| Part 2: Where do we go from here? A change of vision: returning to the Garden "Before our era, the chorus of distress that had assembled over the ten thousand years of our cultural life consisted of nine voices: war, crime, corruption, rebellion, famine, plague, slavery, genocide, and economic collapse. Beginning in 1960, our own era found a tenth voice to add to the chorus, a voice never heard before, and this is the voice of cultural catastrophe - a voice that wails of loss of vision, failure of purpose, and the collapse of values." - The Story of B, p. 276 The uprisings of the 1960s did indeed amount to a broad rejection of the dominant culture. "Turn on, tune in, and drop out" was not a call to retreat from life - it was an invitation to enter a new cultural space. This yearning for a more meaningful culture was widespread, and it went deep, but the yearning was just being born, and it had no direction. It defined itself largely by an ostentatious negation of the previous generations values, together with a vague attempt to embrace a kind of neo-tribalism, and a "go with your feelings" ethic. We wanted to escape from the asylum, but we didn't have any real vision of where else we wanted to be. A movement based on negation could not be sustained, and the rebellious generation resumed its roles in the mainstream - pursuing educations, families, and careers. But the generation had been 'radicalized', and the cultural malaise that gave rise to their movement continued to simmer. Some three decades later, at the end of 1990s, the malaise had again reached the boiling point. The excesses of neoliberalism, corporate power, and globalization pushed a new generation onto the streets of Geneva, Seattle, London, Los Angeles, Washington DC, Prague, Devos, Mexico City - and the list is still growing. This time around, the prospects for the movement are entirely more favorable than they were in the 1960s. There are several reasons for this. For one thing, the movement is not plagued by a 'generation gap'. In the 1960s, the older generation had lived through a Great Depression and a World War, and they did not appreciate their finally-secure world being shaken up by a rebellion of over- privileged youth. With society split in this way, the potential for significant social change was substantially curtailed. Today, there is no 'silent majority' with an unshakable attachment to the established order. Cultural malaise now affects young and old, conservative as well as progressive, middle class as well as worker, South as well as North. The potential constituency of the movement is essentially universal, but an inappropriate emphasis on political correctness by activists prevents this potential from being exploited. Another thing favoring movement success is the fact that neoliberal globalization is not going away, and it is showing no signs of bending to pressure or compromising its aggressive agenda. It is in our face and it is going be more-and-more in our face - and in everyone's face - as the global regime consolidates its power and continues to accelerate the pace of global exploitation. The regime is trapped in this strategy by its Taker ethos and by its deep commitment to capitalist economics. The heavy-handed police response to anti-globalization protests around the world makes it clear that denial, suppression, and soothing press releases are the only responses that can be expected from the regime at this time. Worsening conditions, combined with mindless suppression, will only serve to embolden the movement, and provide it with a clear 'enemy' to unite against. There is a third reason why the prospects for the movement are promising at this time - our cultural 'vision bag' is no longer empty. The sixties' generation smuggled their radicalism into their mainstream lives in a thousand ways - and the past three decades have brought us a renaissance of new visions and new understandings. Whole new disciplines, such as environmental studies, have been introduced into our universities. Writers like Noam Chomsky, David Korten, Vandana Shiva, Martin Kohr, Richard Douthwaite - and many others - have been developing radical critiques, and have been systematically investigating visions for more livable, sustainable societies. Concepts like sustainability, environmental integrity, and whole-systems analysis have begun to permeate the general culture, and are becoming the nucleus of an emerging alternative cultural vision. Nothing can stop an idea whose time has come, and Quinn's Story of B might be just the cultural meme that is needed to consolidate our emerging vision and link it to roots deep within our ourselves and the history of our species. Our common sense has been alienating us from the mainstream cultural mythology, and has been leading us toward a vision of harmonization with the world around us. Quinn helps us understand that such harmonization has always been central to being human - except within the deviant Taker cultural branch. The time has come for The Great Remembering. With a firm primordial basis for its new cultural vision, the movement has the potential to be unstoppable. Humanity, at last, may be on the verge of recognizing that we've been on a wrong cul-de-sac for 10,000 years - and that it is now time to return to sanity and to