The meaning of Chesa Boudin's recall
Understanding the shadow side of our post modern pluralistic age
San Franciscans voted last Tuesday to recall their district attorney Chesa Boudin. You must have heard the news. If you haven’t yet, Chesa was at the vanguard of the progressive prosecutor movement across the country, a movement that promised to bring in a more tolerant, compassionate attitude towards criminal justice. Halfway through his term residents of the most progressive city in the country threw him out.
What happened? What can the Integral Model tell us about why he was recalled and what it means for the future? Surprisingly, quite a lot!
Recall that in my review of Top Gun I suggested its huge success was in part due to the unhappiness of our time. Some of this unhappiness comes from the shadow side of the Pluralistic post-modern level of human consciousness. (Read my previous post to get a primer on these levels) Martin Ucik of Integral Relationships does a great job of outlining the qualities of each level and the limiting views as well.
People who embody this Pluralistic consciousness tend to be humanistic, non-judgmental, holistic, caring, environmentally conscious. At this level we celebrate the feminine, animal rights, sexual liberation, authentic polyamory. We want to show compassion, promote unity, care about all living things. We embrace a great tolerance. We reject hierarchies, seeking to flatten things out.
However this level has a shadow side as do all levels. The limiting views include a fanatical adherence to relativism, an insistence that there are no absolute truths. Sometimes this requires rejecting science if science causes cognitive dissonance. Compassion can easily become Idiot Compassion. Rejection of hierarchies often confuses natural hierarchies that do exist with dominator hierarchies. New-age narcissism is also very common.
No place is more at the epicenter of pluralism than San Francisco. Here we will look the two the limiting views of Idiot Compassion and rejection of natural hierarchies to understand where it went wrong for Chesa’s movement.
Idiot Compassion is a term coined by the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa. This is when our compassion is less for anything useful but just as a way for us to feel good i.e. it feels good to be good. (which overlaps well with new age narcissism). Pema Chodran explains this well
“It refers to something we all do a lot of and call it compassion. In some ways, it’s what’s called enabling. It’s the general tendency to give people what they want because you can’t bear to see them suffering. Basically, you’re not giving them what they need (and keep them in their dependence). You’re trying to get away from your feeling of I can’t bear to see them suffering. In other words, you’re doing it for yourself. You’re not really doing it for them.”
Sorry my left wing friends, but Idiot Compassion does seem to inform the San Francisco style approach towards human problems like crime, drug abuse etc. We tolerate everything (including poo on the street) to the point of..idiocy.
And then we get to the rejection of natural hierarchies. This is an especially fascinating subject and it flows out of Idiot Compassion. We want to love everyone and everything. We want that feeling of unity. All good stuff. If there is a hierarchy how can our love be universal and pure?
However, hierarchies abound in nature. Indeed no matter how much you reject hierarchies, they abound in the life you live every day. Every choice you make is the outcome of an hierarchical evaluation you did, consciously or not. The food you eat, the leisure activity you choose, who you date, your career choice, all of them involve evaluating the available choices and deciding which is best i.e. making an hierarchy.
Some of these hierarchies are natural i.e. they have an objective basis to them. In the last few years San Francisco has had some highly publicized home break ins in neighborhoods that were before very safe. The response of some folk eager to believe that the city is doing ok has been something like “Its just property, the owners need to pipe down and stop making such a fuss.” They say the same about the repeated theft at Walgreens and CVS that saw so many pharmacy branches close down.
These are the same people who will get riled up over an offensive tweet by a co-worker, insist that their workplace is no longer safe until the offender is fired. See, that is upside down. There is natural hierarchy here and if you are not drowning in the soup of your pluralism you will see it. For 99.999999% of people, a home break-in is way more traumatizing than an offensive tweet and the recall vote reflected that.
For that matter, the Walgreens on every corner is a glorious triumph of American ingenuity. It is truly compassionate - to have a pharmacy close by that offers you just about every product you can imagine at prices that would make an 18th century peasant green with envy. Just travel to parts of the world that don’t have this. See how your life is when you have to trek a long distance just to get pain medication.
