Michael Lerner's The Politics of Meaning
Aronson, Ronald
THE POLITICS OF MEANING: RESTORING HOPE AND POSSIBILITY IN AN AGE OF CYNICISM by Michael Lerner Addison-Wesley, 1996 338 pp $24, $13 paper THOSE OF us who are trying to rethink left politics...
...After distributing the specific bequests listed above (to others in your will), I leave the remainder of my estate to the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...
...There is in all this the implicit claim to know the few simple laws governing human reality and our inner nature as well as our hidden feelings and the ways we are in pain...
...DISSENT / Spring 1998 n 117 BOOKS article, by Peter Marin, to a critical assessment of Lerner's politics...
...GIVEN THE publicity Lerner received after the Clintons' momentary embrace of his watchwords, it is not surprising that The Politics of Meaning should have been reviewed in the New York Times Book Review, Time, and the Atlantic Monthly, or that Harper's should have devoted a major A LEGACY OF IDEAS A bequest of any size can be of lasting benefit to Dissent and help ensure that the ideas and beliefs you hold dear will continue to have a public forum...
...Responding to Lerner's challenge means, among other things, to recover and clarify these moments, to give our experiences of hope and meaning and morality their rightful space as part of a politics of justice...
...It is built on a range of experience and knowledge simultaneously too sweeping and too thin...
...Lerner believes that we are all hungry for meaning and purpose, for a wider sense of connection and a community of caring...
...3. "To create the social, spiritual, and psychological conditions that will encourage us to recognize the uniqueness, sanctity, and infinite preciousness of every human being, and to treat them with caring, gentleness, and compassion...
...BUT WHAT if The Politics of Meaning were free from its reductionist and totalizing tendencies, from its author's bent for acting as the charismatic leader...
...Further, Lerner writes, our health-care system should be one that "links physical health to our ethical and spiritual well-being...
...in sexuality, however alienated in our society...
...serious evaluations of the political and intellectual content of his politics have been few and far between...
...He has moved with enviable success, founding and shaping Tikkun, influencing Hillary Rodham Clinton's April 1993 health-care speech, creating "Summits of Ethics and Meaning" and related gatherings as well as a foundation, a summer camp, and a Jewish congregation for which he serves as rabbi...
...This makes it clear that Lerner's is not just a spiritualized politics of the left, but one that makes its demands for its own reasons even when it overlaps with traditional left demands...
...120 n DISSENT / Spring 1998...
...2. "To change the bottom line"—that is, to change society's priorities from increasing wealth and power to the above...
...The Politics of Meaning tends toward the reductionist and dogmatic, rooted in a kind of mental hydraulics familiar from pop psychology: meaningneeds, blocked here, take that vicious or hopeless outlet there or, dammed up, find an even more dangerous subterranean release later...
...First, produced from an intertwined psychotherapeutic stance and religious commitment, the politics of meaning inevitably regards people much as contemporary corporations and governments do, not as democratic subjects whose will matters above all, but as bundles of needs to be deciphered, redirected in "appropriate" ways, and then satisfied...
...The first chapters set out the key themes...
...More seriously, this mix of religion and psychotherapy recalls the hubris of not a few twentiethcentury doctors of the soul who have sought to apply psychotherapeutic insights beyond the consulting room to lead groups and masses to what they "really need...
...Enough of us have turned to psychotherapy and religion to know that the left must eventually confront, and work through, their political implications...
...In keeping with the prevailing ethos, we all learn to manipulate others in a cynical pursuit of materialist goals, coming to see ourselves as isolated individuals disconnected from each other and from our original childhood sense of awe...
...THE POLITICS OF MEANING: RESTORING HOPE AND POSSIBILITY IN AN AGE OF CYNICISM by Michael Lerner Addison-Wesley, 1996 338 pp $24, $13 paper THOSE OF us who are trying to rethink left politics cannot avoid coming to terms with Michael Lerner...
...But what is remarkable is that the left should have remained so silent...
...Of course economic issues are important, but they "cannot be understood apart from the level of solidarity and the framework of meaning that exists in the society...
...It moves along its own distinct axis and is marked by its own coherence...
...This means that The Politics of Meaning overreaches on principle...
...And yet, precisely because these hopes make us feel vulnerable and scared, most people have a high stake in dismissing a politics of meaning, and staying as hardnosed and "realistic" as they can, even while they wish that someone could move them and others beyond their doubts...
...If at times it moves in familiar directions, at others it moves in ways that run counter to the politics of social jusBOOKS tice as we have come to know it...
...Underscoring them may indicate why the politics of meaning is not really a politics of the left...
...Those of us who are secular have had little difficulty appreciating that some of our religious comrades might see the hand of God in such experiences...
...2. You can leave a specific percentage of your estate...
...The feeling of belonging to "a large community of caring" recedes into the past...
...IIS n DISSENT / Spring 1998 CONSIDER THE fact that, as Lerner defines it, a new politics must cover everything...
