The Great Turning

by David C Korten

  Each of the world’s many cultures captures some elements of a deeper truth, yet represents only one of many possible ways of interpreting the data generated by the human senses. Sustained cross-cultural experience can break the cultural trance and awaken a new consciousness of and appreciation for the varieties of the human experience and potential of the species. My life story, as outlined in the prologue, of moving from the cultural island of my childhood to the life of an itinerant global citizen offers an example of how the communications revolution of the last half of the twentieth century created conditions conducive to an accelerated liberation of the human consciousness.

  An awakened Cultural Consciousness is relatively immune to the distorted cultural conditioning promoted by the corporate media, advertising, and political demagogues. Racism, sexism, homophobia, and consumerism are more easily seen for what they are—a justification for domination, exploitation, and violence against life—and a barrier to realizing the possibilities of Earth Community. An implicit underlying cultural premise of all the great progressive movements of our time is that a partnership world is possible.

  SPIRITUAL CONSCIOUSNESS

  The same shrinking of geographic space that is accelerating the awakening of Cultural Consciousness is also accelerating the step to Spiritual Consciousness. Those who travel the world to engage in the life of the peoples and places they visit experience both the vitality of the world’s cultural diversity and the beauty of the planetary web of life. The iconic image of planet Earth taken from space gives visual expression to the profound reality that the world’s people are one people sharing a common destiny on a solitary living spaceship alone in the vast darkness of space. From a recognition of the interconnectedness of life it is only a short step to an encounter with the yet deeper truth that all life flows forth 79from the same spiritual source and that Empire’s war against life is a war against ourselves. This awakening of a spiritual consciousness has profound practical implications, as it is the foundation of the cultural turning:

  From a belief that Earth belongs to humans and is ours to consume as suits our fancy to an understanding that Earth is our sacred home and that it is our responsibility to be respectful partners.

  From a belief that we humans are by nature incapable of responsible self-governance to an understanding that our nature embodies many possibilities, including the potential for responsible self-governance and democratic citizenship.

  From a belief that those who differ from us pose a threat to our security and way of life to an understanding that all persons are born of the same sacred sprit with an equal right to respect and the pursuit of happiness and that cultural and racial diversity is a source of learning and creative potential.

  From a self-justifying belief that those who align with us are the champions of good and those who oppose us are evil enemies to an understanding that we are all both victims and perpetrators of the violence inherent in the structures of Empire.

  A GLOBAL PHENOMENON

  Evidence of a spreading awakening of Cultural and Spiritual Consciousness comes from a variety of sources, including the work of values researcher Paul Ray and feminist author Sherry Anderson. They report data from U.S. values surveys showing that a growing segment of the U.S. adult population is embracing a new culture that values social inclusion, environmental stewardship, and spiritual practice. They call the holders of the new culture Cultural Creatives and estimate that in the late 1990s there were 50 million Cultural Creatives in the United States, roughly 26 percent of adult Americans—compared with less than 5 percent in the early 1960s. They further estimate there are another 80 to 90 million Cultural Creatives in the European Union.6 Essentially those whom Ray and Anderson are calling Cultural Creatives are people who from their survey responses appear to have attained a Cultural Consciousness; many have achieved a Spiritual Consciousness. 80In subsequent chapters, I will from time to time use the term Cultural Creatives to refer to people who have achieved a Cultural Consciousness.

  International polling data suggest that hundreds of millions more Cultural Creatives are spread throughout the world. A 1993 Gallup International “Health of the Planet Survey” covering twenty-four nations found a substantial concern for the environment among people of both industrial and developing nations, with majorities agreeing that protecting the environment is more important than economic growth.7

  The World Values Survey, which gathered longitudinal data from forty-three countries from 1970 to 1994, found that residents of countries that achieve significant economic security show a strong inclination to challenge traditional sources of authority, including government, science, and organized religion, in favor of greater freedom of self-expression and personally examined values. The World Values Survey data reveal a growing acceptance of equal rights for women, a greater interest in the quality of life relative to pursuit of material gain, and an increasing sense of the importance of family life to individual and community well-being. Although the survey reports that church attendance is generally falling, it found an increase in the percentage of people who report that they often think about the purpose and meaning of life.8 These findings are all consistent with a spreading awakening of Cultural and Spiritual Consciousness.

  Ray and Anderson estimate that roughly half of all Cultural Creatives combine a deep commitment to social and environmental values with some form of spiritual practice—embracing an integral spirituality that connects them with the whole of Creation in both its inner and outer manifestations. By the framework of chapter 2 these are the Spiritual Creatives, who have achieved a Spiritual Consciousness. Ray and Anderson call them Core Cultural Creatives. Affirming the importance of a spiritual awakening to the Great Turning, they conclude from their research that virtually all the leaders of progressive social movements in the United States are Core Cultural Creatives. My own experience with many hundreds of movement leaders suggests that this assessment is largely valid both domestically and internationally.