humanity's true cultural mainstream. A new economics & politics: starting with the community "The challenge before us is to reverse our present backward course and re-create ourselves as contributors to the advancement of life's epic journey. It starts with choosing life as our guiding metaphor and continues with deepening our understanding of life's ways in search of insights into the unrealized possibilities of our species. - David Korten, The Post-Corporate World, p. 104 "Until recently, the vast bulk of humanity relied only upon the local economy for its livelihood. Today's problems will eventually be solved by recognizing that local production for local consumption - using local resources, under the guidance and control of local communities, and reflecting local and regional cultures and traditions with the limits of nature - is a far more successful direction than the currently promoted, clearly utopian, globally centralized, expansionist model." - Jerry Mander and Edward Goldsmith, The Case Against the Global Economy and For a Turn Toward the Local, p 391. "What is so exciting about the Participatory Budget in Brazil's Gaucho country is the interaction between active citizens, elected politicians and career officials. Instead of playing an advisory role, as do many citizens bodies in our political system, the regional and sectoral assemblies actually discuss and debate budget priorities. In my neighbourhood, for example, we might decide that a new school is more important than improvements to the highway." - Porto Alegre, Judy Rebick, online ZNet Commentary, 3 March 2001. The Taker vision of 'subdue and conquer' has been reflected in the behavior of Tak societies toward the world, and it has also been reflected in the internal structure of those societies. Those structures have always been hierarchies, permitting centralized control by one ruling elite or another - the topmost takers. Domination starts at the top of the pyramid, and flows downward, with those at the bottom implementing elite agendas and carrying out the actual work of subduing nature. If we want our societies to abandon the dominator paradigm with respect to the world, then we need first to remove the dominator paradigm from our societal structures. Before we can harmonize with the world, we must learn to harmonize our societies. Harmony, you might say, begins at home. In nature, and in non-Tak societies, harmony is achieved not through centralized authority, but through localized interactions. It begins in the small, and from that foundation the larger web of life is woven. If we wish to harmonize our societies with the web of life, then it makes good sense to begin at the local level. The local level, the community level, is where people can meet face to face - and where everyone's voice can be heard. The community is the natural place for social harmony to be developed. Communities can then come together in regional councils, where concerns can be harmonized regarding larger scale issues - and so on. The Taker political model is authority all the way down; the life- harmonization political model is voluntary collaboration all the way up. Tak political agendas begin in the imperial center; harmonized political agendas begin in every community. In my various dialogs in online discussion forums, I've found that many people are very afraid of losing the sense of security that central authorities seem to provide. We Tak have been so long domesticated to hierarchy that is difficult for us to imagine anything else working. We are like the lioness in Born Free, who ran from the lowly the wart hog - not realizing her own power. And we are like the long- term prisoner, who finds upon his release that he has forgotten how to deal with the outside world. But 10,000 years of domestication cannot erase millions of years of evolution, and our capacity to govern ourselves in freedom has not been lost. Our political voices, however, have atrophied - from their long confinement in sealed voting booths. We must learn again to speak, and to listen, and to solve problems together in our communities. One community in Brazil - indeed an entire city - has been achieving spectacular results by means of a bottom-up decision making process. Porto Alegre has for years been using a Participatory Budget Process and the city has become a global model of a livable, workable, fiscally sound city. Discussions begin at the neighborhood level, where everyone is welcome to participate - and from there begins the decision process regarding the allocation of the city's budget. Creativity is something everyone possesses, and when ordinary people are empowered to participate in the decisions of their community, a flowering of innovation and practical problem-solving results. The people of Porto Alegre are not of a different species and they have not passed through any profound consciousness-raising experience - they have simply been empowered to solve their own problems. Their experience demonstrates that harmonization can work, not only at the most local level, but even in a city with a multi-level decision-making process. And if it can work there, it can work elsewhere. In the past few centuries we have become increasingly dependent on industrial agriculture, centralized manufacture, and the long-distance