Living In The Burning Light ...

If I don't start writing more than once or twice a week soon, I'm afraid I'm going to lose all credibility as an obsessive-compulsive attention-seeker. I should at least be able to find an amusing 70s hair band video for you all. I'm not even trying.

An initiative campaign launched last week to shine a little light on the City's freight train approach to building a new jail in Seattle. It's the culmination of about four months of discussion and planning. The effort is much bigger than Real Change, and is fronted by a group of activists calling themselves Citizens for Fairness and Efficiency in Public Safety. I wish we'd discussed a bit less. We have until May to collect the 23,000 or so signatures needed to qualify for November's ballot. The big public launch is on February 19, 7:30-9 am at Town Hall. You're invited.

In my more hopeful moments, I think that this effort, and the opportunity for movement building across race, class, and issue that it represents, is just the kind of organizing that could lead to the new civil rights movement this nation so badly needs. In my less hopeful moments, I think of how overwhelming the odds against our success really are, and how this could be just one more example of institutional power and momentum overwhelming citizen participation.

So, the stakes feel high, and I'm working my ass off, trying to focus on what's important. Today started with a 9 am interview with the Socialist Worker. This arrived far too soon after yesterday's thrilling 1 a.m. conclusion of a 16-hour day. Today, I was at Real Change until 7:30. A mere ten and a half hours. I really should be working right now. No. That's not right. I really should be sleeping.

On the other hand, this is my idea of a really good time. Everyone should be lucky enough to live in the burning light of their passion, surrounded by people they love and respect. I have nothing to complain about.

Above is a two-part video of my speech at our packed forum at Seattle University's Pigott Auditorium last week. I was supposed to speak for 8 minutes. The evidence strongly suggests I went over my time, but at least I wasn't alone in this. This video, if you let it, will lead you to others. All of the panelists were wonderful. The Seattle Channel is showing the forum daily. Sometimes twice. It was that good.

Below is the "Directors Corner" I wrote for Real Change today in the time I had between the initiative steering committee meeting and the meeting of the Real Change board. This issue, in some ways, is about whether we have eyes to see and the courage to change. So, I wrote about that.

As I drove into work this morning, I was thinking of my 9 a.m. interview with the folks from the Socialist Worker newspaper, and what I might say. Here was a rare opportunity to dig a little into the connections between globalization and growing inequality, the war on drugs as a means of criminalizing the black and marginalized, shelters and prisons as containment systems for the surplus and abandoned poor, and how class and race are the unacknowledged third rail in this question of a new Seattle jail that the city is desperately trying to avoid.

This is a time when enormous possibility for change is colliding directly with the prospect of system collapse. This leaves one with a vertiginous feeling of combined hope and dread. As my car made its way down I-5, I drifted to the theologians who have addressed the times in which we live.

Walter Bruggeman, author of The Prophetic Imagination, talks about having courage and conviction, despite the many inducements that exist to just shut the hell up and go along with the program. “Situations of cultural acceptance,” said Bruggeman, “breed accommodating complacency.” When a ten-fold disproportionality exists in King County between Blacks that are jailed and their representation in the community, we are called to actively imagine a different reality

I also thought of Reinhold Niebuhr’s take on Matthew 10:16, “ which reads, “Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.” Niebuhr writes concisely on institutional self-interest as a reflection of the human capacity for evil, and how liberals are often naive on this point. His work was enormously influential during the nation’s last civil rights movement and needs to be revived.

The new city jail is not about how our city handles misdemeanants. It’s about whether Seattle accepts an unacceptable status quo, and commits to a future of deepening race and class inequality as a response to system failure. For the questions behind the questions, the analysts often miss the point. The philosophers, on the other hand, have much to say.

On Power

A friend of mine sent me a quote on power by MLK yesterday after I played Mesmerized by Uncertainty and Revolution of Values for him in my car. I turned the highlights of King's Riverside speech into music and am now obsessed. I find them grounding.

Revolution of Values in particular, with its extended theme on the radical power of love, gets me misty nearly every time. In this speech, King nailed it, and its relevance to the contemporary moment is complete. My appreciation for King's ability to connect a political vision to the fullness of what it means to be human is constantly deepening. Here is King, in a 1967 address the the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, on the subject of power and it's relationship to love.

