The Great Turning

by David C Korten

  The underlying pattern is quite clear. People share a healthy distrust of all forms of unaccountable power, feel powerless to do anything about it, and would rejoice in a transfer of power from the mega-institutions of global Empire to smaller, more local, and more accountable institutions responsive to family and community needs. In short, there is a strong constituency for real democracy in the United States.

  FOR THE CHILDREN

  Raffi Cavoukian, the troubadour whose music has nurtured a sense of love and wonder in millions of children for three decades, is an impassioned advocate for a humane and sustainable world. In 2004, he issued a call to humanity to create a world of “child-honoring societies” that embrace the principles of the Earth Charter.28 It is a simple yet elegant idea that speaks to universal moral values and to the imperative and opportunity of our time.

  Lead Indicator

  The state of our children will be the clearest indicator of when we have successfully navigated the turn to Earth Community. When every human child is receiving the physical and emotional support needed from family and community to actualize the full potential of his or her humanity, we will know we are on course to a new human future. A child-honoring society must also honor family and community. The current state of our children tells us just how far we have yet to travel.

  In the United States, 12 million children, 16.7 percent of the total, live in families that fall below the official poverty line, which means the family income is too low to provide even for the most basic needs of their children.29 An estimated 4 million children in the United States experience prolonged periodic food insufficiency and hunger each year.30

  Deficiencies affect mental as well as physical well-being. In the United States, the average child in the 1980s reported more anxiety than 335did the average child who was receiving psychiatric treatment in the 1950s.31 Even as overall death rates for persons one to twenty-four years of age fell by 53 percent from 1950 to 1999, homicide death rates for this age group rose by 134 percent, and suicide rates, the third-leading cause of death, rose by 137 percent.32 A 2002 National Research Council study reports that “at least one of every four adolescents in the U.S. is currently at serious risk of not achieving productive adulthood.”33 The Commission on Children at Risk calls the increasing incidence of mental illness, emotional distress, and behavioral problems among U.S. children and adolescents an epidemiological crisis.34

  Numerous studies link the increases in anxiety, depression, and social dysfunction among young people in the United States to a decline in the social connectedness of families and communities35— Frankl’s existential vacuum. According to U.S. Census Bureau surveys, married-couple households as a portion of all U.S. households have fallen from 80 percent in the 1950s to just 50.7 percent at the turn of the century.36 Only 73 percent of U.S. children now reside with two biological parents.37

  Globally, UNICEF reports that of the world’s 2.2 billion children, 1 billion, nearly every second child, are living in poverty. Six hundred forty million children live without adequate shelter. Four hundred million have no access to safe water. Two hundred seventy million have no access to health services. More than thirty thousand die each day, eleven million a year before the age of five, mostly from preventable causes.38

  These are not the young of some alien species; they are our human children, and they represent our future. Failure to provide them with proper care reproduces the physical and psychological disabilities that are driving a descent into the barbarism of the Great Unraveling that, if not reversed, will define the human future for generations to come. The increasing struggle to provide for their needs is a tragedy being experienced by people in virtually every country that has come under the sway of corporate globalization.

  Assault on Family Viability

  The New Right’s propagandists would have us believe that family stress and breakdown are the fault of gay marriage, abortion, feminists, immigrants, and the liberals who support them. They are prepared to blame 336most anyone or anything except their own economic and social policies. In the pursuit of their personal power and profits, New Right leaders work tirelessly to

  roll back health and safety standards for the environment, consumers, and workers, including workplace safety standards, a meaningful minimum wage, and the right to form unions to bargain collectively for improved wages and working conditions;

  drive down wages and benefits for working people through international job outsourcing;

  shift the tax burden from the investor class to the working class;

  eliminate public services and safety nets, including public education and Social Security;

  generate military contracts for crony corporations;

  secure intellectual property to facilitate monopoly control and pricing of access to information and technology, including essential seeds and medicines;

  and increase tax breaks and subsidies for large corporations to give them a competitive advantage over local businesses.

  Each of these policies transfers wealth and power from ordinary people to the ruling elite and leaves families and communities without the means to provide their children with the essentials for healthful physical and mental development.

  The following are but a few of the consequences. The details of this list are specific to the United States, but similar consequences are being experienced nearly everywhere as a direct consequence of neoliberal policies.39

  High unemployment undermines family formation, and punitive welfare policies force single mothers into jobs paying less than a living wage without affordable, regulated, high-quality child care options. Even two-parent households are forced to piece together multiple jobs, allowing no time or energy for child care or for a normal family and community life. Parents are thus forced to abandon their children to television and an unregulated entertainment and gaming industry that finds it profitable to fill their minds with images of sex and violence and to actively undermine parental authority and values.337

  Corporations spend billions on direct marketing to children to create lifetime addictions to junk food, alcohol, and cigarettes, and a childhood obesity epidemic is poised to become the leading cause of premature death.

