Get the ‘arc of the moral universe’ out of your mouth.
Get the ‘arc of the moral universe’ out of your mouth.
Clean countertops, empty history.
In January, by a bit of a fluke, I ended up in a room with Sen. Raphael Warnock, where, without him even knowing it, he cured one of my chronic history pains, one that had been having a flare-up that very week.
It was the ache1 about the increasing and, in my view, increasingly mangled references to the Martin Luther King Jr. phrase, “The arc of moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
Warnock was speaking that night at a non-profit with Jonathan Eig, author of the terrific King bio that came out last year. Eig had graciously agreed to meet me for coffee beforehand to offer advice on the newspaper-to-book transition, and I tagged along afterward to hear the two men speak. I suppose I had been expecting Warnock the Politician, but what we got that night was Warnock the Pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church and Keeper of King’s Theological Flame. I took a lot of notes. I was giddy.
I thought about those notes Thursday night as Warnock congratulated President Joe Biden following Biden’s spirited State of the Union address. “That was a sermon tonight,” Warnock told him. He would know.
I thought about those notes again a few minutes later when, to my absolute and sheer horror, Sen. Katie Britt baby-whispered the most hideous version of the “arc of the moral universe” in recorded history from her beige Alabama kitchen.
“Never forget,” she began her run-on, 99-emotioned journey through parent-approved American history, “We are steeped in the blood of patriots who overthrew the most powerful empire in the world, we walk in the footsteps of pioneers who tamed the wild, we now carry forward the same flame of freedom as the liberators of an oppressed Europe, we continue to draw courage from those who bent the moral arc of the universe, and when we gaze upon the heavens never forget that our DNA contains the same ingenuity that put man on the moon.”
Biden had warned an hour earlier that “history is watching” and if so, this is what she2 might have looked like while watching Britt.
I’m not even going to touch “steeped in the blood,” “tamed the wild”3 or her moving “moral” to the arc instead of the universe, because, friends, this is but a tiny leaf-boat of a Substack in a sea of crimes against history. But let’s get it straight where the arc comes from and why Britt should keep it out of her mouth.
Let us first observe that while King resurrected “the arc of moral universe” and made it his own, the expression did not originate with him. It came from Theodore Parker, a 19th century Unitarian minister and states’-rights hater who incited antislavery riots4 and helped fund John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry.
This excerpt encapsulating his first use is long but worth it. Note when he says “the right,” he isn’t talking about “the left” and “the right” like we would use it today, he’s talking about the right thing, the just thing.
Look at the facts of the world. You see a continual and progressive triumph of the right. I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice. Things refuse to be mismanaged long. Jefferson trembled when he thought of slavery and remembered that God is just. Ere5 long all America will tremble.
Parker published this in an 1852 book of his sermons, nine years before the Civil War, and boy howdy was he right about the trembling.6
So, do we think Britt would knowingly shout out some law-breaking neckbeard who denied biblical miracles? No, we do not.
Now let’s talk about the man she may have meant to quote, the man who elegantly distilled the arc to its memorable essence. It’s unknown how King first encountered Parker’s sermon, perhaps during his higher education, but he invoked it many times in his writings, speeches and sermons.
One of the first instances came at the close of the Montgomery bus boycott in 1956, when he read a prepared statement before the media: “These twelve months have not at all been easy … But amid all of this we have kept going with the faith that as we struggle, God struggles with us, and that the arc of the moral universe, although long, is bending toward justice.”
He used it again in 1965 at the close of the Selma-to-Montgomery marches (the famous “How Long? Not Long!” speech) and in the finale for one of the standard addresses he gave all across the country, called “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution.” He invoked it for the last time on March 31, 1968, days before he was assassinated, at the National Cathedral, like this:
We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.
We shall overcome because Carlyle is right — “No lie can live forever.”
We shall overcome because William Cullen Bryant is right — “Truth, crushed to earth, will rise again.”
We shall overcome because James Russell Lowell is right, as we were singing earlier today — “Truth forever on the scaffold/Wrong forever on the throne./Yet that scaffold sways the future./And behind the dim unknown stands God/Within the shadow keeping watch above his own.”
Now let me ask you — did you hear that in your mind as the righteous incantation of a deeply learned orator or the infantalized whisper of a saleswoman getting ready for craft day at the shooting range?
I’m not the first to take issue with a politician’s use of “the arc of the moral universe.” In a 2017 Daily Beast piece, Matt Lewis claimed Barack Obama repeatedly “uses it incorrectly.” Lewis’s argument, adapted from a source and clearly not fact-checked, seems to center on an erroneous belief that King invoked “the arc of the moral universe” only once and in reference to Jesus’s death on the cross,7 and thus Obama’s use of it for earthly, political matters was wrong. He mentions that the concept originated with “clergyman Theodore Parker” but nothing else, completely missing — either through shoddy research or intentional omission — that King used it many times in many contexts, and that for both Parker and King, the realms of spirituality and politics were not separate. Slavery was a spiritual and political issue in Parker’s day, as were civil rights in King’s.
