There Are No Heroes
Embracing the Complexity of People
My grandfather was born in 1933, four years after the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He was born in the time of Jim Crow legally enforced segregation, and lived through the civil rights movement. He has lived through so many great upheavals of history and huge societal changes. The United States is a very different place today than when he was born. Although I disagree with him politically and socially on many things, I am very proud of where his positions are today, compared to the norms in the (white) U.S. that existed for most of his life. I don’t believe in “judging people based on their time” simply because there are always morally upright people one can follow (if you aren’t one of those few standard-bearers yourself). In any time period there were people denouncing the problems of the day, as well as people causing those problems, and a great many people in between ranging from mild supporters, apathetic, to mild opposition to those problems. However, it is useful to see how society changes over time and how the regular fighting of activists has expanded our circle of humanity and human decency.
This is my reflection on King: A Life, by Jonathan Eig, a 2023 biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. Again, he writes about history how I described in my previous post, not as a foregone conclusion, but with the messiness of many people acting in many different ways toward various outcomes. If anyone could be considered a hero, it is the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (I have always looked up to him and admired him). And yet he was not a hero. He was a human being who struggled with anxiety and depression from the massive pressure put on him. He plagiarized, had quite a few affairs, chewed his fingernails, and played pool. He struggled to love all people and constantly doubted whether he was taking the most effective actions, whether he was sticking to his principles, and even whether he should maintain his principles (he initially had bodyguards with guns before he was convinced of the need for a nonviolent movement).
Of course, he had qualities that enabled him to rise to the occasion: his public speaking skills, his empathy and compassion, and his ability and desire to connect genuinely with all people. And yet, he was continuously supported, questioned, rebuked, challenged, and pushed and pulled by people from well-meaning colleagues to ardent segregationists. Without the support of his wife, whom he loved while also having affairs and wanting her to fulfill the traditional role in the family, he may not have been able to cope with the pressure he was under almost daily. Without his many friends and colleagues in the movement, he would certainly not have developed his ideas and principles to such a degree (since he gave so many speeches, he often asked others to write the first draft of his speeches). What I am trying to say is that, as with all human beings, nothing he did was purely his own. He was no hero, though he did more than many people do in their lives, he was a man who made mistakes and strove for what he knew was right. People often point to great moments in history and think to themselves “what would I do in that situation?” And I believe that the correct answer is always “whatever you’re doing right now.” The struggle for human decency and creating a loving world is always (and may always be) ongoing. You do not have to be a hero to act now because there are no heroes, only people who try to make a difference.
There are just a few other key points I took from the book. Since I studied physics, sometimes I have to bring in a science analogy. History evolves based on the actions of many individual people, the field of economics attempts to model and statistically predict the directions these actions will lead a society in based on as much information as they can gather. This is similar to predictions in thermodynamics. Even closed systems (think a box filled with air), can have trillions of molecules in them and it quickly becomes impossible to model the interactions of every single molecule bouncing into each other over and over. However, we can simplify things greatly by looking at the overall outcome of those molecules when certain conditions are applied. Our dear old friend PV=nRT tells us, for example, that if the volume of a container is constant, but the temperature increases, the pressure will increase. This is due to tons of molecules getting more kinetic energy and bouncing off each other more frequently. We don’t need to know the exact direction or speed of each molecule to calculate the pressure. Unfortunately, societies are massively more complex than gases, and there are unlimited factors that can change the direction of a society (including the weather one day, a random accident, or any number of things that can’t truly be modeled).
Although I love pointing out the flaws of economics, I do have an actual point related to the autobiography of MLK. Namely, just as societal change is messy and unpredictable, so are the movements that bring it about. At each stage of the civil rights movement, people argued and disagreed and had different ideas of how to best further the cause of desegregation. The NAACP focused on legal challenges and believed that they were the driving force of desegregation and their work needed more recognition, while the SCLC had its own strategies of direct action (boycotts, marches, etc.). There was conflict between the two organizations, yet everyone was moving toward the same goal in their various ways and that mobilized a lot of different people who were working for different reasons and believed in different strategies. Then there was the SNCC and the Nation of Islam, with their own, more radical visions of the future who mobilized even more people toward their cause and often acted as a foil for the still very radical NAACP and SCLC when seeking concessions from the white political power base.
To give just one example of the messiness of movements, in Birmingham, King and other SCLC leaders were frustrated by middle class black residents who were slow to join the cause of desegregation because they benefited from the status quo. It took conversations and meetings and work, so much work, and finally images and videos of white people and police officers brutally attacking black people to change minds and build consensus. That consensus was fragile. So many people did not agree with the idea of non-violence, or only held to it for so long until they got frustrated with a lack of results. Yet so many people did believe in it. Martin Luther King, Jr. was not a hero, he was a man who worked hard to overcome his limitations, and made mistakes and did things wrong. But he kept examining his convictions and actions and trying to align them and work toward a better world. Just like no person is perfect, no movement is perfect, but that’s no reason not to join one.
If you’re not sure where to get started, you can learn a bit more about King from this post by historian Kevin Kruse. Also, at the bottom of my last post about guns I linked to several organizations which have chapters across the U.S. If you love guns and don’t want to do anything about them, labor reporter Hamilton Nolan has written a handy guide about how to support union organizing, which is a thing basically every worker who isn’t a manager or gig-worker can do! Or you can join your local DSA chapter. I can’t stress this enough: you do not have to believe in everything they are doing to contribute to the projects you support and build a network of people who are working to improve their communities. Finally, don’t let pragmatism stop you. If your answer to “why is X bad thing still happening?” is that it’s not politically feasible to change it, it seems like you’ve found the problem! It’s time for you to go out and change the feasibility of solutions (maybe try running for something yourself).