Our dialogue in Cochrane tomorrow Wednesday August 14 and a related book synopsis

Hello Dialogue Artists,

Tomorrow, Wednesday August 14, we'll join Michael and Judie Bopp in Cochrane for their discussion of how spiritual teachings can contribute to good governance. If you need a ride, please note that several of us will meet at Vendome at 5 PM to drive out to the event. I have circulated essential details of the discussion previously, but if you have any questions you can let me know right away. Here, I will append my most recent book synopsis, which seems ideally relevant to the topic for tomorrow.

Arthur Book: (David C. Korten) The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community (2006)Small family farmers in Asia had designed and built ingenious irrigation systems that worked brilliantly and were highly cost effective. Governments intervened and gave the farmers irrigation systems that were more costly and often did not work as well as what had been displaced. Empire has left us a legacy of “Father knows best,” a system of dominance and hierarchy that is one of two alternatives put forward in Korten’s book. Extreme cases make it obvious that this is a deeply flawed mindset: Think of Stalin or of Hitler as the Father figure in the dictatorships they ruled. Such systems, based on the consciousness of Empire, have been dominant for thousands of years. Why have they been dominant? Korten answers this question using the prototype of peaceful tribes being invaded by violent tribes. To survive, the peaceful tribes must defend themselves. They adopt the culture of violence. Thus the culture of violence spreads. Yet today we have a choice. Not only do we have a choice, but our epoch may be seen by generations that follow ours either as the time of the Great Turning away from Empire and toward Earth Community; or instead as the time of the Great Unraveling. Drawing from the work of developmental psychologists, Korten delineates five Orders of Consciousness from infancy to advanced age, while emphasizing that many adults remain stuck in the first stage or the second. In the first of these five stages of growth, the infant has a Magical Consciousness in which things happen without any discernible cause, as if by magic. The infant is “limited in its ability to recognize the connection between the actions of the self and future consequences,” and thus unable to accept responsibility for its own actions. Normally, around the age of six or seven, the child progresses to an Imperial Consciousness in which an awareness that actions have consequences has developed. There is a residual of magical consciousness at this stage in the child’s identification with superheroes, yet the capacity for seeing themselves as others see them is typically very limited. Instead of “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” the tendency – particularly among boys – is closer to “an eye for an eye.” Obedience to authority leads to good results for the self, so the Imperial Consciousness is typically not one that challenges authority. Around the age of eleven or twelve, the child typically begins to rebel against parental authority, while internalizing the norms of a larger reference group of their peers. This is a hallmark of the Socialized Consciousness – in which the teenager aims for group acceptance both as a criterion of self-worth and as a means of security in a world that is sometimes hostile. The growing ability to see one’s self through the eyes of another and a sense of the need for rules are also characteristics of this third Order of Consciousness. Another is a strong identity with one’s own group and a tendency to consider criticism of that group as a serious affront. Korten identifies people who have developed this Order of Consciousness as the conventional “good citizens,” who would likely be the source of the swing vote in a choice between Empire and Earth Community. Well-intentioned and capable of very positive contributions to society, they are also “susceptible to manipulation by advertisers, propagandists, and political demagogues, and…prone to demand rights for the members of its own identity group that it is willing to deny others.” In their first encounters with another culture, people may initially react with chauvinism, thinking their culture is the only correct path. Eventually, however, many come to celebrate the diversity and find themselves deeply enriched by multicultural experiences. This marks their ascent into Cultural Consciousness – an order of consciousness, according to Korten, which is “rarely achieved before age thirty, and the majority of those who live in modern imperial societies never achieve it, partly because most corporations, political parties, labor unions, and even educational institutions actively discourage it. …Persons who have achieved a Cultural Consciousness have an ‘Inclusive World’ view that sees the possibility of creating inclusive, life-affirming societies that work for all. …such persons recognize culture as a social construct subject to change by conscious choice. Thus, we may call them Cultural Creatives. [Korten cites other authors as the source of this concept.]” Of the fifth and highest order of consciousness, the Spiritual Consciousness, Korten writes that it “approaches conflict, contradiction, and paradox not as problems to be overcome, but as opportunities for deeper learning.” This is the stage not only of wisdom found in the tribal elder and the sage (think of Socrates) but also an opening into new learning opportunities. The Great Turning toward Earth Community, if we make it happen, must be a time in which our thinking regains the strength of the feminine psychology that was responsible for our cooperative evolution as “homo sapiens” in the first place. In Chapter 5, “When God Was a Woman,” he writes: “Early human learning centered on three challenges: developing the art of complex speech to facilitate communication, discovering technologies to extend the capabilities of the human mind and body, and mastering the arts of living in ever larger units of social organization to accommodate population growth.” We now take all this for granted, he writes, and “ignore or deny the archaeological evidence that it had occurred during the period prior to the era of Empire, in the days of goddesses and high priestesses that most historians give short shrift.” In subsequent chapters from Part II “Sorrows of Empire,” Korten lucidly summarizes centuries of empire as well as the Athenian experiment in democracy; then mentions the Age of Enlightenment that gave us the foundations (and the flaws) of modern democracy, with a survey of contributions from individuals such as John Locke, Jean-Jacque Rousseau, and Thomas Hobbes. Adam Smith and many others are included in this overview of modern times. In the six chapters of Part III, “America, the Unfinished Project,” the author devotes particular attention to what had been considered the most advanced of modern democracies. As he draws the book to conclusion Korten places before us again the choice and the possibility with which he opens the book, adding the absolutely essential point that we are in the process of creating history, taking the path toward Earth Community or continuing down the road of Empire. If we choose the first of those two options, we must break the silence, end our isolation, and change the story. The neighborhood where I live provides an example of the isolation in our consumer society, a place where I am scarcely ever involved in transformative dialogue with my neighbors, and rarely see them on my frequent walks. The myriad small decisions that we take each hour of our lives are driven by the stories that our diverse cultures and societies have given us. We can take control of those narratives and move history in the direction of our choice. This book seems an essential reference for that purpose.