Interestingly, in his 2019 book “The Right Side of History,” far-right scold Ben Shapiro adopted Lewis’s false narrative, writing:
Barack Obama was fond of quoting Martin Luther King Jr: “The arc of the moral universe is wrong, but it bends toward justice.” He even had that quotation inscribed on a rug in the Oval Office. But King himself only thought the moral universe existed in the context of a religious narrative of history.
Not only does Shapiro insert a false claim into his own shoe-horned argument, he further denudes the context by failing to mention Parker at all. Perhaps it was Shapiro’s book where Britt first encountered the arc of the moral universe. In this case, it bent only for camouflage.
Conservative loudmouths and lawmakers today run into this problem a lot. Context-free history by quotebook ends up looking as pristine and creepy and fake as Britt’s kitchen, and holy cow you better not try to touch anything. Is it any wonder she’s among the group trying desperately to keep kids from opening history’s cabinets without permission?
I must confess I’ve never been a huge fan of “the arc of the moral universe” nor understood King’s use of it. Why, when so much of what he wrote and stood for was about urgency, about now, about not being patient for justice in the hereafter, would he even entertain an expression that could be viewed as “it’ll be all good in the long run,” let alone add it to his quiver? In his letter from a Birmingham jail, he wrote passionately of moderates’ “tragic misconception of time” and “the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively.”8 He repeated this warning — time is neutral, progress is not inevitable — constantly and in the same speeches where he invoked the arc of the moral universe! How can time be both neutral and favorable?
Enter Rev. Warnock and what I heard him say in January. Speaking of King’s support for the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Warnock noted that King’s father had led a voting-rights push in Atlanta 30 years earlier, “at the height of Jim Crow.”
“[King] was a genius, but he wasn’t a singular genius,” Warnock said. “He came from a movement.” This, to me, was a reminder that even as we lionize our heroes, we must not sanitize them or cut them off from their rich and complicated context.
(Saying that, I am struck by the lack of Britt’s context. She told us she’s from rural Alabama, that her father owned a hardware store and her mother a dance studio. She omitted a lot of her own bio — law school, lobbying, longtime staffer for the senator she succeeded — to arrive at Mom Who’s Just So Darn Shocked That Lil Ol’ Her Became a Yoo-Ess Senator. I do not think the sins of the parent or grandparent automatically pass on to the child, but I would like to know more about Britt’s context.)
Later, Warnock described the situation that compelled King to travel to Memphis in 1968, where he would be assassinated. Warnock named the sanitation workers, Robert Walker and Echol Cole — who were crushed to death inside the compactor of a garbage truck, where they’d sought refuge from the rain, because — four years after the adoption of the Civil Rights Act, Warnock emphasized — white city officials wouldn’t let them inside the public works building. “Their blood summoned Dr. King to Memphis,” he said. “And the poor are still being crushed.”
“There’s a way in which we tell ourselves a simple story about the movement, that there was segregation, Dr. King had a dream, everybody got it, and now we’ve lived happily ever after. And it’s more complicated than that, it comes in fits and starts, and we’re in the midst of a huge backlash right now from those who want to erase this history.”
Then, Warnock teed up King and the arc: “He said, ‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. His life demonstrates that we’re the ones who have to bend that arc.”
Of course.
A sense of morality being one of the sparks that makes us human — and, if you’re from the Judeo-Christian tradition, made in God’s image — it makes perfect sense that we must do the bending.
So, time is neutral. And the arc bends toward justice, if we bend it.
Next week: Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History! (I’m kidding. I’m exhausted.)
There’s one more thing I wrote down that night in January: “We treat King like we treat Jesus. We know he died for us, but we don’t read him.”
If you want to know what that looks like in SOTU terms, it’s House Speaker Mike Johnson leaping to his feet and clapping at the mere mention of that great son of Alabama, John Lewis, and a few minutes later sitting motionless as the president urged him to pass the voting-rights bill bearing Lewis’s name, that would restore the rights he bled for in 1965.
“You’re doing it wrong!” is the painful cry of every history nerd witnessing someone butcher a story they know well. Should we call it archival arthritis?
Clio, Greek muse of history
It’s okay to call them riots, because they were riots.
“Before”
For what it’s worth, Abraham Lincoln was likely also paraphrasing Parker when he said “of the people, by the people, for the people,” and Betty Friedan quoted Parker on the first page of “The Feminine Mystique” — talk about a legacy for some gleefully heretical minister.
Lewis cites: “Evil may so shape events that Caesar will occupy a palace and Christ a cross, but that same Christ will rise up and split history into A.D. and B.C., so that even the life of Caesar must be dated by his name. Yes, ‘the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.’” I haven’t found a primary source confirming this exact quote, though King said something similar in May 1956, minus the arc reference, so it’s certainly possible he said Lewis’s version of the line at another time.
If you want to read more of King’s other concept of time, please see my earlier post — “Hi! I compiled this thing about time for you.” — particularly if you consider yourself a white ally, or an ally to any marginalized group.