The Great Turning

by David C Korten

  The Human Brain

  The developmental processes involved in achieving the potentials of our human nature are physiological as well as psychological. Like other aspects of our physiology, the brain matures with time, and the development of its higher-level abilities requires practice.

  Starting with the basics, what we call the human brain is actually a complex system of three interlinked brains, each with distinctive functions. This basic three-part structure is common to all mammalian brains. At the core is the reptilian brain, which coordinates basic functions essential to survival, such as breathing, regulating the heart, hunting and eating, reproducing, and engaging the fight-or-flight response to danger. The limbic brain, physically layered on top of the reptilian brain, is the center of the emotional intelligence that gives mammals their distinctive capacity to experience emotion, read the emotional state of other mammals, bond socially, care for their children, and form cooperative communities. The third layer is the neocortical brain, the center of cognitive reasoning, symbolic thought, awareness, and self-aware volition.

  In the earliest mammals, the neocortical brain is merely a thin skin covering the older subbrains. In humans, the neocortical brain is the largest of the three by substantial measure.7 Each of the three brains functions with its own integrity, even as it communicates with and influences the other brains as well as the intelligences of the body’s other organs and cellular systems that together give the human organism its vast range of capabilities.

  Because reptiles have no limbic brain, they lack the capacity for an emotional life. With no emotional life they have no capacity to bond and experience empathy. They come together briefly to court and mate, but they rarely function as a community and may even eat their own young as a convenient nutrient source.8

  The emotional intelligence of the limbic brain —the ability to accurately communicate one’s emotions and to read the emotions of others through verbal and nonverbal clues—is only partially formed in humans by the time of birth. The limbic brain of the newborn represents 284a potential that must be cultivated into a usable capacity through emotional exchanges with a primary caretaker —most often the mother. Practice in such exchanges activates the neural connections essential to the intuitive reading of emotional states.

  Creating a neural connection in the brain is much like creating a connection between two people within a human social network. Each such new connection, once established, creates a potential that is more easily activated in the future.

  It is much the same for the intellectual functions of the neocortical brain. It too is only partially formed by the time of birth and matures through use. Achieving the full potential of the higher orders of consciousness depends on the balanced development of both the limbic and the neocortical brains through their use as the child engages the world.

  It is not easy learning to be human. Although we think of our intellectual power as the highest manifestation of our humanity, in many ways our greatest developmental challenges involve our emotional and moral intelligence, a process in which our early experience relating to our primary caretakers is especially important.

  Nurturing Parenting

  The more active and loving the emotional exchange between the child and the adult caretaker, the fuller the early development of the limbic brain, the more fluent the child’s emotional intelligence, and the greater the capacity and subsequent predisposition for empathy, bonding, nurturing parenting, and responsible moral function. Of course, the converse is also true. The less satisfying the human connections experienced by the child, the less of these capacities it will have. Put in the starkest terms, the less developed our limbic brain, the more reptilian our nature.

  The developed neurological connections of the limbic brain respond to the experience of a positive relationship by stimulating the brain’s pleasure centers to reward subsequent encounters with those same persons to create the condition we call bonding. In a physiological sense, pair-bonded couples are “addicted” to each other. Similar physiological processes are involved in the bonding of the mother to her child.

  One of the more startling research findings is that “for men, getting married—becoming sexually and intimately bonded with a spouse— seems to lower testosterone levels,” which appears to be associated with 285a reduction in violent behavior and sexual promiscuity and an increase in positive fathering. There is also evidence linking intimate relationships to strong immune systems and more rapid healing of physical wounds.9 Conversely, humans deprived of intimate relationships are more prone to poor health and early death. A psychologically healthy childhood is a foundation of a physically and psychologically healthy adulthood.

  The implications for society are profound. By supporting the development of the limbic brain through loving interactions, nurturing parents increase the subsequent capacity of their children to function as self-regulating adults with the capacity for empathy, bonding, and moral self-direction that is an essential foundation of mature democratic citizenship. Distant, unresponsive, or abusive parents produce emotionally challenged, self-absorbed adults inclined to turn to coercive hierarchies to impose social order and to the violent acting out of unresolved emotional conflicts.

  The reinforcing interactions between parenting styles and adult predispositions reveal the truly monumental costs to the human future of the corporate plutocracy’s war against the family. By creating economic conditions that make it virtually impossible for millions of parents to provide their young children with the nurturing attention essential to their healthy emotional development, the economic and social policies promoted by the New Right in the United States and beyond perpetuate the reproduction of emotionally crippled adults for generations to come. That the consequences can be devastating not only for the individual but as well for the larger society is graphically demonstrated by a recent case in point that brings to mind the biblical warning of Ecclesiastes 10:16, “Woe to thee, O land, when thy king is a child.”

