[Dialogue] Fwd: The Meaning of the Obama Phenomenon

Wed Mar 26 09:15:53 EDT 2008

____________________________________
 From: RabbiLerner at Tikkun.org
To: KroegerD at aol.com
Sent: 3/26/2008  1:14:16 A.M. Central Daylight Time
Subj: The Meaning of the Obama  Phenomenon

_The Network of  Spiritual Progressives_ 
(http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=jMXAG0dNXCq3PXARQHJbrum/T0wYMbMX)          A message from 
Rabbi Michael Lerner
and  the Tikkun/NSP Community  _Join or Donate  Now!_ 
(http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=8uUbWsOm+Xs48aya1OEa9Om/T0wYMbMX)  

[The article below appeared in the March/April issue of Tikkun.  While Tikkun 
editor Rabbi Michael Lerner analyzes  the  phenomenon that has emerged around 
the candidacy of Barack Obama,  neither he nor Tikkun nor the Network of 
Spiritual Progressives  endorses Obama or any other candidate or political party. 
We   welcome any spiritual progressive to write a response to his  editorial 
or to speak about why you support McCain, Clinton,  Nader, McKinney or anyone 
else, and if well written we will  publish it on our website www.tikkun.org or, 
space permitting, as  a letter to the editor inside the magazine. We welcome 
lively  debate. Send to Dave at tikkun.org.  We are also well aware that  Obama 
is likely to be defeated in Pennsylvania primay,  particularly after the media 
gave such a distorted impression of  his speech about his relationship with 
his former minister Rev.  Wright--but Lerner's claim is not that he will win the 
nomination  or the election, but that he has elicited something rarely  
elicited in American politics. 
[ If, on the other hand, you agree with Rabbi Lerner's analysis  below, 
you'll realize that this kind of thinking is badly needed  in American political 
discourse (it is as absent on the Left as in  the Center or Right). So please 
help us spread these ideas and way  of thinking inside the campaigns of whatever 
candidate you support  or inside whatever party you support or whatever 
political or  religious or social change movement you are part of--by joining  the 
_Network  of Spiritual Progressives at  www.spiritualprogressives.org_ 
(http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=HhuKHfLz/lpAxjcZbHNBj+m/T0wYMb
MX) .--The Editorial Staff of Tikkun]  

The Obama Phenomenon
by Michael Lerner       from the March/April issue of _Tikkun  Magazine_ 
(http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=gLT4lNr7l9Y/Hsf0HNqSPaGCegc
8gFrJ) 

The Phenomenon is  not Barack Obama. Senator Obama is a masterful organizer 
and  teacher. But this editorial is not about Obama as much as about  what he 
elicits in others, and should not be read as an  endorsement of him.

The energy, hopefulness, and excitement  that manifests in Obama's campaign 
has shown up before in the last  fifty years, only to quickly be crushed. It 
was there in the 1960s  and 1970s in the Civil Rights movement, the anti-war 
movement, the  women's movement, the environmental movement, and the movement for 
 gay liberation. One felt it flowing at rallies and demonstrations  at which 
Robert Kennedy, Cesar Chavez, Betty Friedan, Isaac  Deutscher, Joan Baez, and 
Martin Luther King, Jr. articulated  their visions. It was there again in 
Earth Day, in the  anti-nuclear movement, and in the movement against the war with 
 the Contras. It was there during the campaign of Jesse Jackson in  1988 and 
the Clintons' campaign in 1992. And it has been  there-dare we say it-in the 
growth of the religious right and the  Campus Crusade for Christ.

What is that energy and  excitement, and why does it touch people so deeply?

Since  Tikkun started in 1986 we've been trying to convince the political  
leadership of the liberal and progressive forces that they needed  to understand 
this phenomenon and speak to it. Sometimes we've  written about it as a 
hunger for meaning and purpose, and  prescribed a "politics of meaning" as the way 
to respond  politically; in the last few years we've written about the need  
for a spiritual progressive politics to bring this energy into the  public 
sphere.

The phenomenon in question is this: the  intense desire of every human being 
on this planet to overcome and  transcend the materialism and selfishness that 
shape the global  economic arrangements and permeate the consciousness of all 
 people, to overcome the looking-out-for-number one consciousness  that 
divides us and the technocratic language that shapes our  public institutions and 
denies us access to our common humanity,  and to overcome the alienation from 
each other that this way of  being has created so that we might once again 
recognize each other  as embodiments of God or Spirit (or however you want to talk 
about  the force-field of goodness, generosity, kindness, justice, peace,  
nonviolence, and care for each other and nature and the entirety  of all that 
is).

