The How to Save the World 'What You Can Do' list
David
Korten's book When
Corporations Rule the World is on my How
to Save the World reading list. I summarized it this way:
The need to get
corporations out of politics and create localized
economies that
empower communities within a system of global cooperation, overcoming
the
myths about economic growth and the sanctification of greed, and
focusing
instead on overconsumption, poverty, overpopulation, and reining in
untrammeled
corporate power.
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:
We stand at a
critical moment in Earth's history,
a time when humanity must choose its future. As the world becomes
increasingly interdependent and fragile, the future at once holds great
peril and great promise. To move forward we must recognize that in the
midst of a magnificent diversity of cultures and life forms we are one
human family and one Earth community with a common destiny. We must
join together to bring forth a sustainable global society founded on
respect for nature, universal human rights, economic justice, and a
culture of peace. Towards this end, it is imperative that we, the
peoples of Earth, declare our responsibility to one another, to the
greater community of life, and to future generations.
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:
The imperial
prosperity story says that an eternally growing economy benefits
everyone. To grow the economy, we need wealthy people who can invest in
enterprises that create jobs. Thus, we must support the wealthy by
cutting their taxes and eliminating regulations that create barriers to
accumulating wealth. We must also eliminate welfare programs in order
to teach the poor the value of working hard at whatever wages the
market offers.
The imperial security story tells of a dangerous world,
filled with criminals, terrorists, and enemies. The only way to insure
our safety is through major expenditures on military and police to
maintain order by physical force.
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.
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MADE IN CANADA
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