A ‘modest proposal’ to unify the progressive revolution. [PUP is very dynamic and it is continually evolving due to your feedback]

“We must change from a thing-oriented civilization to a person-oriented civilization.” Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Progressive Unity Project (PUP) was adaptated from Gandhi’s famous Constructive Programme to provide a more unified — but no less diverse — vision for what Paul Hawken has called “the largest social movement in all of history,” but one that is at this point still “dispersed, inchoate, and fiercely independent.”  PUP does not try to bring these diverse efforts under a single umbrella — their diversity is their strength.  It does give them a greater sense of coherence that can lead to vastly greater effectiveness.

Gandhi’s Constructive Programme consisted of eighteen projects of social reform centered around an activity — making and using homespun cloth, the so-called charkha — that everyone could do every day.  We keep that structure.  While sustainable, organic food and other ‘cottage industries’ are definitely part of the needs-based economies we need to put in place, for our unifying daily activity we have so far settled on the rehumanization that Martin Luther King Jr. challenged us to bring about.  Our participation could be as simple as walking down the hall to talk to someone instead of emailing them, or giving your full attention to someone you’re talking with: we will be offering soon a list of practices to implement this great shift from consumerism to community on our website, www.mettacenter.org.

Around this one activity that unites and strengthens all of us we will identify eighteen major projects, like renewable energy, new media, human security such that no matter what anyone is doing — saving whales, creating nonviolent ‘peace teams’, creating an alternative media program — it would be related to if not part of at least one or these eighteen great changes that make up the Progressive Unity Project.  You don’t need to change what you are doing (other than to add, if you haven’t already, some ‘consumerism to community’ activities to your life).  You don’t need to join another organization.  The beauty of PUP is that it has already done a lot as soon as you grasp the concept.

Next Steps. We have adopted an ‘open source’ approach to the development of PUP.  Feel free to identify your own eighteen key projects.  Imagine how your work relates to the whole through one or more of them, and be supported by the realization that even if something you are working on should fail — be it banning land mines or getting a peace studies program into your school — you are part of a much larger whole that cannot fail in the long run.  Feel free to communicate your ideas and suggestions with us and anyone else you think should hear them.

As Gandhi showed, a major social movement needs two ‘wings:’ a constructive program in which you ‘cooperate with good,’ and an obstructive program (also referred as satyagraha) in which, when it’s necessary, you ‘non-cooperate with evil.’  Many struggles of the last half century have been one or the other but not both, and their effectiveness has been limited for that reason.  With PUP, there is a good chance that the next time we have to take to the streets in protest we will not be ignored!

At some point, when the PUP model is generally understood, some strategic direction will hopefully emerge, so that the movement as a whole can emphasize now constructive and now resistance actions, as appropriate.  At that point the eagle of nonviolence will have not only two wings but a brain.

The story is simple, and most of us could tell it in more or less the same way:  In the really big picture, the Universe has been evolving unmistakably in the direction of higher consciousness.  This consciousness brings with it a more perfect sense of the unity among ourselves and our fellow creatures.  We human beings, after all, can conceive of ourselves as members of a single family — and our social evolution, with its inventions of human rights, shared governance, etc., has been ever so slowly moving toward that vision, with many setbacks.  Nor is there any evidence that this kind of evolution has reached its end.  Anything that unites us is therefore in harmony with that vast movement; as Einstein famously said, conflict stems from a kind of delusion that we are separate, a delusion that imprisons our vision, and  “our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”