Toward an Effective Spiritual Progressivism

One of the main things I’m trying to do in this column is provide a new political philosophy and strategy that flows from spiritual insight and growth. But it’s like trying to build a gossamer bridge across the Grand Canyon.

Nowhere is the difficulty of this endeavor clearer than with the Network of Spiritual Progressives, an offshoot of Rabbi Michael Lerner’s Tikkun organization in Berkeley, which is holding a national conference in DC in June. Lerner is convening the conference “because liberals and progressives need a new strategy in the Obama years.”

That sounds good, and I’m all for it. But the Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP) is largely promoting the same old political philosophy and strategy, with just a window-dressing of spirituality.

No political strategy can be successful if it’s based on wishful thinking. As loathsome as the Repubs have been since Reagan, they’ve put their finger on the pulse of the American people more often than the Dems in the last 30 years.

But spiritual progressives won’t even cede that premise, attributing the rightward drift, and of late, a growing extremist tide in the United States, to media manipulation, disinformation, and corporate control. These factors are all true, but they simply beg the question: Why are the American people falling for this tired, ten-times-used Tea Bag/Repub Garbage?

That’s precisely where the spiritual dimension comes in, though progressives, including NSP, want nothing to do with it essentially.

President Obama’s real and perceived lack of leadership with regard to the hole to hell in the Gulf of Mexico illustrates more than just the moribund state of American political culture. It mirrors the moribund state of the body politic as well. Spiritual progressives have to address that reality, not keep mouthing the same drivel that politicians (including Obama) do about the greatness and goodness of the American people.

Rabbi Lerner maintains that “the great yearning of a majority of Americans is for a world based on peace, social justice, generosity, environmental sanity, and recognition that our well-being is tied to the well-being of everyone else on the planet.” Balderdash. The great yearning of a majority of Americans is for a decent job that provides enough swill, fill, and pill to keep them numb and dumb.

Our job as spiritual progressives is to provide people (and not just the American people) with a true way ahead. At some level, people know that the darkness of man’s past is spilling over the present into the future, and spiritual progressivism needs to confront that reality head on.

After all, though we got a political calculator in Obama, the hope for real change is what people voted for in Barack. Candidate Barack made us feel alive again, but Lerner is right when he says, “President Obama and Congressional Democrats…have opened up a chasm of despair.”

We need to move beyond an insipid political strategy that calls for “progressives to protect the liberals and centrists from the anger that their policies have generated, because we don't want the quasi-fascists to take their place in positions of power.”

Lerner is speaking of the increasingly right-wing policies of the Republicans of course, though many people in this country won’t read it that way. And for God’s sake, the quasi-fascists took their place in positions of power years ago.

The conventional wisdom that a main reason for the rise of the Nazis was because “the Left in Germany in the Weimar Republic of the late 1920s and early 1930s spent their time critiquing each other rather than uniting to fight the growing Nazi movement” is both superficial and false.

There is nothing more injurious to genuine progressivism, and more conducive to sly authoritarianism, than delimiting criticism under the guise of unity.

After Bush invaded Iraq in 2003, with the acquiescence, indeed the support of most of America’s intelligentsia, I asked a sharp old fellow I know who was a young man in Germany in the early 30’s whether the atmosphere in America felt similar to that period in Germany. He said it did, and that the failure of the Left to address the spiritual deadness at the core of Germany’s economic and political depression is what gave rise to Hitler, and could give rise to fascism in America.

In America these days, as in Germany in the early ‘30’s, “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

People don’t respond to the threat of fascism, however real, but rather to a passionate prescription for radical change. People cannot unite around a strategy, only around a vision. Marches, protests, and petitions have their place, but they are tactics, and their time has passed.

The paradox is that the progressive political sphere now requires an active spiritual dimension to survive and grow, but even self-proclaimed spiritual progressives are stuck on the old paradigm. The irony is that when locality has lost all meaning, progressives are insisting on local solutions, thereby ceding the global dimension to the Global Corporate-State.

Spiritual progressivism that operates within the intellectual and political framework of nationalism is an oxymoron. It's about the earth and humankind as a whole now. Spiritual progressives need to let go of the tired old rostrums of oppositional politics, and work for radical change, of oneself and society, not the illusion of gradual change.

We have to speak of revolution, not evolution. The question is: What kind of revolution?

At some level, all decent people know there has to be a breakthrough in human consciousness, manifesting in an effective political philosophy and strategy.

Can spiritual progressives speak to the heart of what it means to be a human being, touching the timeless and infinite source of life, which is the birthright and potential wellspring within every person? Isn’t that the antidote to a world of growing insecurity, darkness, and despair? Isn’t this the most radical spiritual AND political act?

With a deep insight into the nature and operation of thought, the human mind can cease generating more and more chaos and destruction of the earth and humanity, and begin moving in the direction of intelligence and creative collaboration.

- Martin LeFevre is a contemplative, and non-academic religious and political philosopher. He has been publishing in North America, Latin America, Africa, and Europe (and now New Zealand) for 20 years. Email: martinlefevre@sbcglobal.net. The author welcomes comments.

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