The Great Turning

by David C Korten

  NARROWING THE DEBATE

  Once the debate on economic policy is framed in terms of what courses of action will most effectively drive growth as measured by GDP or, more recently, as measured by share markets, from there on it is simply 249a matter of working out the details. Whatever policies are forthcoming will serve to further the concentration of power in elite hands.

  As soon as the security debate is framed in terms of what measures will most effectively protect us from evil criminals and foreigners, the security debate is already defined as a need to strengthen the police and military powers of the state. From there it is simply a matter of debating the details of how best to do it.

  The deeper cultural underpinning for these prosperity and security debates is provided by the imperial biblical and secular creation stories. The imperial biblical story affirms the righteousness of the rich and powerful, demands faith in the divine order, renders challenges to its authority a sacrilege, and dismisses efforts to improve the conditions of the poor or protect the environment as irrelevant. Whatever exists manifests God’s will, and the imminent Rapture will lift the faithful to heaven and destroy the wicked. The future is preordained, and the faithful need to do nothing but pray and wait. This version of the biblical story also celebrates material displays of power and affluence as symbols of righteousness.

  Although it proceeds from a rejection of any divine or supernatural being, the imperial secular story serves virtually identical ends. It sanctifies a hierarchy of domination as the natural order, provides a logical basis for dismissing demands that the rich and powerful accept responsibility for the public consequences of their actions, and celebrates the benefits and legitimacy of material accumulation and public display.

  Stories are a key to the New Right’s success in gaining control of the U.S. political system. The imperial stories of the New Right are contemporary versions of narratives that can be traced back to the empires of ancient times. The culture-specific variants of these stories shape the public cultures of most all the world’s nations and are often told and celebrated by their own imperial elites.

  Media pundits, intellectuals, think tank spokespersons, politicians, and religious figures sympathetic to the imperial worldview create a cultural echo chamber by endlessly repeating elements of the factually flawed and morally bankrupt imperial narratives as if speaking from an 250identical sheet of talking points. A concentration of media ownership in the hands of proponents of the imperial agenda amplifies their voices far out of proportion to their numbers in the population—shaping the political culture and defining right and wrong for the swing voters who view the world through the lens of the Socialized Consciousness.

  As these stories become embedded in the culture, they systematically diminish our collective sense of human possibility, undermine our commitment to public-interest politics, and limit political debate to choices that strengthen the dominator relations of Empire. It never occurs to most of us to deconstruct the narratives to examine the validity or the devastating implications of their premises for the societies in which we live.

  Empire’s prosperity story celebrates the idolatrous worship of money and material acquisition and a concentration of ownership that leads to spiritual impoverishment for all and material impoverishment for the vast majority. Empire’s security story focuses on building strong police and military forces to impose order by physical coercion to protect established relationships of domination, thus perpetuating a system of oppression and injustice that leads to environmental destruction, social unrest, and faux democracy. Empire’s biblical meaning story focuses on the afterlife. Empire’s secular meaning story reduces life to matter and mechanism. Both lead to alienation from life and strip our earthly existence of meaning and purpose.

  Individually and collectively these stories legitimate imperial rule, deny our humanity, and lead to the material and spiritual impoverishment of human societies. Yet they are very effective in serving the New Right’s intended purpose because they are the only stories most people hear.

  Logic suggests that exposing the flawed assumptions of these imperial stories would strip them of their power. That is, however, a false conclusion. We humans live by stories. Once a story has currency in our minds, we inevitably return to it because it provides the only answer we know to our very real questions about things that are important to us.

  Stories are the key. To redirect the course of humanity, change the stories by which we live. Stories that deny life’s possibilities and sacred purpose have stifled the development of the higher orders of human consciousness and held us captive to the sorrows of Empire. Stories that affirm life’s possibilities and sacred purpose liberate our minds from this self-imposed limitation and call us to carry forward the Great Turning.

  PART IV

  The Great Turning

  There can be no respect for our place in the environment and the environment’s place in us without a spirituality that teaches us reverence for the cosmos in which we find ourselves.1

  Matthew Fox

  We humans live by stories that embody the shared wisdom of our cultures about our possibilities, values, and the nature of the cosmos. Through these stories, most particularly the stories of our origin, we define ourselves, the meaning of our lives, and our relationship to the sacred. When the stories a society shares are out of tune with its circumstances, they can become self-limiting, even a threat to survival. That is our current situation.

  It is now within our means to make an epic choice to put the sorrows of Empire behind us in favor of the joys of Earth Community. We have the knowledge and the technology. The remaining barriers are primarily self-limiting beliefs that have no reality beyond the human mind.