  When Things Go Wrong

  Justin A. Frank, a respected Washington, D.C., psychoanalyst and a professor of psychiatry at the George Washington University Medical Center, points to George W. Bush as an example of the potentially tragic consequences of nonnurturant parenting. By his reading of the public record of George W.’s early childhood experience, Dr. Frank concludes that young George suffered a serious lack of nurturing parenting, with devastating consequences for the United States and the world as he subsequently acted out his unresolved childhood conflicts on the global stage.10 286

  Young George’s father, George H.W. Bush, was largely absent from the home and had little role in George W.’s early upbringing. His emotionally distant mother, Barbara Bush, was by her own account a strict disciplinarian who regularly invoked harsh physical punishment. When George was six, his younger sister, Robin, was diagnosed with leukemia, but he did not learn of her illness until after her death. George simply was told not to play with her. In the meantime, his parents frequently flew with her to the East Coast for treatment. On her death, he was left to struggle on his own with unresolved feelings of abandonment, resentment, self-blame, and love associated with the tragedy and his parents’ stoic response to it.

  Such early experiences profoundly influence whether a child will grow up to perceive the world as largely safe and affirming or threatening and alienating. They also influence whether the child develops a positive self-concept and the ability as an adult to admit error, feel compassion, and see oneself through the eyes of another—in other words, the ability to take the step from an Imperial to a Socialized Consciousness and beyond. (See chapter 2 for more discussion about the levels of human consciousness.) Persistent fears and self-doubt may also translate into learning disabilities, rigid belief systems, claims to moral certainty, and megalomania that bar the passage to the high orders of consciousness. Confined to an Imperial Consciousness, individuals so afflicted are unable to acknowledge even to themselves the evil of the harm they inflict on
others or the moral hypocrisy of their positions.

  Dr. Frank documents the ways in which all these symptoms of thwarted development have been manifested by the adult George W. during his presidency. This pattern has been common among Empire’s ruling elites since the earliest days of Empire, and the species has paid a terrible price.

  Pain of an Unlived Life

  There is no human pain so great as the feeling of being alone in an existence without meaning. Viktor Frankl called it the “existential vacuum” and observed that the frustrated will to meaning may be “vicariously compensated for by a will to power, including the most primitive form of the will to power, the will to money.”11 Erich Fromm noted that humans will endure all forms of degradation to break from the deadly loneliness 287of an unlived life.12 Meaning is a side effect of the transcendence that we experience through selfless acts of creative engagement and contribution.

  To the extent that we find our world responsive to our presence in our early years, we develop the physiological and mental abilities to engage life with growing delight. We have the fascination to explore its possibilities and thereby to know ourselves, realize our highest potential, and experience the joy of life in relationship with Creation. If, however, we experience an unresponsive or even hostile world, we may resort to some form of escapism—a kind of despairing withdrawal from experiencing life—or to the pathological dominance-submission forms of relating that are the defining pattern of Empire. The imperial response of dominance-submission brings us into relationship with a larger world, even if only in perverse ways that lead to sorrowful consequences.

  The escape response leads in its milder forms to “learned helplessness”13 or to various forms of escapist addictions, such as our modern afflictions of “shop till you drop” material indulgence, gambling, drugs, overeating, or compulsive television watching. Such practices, however, do nothing to resolve our struggles. They only further numb our awareness and alienate us from life.14

  Escape is also manifest in political disengagement, chronic cynicism, and the kind of sullen disgruntlement common among those who work in public and private bureaucracies. It may also be manifest in a religious preoccupation with the afterlife —including the longing of Islamic fundamentalists for martyrdom and Christian fundamentalists for the Rapture. In its more extreme forms, the escape response may lead to suicide or psychological catatonia.

  The embrace of dominance-submission as a compensating mechanism creates a drive to acquire power, or to connect to a power holder, in order to validate one’s own existence by dominating, humiliating, or destroying others. The drive to believe that one’s own acts make a positive difference in the world is so strong, however, that even the most brutal and ruthless of evildoers commonly insist that their violence serves a heroic, even sacred, purpose.

  For example, Adolf Hitler, notorious for his contributions to the mechanization of genocide and warfare, sanctified his bloodlust with the claim that he was bettering the lives of the peoples of the nations his armies laid waste and was improving the global culture. He saw himself 288as acting under the command of a higher power to secure peace and freedom, fulfill the eternal laws of nature, and defend the German people from those who meant them harm.15

  Imperial rulers have been reading from the same script for five thousand years. Some may even claim their acts of sadistic brutality are heroic acts of cleansing intended to purify an evil world.

  The stronger the drive for dominance, the more dangerous it becomes. We have previously noted the deranged enthusiasm with which history’s more demented rulers rejoiced in their ability to destroy whole cities, peoples, and civilizations, as in the destruction of Babylon by the Assyrians and of Carthage by Rome.

