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Rabbi Michael Lerner was in town this evening to talk about the project inspiring his new book. The project is all about Taking Back our Country from the Religious Right. Since after the student revolts of the 1960s, in which he was very implicated, Lerner and friends are asking why society has been moving to the right in an on-going investigation (interviewing more than 10.000 people over the last 35 years). Their findings: there’s a spiritual crisis in the United States and only the right is addressing it. |
He explains: many people spend a good amout of their time at work, or on their way to work, or being educated or trained for a job, and the values that shape those places are competition and individualism. And while many people are unhappy with the situation and feel it’s a waste of time, of their life, they also feel that there is not much that can be changed – this is ‘the real world’. A world where other possible values and beliefs count less and where one is made to forget about the other as an embodiment of the sacred. Through naming the spiritual crisis, the right offers people some kind of recognition for things they experience. They also offer their usual solution of turning to the demeaned ‘other’ of society to blame. At the same time the right is the champion of self-interest and materialism, but it gets away with that contradiction because the left is unable to speak to the spiritual crisis. For the left spirituality or religion is either understood as new age flackery or as a codeword for sexism, racism or homophobia. But the left doesn’t have any intellectual categories that capture and speak to the realm of spirit.
What Lerner proposes, is a new bottom-line in which love, care, ecological responsibility, awe and radical amazement at the universe are central. Which subsequently radically questions capitalism and its notions of productivity, efficiency and rationality (what would those mean if love, care and ecological responsibility are taken into account?). The need to create a language that articulates different left-wing struggles together in a wider vision in which love, care and generosity are central. That implies, he insisted, that the left gets over its religiofobia. Remaining convinced that the others around us are stupid, irrational and backward, is not exactely going to get a broken left wing very far…
The Veterans Memorial Building was packed and the audience loved Lerner. J’ai bien aimé ce qu’il a dit, mais il y quand-même une question de style, qui me pouse à penser plus profondément aux différences entre ici et ‘back home’ (which by now has come to mean a peculiar configuation and selection of spaces in Europe, Maria a déjà suggeré qu’il faut demander à Harrisson de faire une carte de ‘mon’ Europe), surtout que tout le domaine de la réligion et spiritualité et la question de la sécularité et laicité est quand-même un marqeur de différence entre ces deux espaces. A suivre…
movements Tikkun | Network of Spiritual Progressives
articles Hostile Takeover: Theocracy in America