The Great Turning

by David C Korten

  From this modest beginning, global civil society has grown significantly in strength and sophistication to become an increasingly influential moral force for global transformation.

  The process of documenting an emerging global consensus continued after the Earth Summit with the drafting of the Earth Charter. Often referred to as a Declaration of Interdependence, the Earth Charter reflects a global consensus reached through a decade-long worldwide cross-cultural conversation about common goals and shared values that began in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. Drafting it involved thousands of individuals and hundreds of organizations from all regions of the world in an open and participatory consultation process.11

  As a charter of people, rather than governments, it has no legal force. Rather than present a list of prescriptions or demands, it outlines the values of the emergent era, articulating an integral vision of a world dedicated to respect and caring for all life, deep democracy, human rights, economic justice, and peace. It affirms that once “basic needs have been met, human development is primarily about being more, not having more.” The charter recognizes that far from being at odds, individual liberty, strong communities, and respect for Earth are inseparable one from the other. Its moral principles align with the wisdom underlying the teachings of all the world’s great religions.

  The Second Superpower

  Global civil society first established its identity as a significant political force in 1999, when fifty thousand demonstrators from around the 87world gathered in Seattle and staged a massive protest that successfully disrupted the Third Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization. The demonstration brought an end to the myth of the invincibility of the forces of corporate rule. From that time forward, whenever the corporate elites gathered in major closed-door conferences to advance the interests of corporate Empire, massive international protests, some involving hundreds of thousands of persons, presented them with a powerful message: The people of the world are watching and will no longer acquiesce in silence to your assault on democracy, justice, and the planet.

  In 2001, global civil society began organizing its own massive forums under the banner of the World Social Forum and the theme “Another World Is Possible.” The 2001 forum drew 20,000 participants to Porto Alegre, Brazil. By the third year, it drew upwards of 100,000 people. The fourth World Social Forum, held in Mumbai, India, drew 80,000 people from 132 countries, with especially strong representation and leadership from India’s Dalit community—once known as the “Untouchables.” In its fifth year, 2005, the forum returned to Porto Alegre and drew 150,000 participants.

  The World Social Forum process has inspired the creation of regional and national social forums around the world. The call went forth from the November 2002 European Social Forum and then the January 2003 World Social Forum, which brought more than ten million people to the streets of the world’s cities, towns, and villages on February 15, 2003, to demonstrate for peace in the face of the buildup to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.12 Commenting on the demonstrations and their impact, the New York Times observed that “there may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion.”13

  It is a perceptive observation. This, however, is a superpower struggle like no other in human history. Rather than a classic contest for dominion between states, it is a struggle between two globalizations grounded in sharply contrasting visions of human possibility—one imperial and the other democratic. It pits an alliance of state and corporate power devoted to a vision of global Empire against an alliance of people power devoted to a vision of Earth Community. Empire holds the edge in institutional power; Earth Community holds the edge in the moral power of the authentic cultural values of a mature consciousness.

  Rather than mobilize around an ideology or charismatic leader, the people-power alliance of global civil society has mobilized around an emergent values consensus. Far from being leaderless, however, it is a 88leader-full movement self-organized by hundreds of thousands of leaders linked in a seamless web of electronic communication. It manifests the qualities of an emergent social organism with a capacity for democratic self-governance grounded in authentic life-affirming human values transcending race, gender, nationality, ethnicity, and religion wholly new to the human experience. Its rapidly expanding capacity for mutual learning, consensus convergence, and global coherence hints at the human possibilities that lie ahead.

  Less dramatic, and therefore less visible, are the millions of participants who are forming local alliances devoted to rebuilding community institutions and democratic participation from the bottom up. This, however, is the most important work of all —the work of living the cultures and institutions of the new era into being.

  The institutions of imperial power have responded to this challenge in the manner of the disintegrating caterpillar’s immune system: with a well-organized effort to reassert their dominion even as global civil society grows stronger. Whether the organized violence of Empire will be succeeded by the peace and justice of a new era of Earth Community or by the chaotic violence of social breakdown and warring feudal fiefdoms remains to be determined. Either way, the established pattern of global imperial power has reached its limit and cannot endure. An exhausted planet and politically conscious peoples will no longer support it.

  A new human era is in gestation. The choices we humans make over the next few decades will determine whether the birthing is successful. To paraphrase civil rights activist Miles Horton, “We make our road by walking.”

  Modern humans have been around for some two hundred thousand years. It is only during the most recent five thousand years that a drive for dominator power brought forth the era of Empire and its reckless squandering of lives, resources, and human possibility to support the privilege and extravagance of the few.14

  Humans have always suffered hardship and deprivation from acts of nature over which they have no control. Slavery and poverty are not, 89however, acts of nature. They are social constructs that create an intentional and pervasive condition of exclusion. No ruling class in five thousand years has delivered on a promise to eliminate either poverty or slavery and its equivalents, because to do so would mean the elimination of elite privilege. There is no elite class without a servant class. The maintenance of a dominator system depends on violence or the threat of violence to maintain the extreme class division.

