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CHAPTER 17
Joys of Earth Community

Destructiveness is the outcome of unlived life. Those individual and social conditions that make for suppression of life produce the passion for destruction.¹

Erich Fromm

Being human always points, and is directed, to something, or someone, other than oneself—be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself—by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love—the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself.²

Viktor Frankl

Two of the great psychoanalysts of the twentieth century—Erich Fromm and Viktor Frankl—each had personal encounters with the horror of fascism in Nazi Germany. After World War II each published his reflections on what in the human psyche can drive humans to such destructiveness. Each came to much the same simple yet profound conclusion: the human drive to belong, to connect, to express our presence, is so strong that if our efforts to connect and affirm our existence through positive means are thwarted, that drive will be redirected to negative means.

Think of it as a drive to live and thereby to do what other successful living beings do: find our place of service in a cooperative partnership with the larger web of life. The development of healthy individuals capable of relationships based on mutual caring and service depends on healthy communities that nurture healthful individual development. Healthy individuals and healthy communities go hand in hand, each inseparable from the other.

We humans, because of the gift of reflective consciousness, have the capacity to live more intentionally and creatively than any other species. We also, however, have the capacity to make terribly bad choices, as the282 sorrows of five thousand years of Empire so tragically demonstrate. The cultures and institutions of Empire alienate us from life, thwart the positive expression of our drive to live, turn our life energy to expressions destructive of both self and community, condition us to choose the path of sorrow and deny the very existence of the path to the joys of Earth Community. Yet as both nonimperial human societies and the living communities of the nonhuman world attest, the way of partnership is a very real possibility.

The work of the Great Turning requires us to free ourselves from the self-inflicted alienation and oppression of Empire as we create societies that support every person in connecting to life in ways that enhance the creative potential of both self and community so that all may enjoy the joys of Earth Community. The work begins in our minds with an awakening to the reality that the drive to connect in a mutually affirming relationship with life is hardwired into our nature and that whether we express that drive in ways that bring sorrow or joy is up to us.

HARDWIRED TO CONNECT

An extraordinary cooperative initiative organized by the YMCA of the USA, the Dartmouth Medical School, and the Institute for American Values brought together thirty-three prominent neuroscientists, children’s doctors, and social scientists to review the mental and emotional health of America’s children and to recommend practical steps to improve their lives. Organized as the Commission on Children at Risk, their report, Hardwired to Connect: The New Scientific Case for Authoritative Communities, is a path-breaking synthesis of science, spiritual wisdom, and conservative and liberal values.³

The commission’s report, based on scientific studies of the human brain, concludes that we humans are physiologically “wired” to form “close attachments to other people, beginning with our mothers, fathers, and extended family, and then moving out to the broader community.”⁴

Using magnetic resonance imaging to take portraits of brain activity, scientists have found during laboratory exercises that the experience of forming a cooperative alliance with another person produces a strong positive response in the pleasure center of the brain—rather like eating chocolate or engaging in good sex.⁵ Other studies find that relationships 283of trust and caring are essential to our emotional health and to the healthful function of society.⁶

The Human Brain

The developmental processes involved in achieving the potentials of our human nature are physiological as well as psychological. Like other aspects of our physiology, the brain matures with time, and the development of its higher-level abilities requires practice.

Starting with the basics, what we call the human brain is actually a complex system of three interlinked brains, each with distinctive functions. This basic three-part structure is common to all mammalian brains. At the core is the reptilian brain, which coordinates basic functions essential to survival, such as breathing, regulating the heart, hunting and eating, reproducing, and engaging the fight-or-flight response to danger. The limbic brain, physically layered on top of the reptilian brain, is the center of the emotional intelligence that gives mammals their distinctive capacity to experience emotion, read the emotional state of other mammals, bond socially, care for their children, and form cooperative communities. The third layer is the neocortical brain, the center of cognitive reasoning, symbolic thought, awareness, and self-aware volition.

In the earliest mammals, the neocortical brain is merely a thin skin covering the older subbrains. In humans, the neocortical brain is the largest of the three by substantial measure.⁷ Each of the three brains functions with its own integrity, even as it communicates with and influences the other brains as well as the intelligences of the body’s other organs and cellular systems that together give the human organism its vast range of capabilities.

