Why our politics needs to be more spiritual

The prevailing popular mood is one of unreflective spiritual confusion. Modern news stories are awash with religious references, but the commentary on broader spiritual perspectives, experiences and practices is relatively underdeveloped.

For instance, the Pope reaches beyond the faithful in his calls for action on climate change, but where is the language of fear, guilt, hope, and existential threat that underpins climate concern? Our bishops call for greater political imagination, to connect our inner and outer lives, but beyond Russell Brand’s oblique hopes for revolution, where are the suggested forms of life that go beyond religious doctrine? And we rightly ask in what sense Islamic State is Islamic, but can we meaningfully respond to barbaric acts of violence without a more open discussion about the darker aspects of our own nature?

Outside of religious institutions, which no longer speak on behalf of the majority, we do not seem to be equipped to explore the full depth and range of human experience. We are spiritually confused in the sense that we struggle to think and talk coherently about the things that are most deeply important to us, for instance whom and what we love, what makes us well up with pride or sorrow, and the fact that we’ll die. That such fundamental features of life seem private or niche is precisely the problem. Tapping into the motivations and values expressed through such experience and reflection may be central to any serious attempt to reorient society. The actor Michael Sheen is not alone in considering the perpetual policy tweaks that now pass for politics as “a morass of bland neutrality.”

The RSA, an organisation which generally focuses on more conventional public policy topics such as enterprise, education and city growth, has recognised this challenge in a new report called Spiritualise. The report focuses on ways to revitalise our understanding and appreciation of spirituality to enrich 21st century political debate, but resists calls for spirituality to be viewed as a new hammer in an old toolbox, to hit established nails on the head. Those who are too quick to ask what exactly spirituality is, and how exactly it is going to help create new policy agendas are in fact perpetuating the problem and missing the point.

The continued neglect of the spiritual in modern society is not benign because it serves to suppress and stigmatise intellectual resources that are not reducible to clear goals, precise definitions, and repeatable measurements. Reappraising the spiritual is precisely about challenging the hegemony of technocratic thinking, and making public debate less instrumental in nature. Once you realise that questions of meaning, the sacred and transcendence are not exclusively the provenance of religion, it becomes obvious that they should be a bigger part of political life.

In his classic text, Self Awakened, the distinguished political philosopher Roberto Unger puts it like this: “If spirit is a name for the resistant and transcending faculties of the agent, we can spiritualize society. We can diminish the distance between who we are and what we find outside of ourselves.”

The need to diminish the distance between who we are and what we find outside of ourselves is a great encapsulation of why the spiritual is worth fighting for; both the term ‘spiritual’ as something with profound political relevance, and the metaphor of fighting, of recognising the spiritual is not facile or escapist, but where important human work needs to be done.

According to a 2013 poll by the think tank Theos 59 per cent of British adults believe in “some kind of spiritual being or essence” and nearly a quarter of atheists “believe in a human soul”, but such figures only heighten the sense of spiritual confusion. It’s as if the available languages have become too saturated to convey meaning, and that’s partly because research tools built for scale and media interest are too blunt to capture the intricacies of human experience.

A deeper problem is that our common sense notion of belief as diluted or tentative knowledge does not capture the richer sense of belief as group identification, shared practices and experiential affinity. Beliefs about values and meaning and ultimate reality are not formed or maintained in the same way as our beliefs about basic facts; instead they emerge subtly and unconsciously from social and cultural osmosis.

Those who say spirituality is not about "belief" are therefore only half right, but spirituality remains ambiguously inclusive for good reason. It is not a unitary concept but a signpost for a range of touchstones; our search for meaning, our sense of the sacred, the value of compassion, the experience of transcendence, the hunger for transformation. 

Such touchstones are quintessentially human rather than merely religious, and they are as sought after in a fast moving hyper-connected urbanised world as they are in tranquil village church. For instance, when you consider the ubiquity of "weapons of mass distraction", including adverts and smartphones, being trained to reconnect with your breath through mindfulness meditation is not just about individual peace, but also a wider war for the control of our attention. Drinking alcohol is superficially about relaxing, but it’s more fundamentally about escaping the self, and its incessant internal chatter. Supporting football teams is superficially about entertainment, but it meets a deep need for solidarity and ritual. And what are those moments that we quietly crave, if not glimpses of transcendence?

Spiritual need and expression is perennial, but it manifests according to historical and cultural context, and that context is curiously charged at the moment. As the principal investigator of this two-year RSA project, I noticed that the mere mention of “Spirituality” does curious things to peoples’ facial expressions, dividing people into three main groupings:

"Spiritual swingers" perk up, and their eyes widen, but they sometimes look at you a little too eagerly for comfort. From meditation to massages; mysticism to monasteries, moonshine to mindfulness. They are up for anything, as long it’s “spiritual," and preferably not too “religious."

"Religious diplomats" look at you warmly but somewhat quizzically, because they can’t figure out your true motivation. Are you one of them at heart? Or do you secretly wish to supplant their established ways with something seditious that they don’t fully trust?

"Intellectual assassins" just glare at you as politely as they can. Their look of discomfort borders on disgust and they are the quickest to ask for a definition of the spiritual, but usually with the express purpose of taking it down.

The challenge now is to revitalise the spiritual in a way that is grounded and inclusive; mature enough to keep religious diplomats on board, sophisticated enough to keep intellectual assassins appeased, and politically relevant for modern challenges relating to "bigger than self" problems like terrorism or climate change. In Spiritualise we focus on Love—our need to belong to something other than ourselves, Death—our intermittent awareness of simply being alive, Self- our path of becoming through self-integration and self-transcendence, and Soul—our sense of wholeness and beyondness, experienced through the beautiful and the sublime.

The sad thing is that in our general wariness of religion we have outsourced these social, cultural and psychological resources to a crypto-consumerist agenda built on casual identity projects exclusively for "spiritual swingers," characterised by the cleric and journalist Giles Fraser as “religion minus the difficult bits for feckless consumers.” What such critiques overlook however, is that it’s not so much that this kind of marketised spirituality has hijacked religion, but that, while religion was looking the other way, consumerism hijacked spirituality.

Through gradual secularisation in the 18th, 19th and early 20th century, society removed religion from our political economy to try to limit the abuse of power outside of democratic control. Rightly so, but this process caused some collateral damage to the language of intrinsic value. One implication, highlighted by Harvard Professor Michael Sandel is that slowly but surely a society with a market has become a market society. Reconceiving the spiritual is about trying to deal with that corrosive loss of perspective, while also providing deeper perspectives on how to galvanise the requisite conviction to deal with problems like climate change and global wealth inequality that are clearly beyond the reach of any technocratic calculus.

An example of this kind of political language was evident on BBC Question Time in the aftermath of Scotland’s independence referendum. One of the foremost Yes campaigners, the journalist Lesley Riddoch was asked whether it was time to accept the final result and draw a line under the constitutional question. She acknowledged the result but qualified that with a remark that went much deeper: “The level of activism, the commitment, the imagination, the friendship, the camaraderie…It was the best year of my life; from the point of view of the humanity and optimism that was generated. If you were a part of that… It’s so precious, it’s so unusual, that you really feel you do not want to see that go. Particularly younger people, older people, people in Estates, people who are not usually involved.” Regardless of one’s view of the outcome, this statement captures the spirit of diminishing distance between self and society that Unger emphasised, and which should be at the heart of democratic renewal.

In a society that has been called Christian, post Christian, multi-faith, spiritually plural, secular, post-secular and post-religious we need a much better public discussion about the spirituality we share. It is time to reorient that discussion away from what we can never really know about our place in the universe, towards what we can know, and experience, about ourselves.