Dear Jean,
The Pope issued a powerful letter to the world today, called Laudato Si, in which he called
upon the people of the world as well as the members of the Catholic Church to make saving the planet from environmental destruction the major and urgent focus of our activity in the 21st century. And he highlighted how climate change will be particularly destructive to the poor. I want\ to share with you the following piece I wrote, which appeared on the front page of the Huffington Post today. If you prefer to read this online, you can go to http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rabbi-michael-lerner/the-pope-might-save-the-p_b_7606804.html. Please never say “I didn’t know what to do in face of the environmental crisis,” because we at Tikkun and the Network of Spiritual Progressives are inviting you to become involved with us in some very specific steps you could take! Please read the article below!
Warm regards and blessings,
Michael
– Rabbi Michael Lerner
The Pope Might Save the Planet… if You Would Join an Interfaith Effort to Support His Direction!
Pope Francis’ Laudato Si plea for environmental sanity and a serious recommitment to the Bible’s call for humanity to be stewards of this planet earth just might make a huge difference by puncturing through the emotional depression that keeps most of the people of the earth paralyzed in face of the growing crisis. You don’t have to be religious or Catholic to join us in supporting the direction he outlines in his important call. Let me explain.
It is not that people don’t know about the environmental crisis that keeps us stuck in our current situation. It is rather that most people are unable to see any way out of the mess that global capitalism has created for us. Feeling hopeless about the possibility of the kinds of fundamental transformations needed to save the planet, much of humanity has chosen the ostrich strategy: deny the problem, and focus instead on getting as much as one can for oneself in the decades ahead as the planet whimpers under the increasing destructiveness of the capitalist imperative to growth without limits and accumulation of money, power or things as the only meaning to life. Yet it is this very growth and accumulation of things, produced at the expense of the earth, that guarantees earth-destruction if not of the planet than at least of its life-support-system that makes human life on it possible.
The Democrats have been a huge failure at developing a serious strategy to stop climate change and preserve the earth for the same reason that most of the environmental groups have failed: they are not prepared to take on the capitalist system with its inherent dynamic that requires growth and requires endless conditioning of people to believe that they will achieve happiness and meaning in life through accumulation and growth.
Nor have they been willing to recognize that people impoverished by global capitalism around the world will not jump onto an environmental bandwagon proposed by the richest countries of the global North when the imperatives of feeding their families seem easier to meet by cutting down rain forests to grow cash-rich produce like cattle that will feed the global North’s hunger for beef, pork, and other animal products.
The Pope recognizes the centrality of eliminating poverty to an environmental program. So do many socialists, but socialist-style global redistribution of wealth is only a necessary but not sufficient condition for addressing the environmental crisis, because giving the poor more money to spend may only increase demand as long as we are operating within the materialist, looking out for number one, growth-as-necessary, more as better consciousness created by capitalist societies.
And that is why the Pope is providing a unique kind of leadership. He is the first international spiritual progressive voice who can go beyond the “common sense” of global capitalism and articulate a different world view.
The essence of the Spiritual Progressive world view is this: We need a New Bottom Line, so that all institutions, corporations, economic policy, governmental policies, our legal system, our education system, our media, and even our personal lives get to be assessed as productive, efficient or rational not to the extent that they maximize money or power (the Old Bottom Line) but to the extent that they maximize our capacities to be loving and caring for each other and for the planet earth, generous and kind, promoting economic and social justice, treating everyone else on earth as equally valuable and equally entitled to share in the benefits of our planet and equally responsible to protect it, responding to others as embodiments of the sacred and not simply as means to our own ends, and responding to the planet earth and the entire universe with awe, wonder and radical amazement rather than simply treating it as a “resource” to satisfy human needs.
It is from this standpoint that spiritual progressives can challenge the values that underlie global capitalism and materialist versions of socialism and instead chart a path to a fundamentally different global economic, political and social world. We at the Network of Spiritual Progressives have begun to do that with our proposed Global Marshall Plan (please download the full version at www.tikkun.org/gmp) and our proposed ESRA–Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (please read it at www.tikkun.org/esra). We are urging you to approach your own community, your friends, your neighbors, your church, synagogue, mosque, ashram, your college or university, your union or professional organization, your social change organization or civic organization, your city council, county supervisors, state legislators, members of Congress, and anyone seeking your support running for office in 2016 and beyond, and ask them to endorse the Global Marshall Plan and the ESRA–Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, as well as to endorse a powerful tax on carbon emissions. And contact both local and national media to insist that they start to talk about the ESRA and the Global Marshall Plan and the need for a tax on carbon emissions. Also, please paste this entire letter on your website, your Facebook or other social media, tweet about it, copy and send it out to everyone on your email lists, and bring it up at dinner tonight and in the coming weeks with your friends, family, neighbors, etc.
