… it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us. — Charles Dickens

As Van Jones said, MLK's great speech was not titled "I Have A Complaint."

There’s still time to work phone banks this weekend for our preferred candidates. But are you going to support the Democrats, the Greens or another outsider party? And whoever wins this week, how do we build hope and momentum for creating a Caring Society going forward? There was another fine jeremiad by Chris Hedges on Truthdig this week doing his best, incidentally, to persuade you not to vote Democrat. The opening paragraph:

The lunatic fringe of the Republican Party, which looks set to make sweeping gains in the midterm elections, is the direct result of a collapse of liberalism. It is the product of bankrupt liberal institutions, including the press, the church, universities, labor unions, the arts and the Democratic Party. The legitimate rage being expressed by disenfranchised workers toward the college-educated liberal elite, who abetted or did nothing to halt the corporate assault on the poor and the working class of the last 30 years, is not misplaced. The liberal class is guilty. The liberal class, which continues to speak in the prim and obsolete language of policies and issues, refused to act. It failed to defend traditional liberal values during the long night of corporate assault in exchange for its position of privilege and comfort in the corporate state. The virulent right-wing backlash we now experience is an expression of the liberal class’ flagrant betrayal of the citizenry.

Those of our readers who don’t like Eli Zaretsky’s excoriations of Obama on Tikkun Daily won’t like Hedges’ writing either. Both are saying things about the defeat of liberalism by corporate hegemony that I imagine middle of the road historians in a hundred years, if there are any, will find fair comment about this era. The question is, though, how we respond when we are in the middle of it. How do we build our own sense of hope and agency?

Cynicism or Realism?

Hedges has a particularly bleak vision. He’s certainly unapologetic about it. I can’t imagine him saying “Sorry to be such a downer,” as Eli does in the course of a really fine exchange with Dutton, a commenter on his last post. These and other comments on that post get to the heart of many of our internal debates – within our movements and inside each of our heads – between the voices of critique, realism, despondency, despair, hope and faith, whether you interpret “faith” in secular or spiritual senses.

Eli notes a “difference between the Christian approach to politics (let’s focus on our spiritual needs) and the Jewish approach (self-critical in the manner of the prophets).” He says to Dutton, “You need some of what you call cynicism, and I call realism.” Dutton responds, “My view of realism is clearly different from yours. To me the reality is that every situation and thing we see in our lives started with a creative thought.”

Hedges too is a prophet, but, as I have been complaining for a while, there is little inspiration in his “dark vision” for most of us.

Eli says, “The prophets were also regularly accused of being too negative.”

How Did Our Progressive Forebears Do It In Their Hard Times?

But as I see it the past successes that Chris Hedges and Eli Zaretsky and all of us progressives celebrate were also generated in times that people experienced as dark. But I can’t believe they were generated by people who were entirely focused on what was wrong, or led by prophets whose following crowds considered them too negative.

When you read about the working and living conditions of the nineteenth and early twentieth century industrial working class in the countries now considered affluent, the starving barefoot children, the mothers dying in childbirth and of sheer overwork, all of them in interminable work in factories and mines, the First World War trenches and slaughter, the desperate unemployed and hunger marchers of the Great Depression, it’s hard to think that our times today in Europe and the U.S. are darker than those, (though globally the times are just as bad). Yet out of those times came a vast array of progressive causes and accomplishments. And one of the critical elements that I see then that I don’t see now was a widespread belief in a utopian or at least a much better future.

There was this dream called socialism, for a start. There were in fact multiple dreams: for example that women’s traditional nurturing skills would change politics once they had the vote, that temperance and prohibition would enable stressed-out working men to support their families and organize politically, that trade unions would enable working people to share in the profits of capitalism, that African Americans could return to Africa and create free and enlightened states, and more and more, not all of them compatible with each other.

Were Both Socialist and Religious Belief Illusions, But Functional Ones For Many Progressives?

Psychologists tell us that depressed people are often more realistic about their lives and prospects than non-depressed people. They also tell us that religious believers and frequent attenders at services tend to be happier than nonbelievers. I have anecdotal evidence that true-believing socialists are happier also, especially if they think there is some scientific basis for imagining their eventual success. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries great numbers of progressives were both religious and socialist.

More than one non-believer among my friends has expressed envy of religious believers to me: their view being that religious beliefs, though delusional, are functional. In my own most despairing years, in my twenties, it eventually became clear to me that animals with less complex consciousness than us typically exhibit a passionate attachment to life that looks very like a kind of inbuilt hope and faith, and that it serves them well. Being conscious is the pits for maintaining an upbeat approach to life. Imagine if those penguins in the penguin movie who have such incredibly hard lives were conscious! They’d be asking, why does God hate us penguins? What is the meaning of all this? They’d go extinct twice as fast. I started to look for the many times that people had snatched victory out of certain defeat, because they had had an unrealistic hope or faith that if they kept struggling, good might come. Forget the times it didn’t — they are just to be expected — but many times, it did! Without “unrealistic” hope and faith those good outcomes would not have happened. I realized the paralyzing effect of my own despair. I saw it was unhealthy and could be a self-fulfilling prophecy. I took my first steps in coming out of it by deliberately choosing to love, and to reverse my decision never to have a child. I had ditched my religious beliefs along the way and realized I needed new bases for hope and faith. (That search has brought me to Tikkun, for good reason; more on that below).

