Haikus to Ponder for a Mutual Friend

I sent these poems to a mutual friend over text to share with another. I am not inclined to think that all creativity must be driven by pain and the tortured soul, which is not to say poetry shouldn’t address these things. In fact, I wonder if dwelling in that place of torture, even creatively for too long, disorders the soul. Such a vision turns life cynical, sarcastic, and immune to other dimensions of felt experience. While there is plenty of reason to be cynical about many things in American culture, there’s also a deep beauty to human life that takes some effort to see it effortlessly.

The Poet in time.
Pain need not be exalted
To fuel what love can know.

Silence and beauty.
The mind sees their clear union.
Between the breaths taken.

Stillness, ceaseless thought.
In breath 1, exhale 2
Non-ego, placid mind.

There’s love in silence.
When the mind arrests
Its own ebb and flow.

The pain knowingly
Embraced can’t take hold of you.
The words turn to peace.

Bad to Horrible Martin Luther King Jr. Appropriations in 2023

As someone who reads, publishes on and continues to advance King’s social and political philosophy, many appropriate and get King wrong either on purpose or they don’t know any better. There is an active tendency every January to whitewash King’s legacy for aims he would have never endorsed. Here are this year’s horrible appropriations.

1. Over at the National Review, we have the luxury of brevity. In “What Reagan Understood about MLK” by Bobby Miller, he writes, “Irrespective of his views on how to best organize society, King believed that America is fundamentally good and understood that the only way to change the hearts and minds of Americans was to appeal to their best instincts.” Miller gets a Horrible. It’s not exactly false, and Miller may be avoiding King’s larger critiques of how society ought to be structured to be anti-racist, including his critiques of poverty, militarism, and imperialism abroad. King tried as he might to appeal to the instincts of whites. Theologically, he believed that all can be redeemed. That’s a larger more Christocentric point than King’s larger realistic critique of poverty in the United States. When Milller separates the theological redemption and hope from the concrete critiques of social and political organization that foster the conditions of white supremacy to continue, this very short article just avoids what it seeks not to acknowledge in King directly.

Second, when Miller claims generally that, “…[C]ontemporary social-justice warriors” simply think “that the country is immutably racist and rotten to its core. They seek the reordering of every institution and convention they deem insufficiently repentant, which happens to be nearly all of them. Their efforts to spark a racial-justice reckoning since the murder of George Floyd have been far more divisive than King ever was.” In this quote, we have a blatant vague criticism that is not very specific. Instead, it is intended to label anything Miller or the National Review audience disagrees with as if it is already divisive when we know at the time of King’s activism gallup polls show that the public by and large despised King. In effect, Miller is setting up a version of the Poisoning Well Fallacy wherein an opponent presents adverse information about King that is preemptively presented to their audience with the sole intention of discrediting or ridiculing something that the targeted person (King in this circumstance) did say.

Again, King’s efforts in his poor people campaign and critiques of the United States as a place of systemic racism are being ignored. King would have protested that institutions are “insufficiently repentant” while also believing in the hope that they might repent and be redeemed. He would have organized the protests against killing unarmed Black men and seen the police as extensions of that systemic and institutional racism that Miller completely ignores.

Conservatives always individualize problems with racists because they cannot live in a world where what they conserve in our institutions is less than the pure ideal they have of it and in ignoring concrete analyses they foster a world made for whites in terms of power and privilege they never want to acknowledge. This individualizing celebrates King’s Christocentric hope without seeing that hope as grounded in the suffering of African Americans in the United States from segregation to the present.

2. On this list, “Celebrate Dr. King by Rejecting Woke Cancel Culture” by Terrence Williams has to be the weirdest entry. I almost thought about not including it on this list given how superficial King’s appropriation is. Dr. King is invoked twice because an actor and comedian wants you to know that cancel culture of Land-o-Lakes butter and Aunt Jemima have been canceled. There’s absolute no understanding about King’s actual writings; it’s superficial at best and at worst ignores the appeal to dignity in the Noble Prize acceptance speech he quotes. The appeal to dignity is the hallmark of King’s personalism I’ve explained elsewhere. If corporations no longer wish to depict minorities on their products for fear of being insensitive and racist, then the corporations are reading the room while Mr. Williams is not.