  Declining health care coverage and skyrocketing health care costs place essential health care beyond the reach of most families.

  A deteriorating public education system is unable to deal with the special needs of children physically and mentally handicapped by the consequences of growing up in physically and socially toxic environments, let alone deal with normal individual differences in learning styles and talents.

  Lax environmental regulations allow corporations to discharge into the air, soil, and water massive quantities of tens of thousands of toxins destructive of children’s physical, neurological, and endocrinological development.

  Intended or not, these conditions are all a direct result of the neoliberal economic policies that are the real priority of the corporate plutocracy. They leave families with few or no good options, and they lead to mental stress, family breakdown, divorce, the destruction of community life, and a coarsening of moral values. The New Right argues that it is the responsibility of parents, not the state, to provide proper care for their children. Ideally, that would be the case; but the policies the New Right advances virtually guarantee that the substantial majority of parents are unable to fulfill this responsibility.

  Assault on Family Values

  Advertising aimed explicitly at children in the unregulated marketplace is one of the more pernicious, intentional, and well-funded assaults by corporate plutocrats on family values. Corporate advertising executives long ago became aware that it is highly lucrative to begin conditioning very young children to value individualistic materialism over family and community. Their efforts became truly sinister a few years ago when they learned that “brand loyalty” begins to take shape as early as age two and that at age three, even before they are able to read, children are already making reques
ts for specific brand-name products. Experts estimate that this early identification may be worth $100,000 per child in lifetime sales.40 338

  Corporate marketing executives responded to this revelation by targeting advertising to ever younger children and using ever more sophisticated techniques to reach and claim their hearts and minds. Child-oriented marketing exploded in the 1990s, from an estimated $100 million in TV advertising targeted to children in 1983, to $15 billion in total advertising and marketing expenditures directed to children in 2004.41

  Kid-oriented advertising defines cool as having money and attitude, indulging in material excess and expensive products, outwitting teachers, and tricking parents. Advertisers pride themselves on their ability to make kids feel that they are losers if they lack an advertised product and get them to nag their parents to buy it. The British side of the industry calls it pester power. Boston College sociology professor Juliet Schor documents from her research inside a leading advertising corporation that this effort is conscious and intentional, and that it employs highly sophisticated research and techniques of psychological engineering.42

  In their efforts to bypass parental filters, corporations have been increasingly successful in bringing their products into schools, inserting product placements into curriculum materials and entertainment programming, and turning school sporting events into corporate billboards. They even hire kids to talk up products with their friends and host slumber parties that become intimate focus groups for testing reactions to new products.43

  The average child is exposed to more than forty thousand television commercials each year. Approximately 80 percent of the advertisements targeted to children fall into four product categories: toys, cereals, candies, and fast-food restaurants. The task force concluded that child-oriented advertising contributes to child obesity, parent-child conflict, materialistic attitudes, and tobacco and alcohol consumption and that exposure to media violence, including marketed video games, movies, and other media featuring violent content, contributes to fear, anxiety, sleep disturbance, and violent behavior.44

  A CONSERVATIVE-LIBERAL ALLIANCE

  The New Right presents itself as conservative, but that is part of its deception. Its actual policy agenda is far from conservative, at least so far as the term conservative is understood by most Americans. There is a culture war in America, but it is not between liberals and conservatives, who in fact share a great many core values—including a commitment 339to children, family, community, personal responsibility, and democracy. It is between the culture of Empire and the culture of Earth Community. It is between the lower and higher orders of our human nature. It is between an imperial politics of individual greed and power and a democratic politics based on principle and the common good. It is between Power Seekers at the extreme political fringes who remain imprisoned in an Imperial Consciousness and the realists of the political mainstream who truly want to solve the problems that beset us all.

  Call those of us on the side of Earth Community progressives—progressive conservatives and progressive liberals. Although we have our differences, we share a commitment to creating a society governed by ordinary people and dedicated to the ideals of liberty, justice, and opportunity for all. We are driven by principle rather than ideology, and we deal in reality rather than delusion. We have no more in common with the ideological extremists of the Far Left who seek violent revolution and state control of every aspect of life than we do with the ideological extremists of the Far Right who pursue imperial wars abroad, a theocratic state at home, and freedom for themselves to oppress the rest.

