Martin Luther King Jr on Avoiding the Dark Abyss of Annihilation
The necessity of love in an age of godlike power
Forty six years ago yesterday, on April 4th 1968, Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated.
What keeps drawing me back to King is not his famous civil rights advocacy, or his infamous and all-too-human womanizing, or his curious disowning by the politically correct Left and adoption by the anti-Woke Right, but his advice to humanity on how to avoid destroying our future.
King’s advice stirred me back in 2021 after I had spent most of lockdown researching and writing on the threats to the future potential of my species. It was here that the haunting reality to the increasingly weighty Sword of Damocles above Promethean humanity’s head, hanging by scarce thread, became viscerally real.
We had stolen fire from the gods. Out of all I learned, two threats to the survival of humanity and complex civilization caused most unease: lab engineered pathogens, that already exist, with infection fatality rates as high as 60% that make Covid, with its 0.02% IFR, seem utterly pathetic; and a nuclear war which would blacken the skies and cause sudden global cooling thereby starving billions of people to death in the cold. A third threat is the kind of technologically enabled totalitarian surveillance and oppressive state controlled lock-in which Soviet secret police, Nazi Gestapo, and Orwell’s Big Brother couldn’t have even dreamed about. Imagine North Korea with under-the-skin surveillance technology capable of detecting internal markers of stress or anger in response to political messaging. Now you now begin to grasp what is legitimately possible.
King issued his advice in the early 1960s and so didn’t yet know of nuclear winter which wasn’t discovered until the 80s. Neither could he have predicted the rise of modern bioweapon or surveillance technologies. That said, the fact that things are far worse than he could have imagined only makes his advice more pertinent by the day.
Before getting to this advice, let me tell you a story that is perhaps the most revolutionarily weird ever told. An abridged version goes something like this. A Jewish carpenter gets betrayed by a close friend to jealous predators interested in protecting their hold on power. He gets beaten and then unjustly sentenced to brutal torture and a slaves death. He then dies one of the worst ways imaginable in conditions of immense physical agony, and primordial social humiliation. Yet despite this absolute horror show, this carpenter manages to genuinely love and forgive all who had wronged him and who had taken delight in his suffering. What makes this story even more weird, is that this was said to be the Creator of Creation made flesh and blood and so could have stopped these horrific proceedings at any time. The fact that Cosmic-Love-Incarnate then manages not only to resurrect from the dead, but to eventually conquer a Roman Empire which had been built around much more understandable and relatable idols of strength and cruelty, only magnifies the shattering strangeness to this story. And that love can eventually achieve victory over divisive hatred and vast earthly power illustrates an enigmatic statement worth pondering.
This story is the central pillar around which Western civilization has been organized. I feel compelled to state clearly that the command to love even one’s enemy strikes me as the most unique, and most essential aspect of Christianity. In an age of such absurd technological power, an age in which the ability to destroy all of humanity resides under the fingers of flawed primates capable of summoning scientifically engineered demons, being guided by love would appear non-negotiable. Martin Luther King Jr published his essay, A Tough Mind and a Tender Heart, not long after the Cuban Missile Crisis during peak Cold War tensions. Therein he describes the necessity for love:
“Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction. So when Jesus says ‘Love your enemies,’ he is setting forth a profound and ultimately inescapable admonition. Have we not come to such an impasse in the modern world that we must love our enemies – or else? The chain reaction of evil – hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars – must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.”
“Love your enemies”. It is hard to imagine a more necessary yet radically challenging command. But how might we do this? I would argue that the place to start is in confronting our own monsters in order to avoid projecting them onto others. Warrior poet extraordinaire, Ernst Jünger, argued as much in his essay from World War 2, The Peace:
“Modern man has a fatal propensity for attempting to free himself of his own feelings of guilt, his own anxieties and terrors, by projecting them onto some scapegoat, some incarnation of absolute evil, which he burdens with all the sins, all the shortcomings that he cannot face within himself.”
What we most despise in others may well stem from what we most fear in ourselves. And so, through confronting the possibility for evil within ourselves, we open the possibility to imagine the existence of goodness within those all too easy for us to hate.
“It is an inner happening: that is the way to the perfection of the mystery of Christ, so that the peoples learn self-sacrifice.” C.G. Jung wrote that in his Red Book. This was part of his description of a series of horrific visions of carnage and blood and fire he received in the year prior to the First World War breaking out. The picture Jung paints is that the people of Europe wouldn’t look where they most feared and confront their own darkness; they wouldn’t partake in the necessary spiritual combat to crucify themselves. They vigorously fed into tribal conflict through scapegoat projection and sought to crucify everyone else instead: ”You are Christians and run after heroes, and wait for redeemers who should take the agony on themselves for you, and totally spare you Golgotha. With that you pile up a mountain of Calvary over all Europe”.
Dr King was right. The most important thing we can do, should we wish to contribute to the future of humanity – not to mind the salvation of our own souls, is to find love for our enemies. To be clear – though turning the other cheek is sometimes wise – I am not suggesting we become pacifist doormats who let evil run wild. Misinterpreting Christ’s teaching such that we apply nonviolence to all circumstances at all times will not allow us to stave off disaster and preserve human potential; Tolkien’s heroes did not resonate so very deeply because they passively allowed themselves to be slain by predators or enslaved by tyrants. But there is a fine line to walk if we are to resist evil in the world without adding to it ourselves. “Darkness”, after all, “cannot drive out darkness”. Hence for those who prefer life to death and freedom to slavery, hatred is a luxury we can no longer afford.
So pick up your Cross.
Refreshing read mate. I get a sense of late that the levels of hate and anger in the West, often on issues they have no nexus to, reflects the comfort and safety of distance. It’s fine to hold pseudo-radical-chic beliefs and pound the drum when one is insulated from the ramifications.