Tikkun Magazine, November/December 2005
CONFERENCE ON SPIRITUAL ACTIVISM
by Michael Nagler
We are here today because we feel that we're really onto something with this concept of "spiritual activism." Without it, we progressives are just about shut out of the mainstream political process in this country—a process that has degenerated into a fight, not a decision-making process, and a fight that doesn't even have two parties but, as Gore Vidal recently said, "one party with two right wings."
In fact, we are shut out of the mainstream discourse in which this process is embedded, because that discourse has come to be dominated by powerful media that are in turn dominated by corporate, not human, interests. The damage to democracy is much greater than the political biases that are often pointed out. Think of what it means that anyone who can afford the financial and moral cost can run a devastating attack ad based on lies that will be exposed a week later, because by then the ad will have done its work and no one will care that it was false. You can tell the public that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction with the same confidence that nobody will care that they don't. And of course, should the attack ad fail, no problem: push the votes through a magic Diebold machine and have them come out the way you wanted. How has all this happened?
I don't listen to the radio or watch television, but yesterday when I was looking for a traffic report I was subjected to an ad for something called "Get Hair" (an insult to all of us in the bald community). If you don't listen to these media regularly, you appreciate how astounding the discourse has become. There was the numbing—or should I say "dumbing"—repetition; they must have repeated the 800 number eighteen times in two minutes. If they deliberately wanted us to react, not respond, to political messages, they couldn't have done a better job. The advertisement cited "clinical studies," knowing full well that no one would believe in them and that, once again, it wouldn't matter. I often remember what Roslyn Carter said the day her husband was defeated by the former Governor of California: "The trouble with that man is he makes us feel good about our prejudices." But what made us so susceptible to that temptation? According to a recent study, Americans are exposed to 3,000 commercial messages a day—every one of which is designed to make us feel good about our prejudices, to react without thinking.
I see this as the core of the problem: neo-conservatives have $200 billion worth of free advertising a year. It's known as American culture.
Science is not going to save us from this propaganda. Ironically, while we live in the very age of astounding, liberating discoveries in science, the significance of these great breakthroughs cannot be delivered to the general public, because their stories cannot make it through the official narrative of our culture: that we are all material objects doomed to compete for scarce resources.
Education is not going to save us, I'm sorry to say, because the purpose of education has been completely forgotten. According to a recent statement by our Chancellor, when he was trying to get the State to restore budget cuts, our purpose is to help students "ultimately become active contributors to our state's economy. We are telling state leaders that these programs are important investments in the economic competitiveness of California."
I hope I am making it clear in these brief words what we are up against: an entire culture, nay, a civilization based on materialism, which is a false doctrine that leads only to misery and violence.
A recent visitor to the United States said, "I have never seen a country with so much religion. And I have never seen a country with so little spirituality." Spirituality is a powerful answer to materialism, perhaps the only one. We are right to feel that spirituality can save us. Spirituality, after all, is deeper than even culturally embedded messages and political behaviors that arise from them.
What is spirituality, then? According to the Scottish Council of Churches, it is the "attempt to grow in sensitivity to self, to others, to nonhuman creations and to God who is within and beyond this totality." This same sensitivity is drowned out by 3,000 messages a day telling us to latch on to our own feelings. There is more to spirituality, of course. Let me share with you one of the most profound statements on spirit I know of, from the famous sixth book of the Chhandogya Upanishad: "Within the City of Brahman [i.e., ourselves] is a secret dwelling. Within that dwelling is a space; and within that space is the fulfillment of all our desires. What is within that space is to be longed for, and realized."
"No!" screams modern culture, "Everything you want is outside you—and we can sell it to you at a discount."
The Upanishad continues, "Here [on this plane of separate existence] people do what they are told, becoming dependent on their piece of land, or their country, or the desires of another; so their own desires are not fulfilled, and their works come to nothing in this world and in the next." Startlingly contemporary. Just last week Herb Lehr, now eighty-three, who worked on the atomic bomb (the blasphemously dubbed Trinity Project), told reporters, "I am in no way ashamed of what I had done in any way, shape, matter [sic] or form. I did what I was told to do. I did it to the best of my ability."
My friend Michael McKinney, thirty-five, who read my book in Florida State Prison, where he has been since he was eighteen, wrote to me recently about how prison existence is torturing him. "Everybody wants to be a killer," he told me, "nobody wants to be their self." Michael knows what our culture wants to forget: violence belies our deepest nature, which is our spirituality, which is our unity. It abolishes the very concept of the individual as a responsible agent with inner depth.
The last time I addressed such a big audience in this hall was during the Free Speech movement, and it gives me such a sense of history and progress to be speaking to you now. If the twelve Quakers who decided to abolish slavery in 1787 (fifty years later, slavery was over) showed the world that slavery was wrong, and if student outrage of the Sixties then showed that racism itself is wrong, what are we destined to show the world? I say, the time has come to show the world that violence is wrong. So this is my audacious proposal: Let's abolish violence.
How on earth can we do that? Spiritually, of course. And that means two things:
- We start with ourselves. Even by turning off the media, for example.
- We work mainly from the positive end, by building the constructive alternative.
This last point—and it's critical—will be a huge job, because to do away with violence, we're going to have to do away with its cultural and commercial infrastructure. Fortunately, millions of people around the world are already building the components of what Lester Brown calls "Plan B," the new way of living—and thinking—that supports cooperation and harmony where commercial culture and industrial civilization have produced widespread pollution, competition, war, and violence. Their project needs to be recognized and supported for what it is: a worldwide movement.
Let's look at the strategic advantages of spiritual activism. First, it can put us back on the moral high ground that has been usurped by the parties of violence and hatred. And it will put in our hands at least three other great advantages. (1) It will unlock the power of the individual. As Louis Menand points out, "we've started to understand every human encounter as a symbolic clash of group interests, and this is misleading ... Groups are essentially imaginary. Souls are real, and they can be saved, or lost, only one at a time." (2) Spirituality will unlock the biggest secret in the modern world: that sexual energy can be transformed. This is huge. Sex is, after all, the fundamental creative energy of life. When Gandhi vowed to harness it, in the summer of 1906, only two months later (on September 11, as it happens), Satyagraha was born.
Which brings us to (3) Nonviolence. Using only rudimentary forms of nonviolence, students in Serbia recently accomplished in two days what NATO bombing had failed to accomplish in eleven months: they got President Milosevic out of power. But the real potential of nonviolence becomes fully accessible only when we bring to it spiritual awareness and spiritual practice; nonviolence is, in fact, the bridge between spiritual development and social change. Of its potential, Gandhi wrote: "My optimism rests on my belief in the infinite possibilities of the individual to develop nonviolence. The more you develop it in your own being, the more infectious it becomes till it overwhelms your surroundings and by and by might oversweep the world." Since Gandhi made that statement, waves of nonviolent resistance have swept over Eastern Europe; nearly a third of the world's population has now been uplifted by similar changes. Such is the power destiny has put in our hands. I propose we use it.
Source Citation
Nagler, Michael. 2005. Tikkun 20(6):21.
