The Movement We Need

This series of writings is an experiment—a new way of writing a book that invites you all to participate in.  I’ve written or co-written thirteen published books over more than four decades as an author, and a number of others (we don’t talk about those), and seen publishing change radically in that time.  

I was lucky early on to work with major publishers and some great editors.  Now, it’s a different world with different values—but at the same time, with more avenues for communication.  So I want to try something a little different—releasing this book a chapter at a time on Substack, and accompanying it with podcasts, social media and who knows what else to broaden its reach.

I’ve been thinking about this book and this topic, ruminating, you could say, for months if not years.  But although being a writer is core to my identity and has been the greatest goal of my life, I haven’t actually been doing that much writing lately.  In part, it’s because there are so many more immediately satisfying things to do—like building shelves.  That immediately makes my life better!  Or sewing.  Possibly baking a pie, or cleaning up the house, not to mention gardening or taking the dog for a walk.  It’s also partly because I haven’t quite seen how to navigate the changes in the publishing world and the media in general to feel like my words would have an impact.  Hence this experiment:  trying a new combination of media, and committing to a chapter a month (terrifying, because I haven’t written them yet and if I say I will, I’ll have to!  What if I need a new set of bookshelves?)

Nonetheless, I have something to say that I hope will contribute to the challenge of the present moment, and that challenge is so dire that I won’t feel good about myself if I don’t do whatever I can to meet it.  So, I begin with this introductory chapter, and promise to follow it with others, and with a series of podcasts that will launch to go deeper into various aspects or perhaps off on strange tangents responding to the current moment, who knows?  I’m not putting up a paywall at this time, although I certainly welcome contributions, but may add new subscriber-only features in the future, who knows?  

For now, if you like what you read, or if it stimulates you, please feel free to pass it around, move it along, share it in whatever ways you want, and comment on it so we can begin a dialogue.  It is my deepest desire to see the emergence of the movement we need right now—one that is open, welcoming, broad-based, strategic, and oriented to our core human needs, one that can gain the power to make this world more balanced, just, and kind.

The Movement We Need

Chapter One:  Core Needs

The first time I was ever arrested for a political action was when I was fifteen years old. Together with one of my high school girlfriends and Santa Claus, a long-haired, bearded organizer with Vietnam Veterans Against the War, we had been handing out balloons in Beverly Hills that said “Peace on Earth! Stop the War in Vietnam!”  As we were driving away, police stopped us, pointed guns at me and my friend Chrissy in the back seat, and arrested us together with Santa Claus.

That was the very beginning of my introduction to activism, and I have been an activist in one movement or another ever since, for more than 50 years. For all of us who've been involved in progressive movements over the long haul, this current moment comes as both a challenge and a surprise.  From the optimism of our early years in the heady ‘60s and early ‘70s, that saw not just the anti-war movement but the reactivation of feminism, gay liberation, civil rights advances, the emergence of the environmental movement and more, through the determined commitment of the ‘80s and ‘90s after Reagan’s election, through the resurgence of mass actions around globalization in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, we never expected that in our elder years we’d be facing an upsurge of 1930s style retro fascism.

Yet perhaps we should not be surprised. Robert Reich, who was labor secretary under Bill Clinton, points out that real wages have not risen since the 1980s while the top 1% have massively increased their wealth.  Inequality has grown at a spectacular rate. The gains in productivity and economic growth over the period of my lifetime have been increasingly siphoned off into the pockets of the ultra wealthy, while the middle class and working class have become increasingly insecure and stressed.

At the same time, while the efforts to transform how we experience gender, race, and other foundational aspects of culture have opened new possibilities of liberation for many, they have also unsettled others and provided convenient scapegoats for channeling disquiet and discontent into grievance and ire.  Overall looms the specter of climate change, with increasing natural disasters, droughts, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes and less and less ability to count on what were once the certainties of natural patterns. In such a maelstrom of change and uncertainty, it's easy to convince people that a charismatic strongman might be the answer to restoring security and order.

