POLITICS OF THE SPIRIT
A Dream of California
By Senator Tom Hayden
"A LANDMARK STATEMENT."
Kevin Starr
California State Librarian
Political rhetoric today mostly consists of repeating old answers. The hand of the past closes the ability to hear the call of the future. California has changed, and political thinking hasn't kept up.
For the past 40 years California was fattened by Cold War contracts. We still are enjoying schools, universities and freeways built in the 1950s. We were a state of less than twenty million in the 1960s. Energy was cheap, the environment seemingly boundless, so we built suburbs miles and miles from our work. The population and workforce was largely white and European. Our economy, the 7th largest in the world, was a powerhouse supplying weapons, computers and movies to far-flung places and cultures.
We were the culminating expression of the frontier personality, conquering all external obstacles to our expansion. If we were accused of tinseled escapism, of running away from our internal needs, we compensated by discovering new frontiers. Masters of our destiny, envy of the world, we were the future.
It takes no scholarship, only a cup of coffee, to see that life has changed in California.
In the past three years, Los Angeles has suffered a loss of hundreds of thousands of defense-related jobs, the worst racial upheaval of the century, and a fire and earthquake that destroyed much of our vaunted suburban paradise. In the face of these breakdowns, the establishment has offered little more than a happy face to cover the bankruptcy of its outdated thinking. "Rebuild L.A.," the proposed response to the 1992 rioting, has faded into a press release.
Many public officials have an idea of the future that is only a xerox of the past. Special interest politics benefits and perpetuates status quo behavior. Mindless growth is its own reward. In real life, this means that every day more of California is developed in the image of the Los Angeles model which has failed. From the Bay Area to Sacramento to Fresno, the traffic creeps along, the air fills with smog, and the flight from cities continues, only to have the same urban diseases reappear all over again.
If we remain addicted to our old ways in these new times, we will continue to spiral from disaster to disaster, becoming the biggest penal colony on earth as the politics of law and order replaces the quest for a better vision.
But just as no one is entitled to rest on their laurels and remain Number One, there need be nothing inevitable about the decline of nations or states like California.
We need a leap to a new dream for the future from the politics of the past.
I have a dream of California that began in the formative decade of the 60s and I hope will mature into a new consensus in our time. My dreams have five themes that grow from the shifting of our cultural tectonic plates that began in the 1960s:
1. That our quality of life depends on more education, not less.
2. That the emergence of a multicultural society is a strength for the future, not a threat to our well-being.
3. That for a sustainable future we must create jobs by restoring the environment rather than degrading what is left of it.
4. That the perpetuation of a Machiavellian government based on interest groups makes human beings expendable and denies the vision of justice upon which government should be founded.
5. That life is not about conquering the world but about discovering meaning in our lives, or about being "happier and better" as Lord Bryce said in Berkeley at the beginning of this century.
First, that we need a cultural and economic future based on deeper and broader education of all Californians.
I view it as tragic that California is 41st in K-12 education funding, and that 200,000 students have been forced to leave their college education in these past two years.
The obsolete thinking behind this downsizing is that California won't need the educational opportunities that empowered us in the past. "Why have bellboys with BAs?," asks a national magazine. But why build an economy around bellboys?, we should answer. "Why not bellboys who study at community college at night to move along to more rewarding jobs?
That's what my father did. He was a hotel doorman who went to college for two years, became a corporate accountant, could buy a home, send me to college, and end his life feeling that he'd accomplished something. How many fathers can feel that way about their prospects today?
The implication of the downsizing doctrine is that education should be adjusted to the needs of business and that business simply won't need many more college-educated Californians.
This is a complete reversal of the promise of the 60s when the traditional view of higher education as a privilege was rejected for the idea of higher education as a right. Then a new generation in a new world needed a liberal college education for their advancement, just as an earlier generation in the 1940s needed high school education instead of just elementary schooling.
Seven million Americans enrolled in colleges and universities in the 1960s, the largest numbers in our history. California led the way, building campuses everywhere and giving the idea of community colleges to the world. The idea that college learning should only serve the narrow and short-term needs of commerce was rejected for the idea that education had an inherent value for the individual and society, introducing us to the wider world.
We should reject a return to the dangerous idea that we cannot afford more education. The only thing more expensive than education, Thomas Jefferson wrote, is ignorance.
In my dream I see schoolrooms as exploratoriums like the pioneering exhibition you have here in San Francisco, or the work of SIGKids, a forum for video and graphic projects recently featured in Wired magazine. We should shift the priority of our huge entertainment industry from escapism to education. Currently more is spent on commercials in America than on public schools. According to Russell Jacoby, while our urban school classrooms are overcrowded, there are 16 square feet of malls for every person in America. And while teachers lack modern technology, in the past five years Americans purchased 51 million microwaves, 85 million color televisions, 48 million VCRs and 23 million cordless phones.
