The Drum Major Instinct
During Martin Luther King’s funeral, nationally televised from the Ebenezer Baptist Church, a eulogizer explained what King would have wanted at his funeral. The eulogizer starts by saying that King wouldn’t have wanted a long eulogy, and that he wouldn’t have wanted mentions of his Nobel prize or his doctorate in systematic theology. What King really would’ve wanted, the eulogizer continues, was for “somebody to mention that Martin Luther King Jr. tried to give his life serving others.. for somebody to say that Martin Luther King Jr. tried to love somebody.” He would’ve wanted somebody to mention that he tried to feed the hungry and clothe the naked. The eulogy ultimately describes King as a drum major for justice, for peace, and for righteousness, and closes by saying that “all of the other shallow things will not matter.” The eulogizer spoke powerfully, with a deep, commanding voice that rolled like thunder across plains. It’s difficult not to be moved when you hear a recording, even more than 50 years removed from the event. And we can be pretty confident that this was indeed what King would have wanted said at his funeral, because the eulogy itself was a recording of King, taken from a sermon given two months earlier by King at that very same pulpit in Ebenezer Baptist Church. [1]
The Drum Major Instinct, as the sermon is known, was made famous by this usage at his funeral – King’s explicit description of how he would like to be remembered, used to emphasize the sermon’s message in its conclusion, has an eerie power and emotional resonance to it given the nearness of his death. It’s only twenty minutes long, and freely available online.
It’s worth getting a few things out of the way up front. To begin with, I intend to focus primarily on the concept of the eponymous “Drum Major” Instinct, and less on the rhetorical force of the sermon itself. I don’t think I’ll need to convince anyone that MLK is an effective public speaker, and suffice it to say that the Drum Major Instinct is an effective piece of oratory. Listening to and getting emotional over an MLK speech on Youtube is in fact kind of funny and embarrassing, which is a shame [2], but I will go ahead and say that if you can listen to the entire sermon and not get a little fired up as his voice crescendos at the end, you can probably just close this review now.
Another point worth mentioning is that the Drum Major Instinct is overtly Christian in a way that my mythologized public-education knowledge of King sometimes obscures. Like, obviously he’s a Christian, but I tend to think of King as a civil rights activist first and foremost, and when he uses terms like “God’s children” I sometimes forget that these are much more than just rhetorical flourishes towards generic liberal humanist ideals. Christianity seems to be having a bit of a moment, albeit this moment is a temporary slowdown in the heretofore seemingly inexorable march towards a glorious secular future, which inexorable march perhaps being overstated among top-tax-bracket blog-reading internet nerds when one considers that over 60% of the country is still nominally Christian, (albeit again “nominally Christian” might be doing a fair amount of work there) but anyways, the point worth clearing up is that recent interest in Christianity, whether among young conservatives or Ezra Klein looking to make moralizing cool again, is not really the impetus of this review. I am not a Christian, and my occasional botched citation of scripture to support claims in this review will likely make that evident. But there is a part of Christianity that I find interesting, and it’s the part that teaches us, normatively and practically, how to be and what to value.
The following review is really my suggestion that the importance of the “Drum Major Instinct” is in providing a compelling answer to the question of how we should live our lives in light of our natural, human instincts. I tend to be pretty suspicious of this particular answer, as you might be towards any singular answer to a question like “how should we live our lives?”, but I think the core concept of the speech is a fascinating prism through which to view the ultimate success of the American Civil Rights Movement. Hopefully this goes without saying, but the Civil Rights Movement was unambiguously good and important, and if we want to understand how to accomplish other things that are good and important, the worldview of its leader may be a worthy subject on which to do some pondering. Before we get to that, however, let’s turn to the sermon itself.
