The Emergence of “Mindful Politics” and the Candidacy of Barack Obama for President

Ideas are emerging on what “Mindful Politics” might be. Seems folks have agreed on the name, but what this political force is is getting worked out in a bit of a chaotic way in unconnected spheres – which is good; it’s exactly how words and phrases should come into use: in the jungle of untamed ideas. What is consistent is that there’s a search afoot by compassion-minded politics-interested folks for something new in reaction to harsh political discourse and many years of hardhearted, mule-headed policy decisions. Doubtless, some have in mind creation of a counterforce to the sickening and democracy-destroying game playing and truth twisting of Karl Rove and his brand of power politics.[i]

James Ishmael Ford [in a sermon for the First Unitarian Society]; Nacho Cordova [in his blog WoodMoor Village]; Terrance Heath [a Buddhist who writes the A-list political blog The Republic of T]; in dozens of disparate essays in a book edited by Melvin MacLeod called Mindful Politics; in the September issue of Shambhala Sun that focused on mindful politics and included excerpts the MacLeod book; and in the “compassion revolution” sought by David Edwards of MediaLens, ideas and definitions have been tossed about. Too, in his recent media blitz to sell his new book, The Audacity of Hope, in which he announced, to great media fanfare, an interest in seeking the presidency in 08, Barack Obama sounded like a brilliant but gentle problem-fixer who might be the emergent first face of Mindful Politics, though he doesn’t use that term and probably never would.

Integral Politics

There is an existant, established term that should be introduced here, that, if not the same as this new Mindful Politics thing, is a close cousin. This other term, “Integral Politics” comes from Ken Wilber and his life’s work on Integral Spirituality. The term’s path for coming into being is quite different from where Mindful Politics is coming from, but both offer openness and acceptance of a wide range of views. A fragment from one of Wilber’s books is posted at Integral World, titled “Some Thoughts on Integral Politics,” where Wilber explains that the blinkered thinking of today’s liberals and conservatives is because of their set-in-concrete worldviews that cause them to distain what truth and genius exists it their supposed political opposites.

The implications of this are explored in an essay posted in Integral World by Greg Wilpert, called “Dimensions of Integral Politics.” Like Wilber, Wilpert writes in Wilber-jargon which, while quite readable, is a bit like a description of the Mona Lisa by naming the hues of paint DaVinci used. Unless you are versed in Integral ideas, it is hard to see through all that Wilpert is saying to discern the hopeful smile.

Mindful Politics needs to resist being a repeat of the debut of Integral Politics of a decade ago, an idea that stumbled in implementation and with the associations that Ken Wilber encouraged. While the philosophical moorings of Integral Politics are splendid and might comfortably fit a defined Mindful Politics like a well-tailored suit, Integral Politics is muddied by association with Compassionate Conservatism, the sputtering Third Way of Tony Blair, and Bill Clinton’s Vital Center which drifted into a permanent stall with the beginnings of the Monica Scandal 24/7.

Integral Politics has come to be seen, inaccurately, as, simply, a search for the elusive political middleground – and that is decided not the flavor of Mindful Politics which seeks to draw compassion and wisdom from the full range of the political spectrum. Mindful Politics is, perhaps, a reaction against Compassionate Conservatism, which proved to be cynical and unbaked, and the political grenade tossing that has gone on for the last couple decades in American politics, from the halls of Washington to the op-ed pages in Peoria.

What is Mindful Politics?

There is no single formulation of what Mindful Politics is, yet -- but there is a mindfield of suggestions.