Some went further to suggest that those complaining about Walgreens closing down could just order stuff online. Sure, if you have the tools and budget to do so. It is no surprise that the neighborhoods that were against the recall were the wealthy white yuppie neighborhoods, the zoom class who could afford these things.
Interestingly, there is actually a spiritual principle behind tearing down hierarchies. In the Buddhist tradition it is called one taste. This is where we develop enough mastery over the senses so that we own our own responses to external events. Everything ‘tastes’ the same, a flavor of our own ‘divine nature’. We are, as it were, living in a state of eternal bliss that is internally generated.
OneTaste is also the name of the famous organization co-founded by Nicole Daedone, she of the Orgasmic Meditation fame. My understanding is that she was informed by these buddhist teachings and her work was to realize them in the realm of sexual desire.
This too is not new, there really is nothing new under the sun. The Indian psychologist Sudhir Kakar in his book Mad and Divine recounts the story of a famous Tantric Tibetan lama from many hundreds of years ago. This lama tried to actualize this idea of one taste in his sex life. He experimented with hundreds of women to find a way to master his own responses, so that he could get turned on through his own will and not the nature of his partner.
He got pretty good at it, however Kakar recounts a bitter-sweet story where he failed. An 82 year old woman came to him hoping to get one last roll in the sack before she passed from the world. He tried, he tried real hard but alas, the requirements of biology were too strong, he just couldn’t get aroused for her and she had to settle for hand based stimulation.
One taste is a noble personal spiritual goal, however it is not the best basis for civic polity.
Is that all esoteric enough for you? If not, here is one more bit of woo-woo. I will suggest that there is another counter force that drove the decline in the city.
Recall that some years ago there was all this fuss about the tech shuttle buses. These buses would come haul thousands of tech workers from their trendy homes in SF down to work in silicon valley.
These tech workers didn’t want to actually live in silicon valley, they preferred the vibrant spaces of the city. So it made sense - you got an apartment in the city. All would be good except that you brought yourself with you, that there was the problem.
Sorry my tech friends, but there is some truth to this. You want to consume the diversity and liveliness and that is great. But what but happens to the creators of that diversity and liveliness when you drive up rents so they can’t actually afford to live in the city? They will get driven out and the city will turn into…Mountain View, the place you wanted to escape!
I will suggest that the city ‘made’ a choice to decline a little so that it wouldn’t be so attractive and so there would be less gentrification. No, it wasn’t a cabal of city elders gathering in a back room making such a deal, it was more of an unconscious leaning that manifested in voting choices that gave Chesa his position among other things.
The city’s population has declined, the gentrification has slowed and so it has worked at least temporarily. Housing prices have not fallen though. People are hedging their bets about the city’s future.
Yes, that is pretty woo woo, but then we live in woo woo times. So where do we go from here? What’s next? Well, as I wrote in the previous post, the healing path is of integration, of growing into the next level of consciousness, the Integral level. This we will go into in a future post, however here are some of the good qualities of this next level as Martin outlines.
Systemic. Recognizes the importance of all preceding levels, including the process of development itself (consciously competent). Is curious and open. Does not force its own values onto others. Self-interest without harm to others. Knowledge, competency, and functionality supersede rank, power, gender, or status. Flexibility, spontaneity, and functionality become the highest priority. Establishes truths and norms through intersubjectivity and inter-objectivity. Accepts the inevitability of nature’s flows and hierarchies. Integrates feminine and masculine polarities. Considers what is good, true, beautiful, functional. Finds natural mix of conflicting (half)“truths”. Utilitarian (greatest good/happiness for largest number of people, or greatest depth for the largest span). Supports people in their development (translation/integration and transformation).
Our compassion is a good thing, just needs a few adjustments. Compassion with pragmatism, creating spaces where everyone can flourish without turning it into a zero sum game. That is good stuff.