For the foreseeable future, I’ll be publishing once a week, on Thursdays, with the occasional extra post. The semester is bearing down.
In the previous newsletter, we talked about the distinction between “patience” as a span of time between deliberation and action, and “patience” as a virtue. This yielded, I argued, a version of patience which was simply a deferral of action and which Martin Luther King, Jr. found to be wanting. A friend pushed back on part of the description, asking if Niebuhr is wrong on the bigger, more complex questions of action1:
This is right—King is right—but I'm not sure that it blunts Niebuhr's call for a different kind of patience, at least most of the time. I mean, have you or I done anything meaningful, or anything at all, in response to the Haitian migrants on the border? Do we even know what should be done, or how that could be done?
King's call, it seems to me, is first of all to grave and evident and local injustice; second, a call for collective action in general; and third, a call to activists and pastors in particular. Which means, it seems to me, that almost all of the time almost everyone will have nothing at all to do in response to suffering and injustice except pray…
This is an excellent question, in that the vast majority of the world’s moral questions are not mine to answer: I take it to be one of the compulsions of social media that I am not just encouraged, but nearly compelled to have an informed opinion about every moral crisis, when the wiser course of action is not to shout, but to pray.
Last time, Niebuhr’s essay, “The Grace of Doing Nothing”, directed us toward the ultimate work of prayer for the Christian. And while it’s certainly correct that King’s approach is best suited to local instances of injustice, the choice between Niebuhr’s eschatological approach which defers action other than prayer, and patient, virtuous, action leaves a gaping hole to many of the wicked problems2 vexing the world: local actions can be attended to, but what of large scale ones? It’s one thing, for example, to attend to an unjust local law, but can King’s approach of deliberate, patient action be applied to something as complex as immigration?
To put it directly: when the scope is large enough or the problem “wicked” enough (see the footnote), is prayer the course of action? There are a great many things to concern ourselves with in prayer, and only so many things that I can be reasonably able to directly act upon.
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To begin, King’s approach—as slow analysis matched with virtuous preparation and deliberate action—is not one which is necessarily limited by scale, I think. King’s work involved not only direct action, but behind the scenes policy work at the national level. King, in addressing the triple-headed monster of militarism, economic inequity, and racism, acknowledges that the problem of racism is a “wicked” one (in multiple senses), and that addressing it requires a complex approach of both local actions and national engagements. Similarly, I think that these options are available to others than persons like King: the opportunities to take “the King approach” of analysis, investigation, spiritual preparation and agitation are manifold and possible.
But answering the question above must push us past whether a question can be answered and address two other issues: our general ignorance about what should be done about a great number of things which we should rightly pray for, and the scope of our action. I want to bracket out the first for the time being: there are a number of things about which I am ignorant, but remain of great moral importance. But in the second part, (what I am to do with issues of great scale and complexity) I think that is because of prayer that questions about which I have some knowledge but which are immensely complex fall within things I need to and can act on.
In the Lord’s Prayer, we petition God for the kingdom to come and to set the world to right, and this praying involves us asking for daily bread as well as the revocation of debts both personal and social. The issues of the Prayer, of invoking God’s presence in the world, involve questions of interpersonal and the social, but here, we cannot think of the one as straightforward and the other as wicked. Our interpersonal problems involve dimensions both known and unknown, dynamics local and transhistorical. Prayer, then, especially at the local level, involves a range of dynamics, dynamics which make even interpersonal questions both local and wicked: our daily bread is that which local people eat, but that bread comes to us through complex processes and supply chains, and our reconciliation with one another is both something you and I enact together against a deep and broad context of time commitments and the like.
And yet, we are called to engage the issues locally, while acknowledging its wicked form. Prayer is a form of action, but one which provides the orientation of subsequent actions, the context of our actions in the world, and the content of our desires for the world. And so, if prayer establishes the source, orientation, content, and end of our concerns, then the complexities which we pray for and ask God to act within indicate the ways in which our actions beyond prayer are to take.
To return to King’s letter, one of the complaints raised by the white ministers of Birmingham was that King was an outside agitator, to which King responded famously, “An injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” King goes on to say that justice, pertaining to what people are owed, cannot be limited to local skirmishes or engagements, but necessarily involves us thinking big even while acting local and deliberate: the two are part of the same cloth, both conceptually, and (I think) metaphysically and theologically. When King says elsewhere that “the arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice”, part of what he means here is that all moral actions in their locality are part of a more comprehensive movement, begun and steeled in prayer, and borne out in the actions which prayer calls forth. But beyond that, our particular actions are entrusted to God, the one to whom our prayers are directed, as offerings, offerings to be used and if need be, purified.
The problems of the border are not ones which I address directly at one level, unless I drive the border and participate directly. But because the question of Hatian migration—or more broadly, immigration—are questions which are “wicked”, direct aid at the border is not the only entry in. Insofar as the the question of the Hatian migrants is one which Christians can participate in through their monetary support, their local actions, and the long work of immigration reform, the work of prayer is always with us.
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These complex processes remain wicked, in that there is no “managing” them: complex questions like climate change or immigration are always acted on locally, even while changing shape beyond local intentions. This is, I take it, part of Niebuhr’s concern: we act penitently, as faithfully as we know. It is here, I think, that H. Richard Niebuhr provides a helpful corrective to King: the “arc of the universe” is not an achievable democratic project, but that which is always somewhere out in front of us, elusive to us, an object of hope. It is, to put it in other words, that which we pray to receive.
But, in the terms Niebuhr laid out, it is not a choice between prayer on the basis of the problem’s scope, or action on the basis of the problem’s simplicity: we pray for things, both local and cosmic, which are all wicked problems to us. But insofar as we pray for them, we are called to pray for wisdom in our acting. And if their answers can be received, then they must be that which we can be done, through God’s provision and wisdom.
I love getting pushback on these. I take it as a deep sign of friendship when it happens: it’s becoming increasingly rare that we venture disagreements, either intellectual or moral, for fear that it means a breach in the friendship. Our friendships are not that fragile, and we would do better to engage in disagreement for the sake of the truth more often.
“Wicked problems” refers to complex problems with multiple intersecting causes, such as climate change, immigration, and international conflicts. This term appears first in the 1973 work of Rittel and Weber: https://www.stonybrook.edu/commcms/wicked-problem/about/What-is-a-wicked-problem