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Many of us are motivated by the desire to affect the world in a positive way. Everyone engaged in political activities on any level believes in their ability, working with others, to affect people’s beliefs and actions, at least on the margins. And, indeed, the fact that change is constant, and that some of that change is in part a result of intentional social movements demonstrates that intentional actions by some can affect the beliefs and attitudes of others, at least on the margins.

Most political activities and discourse target the turbulence on the surface of our shared existence, focused on passing this or that bill or getting this or that candidate elected. But the most successful and memorable movements have reached deeper, stoking either our humanity or our inhumanity, our generosity or our selfishness, our reason or our irrationality. Their focus has generally been narrower than the one I am suggesting (hatred, prejudice and discrimination toward specific groups, or ending hatred, prejudice and discrimination toward specific groups), but they are memorable for being more sweeping in breadth and more profound and lasting in effect than more superficial political struggles.

In many ways, there is a deeper political struggle that is less attended to than the more superficial issue-specific causes to which we address our attention and energies: the struggle between, on the one hand, our more primal inclinations, our bigotries and hatreds, our fear and anger, our irrational tribalistic dogmas, and, on the other, our “higher consciousness,” our compassion and imagination, our hope and aspiration, our generosity and humanity. Each year, around Christmastime, a small barrage of meta-messages celebrating the latter is repeated (e.g., A Christmas Carol, It’s a Wonderful Life, Miracle on 24th Street), and these meta-messages resonate with many people, who enjoy having those centers of their mind and spirit stimulated. We feel good seeing hope and love prevail.

One part of my proposed social movement (see A Proposal: The Politics of Reason and Goodwill) is based on the constant, strategic and intentional creation, identification, dissemination and use of such meta-messages to “soften the ground” for more superficial political discourse, to stimulate the centers of the mind more conducive to the passage of rational, humane, compassionate and generous public policies. This is a movement that occupies a largely unexplored and untapped region between culture and politics, a region usually addressed only by religions, and usually enveloped in a lot of noise not related to what I’m talking about here. But what if a motivated group of people, organized to do so, targeted the zeitgeist itself, stoking and stimulating those areas of the human mind that respond in emotionally gratifying ways to messages of generosity and hope and inclusiveness? And did so in conjunction with related narratives about a commitment to disciplined reason in service to those values?

I understand the skepticism about such a movement, because we think of all of the people who will not be responsive to it, and how Quixotic it seems to be. But it’s clear that over the course of a period of time (a generation or so), similar movements a little narrower in scope and in conjunction with haphazard cultural reinforcing messages have been dramatically successful, by moving people on the margins. The Civil Rights Movement and the Gay Rights Movement are two prominent examples. Under the influence of social movements with political agendas and accompanying proliferation of cultural narratives reinforcing their agenda (e.g., TV shows “normalizing” in the collective consciousness the world these movements were striving to create), dramatic change in the zeitgeist, in the course of about a generation in each case, was accomplished.

What if we combined all of this into a single, coherent, intentional social movement? What if we created a movement whose purpose is to promote disciplined reason and imagination in service to humanity? The fact is that there are relatively few Americans who, if pressed, would explicitly reject the value of working to be more rational and humane people, despite the fact that there is a large faction that implicitly and in effect does reject both reason and humanity. But politics, at root, is a competition of narratives, a battle over human consciousness, and given that we are at a time and place in world history in which few would explicitly reject the value of reason and humanity, that narrative already has an advantage in the competition of narratives. What we need to do is to put meat on its bones, to make sure that that which is, and that which is not, reason in service to humanity is easy to identify and easy to relate with. And the successful movements to which I’ve referred give us shared cognitive, cultural material with which to do so.

America lags behind the rest of the developed world in this cultural progression because of a set of memes, a narrative, which creates a “safe haven” for bigotries and irrationality, an emotional packaging of them which gives them a veneer of nobility. That fortress of ideological delusions continues to resist the progress of reason and humanity. And those who are committed to reason and humanity simply take on the armies sent forth from that fortress, leaving the fortress itself intact. We need to get out our corps of engineers and work on undermining the battlements themselves, work on revealing what’s really hiding behind those walls of faux-patriotism and abused “liberty”. And we need to do so in an organized, strategic and intentional way.

