The Great Turning

by David C Korten

  It will fall to today’s children to reinvent practically everything. Supporting them in developing both the basic skills and the qualities of mind required is an essential responsibility of the current adult generation.

  With heroic effort, the best schools and teachers are organizing their classrooms as learning communities that reach beyond the physical walls of the school. Through their involvement in collaborative research and community-service activities, students develop basic skills in reading, writing, and mathematics along with skills in learning, teamwork, citizenship, and artistic expression as they discover the interlinking patterns of their community’s history, ecology, and function.3

  At its best, a school may become a true community learning center that facilitates the lifelong learning of both children and adults through active engagement in community life. Professional and volunteer coaches can help both children and adults draw on all the learning tools their community offers—including opportunities for voluntary community service and internships. Teenagers may receive instruction in the arts of supportive parenting by acting as tutors and caretakers for younger children under the mentoring eye of elders who in turn receive coaching from their peers in the arts of the elder’s mentoring role.

  Local artists may share their skills in drama, music, the visual arts, poetry, and literature with both children and adults through programs of community beautification and cultural enrichment. Local, national, and international cross-cultural dialogue and exchange programs may actively facilitate the awakening of Cultural Consciousness. Political and religious inquiry may be encouraged and supported by inviting those of differing political and religious traditions to explicate and reflect on their views within settings of respectful dialogue and debate.

  There is also a movement among creative dissidents in colleges and university within the United States and around the world to make the university a resource for democratic citizenship and community service. In the United States, 950 college and university presidents have joined 352Campus Compact, pledging support for students, faculty, and staff who collaborate with their communities in projects that deal with major public issues.4 The U.S.-based Democracy Collaborative is a consortium of more than twenty major university research centers cooperating in research, teaching, and community action intended to strengthen democracy and civil society locally, nationally, and globally.5

  Religion

  Many people look to religious institutions as a source of moral guidance. Religion in the service of Empire has often seriously distorted moral teaching and actively suppressed serious moral inquiry. Individual churches, however, generally have considerable freedom to take a different course, to become centers of community building and ethical inquiry and expression—if their members and leadership are so inclined. People of faith who argue that schools should engage students in the examination of alternative theories of creation might well start by demonstrating within their own churches how such instruction might work. In the course of doing so, they would introduce their own members to a process of moral and ethical inquiry rarely seen within the faith community outside of special cloisters and theological seminaries.

  Through interfaith councils, they can reach out to explore moral questions with persons of different faiths, thereby learning from others while building cultural awareness and a respect for the diversity of religious traditions. Through community service, church members can develop a consciousness of class and explore the conflicting interpretations of what sacred teaching counsels with regard to proper human relationships. Our churches also have a natural role in facilitating interracial exchanges and dialogue, an essential aspect of awakening and deepening Cultural Consciousness.

  Again, such reforms come one church, synagogue, temple, and mosque at a time. Each such initiative becomes additive to a larger process of democratizing the institutions of religion and, more broadly, the institutions of culture and of the larger society.

  Empire flourishes when we are content to sleepwalk through life, accepting and playing by the rules presented to us. That is not what being 353human is supposed to be about. We are an intelligent, self-aware, choice-making species participating in an epic creative journey. When Creation bestowed on us humans a capacity for wise and creative choice, it was presumably with the intention that we use this capacity to beneficial ends.

  The birthing of Earth Community begins with liberating the mind from the tyranny of the belief that there is no alternative to Empire. It moves forward as millions of people who glimpse possibilities long denied translate their deepening awareness into new practice.

  The ancient Greeks glimpsed the possibility of a democratic alternative and undertook a bold but partial and ultimately abortive experiment to translate their vision of the possible into practice. The patriots of the American Revolution glimpsed a similar possibility and, against seemingly impossible odds, revived the experiment. Partial though the early American experiment proved to be, its vision of possibility ultimately spread throughout the world to create the opportunity now before us to bring the vision to full fruition.

  Whether our time will be known as the time of the Great Turning or the time of the Great Unraveling is a question of choice, not destiny. The leadership must come from the growing number of those among us who have awakened from the cultural trance, said no to the addictions of Empire, and acquired the perspective and wisdom of a mature human consciousness.

  As growing millions of Cultural and Spiritual Creatives reach out to one another to form communities of congruence, they create liberated spaces in which to experiment with cultural and institutional innovations based on partnership, shared learning, and ever expanding alliances. This is democratic participation in its fullest and most authentic expression.

