You can’t pick up a novel in the middle of the book and have any idea what’s going on. You don’t know the characters and you don’t know the plot. You need to read it from the beginning to know how the story unfolds.
The same is true with the story of a nation. We can’t really understand what’s going on in this country without understanding where we’ve come from. We can’t recognize forces for what they represent historically when all we can see is how they relate to us now. With almost every issue, what happens now is part of a continuing narrative that began over two hundred years ago. Issues erupting dramatically today have been developing for years, often underneath the surface, as generation after generation writes its chapter in our ongoing history.
Whether you’re learning the history of your family or the history of your ethnic group or religion, knowing where you come from gives you a clue into who you are. It’s difficult to understand what it means to be an American today without understanding what America means, period.
Yet what America means is open to interpretation. To some people, America means a bright spot of freedom and liberty whose shadows and mistakes are secondary to the exceptionalism of our first principles. To them, our country is so good that it hardly matters what we’ve done wrong. To others, it seems America’s historical errors justify perpetual condemnation. To them, at times we’ve been so bad that it hardly matters what we’ve ever done right. We won’t be led through the storm of this moment, either by those who love this country blindly or by those who condemn her blindly. For the blind cannot see.
The guiding light of America’s destiny is neither blind to our problems nor blind to our potential. We will be led through our current storm by the inner light of a more sophisticated, compassionate understanding that America is a continuing narrative. Like any of us, it isn’t a finished product yet. Nor will it ever be. A nation is continuously moving through time, like a novel whose ending can’t be foreseen. What we need now is a deeper understanding of what came before, and a deeper commitment among us to write well the chapter that is ours.
Today, we seem tethered neither to where we came from nor to where we wish to be going. We’ve lost the plot of our democracy—we’re not connecting the dots, and we’re not connecting the dots because we’re not connecting the facts. We’re not connecting the facts because the facts have been scrambled.
Our founders sought safeguards against such scrambling, but the safeguards have been weakened. Thomas Jefferson wanted free public education because only people whose critical thought processes had been honed could be entrusted with the power of self-governance. And he wanted a free press to make sure all citizens had the information we would need in order to make wise decisions. If you’re entrusted with the power to direct a country—which, in a representative democracy, we the people are—then you need to be educated in order to know how to think, and informed by a free press in order to know what to think. On both fronts, however, our power has been diminished.
Someone knew exactly what they were doing when American civics and history lessons started disappearing from many public school curricula. In eleven states, there is no required civics or American history education at all. In more than half of them, no more than half a year learning those subjects is required. But if someone didn’t learn about the Bill of Rights when they were a child, how would they know to be appalled as an adult when they see it under assault?
Knowledge is power, and withholding knowledge is a tool of all oppressive systems. Underresourcing education, particularly among children, and corporate consolidation of the news media have been powerful tools in the dumbing down of the American mind. Without an informed and passionate citizenry, democracy is not a problem for its enemies at all.
Giving people a lot of consumer products but not giving them information is like giving people lots of candy but withholding basic nourishment. Perhaps if you give people a way to make more money, they won’t notice that you’ve taken away something even more precious. If you legitimize their self-centeredness, they’ll be more likely to forget about their ancestors, their fellow citizens, or their descendants.
One of the most powerful things an American citizen can do today is read up on American history, a lot of which most of us don’t remember from school and many of us never even learned. There are enough “American History for Dummies”–type books out there that no one really has much of an excuse for not brushing up on our nation’s history. We gain a deeper understanding of the present when we have a context that includes the past, and a deeper understanding of who we are when we know who came before.
The more we understand the larger narrative of our history and the chapters that were written by other generations, the more empowered we are in writing our own. We learn, among other things, that many of the forces we’re dealing with now are simply the latest iterations of challenges that have been with us from the beginning. The current crisis in our country is the continuation of a narrative that began over two hundred years ago.
