I also plan to invite subscribers to help compose a call for systemic transformation rooted in compassionate, holistic action. This proposal will be based on conclusions I’ve reached from various explorations I’ve initiated in recent years, including several Strategy Workshops and two Compassionate Politics Workshops. At these gatherings, I’ve largely listened and gathered input. Some of the ideas that have emerged have been expressed in Why Some of Us Seek a New Strategy, Looking for Holistic Political Organizations, Our Core Convictions, and Global Transformation: Strategy for Action,
With the new declaration, I'll aim to summarize, polish, and expand those ideas.
And in October I’ll convene a face-to-face group to discuss the statement as it stands at that time. Eventually, this document might be the framework for grassroots organizing.
My own interest in these issues began at the age of 20 in late 1964 and early 1965 when I was active in the civil rights movement, which provided me with a profound sense of community that has motivated me ever since. I had dropped out of college, was working as an orderly in a mental hospital, discovered Esalen Institute, and went to an Esalen-style weekend workshop in Austin, Texas. Thereafter I became immersed in the human potential movement while remaining politically active.
Then I returned to the University of California at Berkeley to study psychology and read books like Varieties of Religious Experience by William James, The Politics of Experience by R.D. Laing, Coming of Age in America by Edgar Friedenberg, and The Courage to Be by Paul Tillich. These books illuminated the intersection of the personal and the political and led me to dedicate my life to organizing “communities of faith, love, and action.”
Some of the conclusions that emerged during this period were expressed in my first publication “Evaluation of the Residence College (1967),” a long essay commissioned by the student newspaper. In this reflection on my experience with that experimental program, I argued:
The development of one’s own innermost experiential potentialities is truncated. Creative expression of one’s true self, whether in art, thought, or personal relationships, is not nurtured. Individuals are not encouraged to develop, to create their own vibrant sense of meaning and direction. Inner strength is seen as a threat; so the ground for a stable sense of autonomy is undercut.
The women’s movement enriched this perspective. In 1969, Carol Hanisch wrote “The Personal is Political” and that phrase spread like wildfire. Hanisch reported that in consciousness-raising groups women discussed their own oppression in ways that facilitated “getting rid of self-blame” and enabled women to “feel like we are thinking for ourselves for the first time in our lives.” She described these aspects as “therapeutic” and affirmed personal changes such as deciding to demand “that men share the housework and childcare.”
But Hanisch and her cohorts contradicted their affirmation of individual personal-growth efforts when they sharply criticized other feminists who “claimed women were brainwashed and complicit in their own oppression, an argument rooted in the sociological and psychological rather than the political (emphasis added).” Hanisch asserted that “taking the position that ‘women are messed over, not messed up’ took the focus off individual struggle and put it on group or class struggle.” They rejected individual efforts as “personal solutionary” and argued:
We need to change the objective conditions, not adjust to them.... At the end of the meeting we try to sum up and generalize from what’s been said and make connections.... I do not go to these sessions because I need or want to talk about my ”personal problems.” In fact, I would rather not.... There are no personal solutions at this time. There is only collective action for a collective solution.... These analytical sessions are a form of political action.... I am getting a gut understanding.
Thus, it seems to me, this element of the women’s movement posed a false dichotomy between the individual/psychological and the collective/political. Reality is both/and, not either/or. Women (and men) are both “messed over” and “messed up.”
At the end of her essay, she illuminated one form of being messed up when she reported:
I think we who work full-time in the movement tend to become very narrow.... I think “apolitical” women are not in the movement for very good reasons, and as long as we say “you have to think like us and live like us to join the charmed circle,” we will fail.
Unfortunately, as reflected in her 2006 introduction, she and many other radical feminists never modified their approach. Rather, they continued to employ an ideological analysis that attempted to make objective/concrete/real what is necessarily subjective/nonmaterial/spiritual – that is, she tried to make the personal political (“the personal is political”). As she said in 2006:
It challenged the old anti-woman line that used spiritual, psychological, metaphysical, and pseudo-historical explanations for women’s oppression with a real, materialist analysis for why women do what we do. (By materialist, I mean in the Marxist materialist [based in reality] sense….)
Personal relationships certainly involve power, as addressed convincingly in Sexual Politics (1970) by Kate Millet and “The Tyranny Of Structurelessness” (1970-3) by Jo Freeman. We certainly need to address those issues and foster widespread empowerment.
And “the personal” has political ramifications, especially in terms of how the erosion of self-esteem and community undermines the potential for effective political action.
But the personal sphere needs to be respected and protected also. Otherwise, totalitarianism can intrude.
At the same time, politics should be affirmed as a distinct realm involving activities of governments that need special attention.
Thus, it seems to me, we can nurture both personal growth and collective political action directed at the government by integrating the personal and the political. These two realms are distinctly different, but they are not separate. They are interwoven and profoundly affect one another. As such, they cannot be separated, as Hanisch did with her attempt to arbitrarily re-define the personal as political and denigrate the political.