  True democracy is more than a particular set of institutions. It is a living practice expressed through living economies, politics, and cultures. Because life is a never ending process of self-renewal in pursuit of unrealized potential, this living practice leads to the continuous evolution of society’s underlying institutional forms in response to changing imperatives and opportunities. This is the lesson to which we now stand poised to give expression. Democracy was an audacious experiment in the eighteenth century. This is the twenty-first century. It is time to bring democracy to full fruition.

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  CHAPTER 22

  Change the Story, Change the Future

  History is governed by those overarching movements that give shape and meaning to life by relating the human venture to the larger destinies of the universe. Creating such a movement might be called the Great Work of a people.… The historical mission of our times is to reinvent the human —at the species level, with critical reflection, within the community of life-systems.1

  Thomas Berry

  To embrace a turning point is to see someone or something differently and then to take action on what you have seen.… These moments, where insight and action intersect, are the training ground for living a life of personal courage.2

  Puanani Burgess

  If you feel out of step with the way things are going in your community, nation, and the world, take heart. Your distress indicates that you are among the sane in an insane world and in very good company. Recall the observation of Elisabet Sahtouris in chapter 17 that life has characteristically learned to cooperate through experiencing the negative consequences of unbridled competition. This is the present situation of our species. For some five thousand years, we have experienced the consequences of unbridled competition. Those consequences have now become so severe, and the overhead costs of maintaining Empire’s dominator hierarchy so high, that either we learn to cooperate or we suffer the fate of other unviable species that failed to learn life’s most essential lesson.

  TO CHANGE THE FUTURE

  It is impossible to exaggerate the creative challenge before us. Six and a half billion humans must make a choice to change course, to turn to life 355as our defining value and to p
artnership as the model for our relations with one another and the planet. Then we must reinvent our cultures, our institutions, and ourselves accordingly. It seems a hopelessly ambitious agenda, yet the key to success is elegantly simple: free ourselves from Empire’s cultural trance by changing the stories by which we define our possibilities and responsibilities.

  Many of us have serious doubts about the validity and values of the prevailing imperial stories. Yet because we rarely hear them challenged by credible voices, we fear ridicule if we give voice to our doubts. Truth silenced becomes truth denied.

  The process of change begins as those who experience an awakening of the higher orders of human consciousness find the courage to break the silence by speaking openly of the truth in their hearts. The more openly we each speak our truth, the more readily others find the courage to speak theirs. We can then more easily find one another and end our isolation as we form communities of congruence in which we share our insights, bolster our courage, and give expression to stories that demonstrate and celebrate the possibilities of Earth Community. As we learn to communicate these stories to an ever growing audience, we begin to tip the cultural balance in favor of Earth Community, thereby changing the course of the human future. We break the silence, end our isolation, and change the story in a continuous cycle that gains momentum with each iteration. (Figure 22.1 is a graphic representation of this dynamic.) Call these expanding conversations Earth Community Dialogues. You can find helpful resources at http://www.greatturning.org/.">

  FIGURE 22.1: To change the future

  356 It is hard to admit that we have been living a lie, as to do so seems to call into question our intelligence and integrity. Yet we are in good company, for living a lie has been a chronic affliction of most members of our species for thousands of years. Let us celebrate the awakening that is the key to breaking free from Empire’s play-or-die dynamic.

  Walk away from the king and join in solidarity to create a different game. It is the basic principle articulated in the question that drove the resistance to the draft in the United States during the Vietnam War: What if they called a war and no one came?

  The momentum is building. Around the world people are organizing from the grass roots up to take back their lives, reject calls to war and violence, rebuild their local economies and communities, democratize their political institutions, and create authentic cultures.3

  Most Earth Community initiatives are small and tentative. Many disappear without a trace. But hope lies in the geometric growth of their numbers, scale, and the linkages among them. Some—like the Landless Workers’ Movement in Brazil and the Green Belt Movement in Kenya — have already achieved sufficient scale to inspire people throughout the world. Millions of such initiatives give substance to a shared vision of the world that can be. The faster they grow and link, the faster the human story changes and the faster the life energy of the human species turns away from Empire and aligns with Earth Community.

  We are beginning to see whole national stories shifting, particularly in the South American countries of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Uruguay, and Venezuela. By March 2005, when Uruguayan president Tabare Vazquez was inaugurated, three-quarters of South America’s 355 million people were living under governments that were rejecting the doctrinaire economic ideology of neoliberalism for political visions reflecting a tilt in the direction of Earth Community.4 Elsewhere smaller countries such as Denmark and New Zealand show potential to serve as national laboratories that demonstrate the possibilities of a new era.