...These "meaning-needs" n DISSENT / Spring 1998 are denied both by "the dominant ethos of selfishness and materialism" and by the left's narrow materialist conception of human needs...
...But in tone and style, in the way his ideas build, in his relationship to his reader, in the purposes of his project, Lerner all but cancels out these starting points...
...In the name of being true to our needs, of liberation from selfishness and, indeed, in the name of hope, Lerner writes in a style that often seems self-congratulatory and self-aggrandizing...
...Struggles for justice are usually accompanied by rich and DISSENT / Spring 1998 n 119 BOOKS emotion-laden rituals, and many of us can point to a hundred texts and a dozen experiences that gave meaning to our lives, moments lived as gratifying approximations of what humans can be...
...Few would deny that at such moments history seemed to have a meaning, or that we were individually and collectively acting on a higher moral vision...
...Lerner is much discussed on the left, but privately...
...One source, which Lerner takes as product rather than cause, is the network of institutions and power relations causing oppression, domination, and exploitation— which the left has traditionally and quite appropriately devoted itself to understanding and changing...
...This may mean encouraging policies such as universal health care—but the reason for this is that "we are never going to build a society that rejects selfishness while denying equal access to health care...
...Michael Lerner stands across our path, having synthesized these concerns into a "politics of meaning...
...That is, they live under the increasingly overbearing sway of institutions and priorities, as well as culture, invading every sphere in the service of maximizing profits...
...Given this reading of today's "crisis of meaning," it should come as no surprise that Lerner's animus "is not necessarily aimed against the rich [or against capitalism, about which Lerner claims to be "agnostic"] but rather against the ethos of selfishness and materialism...
...As such, they deserve a place in the next left...
...in "hate radio" as a deformed response to studiously neutral and lifeless media...
...Consider Lerner's five goals of the politics of meaning: 1. "To create a society that encourages and supports love and intimacy, friendship and community, ethical sensitivity and spiritual awareness among people...
...More than a clever way of disarming opponents, these tactics suggest a cultish, perhaps even authoritarian side to "the politics of meaning...
...in our collective love of spectator sports...
...It is a sweeping, and embarrassingly simplistic, approach to human beings and to human needs...
...Lerner attributes both crime and right-wing politics to "meaning-deprivation" much the way a new recruit to dialectical materialism might have once derived all social problems from the structures of capitalist exploitation...
...A remarkable passage conveys his hubris: The politics of meaning is a strategy aimed at helping us reconnect with that part of ourselves that .. ,. knows we all have had moments that gave us a glimpse of how we might transcend our fears and come together in hope, and that knows that all the cynicism is primarily congealed hurt and disappointment BOOKS about what happened when last we hoped and then lost our hopes (perhaps prematurely...
...The sad truth, I have learned, is that there is no one else but us—you and me, reader...
...More broadly, Lerner calls for a politics that respects our need to "be recognized by and connected to other human beings, and to the life force that pulsates through the universe...
...He leaves nothing open or vulnerable about the presentation of even his best ideas, as each one becomes caricatured by a plodding and leaden style, by a totalizing and reductive approach, and by the self-preoccupied and ultimately domineering subjectivity that stands behind them and keeps intruding itself into the text...
...Thus our world lacks "meaning" for at least two reasons, both ignored by Lerner: it is a posttraditional world whose old authorities and customs have abdicated or been dethroned...
...The best of Michael Lerner's concerns emerge directly from the shared experience of a generation...
...It should be clear that The Politics of Meaning is an effort to articulate a new vision, one which overlaps with many of the left's traditional concerns, but that deliberately separates itself from the left and simultaneously tries to steal the right's thunder by emphasizing spiritual and "meaning oriented" questions...
...Here too Lerner is moving in the opposite direction from the left's hard-won endofcentury humility, back to a psychological and spiritual Leninism...
...It is all here, the one-size-fits-all explanation, the psychologizing interpretation in advance of those of us who disagree, the claim to know more about us than we do, and the attempt to do therapy on us by appealing to our secret soft and vulnerable side...
...It should not be surprising that a world that has made chutzpah into a positive trait should produce such a project...
...it is a capitalist order where individuals and groups left to find their own bearings are not yet free to do so...
...This is not just an intellectual failing...
...The Politics of Meaning is a book-length explanation of Lerner's project, its goals, and its intellectual underpinnings...
...For more specifics on this or other information on gift planning, feel free to phone or write Dissent, 521 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y...
...Except for a glancing public attack now and then, we on the left mostly deal with the phenomenon of Michael Lerner by rolling our eyes at his excesses, telling stories about his campaign of self-promotion (see the revelations in Harper's, March 1997), condemning the self-generated cult of personality swirling around him, or gossiping about his efforts to impose the politics of meaning on writers for Tikkun...
...And yet the hunger for "community, recognition, and higher purpose" persists, frustrated, leading to pain, cynicism, and self-blame...
