Just watched an excellent BBC4 documentary about Martin Luther King. What a leader he was. But what got to me the most, unsurprisingly, were the man’s opponents; the people shouting at the niggers to go home, the police swaggering with their nightsticks as their colleagues beat a man to the ground, the New York Times saying the point has been made so stop marching, Senator Robert Byrd being just as oily and broken as his reputation indicated he was.
History has passed judgement on all these people, and it was not kind.
I felt revulsion. They believed the rightness of their cause with such passion, and they were so horribly and unarguably wrong. It is a failing in us as humans, that we so often exalt the most noxious and the basest parts of our natures.
(This is something which I need to remind myself – that some of the people I disagree with are not simply of a different opinion, but of an opinion to which the only response is condemnation. There are still such people in this world, and their voices are prominent. One of them leads the most powerful nation on earth, for a start.)
A question that arises from the above: of what value is belief when it can lead us so catastrophically astray?
7 thoughts on “They Hated Dr King”
Comments are closed.
A general axiom I have developed is that “belief’s importance is what it allows you to do.”
It’s double edged. Belief makes the greatest and most appalling human actions possible.
My question is “why do we believe what we believe?” And how do we change belief?
“[S]uch people”? Do you mean “people with such beliefs”?
It is my experience that the hardest part of living a good life is not judging others. That in itself is a rare thing; even rarer to take action which goes against others’ wishes without judging them. I was in Thailand when the Iraq war began, and knew nothing of it until I had to go briefly to Laos. It was interesting to see how metta medition had softened me, such that I did not feel outrage, or anger, but felt sad at this obvious suffering, and these political figures acting out of blindness. I am glad that I did not have to confront it for long; the softness would not have lasted.
Tangentially, I am intrigued about which nation you think is the most powerful on earth – or rather, what your definitions of power are, since I’m sure of which country you mean. A guest ajahn (senior monk) at the monastery once said that if one went by the number of enlightened beings in a country, Thailand would be one of the world’s superpowers.
I believe that it is up to the individual to awaken; society’s role is to give as many opportunities for that as possible. This is how to change belief – by not changing others, but allowing them to wake up. This is why we have guides, and holy sites, and places of quiet. That is why it is so important to let people know that it is possible to awaken, to lead a good life.
I was expecting a Billy comment (the question was Billy-bait) but a Jamie comment is an unexpected bonus.
And Jamie catches me being dangerously non-specific with my words – “such people” would be better expressed as “people with such beliefs”. A better expression still of my meaning would be long and probably fold in upon itself, so I won’t attempt to figure it out now.
More on this, and replies to your questions, later. I am a tired morgue right now and I have a new entry to re-read and post.
We are nothing without beleif. In fact it may be impossible for humans not to believe things. In some sense if you think there are no beliefs than that is an act of belief.
You asked: “what value is belief when it can lead us so catastrophically astray?”
Ther are two answers. One Psychological, on Theistic ;).
Psychological – belief allows us to form societies. We develop beliefs aboutt he general trustworthiness of our fellow humans and the goodness of living in realtionship to people unrelated to us. These beliefs for the bedrock of any kind of society.
Further than that beliefs enable us to be agents of change. Of course the kind of change depends on the kind of belief (look at the Nazis, or the the Abolitionists – both wraught change because they strongly believed in something).
The Theistic Reason is simply that the capicity for belief, and the *need* for beleif is planted in us by God as one of the methods he uses to call us to Him. Ecclesiaties 3:11 says that all men have eternity in their hearts. But then it goes on to say that they have not understood it (and so fall into the self aggrandizement and idolotry that leads to the “them’s not like us attitude” that inspired the ugliness that you speak of).
What you see disgusts you because it is sin, perversion of the natural cfapacity for belief into something ugly and, in some sense, less than human.
So that’s my two answers worth.
I often find myself wondering whether I am too distant from outrageous things. I was at a reading of poetry against the Iraq war tonight, and found myself distancing myself from the emotion in the poetry.
I am firmly of the opinion that the war was a mistake, and one that may prove very costly. But I react to it more with sadness and a desire to find a powerfully better approach than outrage or upset. I don’t find that the anti-war camp has made a case for an alternative set of actions. After all, I don’t miss Sadam.
I found myself noticing the similarities between the various activisms, and wondering whether there is something inherantly wrong with actions motivated by passionate belief.
.carla wrote: “I found myself noticing the similarities between the various activisms, and wondering whether there is something inherantly wrong with actions motivated by passionate belief.”
I hope this doesn’t come across badly but do you think that thought is a result of your wanting to distance yourself from strong belief(as you say earlier).
Possibly it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy, you try to distance yourself from it and then you start to think that strong belief itself is the problem and the distance yourself more and so on.
I will never speak against strong belief in general and I don’t beleive that apathy is the answer to others strong beliefs. Outrage has it’s uses if it motivates people to stand up for good. Sure it also motivates people to stand up for bad but the battle for beliefs (Morgues culture war) can try and change peoples beliefs from ‘bad’ to ‘good’.
A great many actions that have transformed society in wonderful ways have been motivated by passionate belief.
Would you rather that we still had slaves and women couldn’t vote? (Rhetorical question there 😉 )
Belief as a phenomenon itself isn’t the problem. It’s *what* people belief that can cause trouble.
I am not sure that was all that coherant. I guess I would disagree with the thought that something might be inherently wrong with strong beleif. Some people have ‘wrong strong beleifs’ buit strong beleif itself just is, a moral baseline as it were…
I think that there is perhaps a worthwhile distinction to be made between strong belief and passionate belief. I have met monks with strong beliefs who are largely without passion. Passion is tricky because it’s a melange of emotions, and emotions, like almost everything, will arise and disappear and signify very little. Belief, as I understand it, is rather more grounded in experience, in seeing and trusting that the nature of things is as Buddha said.
Passion perhaps operates as a motivator, when it arises, but it is by no means the only one, nor one that it is worth relying on as a guide – since, as mentioned, it will arise and disappear; it has no constancy.