Pundits keep saying that the big questions before the American public are about the size and role of government: How much is too much? What should it get involved in and what should it stay out of? This strikes me as exactly the kind of debate that global spiritual citizenship calls upon us to transcend.

For one thing, there will never be agreement in principle. Asking how big government should be is not like asking how many calories we should consume or figuring out the maximum size of carry-on luggage. It’s not only unquantifiable, it’s an ever-shifting landscape and the evidence is all over the map. History shows that bad things can happen when government is too intrusive, and other bad things happen when it’s too hands-off.

The debate reminds me of football fans arguing over whether their team should focus on building up its offense or its defense. You might hear brilliant theories on each side, but the obvious truth is that a winning team needs to do both, and its priorities will shift as circumstances change. Similarly, there are times when government should regulate more, and times when it should regulate less; times when it makes sense to raise taxes, and times when it’s wise to lower them; times when it’s OK to grow the federal budget, and times when it has to shrink. One way of looking at America’s remarkable run of prosperity is as an ongoing dance between the public and the private, with each taking the lead at different times.

Leaving aside the extreme ideologues—“government is the problem” Reaganites and libertarians on the right, and on the left some stray Marxists and progressives who don’t trust any business larger than a newsstand—the vast majority of Americans would agree that government should not entrust our well-being to corporate executives, but also not stifle innovation and entrepreneurial energy. But we will never agree to a formula for achieving the proper balance. We haven’t yet, and we’ve been debating this issue since the days of Hamilton and Jefferson.

It’s wrong question to debate. Our real challenge is to win hearts and minds. By that I don’t mean winning the goodwill of a foreign population. I mean harnessing American minds for intelligence and creativity, and American hearts for generosity and kindness. I call it consciousness reform.

When I tell people that we need to integrate spirituality into any vision of social change, the response from some is cynical. They assume that spiritual types are naïvely calling for some kind of campfire sing-along for brotherly love. In fact, we are talking about something concrete and pragmatic. Thousands of scientific studies have shown that practices derived from the ancient wisdom traditions—yoga, meditation, mindfulness, prayer, communal gathering, etc.—enhance qualities of mind and heart that are universally considered desirable. Practitioners develop the capacity to think more clearly, more creatively, more expansively, and with less attachment to past conditioning. They also tend to widen their circle of empathy and concern beyond the boundaries of themselves, their families and their tribes. The effort of psychologists and neuroscientists to understand these methodologies and adapt them to modern life (in both spiritual and secular contexts) could be the human equivalent of Information Technology.

Government can be big or small; it can regulate business or leave business alone. It matters, but not as much as the pundits think it does, because if we don’t have consciousness reform, all other reforms—of elections, of education, of healthcare, of energy, of regulatory policy, etc—will inevitably fall short of our aspirations. Ideas won’t be conceived, developed and executed as effectively as they might be, and once programs are in place the players in the system will find new ways to screw things up, because, like water, ignorance and self-interest seep into every empty space. And there will always be empty spaces to fill as long as consciousness—individual and collective—is operating at a meager capacity.

To return to that sports metaphor, you can hire a brilliant coaching staff, and they can devise a seemingly foolproof game plan, but if you don’t have smart, skilled, well-trained, egoless players … well, as any New York sports fan will tell you, fahgeddaboutit.

The passage of the healthcare bill has been celebrated in some circles not just as a political win but as a victory for spiritual values.  It is seen as an act of compassion for those in need—the uninsured and the uninsurable, who might otherwise suffer or die from a treatable illness.  Even though the bill falls short of universal coverage, its spirit is consistent with the moral code of caring for “the least of these,” which is present in one form or another in every spiritual tradition.

But healthcare reform is a spiritual victory for another reason: it is an implicit acknowledgement of the unity of life, awareness of which is a common outcome of deep spiritual experience. It would seem to be consistent with this passage in the Forge’s Call to Global Spiritual Citizen: “Humanity is being called to a new way of being that reflects the reality of our essential oneness. Embracing such a transformation of consciousness can inspire genuine cooperation and generate solutions that satisfy both our deep spiritual longings and our practical needs.”

That our unimpeachable oneness has real-world implications sometimes hits home in dramatic fashion, as when we contemplate that our burning of fossil fuel contributes to the melting of Himalayan glaciers, which in turn will affect not only rice growers in Asia but the price of food in American supermarkets.  Healthcare reform also reflects our interconnectedness, and in the coming months, as the merits and demerits of the legislation are debated, proponents of the measure would be wise to emphasize that the health of one citizen affects everyone else. That’s why the issue should have transcended political ideology.  Maybe it still can.

