Spirituality and Politics:

Why does democratic republican politics require a soul? And a big one at that?

Abstract

Politics is the activity of voluntarily joining with others to create, sustain, defend, and renew the polis — whether neighborhood, nation, or world community. Spirituality is the exercise of growing the human soul. Body and soul are one: I am my ensouled body; I am my embodied soul. And so are We when we join together to form a voluntary organization for public purpose. Good politics require and foster high spirituality. Soul growing and polis building are interdependent.

In this essay, I understand politics as it has been defined in thought and action beginning with the ancients up to contemporary times. I also define spirituality in a way that is not contingent on any particular religious or cultural belief system so that it can be shown to be universally acceptable to believers and non-believers alike. I then indicate what political thinkers and spiritual teachers, from ancient times to the present, have shown to be progressive levels in soul-growing and polis-building and their interconnection. I offer this to review and revise the conundrums of the present situation in democratic republican nations.

Notes, references, and further explanations for all the following assertions can be provided on request.

Introduction

My good friend, Father Al Fritsch S.J., recently wrote a piece on the importance of politics to spirituality. He wrote from a Catholic Christian point of view. I wish that his message would resonate over every Christian church pulpit. It supports the role of human action in the co-creation and renewal of the earth which he draws from the essential message of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

However, I want to converse with those of us who have left behind specific religions. Most of us heretics do not reject our traditions. We just want to integrate them. And we want to express what in them is relative to our hip-hop times. I want to talk with “transmodern,” folks for whom the usual expressions of human transcendence do not suffice. In other words, I write for humans of all or no religions, whether Abrahamic monotheistic religions (Judaic, Christian, Islamic), Eastern polytheistic or nontheistic (Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism) religions, or Indigenous earth, or atheistic, agnostic, secular humanistic persuasions.

I affirm that politics and spirituality are interdependent, that one demands the other, that both grow and renew together. Both have cultural expressions which might separate peoples in times and places. But I want to explore the possibility that soul-growing and polis-building are essential to human existence and unite us in peace through justice.

Politics and human existence

The unity of our humanity is our shared natural existence as living organisms adapting to our changing environment in order to live, find meaning, and enjoy respect. Our singular and common capacity, which appears in our speech, our art, our science, and our community, is our ability to build our world through symbolic behavior. This is the behavior of creating tangible, visual, oral and aural, sentient forms as tools for patterning, understanding, and communicating the chaotic experience of our universe. Though each of us is born with the genetic disposition for symbolic behavior, such behavior is learned and nourished through our interaction with others.

Our language, our art, our knowledge, our skills and morals are shaped and transmitted in a community which forms and is formed by these interactions. The ancients called this community “polis;” and we call the art and science of building the polis “politics.” In a sense, politics is the highest of the arts and sciences because it is the condition for acquiring and exercising all the others and, even more, because it is the space and time wherein humans achieve their fullest potential and happiness.

Politics, the act of building voluntary organizations for public purpose, occurs when humans step out of the private place of necessity. We assemble to speak and act to fix the boundaries, rules, and configuration of a public space of freedom. Here is the transition from family wealth to commonweal, from household gods to civil religion, from hierarchical domination to power in association, from enmity to civility. Whether the polis is the governing body of a nonprofit corporation with public purpose, a block club of a neighborhood, the assembly of a town, the council of a city or county, the congress or parliament of a nation, the general assembly of a world association, here is where and how we exercise and enjoy our greatest rights towards public happiness.

Spirituality and human existence.

Thomas Aquinas following the great Muslim Aristotelian philosophers taught that the human soul (anima) was the form that defined the essence of humanity as a rational animal in contrast to a vegetable or non-rational life form. The soul is the form that gives matter, e.g. the body, its essence or identity.

In modern times, the meaning of humankind changed from rational definition to existential experience. To be human is to have a body capable of symbolic behavior. By making images and other sentient forms, we know not only our world, but also know ourselves as creative agents in and for the world. And we encounter others as experiencing subjects like ourselves rather than mere objects of human and natural activity. This “inner” feeling of subjectivity or agency, we call consciousness; and, at least in English, we distinguish between cognitive and moral consciousness, the former called “mind” and the latter called “conscience.”

In other words, we are living organisms, genetically developed through natural selection with a nervous system centered in a brain that stimulates and controls the functioning of the organism including its ability to construct and use sensible forms, i.e. symbols. In the organism’s symbolic activity not only does the body sense things in the world outside the body, but also senses the body’s activity itself. Neuroscientists know that this inner sense arises through the complexity of neurons in the brain. They have discovered by the study of brain injured persons the various parts of the brain where consciousness occurs. But scientists have not fully explained consciousness and may never do so because of its non- or pre-objective aspects.

