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Introducing The Politics Of Meaning
By Peter Gabel
It is impossible to be alive today without feeling at a distance from one's own life, without being at a distance from one's own life. We are present in an absent world. Within ourselves we feel each day and across all our days a longing for the promised land, a longing to fully realize the impacted Someone who we know we are through a meaningful coming-into-connection with the presence of the Other. By "the Other" I mean both actual other persons who hold in their presence both the desire and the capacity to bless us with the recognition that would allow us to emerge into authentic community, and I also mean the Divine Other that authentic community necessarily exists in relation to. For when we emerge from our isolation and become fully present to each other through the blessing and power of mutual recognition, we experience a spiritual elevation that inherently points us in an ethical and transcendental direction. We know immediately, self-evidently, that realizing ourselves through becoming present in community is but a moment on the path toward Being, realizing itself through the healing and transformation of all that it is not yet.
 That is why the experience of authentic community always leads to the struggle for social justice and toward affirming the sacredness of the natural world — my becoming-present to the other, and to myself through the other, is not a completed state to be contemplated, but a movement toward something beyond the present moment, of which the present moment is an incarnation. The ethical imperative that emerges from the experience of becoming present through mutual recognition is thus not some burden or externally imposed duty, but a spontaneous discovery of where we want to go and must go if our life is to be meaningful. Out of the pain and disconnection of drifty isolation, we thus enter the world and discover the significance of the relationship of the present to the future: that is what meaning is.
Today this experience of authentic social connection and consequent sense of higher meaning and purpose is largely denied to us. We are surrounded by an empty outer world that purports to be real and full of energy and direction. This is the world of the Internet and the stock market, the world of the impeachment of the president and the Academy Awards and this month's holiday and so-and-so's wedding. Each day we wake up and try to take part in this world, try to "catch up to" its purported reality and make it our own.
But we can't. We can't catch up to it because it has no spiritual center. It is not really there, and we are really here. The fact that there is now free e-mail on Yahoo! means absolutely nothing to us.  Monica Lewinsky is a "story" that she herself cannot catch up to before the story of herself vanishes into the War in Yugoslavia and no one shows up at her book signings. We take a vacation, but the pleasant sensations cannot support the vacation's attempt to mean something. Each day millions of vacations come to an end and dissolve into mere "time off" that happened and is now over. Time off from nothing, from a succession of meetings and errands that don't quite ever add up to anything because they do not emanate from and do not return to the spiritual center of who one is. The result is a crisis of meaninglessness — a disconnect between our very substantial, felt longings to realize the spirit that we are through an embodied communal life within which our spirit is recognized and engaged in the making of meaning, and an actual, surrounding life-world that is strangely anti-substantial and absent to itself, that is impossible to grab onto while requiring of us that we go through the motions of participating in it.
This book is about how we construct and reconstruct this alienated world in spite of our desire for authentic social connection and higher meaning and purpose. It is also about the new link that is needed between spirituality and politics if we are to lead ourselves out of this paradoxical situation. I say the situation is paradoxical because although every human being on the planet seeks the communal redemption and sense of mutual recognition that I speak of — just as every baby seeks out eye contact with mother — our collective effort to express and realize this desire at present keeps taking a form that can only lead to this desire's imprisonment, to what I call the "the circle of collective denial" that results from a "rotating lack of confidence in the desire of the other" (p. 87). Our desire to fully recognize and be recognized by the other engenders a vulnerability to the other that keeps appearing to threaten us with a kind of spiritual annihilation that in turn leads us to deny our authentic desire and hide behind a congeries of images and masks, both personal and collective, which in turn keeps creating and re-creating the very alienated world that we long to transcend. The fear of annihilation by the other in turn keeps creating and re-creating the increasingly real risk of annihilation: the actual extinction of human life on earth.
Consider the following two news stories reported on the front pages of this week's newspapers in the United States (May 26-June 2, 1999):
- This year's American corn crop has been genetically engineered to produce worm-resistant kernels of corn. But this corn also, as a result of the genetic manipulation, has produced a toxin that is accidentally killing off the beautiful Monarch butterfly.
- During the last years of the Soviet Union, Soviet leaders sought to dispose of hundreds of tons of anthrax bacteria — enough to kill everyone on the planet many times over — by pouring bleach into the canisters of pink powder containing the anthrax and dumping the thus decontaminated anthrax onto a remote island in the Aral Sea. However, the Aral Sea has since been shrinking as a result of Soviet irrigation policies, and the remote island has grown from 77 square miles to 770 and will soon be connected to the mainland. In addition, live anthrax spores have recently been discovered in the island's soil and can easily be spread by rodents, lizards, and birds. Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan are now calling on the United States for help.
The essays in this book seek to provide a description, at once spiritual and political, of the alienation of self from other that has produced these awe-inspiring stories. Each point of divorce from our spiritual center in the stories — for example, hallucinatory nationalism and the demonization of the other, the severing of scientific knowledge and its use from the spiritual being of natural phenomena, the way that a television commercial for cornflakes would unknowingly reinforce our inability to experience the being of the butterfly and its wonder for us, the de-spiritualization of public policy that could have led the experts who approved the decisions to mutate corn or breed anthrax to believe that their decisions were entirely rational, the alienated assumptions underlying existing conceptions of law that could make the creation of genetically engineered corn and the production of anthrax entirely legal, the "perfectly normal," organizational consciousness of the humans who produced, say, the genetic material in the first story and the canisters of pink powder in the second — each of these points of divorce from the soul are taken up in one or another of the essays in the book and are brought into connection with the essential divorce of self from other, and from the Divine Other, that is the book's central theme.
But self and other are not actually divorced, and that is why we are still here and why a "great turning," as Joanna Macy has called it, may still occur. The problem is rather that our connection is denied. Our task is therefore to figure out how this connection that always subtends our reciprocity can be affirmed. The carrying out of this task requires that we develop a new connection between spirituality and politics that Michael Lerner and I have called the politics of meaning.
The politics of meaning is both a way of understanding the world and a strategy for how to change it. We begin with the cry (we could call it a claim or an assertion, but it is really a cry) that our collective Spirit is in crisis because the economic, political, and social institutions that envelop us fail to speak to our common longing to connect with one another and with the natural world in a sacred and life-giving way. This alienating — distancing, isolating — cultural envelopment  frustrates our longing to participate in a spiritually meaningful communal life that would aspire to the fullest realization of our social being. Instead, social-economic institutions, such as the competitive marketplace, foster a climate of materialism, individualism and mutual suspicion that denies this common longing, drives our loving and caring impulses underground and seeks to prevent their expression through the threat of humiliation posed by our culture's main social defense mechanism: cynicism.
- Peter Gabel is president of the New College of California.
Excerpted from his new book, "The Bank Teller and Other Essays on the Politics of Meaning." Reprinted with permission.
Intro |
Greg Guma: Independents' Day
Pauline Oliveros: The Medium Is The Massage
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