A Politics of Love: Talking Civics, Art, & American Culture with Marianne Williamson
"We cannot live, except thus mutually"- Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Malchijah Judah Hoskins:
What about love is inherently radical and political? What are the politics of love?
Marianne Williamson:
Love is radical because it runs counter to the dominant thought system that prevails within the world. Our world is based on the idea that we are separate. Love reminds us that we are one. Fear and the dominant thinking of the world posits that the world is dangerous and love posits that the world is safe should we love one another and take care of one another. So to live your life for the purposes of being self centered, or getting whatever it is that you want runs counter to love. So it's not a small difference. It's actually a big difference. And it is a radical difference in that it replaces an entire thought system and brings forth something completely new and different for the human race.
Now, when I say something completely different for the human race I don't mean like nobody's been talking about love. I'm just saying that the way we now order and organize human civilization and basically have or as long as humanity has been existing, we have been moving more within the tenets of fear and trying to operate within an effort to organize life in such a way that we can be safe within a fearful world. But the only way we will survive as a species in the 21st century is if we actually evolve on a fundamental level to a point where love is our guidance system. Right now the form that fear guidance system takes within the geopolitical construct of the world is economics. But the problem is not just an economic paradigm that prevails, but that it's a specifically unjust economic paradigm, because it is an economics based on short term profit maximization for multinational corporate entities, rather than seeing economics as service to the ultimate betterment of humanity and placing humanitarian principles before economics.
MJH:
How do you think that paternalistic viewpoint of political elites prevents loving, just, and good public policy?
MW:
Well, first of all, I want to make it clear, I don't want to denigrate anybody,this is not a personal game. This is about systems, but my belief is that the old fashioned notion, that you improve your economy in order to improve the human condition.The shift we need is to go from an economic to the monetary and bottom line. The shift we need is the realization that you improve your human condition. And that improves your economy. So I'll give you an example, the bailout. Right now we have spent over a trillion dollars. But that money has gone more towards Wall Street. The issue is not just how much money has been on a bail out, but where it's going to. You had 40% of Americans, even before the pandemic, who could not afford a $400 unexpected expenditure. We had about 38 million people living already in poverty 93 million people living near poverty. We've now shifted since the pandemic began. We have 8 million more people living in poverty and they cannot give them one more $1200 one time stimulus?
So you're asking me “what's love?”, to feed a hungry child that's what love is. What is love? Say to somebody who is desperate and doesn't know how they're going to avoid homelessness during this pandemic, doesn't know how they're going to feed their children.If a person is sick, help them have health care. If a person is so burdened by health by college loan debt that they don't know how they will ever be able to get out of the velvet shackles of working at a job that they hate just so that they can get health benefits. So all that money that they spent and borrowed so that they could pursue their professional dream, they can't even pursue a professional dream because if they went that direction they don't know how they'll ever be able to pay off these college loans.What is a politics of love? The politics of love is, why don't we try to take care of the planet enough that our great, great grandchildren will have a reasonable chance of breathing here.
MJH:
What role do you think trauma is playing in our current collective American experience and how do we go about processing and bearing witness to that trauma?
MW:
We have 10s of millions of Americans who live every day with chronic tension, and anxiety, economic tension, and anxiety that is trauma, poverty is traumatic, despair is traumatic. When people have no idea how they will ever be able to move past the situation where they are working at jobs that they don't really like–sometimes one, two, or three jobs in order to just to be able to barely survive.That is traumatic. When you have millions of American children who go to school in neighborhoods that are now called domestic war zones, where parents are afraid to let their kids go out to play because they don't know if a stray bullet might hit them, that is traumatic. When you have children going to school everyday worried that it might be a school shooting, that is traumatic. When you have kids who are not even taught to read by the age of eight, which means that their chances of incarceration are greater than the chances of graduating from high school. They still go to school every year and they're falling further and further behind. And they can't keep up in class, and they feel like they must be stupid. There's nobody really there to help them–and they know what this means about their future, that is traumatic.
I mean, this is like right up in front of us. There are not only people living at the effect of economic injustice, but there are people who are not necessarily living at the effect of economic injustice, but still living at the effect of the fact that we've created a society where we had detoured from the basic humanitarian purpose of being alive on Earth. We are here to love each other. And when we are so tempted to think that anything else matters more that is a little bit of trauma right there because it creates a fracture in our personality that makes human relationships more difficult, it creates all kinds of social dysfunction and pathology that is almost inevitable. Divorce then is traumatic, drug addiction. I mean, we are redolent with the traumas that are a direct result of the fact that we have forgotten what we're here for. And what we're supposed to be doing here. We are here to love each other.We're here to be good people. We are here to try to build community. We need one another. We're here to take care of each other. We're here to take care of the earth. And we have built socio-political and economic systems that lure us away from that remembrance, just so that something can be sold to us that will make us feel that maybe we can fix it, but it never can.
