Secularism is the separation of church and state. In the past this has worked for democracy. State carries out the democratic ideal of bring meaning to everyone in society. The church gives us the ethical canopy under which everyone pursues meaning. Unfortunately, the evolution of scientific materialism puts a monkey wrench in this equilibrium.

In this country, the progressive democrats who are supposed to advance the pursuit of meaning, follow (correctly) the vehicle of creativity for that advancement. But science is supposed to be one of those creative activities that democrats utterly approve. When science advocates a Godless materialism and meaningless existentialism, the democrats get thoroughly confused. Many of these confused democrats seems to be anti-religion even anti-ethics. How then can religious people trust them to be even-handed about religions and religious ethics?

Republicans have a different confusion. Being conservatives, they are not particularly tied to science and scientific advances. They can accept science’s gifts to society–technology– and yet they don’t have to accept lock, stock and barrel, science’s ideology–materialism. Unfortunately, republicans also grow up in today’s very materialist society and at heart become conditioned by materialist values enough to be confused as well. Never having pursued other-worldliness first hand, republican politicians develop an unhealthy doubt about God and religious ethics, enough to make them into cynics, wishy-washy about religious ethics. It is from this ambiguity about religions and religious ethics that they can at once proclaim their belief in God and yet partake in non-idealist conduct such as blocking the progress of spreading equal opportunity to the poor. They become an unholy alliance of the rich and the powerful on one hand and the fundamentalist Christians on the other hand, but then the secularists–the ones that want to maintain the separation of church and state lose confidence in them.

What is the way out of this conundrum, a near fifty-fifty split in the political attitudes in this country? (And don’t forget that similar dynamic is operating elsewhere in the world, too.) We have to go back to the roots of secularism and ask, is secularism relevant today?

I have already mentioned one reason for secularism in democracy–freedom to pursue a minority religion. But this is not the only root cause.

You have to recognize that democracy evolved in Christian societies and Christianity as a religion was antagonist to affairs of the state from the very beginning. Didn’t Jesus say to his disciples, “render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s?” So in Christianity from the get-go worldly pursuits are not considered as spiritual, there is split between state–the focus of this-worldly acts and religion–the focus of other-worldly acts that take us to the kingdom of heaven (see also, Zohar, 1994).

And Christianity is not the only religion with such a split. In Hinduism also, until Aurobindo, this worldliness is undermined as the pursuit of illusion.

But this kind of thinking must give way to new evolutionary thinking, following Aurobindo. This worldliness is not meaningless as the materialists maintain. Nor is it trivial, as Christians and Hindus think. Instead this worldly actions take place with a definite purposiveness, that of evolving the capacity for representing godliness in matter. Other-worldliness is important to pursue no doubt; without that pursuit how would we know firsthand what God is, what godliness is. But living in this world what we discover in our pursuit of otherworldliness is equally important. How else would we ever evolve godliness in this very physical birth on this very physical planet earth?

In this way, when this-worldliness and other-worldliness are both validated, then what is the relevance of secularism except to the extent of avoiding religious monopoly?

To avoid the monopoly of one religion over others, all we need to do is to clearly distinguish between the concepts of spirituality and religion with religion understood clearly as one’s personal path to God. Spirituality should now designate general ontological and epistemological considerations of God, godliness, ethics and related matters.

Since spirituality in our new worldview is also the basis of our science, and science is already supported by the state and included in our education, all current conflicts and controversies in these matters should disappear like dew in the morning Sun.

An example. Can Creationism be taught in our schools? No, it clearly has a religious agenda, and secularism demands that it stays out of our public schools. But can intelligent design theory be taught? You bet, as one of the early theories of creation that unfortunately does not fully agree with experiment. Can neo-Darwinism be taught in our schools? You bet, also as a partial theory that explains intra-species evolution and speciation in microevolution but not the giant evolutionary leaps of macroevolution. Can the biological creativity theory of evolution advocated in this book in which both upward and downward causation play roles be taught? You bet, as a better theory than both the previous ones, subject to further experimental and theoretical checks on it for details and fine-tuning.