"Now power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose…And one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites -- polar opposites -- so that love is identified with a resignation of power, and power with a denial of love.

…we've got to get this thing right. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love…It is precisely this collision of immoral power with powerless morality which constitutes the major crisis of our times."

I recognize a lot of Reinhold Niebuhr in this. Niebuhr's unsentimental views on human nature and power had an enormous influence on King. The strategic clarity of the civil rights movement derives substantially from Niebuhr's thinking on the centrality of self-interest to human experience and what this means in terms of the need for movement building.

Liberalism fatally assumes a base-line level of human decency that too often fails to materialize. This often includes a blindness to the power that self-interest plays in our own lives. This marriage of love and power that King discusses is the foundation of a grounded and transformational politics that can challenge the dehumanized ethics of a consumer society that defines us in terms of what we earn and own.

For Niebuhr, this grounding in a universal form of love was expressed in Christian terms, but the notion of a transcendent standard of love and community that rises above the limitations of time and tribe can be expressed in other ways as well. Love is bigger than religion. Love is all.

Democracy Out of Bounds

I've been a little bit obsessed with Reinhold Niebuhr the past several months. I find his unsentimental moral and political clarity comforting during these times when down is made to look like up and the way forward is so unclear. I've mentioned his The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness here before, but I've just finished another reading of this and am freshly struck by how out of balance things have become.

Democracy, he says, is "a method of finding proximate solutions for insoluble problems," and he describes this as a constant balancing act, where great vigilance is required to keep one set of organized interests from overwhelming another.

There is a naive and flawed assumption in democratic theory, he says, which is the idea that economic forces will somehow balance each other out in the marketplace and arrive at some sort of rough "natural" equilibrium. This is, he points out, little more than a statement of faith, and one that is seldom borne out in fact. He describes Adam Smith's notion of the "invisible hand" as simply a secularized version of divine providence.

So this assumption that the self-interest of the powerful will somehow harmonize with and uphold the interests of the greater good is one that hasn't fared so well in practice, although the illusion of a convergence of interests is certainly alive and well.

This means that questions that seem relatively settled and uncontroversial, such as the nature of private property and the relationship of church and state, he says, are issues that are constantly under renegotiation, whether we realize it or not. When these questions stop being considered, he says, power accumulates in ways that seriously threaten democracy, which, for all of its flaws, is the best option we have.

This was in 1944, and somewhere along the line, the debate largely seems to have stopped. Niebuhr died an old man more than 35 years ago, but I get the feeling that if he were to rise from the grave today and take a gimlet-eyed look around, he'd say, "What? Didn't anybody read my book?"

And the answer would largely be "No." We don't really read anymore. In this sped up, distracted, crap-filled world in which we live, who has the time?

There is a wonderful essay by Arthur Schlesinger on this very subject, entitled Forgetting Reinhold Niebuhr. Nebuhr has fallen out of fashion, he says, because his ideas in general are anathema to the religious right, while his notions of "original sin" are uncomfortable to the left.

"Niebuhr would have rejoiced at Mr. Dooley's definition of a fanatic. According to the Irish bartender created by Finley Peter Dunne, a fanatic "does what he thinks th' Lord wud do if He only knew th' facts iv th' case." There is no greater human presumption than to read the mind of the Almighty, and no more dangerous individual than the one who has convinced himself that he is executing the Almighty's will. "A democracy," Niebuhr said, "cannot of course engage in an explicit preventive war," and he lamented the "inability to comprehend the depth of evil to which individuals and communities may sink, particularly when they try to play the role of God to history."

Original sin, by tainting all human perceptions, is the enemy of absolutes. Mortal man's apprehension of truth is fitful, shadowy and imperfect; he sees through the glass darkly. Against absolutism Niebuhr insisted on the "relativity of all human perspectives," as well as on the sinfulness of those who claimed divine sanction for their opinions. He declared himself "in broad agreement with the relativist position in the matter of freedom, as upon every other social and political right or principle." In pointing to the dangers of what Justice Robert H. Jackson called "compulsory godliness," Niebuhr argued that "religion is so frequently a source of confusion in political life, and so frequently dangerous to democracy, precisely because it introduces absolutes into the realm of relative values." Religion, he warned, could be a source of error as well as wisdom and light. Its role should be to inculcate, not a sense of infallibility, but a sense of humility. Indeed, "the worst corruption is a corrupt religion."

