Confronting Our Imperial Legacy
In July 2002, Fran and I hosted our friend and colleague Vandana Shiva, the globally renowned Indian scientist, writer, farmer leader, and global peace and justice activist, as our guest on Bainbridge Island. It was the summer following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the United States.
Within days of the attack, the U.S. government declared perpetual war against terrorism, began rolling back civil liberties, and branded dissent as support for terrorists. Leaders of many other governments, glad for an excuse to limit dissent and buttress their own power, 19followed the U.S. example. Around the world, voices of resistance against corporate globalization were briefly stunned into silence.
By the time of Shiva’s visit, the U.S. administration had launched an invasion of Afghanistan and was talking of possible preemptive military action against Iraq, North Korea, Iran, Syria, and Libya. Influential policy analysts were debating the merits of an American Empire, and documents were circulating in which key administration officials openly advocated imposing a Pax Americana on the world by the unilateral application of U.S. military power in the manner of the ancient Roman Empire.
During our conversations, Shiva noted that the mobilization of global civil society to thwart the misuse of trade agreements to circumvent democracy was based on the by then widely accepted critique of corporate globalization to which we had each contributed. Civil society, however, had no generally accepted framework for addressing the larger and even graver threat to liberty and democracy of forthright military domination. Shiva and I invited Perlas to join us in preparing a discussion paper on “Global Civil Society: The Path Ahead.”8
This collaboration brought into focus the relevance of the work of another colleague, cultural historian Riane Eisler. In her classic work The Chalice and the Blade, Eisler placed the conflict between dominator and partnership models of organization in deep historical context and brought to bear the lens of gender analysis to illuminate the deeper roots of our contemporary political struggles for justice, peace, and environmental stewardship. By her reckoning, the repression of creative potential I had been witnessing for more than thirty years has been playing out for some five thousand years at every level of human organization, from relations among states to relations among family members. She traced the tragedy to the subordination of the feminine to the masculine and of the organizing principle of partnership to the organizing principle of domination. Once we made this connection to Eisler’s work we could see that we were dealing with issues that have far deeper historical roots than we had previously considered. This insight led to the book now in your hands.
My intention in writing The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community is to provide a historically grounded frame for understanding the possibilities of the unique time in which we live and thereby enable us to envision the path to a new era. Failing such understanding, we will continue to squander valuable time and resources on futile 20efforts to preserve or mend the cultures and institutions of a system that cannot be fixed and must be replaced.
Note that throughout The Great Turning I use the term Empire with a capital E as a label for the hierarchical ordering of human relationships based on the principle of domination. The mentality of Empire embraces material excess for the ruling classes, honors the dominator power of death and violence, denies the feminine principle, and suppresses realization of the potentials of human maturity.
Similarly, I use the term Earth Community as a label for the egalitarian democratic ordering of relationships based on the principle of partnership. The mentality of Earth Community embraces material sufficiency for everyone, honors the generative power of life and love, seeks a balance of feminine and masculine principles, and nurtures a realization of the mature potential of our human nature.
I urge you to read actively and critically, testing my observations and conclusions against your own knowledge and experience. I hope you will also participate in expanding the circle of dialogue by discussing the underlying issues with friends and colleagues. You might open such dialogue by recommending to those you want to engage that they read The Great Turning. Perhaps you might organize a discussion group. You will find supporting tools and discussion guides at http://www.greatturning.org/. To redirect humanity’s course, break the silence, end the isolation, and change the story.
Please bear in mind that it is impossible for me to engage individually with each reader of this book who might wish to dialogue with me directly. Much as I might wish the contrary, I am unable to respond to personal inquiries.
SYNOPSIS OF THE ARGUMENT
The human species is entering a period of dramatic and potentially devastating change as the result of forces of our own creation that are now largely beyond our control. It is within our means, however, to shape a positive outcome if we choose to embrace the resulting crisis as an opportunity to lift ourselves to a new level of species maturity and potential.
The outcome will depend in large measure on the prevailing stories that shape our understanding of the traumatic time at hand—its causes and its possibilities. Perhaps the most difficult and yet essential aspect of this work is to change our stories.
21 If we succeed, future generations may look back on this as a time of profound transition and speak of it as the time of the Great Turning. If we fail, our time may instead be known simply as the tragic time of the Great Unraveling.
Histories written by the victors of Empire’s endless wars, intrigues, and deceits have greatly exaggerated Empire’s accomplishments while neglecting the costs and lost opportunities. Current attempts by the world’s imperial elites to salvage the power and privilege of Empire are accelerating the collapse of critical social and environmental systems and threatening the survival of human civilization, if not the human species.