The first historical through-line is our foundational democratic principles, the values on which we purport to stand. Inscribed in our Declaration of Independence in 1776, these first principles are the light that guides us through every travail: that all men are created equal; that God gave all men unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and that governments are instituted to secure those rights. Along with those unalienable rights go freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right to bear arms, freedom of peaceful assembly, freedom to protest, and several more meant to ensure our ability to remain a free people. Another fundamental American principle was articulated by Abraham Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address: that “government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Those ideas are not just abstract concepts. They are living, breathing forces for which hundreds of thousands of people have struggled, lived, and died. Every one of them represents a freedom in the absence of which every American would live a very different life.
But a second through-line has also been with us from the beginning, and that is a fierce resistance to those first principles on the part of those who see them as threatening to their interests. Usually, though not always, such forces represent the economic interests of the few pitted against the interests of the many.
So on one hand, we’re a nation “conceived in liberty”; on the other hand, our entire Southern economy was based on the slave trade and it took the Civil War to end it. On the one hand, we believe in the “unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”; on the other hand, we perpetrated the genocide, forced migration, and cultural annihilation on the Native peoples of this continent. On the one hand, we believe that “all men are created equal”; on the other hand, institutionalized white supremacy and segregation raged throughout the South for a hundred years even after the end of the Civil War. That dichotomy represents a dramatic, often tragic pattern that has been with us from the beginning: we were founded on enlightened principles, have in many ways ourselves been the most violent perpetrators against them, and then ultimately—at least most of the time—have reclaimed them.
Slavery was met with abolition, suppression of women was met with the suffragette movement, segregation was met with the civil rights movement, and so forth. Every generation of Americans has included both enemies of democracy and heroes of democracy. Our generation is even now in the midst of deciding which one, in our time, will prevail.
Political manifestations, both good and bad, are but outer reflections of internal realities. They emerge from realms beyond what the eye can see. Love and lovelessness are constantly duking it out, in our hearts and in our world. Slavery, oppression, racism, and so forth are more than mere political wrongs; they represent spiritual malfunctions. Until we deal with our problems on the level from which they emerge, then no matter what we do to solve them, they will simply morph into other forms. Whether it is a health problem or a money problem or a relationship problem or a political problem, both the source of any problem and the source of its solution lie within our consciousness.
That is why a new American revolution is a revolution of consciousness, and a new American politics is a politics of love. If the choice to love remains merely a private decision, then it will have only private effects. Only when love is applied to public issues will it then have public effects.
An overly secularized, rationalistic politics is an inadequate response to the challenges of our time. A politics of love is a twenty-first-century, whole-person politics that speaks to both external and internal issues.
External activism fosters a different way of doing things, which is important. But internal activism fosters a different way of thinking about those things as well. Both are important, because everything we do is infused with the consciousness with which we do it. In the words of Mahatma Gandhi, “The end is inherent in the means.” Enlightenment is a shift in worldview, and only a more enlightened thinking can deliver us to an enlightened world.
America’s founders were products of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, or Age of Reason, during which Western civilization overthrew the mystification of early church dogma in favor of rational thought and individual freedom. Today, we are entering a new Era of Enlightenment, in which we are overthrowing the limits of overly rationalistic thinking that doesn’t recognize the powers of the soul. We are evolving beyond a twentieth-century worldview that posited the world as one big machine, and realizing that in fact it is more like one big thought. Consciousness is no longer deemed irrelevant to human affairs, but rather the driver of human affairs. Things in the outer world are merely effects created by thoughts we think. The role of consciousness in transforming events is the essential realization of a twenty-first-century worldview. Only if we rethink the world will we be able to re-create it. Only in transforming our hearts will we be able to transform the world.
A political mind-set mired in twentieth-century thinking is incapable of solving our most pressing problems, because its focus on externalities too often leaves their causes unaddressed. It waters the leaves but not the roots of our democracy. Not every force that is driving our world is visible to the physical eye. A politics that gives little credence to the inner life, considering it outside the purview of its analysis, is inadequate to the task of navigating these difficult times.
That is why the spiritual seeker is important to the transformation of our politics, and of our country. Spiritual seekers have always been the harbingers of political change in America—the abolitionist movement was started by the early Evangelicals and Quakers, and the civil rights movement was led by a Baptist preacher. Jews and Catholics have been central to the unfoldment of every social justice movement throughout our history.