3. The Federalist takes the cake in this list. In Scott Powell’s “What Today’s Cultural Marxists Would Be Wise To Learn From Martin Luther King Jr.,” Powell ignores the entire history and social context of some texts he cites and quotes. By and large, this piece is an example of conservative appropriations of King. They pay attention to the rhetoric they want, ignore its social, historical, and political context, and then conclude that the bogeyman of leftism/cultural Marxism/identity politics does not live up to what they find agreement in King. Using King against woke-ism is what they would claim they are doing (we’ll see this repeat as a theme with others on this list). However, what they find agreeable is very much often misunderstood or again presented as if King would legitimate what they believe we ought to conserve. Let’s dive into Powell’s statements.

King recognized that the self-evident truth in the Declaration of Independence “that all men are created equal … with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,” wasn’t realized in 1776, nor when the U.S. Constitution was ratified some 14 years later. Nor was Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” proposition “that all men are created equal” fulfilled through the Civil War’s Emancipation Proclamation.

King would be jailed some 29 times in his course to fulfilling those ideals.

https://thefederalist.com/2023/01/16/what-todays-cultural-marxists-would-be-wise-to-learn-from-martin-luther-king-jr/

First, King rejects everything about the Founding Father’s vision that inaugurated this country with the institution of slavery. As King so fondly said, “Slavery in America was perpetuated not merely by human madness but human blindness.” Here, Powell is blind. King went on sometime later in the same essay, “Love in Action” to say, “So men conveniently twisted the insights of religion, science, and philosophy to give sanction to the doctrine of white supremacy” (Stength to Love, p. 37). So, when Jefferson, using Locke, justifies the state and John Locke says in the Fundamental Constitution of Carolina (1669) that “110: Every freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his negro slaves, of what opinion or religion soever.” For King, the Founding Father’s vision of the United States is what is wrong with the United States. In effect, King’s own political theology of Beloved Community is about a multiracial brotherhood and democracy rooted in both the Black Church and Boston Personalism. Those are the ideals he was imprisoned for Mr. Powell, not the Founding Fathers. King’s work is a radical critique of the United States’s Lockean political theology at the heart of Jefferson’s vision.

Consider again, King’s harsh words for the Republic in his “I Have a Dream Speech” Powell ignores with the exception of wishing for children not to be judged for the “color of their skin” but rather “the content of their character.” In that speech, King speaks about why Black people are still not free. The promises of equality remain unfulfilled and it calls out the way the original design of the Founding Fathers generated contradictions in their ideals.

But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. So we have come here today to dramatize a shameful condition. In a sense we have come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our
republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a
promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of
color are concerned.

I Have a Dream Speech, bold-faced emphasis mine.

In this passage, the Constitutional Republic and the Declaration of Independence’s rhetoric never applied to “black men” even though King is asking for those same ideals to apply. Powell might return an objection and say that aren’t those the same ideals I cherish? What Powell is missing is that those same ideals mentioned in the Founding Father’s vision is at minimum what must be done, but not all that can be done to advance racial injustice. In a sense, yes, we might have to concede that the presence of those values matter to King, but what goes unmentioned in his piece is just how critical King was of the lack of those same values applied at all and that they underlie a minimum of what must be done. Powell misses that those values are simply the start of the work that must be done. In King’s words, the condition of poverty is not ignored. The condition of segregation as a continuation of slavery is not ignored. The same concern for poverty now is still part of the defaulted promissory note of both the minimum ideals of what conservatives like Powell cherish and the ability to do more. The doing more part would be part of King’s Poor People Campaign. Pay attention to how Powell attempts to divorce economic arguments about capitalism and institutional racism away from what Powell calls to conserve. Consider these two paragraphs,

King would condemn critical race theory (CRT) because it perpetuates negative racial stereotypes, albeit in a reversal, which denigrates the white race. He would also find it fundamentally flawed, exacerbating division in society rather than bringing people together through constructive dialogue and seeing all people as individuals made in God’s image.

