Michael Kahn reminded us recently of Arnold Toynbee’s conception of a “creative minority” culture, a cocoon that is woven beside and beyond a dominant and dying culture, nourishing the seeds of succession, life that accompanies and follows the dominant culture's failing and demise.
To speak or write of two contrasting cultures is caricature, as are the two images I sketch below. They may nonetheless be useful if they serve fairly to describe a challenge and an opportunity, as I hope they do.
Our still prevailing culture (or what I’m calling a culture) has been named the “industrial growth society” by Joanna Macy, “the military industrial complex” by Dwight Eisenhower, and just “the empire” by David Korten. Whatever its humane accomplishments, for 200 years it’s been relentlessly shutting down the essential life systems of the earth. One of those life systems is human development—the integrated growth of our bodies, hearts, minds and souls, our gifts of companionship and imagination.
Today’s dominant culture of industrial empire is pathologically adolescent rather than truly adult or mature, as if the developmental path was lost in the pre-transformative, pre-right of passage stage of adolescence. So the culture is largely egocentric, anthropocentric, hierarchical, materialistic, competitive, violent, conflict-driven, racist, sexist and ageist, riven by economic and social inequity, unsustainable and fundamentally unnatural because its relationship to the earth is instrumental or alienated, neither organic nor intimate. (I am particularly grateful here to the work of Bill Plotkin.)
The successor or alternative culture I have in mind—the cocoon or embodiment of Toynbee’s creative minority—is life-sustaining and life-nourishing. It is eco-centric (nature or earth centered) and soul-centric (let’s say imaginative, holistic, integrative, spiritual, conscious of the whole web of life). It is egalitarian and democratic, cooperative, community-based, just, compassionate and sustainable. We could call the movement, as David Korten has, a transition “from empire to earth community.”
The scope and vitality of that movement is the subject of Paul Hawken’s recent book, Blessed Unrest (2008). “Life is the most fundamental human right, and all of the movements within the movement are dedicated to creating the conditions for life, conditions that include livelihood, food, security, peace, a stable environment, and freedom from external tyranny. Whenever and wherever that right is violated, human beings rise up. Today they are rising up in record numbers, and in a collective body that is often as not more sophisticated than the corporate and governmental bodies they address" (p 67-68).
When I see compassion as describing and driving our mission and our practice, I am imagining our service to that alternative culture and that transition, and our membership in that community and movement.
