Imperfect Heroes

I tell my students every semester that our heroes are imperfect people, and some of them are complex enough to have some very good mixed with some very bad. We should still admire and aspire to those very good things, even as we recognize the very bad. And we should guard our biases in which ones we are more tempted to do one and which ones we are more tempted to do the other, without recognizing the full truth.

For example, Thomas Jefferson had some high ideals. He was instrumental in helping craft a government that recognized human rights at a level that hardly any government beforehand had done. There is much language in the documents he helped write and put together that I deeply resonate with, and there is much to be grateful in the work that he did.

At the same time, he thought he could own people. He thought he could have a sexual relationship with someone who he thought he owned, in a state where the laws gave him absolute authority over her. She wasn't a slave when the relationship began (at least not technically), but she was a child. By our standards today that would have been rape on those grounds also.

Furthermore, I'm convinced (though I know this is unpopular) that he wrongly supported an immoral war of violence against the divinely-instituted authority over him on hypocritical and inconsistent grounds, given that he justified the war by appealing to the principle that a government is illegitimate if the people don't consent (I don't think genuine Christians can agree with that, but he wasn't a Christian). The inconsistency is that he was enslaving people without their consent, thus governing over them without consent. And that authority was legally absolute, unlike King George's. Jefferson's hero John Locke would never have allowed that combination of views.

And that is all even aside from the fact that Jefferson had loathing and contempt for Christian teaching, literally cutting out the pages in his Bible that he didn't like. As a Christian, it's hard for me to have full respect for him and endorsement of him as a hero. Yet he did great good, things we can respect him for and admire him for, even if we are rightly critical of other things he thought and did.

Similarly, Immanuel Kant put forward a theory that, when applied as it is stated, was truly significant in its recognition of all human beings as having equal status morally. He says that it's always wrong to treat someone as a mere means to an end, and if you apply that consistently you have to recognize slavery as the most extreme case of that. Abolitionists used Kant's moral philosophy as a ground for abolitionism, and thus his thinking had influence in that very important way. It lies behind much of how we see basic human rights today.

Yet Kant in his younger years defended slavery. How is that possible? He had to think of Africans as lesser beings, incapable of having the moral status that puts you in the category of being a full participant in the moral community. He wrongly grounded moral status in the ability to engage in moral reasoning. That excludes people with severe cognitive disabilities as well, not to mention very young children and adults with severe dementia or brain damage. I asked a Kant scholar if he was aware of such cases as objections to his view, and it turns out in his later writings he did have ways of adjusting his views to account for that. As long as you are the sort of being who would typically develop to have moral reasoning, you have full moral status. But that doesn't account for an entire segment of human beings who, in his early view, did not have such typical development. So he unjustifiably put Africans into a sub-human category and didn't accord them the rights and moral status of other human beings.

Kant, probably more than any other intellectual of his day, helped develop the modern racial concept that is still with us today. Dividing humans along continental lines rather than much narrower ethnic lines (e.g. Germans, Italians, Swedish, English, Russian, Polish) was new in his day, and it seems many in that project of rethinking racial categories were doing it in order to justify slavery. Kant himself did support slavery as a punishment (although I'm not sure he ever defended chattel slavery) during the years he was involved in that theoretical rethinking of what races are. And he saw Africans as incapable of moral autonomy and moral reasoning, thus not having the rights and moral status that he assigned to human beings in general, not seeing them as rational beings. He was certainly a white supremacist.

But there is evidence that Kant did get better. Over the course of his life, he encountered Africans who had been enslaved,  and during their enslavement they received an education. Some of them went on to become professors at the institution he taught at. We know he would have rubbed shoulders with them and discovered that they were, in fact, capable of reason. Would the position of his younger years be able to survive such a clash with the evidence in front of him? Well, human beings are remarkably able to hold onto irrational ideas in the face of evidence, but if you look at Kant's work over time, you can see that he did stop defending slavery. He did stop saying that Africans are not rational beings, incapable of moral autonomy. We don't ever see him saying slavery is always wrong. We do see him expressing criticism of its brutality. But the most racist stuff you can find from him in his early work starts getting less so over time, and there are scholars who argue that he might have had a real change in mind over his career, backing off from some of the worst of his views. If so, there's something to recognize as good in his ability to come to better conclusions.

Altogether, though, Kant did a lot of harm in his thinking. He probably did more than any other single person to initiate the terrible views that justified some of the worst evil in the history of the world. Yet he also came up with a view that, when applied consistently, explains why any of that is wrong. And his views were in fact used as support for overcoming some of those same evils. If certain scholars are right, he even was able to see some of the wrongness of his early views and back off of them, which is to be commended if so. It's hard to have a simplistic evaluation of Kant as a person, just as it is to have one for Jefferson.