...Accordingly, I have presented the key themes of The Politics of Meaning in some detail so that the reader may encounter them as fairly and directly as possible...
...That is, the politics of meaning is undemocratic at its core...
...The left also mirrors the larger society in excluding and ridiculing ethical and spiritual goals...
...I bequeath % of my estate to the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...
...in music and dance, however they form pseudo-communities at present...
...I welcome Lerner's effort to bring back so much that is now suppressed, discouraged, and roughed up by left politics as we know it— his attention to such frail impulses as hope and the need for meaning, his admirable insistence on treating small daily acts of caring as political and connecting them with larger social transformations, his determination to open politics to currents of spirituality and religion...
...There is something incongruous about this...
...isolated, we are unable to imagine ourselves as part of a larger and mutually supportive "we...
...This life force leads us to public "spiritual energy surges," as seen years ago in Martin Luther King's campaign against racism, and as seen today in the debased form of right-wing Christianity...
...We ask you to consider one of the following options: 1. You can leave a specific amount or a particular asset...
...A therapeutic sense of what we spiritually need becomes the rallying cry, instead of a new way of thinking about spiritual and material needs in relation to what is fair and right for all...
...My evaluation begins with the striking sense of contradictoriness that dominates the book...
...Many of us have been saying that morality and values must be given a central place in the politics of social justice, alongside traditional left emphases on material need...
...When Lerner calls for family supports (including liberal economic ones) it is because the goal is to "create a society that is safe for love and intimacy" His preoccupation is not primarily to meet survival needs or to serve the rights of individuals, but to create societies "that nourish loving relationships...
...Lerner claims to know this better than we do, poor benighted souls out of touch with our frustrated inner selves...
...We can avail ourselves of our own left traditions of caring and of belonging to a meaningful historical process...
...Lerner demands a politics that meets our deeper needs and simultaneously launches a finger-wagging attack on "materialism and selfishness...
...Third, let me stress my dissent from Lerner's key theme of selfishness...
...it betrays a disturbing arrogance...
...The core of Lerner's critique of liberalism is that in its acceptance of the prevailing isolation, individualism, and selfishness it ignores our need for connection and meaning...
...10017 (212) 595.3084...
...3. You can leave the remainder of your estate...
...Most left intellectuals who once believed it have long since given up the communist certainty that, understanding the dialectic of history, they knew better than the masses themselves where their real interest lay...
...The deprivation of meaning is behind "most of the violence, destructiveness, and other irrational behavior we see in daily life," and is also behind the widespread recent turn to the right...
...4. "To create a society that gives us adequate time and encouragement to develop our inner lives...
...Second, with its focus on "the ethos of selfishness," Lerner's politics of meaning can never understand, let alone tackle, the sources of the problems it raises...
...But we do not have to embrace Lerner's psychotherapeutic/religious politics to counter our tendencies to hopelessness and disillusion...
...The personal becomes political with a vengeance in this unholy marriage of psychotherapy and religion...
...In other words, for the moment, the most important task is to change how we talk about the key issues facing us...
...Liberal solutions are not solutions at all, not because, as radicals have always noted, they leave untouched the systemic roots of social problems, but because their individualism and hostility to spirituality perpetuates and even deepens the void most people feel in their lives, leaving the right free to respond to the widespread hunger for meaning in its racist and authoritarian ways...
...RONALD ARONSON is the director of the Center for Democratic Values, a think-tank project affiliated with Democratic Socialists of America...
...5. "To create a society that encourages us to relate to the world and to one another in awe and joy" Although Lerner stresses that the politics aiming at these goals will rethink "every aspect of our public and private lives," he is equally clear that the primary terrain of the struggle is the realm of values: the immediate goal of his politics is "shifting society's discourse— from selfishness and cynicism to one of idealism and caring...
...At its best, The Politics of Meaning is an effort to reconnect with certain vulnerable and easily routed subjective sources of the demand for a just and humane world—a realm we urgently need to recover, protect and, to use one of Lerner's favorite terms, nurture, if a progressive movement worth our commitment is to be reborn...
...I bequeath $ to the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...
...He is the author of After Marxism and teaches at Wayne State University...
...And then, after carrying out this invasive strategy on the resistant reader, Lerner reaches down from the guru position he has constructed, offering each of us a touch of intimacy...
...Lerner's is, paradoxically, a me-centered politics, in which the search for meaning displaces the search for justice...
...At least three core problems would remain...
...Others have been looking to recapture "our" issues from the right—insisting, for example, on the priority of values over the iron logic of the marketplace, or focusing on how hard economic times harm families...
...Lerner sounds like a young man just converted to radical politics in the old days, as if a few blinding insights, in this case psychotherapeutic and religious, give him the right to pontificate on the entire range of experience...
...Our legal name is the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...
...Another is the process of detraditionalization and secularization, which, like it or not, has been inseparable from the evolution of modernity...
Vol. 45 • April 1998 • No. 2
