because some people have chosen to demean, violate, and oppress others, we ought to ask what that anger is moving us to do. Do we wish to help some one, or do we wish to hurt some one? Is our anger motivated by love, or by hatred?

It is not hard to imagine a situation where the only way to help one person is to harm another, and justice demands that those who do wrong be held to account and made to answer for their crimes. But if we align ourselves with the cause of justice solely because we hate the oppressors and wish to destroy them, then we will never be satisfied until they are all dead. Conversely, if we follow the path principally because we love those who are oppressed, then we will never be satisfied until they have achieved their liberation. If the struggle is eternal, then the choice is to destroy forever, or to build forever.

But is this a binary choice? On the level of individual actions, it usually is not. This is where the discussion of violence or non-violence becomes a question of tactics: what means to resist do people have at their disposal, and which will better accomplish their immediate objectives? Sometimes the survival of one person means taking up arms in self-defense, and sometimes the welfare of a people requires the dismantling of a terrible institution. Non-violence that is only pacifism and acquiescence will fail in its goals.

Dr. King spoke once on the subject of the Watts riots which took place in 1965, and while he described rioting in general as “socially destructive and self-defeating,” he also famously said that “in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard.” When examining the cause of the violence, he observed that the injustices which preceded it were of a greater magnitude, perpetrated by the powerful against people who felt powerless to stop them, and struck back with the only weapons they believed themselves to possess. It is natural to feel anger toward one’s oppressors, and even to hate them—so to hold the oppressed as equally blameworthy as the people who subjected them to persistent injustice would be perverse. It would be like demanding that people should behave better than human beings before even considering whether to treat them as such.

Nevertheless, Dr. King did not abandon non-violent resistance. He believed it was not only morally laudable, but necessary to accomplish his goals. One of those goals was to destroy the laws and social practices that made Black people into second class citizens, or worse. But the more important goal was to replace them with a new system which would be rooted in justice, and promote freedom and equality going forward, to help those who would carry on the struggle once he was gone to go even further than he could. That was a cause based not in hatred, but in love.

So when we face all the ways that Dr. King’s legacy is under attack, whether it is through militarized policing or the undermining of voting rights, or even the attempt to strip citizenship from the infants born on our soil, we must remember for ourselves that the necessity of resisting, and putting a stop to this reactionary nightmare, does not lie solely in hating and hurting the people who have broken what he and his comrades struggled to build. It lies mainly in defending our neighbors—even those who were born elsewhere—and advocating for their rights as if they were our own. We must remain unsatisfied until there is no question that justice will prevail over cynicism and hatred. We must do this fundamentally because we love one another, and we must not back down.

If I have presumed to speak for Dr. King, then I will close with his own words, as he spoke on the occasion of accepting the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1964.

See the transcript of his speech here.