[p2p-research] Fwd: Obama's Mistake--and What It Would Take To Really Rectify It

[Michel Bauwens]

not really on topic of p2p, but of interest ...

this is quite amazing,
http://www.debii.curtin.edu.au/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=39&Itemid=56

and this as well: http://p2pfoundation.net/Stand_Alone_Complex

Some mention of the latter with expert commentary would be very
welcome in our blog.

As you know, I'm on the road, and it is very hard for me to keep up
filling the blog for now,

Michel


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Rabbi Michael Lerner <RabbiLerner at tikkun.org>
Date: Wed, Apr 16, 2008 at 11:04 PM
Subject: Obama's Mistake--and What It Would Take To Really Rectify It
To: michelsub2004 at gmail.com





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Obama's Error--and What It Would Really Take to Rectify It
 By Rabbi Michael Lerner

 A continuing irony of American politics is that the candidates of the
ruling elites have been able to convince many Americans that the
candidates who seek to redistribute wealth to the less fortunate,
provide health care for all, and provide jobs and housing for the poor
are the real elitists. They've been able to get away with that not
only by demeaning the "Hollywood  limousine liberals" (never
explaining why those  wealthy who support tax increases on their own
wealth to feed, house and care for the hungry are not deserving of
more praise than those who horde their wealth for themselves), but
also by portraying liberals as hostile to the religious concerns of
the American people.

  Unfortunately, on that latter point Right-wingers are often
accurate. The relgio-phobia Americans encounter in many sections of
the liberal and progressive world often push them away and into the
hands of the Right.  Deeply suspicious of the slippery slope from some
right wing religious beliefs to religious coercion, homophobia,
sexism, and racism, people on the Left have created a cultural
assumption that anyone who is into religion or spiritual life is
probably a little less intellectually or psychologically developed
than the secularists, perhaps seeking mystery or a father-figure God
to compensate for some lack in their lives.

 The message that most Americans receive from the Left is an elitist
and demeaning put-down: "We need your votes, so you are welcome into
our ranks, but we hope that by hanging out with us secular leftists
you will eventually give up your pathological need for religious
beliefs and evolve to a higher level of rationality that us
secularists have been developing as the only possible way to think
clearly about the nature of reality."  Often unconscious, this
religio-phobic message has done much to push away the majority of
Americans whose religious beliefs are extremely important to them,
even though on purely economic grounds they'd feel more aligned with
the Left's agenda than that of the Right.

 Barack Obama understands this, and has done much in his career to
avoid failing into that trap. His political worldview draws upon the
spiritual and religious wisdom of the human race, without making
explicit some of those connections. Others may shout about their
religiosity to score points with particular religious constituencies,
but Obama is the closest thing we've seen in American politics to a
man who actually embodies spiritual depth.

 All the more sad, then, to have witnessed his error in listing
religion as one of the compensations people who are bitter about their
economic situation embrace along with guns and anti-immigrant
sentiments. Seeing religion as a substitute gratification grabbed on
to by people who are otherwise oppressed is an insight that has been
part of liberal and progressive culture for at least 150 years.
Unfortunately, Senator Obama, like Karl Marx before him, got it wrong
because he identified the needs that are being systematically denied
as purely material, thereby failing into the deep "It's the economy,
stupid" mistake of the Left. And so far, he has sought only to justify
his description of people as "bitter" rather than to address his
mistake in reducing their upsets to those that flow from the current
economic downturn. The fact is that significant  growth in the
religious right happened in the 1990s, during the Clinton
Administration's years of growing prosperity, precisely when people
were feeling most economically secure.

            When I met with Senator Obama in his Senate office, I
explained to him the ideas behind the newly formed Network of
Spiritual Progressives. In the research my colleagues and I did for
ten years at the Institute for Labor and Mental Health we found that
it was not only material, but spiritual deprivation that was at the
heart of much of the pain that Americans experience today. That's why
even at the height of American prosperity in the Clinton years, a
powerful resurgence of right-wing religious forms was providing an
avenue of expression for people whose needs were being ignored by the
liberals in the Clinton administration, the Democratic Party, and even
in parts of the liberal churches.

             Similarly, the revival of a religious Left has not gotten
much traction to the extent that it adopts the liberal political and
economic agenda and makes it "religious" by finding some useful Bible
quotes to back up the peace and justice planks of the Democrats.
Valuable as that may be, it too misses the deeper pain that has led
people to embrace right-wing religions.

             What we discovered in groups that we ran for over ten
thousand middle income working people is that most people spend their
days in a work world governed by the "bottom line" that judges
institutions and social practices to be efficient, rational or
productive to the extent that they maximize money and power. Day after
day, people breathe in the message that to be rational in this society
is to "look out for number one" and treat other people
instrumentally-that is, as valuable to the extent that they help us
achieve our own goals and desires. People learn how to treat each
other as means to our own ends.

             We were struck, however, by how bitter many people feel
about this way of life. Over and over again, middle income working
people told us that they felt they were wasting their lives because
their economic survival required them to do work that in no way
connected to their hunger for a higher meaning to their lives, what
Rev. Rick Warren correctly described as a desire for a purpose-driven
life.

