The Great Turning

by David C Korten

  As the wave of corporate scandals in the opening years of the twenty-first century revealed, the supposed U.S. economic miracle of the 1990s was mostly a stock bubble built on accounting fraud and unfounded expectations. The growing U.S. trade deficit demonstrated that an open trading system managed by corporations to maximize shortterm profits results in dangerously unstable imbalances in the global system. Far from being concerned, however, the Cloud Minders stepped 70up their efforts to restore the bubble and accelerate the export of jobs and the related manufacturing capacities. Soon they were also exporting technological capacities, including those in advanced research and development—fueling a continuing precipitous increase in the U.S. trade deficit and international debt as we become ever more dependent on foreign factories, workers, and technology.

  In the mid-1990s, the United States still produced 90 percent of what it consumed. By the end of 2004 it produced only 75 percent,39 and the decline was accelerating.40 U.S. exports of computer hardware fell from $45 billion in 2000 to $28 billion in 2004. U.S. companies were investing very little in new capacity domestically and the ranks of U.S. engineers were thinning.41 Young Americans planning their careers were quick to get the message. Reversing a previous growth trend, applications to U.S. computer science and software engineering bachelor’s degree programs fell by as much as 30 percent in two years. India and China now lead the United States in computer science graduates.42

  U.S. export surpluses are now mostly in commodities, such as oil seeds, grains, iron, wood pulp, scrap paper, and raw animal hides. The top U.S. import from China is computer components. China’s top import from the United States is soybeans.43 The U.S. trade profile is increasingly that of a third-world country that exports commodities and imports finished goods.44

  In the economic vision of the myopic U.S. Cloud Minders, the proper U.S. role in the global economy is to specialize in consuming the products and technologies produced by sweatshop labor in other countries and paid for with borrowed money, thereby keeping U.S. profits and unemployment high and wages low, while passing the bill to future generations. To paraphrase the late economist Kenneth Boulding, anyone who thinks this a winning long-term economic strategy is either a lunatic or a neoliberal economist.

  The Perfect Economic Storm

  The gathering clouds of a perfect economic storm have the potential to severely disrupt the corporate global economy and force a restructuring in favor of local production and self-reliance. Four conditions combine to produce an unprecedented threat to the status quo.

  The imminent encounter with the point at which oil production peaks and goes into inexorable decline will eliminate the energy71 subsidies on which much of the capital infrastructure of the corporate global economy depends.

  Severe weather events and climatic changes associated with global warming will disrupt food production and global supply chains.

  A collapse in the international exchange value of the U.S. dollar will force the United States to restructure its economy to live within its means; those countries that have built economies geared to exporting to U.S. markets will need to redirect their attention to producing for their own domestic markets.

  The changing terms of warfare will bring an end to the ability of militarily powerful nations to seize with impunity the resources of weaker nations.

  These conditions will shift the economic incentives from favoring global supply lines to favoring local production and self-reliance. The adjustments will be made all the more difficult by a growing scarcity of freshwater, declining forests and fisheries, the paving over of arable land, soil loss, and declining soil fertility, all combined with continued population growth. The transition will be particularly difficult for nations like the United States that have become accustomed to living far beyond their own means and to depending on foreign labor, resources, and credit.

  How we humans choose to respond to these changing circumstances will determine whether the situation degenerates into persistent wars for the last of Earth’s bounty or brings forth a new era of cooperation based on an ethic of equitable sharing to meet the needs of all. When economic collapse hit the people of Argentina at the end of 2001, they rallied as a community to make the latter choice. It is an inspiring story well told in the video documentaries Argentina: Hope in Hard Times and The Take.45

  History suggests that the ruling Cloud Minders are too captive to the addictions of Empire to respond in any way other than their characteristic pattern of competing for control of the last remains of the planet’s resources. Their delusions are well summed up in the 2005 book by Peter Humber, of the Manhattan Institute, and Mark Mills, of Digital Power Capital, titled The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy. In an ode to the Magical Consciousness, they conclude, “The more energy we seize and use, the more adept we become at finding and seizing more.” 72

  Leadership to create a world that works for all is more likely to come from those who live in the real world and consequently are intimately acquainted with the injustice, violence, and environmental failure that Empire has wrought.

  THE GREAT WORK

  Attempting to preserve imperial privilege is not a rational choice. We can choose by default to let the collapse follow its natural course of a massive dieback in the human population and a descent into a fragmented world of local imperial fiefdoms reminiscent of the aftermath of the Roman Empire. Alternatively, we can acknowledge the irreversible changes in human circumstance that create an imperative to join together as one people on one planet to bring forth a new era of Earth Community based on the strong and caring families and communities that are the true foundation of prosperity, security, and meaning.