We Avert Our Eyes from One  Another

Every gesture, every word, every deed, every  political act, every 
interaction with others, every message we  give ourselves all combine to either 
reinforce our separation and  estrangement from each other or to reconnect us in a 
deep way that  allows genuine mutual recognition, the seeing and hearing of who  
we really are, the contact we have with the sacred in ourselves,  in each 
other, and in the world.

We live in a world that is  humanly deadening. It's not just the actual 
murders committed in  our name. I picked up the newspaper this morning and read 
that  U.S. forces barged into a home in the village of Door, 100 miles  north of 
Baghdad, and began to fire at the family living there,  killing four, 
including an eleven-year-old girl. Perhaps tomorrow  they will issue a statement 
acknowledging that this was a mistake,  as they did today about the killing of nine 
Iraqi civilians in  Iskandariya a few days ago, and the death "under 
mysterious  circumstances" of an Iraqi militiaman who died "in custody after  being 
held for three days on a Baghdad arrest warrant" as a result  of a bullet in the 
head. At some point they'll
acknowledge that  the U.S. invasion let loose dynamics that have led to the 
deaths  of over one million Iraqis, and that the "surge" could only be  
described as "working" because it accelerated the process of some  3 million Iraqis 
leaving their homes while neighborhoods were  being surrounded by concrete 
walls to provide protection to one  ethnic group while the other groups fled to 
"safety" elsewhere.  But today, most Americans remain in a state of zombie-like 
denial  of what this country continues to do.

Nor is the deadening  process confined to the various ways we deny our 
involvement in  the world and what is happening therein. For example, our refusal  
to acknowledge that paying the taxes to keep the war going is part  of what 
makes it possible; and our refusal to acknowledge that the  20,000-30,000 
children who die (on average) every single day  around the world because of 
inadequate food and healthcare are  directly connected to our global economic system in 
which we  participate daily and which we accept as "inevitable"; and the  
distance we maintain from those who seek fundamental change, whom  we reject as 
unrealistic.

No, it's not just these large  systems of oppression and manipulation that 
deaden us. It's also  our own withdrawn and depressive certainty that nothing 
much can  happen in the world of politics and economics, or even in our  
interactions with each other. We walk down the streets or ride the  buses, subways, 
or airplanes, averting our eyes from the others  who share our circumstances. 
We are certain that if we start  talking to others that they will feel that 
their privacy has been  invaded and will resent it, suspecting that we are out to 
sell  them something or take advantage of them or manipulate them.  Instead, 
as Tikkun associate editor Peter Gabel has so frequently  articulated on these 
pages, we stay inside ourselves, offering  ourselves to others only in 
tightly controlled roles, the  dimensions of which have been carefully constructed 
to ensure that  we will not awaken in the others their own hunger for love,  
friendship, recognition, or aliveness.

And so we deaden  ourselves and deaden each other. Each time we avert our 
eyes, each  time we pretend not to see the homeless person, the fellow worker  
getting into trouble, the neighbor who needs our help, the car  stalled on the 
freeway, and each time we tighten our face and  muscles to give to the other 
the message of "don't go there" where  "there" means "don't try to force me to 
be real with you when I'm  scared to do that," we manage to convince the others 
that nobody  gives a damn, that they, too, are alone, and that they would be  
making a huge mistake to try to break out of their isolation or to  think 
that their own desires for connection are shared by billions  of others and are 
not simply a manifestation of some private  inadequacy or pathology.

Recently, some columnists have  compared Obama to a rock star because his 
supporters seem to treat  him more like that than like a politician. They are 
only partially  mistaken. What the best and most fulfilling rock concerts of the  
past several decades have offered one generation is what other  
multi-generational mega-churches or Super Bowls and World Series'  offer to others: a 
chance to momentarily experience a  transcendence of all those feelings of 
loneliness and alienation,  a momentary ability to be part of a "we" that reminds us 
of what  it feels like to be less alone. For a moment we experience a  
community of shared purpose, and no matter how intellectually,  psychologically, or 
spiritually empty that moment might be, for  that moment we get a distorted but, 
nevertheless, powerful way of  reminding ourselves of how much more we could 
be than when we are  alone and scared.

The problem, of course, is that these  moments are often based on an 
us-versus-them vision of the world:  our community requires that some other people be 
the bad guys. As  contemporary psychodynamic psychotherapists like to point 
out, we  are often engaged in splitting our own internalized image of  ourselves 
as fundamentally good and decent from another part,  which we see as dirty 
and unacceptable and hence not really part  of us at all but rather part of some 
"evil Other," which in the  West, through history, has been the Jew, the 
Black man, the  feminist, the homosexual, the communist, the terrorist, the  
illegal immigrant, etc.

