There are two modern day heroes whose work and philosophies I study—Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi. Both were involved in a lifetime of passionate work trying to seek justice. Our country celebrates Martin Luther King tomorrow.
King received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. The Nobel winners give an acceptance speech. King’s is above and is worthy of taking a few minutes to watch and contemplate.
There is also a lecture given by the award winners where they describe the history and background of their discoveries and prize-awarded work. I suggest that King’s Nobel prize lecture is still relevant today. One part of that lecture noted:
Modern man has brought this whole world to an awe-inspiring threshold of the future. He has reached new and astonishing peaks of scientific success. He has produced machines that think and instruments that peer into the unfathomable ranges of interstellar space. He has built gigantic bridges to span the seas and gargantuan buildings to kiss the skies. His airplanes and spaceships have dwarfed distance, placed time in chains, and carved highways through the stratosphere. This is a dazzling picture of modern man’s scientific and technological progress.
Yet, in spite of these spectacular strides in science and technology, and still unlimited ones to come, something basic is missing. There is a sort of poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance. The richer we have become materially, the poorer we have become morally and spiritually. We have learned to fly the air like birds and swim the sea like fish, but we have not learned the simple art of living together as brothers.
Every man lives in two realms, the internal and the external. The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion. The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms, and instrumentalities by means of which we live. Our problem today is that we have allowed the internal to become lost in the external. We have allowed the means by which we live to outdistance the ends for which we live. So much of modern life can be summarized in that arresting dictum of the poet Thoreau1: ‘Improved means to an unimproved end’. This is the serious predicament, the deep and haunting problem confronting modern man. If we are to survive today, our moral and spiritual ‘lag’ must be eliminated. Enlarged material powers spell enlarged peril if there is not proportionate growth of the soul. When the ‘without’ of man’s nature subjugates the ‘within’, dark storm clouds begin to form in the world.
King’s work also impacted property insurance as I will explain in tomorrow’s post.
Thought For the Day
The time is always right to do what is right.
—Martin Luther King, Jr.