Ken Burke [of the blog Ghost in the Wire] developed his ideas in a post titled “Mindful Politics (Again): This Time, A Proposal,” offering these concrete formulations of what is needed:

• Politicians and political activists should meditate.
• We need a different relationship to mourning. “Ours is a country with a rather twisted response to tragedy. From Oklahoma City to 9-11 to Katrina, this country suffers from efforts to transform crisis and tragedy into a simulacrum later deployed for rather lamentable ends. There is a real hesitancy to open ourselves up to the pain of these tragedies, to really let ourselves feel the wound, to get to know its texture, to see how that wound is everywhere, a shared vulnerability, a constitutive force. Instead, we turn to anger or forgetting or sublimation or repression. A politics of mourning … that embraces the existential reality of mourning and shared vulnerability, that stressed mindfulness in the wake of catastrophe, could have … transformative consequences.”
• We need to put an end to hope. “It is hope that supplies the nuts and berries that feed the sheepish hunter gatherers as they slumber through their cubicle work and take pride in their gas guzzling off-road vehicles. It is hope that writes the pages in George Bush's twisted future history textbooks, the one that takes all the suffering experienced in Iraq since 2003 and transmutes it into ‘only a comma.’ It is time, I think, that we give up on the poison pill of hope and begin to recenter our thinking on how and why and what the present is, what it feels like, and what it calls for as a response. An end to hope means an end to the wistfulness of some future vision … [such that] some significant progress might be made regarding the world we actually live in, here and now.

Nacho Cordova writes in a recent post, titled “A Center for Mindful Politics,” in his blog WoodMoor Village, “I think a different politics is possible. I think a mindful politics ought to operate with compassion as central animating principle, and with what Kenneth Burke [of Ghost in the Wire] called a comic perspective. Burke noted that we can take a tragic approach to life or a comic approach. In the tragic approach we see people as enemies, as evil, vicious and out to get us. The comic approach stems from the recognition that we as symbol [users], are quite often just mistaken, frequently tragically mistaken. In fact, there is no escaping [making mistakes] because as he puts it, ‘all people are exposed to situations in which they must act as fools, that every insight contains its own special kind of blindness . . .’ ”

Nacho quotes Martin Luther King, Jr., in what he suggests is a definition of the mindful politics he seeks.

We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. There are some things in our social system to which all of us ought to be maladjusted. Hatred and bitterness can never cure the disease of fear, only love can do that. We must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love. Before it is too late, we must narrow the gaping chasm between our proclamations of peace and our lowly deeds which precipitate and perpetuate war. One day we must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek but a means by which we arrive at that goal. We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means. We shall hew out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope.

Nacho also quotes Frederick Douglass on the idea that often agitation and window-breaking and taking to the streets is necessary to effect positive social change. Says Douglass, "Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."

As apostate as it would seem to many seeking a full-throated cry for compassion and gentleness, a restriction to anything close to exclusive use of MLK's “peaceful means” in pursuit of peace would be too anemic to counter terrorism in an age when control of the secrets and materials to build nuclear devises is evermore dispersed. This is something in contention: the muscle a Mindful Politics might employ.

Overwhelming might will be needed to contain well-armed evil organizations. Perhaps the insights of James P. Carse will be helpful here. The following is from the 31st chapter from his book Finite and Infinite Games, written twenty years ago:

Evil is never intended as evil. Indeed the contradiction inherent in all evil is that it originates the desire to eliminate evil. “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.”

Evil arises in the honored belief that history can be tidied up, brought to a sensible conclusion. It is evil to act as though the past is bringing us to a specifiable end. It is evil to assume that the past will make sense only if we bring it to an issue we have clearly in view. It is evil for a nation to believe it is “the last, best hope on earth.” It is evil to think history is to end with a return to Zion, or with the classless society, or with the Islamicization of all living infidels.

Your history does not belong to me. We live with each other in a common history. Infinite players understand the inescapable likelihood of evil. They therefore do not attempt to eliminate evil in others, for to do so is the very impulse of evil itself, and therefore a contradiction. They only attempt paradoxically to recognize in themselves the evil that takes the form of attempting to eliminate evil elsewhere.

In his sermon, titled “Mindful Politics or How to Save the World” from August last, James Ishmael Ford began by quoting the same words of Martin Luther King that Nacho had [see the second blockquote in this article] and then recalled recent twin elevations of anger he experienced: first, relating to the arrests in Britain of al Quada-connected terrorists who were preparing to blow up a series of transatlantic jumbo jets, in flight. And second, relating to Bush’s response to the arrests, ushering in a new codeword, Islamofascism. Bush’s point seemed to be to paint a distinct line around these outsiders, depict them as evil and decidedly not like us, and characterize them and their cause as “hating our freedom.”

