Talk about framing: Lakoff mentions Rachel Maddow above and I’m a huge fan of hers, watch every night after work while I prepare and eat dinner. So last night VP Biden’s economic advisor is on defending Obama’s new proposed “spending freeze.” Maddow eviscerates him (see transcript) for using this framing, that it’s a betrayal of the President’s principles for helping our economic disaster. It’s just more of the same of him trying to frame things in a way to win back those dissatisfied independents that voted in a Republican Senator to fill Kennedy’s vacant seat. Meanwhile, as Lakoff notes above, it only further serves to alienate his true base, like Maddow. The latter makes it clear that no matter how Obama frames it, even in terms approved by conservatives (like a spending freeze), they will oppose it regardless. It’s not just the frame but who frames it that matters.

So why is Obama continuing to try to win support from those that will never, ever give it? Why not just hammer your moral stake in the ground for what you truly believe and damn who likes it or not? Ah, but then it wouldn’t be “political,” would it? Again I ask why not? What the hell makes being political devoid of sticking up for your morals? Or trying to please everyone for a vote? You cannot negotiate with terrorists, or Republicans, so why waste more time with them?

Part of this goes to the integral notion of preaching to your audience, changing your message for different people depending on their understanding. But when your mass audience is the “American people,” all over the political, economic and religious spectrum there is no one framing that will appeal to them all. You’re going to have to pick your core constituency and reinforce them or lose them. Even those terrorist conservatives know this and gear their frame accordingly. Damned liberals are stupid sometimes.

But is Obama even a liberal? It would appear not, just another two-faced politician corrupted by the system and willing to say anything to maintain power. And he is apparently not doing that very well either.

Maddow last night praised Obama for all the acheivements he’s made so far with the economy. She showed how the number of new unemployed has gone down steadily, and how the GDP has gone up steadily, since he took office. She showed how stimulus spending created new jobs and prevented other jobs from being lost. Then she asked: So why is he now switching plans mid-stream with this spending freeze idea? Why, since he’s marched down the field and is on the one-yard line, is he going to punt with 1st and goal?

Maddow had on economist Galbraith who agreed that now was the exact worst time to change the plan with a spending freeze. No one could see a good rationale for it and it was concluded it was a symbolic, political gesture, a “framing” that would be suitable for O’s conservative opponents. This is exactly what McCain proposed, which idea was soudly rejected in the voting booth. But again O is trying to appease not only conservatives but the angry American mobs who voted for a Republican in the MA Senate election. O must be getting advice that he needs to sound more conservative to win back these disgruntled common folk. But Maddow showed numerous polls of exactly those MA constituents casting their vote for the Republican. They still favored things like the public option in healthcare. They still favored Obama’s performance. They still favored stimulus spending. So who the hell is advising the big O to frame this way? It’s not going to appeal even to its target audience and certainly will piss off his base and the conservatives.

It’s time to hire Lakoff to learn how to spin properly. It’s time to get out Geitner and Summers and bring in Reich & Krugman, taking not only a policy but a moral stand on proper economic behavior. At least moving it in the right direction. Listen up big O.

When I wanted to post this I didn’t know in which forum to place it. It almost seems like politics isn’t a “spiritual” issue in the integral world. And yet as Lakeoff makes clear, a key reason liberals are losing the political battle is because they do not recognize the moral implications of the issues. And morality has always been a key ingredient in the spiritual domain. We might even say that politics and business suffer from a lack of properly infused morality into its practice.

There are a lot of directions I’d like to go with morality but for now I want to focus on why it seems to be an unconscious avoidance in the integral community. A strong case can be made that the political arena, public policy, is where the rubber of spirituality meets the road, where we put our moral beliefs into practice in shaping policies that help others. So I have to ask why enacting law to help others seems like anathema in integral circles? How many get politically involved in supporting legislation? In writing their representatives? In campaigning for a candidate that embodies their spiritual ideals? It almost seems like political activism is considered a MGM activity and that we need to focus on business, specifically, selling business our model.

Another aspect is that spiritual for much of the integral community is achieving particular states of consciousness, a very individual and narcissistic affair. To wit our discussion in the enlightenment as commodity thread, where it’s just another possession to notch our belt of positive achievements. Yes, so-called compassion is part of the mix, but only in helping others to meditate to achieve their own blissful states of consciousness. God forbid that we should actually work to change the economic or political systems that enslave people externally. That might actually create conditions whereby people would have the time and energy to meditate to have enlightenment states of consciousness.

Again it goes to the power of the unconscious influences of political and economic systems in which we are embedded. In my comments on Patten in the integral capitalism thread I commended him for recognizing how ads affect us in this way; despite our claims to be conscious of them they influence us nonetheless. And yet he and many of us, me included, fail to recognize how our political and economic systems do so even much more insidiously. Even to the point where we tend to ignore these systems in our quest for spiritual attainment, as if the latter exists in vacuum of empty space disconnected from these bases. In Lakoffian terms, it doesn’t even enter our frame.

So here the topic sits, in a pub. I suppose we can connect a drunken state to an enlightenment state easier than we can to a political-economic state?

Patten acknowledges that most ads operate on an unconscious level “even though we think we are aware of them and disregarding their influence.” That’s been one of my consistent points about capitalism, that even though we think we’re conscious of its exploitation and can fix it with an integral attitude we nonetheless, by participating in its enaction, unconsciously maintain that inherent exploitation.

Patten does recognize that corporations’ interests “are often (although not always) different from the best interests of the country as a whole, and too often unprincipled.” But he then offers this apology: “It’s not the job or the nature of corporations to lead us to an optimal political future.” And why is it not the job of corporations to create pubic as well as private good within principles of civic responsibility? What makes business immune from this?