King was more than a great pastor and civil rights leader. One of the timeless truths King referred to on numerous occasions, which also speaks to us today, was Paul’s letter to the Romans, in which he said, “Do not conform to the pattern of the world, but be transformed in the renewing of your mind.” King drew on Thomas Jefferson’s statement, “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” He warned in a sermon as early as 1954, also recorded in his book, “Strength to Love,” that, “If Americans permit thought-control, business-control and freedom-control to continue, we shall surely move within the shadows of fascism.

First, King would not condemn critical race theory. Critical race theory arose in the legal work and scholarship of Derrick Bell. Bell specialized in fighting reluctant schools to integrate racially; he specialized in post-Topeka v. Brown cases. He posited that simply changing the laws on paper mattered little if racist whites in positions of power could simply continue unabated in denying integration of schools. Critical race theory posits that we look at the law, policy and practices as still shaped by implicit racist institutional norms, and King would have agreed and continued to fight for better schools even now. CRT does not posit racist stereotypes, but calls into question the implicit norms that work a tergo.

Second, you’ll notice that I cited from the same series of essays titled, Strength to Love. Now, Powell is correct that both communism and capitalism are called into question by King. Again, this is answered by King acknowledging a middle-view of personalism that mediates between the excess focus on material wealth in racist capitalism and the violence of communist regimes. The fact that he advocates a middle view is lost on Powell in this very book.

What’s more, the reflections that come out of the first essay, “Traditional Nonconformist” are not against woke-ism, but against the very mores of traditional capitalism. In fact, King’s words I’m about to quote appear before the thought-control sentence Powell cites above. “A legion of thoughtful persons recognizes that traditional capitalism must continually undergo change if our great national wealth is to be more equitably distributed, but they are afraid their criticisms will make them un-American” (Strength to Love, p. 14). The group-think, the thought-control, is the danger of white supremacy itself that conserves these institutions and keeps all persons of color down by perpetuating conditions that go unaddressed. These conditions continue to be ignored by Republicans since Barry Goldwater became the Presidential nominee of 1964 and ran as a Republican and pro-segregationist.

King is best interpreted as a democratic socialist–again the middle position between absolute capitalism and absolute communism (as he warns against originally in his Chapter on Pilgrimage to Nonviolence in Stride Toward Freedom, 1958) and that democratic socialism is grounded in the Protestant theology of Boston Personalism and King’s own work to develop a multiracial democratic ideal of Beloved Community. It’s a progressive agenda by today’s standards in that it acknowledges the systemic explanations of institutional racism in a variety of disciplines, which would agree with Derrick Bell’s legal scholarship and his invention of critical race theory. Mr. Powell’s King is a strawman against the work that truly needs to be done.

Why the Problems with Levinas?

PARIS, FRANCE – MARCH 30. French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas poses at home during a portrait session on March 30,1993 in Paris,France. (Photo by Ulf Andersen/Getty Images)

Why do I see a bunch of people lately decrying Levinas’s ethics? It’s been occurring in my Facebook feed as of late. These barbs against him do have a source in his philosophy.

What doesn’t sit well with people is how infinitizing our obligations are because we are never done being responsible for each other. Even the business of ethical theory, as commonly understood as act utilitarianism and Kantian deontology, cannot stand infinite obligation. Both act utilitarianism and Kantian deontology tell you when you’ve met your obligation and people want to know when they’re done being ethical (and responsible to another). In act utilitarianism, if you have considered everyone equally in your deliberation and chosen an action that maximizes consequences, you’re done. If you apply all versions of the categorical imperative in your adopting a maxim and act on that maxim, then you’re done. You’ve met your obligation and consequently, if you meet your obligation under the ethical theory, then you are assumed responsible only for what was in your immediacy. You did not stop to consider larger structural factors outside of that immediacy. I think that’s the starting point for many Levinasians. In a world of ethical theories, the Holocaust happened, so something else, some higher and more infinitizing sense of obligation is the only way possibly to articulate what being ethical to another means in a world after the Shoah.

