The re-election of George W. Bush in 2004 was an emotional blow for many idealists. We entered the election season believing the failures of the old materialistic/dualistic paradigm were so painfully obvious that people could not help but see it was time for a more sane approach.
Yet when the destructive and divisive ideology of conservatism carried the day, we were devastated beyond the simple fact of losing the race. We felt slapped in the face with the knowledge that we were no longer actors on the stage of common life; we were spectators only. Worse, we felt trapped in hostile territory.
We saw it in e-mails that circulated from one idealist to another around the nation in those depressing days. Most Americans hold different ideals than me, I do not belong here. These were not offhand words, but deep expressions of confusion and isolation.
In the months since that fateful election, a number of books and anthologies have been published that examined what seemed to be the final nail in the coffin of progressive politics, books like What’s the Matter with Kansas? Start Making Sense, Crashing the Gate, et al.
These books approach the subject from different angles, and yet each arrived at a remarkably similar list of reasons for failure of progressive politics to win the hearts of voters. High on that list was the fact that we progressive idealists do not have “a common vision.”
Divided we fall
In the 1960s -- the days of the Democratic vision of a Great Society, the days in which the Kennedy Brothers and Martin Luther King Jr. inspired a nation to inhabit its highest ideals -- every cause was a logical extension of an idealistic vision of harmony and equality and justice. That spiritual vision was so ennobling, so empowering, that it completely transformed society within a single, turbulent decade.
Today, the political party that represents us operates on a cobbled-together platform of policy issues and causes such as environmentalism, pro-choice, gay rights, etc. Rather than pooling our efforts toward a common cause, we tend to get passionate about one or two narrow issues. It has become our habit to define ourselves by what we are against (materialism/dualism), rather than what we are for (idealism). Or if we do say we are “for” something, such as gay rights, we rarely communicate why things such as gay rights matters in a more global sense.
The problem is that by focusing merely on particular social and economic issues, we have been treating the symptoms, rather than the disease. As long as the diseased old paradigm holds sway, the symptoms will always return. It was Plato who asked, "Are they [politicians] not as good as a play, trying their hand at legislation, and imagining that by reforms they will make an end to the dishonesties and rascalities of mankind, not knowing that in reality they are cutting away at the heads of a hydra?"
It is disheartening to know that Plato wrote those words almost 2,400 years ago, yet they so accurately describe us today. In this regard, conservatives have evolved far beyond progressives. Conservatives are able to reign in their special interest groups and pull together a coherent message that addresses voters’ needs for meaning and fulfillment. That is why they are able to win elections despite their disastrous policies and abject failures in leadership.
Why haven’t we idealists -- we who consider ourselves much more “evolved”-- been able to catch up? Perhaps because our own idealism encourages “respect” for the individual to a ruinous degree (See Why We Resist Labels).
New Age-style idealists, perhaps more than any other progressive type, are complicit in the failure to think for the greater good. Although we say we believe in a “holistic” worldview, we rarely act holistically. Of course, we wish everyone well, but we are terribly busy working on ourselves, undertaking our own individual journeys. While we did not create the monster of self-absorbed individualism, we have certainly fed it and helped it grow.
Case in point: How many of us voted for Ralph Nader in 2000, letting our individual sense of “integrity” win out over our ability to serve the whole, and allowing George W. Bush and to win the first time?
Adam Werbach, in Start Making Sense, calls the “me first/my cause first” element in politics as suicidal folly and uses the environmental movement’s refusal to take a stand on the Iraq War as another example. “How can any movement that claims to be a political movement say nothing about the war? Even though we know the [diplomatic] relationships that Bush was shredding are exactly what we require for international cooperation on global environmental problems?”
Clearly, we have made great strides in taking responsibility for ourselves and our reality, but we have yet to reach a maturity that compels us to take responsibility for each other. We have yet to get past the point of asking what the New Age (or whatever we want to call the holistic/alternative/spiritual movement) can do for us, to ask the more important question of what we can do for the vision of a New Age.
It is time to ask the question: What we can do to make the New Age vision of harmony a reality that lifts not just ourselves, but lifts us all?
Where have all the hippies gone?
The idealism of the 1960s was based in the belief that change would come about only through revolution. Then we grew up a little and decided that evolution was the answer – in time, we would all evolve. And so we largely sat ourselves down, became passive and patient and detached.
Today, an idealistic generation that once took to the streets to stop Vietnam has grown fat and mostly complacent in the face of another war in Iraq. We care, of course, but we are also busy taking yoga classes and using our real estate windfalls to finance our retirements.
Meanwhile, there is a new generation growing up appalled at what we adults have allowed to happen, and there are rumblings of revolution again. But these rumblings on college campuses and on blogs are not penetrating far into the culture. We older idealists are part of a baby boom generation so large and passive that our dead weight smothers their efforts. Not only have we betrayed our own vision, but we are betraying theirs as well.