Consider another example. Should community prayer be included in our schools? Yes, so long it is generic and does not hurt the religious sensitivity of any particular individual or group. Can meditation? Yes, of course. Meditation is always generic since it is silent.

My vision is that the Democratic Party, once in its journey back to being the party of creativity and change, will be the first to accept the new scientific paradigm of science within consciousness. This would make the Democratic Party viable again. Instead of being perceived as anti-religion, democrats would be perceived as the vanguards of spirituality. Republicans, initially, would have a lot of problems with the new paradigm because of the stranglehold of fundamentalist Christianity over them, but that too shall pass. Truth wins over everyone. If the new ideas of God and spirituality are true, as they seem to be under quite rigorous experimental scrutiny, everyone eventually will accept their validity.

With science within consciousness–idealist science–to guide democracy and politics, there should never be frontal attacks on meaning and ethics that undermine democracy today. Unfortunately, the shift from meaning orientation to power orientation that has taken place in politics today will take more than a paradigm shift of our science. It will require first, emotional intelligence, and second, a change of our attitude toward ethics.

Emotional Intelligence

For the 1972 primaries, the democrats had a very promising candidate from New England, Ed Musky. But Muskey’s wife was maligned in some conservative newspapers; Musky reacted to this with emotionality, he cried in public. When this was reported in the media, Musky’s political career was over. The public perception guided by the media was that Musky was emotionally immature.

I submit, as few pundits commented even then, the actual truth perhaps was the opposite: Musky was emotionally more mature than most politicians. But Musky lost because he went against the American public perception of what emotional maturity means. Most Americans, maybe even today, mistake emotional maturity with emotion suppression.

It should then be obvious that bringing emotional intelligence to the political arena in this country is a daunting task. The entire culture needs to reevaluate its treatment of emotions–the evils of suppression of emotions and the desirability of achieving a balance. And then there is the difficult job of practicing what one conceptually accepts.

And yet this has to be done. The pursuit of power is a third chakra emotion. Unless and until we balance it with love (as a higher emotion), it is experienced as a negative emotion, and it won’t let go. In this United States, during the Bush II administration, power became so entrenched in negativity that even the idea of torturing prisoners for information in violation of clear international rules could not be let go.

Only when we balance power with love, power can be used in the service of meaning. Our political leaders must understand this and act accordingly and we, the people, must insist that they do.

Democracy must Accommodate Evolutionary Ethics

When the philosophy of modernism solely guided the people of the Western Hemisphere, there was an implicit truce between science and religion based on the Cartesian mind-body split. In those by gone days, secularism was vital and state and religion both functioned appropriately without interference from one another. A democratic state was committed to the advancement of the outreach of meaning; religions (mainly Christianity) were committed to ethics and provided the ethical umbrella for maintaining the meaning-commitment of the state. Although philosophers quibbled about whether ethics was really binding on people (Kant, 1886), for most people, including the people of power, the threat of eternal hell was enough to keep them in line.

But as science increasingly challenged the Cartesian mind-body split and gradually moved toward a material monism, there came a crisis of worldview. In the academe and in the arts and the humanities, this led to post-modernism and existentialism. People including those that guided the state were increasingly influenced by materialist science. People lost their faith in God and religion and as a result they lost the important guidance of religious ethics.

As already mentioned, materialists did try to establish ethics from a scientific point of view, but all they came up with in the wake of Newtonian physics of determinism is the “Greatest good for the greatest number” ethics. In this way ethics lost absolute value becoming relative. Representative democracy easily bought into this relative ethics of the greatest good for the greatest number; it fit well with majority rule.

With the rise of molecular biology and genetic determinism, it became far worse. We were told that since we were gene machines our altruism extends only to our gene-connected relationships (Dawkins, 1976). Personal ethics outside one’s genetic influence was seen to be unscientific. This allowed individuals to be unethical (Machiavellian) in politics and society in general. This is what we see in today’s America.

