The Left's 'Great Awakening'?
Should the left embrace spirituality more openly? Is there a political advantage to doing so?
In this issue: (1) Should the left embrace spirituality more openly? Is there a political advantage to doing so? (2) Quickly exploring some attempts to build a spiritually-engaged left: Michael Brooks, Cornell West, and Slavoj Zizek.
Housekeeping: Friend of the newsletter Russell Whitehouse picked up last week’s issue “Team America’s Cognitive Dissonance” for International Policy Digest.
Also, my first piece in the Christian Science Monitor’s commentary section was published at the end of last week. It is on the roots of anti-science sentiment and conspiracy theory.
Michael Brooks, who died suddenly of thrombosis in July, was known as a popular voice in the progressive movement. In several videos to make the rounds, he argues the case that the left needs to embrace spirituality. The left, in his telling, has a void where the numinous ought to be.
“Why should Steve Bannon have a monopoly on the Bhagavad Gita?,” Brooks said in the days before his death, according to his sister, Lisha.
Brooks’ thesis, so far as I can reconstruct it, is this: the lack of a strong spiritual or religious tradition in the contemporary left, particularly in America, leaves the legitimate impulses on these questions addressed by fringe or culturally-conservative interests. It also paints the left as unforgiving or puritanical in its attitudes to individuals, which harms its institutional goals. If the left is to be effective, it must drop this prim moralism, and also tackle the numinous. It is reminiscent of something Cornell West, with whom Brooks once shared a stage, would say. West has called for a “prophetic spirituality”, a spirituality which could talk about love as well as justice, a link (between power and love) which Brooks also makes.
The intuition captured by this opinion is certainly felt by other members of the left who are active in America as well. Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, for instance, has taken to arguing for Christian-Atheism, an attempt which I rough up in an essay from my upcoming collection Invitation to a Sacrifice. This project, however, seems dubious in a tradition focused not on cultural or communal meaning so much as on individual belief. In America, particularly, religion is viewed as a matter of personal identity, rather closer to a parasocial relationship than a communal one (doubly so for Protestantism which is sola scriptura, at least in theory). Zizek’s attempt to carve out a path for atheistic Christianity is not doomed a priori, exactly, but it does come off as quixotic in a way that West’s attempt, or Brooks’, does not.
So, what might this spirituality look like?
Certainly, other cultures have had some success in cultivating atheistic or agnostic strains of their religion: for instance, Hinduism and, of course, Buddhism.
Brooks himself tangled with the spiritualism inherent to what Robert Wright, among others, has described as “secular Buddhism”; Brooks’ career before The Majority Show with Sam Seder involved hosting “meditation seminars.” Long before he published Against the Web (2020) as a rebuke to the “Intellectual Dark Web”, Brooks cowrote The Buddha’s Playbook (2011) with his “dharma brother” Josh Summers. According to Summers, the book was a natural outgrowth of Brooks’ awareness of the connection between “the cultivation of awareness, compassion, and empathy and how those qualities integrate with social justice movements.”
This would, if advanced, mark a (newish) spiritual direction for the American left, which has become somewhat tied to staunch secularism since the turn of the millennium.
The years following 9/11 saw the rise of the “New Atheists” with figures like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins rising to cultural prominence. These figures critiqued religion from a purely abstract and often ahistorical angle, vaunting “Reason” as a byword, trading on a well-timed and marketed version of Enlightenment values. One of the background conceits to these movements was that religion was necessarily a form of fundamentalism. The secular left should be combative and not seek to coexist with the religiously inclined. Religion in general, and Islam in particular, were predisposed to violence, they often suggested. Never mind the intricacies of global politics (the fact that, historically, these movements grow or shrink in influence and commit more or less violence at different times means, by definition, that something extra-scriptural is playing a factor). This view of religion was convenient politically since figures like Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens (two “horseman of the counter-apocalypse”) pushed a neo-con view of international entanglement like the Iraq War, which was also supported generally by fundamentalists in the Bush administration. If the forces of “counter-apocalypse” embrace the same policy proposal as the apocalyptic ones, where’s the value in it? (Harris, it should be noted, distinguished himself from his “New Atheist” cohort, however, in one ostentatious way: by showing a belief in a secularized Eastern spiritualism.) But perhaps some of the historical pressures for this movement are waning. ISIS has been all but annihilated, Osama Bin Laden assassinated, Saddam Hussein was hanged. Even Omar al-Bashir has fallen from power. And yet, the U.S. continues to offer support for Saudi-led atrocities in Yemen, even as it continues to encourage Israeli annexation of Palestinian land, abroad. Christian fundamentalism, and homegrown conspiracy thinking, retain pull domestically.
The project advanced by the West/Brooks types seems to encourage a form of almost Christian or Buddhist socialism, which may find some limited purchase in the states.
It may count only as an anecdotal data point but I would comment that even godless churches had some cultural cache following the advance of the secularism in the states. Furthermore, it is a well-established trope in American political science that churches are an effective means of organizing. Robert Putnam’s book Bowling Alone (2000) is a classic in the field. Putnam argues that the “social capital” in American life is in decline as Americans become more detached from interpersonal interaction. The trust placed in these organizations, across the spectrum, has plummeted, leaving less belonging/participation in communal events (including religious events), and perhaps undermining the preconditions for a vibrant democracy.
Spiritualism may, in theory, offer some sort of new organizing principle. It would also offer an answer to merchants of “personal meaning”— the self help gurus and defenders of “Judeo-Christian” values— in a way that doesn’t encode these values in reactionary or deeply conservative views of the world. It may be worth exploring for those reasons, though I wouldn’t hold my breath for a “Great Awakening” or a “spiritual revival” for the secular left.