Bush, speaking and acting for America, and the terrorists are tied together in a downward spiral of destiny, just as King had foreseen, seeing each other as ultimate evil, refusing the effort to understand each other. [This is not meant to reduce Bush, America’s agent, and the terrorists to being morally equivalent; they are not. But the actions of the terrorists and Bush/America both stem from a false or faked sense of the other’s sensibilities, needs and complaints.]

Ford also writes in support of Bernie Glassman’s idea, taken from the chapter “Joining Heaven and Earth” in McLeod’s book, of “three points to create a Mindful Politics”: (1) not knowing; (2) bearing witness; and (3) taking action.

These points entail (1) being concerned with understanding, not with being right, (2) being open and fair-minded such that we see what is really happening [Ford’s example here is to not embrace the caricature we liberals tend to have of Bush as being a crude, uncaring dolt. Our default position must be that Bush is well-intended and that he has a worldview we can hope to understand, if not accept.] and (3) we must do something, envision things getting better, and acting to improve the world in ways that are available to us, using the bounty of clarity that comes to us from being witnesses to the world as it is, uncolored by our preferences.

Terrance Heath, in a post to his A-list blog The Republic of T, writes in a post titled "Mindful Politics" that he was struck by an article in the September issue of Shambhala Sun written by John Tarrant that included this quote:

Politics belongs in the general realm of imperfection, self-deception, desperate hope, and congenial affection we call civilization. That’s where the bodhisattva, who is interested in the fate of others, hangs out. Also, if you indulge in politics, certain personal implications accompany you; you don’t get away without being transformed by the material you are working with.

To consider politics is to open yourself—your mind and body, your naked and apparently unoffending skin, your naive hopefulness, and your joy in human company—to a tsunami of lies, humbug, drivel, false promises, masquerade, hypocritical piety, prejudice, greed, murder, and fattening food. To consider politics is to dive into this Hokusai wave of inauthenticity and to say, “Hmmm, this seems like a situation I can work with.”

The quote turned Terrance's thoughts to the breadth of thinking within the progressive blogosphere and that there was wisdom on all sides in some of the internecine battles that had recently been occurring. His focus was changed from the unending shouting match over who was right and who was wrong, to what all might do together to fix core problems.

In a piece last summer, posted to UK Watch, titled “Buddhism and Radical Politics,” David Edwards, author of The Compassionate Revolution, was interviewed. His book, he tells us, “was an attempt to argue that the most powerful response to modern political and environmental problems is radical awareness rooted in compassion and concern for others, rather than anger and hatred.”

Edwards dismisses as “badly mistaken” the idea, put forward [by Winston King, for one, in his 1964 book In the Hope of Nibbana], that [quoting W. King] “eternity mindedness … has little interest any longer in the ordinary affairs of men… the possessor of equanimity goes on, completely unshaken emotionally or mentally by the world’s mental, moral, or social disturbances.”

Edwards said, “In fact equanimity is sought precisely in order to facilitate a feeling of unlimited compassion for all sentient beings. The goal is to throw off restricted compassion and love for one person, one family, one nation or race, the better to embrace all equally. This is said to be a steppingstone towards the true goal: the ‘unusual attitude.’”

The unusual attitude is this: I alone take upon myself the burden of causing all sentient beings to have happiness and the causes of happiness; I alone take upon myself the burden of causing all sentient beings to be free from suffering and the causes of suffering.[ii]

Edwards’ experience is that the Buddhist path has released him from the clutches of selfishness and he has come to see that the West’s “faith in selfish happiness is the real cause of the destruction of the Third World and indeed of our planet. That’s what ultimately drives the state-corporate system, our complicity with it, and our complacent refusal to join the struggle to change it.”

