Feb/Mar 2003

If Only I Could Be Like My Cells
Deepak Chopra, MD

Why Spirituality is Essential to Progressive Politics
Ana Villa-Lobos

The Spiritual Art of Peacemaking
James Twyman

Finding Answers in Community Meetings
John Darling

Reclaiming Our Courage
Paul Rogat Loeb

The Rhinoceros In Our Living Room is Slip Covered
Jeannie Azzopardi

Iraq and the Economy
Dennis Kucinich

Letter to a Warrior
Elias Amidon

Democracy in Action
Letter to Members of MoveOn

Participatory Democracy in Porto Alegre, Brazil
America Vera-Zavala

American Revolt in Pennsylvania
Thom Hartmann

The Omega Point
Finn Honoré

We live in A World With Finite Resources
George Monbiot

Using Homeopathic Remedies
Doug Falkner, MD, M.Hom

The Healing Power of Touch
John Darling

A Somatic Contradiction
Peter Moore, MFCC, CGP

Shamanism and Psychology Join Forces
Jeanette M. Gagan, PhD

Natural Building: A New Course of Action
Coenraad Rogmans

The Movie Mystic
Stephen Simon

The Yearly Round
Richard Moeschl

Cosmic Calendar
Salina Rain

BACK TO TOP

Why Spirituality is Essential to Progressive Politics

By Ana Villa-Lobos

The Left is missing the mark. Its goals—for us to be worthy stewards of the planet, to not harm each other, and to share food and other resources with those in need—reflect the ethics of the world’s major religions, but the Left is reluctant to claim its own spiritual base. Progressives seeking a spiritual life must therefore seek beyond politics, where the reins of meaning have been left in the hands of fundamentalists who sometimes contort and misuse religion for less-than-compassionate aims (for example by citing Exod. 21:24, “eye for an eye,” to justify the death penalty, or misinterpreting “jihad” to justify terrorism).

But far more grievously, the Left tends to pursue its spiritual goals through means that undermine their goodness. In advocating for the oppressed, the Left too often tries to debase the oppressors by showing everyone how evil and inhuman they are—as if derision will change the primary social patterns that drive them to unkindness. This scapegoating lets the system off easy as we shift attention away from the underlying conditions that cause people to act in unloving ways and put all the blame on those who do. It is a war model of social change rather than a spiritual one, taking sides against a perceived enemy, and even when we invoke this model in the name of justice and peace, antagonisms continue and violence escalates. And we wonder why.

There have been exceptions, movements on the Left that were not enemy-driven. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights campaign exemplified spiritual activism in its recognition of the divine potential of both the oppressor and oppressed. Dr. King didn’t fight against anyone for the rights of blacks. As he championed human dignity, he was simultaneously fighting for the spirituality of whites, for people of all colors to live up to the Judeo-Christian principle of loving one’s neighbor as oneself. Elevating blacks meant elevating everyone. Likewise, Nelson Mandela focused his anti-Apartheid campaign on recognizing South African whites as precious and created in the image of God, and in so doing, whites were able to let down their guard, to see blacks as human beings, and to vote in droves for a racially inclusive policy. It also helped Mandela’s own people to spiritually heal and begin to see “the others” as part of themselves, thus breaking the vicious cycle of fear that fortified the Apartheid regime.

In our activism work, we need to align with Mandela and King if we wish to renew the loving core of the Left. This is particularly crucial for our efforts in Israel and Palestine, where the two sides are so polarized and blinded by fear that they can no longer see one another as human beings. Their fear is totally understandable. It’s no wonder that Palestinians are terrified of Israelis. Their civilian populations are bombed in order to kill one terrorist. Their homes are searched at the whim of the Israeli state and their private property destroyed. Their families are shot at while harvesting Palestinian olives within firing range of Jewish settlements. Whole city populations are imprisoned in their own homes, free to buy bread or go to work or visit a neighbor only at the discretion of occupying Israeli soldiers—juvenile males who often act in degrading, defiling ways toward them. It makes sense that they hate and fear the Israelis based on that limited exposure.

