MICHAEL LERNER
I was startled recently by an article Rabbi Michael Lerner ran at his lefty magazine, Tikkun on the Templeton Foundation funding a Pew survey that determined Jews are better educated than Christians, and even better educated than Buddhists and so much better educated than Muslims and Hindus. So I rang up Michael Lerner, whose activism dates back to the late Sixties when he was chair of SDS - Berkeley (Students for a Democratic Society), and I asked him why he thought Templeton would fund this type of profiling, with ethnic and religious tensions now at a crescendo.
Aside from Michael Lerner’s current role as editor-in-chief of Tikkun magazine, he serves as rabbi of Beyt Tikkun synagogue in Berkeley, California. His PhD is in philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of 11 books, including one with Cornel West. Michael Lerner is no doubt America’s most provocative rabbi.
Our recent interview follows.
Suzan Mazur: Is your approach to religion non-dogmatic?
Michael Lerner: No, it’s very dogmatic -- it’s about love. Love of neighbors, love of strangers (the “other,” whoever that might be in whatever society one is living). The magazine I founded, called Tikkun, which means “healing and transforming” the world, stems from a central concept of Judaism—that it is our task to heal and repair the world through the power of love.
Suzan Mazur: You have an enormously interesting biography, particularly for a rabbi. You chaired SDS -- Berkeley in the late Sixties and later organized the Seattle Liberation Front and you were indicted by the federal government for organizing what turned out to be a militant anti-war demonstration. You became friends with Muhammad Ali through your anti-war activism and long before he died he designated you to give a eulogy at his memorial service. You’re the author of 11 books, appear on television talk shows and have an influential following as editor of Tikkun magazine and rabbi of Beyt Tikkun synagogue. Cornel West is one of the co- founders of Tikkun’s Network of Spiritual Progressives and Henry Giroux is one of the members of your editorial advisory board. Why do you suppose NASA in collaboration with the Templeton Foundation and the Center of Theological Inquiry did not reach out to you with some of the nearly $3M in funding regarding the societal implications of astrobiology? The money all went to Christian theologians.
Michael Lerner: Well I’m sorry that they have not been open to many Jewish theologians to my knowledge. I have myself made inquiries about some of our projects to see if they have any interest in them. Basically I’ve received zero response.
Suzan Mazur: Zero response from the Center of Theological Inquiry or Templeton or NASA?
Michael Lerner: From Templeton. I’m disappointed that Templeton has not been more interested in the kinds of creative thinking we do at Tikkun and the projects we’ve suggested to them having to do with promoting progressive voices in the religious and spiritual worlds.
Suzan Mazur: Many now view NASA approaching the Center of Theological Inquiry via Templeton with this inquiry about how their communities would respond to the discovery of extraterrestrial life as a ploy by NASA for more Congressional funding because after two years, the public has seen no results from the investigation and an FOIA was filed by concerned parties regarding the matter. Those associated with the publicly-funded project are not talking. They’re not giving interviews and the secrecy does not look good. Would you comment?
Michael Lerner: On the one hand we’ve got the politics of the situation. I understand that to be that there are people in the religious fundamentalist communities who believe life on some other planet would be a challenge to their interpretation of the Bible and the centrality of human life on this planet as the major intent of the God of the universe.
Those of us in the religious world who don’t share that fear are not going to be particularly concerned about there being research on extraterrestrial life.
Now is there extraterrestrial life? Who knows. It seems a plausible focus for scientific research. There is nothing in our Torah that categorically denies life on other planets in other parts of our universe.
Suzan Mazur: I’ve reported that there are a significant number of scientists at NASA who don’t think we’ll find life anywhere else in the solar system. Plus there is no scientific consensus yet on what life even is. So the $3M in funding to this NASA/Templeton/CTI project looks suspect.
Michael Lerner: It seems there’s a distinction between whether the topic is a reasonable topic for scientific inquiry and whether it’s a reasonable focus for public funding. I think we should be directing our research in ways that could improve the life support system on this planet, which from my understanding of the science seems to be in danger of being destroyed in the next 100 – 200 years, if not a lot sooner, unless we change our human behavior.
Suzan Mazur: You’ve said the following:
“Americans hunger for a different kind of society . . . their need for meaning is just as intense as their need for economic security” and that the “focus on money and power may do wonders in the marketplace but it creates a tremendous crisis in our society. People who have spent all day learning how to sell themselves and to manipulate others are in no position to form lasting friendships or intimate relationships.”
Michael Lerner: I’d like to qualify that. It’s not that they’re in “no position,” but rather a weakened position.
Suzan Mazur: Considering that this American hunger for meaning in life is acute, why would $1.1M in precious government funds be thrown to the opinions of two dozen Christian scholars about how the religious community might respond to the discovery of extraterrestrials?
