Keywords of the Moral Life: The Right Side of History
The Moral Universe's Tragedy, History's Hubris, and the Challenge of Advent
What does it mean that history has a direction to it, morally speaking? In this economy?
A Brief History of a Weird Phrase
No phrase in our public consciousness quite exhibits the Mandela Effect more than this one, I think. The one we know best, from the lips of Martin Luther King, Jr., is the following one:
We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.
Note, fair readers, that King says not “history”, but the “moral universe”. King used this phrase many times in his life, but this one, given in a sermon at the National Cathedral, and published as “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution”, took on a life of its own, as King spoke it in 1968, very soon before his own assassination. For King, neither attack dogs nor Bull Connor nor intransigent politicians could prevent justice for African Americans from coming. King was paraphrasing earlier sentiments by abolitionist and Universalist preacher Theodore Parker, in an 1853 sermon:
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. Things refuse to be mismanaged long. Jefferson trembled when he thought of slavery and remembered that God is just. Ere long all America will tremble.
King picks up a lot of these threads in his own thought: the power of conscience, the moral nature of the universe moving toward its telos. For those committed to amending large scale injustices like slavery or the abrogation of civil equality, the notion that it’s not just my intuition, but my intuitions as reflecting the nature of reality is really key here. My words and actions will make tiny changes to earth,1 but ultimately, there’s a larger force in play here.
But the big alteration to this notion comes in the 2000s, when President Obama began deploying a slight variation on this quote:
Full disclosure: I agree with Obama’s posture on the question of refugees. Refugee law is murky and full of contradictions, but at its heart, it relies heavily on this notion that our moral sentiments are out in front of where the laws actually are, and that over time, we hope that the structure of the world will reflect our moral aspirations.
The slight change from “the moral universe” to “history” matters, I think, particularly for how Christians think about moral change and time. Both of these presents interesting elements of how a Christian moral vision works, but pose questions for what it means to be a time-bound creature living with God, particularly as we approach Advent, the season of waiting for God to act.
So, let’s dig in.
The Moral Universe’s Movement: Toward Justice and Otherwise
Before getting to the trickier question of whether “history” goes somewhere, moral or otherwise, let’s start with the original quote: that the “moral universe” has a direction which terminates in justice.
The Christian, I think, is committed to something like this proposition: to believe that God has created a world is to believe that God has created a world with an order and a telos, and that something of this telos and order is available to creatures by virtue of being God’s creatures. That being said, sin complicates all of this: not only is our knowledge of the full scope of this order compromised, but our wisdom of how to implement it remains flawed. We love good things in too small a measure, and behave too timidly about those good things; we love good things in the wrong way, and with too much vigor.
And so, while Christians should be committed to something like Parker and King’s sentiment—that creation has a moral dimension to it, as fitting a creation of God—I want to flag something here: the distance between the moral universe and policy. As an abolitionist, Parker was unreservedly committed to policy change, but the moral universe operates via the conscience, mobilized into policy. King held much the same approach, but what both acknowledge (King moreso than Parker) is the complicated way in which that happens.
To commit ourselves to a theological truth does not bypass questions of prudence and implementation: how we commit ourselves to a moral good matters as much as what moral goods we commit ourselves to: you can do a good thing foolishly. Likewise, who commits to a moral good matters: a morally creative minority group within society does not have the backing of the whole, and so, social agonism becomes part of what a moral movement has to make sense of. Abolition and civil rights were morally right, their causes illuminated by the dead.
We should see that, while it is right and good to commit ourselves to the Good and the Right in good and right ways, there’s any number of factors which will thwart whether the Good and Right becomes manifest within society, some because of sin and some because of unintended consequences. Abolition passes into toothless law with Reconstruction, fostering resentment and political resistance; the Southern Strategy comes about as a result of the Civil Rights Movement’s success, undercutting much of the Voting Rights Act decades later.
Does that mean that Parker and King were wrong? Not hardly—the Christian is committed not to despair, but to hope, and hope not just in an a-cosmic sense. God desires the good of all of what God has created, and that includes more than the individual well-beings of creatures. Creation is given as a differentiated whole, with human cultures meant to live in harmony and mutual exchange. And apart from sin’s complications, the pursuit of good is something done corporately, and not without small disagreements and conflicts over what that means. Go to a church business meeting where people haven’t had lunch yet: your political ambitions will deflate quickly.
