Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? by MLK Jr.
Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? by MLK Jr.
Read for: MLK’s last published book; the philosopher-strategist behind the gauzy heroism of MLK the school subject; a 60-year-old prophecy that explains a lot about today’s social and political problems; recomposure to replace the feeling of constant shock. This essay is mostly direct quotes and paragraphs since it’s hard to improve on the clarity of his diagnosis and long-term vision.
The opening of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s final book, written almost 60 years ago in 1967, is startlingly relevant. It opens with the triumphant White House signing of the 1965 Voting Rights Act into law, then smacks you with the backlash that followed, from subtle distaste to open violence.
“Negro demands that yesterday evoked admiration and support, today — to many — have become tiresome, unwarranted and a disturbance to the enjoyment of life.”
“Negro leaders who had been present in Selma and at the Capital ceremonies no longer held office in their organizations. They had been discarded to symbolize a radical change of tactics.”
“In several Southern states men long regarded as political clowns had become governors or only narrowly missed election, their magic achieved with a ‘witches’ brew of bigotry, prejudice, half-truths and whole lies.”
“White and Negro civil rights workers had been murdered in several Southern communities. The swift and easy acquittals that followed for the accused had shocked much of the nation but sent a wave of unabashed triumph through Southern segregationist circles. Many of us wept at the funeral services for the dead and for democracy.”
Selma marchers and those present at signing of Voting Rights Act were marching in Chicago suburbs “amid a rain of rocks and bottles, among burning automobiles, to the thunder of jeering thousands, many of them waving Nazi flags.”
“It is precisely this collision of immoral power with powerless morality which constitutes the major crisis of our times.”
Reading these familiar events gave me an odd sense of — not comfort, exactly, but — recognition, recomposure, recombobulation.
This pattern has happened before.
This pattern was interrupted before.
Despite his insistence on hope, MLK projected forward what would happen if segregationist power was allowed to run free. His decades-old prognosis for us is hauntingly accurate and dauntingly dark.
“…unregenerate segregationists who have declared that democracy is not worth having if it involves equality. The segregationist goal is the total reversal of all reforms, with reestablishment of naked oppression and if need be a native form of fascism.”
“This long and callous sojourn in the far country of racism has brought a moral and spiritual famine to the nation. But it is not too late to return home. If America would come to herself and return to her true home, ‘one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all,’ she would give the democratic creed a new authentic ring, enkindle the imagination of mankind and fire the souls of men. If she fails, she will be victimized with the ultimate social psychosis that can lead only to national suicide.”
I cringed in recognition of myself in this quote.
“In this generation the children of darkness are still shrewder than the children of light. They are always zealous and conscientious in using time for their evil purposes. If they want to preserve segregation and tyranny, they do not wait on time; they make time their fellow conspirator. If they want to defeat a fair housing bill, they don’t say to the public, ‘Be patient, wait on time, and our cause will win.’ Rather, they use time to spend big money, to disseminate half-truths, to confuse the popular mind. But the forces of light cautiously wait, patiently pray and timidly act. So we end up with a double destruction: the destructive violence of the bad people and the destructive silence of the good people.”
He acknowledges that against odds like these, disappointment is part of the package. Turning this disappointment into healthy action is a normal and necessary part of social change.
“The Negro’s disappointment is real and a part of the daily menu of our lives. One of the most agonizing problems of human experience is how to deal with disappointment. In our individual lives we all too often distill our frustrations into an essence of bitterness, or drown ourselves in the deep waters of self-pity, or adopt a fatalistic philosophy that whatever happens must happen and all events are determined by necessity. These reactions poison the soul and scar the personality, always harming the person who harbors them more than anyone else. The only healthy answer lies in one’s honest recognition of disappointment even as he still clings to hope, one’s acceptance of finite disappointment even while clinging to infinite hope.”
Because there’s no other real option.
“We will be greatly misled if we feel that the problem will work itself out. Structures of evil do not crumble by passive waiting. If history teaches anything, it is that evil is recalcitrant and determined, and never voluntarily relinquishes its hold short of an almost fanatical resistance. Evil must be attacked by a counteracting persistence, by the day-to-day assault of the battering rams of justice. We must get rid of the false notion that there is some miraculous quality in the flow of time that inevitably heals all evils. There is only one thing certain about time, and that is that it waits for no one. If it is not used constructively, it passes you by.”
The game is inherently asymmetrical and unfair.
“The only answer to the delay, double-dealing, tokenism and racism that we still confront is through mass nonviolent action and the ballot. At times these may seem too slow and inadequate, but they are the only real tools we have.”
And one of these slow tools of his time, the ballot, is being undermined today. Grabbing attention through publicly visible action still works, in both directions.