  FINDING OUR PLACE

  To avoid being overwhelmed by the magnitude of the work before us, we need to keep three things in mind. Although the work may at times seem lonely, tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions, of people 357are already engaged in it. Second, every contribution, no matter how seemingly insignificant, helps shift the balance. Third, we each can do no more than our individual best.

  When I’m feeling discouraged by the seeming inadequacy of my efforts, I find comfort in the wisdom of Vandana Shiva, whom I mentioned earlier as a partner in the initial framing of this book. Shiva travels constantly, electrifying audiences the world over with her penetrating critique of corporate globalization and her call to create the world that can be. She honors her Indian identity and nationality and is at the same time a true global citizen. Equally comfortable leading street protests, meeting with peasant farmers to revive the traditional practices of saving and exchanging seeds, negotiating with powerful political leaders, or lecturing to packed auditoriums in prestigious universities, she exemplifies the life, philosophy, and humility of the highly evolved Spiritual Consciousness. She is totally engaged in the world, yet maintains the deep sense of inner calm and graciousness of a religious mystic as she pursues her activism as a spiritual practice.

  YES! magazine executive editor Sarah van Gelder asked Shiva in an interview how she does it. Shiva replied:

  Well, it’s always a mystery, because you don’t know why you get depleted or recharged. But, this much I know. I do not allow myself to be overcome by hopelessness, no matter how tough the situation. I believe that if you just do your little bit without thinking of the bigness of what you stand against, if you turn to the enlargement of your own capacities, just that in itself creates new potential.

  And I’ve learned from the Bhagavad Gita and other teachings of our culture to detach myself from the results of what I do, because those are not in my hands. The context is not in your control, but your commitment is yours to make, and you can make the deepest commitment with a total detachment about where it will take you. You want it to lead to a better world, and you shape your actions and take full responsibility for them, but then you have detachment. And that combination of deep passion and deep detachment allows me always to take on the next challenge because I don’t cripple myself, I don’t tie myself in knots. I function 358like a free being. I think getting that freedom is a social duty because I think we owe it to each other not to burden each other with prescription and demands. I think what we owe each other is a celebration of life and to replace fear and hopelessness with fearlessness and joy.5

  RESPONDING TO THE CALL

  Life is a journey, not a destination. We have no idea of the limits of its possibilities. Just as our forebears of even a hundred years ago could not have imagined the possibilities that we now enjoy, we cannot imagine today the possibilities of those who will live a hundred, two hundred, or a thousand years hence.

  By the standards of cosmic time, we humans have proved to be remarkably fast learners. During a mere two and a half million years we have developed the capacity for speech, mastered the use of fire, and learned to produce and use sophisticated tools, engage in artistic expression, cultivate our own food, communicate in written form, and establish highly organized societies and systems of knowledge. We are now reaching out to the stars and plumbing the secrets of matter and genetics.

  This has occurred in a flash of evolutionary time, providing proof of the evolutionary potential of the gift of reflective consciousness that Creation chose to bestow on our species. Yet five thousand years ago, faced with the organizational challenge of dealing with growing population densities, our forebears made a choice for the dominator relations of Empire. A self-destructive era of warfare, greed, racism, sexism, and suppression of the higher orders of human consciousness followed. We now face the imperative and the opportunity to embark on a path to a new era grounded in the partnership relations of Earth Community.

  The time of reckoning with the consequences of Empire’s excess is no longer a future event. It is now upon us. Increasing oil prices are but one indicator of the unraveling of an economy based on the depletion of nonrenewable natural resources. An increase in the frequency and severity of extreme weather events is only the most dramatic indicator of the unraveling of the established human relationship with the living systems of the planet. Growth in the frequency and destructiveness of 359terrorist attacks signal
an unraveling in the capacity of Empire to impose its will on subject peoples. Each of these unravelings creates an imperative for a turning from the relationships of Empire to the relationships of Earth Community.

  We are getting a wake-up call we cannot ignore. How we respond will determine whether Creation’s gift of reflective consciousness was well conceived or overly reckless. To pass the test before us, we humans must demonstrate the intelligence and the moral maturity to liberate ourselves from the addictions of Empire and to use our gifts wisely in the service of the whole.

  Rather than give in to despair in this often frightening time, let us rejoice in the privilege of being alive at a moment of creative opportunity unprecedented in the human experience. Peace and justice for all and a sustainable relationship to the planet are within our reach. If we fail to embrace the opportunity, Empire’s pessimistic assumption that we are an inherently destructive species becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and we continue on the path of the Great Unraveling. If we pass the test, we move on to the exploration and realization of untold new possibilities.