So here’s another long post. I keep trying to work out how to express this adequately. I wrote about the difficulty of reclaiming hopefulness on the Left, had an exchange with Peter Gabel about two kinds of transformative experiences, and asked how necessary it is to walk the talk. This one feels to me to get to the heart of my own philosophy about what’s needed, but some time soon I will no doubt try again.

Miki Kashtan referred me to a post called “A world where everyone’s needs matter” at the delightfully named blog The Implicit & Experiential Rantings of a Person. If you read the whole thing, I think you will find this post by Ian Mayes gets to the core of a dilemma we are so often talking about here on Tikkun Daily. He writes:

So that’s the dilemma – how to support profound personal change, redoing your own fundamental personal programming, while at the same time supporting profound social change, rearranging our relationships & institutions in ways that address all the needs of everybody.

The idea is that we are stuck. No adequate structural change to create a good society can be made without profound personal change. No personal change can be profound enough without structural change to support it.

Example: both are needed to tackle the obesity epidemic
There’s a great example in the latest Atlantic: Marc Ambinder’s article “Beating Obesity.” The Right says you just need will power, the Left says it’s structural: the corn subsidies and the low wages in fast food joints which make that food so cheap, the irresponsible and pervasive advertising especially to children, the lack of healthy food sold in poor neighborhoods, lack of health care, the stresses of racism and low income living, and so on. Ambinder writes:

If we are to solve the many problems that obesity is creating for American society, we must first move beyond the stale “willpower versus the food-industrial complex” debate.

He argues that both approaches are needed rather than either/or. That is, both personal and collective responsibility are essential. I would add that the liberal version of willpower is less will and more power: a Higher Power in a 12 step program, or the transformative power of group process, spiritual values, meditation, etc. But it’s still not enough without structural changes.

If you take this combo seriously you will see that the Left will always fail if it doesn’t stress personal transformation and responsibility enough (and develop, practice and popularize the practices that enable personal change and that don’t just depend on individual willpower); and the Right will always fail if it doesn’t promote structural changes (which incidentally it often does promote after they have been proven to work–as in the Tea Partiers’ love of the Constitution, originally created by liberals against the conservative monarchical forces of the day).

Both are needed to create anarchist projects
Ian Mayes, at Implicit Rantings, doesn’t get to the personal/structural dilemma by looking at obesity, but by describing his own attraction to anarchism, and his experience at anarchist projects. He writes that in all of them, at some point, however strong people’s rational assent to their anarchist ideals were, they succumbed to their own tendencies to dominate or be dominated. They had the ideas and the structures, but found it too hard to change their behavior. They couldn’t create the non-domination structure (what Riane Eisler would call the partnership structure) that would change them, because they were already too programmed for domination. He continues:

A third factor then enters the picture – how to do all this profound personal & social change stuff while at the same time actually surviving in this world – that is, getting your food, shelter, medical care, etc., needs met in sustainable ways that do not support or reproduce the old ways. …

Often I find myself faced with the sheer intense enormity of these questions, particularly all of these questions all at once, and my response is simply to shut down. It just gets to be too much. With that, it is easier to just ignore it all, to put everything aside and simply just live my life.

Ain’t that the truth. Done a lot of that myself. I think this exhaustion and hopelessness is the key issue for progressives.

But we still continue to live in this world, still continue to live with people, so really truly ignoring it all in the long-term simply does not work.

I also often find it challenging to try to reflect on these questions within a group of people, because either: a) what I am trying to say & address is either not understood or considered interesting enough to really think about b) the people listening already have some kind of pre-formulated ideology or system that they are trying to sell or c) one of the three factors that I mentioned above gets routinely overlooked or not sufficiently considered.

I believe Tikkun Daily is one place where these questions can be understood and reflected on without pre-formulated ideological “answers.” So let me try and say more about why I like this post so much.

Transformative Ideas and Transformative Experiences
A great deal of what we print in Tikkun magazine is about ideas. In regard to politics and the Left, we constantly challenge the Left to understand and express the deeper ideas (that can be called spiritual, but don’t have to be) underlying the passion for justice and political rights: ideas about the equal worth of every person, the deep desire of each person to be seen, recognized, and loved, the importance of caring, cooperation, and solidarity. Michael Lerner’s editorials are often about how our leaders can appeal to our sense of caring for others and for future generations to get compassionate legislation passed, rather than just appealing to our narrow self interest. We constantly argue that this is critical, and it is.

In fact it’s crucially important for people who think nothing changes unless individuals change deeply to understand that in fact major social improvements have taken place without massive movements of personal transformation. To get social security passed in the 1930s did not require vast movements of personal transformation, exactly (though there’s more to be thought about on that one).

But we often have a sense that we are crying in the wilderness. Yes, many of Tikkun’s ideas have been taken up over the years, but people seem remarkably resistant to the idea that politicians can appeal to our hope, love, generosity, and solidarity with the suffering and excluded, rather than to more narrow self interest.

Someone raised the issue to me yesterday: When was the last time the Left was as weak as it is now?

Some time in the mid to late 19th century I reckoned. And why is that?

