The Politics of Meaning

Excerpted from pp. 4-6 of
"The Bank Teller" and other Essays on the Politics of Meaning

by Peter Gabel

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 really is 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.

Reinforcing these social and economic institutions is a dominant political culture that uncritically accepts the view that economic self-interest is the key to understanding what motivates people and therefore ultimately shapes social reality. Locked in a two-hundred-year-old individualistic paradigm that treats spiritual longings as a private matter to be dealt with by each person in isolation rather than as an inherently social matter of great public importance, most American thinkers, politicians, and pundits from all political spectrums present narrow money-centered or economy-centered explanations of what people want from their political leaders--high-wage jobs; the legal right to equality of opportunity to compete in the marketplace; early computer literacy in public education; health care defined as impersonal insurance coverage; Social Security and Medicare as comprising the sum total of what older people want and need. That people have a need for social connection, meaning, and community that they desperately want addressed in our public social and political life is rendered invisible by this prevailing discourse. That the frustration of these needs influences and explains much of what happens in mainstream politics--explains, for example, why so few people are motivated to vote, or why those who do so often support conservative initiatives that provide them with at least a distorted sense of community ("English Only" laws, for example), or why people so often vote against their economic self-interest when their hope and idealism is spoken to (consider the broad working-class support for Ronald Reagan or the willingness of early Bill Clinton supporters to pay higher taxes for health care and for the participation of young people in a government-supported National and Community Service Program)...these are meaning-centered aspects of our political life that those trapped in the dominant economic paradigm cannot see or understand.

The politics of meaning insists that people's subjective longings for love, caring, meaning, and connection to a spiritual/ethical community larger than the self are as fundamental as the need for food and shelter in the purely physical or economic realms. We wholeheartedly support the struggle for economic justice and security, but we insist that people are fundamentally motivated by more than sheer physical survival, that we are social beings who long to be confirmed by others and to give to others, to emerge from our painful isolation and fully recognize one another in an experience of relationship that Martin Buber called "I and Thou." In Michael Lerner's formulation, each of us deserves to be recognized as created in the image of God, understood not as a supernatural being but as the ethical force in the universe of which we are each a unique manifestation. And each of us deserves to live in a social world in which fostering the spirit of empathy, affirmation, and compassion that accompanies such a recognition would be the very centerpiece of public life.

The strategic aspect of the politics of meaning calls for developing a new kind of politics that actually seeks to create a spiritually alive public sphere, that aims at awakening and speaking to the longing for participation in meaningful community as a central goal of politics itself. In part, this means creating a safe and affirming political movement that embodies the compassion and spiritual aliveness to each other that we seek in the larger society. A politics of meaning must be one that spreads hope infectiously, by example, in order to successfully counter the way our ideas are likely to be caricatured by the cynicism of a media defended against the very longings we are naming. Our strategy also requires developing broad public policies and concrete political initiatives that are meaning-creating in the sense that they evoke, at the rhetorical level, and point toward, at the practical level, the creation of the lived experience of connection, compassion, and community.