  Now, through a global awakening of Cultural and Spiritual Consciousness, ordinary people are coming forward by the millions to say five thousand years is enough. Empire’s power brokers will not readily relinquish their power. An understanding of Empire’s deep roots and the lessons of its history illuminates the nature and magnitude of the challenge at hand as we set about putting Empire’s addictions behind us.

  PART II

  Sorrows of Empire

  Every empire we know of in human history has succumbed to this idolatry of power.1

  Cornel West

  By the accounts of Empire’s historians, civilization, history, and human progress began with the consolidation of dominator power in the first great Empires. Much is made of the glorious accomplishments and heroic battles of the rise and fall of subsequent imperial civilizations. Rather less is said about the brutalization of the slaves who built the great monuments, the racism, the suppression of women, the conversion of free farmers into serfs or landless laborers, the carnage of the battles, and the hopes and lives destroyed by wave after wave of invasion, pillage, and gratuitous devastation of the vanquished. These are among the sorrows of Empire.

  Many of the proudest and most enduring of human intellectual and cultural achievements came before Empire, when societies were more egalitarian and women had important leadership roles; during brief respites from the despotic violence and oppression that defined the imperial era; or during the most recent two hundred years of democratic reform. The deeper human truth is that Empire marked a destructive and self-limiting detour from the path to realizing the possibilities of our huma
n nature.

  To liberate ourselves from Empire’s self-limiting patterns of domination we must understand their dynamics, acknowledge their destructive consequences, and embrace the truth of the human possibilities that Empire has long denied. We must also recognize the limitations of the contemporary human experiment in democracy and the process by which the institutions of imperial states have morphed into the institutions of imperial corporations to present a more benign appearance while leaving the underlying structures of domination in place.

  A brief historical survey is in order to remind ourselves of how brutally destructive Empire has been for all but the favored elites who rule from their perches high in the clouds and to deepen our understanding of the nature, dilemmas, and possibilities of the mature democracies of Earth Community. This review is also a useful reminder of how difficult it is to break free from Empire once its play-or-die dynamic is established.

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  CHAPTER 5

  When God Was a Woman

  Neolithic art, and even more so the more developed Minoan art, seems to express a view in which the primary function of the mysterious powers governing the universe is not to exact obedience, punish, and destroy but rather to give.1

  Riane Eisler

  Early human learning centered on three challenges: developing the art of complex speech to facilitate communication, discovering technologies to extend the capabilities of the human mind and body, and mastering the arts of living in ever larger units of social organization to accommodate population growth. Early humans learned to use fire, domesticate plants and animals, and construct houses of wood, stone, skins, and sundried mud. They created complex languages and social codes. They undertook continental and transcontinental migrations to populate the planet, adapting to vastly different physical topographies and climates as they went. Along the way, they negotiated the transition from roaming as bands of gatherer-hunters2 to living as settled agriculturalists in villages, towns, and cities, and they established the intellectual, technological, and social foundation on which human civilization rests to this day. At each step they moved ever further away from life as one with the beasts of jungle, plain, and forest on the path to becoming distinctively human.

  We now take these accomplishments so much for granted as to ignore the extraordinary learning and sharing they involved. We further ignore or deny the archaeological evidence that this all occurred during the period prior to the era of Empire, in the days of goddesses and high priestesses that most historians give short shrift.

  A WELL-KEPT SECRET

  As cultural historian Riane Eisler observes, “One of the best-kept historical secrets is that practically all the material and social technologies 94fundamental to civilization were developed before the imposition of a dominator society.”3 The domestication of plants and animals, food production and storage, building construction, and clothing production all were discoveries and inventions of what she characterizes as the great partnership societies in which women often had lead roles in developing and applying the underlying technologies.4 These societies developed the institutions of law, government, and religion that are the foundations of complex social organization and cultivated the arts of dance, pottery, basket making, textile weaving, leather crafting, metallurgy, ritual drama, architecture, town planning, boat building, highway construction, and oral literature.

