Remembering Rabbi Michael Lerner's "Caring Society."

Care for others was central to Lerner's Tikkun Magazine and Network of Spiritual Progressives

Rabbi Michael Lerner and Chuck Watts at Public Banking Conference, San Francisco, California, 2013.

Welcome back, subscribers to the Empathy Surplus Network USA Substack. We are a progressive 501c3 nonpartisan, membership-driven human rights empathy education collective. We want to know what our individual and organizational members are most proud of that helped the most people. We use the latest brain science communication insights from George Lakoff to assist members in making empathy central to constant public discourse on human rights issues affecting their communities. We then partner with them over the years to strengthen the commitment of their stakeholders to the duty to care for each other’s freedom and human rights. Join us at https://proempathy.us/join.

This post is in preparation for the Empathy Surplus Network USA Zoom Forum. We will discuss The Little Blue Book and use our Pro-Empathy Freedom Framing Toolkit.

Welcome. I care about you just because you are a human being. That’s how I remember care-wing Rabbi Michael Lerner’s opening remarks at a Public Banking Conference in the Bay Area in 2013. He tirelessly promoted care for humanity to cruel-wing conservatives. 

For Lerner, care was the moral foundation for public banking, which public banking advocates would do well to repeat. My friendly acquaintance, the founder of Tikkun magazine and the Network of Spiritual Progressives, which focused on the politics of care, died on August 28. He was 81. 

Promoting a caring society

Care is the moral foundation of a caring society, a term I learned from Lerner at that conference. Without care, nurturing families falter, and democracy makes no sense. However, it is with empathy, the soul of democracy, that citizens exercise their duty to care for others' freedoms.

The legal concept of the duty to care appeared in English law in 1760.

Care for others was and is central to Jesus's Great Commandment. Divorcing ourselves from King George III's lack of care for American white males was central to the US Declaration of Independence. After World War II, the United Nations made the duty to care for all human beings the central message of its Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 

Progressives must get better at applying science-based communication.

So why can’t progressives in our seven caring institutions of nurturing families, government, education, religion, business, the media, and arts and entertainment unite around our core value of empathy? Why can't our progressive elected representatives and candidates proclaim our care for one another every day? It’s a peculiar progressive problem that we can and should address. 

Conservatism’s moral hierarchy rejects the legal concept of caring for everyone just because we’re human. This is why human rights have yet to be protected by the rule of law in the United States. Elizabeth Wehling and George Lakoff, in their book The Little Blue Book, remind us that we are all morally complex and that even mostly progressively biased people have conservative biases in some areas of their lives. 

Lakoff and Wehling teach us that brains are structured with cascades, where many brain circuits are linked within a network of neurons and are triggered by language and experience. Progressive cascades inhibit conservative cascades and vice versa. Consequently, our job as progressives is to apply this science-based communication to make empathy central to constant public discourse.