  Theologian Thomas Berry calls this affirmative choice the Great Work. It requires a commitment to

  bring our collective material consumption into balance with Earth to allow the healing and regeneration of the biosphere. This requires that we

  realign our economic priorities from making money for rich people to assuring that all persons have access to an adequate and meaningful means of making a living for themselves and their families. Because equity becomes an essential condition of a healthy, sustainable society in a full world, we must

  democratize human institutions, including our economic institutions, to root power in people and community and replace a dominant culture of greed, competition, materialism, and the love of money with cultures grounded in life-affirming values of cooperation, caring, spirit, and the love of life. Because recognition of the essential spiritual unity of the whole of Creation is an essential foundation of the deep respect for the rights and needs of all living beings on which fulfillment of this agenda depends, it is necessary that we individually and collectively

  awaken to the integral relationship between the material and spiritual aspects of our being to become fully human.

  73 The technological revolution of the twentieth century fundamentally altered the relationship of humans to the planet and to one another, created an unsustainable economic dependence on depleting the finite resources and regenerative capacities of the planet, and placed the human species at increasing risk of destruction by its own hand. Yet the circumstances of the lives of Empire’s privileged rulers so isolate them from the negative consequences of this change in the human condition that they are unable even to comprehend the import of what is happening, let alone come forward with appropriate leadership.

  Hope for the human future lies in the fact that Empire has created the conditions for the emergence from the bottom up of a new leadership of the whole. The same technological revolution that brings the imperative for change is also facilitating a global cultural and spiritual awakening to the interdependence of life, the unrealized possibilities of our human nature, and the opportunity before us to bring forth a cultural, economic, and political transformation as a conscious collective choice. It is the work of Ricardo and the Hacienda Santa Teresa on a planetary scale.
Millions of people the world over are already engaging in it.

  Some would call it a reawakening to the spiritual wisdom of our ancient past. Others might liken it to the sense of awe at the wonder and beauty of life that commonly follows a near-death experience. However we choose to characterize it, this awakening is opening the way for an evolutionary leap to a new level of human social, intellectual, and spiritual possibility. We now turn to the evidence that a unique and epic opportunity is presently at hand.

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  CHAPTER 4

  The Opportunity

  The light-skinned race will be given a choice between two roads. If they choose the right road, the seventh fire will light the eighth and final (eternal) fire of peace, love, and brotherhood. If they make the wrong choice, the destruction they brought with them will come back to them, causing much suffering, death and destruction.1

  Seven Fires Prophecy of the Ojibwe people

  We are now experiencing a moment of significance far beyond what any of us can imagine.… The distorted dream of an industrial technological paradise is being replaced by the more viable dream of a mutually enhancing human presence within an ever-renewing organic-based Earth community.2

  Thomas Berry

  Perhaps nature’s most powerful metaphor for the Great Turning is the story of the metamorphosis of the monarch caterpillar to the monarch butterfly, popularized by evolution biologist Elisabet Sahtouris. The caterpillar is a voracious consumer that devotes its life to gorging itself on nature’s bounty. When it has had its fill, it fastens itself to a convenient twig and encloses itself in a chrysalis. Once snug inside, it undergoes a crisis as the structures of its cellular tissue begin to dissolve into an organic soup.

  Yet guided by some deep inner wisdom, a number of organizer cells begin to rush around gathering other cells to form imaginal buds, initially independent multicellular structures that begin to give form to the organs of a new creature.3 Correctly perceiving a threat to the old order, but misdiagnosing the source, the caterpillar’s still intact immune system attributes the threat to the imaginal buds and attacks them as alien intruders.

  The imaginal buds prevail by linking up with one another in a cooperative effort that brings forth a new being of great beauty, wondrous possibilities, and little identifiable resemblance to its progenitor. In its rebirth, the monarch butterfly lives lightly on Earth, serves the regeneration of75 life as a pollinator, and migrates thousands of miles to experience life’s possibilities in ways the earthbound caterpillar could not imagine.

  As the familiar cultural and institutional guideposts of Empire disintegrate around us, we humans stand on the threshold of a rebirth no less dramatic than that of the monarch caterpillar. The caterpillar’s transformation is physical; the human transformation is institutional and cultural. Whereas the caterpillar faces a preordained outcome experienced by countless generations before it, we humans are path-breaking pioneers in uncharted territory. The rebirth is no wishful fantasy. It is already under way, motivated by a convergence of the imperatives described in the previous chapter and a spreading cultural and spiritual awakening of the higher orders of human consciousness.

  The conditions of the human rebirth are likely to be traumatic and filled with a sense of loss, particularly for those of us who have enjoyed the indulgences of Empire’s excess. Our pain, however, pales by comparison with the needless, unconscionable suffering endured for five millennia by those whose humanity and right to life Empire has cruelly denied. If we the privileged embrace the moment, rather than fight it, we can turn the tragedy into an opportunity to claim our humanity and the true prosperity, security, and meaning of community.