So the question is, Is ethics scientific? Is ethics binding on people just as gravity is binding on people? When we accept idealist science, nonlocality of consciousness gives us a solid scientific basis for ethics. And more. Since reincarnation is a part and parcel of the new science, ethics regains its status once again. Is ethics as binding on people as gravity? Yes, although whereas the attempt at a violation of gravity law will get you trouble immediately, in the attempted violation of an ethical law, your trouble may be deferred to your subsequent incarnations. However, since nobody can violate ethics and get away with it, since everyone eventually has to incorporate ethics in their living, ethics must be regarded to be as binding as a scientific law:

Be good, do good; otherwise captain Karma will get you, if not in this life, in your future lives.

Thus science within consciousness gives a scientific basis for ethics, so should democracy go back to the religious ethics of the old? Is the threat of reincarnation enough to keep people in line? Hardly. What if people defer the day of reckoning to future lives? What then?

Fortunately, reincarnation is not the only incentive; there is also the evolutionary movement of consciousness that drives us toward spirituality. Synchronistically this evolutionary pressure also expresses itself in creating crisis conditions if we do not heed its bidding. If we don’t heed the needs of evolution, the social systems break down as it did in the Soviet Union.

Democratic leaderships all over the world must recognize that the crisis that we are faced with today are largely because of the gross violation of evolutionary ethics. Our nonethical antievolutionary actions have created the blockage of our progressive institutions of society that have traditionally been the marker of evolutionary movement of meaning such as democracy, capitalism, and liberal education. There is a block in evolutionary movement of meaning. The call of the evolutionary ethics for our democratic leaders is loud and clear: it is no longer, “Be good, do good.” It is to take actions that will unblock the evolutionary movement of consciousness. It is to restore democracy, capitalism, and liberal education.

One does not have to see a contradiction here. Indeed, the old ethics remains important, but its purpose is shifted. The purpose of the way of life signified by “Be good, do good,” is no longer directed toward personal salvation or liberation alone, but also to planetary movement of consciousness as a whole.

So long as spiritual component of our culture is solely directed to personal “enlightenment,” the block of democracy due to the shift of the search for meaning to the search of power is unmovable. Only when this unmovable block is confronted with the irresistible force of evolutionary pressure of consciousness will there be unblocking. Only when we as a society recognize the evolutionary need for the transformation of the negative energies of power into the positive energies of love and act on it and demand that action from our elected representatives and leaders as well, can we make a quantum leap and make progress.

What does this mean in concrete terms? Right now, democracy is being practiced more and more in a way as to leave a lot of people out of the “loop,” these people have no motivation to participate in democracy. This is in gross violation of evolutionary ethics that is to maximize people participation in meaningful processes.

We must remember that in a democracy the elected representatives are but custodians of people’s power, our power. We also must elect those leaders who can anticipate the evolutionary needs of the movement of consciousness and can lead people to that end. Gandhi was such a leader for India. Michael Gorbachev was such a leader for the Soviet Union. Nelson Mandela was such a leader for South Africa. Abraham Lincoln and John Kennedy were such leaders for America. What is the difference between these visionary leaders and ordinary leaders of power? These leaders correctly foresaw the way their country could respond to the evolutionary needs of consciousness. They personalized those needs and acted in synchrony of their persona. The rest is history.

In the political arena, it is also clear that so long as we bind ourselves to nation states, negative emotions can always find a strong anchor in the concept of patriotism and rally around the nation’s people again temporarily thwarting evolution. This happened in the United States immediately following the disaster of 9/11 and continuing ever since. What is the remedy?

Short-term remedy is easy: get rid of the demagogue leadership in favor of those who will not use patriotism as the clarion call to block evolutionary movement of consciousness.

But in the long term, only a movement toward internationalism, beginning with bigger units than a nation will save us from myopic unethical leaders. This movement toward internationalism is already taking place in Europe in the form of the European Union.

