Transcendental Politics

Hi. I'm Steve Harvey (not the famous one!), a teacher, writer, public interest lawyer, and social and political activist. My life's journey has led me to the conviction that we are all part of a shared story, one that we write together, and that it is incumbent on us to write it well.

I am asking you to fund the creation of a nonprofit organization whose purpose is to become the nucleus of a social movement --in some ways, the ultimate social movement, distilling the essence of all those in the past that we most admire, and establishing it as an enduring feature of our social institutional landscape. I call this movement "Transcendental Politics ."

(The money will be used, first, to pay the 501(c)(3) nonprofit status filing fees, to design and create a website, and then to pay set-up and operational costs for establishing a functioning nonprofit. I will be contributing an enormous quantity of my own time, money and expertise for free, and will be relying heavily on other volunteers for the foreseeable future, establishing a board of directors along with our 501(c)(3) application. At some point, probably still years in the future, we will have a small salaried staff, including either a part-time professional fundraiser/grant writer or a full-time Executive Director with that skill set, to create a fully functioning and robust organization. As a nonprofit, the need to fund-and-friend raise will never end; the greater initial boost --and even sustained revenue stream-- we can get from this gofundme campaign, the better.)

Some people believe that trying to improve the world is a utopian fantasy, but, in reality, it's a historical constant. Throughout history, in every time and place, there are people working to improve the human condition. Our history books are filled with the names of individuals and the movements they've founded that have helped transform the lives of millions for the better.

The question isn't whether we can and should engage in this shared endeavor, but rather how to do so most effectively. By experimenting with attempts to answer that question, by creating and supporting and rallying to movements that attempt to do so and to do so in rational and imaginative and realistic ways, we give the lathe of history more to work with, more to select from.

Those of us who live in relative comfort know that there are far too many who don't. Those of us who suffer relatively few and relatively mild injustices know that there are far too many who suffer far more and far more egregiously. We can and should allow ourselves to feel empathy. We can and should allow ourselves to feel outrage. We can and should allow ourselves to feel hope..., and commit ourselves to act on that hope, to seek to do better, to strive, as individuals, as organized groups, as reasonable people of goodwill working together with all other reasonable people of goodwill everywhere, to create a kinder, fairer, more prosperous and sustainable world.

My lifelong love of world history and of literature, my youthful years of backpacking around the world, my work in factories and on farms and in orchards and in offices, with infants and children and adults and the elderly, in education and healthcare and urban outreach, as a sociologist and public policy analyst and even army infantryman, my writing of an epic mythology that attempted to capture the essence of the human condition in a single tale, have all imbued me with a synoptic perspective, a broad and detailed appreciation of the human condition, a recognition that it is an evolving ecosystem of ideas and institutions and technologies and movements, and that we are capable of cultivating this garden of human consciousness to create an ever-more rational, ever-more imaginative, ever-more humane social context within which we live and thrive.

Great ideas evolve from tiny seeds that germinate, sprout, grow, blossom and spread. The seed for the idea I am seeking to fund now began when I was a Democratic candidate in an overwhelmingly Republican district for the Colorado state legislature in 2010. I asked myself what message I could campaign on that both represented what I sincerely stand for and could resonate with those of an opposing ideology. I came up with the phrase, "reasonable people of goodwill working together."

I lost the election, as expected, but continued to think about the possibility of an enduring social movement committed only to rallying all reasonable people of goodwill, to mobilizing disciplined reason and imagination and empathy in service to our shared humanity, a cross between a non-exclusive secular religion without any excess trappings and an all-inclusive citizen academy, cultivating rational discourse and empathy and cooperation locally, nationally, and globally.

So, six years ago, even prior to the election, I established a blog on which I published my social theoretical and polemical essays (Colorado Confluence ), and began developing an evolving social movement proposal , one that was at first named "The Politics of Reason and Goodwill," but has now become "Transcendental Politics." The mission of Transcendental Politics is to cultivate, gradually and in perpetuity, an ever-greater commitment, among an ever-larger portion of the populace, to the mobilization of methodical reason and imagination in service to our shared humanity.