We now have the means to end the five-thousand-year era of Empire that has reproduced hierarchies of domination at all levels of human organization. A global cultural and spiritual awakening is building momentum toward the birthing of a new era of Earth Community based on a radically democratic partnership model of organizing human relationships. This awakening gives us cause for hope.
There are those who say that the violence and greed of Empire are defining characteristics of our human nature, that ruthless competition for power and material goods is inescapable. They say our impulses must be disciplined either by central authority or by market competition, both of which create hierarchies of power that consign the majority of humans to lives of desperation and suppress the creative potential of the species.
The truth is at once more complex and more hopeful. Our human nature actually embodies many possibilities, ranging from violence and greed to love and service. Contemporary human societies fail to manifest the higher-order potentials of love and service, not because of an inherent flaw in our human nature, but because the dominator relations of Empire actively suppress the development and expression of this potential. As a species, we now face both the imperative and the opportunity to say no to Empire, grow up, and accept the responsibilities of mature adulthood.
Our failing environmental and social systems create the imperative. The global revolution in transportation and communications is creating the opportunity. Leadership in actualizing the possibilities is coming from people everywhere who are making the choice to walk away from Empire’s false promises and engage the work of turning our cultures, economies, and politics from dominator to partnership relations.
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THE CULTURAL TURNING.
The Great Turning begins with a cultural and spiritual awakening. Economic and political turning can only follow a turning in cultural values from money and material excess to life and spiritual fulfillment, from relationships of domination to relationships of partnership, from a belief in our limitations to a belief in our possibilities, and from fearing our differences to rejoicing in our diversity.
THE ECONOMIC TURNING.
The values
shift of the cultural turning calls us to turn from measuring well-being by the size of our yachts and bank accounts to measuring well-being by the health of our families, communities, and natural environment. It leads us from economic policies that raise those at the top to policies that raise those at the bottom, from economic plutocracy to economic democracy, from hoarding to sharing, and from the rights of ownership to the responsibilities of stewardship.
THE POLITICAL TURNING.
The economic turning creates the necessary conditions for a turn from a democracy of money to a democracy of people, from passive to active citizenship, from competition for individual advantage to cooperation for mutual advantage, from retributive justice to restorative justice, and from social order by coercion to social order by mutual responsibility and accountability.
Some critics will surely complain that “Korten wants to change everything.” They miss the point. Everything is going to change. The question is whether we let the changes play out in increasingly destructive ways or embrace the deepening crisis as our time of opportunity. Now as never before we must unleash the creative potential of the species and direct it to democratizing our cultures and institutions and bringing ourselves into balance with one another and Earth. It is the greatest creative challenge the species has ever faced. Success would seem a futile dream, except that all around the planet momentum is already building.
THE BOOK
Although the issues addressed in The Great Turning are global and universal, I have chosen to focus my analysis on the United States. It is the nation among all others that is most challenged by the imperatives of the Great Turning. Few other nations are so accustomed to living beyond 23their own means, so imbued with a sense of special virtue and entitlement, or so burdened by a political leadership as out of touch with global reality and as incapable of accepting responsibility for the consequences of its actions. Because of its global presence, whether the United States responds to the imperatives with the logic of Empire or the logic of Earth Community is likely to have far-reaching consequences for all nations. Furthermore, the United States is the nation of my birth, the nation I know best and love most, and the nation for whose role in the world I feel most responsible.
The Great Turning is presented in five parts. Part I, “Choosing Our Future,” explores the choice at hand and the nature and implications of the distinctive imperatives and opportunities now before us.
Part II, “Sorrows of Empire,” reviews the conditions that led humans in an earlier time to turn away from a reverence for life and the regenerative power of the feminine to pursue the path of violence and domination. A synopsis of the imperial experience illustrates the self-replicating social dynamics of Empire, charts the transition from the institutions of monarchy to the institutions of the global economy as the favored instruments of imperial rule, and reveals the costs of Empire’s often overly idealized accomplishments. It also draws lessons from the early Athenian experiment in popular democracy and the insights of the great Athenian philosophers.
Part III, “America, the Unfinished Project,” turns to the United States and the history of the challenge now before us as a nation. In an effort to dispel the myths underlying a dangerous complacency about our institutions and global intentions, it takes a sober look at the reality that we have never been the democracy we imagine ourselves to be and we have always had imperial ambitions. It concludes with a look at the actions of a particularly corrupt and incompetent administration as a national wake-up call to confront the reality of our history and engage a popular mobilization to build the democratic society of our founding ideal.
