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Shifting
Paradigms for a Just, Peaceful and Sustainable World:
The launching of a new social movement, and
The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious
Right,
by Michael Lerner
I want you all
to fill in the blank: It’s the ______, stupid!
If you are like
me, I am sure you all have heard or read the phrase more times than
you want to think. “It’s the Economy, stupid!” Coined
by Democratic Party strategist James Carville during the 1992 Clinton
campaign, the slogan became a mantra for Democrats, and the unquestioned
conventional wisdom guiding subsequent campaigns. It was recycled
in election years since as “It’s still the economy,
stupid!” In our post-9/11 world, “It’s Security,
stupid!” has been added to the mix. The day after the 2004
election calamity, conservativehq.com published commentary entitled
“It’s the values, stupid!” by Richard Viguerie, dubbed
the "funding father" of modern rightwing strategy.
He said,
Make no mistake
- conservative Christians and ‘values voters’ won this
election for George W. Bush and Republicans in Congress. The issues
of abortion, homosexual marriage, stem cell research and judicial
nominations drove voters to the polls en masse, and it’s crucial
that the Republican leadership not forget this - as much as some
will try. On November 3, 2004 Republicans were given a mandate by
the American people. … There is no room for compromise on moral
values.
Now, it can
be argued whether Richard Viguerie would actually pass a “moral
values” test, if there is such a thing – In the 1980s
he was saved from debt by a generous grant from Sun Myung Moon,
who had also raised money for Viguerie in the name of Korean orphans
-- only 6% of whom received the money, the lion's share of which
went to the conservative strategist. (Wikipedia). It can also
be argued that there are other more frightening and sinister reasons
for the 2000 and 2004 election results that have put and kept Bush
and the neocons in power.
But it turns
out, according to research by the Institute of Labor and Mental
Health conducted over a
period of more than 25 years with over 10,000 working people, Viguerie
was – at least in part – right.
The author of
the book I am to talk about today, Michael Lerner – the book
The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious
Right – has been a social activist since the early ‘60s
when he met and strategized with Martin Luther King, Jr., whom he
met through his spiritual and intellectual mentor, Abraham Joshua
Heschel. Lerner is also a prolific thinker and writer, a Rabbi and
teacher, editor of Tikkun magazine and national chair of
The Tikkun Community. He has a PhD in Philosophy.
In 1979, shortly
after receiving his second PhD in Clinical Psychology, Lerner became
executive
director of the Institute for Labor and Mental Health (ILMH). In
1982, the National Institute of Mental
Health awarded ILMH a multi-million dollar research grant and Lerner
became Principal Investigator
for the project, which focused on work stress, family life and the
psychodynamics of powerlessness.
One question particularly became the focus of this research, as
Lerner explains: “The psychotherapists,
union activists, and social theorists who were working at the institute
had one question we particularly
wanted to answer: why is it that people whose economic interests
would lead them to identify with the
Left often actually end up voting for the Right?” (p40)
Lerner and some
of his colleagues founded Tikkun magazine and the Tikkun
Community in order to communicate this central research finding
of the ILMH: that Americans have “meaning needs” that
are just as important a determinant to their behavior as their material
needs. Tikkun means to heal, repair and transform the world.
This is the
background and inspiration for Lerner’s newly published book,
The Left Hand of God.
What Lerner
and his colleagues discovered is that there is a “spiritual
crisis” in American society. He
says: “Americans hunger for a framework of meaning and purpose
to their lives that transcends their
own individual success and connects them to a community based on
transcendent and enduring values.
For a significant number of Americans the major crisis in life in
not the lack of money, but the lack of
meaning – and that is what I mean when I say we face a spiritual
crisis” (p40).
It is my hunch
that most, if not all of us in this room can identify with this
crisis as Lerner defines it, though some of us may not be comfortable
with or understand it in a spiritual frame. However, if we look
back at our experiences of the workplace, education, and relationships,
and the effect on us of “marketplace values” and advertising,
for instance, we all probably can identify feelings of isolation,
alienation, disconnection, meaninglessness, anger and self-criticism
– which in turn lead to depression, addictions, and what one
of my teachers, Matthew Fox calls acedia – a medieval term
borrowed from Thomas Aquinas, a sin of the spirit that comes,
as Aquinas says, from a shrinking of the soul that results in a
lack of energy to begin new things. In the modern sense acedia
translates as boredom and includes cynicism, despair, depression,
cosmic loneliness, restlessness of spirit, ingratitude, and couchpotatoitis….
What wears especially
on our spirits is the “bottom line mentality that judges every
activity, every
institution, every social practice as rational, productive or efficient
only to the extent that it maximizes
money and power” (p2). “In the simplest of terms, Americans
are told to focus on the economic bottom
line, to value money and power above all else, and to see themselves
as rational maximizers of their own
self-interest” (p44). To address the crisis, Lerner calls for
a new bottom line, as we shall see.