I dream of students traveling through multimedia technology to the outer expanses of the Milky Way, the interior of the atom, the villages of Poland, Laos or El Salvador from which their parents and parents' parents came.
The computer revolution which exploded in the 60s has transformed the possibilities of learning, yet our school structures remain caught in the paradigms of the past. Our children already have made the transition to the Information Age in the ways they understand and communicate. They know more than their parents or teachers about CD-ROM.
These kids need meaning in addition to technology. We need to invent schoolrooms that are more interesting than video arcades. In the paper the other day, I came across just this sentiment from a youngster who was engaged in a multimedia project in his classroom. "It's more interesting than Nintendo," he said.
That's what we need, to enthrall our younger generation with the new possibilities of learning. Discipline and punishment alone will never reduce the widespread apathy, the drug and alcohol use, and the dropout rates that afflict our schools today.
As part of my dream I see college students coming back to the public schools as part of a California Service Corps to tutor and help youngsters with their homework and try to reduce those rates of dropping out and drug addiction.
I see those college students becoming the leadership link with the next generation. Not only white students of Generation X, in search of meaning beyond the malls, but a human rainbow of all colors emerging from our campuses to lead California into the age of the Pacific Rim, the Information Revolution and that of Ecological Sustainability.
The second message of my dream is that cultural diversity is a great gift, a great strength, not a reality to be feared.
Many are threatened by the evolution of California as a multicultural state. As Joel Kotkin has written, "a large part of the 'decline of California' mythology revolves around the theory that a multicultural 'majority' minority state is by its very nature incapable of competing in the new global economy."
If this pessimism is correct, there is no future for California, since three-quarters of the students in the Los Angeles school system are of minority background and one-half the labor force will be non-white in the year 2000.
But there is a more optimistic dream. California can become the multicultural capital of the "new world order," sitting astride the vast new routes of commerce and immigration stretching from East Asia to Central America. California exported to these areas at twice the national average in the past two years, generating $80 billion. Already 500,000 Californians are employed in trade, their numbers growing at 20,000 yearly.
As Kotkin points out, the numbers of minorities qualifying for university admission has grown dramatically in the last decade. Despite continuing racism, the number of businesses owned by African-Americans, Latinos and Asians in Los Angeles is the largest in the country, with twice the revenues of New York's. And California has the largest number of women-owned businesses in the United States.
This is a tumultuous transition which also contains dangerous possibilities arising from racial conflict and vast economic disparities. While women and minorities compose the vast majority of our workforce, only 5 percent hold top jobs. Instead of attempting to lead California through its transition to a multicultural state, too often our elected officials reinforce or ignore these disparities.
No one supports illegal immigration. But is illegal immigration best reduced by inflaming a symbolic and unwinnable military conflict with immigrants at the border, or by investing in employment in less-developed nations like Mexico and enforcing the laws against exploitation of immigrant labor here?
Illegal immigrants serve the needs of certain employers for cheap labor in agriculture, hotels, restaurants and the garment industry. These industries give hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions to politicians to turn their eyes and enforcement power from the inhuman and illegal work that serves as a magnet for more immigrants to cross the border.
Beyond the pool of illegal immigrants, there are millions of legal immigrants who are becoming the new middle class of California. As Kotkin again points out, the ten most common names of homebuyers in California include Lee, Nguyen, Garcia, Rodriguez, Martinez and Wong. In Orange County among new homebuyers, the Nguyens outnumber the Smiths by two to one.
Our experiment with cultural diversity can set a powerful example to the world with California becoming a new center of trade and commerce. But we can do so only by utilizing the energy represented by our diversity, not by perpetuating the politics of fear. Kotkin, quoting the French historian Fernand Braudel, reminds us that historically "commerce grows wherever the spirit of tolerance convenes."
The third message of my dream is that work in the future must restore the California environment instead of destroying it.
We spend billions annually simply for the fossil fuels wasted and hours lost while we are stalled in freeway traffic. We use up and throw away packaging that lasts 400 years in a landfill in order to keep products on supermarket shelves so we can eat them in two minutes. We risk our life savings on medical bills while the U.S. Centers for Disease Control says that over half of the diseases in America are preventable.
The best thinker on this subject in California is Paul Hawken, author of The Ecology of Commerce. California alone produces five percent of the emissions creating global warming. As Hawken writes, "we indulge in a blowout sale of hydrocarbons."