Very briefly, the proposal consists of a network of special purpose community organizations (both physical, in geographic communities, and virtual, through social media), an internet portal or data base providing peer-review quality arguments or relevant information on all sides of disputed public policy issues, and what I call a "metamessaging " campaign promoting a commitment to reason in service to our shared humanity (feel-good holiday season stories and movies, such as "A Christmas Carol" and "It's a Wonderful Life," are a good example of such meta-messages).

The primary innovation is that this movement is committed entirely to promoting only a set of procedures and structures for realizing a widely shared underlying value (reason in service to our shared humanity), and not to any specific policy positions. Let people come to the table as they are, and let reason in service to our shared humanity guide our discourse as much as possible. This is common ground most people can agree to and believe in, with the potential to narrow the chasms that divide us and increase the bridges of mutual understanding that span them.

For a more complete description of the proposal, please read the post pinned to the top of the Transcendental Politics Facebook group page , which includes the essay
"A Proposal for Orchestrating an Historical Paradigm Shift ." The second box on the "Catalogue of Selected Posts " page of Colorado Confluence contains hyperlinks to dozens of essays exploring the proposal, including one very long and very detailed explanation of it that explicitly addresses many of the misconceptions and explains the subtleties of it. Also, please join the Facebook group , with over 3,000 members already.

The purpose, not that different from the most admirable aspects of numerous historical social movements --some of which became world religions-- is to cultivate a greater commitment to reason and imagination and empathy and humility, to human consciousness in service to our shared humanity. In that sense, it shares much in common with Christianity, Buddhism, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, the American Revolution (and particularly the drafting and ratification of the Constitution), Gandhi's Indian Independence Movement, the anti-Apartheid Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, and very many others.

The differences are that it joins together the commitment to reason and the commitment to humanity, leaves out trappings that aren't directly related to the purpose of cultivating a greater commitment to reason and to our shared humanity, makes the movement comprehensive rather than special purpose, opens it up to everyone willing to commit to striving to be reasonable, in formally defined ways, and humane, in formally defined ways, and seeks to make the movement enduring rather than temporary.

This proposal does not require or expect that people will suddenly become rational; it is aware of and incorporates the cognitive science and psychological research into how the human mind works, the ways in which we are generally persuaded by frames and narratives that resonate with our own previously held frames and narratives rather than by rational arguments.

But it recognizes that reason has indeed played an increasingly salient (though by no means uncontested) role in our social institutional landscape, that there is an easily discernible and very powerful evolutionary current favoring the institutionalization of forms of disciplined reason, with scientific methodology and mathematical analysis growing in recent centuries into a dominant force in our enterprise of understanding the nature of the reality around and within us, legal procedure displacing more capricious forms of justice, and the value of reason, in the abstract, being acknowledged by nearly everyone.

This movement seeks to leverage that near universal, if too often only nominal, recognition that reason has value, and the accompanying near universal, if also too often only nominal, recogntion that a commitment to our shared humanity has value. It is a movement dedicated to cultivating that always flickering light in the darkness, that noble and virtuous belief in our own humanity that sets us apart, and to make it as much and as growing a reality going forward as we are able to.

My childhood and lifelong dream of becoming a "great writer," of writing an enduring and sublime work of literature, has really always been a part of the larger dream of having a beneficial effect on human consciousness, of helping to expedite our journey into a wiser, kinder, more joyful and more edifying future. Transcendental Politics is the embodiment of that larger dream. It is a dream for humanity that so many have shared so fervently for so long, and that many have sacrificed and died for.

And so this is also a personal request, to give my life meaning after so many years of seeking the best way to do so. Let my name be forgotten, but let this simple but powerful idea take root and become the best kind of immortality: Having done something to leave the world a better place by virtue of our having been in it.

My profound and heartfelt thanks to all who contribute, no matter how small the amount. The challenge to realize the fullness of our humanity is a daunting one, and yet one that we must never embrace, with efforts that may succeed or fail, but without which we condemn ourselves to being something less than what we are and the most vulnerable and destitute among us to suffering horrors we do not need to inflict on them. Thank you so much!