The Moral Arc of the Universe

Martin Luther King, Jr.

MLK contended that the moral arc of the universe tended toward justice.  But as I've been sitting here thinking, I have to wonder about that.  Hegel, and a lot of other thinkers, considered the moral trajectory of the universe to tend toward freedom.  Indeed, the Founding Fathers expected that the United States would find justice through freedom, but tended to privilege freedom over justice.  Embedded within many of our documents of principle (the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, Washington's Farewell Address, the Monroe Doctrine, FDR's Four Freedom) are not articulations of justice, but rather ideas of freedom.  Freedom from foreign intervention, freedom from entangling alliances, freedom from want and fear, freedom of free speech, the freedom of worship.

Franklin Roosevelt

Justice is part of those freedoms.  Freedom of speech and religious expression is a just life insofar as it permits the rigorous conversation about what a good life entails.  Freedom from want and fear are just inasmuch as they permit people to elevate themselves above starvation and expand their intellectual capacities without fear of reprisal.  We operationalize many of those freedoms by means of non-intervention, and declarations that we will not interfere in the affairs of others.  Necessarily, because we are human and fallible, we don't always (or even often) attain those principles.  But we still hold them up as first principles--things for which we strive.  When principle and reality conflict, the trajectory has been toward harmonizing them.

Justice

In contemporary conversations about the good life, we tend to vacillate between justice and freedom.  Arguments revolving around gay marriage include references to freedom, but the overwhelming tendency is to consider the justness of arbitrarily excluding homosexual couples from the institution of marriage.  The gun control debate is an argument about freedom--namely, what right the government and by extension the people have to restrict the ownership of certain types of private property.  So these aren't academic discussions by any means; they touch us all everyday.  At the heart of those conversations is an idea of what it means to live a good life.

I have the sense that no single good life exists.  Good exists along a continuum between justice and freedom.  One of the implications, however, is that conflicting views of goodness have the potential to rise to confrontation.  Proponents of a particular type of goodness will lose sight of the fact that their perspective is just that: a single perspective.  When that happens, beliefs have the tendency to rise to ideology and ideologues will condemn proponents of other views as wrong, corrupt, ultimately immoral.  As reasoned discourse becomes impossible violence is just around the corner.

Freedom

This isn't a particularly difficult situation to imagine and as communities and cultures increasingly come into intimate contact, conflicting views of what constitutes a good life will uneasily meet.  We know from physical geography that borders are areas of conflict, and in the ideological world the same applies.  The interstice between ideas generates conflict in a way that tends to move whole ideologies with it.  The tail, in many cases, wags the dog.  No easy solution exists, but it certainly involves a commitment to reasoned dialogue and a fastidious attention to generosity.  That is, we should never think the worst of our opponents.  We are each engaged in a long struggle toward attaining the best for ourselves.