Visionary Hope

Abstract

This is the second collection of essays from Peter Gabel, law professor and long-time associate of Tikkun. The essays range over law, domestic U.S. politics, foreign policy, and a variety of cultural themes including the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, sports, evolutionary theory, and the lessons of illness. While the topics are disparate, an underlying unity can be found in what might be called a “spiritual social theory.”Social theory, roughly speaking, is an attempt to comprehend the most basic and essential features of collective human existence and to normatively evaluate them in terms of concepts like rationality, freedom, justice, and human fulfillment. It is neither a purely descriptive sociology nor purely an ethics or political philosophy; rather, it is a fusion of the explanatory and the prescriptive, an account of why things are the way they are and how and why they could become better.Gabel’s version of social theory recognizes the realities of historical change, class and ethnic struggle, gender oppression, and collective suffering (such as avoidable mass starvation) but takes them as secondary phenomena. But where Marxism gives primacy to class struggle and economic development, or where certain forms of radical feminism give primacy to gender relations, Gabel’s theory gives primacy to concerns about the expression — or suppression — of human beings’ essential and primary spiritual identity.This spiritual identity, Gabel contends, resides in the fact that “we are each expressions of a loving energy and are animated by the desire for mutual recognition and affirmation of that loving energy — that we each long for recognition of our inherent worthiness and sacredness.” This loving energy, in turn, is the core reality not just of our personal lives but also of the universe as a whole. Thus to the familiar view that our essential identity is not social or physical but spiritual — a soul, a spark of the divine, a child of God — Gabel adds a relational dimension. We desperately need to be recognized, and we desperately fear rejection. Isolation, alienation, passivity before superior social elites, attachment to empty social roles, aggression, and oppression result when we allow ourselves to be ruled by the fear. Progressive social movements for democracy, ethnic or gender rights, economic fairness, and vibrant interpersonal care come when we allow ourselves to recognize and be recognized. Overall, for Gabel “the spiritual dimension of social existence [is] at the center of our understanding of social phenomena and at the center of our effort to transcend the problems that continue to limit and constrain us.”Gabel’s application of this perspective to law begins with his observation that our legal system is shaped by presuppositions directly at odds with our spiritual nature. People are viewed as antagonistic individuals involved in zero-sum conflicts, mediated by seemingly universalistic and rational (but in reality limited and slanted) rules designed to protect the monetary and ego needs of separate individuals with no stake in loving communities of mutual recognition. This perpetuates and unreflectively endorses the social antagonism that creates an unhappy, lonely population that is hungry for meaning but unable to find it.Gabel’s alternative vision of law (though why it would still be called “law” is a question) is a systematic attempt to meet our spiritual hunger for recognition, to allow us to speak and be heard, and to have that speaking and hearing unfold in a context in which our personal needs are recognized as crucially important, as are those of other individuals and of the community as a whole. We need to have our hurts and losses acknowledged, to empathize with our fellows, and to bind up all our wounds through a recognition of our spiritual bonds. To do this, Gabel cautions, lawyers and judges will need a lot more wisdom and fewer rules.Gabel’s attempt to “spiritualize foreign policy” is similar. Taking the United Nations as a hopeful attempt to realize our ties as global citizens, he suggests that we respond to potential threats of military aggression by publicly acknowledging the experiences of loss and justified anger on the part of the citizens of the aggressive nation; hold serious and open-ended meetings to find common ground that would defuse the fears that often underlie the attraction of aggression (think Iraq under Hussein, contemporary Iran, Israel, the PLO, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, etc.); and encourage direct human connection among leaders of “enemy” states. With recognition, personal contact, and a broader vision of global good, Gabel asserts, the relentless march to yet another war would be halted. Even if the leaders remained aggressive, public recognition of the suffering of the broad masses under those leaders would lessen their support for the leaders’ military aims.In other contexts Gabel tells us that Obama should have seen beyond conventional interest-group politics to consistently argue for his policies as an expression of the best of democracy: a community of loving and caring people who seek and can find recognition. Al Gore, he writes, should have argued for continuing the Florida vote, not on the narrow basis of states’ rights, but because voting rights enshrine a hard-won recognition that each of us matters. Evolutionary biologists who describe life as simply a manifestation of mechanical biochemical processes should, rather, “lean in” toward living beings and “anchor [themselves] in the self-evident knowledge that Being has of its own presence and intentionality, and engage in empathic apprehension of the other forms of life that surround us in our own time.”As someone who has written extensively on how politics and religion/spirituality need each other’s insights, I very much appreciate Gabel’s wonderful theoretical chutzpah. It is one thing to recommend Buddhist compassion when someone insults you; it is another to imagine a spiritual overhaul of the legal system — an arena as anti-spiritual as the military or Wall Street. There is a visionary hopefulness in advocating for compassion and recognition in contexts overwhelmingly defined by opposition, competition, and violence. It makes sense that Gabel’s most cited moral inspiration is Martin Luther King Jr., who believed that nonviolent protest and an underlying attitude of love even for those who committed terrible violence against