Bringing Up the F-word

It's hard to talk about the threat of fascism without sounding like an alarmist crank. But more and more, the F word is showing up. Robin Meyers used it last year in Why the Christian Right is Wrong. Kevin Phillips, a one-time Nixon speech writer is also concerned with "proto-fascist" tendencies in the Christian Right. Local journalist David Neiwert tracks developments on the extreme right on his excellent Orcinus blog. Chris Hedges, the distinguished war correspondent with an M.Div. from Harvard has a scary book out, and then there's the new book on the Blackwater Security forces to keep you up nights as well.

And that's just what comes up on the Real Change site.

Reinhold Niebuhr's The Children of Light and The Children of Darkness, published in 1944, is a discussion of democratic theory that expands on many of the ideas first published in 1936 in the landmark Moral Man, Immoral Society. The book examines what was the key question of the time: how did this happen?

It's a question that almost always gets asked too late. Niebuhr described the blindness of liberals to what in hindsight is often all too obvious in a passage that is as relevant today as it was 63 years ago.

According the the scripture, "the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light." This observation fits the modern situation. Our democratic civilization has been built, not by children of darkness but by foolish children of light. It has been under attack by the children of darkness, by the moral cynics, who declare that a strong nation need acknowledge no law beyond its strength. It has come close to complete disaster under this attack, not because it accepted the same creed as the cynics, but because it underestimated the power of self-interest, both individual and collective, in modern society. The children of light have not been as wise as the children of darkness.

The children of darkness are evil because they know no law beyond the self. They are wise, though evil, because they understand the power of self-interest. The children of light are virtuous because they have some conception of a higher law than their own will. They are usually foolish because they do not know the power of self-will. ... Modern democratic civilization is, in short, sentimental rather than cynical. It has a ... fatuous and superficial view of man. It does not know that the same man who is ostensibly devoted to "the common good" may have desires and ambitions, hopes and fears, which set him at variance with his neighbor.

It must be understood that the children of light are foolish not merely because the underestimate the power of self-interest among the children of darkness. They underestimate this power among themselves. The democratic world came so close to disaster not merely because it never believed that Nazism possessed the demonic fury which it avowed. Civilization refused to recognize the power of class interest in its own communities.

My friend Rev. Rich Lang at Trinity United Methodist Church in Ballard has called an Emergency Meeting at his church for August 1, at 7 pm. I'm going. Rev. Lang has been concerned with the growing signs around us for some time, but a recent Executive Order signed by the President has him particularly concerned. His column from today's Real Change is reproduced below.

We are in a grave constitutional crisis with a President who seemingly wants to be a king, and a Congress unable and unwilling to oppose him. This administration is building, plank by plank, the framework for military dictatorship. Already in place is a global governing philosophy that uses the military as muscle for invading other nations for the purpose of social engineering and massive corporate profits. The Defense Authorization Act of 2006 empowers the President to impose martial law in the event of a terrorist incident. The National Defense Authorization Act of 2007 permits the President to command National Guard troops without the consent of state governors. The National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive gives the President dictatorial powers in the event of a “catastrophic incident.” The Military Commissions Act suspends the right of habeas corpus. This short list doesn’t include widespread wiretapping of citizens, construction of concentration camps, private armies, an ever-expanding military budget, increased government secrecy, non-cooperation with Congress, and the inevitable bankrupting of domestic budgets. And, now, the latest grab for power has the Executive announcing that “our property” can be seized for dissent against the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

We are in a very grave constitutional crisis, folks. I encourage every one of you to make a noise in the offices of Senators Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, and your congressional representatives. Silence is the death of democracy.