Because reptiles have no limbic brain, they lack the capacity for an emotional life. With no emotional life they have no capacity to bond and experience empathy. They come together briefly to court and mate, but they rarely function as a community and may even eat their own young as a convenient nutrient source.⁸

The emotional intelligence of the limbic brain —the ability to accurately communicate one’s emotions and to read the emotions of others through verbal and nonverbal clues—is only partially formed in humans by the time of birth. The limbic brain of the newborn represents 284a potential that must be cultivated into a usable capacity through emotional exchanges with a primary caretaker —most often the mother. Practice in such exchanges activates the neural connections essential to the intuitive reading of emotional states.

Creating a neural connection in the brain is much like creating a connection between two people within a human social network. Each such new connection, once established, creates a potential that is more easily activated in the future.

It is much the same for the intellectual functions of the neocortical brain. It too is only partially formed by the time of birth and matures through use. Achieving the full potential of the higher orders of consciousness depends on the balanced development of both the limbic and the neocortical brains through their use as the child engages the world.

It is not easy learning to be human. Although we think of our intellectual power as the highest manifestation of our humanity, in many ways our greatest developmental challenges involve our emotional and moral intelligence, a process in which our early experience relating to our primary caretakers is especially important.

Nurturing Parenting

The more active and loving the emotional exchange between the child and the adult caretaker, the fuller the early development of the limbic brain, the more fluent the child’s emotional intelligence, and the greater the capacity and subsequent predisposition for empathy, bonding, nurturing parenting, and responsible moral function. Of course, the converse is also true. The less satisfying the human connections experienced by the child, the less of these capacities it will have. Put in the starkest terms, the less developed our limbic brain, the more reptilian our nature.

The developed neurological connections of the limbic brain respond to the experience of a positive relationship by stimulating the brain’s pleasure centers to reward subsequent encounters with those same persons to create the condition we call bonding. In a physiological sense, pair-bonded couples are “addicted” to each other. Similar physiological processes are involved in the bonding of the mother to her child.

One of the more startling research findings is that “for men, getting married—becoming sexually and intimately bonded with a spouse— seems to lower testosterone levels,” which appears to be associated with 285a reduction in violent behavior and sexual promiscuity and an increase in positive fathering. There is also evidence linking intimate relationships to strong immune systems and more rapid healing of physical wounds.⁹ Conversely, humans deprived of intimate relationships are more prone to poor health and early death. A psychologically healthy childhood is a foundation of a physically and psychologically healthy adulthood.

The implications for society are profound. By supporting the development of the limbic brain through loving interactions, nurturing parents increase the subsequent capacity of their children to function as self-regulating adults with the capacity for empathy, bonding, and moral self-direction that is an essential foundation of mature democratic citizenship. Distant, unresponsive, or abusive parents produce emotionally challenged, self-absorbed adults inclined to turn to coercive hierarchies to impose social order and to the violent acting out of unresolved emotional conflicts.

The reinforcing interactions between parenting styles and adult predispositions reveal the truly monumental costs to the human future of the corporate plutocracy’s war against the family. By creating economic conditions that make it virtually impossible for millions of parents to provide their young children with the nurturing attention essential to their healthy emotional development, the economic and social policies promoted by the New Right in the United States and beyond perpetuate the reproduction of emotionally crippled adults for generations to come. That the consequences can be devastating not only for the individual but as well for the larger society is graphically demonstrated by a recent case in point that brings to mind the biblical warning of Ecclesiastes 10:16, “Woe to thee, O land, when thy king is a child.”

When Things Go Wrong

Justin A. Frank, a respected Washington, D.C., psychoanalyst and a professor of psychiatry at the George Washington University Medical Center, points to George W. Bush as an example of the potentially tragic consequences of nonnurturant parenting. By his reading of the public record of George W.’s early childhood experience, Dr. Frank concludes that young George suffered a serious lack of nurturing parenting, with devastating consequences for the United States and the world as he subsequently acted out his unresolved childhood conflicts on the global stage.¹⁰ 286

Young George’s father, George H.W. Bush, was largely absent from the home and had little role in George W.’s early upbringing. His emotionally distant mother, Barbara Bush, was by her own account a strict disciplinarian who regularly invoked harsh physical punishment. When George was six, his younger sister, Robin, was diagnosed with leukemia, but he did not learn of her illness until after her death. George simply was told not to play with her. In the meantime, his parents frequently flew with her to the East Coast for treatment. On her death, he was left to struggle on his own with unresolved feelings of abandonment, resentment, self-blame, and love associated with the tragedy and his parents’ stoic response to it.

