the public mind - a difficult matter, we will have to come at it from many directions

I am going to begin by suggesting the somewhat radical idea that in terms of ideals, service is not only a higher goal than Peace, but one more concretely achievable.  Moreover, I have in mind service to the public mind.  The question then naturally arises: What is that?  You see, Peace is a goal that is centered on the values of the activist, while service is a goal that is centered on the social other.   It is not what I want to achieve, but what service can I offer, from I to Thou.

The public mind is clearly something difficult to take hold of in a concrete way, although many people have at least a naive idea of what it might be.  It is, at least, the way we think as a whole - as a collective of individuals.  We have, for example, the idea of: "the court of public opinion".  We know that some lawyers "try their cases in the press".  Certainly one of the basic political skills involves creating advantageous images in the public mind of one's candidates or issues.

Celebration and Theater, or in the old style, political activism in the sense of protests, all involves trying to effect the public mind.

We ought, however, to be able to be more precise - more exact.  Each of us as individuals thinks and has our own values.  We may be part of a small community of shared values.  Perhaps we are Catholic and share with other Catholic's certain views on abortion.  Or, perhaps we own guns, and share with the National Rifle Association membership certain views on the Second Amendment.

If one is both a Catholic and a gun owner, do these values work together, or would there be a problem?  I raise this question, not to solve it, but to suggest that whatever the public mind is, it is some a bit more complicated in its reality than any one view of any one issue.

Perhaps the public mind is not so much a thing, like an individual mind, but rather a social process.  We each have our individual views, but the totality of these views, in the sense that there is wholeness to it, is something considerably different from individual thinking.  Perhaps mind is not quite the best word.

Let's try another term.  Suppose we say something like: heart of the community. Now that term suggests other characteristics and qualities.  An event like the bombing in Oklahoma City, or the 9/11 tragedy - these evoke something in the heart of the community, something much more like a force than a thought.

Perhaps Celebration and Theater have more kinship with that - with heart - than with mind.  It is not about what you think so much, but what you feel.  In this case, perhaps again, thought follows feeling to a degree.

Now clearly despots and dictators have used (and abused) their citizens frequently in ways designed to fool the heart, and to drive away reason from the mind.  A mob, for example, is a kind of mindless heart, in which something was broken and now it only knows rage, for reason has fled.

Certainly another political skill involves capturing the mind via the heart - using emotion to drive thinking in a certain direction.

But suppose we went another way - not politics but statecraft.  Suppose we wanted: heart filled reason in the community mind?  How is that accomplished?

Well, it seems to me that the only way to do that is to begin by honoring something in the community mind.  Our intention can't be to capture it or to force it in a certain direction, but rather to respect it.

Perhaps the first act is to understand it - to have empathy toward it.

Imagine for a moment that the community mind is a kind of fiction, a necessary fiction perhaps, but not quite true.  What we have is individual minds, and hearts, which occassionally move in the same direction.  Sometimes this movement is manipulated, such as what advertising (both commercial and political) seeks to do.  But suppose the ideal was not to manipulate the movement in the same direction, but rather to aid the free acts by which the individuals choose to move in the same direction.

Suppose that in our honoring and empathy we discover that beneath the surface differences in individual ideas and values lies something shared.  Suppose that our common humanity is actually stronger than our moods and thoughts of the moment.  Suppose that we share, at a deeper level, matters far superior in nature to the superficial differences we take as the norm.

Suppose that in our human essence we are more alike than we are different.

Now wouldn't it be wonderful if Celebration and Theater, Art and Rite, tragedy and comedy and activism and wisdom could perform the service of connecting us to one another at this deeper human level, in spite of all our superficial differences.

Such an act of service is an act of generousity and love, which places the social needs of the whole above the values of the activist group.  Moreover, both the activist group and the community heart are trapped inside the same paradigm, in a certain kind of way. Each has thoughts and beliefs about the nature of the political process, how it ought to work, and what its goals should be, and many elements of the whole fight over what they perceive are their differences.

Now we already live in a political situation created by the activities of a collective of activist groups.  These groups were mainly oriented to the values of the Christian Right, and in cooperation with certain right-wing elements of the Republican Party, were able to leverage their personal agendas into positions of power and authority.  Basically they didn't serve the community heart at all, but rather only their own social agenda.

If the evolving Citizen Governance movement follows this pattern it will only lead to more division within our society, not less.  The essential act is to sacrfice personal values (or perhaps to place a greater value on service, than on one's own agenda) in favor of working for the good of the whole.

Celebration and Theater, Art and Rite, tragedy and comedy, activism and wisdom - all in service to the heart of the community.  Now don't you think we really already share the desire for that?  Our next question is: What would that mean in practice?