We find ourselves in a strange world of reversals. in my younger days it was the left, whether the political activists or the social rebels, the protesters or the hippies or the many who were both, that outraged sensibilities and transgressed accepted standards of behavior. Today, the alt-right figures like Donald Trump or Steve Bannon claim the terrain of transgression, portraying themselves as those who dare to say the unsayable, relegating progressives to the awkward position of defenders of propriety--something that doesn't sit easily with us!  Having for decades been critical of our major institutions, from our political system to religious authorities, we know now find them under a steeper assault from the right, attempting to tear down not their oppressive aspects, but all the safeguards and bulwarks against repression that have been built in over centuries of struggle, however imperfectly.  We end up having to defend the very systems we ourselves have often wanted to tear down, because their destruction by the right would not lead to greater liberation but only to a more restrictive tyranny.

We are in a dangerous moment when, we face the real possibility of losing such imperfectly democratic institutions that we have. But I also believe that this is a time of tremendous opportunity. if we can navigate this moment successfully, we can still create a world of greater justice, balance and peace.

In this moment of great challenge, we on the left might benefit from some serious self examination.  Why are we not more effective in channeling discontent into movements for greater justice and liberty?  Why do the very classes that traditionally have supported movements for greater equality and liberty, now often support authoritarians?  What have we done or failed to do that has landed us in such a precarious position?  Are there lessons we can learn that can help us move forward?   

I believe so, and I intend in this series of writings to share my own reflections from over half a century of activism, as well as suggestions for new directions. Over the decades, I've been involved in movements that had enormous successes, and those that made great mistakes. I hope to share these insights honestly, so that younger activists may the void repeating the same mistakes and achieve even greater successes.

While I've always been an activist, I've never been only an activist. I've been blessed and privileged to live a full and complicated life, and I'll be drawing on many areas of my life experience to formulate ideas about the movement we need.

My formal academic training is in psychology. While my BA was in Art and I spent a year in a graduate film program at UCLA in the ‘70s, I eventually earned an MA in the ‘80s in an experimental feminist therapy program at Antioch University West, and practiced as a counselor until my work led me in a different direction.  Since the 1970s, I’ve been writing, teaching and practicing in movements to reclaim spiritual roots in the ancient traditions of the Goddess, that predate patriarchal religions in Europe and the Middle East. I also hold a double diploma in permaculture design and teaching from the Permaculture Institute of North America, and have taught and practiced that system of ecological design and land management for over 20 years.  I've written 13 books, many of them on earth-based and feminist spirituality,

For me spirituality and activism have always gone together.  Both address our deepest values, our sense of fairness and justice, our core aspirations for the world we want to see. I've always loved Dion Fortune's definition of magic as  “the art of changing consciousness at will“. That also seems a good definition for profound political change, going to the root of the structures it seeks to shift, contesting not just who holds power at any given moment, but challenging our understanding of power itself.

In the dominant culture, spirituality has generally been bound up with religion, with dogma and belief systems, with the structures of rule and authority.  But the root meaning of “spirituality” is related to breath, to life itself, to inspiration.  Spirituality does not have to be bound by belief in supernatural things we cannot see.  An embodied spirituality, imminent in the world, shifts our relationship to what we can see to one of reverence for the ordinary miracles of life:  the pull of the moon on the tides, the iridescent web of a spider, or the way a leaf performs alchemy with sunlight, air and water to feed the growth of a great tree, then dies, falls, and decays to nourish the soil at its roots.

Earth-based spirituality affirms science.  The more our rational minds explore the intricate workings of the universe, the deeper our sense of awe and reverence can be. We can honor our intuition and emotions, which have often been overlooked in the dominant culture, and still use and value our rational mind and understanding. The most common things in life:  birth, growth, healing, love, death and regeneration are mysteries, in the sense that some aspect of them goes beyond rational explanation and touches us deeply in the realms of emotion and spirit, connecting us to all of life and filling us with awe and wonder.

This approach to spirituality comes in part from my Jewish roots.  The rabbis and teachers of my childhood synagogue and Hebrew schools always taught that blind belief had no place in Judaism. Abraham argued with God; Jacob wrestled with the Angel. The Torah was a given, but subject to interpretation and reinterpretation.  Human beings are given rational minds and critical thinking in order to use them.