Such early experiences profoundly influence whether a child will grow up to perceive the world as largely safe and affirming or threatening and alienating. They also influence whether the child develops a positive self-concept and the ability as an adult to admit error, feel compassion, and see oneself through the eyes of another—in other words, the ability to take the step from an Imperial to a Socialized Consciousness and beyond. (See chapter 2 for more discussion about the levels of human consciousness.) Persistent fears and self-doubt may also translate into learning disabilities, rigid belief systems, claims to moral certainty, and megalomania that bar the passage to the high orders of consciousness. Confined to an Imperial Consciousness, individuals so afflicted are unable to acknowledge even to themselves the evil of the harm they inflict on others or the moral hypocrisy of their positions.

Dr. Frank documents the ways in which all these symptoms of thwarted development have been manifested by the adult George W. during his presidency. This pattern has been common among Empire’s ruling elites since the earliest days of Empire, and the species has paid a terrible price.

Pain of an Unlived Life

There is no human pain so great as the feeling of being alone in an existence without meaning. Viktor Frankl called it the “existential vacuum” and observed that the frustrated will to meaning may be “vicariously compensated for by a will to power, including the most primitive form of the will to power, the will to money.”¹¹ Erich Fromm noted that humans will endure all forms of degradation to break from the deadly loneliness 287of an unlived life.¹² Meaning is a side effect of the transcendence that we experience through selfless acts of creative engagement and contribution.

To the extent that we find our world responsive to our presence in our early years, we develop the physiological and mental abilities to engage life with growing delight. We have the fascination to explore its possibilities and thereby to know ourselves, realize our highest potential, and experience the joy of life in relationship with Creation. If, however, we experience an unresponsive or even hostile world, we may resort to some form of escapism—a kind of despairing withdrawal from experiencing life—or to the pathological dominance-submission forms of relating that are the defining pattern of Empire. The imperial response of dominance-submission brings us into relationship with a larger world, even if only in perverse ways that lead to sorrowful consequences.

The escape response leads in its milder forms to “learned helplessness”¹³ or to various forms of escapist addictions, such as our modern afflictions of “shop till you drop” material indulgence, gambling, drugs, overeating, or compulsive television watching. Such practices, however, do nothing to resolve our struggles. They only further numb our awareness and alienate us from life.¹⁴

Escape is also manifest in political disengagement, chronic cynicism, and the kind of sullen disgruntlement common among those who work in public and private bureaucracies. It may also be manifest in a religious preoccupation with the afterlife —including the longing of Islamic fundamentalists for martyrdom and Christian fundamentalists for the Rapture. In its more extreme forms, the escape response may lead to suicide or psychological catatonia.

The embrace of dominance-submission as a compensating mechanism creates a drive to acquire power, or to connect to a power holder, in order to validate one’s own existence by dominating, humiliating, or destroying others. The drive to believe that one’s own acts make a positive difference in the world is so strong, however, that even the most brutal and ruthless of evildoers commonly insist that their violence serves a heroic, even sacred, purpose.

For example, Adolf Hitler, notorious for his contributions to the mechanization of genocide and warfare, sanctified his bloodlust with the claim that he was bettering the lives of the peoples of the nations his armies laid waste and was improving the global culture. He saw himself 288as acting under the command of a higher power to secure peace and freedom, fulfill the eternal laws of nature, and defend the German people from those who meant them harm.¹⁵

Imperial rulers have been reading from the same script for five thousand years. Some may even claim their acts of sadistic brutality are heroic acts of cleansing intended to purify an evil world.

The stronger the drive for dominance, the more dangerous it becomes. We have previously noted the deranged enthusiasm with which history’s more demented rulers rejoiced in their ability to destroy whole cities, peoples, and civilizations, as in the destruction of Babylon by the Assyrians and of Carthage by Rome.

That such acts of destruction reveal the desperate efforts of the emotionally wounded to prove their existence does not excuse them. The criminally deranged belong in prisons or mental institutions, not positions of power. Our longer-term commitment, however, is not to fill the beds in our prisons and mental institutions. It is to eliminate the source of the pathology by redesigning modern human societies to support the healthful development of every individual from birth to passing. We have much to learn in this undertaking from the contrasting ways in which modern and traditional societies organize the basic routines of daily life.

THE INVISIBLE CURRICULUM

The human life cycle is divided into three primary stages: childhood, adulthood, and elderhood. To experience the joy that flows from actualizing the potentials of our humanity we need the support of strong, loving, and stable families and communities in negotiating the invisible curriculum of life through which we develop the fullness of our humanity.

