This is a nice idea: the radical efforts of the working class–led in this case by San Francisco longshoremen (port workers)–made possible the 1960s Haight Ashbury counterculture. I don’t know that he makes the case adequately in this article. But I like it.

The first thing anyone said to me in San Francisco in 1980 when I got down off a greyhound bus–he was a very large middle-aged blue collar guy and I had long hair, a beard, rucksack and cowboy hat–was “ferkin’ hippie.” It didn’t strike me then that the unions and the counterculture had much love for each other.

But as a leftie writer-carpenter I actually had a little used union card myself at that time, and I have never wavered in arguing that much of the best of our current system was created or made possible by the unions. At their best they stood for brother- and sisterhood as well as for sectional interests, and the ferkin’ hippies just did that in a different way.

Of course Democrats are delighted at Specter’s defection to join them and gain a possible filibuster-proof majority in the Senate for the first time since Jimmy Carter’s presidency. But does that mean Pennsylvania Democrats have to vote in 2010 for a man who opposes universal health care, the Employee Free Choice Act and other progressive legislation? Open Left today is asking its readers to pony up $25 or more to oppose Specter in the Democratic primaries. Interesting to see if any kind of movement to oust him gets going. If not, his defection just strengthens the conservative Democrats in Congress.

Meanwhile there’s a useful analysis in the American Prospect on voting trends that claims a new progressive majority is being built. Specter’s state is an example: “in Pennsylvania the white working-class population declined by 25 points between 1988 and 2008, while white college graduates rose by 16 points and people of color rose by 8 points… This shift strengthens the progressive agenda and will continue to strengthen it in the future as the decline of the white working class and the rise in more progressive populations continues.”

The complications of American politics! White working class decline means fewer socially conservative Reagan Democrats voting for Specter… who opposes pro-union legislation that would benefit the white working class. This is the conundrum that has driven the Left crazy, and which has been analyzed by no one better than Tikkun‘s Michael Lerner, who ascribes this voting by the working class against their material interests to their voting for their spiritual interests, as they understand them. If the Left had offered a progressive spiritual response to divorce, drugs, teen pregnancy, loneliness, consumerism and all the ills of modern society, the Right would not have cornered the market in presenting solutions to the spiritual crisis of our times.

So will a progressive candidate emerge in Pennsylvania who can challenge Specter from the spiritually savvy Left? Don’t count on it. The Republicans have painted themselves into a corner by rejecting their own moderates, but the Democrats are still painting themselves into another corner by not addressing the spiritual crisis. If you don’t like “spiritual” call it “existential”: but it’s about how modern society is not engendering community, respect, meaning, and mutuality. Saving Wall Street is just no way to address that crisis.

So Specter helps the Democrats save Wall Street, but does not help them save community, health, or the environment: neither our souls nor in the end our bodies (see This is Terrifying below).

ALLIGATORS basking off the English coast; a vast Brazilian desert; the mythical lost cities of Saigon, New Orleans, Venice and Mumbai; and 90 per cent of humanity vanished. Welcome to the world warmed by 4 degrees C.

Clearly this is a vision of the future that no one wants, but it might happen.

That’s the start of an article in New Scientist that I read two months ago that has haunted me most days since (see the map better here, but you have to subscribe). I have read a fair amount about global warming, in a lay person’s sort of way, but when I read that James Lovelock, the Gaia Hypothesis guy, said that most of humanity would be gone by the end of the century I thought he was just an old man going a bit off his rocker.

I was also so deeply affected by doom scenarios in my twenties, none of which turned out to materialize, that I had become skeptical of new ones. I got interested in how attracted we are to apocalyptic fears–there is so much history of that, especially in European culture and its American diaspora. Plus it seemed to me that the Left had discounted the adaptability of markets and that explained the mistake of the late 1960s doomsters (like the Ehrlichs and the Club of Rome), who said there would be more shortages of everything, from food to metals, when in actuality we had less famine and cheaper raw materials in the subsequent decades (as famously argued by Julian Simon). So I preached about the return of hope (still available here on my frozen-in-time website that I haven’t done a thing to since starting at Tikkun). I didn’t discount global warming, but I didn’t think it would be anything like this bad.

But this article was like some sort of straw on this camel’s back. The idea that there may only be one billion of us left at the end of century is haunting me. My wife and I will be long gone, but our son, now 20, can expect to live through a lot of it, and should I be hoping for grandchildren or not?