Likewise, it makes sense that Israelis hate and fear the Palestinians. As Jews fled the Nazi furnaces and sought refuge in their ancient homeland, Arab Palestinians lobbied Britain to change its immigration policies in the region to exclude Jews, and refugee ships were turned away. When the U.N. partitioned the British-held territory into two states—one primarily Arab, one primarily Jewish—the new nation of Israel was immediately attacked by five neighboring Arab countries in an attempt to destroy it. More recently, Israel has been bombarded by a rein of terror, grandmothers intentionally killed while buying ice cream for their grandchildren, teens dying while they dance. And in the newspapers, Israelis read about Palestinians heralding the suicide bombers as martyrs, and publicly cheering each new incident of Jewish carnage. Israelis, who have almost no human contact with Palestinians to balance these horrifying images, are understandably afraid of their Arab cousins.

Each side, then, has experienced unimaginable pain and fear, and if they could only recognize and identify with the tremendous suffering of the other, it might trigger a compassionate moment, a breakthrough, an “Aha, you’re also scared, just like me. You’re also worried about being bombed as you walk to the store. I know exactly how horrible that is. I feel for you.” But rather than uniting in their shared understanding of life under threat, they don’t comprehend why the other is behaving in such a way, nor recognize the other’s basic legitimacy as a people. Instead, they see in the other only a perpetrator of unfathomable, inhuman acts of cruelty.

The Palestinians and Israelis have a monumental spiritual challenge before them: to more truly see the other, to have compassion for a seeming aggressor who is likewise living in daily apprehension of death, and to break their own side of the vicious cycle of fear and violence. The only way we in America can support them in rising to a task of such enormity is to ourselves see both sides as fully human, as deserving of love and care, as similarly beautiful beings making terrible, murderous mistakes because they are trying to defend themselves, and trapped under a veil of quite understandable fear.

We on the Left far too often fail to help in this regard. Of course we decry it when racists regard all Arabs as anti-Semites or terrorists, but rather than balance this atrocity with love, we balance it with hate; only in the Left’s case, this hate is for the Israelis (as if the antidote for hate were to equally distribute it). This in no way makes us balancers or a counterpoint to the Right. In fact, when the Left casts all of Israel as an oppressive, illegitimate monster because of its government’s policy of occupation, and when we fail to recognize and have compassion for the emotional-historical context which drives this policy, we are only perpetuating the very fear, inhumanity, and lack of understanding that fuels the cycle of othering we are hoping so much to break.

But we persist, in part because of a superiority complex. As peace-lovers, we think we’re loving—they’re hateful. We’re good—they’re bad. The Green Party is awesome—Republicans suck. Certainly we recognize the Right dehumanizes people, including immigrants, homosexuals, single mothers, and people without medical insurance. But what we usually don’t see is that the Left dehumanizes, too. We dehumanize the Right. We dehumanize the Israelis who back the Occupation by failing to see the fear that drives them. We dehumanize people who wield power in what we see as unloving ways, without giving a damn about their pain, fear, or ultimate welfare.

A spiritual politics that recognizes the full humanity not only of the obviously oppressed, but also of the apparent oppressor, is hard to come by in our polarized world. Yet it is only through such a compassionate worldview that we can ever hope to heal the system as a whole, rather than just attending to the needs of our chosen beneficiaries. Mandela’s methods worked precisely because he chose everyone in the South African conflict. While he boldly and unapologetically criticized the wrongs done, he didn’t hate his enemy as a way to extinguish hate. He didn’t capitulate to “way of the world” tactics of withholding love from those who withheld love from him. He held to a spiritual vision of the seeming oppressor.

Of course we’d rather limit our compassionate alliance to the “good guys,” the victims, the blatantly oppressed, since identifying with that aspect of our own selves is so much more palatable. Who wants to love and recognize the humanity of “the bad guys,” particularly when the bad guys are the ones with the most power? But whomever we see as the enemy, no matter how imbalanced the power equation is in their favor, that is precisely the person we must try to love and understand. Like us, our perceived enemy is petrified. Like us, that person does not feel wholly safe or recognized or loved. And we will never heal this state of affairs by cutting them off from us in contempt.