We find the same question repeated over and over, in books, on TV, in newspapers, all over the Internet: Can we liberals make our pet causes secondary to creating success for a broader progressive movement that will support all our causes?
Because politics is the public reflection of our inner lives, an equally important question is: Can we spiritual idealists make our individualism secondary to our collective spiritual health and effectiveness in the world?
In search of a vision
Politically, idealism did very well in the early 20th century when people were struggling to survive. The idealism that spurred what Adam Werbach calls the “liberal project” created the minimum wage, the 40 hour workweek, Social Security, civil rights, equality.
In fact, idealism succeeded so well that it has become a victim of its own success. Because of its political triumphs, basic survival is no longer a concern for the majority of us. “Most Americans today are not survival oriented; they’re fulfillment oriented,” says Werbach. “People are looking for something to believe in. They’re looking for meaning in life. They’re looking to be part of a broader project.”
The problem is, political idealism has traditionally been opposed to joining meaning with politics and government. We have been trained by to mistrust all public expressions of spirit. After all, that’s what separates us from the conservatives with all their flashy confessions of faith. We believe meaning and spirituality should remain a “private matter.”
That is one reason why idealists have always focused their political energy on economic matters. And in the first half of the 20th century, those economic matters were paramount. But it’s a new century now, and we the people have the luxury ignoring our economic well-being when we go to the polls. We have the luxury of voting for our “meaning” needs instead. And who is addressing meaning needs, who are the ones placing themselves as representatives of meaningful “values”? Conservatives.
So there’s the problem in a nutshell: Because the Religious Right is the only spiritual representative on the political scene -- the only one clearly articulating the pain inherent in the materialistic American way of life -- they win by default.
That is why the Democratic Party, in its present form, is essentially dead, according toWerbach. And as soon as we understand that, he says, we make “space for something else to grow.”
“Only the breath of a serious and new moral-intellectual vision will be sufficient to resuscitate the Democratic party” and its idealistic aims, Werbach continues. What we need is a new vision, a new narrative, with a core element of “soul.”
Spiritual politics
In February 2006, a new book answered the call for a more meaning-centered politics. In The Left Hand of God, Michael Lerner persuasively argued that if idealists and spiritual progressives want to have a say in how life unfolds, they have to be willing to stop separating their spirituality from their public lives.
It is time, Lerner writes, for spiritual liberals “to come out of the closet and identify publicly as spiritual beings and claim their right to be heard and respected as spiritual people.”
This is not a new observation. Walt Whitman, the great 19th century mystic poet, felt that democracy was a concept “the real gist of which sleeps, quite unawakened.” He believed the solution was the ‘spiritualization’ of the political sphere. “The core of democracy, finally, is the religious element.” He talked about a universalized spirituality “which is adhesiveness or love, that fuses, ties and aggregates, making the races comrades, and fraternizing all.”
A culture war presented in the secular terms of liberal politics -- as the rich vs. the poor -- ignores the fact that the rich are meaning-deprived as well, and experience just as much spiritual pain as the poor. It’s not that the rich have too much money – it’s that they do not have a good spiritual foundation. Spiritually-centered rich people share their wealth.
Only a spirit-based vision can motivates us to transcend old paradigms -- or “frames” as they are lately being called. Otherwise, politics remains a battle of egocentric special interests and fragmented idealism. This battle alienates young idealists who do not identify with the narrow agenda of the secular Left. For example, feminism has become so tightly bound to a spirit-less agenda that even young women who are drawn to the empowerment of goddess worship or Wicca feel no attraction to political feminism.
The irony is that most of us support liberal politics because of deeply-held spiritual values, then we turn around and refuse to publicly identify what those values are. As Lerner concluded, a spirituality-deprived politics “consistently disarms itself of what could be its most powerful weapon: a vision of the world based on love.”
Naming names
Of course, none of the political authors quoted above wrote their words in the New Age context I have placed them here. Interestingly, even as they all argue for the widespread and public adoption of a political vision based in spirituality – along with its consistent and repeated communication -- they all, with the exception of Lerner, decline to suggest what the content of that vision should be.
The reality is, If we want to have any impact on public life and in the world, says Lerner, we cannot decline to articulate our spiritual vision.
“If your goal is to heal and repair the society,” he continues, “and you want to enlist the politicians to pursue policies that require courage… then there is only one thing that can work: building a social and political movement in the larger society that is so visible, noisy, and persistent that the powerful cannot ignore it.”
Like Lerner, I am not shy about articulating what a vision of our future should be. I believe that vision should be the ages-old of idealism. That vision should be the empowering principles of the New Age.
Go back to Becoming the Solution.
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