transport of food and goods. It is not necessary that we achieve full self-sufficiency at the local level, but we must move very much in that direction in order to achieve energy sustainability. There is no reason to abandon the benefits of trade and specialization, but the full environmental costs must be taken into account. Our communities will continue to be part of a larger economic web - but we can greatly increase the diversity of our local production and thereby the degree to which we are locally self-sufficient. In economics as in politics, the local community is the place where harmonization needs to begin. Empowering the movement: unity through harmonization "In the United States, more than 30,000 citizens' groups, non- governmental organizations, and foundations are addressing the issue of social and ecological sustainability in the most complete sense of the word. Worldwide, their number exceeds 100,000. Together, they address a broad array of issues, including environmental justice, ecological literacy, public policy, conservation, women's rights and health, population growth, renewable energy, corporate reform, labor rights, climate change, trade rules, ethical investing, ecological tax reform, water conservation, and much more." - Paul Hawken, The Resurgance of Citizen's Movements, Utne Reader, Nov-Dec, 2000. "We don't have to change HUMANKIND in order to survive. We only have to change a single culture." - Story of B, p. 255. When the Takers decided that the world was theirs to conquer, a 10,000-year process was unleashed which first created civilization, and then brought that civilization to the brink of collapse. We got as far as the Industrial Revolution, and beyond, without recognizing that we were going down a cul-de-sac. Thomas Malthus raised the alarm in 1798 when he pointed out that geometric population growth cannot be sustained. But it is only in the past fifty years that we have fully understood the implications of the irresistible force (human growth) colliding with the immovable object (the finiteness of the Earth). Until very recently we were like the slow-boiling frog, lulled into ignorance of our impending doom. In some sense we can thank industrial capitalism for bringing things near the boiling point, and neoliberal globalization - which has turned the heat up all the way. The goal of neoliberalism is to maximize growth, which pushes us toward our apocalyptic collision at the fastest possible speed. Thus the frog has been wakened from his slumber, and we see the beginnings of a global counter-movement. Currently, the movement expresses itself as thousands of separate sub-movements, each responding to one symptom or another of our civilizational crisis - and each with its own ideas of how to bring about change. Some of these movements are beginning to find common ground, as we saw in Seattle between labor activists and environmentalists. 'Anti-globalization' and 'sustainability' are serving to some extent as unifying rallying cries. Nonetheless, the movement is for the most part fragmented. The potential energy is there, but there is little sign that the movement is moving toward any kind of effective coalescence. At the end of each big protest, everyone goes back to their own group and continues as before. How can we help the movement move toward coherence? The first thing we need to be clear about is that only a total and global transformation of society is capable of dealing with the crisis that our civilization faces. Election reform, Tobin taxes, international courts of justice, restraints on corporations and the IMF, monetary reform - all of these amount to little more than rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. We need a full change of crew and a complete change in course - not a few minor adjustments to the furniture. If our movement does not have such transformation as a central goal, then whether it succeeds or fails is of little consequence to the fate of humanity. If we truly seek a sustainable society, then we seek to harmonize humanity with nature - and nothing could be more radical. Such an agenda amounts to a rejection of capitalism, our current political regimes, and Tak mythology - and it leads us away from our 10,000-year cul-de-sac. The second thing we need to realize is that our political and economic institutions can be of no help in achieving social transformation. The upper levels of our business and political leadership are deeply committed to capitalism and to the pursuit of growth. Those at the top will be the last people to abandon the Taker vision. As conditions worsen, millions of us are realizing that further growth is not the answer. But our leaders can think only in terms of 'still more market forces' - as a medieval doctor might have prescribed 'still more leeches'. In the endgame, when the movement is very powerful, then it will be possible to work with these people to arrange for an orderly transition. But in the meantime, lobbying for changes from the top is both futile and dangerous. The most that can be achieved are offers of co-optive reforms or pseudo-progressive candidates - the very shoals upon which many a previous movement has gone aground. We must always beware of elites bearing gifts - and the closer we get to victory, the more enchanting will