The Ties That Bind

A brush with the worst of the human experience shows the importance of preventing arguments from tipping into toxicity, while not losing the ability to stand firm against evil.

by Martin Davis
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

We are good—quite good, in fact—at arguing with one another. In the Advance’s first year, we’ve almost daily chronicled people’s ability to do so. Whether through conflicts over education, zoning ordinances, elections, or athletics, we pour countless hours into having it out with our neighbors.

The arguments we have are necessary and can prove productive. Despite our best efforts to reduce the human experience to data points and explain our actions, life continues to befuddle the computer. Our interactions are too complex, and the effects too unpredictable.

These same arguments, however, can become toxic. And it happens most often when our arguments aren’t counterbalanced by talk about the rich ties that bind us.

Thinking about those ties has been front-of-mind for me over the past several months, and especially over the past few days. For I’m learning to deal with the consequences of toxic behavior in a way that too few of us anymore do.

This week, our youngest son deployed for the first time.

He is clear-eyed about the dangers he faces, and about what motivates him to serve in one of the most dangerous regions in the world.

I wonder how many of us are as clear-eyed about why we do the things that we do.

The answer, I fear, is “not enough.”

Begin with the fact that the language of war is pervasive in our society. It runs through athletics. And it too often defines our politics.

Both my partner Shaun Kenney and I have heard people within our respective political spheres talk about the “other side of the aisle” as people they are “at war with.”

Such language cheapens the reality of war—which my son and his brothers in arms are now engaged in—and unnecessarily inflames the debates we face as a community.

As Shaun says so well when confronted with these situations, “I’m not at war with my neighbor.”

When Our Neighbors Are at War with Us

If anyone had a right to feel at war with their neighbors, it was Martin Luther King, Jr.

As Jonathan Eig has described in his new biography of King, the brutality of M.L.K. Jr.’s grandfather’s life, the challenges faced by his father, and the trials and tribulations he endured before he was known much beyond the city of Atlanta offered plenty of reason for King to mistrust white America. Indeed, to go to war with it.

And early in his life, he had the opportunity. King often talked about his early experience with a white boy in his youth that was terminated when the two reached school age. As the boy explained to King, now that they’re students they were no longer allowed to be friends.

This event, which happened when King was six, marked the first time he says he became acutely aware of race, as he wondered why skin color alone would lead to judgment.

“I was greatly shocked,” King said: “and from that moment on I was determined to hate every white person.”

But, Eig says, “M.L.’s determination to hate every white person faded quickly, but his determination to fight racism never diminished.”

What we admire about King today was his refusal to turn on his neighbor. What we too often forget was his willingness to call out evil.

According to Eig:

Racism had ground down [Martin Luther King, Jr.’s] paternal grandfather, but M.L. King, Jr. saw prejudice and discrimination as evils to confront, not curse. Justice, in his youthful view, was like love: denial only made the desire for it grow.

How we pursue justice matters.

In a review of Eig’s book for The New Yorker, “Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Perilous Power of Respectability,” Kelefa Sanneh cuts straight to the issue. King was a practitioner of “respectability politics.” Simply put, it’s “the idea that a group is more likely to be treated with respect if its members behave respectably.” Sanneh continues:

Unlike King himself, respectability politics does not have a great reputation; the term is used primarily by critics of it who worry that this approach tends to “rationalize racism, sexism, bigotry, hate, and violence,” in the words of one NPR report. This is the most paradoxical aspect of King’s long, glorious afterlife: fifty-five years after his death, he is almost universally respected, but his lifelong devotion to the politics of respectability is not. (Emphasis added.)

We can respect the man and his oration. We can respect his ideals. What we cannot embrace is his commitment to respectability. Perhaps because we have lost the ability to find any dignity or virtue in those we oppose.

King saw and understood as clearly as anyone the evil of racism, yet he did not let go of the values in white culture that would prove the most powerful weapons in fighting bigotry’s promoters.

So while he would chastise white ministers in “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” he simultaneously embraced the theologies of Walter Rauschenbusch and Reinhold Niebuhr, and especially the power of the great 20th century minister Harry Emerson Fosdick’s oratory.

Sad, Lonely, Angry, and Mean Society

With what was King inoculated that saved him from turning on his neighbors?

Though David Brooks did not set out to answer that question, he unwittingly did so in his recent opinion column for the New York Times, “How to Save a Sad, Lonely, Angry, and Mean Society.”

I’d argue that we have become so sad, lonely, angry and mean as a society in part because so many people have not been taught or don’t bother practicing to enter sympathetically into the minds of their fellow human beings. We’re over-politicized while growing increasingly under-moralized, under-spiritualized, under-cultured.

King could turn from hate—even at an early age—because of the arts.

Though he wouldn’t read the great writers and thinkers until college, early on he was raised to value culture. And that appreciation of culture is what kept him grounded in respectability—a virtue we have largely lost—when those around him were quick to turn to politics and violence.

King was not a scholar—one need not be to appreciate the arts. But he was a well-read man. And in the arts lies our path to recovering our humanity.

As Brooks concluded:

The best of the arts induce humility. In our normal shopping mall life, the consumer is king. The crucial question is, do I like this or not? But we approach great art in a posture of humility and reverence. What does this have to teach me? What was this other human being truly seeking?

Rediscovering Respectability

The path to discovering the ties that bind us requires neither costly programs, nor advanced degrees.

It requires a simple willingness to engage with the best of culture.

In so doing, we reap to wisdom of thousands of years of learning around the great questions for which there are no definitive answers—but there are humane ones.

And when we discover these, we can identify evil, and simultaneously learn to not make war with our neighbors.

I’ve never experienced war, but I’m living through the next worst thing—waiting for someone to return who is.

Too few of us today know that pain, because few of us have a direct connection to the military. As Pew Research has reported:

The share of the U.S. population with military experience has declined, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. In 1980, about 18% of U.S. adults were veterans, but that share fell to 6% in 2022.

Though more of us are spared that pain, we’ve also lost something—to ability to discern between evil that must be resisted, and disagreement that is a healthy part of the human experience.

To rediscover the difference, let us commit to turning toward that which unites us. In the words of Isaiah:

“Learn to do well; …. Come now, and let us reason together.”