Here’s a stunning fact I had missed: According to a Rasmussen poll released last week, 37 percent of Americans under age 30 prefer capitalism, 33 percent prefer socialism and 30 percent are undecided.

This is unprecedented in American history. See Harold Meyerson’s column on it in the WaPo.

Meyerson argues that twenty-somethings’ view of socialism is no longer poisoned by the Soviet Union, old history of which they know little. To them it either means European social democracy, which they see as positive, or it’s something the Rush Limbaugh Republicans are foaming at the mouth over, accusing Obama of promoting, which must mean it’s good. So to them it means socially oriented capitalism, as in Europe or Obamaland, capitalism plus universal health insurance, not an end to the market, to private ownership or profit.

Maybe there really is a chance to go back to the root of socialism, before it meant state control of the economy, or some kind of anti-democratic rule. A biographer wrote of Keir Hardie (1856 – 1915), founder of Britain’s Labour Party:

The moving impulse of Keir Hardie’s work was a profound belief in the common people. He believed in their capacity, and he burned with indignation at their unmerited sufferings. He never argued on the platform the economic theories of socialism. His socialism was a great human conception of the equal right of all men and women to the wealth of the world and to the enjoyment of the fullness of life.

A quote from Hardie himself:

I have said, both in writing and from the platform many times, that the impetus which drove me first into the Labour movement, and the inspiration which has carried me on in it, has been derived more from the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth than from all other sources combined.

For some months this winter I was feeling more emotionally and spiritually depleted than I think at any time since my early twenties. To explain why I’d probably have to write a book-length memoir, which I’ll spare you. But I do think it is an occupational hazard of trying to dream big to change the world.

As Michael Lerner writes in Tikkun‘s Core Vision, “We are trying to create something which doesn’t have an exact analogue in contemporary life. The truth of the matter is, many of us are wary of any organization — they remain human institutions, susceptible to the ever-present reality of human frailty. The capacity to under-whelm, frustrate, disappoint, and madden is common to all human organizations, whether spiritual or secular, whether on the left or the right or in the middle.”

Finding sources of support in a new place can take time. My wife and I moved across the country so I could take this job. I miss my Unitarian Universalist congregation in Kingston, NY, where I drew sustenance every Sunday from services that spoke to an agnostic like me as well as to believers and atheists in our community. The minister’s language was inclusive and her sermons deep, we shared our Joys and Sorrows with each other, and in the meditations I had found, despite my despondency about my failures as writer and activist, the mysterious sense that things would be, or maybe already were, all right. Illusion, fantasy, or tapping into some ocean of reality beyond the ego: who am I to say? As she lay near death, overwhelmed with the sin and pain of the world, the medieval mystic, Julian of Norwich, heard Jesus say, “It is true that sin is the cause of all this pain; but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”

I am an ex-Christian who does not enjoy Christian services. So it’s a great surprise to find myself saying that the experience that has most helped to revive me in recent weeks has been going to First Congregational Church in Oakland. There is an openness about our brokenness and failures at that church, combined with a warmth and joy, that is unlike anything I have experienced before. I hold my nose, as it were, about the Christology and the language of a personal Mother-Father God and work hard to translate it into acceptably agnostic terms, because of the experience it enables for that congregation, and through them for me. I find myself, a notorious non-cryer, standing with tears running down my cheeks when the pastor’s empathy embraces us all and her stunning singing voice lifts us into alleluias. We have published her in Tikkun: Rev. Lynice Pinkard (photo at right).

Easter was amazing. A gospel choir rocked the church, along with Latino praise songs and a U2 anthem. The choir director is a Muslim. Pastor Lynice got up and said that all this show was great but not the point: the point was the suffering in the congregation and outside it, the people who felt there was no way forward, the addictions, foreclosures, lay-offs, illnesses, split families, homophobia, racism, and Empire Affective Disorder… but the Easter message is that where there is no way there is a way. She was crying, many of us were crying, but there was joy and life breaking through. Hear the sermon here.

At that church I keep thinking of Dylan Thomas’s “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower.”

“What is true is sacred. What has been suffered. What is beautiful.”