“A hundred times I have been asked why we have allowed little children to march in demonstrations, to freeze and suffer in jails, to be exposed to bullets and dynamite. The questions imply that we have revealed a want of family feeling or a recklessness toward family security. The answer is simple. Our children and our families are maimed a little every day of our lives.”
“By taking to the streets and there giving practical lessons in democracy and its defaults, Negroes have decisively influenced white thought…More white people learned more about the shame of America, and finally faced some aspects of it, during the years of nonviolent protest than during the century before.
“Touring Watts a few days after that nightmarish riot in 1965, Bayard Rustin, Andrew Young and I confronted a group of youngsters who said to us joyously, ‘We won.’ We asked them: ‘How can you say you won when thirty-four Negroes are dead, your community is destroyed, and whites are using the riot as an excuse for inaction?’ Their answer: ‘We won because we made them pay attention to us.’” A proto-version of the attention economy.
He was so prophetic that every societal debate that seems new or novel seems to have been addressed in this book.
Internal movement politics: Going for mass appeal vs. a pointed slogan that might scare off moderates, progressive organizations fighting about which ones have “sold out,” antisemitism in the movement, eye for an eye vs. nonviolence and love.
Amazonian levels of consumption: “We have come to the point where we must make the nonproducer a consumer or we will find ourselves drowning in a sea of consumer goods. We have so energetically mastered production that we must now give attention to distribution.”
Gross inequality: “The contemporary tendency in our society is to base our distribution on scarcity, which has vanished, and to compress our abundance into the overfed mouths of the middle and upper classes until they gag with superfluity. If democracy is to have breadth of meaning, it is necessary to adjust this inequity. It is not only moral, but it is also intelligent. We are wasting and degrading human life by clinging to archaic thinking.”
Material abundance and affluenza: “We must work passionately and indefatigably to bridge the gulf between our scientific progress and our moral progress. One of the great problems of mankind is that we suffer from a poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance. The richer we have become materially, the poorer we have become morally and spiritually.”
Tech supremacy: “When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”
And why tech advancements never end up solving problems for good (feels especially relevant in this AI hype cycle): “Western civilization is particularly vulnerable at this moment, for our material abundance has brought us neither peace of mind nor serenity of spirit. An Asian writer has portrayed our dilemma in candid terms: You call your thousand material devices ‘labor saving machinery,’ yet you are forever ‘busy.’ With the multiplying of your machinery you grow increasingly fatigued, anxious, nervous, dissatisfied. Whatever you have, you want more; and wherever you are you want to go somewhere else…your devices are neither time-saving nor soul-saving machinery.”
By the time I got to this quote, I had to laugh at how this same “innovative” idea had gotten so much excitement a couple of presidential elections ago: “I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective — the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income. Earlier in this century this proposal would have been greeted with ridicule and denunciation as destructive of initiative and responsibility.”
He was unapologetic about strategically building power to take on big problems.
“One of the greatest problems of history is that the concepts of love and power are usually contrasted as polar opposites. Love is identified with a resignation of power and power with a denial of love….What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.”
“Power, properly understood, is the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political or economic changes. In this sense power is not only desirable but necessary in order to implement the demands of love and justice.”
In a book full of shockingly accurate truths from the past, this one rings like a deep, resonant bell:
“Edmund Burke said on one occasion: “When evil men combine, good men must unite.” This is the pressing challenge confronting the white liberal. When evil men plot, good men must plan. When evil men burn and bomb, good men must build and bind. When evil men conspire to preserve an unjust status quo, good men must unite to bring about the birth of a society undergirded by justice. Nothing can be more detrimental to the health of America at this time for liberals to sink into a state of apathy and indifference.”
The full text can be found here, but it’s easier to read as a book.
Read with:
📎 Brief summary of the book and its context: https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/where-do-we-go-here-chaos-or-community
🗺️ The social change ecosystem map, a framework for articulating the strengths you can bring to social change, which are often different than the stereotypical ideal we may see in media: https://deepaiyer.substack.com/p/all-of-us. (Another framework with the same idea).
📰 Interview with Diane Nash, a civil rights activist and founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
📕 John Lewis: A Life by David Greenberg. I’m only partway through, but the stunning violence of the civil rights movement continues to surprise. At one lunch counter sit-in, the restaurant owner refused to serve them, left the restaurant, locked the doors, and flipped on a switch, which turned out to be a fumigator that released poison into the air until John Lewis and his friend almost asphyxiated. This was one of the tamer examples of how viciously people resisted integration.
📚 Lessons from a Dark Time and Other Essays by Adam Hochschild and The Green Island by Shawna Yang. Other reminders that it could be worse — both for perspective and as a warning.