Meaning politics
Michael Lerner's crusade to restore our nation's spiritual values
by Dan Kennedy
by Dan Kennedy
It turned out that Clinton had been reading the ideas of Michael Lerner, a clinical psychologist and ordained rabbi who is the editor and publisher of Tikkun magazine. Lerner and Tikkun have been at the forefront of attempts to define a new kind of progressive politics based on moral values, personal responsibility, community, and environmental sensitivity.
Clinton -- and, by extension, Lerner -- were widely derided at the time. Critics charged them with spouting psychobabble and New Age mysticism. The most devastating blow was delivered by the New York Times Magazine. Michael Kelly, a Times Washington correspondent now at the New Yorker, wrote a profile of Clinton that was somewhat sympathetic -- certainly more sympathetic than Lerner is willing to acknowledge. But the title, "Saint Hillary," and Kelly's catch phrase "the politics of virtue" made a mockery of Clinton's attempts to address the emptiness of modern life.
Now Lerner has expanded on his ideas in a book, The Politics of Meaning: Restoring Hope and Possibility in an Age of Cynicism (Addison-Wesley, 355 pages, $24). Lerner's vision is nothing if not sweeping: he calls for such things as corporate "ethical-impact reports," one-year paid family leave, even non-governmental neighborhood networks to help single people find partners. And he's started an organization, the Foundation for Ethics and Meaning, that drew well over 1000 people to a recent three-day "summit" in Washington.
With calls to build a society "in which people will be so excited to be meeting one another and having the opportunity to spend time together, that we will resemble playful puppies, joyfully exploring and celebrating one another's existence," critics will find plenty of material to make sport of. They shouldn't. The Politics of Meaning is a wise treatise on the ideal society and possible ways to build it.
Lerner, 53, spoke with the Phoenix in a telephone interview from Tikkun's offices in New York City -- one of three cities (the others being Berkeley, California, and Jerusalem) that he calls home.
Q: You seem to be saying that every political problem is really a spiritual problem.
A: I wouldn't say every problem, but I would say that the fundamental crisis in America is the ethos of selfishness and materialism, which shapes the way we understand every other problem.
The politics of meaning is not just for religious people. It's for people who share the sense that human beings deserve to be treated with respect and caring, and that the physical world needs to be responded to with awe and wonder and not simply a technocratic mode of "How do we use it?" People who feel those two things may not be connected to any official religion, and may not even identify themselves as religious. Yet they have a consciousness that is appropriate to a politics of meaning.
For example, people focus a great deal on the fears of downsizing. But these fears only make sense with a background condition in which everyone understands that each person is out for themselves and is alone, and nobody is there to take care of them. It's only in the context of the decline of solidarity, the absence of a society in which each person is treated as being created in the image of God, that makes downsizing so fearful.
You might have heard that to mean, how come there aren't better unemployment benefits? But that's not only what I mean. Unemployment benefits are one manifestation. But long before there was unemployment insurance there used to be communities of people where, when somebody was economically hurting, the rest of the community would try to take care of them, provide them with food, provide them with shelter. It's a whole way of being that is gone today. I'm trying to show that underlying so many of our political problems are the background conditions of the absence of communities of meaning and purpose, and a shared sense of an ethical and spiritual connection.
Q: Doesn't a widespread change of heart have to take place before any of the specific steps you talk about make any sense?
A: Yes, absolutely. Putting forward a vision of what a society that is based on love and caring might look like is very different from asking, "What would you do if you were a congressperson next year?" Unfortunately, it's been the excessive focus on that question that has led the Democrats to lose all sense of vision.
Let me focus on something that I think I'd be very much in favor of trying next year: introducing legislation to reward school districts that have a 12-year program teaching empathy, and making federal aid to universities contingent on their assessing applicants in part for their involvement in community service or other acts of caring.
I would also like to see the Democrats and liberal forces and the labor movement convene a National Families Day to focus on the problems people face in families as a result of living in a society based on selfishness and materialism. You might think, "Wait, what's practical about that?" But we're trying to do what the women's movement did: we're trying to change the basic paradigm by which people understand themselves.
The assault on selfishness, just like the assault on patriarchy, can't be accomplished just by government legislation. The main thing the women's movement did was to change how people perceived women and how women perceived themselves. From that flowed a zillion other changes on every other level -- economic, political, and so forth.
Q: Do you hope your book will have an effect on this year's political campaigns?
A: I certainly think that liberals and progressives have been losing because they don't understand meaning needs, and address only economic and political-rights needs. As a result, they have tended to focus more and more narrowly on issues that face only the most oppressed, and they largely have been unable to understand the problems facing middle-income people. So the book, if it were studied and understood by liberal Democrats, would certainly help them. On the other hand, this book is also a critique of liberals and the left, so it wasn't narrowly aimed at the election in that sense.
Q: If Bill Clinton is re-elected, do you think he can regain the promise of his 1992 campaign, when, as you write, he talked about the crisis of meaning in a rather compelling way?
A: It wouldn't surprise me if he talked in that language. I think he's likely to be a better president in his second term than in his first term, but I sure wouldn't want to tie the politics of meaning to Clinton.
The shared fantasy of the lesser-of-evils politics of 1996 is that once he's re-elected, the Good Bill will re-emerge. Maybe. I'm certainly hoping so. But let's put it this way: rather than bet on that, I'd rather give my money to charity.