  According to Ray and Anderson, Cultural Creatives come from all races, religions, classes, and political parties. The only clear demographic predictor is gender. Sixty percent of all Cultural Creatives are women. Sixty-seven percent of Spiritual Creatives are women.

  81 Spiritual Creatives are not only leading the growing resistance against the global violence and economic injustice of Empire. They are also leading the proactive work of growing the imaginal buds of Earth Community. Leadership in the prodemocracy, peace, environmental, human and civil rights, economic justice, gender equality, holistic health, gay rights, organic agriculture, and voluntary simplicity movements comes from within the Spiritual Creative ranks. Together they are creating a new politics of partnership centered on a spiritually grounded affirmation of peace, justice, democracy, and life. Although many of these leaders have no formal religious affiliation and few speak openly of their spiritual orientation, a substantial proportion are deeply spiritual and approach their work as a form of spiritual practice.

  INSTITUTIONAL AND TECHNOLOGICAL MEANS

  At the same time as the species is experiencing the cultural and spiritual awakening necessary to the cultural turning, it is acquiring the institutional and technological means to translate that advance into the economic and political turnings that the cultural turning makes possible. To appreciate the epic nature of these developments, we must place them in historical perspective.

  International Institutions

  The very first international organization aimed at advancing cooperation among nations, the International Telegraph Union, was established only in 1865. The Universal Postal Union followed it in 1874. It seems noteworthy that both these pioneering institutions dealt with expanding the capacities for international communication.

  Shortly thereafter, the International Peace Conference held in The Hague in 1899 made an initial effort to abolish the use of war as an instrument of national policy. It adopted the Convention for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes, whic
h established the Permanent Court of Arbitration to provide a means for peacefully settling international disputes. The Treaty of Versailles of 1919 created the International Labor Organization and the short-lived League of Nations.

  It was only in 1945, just sixty years ago as of this writing, that the United Nations was founded as the first international organization to 82bring together all the world’s nations to sit in permanent assembly to address the range of global human needs. Of even more recent origin is the electronic communications capability that has virtually eliminated the geographic barriers to human communication for a substantial portion of the population and is moving the species toward a capacity to make informed collective choices.

  Communications Technology

  Much of Empire’s power has come from the ability of ruling elites to control the flow and content of the information by which subject peoples define themselves and their circumstances. Until quite recent times, ordinary people had virtually no means of communicating with one another other than through the unassisted spoken word. It was rare for people to have contact with anyone beyond their immediate village.

  Modern humans, Homo sapiens, have been around for about two hundred thousand years. Public mail service became accessible to ordinary people only about two hundred years ago. Telephones did not come into general use until the mid-1900s, and the cost of a long distance call made it a luxury item until the 1980s. The first commercial airline service across the Atlantic was established in the 1930s. The explosive growth in international travel began only with the first transatlantic commercial jet service in 1958. It was not until the 1990s that the capability for interactive, instantaneous, multiparty global conversations became available via satellite-linked Internet, teleconferencing, and videoconferencing technologies. Development of the World Wide Web began in 1990. The first Web browser for popular use, Mosaic, was released in March 1993.

  Although a serious digital divide remains, these technologies are connecting the world’s people into an interactive communications web. Millions are now using them to create a dynamic, self-directing social organism that transcends the boundaries of race, class, religion, and nationality to function as a shared conscience of the species. The computer communications revolution has happened within the space of little more than ten years. It is so new that even most of its participants are scarcely aware of the profound significance of the transformation in which they are participating.

  The computer communications revolution is transforming the very nature of news and opinion media through an unprecedented 83process of democratization. Public interest groups are rightly concerned that a handful of publicly traded corporations have monopolized conventional print, radio, and television media outlets to serve purely commercial interests. The revolution in computer communications technology, however, is producing an end run around corporate efforts to monopolize and centralize access to the public mind. Every person in the world with a computer and an Internet connection has access to virtually all of the world’s consequential print, audio, and video news sources and the capability to create an electronic newsletter or radio or television station of their own free from any licensing requirements or monopoly controls. Bloggers (short for Web loggers) are regularly scooping the professional newscasts on major stories, and many are posting audio versions of their news and opinion pieces for instant download to portable playback devices.

