Peter Gabel has been Michael Lerner's main partner in the development of the ideas underlying the politics of meaning/spiritual politics that are at the core of the Tikkun Community. He is the associate editor of TIKKUN Magazine and director of San Francisco's New College of California Institute on Spirituality and Politics, where he is now developing an undergraduate major in spiritual activism. For that reason, he was the logical choice to give an opening address defining the vision underlying the conference.
Here are the central ideas of a Politics of Meaning:
The desire for mutual recognition.
The denial of the desire for mutual recognition, and the creation of a milieu of blocked connection.
The fear of humiliation that underlies that denial.
The circle of collective denial as being the process by which society encloses spiritual longings and keeps them from being expressed.
The nature of spiritual pain and its effect on politics and culture, including how the Right has spoken to this spiritual pain.
A moral presence: building a parallel universe, and the creation of a spiritual activist platform emerging from a coherent moral vision that links practical reality to an overall vision of a good human community, and how that speaks to the spiritual and political at the same time.
What is the greatest source of pain and suffering that we see in daily life? The fact that people experience meaninglessness and social disconnection, that their deepest needs are somehow not being spoken to and can't be expressed, that in everyday life people are floating at a distance from their own experience--from what really matters to them. Many of us are trapped by the shallowness of media culture, locked in patterns of social separation, and feeling the pain of not being able to become fully present to each other. This is the greatest source of violence and social misery.
If people long to become fully present to each other, why don't they? We are all animated by a desire for mutual recognition whereby we affirm one another's existence and become present to each other in a whole and transparent way. This is a profound need in all living beings. It is as important as the need for food and shelter.
We know that children who are not held or nurtured will fail to thrive and even die from a lack of the most basic and fundamental of intimacies: of eye contact and loving connectedness. We know it in ourselves and experience it in a way that animates us in every moment of our existence. Yet, in the world we are currently in, that desire for mutual recognition is denied in our everyday life.
We live in a culture in which the denial of desire for mutual recognition is continually being manifested all around us. It is a central part of our conditioning as we grow up, and we internalize that artificiality in becoming an adult.
In one sense, there are a lot of historical reasons one can give to help understand this phenomenon. However, it is simply the truth about the development of human evolution thus far. For all the developmental accomplishments of the human species, we still tend to perceive the Other as a threat, rather than as the source of our completion. In reality, we are the source of each other's salvation.
Yet, living in what I call "a circle of collective denial"--a rotating denial of desire, which we pass on to each other--creates a social field in which the aspect of our psyches that is afraid of the Other has a very powerful grip on social consciousness. This form of denial coexists with desire all the time. The longing for connection with the Other is the source of hope at the same time that the circle of fear, denial, and tentativeness is the source of withdrawal and depression.
You may remember the few weeks following September 11, 2001, after the World Trade Center collapsed. Try and recall that day--when the towers came down, when people were jumping off the buildings--and how shocking it was. Can you remember that for two weeks after that happened, there was a break in the flat surface of life, what I call "the denied surface"? Something spiritual spontaneously arose. The recognition of the heroism of the firefighters and the police, people who gave their lives for other people to be able to live, the sense of shock of "what have we wrought in this world that this could have happened?"
Some of you may remember that Kevin Spacey organized a televised concert in which he and other people sang John Lennon's "Imagine." There was such a spontaneous outpouring of awe, compassion, poignancy, and sadness. It was very beautiful, until the forces of denial re-formed around the experience and turned it into "we're gonna get them." A paranoid stance reemerged. The possibility of looking at what humanity was doing to itself that existed in those first few weeks was lost.
What I am trying to describe here is the spiritual pain of people in an environment where they cannot see each other or express their deepest needs for meaning, purpose, and connectedness with others. That spiritual pain is very great and lives inside us every day. Up to this point, progressive forces have not spoken to that spiritual pain. The Democratic Party's presentation of what they are for limits itself more or less to the standard liberal worldview of helping other people with external needs. Addressing economic needs in that flat way does not reach inside to that feeling of pain and that longing for something higher and something more significant.
It's the Right that has spoken to that need for the last twenty-five years--since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. The Right has emerged to shape everything that it stands for within a moral discourse about a good community and what a good community values, thereby creating the idea of the community by defining it in moral terms.
The Right has connected its worldview with its presentations of policies. Its candidates have spoken to the spiritual suffering I am describing, mainly through images of social connectedness and images of the loving family. Some of you may remember Ronald Reagan's "Morning in America" television campaign ads in 1980, in which a woman appeared holding a child, saying it was time for morning in America, time to come back to the loving family. Those ads were tremendously powerful because they spoke to the longing for vulnerable connectedness that we all feel inside ourselves.
The Right's emphasis on the family as a source of connectedness and love, on the nation and the flag bringing us together in an ideal community, on religion, and on God as being central to the nature of a moral universe where we are all bonded together with purpose--these are ways of speaking to this longing for connectedness. Such images are frequently fantasies for alienated people. Even though I emphasize the fantasy nature of this appeal, we must acknowledge that the political Right, through church groups, has also developed very real communities in which people are welcomed, blessed, and accepted simply for being who they are. They are brought into an environment of love, regardless of whether we think it's real or imperfect love.
The defining values for people in these right-wing communities are values of connectedness. Progressives have not developed a worldview that can speak to that same spiritual pain nor learned how to say, "If you join us you will become a member of a community of mutual recognition, love, acceptance, meaning, and purpose that will give moral definition to an experience of solidarity in your own life."
