by Rachel Robison-Greene
In 1961, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered an address before the annual meeting of the Fellowship of the Concerned. In the speech, he defended non-violence, arguing that rising up in a spirit of hatred was not only bad for the soul, but it was also counterproductive. He warned that doing so would ensure that “unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolate night of bitterness” and that “our chief legacy to the future will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos.”
Lately, the hatred and vitriol omnipresent in social life makes it feel meaninglessly chaotic. Most people crave social connection, which explains why they are willing to subject themselves to the exploitative practices of social media companies. Instead of friendship, we often find ourselves slogging through posts expressing senseless cruelty, misinformation, and a reckless commitment to maintaining in-group out-group dynamics. People wear their rage as a badge of honor, and it is often political rage. The angry person feels powerful—they subordinate the subject of their rage along with those who don’t also burn with righteous indignation.
In that same address, King describes what he calls an “Ethic of Love.” He says, of the students he mentors in the movement, “When the students talk about love, they are not talking about emotional bosh, they are not talking about merely a sentimental outpouring; they’re talking about something much deeper.” The kind of love that King has in mind is not romantic love or even the love of friendship. The love that motivated his movement was “understanding, redemptive, creative, good will for all men.” He uses the Greek word agape to label the type of love he has in mind, and it is political at its core. Yet again, we find ourselves in a political context in which anger vibrates at fever pitch. It is a moment for us to ask ourselves: what is the real potential of political love?
Moral emotions are political emotions. They motivate the climate that we occupy. As demagogues throughout history have known well, certain negative emotions are powerful motivators. When ranchers are angry with climate activists, they respond powerfully to rhetoric that demonizes environmentalism. When parents fear immigrants, they’ll do anything to get them out of their communities. When people hate members of the LGBTQ community, they will eagerly vote for whichever candidate offers the most forceful anti-gay rhetoric. Various retributive attitudes have a similar motivational force. Some people make political decisions guided primarily by the idea that people should get what they deserve. This makes law and order without nuance policies popular. Negative emotions move people to the polls.
Acts of aggression are often viewed as acts of strength. Aggression runs alongside the negative emotions. A person might be seen as more powerful when they strike another person than when they embrace them. Love and care are often thought of as “soft.” This may be because care work is often thought of as women’s work and society is often inclined to think of women as subordinate rather than powerful. If King is right, far from being “soft,” love is radically powerful. We don’t need to accept the rhetoric that we are only strong if we are aggressive.
In Anger and Forgiveness, Martha Nussbaum argues that negative emotions are not productive. Anger and retribution are a child’s conception of strength. She understands anger as “the retaliatory and hopeful outward movement that seeks the pain of the offender because of and as a way of assuaging or compensating for one’s own pain.” Anger, when understood in this way, relies on what she calls “the payback wish,” or the belief that if a person gets angry enough, that anger will somehow compensate for the harm that has been done. Nussbaum points out that this is magical thinking. No amount of anger can undo the past.
Motivated by and in the spirit of thinkers like Ghandi, King, Mandela, and TuTu, Nussbaum argues for revolutionary non-anger and unconditional love. She says, “At least the possibility is held out, then, of a love that is itself radical and unconditional, sweeping away both forgiveness and the anger that is its occasion, a love that embarks on an uncertain future with a generous spirit rather than remaining rooted in the past.”
What would radical political love look like? For King, it is, “the love of God operating in the human heart.” Religion was essential to the way that King thought about love, but it is possible to employ the concept without that belief. King explained that employing an ethic of love is a “movement based on a philosophy, the possibility of the future bringing into being something real and meaningful. It is a movement based on hope.”
King notes that humans are capable evil, but they are also capable of recognizing and pursuing good. The hope of anger is that it’s subject will be harmed; it depends on the irrational payback wish. The hope of agape is that the individuals in a community will exercise their capacity to recognize and pursue good. The action of agape is non-violent activity that forces confrontation with the fact of our shared humanity. Thus, political love is an activity. King insists, “Agape is not a weak, passive love. It is love in action. Agape is a willingness to go to any length to restore community.”
Does this philosophy provide us with what we need to fend of the “endless reign of meaningless chaos”? I’m not sure, but if we conditionally accept its fundamental assumptions, it provides us with a project. Importantly, King thinks of agape as a creative activity. When we insist on looking forward in a spirit of love rather than backward in a spirit of anger, we can work together to come up with strategies that force us to see and appreciate one another as suffering beings with dignity.
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