From the Moral Universe to Sides of History: The Impersonalization of Justice
When President Obama began using the “right side of history” phrase, a further change happened: the moral universe—which King and Parker took to mean something which moves in the soul toward a divinely intended end—became indifferent. The moral universe—something available to the conscience rightly moved—was replaced by the impersonality of the world.
History, as a category, is not the same as time—history requires interpretation and someone to tell it. The old adage that “history is written by the winners” isn’t wrong here: there are all sorts of ways of connecting the dots of historical events which are contested, and draw all kinds of meaning out of shared events. That we’re currently living through a global ecological crisis is a great example: everyone realizes the weather is changing, and there’s little shared agreement about who started it or what to do about it now.
And so, “the right side of history” assumes that, in the end, one particular telling will take the field, and that it will be retrospectively recognized universally as correct. It’s a fairly homogenous view of social change, one which King and Parker knew was far more contested and agonistic. I don’t mean this to say that Obama thought that social change happened automatically: far from it. Putting ideals into motion required, for Obama, process, rhetoric, and persuasion. But there’s a universal optimism that in the end, there will be no other story to tell than that of the Right.
But in his shift from “the moral universe”—as a set of moral principles—to “history”, there is a second important shift: that what matters here is not intuitions, but policy. The earlier notion of a moral universe left room for how an ideal might be implemented. Abolitionists, for example, disagreed with one another about how to accomplish it, or who should even be included in abolition; the Civil Rights Movement, as a coalition, contained similar factions and divisions about tactics and ends.
But “history” is something which everyone shares, like it or not. It does not care about your nuancing of reasons or pace: a shared history which is communicable across cultures means that there is either a good policy or not, and thus, a commitment to the Good or not. In the clip above, the “right side of history” is one of policy, not ideals, of judgments and not intention: it’s a vision of moral progress fit for an age of management and social engineering. And in that, we are far beyond King and Parker, and into much more dubious ground.
It is one thing that say that God desires justice for creation, and another thing entirely to say that this policy is the manifestation of that justice. And quite another step again to say that this policy, derived in a particular space, is one which can or should be implemented universally—even if the common commitment toward love of refugees is shared! History becomes an impartial judge, not on the basis of our intent, but on the actions rendered.
Christian Hope and History’s Redemption
Advent involves a great deal of waiting and yearning for justice but that waiting is for a shape which we cannot fully anticipate. It is, in proper sense, apocalyptic: the God who will break through, and in that breaking through, create a shape of justice which cannot be fully anticipated. Advent is the coming of God into creation in a shape which we recognized well only in retrospect—only after we had rejected that shape—unless by God’s grace, we are part of the welcoming party who has the sight to see what is among us all the time.
If Christ is the one in whom all time hangs together, then the bearing upon this question of historical action should be evident: that which we think we are doing as an anticipation of God’s justice may be true, and it may just be well-intended opposition to the form of that justice which God brings. Christians bear witness to the moral universe in their humble enactments of the way of Jesus, and in doing so, we bear witness to what we have been given to bear witness to, following God in time, as those called in specificity to the way of Jesus.
There is a moral universe—I think Christians are compelled to confess that much—and I think there are indicators of its direction which we see in Christ’s own person. And, I think that social fullness of that remains to be seen. What shape will God’s redemption of all things take? The easy answer is that it will take up all of that which is already implanted in us and around us—the moral universe made known to us in Christ—and transfigure it in dazzling and amazing ways. The shape of Christ’s fullness will break open our hope, either to shatter it or to reveal what is true within it.
Who could have seen Nazareth coming?
Reading: last week was the American Academy of Religion, and Thanksgiving, which meant a ton of travel time, and thus, a lot of reading. Wendell Berry’s The Hidden Wound was a good prep to starting his The Need to Be Whole over Christmas break. Jonathan Auxier’s books are family favorites, so I was a good dad and read Peter Nimble and His Fantastic Eyes to join in on the family fun. Rebecca Stead’s When You Reach Me was a Newberry winner my wife picked out for me, and was really good. Michelle Miller’s Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology was a sober and moderating read if you’re prone to digital alarmism like I tend to be: lots of things there for teachers to consider, and not all entirely negative.
Christmas Recommendation: If you’ve enjoyed following along in 2022, why not give someone a subscription?
For the love, watch this video and be introduced to the band that changed me more than any other in the last twenty years.