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    Martin Luther King's Civility

    We've been talking a lot lately about civility, for obvious and painful reasons. And our public conversation on that topic tends to go astray pretty quickly, because we don't all mean the same thing when we say "civility," and often aren't even sure what we mean by the word ourselves.

    If we mean by "civility" that our public debates should never get heated, and that no one should ever speak angrily about politics, then we're going to be disappointed. American politics has been a rough and tumble business since Jefferson and Adams, at least, and on balance the country is better for it. Inciting violence and inflaming listeners is clearly unacceptable, but we can't rein all of the negativity and name-calling, and we shouldn't. There have always been politicians who managed to be dangerous and inflammatory without breaking any of the superficial rules of polite debate, and some of the speech that breaks those rules is valuable.

    Neither should "civility" mean ceasing to disagree. There will always be disagreements, and no amount of comity or bipartisanship will make them go away. Every democracy has to make choices about serious questions, and the answers to those questions are almost never unanimous. Disagreement isn't a flaw that ruins democracy; democracy is the process of working out disagreements. People who complain that partisan politics are too partisan or too political are basically expressing a discomfort with democracy itself.

    What I was planning to write, and still view as at least 90% of the truth, is that the heart of civility is participating in the civil process of resolving disagreements, and committing to abide by it. We have disagreements, and will always have disagreements, and we don't believe that any king, high priest, generalissimo or Wise and Distinguished Op-Ed Columnist can be trusted as an infallible referee. So we have this system for resolving our arguments, a system of elections, legal proceedings, and government institutions that allows us to argue and resolve arguments peacefully. Staying with that system, and binding ourselves to the outcomes even when we dislike them, is what makes us civil. "Peaceful" doesn't mean quiet or amicable or even fair. Jefferson and Adams and their partisans could sling a prodigious amount of mud. But when there was an election, they accepted the results. When a court rendered a decision, everyone abided by that decision. The Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans might have been enraged with each other on a regular basis, but they kept it in the courts and the voting booth and the Capitol building. The alternative, as one prominent member from each party demonstrated, was to take it outside the system like Hamilton and Burr. The rest of Jefferson's and Adams's supporters kept it vicious but not violent, and that's a pretty good result. If everybody gets their feelings hurt and nobody gets anything except their feelings hurt, I'd say the country is doing very, very well.

    When someone declares that they will not be bound by the civil process, when they declare it illegitimate or announce that they will ignore outcomes that displease them, they are essentially refusing the civil peace. What they're saying is that their participation in our democracy, our justice system, and our national life is conditional on getting what they want. That's "We will honor all the laws and respect the courts, unless the courts try to integrate Ole Miss, in which case we will form a violent mob," or "We will honor the elections unless Aung San Suu Kyi does not win," or “We have a constitutional remedy here, and the framers said, if that don’t work — revolution." These are refusals to accept the social contract, refusals to renounce force. They are expressions of lawlessness ad threats of civil violence. It doesn't matter what tone of voice they're said in.

    If we're calling each other ugly names but still talking, that's a good thing. As long as we agree to resolve our differences peacefully, we can call each other scoundrels and shout until we turn red (or blue). Without that agreement, we're not in a civil relationship. We're just dealing with rival gangs.

    I've been worried by a lot of political rhetoric for the last few years, and it's not the name-calling that bothers me. It's the repeated claims that the other side is illegitimate or tyrannical or otherwise outside the civil process, the kind of language that suggests that the speakers and their listeners shouldn't feel bound by the process. Claiming that the President was not lawfully elected and has no authority is not civil; it is an implied threat of political violence. Calling the federal government's most banal and everyday functions "tyrannical" is not civil; if it is not a rhetorical preparation for bloodshed, it is at least an attempt to keep bloodshed open as an option. No one who says such a thing should be trusted. Raving about "Second Amendment remedies" if an election does not go one's own way is a disqualification from public life. So is showing up with a mob when you've lost an election. And peddling obviously false conspiracy stories, claiming that grandmothers will be euthanized by the health care bill or that the President of the United States is trying to destroy the economy in order to impose a socialist system, is an obvious attempt to undermine and delegitimize the very systems that preserve civil peace. This is incivility, a threat to our domestic peace.