MJH:
How does it feel for you to be so accepted and understood by a younger generation?
MW:
Well, a couple of things are involved there. One is the generations go in cycles, you know, in my generation we read ROM DAS and Alan Watts. Philosophies in the morning and went to Vietnam anti war protests in the afternoon.So I grew up in a generation where the two were not separate. The Cultural Revolution of the 60s and the 70s was musical, it was political , it was sexual, it was cultural. It was all of those things, those various pursuits didn't exist in the separate lanes it was all under the term counterculture.That kind of energy seems to be coming back around again. I see my generation in your generation is like the perfect third on a piano.
MJH:
Andres asks, “What role does poetry play in your life?”
MW:
Well, definitely. I'm a big, big fan of the sonnets and love poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Burns, I am a fan of the Shakespearean sonnets. I love Mary Oliver. And I also think of poetry, not only specifically poetry, but all poetry that has to do with fiction or poetry that has to do with the stories that come at us from the right side of the brain, because I feel that right now with the state of the world as it is, we definitely need that kind of nurturance. I mean during COVID I don't know what I would have done without watching The Crown, without watching Queen's Gambit, without reading the kind of books and stories that have to do with hearts. So, poetry and literature mean a lot to me.
MJH:
Where do you find joy to sustain yourself?
MW:
Well, if I don't take care of myself. I'm not going to be able to participate in anything that takes care of you, either. And I definitely have learned that my greatest joy,as with most people, is found in personal relationships, intimate relationships, relationships with the people that I love.
I also don't know what I would do without looking at my Course of Miracles exercise every morning. If you don't pray, meditate, or whatever your spiritual practices in the morning, I don't know how I would make it through this moment of chaos in the world. We take a bath or shower in the morning to get yesterday's dirt off our bodies. And we meditate in the morning to get yesterday's stress off our minds, and it's a big deal because you're not just carrying your own stress, you're carrying the stress of millions of people around the world.
And I love music. Also books and I'm reading a book right now called Into the Magic Shop. It's by a Stanford neurosurgeon named James Doty who was a little boy living in a very poor neighborhood. There was a woman in a magic shop, who basically taught him what he now realizes are now metaphysical principles and how those principles helped him move away from the circumstances that statistically would have meant he'd go nowhere in life, but he ended up all the way to the you know the top levels of professional achievement and service and contribution.There was a book by Sue Monk Kidd called The Invention of Wings. I love Sue Monk Kidd. A wonderful book called The Book of Strange new things meant a lot to me this year.
You know the older I get, the more I begin to think of the fact that when you get to my age, and you start thinking about the things you always said, I'll do it someday. And it's kind of like, well, maybe get around to it now. So certain classics I've read, Dostoevsky, but not as much Dostoevsky as I want to read. I re-read The Age of innocence recently, classic literature like you were talking about poetry. And I remember a couple of years ago I was in an airport waiting to get on an airplane, I was sitting next to a man and we began talking and he teaches seventh grade English. And I said, oh, what are the books that they're teaching seventh graders? Now I could they still reading Red Badge of Courage and stuff. He said, Oh, no, we don't do that anymore. So what do you mean you don't do that anymore?
And I think a large part of why we're where we are in our country is because of some really wrong turns in our educational system. I think this whole direction towards the core is just horrible and needs to be dropped. But in addition to that, this whole STEM, science, technology was so much and math was so much at the expense of the humanities–and the humanities and what makes us a full human being.
We have 11 states that don't even require half a year of civics and US government and US history. I don't think the Trump phenomenon would have arisen where there not so much rampant ignorance of American civics. If somebody doesn't learn the importance of the Bill of Rights when they were a child, how do they know as an adult to be horrified when it's under an assault? There are millions and millions of Americans that out of the 10 amendments to the Constitution that are our Bill of Rights known and one of them and it's called the Second Amendment. Well, there are a few others.
I believe that music and art are taken so much out of the schools, these things are very important for the fulfillment of a human actualization, as human beings. It is as important that you know literature, that you know culture, that you know art, that you know music, than it is that you are some automaton who can do the math.
