Smiling over Maureen Dowd’s piece in the Sunday New York Times, however, my grin turned upside down. It occurred to me: no one who intends to vote for McCain or Palin will find this funny.
Dowd is one of many who are not only preaching to the choir but doing so in a way that reinforces the wall between parties with layers of scorn. We who read and laugh can’t possibly imagine that someone would actually buy what the other camp is selling! Mockery fosters hostility, intolerance, and elitism—all in fun. It isn’t possible to communicate with them, so why even try? Our opponents are just plain wrong.
Except that they aren’t. Any side is a side. Isn’t there a better way?
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Tilting towards the political these last few weeks, it may seem that my blog is leaning far beyond its intended scope of our desires for food, sex, and spirit. However, what is at stake in this election, when it comes right down to it, is precisely our desire for spirit.
How so? As noted, a desire for spirit is a desire for a sense of vitality, direction, and belonging that gets people out of bed in the morning, willing to believe that life is worth living. It is a desire that finds its pleasure as we participate consciously in naming and bringing into being a world we love that loves us. It is a desire that makes its wisdom known in patterns of chronic frustration, depression, and despair.
People across the nation are feeling acutely a frustration with the current administration and its policies—a frustration that signals to us that we want more. We want new energy, a new direction, and a renewed sense of belonging to a country of which we are proud. We want change in which we can believe, and both parties are selling it to us.
However, if you take a look, you can see that the positions offered in response to this frustrated desire fan out along the mind over body spectrum we have identified in relation to our desires for food, sex, and spirit. At this end, one party is calling individuals to develop greater will power and self-restraint among individuals and corporations. At that end, one party is calling for more effective government regulation of and involvement in key industries and services.
The response to the recent collapse of Lehman Brothers investment bank is case in point. McCain attributes the crises to excessive greed, while Obama points to the absence of government regulation over the derivatives markets.
Both responses, however, reinforce the mind over body logic they share. Whether the mind in question is individual or collective, the dynamic is the same: we are led to believe that we will bring into being the world we want to see by exercising the power of mind to rule over the renegade bodies that are abusing our precious freedoms.
From this perspective, both visions of change are offering us more of the same. There are differences and those differences matter, but they do not matter enough to make a real difference.
We, as individuals and as a country, need our own version of what I have been describing in these posts as an “experience shift”: we must learn to discern the wisdom in our sensations of frustrated desire.
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Simply promising more or less government is way too crude a tool to deal with the issues of our time. The messy negotiations conducted amidst tightly strung webs of conflicting commitments merit careful attention—but not just that. Change happens so quickly that we need to be able to recognize when and how government action is necessary, and when it isn’t. We need to cultivate a sensory awareness of how the movements we are making--as individuals, communities, corporations, and country—are making us. This is not just a question of accountability; it is rather a willingness to discern the impulses to move locked in patterns of chronic pain and frustration and see them as something other than either a matter of will power or government control.
When we examine the movements contributing to our current dissatisfaction, we find a common thread: inequality. The movements we make when we think and feel and act as if we were minds over bodies serve to concentrate power in the hands of those who reinforce this belief. Ironically, we place our faith in larger and larger institutions that promise to give us the economic, political, personal, or spiritual autonomy over our material circumstances that our mind over body training teaches us to want. Political parties included.
This inequality is soon structural. It is what we are creating—not as a result of excessive greed or lack of government oversight, but as a result of our willingness to create relationships with those who promise us the mind over body power we believe will grant us the sense of vitality, direction, and belonging we seek.
The crux of the matter is this: are we moving in ways that foster relationships in which all entities benefit? This is the question that a government by the people and for the people must answer. For if one party to an exchange has a much greater concentration of power, then that is where government is needed—to ensure a mutually enabling relationship.
Banks depend upon the solvency of individuals as much as individuals depend upon the solvency of banks. If the benefits accruing from a relationship are one-sided, then it is in everyone’s interest to provide a counterbalance—not regulation for the sake of regulation, but an articulated sense of the common good, the shared principles and rules that enable the play to continue.
This logic is what we have been working with of the past few months: In so far as we are intent on naming and bringing into being a world we love that loves us, we are obligated to let others live as the condition of our own freedom. This is something that we all must embrace—our ends both tempered and empowered by what we share. This country. This planet. This race. This tomato.
Next Week: Enabling Freedom
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