The Effectiveness of  Not Demonizing

Obama's appeal starts from his insistence on  not demonizing the Other-the 
very point from which Tikkun started  as a project of the Institute for Labor 
and Mental Health (ILMH)  twenty-two years ago. At ILMH we learned-through 
conducting an  intensive study of working class consciousness-that people moving  
to the Right politically were not primarily motivated by racism,  sexism, and 
hatred, but by the spiritual crisis in their lives  that the Left failed to 
address and the Right spoke to (albeit  with distorted solutions).

Obama avoids detailing his  political programs precisely because he knows 
that in so doing he  would shift the discourse from how to break through the fear 
we  have of each other and our "certainty" that we are condemned to be  alone 
and alienated, back to the old discourse about point X or  point Y in his 
health care or environmental program, leaving most  people behind in despair. 
Instead, he confronts that despair  straight on.

Obama knows that most people want a very  different world, but don't believe 
it is possible unless someone  else makes it happen. He challenges his 
audience by telling them  that there is no one else, that they themselves are the 
people who  must make the world different. To quote Obama from his Super  Tuesday 
speech: "So many of us have been waiting so long for the  time when we could 
finally expect more from our politics, when we  could give more of ourselves 
and feel truly invested in something  bigger than a particular candidate or 
cause. This is it. We are  the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change 
that we  seek."

In short, Obama is telling his supporters, we  are not in need of some 
magical leader, not even Obama himself.  Rather, what we need is the confidence in 
ourselves to reclaim the  public space, to break down our fears about ourselves 
and each  other, and to recognize that it is only when we move beyond our  
personal lives and work together for our highest vision that  anything 
substantial will change.

Obama has used his  campaign to teach us that we actually can emerge from our 
 frightened, withdrawn state, and enter into a public community and  affirm 
each other's humanity, whether that be through our foreign  relations, in our 
approach to immigration, in our economic lives,  or, even, in overcoming the 
ossified categories of "the Left" and  "the Right." And Obama presents himself 
with a sense of certainty  that helps us overcome our own uncertainty-he is 
determined to win  the election because he thinks we can do this if we are 
willing to  "declare that we are with each other."

It is precisely this  striving to create a transcendent experience of 
connection without  demonizing the Other that has been the important element in the  
Obama phenomenon. Although the criticisms of his seeming inability  to 
recognize the depth of the struggles that must be waged against  the entrenched 
powers of global capital are well-founded, the  Obama phenomenon promises to 
accumulate the power to challenge the  powerful precisely by rejecting the 
demonizing of the other and  following a path of nonviolence, not only in actions but 
also in  words. This kind of nonviolent communication, a powerful extension  of 
Gandhi's and King's methodology, may actually, in the long run,  prove far 
more effective than pointing out the cruelty and  hypocrisy of those who will 
not challenge the existing systems of  militarism and global economic and 
political  domination.

This is About Us, Not About  Obama

Surely, one might object, we are giving far too much  credit to Obama 
himself. After all, many on the Left argue, Obama  is just a consummate politician, 
and not one committed to the  programs that we all need. Obama voted against 
the war in Iraq,  but he does not advocate the kind of withdrawal that we at 
Tikkun  believe is the necessary precondition for any real healing in that  
country, namely a total and complete withdrawal not fudged by  turning our military 
into "advisors" who could then stay in the  country until it is stabilized. 
(Our troops are still in Germany  and Japan sixty-three years after the end of 
the Second World War,  so we know how hard it is for any government to 
acknowledge that  "stabilization" has been achieved.) Obama does not support a  
single payer health care program of the sort that the NSP  supports, and his ideas 
on health care have been less plausible  than those of Hillary Clinton. Obama 
has not supported a serious  tax on carbon emissions and his environmental 
programs have not  challenged the global corporate polluters and exploiters of 
the  earth, nor is he likely to support the kinds of radical changes in  our 
Western levels of consumption necessary to save the planet  from destruction. 
Obama has not been on the forefront of struggles  against poverty and for the 
empowerment of workers. And Obama does  not yet advocate for a Global Marshall 
Plan or for the Strategy of  Generosity that has been central to this magazine 
and the NSP's  approach to transforming the world.