One of the things I feel so strongly about which is a part of the politics of love is making every school in America represent a world class education, and that should go all the way from universal preschool through college, all the way through technical school. Every school should be a palace of culture and the art and intellectual understanding, it should not just be intellectual development, but also artistic development and cultural development as well.
MW:
You have referred more than once to the issue of bearing witness and of course bearing witness to the agony of others is a spiritual principle, you know, the night before the crucifixion when the disciples were falling asleep, the symbolism there It's not just that they were falling asleep, because they were out late, but they were falling asleep, because they knew what was going to happen the next day. And that's what we all tend to do: If you really bear witness to the suffering of these times the temptation is to go into distraction. It's just too painful.And Jesus said, can you not remain awake with me in the hour of my agony? That's why organizations such as Human Rights Watch have been so important to so many people. The idea that you will light a candle that you will continue to bear witness when you think about how many people as you and I speak. How many people around the world are unjustly imprisoned with no one calling them, no one writing them, no one advocating for them. And in our minds to refuse to forget that, is the meaning of our lives. And the purpose of our lives depends on that.
Now the next thing we have to look at you and I. You and I we're not the package the old order wants to hear from. Unless we are willing to stultify, unless we're willing to go along. They really don't mind if it's a woman. They really don’t mind if it's a black person, as long as we tow the line. And they see something about the authentic expression of who many of us are at this time as dangerous, because it is dangerous to the old paradigm. But revolution is not inherently violent. It's just like revolution in a machine. Nature has got to replenish itself, nature has got to regenerate. What is really dangerous is stagnation. What is really dangerous is if in the 21st century, we keep playing it like the 20th century.. The thought system that dominated in the 20th century got us to where we are. So there are very, very deep underlying levels of contest and struggle here, which on the part of many isn't even conscious.
In America a lot of this has to do with a sense of identity. You and I look at the possibilities for the 21st century: different colors, different ethnicities, different gender, sexuality, fluidity, different cultural ideas and we go. “Wow, isn't this exciting to us?” This is the full embodiment of E Pluribus Unum. This to us is the full embodiment of the possibilities of America. But there are forces in this country who do not agree with us, who see what I just described as psychic annihilation. Because they were raised to believe. No, it's this color.And it's this religion. And it's this basic view of things and sexuality. And if others want to be here, that's fine if they stay in their place, then they can be here. But, express their full authenticity, and seek to spread their wings? Because if they do seek to spread their wings that necessitates a change in the economic order. It's not just about money. It's about power. It's about identity. And that I believe, is the real challenge that so many of us face.
MJH:
What advice do you have for my generation?
MW:
There are classic teachings, well there's a book called Testament of Hope, which is the collected writings and speeches of Martin Luther King, you just open it anywhere. Any of the writings of Gandhi. I mean those two alone.Beyond that I don't think you need my advice. Trust what's already emerging from within you. I don't hear the questions you asked and think of you as someone who needs my advice. I think the older you are, the more you know some things and the younger you are, the more you know other things. The audacity of youth, the idea that you can change it. You have that, just be and stand on what and who, you know. If I have any advice, it goes back to what you said earlier about self care. Enjoy yourselves, enjoy your youth, because when you were young, you can't really imagine not being young, you can't really imagine it.
I said earlier, when I was young when I was in college, we would read ROM DAS in the morning and and and go to anti war protest in the afternoon. So one young man said to me, at one of my lectures, years ago, he said,
“You know, you're just an aging hippie. Your generation was just about drugs, sex, and rock and roll.”
And my answer to him was, “That was just part of the day. The rest of the day we stopped the war. What have you done? Yeah it was drugs, sex, and rock and roll, but it was also stopping a war and standing up to the American military industrial complex. There are a lot of hours in the day, and don't miss out on your joy.”
It's important not to take yourself too seriously because life is so serious. But that's not about speaking to your generation, that's just about speaking to people. I think that anybody who looks at what's going on in America today and is being honest with themselves knows that your generation is doing just fine.
And I think we owe you a thank you. And you're advising us as much as we're advising you. You know I have an adult daughter, she's 30 years old and this happens where there's an intergenerational dynamic where the younger coaching the older, as well as the older coaching the younger and there's something beautiful about it and I'm honored to be part of it.
I was curious about The Magic Shop, which Marianne mentions, so I looked it up --- turns out it's James Doty rather than what appears in the text. Thought I would share. Thank you for this and for all you share.
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