Nature Spirituality and the Negation

Roger S. Gottlieb

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Nature Spirituality and the Negation
Roger S. Gottlieb

Forms of Negation

Theories of the radical transformation of society—"radical" in the sense of a significant alteration in the direction of greater freedom, increased sense of rights extended to those currently lacking, a more rational form of social organization in the direction of meeting human needs and (more recently) the needs of other forms of life as well—typically put a great deal of their hopes on at least one "negation": that is, an aspect of the current unfree society that leads in dialectical fashion to experiences that motivate masses of people toward fundamental social change.

For the theorists of the French Revolution this was the pressure of increasing taxes on the peasantry. For Marx it was recurrent, ever bigger economic crises combined with the political homogenization of the working class. For early Western Marxist Georg Lukacs it was the fundamental contradiction between people experiencing themselves as thinking and feeling subjects and (they or their labor power) being treated by capitalism as unfeeling, objectified commodities. Feminist and antiracist movements often locate the negation in the contradiction between the rhetoric of [End Page 9] egalitarian democracy (or at times religion) and the way oppressed groups are denied rights, fairness, and respect. For the environmental movement it is the hope that the experience of environmental calamities such as climate change, dried up rivers, and burning forests will wake people up to the sheer magnitude of the threat, and the essential and life-threatening irrationality of current policies and priorities.

Spirituality

Spirituality, a concept widely used in traditional religion, in "spiritual but not religious" settings, and in indigenous traditions, may be described as a belief, a form of life, and a set of characteristic experiences.¹ The belief is that living by certain key virtues—for example, awareness, acceptance, compassion, gratitude, and love—is essential for a good, happy, morally beneficial life. Along with this belief is the attempt to cultivate these virtues. Finally, there is a range of typical experiences to which this attempt gives rise. These experiences may include a sense of connection to a wider reality, a pervasive feeling of gratitude, the ability to understand one's own mental states, a sense of peace such that the drive to acquire and control are diminished, and the ability to have compassion for radically different types of people and indeed for nonhuman life as well.

Spiritual practices are frequently repeated, virtually habitual, mental, physical, and social forms aimed at cultivating spiritual virtues: meditation to train the mind, prayer to orient one's emotional life, forms of social service to develop compassion, bodily practices like yoga and tai chi to orient the body to self-awareness and spontaneity, and silence or fasting or celibacy to limit the power of intense desires for vicious speech, overeating, and sexual misconduct.

Virtually all forms of spirituality aim at lessening the power of what is sometimes referred to as the ego: that is, that aspect of the self that is driven, selfish, self-hating, violent, unconscious of one's own desires, unable to recognize and deal with fears and resentments without hatred and violence. Since the ego—especially oriented toward individualistic self-concern, high consumption, and narrow group self-interest—is an essential ideological and characterological prop of contemporary patriarchal, racist, environmentally [End Page 10] destructive capitalism, spiritual perspectives offer at least one possible counteracting force—that is, a negation.

Spirituality thus understood is necessarily the negation of collective forms of exploitation and domination, irrationality-based group hatred, or unending consumerist desire. Justifications for the various social and ideological structures underlying unfreedom are at odds with spirituality—at least spirituality as I have just described it and as it has been lived by people as various as Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, Dorothy Day, Rabbi Michael Lerner, and Thich Nhat Hanh.²