The Great Turning

by David C Korten

  Much like most contemporary democracies, the Athenian democracy of their day was primarily concerned with protecting the rights of the individual. The fabled three began from a different starting point. Their goal was a virtuous politics and a good society, which by their definition is a society that nurtures the full development of the qualities that make us distinctively human. This distinction embodies an insight at the core of contemporary studies of human maturity, that is, that the concept of individual rights and responsibilities has a very different meaning to those who function at the self-centered lower orders of human consciousness than it does to those who have achieved the inclusive perspective of the higher orders of consciousness. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle believed that the good society needs the kind of leadership that comes only with the wisdom and discipline of a mature consciousness. They were thus less concerned with securing individual rights than with solving the puzzle of how a society might best identify and appoint wise leaders of a mature moral consciousness who would guide the society to achievement of its higher-order possibilities.

  Socrates (470–399 BCE) laid the foundation with his belief in the ability of man to discover enduring principles of right and justice as a guide to virtuous living independent of selfish desire. He equated true happiness with goodness and taught that the highest obligation of the statesman is to tend to the spiritual health and development of the souls of the nation’s citizens. The idea that those who understand the nature of true happiness recognize that the pursuit of unlimited wealth and power leads ultimately to misery and the loss of one’s humanity was a foundation of his political philosophy. Presumably, Thomas Jefferson had Socrates’ definition of happiness in mind when he proclaimed in the U.S. Declaration of Independence that the pursuit of happiness is an inalienable right.

  Socrates was an outspoken critic of Athenian democracy because he believed it wrong to put decisions of governance in the hands of men who lack true insight and to treat the views of all citizens as equal on 148matters of morality and justice. He thus articulated one of democracy’s basic dilemmas: all persons may be created equal in the eyes of God, but many fail to achieve the mature understanding and capacity for moral judgment essential to the practice of a mature citizenship that looks beyond individual advantage to the well-being of the whole.

  The Republic

  Plato (428–348 BCE), Socrates’ most distinguished student, taught that the ethical foundation for human affairs is to be found in an ordered universe that is both spiritual and purposeful. In his search for an ideal state free from the turbulence of self-seeking political competition between individuals and classes, Plato proposed a plan in Republic for a society divided into three classes: the working class, the soldier class, and a ruling class that would be specially prepared to rule by rigorous intellectual training. An educational screening system would sort out the candidates by aptitude and moral character to assure that the men who ruled would be those best suited to serving the interests of all.

  Plato favored what he called a true aristocracy, or rule of the best. He distinguished true aristocracy from both oligarchy, which he defined as domination by merchant princes, and democracy, which he dismissed as subjecting the state to the irresponsible will of the masses. In short, he accepted the dominator hierarchy of Empire as organizing principle, but sought reforms that would reduce many of the more destructive aspects of political competition by assigning the positions of power to people of an advanced moral sensibility.

  Although Solon, Cleisthenes, and the eighty-four-year rule of the Five Good Emperors of ancient Rome approximated Plato’s ideal republic, throughout five thousand years of history the imperial norm has more often resulted in rule by brutal and arrogant psychopaths than by wise and selfless sages. The logic of rule by wise saints is difficult to question, but it creates a problem: Who will judge the qualifications of the available candidates, and who will guarantee the integrity and wisdom of the judges?

  RESOLVING THE LEADERSHIP DILEMMA

  Athens dealt with the leadership dilemma by limiting the vote to those deemed worthy—which turned out to be those who were sufficiently 149organized to demand representation. This solution had a deeply pernicious consequence.

  As noted earlier, a society divided between the enfranchised and the disenfranchised must create a moral justification for the domination of one group by another. This invites abuse of power expressed through racism, sexism, and classism, thus undermining the ethic of equal rights. Yet an ethic of equal rights is the essential foundation of democracy and of a society dedicated to supporting all individuals in the realization of true happiness through the full development and expression of their talents. To deny to whole classes of people that which is the sacred obligation of the society to nurture is both illogical and immoral.

  Civil Society

  Aristotle (384–322 BCE), who was in turn Plato’s most distinguished student, shared with Socrates and Plato the belief that ethics is not a matter of adherence to moral absolutes. Rather, ethical behavior follows from a mature and considered choice for the true happiness achieved through a virtuous life of intellectual contemplation and a balanced disposition free from the extremes of excess and moral deficiency. Aristotle taught that a proper moral education seeks not to inculcate specific rules of behavior, but rather to help the student recognize the reasons for virtue and to experience the pleasure inherent in virtuous action.

  Aristotle believed that, although each individual is born with a capacity both for virtue and intellectual contemplation and also for savage lust, brutality, and gluttony, the former capacity is what makes us distinctively human and is the capacity we properly strive to cultivate. He believed that ethics and politics are inseparable one from the other, because the highest development of the individual, which he took to be the measure of the moral standard of a society, is inseparable from the problems of political association.