All of the above would  be relevant points if we were discussing whether to 
endorse the  candidate Barack Obama. But we are not. We have never endorsed a  
candidate, despite the many who misperceived our enthusiasm for  the language 
being used by the Clintons during the 1992 campaign  and for Hillary Clinton's 
spontaneous speech when she explicitly  endorsed our "politics of meaning" 
and then invited us to meet  with her and strategize together in the White House 
in 1993. The  truth is that even beyond the legal prohibitions that make  
endorsement impossible for a 501c3, we actually don't see any  political party or 
candidate who fully articulates a spiritual  politics of the sort you'll find 
in our Spiritual Covenant with  America at www.spiritualprogressives.org. So 
while some of us may  endorse a candidate in 2008 as private citizens, in no 
way does  this extend to an endorsement by the magazine or the Network of  
Spiritual Progressives. Nor are we surprised to find that members  of the NSP 
differ sharply in who they would  endorse.

These Dead Bones Shall Yet  Live

What we are talking about is the phenomenon of hope  and the coming back to 
life of the spiritually dead. This is the  good news of Spring, with nature 
blooming; the good news of  Passover and its message that no system of slavery or 
deadness is  inevitable because there is a Force in the universe that makes  
possible the transformation from that which is to that which ought  to be; and 
the good news of Easter with its message that even the  dead can be 
resurrected, or as our Jewish prophet Ezekiel put it,  that "these dead bones shall yet 
live."

Or to put it  another way: no matter how spiritually and emotionally dead the 
 majority of people on the planet may appear to be, no matter how  lost in 
their pursuit of money and fame and sexual conquest and  me-first-ism and 
don't-bother-me-ism, the truth is that the  resurrection of the dead is always at 
hand, always a possibility.  Human beings can always be awakened again to choose 
life, to  choose love, to choose kindness, generosity, ecological  
sensitivity, and awe and wonder at the grandeur of creation. That  capacity of human 
beings is what it means to have a soul, though  in my view it might be better to 
say that all human beings  participate in the soul of the universe, which is 
the God of the  universe.

The big task for spiritual progressives is to  keep the Obama phenomenon 
alive whether or not he becomes the next  president of the U.S; either way, the 
challenge is substantial. In  the early days of the Clinton presidency when the 
Washington Post  and the Wall Street Journal were describing me as Hillary  
Clinton's guru, and Bill Clinton was steadily reading Tikkun,  Hillary told me a
powerful story that has stayed with me ever  after. She told of a meeting 
that FDR had with leaders of the  labor movement who were trying to convince FDR 
to support the  Lehman Act (to grant legal status to union strikes and  
organizing). After four hours of discussion, FDR summarized this  way: "Gentlemen, 
you have totally convinced me that you are right.  Now, go out there into the 
world and force me to do it" [emphasis  mine]. His point, Hillary explained, is 
that even as president,  the forces pushing in the direction of the status 
quo are  potentially overwhelming unless countered by a well-organized  popular 
movement, and she and Bill did not feel that they had  enough of a movement 
behind them to push for their most visionary  ideas.

That's why the movement is so very  important.

The Living Movements We  Need

It matters, however, what kind of movement. The Left  and the liberal 
progressives have not been particularly effective  in building a transformative 
movement in large part because  they've been stuck on the level of "policy and 
program" while  ignoring the spiritual hunger for meaning and purpose, for  
connection and mutual recognition, that we've been talking about  in Tikkun all 
these years.

All of the movements and  campaigns that were mentioned above were originally 
embodiments of  that larger set of spiritual concerns, and they drew their 
energy  precisely from their ability to reconnect to the deep and abiding  
hunger, often well-hidden below the surface appearance, for a  return to life, to 
the spirit, to God, or however else you choose  to express this. When that 
hunger explodes into life, when people  are resurrected from their spiritual 
death, everything becomes  possible. And that itself can be overwhelming, as we can 
see from  reading how scared the people were at Mt. Sinai when God revealed  
Herself to the people. It feels so much safer if people can find a  way to 
turn that energy into something not quite so revolutionary:  into commandments, 
social programs, rituals, legislation,  political platforms, or concrete 
demands. And there's nothing  fundamentally wrong with this as long as one keeps the 
fires  burning inside, the connection to the loving and awesome energy of  
the God of the universe, or of the power of staying alive to each  other and to 
oneself at every moment.

Unfortunately, what  often happens in social change organizations is that the 
fear  becomes so great that it overwhelms the hopefulness and the love,  and 
so they barely keep alive the pale shadow of that hopefulness,  and instead 
try to prove that they are "realistic" by focusing  their energies on struggles 
for this or that specific program, now  increasingly out of touch with the 
underlying desire which led  them and their supporters into these struggles in 
the first place.  And without that desire and the contact with the
aliveness that  it first evoked, these struggles become deadening and people 
drop  away, and then they are lost. Washington, D.C. and many of our  major 
cities around the country are filled with people who are  involved in these 
liberal or progressive organizations that have  lost their fire, and many more who 
have dropped out because the  experience was no longer humanly satisfying or  
sustainable.

