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As the clusterfuck of this last year has unfolded, when I’ve pushed back the curtains of anger and despair—even of hope—that add to my confusion rather than dispel it, I keep having the sensation of missing something. What am I not seeing as I read the headlines, watch the clips, listen to the commentators? What am I not seeing?
I’ve just finished a short book that suggests a clarifying answer. Radical Universalism: Beyond Identity by Omri Boehm, an Israeli-American professor of philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York. It’s definitely an academic book; my own tastes run to fewer footnotes and perhaps fewer arguments with scholarly precursors. But tastes aren’t always reliable guides to value, and I am very glad to have read this book. I think you will be too.
Boehm uses three main texts to explore the ways liberalism has evolved to permit so many repugnant deeds justified in the name of democracy, of majority rule, of law and legitimacy: the character of Abraham in the Hebrew bible who disobeyed and argued with God when the Divine dictated cruel actions; Immanuel Kant’s writings on the Enlightenment (Boehm has written extensively about Kant); and the Declaration of Independence. He also draws on many other writings including those of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
It is Dr. King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail that contains the words that to me best convey Boehm’s main point. In April, 1963, a group of Birmingham, AL, clergy chastised Dr. King for speaking out against the war in Vietnam. If you haven’t already read it, here is “Beyond Vietnam—A Time to Break Silence,” the speech given earlier that month at a meeting of Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam that most completely expresses his reasons for doing so:
“I have tried to make it clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or even more, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends. . . .
“The . . . great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice. . . .
“An unjust law is no law at all.”
All of the sources Boehm uses point to the same higher truth, that authority which is understood to be legitimated by a majority consensus—to be “legal” as that term is often used—is illegitimate if it is not guided by an ultimate, undeniable, and universal ethic. Through the book, Boehm returns to slavery as an especially illuminating case in point. It is never right, never ethical, to purchase, own, or sell another human being, despite there having been duly voted upon legislation in certain times and places that authorized that crime against humanity.
I didn’t know that before the Civil War, Lincoln had a scheme to end slavery by purchasing the enslaved and compensating slaveholders for the consequent loss of labor. Boehm points out that “The idea that slaves should have been emancipated by negotiation and purchase, liberating them in a long process of compensation to slave owners, tax reductions to Southern states that diminish slavery, and so forth—reinforces the assumption that four million humans were in the first place owned by right.”
A meme by the historian Heather Cox Richarson has been making the rounds: “The correct response to Dachau was not better training for the guards.”
This is what I have been missing, that calls for better training, documentation, accountability for ICE and Border Control Agents implicitly legitimate the existence of a federal force authorized to occupy US cities, to invade homes and businesses, to terrorize, beat, gas, and murder ordinary people peacefully assembling and exercising their freedom of speech.
I am glad that some courts have rendered decisions that pause or in some way remedy this evil. I applaud the legal organizations bringing such energy and dedication to this cause. But there is no way that the most important question for this nation is whether all this is legal. Legal or not, it is deeply, appallingly wrong, a violation of the fundamental nature and lives of human beings.
I admire Boehm’s treatment of the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, in which he breaks the second sentence down to a logical proposition that clearly makes equal rights a higher good than the existence of a government that undermines them. The right to pursue higher truth and higher love is embedded in this founding document:
All men are created equal;
Governments are created to secure their equal rights;
therefore, When any government undermines these rights, the right to abolish the law and revolt follow.
Boehm has little time for identitarians (he calls them identarians) who claim these principles are meaningless because only the rights of men are asserted and Jefferson, among other framers, violated even these by owning slaves. That many of the historic figures who articulated such propositions about universal truth were racists and sexists is not in dispute. But it’s a clumsy and simplistic artifact of our polarized cancel-culture moment to say this erases the beautiful principle of universalism which we have the opportunity to enact in these times.
I can’t properly depict a book in a blog, but I can recommend reading it and considering whether you, like me, have sometimes lost sight of the higher truth and higher love that can guide this country past the error of caring more about order than justice. I don’t doubt that most Democrats in Congress feel hampered in their ability to act to stop the MAGA destruction of democracy by the notion that rules and order must be preserved even if in practice they violate truth, freedom, and human rights. But like Lincoln’s plan to end slavery by buying human beings, this way of acting legitimates an illegitimate order.
One thing I’m thinking about is Boehm’s call to recognize duty as well as rights. “Liberals,” he writes, “rarely argue for some hard universal duty for all humans that may well demand that they act against their interests—it usually does. Instead, they invoke their right as citizens to refrain from doing just that.” If we keep leaning into that right, I dread to see what may come.
“Where Can a Man Go from Here?” by Coco Montoya.