The Apocalypse Trajectory

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

—Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

As I ease along toward my mid-fifties, having borne witness to a great many atrocities committed in my name, and as I currently witness a transition from the blundering, brutal fascism of President Trump to the smugly violent neoliberalism and imperialism of President Biden, I am tempted to dismiss King’s statement as hopelessly naïve. Not only is that quote a curt paraphrase of a more nuanced idea, it has likely also been used for cynical or misguided rhetorical purposes more times than I am willing to count. Even liberal commentator Chris Hayes has his doubts:

But this story, and the analogy of the long imperceptibly trending line of progress, is wrong. It does not allow for what is perhaps the most significant feature of the story of racial justice in America: backlash and backwards movement. And 50 years after King’s death, that’s the most brutal reality we must confront.

All that said, I’m not one to so decisively second-guess Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (who I’ll henceforth call MLK). The man was brilliant and courageous, and I’m not wielding those adjectives lightly. More than that, there was a great deal of growth and nuance to his worldview, as evidenced by his own words and deeds. He was quite capable of both expressing boundless optimism and offering sober analysis of morbid realities.

So I’m inclined to believe that when MLK included the paraphrase in a prepared statement regarding end of the Montgomery bus boycott in 1956, he had more on his mind than boundless optimism. While within the context it appears that the paraphrase is intended as a divinely sanctioned call to righteous action, he closes that speech by reminding his audience that the failure to successfully challenge the status quo offers an outcome that is not at all hopeful:

With this dedication we will be able to emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man to the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice.

I think that closing tells us that King knew what he was up against. He certainly knew twelve years later, when at the end of his final recorded speech he all but predicted his own assassination. While some major reforms were enacted in response to the Civil Rights Movement and to the waves of violence that swept the nation both before and after MLK’s assassination, I find it difficult to accept that we – in the sense of the national and global ‘we’ – are now or have ever since been trending toward a “glittering daybreak of justice.”

With the ship of state of the world’s most powerful empire soon to fall under the nominal control of a chief architect of the campaign to roll back the tentative social progress of the Civil Rights Era, I won’t bother hypothesizing about what MLK would say about the world today. It’s unnecessary, anyway: we don’t actually need him to tell us about accelerating climate catastrophe, fascism being stoked in response to the intensifying crises of global capitalism, and a tenuous multi-polar détente being threatened by U.S.A.’s unwavering belligerence.

Perhaps it’s fitting now to consider the words which MLK paraphrased. In 1853, abolitionist minister Theodore Parker published a collection of sermons. Included in one of those sermons was this passage regarding the institution of chattel slavery in the U.S.A.:

Look at the facts of the world. You see a continual and progressive triumph of the right. I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.

Parker describes justice in terms that could be considered metaphysical, but keep in mind that he was writing as his country was embroiled in increasingly violent struggles over its foundational wealth-building institution. It was only a few years later that fellow abolitionist John Brown led a raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry that he hoped would spark a national uprising against slavery, and a few years after that when the country engaged in a civil war over the same. So the metaphysical, in this conception, both affects and is affected by collective human endeavor.

So it may be that both Parker and MLK, despite the lofty optimism of their surrounding speeches, considered their view of the ‘arc of the moral universe’ to be as cautionary as it was inspirational. It is cause and effect: the universe may treat us as we act. If the universe does indeed prefer that our collective behavior be harmonious and just – with each other as well as with the rest of the natural world – then we may yet survive and thrive if we pursue justice. If we fail, however, then our “bleak and desolate midnight” may prove to be a moral coma from which we will never wake.