This is the "moment of truth" for all the spiritual traditions of the world: if you have something to teach us about how to live, apply that wisdom concretely to developing a spiritual bailout vision for the entire planet. We urge you to find the people in your own communities who have the most to say about the ongoing relevance of your tradition and join us as we try to combine and refine the wisdom of these various traditions in a way that will help our policy makers reshape what they mean by a bailout, its goals, and its methods. Our first gathering to discuss this in greater detail will take place in Washington, D.C. April 29-May 2nd-please be there if this message speaks to you. And help us create this discussion in your church or synagogue or mosque or ashram, labor union, professional organization, college or university campus.
And as we watch the Obama Administration begin to slide down a disastrous path toward endless war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, we recognize that this is precisely the moment to acknowledge our need for a new conception of how to achieve "homeland security" that no longer gives primary attention to "the strategy of domination" (as in: security comes from getting power over the other guy because if you don't, he'll seek to get power to dominate you). Instead, we need a fundamentally new paradigm: the strategy of generosity (as in: care for others, make them feel that you genuinely want their well-being, and they will feel the desire for their activities to contribute to your well-being).
In practical terms, a global strategy of Generosity would translate into a Domestic and Global Marshall Plan, in which the advanced industrial societies dedicate 1-5 percent of their gross domestic product each year of the next 20 years to finally eradicate global poverty, homelessness and hunger, provide all with adequate education and health care, and systematically repair the global environment while ending the production of unnecessary and wasteful forms of production. While a market mechanism should remain a central part of this process, global planning, democratically controlled, must become a major priority for the human race. Otherwise, government spending to increase consumption may simply accelerate the production of environmentally destructive consumption.
Congressman Keith Ellison introduced HR 1078 in the last Congress endorsing the idea of a Global Marshall Plan and it has been cosponsored by twenty Congressional leaders including Barbara Lee, James Moran, Emanuel Cleaver, Barney Frank, John Conyers, Dennis Kucinich and more. That idea should seem far more plausible to a Congress already imagining spending trillions to help a failed banking system. And it is an indispensable part of building and sustaining a global economic recovery.
It may be that in the first few years of the Obama Administration a strategy of generosity will only gain political traction if it is sold to the public as an addition to rather than total replacement for a strategy of domination. Similar political constraints may make it opportune to insist on calling for a Domestic as well as Global Marshall Plan in order to overcome the fear of many who are suffering in the current meltdown that we are taking away from them supports that they need to get past the immediate downturn in employment and in social benefits. Yet it is precisely at this moment that we must help people understand that there is no way to overcome the local meltdown without healing the global meltdown, and that a global strategy of generosity is both a moral necessity as well as a practical self-interest plan for the American people.
Here we see that spiritual values like generosity, reciprocity and caring for others have very practical implications, and can become the cornerstone of a sustainable global economy.
Unless our economic recovery is directed by a larger spiritual vision, rather than a return to the profligate consumption of the past, we will have missed what may well be the last best opportunity to create a sustainable and ethically coherent world.
Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun Magazine, r abbi of Beyt Tikkun Synagogue in San Francisco, and chair of the interfaith Network of Spiritual Progressives. Rabbi Lerner is author of 11 books, including The Politics of Meaning, Jewish Renewal, Healing Israel/Palestine, and with Cornel West: Blacks and Jews--Let the Healing Begin. For more information on the conference of spiritual progressives, contact www.spiritualprogressives.org or call 1 510 644 1200. Info will be available by March 11, 2009. RabbiLerner@Tikkun.org
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