I’m writing this for you, my friends and allies who care about the suffering in the world. You want peace, justice, freedom and an end to exploitation and oppression. You are posting your concerns on social media. You may be writing to politicians, boycotting corporations, donating to worthy causes, joining street protests, voting strategically.
You stand in a long and proud tradition of progressive activism which brought some people out of the cruel grip of local warlords, psychopathic tyrants, slave-owners, religious bigots, racists and misogynists. Our ancestors’ struggles for democracy, the rule of law, religious freedom, the campaigns against slavery, for human rights, women’s rights, the rights to protest and for trades unions to organise – all of this led to progress. That is why we are called “progressives”.
But now the progressive movement is failing to progress and in many places it is retreating against reactionary forces.
Why is that?
I believe it is because progressives have focused too much on the political struggle and neglected the spiritual.
I can almost hear some of you recoiling at the word “spiritual” – and I don’t blame you. The spiritual has become conflated with religion, and a lot of the time the spokesmen of religion are among the reactionary anti-progressive forces.
Let me try to explain “spiritual” in a different way.
Two people can perform the same actions but with completely different spirits behind it. We talk about a spirit of generosity or a mean spirit; a spirit of openness and honesty or a spirit that is clouded and opaque. Spirits may be unseen but they are felt. The indo-european root word for spirit, (s)peys, means to blow or breathe – the same root as respire, expire and inspire. In the Bible we have the image of God creating Adam from the dust of the ground and then breathing into his nostrils. In other words “spirit” means the animating force that gives life to something and moves it in a particular direction.
“spirit” means the animating force that gives life to something and moves it in a particular direction.
Ancient wisdom talks about the three levels of body, mind and spirit. Battles must be fought at each level.
Politics, along with its cousins, economics and sociology, belong to the level of the mind. This is the realm of ideas, beliefs and sense-making. Our political views arise out of the ways we see and make sense of the world and our place in it. Politicians try to persuade us to vote for them by appealing to the mind, but also to our emotions by using the techniques of marketing and advertising.
The limitations of politics at the level of the mind is that it doesn’t necessarily inspire and motivate people. To mobilise the masses; to inspire individuals to make sacrifices requires spirit, which takes us into the realm of ideology.
At the end of the Cold War progressives lost interest in ideology. There was a perception that the Nazi and fascist ideologies had been defeated and Marxism had failed to deliver on its promises. There was an assumption that globalised capitalism would meet people’s material needs better than any Marxist planned economy could, and all that remained was to use the ballot box to ensure that wealth was distributed through progressive taxation. Politics had replaced ideology. The American political scientist Francis Fukuyama even wrote a book about it called The End of History and the Last Man.
Now ideology is making a comeback.
Not so much on the Left (because progressives on the whole see communism as a failure and have abandoned ideology for politics and championing minority rights) but on the Right. The old ideologies of nationalism, racial superiority and the cult of a strong leader appointed by destiny, all wrapped in religious language and symbolism are on the rise in many parts of the world including the USA, Russia, India.
These big movements for change which are upturning traditional politics derive their potency from their underlying spirits of fear, desire for order and control, tribalism, materialism and selfishness. Where spirit meets politics, spirit always wins. Logic and reason doesn’t move people. Emotions are temporary. The only way to fight against the reactionary spirits of MAGA or Putinism is with an equally potent progressive spirit grounded in love, justice, courage, compassion, fairness, inclusivity, respect.
The only way to fight against the reactionary spirits of MAGA or Putinism is with an equally potent progressive spirit grounded in love, justice, courage, compassion, fairness, inclusivity, respect.
Martin Luther King understood this, saying “I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant.”
Gandhi understood this: “Power is of two kinds. One is obtained by the fear of punishment and the other by acts of love. Power based on love is a thousand times more effective and permanent than the one derived from fear of punishment.”
In Islam the word for struggle or battle is jihad. One of the most famous sayings (Hadith) about the Prophet Muhammad says: A number of fighters came to Muhammad and he said “You have come from the ‘lesser jihad’ to the ‘greater jihad’.” The fighters asked “what is the greater jihad?” Muhammad replied, “It is the servant’s struggle against their lower desires”.
the most important struggle is always within ourselves. We have to “be the change you want to see in the world”
In other words, while we may have to struggle in the outer, material world, the most important struggle is always within ourselves. We have to “be the change you want to see in the world”.
The great Soviet dissident writer Alexandr Solzhenitsyn was an idealistic communist in his youth, until a letter he wrote criticizing Stalin landed him in the prison camps. In The Gulag Archipelago he wrote:
It was granted me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good. In the intoxication of youthful success I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer, and an oppressor. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. And it was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart – and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains … an un-uprooted small corner of evil.
Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.
And since that time I have come to understand the falsehood of all the revolutions in history: They destroy only those carriers of evil contemporary with them (and also fail, out of haste, to discriminate the carriers of good as well). And they then take to themselves as their heritage the actual evil itself, magnified still more.”
