Politics of Meaning  

No. James' Carville's famous "It's the economy, stupid" is deeply wrong. Money, sex, food and power are not the only human needs sufficient to motivate people. People hunger for meaning and purpose in their work and in their personal lives. By and large, liberals keep missing this--and that's why they keep losing, even when they are winning.

People living in the advanced industrial societies of the West want economic well-being and political rights, to be sure, and we are a long way from securing that for people of color, women, and gays and lesbians.

Yet what we've discovered is that there is an equally strong set of needs that we call spiritual or meaning needs: people want their lives to have some higher meaning and purpose than simply accumulating money, power, sexual gratification and fame--they want their lives to be connected to something about which they can feel that it has transcendent value.

And they hunger for personal relationships, families and communities in which they can experience themselves as being cared for and recognized in all of their specificity and uniqueness and spiritual beauty--not only for what the can "deliver" or "do" for others, not for how they will be "of use," but simply because they are valuable and deserving of love and caring just for who they are as embodiments of the sacred.

Unfortunately, very few social change movements move beyond the first set of needs to actually understand and integrate into their thinking and program these spiritual or meaning needs (for an example of how to do that, please read our Spiritual Covenant with America at www.spiritualprogressives.org--it is a detailed embodiment of a spiritual progressive politics, and read our plan for a Global Marshall Plan at that same site).  The absence of this consciousness and program in progressive and liberal movements and political parties has limited the potential impact that all these movements could have. It will take a very different kind of movement—one founded on and giving central focus to a spiritual vision--to create a real alternative to the political Right, to the fundamentalists (religious and political), and to our society’s ethos of selfishness, materialism, and cynicism.

We in the Network of Spiritual Progressives seek to create that alternative. We are a community of people from many faiths and traditions, called together by TIKKUN magazine and its vision of healing and transforming our world. We include in this call both the outer transformation needed to achieve social justice, ecological sanity, and world peace, and the inner healing needed to foster loving relationships, a generous attitude toward the world and toward others unimpeded by the distortions of our egos. Our movement will encourage a habit of generosity and trust, and the ability to respond to the grandeur of creation with awe, wonder and radical amazement.

We are guided in our work by our belief in the principle of solidarity. For us, this principle has spiritual roots in the Jewish commandment to remember that we were all slaves in Egypt; we believe that we are all harmed by oppression directed at any group or individual. This is a message which is common to most of the religious and spiritual traditions of the human race for the past several thousand years, and is part of the tradition also of many secular and even "orthodox atheist" groups that came into existence in the past few hundred years when the religious and spiritual communities that supposedly were committed to these values actually failed to take them seriously and became, instead, embedded in economic and political realities that were oppressive.

Please read Rabbi Michael Lerner's book The Politics of Meaning and Peter Gabel's book The Bank Teller and Other Essays on the Politics of Meaning. Both are available at our online book store at www.tikkun.org