    That was where I was going to leave things, when the holiday forced me to think about Martin Luther King, Jr., and his approach to our public life. Because Dr. King was profoundly dedicated to peace and civility, but also refused a system that he viewed as manifestly unjust. He did not always abide by the laws or the courts. He did not always obey lawful orders by police officers, and he counseled others to the same eminently civil disobedience. Dr. King did not work within the system, the way someone like Thurgood Marshall did; that does nothing to diminish Marshall's staggering achievements, but makes Dr. King's even more surprising. I have to admit that King, whom I admire, refused to accept the laws and the framework for resolving disputes that I otherwise view as essential to keeping the peace, and yet he made the world a less violent place.

    The obvious difference is that King and his followers were willing to suffer, rather than to cause suffering, in order to achieve their goals. They could (and did) step outside the rules meant to prevent civil violence because when they stepped out side those rules they brought no violence and no threat with them. They could break the laws in service of a higher good because they were in a peculiar way the perfect citizens: harming no one and wishing no one harm. They didn't need the rules to preserve the peace because civil peace itself was their rule.

    They were faced, all too often, with antagonists who had abandoned the framework of civil society in order to intimidate and threaten, and sometimes even to murder. That made the moral choice facing the nation very clear. And often too, King and the SPLC faced legal authorities who were so violent and coercive that they exposed the coercion and threats of violence hidden under the guise of the law. King's vision was successful in part because the radical change he advocated was in fact safer, more peaceful, and less physically threatening than the public order that the authorities decreed necessary.

    Talking about revolution is cheap, and easily lapses into an expression of thuggery. Those who genuinely feel that our political system has become tyrannical could learn from Dr. King, who managed a truly revolutionary response to oppression, forcing the violent to lay down their own arms.

    And perhaps the secret is that Dr. King never wrote his enemies off, never dehumanized them. Even when facing the worst of mobs, he was acutely aware that the people in that mob were human beings, with moral selves, deserving of love. In the clip below he talks about how non-violent resistance reaches out to the oppressor's conscience, even if sometimes people wrestling with their troubled conscience simply double down on their wicked behavior. But King talks about this as effective, even when its short-term results seemed counter-productive. It wasn't just about "winning" for King, but about reaching another human soul, even if he only nudged that soul on a journey it was still far, far from completing. Nothing can be less violent than that: to confront one's enemies without fear while attempting to hasten their redemption.

    Martin Luther King taught us to confront our opponents' consciences, rather than our opponents, and that lesson is one we need tonight, more than we have in many years. I am grateful to Dr. King tonight.

    Comments

    Very well done. Your post is inspiring and thought-provoking. And I enjoyed the clip of Dr. King talking about resistance and how he feels it is best to resist. I thought it was interesting what he said about people feeling shame. I have recently observed and had the thought that a lot of people support or do things that deep down they know are wrong but instead of addressing their wrong-doing they attempt to make it out that those who disagree with them are the ones doing something wrong. Seems to me that this makes a situation unnecessarily complicated and prolongs any conflict. If only people could own up to their transgressions easier then maybe we would spend less time arguing with one another.

    I especially liked the following passages in your post:

    And perhaps the secret is that Dr. King never wrote his enemies off, never dehumanized them. Even when facing the worst of mobs, he was acutely aware that the people in that mob were human beings, with moral selves, deserving of love.

    and

    The obvious difference is that King and his followers were willing to suffer, rather than to cause suffering, in order to achieve their goals. They could (and did) step outside the rules meant to prevent civil violence because when they stepped out side those rules they brought no violence and no threat with them. They could break the laws in service of a higher good because they were in a peculiar way the perfect citizens: harming no one and wishing no one harm. They didn't need the rules to preserve the peace because civil peace itself was their rule.

    I wish everyone a meaningful and peaceful Martin Luther King day. His legacy certainly lives on in all of us. And it is up to us to keep that legacy alive forever.


