Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history

A cultural cocoon

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.

A note on compassion

As many readers of Reckonings know, for many years - over 30 now - I have worked for The Christopher Reynolds Foundation. The focus of our attention has evolved during that time, but I think a spirit has remained constant. On the one hand, we of the Reynolds board have never sought to capture that spirit in words; and on the other, our conversations with each other and our dialogues with grantees during all that time are always trying to describe it in words.

During the past year, as our work on Cuba and Cuban-American relations has continued, we have begun anew to discuss our core values and our mission. This spring, as part of that ongoing dialogue, I began to take note of my own thoughts. The recent postings on Reckonings - ideas of Joanna Macy and Bill McKibben, and my responses to Paul Hawken's book Blessed Unrest - are part of that musing. So too are the following two postings, the first a suggestion that compassion is at the heart of our intention, the core substance of our gift and our practice; the second, indebted particularly to Paul Hawken and to Bill Plotkin's recent book, Nature and the Human Soul, is an effort briefly to describe the larger movement of which we experience ourselves as members.

I thought it might be useful to post abbreviated versions of these two reflections here on Reckonings, in the hope that they might provoke a discussion or elicit suggestions of additional resources we should explore. Thoughts can be added as comments here or addressed to john@reckonings.net.
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I have in mind a holistic conception of compassionate attention to healing suffering and nourishing the quality of lives, human and otherwise. At Spikenard Farm, for example, it’s a conception whose interactive components include education, the arts, farming and community building, with farm and apiary as organizational core. I can imagine other kinds of programs pursuing essentially the same conception of holistic growth and healing that aren’t on farms – they could be anywhere - schools, hospitals, libraries, churches, animal shelters and wildlife sanctuaries, penal colonies come to mind.

Could we describe a mission as informed and inspired most deeply by a spirit of compassion, expressive of the Buddhist commitment to metta or loving-kindness , or the Judeo-Christian tradition’s grounding in love of God and neighbor? The Christian contemplative Thomas Merton wrote, beautifully I think, “Compassion is the keen awareness of the interdependence of all things." The word’s origin, I learn, is Middle English : via Old French from ecclesiastical Latin compassio(n-), from compati ‘suffer with.’ We could as well use the word love, or mercy, working to diminish the suffering of all sentient beings.

Nourishing compassion for self and for others is the core of mindfulness and the Buddhist practice of meditation. Compassion is essentially relational, synergistic, holistic. Empathy for others and for oneself are naturally and necessarily integrated, extensions of one another.   And in turn, psychologist Christopher Germer writes, “… as mindfulness begins to dissolve the artificial boundaries that define our separateness, we begin to experience our innate affinity with all beings.” (Germer, et al, Mindfulness and Psychotherapy, Guilford, 2005) 

Compassion can describe and comprise a mission and a practice: what we seek to embody and to nourish with our grant-making and what we might call our field work, our ongoing learning and companionship with grantees and their other companions and beneficiaries, who become then our fellows in compassionate practice.

We ourselves and our grantee-fellows-in-compassionate-practice may not use that language, but if it is our mission and our practice, and we take the time to learn about and truly know our grantee companions’ world and their practice, we can choose essentially to be in the business of nourishing the compassionate practice – and diminishing the suffering - of others.