We are adrift between the petrochemical age and the Ecological Age. We need to return California to the global environmental leadership that began under Jerry Brown. Just 20 years ago utility companies were forecasting the need for 40 new nuclear power plants. Those wild fantasies were put to rest by visionary leadership. We have saved billions of dollars as a result utilities today have invested in conservation, renewable resources and clean car programs which their management would have rejected as mad environmentalism only a few years ago.
As I have proposed, we need to go further and faster. We need to build a clean car and clean transportation industry in California by enforcing the clean air mandate and wisely spending the $163 billion in transit funds that our voters have generously approved.
We need to reduce the consumption of energy by at least 50 percent in the next 50 years. Energy efficiency creates four times the jobs as building new power plants. We will never become "competitive" with Japan or Germany while we waste twice the energy they do per dollar's worth of production.
We need to see the potential of jobs in telecommunications to improve the quality of life and reduce the pollution and stress of commuting. Internet is growing at a rate or 15 percent each month; at the present rate it will have 700 million people on-line in the year 2000. The number of telecommuters in the U.S. has increased from 4 million to 8.3 million since 1990. Half the California workforce could telecommute at least part of their time. Not only is it good for people to work in their home or nearby, but the savings to employers are estimated at $8,000 per employee.
We also need to employ people in a dramatic expansion of health care services. Medical equipment is one of our fastest growing industries, and nursing is a growth occupation of the future. More important, we will need primary care and geriatric specialists and a while variety of "alternative" approaches to wellness.
An alternative agriculture based on organic diversity and sustainability is beginning to develop in California. According to the National Academy of Sciences, the loss of genetic diversity in our food system represents the single greatest threat to our food supply, a repetition on a global scale of the 19th century Irish potato famine that propelled my ancestors to this country. The narrow band of favored hybrid seed stocks favored by traditional agribusiness relies on high inputs of petrochemical fertilizers which have radically degraded the "ecological capitol" of our soil and the promotion of genetic diversity are necessary to our survival and sustainability.
Tourism employs ten percent of the global workforce. California can no longer assume that its position as a global tourism magnet will go unchallenged. Without restoring our environment and turning our diversity into a strength, however, we will continue to see travelers choosing other destinations, as long as they hear reports of California's polluted coastlines.
The transition to the Ecological Era is beginning. There are 70,000 new environmental businesses in America, largely without support from government or the tax structure. Our entire tax structure needs to be overhauled in the direction of "green taxes" in the coming decade. Currently we tax people on their income or payrolls, while we subsidize gas-guzzling cars, throwaway consumption and toxic pollution. California is on of the few states that does not even have a severance tax on its dwindling supplies of oil. We need to stop taxing people for using their personal energy at work and start taxing people for wasting finite fossil fuel energy.
The fourth message of my dream is that we cannot achieve the great transition to an educated, multicultural, ecological society without ending the Machiavellian politics of the Special Interest State.
For 500 years, as my friend Matthew Fox points out, Western politics has been in the thrall of Machiavelli's advice to the prince on governing the nation-state. Machiavelli's advice was that politics is not about justice but about interests. "The fact is," Machiavelli wrote, "that a (politician) who wants to act virtuously in every way necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous."
It is noteworthy that Daniel Bell, who in the 1960s wrote a book extolling the "end of ideology" as a source of stability, has now written that corruption and greed are the deepest problems facing democracy after the Cold War. "In almost every society, the distrust of the political order and of politicians is rising, often feeding reactionary forces that seek to channel the resentments of a population into religious fundamentalism or rising nationalism," Bell writes. Machiavellian politics, based on the primacy of means over ends, is creating the conditions of its own demise by breeding deepening public distrust.
Nevertheless, Machiavelli's counsel to use deception, guile and appearances has reached a manipulative crescendo in modern politics where candidates raise money from interest groups and shamelessly merchandise themselves in 30 second advertisements to voters.
Special interests act as parasites sapping the vitality of democratic government. They deter any focus on the future with their incessant demands for favoritism in the present. For example, the oil industry has spent $18 million on campaigns and lobbying in California since 1991, largely attempting to thwart any shift towards renewable resources or alternative forms of transportation. The tobacco industry spends more money in California than anywhere else, in a relentless campaign to prevent Californians from quitting smoking. The tax structure is riddled with more tax loopholes for interest groups than the budget for education.
It is no wonder that so many modern candidates and their slogans seem to clone and blur, so after preaching trickledown economics combined with law-and-order. They favor more tax breaks to business, oppose any loophole closures, and all favor the "three strikes" law which will cost $20 billion. Few seem to notice that tens of billions of dollars in tax breaks for the past 20 years have left our schools underfunded at 41st in the U.S., and that a quadrupling of our prison population from 28,000 to 140,000 has done little to reduce violent crime.
