The question you're asking seems to be, what can take the place of shared belief in a higher power and a deeper meaning to the struggle? What will hold people together the way Christian beliefs held together those involved in the civil rights movement? There's no going back to that I'm pretty sure, though there is a tiny movement of a handful left intellectuals back to Christianity that is evident here on substack.
I'm not a believer and never was, and I don't see "safety and comfort" liberalism as you describe it, as inevitable in a secular world. I believe there can be meaning and a reason to struggle outside of religion. Selfish pursuit of pleasure and novel experiences in a meaningless world is not natural. It fact I see it as highly unnatural, and imposed from above, as other sources of meaning are deliberately destroyed, mainly to deliver greater profits to our rulers, both left and right. Family, land, connection to place, traditions -- all these are under attack and have been for a long time. These are things people will fight for.
I think by the time of his death MLK would have agreed with you that selfish pursuit of pleasure and novel experiences in a meaningless world is not natural and was under attack by our profit-seeking rulers, who were imposing that system from above and had been for a long time.
But I don't think he saw the necessary response as a fight, even though he led marches and protests. My guess (and it's really just a guess, at this point) is that in his mind seeing the protests as a fight against evil purveyors of profit, even for a just cause, only made people hate the enemy. That guaranteed an endless cycle of hostility in society no matter who "won." The purveyors of profit would profit from that fight. So, ironically, demonizing them as something to fight against just made them stronger in the long run.
That's what twentieth century statist Marxism became as a resistance force against profit -- demonizing the capitalists to get people fired up. It led nowhere, except to the gulag.
For MLK the alternative was to love your enemy. Not just do unto others, or love your neighbor as yourself, but literally love your enemy, turn the other cheek. I think he would have said that only one belief system ever created by human beings literally rested on loving your enemy, and on believing against all rational evidence that the creative metaphysical force sustaining all of existence wanted it that way. And that all of that was more important than owning the KKK or George Wallace or even passing another bill in Congress. I might be wrong about this part of King's thinking. I need to read more.
If it's true that only one human belief system ever really stood for loving one's enemies, and for the transformative social effects that could come from that, and King clung to that belief system in spite of everything, then maybe people who disagree with Trump today, and with the larger system that spawned him, should pay attention to that and try to learn lessons from it -- even if they can't in the end sign up for literal belief in things like the Resurrection. King couldn't either, it seems.
I'm under no illusions about what it will mean in practical terms to "pay attention" in the sense I just recommended. Outside of the lefty Christian circles you referenced, the support for Christianity as a social glue for an anti-Trump resistance movement is, indeed, zero. I would bet that the resistance will probably coalesce around AOC, Gavin Newsom, the Democratic Party's billionaires, and the network of corporate-funded nonprofits whose politics and social engineering plans helped bring us Trump in the first place. I just don't see anything good coming from that, anymore than good came from the nihilistic, thuggish resistance of the 1960s like the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground, and SDS.
And so, like MLK, I can't bring myself to sign up for the budding protest movement of the AOC industrial complex. To me, it's just a sanitized, technocracy-worshipping version of bullying 1960s radicalism. If there's to be an alternative to it, I think maybe it's less about confrontational street protests and defiance for its own sake and more about building something, based on the things you mentioned -- family, land, connection to place, traditions. One of those traditions is the worldview that commanded loving your enemies, on paper at least. I admit that worldview is completely nonsensical, with nonexistent political power or social relevance. To me that makes it seem more likely to be true. Which itself makes no sense.
Sorry for the long monologue, hope all is well in your part of Ohio...
The Bernie/AOC rallies seem to drawing big crowds. I haven't been paying attention to the content because I don't take those two seriously. Something they are saying seems to be inspiring people to turn out though.
The question you're asking seems to be, what can take the place of shared belief in a higher power and a deeper meaning to the struggle? What will hold people together the way Christian beliefs held together those involved in the civil rights movement? There's no going back to that I'm pretty sure, though there is a tiny movement of a handful left intellectuals back to Christianity that is evident here on substack.
I'm not a believer and never was, and I don't see "safety and comfort" liberalism as you describe it, as inevitable in a secular world. I believe there can be meaning and a reason to struggle outside of religion. Selfish pursuit of pleasure and novel experiences in a meaningless world is not natural. It fact I see it as highly unnatural, and imposed from above, as other sources of meaning are deliberately destroyed, mainly to deliver greater profits to our rulers, both left and right. Family, land, connection to place, traditions -- all these are under attack and have been for a long time. These are things people will fight for.
I think by the time of his death MLK would have agreed with you that selfish pursuit of pleasure and novel experiences in a meaningless world is not natural and was under attack by our profit-seeking rulers, who were imposing that system from above and had been for a long time.
But I don't think he saw the necessary response as a fight, even though he led marches and protests. My guess (and it's really just a guess, at this point) is that in his mind seeing the protests as a fight against evil purveyors of profit, even for a just cause, only made people hate the enemy. That guaranteed an endless cycle of hostility in society no matter who "won." The purveyors of profit would profit from that fight. So, ironically, demonizing them as something to fight against just made them stronger in the long run.
That's what twentieth century statist Marxism became as a resistance force against profit -- demonizing the capitalists to get people fired up. It led nowhere, except to the gulag.
For MLK the alternative was to love your enemy. Not just do unto others, or love your neighbor as yourself, but literally love your enemy, turn the other cheek. I think he would have said that only one belief system ever created by human beings literally rested on loving your enemy, and on believing against all rational evidence that the creative metaphysical force sustaining all of existence wanted it that way. And that all of that was more important than owning the KKK or George Wallace or even passing another bill in Congress. I might be wrong about this part of King's thinking. I need to read more.
If it's true that only one human belief system ever really stood for loving one's enemies, and for the transformative social effects that could come from that, and King clung to that belief system in spite of everything, then maybe people who disagree with Trump today, and with the larger system that spawned him, should pay attention to that and try to learn lessons from it -- even if they can't in the end sign up for literal belief in things like the Resurrection. King couldn't either, it seems.
I'm under no illusions about what it will mean in practical terms to "pay attention" in the sense I just recommended. Outside of the lefty Christian circles you referenced, the support for Christianity as a social glue for an anti-Trump resistance movement is, indeed, zero. I would bet that the resistance will probably coalesce around AOC, Gavin Newsom, the Democratic Party's billionaires, and the network of corporate-funded nonprofits whose politics and social engineering plans helped bring us Trump in the first place. I just don't see anything good coming from that, anymore than good came from the nihilistic, thuggish resistance of the 1960s like the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground, and SDS.
And so, like MLK, I can't bring myself to sign up for the budding protest movement of the AOC industrial complex. To me, it's just a sanitized, technocracy-worshipping version of bullying 1960s radicalism. If there's to be an alternative to it, I think maybe it's less about confrontational street protests and defiance for its own sake and more about building something, based on the things you mentioned -- family, land, connection to place, traditions. One of those traditions is the worldview that commanded loving your enemies, on paper at least. I admit that worldview is completely nonsensical, with nonexistent political power or social relevance. To me that makes it seem more likely to be true. Which itself makes no sense.
Sorry for the long monologue, hope all is well in your part of Ohio...
The Bernie/AOC rallies seem to drawing big crowds. I haven't been paying attention to the content because I don't take those two seriously. Something they are saying seems to be inspiring people to turn out though.