Consciousness, the inner awareness of cognitive and moral activity, is the awareness of the self as agent, of the “I” as subject. For philosophers this is evidence for spirit in matter. When I touch my body, I sense my body as the “me” another object in the world, but I also sense my body as the “I” as the one who is touching. For some, like the French philosopher René Descartes, this duality in human experience leads to the fallacious conclusion that we are or have two entities, the res extensaand the res cogitans, body and soul, mysteriously joined but separable. It can also lead to the tragic judgment that others are objects able to be used and manipulated at will.

Unembodied souls, including ghosts, angels, and immortal spirits, do not fit within my belief system. I think that belief in immaterial or supernatural spirits is unscientific insofar as it violates a canon of scientific method called Occam’s Razor which counsels not to multiply entities without necessity. More important, the belief in immaterial souls violates the scientific criterion of falsifiability: a scientific theory must be able to be proven false. However, I do not dismiss or demean people who do believe in bodiless or immaterial spirits. I see various reasons for such beliefs: fear of death, desire for immortality, comfort to those grieving loss, religious and other cultural traditions among them. The belief or disbelief in immaterial entities or bodiless souls is not the point I am making or defending here or anywhere.

The point I am making is that human persons here and now in the world are body and soul. Ensouled bodies. Embodied souls. Subject and object. Inner and outer. All humans need to be seen and treated as agents with the freedom to achieve their fullest potential as well as objects of inquiry. And soul needs to be nourished and developed through exercise along with the body in order to expand that freedom in pursuit of happiness. Following many masters from whom I have learned and am still learning, spirituality is the desire and commitment to growing the soul. These masters have taught a continuum or circles of progress from those who are soulless to those who are great-souled.

Growth of soul and progression in politics

At the moment of birth, when the infant is held, nourished, bathed, cooed, smiled at, and loved, the child begins her journey of soul growing. She starts noticing another person connected to her. Gently bite her finger, she opens her mouth. Smile, she smiles back. She cries, you come to feed her. Which comes first? Her sense of you or of herself? Or maybe it is the same.

As she grows, she imitates your talk and gesture and becomes more aware of herself as separate and tests it by manipulating your behavior as she does her own. She grasps and laughs at shining baubles you put before her which she can throw away from her. She learns to name them from your naming. She is fashioning a world — one that revolves around her, one that can hurt or please her. She also learns to please you and that pleases her.

She also learns there are others in family or kindergarten with whom she can play and from whom she can learn. She finds out that she can hurt or please them as well. And so grows her soul.

Soul-growing from un-souled to great-souled can be articulated in phases: Awareness of myself as agent in the world; awareness of others as interacting agents in the world; awareness of self and others as interacting from closed to expanding circles in a social world; awareness of self-with-others transcending, i.e. passing beyond older beliefs and seeking new understanding of the world; awareness of strangers as neighbors intimately tied to myself in a world of connected and interacting conscious living agents in process of constructing our world; awareness of the unity of all beings in a universe.

Another way of putting soul growth is the movement from self-consciousness to other-consciousness to social consciousness, to transcending consciousness, to world consciousness, to cosmic consciousness. Cosmic consciousness is called God Consciousness by mystics of many religions, putting on Christ by St Paul, Nirvana by Buddhists, Omega point by theoscientists and so on.

Spirituality means increasing transcendence over ego. “He must increase, I must decrease,” said the gospel which proclaimed Love as the supreme energy of the universe.

I have my own list of great-souled persons: Mahatma Gandhi, Jesus of Nazareth, Paul of Tarsus, Prophet Mohammed, Martin Luther King, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dorothy Day, Abe Lincoln, Eleanor Roosevelt, Saint Francis of Assisi, Nelson Mandela, Frederick Douglas, John Wesley and many more. I know many others without celebrity status but meet the criteria of the high-entropy, great souled (one of which is not caring about celebrity status). Those criteria include the highest degree of empathy, of connection to others, of the sense of wholeness with all, of respect for strangers, love of neighbors, reduced ego, acceptance of death, abhorrence to cruelty, solidarity with the poor, powerless, and “little ones,” open quest for truth, action to foster justice.

The great-souled ones confront evil in the human world, e.g. cruelty, which results from the retardation of soul-growing and in particular from the failure of empathy or the expansion of consciousness to embrace others and the whole world.