Q: What do you mean by your wonderful phrase "powerlessness corrupts"?
A: Of course, it's a response to the famous slogan "power corrupts." What I've discovered as a psychotherapist is that when people feel that they don't have the power to make the world the way they think it ought to be, they end up seeing themselves as fundamentally powerless. They accept all kinds of ethically corrupt and psychologically dysfunctional forms of behavior as inevitable, and they accommodate to it. And as a result they get much less of the world that they actually want.
In other words, people's powerlessness, their sense that the world is fundamentally immoral and will stay that way, and that there's nothing they can do to change it, leads them to act in corrupt ways in their own personal life.
Q: The Unabomber seems to be suffering from the sense of alienation that leads to this sense of powerlessness. His response appears to be a twisted attempt to avoid the kind of personal corruption that you say is the typical coping mechanism.
A: I don't excuse his conduct, but the extreme alienation that this guy seems to be into doesn't seem to me to be so much more extreme, except in the way that it's acted out, than the alienation that people experience that leads them to alcoholism, drug abuse, and various forms of mental breakdown.
We've got millions, tens of millions of people suffering from alienation in this society, and they act it out in a wide variety of ways. Some of them become Pentagon generals. Some of them become Unabombers. And the sickness is all around us. I don't want to put down people who are suffering. I want to figure out a way to cure it.
Q: You say some fascinating things about ways in which child sexual abuse has helped create social dysfunction. You also argue that efforts to discredit women who say they've recovered memories of abuse are indicative of something broader in the culture.
A: Let me make it clear that it's not that I think there are never cases in which children have been manipulated into giving false testimony, because that clearly has happened. And there are instances in which psychotherapists or others plant memories of abuse unintentionally that are then remembered. I am a psychotherapist, so I know about the ways in which people can abuse their power in that circumstance.
But the offensive against false-memory syndrome seems to me to be connected to the emergence of the women's movement, and of other groups, which actually did start to recall histories of abuse in childhood on a wide enough level that it really would have brought to light the deep perversion in American society. It would have at least raised the issue of how men, themselves victims of powerlessness and oppression in the world of work all day, act that powerlessness out on their children. Not just through sexual abuse, but through violence toward children or the psychological abuse of children.
I think there's a tremendous level of psychological abuse of children in this society, and that is one of the deepest yet-to-be-seriously-explored issues that a politics of meaning will try to focus on.
Q: Why are right-wing, hate-mongering talk-radio hosts so popular?
A: Hate radio, like the right itself, has a message that liberals typically don't hear. It says to the ordinary American, "You are not getting the love, the caring, the respect that you deserve. And the reason that you're not getting it is because African-Americans, gays and lesbians, feminists, Jews, and immigrants are taking it from you and getting special benefits, aided and abetted by liberals and these big-government programs."
A fundamental part of this is correct. Most people are not getting the love, the caring, the respect that they deserve. Hate radio then goes on to attribute that in a totally incorrect and disgusting way. But as long as there is nobody else around giving out the first part of the message, people will turn to hate radio because they feel recognized there. Somebody is speaking to their experience. They then become open to listening to the rest of the analysis, because at least somebody is paying attention to them.
When liberals hear people responding to hate radio, they say, "Oh, those people just are sexist, racist, homophobic, xenophobic, anti-Semitic," etc. In other words, they fail to understand the legitimate part of the message, and hence they write off the entire constituency. And in so doing they give the right the very victory it ought not to be achieving.
Q: You also see the mainstream media as part of the problem. What do you think needs to change?
A: I believe that most people in the media are deeply cynical. There's a difference between skepticism and cynicism. Skepticism is having doubts about something and approaching it with your doubts. Cynicism is approaching something in which no set of facts is going to be sufficient to convince you that the whole world isn't based simply on what the media hold as their fundamental religion, which is that everybody's motivated by material self-interest and nothing more.
But the cynicism is rooted in having been hurt. Most people who went into the media started out with some hopefulness. They've been disappointed over and over again. They've felt humiliated and shamed by their openness to possibility. As a result they've closed down, and they're protecting themselves against any further hurt or humiliation -- the humiliation of being seen as naive or too vulnerable.
By their endless cynicism they have turned off their own potential constituency, so that people don't want to listen to the news anymore. If all they're going to hear is exposés of how bad everybody is and how impossible it is to trust anybody, and never anything about the content of people's ideas, then why should anybody care about it? And so people stop caring. They not only don't vote, they don't listen to the news media anymore.
Q: In what ways did the activism of the 1960s help shape the politics of meaning?
A: There was a part of the movement of the '60s that was really asking about alienation in American society, and asking about the values that underlie American society. That part of the movement eventually got subordinated to a more narrow rights focus. There were many of us in the New Left who never fit into the Marxist framework and who never really fit into the liberal framework. We wanted a more fundamental change in the society, but we didn't really have the language for it.
I am very critical of some of the self-indulgence that we got into in the '60s. There was a way in which whatever felt good was suddenly radical, and there was a level of moral irresponsibility that paraded under the name of self-realization or self-actualization that I'm very critical of. But I also think that the '60s liberated the underlying desire of people to live a moral life, and that that desire remains active in millions and millions of people. o
For more information, contact the Foundation for Ethics and Meaning at (212) 665-1597; or check out the organization's World-Wide Web site at http://www.panix.com/~fem.