  Aristotle conceived of the state as a community of politically engaged citizens who share a common set of norms and values cultivated through a rigorous process of education devoted to developing a highly refined capacity for reason. He called such a state a “political society,” the Greek term later translated into Latin as societas civilis, or civil society. According to political theorists Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato, Aristotle’s ideal was a state whose citizens were sufficiently united by 150their goals and lifestyles to be able to function as a “single homogeneous, organized solidary body of citizens capable of totally unified action.”8

  Collective Wisdom

  In his struggle with the problem of how the good society might best select wise leaders, Aristotle arrived at the pragmatic conclusion that the government best suited to supporting man in the development of his highest nature will be controlled by a strong, numerous, and educated middle class in a state unburdened by extremes of wealth and poverty. He reasoned that, although the individual members of a polity may not be the best of men, they are more likely as a collective to arrive at a reasoned judgment in their choice of leader than are the members of a smaller group, even though those who make up the smaller group may be individually wiser. Aristotle thus arrived at a democratic solution to the leadership dilemma based not on a theory of individual rights but rather on a theory of collective wisdom.

  Aristotle is also among those great political philosophers, including notably Thomas Jefferson, who recognized that the institution of private property is an essential foundation of a strong and democratic middle-class society. He also recognized, as did Jefferson, the essential need for governmental intervention to prevent a concentration of ownership by any individual beyond that required to support modest comfort, as well as the need for government to assist the poor in becoming property owners by helping them buy land for small farms or otherwise become established in self-owned trades or professions. Aristotle considered such measures integral to each citizen’s prosperity and self-respect, which are in turn a foundation of responsible political participatio
n. His wise counsel, with some glaring exceptions, is of considerable relevance to the present human circumstance.

  For Men like Me

  For all of his wisdom and the importance of his contributions to political theory, however, Aristotle’s vision included a crucial flaw: a defense of slavery and the male domination of women.

  For that some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient; from the hour of their birth some are marked out for subjection, others for rule.… Again, 151the male is by nature superior, and the female inferior; and the one rules, and the other is ruled; this principle, of necessity, extends to all mankind.… It is clear, then, that some men are by nature free, and others slave, and that for this latter slavery is both expedient and right.9

  In effect, Aristotle’s vision of the good society was built in part on a self-serving elitist fantasy in which women and a permanent slave class toil to support a philosopher class of male citizens in the good life of refined leisure and reflective contemplation. He shared with Socrates and Plato this hypocritical chauvinism that ultimately was the seed of the undoing of Athenian democracy—and the inevitable undoing of any democracy that persists in similar contradictions.

  Another crucial flaw in Aristotle’s vision that has no place in the good society is his ideal of the civil society as “homogeneous.” Diversity is essential to a society’s vitality, as it is to the vitality of all living systems.

  Enduring Principles

  Setting aside for the moment the flaws of their elitist chauvinism, the great Athenian philosophers defined a number of enduring and ennobling principles of considerable relevance to our own time.

  Humans have a capacity for both good and evil, and nurturing the former is an essential task of the good society.

  The state is a unifying force essential to civilized life, because of the need to nurture our positive nature and to restrain our destructive impulses. The priority is to nurture the positive.

  Wise rulers who understand the nature of the good society and the proper role of the state in supporting its realization are required to guide the state in its responsibilities.

  Economic democracy based on a just distribution of ownership rights is an essential foundation of political democracy.

  The most promising solution to the challenge of assuring that those elevated to positions of power meet a minimal standard of maturity and wisdom is to vest the power to choose in a materially comfortable, strong, and well-educated middle class and to make the development and maintenance of what is essentially a classless society a priority of the state.

  152 On reflection, it seems almost axiomatic that if a society is to be ruled by the good and the wise, the state must give priority to supporting a cultural and institutional context that nurtures the goodness and wisdom of its citizens. Think of it as the experience of Ricardo and the Hacienda Santa Teresa writ large.

  This of course poses a classic conundrum: if the wise state is a product of a wise citizenry, and a wise citizenry is the product of a wise state, which comes first? Perhaps what comes first is neither the wise state nor the wise citizenry, but rather a vision of the benefit and possibility of an inclusive and egalitarian world ruled by wise and mature citizens who share power and rotate leadership roles to create a dynamic, democratic leadership of the whole. The vision then becomes a template for what the people of an organized civil society join in living into being.

  Democracy and political maturity must evolve in tandem through the engagement of all in the responsibilities of citizenship. Proper schooling and a strong civic culture are important, but in the end democratic citizenship is a practice, and the experience of doing it is our best teacher.

  The political philosophers Cohen and Arato observe that for democracy to work, all citizens —not just the elites—must be supported in developing through practice a political consciousness and a sensibility that embraces the needs and well-being of the whole.