The Sermon
King opens by quoting a passage from Mark, in which James and John ask Jesus if they can sit at his left and right side in glory. Jesus responds that positions of glory aren’t his to give, and then states, “whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant.” As King explains, James and John are asking here for positions of power as Jesus’s top lieutenants, and Jesus is telling them, “I can’t give you that.” The disciples are constantly messing up in the bible and this particular gambit seems pretty obviously stupid, but asking Jesus if you can be the Robin to his Batman is so transparent in its self-interest that I kind of respect it. Anyways, in their request, James and John are acting on the “Drum Major Instinct.”
The Drum Major is that guy or gal at the front of the marching band, waving the baton and presumably coordinating the band. To the extent that this guy/gal at the front of the marching band is leading the parade (and getting to swing their baton in a way that, from an outside perspective, feels somehow even less conducive to coordinated music-making than do the motions of a conductor), they’re a metaphor for the leader and center of attention that we all envy and wish we could be. The “Drum Major Instinct” then, is a term King uses for a simple and intuitive concept – the human drive for status and recognition (from here on out, I’ll use DMI for Drum Major Instinct to refer to this concept). And King goes on to describe how he sees the DMI as a driver in selfish behavior between individuals, but also in the ugly racial hierarchies and nationalisms of his time, as races and nations all need to feel first.
The clever part of the sermon is when King ties this all back to Jesus’s response to James and John. We, who generally condemn power-grabbing and attention-seeking behavior even as we notice it in ourselves, might expect a consummate square like Jesus to be angry with James and John, and tell them to stop being so selfish. But King describes Jesus’s response as, rather than condemnation, a reprioritization – a redefinition of greatness, one in which greatness is still great but “those who are greatest among you shall be your servant.” As King would have it, Jesus is telling James and John (and therefore you) to be great, and even to want to be great, but not in fame or wealth or power, because true greatness lies in Christian moral excellence. [3] Hence the aforementioned “eulogy” he gives himself:
“Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter. I won't have any money to leave behind. I won't have the fine and luxurious things of life to leave behind. But I just want to leave a committed life behind.”
And that’s pretty much the sermon. It’s a moving call to challenge what you deem as “greatness” and reconsider what you value. But I think if you’re paying attention to what King is saying, or if you’re trying to operationalize it in your own life, you’re left with a lot of questions.
But What Really is the Drum Major Instinct?
That humans desire status is one of those claims that’s so obvious that the obviousness belies the big fascinating question underneath, of what we really mean when we say status. In his introduction of the DMI, King references the work of the psychotherapist Alfred Adler (who coined the term “inferiority complex”) but he doesn’t provide any more specificity besides a few examples that are too broad to give much more insight into what he’s really talking about. The nearest problem is that when your Johns or your Jameses of the world want to sit at the right hand of Jesus, it’s not immediately clear why they have deemed the right hand of Jesus to be valuable. To take the DMI literally, does our desire to be the drum major come from wanting to lead, or wanting to be seen leading? Does wanting to truly lead (and not just to be seen leading) just mean wanting to exert authority over others? Does wanting to exert your authority over others derive from an inferiority complex developed at a young age, because your real-estate mogul father never gave you the unconditional love and respect you craved? You can go on like this for a while, but the questions boil down to external vs. internal motivation, and whether it is even possible to be internally motivated when our internal motivations seem to be so profoundly shaped by our environment and socialization.
It’s worth noting that our understanding of status tends to be shaped not just by broad ideologies and civilizational values but by our immediate peers. My embrace of socialist/anarchist politics, Kim Petras, and completely impractical clothing, despite America’s general suspicion of these proclivities, is perfectly compatible with status-seeking behavior if the assessors of my status are Bushwick gays. But this is also based on my imperfect mental model for how Bushwick gays, or any immediate peer group I might have, assess status. And this peer group doesn’t even necessarily have to be real. As Scott Alexander has written, conspiracy theorists maintain an internal sense of esteem by believing that they possess “forbidden knowledge” that privileges them over the derision of the masses, and are therefore superior to those who sneer. At least from my own (pathetic) experience, part of the appeal of “forbidden knowledge” like this is that it lets you imagine some higher authority who can validate this knowledge and, in doing so, further validate your superiority and general specialness. This higher authority, unlike the sheeple, knows the Truth, and so is an arbiter worthy of our consideration. And if we’re discussing higher authorities, it doesn’t get much higher than God.
