Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of a progressive Jewish magazine Tikkun. He is also the author of a new book, The Left Hand of God, which we are going to be reading this fall in the book study group. In the book he talks about his work as a psychologist for the Institute for Labor and Mental Health, where for the last thirty years he has worked with therapists, labor activists, and social theorists, to interview American workers to try and better understand their stresses, needs, and aspirations.
His book tells the story of their findings and it is not a pretty story. The world of work is not a healthy place. Although the average American worker is materially comfortable by the standards of most of the world, there is deep insecurity about holding and maintaining jobs. In addition, there is a corrosive bottom-line mentality that forces workers to see others in the "real" world as instruments for their own survival and advancement:
In short, How can this person be of use to me?" becomes the guiding question, shaping many, not all, relationships in the world of work. All day long we are taught to see others in instrumental terms--to ask how they can be useful to us to advance our goals and interests. And we are also learning to see things from an external standpoint, to accept a technocratic rationality in which ethical and spiritual awareness is replaced by a manipulative and materialistic consciousness.
Moreover, Lerner has heard from thousands of people another "deep truth" that it is hard not to think this way when you get home. Because what we have learned at work is that this is the "real world" and we want our children to be prepared for it and we want to be able to protect our family and home in this environment. And so we find it difficult to turn it off.
But we also find this way of thinking and living deeply unsatisfying. It is not congruent with our deeply held values. It is not really what we want our children to be learning from us. It does not satisfy our needs for meaning and spirit. So the question becomes where do we go to find a different way of thinking and living?
The answer to that question, Lerner maintains, can be found in the growth and success of the religious and political right in American today. They, far more than progressives, have understood the spiritual plight of average Americans and have offered a place - churches - and an answer - an all powerful God who loves them that fills their spiritual void. They have answered this spiritual need and grown because of it even though, according to Lerner, their overall religious narrative encourages and supports the very atmosphere that is causing the problems in America. Their God is a God of fear: we should be afraid. They unquestionably support an unbridled free market economic system that outsources American jobs, that attempts to limit goverment attempts to distribute wealth more justly (through taxes), that encourages the acceptance of economic social darwinism (survival of the fittest - if you are rich you deserve it; if you are poor you also deserve it), and that blames others (Muslims, homosexuals, athiests) for the world's problems.
Why do struggling American workers attend churches and support politicians whose theologies and policies are not looking out for their economic and material interests? Lerner's book is the second I have read in the last year that asks this question. The other, What's the Matter with Kansas by Thomas Frank, sought to understand why low income workers in Kansas supported politicians and preachers who advocated policies that made the workers poorer. Lerner's book addresses more directly the spiritual aspect, but both offer the same conclusion: spirit and meaning trump economics. Liberals, they both maintain, are still stuck on Abraham Maslov's hierarchy of needs which holds that material needs need to be addressed before people are able to worry about a "higher" level of spiritual needs. So liberals offer economic programs and conservatives offer an all-powerful loving God and guess who the people trust?
Our task, according to Lerner, is to acknowledge and address the real spiritual needs of Americans and match it to a theology and politics that is based on a different narrative than the "real world." Because the real world does not have to be our world.
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