Further, he states, “Buddhism doesn’t challenge corporate capitalism at its weakest point – that it exploits the Third World and wrecks the environment – but at its allegedly strongest point: that it fails to deliver happiness to people selfish enough to be part of it.

Thus, for Edwards, the “openness and acceptance of a wide range of views” – which I identify as the consistent theme of the emergent Mindful Politics – begins with a realization of the disastrous past of First World actions that fail at increasing happiness -- even for those most rewarded for their part in the capitalist economy.

Obama as possible president

Barack Obama has come along as this improbable gift during a horrible time. Along comes the political rockstar with the perfect All American life: A black African father, a white mother, and a childhood spent in Kansas and Hawaii and Indonesia. Coming from nowhere to be elected Senator from Illinois two years ago, he has emerged as kindly and brilliant and able to dazzle folks from a wide spectrum of backgrounds and political beliefs.

Bush may be well-intended, but his administration will very probably be looked back upon as our nation's worst. And in 2008, in whatever circumstance the Iraq War and the US economy may be in, our country will be looking for a definite change in direction at the helm.

Joe Klein -- a writer for Time, famous for being the Anonymous author of Primary Colors and now a bit of a gadfly who appears frequently on The Chris Mathews show and This Week -- wrote the cover article for Time's Oct 23 issue that captured the Obama phenomenon.

Klein wrote

He's a liberal, but not a screechy partisan. Indeed, he seems obsessively eager to find common ground with conservatives. "It's such a relief after all the screaming you see on TV," says Chuck Sweenny, political editor of the Rockford Register Star. "Obama is reaching out. He's saying the other side isn't evil. You can't imagine how powerful a message that is for an audience ..."

... and ...

At one point [in Obama's new book, The Audacity of Hope], he considers the historic influence of ideological extremists -- that is, people precisely unlike him. "It has not always been the pragmatist, the voice of reason, or the force of compromise, that has created the conditions for liberty," he writes about the anti-slavery movement of the 19th Century. "Knowing this, I can't summarily dismiss those possessed of similar certainty today -- the antiabortion activist .. the animal rights activist who raids a laboratory -- no matter how deeply I disagree with their views. I am robbed even of the certainty of uncertainty -- for sometimes absolute truths may well be absolute."

We need to be healed. We need fixes for the many accumulated problems. And we need maturity, kindness and competence. Maybe Obama's our guy.
__________

[i]An article in The Chronicle Review from April, 2004, by Alan Wolff -- a frequent guest on Keith Olbermann's Countdown show -- called "A Fascist Philosopher Helps Us Understand Contemporary Politics" may [or may not] help us to understand Rove. Wolff contends that today's conservative political operatives are admirers of Carl Schmitt, a political philosopher who advocated the need for ruthless means since politics is a endeavor where winners and losers must be determined. Here's the money quote from Wolff's piece:

Liberals think of politics as a means; conservatives as an end. Politics, for liberals, stops at the water's edge; for conservatives, politics never stops. Liberals think of conservatives as potential future allies; conservatives treat liberals as unworthy of recognition. Liberals believe that policies ought to be judged against an independent ideal such as human welfare or the greatest good for the greatest number; conservatives evaluate policies by whether they advance their conservative causes. Liberals instinctively want to dampen passions; conservatives are bent on inflaming them. Liberals think there is a third way between liberalism and conservatism; conservatives believe that anyone who is not a conservative is a liberal. Liberals want to put boundaries on the political by claiming that individuals have certain rights that no government can take away; conservatives argue that in cases of emergency -- conservatives always find cases of emergency -- the reach and capacity of the state cannot be challenged.

">[ii] It should be noted that the Unusual Attitude is not a universal Buddhist prescription – rather, it is peculiar to Mahayana Buddhism and is part of one of three options a person would have in generating bodhicitta. Readers should reference the Tibetan Lama Virtual Library’s “Three main Doctrines of Buddhism: the shared and the unique” for more details.

Technorati tags: Barack Obama, Obama, Mindful Politics, Integral Politics, Joe Klein, Unusual Attitude, Finitie and Infinite Games, James Carse