We learn in childhood to obey the word of our parents in return for the care that keeps us safe and healthy. Adulthood, which commonly includes a transition to parenthood, marks a total role transformation from dependence and obedience to full responsibility not only to care for oneself but also to engage in a partnership with one’s spouse, to care for one’s children, and accept the public responsibilities of citizenship.

The final stage in the human life cycle, mature elderhood, can also be the richest and most fulfilling. With a secure identity, no further need to prove ourselves to the world, a lifetime of experience on which 289to draw, and our children established in their own families and careers, we are free to explore, embrace, expand, and serve in previously impossible ways.¹⁶

The ways in which traditional and modern societies deal with the passage through these life stages could scarcely be more different, revealing their strikingly different values and priorities. The way of the traditional society is the outcome of self-organizing processes that flow from an innate sense of the needs of children, families, and the community as a whole, often as mediated by the Spiritual Consciousness of wise elders. The way of the modern society is the outcome of decisions made by the owning classes, commonly mediated by the self-interested sense of personal entitlement of an Imperial Consciousness. At every hand, ordinary people find their choices controlled by the institutional hierarchies of big business, big government, big education, big unions, big media, and big religion and limited to those that favor the interests of some faction of the ruling class.

The Way of Empire

Captive to the addictions of Empire, modern societies characteristically segment the life cycle, sandwiching a frenetically fragmented adulthood between long periods of enforced isolation and dependence during both childhood and elderhood. While the parent or parents try to piece together a living income from multiple jobs, the young child of the modern household is commonly parked in front of the television as a sacrificial offering to corporate advertisers, warehoused in day care centers, or left to fend on the street without adult supervision. The child’s primary responsibility in such circumstances is to keep out of the way of busy adults.

After reaching school age, the child is consigned to an educational facility in a state of enforced regimentation for a major portion of the day in the care of seriously overburdened and often undertrained teachers. Although some wonderful schools provide a rich learning environment, in the more typical school the child’s main task is to fight off boredom while mastering the mechanics of reading, writing, and arithmetic and memorizing large quantities of information unconnected to any other aspect of his or her life. Where children relate directly with other children, they are pretty much on their own to work things out for themselves, with little adult guidance. 290

Typically, the experience of the child’s parents is similarly fragmented and alienating. Struggling to support themselves and their families with multiple jobs offering less than a family wage and no benefits, they have little time for family, community, spiritual, or leisure life. Lacking other options, most grit their teeth and tough it out.

Negotiating the passage from the dependence of childhood to the responsibilities of parenthood is surely one of the most difficult challenges of the human life cycle, and no work is more important than parenting to the future health of the society. It is, however, much easier to become a parent than to be a parent. Yet the cultures and institutions of modern Empire not only fail to provide support and preparation for the transition from childhood to parenthood, they make it virtually impossible for parents to fulfill their parental responsibilities.

When and if retirement comes, it too often means enforced isolation and loneliness or confinement in facilities that offer only the company of other elders. Here again, individuals are pretty much on their own, with little or no support from or preparation by the contemporary cultures and institutions of Empire.

It is as if modern imperial societies were intentionally designed to keep life fragmented and disconnected to minimize the possibility that we might experience the enduring, caring relationships that are a foundation of healthful human development. Replication of the sorrows of social pathology is an almost inevitable result. The contrast to the traditional tribal community is stark indeed.

The Way of Earth Community

In many traditional tribal villages, family, work, spiritual, community, and recreational life flow naturally one into the other. Children grow up participating fully in community life, learning by doing under the watchful eye and coaching of parents and of elders revered for their wisdom and service. Older children learn parenting skills by participating in the care of younger children and in the life of hearth, field, and workshop.

The cultural life of the tribe underscores the individual’s enduring connection to community, place, and generations past and future. Public celebrations clearly mark graduation from the relationships appropriate to an earlier stage to those appropriate to a later stage, and many role models are always at hand. 291

When I turned sixty-five, Timothy Iistowanohpataakiiwa, a Native American friend and elder, gave me one of the most important gifts of my life. In a simple Native ceremony attended by a number of friends and colleagues, he initiated me as an elder into the human community and commemorated my graduation with the gift of an eagle feather he had worn during his participation in the sacred Sun Dance ceremony. It totally changed my outlook on aging. Rather than passing into irrelevance on the path to death, I was initiated into elderhood as mentor, teacher, and wisdom keeper.

Although a complete return to traditional ways is neither possible nor appropriate, we have much to learn from those traditional societies, because they embody an innate understanding of the developmental needs of children and of the art of living in relationship to the larger web of life. Contemporary imperial societies organize for money making. Traditional societies organize for living.