King believed in a personal God, one you could know and, in some sense, have a relationship with. We may be able to sidestep the whole difficulty of sourcing external motivation if we believe in a God that loves us and cares about us and will ultimately ask us to account for our life, because in the face of a God like this, why should you care what even your friends and family think if their thinking contravenes God’s will? This feels a little bit unsatisfactory though, mostly because the sermon loses a lot of its charm if we reduce it down to an admonition to seek status with God rather than with your community. Part of why it feels refreshing, especially since it comes from a religious leader like King, is in its understanding and acceptance of a generally repressed and shamed instinct. [4] If we subvert the meaning of the DMI halfway through the sermon from a desire for status from your peers, to a desire for status from God, we’re then just swapping out one hard part for another [5]. It’s natural to desire status from your peers, but it isn’t natural to desire status from God (at least, not over your desire for status from your peers), and channeling one into the other seems nontrivial.
An Honest Drum Major Instinct
Is there a way to maintain the naturalness of the DMI while still channeling it towards good and noble ends? This seems like a fair question, particularly because King himself clearly found a way to do this. Although hagiography and whitewashing has glossed over how controversial (and thus courageous) of a figure he was during his lifetime, he was still the leader of an incredibly influential and widespread movement, earning the praise and acclaim of millions of his peers. All of which was done in the service of one of the greatest causes in history. It certainly seems like King got to have it both ways. It’s indisputable that he genuinely believed in both the righteousness of his cause and the responsibility he held as a minister to mobilize in support of it, but it’s also true that King’s entire life is an idealized example of the kind of pursuit of greatness that he’s describing. He really was a drum major for justice, and peace, and love.
It seems clear that part of why King was able to satisfy his DMI with such perfect outcomes was that he found the genuinely noble and righteous values of his society, made honest efforts to excel in them, and then applied his excellence in these values towards noble and righteous ends. Easy enough, right? That this was (1) likely not the easiest path to covering himself in glory, and (2) that it required inordinate amounts of rhetorical genius and political talent, and (3) that it still included selectivity in what King chose to value, is hidden from view when we spell it out like this, however. The devil is in the details.
Note (1): a man of King’s talents could likely have achieved the acclaim of his peers in many arenas of human excellence. And while it’s unlikely that he would have reached the immortality that he’s earned from civil rights activism by becoming the world’s greatest car salesman or talk radio host, it would certainly have satisfied any reasonable DMI to some local maxima (as opposed to the global maxima of a Nobel Peace Prize and a federal holiday in your honor). Devoting his life to God and thus [6] Walter Rauschenbusch’s social gospel was not the only way for King to reach a position of leadership.
(2), that King needed a generational amount of talent and skill in fulfilling his DMI, is most troubling if one fully subscribes to an off-putting consequentialist view that King was somehow more excellent in love/justice/peace than both the person who quietly goes about life being a kind and humble person while never holding earth-shaking positions of leadership and (more excellent than) your Ralph Abernathys or John Lewis’s or important-but-probably-not-crucial role players in the civil rights movement. That any of these people could have been in some abstract sense kinder or more loving than King seems possible, but if they did not possess the full complement of talents (and luck) that made him the leader of the movement, does that make them somehow less excellent? If we accept that the purity of love is the true measure of excellence than we either lose out on the DMI as an effective motivator for greatness because pure love might in fact go quietly about life being a kind and humble person, never achieving world-changing greatness, or we have to contort ourselves to the belief that a truly “pure” love would need to make itself felt on the world by finding the global maximum of expected value it (the love) can hope to bring about in the world. Perhaps it’s easier to simply accept that the consequences of your actions are at least equally relevant to excellence as are the purity of your intentions. In this case, some amount of natural ability is necessary.
