The Bank Teller and Other Essays on the Politics of Meaning [Paperback]

Peter Gabel (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 096550297X | ISBN-13: 978-0965502979 | Publication Date: June 1, 2000 | Edition: First Printing

THE BANK TELLER explores the desire within each of us to overcome our isolation and to see and be seen by the other in a relation of authentic connectedness. In a series of strikingly original essays, Gabel shows how "the opening up of desire" requires a fundamental challenge to our existing social institutions and a new political strategy that invents new forms of work, friendship, and community. "The ideas you read here will...eventually...become the major ideas shaping the thinking of all those who wish to heal and transform the world"--Rabbi Michael Lerner. "In this insightful and provocative essay collection, Gabel...reveals the limits of a world in which human regard is measured only by the commercial value of one's approval ratings"--Patricia Williams.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

These essays, most previously published in Tikkun, where the author is associate editor, exude the spirit of the '60s in their call for spiritual and political renewal based on the "politics of meaning." Gabel (who is also president of New College of California) offers a vision of a communitarian, loving, transformed world. His vision entails a diagnosis of what ails usAa culturally produced "alienation of self from other" yielding "a crisis of meaninglessness"Aand a cure: the politics of meaning, a radical social effort to "transform the alienating public culture that envelops us" and to generate "reciprocal affirmation through meaningful public action" in a way that links spirituality and politics. The concepts sound fluffy in the abstract, and they don't entirely lose their fluff as Gabel applies them to such areas as philosophical foundations, American politics, public policy, education (he wants to abolish the SAT) and law. Yet Gabel is onto something. The title essay nicely challenges the notion that a "bank," for all its hierarchical trappings, is not a "group of people in a room," too terrified of humiliation to step out of their assigned roles, whether that of teller or customer. Clinton's election is convincingly depicted as the triumph of the reemergent "erotic power of the sixties," a decade Gabel extols, down to its rock lyrics (e.g., "All You Need Is Love") and urges us to learn from. This book is like a pie: a flaky crust, but a substantial interior. (Aug.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

The Bank Teller and Other Essays on the Politics of Meaning, by Peter Gabel. Law Professor, Law Dean and college President, Peter Gabel gets down to fundamentals about the politics of meaning. This is not a muckraking expose but rather a relentless push on readers to examine their isolation and alienation from one another, their neighborhood, workplace, and community without which a functioning democracy cannot evolve. --Ralph Nader's 2007 Top Ten Holiday Reading List for Activists

Peter Gabel's powerful and profound analysis of the psychodynamics of contemporary Western societies is a major breakthrough in contemporary thought. Gabel demonstrates the way that we each participate in a fear-based withdrawal from each other into social roles that keep us trapped in isolation and loneliness while yearning for real contact and yet denying to ourselves and others that yearning for fear of being humiliated and rejected. Gabel shows that the desire to transcend these crippling dynamics is omni-present, and helps progressives and liberals understand how to address this need for authentic recognition, a need that till now has been largely ignored by the Left while it was being seized upon and manipulated by the Religious Right. This book and the thinking behind it has had a major influence on my own thinking, and I hope everyone who cares about saving America from its own self-destruction will carefully read The Bank Teller. --Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun, chair of The Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP) and author of 11 books, most recently the national best-selller The Left Hand of God.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Acada Books; First Printing edition (June 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 096550297X
• ISBN-13: 978-0965502979
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.8 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,569,403 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Social Transformation Explained?, January 9, 2001

By 

Paul R. Lehto "www.votersunite.org/info/lehto... (Everett, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Bank Teller and Other Essays on the Politics of Meaning (Paperback)

Can Peter Gabel's "The Bank Teller and other Essays on the Politics of Meaning" take you where you've never gone before, philosophically, politically, and spiritually? It's worth a look:

First, Gabel safely assumes what all of us already know: our communal project seems marked by gridlock, deadlock, decay and cynicism, while our private project seems marked by the Internet "revolution", giddy expectations of "progress", and the claimed constancy of change. Interestingly, by tracing out the political, sociological and psychological roots of these phenomena Gabel makes a telling diagnosis: we are witnessing nothing less than the privatization of hope and social desire itself, where anything is possible personally but nothing is possible politically. Symptoms of the suppression of hope and social desire are the dysfunctions that fill the papers of the day, the desperations going hand-in-hand with the alleged peaks of success.

These ideas, fleshed out, would seem a decent accomplishment for one book, but Gabel goes further. Rather than simply bemoaning the twins of cynicism and suppression of social desire, Gabel explains and elaborates on it with a credible psycho-political framework, explaining just how the suppression of social desire manifests itself throughout society. This framework constitutes a large new contribution to the "Politics of Meaning" framework co-developed with Michael Lerner. Key among the processes suppressing social desire is a "rotating lack of confidence in the desire of the other", perhaps also thought of as a learned doubt that another person will respond positively to an expression of enthusiasm (based in a fear of humiliation). Many a preacher or would-be lover can testify to the primacy of this terror and Gabel is dead-on in explaining its role in culture and society.

But in the series of essays that comprise the book, Gabel elucidates not only the implications of the supression of social desire, but also the implications of its release historically (certain parts of the 60s) and prospectively. Taking seriously the idea that humans are creatures of meaning (of which modern "competitive man" is just one dysfunctional subset) Gabel both describes the kaleidoscope of society and begins to describe possibilities for changing social patterns when the kaleidoscope is turned by the emergence of social desire.

It's been reported that in Japan a dating service has distributed sensors that are worn around a necklace and which allow the user to choose various options such as "movie", "conversation", or "love", depending upon what one wants to experience. The sensors then beep whenever another person who has selected the same option comes within ten meters, and the two can meet. On the personal level, this is one clever, if crude, method of overcoming the "lack of confidence in the desire of the other" Gabel writes about. Similarly, on the sociopolitical level, Peter Gabel's book is quite the tease. If you care at all about transforming society, we should have a match. And it should be quite the evening. ++++++++++

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A compelling and provocative case, April 29, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: The Bank Teller and Other Essays on the Politics of Meaning (Hardcover)

Were the 60's a special time in history for nascent communal meaning and purpose, or were we just young and foolishly optimistic about our generation's ability to change the world? Reading this brilliant series of essays brought back to me, a 56 year old lawyer, the spirit and intellectual joy of times I had long since forgotten about. But heck, I'm not giving up now after taking this stimulating course by Peter Gabel offering a rich, resonating, carefully crafted, and highly persuasive political philosophy revealed in ever increasing fullness with every turned page. There is much here for anyone interested in benefitting from what has clearly been a lifetime of scholarly commitment by the author to the pursuit of truth regarding the fundamentals of being and human interaction.

This remarkable body of work will generously reward the time taken to read and reflect upon it. Although the author makes no apologies as he directly challenges the conventional political and social mores of today, he makes a strong and well corroborated argument for the ultimate triumph of hope, leading to the emergence of caring interpersonal recognition and confirmation as the twin bedrocks of a new and everlastingly meaningful society.