The Great Turning

David Korten’s book When Corporations Rule the World is on my How to Save the World reading list. I summarized it this way:

So when his new book The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community was announced to considerable fanfare, I rushed to grab a copy. For those early in the journey to realization that civilization has entered its final century, this book could be illuminating — it contains useful histories of civilization’s early and more recent failings, their causes, and the resulting crises threatening it today. But for those well along in that journey, alas — for those who are Too Far Ahead — this book really has nothing new to say.

Most of the books on my aforementioned reading list talk about our civilization, singular, global, brilliantly successful and fatally flawed, and the need to prepare for life after what global warming scientists and End of Oil strategists are now calling an apocalypse. That terrible-sounding word means nothing more than Great Discovery, and is surely accurate, if not an understatement. But in order not to sound too negative and turn readers off, Korten describes two forms of civilization:

• Empire, the destructive, hierarchical, unsustainable and inherently brutal form of civilization that, as Ronald Wright and Jared Diamond have explained, defines every civilization in human history, and
• Earth Community, its antithesis, a collaborative, sustainable, caring, egalitarian form of civilization that, Korten argues, is possible.

Earth Community would be a response to and implementation of the Earth Charter, which Korten had a hand in drafting, and the Charter is certainly inspiring:

What is precipitating the apocalypse, he says, is a ‘perfect economic storm’ with four components:

• The End of Oil
• Global Warming
• Imminent US Dollar Collapse
• New, Asymmetric Warfare

And the Internet provides us with a unique and urgent opportunity to respond to this storm by creating Earth Community through a “global awakening”.

Parts 2 & 3 of the book provide an extensive history, first, of ancient and modern civilization (“Empire”) and its “sorrows” and the difficulty of breaking free from them, and then of the rise and pending fall of US Empire. The highlight of this is an interesting (if somewhat self-serving) “story” of Imperial Prosperity and Imperial Security. In this excerpt of The Great Turning in Yes!, Korten summarizes these as follows:

Korten uses the familiar Thomas Berry quote to incite us to create a new story: “The deepest crises experienced by any society are those moments of change when the story becomes inadequate for meeting the survival demands of a present situation”. He could have added this additional Berry quote that I have used: “We are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story. We are in between stories. The old story, the account of how we fit into it, is no longer effective. Yet we have not learned the new story.”

So I was pumped for Parts 4 & 5, where I expected Korten to expand beyond the wise advice to dismantle the excessive power and privilege of corporations he proffered in When Corporations Rule the World, and tell us precisely how to go about achieving this “global awakening” and creating Earth Community. He recognizes that this must be done “from below” (with encouragement or at least non-interference from a political and economic system with post-Empire sensibilities). But I looked in vain for a practical discussion of how to create models, intentional communities, sustainable natural enterprises, peer-to-peer sustainability information exchanges and personal sustainable living programs. You know, community-building stuff. Real what you can do stuff. I guess I’m just too far ahead, and this will appear in Korten’s next book.

This book does contain a set of principles for Living Economies and Living Politics, and these are intriguing and useful. The principles (detailed in the book) are:

Economic Principles:

• Economic democracy (economic egalitarianism and local ownership)
• Local preference (buy local) 
• Human scale (corporate size limits)
• Living indicators (driven to optimize well-being not wealth)
• Fair-share taxation
• Responsive markets (driven by need, not advertising)
• Responsibility for harms caused (including externalities)
• Patient capital (no more absurd ROI expectations)
• Generational jubilee (full redistribution of accumulated estates on death)
• Information & technology sharing (open source, peer production etc.)
• Economic self-determination (end of foreign control of resources and trade)
• Fair and balanced trade 

Political Principles:

• Right to vote
• Public financing of elections
• Voting integrity (no Diebold)
• Nonpartisan election administration (duh)
• Direct election
• Equal media access
• Open debates
• Equal representation (proportional representation, instant runoff voting)
• Political rights for people (i.e. not for corporations)

I can picture John Gray groaning as he reads this book, however. Where John Gray’s Straw Dogs deconstructed the naivety and magical thinking of humanism, Korten attempts to put it back together again, and make it do the heavy lifting in creating Earth Community. While Korten talks about a humanist liberal-conservative “inclusive” coalition, his principles and approaches are definitive progressive-humanist philosophy. Conservatives will be unimpressed at the re-framing, a thinly-disguised attempt to win them over to progressive, even liberal, principles.

You know what I think about new enlightenments, “second superpowers”, collective human consciousness and spontaneous collaboration, humanism’s self-fulfilling wishfulness. Self-help writ large. It’s a great idea, and I’d really like to believe. We do what we must, then we do what’s easy, then we do what’s fun. There is no time or energy left for what’s needed to save the world, even if we can agree on what that is.

I like Korten’s roadmap. Unfortunately, you can’t get there from here.

Postscript: Korten’s book does talk about the work of BALLE, and this is an organization I can get into — real grassroots enterprise and community-building. Coincidentally, Chris Corrigan and I were just Skyping about BALLE (Chris is an adviser to the Vancouver chapter). More on this later.