In the words of Plato, “To philosophize and do politics are one and the same thing.” Not only does enlightened politics require spiritual understanding, but enlightened spirituality requires attention to politics. No serious religious path gives anyone a pass on addressing the suffering of other sentient beings. The idea that we can leave politics out of our conceptualization of our spiritual journey is an outdated concept, because politics is simply the journey we take together. We can’t transform our country without transforming our politics, and that we can do only by participating. Standing on the sidelines is not an option for a conscious seeker, or for a conscious citizen. Too much blood and too much suffering result from an unconscious politics for those of us who claim to be on the journey of higher consciousness to ignore. We must take a fundamental step forward in re-creating the world from the inside out.
“Love each other” is not just a prescription for personal salvation; it is a prescription for political renewal as well.
When tens of millions of people trapped in economic shackles with little dignity, few prospects, and little hope are then told by a political candidate that the system is rigged against them and only he can fix it, you can’t just blame the candidate for taking advantage of all that hopelessness. The larger responsibility lies with a political establishment that allowed such mass despair to develop in the first place—and with those of us who allowed it to.
Economic despair is not a statistic in the lives of people who are living with it; it is a real, devastating human experience. It is a festering wound from which other symptoms emanate, such as domestic violence, opioid addiction, sickness, bad health from lack of access to care, depression, suicide, and a general breakdown of community and culture.
In a country dominated by a political system that has been dedicated more to its campaign donors than to its people, and more to the financial gain of the wealthy .01 percent of its population than to the actual practice of democracy, the crisis we now have on our hands was almost inevitable. A massive cry of economic despair was going to make itself heard—whether in support of a progressive populist such as Bernie Sanders, or an authoritarian populist such as Donald Trump. It’s not that either of them necessarily had better plans for dealing with all that suffering than did Hillary Clinton; it’s just that they’re the only two candidates who acknowledged all that suffering. And that made all the difference.
Having substituted obeisance to the dictates of market forces for obeisance to the dictates of democratic and humanitarian concerns, the political establishment is reaping now what it has sowed. Climate change has reached extreme and dangerous levels because the US government has done more to advocate for the short-term maximization of profits to the fossil fuel and chemical companies than to advocate for the well-being of our citizens and our planet; our tax policies do more to fill the coffers of the 1 percent than to address the economic struggles of the 99 percent; and our efforts to protect national security center on increased preparedness for war yet diminished efforts at waging long-term peace. All of those factors represent more than a political challenge; they represent dire threats, over the long run, to our democracy and quite possibly to the very existence of our species.
Such problems represent something deeper and more fundamental than a system dedicated to externalities has any idea how to fix. They are reflections of the fact that, in the words of Gandhi, “humanity is not in its right mind.”
A lack of love is the level of the problem, and a lack of love is the level of the solution. Only when we realign our politics with our deep universal values will the forces arrayed against us fade away. In the words of Albert Einstein, “The problems of the world will not be solved on the level of thinking we were at when we created them.”
Political issues are moral issues. War and peace are moral issues. Economic injustice is a moral issue. Mass incarceration is a moral issue. Unfair tax laws are a moral issue. Racial inequality is a moral issue. Breaking treaties with Native tribes is a moral issue. The neglect of America’s children is a moral issue. Global poverty is a moral issue. A self-perpetuating war machine is a moral issue. Putting immigrants in cages is a moral issue.
The question is not simply what we should do about such problems. The larger question is, Who are we that such problems even exist among us? And who do we have to become in order to solve them?
Whether for an individual or for a nation, every crisis comes with two things: a reflection of who we have been, and an invitation to become who we need to become. And that is where America is now. We need to reach for higher ground than that on which we’ve been standing over the last few decades. Nothing less will heal our country.
Separating politics from the deeper questions of our humanity leaves us dangerously fractured as a civilization. America needs to atone for some mistakes of our past and make serious amends. We need to be willing to do things differently moving forward. And we need to take a brutally honest look at how certain concepts left over from the late twentieth century do more to corrode than to advance our democracy. A new kind of American—a new kind of thinker and a new kind of citizen—needs to arise now.
And quickly.