The comforts in religious belief can be various, and focused on this life or an afterlife; but the this-life hopes need not be so very different for believers or nonbelievers. In the 12-Step world where people seek and may find the help of a Higher Power, believers see that power as divine while nonbelievers see it is as a purely natural if mysterious force arising from group support and the psychological wisdom in the steps: for those for whom it works, the experience of it working is the confirmation that there is a higher power than their own conscious will involved. The element of mystery remains, but to refuse the experience because it is mysterious would be self-defeating.

The Liberating Role Of Disillusionment

The ways that we develop beliefs that generate hope and activist energy for us personally or collectively when in the darkest of times are what interest me most. These hopes are critical to our getting the gusto up to try the impossible, to get off our addictions, to make the kind of social changes happen that our former heroes made happen in their dark times. I do not find it at all simple to understand how this happened historically, or how we can help it to happen now. But giving up doing it the way we have been doing it when that doesn’t work (as happens at the start of the 12 steps) is sometimes a critical element. I am with Zaretsky and Hedges on that.

In the exchange with Eli Zaretsky, Dutton writes:

…disillusionment is always the “maturation” of development, whether in our spiritual beliefs, romantic beliefs, or political ones, but the experience of disillusionment is also an incredibly painful one. It has to happen, and hopefully we come into mature relationship with what was once all good without it first becoming all bad too us, or at least hopefully we don’t rest in that transition space indefinitely. So I guess what I’m wanting to share with you is, I hear your disillusionment and the pain that it brings. From my soul to yours, I offer you my understanding and my encouragement to please take the next step.

I feel that the whole of the western left is going through some version of the pain of disillusion. It’s not just the pain of so many defeats. It’s also the sense or suspicion we have when we look back at the utopian believers among our leftwing forebears, who were able to fire people up with socialist and communist dreams, that they had an inspiring illusion. Our cynicism now is not just about liberalism, or Obama; it is equally about the prospects for socialism, for a caring society. Most of us also lack the very direct sense of God’s help that many of them felt (more in the British, and both white and black American socialist traditions than in the continental European traditions which were more secular and Marxist).

To what extent might the socialism of the 19th and 20th centuries have been based on illusion? To the extent that it was not well informed about how culture is created, how deeply imbued we each are with the culture of the past. As David Wolinsky says in the comments on Eli’s post:

We carry in our psyche the toxins we breathe – both because they distorted our parents and because there is so much ongoing suffering in life around us, which is part of us.

It’s not an easy task to rid ourselves of these toxins, or to learn better ways of relating, of raising children, of working together in couples, organizations and campaigns, of leading and following, of resolving conflicts with friends as well as enemies, and of developing nonviolence in all areas of life. These things have to be worked at at many levels. Identifying the systemic evils of capitalism and militarism is only a first step. The alternatives are not swiftly self-created once laws to combat these evils have been passed. They are created consciously, with innovations and practice and on generational timescales. So it’s not surprising that we have some disillusionment with the achievements of socialist experiments to date, and with the theory behind them, which was after all thin.

But What Next?

In another comment on Eli’s post Peter Gabel writes:

the deeper point for our hope is that we must find a way to feel the hope from ourselves as a semi-autonomous parallel force or culture within American society where we gain our sense of reality and our sense of future vision from our own network, not from TV.

The work surely does start with disillusion about today’s liberal politics, and with disillusion about our great grandparents’ socialism, with its state planning and its too-easy assumptions about how unselfish people would be created by state ownership. But as Dutton writes, that’s just the preliminary to a next step, the step after disillusion. Which is what?

To rebuild a utopian vision now, I believe we have to build this “semi-autonomous parallel force or culture within American society” that Peter Gabel writes of. In fact, it is being built in multiple ways right now: in the networks that connect middle class urban farmers with the low income people’s food deserts; in queer culture where people start to think “it’s queer to give away money;” in restorative justice programs that resolve community wounds and keep kids out of prison; in projects that learn from Islamic no-interest banking; and in many other ways, including things like Burning Man. Go to Yes! magazine for many examples and I was inspired this week by this story in the current Sojourners magazine about The Family Place in DC. Many people do have experience of creating caring societies at the very local level, in their food or queer networks, their congregations, nonprofits, small businesses and health care facilities.