African Americans was the only possible way forward.As well, I find some of Gabel’s historical analyses particularly instructive. In a few clear and intelligent pages he summarizes the conservative ideological and legal assault on the New Left during the 1970s and 1980s through doctrines such as “original intent” (the call to shape our law according to what we imagine a few people thought was right 250 years ago), “law and economics” (the idea that people are essentially isolated economic agents), and “the new federalism” (states’ rights). Here Gabel the long-time law professor shows his expertise.In several places Gabel makes excellent use of Sartre, whose psychological and social insights continue to be valuable but neglected. To describe the contrast between social life with and without spiritually oriented recognition, Gabel employs Sartre’s illuminating contrast between the “serial group” (people isolated and alienated, each subject as an individual to social patterns and elite power) and the “fused group” (revolutionary situations in which we come together for recognition and support). This idea of the fused group captures my own experience of political action, collective spiritual connection, or even the rare and beautiful times when students and teacher forget their social roles and share in the pursuit of knowledge and the appreciation of wisdom.Finally, I think there is much value in Gabel’s consistent critique of the false universalism of detached rationality in law, politics, and science. While he utilizes critical legal studies’ critique of illusory objectivity in mainstream legal theory, he correctly points out that the movement failed to see that without some vision — be it that of capitalist individualism or of spiritual connection — law is simply not possible. Gabel consistently argues that views of people as fundamentally self-interested, states as inherently aggressive, or matter as essentially without spiritual meaning are no more than highly contestable interpretations.The book’s greatest drawback is that Gabel’s own belief in the cosmic and human primacy of “loving spiritual energy” is at best simply another interpretation.This would not be a problem if Gabel did not frequently write as if it were, rather, a “fact” of life. (A similar problem attends his unjustified certainty about how well his policy proposals would work in real life.) Gabel’s belief in the essentially spiritual nature of human and cosmic existence is at best a belief that may be more properly described as a hope or faith. Yet throughout the book he uses words like real, true, actual, and fundamental to present this spiritual nature as an essential fact.Gabel offers precious little argument for his point of view, telling us instead that the truth of his position “depends upon whether you can recognize it as true” — whether it produces “an experience of recognition.” But because in a pluralistic society we are subject to a wide variety of intuitions about what is true, theory requires reasons. Reasons are what enable us to reach people of fundamentally different intuitions, habits, prejudices, and cultures.There is an enormous, almost crushing number of arguments against Gabel’s claim that humans seek “not primarily food, shelter, or the satisfaction of material needs, but rather the love and recognition of other human beings.” For every Mandela and Bishop Tutu (two of his other inspirations) who preach forgiveness and reconciliation, there are their neighbors in South Africa whose actions have given that nation the world’s thirteenth highest homicide rate and one of the highest incidences of rape, with one local survey reporting that one in every four men admitted to raping a woman or girl. For every New Deal effort that sought broad economic respect for workers, there is the long-term grind of capitalists undoing it. And for every labor victory, there is working-class abandonment of the positive work of communist organizers in exchange (temporarily, it turned out) for a higher standard of living.Virtually all the social movements that Gabel touts as expressions of universal love were marked by partiality: the U.S. Socialist Party failed to stand with immigrants, the New Left was rife with contempt for the politically conservative working class, serious conservationists have often been ignorant of environmental racism, etc. Was it a particular social group’s self-interest or universal love that motivated these movements? Was it both? How would we know? What would make one more real or essential than the other?If Gabel is right that “the social-spiritual longing for love and mutual recognition is ‘fundamental’ while fear and paranoia are not,” why is fear (as well as the violence and oppression it supposedly produces) so prevalent? Why is the less significant, less central phenomenon the dominant social force? If human beings are essentially loving, why do they cause so much unnecessary suffering?In the face of such concerns Gabel is simply unjustified in writing as if he can be certain that humans and the cosmos are essentially spiritual and that those who deny it are misled by fear, alienation, ruling-class ideology, etc. Using psychological interpretation to dismiss those who disagree manifests an authoritarian and fundamentalist tendency completely at odds with the rest of Gabel’s thinking. As well, psychology, to quote Dostoyevsky, is a knife that cuts both ways. Perhaps not seeing human beings as essentially violent, self-interested, and irrational (consider what we’re doing to the world’s climate!) stems from unacknowledged fear and grief. Perhaps people believe in the metaphysical guarantees of God, a universal force of love, or an “essential spiritual nature” just to deal with their suppressed despair about how awful things are.It is common for theorists to turn to psychology and/or spirituality when mass movements fail. Such was Wilhelm Reich’s attempt to combine Marx with Freud after the German Left’s loss to Nazism; feminism’s romance with the theories of Nancy Chodorow and Dorothy Dinnerstein, who claimed that psychological development conditioned by exclusively female mothering was the “real” reason for feminism’s very limited successes; and Gabel’s, Tikkun’s, and my own theoretical turn to spirituality after the collapse of the New Left. The very problems of subjectivity, meaning, and psychology that are so important to Gabel were central to Western Marxism — anti-communist and anti-capitalist thinkers