As progressives, what we have to do with this conference and with this movement is to build a politics of meaning or a spiritual politics that also speaks to people's spiritual longings. Those of you who are religious have an important role to play because you are not afraid to talk about love, connectedness, and a higher purpose, or to express your concern for the environment, not only in terms of scientific analysis, but with a sacred sense of nature. You have to help the Left learn to speak in that language and help us make sure we don't speak a technocratic discourse such as "we're for health care, we're for the environment," where moral resonance is lost and spiritual meaning is hidden.
Let me conclude with three key elements that challenge the circle of collective denial, so that we may build a politics that elicits hope in the progressive majority.
The first is moral presence. Here I am speaking to each of you as individuals rather than as a collective. Moral presence manifests itself in how you are, how you hold yourself, how you relate to the Other. That was missing in John Kerry's presidential campaign. I'm sure it was hard for him to retain centeredness when everyone was telling him what to do and what to say. But Kerry presented himself as the man who, as we watched him hopefully, would stand up and say [fake monotone voice], "From North to South, from East to West, the message is clear: the people want change." That is not manifesting moral presence. So, when we listened to him, we heard only the hollowness of the echo and not the presence of the person engaged in helping to express for all of us the direction we long to go in. The capacity for authenticity is central. We have to call on it in ourselves, in whatever fragments it exists, and try to manifest it in how we relate to each other, to the world, and certainly to those we are trying to influence.
The second element essential to creating a Politics of Meaning is "building a parallel universe." Our task is to create a culture in which we support authentic mutual recognition of each other. To sustain our own belief in the possibility of a society based on authentic mutual connection, we have to build a universe of relationships and activities within our own lives that nourish us and restore our own belief that such a thing is possible. At a conference like this we can all believe it for a few days. But when we leave this building and return to the world of social separation, it's easy to become doubtful and to lose hope.
To resist that separation requires building a parallel universe in which we see each other practicing spiritual politics, practicing the reality of mutual recognition, as opposed to the mere manipulation of objects and technical thinking and just getting things done--things that are actually distancing activities. Here are some examples:
At New College, where I have taught for thirty years, I am proposing that our evaluation of each other take Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and the Jewish ten days of reflection and repentance as a model for our own communal self-exploration. The idea being to think back on the previous year, on all that we had hoped for, on all the ways that we came up short or missed the mark, and we talk to each other in pairs (a practice borrowed from a Jewish tradition developed by Rabbi Lerner in his synagogue, Beyt Tikkun) as Teshuva buddies: people who talk to each other daily and encourage this process of self-reflection.
Supported by our co-worker, we then develop our own vision of what we hope to accomplish in the coming year. This practice is subsequently transcribed and becomes the evaluation process. That is a sacred way of looking at evaluations in an organization, and is based on strengthening each other's spiritual hopes, rather than evaluating each other in a detached way according to how well each one is functioning in the workplace. That's an example of building a parallel universe by adapting a religious practice--which has worked for 3,000 years--within a college.
The final thing that we have to do is develop a spiritual activist platform. Such a platform connects a spiritual vision of human community with practical issues. Here are some examples of how a politics of meaning approach would differ from a traditional liberal approach to activism.
Healthcare
From a Politics of Meaning perspective, healthcare is not just insurance. It is about caring about each other's health and the health of each other's families. The caring element ought to be crucial to how one speaks about healthcare. Speaking about care in that sense elevates the program or policy in a way that can inspire people to want to do that because people do actually want to take care of each other's families if given the opportunity. This discourse would make universal healthcare a moral imperative. Once the subject of healthcare is about caring for one another, it becomes impossible to disqualify anyone from receiving it due to a lack of money. That's a morally degrading healthcare platform. Thus, it becomes much more possible to argue for universal healthcare when it is presented within a moral framework as being necessary to our capacity to care for one another as human beings.
Social Security
The debate about Social Security is upsetting to me. The Democrats are simply saying, "just keep it the way it is, there is no need to change, your checks are secure." The Right seems to have the innovative proposal of private accounts. But actually, Social Security is one of the great achievements of humankind: we have developed a process by which generations take care of each other in a loving and connected way and thus have brought that element of compassion, concern, and solidarity into the whole social fabric. That's what needs to be evoked: the meaning of social security as intergenerational support, concern, and compassion, not as just an insurance technique to allow people to die in peace as individuals with only material needs. Do you see the difference between the two?
An Education Platform
George Bush had a great idea when he came up with the slogan "No Child Left Behind" because it suggests that all children are included in a loving way in the community. It's well put. Our perspective on education cannot just be that we want more access and we also want standardized testing. Just not as much, which is basically the Democratic Party position: somewhat fewer standardized tests. I am thinking about my ten-year-old son, Sam, and how much I want his school to attend to his moral and spiritual development, to help him to have a sense of awe and wonder in the presence of nature, to help him to connect to a deeper flow than MTV does. To keep that alive in his own joyful development so he can care about and cooperate with others.
That should be at least as important as his ability to manipulate objects and take the standardized tests. Certainly, if you have children, you are aware of the impact of standardized testing systems on kids: the creation of insecurity and of humiliation where there was none before. The linking of what someone merits, by their capacity to manipulate math symbols and answer reading comprehension quizzes--e.g., "What's a good topic sentence for this paragraph?"--is not healthy. It's not a good way to guide the next generation to become more-whole human beings capable of healing the world's injuries and suffering.
A Politics of Meaning approach to education is different. Yes, we favor access and support public education, but with a vision of what that education should be, one that aims at meeting peoples' deepest needs and answering their profound longing in their lives. Rabbi Lerner has developed these ideas into a Spiritual Covenant with America in his forthcoming book The Left Hand of God. In this movement, we have to further develop this kind of meaning-oriented thinking as part of our platform and also as part of our own inner lives. And in a forthcoming issue of TIKKUN, I'll tell you a bit about the undergraduate program in spiritual activism that I'm developing at the New College of California.
