“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
Martin Luther King Jr.
In President-Elect Joe Biden’s victory speech last week, he declared, “once again, America has bent the arc of the moral universe towards justice.” This is a reference to Dr. Martin Luther King’s famous quote “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Dr. King’s quote, a catchier version of a speech by Theodore Parker, has inspired generations to come. President Obama was so inspired by the quote that he had it woven into a rug in the Oval Office.
It is a quote that is so often repeated that one is tempted to accept the truth behind it as incontrovertible. Steven Pinker, in Better Angels of Our Nature, argues with overwhelming data just how much the world has improved over the last few hundred years. Pinker’s works, alongside the TED talks by Hans Rosling, have convinced many (perhaps most?) in my liberal circles that some version of this sentiment is true.
Now consider MAGA. Make America Great Again, from day one, was a jarring political sentiment. I’ve heard people challenge this slogan literally, saying something like: “when we America great? After WWII when African American soldiers returned home to Jim Crow? In the 1960s, during Vietnam and the civil rights protests? In the 1980s, during the AIDS epidemic?” Obviously each period of American history has had massive flaws and massive challenges, just as today does as well.
But the problem with MAGA goes deeper than its literal confusion. MAGA attempts to invalidate the idea that we are bending towards justice, that this country needs to look forward rather than back, that we are an imperfect union that needs to improve.
Decidedly, there have been large swaths of the population who have suffered over the previous decades. They are frustrated, and they are angry. The resonance of MAGA and the hold it has on a certain part of the population is evidence for how frustrated and how angry they are. The answer, however, is not to emulate some point in the past. The answer must be to mover ourselves forward.
The arc of of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” This quote, while beautiful and inspiring, is also seriously misleading. The moral universe doesn’t bend on its own as the quote might imply. Progress is not inevitable. And justice will mean many different things to many different people.
Most worryingly, the quote serves as justification for a lot of injustice today. If we believe our current system is helping move the world towards justice, we are much more likely to overlook and accept the injustices that support our modern system. These injustices are merely necessary collateral damage on the way to justice. But this of course is a dangerous line of thinking and an easy recipe for complacency. Much of the progress in our modern world is from people who didn’t accept the status quo.
I believe the arc of moral history will bend towards justice, but if the last few years have taught us anything, it is that progress is not inevitable. Our systems do not guarantee progress. We must fight for progress within the system, and we must fight for progress by improving the system.
