The recent appearance by Ta-Hehisi Coates with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show produced the sound-bite to the effect that he rejects the idea of The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. that the arc of the universe bends toward justice, replacing justice in that formulation with chaos. The extended interview, which I hadn't heard before this morning isn't so bleak and, apparently wasn't as quote worthy as that first part. The soundbite wasn't all there was that Coates had to say about it and the rest of it was, with all due respect, a contradiction of it. I had been pretty disturbed when I heard the sound bite because I think that quoted sentiment is fatal to political liberalism and, most certainly, the political success of liberalism - taking office, taking power, changing laws and policies for the better.
Chaos as the ultimate and inevitable result of anything we do produces a sour, depressed sense of futility which disables any effort to do anything. It is the dead end of despair that Eugene O'Neill ended up with after he gave up (way to easily) on his previous leftism. Though his choice of leftism was a dead-end to start with. I think it is an inevitable conclusion of materialism in which nothing, ultimately matters, including what happens to other people, it produces a disinclination to care about anything except what touches us, directly. If someone with the privilege and success, even monetary success of an O'Neill gives up, it's probably even more dangerous course for those who are guaranteed to not have the privilege that he enjoyed.
I agree with RMJ that the difference between The Reverend King's take on the ultimate tendency of history as compared to Ta-Hehisi Coates' formulation is the difference between atheism and Christianity, or, for that matter, Judaism or Islam or even Buddhism in which, eventually, there will be a liberation from that painful and primordial chaos, against which God created the universe and life in the Genesis narrative. The chaos isn't found good in that great alegory, it was organized matter and, even more so. living beings that are found good, or just, if you will.. The most powerful and sophisticated exposition of that alternative I have heard is the great theologian James Cone's The Cross and the Lynching Tree, in which he notes that it was the power of the belief that death was not the end of the arc, but that contrary to Coates' dead end for the victims of the ultimate injustice at Auschwitz or by the bullet of a racist cop, there is hope for justice hidden within that merely apparent dead end. Hope for the victim and hope for their families and loved ones who survive. I think it was that hope that provided the essential fuel that powered all of the great movements for justice, it is the reason that any kind of progress was ever made, that means that it is not an inevitable consequence of racism that it can't be either weakened or defeated. It is a force which will never be replaced by any other thing and produce reliable results.
I don't think as good a writer and thinker as Coates will stick with his current thinking, I think he will come to reject it. I think that because that was my experience and I'm no Ta-Nehisi Coates. I was led to think in those terms by the ideology promoted in academia, materialist determinism being the default assumption of it, and which came to dominate the nominal left in the post-King period, what I have come to see is the cause of the impotence of that left as opposed to the earlier left which believed that justice was possible and the right goal of history, of our action as characters in that narrative. I can't find the poem by Archibald Macleish in which he criticizes the existentialists for their wallowing in despair, as I recall he notes that they pretty much throw in the towel because we die. I remember getting a kind of grim thrill from reading "No Exit" when I was a teenager, watching the video of it with Harold Pinter recently I couldn't but feel it was a total waste of time and a cheap imitation of philosophy in a nose dive of decadence, something which is also inevitable under a materialist intellectual regime. It reminded me of a statement Rupert Sheldrake made a while back that he found current theology more interesting and useful than recent philosophy which was obsessed with such things as attacking the status of consciousness in service to atheism.
But I am a political blogger, the ultimate value of any intellectual pursuit in real life is in the extent to which it promotes the continuation of life, the improvement of life, the progress towards equal justice, economic justice and the political means through which those things that do that can be put into effect and those forces and ideologies that hamper and defeat that, producing inequality and denying justice can be thwarted and defeated. I would rather go down trying to do that than giving into despair.
Giving up on the excuse of science and material causation is both lazy and it is unrealistic. History doesn't just happen, it isn't an inevitable result of the workings out of non-conscious atavaistic forces or some brainlessly swinging dialectic. we are the agents of human history in so far as we live it. If we give up, what results will be the result of our choices. Unless we choose to believe that we can bend the arc of history toward justice, even in opposition to any alleged biological force of natural selection or material causation, the failure of justice is guaranteed by our choice.
Liberalism is harder than its alternative because it requires more effort to care about other people, it takes more effort in every way, it takes having the energy and the commitment to do that day after day, year after year, for an entire lifetime. The best that materialists have presented to do that is the failure of Marxism which empties Bertolt Brecht's formulation of the same observation* seem as empty as Sartre's view of existence. Even Silvio Rodriguez brilliant song which is introduced by Brecht's quote, a beautiful Marxist and, despite that, wise and necessary warning against American imperialism doesn't hold it up, considering his alternative in Castro's regime instead of a true egalitarian democracy governing with the consent of The People, and Castro's Cuba has been the least bad of any of the attempts made under Marxism, in the past century which is more evidence that materialism is a dead end.
With that failure of Marxism to even get off the ground, with the spectacle of inequality and INJUSTICE that Marxism as a real phenomenon in history is, and the current materialist pseudo-leftism of neo-atheism which replaces a futile, neo-liberal, liberalish libertarianism for any real hope for progress doesn't even hold the hope of any kind of effective struggle. In the TV and media trained, post-literate neo-atheists we see the refusal of the only alternative of The Reverend King, the Liberation Theologians, the examples of the Christian base communities which were so subversive that the United States under the degenerate leadership of Reagan and Bush conducted a terror war against them, the dead end that materialism is, Materialism begins as it ends in a declaration of futility and defeat of the goals of liberalism by an inevitable chaotic miasma. As a proposal as a liberal alternative it deserves to be rejected because it must be for there to be any such thing as liberalism.
* There are men who struggle for a day and they are good.
There are men who struggle for a year and they are better.
There are men who struggle many years, and they are better still.
But there are those who struggle all their lives:
These are the indispensable ones.
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