MLK Day 2020

Why liberation?  Because unless we are free, we cannot flourish and cannot come to the fullness of our virtues.  Without freedom our virtues are not fully our own; they are contingent and can be controlled by another.  An act of generosity can be undone; an act of love can be outlawed or prevented; justice can be thwarted; wisdom can be limited.  Freedom is the first virtue upon which the others, acts of our free will, depend.  Liberation is the act of resistance to that which would make one unfree and is therefore key to maintaining our freedom and allowing ourselves to flourish. 

Reading Dr. King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail, I sense that I am experiencing a mystery, something miraculous.  Here is a black man in the Jim Crow south, sitting behind prison bars, and yet he is free because he possessed an interior freedom.  He is not free in the external sense – he cannot go for a walk down the street or perhaps order a cup of coffee from the white lunch counter.  Yet his words, his thoughts, his actions, constrained as they are, are the mark of a free man.  Both interior and exterior freedom are important.  Of course, we want to possess and maintain exterior freedom, but when we don’t, interior freedom allows us to take an act of liberation, an act that will make us free internally and externally.  When we read Dr. King’s letter, we are reading many things at once, but fundamental to them all is a man going through the act of liberation, of setting himself free, which is part of why we find it so compelling.

Liberation comes from the Latin word liberatio.  It is most closely connected to the Latin libertas – English “liberty.”  The usage of liberatio goes back to classical Rome, including such authors as Cicero and Quintilian.  It means to be set free from something.  Liberation-liberatio is a word that asks a question – to be set free from what?  In Latin and English usages, a whole range of answers to this question can be easily provided – debt, jail, patriarchy, work, religion, a king, delusion, propaganda, a boss, hatred, and so on.  A practically endless list could be provided.  We even playfully talk about ‘liberating’ something when we are stealing it for an ostensibly just reason, say a six-pack of beer from a fraternity house refrigerator.  Usually though, liberation is about something more serious, such as addiction, an abusive spouse, or a concentration camp.  For our purposes here, to the question – liberation from what? – the most exhaustive answer is – liberation from a master.  Liberation from a master that would control us, keep us down, dictate our lives.

Why now?  Because we simply cannot wait to be free.  We spend our lives daily asserting our freedom and liberating ourselves from those things that would oppress us, chain us, and bind us.  Liberty and its opposite, servitude, can exist in past, present, and future, but liberation exists primarily in the present.  Sure, we can talk in a historical sense of someone being liberated in the past, such as the emancipation of a political prisoner, or we could look back at a time when we felt liberated from an addiction.  Still liberation is the always present act of making oneself free.  The question – am I free from a master? – can only be answered in the present.  We can speak of being free, of possessing liberty, but these are only contingent states of existence.  Liberation is the on-going act of asserting and claiming one’s freedom without which there is neither freedom nor liberty. 

Anarchist folk-singer Utah Phillips, paraphrasing a fellow-worker, says, “Freedom is something you assume, then you wait for someone to take it away.  The extent to which you resist is the extent to which you are free.”  There is a lot of truth in this statement, but I would add that one does not have to wait too long for someone or something trying to take away one’s freedom.  I do not wish to suggest that every little inconvenience is oppressive – my alarm clock, the speed limit, a request from my boss, and so on.  I also do not wish to suggest that we are constantly beset only by forces looking to strip us of our liberty, for the tools for our liberation surround us.  Yet freedom, which may disappear dramatically as when the Gestapo or the slave-traders arrive, just as often slips away little by little imperceptibly.  Vigilance is the virtue of the liberated.

In his letter, Dr. King mentions Socrates, who sitting in his Athenian jail cell was ostensibly an imprisoned man, but by his words and actions he revealed himself a free man, more free than those walking around outside his prison.  Undoubtedly, Socrates and others like him would prefer to be at liberty in the fresh sunlight of the day, but all those who appear free are not, and all those who appear in servitude are not enslaved.  There is a paradox here: the truly free person will be free wherever they are, even in a jail cell.  That paradox, however, creates an ethical dilemma for the rest of us, for it is unjust that the free be imprisoned; it is an oxymoron that cannot stand.  Even more, our liberation is bound up with the liberation of others.  We cannot become free when others are unjustly imprisoned; putting another in shackles unjustly can never be an act of liberation for the jailer or society. 

If Socrates and Dr. King can be free, even when sitting in a jail cell, then perhaps you and I can find a way to our own liberation, which may involve keeping Socrates and the Dr. Kings of the world out of their jail cells.

There is something for us to ponder until next time.  It may well be a paradox or oxymoron for the free to be imprisoned, but is there any necessity that the free person also be a just person, or for the free to be innocent?

Resources

Find Dr. King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail here.

Check out my article on Socrates and Dr. King: “A Philology of Liberation: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as a Reader of the Classics.” Verbum Incarnatum: An Academic Journal of Social Justice 4 (2010): 124-144.  This article was written in the heady days of Barack Obama’s election, so it begins rather starry-eyed.  The realities of U.S. race relations have become all too apparent in the days since his inauguration in 2009.  I, like many, regret being so naïve about where we were headed.

For Utah Phillips’ words, see John Malkin’s Sounds of Freedom: Musicians on Spirituality & Social Change, also on “Direct Action” from Fellow Workers, his collaboration with Ani DiFranco.  This is a beautiful, educational, and inspiring collaboration, a follow-up to their The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere.

To learn more about the trial and death of Socrates, read Plato’s dialogues The Euthyphro, The Apology, The Crito and The Phaedo.  Check out Jacque Louis David’s famous painting The Death of Socrates.