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 life-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.
LIVING ECONOMIES
The local living economies we must create are on every dimension virtual opposites of the suicidal global imperial economy we have. Table 21-1 summarizes the critical features that distinguish the two.
One of the important lessons of history is that those who own, rule. Even in titular democracies, the powers of ownership readily trump the power of the ballot and play an often decisive role in shaping cultural values. For these reasons, growing living economies that democratize economic relationships in the deepest sense is a leading edge of the work of birthing Earth Community. The following are design principles to guide this work.
ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY. Democracy is strongest when people own the homes in which they live and have a direct ownership stake in the assets on which their livelihood depends. When workers are owners, the conflict between workers and owners disappears. When income and ownership are equitably distributed, the market allocates efficiently and responds to the needs of the many rather than the wants of the few. Local owners who have a long-term stake in the enterprises they own are patient investors who stay the course rather than seek quick profits from short-term market swings. 343
TABLE 21-1: Critical distinguishing features
LOCAL PREFERENCE. Communities are most economically secure and most in control of their own economic priorities when most of their basic needs are met by local businesses that employ local labor and use local resources to meet the needs of local residents for employment, goods, and services. Such communities are most likely to manage their environmental resources responsibly and sustainably when they depend on the yield of those resources for their continued well-being. Business decisions are most likely to take into account the health of the community and its natural environment when those who make the decisions live in the community and share in any social and environmental burdens those decisions create.
HUMAN SCALE. Human-scale enterprises and markets foster face-to-face economic relationships of mutual trust and accountability, which are an essential foundation of strong communities. Markets are more efficient and responsive when served by several small local firms rather than one or a few very large firms with absentee owners.
LIVING INDICATORS. Communities that evaluate their economic performance against indicators of social and environmental health are 344likely to manage their resources in ways consistent with the long-term well-being of children, families, and communities.
FAIR-SHARE TAXATION. It is just and proper that those who enjoy the greatest economic gains from public services and facilities pay the greatest share of the costs of providing and maintaining these public services.
RESPONSIVE MARKETS. The economy functions most efficiently and democratically when businesses respond to the self-defined needs of people rather than spending large sums on advertising to generate demand for unneeded products. Advertising aimed at creating artificial desires distorts the market, wastes resources, serves no public purpose, and is properly discouraged by treating advertising as an after-tax expense.
RESPONSIBILITY FOR HARMS CAUSED. Markets allocate fairly and efficiently only when the full cost of each good and service is internalized in its price. Because unregulated markets lead to the extensive practice of shifting the costs of private decisions onto the public, public intervention through regulation and the assessment of compensatory fees is essential to assure that market prices reflect the full costs—including social and environmental costs—of a good or service. Similarly, it is proper for those who make private decisions and reap the benefits therefrom to bear liability for harms to others resulting from intention or neglect. Limiting the liability of the owners and managers of corporations violates this principle and invites reckless and irresponsible behavior.
PATIENT CAPITAL. Public policy properly favors patient investment over speculative trading that distorts and destabilizes markets and creates perverse incentives for managers to focus on short-term results and engage in fraudulent accounting practices.
GENERATIONAL JUBILEE. In the spirit of the biblical jubilee, it is proper to restore a condition of equity at the end of each lifetime by equitably distributing the assets of large estates on the death of their owners.
INFORMATION AND TECHNOLOGY SHARING. Inventors and artists have a right to fair compensation for their original contributions. There is, however, an overriding public interest in the free sharing of essential information and beneficial technology, and no individual or enterprise has a right to monopolize such information and technology or unduly restrict its use by others. 345
ECONOMIC SELF-DETERMINATION. It is the right and responsibility of the citizens of every nation to control their own economic resources and to determine their own economic and social priorities, terms of trade, and rules for foreign investors consistent with their needs and values so long as they internalize the costs of their decisions and do not shift costs onto others.
FAIR AND BALANCED TRADE. Trade relationships should be fair and balanced. Fairness means that the price of exports must reflect full production costs—including the cost of providing workers with living wages and benefits and practicing sound environmental stewardship. Balance means each nation’s exports and imports must be maintained in balance so there is no buildup of long-term international debt.
These are all basic principles of sound market economies. Market fundamentalists will denounce them as violating market freedom, a code word for the freedom of those members of a society with the most money to do whatever they like without regard to the consequences for others. It is the difference between the democracy of the many championed by Jefferson and the democracy of the very rich championed by Hamilton. The economic principles of Empire create a powerful bias in favor of valuing and concentrating wealth. The economic principles of Earth Community have a bias in favor of life and an equitable distribution of wealth and ownership.
