The Real Reason Civil Rights Won

This is my third and final column on The True and Only Heaven, the large volume by the late Christopher Lasch. The book is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. To me, it is a massive and overlooked masterpiece that diagnosed the problems of modern American culture with more perception than any other books of its time -- and perhaps of our time as well.

To oversimplify, Lasch argued that Americans have gotten to a point where we refuse to discuss "the forbidden topic -- limits." The disease of progressivism has infected both the left and the right. The right argues that low taxes will lead to an inexorably expanding economy. The left won't be happy until, well, the left will never be happy.

In my view, the most compelling chapter in The True and Only Heaven is "The Spiritual Discipline Against Resentment." In it, Lasch argues against the liberal and enlightenment propositions that human beings will achieve happiness through scientific progress and by shedding local attachments in favor of universal humanity.

Lasch discusses the work of Harvey Cox, whose 1960s book The Secular City argued that working for a universal community "undermined tribal idolatries and made possible a higher form of religious life." Lasch was having none of it: "Cox's thesis -- secularization as the path to true faith -- did not lack ingenuity; but it ignored the possibility that ultimate loyalty to the creator of being has to be grounded in loyalty to family and friends, to a particular piece of earth, and to a particular craft or calling." Moreover, man's scientific "mastery" over nature would not bring happiness -- to the contrary, it has "deprived individuals of any mastery over the concrete, immediate conditions of their existence."

It was in Lasch's defense of "tribalism" that the truly unique nature of the Civil Rights movement is revealed. Had the movement been simply a call for universal brotherhood or individual rights, it may have failed. Instead, it was a movement that had the very specific characteristics of a very particular people: Christian Southern blacks.

"Culturally backward by Cox's enlightened standards," Lasch observes, "Southern blacks lived in a culture full of 'tribal residues'; yet they showed more confidence in the goodness of things -- in the existence of some creative force that works for universal wholeness, in the words of Martin Luther King Jr -- than those who enjoyed fuller access to the fruits of scientific enlightenment."

A major part of the outlook of blacks was the avoidance of resentment. Civil rights leaders stepped outside the circle of retribution, treating their opponents as fellow Southerners as well as fellow human beings. Martin Luther King referred to his home as the "beloved South."

In this way, King could present the movement as an attempt of one Southerner to help his homeland shed the shame that was embarrassing it in the eyes of the world. And by confronting his oppressors with nonviolence -- and in essence treating his attackers as people who, for all their sin, were loved by God -- King avoid the trap of retribution and resentment.

However, as Lasch points out, after the death of King the Civil Rights movement, and liberalism itself, became about revenge, rage, resentment and social engineering. Rather than cooling resentment, programs like bussing and affirmative action -- usually enforced by white elites -- actually enflamed it by making the supporters seem condescending and the recipients inferior.

My father was a JFK Democrat back when Democrats could be anticommunist and pro-life. He taught his kids that racism is a vile sin and the province of the ignorant. But I learned that black people were just like me not necessarily by his speeches, but from the way my father respected Petey Greene.

Greene was a brilliant, bombastic, intense, poetic and hilarious TV and radio host in Washington, D.C. in the late 1970s. (Greene, who died in 1984, was the subject of the Don Cheadle movie Talk to Me.) Greene was the picture of political incorrectness -- as seen in perhaps his most famous clip is his instruction on "How to Eat a Watermelon."

My father liked to watch the show "Petey Greene's Washington," and watching him watch Petey I saw, not an immaculate example of the brotherhood of man, but an appreciation of a local character who was raised in our home town. I saw one man, my father, appreciating the humor and wisdom of another man, without condescension or misplaced and patronizing pity.

Similar to how Martin Luther King addressed Southerners, white and black, as equals, and thus challenged whites to be ashamed of how the South appeared to the rest of the world, Petey made those of us living in the white suburbs of Washington to think about the problems in our own community, in our own city, and feel embarrassed by the way blacks were being treated in our own town. It hurt our pride and stirred our conscience because this was not some abstract declaration about universal peace and justice -- it was suffering in our own backyard.

As much as liberals, in all their smugness and obsession with black authenticity, may deny it (you couldn't possibly identify with the black experience!), for Washingtonians -- all Washingtonians -- Petey felt like one of us. As Lasch might out it, we were loyal to a particular piece of earth -- Washington -- and Petey represented our piece.

Of course, it's possible to extrapolate this, somewhat, to loyalty to the larger American family. This is why I can't get too worked up when Fox News parades out an outrage from some lunatic academic or communist. Sure, these ideas are dangerous, but lot of times these are just silly, resentful minor characters in the American community.

Charles Krauthammer nailed it a few months back when he was asked about the communist Van Jones, who worked in the Obama administration. Krauthammer said -- and I am paraphrasing from memory -- "Look, every administration has a few communists in it."

It was spot-on. Most of these people are not worth the time. They remind me of a line Thomas Merton once used about secular humanists. They are full of love and mercy when it comes to the needs of the abstract, universal human family, but absolutely ruthless when it comes to the treatment of individual human beings.