  The cultural and spiritual awakening underlying the prospective human metamorphosis is driven by two encounters: one with the cultural diversity of humanity and the other with the limits of the planet’s ecosystem. A rapid increase in the frequency and depth of cross-cultural exchange is awakening the species to culture as a human construct subject to intentional choice. The spreading failure of natural systems is creating an awareness of the interconnectedness of all life.

  These encounters are bringing forth the higher and more democratic orders of human consciousness, expanding our sense of human possibility, and supporting the formation of powerful global social movements dedicated to birthing a new era of Earth Community. To understand the nature and significance of this awakening, we must first understand the nature and function of culture.

  CULTURAL CONSCIOUSNESS

  One of the brain’s most important functions is to translate vast quantities of sensory data into information meaningful to the organism’s survival, for example, alerting the organism to the presence of food, 76danger, or a prospective sexual partner. The human brain must sort and translate the data of our senses not only into information useful to our survival, but as well into the complex abstractions of ideas, values, and spiritual understanding essential to our creativity, social coherence, and sense of meaning.

  In translating sensory data into meaningful information the brain necessarily sorts out the relevant from the irrelevant to draw the attention of the conscious mind to the data the brain’s filtering mechanisms deem most important. Thus, information presented to the conscious mind is determined partly by the raw sensory data and partly by the brain’s filtering mechanisms, which in turn are shaped by a combination of genetics, individual learning, and group culture.

  Culture is the system of customary beliefs, values, perceptions, and social relations that encodes the shared learning of a particular human group essential to its orderly social function. The greater the individual and cultural learning components of the brain’s interpretive mechanism, as contrasted to the genetic component, the greater the capacity of the species to adapt rapidly to new circumstances.

  In the case of humans, the individual and cultural learning components are substantial, which gives us an unequaled capacity to adapt and innovate through individual and shared learning. The greater our conscious awareness of culture as a social construct subject to critical examination and intentional choice and the greater our capacity to communicate with one another, the greater our capacity to choose our future.

  Social Construction

  Culture shapes our perceptions mostly at the unconscious level. It rarely occurs to us to ask whether the reality we perceive through the lens of the culture within which we grow up is the “true” reality. As evolution biologist Elisabet Sahtouris observes,

  Until the last half century before the new millennium, it did not occur to people that they could have anything to do with creating their worldview. All through history, people thought the way they saw the world was the way the world really was —in other words, they saw their worldview as the true worldview and all others as mistaken and therefore false.4

  In our first encounters with people from different cultures, we are likely 77to experience them as weird, difficult to understand, and possibly dangerous. Through extended intercultural experience, however, we come to see the deeper truth of culture as an organizing construct that defines a shared worldview essential to social coherence. Coming to understand the nature of culture is the essence of the critical transition from Socialized Consciousness to Cultural Consciousness described in chapter 2.

  The spreading awakening of Cultural Consciousness is of particular importance to us in this time of rapid change in the human circumstance. It is essential to our ability to live on a small planet in peaceful and mutually beneficial relationship with peoples of cultures different from our own; to identify and change those aspects of human culture that are actively self-destructive; and to consciously bring forth a new culture of Earth Community.

  For five thousand years, successful imperial rulers have intuitively recognized that their power rests on their ability to fabricate a falsified culture that evokes fear, alienation, learned helplessness, and the dependence of the individual on the imperial power of a great ruler. The falsified culture induces a kind of c
ultural trance in which we are conditioned to deny the inherent human capacity for responsible self-direction, sharing, and cooperation that is an essential foundation of democratic self-rule. The trance creates an emotional bond with the leader, alienates us from one another and the living Earth, erodes relations of mutual self-help, and reduces us to a state of resigned dependence much like the one Ricardo encountered among the sabaneros and peones of the Hacienda Santa Teresa when he first took over its management.

  Cultural Awakening

  In the United States, an important step in the awakening to the role of culture as a social construct came with the civil rights movement in the 1950s and ‘60s. Participation in that movement awakened many people to the truth that relations between races are defined by cultural codes that have little to do with reality. Once people learned to recognize the difference between reality and an unexamined belief system in reference to race relations, it became easier to see similar distortions in the cultural codes that define the relations between men and women, people and the environment, heterosexuals and homosexuals, and people and corporations.5 The civil rights movement thus prepared the way for the social movements that followed.

  78 Globally, a rapid increase in international travel, exchange, and communication has exposed millions of people to sometimes unsettling but usually enriching encounters with cultures not their own. That experience has opened many to viewing their own culture and the larger world in a new light. The experience of cultural awakening has become a contagious, liberating process of global scale that involves hundreds of millions of people and transcends the barriers of race, class, and religion.