The Luxury of Political Moderation
I recently had an editorial published in The New York Times. You can find the original here or read the full-text that follows.
The Luxury of Political Moderation: A lack of moral imagination can make deeply ethical actions appear like crimes
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail” was written as a response to a group of “white moderate” clergy members who claimed to be supportive of the civil rights movement — but who had also called Dr. King’s activism both “unwise and untimely.” For these moderates, civil rights activists were not courageous adversaries of a horribly unjust society, but lawless “outside agitators” threatening the tranquillity of the status quo. And so, rather than commending these activists, they condemned them and blamed the outbreak of violence on their resistance to Jim Crow rather than on Jim Crow itself.
In his response to their calls for slow and incremental change, Dr. King made a provocative claim: He argued that these white moderates were a potentially greater threat than the members of the Ku Klux Klan. Whereas the “ill will” of the rabid segregationist was out in the open and could therefore be combated, the “shallow understanding from people of good will” threatened to enervate the civil rights movement into acceptance of an intolerable status quo. For King, moderation in the face of injustice might have been a worse problem than injustice itself.
A half-century later we find ourselves, domestically and globally, in a similar crisis, arguably more divided than ever. Those fighting against inequality, sexism, racism and xenophobia face an entrenched and increasingly emboldened reactionary opposition. In between them lies our current equivalent of Dr. King’s “white moderate.” And these moderates, with their outsized political power and their nostalgia for a lost status quo, similarly represent a greater threat to progress than do the reactionaries.
As in the past, today’s moderate is generally not the victim of contemporary injustices. While many moderates acknowledge the existence of these injustices, their relative comfort allows them the luxury of denying their severity. In the United States, a spate of policies and movements that promise to help alleviate these problems have emerged — Medicare for All, the cancellation of student debt, the elimination of ICE and the Green New Deal, and Black Lives Matter and the #MeToo movement. But as in Dr. King’s time, today’s moderate only pays lip service to the general goals of these policies and movements while also condemning their stridency. For them, this stridency, in its potential upending of their comfortable status quo, seems a greater threat than the injustice it means to address.
As Dr. King understood, the problem he was facing — and that we now face again — is the problem of moral imagination. Moderates might have the “good will” that leads them to acknowledge injustice, but their very moderation is indicative of a “shallow understanding” that is emptied of the pain of those who currently suffer. For these moderates, injustice is a foreign affair, an abstract problem to be solved. Their response then lacks the urgency that a true understanding would bring. Learning how to expand their moral universe — learning how to turn opponents into allies — is just as pressing a problem as ever.
Almost two centuries ago, Søren Kierkegaard addressed this very issue. In his work “Fear and Trembling,” he went to great lengths to praise the biblical Abraham for his apparent willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac. And while Kierkegaard’s praise of Abraham has led to no small number of misinterpretations, given how horrific it appears to be, Kierkegaard was not suggesting that we too should be willing to commit such an obviously terrible act. Instead, as Dr. King’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail” helps reveal, Kierkegaard used this story to demonstrate how, to those with a more limited moral imagination, actions which are deeply ethical can often appear as the greatest of crimes — as if we were willing to sacrifice that which is most dear.
As Kierkegaard understood, we typically make judgments from the point of view of the conventional ethics in which we are raised, but these ethics are always tied to the particular society we inhabit. And while Kierkegaard realized that our particular social ethics might contain a measure of truth, perhaps even a great deal of it, our adherence to them is often inauthentic. That is, we often act ethically because we have been socialized into a particular ethical worldview and not because we have any deeper underlying ethical commitments.
This means that there might be ethical actions that fall outside of our ethical horizon. But as we have each been raised to believe in the supremacy of our ethical reality — we each believe that our values are the true values — the mere suggestion that an ethical reality lies beyond our horizon threatens to undermine our worldview. So while it is easy to say that Abraham is a criminal, because this is a judgment that we can make from within our ethical worldview, it is harder to accept the possibility that he might not be — because that requires that we accept that our worldview might have limits. Consequently, even the smallest of such transgressions threatens the integrity of our world. And they tend to elicit the most ruthless of responses.
Several years after writing “Fear and Trembling,” Kierkegaard would write what is generally considered to be his “mature” ethics, in the aptly titled “Works of Love.” Unlike the different forms of social ethics that depend on our conformity, for Kierkegaard, love is the deepest expression of our authentic self. And when we learn to love, what we love is this same self in others. When we act out of love, we are not motivated by a fidelity to a particular set of social values, but by an authentic bond that unites all individuals on the basis of our shared humanity.
In the earlier “Fear and Trembling,” Kierkegaard realizes that love is necessarily transgressive. Eschewing the conventional ethical motivation of social conformity, the loving individual is instead motivated by a sense of love that they have discovered within themselves. When the demands of love conform to social norms, such an individual might appear to be obeying them; but when their love conflicts with what their society dictates, the veil lifts, and their alternative ethical motivation is revealed. As Friedrich Nietzsche would write a few decades later, “Whatever is done from love always occurs beyond good and evil.” To those whose actions remain governed by an adherence to social norms, the very existence of love poses an existential threat.
To much of 1960s America, white moderates certainly appeared to be acting ethically. But in Dr. King’s view, they were betraying their fellow human beings by choosing obedience to social norms above a higher form of justice, informed by love. If only these moderates could find the love that would authentically bind them to their fellow human beings, it would reveal to them “the deep groans and passionate yearnings of the oppressed race.” And with their moral universe so enlarged, rather than defending the status quo, these now former moderates would recognize the necessity of “lovingly” breaking “unjust laws.”
Kierkegaard, too, faced with the transgressive nature of love, wanted his readers to realize that we have a choice. On the one hand, our fear of transgression might lead us to hold ever tighter onto the status quo, finding the comfort that conformity provides. But on the other hand, we might find the courage to withhold judgment, because reality is not always as it appears. And if we find this courage, we might also find a way to expand our moral imagination so that we see the deep bonds of love that often unite those who fight for social, political and economic justice.
In order for this to happen, we have to leap beyond the narrow confines of our world in the vague hope that something else lies beyond. And while we can call this leap by many names, for Kierkegaard, its truest name was faith.