be the refrains of their siren song. Third, we must recognize that this movement has an entirely different kind of mission than previous social movements. We are not seeking to change the policies of the current regime, nor are we seeking to replace the leadership of the regime. Our goal is to abolish centralized regimes altogether and to establish a new kind of global society - locally based, harmonized internally and with the world, and organized around sustainability and stability instead of growth and change. Overcoming the current regime is actually the easier part of our task - more difficult by far will be the establishment of our new society. If the regime were to announce tomorrow that they were handing over the keys of power to 'us', 'we' wouldn't know where to begin! Indeed the word 'we' would have no meaning. Who would accept the keys of power on our behalf? Who is ready with a suitable program and implementation plan? Who has been granted 'our' authorization to establish a new society - and who has shown us the blueprint for that society? We, I suggest, are far from ready to seek victory. We have a bit of homework to do - and therein lies the key to bringing the movement into coherence. The establishment of a new society is in fact a project. There are a variety of problems to be solved, and tasks to be carried out, in order to complete that project successfully. And surprisingly enough, the current regime has an important role to play in the project! The role of the movement, I suggest, is to build the political infrastructure of the new society. The role of the current regime is to keep the world going until we have that new infrastructure in place. The role of that new political regime will be to build the new society. There's not much we can do to influence the current regime's actions in any case, so we might as well let them get on with their business while we get on with ours. And we can't decide how to build the new society until an appropriate societal decision-making structure is in place. Hence building that structure is where we can most productively invest our efforts as a movement. I have suggested that the political regime of our new society will need to be locally based and to operate by harmonization. In order to build the infrastructure of that new regime, the movement itself must learn to operate by harmonization and it must strive to become locally based. In that way, the movement becomes the new political infrastructure! The first task of the movement, I suggest, is to begin a process of internal harmonization. As the movement begins to achieve harmony with itself, it can then extend that harmonization process outward to the rest of society, and it can develop its roots in local neighborhoods and communities. When the whole global society is in harmony in this way then 'we' will be ready to dispense with the current regime, and no one will be motivated to defend it. There will be no final battle, just as there was none in Eastern Europe when the people unanimously decided they would no longer tolerate the Soviet-era regimes. With that kind of unanimity in opposition, no regime can stand. In order to pursue internal harmonization, the different sub-movements of the emerging movement need to begin meeting with one another, developing a sense of a larger movement community - and working out how they can collaborate toward social transformation. Harmonization is a holographic process - it can proceed wherever movement people meet, and it spreads like a web, with no center and no hierarchy. Productive ideas spread as memes, just as they do today on the Internet. There is no need for a centralized movement structure, and such a structure would in fact work against the establishment of a locally based society. And there is no need for any agreed ideology - not even an ideology based around sustainability or the rejection of the Taker myth. The process of harmonization is itself what the revolution is really about. Of course we will choose sustainability, once we start taking our problems into our own hands - how could any reasonable person choose otherwise? Who wants a society that cannot be sustained, leaving a bigger problem for our grandchildren to deal with? Environmental awareness now permeates our culture, and that is sufficient assurance that that as we chart our new course, we will be steering out of the Tak cul-de-sac. The key to successful harmonization is the use of appropriate process in movement sessions and councils. We need to learn how to work together effectively to solve problems - despite our differences in ideologies and religions. Only in that way can the movement succeed, and only in that way can the new society operate effectively. Such processes are not rocket science, but most of us are not familiar with them. We will need the help of experienced facilitators to get started, and then through practice the knowledge of how to achieve harmonization will become part of the movement culture - as it has always been part of every non-Tak culture. A good starting point - for those who wish to find out more about process techniques and the growing network of facilitators - is Tom Atlee's Co-Intelligence website: http://www.co-intelligence.org. |
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