More than two thousand years ago, the great Greek philosophers reasoned that the good society is one that supports every person in their journey to the full realization of the highest potentials of their humanity and, in so doing, reproduces the conditions of its own healthful function. Many traditional societies came far closer to actualizing this ideal than do most modern societies, despite the latter’s considerable advantages in technology, scientific knowledge, and material resources.

Actualizing the ideal, however, does not require going back to lives of subsistence and isolation. It is entirely possible to create societies that are at once human, rooted in their place, and modern in their global connections, understanding, and use of technology. It begins with applying the organizing principles of partnership to the restructuring of our human institutions. Here we may look to nature as a knowledgeable and inspiring teacher.

NATURE AS TEACHER

Life on Earth has been learning the secrets of organizing by partnership for four billion years. The defining patterns found in virtually every living system on the planet reveal the lessons of that learning. From the descriptions of the workings of these systems authored by biologists Janine Benyus, Mae-Wan Ho, Lynn Margulis, Elisabet Sahtouris, and others we can discern a number of organizing principles for the partnership societies we must now create.¹⁷ 292

Principle of Cooperative Self-Organization

Life has learned to establish and maintain coherence through an energetic dance of mutual influence, self-regulation, and adaptation that maintains a balance of individual and collective needs at each of life’s many levels of organization, from cell to global biosphere. Each level of organization appears to be a choice-making entity in its own right, with its own capacity to choose in the interests of both self and whole.

Conditioned by our imperial cultures, we humans have been so focused on the patterns of competition that contribute to life’s dynamism that we have failed to see the deeper narrative of life as a profoundly cooperative enterprise. Life has learned what many of us humans have not — living beings exist only in relationship with other living beings.

According to Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, one of life’s most important lessons is that the species that survive and prosper are ultimately those that find a niche in which they meet their own needs in ways that simultaneously serve others.¹⁸ Furthermore, as Sahtouris observes, life has characteristically learned to cooperate through experiencing the negative consequences of unbridled competition. In her words, “One can discern in evolution a repeating pattern in which aggressive competition leads to the threat of extinction, which is then avoided by the formation of cooperative alliances.”¹⁹ These observations speak directly to our human time as we learn the extent of the threat that ruthless competition now poses not only to our own species but as well to countless others.

Principle of Place

Life has learned to organize into complex multiorganism ecosystems that adapt to the most intricate details of the microenvironments of their particular physical locale. Each species evolves and learns within the context of the location-specific ecosystem in which it establishes itself, making its individual contributions to a cooperative community effort to capture, share, use, and store the available physical resources to optimize the potentials of the whole. The mutuality of learning and alliance building within any given ecosystem community is underscored by the devastation that sometimes results from the introduction of an alien species, a consequence much like introducing a cancer tumor into a healthy living body, or a Wal-Mart into a previously thriving local economy. 293

We humans have been relating to the ecosystem of planet Earth as if we were an alien species—the cancer tumor in the body of life—seeking our own unlimited expansion without regard to the consequences for the larger community of life on which our own existence ultimately depends. We must now learn what every successful species has learned before us: to live as members of cooperative living communities exquisitely adapted to the microenvironments of our particular place on Earth.

Principle of Permeable Boundaries

Life has learned that to maintain the coherence of its internal energy flows, it must bound itself at each level of organization with a permeable membrane by which it can manage the intake and dissipation of energy and matter from and into its environment, and exclude predators. For example, if the wall of the cell is breached, the cell’s matter and energy instantly mix with the matter and energy of the environment, and it dies. To maintain the coherence of their internal energy and information exchange, multicelled organisms require a skin or other permeable protective covering. Similarly, biological communities or ecosystems need the boundaries provided by oceans, mountains, and climatic zones to exclude invasive species not acculturated to the established community. The planetary biosphere depends on the atmosphere and ozone layer held in place by Earth’s gravitational field to control the exchange of radiation with the universe beyond.

Even as it needs boundaries to maintain its integrity, however, life’s processes of self-renewal depend on a managed exchange with its environment. Therefore, each organism’s boundary membrane must be permeable, and what flows through that membrane in both directions must be subject to management by the organism so that it can maintain itself in a balanced relationship with all around it. Successful living entities protect their borders not out of selfishness but out of a need to maintain their internal integrity and coherence and to assure that exchanges with their neighbors are balanced and mutually beneficial.

