65 conflicto, reconciliación y hermandad Second, in Fratelli tutti, Pope Francis teaches that fraternity can only be built if we are open to “authentic encounters” with others, to the practice of agape. Service, he explains, “is never ideological, for we do not serve ideas, we serve people,” and we must prioritize “the dignity of every human being over his or her ideas, opinions, practices, and even sins”, despite the “forms of fanaticism, close-mindedness and social and cultural fragmentation that proliferates in present-day society.” We must serve others, and service “always looks to their faces, touches their flesh, senses their closeness and even, in some cases, suffers that closeness.” Dr. King offered similar instruction through his reliance on agape as the model for engaging a world that was hostile to the goals of the civil rights movement. “Agape” is the term used in the Bible to denote sacrificial love, in contrast to “phileo,” which focuses more on the lover’s feelings for another, rather than on how the lover can meet the other’s needs. When we love those “who oppose us,” according to King, we speak of agape. The key, for King, was that agape is a “disinterested love” in the sense that “it is a love in which the individual seeks not his own good, but the good of his neighbor,” and does not discriminate “between worthy and unworthy people” or based on “any qualities people possess.”3 The importance of these demands for the civil rights movement is obvious, and King explained that “the best way to assure oneself that love is disinterested is to have love for the enemy-neighbor from whom you can expect no good in return, but only hostility and persecution.” Crucially, agape itself springs from the loved one’s needs. Loving the white man, according to King, was a response to the white man’s needs, for his personhood was greatly distorted by segregation, and “his soul greatly scarred.”4 I live in Minneapolis, and our law school is three miles from where George Floyd was murdered, and only a few blocks from the courthouse where the verdict was announced earlier this week. Mr. Floyd’s death would not have captivated the world’s attention if a 17 year-old girl had not taken a 9-minute video of what happened on that street. That video was painful and traumatizing, as it made the statistics I cited about 3 King Jr. M.L, An Experiment in Love (1958), in A Testament of Hope, at 16, 19. 4 Id. at 19. See generally Vischer R., Martin Luther King Jr. and the Morality of Legal Practice: Lessons in Love and Justice (2013).
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