Can a Spiritual Outlook Regenerate Our Social Institutions?

False hope can be dangerous, personally and politically. After centuries of utopian dreams and “scientific” understandings, I find it hard to believe that we can transform the world. I approached Peter Gabel’s important book with some skepticism. Show me that we can change the world. Persuade me that a spiritual outlook, “another way of seeing,” can be powerful enough to regenerate our social institutions.

Gabel’s intent in this collection of essays and occasional pieces is to shift our attention from the material world to the spiritual dimension of social life. He hopes to show that this spiritual engagement can be a main shaping influence on society. It is a big claim, and he pursues it with zeal and conviction: “Human beings actually exist in a psycho-spiritual world in which they seek not primarily food, shelter, or the satisfaction of material needs, but rather the love and recognition of other human beings, and the sense of elevated meaning and purpose that comes from bringing the world of inter-subjective connection into being.”

Love as a Historical Force

It is quite a step to see the longing for love and recognition as a key historical force. Yes, it inspired the movements of the 1960s, and Gabel is wonderful at describing how it felt to be lifted up out of alienation and isolation into the shared optimism of that time. But those very movements, although they have made a serious impact on the world, have not achieved the sweeping transformations their participants hoped for. Their aftermath tends to be a pronounced weariness, withdrawal, and rage, out of which their adherents must begin all over again to “come into existence as an idealistic, hopeful, potentially loving community.” No wonder the seasoned warriors of this struggle are inclined to leave the remaining work to the next generation. Is this despair? Perhaps not. It may be, rather, a realization that we activists should keep our endeavors focused, local, and particular, as the ecology movement and the real-food movement seem to be doing, perhaps because they have learned something from those of us given to totalizing expectations.

Gabel is not carried away by the power of theory; this is one reason his book is so readable. A reader will never feel beaten over the head by Gabel’s effort to prove his theory correct. To the contrary. “All phenomenological or descriptive theory depends not upon a theory’s ability to explain facts from premises or theoretical postulates, but rather upon its self-evidence, upon its capacity to produce an experience of recognition in the reader,” he writes. Few theoreticians (Marx, Freud, or theorists of liberalism), would endorse this limiting view of theory, but for Gabel it is crucial. Theory is not a declaration of truth, or a definitive account of how things are. It is an organizing principle, a lens through which we are invited to view the world, whose force depends on resonance, the reader’s response. Gabel is inviting his readers to measure his other way of seeing by their response to it. This is a rare and thrilling invitation.

Gabel writes what Timothy Garton Ash (quoting George Kennan) called “the history of the present.” He is an eyewitness and participant in the events he analyses, creating a record of significant events as they are unfolding. In this, he is writing against the grain of the commonly held view that distance confers objectivity and that our collective understanding of what has happened is enhanced by being far away from it. One evident disadvantage of this distancing approach is the later historian’s inability to report what could not be known at the time the historian is studying: Who could know for certain that Barack Obama would turn out to be not at all what he seemed? Or that the failure of the high hopes he inspired would once again alienate the disengaged citizens he had drawn into political participation. Whatever later historians may come to...