  It is also noteworthy that when historians do mention the accomplishments of the early humans, they rarely mention the relatively egalitarian nature of their social structures and until very recently were prone to use a language that might lead the reader to believe that the early societies comprised only men. For example, a respected college history text published in 1958 offers this observation on pre-Empire humans:

  Whereas all of the men who had lived heretofore were mere food-gatherers, Neolithic man was a food-producer. Tilling the soil and keeping flocks and herds provided him with much more dependable food resources and at times yielded him a surplus.5

  Such a statement would presumably be unthinkable in a contemporary history text, not only because of the sexist language, but as well because it overlooks gender as a critical dimension of the human experience and the seminal contributions of women to many of the most important early human advances. Recognizing the distinctive role of women in the initial humanization of the species, we can more easily understand the enormous cost to our humanity of five thousand years of imperial repression of women, the importance of gender balance, and the essential role of women leaders in birthing Earth Community.

  Credit for exposing the consequences of the male chauvinist view of history rightly goes primarily to women like Eisler who have examined the archaeological evidence through the lens of gender to provide a fuller understanding of human experience and possibility. Eisler presented the result of her inquiry in 1987 in the pathbreaking feminist classic, The Chalice and the Blade, which juxtaposes the chalice as the symbol of the power commonly associated with the feminine to give 95and nurture life—the ultimate creative power—against the blade as the symbol of the power commonly associated with the masculine to dominate and extinguish life—the ultimate destructive power.

  There were, of course, no written languages during this early period. Therefore, we know its people only by what remains of their physical artifacts, the stories and legends eventually recorded by early scribes, and practices of isolated Stone Age cultures that have survived as a living record. We can only infer from the available fragments of data what went on in the minds of these early people, their values, their spiritual beliefs, and the variety of their ways of living. There is, however, compelling evidence to suggest that during the crucial pre-Empire days humans lived in relatively egalitarian social units, worshipped the regenerative powers of the Goddess, and depended on women for leadership in many aspects of family and community life.

  Given the ambiguity of the data and the variety of human experience, it is inevitable that modern interpretations of preliterate life differ significantly, and all interpretations are subject to challenge. My intention in this chapter is not to document or resolve the contrasting interpretations, but simply to place the current five-thousand-year era of Empire in the larger context of the long trajectory of human development.

  IN THE BEGINNING

  The available fossil evidence suggests that the earliest humanlike species appeared in Africa some four to five million years ago and that the earliest modern humans, Homo sapiens, emerged on that continent somewhere between one hundred thousand and two hundred thousand years ago and migrated outward to populate the planet.6

  The broad outlines of the lives of these early peoples are reasonably clear. Until about 11,000 BCE, when the Ice Age ended, most humans were organized into bands of five to eighty male and female adults and their dependent children. They were food gatherers, rather than producers, and lived by scavenging for wild berries and roots, hunting wild animals, and fishing the streams. The women replenished the tribe by bearing the children, nursing the infants, and gathering food; the men were generally larger and stronger than the women and thus more naturally suited to roles as hunters and warriors. Members of the band shared the available food and the benefits of community life.7

  96 Because the gatherer-hunter lifestyle supports only low population densities, in most settings some bands had to migrate periodically as the population increased, in search of berries, roots, wild grains, and game, perhaps following the seasonal movements of the animals they hunted for flesh and skins.

  Some took advantage of new opportunities as glaciers receded and water levels rose to create new habitats that brought forth an abundance of fish, shellfish, and waterfowl. Warming temperatures encouraged the growth of a lush variety of fruits and other edible vegetation available for the picking. As the communities grew, they learned to augment nature’s largesse through active participation in its regenerative processes by collecting and planting the seeds of edible plants. The establishment of permanent sett
lements also facilitated processes of wealth accumulation that were impossible for itinerant gatherer-hunters.

  Others who had lived by following animal migrations reduced the uncertainty of the hunt by learning to domesticate animals into managed herds. These people became nomadic pastoralists who guided their flocks and herds of goats, sheep, cattle, and horses across the landscape in search of green pastures. Moving regularly with their animals, the nomadic pastoralists could accumulate only the surplus they could transport. Thus, they commonly measured wealth primarily by the size of their herds.

  GODDESS CIVILIZATIONS

  Beginning about 7000 BCE, centers of settled agriculture began to appear in favored regions of Eurasia, subSaharan Africa, and the Americas. Many of the more important were located in the Near and Middle East in what are now the territories of Turkey, Greece, Iraq, Iran, and Syria; throughout the Mediterranean region; and as far north as England. The ancient Aegean civilization centered in Crete and the lesser islands of the Aegean Sea between the present states of Greece and Turkey was one of the earliest and most enduring.8

  Settled Agriculture

  Settled agriculture no doubt grew out of the astonishing accumulation of botanical knowledge that modern ethnobiologists find to be characteristic of gatherer-hunter peoples—representing the shared learning of many individuals over generations spanning many thousands of years. 97Drawing on this knowledge, some among those responsible for gathering experimented with selecting and cultivating the seeds of particularly useful crop species. As the gathering was predominantly the women’s responsibility, it is likely that women led the early development of the arts of cultivation.