When we do battle with reactionary forces – for example in a street protest, or a law court – what we see in front of us in the “material world” will be individuals. They may be armed police, soldiers, judges or politicians.
However it is vital that we remember that we are not fighting against those individuals but against a system and spirit of harm that is operating through them. It may be a corrupt and broken political system, it may be a hateful and racist ideology and beliefs. Our aim should always be to overcome the root causes of the harm, not the individuals who it’s working through.
From a spiritual perspective, the real enemy isn’t people – it’s not Trump, Murdoch, billionaires, Hamas or Netanyahu. It’s not even ideas or ideologies like capitalism, communism, patriarchy, racism, nationalism. The real enemy, as Solzhenitsyn points out, is the evil inside every human being, including ourselves. As we do battle here, it changes how we engage with people and systems, making us more effective.
Kazu Haga writes in Healing Resistance – A Radically Different Response to Harm: “For most of us, our natural reactions to violence falls into one of three categories: to fight, flight or freeze. Nonviolence gives us an alternative way of responding, to face. Facing means looking your assailant in the eye, not backing down, not giving into fear, and not reacting in kind…. The idea that nonviolence is about ‘not being violent’ is one of the most common and dangerous misunderstandings that exist.”
During the Civil Rights struggle, the most successful actions were taken in communities where people had been trained to face the hatred and fear in their attackers and respond with courage and love instead of reacting with anger or fear.
For example, in 1960, David Hartsough was participating in a lunch counter sit-in protest in Virginia when a white man put a knife to his chest and told him “you nigger lover, get out of this store in two seconds or I’m going to stab this through your heart.” Hartsough recalls that moment: “Loving my enemy was suddenly more than just a discussion in Sunday school or a confrontation among schoolboys over ice balls. For a fleeting moment I doubted that Jesus meant to include a man so hateful among those who deserved to be loved. I had just seconds to respond to him, and I was grateful for those many hours of role-playing and practice the previous two days. I turned around and tried my best to smile. Looking him in the eye, I said to him, ‘Friend, do what you believe is right, and I will still try to love you.’ Both his jaw and his hand dropped. Miraculously, he turned away and walked out of the store.”
Most of us would not be able to respond in this way. To reach that level requires a sustained spiritual practice and spiritual struggle within ourselves.
I will write another post about what such a spiritual practice might look like for progressive activists. For now I just want to flag some headline elements of such a practice.
1. Courage. “If your convictions are worth anything, you should be ready to stand up for them and if necessary make some sacrifices, and if you are not ready then you have no convictions at all – you just think you do. But those are not convictions and principles, just thoughts in your head.” This is from one of the last letters written from prison by Russian opposition leader Alexander Navalny before he was killed in 2024.
2. Honesty and Truthfulness. In his Nobel Prize lecture, Solzhenitsyn writes “violence does not live alone and is not capable of living alone: it is necessarily interwoven with THE LIE. Between them exists the most intimate, the deepest of natural bonds. Violence has nothing with which to cover itself except the lie, and the lie has nothing to stand on other than violence…. [Violence] does not always, not necessarily, openly throttle the throat, more often it demands from its subjects only an oath of allegiance to falsehood, only participation in the lie. And the simple step of an ordinary courageous man is not to partake in falsehood, not to support THE LIE! Let the lie come into the world, even dominate the world, but not through me.”
3. Love, Compassion and Mercy. Quantum mechanics and Indigenous spirituality share an understanding that everything is connected and there is no separate “other”. As above, so below. As within, so without. Love means attending to the quality of all our relationships (including our relationship with ourselves), showing mercy to those who hurt us, having compassion for the suffering and trauma of our oppressors as well as the oppressed whilst still confronting them with truth and putting ourselves on the line to protect and prevent harm.
4. Humility and self-examination. Whenever we identify ourselves as being on the side of the “good guys” our ego latches onto that, and it becomes very hard for us to see our shadows – the parts of us that are still wanting to lie, exaggerate, control or manipulate, that parts that see ourselves as better than others, the parts that are fearful, selfish, angry, cynical, the parts that may be caught up in addictive attachments. This is why progressive movements so often fracture and split and fail to be effective. We would do well to remember the symbol of Lucifer – the angelic bearer of light – falling from heaven because of pride. Progressive spiritual warriors need to constantly look within and own the parts we don’t like about ourselves and accept loving feedback from our friends and partners who see our faults more clearly than we see ourselves.
Working on ourselves is an essential starting point, but it is not enough by itself. There are lots of people doing various forms of spiritual practice who don’t change anything beyond themselves. It’s a phenomenon that is part of the narcissistic individualism of Western culture. What is needed at this time, more than anything else, is a movement of the spirit that is grounded in progressive values, and a rallying cry to action for everyone whose souls shrink at the onslaught of violence, fear and lies we are witnessing. In the words of Victor Hugo, “No power on earth can stop an idea whose time has come.”