I understand one of the 2015-2016 NASA/Templeton/CTI religious scholars was advising NASA on how to manipulate space imagery to appeal to the religious community. It smacks of Leni Riefenstahl. The person I’m referring to, by the way, abruptly cancelled an interview with me two weeks ago.
Why won’t the government just communicate that we are stuck on this planet and spend the money to help people deal with that reality?
Michael Lerner: Why they’re doing this is again a political issue. My guess is that there’s a significant segment of the political Right that doesn’t believe there is a significant crisis on this planet and does not take the destruction of the life support system of this planet very seriously. That’s a huge mistake, because preserving the life support system on this planet should be one of the highest priorities of any sane government.
So while one segment of the Religious Right denies the possibility of life on the planet and sees that as inconsistent with its reading of the Bible, another segment of the Right cheers on conversations about creating life on some other planet as a way to avoid making changes in the behavior of global corporations that have systematically undermined the life support system of this planet by polluting the air, land and water.
So the focus on life on another planet -- that we’ll be able to move human life there if we destroy this planet -- is part of the thinking that is promoted by those who don’t want to seriously focus on the kind of transformation of the global economy that is necessary to save this planet. Instead, they support far-fetched inquiries that may be scientifically legitimate but that are ethically and spiritually illegitimate under the actual circumstances.
Suzan Mazur: With ethnic and religious tension at a crescendo do you really find the recent Templeton-Pew Global Religious Futures announcement helpful that Jews are better educated than Christians, and even better educated than Buddhists and so much better educated than Muslims and Hindus?
You ran a piece about this Templeton-Pew survey in your online magazine without really further analysis. Do you view such profiling by Templeton as productive?
Michael Lerner: Not particularly. I ran the article just to show that that kind of research is being done. I don’t think it makes Jews safer on this planet to be pointing out that we’re better educated.
The reason I may have been attracted to the Templeton-Pew information is that I want to help people understand that Jews have not been cheating in some way in the public sphere in order to have a disproportionate amount of jobs where intellectual achievement is a criterion for entrance. It’s that historically, for 2,000 years Jews have been among the most literate of the peoples on earth, giving the highest honors in the Jewish world to our greatest scholars, not to our best military leaders or people who figured out how to make themselves rich.
Jews were among the first to create a society in which everyone could read our holy Bible whereas in some branches of Christianity reading the Bible was explicitly forbidden to those who were not clergy. . . So Jews had a huge advantage when capitalist societies developed and each individual was able to promote herself or himself in the capitalist marketplace.
Before that time, in feudal societies, before Jews were let out of the ghettoes of Europe, most Jews were prohibited from most jobs in Christian societies. They were not allowed to be in any of the guilds in the major ways that people were able to sustain themselves. That’s why Jews ended up having to be traders.
When capitalism opened up the public sphere by no longer requiring one to be Christian in order to get a job in most areas of work, Jews were allowed to participate in selling their skills to the owners of capital. Given their literate heritage, Jews got a disproportionate number of positions like as teachers, social workers, therapists, doctors, lawyers, etc., and that gave to the masses the impression that Jews had been given disproportionate power.
Actually Jews really don’t have so much power. They have positions that are sort of the front, the public appearance of the ruling elite of our society. But it’s the 1% top wealth holders, the ruling elite that makes the decisions and shapes those fields and what’s acceptable and not acceptable. However, when people get unhappy with their lives in Western societies, the ruling elite points the blame at the Jews. . . .
That’s why I ran the Templeton-Pew piece. Jews have this advantage in the competitive marketplace, and so more Jews are going to get into those kinds of positions. But there’s also a disadvantage, which is that when people get angry at the ruling elites, the ruling elite says: Oh, it’s not us, it’s the Jews. Because Jews are the public face of many Western class societies.
Suzan Mazur: Thank you. You’ve said that scientists “understand that the scientific method is appropriate for describing regularities in the natural world, but not for understanding all of reality.” Would you say more about that?
Michael Lerner: I distinguish between science and scientism. Science is a particular kind of practice aimed at trying to understand aspects of the natural world. Its focus is on those aspects that are publicly observable and repeatable and can be measured or can be subject to intersubjective confirmation either through verification or falsification. That’s the legitimate role of science to engage in that kind of activity in understanding the natural world.
Scientism is something else. Scientism is the attempt to take the scientific method, which was developed to understand the natural world, and in particular that part of the natural world that is observable or measurable — take that methodology and apply it to all kinds of other aspects of existence that are not subject to public observation or measurable.