  That such acts of destruction reveal the desperate efforts of the emotionally wounded to prove their existence does not excuse them. The criminally deranged belong in prisons or mental institutions, not positions of power. Our longer-term commitment, however, is not to fill the beds in our prisons and mental institutions. It is to eliminate the source of the pathology by redesigning modern human societies to support the healthful development of every individual from birth to passing. We have much to learn in this undertaking from the contrasting ways in which modern and traditional societies organize the basic routines of daily life.

  THE INVISIBLE CURRICULUM

  The human life cycle is divided into three primary stages: childhood, adulthood, and elderhood. To experience the joy that flows from actualizing the potentials of our humanity we need the support of strong, loving, and stable families and communities in negotiating the invisible curriculum of life through which we develop the fullness of our humanity.

  We learn in childhood to obey the word of our parents in return for the care that keeps us safe and healthy. Adulthood, which commonly includes a transition to parenthood, marks a total role transformation from dependence and obedience to full responsibility not only to care for oneself but also to engage in a partnership with one’s spouse, to care for one’s children, and accept the public responsibilities of citizenship.

  The final stage in the human life cycle, mature elderhood, can also be the richest and most fulfilling. With a secure identity, no further need to prove ourselves to the world, a lifetime of experience on which 289to draw, and our children established in their own families and careers, we are free to explore, embrace, expand, and serve in previously impossible ways.16

  The ways in which traditional and modern societies deal with the passage through these life stages could scarcely be more different, revealing their strikingly different values and priorities. The way of the traditional society is the outcome of self-organizing processes that flow from an innate sense of the needs of children, families, and the community as a whole, often as mediated by the Spiritual Consciousness of wise elders. The way of the modern society is the outcome of decisions made by the owning classes, commonly mediated by the self-interested sense of personal entitlement of an Imperial Consciousness. At every hand, ordinary people find their choices controlled by the institutional hierarchies of big business, big government, big education, big unions, big media, and big religion and limited to those that favor the interests of some faction of the ruling class.

  The Way of Empire

  Captive to the addictions of Empire, modern societies characteristically segment the life cycle, sandwiching a frenetically fragmented adulthood between long periods of enforced isolation and dependence during both childhood and elderhood. While the parent or parents try to piece together a living income from multiple jobs, the young child of the modern household is commonly parked in front of the television as a sacrificial offering to corporate advertisers, warehoused in day care centers, or left to fend on the street without adult supervision. The child’s primary responsibility in such circumstances is to keep out of the way of busy adults.

  After reaching school age, the child is consigned to an educational facility in a state of enforced regimentation for a major portion of the day in the care of seriously overburdened and often undertrained teachers. Although some wonderful schools provide a rich learning environment, in the more typical school the child’s main task is to fight off boredom while mastering the mechanics of reading, writing, and arithmetic and memorizing large quantities of information unconnected to any other aspect of his or her life. Where children relate directly with other children, they are pretty much on their own to work things out for themselves, with little adult guidance. 290

  Typically, the experience of the child’s parents is similarly fragmented and alienating. Struggling to support themselves and their families with multiple jobs offering less than a family wage and no benefits, they have little time for family, community, spiritual, or leisure life. Lacking other options, most grit their teeth and tough it out.

  Negotiating the passage from the dependence of childhood to the responsibilities of parenthood is surely one of the most difficult challenges of the human life cycle, and no work is more impo
rtant than parenting to the future health of the society. It is, however, much easier to become a parent than to be a parent. Yet the cultures and institutions of modern Empire not only fail to provide support and preparation for the transition from childhood to parenthood, they make it virtually impossible for parents to fulfill their parental responsibilities.

  When and if retirement comes, it too often means enforced isolation and loneliness or confinement in facilities that offer only the company of other elders. Here again, individuals are pretty much on their own, with little or no support from or preparation by the contemporary cultures and institutions of Empire.

  It is as if modern imperial societies were intentionally designed to keep life fragmented and disconnected to minimize the possibility that we might experience the enduring, caring relationships that are a foundation of healthful human development. Replication of the sorrows of social pathology is an almost inevitable result. The contrast to the traditional tribal community is stark indeed.

  The Way of Earth Community

  In many traditional tribal villages, family, work, spiritual, community, and recreational life flow naturally one into the other. Children grow up participating fully in community life, learning by doing under the watchful eye and coaching of parents and of elders revered for their wisdom and service. Older children learn parenting skills by participating in the care of younger children and in the life of hearth, field, and workshop.

  The cultural life of the tribe underscores the individual’s enduring connection to community, place, and generations past and future. Public celebrations clearly mark graduation from the relationships appropriate to an earlier stage to those appropriate to a later stage, and many role models are always at hand. 291