Tikkun Magazine, January/February 2008

Empowerment is Not Enough

Response to Lappé 

by Nichola Torbett

FRANCES MOORE LAPPE ARTICULATES A PERSPECTIVE THAT WE OFTEN hear expressed with less eloquence and sensitivity by people who object to the NSP's approach: It's not more of your do-gooder love and generosity that we need, but empowerment and democratization.

While empowerment and democratization are indeed necessary, they are not sufficient.

Lappe is right to point out the way that "generosity" is often a mechanism by which existing power relationships are maintained: i.e., we'll give you this much so that we can feel like good people as we go about dominating you and exploiting the resources of the planet. That is not the kind of generosity we advocate. Our Global Marshall Plan explicitly addresses structural transformation and the empowerment of local people, as Lappe acknowledges.

We must always keep in the foreground this commitment to a world in which the spiritual as well as material needs of every human being can be met.

The love and generosity we advocate is not about feel-good charity but about radical transformation of how we see ourselves in relationship to other people and other forms of life.

Anyone who has experienced a meeting that emphasizes democratic process knows that democracy can be a nightmare when people bring to it their fearful, small selves. In those instances, "democracy" is reduced to a battle among the self-interested agendas of each person in the room. Each individual remains encased in the self-righteousness of his or her own position. Those skilled at the rules by which such meetings are conducted-usually Robert's Rules of Order—make use of every possible mechanism to make sure that their position is heard and that the positions of others are not. Eventually, a vote is called that means that the self-interests of some triumph over the self-interests of others. If you've been watching Congress during the past few years, you are familiar with this scenario. It is a microcosm of what has become of our American democracy, where individual tax impact means more than love of neighbor.

Is this our highest vision for public life? Is it what we want for the Iraqi people, or any other people?

The problem with empowerment as our highest goal is that power is in itself amoral. Moreover, a program of empowerment does not call into question our view of human beings as self-contained packets of individual self-interest, packets that most of us long to transcend in order to encounter each other more fully. Many of us are deeply lonely in our little self-interest containers.

Power, to be transformative, must be tempered by love—not some sentimental feel-good love but a deep compassion steeped in the humility and wonder that comes from acknowledging the sacredness of all life and recognizing the profound ways in which we impact each other, the ways that we are not separate after all. From this point of view, a different kind of public conversation—a different kind of democracy—becomes possible, one that acknowledges that the well-being of any one group cannot be secured without also attending to the well-being of everyone else. That is what we mean by love and generosity.

Nichola Torbett, Director of National Programming for the NSP, moved cross-country to work for this organization because it is the only one that squarely addresses her lifelong obsession with the intersection of love, politics, and meaning.

Torbett, Nichola. 2008. Empowerment is not enough: Response to Lappé. Tikkun 23(1):31-32.