(For those of
you who would like to delve more deeply into an analysis if this
spiritual and political crisis, in addition to reading Lerner’s
book, I recommend The Back Teller and Other Essays on the Politics
of Meaning, by Peter Gabel, lawyer, philosopher, social theorist,
a colleague of Lerner and associate editor of Tikkun.)
Lerner shows
how the Religious Right addresses this crisis, even though their
responses to it are distorted, and tend to lead to intolerance,
and foster hatred and fear of the demeaned “other.” (Can
we name these current demeaned others? Gays and lesbians, feminists,
activist judges, liberals, even Democrats…) The Political Right
has increasingly and very consciously linked itself to the Religious
Right over the past 25 years, and perpetuates and exacerbates this
spiritual crisis through their ideologically driven policies that
concentrate wealth and power for the select few. They are very versed
in manipulating this fear of “other” to their political
advantage. The vicious cycle of fear and demonization – in
combination with the promotion of consumerism (Remember after 9-11
when President Bush implored citizens to go out and shop and to
take the kids to Disney World?) – serve the Political Right
by distancing and distracting from real social ills. (A friend suggests
that Republicans will never intentionally overturn Roe v
Wade, as it is one of their bread and butter campaign issues.)
Meanwhile, the
Political Left, who traditionally works out of a framework of rectifying
economic
inequalities, focusing on reforms and tweaking technicalities of
policy, has missed the boat when it
comes to addressing the meaning needs of Americans. “…[M]ost
visible forces of the Left have been
unable to address [this spiritual crisis], largely because they
don’t even recognize spiritual needs as a
central reality of contemporary life” (p44). In the book, Lerner
does a beautiful job of tracing the
intellectual legacy of the Left to show why and how they have persistently
neglected – and even avoided
at all costs – the spiritual dimension of the human experience.
We can also describe the spiritual
dimension as “heart values.”
As an aside,
yet related, some of you may have heard Amy Goodman’s interview
with Kevin Phillips last night on Democracy Now! (Tune in locally
to WETS-FM, Johnson City, 88.5, M-F, 6:00 pm.) Phillips wrote The
Emerging Republican Majority in 1969 – and it became the
"political bible of the Nixon administration." Throughout
the 70s and 80s Phillips was viewed as one of the GOP's top strategists.
He’s since turned a corner and is a registered Independent!
His new book is American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of
Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century.
The right
embraced [Ronald Reagan], because that was at point in time -- and
here I go back more to my Republican antecedents -- where, in my
opinion, during the 1960s and 1970s, the left had pushed much too
hard against religion in an attempt to create a more secular society.
And this just grossly “mis-underestimated” the role that
religion plays in the United States, and it created this huge backlash.
So the balance was beginning to be restored in the 1980s, and now
the pendulum has swung, so the abuse is on the part of the religious
right, the people who were complaining about being abused 30 or
40 years ago. – Kevin Phillips
If, at this
point, you are wondering what The Left Hand of God has to
do with all of this, here is where the title comes in.
Lerner traces
two worldviews that have dominated the human experience through
history. One is a
worldview that sees the world through a frame of fear and domination.
It says that the world is a
fundamentally scary place, and that we are ultimately alone. All
others are seeking their own selfinterest.
In light of this, the best we can do, Lerner says, is to find a
few allies and dominate and control others before they, the evil
others, dominate and control us. We are all subject to this worldview
in our
rugged-individualist-me-first-looking-out-for-number-one society.
The other more
hopeful worldview sees the world through interconnectedness, caring
and cooperation.
Lerner points out that we begin life with the care of a “mothering
other” – with nurturing love and
generosity as our first experience. Security comes through caring
for one another in community.
Both worldviews
operate within each of us on a spectrum from fear to hope. (Note
George Lakoff’s work, Moral Politics and Don’t
Think of an Elephant … and the strict father and nurturing
parent paradigms.) We are influenced one way or another by childhood
and adult experiences, by ideologies and education, and by whether
the worldview of fear or hope is dominant in our social climate.
Lerner speaks of how we are subject to the flow of social energy,
which manifests in a spectrum from fear to hope. For the past fives
years or so, as you are aware, fear has been ascendant in our culture.
“One of the goals of this book is to encourage us to become
more conscious of which paradigm we are using at any given moment
and to help make it less scary to choose the paradigm of hope”
(p84). (Examples?)
Lerner has traced
these worldviews as social/cultural energy by looking at intellectual
and literary trends through history. In the Bible he clearly identifies
these two worldviews and has named them the Right and Left Hand
of God, borrowing initially from The Song of Moses and Miriam,
Exodus 15: 6:
Your right
hand, O LORD,
was majestic in power.
Your right hand, O LORD,
shattered the enemy.
The Right
Hand of God has been historically important as it served for
the most part to help the oppressed cast off the yoke of oppression.
