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Martin Luther King Day
This is our newest official holiday, the only one I have seen instituted in my lifetime. Though I am an advocate of Tradition, this day provides a chance to focus on the limitations of traditional views, and our abilities to improve them. Today’s emergent spirituality is genuinely conservative, in that it seeks to preserve supra-cultural technologies of transcendence, which go back to prehistory. If these practices have been lost, displaced by cultural devices whose potency is more symbolic than practical, then our effort is one of recovery, not maintenance, and hence is also radical; “of the root”. Even a radical conservative, however, must not suppose that there are not important lessons taught in modern parlance.In honor of the occasion, I give you the dark-eyed junco, a relative of the sparrows, and a ubiquitous presence in Central Park during the Winter. This little bird is notable as an example of folk taxonomy, which is to say Traditional, as opposed to scientific, distinction. Our eastern “slate colored” type looks quite different from its western counterparts, and the various birds were always known by different names. Observers in the field have traditionally recognized them as different species, based on differences in appearance. Formalized observation (and now genetics), has shown, however, that the types interbreed where their ranges overlap, and ornithologists have combined the group into a single species. The regional variants are now considered subspecies, a term which is replacing the heavily freighted word formerly given to groups differentiated by superficial characteristics: the word “race”.
We are all the same, yet we are all different. This is a basic Mystery of Life. We know that, as a species, we are one, with an existence that transcends the individual, but our experience is of separation and individuation. I wrote, in my New Year’s piece, that “identity’s a tragedy, but it’s what we have”. Differentiation is the result of the Fall, which I identify with the Big Bang, and with the Gnostic vision of Creation. Our purpose is to return to unity, to connect every point, all at once, but our route must take us through these differences, which, along the way, we find cause to celebrate. Nevertheless, the separation of black from white is of the same order as the separation between individual and society, or between each of us and God.
Such is the nature of racial identity; it is a mystery, and so, a microcosm of The Mystery. We are a racist society to the degree that we believe that race is a distinction we should make, not to the degree that we find we can’t help but make it.
Finding paths through such a conceptual briar patch is spiritual work. Politicians can only follow after, and those who go first will be most torn by thorns. If others were sacrificed before and after him, Dr. King remains a fitting index of the cause commemorated in his name. The mobilization of social willpower through moral imperative is the closest thing to a political idea that the twentieth century produced. He is the great American exemplar of the form; a worthy student of Gandhi. Their passive resistance marks the development of a politics of asceticism, and a move away from the specificity of issues, to the generality of justice. Dr. King built a coalition not by appealing to desire, but by demonstrating the propriety of his position, compelling agreement, wielding power without force. This passage of politics from the real to the ideational domain is a glimpse of a better future, and well worth a day off for the economy.
The juncos never take a day off. Just how much they distinguish is not clear, but like us, they are largely visual creatures. Still, at their margins, they seem not to discriminate, or rather, they see the commonality beneath their varied plumages. We who maintain their names may take a lesson from the birds: that if we watch, we must be prepared to learn.