But my approach comes even more deeply from my many years of immersion in the ancient Goddess traditions. These lie at the root of Western culture, in the earliest strata of civilization, and belong to a time when warfare was not yet endemic. Indeed, it was warfare itself that shifted the balance of power from societies in which women held agency and honor, to cultures where men ruled and where whole categories of human beings could be reduced to captivity and chattel slavery. This is a long, historical argument which is not really the argument I want to make in this writing, but I offer it as background understanding.  At the roots of European and Middle Eastern cultures lie older conceptions of the world, in which women held power and deity could be seen in female form, where life in this world was valued, where the cycles of birth, growth, death and regeneration in nature and human lives were seen as sacred.  The knowledge that such cultures existed, that patriarchy is not ubiquitous and inevitable, has been tremendously empowering to many feminists.

Progressive movements today are also deeply influenced by insights from surviving indigenous cultures and religions, and by the attempt to “decolonize”: to examine the thought-structures that shape our perceptions of reality and change them.   This is not an easy nor quick process:  It is the work of a lifetime or more, and yet it is one of the more exciting potentials of our time should we manage to survive the current moment.

There are thousands of indigenous cultures, many of them surviving to this day. We should be wary of lumping them all together, erasing their uniqueness and distinctions, or assuming that they are static and unchanged, rather than dynamic and evolving like all cultures. We should beware of the temptation to romanticize a mythic, globalized indigenous culture, and attribute to it everything we wish culture to embody, or to appropriate bits of this and that from various traditions, cherry-picking what we want and ignoring the need to engage with the real- life struggles that indigenous groups face today.

And yet it is also vitally important to learn, in a respectful way, from what indigenous cultures can teach us. There are many surviving indigenous traditions today that define gender and allocate power in very different ways than patriarchy.  And there are common ideas of reciprocity, respect for the earth, reverence for nature and an understanding of human life as integral to the natural world, that might be of meaningful help to us in this current moment.

In this writing, I'll also be drawing on insights from practical engagement with actual earth and land, as a gardener, land manager, and permaculture designer and teacher. “Permaculture” is a term coined by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, two Australians environmentalists, in the 1970s, to imagine how we might better take nature as a model for both agriculture and culture, developing systems that are self renewing and self managing, as a natural forest or prairie might be.  Permaculture draws on a wide knowledge of both indigenous and traditional approaches to land management, and integrates them with systems theory and environmental science. 

Three core ethics are foundational to permaculture: care for the earth, care for the people and care for the future, which is sometimes expressed as limiting consumption, or more simply, ‘fair share’. Permaculture also has a set of guiding principles that can be applied in many different situations, principles such as “Catch and store energy” or “Use biological resources”.  It is my hope In this writing to offer some guiding principles that can help us in forming regenerative movements.

What do I mean by a regenerative movement? ‘Regeneration’ is a core value in the permaculture movement. It's an evolution from talking about ‘sustainability’: for to sustain something implies to keep it as it is, and the situation we find ourselves in now, environmentally and politically, is not really one we want to simply sustain.  We want to improve it, to make it more just, more equitable, thriving, balanced, and able to last in the long term. We want to conserve what is worth conserving, while allowing for change and growth. Faced with tremendous disruption and disturbance, we want to nurture resilience: the ability to bounce back after a disruption.

Regeneration is also the heart of earth-based spirituality. Marija Gimbutas, the archaeologist who did major work on the ancient Goddess cultures of Old Europe, used to say that it was a mistake to conceive of the Goddess as merely an icon of fertility. “She's not about fertility, she's about regeneration”, she told her biographer, Joan Marler. Symbols of regeneration, from seeds sprouting to spirals, abound in ancient art and sculpture. And many of the same symbols are also the core patterns in nature that we work with in permaculture: the branching pattern the wave, the radial circle, the net.

What do I mean by a movement?  I mean the hundreds and thousands of loosely linked groups and organizations working for progressive social change, as well as the even larger numbers of people who may not belong to any single group but somehow identify with the struggle for greater justice. The movement crosses all races, genders, ages, class backgrounds, physical abilities and other identities, though not every aspect of it reflects its full diversity.  Group may not agree on every issue, but share common values: individual freedom balanced with communal responsibility and mutual aid, the recognition that the world is often unfair and that our goal is to make it more just, that all people deserve to have a voice in the decisions that impact them, that it's our human responsibility to care for and protect the earth’s ecosystems and biodiversity.

A regenerative movement is one that aims to take us beyond the status quo to create a world of greater vitality, life, diversity and abundance. It works with the patterns of nature, whether they are found in ecosystems or in human systems. It's a movement that can face setbacks, opposition, and hostility, and return with renewed determination and vision. To do so, it must be a movement that nourishes and supports those who take part in it.

