“Southern trees bear a strange fruit. Blood on the leaves, blood at the root.” As I pondered King’s sermon “Shattered Dreams,” the universe was sending signs to me, signs that calling out my endangered dreams of racial justice for blacks and Jews at this symposium revisiting Reverend King’s sermons somehow accorded with its intention. My wife Debra had just been telling me the story of Abel Meeropol, the Bronx-born Jewish poet and school teacher, who wrote the lyrics for “strange fruit,” a haunting poem about lynching that Billy Holiday first hesitantly sang in 1939 at the Café Society in Greenwich Village, the first racially integrated night club in America. Strange Fruit became her closing song; the waiters stopped all food and drink service; the room went totally dark, her eyes closed shut during the musical introduction. The first time she sang the song, nobody clapped at first. Meeropol was a member of the communist party, later adopting Ethel and Julius Rosenberg’s two sons after their parents’ execution in 1953. Harry Anslinger, the racist head of the Federal Bureau of the Narcotics, who initiated the war on drugs, forbid Holiday from ever singing that song again. She refused, demanding that it be included in every play list contract. Anslinger never stopped trying to shut her down. Finally in 1947, Holiday was arrested and sent to prison for a year for heroin possession. She was forbidden from ever playing a liquor-serving club again. Upon her release, she played a standing room only Carnegie Hall.
That was the year I was born in Manhattan. Before WWII my parents had both been members of the Communist Party until the Hitler-Stalin pact. My father landed at Normandy to fight the Nazis. The party had sent my mother into Nazi meetings in Central Park; they thought that any man who dared enter to speak his outrage would not come out alive. Debra telling that story seemed like a signal emitted from the global mind that the slow and bloody ascent of justice was under threat, that I was being called to bear witness and my friend Jon Greenberg wanted me to look for guidance in King’s sermons on to how to be to fight it off.
It is certainly true that the historical “arc of the moral universe” is stitched with contradictory sociological codes, but to believe that it ultimately bends towards justice, as Reverend King told his followers, may quicken our will, may complement our fragile courage. That generations of slaves believed that transcendental forces stood with them testifies to the courage of their collective imagination. But there is no reason to believe that it is true. More likely such a notion is a political fairy tale for adults, including me. King almost intimates as much when he calls us to be courageous, to recognize “the necessity of suffering in a righteous cause.” “Almost anything that happens to us,” he says, “may be woven into the purposes of God.” Yes, exactly so. The events that happen to us; the actions that we take can all be woven into divine purposes. But which purposes? There are so many.
The many to many relation between human actions and divine purposes is so dense, so intricate, so congested. Religious Jews settling Judea and Samaria have often understood the Holocaust as an exasperated God’s finally shoving we Jews to Zion, Judea and Samaria the ancient homeland, to occupy all Palestinian lands. Today’s proponents of political disenfranchisement of blacks in the United States or Muslims in mother India, believe that God or the gods are on their side, that the telos of history points in the dark direction they want to go.
There are so many goods. And these goods are not independent entities; in our worlds they are always assembled. One consequence is that the basis of good need not be good. Ralph Waldo Emerson vehemently opposed slavery, but he did so on the basis that all humans participate in divine power, that we are designed to be self-reliant, “to be self-sustained, to need no gift, no foreign force.” He divinized private property, the “cruel kindness” of the capitalist market, believing that poor deserved what they got (McCarraher, 2019: 169). For Emerson, who divinized man, divine power pulses through the transfers of coin in the marketplace. Human slavery may not be ordained; but wage slavery with its exploitation and systematic impoverishment is part of the divine order. The working poor deserve their plight.
Those white Christian nationalists who are today carving out redoubts in Idaho and Oregon where they have stashed arms and are capturing the commanding heights — the board of supervisors, the registrar of voters, and the school boards, believe they can discern God’s providence. It is ugly; it is evil. They are banning books, arresting women who refuse to carry a stillborn to term, erasing slavery and the struggle for freedom from public history, once again stripping blacks of the right to vote or refusing to count their votes equally, spreading anti-semitic conspiracies such that Jews are being shot right in front of our synagogues.
