Ukraine's Orange Revolution of 2004, from a blog in Kiev

I was talking with Peter Gabel, radical law professor and Tikkun’s Associate Editor, this week about the contrast between the word and the experience, the talk and the walk. I was saying the word is hugely important in social change, but in the end comes to little on its own. Preaching love isn’t powerful on its own. Doing love is. I cited one of my favorite set of practices for learning how to do love: Nonviolent Communications classes (NVC).

Peter surprised me by countering that, much as he appreciated NVC, in his understanding that was not the kind of experience that created social change. What does are those experiences that take us out of ourselves and our self-reflective awareness, into a communal feeling, where we connect with each other in a kind of flow. The power of the black churches in galvanizing people to engage in nonviolent conflict together and gain their civil rights was a power that flowed from singing together in church, from call and response in church: it was more kinesthetic and celebratory than self-analytical. When people were afraid they gained power from each other, from their faith nurtured in those experiences of community. This was the power he experienced in the sixties counterculture: the music, dance, celebration, crowds demonstrating together and feeling the flow of possibility, the sensuality and sexuality, the connection. He feels it today in Rabbi Michael Lerner’s congregation, Beyt Tikkun, when everyone dances together, holding hands, connected, or when they gather together under the night sky where the rabbi leads them in an imaginative experience of the universe and the planet. NVC is too self-reflective to have that kind of power, he said. (None of this is verbatim–he would express it better).

I get his point. Certainly he’s right that radical social change has often depended on these kinds of experiences. Every time rising hopes of change sweep through a suffering and angry people and they become able to topple dictators that power is in operation: the individuals who take part in these movements do undergo huge personal change in the moment, become able to do things they could never do before, but it’s more of a group phenomenon than an individual one. They catch fire from each other. Not nearly enough was written about that when Cory Aquino died this month, at least that I read. The people who came out in the streets in their hundreds of thousands to elect Aquino in the 1986 created a revolution in the Phillipines, and their experiential blaze leapt the fire breaks between cultures to spark equally “unrealistic” hopeful crowds elsewhere (with ongoing effect, as in the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, in the photo). From the Wall Street Journal, no less:

The [Philippino] “People Power” revolt showed that ordinary people could mass together to topple authoritarian leaders, influencing a series of similar pro-democracy upheavals from Eastern Europe and Taiwan in the late 1980s to South Korea and South America.

I have felt that power of possibility myself in demonstrations and in building cooperatives in an earlier stage of my life, where my bond with others was connected to our shared experiences of the music, the love, the counterculture. And while I was drawn back to formal religion through a Unitarian congregation, in part because it was intellectually aligned with my agnosticism, in recent times of utter spiritual depletion it is another church that has revived me: a multiracial Christian one arising from the black tradition where the theology doesn’t work for me but the music, the expressiveness, the kinesthetic empathy for suffering, the tears and the joy, do.

I haven’t thought about experientialism before as being of two kinds. Is there a way one can distinguish between transformative experiences that take us out of ourselves into a shared feeling of our humanity, and those that are much more self-reflective, introspective and, I don’t know, painstaking? It feels like the difference between a party and an evening class, between a dance you learned from your mother’s knee and me trying to sort my feet out at a formal dance class.

If the essential problems are egotism, loneliness, insecurity, a sense that the world is dog-eat-dog and I’d better attack before you do, then how do we change?

My own sense of it is that those out-of-your-petty-self communal highs are vital, but they turn into as much dust and ashes as the equally vital preaching of the visionary word if they are not ultimately supported by learned practices of day-to-day cooperation. (Does that mean I am agreeing fully with Will Pasley’s comments yesterday? Almost.)

After the huge crowd of enraged and celebratory working class women brought the king back to Paris in the French Revolution, came the Terror, and Napoleon. After Cory Aquino was swept to power on her obvious integrity, came the disappointment of her lack of political skill in ruling. After innumerable left wing movements raised fervor, hope and energy, came their infighting. Good communal feeling lasts for a while. It gets us over the hump, takes us out of ourselves. But in the end we have to deal with our own patterns of behavior. We have to learn how to dance with the two left feet our parents’ DNA or their culture gave us. And does it matter which of those formed us — original sin/DNA or contemporary socialization? We still have to learn new behaviors.

After all the stunning analysis of the Word, and all the joy and energy of the communal celebration, it is truly the practices of personal change and cooperative work that excite me. For me, they are the cutting edge of transformative social change, the poor relatives that get left out in the thrill of revolutions, the practices that have to be developed step by step, often with great difficulty, but also with great creativity. They last. In the end, the new world is built from them.

I am thinking of so many of these practices, but I have to go to work to put out a magazine, and try and get on with my visionary boss and my colleagues and all the difficult and ornery people we are trying to reach…