In permaculture we like to say that we begin with thoughtful, protracted observation rather than jumping into ill-considered, energy-intensive interventions. One of our core principles is “Practice self-reflection and accept feedback”.  In this writing, I intend to offer thoughtful reflection, and loving feedback to the movements I have been part of for over half a century.

And so I return to the questions that sparked this inquiry:

Why is the right wing so successful and why does the left seem to be losing ground with some of the key groups that have traditionally been in the forefront of calls for greater equality?  Could it be that the right wing is more successful than the left at meeting some core human needs?

When I was a graduate student in film at UCLA, I had a screen writing teacher, Bill Menger.  When he didn't like somebody’s script, he would say, “He writes as if he’d heard about people but never actually met any.”

Activists often organize as if we’d heard about people but don't actually know very many. That is, we don't understand who people are, what our basic needs are, how we tend to react and respond, and how we might meet those needs.  We organize as if people were who we think they should be, and when they're not, too often we simply condemn or dismiss them instead of doing the hard work we need in order to reach them, persuade them and inspire them.  We behave as if the point of organizing were to judge and categorize people, rather than to understand, educate and persuade them.

We hold ourselves and others up to high standards for altruism, sensitivity, awareness, courage and selflessness. That's not necessarily bad: having ideals to strive for can bring out the best in all of us. But those ideals can become oppressive and destructive when we blame and shame people for not living up to every aspect of them. In movement building, the perfect is too often the enemy of the good.

The right wing, in contrast, has been growing so swiftly and successfully in recent years, in part because it accepts and affirms people's worst impulses. They say it's fine to be racist, sexist, to say the unsayable, think the unthinkable.  They give full range to greed, resentment, anger, blame:  all of those emotions that most religious and social movements have for centuries been trying to get people to transcend. To put it crudely, I might say that the right makes bad people feel good about themselves, while the left is skilled at making good people feel bad about themselves.  Or, to put it in a bit more hopeful framework, we might say there are no good people or bad people:  there are only people, with good and bad impulses. But the right makes people feel good about their worst impulses, while the left often makes people feel inadequate and bad about even their best impulses and acts.

All of us have those bad impulses.  We all have moments of resentment, self-righteousness, ire and schadenfreude.  Anyone who has ever raised or helped to raise a toddler knows just how irrationally angry, frustrated, self-centered and greedy humans can be. Toddlers make up for their tantrums by being cute—a condition we generally grow out of. Hopefully, we then learn consideration for others.  But perhaps it's no great surprise that flag-bearer of the alt-right MAGA movement, Donald Trump, often seems like a five-year-old screaming about how unfair you are to make him pick up his toys.   

With the alt-right telling people “Your resentful emotions make you a heroic defender of freedom”, and a left telling people “No matter how good you think you are, you are inherently racist, sexist, selfish and your privilege is oppressing others all over the world”, it's not surprising that many disaffected people are drawn to the right instead of the left. This is a simplification, of course, and there are many voices on the left that are calling for a movement that is inviting, affirming and empowering. I strongly believe that we have the capacity to create such a movement, and to do it skillfully. But to do so, we must organize people as they are, not as we think they ought to be.

Human beings, regardless of background and culture, have some core emotional needs that are important to recognize. Movements that succeed find ways to meet these needs that are inclusive and empowering. Many of them are easy to meet in negative ways, and to understand the success of right wing movements we must take an honest look at the ways that they do meet people's core needs. I will outline the five needs that I think are most key to organizing, and as these posts continue I'll go deeper into the ways we can address each one. Those five core needs are safety, belonging, value, agency and meaning.

It may seem somewhat suspect idea that a movement should meet the emotional needs of those who belong to it. Shouldn't we be part of the movements for social justice purely for the sake of the outcomes? For making a more just and regenerative world?  Yes, in an ideal world composed of ideal people, but real people, those we might actually have met, not just heard about, have needs and will find ways to get them met.

 In permaculture, we strive to create the conditions that will favor the results that we want. So, in a garden, we might nourish the soil so that plants are healthy and have resistance to pests and diseases. If we want to grow particular plants or raise animals, we analyze their needs and behaviors, and figure out how best to meet those needs and put those behaviors to good use. A movement is composed of people. If we want to attract people, elicit their most creative and committed work, and keep their allegiance, we need to consider how to create a nourishing people-habitat.  We might nourish the ‘soil’ by examining how we can meet these underlying needs, so that our groups become places where people can thrive.

