Left and the liberal forces tend to be very narrow in their focus. They look at one specific issue, instead of coming up with a coherent worldview that helps people see the interconnected nature of our problems and need for a fundamental transformation. We do that in our Network for Spiritual Progressives and through Tikkun. We are trying to get people in the social progressive world to reopen themselves to a coherent worldview.
The best articulator of that worldview, apart from the people who are connected with our Network of Spiritual Progressives, is Pope Francis. The Pope today is the most significant progressive thinker in terms of his impact and outreach to a huge following of people and, in time, if he isn’t killed or he doesn’t die or get forced to resign by unrepentant conservative forces in the Catholic world, he could have a huge impact in transforming the Catholic Church into being more connected with liberal and progressive movements. That’s just what infuriates the conservatives, who have always sought a more repressive, hierarchical and patriarchal perspective.
Can atheists and agnostics recognize these same human needs without being part of any organized religion?
I don’t think that it’s necessary to fit into a traditional religion to have an awareness of spiritual consciousness. To be spiritual means to look at the world from outside of the categories that the empiricists have developed. The empiricists developed a worldview that said: ‘That which is real is that which can be verified through our data or be measured. And that which cannot be measured or subject to empirical verification to our data is not really real.’
This worldview has become the dominant worldview in global capitalism. It’s shared by many people on the Left, Right and Center. This is the dominant religion of the contemporary world. It’s a religion because it has no foundation based on its own criteria; because it cannot be verified through data or be measured. But everybody believes it, so it’s considered common sense. When you’re in a religion, the pervasive religious belief is just obvious, so you accept it instead of asking yourself what the basis of that belief is. The people I call spiritual are those who reject the empiricist worldview and say, ‘no, there are other ways of knowing that are not subject to empirical verification or measurement’.
Do you think international leftists should be pushing for capitalism with a friendly face or for something different that we haven’t discovered yet?
I’m not for capitalism with a friendly face. I’m working for a different society, a society based on love and generosity. Such a society would have to have elements of economic justice and democratic control of the economy that were the intent of socialism (though unfortunately often implemented in a bureaucratic way that rarely gave ordinary people the power it had promised). So I’m calling my vision Revolutionary Love. That society would seek ‘a New Bottom Line’ so that every institution and social practice – corporations, economic policies, laws, government policies, health and education – would be judged to be efficient, rational or productive to the extent that these institutions and the social practices they fostered maximized our capacities to be loving and caring, kind and generous, ethical and environmentally sensitive and responsible. We need to support each other to be capable of responding to human beings as embodiments of the sacred and capable of responding to the world with awe, wonder and radical amazement.
This is what the Network of Spiritual Progressives is all about: to change the consciousness of America and foster a spirit of generosity and create ‘The Caring Society’ – caring for each other and caring for the earth. Despite the political power of the most selfish elements in our society, most people yearn for a different kind of world, and in my book Revolutionary Love I expand on these ideas. ■
SARA MERSHA
Sara Mersha is the director of grantmaking and advocacy at Grassroots International. She was born in Ethiopia but has spent most of her life in the US. Grassroots International is a non-profit organization that works all over the world to help small farmers and other small producers, indigenous peoples and women, win resource rights to land, water and food.
Do you think Grassroots International’s emphasis on resource rights requires reimagining democracy as a continually evolving process as opposed to a system where people just cast their vote in a ballot box every few years?
At its core, resource rights is about guaranteeing the human rights to land, water and food sovereignty as well as climate justice. To ensure these rights, it’s important for people to be able to exercise a deep level of democracy. For example, food sovereignty was defined at the Nyeleni Forum on Food Sovereignty as ‘the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems’.
This requires respect for local processes, for community members to come together and discuss these issues so that they can decide together how they want their food systems to be set up – what kind of food is produced, who produces it, and how it is produced in a way that is healthy for people and the planet. Similarly, with rights to land, and with climate justice.
In February 2016, we came back from visiting our partners in Mexico – most of which are indigenous communities in Oaxaca and Chiapas who have a long practice of deep democracy. Each community or village has a general assembly where community members come together to make decisions. They name people to represent them as members of the communal authority, and those members see their role as serving their broader communities and implementing the decisions made by the general assembly. More and more indigenous communities throughout Mexico are using the power they have through their local assemblies and decision-making processes to create communal statutes to protect their natural resources (such as land, water, and food systems) from extractive industries such as mining companies.
In the US, there are other examples of communities passing resolutions at the local level to ensure food sovereignty (such as a number of local resolutions in Maine about the right to produce and sell food at a local level) and protection of natural resources (such as resolutions to prevent fracking or other forms of extraction, through resolutions on the Rights of Nature).
Why do you think NGOs have not been more eager to get input from grassroots organizations in the countries they are trying to help?
There are vast differences in the types of NGOs that operate at the international level. Unfortunately, the top-down model that has been used by large-scale institutions like the World Bank is often replicated among some large international NGOs and foundations. Our model at Grassroots International is about solidarity with social movements that are at the forefront of working toward the kinds of changes the planet needs. For that reason, it is important to us that we have close relationships with groups in each country where we work, and that they let us know what the priority areas are that they would like us to fund. We also have a reciprocal relationship based on mutual trust and transparency, so that they can also share their feedback with us about our work as a whole, including advice for our advocacy and education work in the US.
Many NGOs rely on commercials featuring starving children to get donations. Do you think this has a negative effect?
Grassroots International’s work is focused on solidarity, not charity. Our partners are powerful agents of change, and we strive to communicate about their work with others in a way that educates others about the amazing work they do, and about our responsibility, honor and opportunity to work to address the structural issues that are the root causes of the conditions that peasants and Indigenous peoples face throughout the world.
Depicting people in the Global South or impoverished communities as destitute and in need of help feeds into the North-as-savior myth that drives many international development models. This model ignores both the root causes of poverty and hardship (like corporate deregulation, unjust trade policies and a long history of economic and political piracy, capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, colonialism, neoliberalism, etc) and the power and resilience of local communities