The reason why Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, and most secular humanist organizations have not yet embraced this path is that they are dependent for funding and legitimation both from the capitalist class (the one percent of the richest, the ten percent of the next to super-richest who imagine themseles soon becoming the richest, and their assortment of lawyers, publicists, columnists and talking heads in the media, managers of their corporations and estates,) as well as from many in their religious communities who are attached to the materialist and looking-out-for-number-one worldview of global capitalist societies and hence dismiss any fundamental alternative as “unrealistic.” To be sure, there are a handful of enviornmentally sensitive people in every religious community who have taken courageous stands on social justice and the environment, but they too ofen modulate their voices and the content of their message to avoid sounding “too radical”–so they avoid thinking, much less publicly talking about, the relationship between the dynamics of the capitalist system with its inherent need to constantly grow, and the huge pressures that puts on very decent people in corporations to meet the demands of the market place and put that ahead of the survival needs of the planet. Ironically, it is precisely the undemocratic and hierarchical nature of the Catholic Church, and its previous accumulation of huge wealth, that frees the Pope from these concerns and hence made it possible for someone who genuinely is rooted in the spiritual values of the Bible to actually ask the world to remake itself in accord with those values. I don’t recommend the undemocratic or hierarchical path, but I do rejoice that this made it possible for a religious leader and a religious movement to develop that would be unequivocal in its critique of capitalism without falling into the narrow economistic and materialist worldview that has characterized most Left movements. It is their economistic, materialist and religio-phobic perspective that keeps most people on the Left from embracing the path of the spiritual progressive, even though in their hearts most people on the Left simultaneously embrace the values of the New Bottom Line (and were they to do so more explicitly, and get progressive organizations to publicly embrace and emphasize the New Bottom line the Left would be far more successful).
Of course, the Pope’s stand is generating considerable opposition from conservative Catholics who have already found ways around the Bible’s social justice teachings so that they could explain why they are champions of the rich and still call themselves Christians. All the more reason for the rest of us to embrace this Pope, even as we gently and lovingly chide him to consider applying his message of caring for everyone more fully by embracing full rights for women and homosexuals.
The best way to support the Pope is to build an interfaith movement based on these values articulated in the New Bottom Line. It is only when people begin to see a spiritual progressive movement in the public sphere with a strategy for how to save the planet that is willing to challenge the fundamentals of global capitalism that they will be able to imagine overcoming their own passivity, emotional depression, and mistaken certainty that “nothing will ever make possible a new economic system.” It is only when they see millions of us working together for a fundamentally different world that they will overcome this mistaken commitment to “being realistic” and instead recognize that “we never know what is possible until we join with others to struggle for what is desirable.” So I invite you to become a member of the NSP–Network of Spiritual Progressives atwww.spiritualprogressives.org/join. You don’t have to believe in God or be part of a religious or spiritual community to be a spiritual progressives–you only have to embrace the New Bottom Line articulated above–so the NSP is not only interfaith and welcoming people from every religious community in the world, but also welcoming to secular humanists and atheists who want the kind of world we are seeking. If you are already a member, would you please consider creating a local chapter to work together on bringing these measures to the organizaitons and elected officials in your community–or at least to creating a once a month reading group to read and discuss the articles in Tikkun magazine and the approach of the NSP to protecting the environment? We’ll be glad to help you get that started (contact cat@spiritualprogressives.org).
But neither are we some flaky New Agey kind of operation that believes everything will be fine if we just change our own hearts. We seek both an inner transformation and an economic, political, and societal transformation, and welcome those who will join with us in actually building a social change movement based on the principles of the New Bottom Line–a movement that is compassionate towards not only its own members but toward those who do not agree with us, a movement that is psychologically and intellectually sophisticated, and integrates humor, playfulness, joy and love even as it seeks to challenge the institutions and economic arrangements that are destroying the planet. JOIN US, pretty please!
Warm regards and blessings,
Michael