Supporters of universal coverage argued that President Obama should have articulated the moral imperative more forcefully during the long, grueling march to passage.  They believe it would have been easier to gain support for the bill if he had appealed to people’s sense of conscience: fellow citizens are suffering and dying because they can’t afford adequate healthcare, so it is our moral duty to provide it.  I disagree. 

Imploring people to be compassionate can only go so far.  If you tug at heartstrings, you might succeed in getting some folks to write a check to a charity, but you are not likely to alter any passionately held political convictions, and not even as skilled a speaker as Obama would convince people who despise politicians to trust the government to do the right thing the right way.  You are more likely to arouse a defensive reaction: I don’t need government to tell me how to be compassionate; I’m plenty compassionate when it comes to those I love and care for; I give to the needy through my church, not my tax dollars.  They might also counter the ethical argument with one of their own: self-responsibility is a high moral principle; making people dependent on government weakens them and the country; so let private charities help the poor, and keep Washington bureaucrats out of it.  You may find that argument specious, but you won’t convince anyone who holds it strongly.

Everyone is naturally compassionate; crooks and thieves and murderers will lay down their lives for their children and give everything they own to cure a sibling of disease.  It is also true that one consequence of spiritual growth is to extend the individual’s range of care and concern beyond the usual circle of self, family and loved ones to encompass the Other: strangers, people at a distance, those with whom they disagree and of whom they may even disapprove. But appeals to conscience are not likely to get many people to leap to a wider orbit of compassion, especially when they come from politicians they don’t trust.  A pragmatic argument based on our inherent connectedness might be more convincing. 

The notion of skillful means—what Buddhist and Hindu teachers call uppaya—applies here. Ideas should be presented in a way that matches the listener’s needs, frame of reference and level of receptivity.  In the healthcare debate, it is not skillful to exhort people to be compassionate in ways that do not come naturally to them, and it would be worse than unskillful to demonize opponents by implying that they lack compassion. In fact, compassion for those who disagree ought to be a starting point. 

If I were advising Democrats, I’d tell them to first acknowledge that it is noble to protect and care for one’s family, friends, and loved ones above all others; that it is perfectly understandable that people do not want their hard-earned cash to be spent on strangers outside their circle of concern; and it is honorable to stand up for the values of personal responsibility. I would then say this: the fact is, we are all connected, and not providing healthcare for everyone—reverting to the way things have been—bounces back to your circle of concern in a far costlier way. 

I would explain to opponents of reform that keeping every citizen healthy—even those they couldn’t care less about—is good for them and the people they do care about.  I’d say that right now their tax dollars are being spent on costly emergency care for people who can’t pay for insurance or treatment.  I’d show them how treating chronic conditions at an early stage will reduce taxpayer expenditures and lower their insurance premiums.  I’d say that when productive citizens leave the workforce because of a disease that might have been prevented, it hurts their pocketbooks because those sick people are no longer paying taxes.  I’d say it’s great to believe in free markets, but right now American businesses are competing with foreign companies that don't incur healthcare costs, and as a result you or someone you love might get laid off.  I’d present reform not as an act of charity but as a way to prevent illnesses that would otherwise cost us more money and damage our economy.  In short, we're all in this together, and if that doesn't make you care about the suffering of strangers, then look at it in pragmatic, dollars-and-cents, what’s-in-it-for-me terms.

People can comprehend the implications of interconnectedness whether or not they feel compassion for those outside their circle of concern.  As evidence, look at the difference between people who live in cosmopolitan cities and those who live in rural areas and homogeneous towns.  I’m guessing that city dwellers are far more likely to approve of healthcare reform.  Why?  Because when you work with people who are different from you, and you ride public transportation with them, and your kids go to school with them, you not only become more tolerant of those individuals, you see more clearly that we’re all connected.  That guy sneezing on the subway?  You might not care a hoot about him, but you want him to see a doctor, because if he doesn’t, you and your kids might catch whatever he has.  And if he ends up in a gutter with tuberculosis, it’s going to cost a lot of tax dollars to take care of him.

We’re all connected, like it or not.  You can see that in terms of spirituality or in terms of physics.  You can accept or reject the moral implications inherent in the web of life.  But, it is hard to argue that keeping every citizen healthy is not in your self-interest. 