One fundamental reason for this cloning is the common dependency candidates have on campaign contributions from the interest groups of the status quo. Quite simply, candidates tend to think like the contributors from whom they raise money, and those contributors are more interested in borrowing from the future than investing in it.
But a state dominated by deceit and interest-group favoritism becomes dysfunctional during a time of sweeping global change. The historian Barbara Tuchman describes this process as "the march to folly," when rulers become addicted to old ways despite clear evidence of the need for reform. This decay and dysfunction is what we are witnessing from Sacramento to Washington.
Since the 1960s the cynical politics of Machiavelli's state have been opposed by a very different politics based in spiritual and moral concerns, based on telling the truth rather than manipulation, on participatory democracy rather than placating interest-groups.
Nothing less than a paradigm shift in politics is occurring as the centralized structures of the nation-state, of public and private bureaucracy, and of the industrial corporation fine themselves undermined by democratic revolts, by decentralized information technologies, and by the emergence of the environmental crisis.
We have seen the creative power of civil rights, women's and environmental movements make progress against the institutional power of state and corporate bureaucracies time after time.
The effort to achieve campaign reform and lobbying reform is not simply about limiting contributions and tinkering with disclosure forms. It is about awakening the power of citizens to have meaningful lives.
We have seen the beginning of a spiritual force in politics in the powerful global role of the Dalai Lama and the democratic revolutions in South Africa and Czechoslovakia which elected former political prisoners Nelson Mandela and Vaclav Havel as presidents of their transformed nations.
The alternative to Machiavellian politics is what Havel calls "living in the truth," a politics based on a compassionate spiritual connectedness with other human beings, the whole earth, and the mystery of the universe itself. Understanding that each human being is subjective and unique means that we must reject the bureaucratic mentality that reduces individuals to replaceable cogs in government's machinery.
This politics is not about maintaining incumbency four the Prince, but about service, about aligning government with the needs of people and the planet.
It is a remarkable irony that Richard Nixon was buried during the same week that Nelson Mandela was elected president of South Africa.
Richard Nixon was the leading symbol of Machiavelli's creed in our time. He built the Watergate State, a web of interest-group intrigue designed to perpetuate an elite in power. In Nixon's global vision, Nelson Mandela was a hapless political prisoner whose fate was unimportant compared to the larger interest of preserving South Africa as a "strategic asset" of American foreign policy. For Nixon, South Africa was about gold, diamonds and anti-communism, not about the oppression of humanity.
Nixon could not imagine that the soul of Nelson Mandela in a cell on Robben Island would prove more powerful than the police forces and atomic arsenal of the South African state.
The Sixties was about greater enfranchisement and political reform, but it was also about defending the human soul against mutilation and denial.
The final message of my dream is that we must realize that life is not about conquering other people or other frontiers, but about finding meaning in our own lives.
The California saga, in its negative sense, has been about escaping other places to conquer new frontiers. In treating other people, and the land itself, as alien objects to be possessed and "developed," the frontier mentality can leave behind a trail of forgotten people and ruined landscapes.
The human price of our economic statistics should never be forgotten. Every one percent of unemployment in America, for example, is linked with 10,000 divorces.
For the majority who work, the price is similarly high. We seem to be always speeding up our lives and working harder in a futile attempt to fine time for ourselves. We take unprecedented quantities of drugs in an effort to cope. The seven leading legal drugs in America include three for hypertension, two for ulcers, and two for cholesterol and angina.
The average working person has only 16 hours of leisure time each week, down from 26 hours only 20 years ago. With less time for ourselves, and less time for our children, is it any wonder that we are drowning in pathologies of desperation?
But there is a positive alternative to the frontier treadmill. It is the alternative of realizing that we are "at home," the alternative of staying put, the alternative of the inner frontier within our own lives and our own communities. To practice what Jefferson called "ward government." To become "happier and better," in Lord Bryce's words. To be about "the politics of meaning," as Tikkun Magazine would say.
Now that the old frontiers are becoming exhausted, the agenda of the inner frontier calls us to be present. The question before California is that posed by Rodney King during the violence of 1992, "can't we all just get along?"
Our destiny depends on how well we answer that question. If we remain in the grip of old answers and old politics, we will fail. If we embrace a new politics of the spirit, we can realize a new California dream. As Emerson wrote, "When Nature has work to do, she creates a genius to do it."
Excerpted from remarks made before the Commonwealth Club
San Francisco, May 16, 1994 |
Tom Hayden is national co-director of No More Sweatshops!, a coalition of labor, clergy, community and campus advocates of "sweat-free" guidelines on public procurement and enforceable labor standards for corporate behavior.
