Many years ago when visiting Washington D.C., I went to the Capitol to have lunch with then Representative Dennis Kucinich. He was taking me upstairs to the Congressional dining room, and when the door to the elevator opened there stood then Congressman Lindsey Graham. Much to my surprise, the very progressive Dennis and the very conservative Lindsay were all over each other with friendly affection. “Hey Lindsay!” “Hey Dennis!” They were like old buddies, while I stood there surprised and confused. At the time, Graham was all over TV attacking Bill Clinton about Monica Lewinsky, arguing for impeachment, going on and on about how horrible he was.
“What’s with you?” asked Dennis when he saw the look on my face.
“Well, Lindsay Graham is so… awful! I see him on the news practically ever night going on and on about Clinton.”
”Oh Marianne,” he said. “That’s just for TV. He’s actually a great guy and we do a lot of work together.”
That’s when I registered what a performance art American politics had become. Later I read a very interesting book by Matt Taibbi called Hate Inc, chronicling the descent of American politics into the psychological blood sport it has become. There was so much more money to be made making us despise one another than with helping us understand the truth.
Now we have whole generations who have never known anything else. It doesn’t just sadden me for them but for the country, because in the absence of righteous dialog what happens to the public sphere? It disintegrates, that’s what happens. The word “divided” doesn’t even begin to cover it. We’re not just a divided nation. We’re a ruptured one.
One of my favorite people was my late friend James Doty, a neurosurgeon and author who wrote a marvelous book called Into the Magic Shop. I remember Jim talking about how the intelligence center of the body is not the brain alone, as had long been assumed, but rather a partnership between brain and heart. That’s huge to me, because it doesn’t just speak to how the body operates…it speaks to how an entire life operates. And how civilization unfolds as well.
We seem to cross swords now more than we speak to one another. Domination has replaced partnership in how we relate to almost everything. We’ve become obsessed with winning whether in work, politics, or even normal conversation. It leaves us always winning or losing in what could and should be a win-win world.
All that can change, and it will change if we take it upon ourselves to try to think and live differently. So much is falling apart around us, and we will not find deliverance through an approach to our problems that’s a mere enactment of the thinking with which we created them. We’ve all heard the Einstein quote. It’s time to make it real. We have to think with the heart as well as the head.
It’s not enough to be smart if we are not wise. The capacity for reverence, and love, and compassion are as important as our capacity for intellectual analysis. The mechanistic, rationalistic, amoral way of looking at the world has brought us to near ruin. We’re used to a certain kind of thinking in ourselves and in our leaders, but as it’s often said in Alcoholics Anonymous, “Your best thinking got you here.” We need to make a conscious choice to think differently, and act differently, if we’re to recreate the world.
In many ways we’re like spiritual stroke victims learning to talk again. It’s not just about being “nice” or “respectful” or “a good listener,” although all those things are important. It’s about a shift in brain waves, as we learn to think differently. An expanded heart is our greatest power tool today. It’s only when we listen to one another - learn from each other, and engage in a constructive synergistic dialog - that we do anything but joust. We have done incalculable damage indulging the mean-spirited slop that passes for culture, much less politics, these days. We have got to reinvent the field.