The work of the economic turning centers on developing local living economies that embody these characteristics while resisting the encroachment of global corporations on the rights and well-being of people and communities. The work includes promoting community investment and policy reforms that strengthen local ownership and create a persistent bias in favor of enterprises that are human-scale and owned by those whose livelihoods depend on them.
LIVING POLITICS
Most discussions of democracy focus on the institutions of political democracy and electoral politics. Without economic and cultural democracy, however, political democracy is more illusion than reality, because those who control the processes of economic and cultural choice ultimately control political choice. 346
The politics of Empire play out as a win-lose competition between elite power brokers who seek personal gain by controlling strategic resources through the control of information, dissent, and rule making. The politics of Earth Community play out as a cooperative effort to solve problems and grow the potential of the whole through open deliberation and consensus building in community forums, the free flow of information through independent media, and the decision making of an open political process.
Citizen Deliberation
Democracy is a hollow exercise when reduced to citizens voting every few years for a preselected slate of candidates known primarily through carefully crafted TV advertisements. The practice of real democracy involves a continuing and vibrant citizen engagement in meaningful deliberations in a wide variety of public forums. These can range from a modest neighborhood gathering in someone’s living room; to events organized by local churches, colleges, and community services organizations; and to complex networks organized by national citizen groups using electronic communications media and polling technology to involve thousands, even millions, of people.
America Speaks, a U.S. organization created and led by Carolyn Lukensmeyer, is pioneering approaches that use state-of-the-art communications technologies to engage thousands of citizens in dialogues on local and national issues such as Social Security, to develop a consensus on priorities, to encourage civic engagement, and to communicate community views to policy makers.1 Since 1982 the Kettering Foundation has been supporting public forums dealing with a range of national issues including health care, campaign finance reform, and national security. In a time of public disengagement, sound-bite journalism, and PR spin, such initiatives are crucial to the process of democracy in order to open the public mind to a wide range of perspectives and possibilities and engage the public in a deep assessment of values and priorities.
Independent Media
As discussed in chapter 4, the human species is in the midst of a communications revolution that is linking the world into a seamless web of communications that can be used either to strengthen elite control or 347to create an open-access commons with direct communication among people, families, and communities. The profit-driven communications model of the corporate media leads to a further concentration of elite power and control and reproduces the social pathologies of Empire. The service-driven communications model of independent media deconcentrates and democratizes media control, creating a vast potential to accelerate human learning, advance the awakening of Cultural and Spiritual Consciousness, and hasten a global embrace of the life-affirming cultural values of Earth Community.
Advancing a turning from the autocratic corporate media model to the democratic independent media model is an essential priority for citizen initiatives and policy advocacy. There are endless creative possibilities, as many Cultural and Spiritual Creatives are already demonstrating. They are blogging and podcasting; creating magazines, community newspapers, independent radio networks, and low-power community radio stations; and establishing independent media centers. All these are elements of a growing, self-organizing system of independent media.
Others are engaged in resisting corporate media concentration by claiming the communications frequency spectrum and the copper and fiber-optic conduits that deliver electronic media and the Internet as community resources managed as regulated, open-access public utilities. Each such initiative contributes to weakening the hold of corporate media monopolies, breaking through censorship barriers, exposing the bias and banality of corporate media programming, and opening political deliberation to diverse voices and lively debate.
Open Political Process
In the end, elected representatives must translate favored solutions into the decisions that govern public rules and priorities. This requires an open, fair, and honest electoral system responsive to the full spectrum of popular views and interests. The 2000 and 2004 U.S. presidential elections provided a troubling reminder of how far short of this ideal the electoral system in the United States falls. Many of the failings are the result of intentional efforts to subvert the democratic process in the grab for political power. Following are some of the reforms advocated by U.S. citizen groups to open and democratize U.S. politics and the electoral system. 348
RIGHT TO VOTE. All adult citizens must be guaranteed the right to vote in a convenient, adequately equipped, and secure polling place and to have their votes duly counted according to voter intentions.
PUBLIC FINANCING. Public elections must be publicly financed under clear and open standards to reduce opportunities for corruption and to focus the attention of elected officials and aspirants on issues and their accountability to the electorate.
VOTING INTEGRITY. Voting machines must use open-source software subject to independent citizen audit, and they must produce a verified record of every vote to support manual recounts in the event of machine malfunction or suspected rigging.
NONPARTISAN ELECTION ADMINISTRATION. Election administration should be the responsibility of nonpartisan officials required to avoid any appearance of partiality. This seems so obvious as to not require mention, yet in the United States elections are administered by partisan state-level officials who are elected by party affiliation and sometimes even serve as campaign managers for contesting candidates, creating a blatant but currently wholly legal conflict of interest that undermines the credibility of the system.