  A politics of mature citizenship properly honors both the conservative values of freedom and individual responsibility and the liberal values of equity and justice for all. It brings together a conservative concern for community and heritage with a liberal concern for inclusiveness and the creation of a world that works for the whole of life and children yet to come. It recognizes the importance of local roots combined with a global consciousness. In the mature human mind, these are complementary values that call us to a path of spiritual health and maturity.

  Progressives of all stripes act from deeply shared values that resonate with the most basic of Christian values —do not kill, do not steal, love thy neighbor as thyself, and do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Yet just as these are not exclusively liberal or conservative values, neither are they exclusively Christian values. They are universal human values shared by believers in Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Native spirituality, among others. From this foundation, we can pull back from the extremes to find common ground even on those issues that presently are the focus of intense political acrimony, including abortion, gay rights, gun control, and the teaching of evolution. For too long we have allowed extremists on both sides to define these debates in all-or-nothing terms that drive out the search for common ground based on shared moral principles. 340

  Beneath the political stresses in the United States that at times threaten to tear our nation apart, we can see the emergent outlines of a largely unrecognized consensus that the world most of us want to bequeath to our children is very different from the world in which we live. Conservatives and liberals share a sense that the dominant culture and institutions of the contemporary world are morally and spiritually bankrupt, unresponsive to human needs and values, and destructive of the strong families and communities we crave and our children desperately need. Deceived by the divide-and-conquer tactics of imperial politics, each places the blame on the other rather than forming a united front to reject Empire’s lies and unite in a stand against the New Right’s war against children, families, and communities.

  Most people are stretched far too thin to spend the time it takes to sort out the competing arguments on whether global warming is taking place, why gas prices are so high, or why the Iraq war turned out to be such a terrible mess. What they know very well, however, is that their lives are stretched to the breaking point; their children suffer from asthma, obesity, and a continuous bombardment of sex and violence on TV and of ads promoting junk food; and they are unable both to keep bread on the table and to supervise their children. To raise healthy children we must have healthy, family-supportive economies, and to have healthy, family-supportive economies we must have healthy, democratically accountable political systems responsive to the needs and values of people, families, and communities. The struggle for the health and well-being of our children is potentially the unifying political issue of our time and an obvious rallying point for building an Earth Community political majority.

  It is within our human means to create a world in which families and communities are strong, parents have the time to love and care for their children, high-quality health care and education are available to all, schools and homes are commercial free, the natural environment is healthy and toxin free, and nations cooperate for the common good. It is about renewing the democratic experiment, liberating the creative potential of the species, and coming home to life. It is an idea whose time has come and the foundation of a true political majority.

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  CHAPTER 21

  Liberating Creative Potential

  Let ours be a time remembered for the awakening of a new reverence for life, the firm resolve to achieve sustainability, the quickening of the struggle for justice and peace, and the joyful celebration of life.

  The Earth Charter

  Imperial societies maintain their dominator structures by consolidating control over all three spheres of public life — economic, political, and cultural—thus limiting people, families, and communities to whatever options the institutions of Empire find it in their interest to offer. Having little control over their lives and struggling to make ends meet, people withdraw from active engagement in civic life, causing the creative problem-solving capacity intrinsic to a vital community life to atrophy from neglect.

  The basic framework for the work of birthing Earth Community is simple: make the lif
e-affirming values of Earth Community the values of the prevailing culture; renew the democratic experiment to restore to people, families, and communities the power to give expression to those values; and do it all on a global scale. An immodest agenda, this requires, in the words of Frances Moore Lappé, that we take democracy where it has never been before.

  Empire has conditioned us to believe that the constitutional plutocracy we have is the democracy to which we feel entitled. As noted in chapter 11, a constitutional plutocracy pits the factions of a ruling aristocracy against one another in a competition for the favor of the electorate. It creates an illusion of popular control without the reality. True democracy is a living practice centered on active community engagement through which we both discover and give direct expression to our vision of the world we want. Such engagement might involve participating in a community play or church choir, operating a local business, testifying at a public hearing, teaching in a local school, serving on a 342local commission, running for local office, establishing a local elder care facility, volunteering at the library, organizing the cleanup of a park, or promoting a local-first campaign in support of local independent businesses.

  None of this eliminates the need either for government or for elections. To the contrary: government is essential to deal with public needs, and elections are an essential feature of democracy. Democracy, however, is more about a way of community life than it is about elections. A living democracy finds expression in living economies, living politics, and living cultures.

  The economic sphere is where we come together to transform the gifts of nature into our means of living. The political sphere is where we come together to find agreement on the rules by which we will live and hopefully to solve problems facing us as a community in the best interests of all. The cultural sphere is where we come together to discover and express our shared values, sense of identity, meaning, and relationship to the transcendent.