also in this section For the record... Amnesty International opposes Bush's order for military tribunals Five reasons why the transit of highly radioactive materials should be banned The Forgotten Terrorism Appeal to the UN and world community British government's white paper on Al Qaida, the Taleban and the events of September 11

Thanksgiving: Time to Build an alternative to Modernity and Fundamentalism

by Rabbi Michael Lerner

Posed as a struggle between the principles of post-Enlightenment democratic Modernity and fundamentalist authoritarianism, the war in Afghanistan wins near universal approval, almost an update of the Second World War for a new generation hungering to do the right thing and experience the pleasures of nationalist solidarity denied us in the Vietnam era. Yet President Bush's initial inclination to call this a crusade may have been a more candid and insightful account of what is at stake.

Before we bomb another society into modernity, we might consider ways in which what we call Modernity may in fact function as another religious system, and then understand why history may view this as another in the long series of religious wars that have caused so much pain in human history. This Thanksgiving may be a perfect moment to consider another alternative - by taking the spiritual message of Thanksgiving seriously.

We like to think of modernity as a kind of "neutral" value-free, advance of rationality. Modernity has wonderful aspects - the recognition of the importance of individual freedom and protection from state power, the insistence on a private realm free from public interference by the community, the freedom of individuals to choose our own level of religious belief and observance, the pursuit of science and the rejection of sexist, racist, anti-Semitic, and homophobic worldviews.

Yet the form of modernity the West has offered to the rest of the world has been tied to a capitalist ethos and economics which has brought not only growing gaps in income between the top 20 percent of the world's wealthy and the bottom 20 percent (that gap was 30:1 in 1960, 60:1 in 199-0, and 76:1 in 1998) but also a worldview which has been militantly materialistic, insisting that institutions or social practices be judged rational, productive and efficient only to the extent that they maximize money and power. Though we've told ourselves we were offering economic well being (which is true, for a section of third world populations), and claimed that would bring democracy and human rights as well, the actual experience of many people is that they are being offered a cultural economic package in which consumption is the highest good, and cannot be constrained for the sake of preserving the world's environment or human values.

This is a new religion, as much as we once acknowledged communism to be a religion as well, and the human consequences of this religion are already visible in many Western societies: a collection of individuals who know how to "look out for number one" but who are emotionally and spiritually illiterate, narcissistic, and have great difficulty in sustaining lasting relationships or building solid families. Human relationships are frequently reduced to "what's in it for me" and our capacity to respond to nature with awe is replaced by a narrow pragmatism that sees commodities rather than mystery.

This globalization of selfishness and materialism is experienced by practitioners of other religions as a crusade every bit as intense as those which was led by earlier Western invaders, though more subtly executed because this time the West has created local elites (the small upper and upper-middle classes of 3rd world countries) who themselves become beneficiaries and advocates for this new religious system which they impose on their own people with the help of American military and economic assistance. When Jewish fundamentalists in Israel burned bus-stop advertisements for American products displaying scantily dressed women provocatively posed, their anger was not at the product being sold but at the ways that sex is transformed from a holy act of love to a cheapened means of mass manipulation.

Yet the fundamentalist alternative is even worse, articulating the failures of capitalist ethics but then proposing a return to authoritarian, undemocratic, sexist, and anti-Semitic world views. George Bush says we must choose which side we are on, but this is a moment when some people have begun to look for a third path, one which rejects both the corporate version of modernity and the fundamentalist way of resisting modernity.

A first step in developing that third path is to seek A New Bottom Line --- so that we judge institutions productive, efficient and rational not only to the extent that they maximize wealth and power but also to the extent that they maximize our capacities to be caring, ecologically aware, ethically and spiritually sensitive, and capable of responding to the universe with awe, wonder and radical amazement at the grandeur of creation. A politics that sought to make that its standard of rationality would soon recognize that many of our social, economic and political institutions are irrational, precisely because they do not tend to produce or sustain human beings who are loving, spiritually sensitive, ethically and ecologically aware, or filled with awe and wonder.

I propose the Social Responsibility Amendment to the US Constitution as a first step: require that any corporation operating in or from the US with income over $20 million per year. Be required to get a new corporate charter every 20 years, which would only be granted to those which could prove a history of social responsibility as measured by an Ethical Impact Report and assessed by a grand jury of ordinary citizens. Similar steps should be taken to make every societal institution responsive to a New Bottom Line.

This may seem visionary and impractical to a people obsessed with protecting itself from anthrax and criminal hijackers. Yet its even more impractical to think that we are going to find protection from those who really hate us unless we can dry up the swamps of anger from which these evil people recruit their accomplices. It would be far harder for the Bin Ladens of the world to recruit if they were facing an America which was known in the world for:

a. Leading the effort to redistribute the world' wealth, eliminate poverty, hunger and homelessness (a first step would be to take the $1.4 trillion tax cut and use it to build the economic infra-structure of the third world)

b. Leading the effort to protect the environment rather than blocking environmental treaties.

c. Actually embodying an ethos of open-hearted generosity both to its own poor and to the poor of the world, and changing its social system so that spiritual values were as central as materialism to its conception of the good.

The first step toward building such an America is to overcome the pathological fear that "there is not enough" and that "we are not enough" and instead open ourselves to an attitude of joyful celebration and daily thanksgiving for the goodness that is already there in the human race and in the universe. Instead of letting the terrorists be the frame through which we view the world, we could view the world through the frame of the hundreds of people who risked (and sometimes lost) their lives on September 11th because they wanted to help others. We are surrounded by huge amounts of goodness, but the religious system of corporate capitalist modernity doesn't really teach us how to appreciate what is there, but only to focus on getting more.

It's time to let genuine Thanksgiving permeate our souls. And allow that attitude to then shape our reactions to the world. We'd quickly begin to see ourselves as connected to all other human beings, not in deadly competition with them. And the generosity and openheartedness that would begin to shape our social policies would make it much much harder for those who hate us to find a responsive ear in the peoples of the world.

These seem like idealistic goals that have nothing to do with "reality" because we are so deeply entrenched in the religious system of corporate capitalist Modernity that we can no longer even imagine a different set of values shaping our daily lives. But unless we develop an Emancipatory spirituality, we will be stuck with two bad choices: Bush or Bin Laden. Many of us want to say "no" to both. And the ethos of Thanksgiving gives us a good place to start.