             Moreover, as people bring into their personal lives the
values of "looking for number one" and believing that getting their
own needs met is the highest possible good, they find that their
families and friendships become increasingly unstable, as more and
more people switch from one relationship or marriage to another,
imagining that the next one might satisfy yet more of their needs. No
wonder people feel lonely, afraid, and deeply troubled by a society in
which the narcissism is bred not by some peculiarities of one
generation or another, but by the fundamental notions of rationality
that predominate in all of the major economic and social institutions.

             For this very reason, we've been urging candidates in
every political party to embrace a "new bottom line" in which
corporations, social practices, government policies and individual
behaviors are judged rational, efficient or productive not only if
they maximize money or power, but also to the extent that they
maximize love and caring, kindness and generosity, ethical and
ecological sensitivity, enhance our capacity to treat others as
embodiments of the sacred and to respond with awe, wonder and radical
amazement at the grandeur of the universe.

             It was this that I tried to express in the "politics of
meaning" that I shared with Hillary Clinton in the mid 1990s when the
New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and much other
media mis-described me as "the guru of the White House," and it was
this that the Network of Spiritual Progressives now describes as a
"spiritual politics" for the 21st century. In my contact with Senator
Obama I've become convinced that he understands this, and that the
reason he fell back into a materialist and reductionist account when
speaking with supporters in San Francisco is that he knows how
resistant many people in liberal and progressive circles have been in
the past decades to anything resembling a religious or spiritual
discourse.

 Because of the almost allergic reaction many liberal and progressive
insiders have to the concept of "spiritual" and the reality of
religion as an explanatory category, the Senator fell back into the
categories of thought that have made most liberals unable to
understand the legitimate spiritual hungers that lead people to
embrace religious and spiritual practices, and hence unable to connect
in a deep way to many Americans whose economic circumstances could
have been expected to embrace progressive politics but whose spiritual
and religious yearnings make them feel unwelcome in many liberal
contexts. That's why we created a Network of Spiritual Progressives to
help bridge this gap, and a Spiritual Covenant with America to help
progressives articulate a politics that addresses these spiritual
needs.

         In substituting a reductive materialist explanation rather
than articulating the real spiritual crisis, Senator Obama, who
reassured me, as Hillary once did, that he understands and agrees with
this spiritual politics, may have critically weakened his credibility
among many who might otherwise embrace his candidacy. Yet if he does
explicitly embrace a spiritual politics, he can transcend the
left/right dichotomies that have torn our country apart. What remains
to be seen is he can do that in the context of a Left whose
religio-phobia is both intense and unconscious, and a media determined
to make every mistake into a fatal error no matter who the candidate.
If his supporters let him do so, Senator Obama has the understanding
and capacity to become the first national figure to embrace a
spiritual progressive agenda, and doing so may be the only way he will
overcome the stigma of elitism with which the Republicans (with the
aid of Hillary Clinton) now seek to mis-describe him. But making it
safe for Obama to publicly embrace his own highest vision while
acknowledging what was really mistaken in what he said will require a
struggle by those of his supporters who are spiritual
progressives--and they may remain too intimidated by the
anti-religious culture of the Left to feel empowered to raise these
issues with their standard-bearer. If they do not, the elitism charge
may outweigh issues of war, race, and economics in the unconscious but
powerful mass psychology that often determines the outcomes of
American elections.

*************************************************
 Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun Magazine www.tikkun.org,
chair of the Network of Spiritual Progreessives
www.spiritualprogressves.org, and author of eleven books including
The Poltics of Meaning, Healing Israel/Palestine and The Left Hand of
God: Taking Our Country Back from the Religious Right (HarperCollins,
2006).  RabbiLerner at TIKKUN.org

***************************************************
 Please circulate this message to your lists, post it on your
websites, and ask media people to consider when they write about the
elections.

 If you wish to support this kind of thinking and see it included in
the national debate,  help us by JOINING or DONATING to  the Network
of Spiritual Progressives (NSP)  at  www.spiritualprogressives.org.

 We do not support any candidate or political party, but instead seek
to introduce into the political discoruse of Western countries the
ideas articulated in the Spiritual Covenant with America and in the
NSP version of The Global Marshall Plan, both of which you can find at
www.spiritualprogressives.org. For more info after reading our website
or to obtain a copy of our dvd about the NSP: Nichola at Tikkun.org or
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Time). Members of the Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP) receive
Tikkun magazine as part of their membership. NSP is an interfaith
organization, equally open to spiritual but NOT religious secularists
as to people in all religious communties. It is chaired by Rabbi
Michael Lerner, Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister and Princeton
Professor Cornel West.



If you are interested in receiving training as a spiritual progressive
activist, we will offer such a training in Washington, D.C. over the
Memorial Day weekend, May 23-26. More info on the website and from
Nichola at Tikkun.org.  We are also seeking volunteers and interns--go to
www.tikkun.org and click in the left hnd side the box saying "JOBS"
and read how to apply. Ditto, we are still looking for a new assistant
editor--read about how to apply at "Jobs" on the Tikkun website
www.tiwkkun.org.




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