Patten seems to give corporations a pass by noting “many corporate leaders are quite enlightened.” Recall David Loy* relating this to the good slave owner rationale. It doesn’t matter if the slave owner is a nice guy, even an enlightened guy, slavery is wrong. As is capitalism, at least in this time and place for a supposed elevated integral consciousness.

I’m glad Patten didn’t ignore the issue, and he made some of my own points. But he still seems to think to get at the root of the problem, for-profit corporate capitalism, is “left-wing-style condemnation of greedy malicious corporate villainy,” implying that it must surely be a mean green meme response. This integral notion that we can make nice with corps and their Republican cronies is the same mistake Obama has made. We should not, and cannot, negotiate with an outdated system like slavery or capitalism to improve it. Some things really need to go the way of the dodo.

By not confronting this Patten & Co continue to not heed his own advice about ads. They continue to brush it under the carpet of awareness, continue to proceed “even though we think we are aware of it and disregarding its influence.”

* Here’s the previous post quoting excerpts from David Loy’s essay “Can corporations become enlightened?” in The Great Awakening: A Buddhist Social Theory, Wisdom Publications 2003:

The system has attained a life of its own. We all participate in this process…yet with little or no sense of moral responsibility for what happens, because such responsibility has been diffused so completely that it is lost in the impersonality of the corporate economic system.

One might argue…that there are good corporations….The same argument can be made for slavery, there were some good slave owners…. This does not refute the fact that slavery was intolerable…. And it is just as intolerable that today the earth’s limited resources are being allocated primarily according to what is profitable to transnational corporations.

My Buddhist conclusion is that transnational corporations are defective economic institutions due to the basic way they are structured…. It is difficult to see how…they can be simply patched up to make them better vehicles for our economic needs. We need to consider whether it is possible to reform them in some fundamental way…or whether they should be replaced by other economic and political institutions (100-01).

Theurj said:

Wilber himself has commented on Marx, for example in Excerpt A, Part III, Page 1. He shows how certain worldviews are enacted within specific techno-economic bases, capitalism arising with the industrial era. It could be argued that the latest informational base arises within the so-called peer-to-peer worldview. He acknowledges that the base transforms much faster than the societal worldview and “that spells disaster” since the old worldviews loathe changing to accommodate it. Perhaps most importantly, Wilber agrees with Marx that “it is not the consciousness of men that determines their reality but their economic-material realties that determine their consciousness.” That is, the economic base is the strongest influence for most people in shifting their worldviews upward. To continue to support outdated capitalistic economic bases, even an upgraded “integral” capitalism, instead of the peer-to-peer worldview relevant and its concomitant economic base indeed “spells disaster.”

Joseph said:

Thanks for the reference to Adorno. This is a pretty sophisticated analysis of what I’ve been groping at intuitively. That “spirituality’s inherent values have been co-opted into a dominant form of commercialization endemic to our socio-economic system”.

One of the primary reasons I’m taken with the Emergent Christian scene is that they have consciously cultivated a narrative that to truly follow the teachings of Jesus one must resist the Empire of global capitalism. They’re big fans of Wendell Berry and others who critique the global economy. My friend Mark Scandrette teaches very practical workshops on living simply in a financially responsible way, & cultivating awareness of how our spending habits effect others in the world. I’ve seen him stand up in front of a roomful of middle class evangelicals and point out to them that the coffee & chocolate they consume are likely produced by child slave labor.

I liked what you wrote about Spirit Rock center operating primarily on the principle of dana. And I wholeheartedly agree with you that being responsible with how we participate in the economic system is the only effective way to begin to change it.

I does bother me that in TN, the cost of keeping an inmate incarcerated costs on average $63,000.00 per year. A Fentress county female teacher was recently sentenced to 12 years for having consentual sex with a 17 year old boy. That will cost the TN taxpayers 3/4 million dollars, because of the CONSENTUAL sex act. Bear in mind, that the state of TN is contemplating the early release of actual murderers, rapists, thieves, and drug dealers, because there isn’t money in the state budget to keep them incarcerated!!! How bad does this situation have to get before someone wakes up and demands a change in these archaic, ignorant laws???

Moral Outrage is http://www.moraloutrage.net/index.php?topic=General

Thanks for your article.

Capitalism also tends to reduce all spheres to that of exchange value. In Wilbespeak it becomes a dominating paradigm, applying its own injunctions onto all other paradigms. Therefore even in paradigms such as philosophy and religion the primary value is commodity exchange. Adorno calls this process reification.

So this thread sees the obvious expression of commodified spirituality in Hamilton and Wilber, how spirituality’s inherent values have been co-opted into a dominant form of commercialization endemic to our socio-economic system. We talked earlier in the aesthetics thread about how the artist is often unaware and embedded within their cultural context, and how this context will find expression within the art itself. And so it is with the commification of spirituality. And along with this process is the very real but hidden enactions inherent in capitalism, the same reduction of all values spheres to the marketplace. And perhaps even more importantly, the same reduction of the consumer to buying another product to mask their economic suffering within a system that perpetuates an unjust distribution of wealth based on the profit motive. In this case the product is “enlightenment,” which within this context only serves to keep us enslaved in a corrupt system. Yes, I’m poor and malnourished and cannot afford to buy needed clothing, but I’m enlightened god damn it and that’s all that matters.

We discussed in the integral capitalism thread that buying into capitalism is not a given; there are real-life alternatives already in existence, alternatives that do not perpetuate such injustice. Alternatives that arguably come from a more complex, developmental worldview. But by continuing to financially support those “integral” institutions that do not seek out such alternatives, and themselves unconsciously buy into less complex, developmental worldviews that support such injustice, we continue to maintain such systems. At the very least we should take the responsibility to admit what we are doing, to become conscious when we spend our dollars this way. And perhaps commit to doing better in the future?