King preached: “Our refusal to be stopped, our ‘courage to be,’ our courage to go on ‘in spite of,’ reveal the divine image within us.” I agree, but not the way he construes it. That the former president appears on national television with a baseball bat to prefigure and provoke a potentially murderous, vigilante attack on the black attorney general who has indicted him for violating the law, that he regularly alludes to antisemitic conspiracy to explain and mobilize against the legal attack on him, that Israel, the country I grew up believing a beleaguered democratic nation-state for my people has chosen apartheid and authoritarianism, these are my shatterings. I mourn and rage against what my fellow American citizens and my fellow Jews are doing. But I have a problem. I do not believe that God is an anthropomorphic force who has purposes, who can be my personal God. He does not choose me, or us, or them. I cannot be animated by a belief that there is, as King says, a door to another world, a belief that makes it possible to absorb the pains of this world. Yet I want what King wants and I want to make his way of imagining the order of the universe work for me. My dreams are breaking, the nightmares are so real and so incomprehensible. For me the matter is urgent. I need a ground on which to stand and act in this world.
My embrace of King rests on the “courage to be,” where the nature of human being is the most important stake of all. It is to something like God to which I am bound in the goods by which I am animated, goods that move me, divine images within me. Such goods are before me and after me. They are not entities, not phemonenal, not beings. In my understanding our being is institutional. Institutional practices – like buying and selling goods, voting for representatives, loving partners and caring for babies, healing bodies, extracting truths, worshipping God, feeding the hungry, defending territory by force– are all grounded in non-phenomenal goods, both desirable and real, objectives and objective. Like an apophatic god, one not reduced to a being, but a full nothing, das Nichts, and here I withdraw myself from Heidegger’s language that reveals as it withdraws from beings. Something In contrast to the presence of things, an institutional substance is an absent presence towards and around which practice incessantly moves, known only through this movement. This is the mysterious core of an institutional logic, the marvel of our doing, that we can recognize and say that this is that, that institutional substances, the basis of institutional being, give us the isness and the oughtness of life that we can take for granted and depend upon to get on with just about everything. These absent presences are known in practice, really layered networks of practice, in the subjectification and objectification they require and afford. Who I am is co-constitutive of what moves me manifest in what I do. I call these teleo-ontologies – in their conjoint oughtness and isness – institutional substances. I refer to substances like knowledge, love, justice, market value, sovereignty, popular representation, beauty. They are real and they are good. You cannot know them as entities or a sum or rules; you can only know them in practice. Through institutional logics, the constellations of practices informed by these institutional substances, we are given a being beyond the creatural. These substances are excessive to the practices through which they are produced or performed and so, in consequence, are we. They are phenomenologically eternal. Not only is it inoperable to say to somebody that you will love them for the week; a lover assumes that the reality of love itself predates and postdates his very existence. He knows that without such substances in the world, it will not be worth living here, or living at all. Infinite hope is immanent to our institutional being; so are agency and historical possibility.
We live in a period where gods are being harnessed to geo-political struggle. The moral universe, let alone its arc, seems at the risk of breaking apart into multiple Manicheanisms. Once again we are sliding towards world war and civil war as well. For me the moral engine of our world is our ability to make goods into gods, to live for them and to keep them alive within us, to as King urges, sustain “the infinite hope for them” in the midst of “finite disappointments,” rather than to make god into goods, to make an infinite fullness, a blinding inexplicable light that can break into the creaturely world, overturning all regularities. This polytheistic challenge includes the difficulty of how the one Gods should be folded into constellations in which we live. This casting knits the necessity and hence the liberty to choose the world in which we want to live and the person we wish to be, rather than a monistic world with the presumption of one way. We must face the insoluble problems of the coexistence of difference, and the inherent tendency to hierarchy, closure, certainty, and coercion. We face the gargantuan task to work through the ways in which different goods either depend on each other or can coexist, or contradict and must be kept separate, or selectively weakened or even destroyed, securing a peace enforced by higher authorities. It is morally more complex to live in this new world, saturated with undecidables and indeterminacies. But it is alive and vibrant in its questions, in what is at stake, in needing to manage the plurality both out there and within ourselves. This knits democracy into the order of the world as a requirement of existence in its complex institutional plurality. Monotheism is dangerous, affording coercion in the face of difference, centralization in the enforcement of orthodoxy. The world ruled by one God is pushing us towards authoritarian religious ethno-nationalisms, the apotheosis of power over law or democracy, wars that nobody will win. Either we will destroy each other with war, burn and asphyxiate large swaths of our populace, push the urgency of justice to the margins, or we will celebrate the goods that we have built over centuries and learn to live with and for them. These goods have been given to us, by ourselves. Nonetheless, they are miracles, sources of grace, gifts for which no one of us can claim authorship. There is no one giver, no one super person with a purpose. These goods are our gods to whom we sacrifice our lives. We choose and cherish them, giving our lives in their service, believing that they are real, worthy and actionable.
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