  The expansion of Internet access is creating the possibility of a democratic media network in which every voice has its potential outlet and people have near infinite variety in their choice of sources for news and opinion—blurring the distinction between mass and individual communication. Through a process of self-organization, a system is evolving in which stories and opinion pieces enter the communications web from millions of independent sources to be sorted and aggregated by Web sites that serve as trusted portals for specific constituencies. This radical democratization of media makes it increasingly difficult for any individual or group to monopolize the venues of cultural regeneration in order to control a society through the falsification of culture.

  Quality and reliability will be continuing issues resolved through the same dynamics of user feedback and evaluation now used to assess the integrity and reliability of individual commercial Web vendors. With a virtually unlimited number of broadcast and publication channels, media monopolization and the suppression of news or opinion are becoming impossible.

  FROM CONSCIOUSNESS TO ACTION

  The conditions are now in place for the species to take an essential step beyond the self-limiting cultural beliefs and stories that divide us to an appreciation of the deeper values and spiritual origins of life that unite us.

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  You’re Not Crazy—You’re Human

  Educator Parker Palmer has outlined the process by which the individual experience of awakening to a Cultural Consciousness translates into individual commitment and ultimately into an irresistible force for transformation.9 It begins when an individual functioning at the level of the Socialized Consciousness awakens from the trance induced by the prevailing culture. This awakening commonly leads to a deep disconnect between the realities of family, work, and community life grounded in the previously unexamined values and the examined, authentic values of a maturing consciousness. This disconnect confronts the individual with the often painful choice between conformity and authenticity.

  Palmer notes that those who make the choice to align their lives with their authentic values experience a sense of isolation from family members, friends, and associates whose views are defined by the codes of the old culture. The individuals undergoing this transition may at times feel like creatures from outer space in the midst of a family gathering or class reunion. With time, however, they find others, even among their immediate family, friends, and associates, who are feeling a similar sense of tension and isolation and join with them to create what Palmer calls a community of congruence. It may begin with only two or three others with whom they share an occasional conversation or meal. Together they help one another discover that the craziness is not in themselves, but in what many institutions decree as “normal.”

  Once the nucleus of such a community forms, it attracts others and may become regularized in the form of a book club, study group, spiritual retreat, conversation café, or quilting party, where people who share the struggle of reconciling their lives with an awakened consciousness gather for mutual support. In the civil rights movement, these communities of congruence commonly formed within African American churches.

  Such communities are forming by the millions all around the world. To draw on the butterfly metaphor, we might think of them as the imaginal buds of the new culture. With time, individual communities of congruence reach out to form alliances with others to create larger cultural spaces, such as a farmers’ market or food co-op; these create the imaginal buds of a new economy and allow participants to live more authentic and fulfilling lives. Gradually they build the power to transform or displace the institutions of the dominant culture.

  85 Such communities and alliances formed in significant numbers during the latter half of the twentieth century to bring forth great social movements for national independence, human and civil rights, women’s rights, peace, environmental protection, and economic justice. During a period of only fifty years these movements dismantled the prevailing system of European colonial empires, codified human rights in international law, rewrote the legal codes of nations, and redefined the prevailing cultural codes regarding relationships among men and women, races, nations, and species. These alliances are now linking into the most powerful and truly global social movement in the whole of the human experience.

  Birthing Global Civil Society

  The alliance-building processes that gave birth to this global meta-movement became visible only in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro during the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), at which the world’s heads of state gathered for an Earth
Summit. The conference proved to be a landmark event in the human experience.

  Its significance came not from the accomplishments of the official meetings. Their effectiveness was limited by the organized intervention of global corporations working under the banner of the Business Council on Sustainable Development and the International Chamber of Commerce to make certain the official meetings did not produce conclusions contrary to corporate interests. On the other side of town, however, a gathering of eighteen thousand private citizens of every race, religion, social class, and nationality was making history as participants drafted informal citizen treaties setting forth agendas for cooperative voluntary action.

  I had the privilege of being a participant in the citizen forum. It was a life-transforming experience. It was here that many thousands of leaders of what would only later come to be known as global civil society discovered that underlying our differences there is a common dream of a world that works for the whole of life. We committed ourselves to bring it into being.

  The citizen deliberations, which called for a sweeping transformation of human cultures and institutions, demonstrated that the peoples of the world share a common vision of the world in which they want to live. Key elements of the consensus were summarized in the People’s 86Earth Declaration: A Proactive Agenda for the Future. It ends with the following commitment:

  We, the people of the world, will mobilize the forces of transnational civil society behind a widely shared agenda that bonds our many social movements in pursuit of just, sustainable, and participatory human societies. In so doing, we are forging our own instruments and processes for redefining the nature and meaning of human progress and for transforming those institutions that no longer respond to our needs. We welcome to our cause all people who share our commitment to peaceful and democratic change in the interest of our living planet and the human societies it sustains.10