Media: The Crucial Problem

The key to all these reforms I am talking about is an independent media, and right now, we don’t have it, especially in America. The media, like everything else in our society, has also shifted its emphasis from meaning to power. The results are well known. We cannot get any news without commentary, “spin,” mixed in. People of media can be bought. Media has become business enterprises. Media concentrates on what sells, and what sells is negative (vital) energy stuff. So media reports the negative news much more than the positive. Etc., etc. What is the remedy? Is there any?

I submit that so long as media is run as a money-making enterprise, so long as it is part of a private corporation, a power structure, media is going to be influenced. This is especially true when the prevalent belief system is materialism and truth becomes a relative value. If the idea that truth can be experienced to give you conviction and certainty is denigrated, who will take the arduous trouble of establishing truth or remaining faithful to truth?

Democracies, not only in America but also in many other countries, have to address this issue sooner or later. The remedy may have to be very radical. For example, one measure is to make the news medium officially, via constitutional amendment, a fourth independent estate of democracy. By and large, of all three branches of the government today, the judiciary is relatively independent of the other branches. We can take this as a hint and model the independent news medium after the judiciary.

We have to recognize that only for primarily material outputs, the privatization is a good workable idea because the drive is guided by material needs. For any other sphere of activity, privatization is not the best way. This is true of health care systems as we are bitterly discovering. News media deal with archetypal values such as truth and justice. When the society and culture as a whole maintain these values, private news media work. But when these values break down because the society as a whole has acquired a paradigmatic confusion, a private news media cannot be expected to rise beyond the valuelessness of the culture itself. The only safeguard is to make it a constitutionally independent public-funded organization.

I am not suggesting that this “Government” news becomes the only available news. I am not suggesting changing our tradition of free speech which means anybody can publish anything newsworthy. So the public sector news medium will not impede private media except that it will make today’s “spinning” media into objects of entertainment much like our tabloid newspapers.

Quantum Activistic Plan for Rescuing Democracy: a Summary

The job is to veer politicians from power back to meaning. How do we do it? Let’s count the ways.

1. Democracy, an idealist system from the get-go, works best within a two party system. The first and foremost task to rescue democracy is to veer the two major political parties of the country to conform to idealist character. One party must be creativity and progressivity minded, the other must be conservative.
2. In this country, the republican party is the conservative party and they still conform to their basic values except for a segment called the neo-cons. This segment is trying to bring back very old systems: world domination through military means and feudalistic huge gap between the haves and have-nots. The neo-cons are counter-evolutionary and their power within the Republican Party must be contained.
3. Power likes company and the republicans have joined forces with the religious right coming dangerously close to violating the separation of church and state, secularism. This also has to be contained.
4. The Democrats are the American equivalent of a progressive party and their principal problem is a lack of rudder. Their confusion is coming from accepting materialist science–lock, stock and barrel. So here is an enormous opening for quantum activists. Bring the new science to democrats. This not only will give them a rudder to see their way out of the current cluelessness but also enable them to be on the right side of God and ethical values for a change.
5. Both parties must be persuaded to see the importance of maintaining the balance of power between the five independent estates–presidency, the legislature, the judiciary, the news media, and (government-independent) religion.
6. The culture of a democratic country must pursue emotional intelligence and balance power with love. Then only its political parties may be expected to find their way back from power to meaning.
7. The political parties of a country must follow ethical principles and for best results, evolutionary ethics.
8. Political leaders will best serve democracy when they dedicate their power to the service of meaning, when they practice emotional intelligence before they preach it, and when they personalize evolutionary ethics before acting on it.
9. Eventually, to help the evolution of consciousness, we must work toward internationalism and abandon the concept of nation states altogether.
10. We must find a way to guarantee an independent news medium. If it requires a constitutional amendment to make the medium an independent official part of the Federal Government (in the model of the judiciary) supported by public funds, so be it.