The Liberalism of Martin Luther King

Charles K. Rowley: In 1993, in his book, Post-Liberalism, [John] Gray poked around among the rubble of classical liberal philosophy to determine what, if anything was left. He concluded that none of the four constitutive elements of doctrinal liberalism — universalism, individualism, egalitarianism and meliorism (or human flourishing) — could survive the ordeal by value pluralism and that liberalism, as a political philosophy, therefore was dead. www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_01_1_rowley.pdf

It seems to me that the character of Imperial Germany after 1878 can best be caught in the term "illiberal." [[I am using the term as the dictionary defines it: "Not befitting a free man . . . not generous in respect to the opinions, rights, or liberties of others; narrow-minded." The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1967)]] - Fritz Stern, The Failure of Illiberalism, p. xvii

A politics phrased in the language of a war by the oppressed against oppressors clearly has abandoned the democratic perspective for something darker. - My "Liberalism" Problem—And Ours

The principles of liberalism are universalism, individualism, egalitarianism, and meliorism (human flourishing), according to Professor Rowley, above.

Egalitarianism. As cited in The Liberal Founding, Fritz Stern wrote, "At our country's founding, the spirit of liberalism suffused the Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. " When Martin Luther King asked the mainstream society to live up to its own stated principles, proclaiming, "I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,'" he was citing the passage in the Declaration which outlines the liberal principles on which the nation is based.

Universalism. Martin Luther King said, "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." To me this seems to mean that King held that people should not be judged by the group they belong to, but by the type of people they themselves are. King also said, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. ... Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly." Here, King seems to be saying that injustice, prejudice, denial of civil rights to any individual, whoever it might be, threatens the liberty of everyone of every race. "God," King added, "is not merely interested in the freedom of brown men, yellow men, red men and black men. He is interested in the freedom of the whole human race."

This is in contrast to the particularism of the left. An earlier post, Liberal, Left notes:

The left characterizes virtue as a property of a group (the oppressed). It takes a personalistic approach to evil, in the form of an implied out-group which chains the oppressed worker. The battle against evil, it is implied, will take the form of a war against a group of people who are, as a foregone conclusion, evil.

The brilliance of King's "not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character" standard is that it avoids stereotyping individual people by the assumed characteristics of the group they supposedly belong to. As Liberal, Left noted, "The process of identifying certain people as members of oppressor groups is profiling. The process of targeting the person profiled is discrimination." Martin Luther King, even while battling against the discriminatory treatment of African Americans, avoided the temptation to demonize the people he was appealing to. Political democracy, after all, is a government of all the people.

Meliorism. Martin Luther King, in Letter from Birmingham Jail:

Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. ... Segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and sinful. ... Thus it is that I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, for it is morally right; and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong.

Washington concluded his Farewell Address by saying:

I anticipate with pleasing expectation that retreat in which I promise myself to realize, without alloy, the sweet enjoyment of partaking, in the midst of my fellow-citizens, the benign influence of good laws under a free government, the ever-favorite object of my heart, and the happy reward, as I trust, of our mutual cares, labors, and dangers.

Both these figures from the nation's history recognize that the purpose of a liberal society is to better the human condition as it affects each citizen. As John Adams wrote to Jefferson,

We may say that the Eighteenth Century, notwithstanding all its Errors and Vices has been, of all that are past, the most honourable to human Nature. Knowledge and Virtues were increased and diffused, Arts, Sciences useful to Men, ameliorating their condition, were improved, more than in any former equal Period.

Individualism. The locus of freedom is the individual, not the group or class. Thus Dr. King, above, upheld "any law that uplifts human personality." And also as noted above, he observed, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. ... Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."

The preceding section on Universalism discussed the problems inherent in thinking of people in terms of the group they are thought to be identified with: profiling, stereotyping, targeting. It should be added that the notion of group rights is not an aspect of justice. Groups may be unjust to their own members, as John Stuart Mill's passages on "social tyranny"* suggest. In contrast, justice for the single person expands to justice for any groups containing people needing the freedom afforded.


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(*)Mill argued, in On Liberty, "Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough; there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling, against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development and, if possible, prevent the formation of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own."