Part IV, “The Great Turning,” outlines the scope of the work of the Great Turning by contrasting the stories and deep assumptions underlying the values and relationships of Empire and Earth Community that legitimate a hierarchy of domination and wealth concentration on the one hand, and networks of partnership, sharing, and mutual learning on the other. It draws on the deeper insights of both science and religion to make the case that learning and partnership are integral not only to life, but as well to the whole of Creation.
24 Part V, “Birthing Earth Community,” outlines a strategic framework for bringing forth a new era of Earth Community. It describes how self-organizing processes of citizen action, based on grassroots leadership, can advance an agenda of cultural, economic, and political democratization that roots power in people and liberates the creative potential of the species. It further makes the case that the foundation of a majoritarian political consensus based on family and community values and a concern for children is already in place.
PART I
Choosing Our Future
The capacity to anticipate and choose our future is a defining characteristic of the human species. The recent global spread of communications technologies has combined with a confrontation with planetary limits to present us with a unique opportunity, and the necessity, to use that capacity with conscious collective intent.
The defining choice is between two contrasting models for organizing human affairs. Give them the generic names Empire and Earth Community. Empire, which features organization by domination and which has been a defining feature of the most powerful and influential human societies for some five thousand years, appropriates much of the productive surplus of society to maintain a system of dominator power and elite competition. Racism, sexism, and classism are endemic features of Empire. Earth Community, which features organization by partnership, unleashes the human potential for creative cooperation and allocates the productive surplus of society to the work of growing the generative potential of the whole.
The defenders of Empire teach that we humans are by nature limited to a self-centered and ultimately self-destructive narcissism. Their favored organizing model suppresses development of the higher orders of human consciousness and thereby creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. The organizing model of Earth Community, by contrast, nurtures expression of the higher-order human capacities for responsible service that Empire denies. A convergence of imperative and opportunity unique to the present moment in the human experience sets the stage for an intentional collective choice to put the way of Empire behind us as we live into being a new era of Earth Community.
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CHAPTER 1
The Choice
Energy always flows either toward hope, community, love, generosity, mutual recognition, and spiritual aliveness or it flows toward despair, cynicism, fear that there is not enough, paranoia about the intentions of others, and a desire to control.1
Michael Lerner
All societies are patterned on either a dominator model—in which human hierarchies are ultimately backed up by force or the threat of force—or a partnership model, with variations in between.2
Riane Eisler
In the early 1970s, while teaching at the Central American Management Institute in Nicaragua, I made several visits to a cattle ranch in Costa Rica I’ll call Hacienda Santa Teresa. The simple but compelling story of this ranch captures for me the essence of the tragedy of unrealized human possibility that plays out at all levels of society, from relationships among nations, to relationships within nations, between races and genders, within families, and among individuals. The names are fictional. The story is true.3
HACIENDA SANTA TERESA
When Juan Ricardo took charge of the Hacienda Santa Teresa as manager in 1970, its lands, roads, fences, and buildings were in poor repair; many of its cattle were in poor health from a lack of necessary mineral supplements and vaccinations. Most of the sabaneros, the workers who looked after the cattle, were single men who lived in a dilapidated, unpainted one-room bunkhouse, where they slept on wooden planks. The peones, who did the manual labor, shared a similar but separate facility28 in which they simply slept on the floor for lack even of wooden planks. Each received a small wage plus a ration of rice, beans, lard, coffee, and occasionally corn flour for tortillas. These conditions were standard for the region.
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sp; Sabaneros in those parts were often related to one another and formed tight-knit groups. For the most part they were cleaner and more concerned with the appearance of their quarters than the peones, but were still lax in their personal hygiene and generally in poor health. They had a reputation for honesty, did their jobs well, and commanded a certain grudging respect from the ranchers, who depended on them to care for the cattle on distant pastures.
Like most others in the region, the sabaneros at Hacienda Santa Teresa were responsible for providing their own equipment, which was often in poor repair. Their bridles had no bits, their ropes were old, and they lacked basic rain gear even though heavy rainstorms were common. The ranch provided their horses, which received minimal care. The sabaneros did not know how to trim their horses’ hooves properly and took no care to remove ticks from the animals’ hides.
The peones built fences, repaired roads, cleared land, and constructed corrals and buildings—tasks for which some of them had considerable skill. They were, however, considered incorrigible thieves who needed strict supervision. They were expected to respond to any order with subservience and respect. Because labor-code provisions only took effect after three months of employment, many ranchers made a point of never keeping a peón that long. The sabaneros were disdainful of the peones, whom they considered dirty, unprincipled, irresponsible, and ignorant, and felt they were entitled to give the peones arbitrary orders.
The Great Turning Page 4