The conservative nature of progress

There's a common genre of articles and presentations proclaiming that everything we think we know is wrong. They often focus on our cognitive biases.  There are, of course, valid points in such articles. Human fallibility is real, and old knowledge often has to be replaced. At the same time, if everything we think we know is wrong, then what does progress mean? If we are not just fallible but incompetent then how can we make progress? If our minds are too limited to have learned anything correctly before, how are we going to learn anything correctly now.

Conservatism at its best is about the notion that we can actually have at least some degree of confidence in time-tested insights. For all its skepticism of new ideas, there's also the possibility that when genuine progress is made it can be preserved and serve as a foundation for the next advance. That is a far more progressive ideology than the premise that the next breathless enthusiast in a conference room can overturn everything (for a fee).

Thoughts on MLK thus far

I'm a few chapters into the MLK book. I don't have many specific points to highlight (aside from one, below), but I will note that his thought was far more complex than that one line from that one speech that everyone quotes as an argument for color-blindness.  There's no denying that he wanted to work toward color-blindness, or work alongside people of all races in the present. At the same time, he never acted as though history could just be hand-waved away. He was quite adamant about the burden that history had imposed specifically upon African Americans, and how it made their advancement much harder than the advancement of Irish, Italian, Polish, or even Jewish Americans in the face of discrimination.

But he was also not an apologist for pathologies of crime, broken families, etc. in African American communities. He would argue adamantly that these things were rooted in history, argue adamantly that the government must remedy this, but also argue adamantly that while pushing for the government to remedy this the African American community must also work on it themselves.  In short, he went easy on nobody. A liberal could point to where he argued for white people to recognize their responsibilities and the role of history. A conservative could point to where he argued for African Americans to do everything possible for themselves. A relativist could point to where he recognized unique historical circumstances. An absolutist could note his firm adherence to Christian morality and personal responsibility. It was a far more complex take than anybody looking for a simple partisan box to slot him into. What else would you expect from one of the sharpest minds and best Christian teachers of the 20th century?

One specific point that I found interesting was where he noted that the challenges of automation pointed to the need for workers of all races to cooperate politically. It is a point that has been salient for centuries (water and wind power were automating tasks long before "machine learning" became a buzzword) but has certainly not become less salient. I don't claim to know what he and Andrew Yang would say to each other if they met, but I would love to overhear that conversation.  I suspect that there would be many areas of distinction and differences of emphasis, but both of them would recognize the significance of some key questions.

Also, he repeatedly condemns the Vietnam war, and the way that the government spends far more money producing a Vietnamese corpse than it spends uplifting a poor American. A Christian indeed.

Next book: Where do we go from here--chaos or community?

I gave up on Rene Girard. I'm reading Martin Luther King's final book, titled Where Do We Go From Here--Chaos or Community? The first chapter was a recounting of the state of black America in 1967, focusing on the stark economic and educational inequalities remaining after the lifting of formal legal inequality. He knew that fixing those problems, involving stubborn facts on the ground, and threats to economic interests, would take far more work than fixing the formal legal inequalities.

The second chapter, which I'm partway through, discusses the challenges of keeping people focused on non-violent resistance in the 1960's. This passage is striking:

Over the last decade they have seen America applauding non-violence whenever the Negroes have practiced it. They have watched it being praised in the sit-in movements of 1960, in the Freedom Rides of 1961, in the Albany movement of 1962, in the Birmingham movement of 1963 and in the Selma movement of 1965. But then these same black young men and women have watched as America sends black young men to burn Vietnamese with napalm, to slaughter men, women and children; and they wonder what kind of nation it is that applauds nonviolence whenever Negroes face white people in the streets of the United States but then applauds violence and burning and death when these same Negroes are sent to the field of Vietnam.

All of this represents disappointment lifted to astronomical proportions.  It is disappointment with timid white moderates who feel that they can set the timetable for the Negro's freedom. It is disappointment with a federal administration that seems more concerned about winning an ill-considered war in Vietnam than about winning the war against poverty here at home.

Yep, he was definitely a follower of the Carpenter from Nazareth. And that last sentence (highlighted here, but not in the original) could be written about almost any era of US history, if the word "Vietnam" were replaced with some other country.