DIRECT ELECTION BASED ON ONE PERSON, ONE VOTE. Replace the Electoral College system, which gives some votes several times the weight of others in presidential races and which can produce a president who receives significantly fewer votes than his opponent, with a system of direct election based on the fundamental principle of one person, one vote.
MEDIA ACCESS. Require radio and television stations licensed to use the public airwaves to provide free airtime for ballot-qualified candidates and the discussion of public issues by persons of diverse views. Allowing the corporations that are granted control of this limited and extremely valuable public resource to grant access only to those politicians who are able to pay whatever advertising fees the stations choose to charge is a major contributor to political corruption.
OPEN DEBATES. Place the administration of political debates in the hands of scrupulously nonpartisan organizations and open them to participation by all credible candidates to give voice to a wider range of points of view. 349
EQUAL REPRESENTATION. Open the political process to more voices and create an opening for minority representation by instituting instant runoff voting and proportional representation.2
POLITICAL RIGHTS FOR PEOPLE. Limit political rights and participation to natural persons and to organizations composed of natural-person members and formed for the specific and exclusive purpose of political action. Corporations organized for the purpose of making money for their owners are artificial legal entities granted a public charter to fulfill a public purpose. It is their responsibility to obey the law, not to write it, and they are properly barred from any effort to influence elections or legislation.
LIVING CULTURES
Living cultures flow from life in family and community and nurture the development of our higher orders of consciousness. As the institutions of Empire have co-opted and centralized the processes of culture formation, they have not only propagated false cultural values but have also weakened the bonds of family and community.
One of the Great Turning’s most important challenges is to convert, through an incremental bottom-up process, four primary institutions of imperial culture—family, education, media, and religion—into institutions of living culture supportive of authentic cultural expression and the development of the higher orders of consciousness. The goal is to make cultural formation a participatory and intentional process through which we each discover our own distinctive cultural identity and simultaneously expand our awareness of the creative value of the cultural diversity of the species, thus building mutual trust and facilitating cooperative sharing and exchange.
Family
In modern times Empire has decimated family relationships, first of the extended family and then of the nuclear family. Like any other human institution, extended and nuclear families can be violent centers of oppression, loving centers of creative expression, or anything in between. The basic institution, however, is crucial as a source of the enduring relationships essential to our healthful individual development—and particularly to the healthful development of our children. The challenge 350is to make those relationships caring and nurturing. The changes come one family at a time but are far easier to achieve when supported by family-friendly living economies and public policies—both arenas for constructive citizen action, as discussed previously. Fractured though it has become, the nuclear family is still common. The extended family has become less common, and we easily forget its benefits.
The extended families of more traditional societies served as the basic unit of social organization and provided an intergenerational support system. Children had multiple stable caretakers to whom they could turn for help and with whom they could bond. Parents could count on sharing resources and the burdens of child care with those who shared the bonds of kinship. Elders remained active and valued and knew they would have caring help near at hand in the event of infirmity. Family celebrations also commonly featured singing, dancing, and other forms of artistic expression.
In modern societies in which even the standard two-parent nuclear family is at risk, it may be neither possible nor appropriate to return to the often insular and oppressive model of the extended biological family. It is possible, however, to create virtual families within the context of intentional communities—such as co-housing compounds and eco-villages—that offer many of the benefits of the extended biological family, with fewer of the disabilities. Such communities readily accommodate a variety of nuclear-family arrangements within virtual extended-family groupings that offer the benefits of age and gender diversity and multiple providers of child and elder care, while being relatively more open and less confining than the biological extended family.
It is essential to social health that families and extended family communities are supported by economic and social policies that encourage the creation of family-wage jobs and the flexible integration of family, work, and community life; multifamily cooperative housing arrangements; and the legalization of stable, caring civil unions and domestic partnerships.
Education
The capacity and desire to learn are inherent in our human nature. We are born to learn from the day of our birth to the day of our death. Empire, however, has given us schools that too often serve as institutions for the confinement and test-driven regimentation of children isolated 351from the life of community. Such schools are well suited to preparing children for obedient service to the institutions of Empire, but not for life and leadership in vibrant human communities nor for roles as social architects of a new human era. It is little wonder that so many youth rebel, drop out, and turn to sex, drugs, and violence in a desperate effort—as elaborated in chapter 17 — to establish any kind of relationship that affirms their existence, even if in fleeting and ultimately self-destructive ways.
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.