How it’s played out in my family
My own sense of people’s disillusionment with the Left, including the spiritual or religious Left, comes from my family story. My grandfather was a Christian socialist and pacifist who passionately believed that a new society was possible. My father found his father’s theology and personal practice, or personal life, unconvincing: the theology was superseded by scientific ideas, while the personal life and lack of methods of personal transformation felt inadequate to the creation of socialism. To sum up his view as I imagine it was then: Human nature is too difficult a material to create a socialist commonwealth out of. All those working class men who signed the pacifist pledges that Grandad and his friends promoted succumbed to the jingoism of the First World War and marched off to slaughter. My father also felt inadequate in his own personal life to deal with his problems and felt that his father’s Christian socialism offered him no way forward.

I feel intuitively that this is the primary reason the socialist vision has dimmed. The communist experiments failed for lack of many things, but their amazing optimism that they could create a “New Man” wasn’t only stymied by capitalist opposition, but by the fact that they didn’t know how to deal with the “old man” still inside them. The New Class was as attracted to domination as the old one had been. Granted their political and economic ideas were sorely lacking — they discounted the importance of democracy, and overestimated their ability to command the economy. But people’s skepticism about socialism is also strong in Western European countries where democracy and markets were combined with some socialist ideas. They prefer what they have to Communism or American capitalism but their politicans still primarily appeal to their self interest.

Capitalism doesn’t believe so much is possible; it offers purchasable versions of or substitutes for the things that matter in life–not just food, shelter and clothing but happiness. So people gravitate to this more narrowly self-interested option, because the Caring Society vision is just not supported by their experience that people really can change. That’s how it appears to me, anyway.

My father would have got stuck into an academic career, but he found the personal transformation he was seeking. The movement he joined, the Oxford Group, which arose out of the revivalist / holiness traditions of Christian evangelism and which birthed Alcoholics Anonymous, was determinedly apolitical. During my upbringing movement members would sometimes quote the German trade unionist Hans Boeckler, who said “When men change, the structure of society changes. When the structure of society changes, men change. Both go together and both are necessary.” (Googling the quote I find it in the obituary of one of my father’s closest colleagues, a Scottish shipyard worker who joined the movement and whose son works with the movement today on racial reconciliation in Richmond, VA.) But my father said to me privately that he only believed in the first half of that statement. He had given up on his socialism altogether, in the sense of not believing in the power of structural change to change people.

This often happens to people who get deeply into personal transformation practices. But their myopia about structure often also leads them to to create cultic movements, in which the same tendencies to dominate and be dominated as Ian Mayes identifies in anarchist organizations come to the fore. This happened in the Oxford Group, though not as badly as in many movements. It does not result just from lack of personal change to reduce outsize egos or build up undersize egos. It results from lack of thinking about the way the whole, the formal and informal structures, have a kind of life of their own that must be attended to and shaped at the level of the whole, not just at the level of the individual members.

I have spent much of my own life attracted both to the Left and to personal transformation ideas, while being allergic to each side’s allergy to the other, and while being too scared of cultic tendencies to join anything (until a Unitarian congregation about a decade ago and then the Network of Spiritual Progressives and Tikkun).

The challenge to people who are primarily into ideas
It is possible to promote ideas of social transformation based on spiritual principles, without also promoting methodologies for personal transformation. Maybe these methodologies, like the ones liberals have often tried out in the last few decades–EST, co-counseling, 12 Step Programs, NonViolent Communication, meditation etc.–have been disappointing for some people, too formulaic in some cases, or too prone to cultism in others. They have disappointed the political Left in their tendency to follow the same line as my father did in rejecting the second half of Hans Boeckler’s quote: they typically haven’t embraced social structural change.

But I think the political left and personal transformation methodologies need each other, cannot succeed without each other. This is why I am delighted that Miki Kashtan, a leader of Nonviolent Communications, is blogging with us here.

One argument against integrating structural and personal transformation groups would be that many great social changes have been achieved without widespread methodologies of personal transformation. The argument would be that it’s really not the personal change methods that work, it’s the struggle, and pursuing it with the right ideas. This is back to my example above: we got social security in the 1930s without a mass movement of personal transformation.

Or did we? Frequently the people who have led the movements of the secular and spiritual Left that have changed society and the people who staffed them did have some experience of personal transformation that gave them hope that society could become more compassionate. It might be more in the way of spiritual insight about the universe or other people or nature, or it might be some experience of personal change in which a person was freed from a protective shell that rendered them lonely or from some addiction, hatred or other dysfunction. It might be that the in the movement they joined, the people really cared about each other… at least until the leaders got out of hand or the movement split. It might be the experiences Peter Gabel talks about that I summarized as ones 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.”

In the course of doing progressive political organization and campaigning work, however, many people lose this sense of hope about personal transformation as a fuel for their political work. Our own progressive organizations often do not attend to the needs of their own people enough to maintain their inner energy and hope. Feelings of communal oneness that take us out of ourselves are great, but they don’t stand up for long to the stresses of movement work in which people are not empathic towards each other.

The creation of spiritual, anarchist or other movements that do not revert to domination but truly develop into partnerships requires a mix of attention to personal needs and structural needs. Until we create this level of partnership in progressive organizations we can’t expect people to believe we can do it at the level of the whole society. We can’t expect to believe it ourselves! Just as with the obesity epidemic, there is no single solution — it isn’t “willpower or the food-industrial complex” there, and it isn’t political ideas or attending to personal needs in progressive movements.

When I talked to Edwin Rutsch about all this week, he said that Gloria Steinem’s quote that hierarchy and violence can’t be remedied by more hierarchy and violence; the means we choose decide the end we get; the means are the end. This clip is very short, and worth it: