The Great Turning

by David C Korten

  As communities of congruence grow and connect, they advance the process of liberation from the cultural trance of Empire and offer visible manifestations of the possibilities of Earth Community. Individually and collectively they become attractors of the life energy that Empire has co-opted—thus weakening Empire and strengthening Earth Community in an emergent process of displacement and eventual succession.

  BUILD A MAJORITARIAN POLITICAL BASE. As the base strengthens and the stories of Earth Community are refined, the next task is to 318build a majoritarian political base. This requires taking the culture of Earth Community mainstream through the many formal and informal communications channels beyond corporate control. As communities of congruence begin to tip the balance of the public culture in favor of Earth Community, the radical democratization of the formal institutions of economy, politics, and culture will follow.

  These four strategic undertakings are sequential in that each prepares the way for the next. They are also simultaneous in that each is currently in play, developing at its own pace, and contributing to the birthing process. New initiatives are always in gestation as others are reaching maturity. Each expression flows from authentic values, advances the awakening of Cultural and Spiritual Consciousness, expands communities of congruence, and accelerates the redirection of life energy from Empire to Earth Community to add strength and vitality to the emerging whole and thereby to redirect the human future.

  Metaphorically, the strategy might be thought of as a process of “walking away from the king,” because it centers not on confronting the authority of the king, but on walking away — withdrawing the legitimacy and the life energy on which the king’s power depends. Think of it as a conversation with the king along the following lines:

  You have your game. It’s called Empire. It may work for you, but it doesn’t work for me. So I’m leaving to join with a few million others for whom the game of Empire isn’t working either. We are creating a new game with new rules based on the values and principles of Earth Community. You are welcome to join us as a fellow citizen if you are willing to share your power and wealth and to play by the new rules.

  This imaginary conversation is acted out through initiatives that turn away from Empire in each of the economic, political, and cultural spheres of public life.

  ECONOMIC TURNING

  One of the most visible manifestations of global civil society is the popular resistance against corporate globalization and the institutional instruments by which globalization’s supporters are imposing their 319neoliberal policy agenda on the world. Less visible, but ultimately even more important, are the many initiatives aimed at growing corporate-free economies that mimic healthy ecosystems. These initiatives range from “buy local” campaigns and efforts to rebuild local food systems based on independent family farms, to efforts to eliminate corporate subsidies, stop the intrusion of big-box stores, hold corporations accountable for harms committed, and reform corporate chartering. There are groups that encourage humane animal husbandry and sustainable agriculture, seek to abolish factory farms and ban genetically modified seeds, promote green business, introduce sustainable community-based forestry-management practices, and work to roll back the use of toxic chemicals. Other groups are working to strengthen the protection of worker rights, raise the minimum wage, advance worker ownership, increase socially responsible investing, and promote other fiscal and regulatory measures that improve economic justice and encourage environmental responsibility.

  In the United States, one national initiative with which I have a close association is the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE), an alliance of local groups across the United States and Canada committed to the vision of a planetary system of local living economies free from the pathologies of absentee ownership.3 BALLE chapters support local businesses in growing webs of economic relationships among themselves, raising consumers’ awareness of the implications of their shopping choices, and working with local governments to write rules that favor the locally owned businesses essential to prosperous and vibrant community life. Where local production is not practical, BALLE chapters promote trading relationships between local-economy enterprises in different localities and countries.

  Innovative graduate business schools, such as the Bainbridge Graduate Institute, are creating curricula geared to preparing managers for a new economy whose defining goals are social and environmental health. Co-op America supports the marketing efforts of independent green businesses. The American Independent Business Alliance and the New Rules Project of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance help communities develop policy frameworks supportive of local independent businesses.4 These are only a few of many organizations dedicated to supporting the emergence of locally rooted, life-serving economies in the United States.

  Similar initiatives grounded in Earth Community values are taking 320root most everywhere in the world. As newly liberated economic spaces connect, they may bring forth larger unifying institutional structures, such as cooperative buying and branding groups, but they remain always rooted in and controlled by communities of place. Each such expansion provides people with more choices of where to shop, work, and invest, thereby allowing them to reclaim for their communities more of the life energy that global corporations drain away.

  Such efforts might seem futile if not for the fact that community-rooted, human-scale, values-based, independent businesses constitute by far the majority of all businesses, provide most of the jobs, create nearly all new jobs, and serve as the primary source of technological innovation.5 They include businesses of all sorts, from bookstores to bakeries, land trusts, manufacturing facilities, software developers, organic farms, farmers’ markets, community-supported agriculture initiatives, restaurants specializing in locally grown organic produce, worker co-ops, community banks, suppliers of fair-traded coffee, independent media outlets, and many more.

  POLITICAL TURNING

  Other citizen initiatives are democratizing the structures of government, promoting more active citizen participation in political life, opening the political process to a greater diversity of voices and parties, and shifting public priorities in favor of people, families, communities, and the planet. They are lobbying governments on a host of economic, social, and environmental issues ranging from international trade rules to local building codes that need revising to encourage green construction. Many follow a strategy of building momentum from the bottom up, working with local governments on initiatives in support of living wage rules, corporate accountability, and preferential treatment for local independent enterprises. Even advances on global issues like peace and global warming are beginning with local initiatives, including those begun by local governments and politicians.

  In the United States, for example, while the Bush II regime in Washington continued to deny the reality of climate change, some three hundred mayors of major U.S. cities met in June 2005, in Chicago, not to debate whether climate change was an important issue, but rather to share ideas on what they should be doing about it. These discussions 321led to a unanimous endorsement of the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, calling on all cities to take climate change seriously and to commit to reducing global-warming emissions to 93 percent of 1990 levels by 2012. It further called for decisive federal action.

  Seattle mayor Greg Nickels, who initiated the Climate Protection Agreement, got climate-change religion during the winter of 2003–4, when an absence of the traditional snow pack on the Cascade Mountains resulted in a cancellation of the ski season and created a serious threat of water and power shortages for the city the following summer. Another signatory, New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin, pointed out that another foot of water in the ocean and New Orleans would be gone.6 A little more than two months later, on August 29, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and flooded 80 percent of the city in one of the worst disasters in U.S. history.

  The climate-change initiative is only one example of what some pundits are noting as an
important trend in the United States. Frustrated by the failure of national politicians to deal with impending economic, social, and environmental collapse, the elected officials of U.S. cities are stepping in to lead from below. It is in the cities where the realities of homelessness, poverty, violence, decaying schools, droughts, floods, and industries battered by “free” trade agreements are felt most acutely. This creates the impetus for urban politicians to emerge on the cutting edge of a progressive problem-solving politics.7 Not only are the imperatives clearer to local political leaders, but they can also break the grip of big money and media spin more easily than national political leaders can. Urban politicians are learning to work with neighborhood networks to counter the smear campaigns organized by big-money interests against innovative programs in child care, affordable housing, recycling, and open-space preservation.8

  Some of the most interesting and ambitious projects involve alliances among grassroots citizen groups, local governments, and national office holders to put forward visionary Earth Community initiatives even in the face of seemingly overwhelming resistance from the ruling imperial establishment. Two examples from the United States are the Apollo Alliance, which promotes a sustainable and clean energy economy, and the Peace Alliance, which advocates creating a U.S. cabinet-level Department of Peace devoted to advancing peace both domestically and internationally.9 322

  CULTURAL TURNING

  There is evidence of an emergent global cultural turning associated with the widespread awakening of the Cultural and Spiritual orders of consciousness. As discussed in part I, the awakening is a consequence of increasing cross-cultural experience, the influence of progressive social movements, and exposure to the realities of global interdependence and the fragility of a finite global ecosystem.

  It is this awakening that makes the Great Turning possible. It finds popular expression in the many economic and political initiatives mentioned above. It also finds expression in more distinctively cultural initiatives aimed at rebuilding families and communities through such activities as co-housing and eco-village projects, the creation of safe, vibrant public spaces, the voluntary simplicity movement, and programs in intercultural exchange, media awareness, and educational enrichment.

  Most particularly, however, the cultural turning is gaining momentum from a number of global turnings that bring new leadership to the fore and accelerate cultural and spiritual awakening. The following are of particular note:

  Indigenous peoples whom Empire and modernity have ruthlessly decimated and marginalized are reclaiming their traditions and identities and reaching out to share their understanding of the human connections to the sacred Earth. Respectful exchange between indigenous peoples and those peoples whom modernity has alienated from the ways of life may prove to be an especially powerful driver of cultural and spiritual awakening.

  Growth in the percentage of elders in the population due to falling fertility rates and increasing life spans contributes to a rise in the percentage of the population that has achieved the maturity of a Cultural or Spiritual Consciousness. There is growing interest in the potential benefits of elders making their experience and wisdom available to the larger society through their continued active engagement, particularly as teachers and mentors.

  Immigration is shifting the racial mix of the northern nations that have been the centers of white power and global domination. The unwillingness of immigrants to remain confined to the role of a racially defined servant class is a source of increasing social tension, but it provides a much needed challenge to white 323power hegemony and creates a demand for intercultural exchanges that are driving cultural awakening, particularly among the young.

  Perhaps the most significant single contribution to the cultural turning of the past fifty years has been a spreading rejection by women of Empire’s definition of their social roles. The reascendance of women may be one of the most significant human social developments of the past five thousand years.

  Feminine Leadership

  The wave of transition to feminine leadership in the United States bears special mention. The cover story of the May 26, 2003, issue of BusinessWeek calls it “The New Gender Gap” and notes that in America’s high schools girls now outnumber boys by substantial margins not only in music and the performing arts but also in the leadership of student government, yearbooks, school newspapers, and academic clubs. Boys maintain their lead only on athletic teams, and girls are rapidly gaining ground there as well. At the college level, women earn nearly 60 percent of U.S. bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and experts expect the gap to continue growing.

  Since the 1960s, more women than men have been voting in U.S. elections. Women still lag far behind men in occupying top positions in corporate management and electoral politics, but this is changing as the emerging patterns of female academic and leadership proficiency work their way through the system.10 BusinessWeek suggests these trends “could make the twenty-first the first female century.” It won’t actually be the first female century, but if the U.S. trend turns out to also be a global trend, as the evidence suggests, it may be the first in the past five thousand years. Given the needs of our time, it is a decidedly hopeful development.

  Recall from the survey research of Paul Ray and Sherry Anderson, described in chapter 4, that two-thirds of Spiritual Creatives (whom they call Core Cultural Creatives) are women. Wherever one turns within contemporary progressive social movements, women are in the lead, quietly organizing around issues of peace, human rights, justice, sustainability, community, and local economies. Although their commonly unassuming networking style of leadership often leaves me—a white male—feeling disoriented and impatient, it usually turns out to be at 324once highly effective and remarkably efficient. It should not be surprising that women are providing a disproportionate share of the leadership in contemporary progressive movements.

  Studies by psychologist Carol Gilligan led her to conclude that men tend to give more weight than women to individual autonomy and freedom, moral reasoning, and the vigilant defense of individual rights. Women give a higher priority to forming strong relationships in which they seek to please or serve others. According to Gilligan, these differences lead men and women to different approaches to resolving conflicts. Men tend to sort out their differences through logical arguments, courts of law, and combat. Women are more inclined to settle differences by talking them through to discover their respective needs and viewpoints. Men are more inclined to structure relationships by hierarchy; women are more inclined toward partnership models of organization.11

  These differences make women the natural leaders in the work of birthing Earth Community, and they are indeed rising to the challenge. The goal, however, is not to swing to the extreme of domination by females, but rather to achieve a synthesis that brings the feminine and masculine tendencies into a healthy dynamic balance.

  Spiritual Inquiry

  As examined in part IV, the challenges of our time call us to revisit our deepest defining questions: Where did we come from? What is our purpose? and, What are our values? The public debate in the United States over intelligent design versus mechanism and chance discussed in chapter 15 brings such questions relating to human origin and purpose to the fore and challenges the more extreme and doctrinaire fundamentalism of both the scientific and religious establishments.

  Another development in the United States with important implications for the cultural turning is the claim by media pundits that Christian voters decided the outcome of the 2004 U.S. presidential election based on moral values relating to abortion, gay marriage, and stem cell research. This announcement stunned members of the broader faith community—including a great many Evangelicals—who consider war, poverty, and environmental destruction to be far more pressing moral issues. They vowed they would no longer allow a fringe minority with an extremist political agenda at odds with scripture to be the arbiters of Christian morality. 325

  Groups from across the spectrum of C
hristian denominations reached out to one another and to those of other faiths to engage in a discourse on basic moral questions such as: What did Jesus teach? What is the foundation of moral behavior, and what are valid sources of moral authority? What is the appropriate role of religion in politics? Like the debates on intelligent design, such conversations engage the mind in a critical examination of received wisdom that opens the door to the awakening of Cultural and Spiritual Consciousness.

  Because Evangelicals constitute the largest identifiable faith grouping in the United States and because most of the religious Right comes from within their ranks, what is happening within the Evangelical segment of the U.S. faith community is of particular significance. Contrary to the general public perception, Evangelicals are at least as diverse in their political views as other religious groups.12 Indeed, the number of Evangelicals whose values align easily with those of Earth Community may well be greater than the number who embrace the political agenda of the New Right. The former are coming forward to express a broad and well-examined view of the social mission of Christianity.

  At its October 2004, meeting, just before the U.S. presidential election, the board of directors of the National Association of Evangelicals, which represents thirty million Evangelicals in forty-five thousand churches, adopted by a 42-0 vote a carefully nuanced document on political engagement. The document endorses efforts to advance racial justice, religious freedom, economic justice, human rights, environmentalism, peace, and nonviolent conflict resolution.13 It also calls for humility and cooperation in political discourse and admonishes, “We must take care to employ the language of civility and to avoid denigrating those with whom we disagree.”14 In 2005, Evangelical leaders were calling for strong action on global warming.15