Lastly, consider (3), that King was in some ways not a perfect drum major for love, or Christianity. This sermon itself, the “Drum Major Instinct” is copied, in parts verbatim, from an earlier sermon delivered by another minister. While this practice of borrowing is largely accepted among ministers, it fits in with a broader pattern of plagiarism by King, including in his doctoral thesis, a setting where plagiarism is definitely not kosher. He also cheated on his wife – many times. None of this is to suggest that because King was imperfect he was not a “real” hero, nor that following your DMI requires a zero-tolerance policy for mistakes. The point, rather, is that the values in which King achieved excellence to satisfy his DMI are not a perfect overlap with our idealized set of values, because greatness in values are not equally consequential. While it’s a source of significant confusion to me that I’m consistently under-recognized for my overwhelming excellence at not cheating on my wife when compared to King, I’m forced to be consequentialist here; King fought for, and won, civil liberties for millions of Americans – what have I done? If I want to earn the acclaim of my peers, I will need to find the values and outcomes that are consistent with my own (objective, correct) moral compass [7] and that my peers are willing to praise and recognize me for.
It’s worth returning to the most definitive point that King makes in his sermon about what kind of greatness is worthwhile: that the greatest among you will show greatness in service. That King ** led ** a movement to ** serve **the social welfare of his race and his nation is not a contradiction, and follows naturally from our consequentialist reasoning above. But an important corollary is that if King was no longer able to effectively serve – be that his society or his race or his congregation – the great thing to do would be to step aside. If you are leading a movement for social justice, but you’re making all the wrong choices and preventing talented people from replacing you, you’re not truly serving anyone. The greatest act of service you could provide is to step aside while there’s still time to hold a primary – err, I mean, to step aside and find a place where you can serve. If I’m a terrible doctor who consistently misdiagnoses patients and commits medical malpractice, I’m not redeemed by the mere fact of my occasionally still curing illnesses. Both the patients that I do help and the patients that I don’t would be better off or equal by receiving care from a competent doctor instead. Of course, the intellectual honesty that this requires seems incredibly difficult to cultivate and maintain. But greatness would require that you are decisive and confident enough to achieve the outcomes you want and that you manage to stay intellectually honest the entire time.
Notice the priorities I’m implicitly describing here. King was probably thrilled at winning a Nobel Peace Prize, and greatly motivated by the recognition this award garnered, but earning a Nobel Peace Prize was not King’s deepest desire, and covering yourself in earthly glory cannot be yours, either. We’re trying to align our incentive, recognition, with our goals, greatness in service (or in any other true values we might hold). But so the service is more important than the recognition and must come first. The danger of our consequentialism and the necessity for intellectual integrity comes from the fact that if your DMI comes first, you can and probably will attempt to justify basically any of your means with your ends. But your true ends will not be justice or beauty. They’ll just be the power or wealth or status or Nobel Peace Prize that you’ve prioritized.
King’s sermon suggests that true greatness lies in moral excellence, and that your own drive for recognition can be lined up and aimed at this moral excellence, like readjusting the angle of a rocket before it shoots for the stars. I think this is off. Your “drum major instinct” cannot be repurposed so crudely, and for those of us who can’t offload recognition to the eyes of a deity, your monkey-brained instincts can’t be relied upon to motivate unseen unselfishness – for that, you must love. You can still, however, achieve recognition for moral excellence, as King did. As long as society still holds values that your morality leads you to care about, there will be overlap between the aim of your drum major instinct and the aim of your moral compass. And if you can achieve status in your pursuit of justice just as you can in your pursuit of wealth, why would you choose to pursue wealth? [8]
If the takeaway I’ve expressed here – that you should find the overlap between the values that society holds in high esteem and the outcomes that you believe are morally important – feels diluted, and less stirring than King’s original rhetoric, that’s because it definitely is. But I’m attempting to salvage what I think is a useful way to structure your goals from a beautiful but imperfect sermon. We live in a world that seems to lack moral leaders of King’s stature, where cynicism seems to pounce on anyone who tries to achieve that which is both great and righteous. But there are other options, and it is not only the critic who counts. While we all exist with varying degrees of “drum major instincts”, pretty much everybody can recognize that the feeling you get when you’re praised is powerful. If you let it loose, what could your instinct for this feeling lead you to accomplish? What would the world look like with a few more drum majors for righteousness?