The trade agreements that have aroused a powerful global resistance movement seek rules that guarantee the right of corporations to place clear protective boundaries around their interests and to manage these boundaries for their exclusive benefit. These same agreements prohibit individuals, families, communities, and nations from establishing any form of protective boundaries that allow them to maintain the coherence 294of their internal life-energy flows from assault by predatory corporations intent on extracting the life energy of people and nature to advance the growth of their financial assets. They are akin to a medical practice devoted to protecting the cancer from the body’s immune system.

As for any living organism, the healthful function of human communities depends on permeable, managed boundaries. The family, locality, or nation that either leaves itself open to the unregulated intrusion of predatory alien corporations and financial speculators or conversely closes its borders to balanced and beneficial exchange will be quickly drained of its vitality.

Principle of Abundance

Life has learned that frugality and sharing are the keys to abundance for all. Biological communities exquisitely fine-tune the efficient capture and recycling of energy and useful matter. They are living exemplars of the motto “Waste not, want not.” The wastes of one become the resources of another through the continuous reuse and recycling of energy and materials within and between cells, organisms, and species cooperating to minimize the dissipation of energy and useful matter beyond their respective individual and collective boundaries.

The abundance of life depends on its ability to both share and conserve energy and matter, and to freely share information in order to grow the potential of the whole. Unrestrained growth based on competitive expropriation is the ideology of cancer cells and alien species. True abundance depends on frugality, mutuality, and sharing.

Principle of Diversity

Life has learned that diversity is an essential foundation of creative potential. Just as life never exists in isolation from other life, neither does it exist in monocultures. Life has learned that the greater the diversity of the bio-community, the greater its resilience in times of crisis and the greater its potential for creative innovation in the pursuit of new possibilities.

Likewise, a diversity of age, gender, culture, religion, and race provides an invaluable contribution to the resilience and creative potential of human communities. We humans have yet to learn to celebrate, cultivate, and harvest the benefits of diversity long denied by our many chauvinisms. 295

EARTH COMMUNITY

The turning from Empire to Earth Community has two primary elements. First is a turning from money to life as our defining value. Second is a turning from relations of domination to relations of partnership based on organizing principles discerned from the study of healthy living systems.

Partnership in a Contemporary Context

If we were to apply living-system principles to organizing the relations of daily life within our modern context, we would create locally rooted, self-organizing, compact communities that bring work, shopping, and recreation nearer to our residences—thus saving energy and commuting time, reducing CO₂ emissions and dependence on oil, and freeing time for family and community activities. Life would become less dependent on cars, and the needs of automobiles would no longer dominate the landscape. We would convert land now devoted to roads and parking to bike lanes, trails, and parks. Our governance processes would be radically democratic.

We would grow more of our food on local family farms without toxic chemicals, process it nearby, compost organic wastes, and recycle them back into the soil, thus better securing our food supply and improving human and environmental health. We would design environmentally efficient buildings for their specific microenvironments and construct them of local materials to reduce the energy costs of transport. We would produce much of our energy locally from wind and solar sources. Locally generated wastes would be recycled locally to provide materials and energy inputs for local use.

With family life, work life, and community life more geographically proximate and people in more regular and natural contact, our lives would be less fragmented and more coherent, the bonds of community denser, stronger, and more trusting. Children and youth would be naturally engaged in community life, thus acquiring the experience, mentors, and role models they need to prepare for the responsibilities of adulthood. We can provide our youth with courses in developmental psychology, responsible citizenship, and the skills of parenting as part of the school curriculum and encourage them to practice the application of these skills through community service and the care and mentoring of younger children. 296

With the restoration of community life, elders would become a resource as caretakers, educators, mentors, and wise advisers to those still negotiating the pathway to a mature consciousness, thus restoring respect and meaning to the elder years. The elder who remains engaged in the responsibilities of community life is unlikely to suffer from either a longing for or a fear of death. By their very presence in the fullness of their maturity, they keep alive the flame of the spirit of what can be and serve thereby, often in unassuming ways, as individual and collective guides to the future.

Psychologist Robert Kegan observes that “who comes into a person’s life may be the single greatest factor of influence to what that life becomes.”²⁰ It is particularly important that each child experience a deep and enduring relationship with at least one elder of a mature consciousness. I recall the significance of my relationship to my paternal grandmother, in whom the flame of the spirit of life burned bright and who communicated to me in so many ways her sense of life’s wondrous possibilities and the virtue of standing on examined moral principles. It took me many years to fully understand and appreciate the lessons she taught me, but her influence lives on in all that I do.