The five core needs: safety, belonging, value, agency, and meaning, can be met in negative ways that exclude and disempower one group of people to benefit another, or in positive ways that are liberating, empowering and connecting.

Safety: The safety we strive for within our movements is emotional safety. As activists, we can't and don't always want to assure physical safety.  We sometimes ask people to do physically and legally dangerous things in the furtherance of justice. But we do want to create a sense of emotional safety, a confidence that we are involved with others who care for us, will look out for us and will consider our interests as well as their own. We might frame this as solidarity.

Belonging: Humans are social animals, and we need to feel a sense of belonging, to know that we are part of something bigger than ourselves. Traditionally that might be family, community, clan, tribe, nation, but it may also be political orientation, fan club, religious or spiritual group, or any other collection of people we can identify with. Ideally, we long to be part of something important, something that furthers our values in the world.

Value: As well as being part of something, we are also unique individuals.  We have a powerful need to feel seen and valued, for the fullness of who we are as human beings.  We resent being placed in categories or boxes, slapped with labels that define us more narrowly than we experience ourselves. Successful regenerative movements contest categorizations, and fight against prejudice of all sorts: racism, sexism, homophobia, and all the isms. We're often very good identifying and calling out instances where they appear overtly or subtly. But we also need to get good at finding ways to truly see and value each one of us as fully rounded human beings, not just as representatives of some particular identity.

Agency:  There are many different sorts of power in this world but one definition I like is “the ability to get what you want done”. We strive for that kind of power, and we have a strong need to feel a sense of agency, that we can make choices and decisions and take actions that have an impact on the world around us. Ideally, that's a positive impact. we each want to make our own valued contribution to the community we belong to, and to its goals and projects. But thwarted, we'll settle for a negative impact, as opposed to feeling no sense of impact at all. When I was practicing as a therapist, I had a client who had recently been released from a long prison term. In jail, she had often gotten into fights. When we discussed why, she said “I would just start to feel like I was disappearing, like I wasn't there. I had to lash out and hit somebody just to know that I still exist.”  I often think of her when I hear about some young, disaffected person shooting up a schoolroom or a shopping mall with an AK47.  Is this a desperate, horrific attempt to feel some sense of power and impact in the world?

Meaning:  We also have a powerful drive to find meaning and purpose in the world. The human mind has evolved to recognize and create patterns. We look out into a field of stars and see figures, heroes, deities, animals.  We want the world to make sense.  Too often it doesn't. Injustice surrounds us, some of it human created, some of it just the function of bad luck or circumstance. When we find or impose a pattern, we feel a sense of control and relief from some of the existential anxiety of being a mortal, vulnerable body in a dangerous world.  We look for patterns in our own lives, and we want to believe that our lives mean something, that we can act in pursuance of our deepest values and bring reality closer to our ideals.

Extremist movements play on these needs very effectively.  Right-wing news media inflame people's sense of fear and insecurity, painting the world as a threatening place, and then promise them safety, offering a ‘strong man’ who can save them. They offer a sense of belonging the easy way—by identifying and vilifying an out-group that does not belong.  People gain a sense of value by partaking in the group (although that value is conditional.) Identifying with the strong man, people feel a sense of power, however illusory, often bolstered with the possession of weapons and fantasied or real acts of violence.  Finally, they wrap it all up with a powerful sense of purpose—take our country back, make America great again. 

To meet these needs in empowering and inclusive ways, a regenerative movement needs to be strategic, long term, and above all, welcoming.  To make the profound changes we see are needed, we need a broad-based powerful movement, a big tent that can shelter a broad diversity of people and groups.

This is a terrifying and challenging time, but it is also a great time of opportunity.  If we commit ourselves to valuing the inherent worth in every human being, if we identify our core human needs and find positive ways to meet them, if we are willing to organize, educate, and value people as they are, not just as we wish they would be, if we think strategically and plan for the long term, we can build a broad-based, regenerative, welcoming movement that will be an enormous force for positive change.

Read Chapter 2: 
13 Principles for a Welcoming Movement

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