What is the Politics of Meaning?


My political interest has been aroused by an exciting movement of great thinkers and profoundly spiritual individuals whose belief is that American society (and others?) can be healed along the following lines...


The politics of meaning is both a new theoretical orientation and a strategy to change American society.

Theoretical Orientation

Liberals and progressives have focused on economic needs and individual rights--and have fought against corporate or governmental forces that deny each. A progressive politics of meaning supports the liberal agencda on these issues (including civil liberties, women's liberation, economic justice, choice, ecological sanity, etc.) Yet liberals have too narrow an understanding of human needs. They often see our primary interest as economic survial or individual freedom. But they've been unable to recognize the ethical, spiritual, and psychological needs that are equally central.

We see human beings as fundamentally in relationship to each other and needing each other's recognition and love. The healthy human being is not the one who can stand alone, but the one who can acknowledge his/her need for others and can recognize in every other the sanctity that makes them worthy of respect and caring.

Human beings have a need to transcend the materialism and selfishness and the manipulative consciousness that teaches them to see others primarily in terms of what they can get out of others. Most people have a hunger to move beyond the "looking out for number one" common sense of this society and to see their lives as connected to some higher ethical and spiritual meaning. Yet most people believe that this is unrealistic, that ethical and spiritual life can only be ideals for some future eras, and that in the meantime they must be "realistic" and live according to the dominant ethos.

But a world based on selfishness and cynicism produces a huge amount of psychic pain. The ethos of selfishness and cynicism plays itself out in a weakening of families, loving relationships, and friendships--because the more people internalize the cynical view that everyone is only out for themselves, the harder it becomes to trust anyone or to believe that they will really be there for you when you most need them, when you don't have so much to give back and can't make the relationship an "equal exchange" (in market terms). Nor can you trust corporations not to pollute the environment or others not to rob you on the streets or at home. As trust dissolves, fear increases.

Because liberals and the Left never really address this crisis of meaning, the Right has been able to position itself as the meaning- oriented political force in the society, bemoaning the ethical and spiritual decline and the crisis in families.

That's why we need a progressive politics of meaning.

Sound-Bite Version

The goal of a politics of meaning is to change the bottom line in American society, so that productivity or efficiency of corporations, legislation, or social practices is no longer measure solely by the degree to which they maximize wealth and power--but rather also by the degree to which they tend to maximize our capacities to sustain loving and caring relationships and to be ethically, spiritually, and ecologically sensitive.

Strategy

Some people think that all of these meaning issues only have an impact on middle-income people, and that liberals and progressives should first solve the economic problems of the society and stop the cutbacks of the conservatives. We wish them luck. But we believe that they will be unable to do that until they've addressed the meaning crisis. The alliance needed between poor people and middle-income people is given equal attention to the pain faced by poor people. Up until now, the Left has tended to give the message to the American majority that they are being selfish and bad to worry about the collapse of their families, crime, etc., when the pooor are suffering so much more. This has not been an effective strategy. We think the best way to seve the interests of the most oppressed is to take seriously the meaning crisis, and build a cross-class alliance on that basis.

Some New Age people talk about meaning issues, too--but they tend to focus on changing their own heads. That's an important element--but it is unlikely to work for most people unless we build economic and political institutions tha foster caring rather than selfishness and cynicism. In TIKKUN magazine, we put forward specific programmatic ideas to show what this might look like concretely.

The Plan We've created the Foundation for Ethics and Meaning as the vehicle to build a movement to "change the bottom line" in American society from selfishness and cynicism to caring and solidarity. We've built local chapters around the country, and in 1998 we are considering creating a national teach-in modeled on Earth Day with the focus on Social Responsibility and Spiritual Renewal. Some local chapters are exploring ballot initiatives to require state and local governments to consider a corporation's history of social responsibility before awarding government contracts--or even requiring corporations to reapply for their charters every twenty years, at which point their social responsibility records would be a factor for reincorporation. Other people are beginning to organize in their professions--and to get people to reenvision what their work world would look like with a politics of meaning bottom line. To be part of this effort, join the Foundation for Ethics and Meaning and subscribe to TIKKUN magazine.

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