Empire is expensive. Eliminating wasteful uses of energy and other resources would mean less need to expropriate the resources of other countries through economic and military domination, thus greatly reducing the need to divert resources to maintaining a large military force. If foreign interests no longer control the labor and natural resources of the world’s poorest nations, those resources would be available to the people of those nations for use in improving their own lives. This would reduce the motivation for terrorism and further reduce the need to expend scarce resources on domestic security. Breaking up global corporations into human-scale, locally owned enterprises would free still more resources by eliminating the massive burden of inflated executive compensation packages and by removing bureaucratic barriers to innovation.

An economy that responds to the self-defined needs of adults of a mature consciousness would no longer allocate a major portion of its creative talent and communications resources to advertising to make people feel insecure and incomplete in order to create artificial demand. Less advertising would mean less visual pollution, a stronger sense of self-worth for individuals, and a reduction of wasteful consumerism 297that could be translated into a shorter workweek and more time for family and community.

The savings could finance first-rate education, health care, and community services for all and provide workers with a living family wage. The benefits would ripple out across the social landscape. With ample living wages, educational opportunities, and essential services, crime rates would drop, and prison and other criminal justice costs would fall.

We would be working less and living more. Our lives would be freer and richer. Our environment would be cleaner and healthier. A world no longer divided between the obscenely rich and the desperately poor would know more peace and less violence, more love and less hate, more hope and less fear. There would little need for dominator structures to impose order. Earth could heal itself and provide a home for our children for generations to come. These are all among the abundant joys of Earth Community and all are within our collective means.

Indicators of Success

We might ask by what indicators we will know the Earth Community we seek to create. We will know a society has succeeded when it matches the following description:

• Virtually every adult has achieved at least a Socialized Consciousness and most adults have achieved a Cultural Consciousness by early middle age and a Spiritual Consciousness by late middle age.
• There is a vibrant community life grounded in mutual trust, shared values, and a sense of connection. Risks of physical harm perpetrated by humans against humans through war, terrorism, crime, sexual abuse, and random violence are minimal. Civil liberties are secure even for the most vulnerable.
• All people have a meaningful and dignified vocation that contributes to the well-being of the larger community and fulfills their own basic needs for healthful food, clean water, clothing, shelter, transport, education, entertainment, and health care. Paid employment allows ample time for family, friends, participation in community and political life, healthful physical activity, learning, and spiritual growth.
• Intellectual life and scientific inquiry are vibrant, open, and 298 dedicated to the development and sharing of knowledge and life-serving technologies that address society’s priority needs.
• Families are strong and stable. Children are well nourished, receive a quality education, and live in secure and loving homes. Rates of suicide, divorce, abortion, and teenage pregnancy are low.
• Political participation and civic engagement are high, and people feel their political and civic participation makes a positive difference. Persons in formal leadership positions are respected for their wisdom, integrity, and commitment to the public good.
• Forests, fisheries, waterways, the land, and the air are clean, healthy, and vibrant with the diversity of life. Mother’s milk is wholesome and toxin free, and endangered species populations are in recovery.
• Physical infrastructure—including public transit, road, bridge, rail, water and sewerage systems, and electric power generation and transmission facilities —is well maintained, accessible to all, and adequate to demand.

The first time through, this list may read like a radical utopian fantasy, but only because it contrasts so starkly with our present experience. In fact, each of these conditions is achievable by all but a very few of the most physically and socially ravaged nations, and each condition aligns with core values shared by both conservatives and liberals. If any of them seem alien, it is only because they all depend absolutely on cooperation and sharing. They are forever beyond the reach of the lone individual and of societies that choose to live by the values and relationships of Empire. They are achievable only by societies that choose to live by the values and relationships of Earth Community.

HAPPINESS IS A CARING COMMUNITY

Becoming more frugal in our use of resources has become a condition of human survival. To the alienated Imperial Consciousness that finds meaning primarily in the addictions of Empire, this seems an almost unthinkable sacrifice. The more mature consciousness recognizes, however, that a turn to Earth Community is neither about self-sacrifice nor about renouncing technology or progress. It is about getting clear on our values, setting new priorities, redefining progress, and consuming 299less so that we may become more human and in the process experience the abundance of authentic relationships.

During the last half of the twentieth century, most nations came to embrace economic growth as a proxy measure for human progress and happiness. Comparative international studies, however, report that once a nation has achieved a moderate level of per capita income, further increases in wealth bring only slight increases in perceived well-being.²¹ This growing body of research on the “economics of happiness” affirms one of the oldest and most universal of spiritual insights. Beyond the minimum level of income essential to meeting basic needs, the authentic relationships of strong communities are a far better predictor of happiness and emotional health than the size of one’s paycheck or bank account.