So we turn to Martin Luther King, Jr. King helped usher in many important advances in how we think about race and how we structure our society in terms of race. He did probably more than any single other person to advance the cause of racial justice in his generation. Those who didn't like him who didn't like his methods were proved empirically wrong, given the results. That includes Malcolm X in one direction and those he called white moderates in the other direction, all of whom shared his goals but who disapproved of how he went about it (in different ways in each case). And most Americans today credit him for the many advances in racial justice that the United States has had since the beginning of his public work.

Now we're at a time when many on the right find it much easier to decry King than to recognize the good he did. They point to his affairs. They note that a leaked FBI report (which we don't know actually even is an FBI report, never mind whether it's true) portrays him as a sexual abuser of women. If it's true, he participated in great evil, but of course we don't really know if it's true. They point to his plagiarism in his academic work, some of which was what earned him his Ph.D. (and for the record, Boston University, who granted him that degree, looked at evidence and acknowledged that it is real but did not judge it to be grounds of revoking his Ph.D.). They recognize that he had tendencies on issues of governance that are much further left than many of his supporters would support. I do think it's fair to see him as a democratic socialist, something like a Bernie Sanders, although I can identify several ways their views would differ.

And Christians who look at his theology rightly see the work that he did during seminary as advocating genuine heresy. He was not a Christian, at least at that time. He denied Jesus' divinity. He denied an afterlife. That's simply not Christianity. Now we don't know where he ended up, because he never wrote anything about those issues later on, either to reaffirm those views or to demonstrate that he had returned to the views the church he was raised in held. Some have argued that he couldn't have been ordained in that church without affirming orthodox theology, but we really don't know, and it's not really justifiable to claim that we do, in either direction.

I myself have my own unpopular criticisms of King. As I said of Thomas Jefferson's support for the immoral war against King George, I would say that King's actions were in the same direction. Many defend civil disobedience, and King did. I assign his defense of lawbreaking every semester in one of my classes. I understand his arguments. He thought that methods within the law were insufficient to make the changes that needed to be made, and he thought nonviolent lawbreaking was the only way to get change. He was empirically proved right that his methods could work. But that doesn't make them okay. I don't think they are compatible with a Christian view of how we interact with an unjust government. I think the white moderates that he criticized in his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" were actually correct in their view of lawbreaking, although he was right to point out that they should be doing far more than they were. They were content to do nothing and use his lawbreaking as a way to excuse that. Many people disagree with me on this, I am aware. But I think Rosa Parks was wrong not to give up her seat. That's not how Christians are taught to behave. I think protesting where an ordinance says you can't protest is wrong. I would extend this to Renee Good's protest of putting her vehicle in the way of ICE vehicles (not that murdering her was a legitimate response either, and it was murder) and to the defenders or Renee Good who invaded a church service yesterday, a clear act of trespass on private property with a refusal to leave when told to do so by the owners of that property. In all of these cases, I think the governing authorities can charge the person with a crime, and they are right to do so. I am not with King in his view of civil disobedience. But I am aware that my particular evaluation of which things about him are good and bad is not going to line up with many people's.

In any case, it seems like we can put King in the same category (at least broadly construed) of receiving a mixed evaluation as Jefferson or Kant. And there are many, many others that we can say the same thing about. I would put John Brown and Christopher Columbus in the same category, for example. I could have easily spent several paragraphs on them or on James II, Martin Luther, Augustine, Jordan Peterson, John MacArthur, or Pope Francis. We should affirm what King got right and the many good things he did. We should recognize that his methods, whether we agree with them or not, achieved much good. And we can recognize bad in him. He was a flaw person. He probably wasn't a Christian, at least in his younger years. His profession of Christianity was thus hypocritical. He was an adulterer. There is some (but it's unclear how strong) evidence that he might have been an abuser or delighter in others' abuse of women. Maybe. He was certainly a plagiarist. But none of those things are reasons to dismiss the others of those things. He was a human being, an imperfect one, whose good we can celebrate and whose bad we can lament. There's no room for giving him a purely glowing evaluation, and there's also no room for giving him a purely scathing evaluation. Both are dishonest. In this life, we are all imperfect, and we are all capable of doing good, sometimes even great good, while in other ways being truly evil or at least highly problematic. The problem lies in when we let out partisan identifications determine which people get which evaluation. If we are glowing about Jefferson and scathing against King, I suspect there is partisan bias behind that. The same goes with those who are glowing about King but scathing against Jefferson. And you can substitute in the names I listed above to test this out in your own evaluations of people.

I propose that we recognize the full range of good and bad in important and influential figures. We don't make MLK Day about just celebrating King, but we recognize his imperfections. But we also don't use it as an occasion to pretend that he was the height of all evil and did nothing good worth celebrating, because that is fundamentally dishonest.