What happened at a certain stage in the development of science was that there were some people who took that methodology and said this isn’t just about the natural world, this is about all of existence, and anything that is real must be measurable or subject to verification or falsification through public observation. Scientism then became a tool to relegate from the public sphere religion, ethics, aesthetics, love, kindness, generosity. They described all these areas of human experience as purely private, arenas of experience that you can have in your personal life but that have no role in the public sphere.
Why did that approach develop in European societies? It developed because in the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries, the public sphere was governed by Christian law and Christian observance. As the new class of merchants, bankers, and artisans began to see themselves as having common interests, they began to feel oppressed by the Church’s demand that workers should be paid “a fair price” for their labor and goods should be sold at “a fair price” in the public sphere. So this new class began to demand reforms and ultimately made revolutions against the feudal order that was supposed by the feudal elite to be God-given and therefore unchangeable.
The rising class (today we called them capitalists) said: We don’t want the Church to limit our ability to accumulate wealth or to force us to pay more to workers than we have to—this limits what should be our freedom to amass wealth. So instead of just arguing about those specifics, this new class embraced a different world view – the scientific world view. They said:
Our world view works. How do we know that? We can show, we can predict the movement of the stars, we can measure the acceleration of gravity when something is falling. We can build wonderful technology and powerful weapons out of our scientific knowledge, We have something that’s real. You religious people or even secular people with ethical ideas have something that’s not observable and not confirmable. Not verifiable or falsifiable. Not measurable! So your stuff is nothing, literally nonsense.
In short, they took the very valuable work of science and turned it into a new ideology, a new belief system — that I call ‘scientism’ — to eliminate or reduce the credibility of anyone who wanted to invoke ethical or spiritual critique of the unequal and oppressive regimes that this new class was creating around the world (though, of course, part of the reason that many people rallied to this new class and order they were creating was because the feudal order had been even more oppressive, keeping people in rigid castes from which almost no one could ever escape).
That word ‘nonsense’ is one that shows the dominance of this scientistic world view. The scientistic world view that says that everything that can be known and everything that is real must either be subject to measurement in principle or be observable and verifiable or falsifiable. At least in principle.
And all the religious stuff and all the ethical stuff and all the aesthetic stuff – that’s not observable or measurable, so it’s not really real. It can’t be known. It’s purely subjective. The subjective has no place in our public sphere, and because that has no place in our public sphere, don’t come and tell me that I can’t make as much money as I want to. Because the one thing that is really observable and measurable is money. So our bottom line is: We’re going to decide what’s efficient, rational and productive behavior based on how much money it produces or how much power it produces.
We spiritual people are now challenging that world view and saying: No wait a second, that’s just another religion. Scientism is another religion.
What do we mean that scientism is another religion? By its own criteria the scientism worldview is not observable, measurable or subject to intersubjective verification or falsification. It’s just another one of those religions.
So we at Tikkun and the Network of Spiritual Progressives respond to the defenders of capitalist versions of “freedom” by saying: You’re entitled to your religion but don’t think you’re on a higher plane than those of us who have a different religion. Your worldview is based on a worldview that simply equates material success with well-being. But that equation turns out to not be true.
Suzan Mazur: Some scientists are attempting to move into the arts and other areas in an effort to improve the arts, etc.
Michael Lerner: That’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with using science in any sphere. I’m a rabbi. I’ve got a synagogue. Certainly if we had enough money to build a building, I’d certainly want scientists to come and people trained in science – engineers and architects – to tell us how to build a building. There’s nothing wrong with having scientific information. I’m not challenging scientific information. I’m challenging scientism, that is, the inappropriate introduction of scientific categories into spheres that are different spheres.
Suzan Mazur: Do you see Templeton as doing this with their funding?
Michael Lerner: My sense is that in Templeton grant-making there has been a blurring of the distinction. I have an impression, because when somebody from our network of spiritual progressives did speak to funders at Templeton, they were told that they would have to do measurements of the outcome of the research that met scientific standards.
I know what that is because I have myself been a scientist in that regard. I was the principal investigator of a major grant from the National Institute of Mental Health. I was asked to do pre-tests, post-tests, post-post-tests, measuring the intervention in terms of its impact on a whole variety of scales, etc. So I know what it is to do that.
That approach is not appropriate for dealing with, for example, the crisis of meaning. The ways that love is threatened by the essence of capitalism.
You can’t measure the love. You can’t measure meaning.
So when you try to force people into that kind of thinking, you’re blurring the boundaries between science and spirituality and religion. You are trying to push the dimension of human life that the Bible refers to as “being created in God’s image” into a rigid cage that essentially squashes precisely what religion and spirituality and ethics have to offer human life, and that is so badly needed in the contemporary world.