Philosopher kings and a democratic republic

When Aristotle studied the Republic, the res publica, the public thing, using the Athenian polis or city-state as a model, he counseled rule by philosophers. Remember that he was tutoring the young Alexander of Macedonia who was in the process of conquering the known world in his quest to become the Great.

Philosophy, in the era of late antiquity, was a way of life as well as a scientific quest. It was an education of the cognitive consciousness or mind in the academy but also a training of moral consciousness or conscience through action in the public sphere. In the Hellenistic age, after the death of Alexander and into the rise of Rome, the Cynics, the Skeptics, the Stoics, the Epicureans, the Neoplatonists, and the early Christians were all schools in moral as well as cognitive excellence.

Aristotle considered the rule by one (monarchy), the rule by the few (aristocracy), and the rule by “the many” (democracy). He could not affirm democracy because he could not see that the many would ever become wise. He thought that rule by the demos was rule by the unruly mob — what we now call populism. This leads to tyranny, i.e. persons who use force rather than wisdom and persuasion to run the state. For Aristotle the ideal rulers were thoughtful and of high character. Great-souled. Philosophers.

This became a challenge to the founders of the United States of America. They realized that a democratic Republic could be sustained only if the people were well educated in the principles and practices of freedom. And so, they supported universal public education and the creation of universities teaching the liberal arts and sciences. According to George Washington “It is the peculiar boast of our country that her happiness is alone dependent on the collective wisdom and virtue of her citizens and rests not on the exertions of any individual.” The philosopher kings of a democratic Republic are the people.

The culmination of politics in a democratic Republic coincides with the culmination of spirituality — a great-souled people of cognitive and moral excellence. Just as soul-growing is a means to the building of the polis, so is action to build the community a means to the growth of the soul of the nation and its citizens.

The soul of the body politic

Just as the human body has soul, so does the body politic. Jon Meacham recently wrote The Soul of America, a defense of America because he sees that America is under attack by a domestic and international movement that destroys its soul. It undermines fundamental principles as identified in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the progressive history towards greater inclusion and democracy. Others have named it the American ideal, dream, imagination, and character. Robert Bellah and others have called it the “civil religion” in distinction to (but not in opposition to) the religions in the private household or cultural sphere. It is the unum in pluribus that Jefferson and Madison supported in their advocacy of the rights of free exercise of religion, assembly, speech.

Lately many historians, in response to the challenge of the present situation, have written extensively concerning the contradictions within the American soul in its politics before, during, and after constituting the Republic. That contradiction is most notable in the declaration and firm belief in the equality and freedom of all human persons and the exclusion of classes designated by race, gender, origin, livelihood, wealth, and private morality to the promise following that declaration.

These historians document the struggle of politics to achieve the ideal of the right to life, liberty, and happiness for all, even to the addition of the results of these struggles to the Constitution. They also document the stain on the soul or character of America, beginning with slavery, which as Rev. Jim Wallace writes is and continues to be America’s Original Sin. They document the genocide of indigenous Americans, the harsh treatment of the descendants of slaves and of non-European or non-white immigrants, discrimination against women, suppression of workers, rejection of refuge-seeking Jews and others suffering oppression, concentration camps for Japanese-Americans, campaigns of fear against dissenters, and the use of torture and war crimes.

We have seen that a person, with the help of other people and with spiritual exercise, can grow her soul. Now we ask whether a body politic can grow its soul? Can it reach back into its own ideals and vision to renew itself? Can America, now in the shadow of fear and under the stain of bigotry, grow its soul? We have been here many times before. And yet, through the light of thoughtfulness and the cleansing action of solidarity, we removed the shadow and the stain. Can we do so once again? And continue our long pursuit of liberty and justice for all that was promised in the declaration of independence, the bill of rights, the defeat of slavery, the charter of the United Nations, the amendments to the Constitution to guarantee greater inclusion, the Paris accords by nations united to repair the earth.

The present threat to democratic republics is nationalist populism, fired by fear and resentment, focused on self-enrichment at the expense of impersonal others, and enabling narcissistic leaders with anti-social personality disorders over persons of character. The decline of empathy, the loss of a sense of union with others and connection with the world, coincides with the decline of democratic republics.

The growth of soul of persons and of nations is a process of increasing empathy and solidarity. The culmination of politics in a democratic Republic coincides with the culmination of spirituality — a great-souled people of cognitive and moral excellence joining together to ensure public happiness.

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“You must reduce the self to nothing or expand it to embrace the universe,” said a Zen master I studied with in Hawaii, “it is the same.” In working with his disciples, he would have us all learn to meditate and to foster the Aloha Spirit through concerted action. Political action and soul building go hand in hand.