You can rely on Ursula le Guin. Her work ties the personal with the political as engagingly as any I know and way better than most. The quote is from The Telling, a novel from 2000 that I’m just catching up on. I found the opening pages hard work, confusing in the way science fiction sometimes is, when the author thinks they can drop you right into another world and time without enough clues. But the book becomes straightforward and wonderful.

A fiercely repressive religious right has taken over Earth. A young Earth woman who has suffered deeply from it finds herself representing the equivalent of the UN on a planet where the repressive takeover comes from the other side: from a scientific secular fundamentalism, that represses a holistic religious culture.

The portrait of this displaced culture is beautifully done: it is religion without any notion of the supernatural. It is seen by the modernisers as anti-modern only because it acquires its truths slowly, conservatively: given time, truth, and honest communication, it will grow and incorporate what is good about the new while learning what is not good about it, but all in a nondogmatic way. This culture is called the Telling, because it goes forward by telling stories, which are often ambiguous, yielding their truth in the way of parables, not in the way of creeds. Just like a le Guin novel.

The point is well made: the kind of repression we secular moderns associate with religion can be accomplished just as horrifically by people trying to be secular and modern like us; while the social benefits of religion can be developed by people without creeds or even beliefs.

“Tell him that belief is the wound that knowledge heals,” says one of the old culture’s teachers.

I had no idea any part of Texas was like this. Photos from Kay Shearer in our office.

A rare moment. And entirely welcome. Krugman talks about our spiritual need.

Arlen Specter, in the SF Chronicle yesterday, said there was no evidence of criminal acts by the Bush government. Over a hundred dead in our torture mills isn’t evidence? He should watch Torturing Democracy.

We are constructing a new Tikkun Daily website. It will have various bells and whistles but the main feature will be a joint blog. What I am doing here now in a low profile way is to get myself familiar with the technology, and with what it takes to blog every day.

Our goal is a site that “will address politics, culture, religion, and private life through an interfaith worldview that is based on the knowledge that most of us share but rarely have the gall to express overtly: that in this appalling and beautiful world, love can be embodied and become the basis for social relations.”

Not so ambitious, eh?

We are starting to recruit bloggers who can do this with us. We want to maintain Tikkun‘s amazing record of combining cutting edge philosophy, psychology, politics and reflections on culture, with a spiritual, theological awareness. But to do it in the way that writing is emerging now on the web.

While capitalism is busy destroying itself, it is remarkable how the Left is failing to reinvent itself and grow. We are convinced that the Left must understand at a deep level that there is a spiritual crisis in America–a crisis of meaning, if you don’t like the ‘s’ word. Until it does, the Left (or whatever we want to call the people who believe that love can be embodied in the political and economic system) will not be able to inspire, grow, make allies, and catalyze the changes that are needed to make human civilization sustainable.

To get a taste of what I’m talking about, check out our Spiritual Covenant with America, which handily contrasts our approach to major issues like capitalism, healthcare, education etc. with typical left/liberal approaches on the one hand and conservative ones on the other.

When my son told me that a high school senior he met on a college visit a couple of years back thought that Colbert was a conservative, my mind boggled. Could someone be so out of it not to realize that Colbert’s uber-conservative persona was a way of satirizing conservatism in a conservative-ascendant era? I put the boy down as an aberration.

Now it turns out lots of conservatives think Colbert’s jokes are really on liberals. Apparently watching Colbert just confirms you in your prejudices, or so says a new study.

I respect Jon Stewart for his serious progressive intent, and enjoy most of his shows that I have happened to see. But I usually turn off Colbert: the cynicism level is way too high for me. I have thought of both of them, but especially Colbert, as a kind of modern media equivalent of samizdat: the subversive literature that was passed secretly from hand to hand in Soviet Russia. Subversive writing flourished in the Soviet Union because of repression. But much was said at the time about how the West’s complete freedom to publish anything, along with the commercialization of almost everything and the growing power of big money in the media, meant that radical writing was marginalized and its impact gutted. You got more respect as a radical writer in the USSR than in the USA. Even public TV and radio in the era of Bush barely promoted anyone left of center: what I would call centrists were seen as the left side of the spectrum, while the left was effectively invisible. The one bright spot on TV seemed to be these two comedians: the comedy somehow enabled them to smuggle liberal critiques into prime time. That’s what I mean by samizdat equivalent: smuggling ideas into the public square.

But I always wondered if that was really true of Colbert and this study makes me think it probably was not. I’m sure it is true of Stewart. But in a more progressive era, surely we can get more overtly progressive voices into prime time. Long live Rachel Maddow!