  For it is through political experience that one develops a conception of civic virtue, learns to tolerate diversity, to temper fundamentalism and egoism, and to become able and willing to compromise. Hence the insistence that without public spaces for the active participation of the citizenry in ruling and being ruled, without a decisive narrowing of the gap between rulers and ruled, to the point of its abolition, polities are democratic in name only.10

  The contemporary phenomenon of global civil society may be an early manifestation of the human capacity to actualize on a global scale Aristotle’s ideal of a society able to achieve coherence primarily through nonhierarchical self-organization. In sharp contrast to the self-limiting social homogeneity of the Aristotelian ideal, however, global civil society is inclusive of a diversity of races, religions, classes, languages, genders, and nationalities that Aristotle could scarcely have imagined. 153Global civil society manifests a leadership of the whole around a unifying vision of a possible world grounded in universal human values of justice, sustainability, and compassion.

  THE ENLIGHTENMENT

  The Enlightenment, the next period of significant inquiry into the nature and potential of humankind and the democratic state, followed the death of Aristotle by some two thousand years. Presenting a powerful challenge to the absolutism of the institutions of both state and church, the Enlightenment began in England about 1680, spread rapidly to most of the countries of northern Europe, and established its center in France. John Locke (1632–1704) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) were two of the Enlightenment’s most influential political philosophers.

  Locke articulated the ideals of liberalism, which gave primacy to protecting the natural property rights of the individual (which he defined broadly to include life, liberty, and estate) as absolute and inalienable. He reasoned that to secure the orderly protection of their property rights, individuals ultimately agree among themselves to establish a government to which they surrender certain powers. Because a government properly exercises only the authority expressly granted to it by the people, the people may overthrow it if it exceeds or abuses that authority. Focused on property rights as the foundation of liberty and dismissive of the idea that it is the purpose of government to serve some larger good, the propertied classes embraced Locke’s concept of liberty and the responsibilities of government with particular enthusiasm as it lent a patina of democratic legitimacy to their privilege.11

  Much like Locke, Rousseau grounded his political theory in a concept of popular sovereignty and a “social contract” by which the people create a civil society with morally binding laws and duties through their mutual agreement. Rousseau reckoned that binding laws require both a legislative body to make the laws and an executive body to see to their enforcement. The power to make and enforce laws necessarily passes, respectively, to the legislative and executive bodies created by the social contract and thereby to those individuals the people commission to fill those offices and to act in the name of the popular will. The people are thereby morally bound to abide by the law as established and enforced by the chosen officeholders until the people choose to replace them or 154change the form of government—rights that remain irrevocably with the people. Rousseau’s conception was more inclusive and revolutionary than Locke’s and presented a great challenge to elite privilege.

  More than two millennia passed between the end of the democratic experiment of ancient Athens in 338 BCE and the next democratic experiment in Western culture that began with the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776. This long gap is a sobering reminder of the challenge facing those committed to carrying the democratic experiment forward to a new level of maturity.

  Athens’s turn to democracy began with a wise strongman leader who responded to the social tension of growing inequality with domestic economic reforms that strengthened economic justice rather than with efforts to defuse the tension through foreign conquest. Although only partial, these economic reforms were a sufficient step in the direction of economic
democratization to provide an underpinning for the political reforms that followed.

  Unfortunately, Athenian democracy never matured. Even at its height it was concerned primarily with securing the individual rights of a privileged minority. The majority—women, slaves, and persons born to foreign parents—were excluded in a denial of democracy’s essential principle that every person acquires certain inalienable rights by the fact of his or her birth.

  The great Athenian political philosophers—Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle—began not with a concern for individual rights, but rather with a definition of the nature of the good society as one that nurtures the full development of the higher qualities of the mind of each person through a combination of education, disciplined reflection, and civic engagement. Such a society requires a wise and mature leadership, thus raising the question: who will decide who is sufficiently wise and mature to lead?

  Aristotle, who believed the choice of leadership is best left to the collective wisdom of the largest possible group of well-educated, involved citizens, articulated a concept of a leadership of the whole grounded in active civic engagement in all spheres of community life. This vision— minus Aristotle’s blatant sexism, racism, and classism—is the vision of 155a mature democratic ideal. The distinction between democracy in its more and less mature forms is important to our understanding of the challenges now facing the nation that embarked on the first, yet partial, democratic experiment of the modern age.

  The ideas of the Enlightenment philosophers reignited democratic passions and made major contributions to shaping the political institutions of modern democracy. In contrast to the Athenian political philosophers, however, Locke and Rousseau were primarily concerned with limiting the role of government to maintaining order and protecting individual rights. They took a less expansive view on questions relating to human perfectibility, the good society, civic participation, and the role of the state in supporting each individual in achieving the qualities of wisdom and moral judgment that are foundations of the more robust and mature democracy of Earth Community. The modern democratic experiment has suffered accordingly.