It's not enough to conclude that one should  keep the movement alive after 
the campaign is finished. That was  the promise of the McGovern campaign in 
1972, the Carter campaign  in 1976, the Kennedy campaign in 1980, the Jesse 
Jackson campaign  in 1988, and the Clinton campaign in 1992. This won't happen  
unless the people work to make it happen during the campaign,  right now, in the 
midst of the struggle. And it must be done in  such a way that people are not 
re-privatized, passivized, and then  eventually demobilized. It has to be 
planned regardless of what  happens in the actual horse race for the presidency.

And  this year there is a special challenge, because the people who  have 
returned to life and energy are not just in the Obama  campaign but in the 
Clinton campaign, and in the Green party, and  in other political parties as well, 
and they need to be welcomed  into an ongoing movement that keeps this energy 
alive, without  facing recriminations for not having backed whoever others 
think  that they should have.

Win or Lose: What  Obama Needs to Do Right Now

Obama himself seems to  recognize, at times, that what really counts is not 
the horse race  or even who wins the presidency, but the creation of an ongoing 
 movement that will last. Unfortunately, he does not take the next,  
absolutely necessary step of telling his supporters what they can  do to keep the 
movement going right now and endow it with the  energy to last beyond the November 
elections. So, for example, the  people in New York, California, 
Massachusetts, Iowa, New Hampshire  and all the other states that have voted are 
implicitly being  given the message that there is nothing for them to do right now  
except to donate more money to the campaigns of their  candidates.

Imagine how different that could be if Obama  were to ask people to meet 
weekly in their neighborhoods in small  groups to begin to build ongoing projects 
of social change that  would embody their highest ideals. Groups could be 
organized, for  example, around universal health care, environmental sanity, the  
Global Marshall Plan as the path to homeland security, corporate  social 
responsibility, and electoral reform. If the millions of  people who have been 
touched by the campaigns (and yes, not only  by Obama, but by Hillary Clinton, 
John McCain, etc.) were to begin  working now for the changes they want their 
candidate to bring to  the country, then these campaigns would stop resembling 
horse  races and start resembling the building of mass movements and the  
reclaiming of social space from all those columnists, politicians,  and public 
opinion leaders whose impact historically has been to  deaden our hopes and 
convince us that we should just attend to our  own personal lives.

This is where the NSP comes in. We are  not of any particular candidacy, and 
not feeling conflicted about  people who didn't back Obama but backed Clinton 
or even Huckabee  or McCain or Nader or whoever. We see the big picture. We 
know  that the key is to keep the hopeful energy alive, regardless of  the 
outcome of the election, because that is the energy that will  set the contours for 
what elected officials do once they have  won.

That is the challenge, and for that, we need a  way for people to become 
fully engaged in the electoral arena, and  yet to recognize that what moves them 
is something far bigger than  a great speaker and dynamic politician, but 
rather the goodness  within them and within everyone else that has momentarily been 
 allowed to reveal itself through the legitimating framework of an  electoral 
campaign. But far too few people know about the NSP, and  unless you help us 
change that (e.g. by inviting friends to a  weekend afternoon or weekday 
evening gathering at your apartment  or house and showing them the NSP video and 
then discussing with  them our program and ideas) people will not know where to 
go or  what to do, and instead will simply be waiting for the next round  of 
the election from September to November, and after November  will feel lost and 
powerless and may even feel that they've been  used and tricked once again.

It has always been that way  after elections. But it doesn't have to be. The 
movements that  have been generated by Obama, Clinton, McCain, Huckabee, and  
others could remain alive if we choose to make them such-alive,  and able to 
transcend sectarian political boundaries. We at NSP  will do our part to make 
that happen, but we can't do it without  your involvement.

Contact: _www.spiritualprogressives.org_ 
(http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?v=2&c=9aZZ4ADp2RH6B1DRJh9UAem/T0wYMbMX)   or .

Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun, and chair of the  Network of Spiritual 
Progressives.

Please consider  subscribing to Tikkun. Your financial support helps us keep 
the  magazine running and allows us to provide you with these exciting  
writers. You can subscribe online or by calling or by going to  
ww.spiritualprgoressives and becoming a dues paying member of the  Network of Spiritual 
Progressives (a sub to Tikkun  comes as  part of membership).

Fax 

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