A Vision and a Language Adequate For Building a National Movement

But the collective vision arising from these fragments is still lacking. The people who have a big strategic vision still tend to be stuck in the language of systemic change alone, relegating spiritual inspiration and personal change to the sidelines. The people focused on spiritual, personal and local change seem to lack the language and vision of systemic change. We are still not getting Beyond the Fragments (the name of a UK national conference I was involved with in the late 1970s — so little has changed!) and towards a sense of our unity at a national level, such that we can field candidates and take over the Congress.

What are currently the final two comments on Eli’s post capture this beautifully. Don Thomann says,

The fundamental question is NOT what our leaders, our traditions or our aspirations can do for us.
The fundamental question for each and every one of us is:
Is it possible to live my everyday life without fear, without anger and aggression, without animosity and hatred, without regret and despair, without both outward and inward violence?

If that is not possible; then all the political maneuvering, all the regulatory enforcements, all the structural changes in society, all the “progressive ideals,” all our traditional morality and all our religious disciplines are meaningless.

If I am not up to that challenge, all our “hopes” have no foundation.

Many spiritual people will instantly agree with that. Some say there is no systemic change that can be led and delivered by politicians and movement leaders unless people grow spiritually, first; others that even if it is delivered, as it manifestly has been even without masses of people reaching a noticeable degree of enlightenment, it means nothing unless people also grow spiritually. But I have to agree with David Wolinksy’s reply:

Because are in this together, we depend on BOTH visionary sustenance (whether that be music or Obama in 2008) and somehow learning to work with what we have. Although it embodies one of the greatest possible insights (the necessity to “positively” engage internal violence) , Don’s comment[s] lose their value if taken to mean anything like “until you deal with the internal demons, no external good is possible”.

The fact is that slavery was abolished, universal suffrage achieved, safety nets slung, urban hygiene engineered, factory conditions improved, lifespans doubled, safety laws passed, education delivered — all imperfectly of course. External good of that kind is possible. And it is good. These things have greatly reduced the violence in many people’s lives. And they didn’t require that human nature be changed first, or massive popular enlightenment achieved.

I believe they did depend on prophetic leadership of a kind that did not just criticize the horrors of the time but also presented visions of a better world that were intellectually credible and therefore inspiring.

What I don’t know but suspect is that they also did depend on many grassroots initiatives of all kinds in which people did experience love in action. I think for example that there is a relationship between the evangelical revivalism of the 18th and 19th centuries, especially when it preached love, education and charity more than hellfire and damnation, and the progressive politics of the age. That is clear in the context of the British campaign against slavery and the Wesleyan revival, which provided many of its leaders and supporters; and in the relationship between the abolitionist fervor of the great American revivalist Charles Grandison Finney and the American abolition movement. There are many other examples.

So from that perspective, what we have today is many grassroots experiences of caring, compassion, community and spiritual growth, but little overall leadership and organizing that combines a vision of systemic change (deriving in many ways from Marxism) with the language and experience that is inspiring people to compassionate action at the local level. Obama had some of the language for it, though it is noticeable that centrist conservatives like Andrew Sullivan were as attracted by Obama’s campaign promises as were spiritual progressives, each hearing quite different messages. Sullivan of course had the more accurate read. But all that this tells us is that Obama was onto something. His language was not that of the conventional left. He unabashedly talked of hope, faith, and empathy, and people responded hugely — on the left and the middle and some on the right.

The lesson for the left to take is to learn to give national leadership using the same language, but with the substance to back it up of a kind that Obama has not been able (for whatever reasons) to give. He showed the power of that hope, faith and empathy-based language. Who else is using it effectively? I am no expert on the Green Party, but I haven’t really heard it from them. Am I wrong? I think liberals and lefties as a whole are embarrassed to use that language. It feels phony to them. But they respond to it from a Martin Luther King, an Obama, or a Van Jones. They want it to be genuine, and then they do respond.

The Value of the NSP

It has been a dream come true for me to work at Tikkun because Michael Lerner’s and Peter Gabel’s combination of the social systemic and the spiritual seems to me the best attempt in America today to model the kind of ideas that could lead a progressive revival. I have no doubt Obama got some of his language from his reading of Tikkun, among other influences.

But most progressives are still embarrassed by that language, still unable to stomach the idea of there being no red and blue America but only one America, still finding their identity too tied up in what they are against and in the revelation of systemic evils and solutions to also embrace the language of empathy, care, family, and God or agnostic spirituality, to appeal beyond the circles of the initiated. This is not about going soft on the evils of war, poverty, and environmental destruction. MLK was not soft on those evils! It’s about using a more universal human language and experience, one that evokes our deepest longings and values. When there are progressives at every political level who are able to understand, for example, the NSP’s Covenant with America and make it their own, in their own language, then there will can be a progressive revival in America. It has to be combined, of course, with development of leadership and movement styles and relationships that correspond with that language. It’s not done in a day. But that’s what gives me hope, that many people are trying to do it.


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