Deepak Chopra: Love as Social Policy

Deepak Chopra's new entry at intent blog is the foundation for the new revolution--if enough people are willing to listen and commit to his prescription for healing. In this case, the doctor does know best.

Here is the highlight:

Beyond this, the new vision of social policy can advocate the conditions that promote social accord:

--Offer yourself in service
--Talk to children about their fears (and to adults, too)
--Refuse to contribute to the toxic debate between political enemies
--Join groups that promote social justice and tolerance
--Walk away from situations dominated by discord and antagonism
--Exercise patience and tolerance
--Give time personally to someone who is outcast in society
--Cross barriers of class and race; sympathize with "the other"
--Start grass roots movements to counter militarism, mandatory sentencing, denial of civil rights, and so on. Write and speak on these injustices.
--Get a spiritual life. If you are religious, go back to church and reclaim it from intolerance.
--Read about inspiring leaders, whether Jesus, Nelson Mandela, or Lincoln, and remind yourself of what successful idealism looks like.

One of these strikes me in particular: the injunction to walk away from situations dominated by discord and antagonism. I maintain a political blog where I essentially try to document the insanity of the current administration and of certain social trends. Politics in America is the embodiment of discord.

For the past months I have been thinking about (and occasionally writing about) the possibility of an integral politics, an approach that can transcend party identifications as they currently exist. I have not been able to find anything that "feels" right to me. The existing "third way" systems seem like a compromise, not a solution.

The problem for me is that I am easily angered by Bush's policies and the ways in which he and his cabal trample civil rights and human decency. Gripped by this anger, it's very easy to engage in partisanship, which is what I have been doing. I am not offering a solution in doing so, but simply adding to the cacophony of angry voices.

What might an integral politics built on love look like in practice? We could still oppose inhuman policies and violations of our civil rights. We can still campaign for change. We could seek out and support politicians who share our views.

We could still embrace the best of conservative ideology (change begins with the interior) and the best of liberal ideology (change must start with the exterior). Here is Ken Wilber's version of this model:

In each case, the conservative mostly recommends interior changes, the liberal, exterior changes. Likewise, when it comes to social change, the conservative recommends interior development (character education, family values, industriousness, self-responsibility); the liberal recommends exterior development (material improvement, economic redistribution, universal health care, welfare statism). Of course, there are exceptions. But more often than not, that is a genuinely basic difference in socio-political orientation between conservatives and liberals.

We do have a bit of a terminology problem, however, in that 'liberal' and 'conservative' have been used in many different ways. So let me point out that there are two different issues here: one is the actual scale of causality for human ills: is it interior or exterior? And two, we are dealing with the names of political orientations (liberal, conservative, socialist, libertarian, etc.), each of which is a mixture of the interior-exterior scale that we are talking about plus several other important scales, such as the average level or levels of development that the political party mostly supports (e.g., blue, orange, green, etc.); the emphasis put on individual versus collective values; the nature of political change advocated (gradual, revolutionary, traditionalist), and so on. An integral or AQAL politics takes all of those scales into account in order to fashion a more comprehensive view of human political possibilities--and a more comprehensive, balanced, effective form of political inquiry and action.

This is the foundation of a truly integral politics. The only thing missing is the moral orientation. You can have the most elaborate theory in the world, one that includes interiors and exteriors, individual and collective, vertical depth and horizontal span, but if it lacks a moral core it can just as easily be used for evil as for love.

Chopra's prescription provides the moral core to Wilber's theoretical model. The brilliant part of Chopra's addition is that each of the world's great religious traditions has at its core an ethos of love. Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, Jews, and so many other faiths can all come together in service of making the world--and our politics--a place with love as its core.

Love is the one thing that can unite people and ideas from various places into an integrated whole. A true integral politics will be a politics of love and compassion.

"Sure," says the voice of doubt in my head,"sounds great in theory, but how well do you think that will work in the real world? How do you plan to fight Tom DeLay and Bill Frist and Dick Cheney with love as your weapon?" When he says it like that, it does sound kind of foolish and naive.

Martin Luther King, Jr., taught revolution through love, and he did some amazing things. Just because we seek to make love and compassion the moral center of a new politics doesn't mean we can't get angry. It doesn't mean we can't protest and encourage others to protest. It doesn't mean we can't seek to depose the current regime or indict its leaders. What it does mean is that we do not make anger and hatred the fuel of our drive to change things. Love must be the motivation.

If we seek change through anger and hatred, we will burn out and self destruct as these darker emotions become our moral core. We can feel these feelings, acknowledge them, and allow them to pass through us as they come up, but if we hold onto them and make them our tool, we will evoke a similar response from those we hope to change.

We need to reclaim the moral discussion from the hateful fundamentalists who proclaim love while they seek to condemn anyone who doesn't conform to their narrow view of the world. We must make values the center of a new discussion, and we must offer an alternative to the fundamentalist values that are being held up as an ideal.

I don't know how to do this yet. But if others feel the same way, we can begin to formulate a new model, a new politics, and a new way of governing.