  The explosive advance of human knowledge in the past hundred years greatly expands not only our understanding of our nature and possibilities but also the capacity for cooperative self-organization and mutual service inherent in the very nature of life itself. To navigate successfully the turbulent waters of the Great Turning, we must revisit and update the stories by which we communicate our common understanding of our human origin, purpose, and possibility.

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  CHAPTER 15

  Beyond Strict Father versus Aging Clock

  Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.

  Albert Einstein

  For peoples, generally, their story of the universe and the human role in the universe is their primary source of intelligibility and value.… The deepest crises experienced by any society are those moments of change when the story becomes inadequate for meeting the survival demands of a present situation.1

  Thomas Berry

  Alienated from life and lacking a story appropriate to our time and understanding, we contemporary humans are condemned to seek meaning where it is not to be found. We pursue money as a measure of our worth, go shopping to distract us from our loneliness, dominate and destroy to affirm our existence, and turn for moral guidance to dogmas that affirm the disabilities of our alienation rather than challenge us to fulfill our potential.

  The last century was a time of extraordinary advance in human understanding regarding the origins of the universe, the evolution of life, and the developmental path of the human individual. For the most part both science and religion remain wedded to stories of older origin that incorporate nothing of this new knowledge. These outdated stories impair our vision of the possibilities of our higher nature, our connection to life, and our place in Creation.

  GRAND CONFRONTATION

  The long-standing conflict in the West between science and religion pits the religion of the strict father against the science of a mechanistic world likened to an aging clock. This contest has raged in the West since the beginning of the scientific revolution.

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  Religion of the Strict Father

  By the time of the early scientific revolution in the sixteenth century, prevailing Christian theology had fallen into a distrust of th
e human intellect and its ability to perceive truth from observations of the material world. Indeed, excessive concern with material phenomena was considered a sign of a neglected soul. Religious authorities maintained that divine revelation as enshrined in scripture and interpreted by themselves was the only valid source of truth and that the universe is governed by forces beyond human knowing. The prevailing Western worldview of that time, particularly as defined by the Catholic faith,

  viewed the human relation to God as one of a child to a father who demands strict loyalty and obedience;

  ascribed to God both human emotions and the power to create and destroy whole worlds by an arbitrary act of will;

  held humans to be both the purpose and center of God’s creation;

  venerated a pantheon of saints with powers to intervene in matters of the heart and flesh;

  attributed physical and mental afflictions to possession by malevolent spirits; and

  claimed for religious authorities the power to guarantee a place in heaven.

  A dramatic shift in the dominant cultural perception began to take place around 1660, as the mechanistic worldview of the scientific revolution took hold in Europe. The shift from magic to mechanism was a bold step that opened the way to extraordinary advances in understanding and technology, much as the child’s awakening to physical mechanism is an important step on the path to a mature consciousness. Unfortunately, however, the scientific revolution brought not only a rejection of the magical fantasies of the lowest order of consciousness but also a denial of the spiritual foundation of reality and a deep alienation from life.

  Science of the Aging Clock

  In sharp contrast to the belief systems of most religions, the ideological frame of standard Western science steadfastly maintains that the physical world is the only reality and that the disciplined observation of 255physical phenomena is the only source of truth. That stance began with the theories of Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) and the proofs of Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) that the sun is the center of the solar system and Earth is but one of its several orbiting planets.

  The conventional scientific wisdom of that day held that nature functions with the predictable precision of a mechanical clock and that its mechanisms are fully amenable to human understanding.2 Unable to explain the origins of the complex machine postulated by their theories, the early philosophers of the scientific revolution conceded that territory to the theologians, suggesting that the universe was created and set in motion by a master clock maker who then left it to wind down as the embodied energy potential of its wound-up spring was depleted.

  The contrast between the doctrines of science and the prevailing doctrines of the Christian churches of that day could scarcely have been more stark. Religious doctrine maintained that the material realm is an illusion, even the work of the devil to distract and deceive, and only the spirit realm is real. Scientific doctrine maintained that only the material is real. Religious doctrine proclaimed that humans are the center of God’s attention and the purpose of his creation. Scientific doctrine placed humans at the periphery of a vast, godless universe devoid of purpose or meaning.

  Rather than recognize material mechanism as but one of reality’s dimensions, the science fundamentalism replaced the self-limiting dogma of the religious establishment with a self-limiting dogma of its own— denying the very existence of whatever it could not measure and explain in terms of replicable mathematical relationships. It thus proclaimed life an accidental outcome of material complexity and came to treat it as a mere collection of chemicals and genetic codes subject to physical manipulation for human convenience. Science fundamentalism not only denied the higher orders of human consciousness, it declared all consciousness, spirit, and intention to be mere illusions, essentially stripping away any apparent foundation for personal moral responsibility.