    There is a time when idealism becomes self-defeating.  What laissez-faire capitalism has done to the entire globe is unacceptable.  Fire hoses and German Shepherds are unacceptable to me!


    Wow, great clip, great blog, I thoroughly enjoyed it, I only take issue with one thing you wrote, once people start to call me names, I totally don't hear what they are saying. Innocent However, while I was reading your blog, I couldn't help but think that Sarah Palin is actually the Anti-MLK.

    Thanks for the great read.


    When I saw the title of your post the two points that came immediately to mind were ones you made--the unwillingness to inflict violence on others and the unwillingness to dehumanize another human being--the stubborn, insistent belief that all of us are capable of changing for the better no matter how impossible it might seem and that even where that is not destined to happen, we are obliged to love our fellow humans even if we also intensely dislike them or specific things they are doing. 

    Three other characteristics of Dr. King's approach to social change seem worth noting to me.

    First, in challenging the existing order, he appealed not to some imagined utopia but rather to the beliefs stated in the country's founding documents, beliefs from documents whose validity and worth were nominally embraced by his persecutors.  His were appeals deeply grounded in, not a rebuke to, the history of his country.  He was calling for us to make real the promissory note reflected in some of those documents (he was selective in which ones he cited--wisely so!  it seems like a simple point but the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution, both treated as Holy Grail by some of our fellow citizens and assumed to reflect a common belief system, actually point to contradictory conclusions on some of the most important and fundamental issues in our history.)  A very effective advocacy strategy.  Today we see many on the far right appeal to the commitments reflected in our founding documents, often in ways that reflect partial or misunderstandings of those documents.  A great speech by a public figure yet to be made will call out the falsehoods, identifying specific ones followed by a repeated rhythmic refrain of "But that isn't what it said..."  

    Second, he was peaceful and civil, but he was militant.  Those are not a contradiction in terms.  He was forceful, insistent.  He confronted power directly, in just about the most open and assertive way imaginable.  He didn't believe that it was possible to bring about fundamental change without doing that.  He showed far greater physical and moral courage than some of his critics who engaged in vandalism or other mayhem when they thought themselves least likely to get caught.  Whereas he performed his acts of civil disobedience in broad daylight for all to see--and explained and stood by the morality of those acts, sometimes from his jail cell.

    Third, his rhetoric was powerful, inspirational, and effective without insulting or denigrating others.  He was never to my knowledge publicly cynical or sarcastic about his adversaries.  Yet no one could say he pulled his punches.  To the contrary.  One of the most powerful orators in our history showed deep restraint.  Sometimes when it comes to appeals to move people, what seems like less turns out really to be more. 

    Thanks for your post.  I saw a whole lot of references to Dr. King and his legacy yesterday and was pleased because sometimes with these holidays it doesn't always seem to be clear what or why we are celebrating or commemorating.  I saw a good deal of effort put into that yesterday--during the Celtics-Magic basketball game, for example, the network even showed a clip of Celtics' coach Doc Rivers referencing King and Rivers' views about his legacy in his remarks to his team.  I attribute this largely to the proximity of this year's holiday to the Tucson tragedy. 


    Thanks for the thoughtful post, doctor. It spurred me to read up a bit on MLK's philosophy and life. By the end of it, he'd evolved from a simple civil-rights activist to a full-fledged revolutionary who saw war, poverty, racism and (yes) capitalism as all links in a web of oppression.

    He stuck to his non-violent strategy, but his vision of the societal changes needed was increasingly sweeping. In a way, he became what the FBI had long cast him as: the most dangerous Negro in America. And I mean that in the best possible sense.


    The Manchester Union-Leader, in New Hampshire, was denouncing MLK as a Communist well into the 1980s.

    It's striking that we've limited our public memory of king to the period from roughly 1955-1964, from the bus boycott in Montgomery to the Civil Rights Act. People prefer to forget that Dr. King did not see the Civil Rights Act as the end of his struggle, and that he continued to champion social justice on many other fronts. But of course, that deliberate amnesia allows people to claim MLK for causes that he actively fought against.


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