Between Putin and Fundamentalisms

“[What] is predominantly progressive, or woke, [was once] irreverent. Now it is pious. Once it believed that truth was best discovered by engaging opposing points of view. Now it believes that truth can be established by eliminating them. Once it cared about process. Now it is obsessed with outcomes. Once it understood, with Walt Whitman, that we contain multitudes. Now it is into dualities: We are privileged or powerless, white or of color, racist or anti-racist, oppressor or oppressed.”

- Bret Stephens (yes, I'm quoting a conservative, how dare I?)

I am inviting you into a deep, somewhat intellectual, but definitely spiritual conversation. It is with one of my most important teachers in the practice of Emergent Consciousness Dialogue. Thomas Steinenberg. Host of “Radio Evolve”

I grew up in a fundamentalist community. These communities come together by making themselves right and other people wrong. They are held together by the threat of exile.  A most primal of human fears. 

I experience this same flavor of identitarian, self-righteous, fundamentalism in many of the “woke” circles that I am invited into.

I know the taste and smell of it. I know what it looks and feels like. I also understand the values that these communities stand for. We want a more just, inclusive, and sustainable world. A world where more of us can thrive. We are trying to take a stand that is squarely on the side of life.

But fundamentalisms change things. They turn into piety. They rely on shame and guilt. Thinking becomes binary. Either/or. Good and Evil. In or Out. The quest for justice becomes a secular religion. And it becomes a direct threat to the liberal foundations of the democratic systems that define an open society. A system that was designed to facilitate the contestation of ideas, vigorous debate and a struggle for power that does not resort to violence.

In a very different way, what we are seeing in Russia’s catastrophic aggression against Ukraine, is also a threat to this liberal world order. It is important to consider what these two opposites have in common.

How is resentment at the very root of what is driving these aggressions?

Look, I’m not being naive here. I was born a colonial subject on an island that is still a colony. Too many Puerto Ricans died in Vietnam. You and I have witnessed the terrible failures of Iraq and Afghanistan in our very lifetimes. I know that imperialism uses the disguise of liberal ideals so that it can perpetuate domination. 

I know that people of color have been excluded from the democratic franchise at the heart of this liberal ideal. I understand that the so-called middle ground where we are supposed to meet is a middle ground defined by patrician white men who sit on the nation's Senate at the behest of those with the most wealth.

But to me, as far as I can see, when it comes to governance at any sort of scale, we need democracy from the bottom up. We need more citizens who will resist the pull of polarization. We need people who are willing to know less and discover more. Folks who are not moving from a place of justified resentment. Humans ready to do the work of seeing “the other” with a heart full of empathy. Able to acknowledge what “the other” fears and to invite them into a different story. 

We need to nurture islands of sanity where people can contest ideas in a peaceful way. We need this especially today, as the seeds of violence and separation sprout vicious weeds in our garden. 

But this cannot be the dry project of modernity. It cannot be so committed to measured rationality that it becomes devoid of spirit and aliveness. It must be suffused with meaning. It has to be connected to ritual and ceremony. There must be ways for us to sense it in our bodies.

Thomas and I are committed to the practice of emergent dialogue. We want to know less and discover more. And we want the aliveness, the spirit that was revered in the rituals of our ancestors to once again permeate our lives. To be at the heart of the process we engage in as we learn to live together.

I hope you enjoy our conversation.

Saludos,

Gibrán