like Antonio Gramsci, Robert Reich, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse. Gabel’s casual dismissal of Marxism as locked into economic determinism is simply blind to this tradition, as well as to its more distant (but still related) second cousin of socialist feminism (e.g., the groundbreaking work of Sheila Rowbotham).But we can include psychology and spirituality in social theory without claiming that “the cause” (emphasis added) of material suffering and injustice “is to be found in the socio-spiritual separation expressive of an underlying failure of mutual recognition that expresses itself existentially as Fear of the Other.” Why replace a one-sided emphasis on the institutional, social, external, or measurable with one on the psychological and spiritual? Why the same old search for the “one true thing on which all else depends” instead of a holistic account of interdependence? And why would Gabel want to suggest that we can know the truth of his theory just by an examination of our own interior experience? If what is outside us is sustained by what is inside, doesn’t what is “inside us” also come from what is outside? Babies (a group Gabel frequently invokes to make his points) may have the capacity and need for love, but if they do not experience any actual loving, that capacity dries up. In a book so relentlessly (and correctly) critical of bourgeois images of the atomized, isolated self, why describe spirituality as something we “just have” (a metaphysical DNA?) as individuals, distinct from the social relations of material support and education that make it possible?Gabel’s concept of “recognition” is central (a concept, interestingly, that entered Western philosophy with Hegel, who like Gabel believed that all life was ultimately united in a universal force of connection and wisdom). Yet when Gabel says that people seek above all to be recognized, I want to ask: “Recognized as what?” He answers: as the spiritual, worthwhile, loving beings we essentially are. Think, he suggests, of how babies spontaneously cry for affection or how people at a religious service share joyfully in eye contact.I have my doubts, for in my experience people want to be known by the joys and sorrows of their own particular lives, by the work to which they give their hearts, and by the social groups that forge and sustain their identities. My own life as an American Jew, a political and cultural radical, an author, the father of disabled child, a teacher. . . all these and more are essential to recognizing me. Could Gabel himself feel truly recognized by people who had no understanding of his struggles, delights, and regrets as a father, writer, professor, and spiritual believer? Infants can be loved just as they are. But if they are loved they develop into adults with social and historical identities as well as spiritual ones. To recognize them means not just a passing glance or a hug, but a full engagement in their jointly personal and social existence. A vague, generic gesture of “spiritual recognition” is not enough.We require social relations to make real recognition possible, and in that way spirituality is a social product. From other people we learn how to be compassionate, loving, and skillful enough to respond to what this particular person in front of us needs, and we learn what it means to experience life as a social being. We also learn how to manage our own emotions so that we can bear with another’s suffering or hear another’s anger. The social roles (profession, nationality, culture, politics) that Gabel so frequently condemns as antithetical to spiritual connection are, paradoxically, also connections and cultural forms that make recognition possible.If justice is, as Gabel says, “self-evident,” how are we to resolve the abortion debate? Or mediate between those who do and those who do not believe that animals — or forests — deserve moral consideration? Further, what is it to “recognize” the slave-owner who is committed by everything he “knows” to the naturalness of slavery? We may be polite and compassionate as we free his slaves, eliminate all his wealth, and destroy his manner of living. But will he feel “seen” by us?These are political or moral differences that cannot be obviated by intuitive appeals to a faith-based, universal spiritual energy. Even if such an energy exists, it still needs the insights and intelligence of purely political theory to respond to conflicts over, for example, gay marriage, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or veganism. Thus as much as politics needs spirituality, the converse is also true. How would spiritual teachers have learned about the spiritually deadening and immoral effects of patriarchal privilege or the ways in which advanced capitalism poisons ecosystems if secular political movements hadn’t taught them?Taken as faith, I have no problem with Gabel’s belief in the essentially spiritual nature of humans and the cosmos — or with anyone else’s belief that Jesus is the son of God, that God spoke to Moses, or that we are all part of Brahma. Until we have a vastly more loving society, there will always be reason to believe, as Marx put it, in something that is the “heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.”Yet for me the original Marxist faith in the inevitable dialectic of history, the liberal faith in human reason, and faith in an inherently, metaphysically guaranteed spiritual reality are just that — faith. One can be a Marxist — critiquing capitalism and dreaming of socialism — without believing that proletarian victory is inevitable. One can be a liberal — celebrating the progress of science and individual rights — and still accept that in the end rationality may succumb to its opposite.Similarly, one can choose a life infused by spirituality — believing that awareness, acceptance, gratitude, compassion, and love make you a happier person and a lot more fun to be around — without thinking that spirituality is “in truth” inherent in the nature of the universe or that love is more basic than fear.I’ll take my spirituality straight, without faith, guarantees, or certainty. I wouldn’t say this position is truer than Gabel’s, only that it fits my spiritual personality. As his version no doubt fits his.Given how much we agree on, perhaps we should just leave it at that. If not, we replace the false Objectivity of Science or the false Neutrality of Law with a false Certainty of Spirit. And why would we want to do that?