In the 1960s, when I was a student radical, I thought in Marxist terms. As a staunch atheist, I believed with Marx that religion was the opium of the people. At one point, I became disillusioned with trying to change the world by changing the system. On a personal level, I was a mess, and neither Marx, nor Freud, nor Darwin for that matter could help. Nor could they answer the Big Questions.

My search for alternative viewpoints led to Eastern mysticism. It was a revelation to discover a rational, practical spirituality that was vastly different from conventional religion. I started riding pedal-to-metal toward enlightenment. Now I saw politics as the opium of the people. Social change would arise from individuals achieving inner peace and higher consciousness. I became a spiritual activist, teaching meditation, saving the world one mantra at a time, watching dramas like Vietnam and Watergate unfold like a movie with a Monte Python script.

Like the commies who became neocons, I had done an ideological 180. But I was still an ideologue.

Flash forward a couple of decades. By then, lots of us had expanded our consciousness and achieved a measure of inner peace, but violence, injustice, environmental degradation and other expressions of human folly had continued unabated. As if awakening from a collective dream, spiritual practitioners realized that inner work was not enough. Indispensable, yes, and tragically undervalued, but its impact on the social landscape was not as automatic as we naively hoped it would be.

A new synthesis comes into play, with inner development providing a foundation for creative, innovative ideas and skillful, life-supporting action. Personal enlightenment without proper action is like singing a great song in the shower instead of a concert hall; action without an big mind and open heart is bound to fall short and produce unintended consequences. A lot of people who came to same conclusion launched efforts to spiritualize social activism. The Forge’s Global Spiritual Citizenship initiative is one of them.

There are many good reasons why the synthesis of inner and outer is essential. One of them is that it can end the tyranny of ideology.

It seems to me that if anything qualifies as the opium of the people nowadays it’s not a specific ideology but ideology itself. Whether religious or political in form, when ideology petrifies into iron-clad dogma creativity and insight are smothered. For ideologues, theory trumps evidence. Facts that call their premises into question are either denied or rationalized away. That’s not the sort of thinking we need in a complex world of interlocking problems.

In my experience, transformative spirituality frees a person from attachment—not just to material possessions but to ideas, opinions, and beliefs. By way of analogy, imagine two people in a room, one at a window facing east and the other at a window facing west, arguing over who sees more accurately. If you want to prove that each of their views is limited, take them up to the roof. Authentic spiritual practice is like an elevator to a higher vantage point.

Not long ago, I made that case to a friend of mine. He replied, essentially, “That’s great in theory, but what do we do now, with the right-wing screaming that government can’t be trusted and lefties arguing that corporations can’t be trusted?” Good point. And history gives us plenty of evidence to support either side of the ideological divide. Well, here’s one modest proposal.

Given the economy-busting events of the past year, I’d say the burden of proof right now is on the free market ideologues. If the finance and business elite want government off their backs, let them prove they can be trusted to act with virtue, honesty, and integrity. Let them show they can put the common good ahead of short-term gain. Other professions have regulatory bodies that hold their members accountable. Doctors have the AMA; lawyers have the Bar Association; psychologists, dentists, social workers, and others have equivalents. Because these associations exact a heavy price on members who violate their standards, they have proven to be reliable self-regulators. They don’t eliminate the need for laws and oversight by any means, but they certainly keep them to a minimum, and their sanctions serve as effective deterrents.

Why don’t corporate executives create something similar? I first heard the idea from Lee Cockerell, the former head of operations at Disney World and the author of a book on leadership (Creating Magic). Think of it. Grant membership to anyone at the level of, say, vice president and up. Sign up big-time CEOs so the organization has credibility right off the bat—and maybe so much stature that anyone who doesn’t join would be a pariah. Set the bar high with rigorous standards, not just for obvious ethical matters, but also things like the treatment of employees, remuneration policies, the impact of decisions on communities and the environment, deceptive advertising, and so forth. Start the way doctors do: first do no harm. Then enforce the standards so violators feel the pain, not of financial loss alone, but of shame-inducing, career-threatening exposure. This might create incentive for a spiritual renaissance in the boardroom: to live up to high standards, individuals would have to grow in consciousness and compassion.

If, in time, the public is satisfied that corporate executives are not the greedy, selfish, corrupt and lying scoundrels their enemies say they are, then the left will have no excuse to spend tax dollars on excess regulation. In short, if corporate leaders want government off their backs, they should do what teenagers have to do: prove they deserve our trust.