The United States has been the world’s most aggressive national proponent of economic growth and consumerism as the tickets to happiness. Over the last half of the twentieth century, inflation-adjusted U.S. gross domestic product per capita tripled, yet surveys indicate that self-reports of satisfaction with life have remained virtually flat.²² What did clearly increase in the United States over this period were measures of depression, anxiety, distrust, and psychological dysfunction. The incidence of depression increased tenfold.²³

One of the more startling affirmations of the wisdom that relationships are more important to happiness than money and material possessions comes from a study that compared the life-satisfaction scores of groups of people of radically different financial means and physical circumstances. The results showed four groups clustered at the top of the life-satisfaction scale, with almost identical scores.

One group (with a score of 5.8 out of 7) comprised persons on the list of Forbes magazine’s “richest Americans,” the richest of whom own tens of billions of dollars in assets, and the “poorest” hundreds of millions. The other three groups were the Pennsylvania Amish (5.8), the Inuit people in northern Greenland (5.9), and the Maasai (5.7), a traditional herding people in East Africa who have no electricity or running water and who live in huts made of dung.²⁴ This suggests that in complex modern cultures, it takes a great deal of money, indeed, to equal the happiness that comes in simple societies from a sense of belonging to a place and a strong, caring community.

Perhaps the most revealing comparison was between Calcutta slum dwellers (4.6), whose life-satisfaction score was slightly above a neutral 300rating (4.0), and Calcutta pavement dwellers (2.9), who were the lowest-scoring of all the groups surveyed. Both the slum dwellers and the pavement dwellers live under appalling conditions of physical deprivation. The pavement dwellers, however, have no place or community, while the slum dwellers live in a place they identify as their own located within a bounded, if rudimentary and unstable, community.²⁵ Relationships of mutual caring and commitment are the variable that most consistently explains these results.

The greater the extent to which our relationships are reduced to impersonal financial exchanges, the greater the sacrifice in happiness, well-being, and emotional health. Money can help to compensate for the loss, but it takes a great deal of money to buy the happiness that companionship and community bring for free.²⁶ Relationships, not money, are the true measure of well-being. What matters most is our connection to and participation in the life of community. If we were to define human progress by the measure of human happiness, we would devote far less of our resources to making money and far more to building community.

My life journey has taken me to the lands of the Maasai in Kenya, and I have walked among the slum dwellers of Calcutta. While I cannot speak with confidence for those Maasai who have retained their traditional ways, I have no doubt that any Calcutta slum dweller would instantly choose to trade his life for mine. I am equally clear I would have no interest in such a trade and believe that no one in our modern time should be confined to lives so harsh and limiting. My contact with both groups gives me all the more reason, however, to be respectful of the profound implication of the finding that human happiness depends far more on the relationships of community than on money and material possessions.

Newtonian physics embodied the premise that only matter is real. The more contemporary science of quantum physics teaches the very different lesson that “solid” matter is mainly empty space given form and substance by a relational fabric of energy particles in constant motion. Relationships are real; matter is an illusion.

The old biology taught that each living being is engaged in an individualistic competition for survival against every other living being. 301The new biology teaches that life exists only in cooperative relation to other life and the species that survive are those that find their place of service. Life is community.

Psychologists are affirming the ancient wisdom that happiness depends not on the quantity of our possessions, but the quality of our relationships. As Empire is the path to sorrow, so Earth Community is the path to joy. Relationships are the foundation of everything.

We humans have a powerful drive to connect with one another and with nature. Perhaps more than any other species we are aware of the vulnerability inherent in the reality that we exist physically and psychologically only in relationship. The pain of separation is so great that we will do most anything to connect, even to the extent of destroying the objects of our love.

Earth Community offers an alternative to the alienation and the sorrows of Empire, a way of living that places life values ahead of financial values and organizes by the principles of partnership rather than the principles of domination. The deeper and more mutually affirming our relationships, the richer and more distinctively human we become. The yawning gap between the integral relationships for which we yearn and the fragmentation and alienation of modern life suggests the epic proportions of the challenge before us.

Yet the key to redirecting our human course is elegant in its simplicity. To change the human course, replace the stories of Empire that presently guide our collective path with stories of Earth Community grounded in the wisdom of the highest orders of human consciousness and informed by the whole of human knowledge and experience.