Life Beyond Politics

The election is over. The results are in. Half of our country is ecstatic, and the other half is sorely disappointed, if not devastated.

But we must learn to live together and talk to one another again.

We’re going to have to do something we haven’t done well as a society for a long time: look into one another’s eyes and see not an ideological friend or foe, but a fellow human being walking this path alongside us.

Tolstoy suggests something like this at the end of War and Peace through the character of Pierre. He has just returned from Petersburg where he has been trying to unite conservatives and liberals, who are at each others’ throats over the future political direction of the country.

“I don’t say we should oppose this or that. We may be mistaken,” Pierre tells his wife, Natasha. “What I say is: let’s join hands with those who love the good, and let there be one banner—active virtue.”

A Higher Truth

This advice might sound hopelessly naïve, even heretical, to a deeply divided American public in the aftermath of such a consequential election that many on both sides have described in almost apocalyptic terms.

However, the current approach to solving social problems is not working for most of us.

I’ve learned from bitter personal experience that the more wounded or outraged I am, the more convinced I become of the rightness of my position. Those who are just as hurt and angry as I am, and who passionately disagree with me, are equally convinced of the correctness of their political position. We argue, we shout, we disconnect, and seethe in righteous indignation.

When do the cycles of attack and counterattack, rage, and response end?

Only, I believe, when we acknowledge that none of us has a monopoly on the truth, that we are all created in the divine image, and that there are higher human truths that transcend the political altogether.

Again, call me an incorrigible Pollyanna, but I see no other way forward.

A World of Hurt

If there is one thing I have learned from teaching inmates and prosecutors in my Books Behind Bars program, and, more recently, listening to crime victims’ stories, it is that we are all swimming in a great sea of sadness and have been traumatized by life in one way or another.

No wonder so many of us, myself included, have learned to erect self-protective walls.

“Our deepest fears,” the poet Rilke said, “are like dragons guarding our deepest treasures.”

I try to focus on the treasures that lie beneath the words and find out what really matters to people: not what they hate but what they love. When it seems to me at first that someone only knows hate, I contemplate what unhealed trauma in their lives has blocked their capacity to love.

And then I ask myself an even more important question: What unhealed trauma in my own life has blocked my ability to feel that person’s pain and truly hear where they are coming from?

Love in Action

My life’s work has increasingly been dedicated to trying to heal my wounds so that I can then try to build bridges of empathy among others and embody what Uplift, an international organization dedicated to cultivating higher consciousness, calls “Love In Action.”

I strive to model for my students and readers the crucial importance of active listening, bearing witness to one another’s full humanity, and finding compassion in our hearts for those who have made mistakes and those whom society has cast aside.

I have written about beauty and courage and freedom in every respect—physical, spiritual, and emotional—which is one of the cherished dreams of the incarcerated individuals I work with. And not only them, but the prosecutors and especially the victims and their families, as well.

They, too, seek freedom from the prison of their inconsolable sadness and outrage that can make it difficult to forgive and move on with life.

A Different Kind of Intelligence

Through these difficult and sometimes beautiful encounters, I have become convinced that knowledge, information, and even the ability to think critically and argue a point forcefully are no longer enough to solve our most urgent social problems.

Politics won’t save us, either.

We need to cultivate a different kind of intelligence to help us become better human beings and find our way through our current morass: the ability to distinguish between the authentic and the fake, the music and the noise, the life-giving and life-destroying.

The ability to love and practice that love daily.

It is the hardest work I know. As my wife and two boys will tell you, I’ve still got a long way to go. But I cannot think of any more worthwhile task at this moment.

I hope you will join me so we can take this journey together.

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