Critical Hope
In a discussion group I once quoted the great civil rights leader Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to support my sense that society as a whole can improve. The quote was often repeated by President Barack Obama. “We shall overcome,” Dr. King exclaimed, “because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” He said this in a speech titled “Remaining Awake through a Great Revolution” at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, on March 31, 1968. A few days later Dr. King was assassinated.
The Long Arc
G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831), Introduction to the Philosophy of History
A political scientist in the discussion group thought my use of Dr. King’s quote was complete nonsense. What does “arc of the moral universe” even mean? When we soberly face the waste land (T. S. Eliot) of contemporary society, how can any of us believe the moral universe bends toward justice? Moreover, if you did believe this, wouldn’t you become complacent about the suffering and violence inflicted at what Hegel called the slaughter bench of history?
Now I agree, as Mychal Denzel Smith once said, that one could use King’s quotation to give “hollow inspiration” and thereby risk “magical thinking.” After all, if everything will work out fine in the end, why try to make things better now? But that’s not how Dr. King meant it. Instead, he appealed to the arc of the moral universe in a call for ongoing struggles toward enduring social transformation. To envision and advance long-lasting social change—a “Great Revolution,” in King’s words—we need critical social hope.
Critical social hope does not close its eyes to conflict and suffering and their entrenched sources. It tries to meet them head on, and it looks for long-term relief. Critical hope also does not embrace easy optimism about our society’s future. Rather, it knows genuine social renewal will meet roadblocks and resistance. Hope is not optimism, as Terry Eagleton has shown, and critical hope is not naïve about what my books call “societal evil” (see Religion, Truth, and Social Transformation, 233-34, 319-23; Shattering Silos, 26-27, 98-100, 175-77; Social Domains of Truth, 291-96).
This means, however, that redemptive criticisms of contemporary society cannot give in to despair. The flip side of critical social hope is a hopeful critique of society as a whole. And to be hopeful, rather than simply naïve or optimistic, a comprehensive social critique must point to something like a long arc bending toward justice.
Societal Principles
The Gateway Arch in St. Louis, MO. Photo by Chris Hardy on Unsplash
This long arc lies in what “Common Ground,” my previous post, calls “societal principles.” Societal principles such as solidarity and justice are expectations that human beings share about what makes for goodness in social life. They emerge through struggle and conflict during the course of human history, and we give them shape in our cultural practices and social institutions. Societal principles are not abstract ideals floating in intellectual thin air. Nor are they mere values that individuals and communities may or may not prefer. Rather, they are firm expectations built into the very fabric of society, and they call for our response.
I’ve already mentioned solidarity and justice. By solidarity I mean the expectation that no individual or group should be excluded from the recognition human beings owe each other. By justice I mean the expectation that every individual, community, and institution that bears rights and responsibilities should have their legitimate interests honored in relationship to the interests of others. To these we can add other shared expectations, such as the societal principle of resourcefulness or stewardship: the expectation, so crucial for a critique of capitalism, that human and nonhuman potentials should be carefully stewarded for the sake of interconnected flourishing.
The fact that we share these historically hard-won expectations is a reason for critical hope. They are the long arc sustaining Dr. King’s impassioned social vision.
A Life-Giving Society
Appealing to the long arc of societal principles is crucial for a hopeful social critique. But toward what does this long arc incline? It inclines, I would say, toward a society in which all creatures flourish in interconnection with each other. This would be a life-giving society; moving toward it would be a “life-giving disclosure” of contemporary society (Social Domains of Truth, 128-32).
To envision such a society is to look for what the Hebrew prophets promise as an age of messianic fulfillment and what progressive Christians imagine as a new Earth. Here we’re not talking about pie in the sky in the sweet by and by but rather an earthly society where violence and suffering stop. This society is in the future, but it is not only in the future. It is always already unfolding in how we respond to the call to justice, solidarity, and the like. What we do now, and the institutions we foster or transform, can help build a life-giving society.
In 1936, midway through the Great Depression, Randall Thompson, one of America’s finest composers, wrote The Peaceable Kingdom, a sequence of choruses on texts from the prophet Isaiah. It concludes with a glorious promise of what a life-giving society would be like. Using the King James Version of Isaiah 30:29, the double chorus sings:
Ye shall have a song, as in the night when a holy solemnity is kept;
And gladness of heart, as when one goes with a pipe to come to the mountain of the Lord.
Peaceable Kingdom (1834) by Edward Hicks (1780-1849)
I hear “the mountain of the Lord” as the new Earth where violence and suffering stop, where, in the words of Isaiah 11:6-9, the wolf and lamb live together and no one is hurt or destroyed—a scene depicted two centuries ago with unsettling naiveté by the Quaker minister and folk artist Edward Hicks.
Now we need new images of the life-giving society toward which the arcs of justice and solidarity incline. As Dr. King knew, the struggle toward it is long and hard. Yet all along the way, and in the end, we shall have a song. We shall have gladness. We shall overcome. That’s the promise built into critical social hope.