I believe in the human ability to organize to accomplish great things. And I believe it’s time to organize to try to affect the zeitgeist in an intentional way, working to stimulate and liberate our collective genius, to stimulate our compassion and humanity and to lay bare and unprotected the cultural pathologies that stand in the way of our collective genius and our compassion and humanity. It’s time to work in a conscious and organized way at becoming a more conscious and humane people.

Many things have led to this moment, and have made it ripe for all rational and humane people to stand up and speak with one voice, and do so in an effective way. The struggle between those driven by fear and loathing on the one hand and those driven by hope and humanity on the other has come to a head. Both forces are at or near a peak. And those who preach hatred, those who preach irrationality, those who preach implicit inhumanity, are an embattled faction, with only residual influence on the zeitgeist.

When a fresh and inspirational young candidate was elected president in 2008 on a wave of hope and a widespread desire for the kind of change I’m referring to, the resistance rallied, fear and hatred rallied, irrationality rallied. It is a desperate and embattled opposition, crying out in the death throes of a failed ideology. We need to stop letting their anger and irrationality penetrate us, and need to smile at it indulgently, saying, “you are the past, and we are the future.”

Because by doing so, we can make it so.

Buy my e-book A Conspiracy of Wizards

A new perennial question in American politics is: How much of the rabid opposition to Obama is due to race, and how much is due to other factors? This question was taken up The Economist, in its Lexington column, concluding that race has little to do with it (http://www.economist.com/node/17308059). I think Lexington is mostly right, but underestimates the effects of synergy.

Obama combines a set of defects, from the point of view of his ideological opponents: He is an elitist member of the intelligentsia; he has a foreign (Muslim) sounding name and a cosmopolitan history; he seems to lean toward European-style social democracy (“Socialism!”); he represents a commitment to conscious and intentional progress over political idolatry. In short, he is “the threatening other” that populates the manufactured hysteria of right wing zealots. It is not that he is black, in and of itself, which motivates most of the antagonism toward him, but rather the reality and mythology of who is, which is only more dramatically underscored by the sound of his name and the color of his skin.

It’s completely true that Obama would have problems with the Right even if he were a white guy named Jack, but that doesn’t mean that the marginal symbolic accelerants he’s saddled with are irrelevant. By analogy, a fire that started in the kitchen and is raging through the house would have happened with or without the overly combustable material in the walls, but how hot it would have been, and how much damage it would have done, is hard to estimate. It’s hard to look at the widespread “birther” nonsense and insistence that Obama is a Muslim (both involving myths adhered to by a significant percentage of the American people) without recognizing that it isn’t just his liberalness, but also his “otherness,” that is in play.

The right-wing torch-bearing mob forming the mass of the opposition, ready to shoot “commies” and “wetbacks” at the drop of a hat, defining the world in terms of a pretty narrow “us” and an otherwise all encompassing “them,” is not unaffected by Obama’s “otherness.” It’s true, as the argument goes, that he was black in 2008, but one by a tidy margin even so, receiving a significant number of votes from those same white working-class folks who are lined up against him now. His color is not the only variable, or one which creates such an impenetrable racist barrier that he could never have been a viable candidate (obviously, he was). But it is one ingredient in a mix that, when triggered by other ingredients, contributes to a combustion that would have happened with or without his color, and with or without his Muslim sounding name, but which is made hotter by those accelerants.

Obama’s burden is that he combines being a smart, erudite, academic, rational Progressive with being Black and named Barack Hussein Obama, in a country populated by many very tentatively and precariously tolerant of the latter facts, but completely allergic to the former ones. But once that allergy is triggered, the resistence to the latter facts breaks down as well, and all of the ingredients combine to feed the fever and contribute to the reaction.

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