I was surprised by the response of a friend of mine to a question with regard to the most pressing issue facing the planet. He insisted that the question of meaning was the most critical one confronting us. There he was, a committed environmentalist, mouthing a vague concern about "meaning" of all things. At the time, it sounded a bit silly to me. Not long ago Hillary Clinton was trashed in the media for talking about the "Politics of Meaning". Why couldn't the First Lady be heard when she called for a new kind of politics? She spoke of "a sleeping sickness of the soul" in America, of a nation crippled by "alienation and despair and hopelessness."1 The media response was as shallow as it was merciless: "The meaning of the politics of meaning is hard to discern under the gauzy gushy wrappings of New Age jargon that blanket it." So wrote Michael Kelly in the New York Times Magazine. That sure settled her hash and saved Kelly the trouble of thinking about and genuinely critiquing her point. There was no New Age jargon in her remarks (and even if there were, such language would not necessarily invalidate her point). The columnist in the Washington Post writing about her and the politics of meaning, commented: "Well, she's having an adolescent identity crisis here. Are there any adults at home in the White House?" The tone here is superficial and cynical at best and hateful at worst. But what can one expect in a society in which Winning Through Intimidation and Looking Out For Number One were recently best sellers -- embodying the "truths" around which society is organized?

  The trouble is Americans don't like ideas. We prefer action. We like to think that we live in a world in which everything, in principle at least, is fixable. We are in the middle of a crisis of meaning. After watching the Presidential and Vice-Presidential so-called debates what struck me was the poverty of imagination in our political discourse. I simply tune out when a politician speaks (rather like, I suspect, some people tune out when a minister of religion opens his or her mouth!). There is very little appeal to new vision, no mention (God forbid) to what we might have to sacrifice in order to form a decent, just, and inclusive society. The issue for us all is spiritual, requiring deeper levels of self-knowledge and understanding of the variety of contexts in which modern life is lived. Learning and change is painful. The electorate (that's us!) doesn't like subtlety and we are frustrated by the fact that democracy is messy. If change and managing chaos is the future we will need the emotional strength not only to manage our own anxiety but to manage the anxiety of others! Such is the art of politics.

Add to the soured rhetoric of political ideology, the view that private identity takes precedence over public ends or purposes and we end up with a violently weak society whose "values" are enshrined in private affluence and public squalor. Politics degenerates into the merely personal. Character assassination substitutes for serious debate. Those who disagree with my "politics" are the enemies of my identity. They are the opponents of my being. This is one of the reasons we're ripe for anti-democratic solutions. When we make things an all-or-nothing affair, conversation or compromise are not only unnecessary, they are an impediment. They get in the way of implementing a social vision. Authoritarian visionaries are not open to conversation, let alone disagreement. They prefer flattery and compliance. The matter is settled and they are right. And those in power control the story which drives the vision. As far as they are concerned, might is right. Truth is on the side of the biggest battalions. We enter the black and white world of rigid absolutes, of refined and competing resentments, of naked power; one is either a victim or a victimizer, oppressed or oppressor, abject or triumphant.2 We reject the hard truth that the world is more complicated than our simple solutions would allow. Freedom and liberation are never won once and for all. The battle continues.

1 April 6, 1993. See Don Jones, Michael Lerner and Joan Campbell, Religion in the White House, in Cross Currents, Summer 1994, 247ff.

2 See Jean Bethke Elshtain, Democracy On Trial, New York: Basic Books, 1995, 44.