It aided God’s commitment to the poor and powerless. Lerner
explains that there is a perversion of this in contemporary American
politics as the most powerful elites use the RHG to justify
domination, control and oppression. This is an inversion and undermining
of this historical RHG. A recent justified application of
the RHG can be found in Liberation Theology.
The Left
Hand of God is the loving, compassionate, kind, generous aspect
of God, found throughout the Bible. All major theistic religions
embody both of these aspects of the Divine.
Lerner believes
that the Left (and Democrats in particular) will continue to loose
over the long haul if they don’t get over their fear of spirit
and begin to address in deep and significant ways, these meaning
needs which Lerner identifies. Moreover, he sees that all of humanity
will loose as the dominator/materialist paradigm takes us to the
brink of self-destruction through violence and the collapse of the
Earth’s life-support systems. (Ultimately, I believe, the only
way for humans to adequately address imminent ecological crises
involves a profound spiritual task, and that is to resacralize nature
and our relationship to it.)
People on the
Left must learn to identify with and attract those seeking meaning
who are being pulled to the Right. This means not condescending
to them as stupid, irrational, or backward just because they are
religious. This means deeply rethinking aspects of the Lefts’
political philosophy and strategy. It’s not just about “getting
spine” – though wouldn’t we like that, too! –
or throwing in a bit of religious language into political speeches,
or becoming “kindler, gentler” Republicans. This is about
moral and political courage (courage, etymologically from
the Old French, corage, meaning heart). It is
about taking to our political heart what eco-theologian, Thomas
Berry reminds us: that "the universe is not a collection of
objects but a communion of subjects." It is about esprit
(spirit and mind), about consciously choosing a worldview infused
with universal, heart-centered values. It is about creating, as
Lerner implores, a new bottom line of “love, generosity, kindness,
compassion, caring and cooperation, ethical and ecological sanity,
and awe and wonder at the grandeur of creation.”
And by the way,
Lerner is an avid defender of separation of church and state. While
many on the Religious Right have designs on imposing a particular
form of fundamentalist Christianity on the rest of us, even going
as far as establishing a State religion, Lerner advocates no particular
religion and argues equally for freedom of religion and freedom
from religion. And, while he is critical of the way in which
secularism has sometimes arrogantly marginalized religious and spiritual
people – and has, in some ways, contributed to the materialist
worldview that has us in our current cultural/political pickle –
he recognizes the genuine moral authority of most secularists (not
that they inherently have any more authority than religious folk,
or vice versa). (I have heard him say that many atheists he knows
are also some of the most spiritual people he has met!) In order
to counter the growing political power of the Religious Right, he
calls for the alliance of progressive, religious people of all faiths,
people who are spiritual but not religious, and secular people.
The Left
Hand of God is divided into two sections. Lerner lays out an
analysis of our crisis in Part One: America’s Spiritual
Crisis. The second part is The Spiritual Agenda For American
Politics: A New Bottom Line. His Spiritual Covenant for America
gives examples of how this new bottom line can be applied to a political
agenda in specific areas such as families and the workplace, education,
health care, environmental stewardship, national security, etc.
Lerner asks us to join him in asking this question: What do our
institutions and communities look like when they have as their new
bottom-line these Left Hand of God qualities?
Lerner and others
hope to ignite a movement with this work. He encourages us all to
“come out of the closet as spiritual beings” – and
to recognize each other across geography, lifestyles and language
barriers (we sometimes have these language barriers even among our
English-speaking selves). Read the book – available in Boone,
by the way, at Espresso News and Black Bear Books. And, finally,
he invites us help build the movement by joining the Network of
Spiritual Progressives (spiritualprogressives.org).
Plan to join
other North Carolinians in Greensboro, April 28-29 for a conference:
Spirituality, Activism and Social Conscience in NC: Transformative
Politics for Our Times. Michael Lerner will join us as we discuss
and strategize building a spiritual progressive movement in our
state. The conference is sponsored in part by the Progressive Democrats
of North Carolina Caucus (http://greendogs.org/)
and PDNC-PAC (http://pdncpac.org/).
For further information, contact me by email at peace@celticwayfarers.com,
or phone 828-264-8904. Attend the national Network of Spiritual
Progressives conference in Washington, D.C, May 17-20 (http://www.spiritualprogressives.org/).
Sources
Bible, New International Version. http://bibleresources.bible.com/
Democracy Now! <http://www.democracynow.org/>.
Fox, Matthew and Rupert Sheldrake, a dialogue. In the Vale of
Soul-Making. Resurgence Magazine
Online, <http://www.resurgence.org/resurgence/articles/fox.htm>.
Lerner, Michael. The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country
from the Religious Right. San
Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2006.
Tikkun magazine online. <http://www.tikkun.org/>.
Viguerie, Richard. It’s the values, stupid. <http://www.conservativehq.com/?p=17>.
Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_viguerie
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