“Us versus them” is a comforting game that gives us psychological distance from those we fear, but it is not a system-altering game. It’s the game that’s already out there, etched into our social institutions. It’s the game we learn by watching TV and getting picked on at the playground and trying to “be somebody” in a competitive market. But it’s a game that no matter how good we are at as progressive activists, if we play it, we’ve already lost. If we play it, we aren’t offering an alternative to the current war-producing system; we’re reinforcing it. And lives are lost everyday because we don’t recognize this and stop it.

We can no longer afford the comfort of saying the Palestinian child is “us,” and the Israeli soldier who kills him is “them.” We can no longer say the Israeli girl blown up on the bus is “us,” but the Hamas terrorist and his supporters are “them.” We can’t say we are the hurt ones and they are the ones who inflict hurt. We are all oppressed and we are all oppressors. We need to work together, drawing on the totality of our human ingenuity, to remake the system that divides us and get it better this time.

It’s easy to be cynical and think, “Yeah right, nice idea, but it’s utopian. We can’t really change things. Every action we take toward a more loving society gets swallowed up by some gigantic social-political machine.”

It’s important in this case to look at history:

In the 1940s, most East Indians had only sticks and stones against the English Empire’s massive military power which had been colonizing them for years in what must have felt like a permanent state of oppression. It was “utopian” for the Indian population to imagine that the actions of the weak could ever lead to the withdrawal of the powerful.

In the 1950s United States under Jim Crow laws, with segregated social institutions, in the face of cross-burnings, lynchings, and other violence, in a world where whites held all the cards, American blacks had no reason whatsoever to believe in the possibility of change.

In the 1980s, South African blacks under Apartheid were caught in a huge, seemingly intractable system of oppression, segregated townships, and rampant social and political inequality. They had no voice, no vote, and they would have been entirely justified in thinking the system was just too big, and their actions would always be futile in effecting real change.

Thank God someone thought otherwise in each of these historical moments. Thank God someone was an idiot and had hope despite it all, and then clung to that hope—through failures and prison sentences and assassinations—until it became a reality. Thank God someone was able to overcome the common cynicism and despair and imagine the more loving world that could be. But it’s very, very tough to imagine that world in the face of a media barrage of counter-images, day after day.

And that’s why we need each other to walk this path. We need another image in our heads and hearts, and we need help maintaining it. It’s almost impossible for one person alone to overcome a lifetime of social programming that says nothing can change, we’re stuck forever with escalating hate and fear, and the only way to survive is to conquer enemies. Dominate, prevail, show everyone you’re better than they are, and you’re playing it right. But question the competitive, enemy-based foundation on which the institutions of human life are currently constructed, and you’re not just radical, you’re a heretic. You’re a blasphemer. You’re crazy!

We need to be crazy together so we’re not the only ones saying the emperor has no clothes, so we can be a movement of heretics questioning not the love in each other’s hearts, but the institutions that support that love’s denial. Our activist communities should ideally be arenas for us to try on fool’s clothing, to practice being vulnerable rather than defensive, practice embarrassing ourselves rather than playing it cool, and get used to bucking pessimism as we dare to envision “the impossible”—a more just and loving world. Mandela dared imagine this “impossible” better world. King and Gandhi dared. The Israelites enslaved in ancient Egypt dared.

“Realism” has never broken the chains of oppression; hope has. But in exchange, hope asks a lot of us. It asks us to defy our conditioning, to defy most of what we’ve learned about how reality works, and to create a world in which all life is sacred, not just the people we happen to agree with. It asks us to love and trust again, like we haven’t since childhood. It asks us to thaw six billion hearts from the safety we’ve found by giving up hope.

That’s a big job and we’re just little people who would probably rather wait for someone else to come along and fix things. But at every epoch in history when society has changed for the better, it’s because little people like you and me noticed the world was drowning, looked around reluctantly to see if someone else would save it, and finally realized, “We’re it.”

Ana Villa-Lobos is a doctoral student in sociology at U.C. Berkeley, and a Fellow at the Berkeley Center for the Development of Peace and Well-Being. She is co-chair of the Tikkun Campus Network, and founding member of Berkeley Tikkun. This article first appeared in the Jan/Feb ’03 issue of Tikkun Magazine, www.tikkun.org.