But I think we also need to begin the process of organizing some form of resistance, protest, and/or strategy for impeachment. Our politicians are fiddling while democracy burns. Feeding from common corporate money sources, they are no longer worthy of our trust. Indeed, they have betrayed us.

For example, almost daily some media figure or political operative drops a hint that our country might be hit again by the terrorists. Ask yourself: In the event of another catastrophic occurrence, can you trust this government to stay true to the idealism of democracy, and the laws of limited checks and balances of power, encoded in the Constitution? Can you trust Congress to represent the people?

I certainly cannot. We are, I repeat, in a grave, surreal even, constitutional crisis. We are dealing with a spirituality of tyranny, an unleashing of ruthless, arrogant power that corrupts all it touches.

It’s time to get angry and cast out this unclean spirit from our land. Such a statement can now get me arrested, disappeared, and stripped of all assets. Is this America? Is this the country in which we have been raised? And how long, friend, until you yourself awaken only to discover that there is now a knock on your door?

I call upon all who care to assemble at Trinity United Methodist Church, on Aug. 1 at 7 p.m. There we will begin to strategize how to reclaim the power of the people, the birthright we share from our heritage of democracy.

Knock. Knock.

Against the Servants of Mammon

One of the more unusual books in my library is Walter Rauschenbusch's Prayers of the Social Awakening, a lovely volume that was published in 1910. Rauschenbusch's Christianity and Social Crisis is considered the seminal work of the social gospel movement that helped animate the Christian left during the first half of the last century.

Rauschenbusch's theology sprang from the ideals of the Sermon on the Mount, and sought to be relevant to the issues of the day. His ideas paralleled those of John Dewey, another influential philosopher of that time, who held that evil was mostly a function of ignorance, and that the promise of education offered a future of steady progress toward a just society.

The optimism of the social gospel would be challenged in 1932 by Reinhold Niebuhr, who's Moral Man and Immoral Society argued that self-interest dominates human affairs and is at the core of our society. While Niebuhr's return to the idea of original sin outraged progressive Christians at the time, his views later came to be accepted, and Rauschenbusch's optimism came to be regarded as somewhat naive. Niebuhr's ideas became an obsession for a young Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The theologian's clear-eyed analysis of power, politics, and morality helped form the theoretical underpinnings of the civil rights movement. Niebuhr's thought, which is anathema to the religious right and an uncomfortable challenge to the complacency and materialism of mainline Christianity, now languishes in relative obscurity.

And yet, there is something about Rauschenbusch that remains very attractive. The 1910 volume is a book of prayers that still, nearly a century later, often feels entirely relevant. I was paging through it last night and found this, Against the Servants of Mammon.

e cry to thee for justice, O Lord, for our soul is weary with the iniquity of greed. Behold the servants of Mammon, who defy thee and drain their fellow-men for gain; who grind down the strength of the workers by merciless toil and fling them aside when they are mangled and worn; who rackrent the poor and make dear the space and air which thou hast made free; who paralyze the hand of justice by corruption; who blind the eyes of the people by lies; who nullify by their craft the merciful laws which nobler men have devised for the protection of the weak; who have made us ashamed of our dear country by their defilements and have turned our holy freedom into a hollow name; who have brought upon thy church the contempt of men, and have cloaked their extortion with the Gospel of thy Christ.

For the oppression of the poor and the sighing of the needy now do thou arise O Lord, because thou art love, and tender as a mother to the weak, therefore thou art the great hater of iniquity and thy doom is upon those who grow rich upon the poverty of the people.

O God, we are afraid, for the thundercloud of thy wrath is even now black above us. In the ruins of dead empires we have read how thou has trodden the wine-press of thine anger when the measure of their sin was full. We are sick at heart when we remember that by the greed of those who enslaved a weaker race that curse was fastened upon us all that still lies black and hopeless across our land, though the blood of a nation was spilled to atone. Save our people from being dragged down into vaster guilt and woe by men who have no vision and know no law except their lust. Shake their souls with awe of thee that they may cease. Help us with clean hands to tear the web which they have woven about us and to turn our people back to thy law, lest the mark of the beast stand out on the right hand and forehead of our nation and our feet be set on the downward path to darkness for which there is no return forever.