Friends help you live longer. And the reason is mysterious to researchers who have barely looked at this before! Only smoking was as important a risk factor as lack of social support for the health of 736 middle aged Swedish men. I love this article.

“In general, the role of friendship in our lives isn’t terribly well appreciated,” said Rebecca G. Adams, a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. “There is just scads of stuff on families and marriage, but very little on friendship. It baffles me. Friendship has a bigger impact on our psychological well-being than family relationships.”

In my own life, I have found the making of friends to be as mysterious as falling in love. Some friendships catch and deepen and some don’t. Some people seem to have friendship in their focus, so they are willing to get together or write as if it’s important to them, and some don’t. Others no doubt are baffled when I don’t make more effort, but maybe the chemistry wasn’t there for me. Or it was but I was too busy.

The best way to make friends I have found is to be doing something regularly with them–work or an evening class or a congregation. In England after an evening class half the class goes to the nearest pub: I miss that in America. I miss the kitchens of the “left ghetto” in Leeds, Yorkshire–a bunch of communal houses in Chapeltown, a depressed area then in that northern city–where people dropped in unannounced and had cups of tea or spliffs. Dropping in isn’t practiced much in America. It’s doing things together that seems to work best here.

But keeping friends you no longer see regularly at work or elsewhere, that’s hard. I recommend breakfast dates: a great way to keep up. Now my wife’s been laid off from her nonprofit–because foundation funding is tanking due to the economic meltdown–I have to eat half a breakfast at home first to save money and just have coffee and a side with a friend at a cafe. We cut the breakfasts out when we were budgeting last weekend and then put some back in. This article’s confirmation: my life might depend on it!

It’s so hard to explain what we are looking for in terms of art for the magazine. In general, I feel “realism” in any of the arts has come to mean painful realities, the things we would rather cover over, the rapes and violence and harshness, the dirt and poverty. I’d love to see uses of the term that referred to love, empathy, beauty, recovery. Those are real too. They happen. As the T-shirt says: Compost Happens. Maybe some people do use “realism” for healing experiences, so if you find uses of it like that please send them along, or comment.

But love and empathy and such are often portrayed with Hallmark card sentimentalism, or in some unreal way. For a long time I thought of The Bone People, the novel by Keri Hulme, as my ideal example of the realism of love: a novel filled with pain and horror, and yet that made compassion and recovery as real as those.

This week I came across this quote that I find gets right to it:

In his memoirs, the German theologian Paul Tillich explained that art had always left him cold as a pampered and trouble-free young man, despite the best pedagogical efforts of his parents and teachers. Then the First World War broke out, he was called up and, in a period of leave from his battalion (three quarters of whose members would be killed in the course of the conflict), he found himself in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin during a rain storm. There, in a small upper gallery, he came across Sandro Botticelli’s Madonna and Child with Eight Singing Angels and, on meeting the wise, fragile, compassionate gaze of the Virgin, surprised himself by beginning to sob uncontrollably. He experienced what he described as a moment of ‘revelatory ecstasy’, tears welling up in his eyes at the disjunction between the exceptionally tender atmosphere of the picture and the barbarous lessons he had learnt in the trenches.

It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite aside from all other requirements, need to be a little sad before buildings can properly touch us.

It’s by Alain de Botton, from The Architecture of Happiness.

I just learned about a magazine that could really help us at Tikkun. We are always in need of good art that in some way embodies a spiritual critique of society or vision of what could be, and it’s surprisingly difficult to find it. I tried expressing that need here (a pdf download under “Art Submissions”). Now I find that Image magazine has been doing something like this for twenty years. The editor, Gregory Wolfe, explains how they started it:

As we surveyed the cultural landscape, we noted the irony that large numbers of both secularists and religious believers shared an identical notion: great art and literature inspired by faith could no longer be created. Secularists, leaning on Freud, thought that because religion was fantasy and great art was about reality, never the twain should meet. The pious had an almost Gnostic attitude: they believed we lived in an era when art was utterly corrupt, so that nothing good could come from the realm of high art.