  Culture of Alienation

  The rigid dogma of science fundamentalism was useful in imposing on science an uncompromising intellectual discipline that has led to enormous advances in human knowledge and technology. Unfortunately, the premise that only what can be observed is real came to be 256treated as proven fact rather than a useful basis for conducting science. It shaped the worldview of modern culture—thus perpetuating the alienation from life that is a primary driver of the addictions of Empire. Any competing view is dismissed by science fundamentalism as mere unproven religious belief. Such a stance neglects the reality that by its dogmatic rejection of intelligence and consciousness, science fundamentalism itself crosses the line that separates scientific inquiry from the propagation of unverifiable religious dogma.

  Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) set forth perhaps the clearest exposition of the philosophy to which the scientific revolution gave rise. Taking material mechanism to its logical extreme, Hobbes postulated that there is no meaning to existence and therefore no objective standard against which to distinguish between good and evil. According to Hobbes the only rational course is for each individual to pursue that which brings pleasure and avoid that which brings pain—essentially the simple motivational profile of the consciousness of very young children.

  From this premise Hobbes concluded that, given the natural right and inclination of each person to pursue immediate impulsive pleasures, order requires a strong state headed by an absolute ruler and law giver who has a free hand to determine what constitutes the public good and to impose order unhindered by any covenant with the people. In a stroke, Hobbes thus turned the scientific denial of that which makes us human into a rationale for an economics of greed and materialism and a politics of totalitarian rule.

  The Evolution Wars

  The long-standing tension between science and religion has again come to the fore in the United States in a struggle between creationists and evolutionists over what public schools will teach their students regarding the origins of the human species. At one extreme are scientific true believers like British biologist Richard Dawkins, who insist that life has evolved through a purely mechanistic process of chance mutation and natural selection and that this is settled fact not subject to challenge by rational minds. At the other extreme are the religious true believers like evangelical theologian Albert Mohler, who considers it settled fact that God created the cosmos, Earth, and all of Earth’s living beings in six days in a series of discrete events that culminated in the creation of man in God’s own image. By the reckoning of the Albert Mohlers, belief in 257God and belief in evolution are mutually exclusive.3

  A considerable number of scientists and theologians hold positions all along the continuum between these extremes. One increasingly popular school of thought that draws support from some members of both the scientific and faith communities is the theory of intelligent design, which maintains that life’s complexity bears the mark of an intelligent designer. Some among this group believe that the fossil record can be explained by the theory that God intervened periodically to create new species over time. Others believe that God set creation in motion to play out through mutation and natural selection like a computer program.4

  The public debate on evolution continues to be conducted entirely within the basic frame of pre-twentieth-century stories. The assumption is that, if intelligence was in any way involved in creation, it must reside in an external God who exists apart from his creation and functions in the manner of a magician waving a wand or an engineer constructing a machine from mechanical parts—another variation of the imperial meaning story.

  There is no consideration of the possibility that creation may be the manifestation of a creative intelligent consciousness intrinsic to all being, and most particularly to all life. Such an idea is integral to the experience and teachings of religious mystics, but it is alien to conventional science and treated as heresy by many Western religious leaders. The significance of whether we think of God as extrinsic or intrinsic to Creation was brought home to me in 1999, when I had occasion to meet religious scholar Marcus Borg at a conference sponsored by the Washi
ngton Association of Churches at which we were both speaking.

  TELL ME YOUR IMAGE OF GOD

  In his presentation, Borg challenged us with the assertion, “Tell me your image of God and I’ll tell you your politics.”

  Serving Different Masters

  Borg elaborates that the Christian Bible describes God in terms of two quite different clusters of metaphors that evoke different images and suggest quite different relationships between humans and the sacred. These metaphors spring from contrasting voices within the biblical tradition and reflect sharply different worldviews.5 One affirms the dominator 258relations of Empire and the other the partnership relations of Earth Community.

  The first cluster uses the familiar anthropomorphic metaphors of king, lord, and father, which evoke an image of a distant male authority figure with a physical human form to whom humans are presumed to owe unquestioning loyalty and strict obedience akin to that of a child to a traditional father, or a subject to a king. Borg calls it the monarchical model of God.6

  The most common modern understanding of God, both in the church and in the broader culture, centers on the monarchical model. By this understanding God is a supernatural being who resides in a distant place, created the world a long time ago, and established natural laws to order his creation. The main disputes center on whether God chooses from time to time to intervene in the affairs of his creation. In this conception, humans are not only the centerpiece of creation but also the realization of its purpose.