There are two modern-day heroes whose work and philosophies I examine—Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi. Each had been concerned in a lifetime of passionate work making an attempt to hunt justice. Our nation celebrates Martin Luther King tomorrow.
King obtained the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. The Nobel winners give an acceptance speech. King’s is above and is worthy of taking a couple of minutes to observe and ponder.
There’s additionally a lecture given by the award winners the place they describe the historical past and background of their discoveries and prize-awarded work. I recommend that King’s Nobel prize lecture remains to be related at the moment. One a part of that lecture famous:
Fashionable man has introduced this entire world to an awe-inspiring threshold of the longer term. He has reached new and astonishing peaks of scientific success. He has produced machines that suppose and devices that peer into the unfathomable ranges of interstellar house. He has constructed gigantic bridges to span the seas and gargantuan buildings to kiss the skies. His airplanes and spaceships have dwarfed distance, positioned time in chains, and carved highways by way of the stratosphere. It is a dazzling image of recent man’s scientific and technological progress.
But, despite these spectacular strides in science and know-how, and nonetheless limitless ones to come back, one thing fundamental is lacking. There’s a type of poverty of the spirit which stands in obvious distinction to our scientific and technological abundance. The richer we now have develop into materially, the poorer we now have develop into morally and spiritually. Now we have discovered to fly the air like birds and swim the ocean like fish, however we now have not discovered the easy artwork of dwelling collectively as brothers.
Each man lives in two realms, the interior and the exterior. The inner is that realm of religious ends expressed in artwork, literature, morals, and faith. The exterior is that advanced of gadgets, strategies, mechanisms, and instrumentalities via which we dwell. Our drawback at the moment is that we now have allowed the interior to develop into misplaced within the exterior. Now we have allowed the means by which we dwell to outdistance the ends for which we dwell. A lot of recent life may be summarized in that arresting dictum of the poet Thoreau1: ‘Improved means to an unimproved finish’. That is the intense predicament, the deep and haunting drawback confronting fashionable man. If we’re to outlive at the moment, our ethical and religious ‘lag’ have to be eradicated. Enlarged materials powers spell enlarged peril if there’s not proportionate progress of the soul. When the ‘with out’ of man’s nature subjugates the ‘inside’, darkish storm clouds start to kind on this planet.
King’s work additionally impacted property insurance coverage as I’ll clarify in tomorrow’s submit.
Thought For the Day
The time is all the time proper to do what is true.
—Martin Luther King, Jr.