Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/articles/page/59/)
In this time of ideological upheaval, when the old ideologies of left and right, of socialism, liberalism, and conservatism, no longer capture the political imagination the way they once did, new political visions are required. Some have tried to formulate a “Third Way” between social democracy and conservatism. Others, such as Michael Lerner, have proposed a more spiritually-oriented approach to transcend left and right. I would like to present another vision, that of Integral Politics.
The basic medical facts about a full-scale nuclear war have been clear and undisputed for decades. Hundreds of millions would be killed and injured. Massive outbreaks of disease would follow. Food supplies and water would be contaminated and the systems to deliver them destroyed. Drastic and sudden climate changes would wreak havoc on agriculture and human and animal populations. All essential services, including medical and health services, would be rendered useless. Epidemics would rage. Civil defense–the notion that there is somewhere to hide–remains a hoax.
There is a growing sense in American life that politics has become corrupt. Those traditional public spheres in which people could exchange ideas, debate, and shape the conditions that structured their everyday lives increasingly appear to have little relevance or political importance. Within the increasing corporatization of everyday life, market values replace social values and people appear more and more willing to re treat into the safe, privatized enclaves of the family, religion, and consumption. The result is not only silence and indifference, but the terrible price paid in what Zygmunt Bauman calls the “hard currency of human suffering.”
When Jimmy Carter was inaugurated, he said that he would spend every day of his presidency thinking about how to reduce the threat of nuclear war. Four years later, the United States and the former Soviet Union possessed more nuclear weapons in their arsenals than before Carter’s arrival in the White House. What was Carter thinking about on those long afternoons in the Oval Office?
By now, you’ve probably heard there’s a “war against boys” in America. The latest heavily-hyped right-wing fusillade against feminism, led by Christina Hoff Sommers’s new book of that title, claims that men are now the second sex and that boys–not girls–are the ones who are in serious trouble, the “victims” of “misguided” feminist efforts to protect and promote girls’ development. They counsel anguished parents to “rescue” or “protect” boys–not from feminists but from a definition of masculinity that is harmful to boys, girls, and other living things.
As our century draws to a close, we are facing a whole series of global problems which are harming the biosphere and human life in alarming ways that may soon become irreversible. Concern with the environment is no longer one of many “single issues”; it is the context of everything else–of our lives, our businesses, our politics. The great challenge of our time is to build and nurture sustainable communities–social, cultural, and physical environments in which we can satisfy our needs and aspirations without diminishing the chances of future generations.
The debate about global warming is a debate about the outcome of a gamble. We are betting that the benefits of our industrial and agricultural activities will outweigh the possible adverse consequences of an unfortunate by-product of our activities, an increase in the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases that could lead to global warming and global climate changes.
In Israel, where the rabbinate together with the army give patriarchy a stranglehold on civil society, the potential impact of the feminist study of Judaism is of far more than personal significance. Nevertheless, it is only recently that the isolated efforts of a few scholars working in different institutions have begun coming together to form a vibrant and distinctive Israeli branch of feminist Jewish women’s studies, bringing a breath of fresh air and activism to a field dominated by conservative Judaic studies faculties and yeshivas. This in itself is one of the most important messages to emanate from the conference on “The Impact of Women’s and Gender Studies on Jewish Studies” held in Jerusalem in June 1999.
A longing for Kabbalah is abroad in the land. Even people with little connection to Judaism, no knowledge of Hebrew, many of them in fact non-Jews, are seeking initiation into the secret chambers of Jewish esoteric knowledge. Differing from the interest in Hasidism that centered mostly around Chabad in the preceding decades, this turn to Kabbalah has rather little to do with Jewish observance or with nostalgia for a romanticized shtetl past (a past that many denizens of “Kabbalah centers” in fact do not share). The Kabbalah seekers are after the Truth, with a capital T.
Education is everywhere in crisis. This is true not just in the failed schools of our inner cities but also in our successful” schools where we are spending huge sums to turn out graduates who lack a moral conscience to match the power of their skills to destroy, to make greedy profits, and to despoil the earth for future generations.
If I sought a conviction for the last thirty years, it would be this – every one has a right to life. Equally, no one has the right to kill – no individual at home or on the street, no doctors in abortion clinics nor any Dr. Jack Kevorkian, no government through war or death row. God alone reserves the right to kill. And then, never does.
While the twentieth century was shaped largely by the spectacular breakthroughs in the fields of physics and chemistry, the twenty-first century will belong to the biological sciences. Scientists around the world are quickly deciphering the genetic code of life, unlocking the mystery of millions of years of biological evolution on Earth. Global life science companies, in turn, are beginning to exploit the new advances in biology in a myriad of ways, laying the economic framework for the coming Biotech Century.
Naomi Wolf describes her struggle to “come out” as a spiritual person in a progressive, post-Marxist milieu which was “profoundly atheistic and hostile to religious and spiritual traditions.”
ONE: Name. Often unpronounceable, unmanageable, redolent of incense and cumin. A name that twists letters into spirals the way a djinn emerges from a lamp.
The first and most fundamental human right is the right to life. Without it such other rights as freedom of speech and protection against arbitrary arrest are simply irrelevant. In this sense, genocide – the intentional destruction of substantial portions of the racial, national, ethnic and religious components of humanity – is the most heinous of all human rights abuses.