Here’s my last suggestion. Name the organization the Association of Business Executives—ABE, in honor of the president whose name is synonymous with honesty. Live up to that acronym, Mr. and Ms. CEO, and even leftist ideologues might agree to a looser grip on the market.

Name a collective challenge, and it’s a good bet that the loudest arguments over it are about the role of government: to what degree are government regulations, policies and programs the cause of the problem, and to what degree should they be part of the solution? With the possible exception of religion, the issue of government involvement in the private sector seems to be the leading source of polarization in American life.

Can we all just shut up and agree that government is sometimes part of the problem and sometimes part of the solution? Agreement on that would be a starting point for any serious attempt to transcend polarized positions and focus creatively on the common good.

It’s hard these days to get buy-in on even that obvious proposition. Ever since Ronald Reagan famously pronounced that government is the problem, not the solution, that position has hardened into dogma. It certainly attracts the loudest screamers and the most virulent evidence-be-damned ideologues. This wasn’t the case thirty years ago, when there were living, breathing Marxists who argued – regardless of the facts – that free market capitalism was the problem and collectivism was the solution. I know, because I was one of them. Now, you don’t hear anyone calling for the permanent nationalization of major industries. Even advocates of single payer health coverage would leave hospitals, doctors, drug and medical supply companies and other providers free to run their own businesses on the open market. No, it seems that all the true believers are on one side, where the free marketeers can’t find anything useful or good in government (unless of course a program benefits them or their constituency).

It would help enormously to step back and take a clear-eyed look at history. We would see that at times major social gains were made by lowering taxes and getting government out of the way – and at other times by raising taxes wisely and tweaking the marketplace intelligently. Such a fact-check might be a good first step in transcending socio-economic ideologies. We would find that government has often paved the way for commercial breakthroughs that made some people rich and improved the quality of life for the rest of us. Check out, for instance, the origins of the communications industry, which America has dominated ever since the 1920s when the Hoover administration – yes, that Hoover – had the foresight to pull together a consortium of private companies to form the Radio Corporation of America (RCA). Or check out how the Small Business Administration has helped entrepreneurs. Read the recent New Yorker article by Atul Gawande, which describes how the Federal government, beginning over a century ago, has improved farming methods. Private farmers benefited enormously, and everyone else has enjoyed cheap, abundant agriculture (in 1900, more than 40% of family income went to food; now it is less than 10%).

Every time I hear a knee-jerk anti-government rant, I recall a conversation I had in 1990 with a hugely successful entrepreneur named Steve. He and his partner had made a fortune only a few years after starting a chemical company. He was as puffed up with pride as a jock who just scored the winning touchdown. He deserved to be proud; he worked incredibly hard, took big risks, and made very smart decisions. But he fancied himself a completely self-made man. A staunch Reaganite, he deplored welfare, railed against regulations and never met a tax he didn’t hate. I must have heard “get the government off our backs” a hundred times from him, never mind certain inconvenient facts.

Steve’s share of the capital that got his business off the ground came from an inheritance. No problem there. But how did his father make the money he left to Steve? Well, for one thing, he’d gone to college on the G.I. Bill, and he purchased his first home in the 50s with a low-interest mortgage under a program the government created to encourage home ownership. The properties he developed were sold mainly to couples taking advantage of the same programs, in suburbs made possible by the Interstate Highway program and government investments in railways and electricity lines. Steve and his partner were educated in public schools and state universities. The chemical process that made their business possible was discovered in a university lab under a government research grant. When they opened their first factories they sought locations with low taxes, for sure, but also with excellent roads, public transportation and schools. And here’s the kicker: during that 1990 conversation, Steve said he was about to go to Romania and Bulgaria to open new factories. I asked if it wasn’t a risky proposition to be doing business in countries recently liberated from the Soviet Bloc. His reply: no problem, the U.S. government is offering guaranteed loans to companies willing to invest there. Steve saw no contradictions between his own story and his libertarian rants.

Part of our job in fostering Global Spiritual Citizenship, it would seem, is being willing to look clearly at the facts, preferably with minds unattached to ideology and expanded with the help of consciousness technologies. We might then find ways for private and public interests to serve one another, as they have in the past.

Meanwhile, I welcome voices from the right who can balance this blog with historical instances when less government led to outcomes that worked for the common good.