I’m looking forward to learning more. The interview is in the Christian Century. This paragraph also caught my attention. He could be describing Tikkun, if you substitute some other words, like “social transformation” for “the arts”:

Another problem we have stems from one of our virtues: Image deliberately transcends many of the niches in our society–niches where money and power tend to accumulate. We’re neither the evangelical nor the Catholic journal of the arts. We’re neither neoconservative nor New Left. We don’t advocate realism over abstraction in painting or vice versa. And yet each of these causes and communities likes to support its own. You have to have a fairly broad vision to believe Image is worth supporting. So the sort of patrons who make what we do possible come along passing slow.

Nichola Torbett is one of my favorite people. She is innovating in what I feel is the most critical area of social change: how to bring the great social and spiritual visions of a Michael Lerner or Peter Gabel together with the practices of personal change and community formation that have been pioneered over recent decades by all kinds of congregations, therapists, and teachers.

On the Tikkun Phone Forum last night Nichola described her current ambitious venture, which is just in its early days: the Seminary of the Street, in Oakland, CA. Our discussion can be heard here. Nichola was the national organizer of the Network of Spiritual Progressives from 2006-8 and has written a number of pieces in Tikkun, such as this review of Van Jones’s new book.

Nichola goes right to the heart of the dilemma facing all would-be world-changers. We envisage a better world, in which we care for each other. But we have trouble caring for each other in our families and workplaces and maybe especially in our social change movements. Our own human nature, and the pain and defenses we have inherited from our forebears, get in our way. So we sabotage our own movements. If we can’t do it on the scale of a movement, how are we going to do it on the scale of a whole political system?

The Left in its time has been plagued by ego, internal conflict, demonization of enemies (including ones on the Left), sexism, racism and all the familiar prejudices, and less well-understood ones like religiophobia and a huge unease with leadership. Lots of people have left the Left to go down more spiritual or therapeutic paths to heal themselves. But it seems to many of us that unless the social change movements themselves are infused with practices that foster mutual respect, humility in the egotistic, leadership capacity and vocation in the timid, effective communication with those we disagree with, teamwork, and, yes, love and joy, they will continue to multiply enemies, not allies.

Nichola is eloquent about all this and she talks about a range of work the Seminary is involved in. So spare a few minutes for the audio (it’s an hour long, but you’ll know in the first few minutes if you’re interested, and the first twenty mins are just Nichola, before the Q&A starts). And check out the Seminary of the Street classes if you are in the Bay Area, or write ntorbett@gmail.com for more info and their newsletter.

We are starting this blog and I am terrified. What if I inadvertently reveal my innermost thoughts?

But isn’t that what a blog is for? What is a blog for?

A blog is a different view into the authors’ responses to the world, in real time. It strips off the carefulness of a magazine. It’s mental and emotional nakedness.

The magazine only has considered, well written thoughts on a topic–which may be different from the author’s first ideas about it. Here you get quickly written pieces, without editorial control, that include those first responses. I will imagine that each blog post is well considered as I write it. I will think this one little thought I am writing down, this one response to something out there in the world today, somehow reflects my lifetime wisdom. But an hour, a day, or a week after posting, as comments come in, I discover how useless my first thought was. I change my mind in public. Mea culpas. So many times having to admit I pontificated when I didn’t know, or I wrote out of my old prejudices. It gives me a stomachache to imagine it already.

Blogs are about showing vulnerability. They are about sharing a response to the world as it is experienced. My own favorite blog is Andrew Sullivan’s, even though I disagree with a great deal that he writes. I was aghast at his semi-erotic approval of George W. Bush during the 2000 election and his enthusiasm for the Iraq War, but even then I appreciated his honesty as a man who wrestled in public with contradictions of being a gay Catholic with AIDS. This honesty was confirmed when he turned against Bush and the Iraq War, gradually, in public, to major invective from his former friends and supporters. That is one of the most courageous things I have seen online. He has done more than anyone I am aware of online to blow the whistle on torture. I think his judgment is deeply off in opposing universal single payer health care and progressive taxation, and in his whole-hearted support of capitalism. But I respect his sincerity. His blog has helped me understand many conservatives whom I disagree with.

Could this blog help people understand a spiritual progressive response to the world in a different way than Tikkun magazine or the books of writers like Michael Lerner and Peter Gabel?

Yes, if we are ready to show how we bloggers, less brilliant than Lerner or Gabel, newer to these ideas than they, are grappling with this response to the world every day. We just have to write well and be transparent. And have the stretchers ready to cart us off to recuperate.