[1] Hopefully you can forgive me here for the cliche of a voice that “rolls like thunder across plains”, because if there’s one voice for which that descriptor truly fits, it’s MLK.
[2] The weirdness of sincerely listening to King speeches seems like it probably comes from a cynical and irony-obsessed culture combined with that whole idea of a student reading Shakespeare and saying “it’s just a bunch of cliches.” A generous interpretation would be that it’s a defense against people who are performative, i.e., doing something to show off in clumsy and inauthentic ways. This itself is ironic in light of the remainder of this review.
[3] This setting of a “new definition of greatness” is essentially Nietzsche’s transition started by Christianity from master morality to slave morality as discussed here.
[4] Another problem is that it feels like scripture is somewhat opposed to any kind of externally sourced DMI in your love for God. See Matthew 6:5-6: “And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full.But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.”
[5] To be clear, the hard parts I am comparing between are the cultivation of a DMI for status from God – hard because you now have to believe in God and privilege him above everyone else in your life combined – as opposed to the renunciation of the DMI altogether. I would submit that the issue of overcoming the DMI is less about whether or not you can actually commit to not caring about the values of your neighbors (although this definitely seems like a Herculean task, e.g., you would describe it using phrases like “overcoming man to become the Overman” or “achieving enlightenment”) and more to do with what happens to you once you have in fact overcome the DMI. This is my whole trouble with Nietzsche’s “break the old tablets and write new ones”, or advice “not to worry what anyone thinks of you.” I get where they’re coming from, but if you’re not worried about what anyone thinks of you ever, you’ll probably end up being an asshole in lots of ways that you’re blind to unless you can rederive your own comprehensive morality from first principles. I guess if you really get down to it you should be kind out of empathy and not just because you want someone to think better of you, but don’t we want to keep every possible incentive for kindness?
[6] This “thus” was not guaranteed. A white preacher castigated King early in the Montgomery Bus Boycott that preaching should not be political. He could probably have become a well-respected minister with little or no interest in broader social justice. Interestingly however, it seems possible to make the case that King actually had an earlier interest in social justice than he did in preaching: part of the appeal of the ministry to him was the potential to advocate for social change. Although he would later in his life have encounters with God (and state that his devotion to God came before his devotion to social justice), he did not feel a calling to the ministry for all of his early life. On a personal note, this is why I have a bit of a bone to pick with the idea of a divine “calling” in the first place – as somebody who has never felt a divine calling, I’ve spent a lot of effort reading and trying to reason out my place in the universe, and my reasoning is usually, as far as I can tell, logicized and secular. Does this mean God doesn’t have a place for me yet, or is my seemingly secular “reasoning out of a place in the universe” itself part of the path that God has laid out for me?
[7] Obviously I’m kidding here, but I do want to note that this entire essay rests on the premise that you have some idea of what is morally good and important. Whether or not you’re right about what’s morally good and important is a whole separate question. It should also be obvious that the project of this review is not to lessen the importance of the aspects of morality where excellence isn’t heavily positively incentivized, i.e., cheating. You should be a good person because that’s a good thing to do. But the DMI can’t help you here – the reinforcement is only negative for stuff like this. This might get at a possible response to this review, which might fall along the lines of, “you shouldn’t need the reward of a cookie to be a good person.” Which is obviously true, but proactively championing moral values often requires effort and sacrifice, and pinning it all on a person’s innate altruism seems a little naive.
[8] You might say it’s easier, less demanding. Fine, but then know your greatness is hollow: you only earned it because you couldn’t pass muster in what really matters.