The universe just is. King is wrong about that, and while it sounds nice, and is perhaps comforting when the situation appears hopeless, it is nonsense.

Last edited Fri Jun 26, 2015, 12:01 PM - Edit history (1)

He was not opining on the nature of the physical universe in the way an astrophysicist or other scientist would. He was merely commenting on the shift in the moral conclusions of human beings, our "moral universe", over time and how that shift is almost always towards greater freedom and equality.

King lived through a transformative era and witnessed the enactment of the core civil rights legislation and Supreme Court decisions that abolished segregation. Today we saw a landmark ruling that has transformed lgbt equality in similar fashion. But we are also in an era where the state has vastly increased its surveillance technological capacity and has used that capacity to put all of us under continuous monitoring. We are also in an era where a militarized police force takes our lives from us on a whim and without, almost always, any official repercussions. We are also in an era where some of the landmark civil rights legislation of the 60s has been eviscerated, for example the voting rights act, and the many successful assaults on affirmative action. We are in an era where center right neoliberalism dominates and continues to dismantle the social systems established in the first 80 years of the 20th century.

There is no moral arc. It is a random walk.