Suzan Mazur: The thinking is that the Templeton awards to science — tens of millions annually in science grants — are not really serving science. They’re compromising science and the integrity of scientists accepting the money. A perfect example is the recent Royal Society public conference I attended on new trends in evolutionary science in which 10 of the 26 presenters were associated with an $8M plus grant from Templeton. The conference was seen as a virtual waste of hundreds of thousands of dollars in travel expenses spent by roughly 300 people in the audience who were subjected to a three-day discussion about natural selection and niche construction.
I also attended an origin of life conference at CERN a few years ago that was funded by Templeton that was also a waste of everyone’s time. I attended as an independent journalist. To appease Templeton a session on the “unthinkable” was included involving images thought to be evidence of alien life found in various parts of the world. I walked out of the presentation.
Michael Lerner: There is blurring of a lot of boundaries there. I think this blurring does diminish the work of serious scientists.
Templeton’s efforts would be more productive if it recognized that ethical concerns, spiritual concerns, religious concerns are not the same as scientific concerns. They are separate, in different spheres, based on different foundations. It would benefit humanity far more if Templeton funded those of us who seeking to build an ethically-centered and love-oriented society right here on Earth — before the environmental crisis, and/or irresponsible militaristic, racist, sexist or homophobic leadership, manages to cripple or destroy the life support system that makes human life possible.
I’m not saying that what Templeton is doing is morally evil, but it’s a mistaken approach that ends up pushing people who are doing creative work into an alternative paradigm. It’s a big problem for those of us who are actually interested in healing and caring and transforming the world by building a new criterion of productivity, efficiency and rationality—what we call The New Bottom Line.
Suzan Mazur: Do you think your “Global Marshall Plan” can still work in a world that grows increasingly more crowded and crawling with arms dealers?
Michael Lerner: There’s nothing more needed in the world than to switch from the paradigm that says homeland security is achievable through the United States in alliance with other national entities exercising power and control and domination and that’s the way we will achieve security for ourselves. This paradigm of power, control and domination has been in play for the last 10,000 years and it has not achieved security for anybody. It has only achieved more and more wars and profits for the weapons industries and the already-super-wealthy. The 20th century being the premier example of that in which tens of millions of people died as a result of wars. People are just as insecure today as they were before the 20th century.
So the Global Marshall Plan is based on the contention that we will achieve far more homeland security if we move from a strategy of domination to a strategy of generosity and caring for other people. Will it work in a world where there are so many arms-control people? That is, indeed, the world we’re in and we need to change that world.
Generosity is not just a matter of throwing money to others, though for the 2.5 billion people who try to live on less than $2 a day and who barely survive, it’s an important component. But our Global Marshall Plan is much more sophisticated about ways to be generous.
We don’t have to capitulate to the logic of the militarists. We have to challenge that logic. And we can challenge that logic.
You have to go to a different level – to the level of: What is it that makes people so unhappy? What is it that makes people so miserable that they’re willing to engage in violence and struggle in order to achieve their end?
If you start with that question and ask how do you alleviate that, then the Global Marshall Plan can play an important part not simply by delivering money to people to eliminate poverty, but by validating a different concept of what we as Americans or we in the West are (or ought to be) all about. Namely, not about getting as much as we can for ourselves without regard to the consequences for others, but rather genuinely caring about and loving and respecting people around the world instead of viewing them as a bunch of jerks and idiots.
Many people look at the elites of our society and hear them communicating a very unfortunate message: That we Americans have all the answers and our money gives us the right to dictate, or if not with our money, then our military gives us the right to dictate to them.
We need to approach other non-Western cultures in the spirit of humility: We need to learn from you about the wisdom of your culture, not just you learn from us. Because your cultures have not been as violent and destructive as ours have been in the past two or three hundred years.
So it’s a whole different approach. It’s not “America First” but rather “we are all on this planet in this together, so we need to take care of each other and learn from each other”. And throwing money at the problem is not sufficient to achieve the end. It is a necessary component in terms of ending global poverty, but it will not get us to a level of security until the people in other cultures worldwide actually believe that we care about them, respect them and want to do everything we can to make their lives as good as they possibly can be.
Suzan Mazur: So the government should be investing in this approach to world peace rather than in questionable concerns about the discovery of extraterrestrial microbes?
Michael Lerner: Yes, exactly. It should be funding all of us who want the New Bottom Line that our Network of Spiritual Progressives proposes: judging institutions, corporations, government policies, our education system, and our legal system as “productive,” “efficient” and/or “rational” to the extent that they maximize our human capacities to be loving and caring, kind and generous, ethically and environmentally sensitive, and capable of responding to others as manifestations of the sacred, and responding to the universe with wonder and radical amazement at its grandeur and awesome reality.