The other claim that gives many people trouble is that an ethical subjectivity that prefigures moral experience is contained in the other to I relation. On its own, that’s a pretty potent and controversial claim: The other is given as that which suddenly lays claim to me in their very infinite transcendence. Unless one is a phenomenologist and accepts that evidence can be given in experience, one might find the whole notion of an other’s givenness in the face-to-face encounter somewhat suspicious. How can the demand of that face place upon me an infinite obligation in a world of finite possibilities? For Levinas, the infinitizing sense comes from the other’s transcendence. The infinitizing sense of the ethical comes from an order of givenness that is Holy. Thus, Levinas’s appeal of this infinite has to do with how open we are to registering phenomenological evidence born out of religious overtones in our experience.

One might put it this way. Levinas’s ethics will fail ultimately from every getting off the ground in a world where everything can be assessed, measured, quantified, and comparable to everything else. People want to be done with things and they surely want to be done with the arduous ethical tasks. They want to be told they’ve done their fair share of being responsible for the environment after buying a few reusable straws from Amazon, done with caring for non-human animals after a few Meatless Mondays, or done with social justice after the anti-racism seminar at work rather than thinking these problems are larger and more systemic. These items become checks on a to-do list app on their phone. There is no infinite anything here; there is only the vague appearance and shallow effort of the good.

For the Levinasian, the ethical calls this world of quantifiability into question. Persons are infinitely valuable because they are singular and given as such. To put it another way, the other’s infinite demand placed upon me emanates from the fact that there is nobody like Jon. The fact that Jon cannot be categorized or equated to a world of standing-reserve quantifiability or reduced to his race, class, or sexual identity is because of the infinite value that is given in the I-other (or what Buber calls the I-thou relationship). It’s when those in power think that people can be treated in a way that reduces their singularity down to a finite essence or category. When the Law of Protection for German Blood and German Honor is passed in 1935 or when the Dredd Scott case is decided in 1857, these laws reduce the otherness, the singularity of persons to race. Racism is thus a denial of a person’s infinite transcendence by positing socio-economic and political hierarchies that legitimate oppression along racial lines.

Whether it’s a limit or not, we must be honest. Levinas’s ethics are a form of theistic ethics and I read Levinas as a fellow personalist in the same way that the term applies to Buber and Scheler. In these various forms of theistic ethics, the dignity of the other is as infinite as the God that is also wholly other or that in the eyes of God we are infinitely loved and so we should also enact the same infinite regard of the other as God (more Scheler than Levinas at that point; also Levinas thinks himself critiquing Buber “by starting with the idea of the Infinite” p. 69 T&I). Within the existential and phenomenological registers of experience, the sense of the infinite is the Holy. My point is that the infinite is the content of the Holy and so when God is invoked as the source of that infinite value–whether it is agapic love or simply the value of the person’s face, both Scheler and Levinas require the Holy to manifest as part of their phenomenological descriptions. The infinite is the content of what and how that infinite value of the person is given.

What’s more, the sense of the infinite pales in comparison to the actual life that God plays in the roles of believers. This is the God that has already died in Nietzsche’s pronouncement. It’s a God that is sanitized and provides no transformation on the part of believers. These believers are acting in such a way that God’s infinite demand for justice in Judaism or Christ’s infinite agapic love would be managed by a to-do list app. Think about it. In everyday American Christianity, the ex-infinite God has been transmuted by capitalist economy. How many times has my wife heard God gives you just the amount of pain you can handle with her diagnosis of a chronic illness. The thinking goes if you have the right amount of faith, God/the universe will give you whatever you want, etc, especially with prosperity Gospel. Sow a seed of a financial gift and receive these blessings. A colleague on Facebook said, “Theism itself is changing, at least in those traditions, to expunge the messy notion of a relationship without limits or bounds.” Maybe it was already changing when Zarathustra came down from his mountain. A God so intimated with capitalist economy will succumb to limits. When I consume a video game, I play it for a while until I win it. At that point, God is a commodity, a transaction, or a service. What’s clear is that the Holy doesn’t manifest in the way that Marcel, Buber, King, Cone, or Nancy Ambrose require even though the Holy manifests in specific ways for each of these thinkers.

A larger point can be made. An incarnate love is something very much in the phenomenological register of what Christians mean and experience in the Holy. If you combine that incarnate love with a relational ontology of being infinitely responsible for the other, would you get something like King’s Beloved Community? That’s a question I presented on two years ago at the digital SAAP during the pandemic. I am still asking the question.