Change The Story – Change The Future

Last year, two very public leaders have given us challenging messages on how to change our future by changing our basic cultural and belief story.David Corten. Source: ips-dc.org

One is David Korten , a rebel economist who began his career as a professor at Harvard Business School. From his experience in Africa and Asia – where he went to help grow local economies intending to use the formulas of American corporate business success – Korten famously had a deep change of mind. In 1995, he published the results of his transformed view of the world in his classic study, When Corporations Rule the World.

The other author is Francis, our Jesuit Argentinean pope, with his recent acclaimed social encyclical, Laudato Si’: On Care for our Common Home.

Source: stjohnthebaptistcc.orgIn this brief reflection, I hope to outline Korten’s thinking, and then compare it briefly with the thinking of Pope Francis. This isn’t, of course, a complete analysis – but I hope it might move you to read both Laudato Si’ and Korten’s Change the Story – Change the Future: A Living Economy for A Living Earth (Berrett-Koehler Publishers Inc., Oakland, CA.); as well the fuller version of this present text in the latest edition of the Jesuit Forum’s Open Space Our cultural stories are lenses through which we view reality. We shape our lives, our society, its institutions and power structures by the way we sum up our history and our science in a powerful, often-repeated public narrative. Korten says we humans live by stories. If we get the story wrong, we will get the future wrong. Hence: change the story and change the future.

Korten believes that “the defining struggle of our time is a contest between global corporate power and people power. It is a struggle between money and life as our defining value and between plutocracy and democracy as our system of governance.” (p. 13)

Corporate power mobilizes around what Korten labels the Sacred Money and Markets story. Here money is treated as humanity’s defining value. An unregulated global market serves as money’s moral compass. Life – including biodiversity and the life of the earth – is not the controlling value. In fact, destroying life to make money can be counted as “wealth creation.” Corporate capitalism is embedded within the Sacred Money and Markets story.Source: sgbooks.com

Korten contrasts this system with the counter-weight which he calls the global people power movement. He writes, “The people power movement mobilizes around a wide variety of peace, justice, and sustainability initiatives. It yet lacks a recognizable unifying story of sufficient power, clarity and visibility to successfully challenge the story that legitimizes corporate rule. To prevail, people power needs its own story.” (p. 14)

The corporate story, since early on in the Industrial Age, has inspired some massive, even dazzling, human achievements. But that is not the whole story. Money can prosper while life withers. We need to look at the world through the lens of life instead of money.

Korten makes the case for a Sacred Life and Living Earth story grounded in a Living Universe cosmology in which each human being is an intelligent and self-directing participant in a conscious, interconnected self-organizing cosmos. The cosmos as a whole is on a journey towards greater complexity, beauty, awareness and possibility. He writes of “a mystical unity” in which we are one with “the timeless eternal One.”  

We are not meant to be “money-seeking robots inhabiting a lifeless Earth in a mechanical universe.” There is a dream in our hearts which is older and more powerful than the incantations of money, markets and profits. The dream of a world beyond individualism, greed and violence runs deep, from the beginning.

Source: youtube..comFor Korten, “the Spirit is in the world, and the world is in the Spirit.” It is the inexhaustible energy of the Spirit that drives the evolution of the universe, and human creativity within it.  “The image of a universal spirit manifesting in what we experience as material reality points to the interconnection of all beings and to the possibility of deeply democratic societies,” Korten writes [p.15]. This is the foundation of his Living Universe Cosmology and the Sacred and Living Earth story. Where this message is concerned, Korten is an evangelist; he would like the recurring theme of our daily six o’clock news not to be money, money, money, but rather life, life, life. He wants life to be the lens through which our society views the world.

I can easily imagine David Korten and Pope Francis having a lively conversation. Both promote dialogue rather than confrontation as the most effective instrument to bring about basic change. Korten’s insistence that we must “change the story” matches the conviction of Pope Francis that without deep cultural change – without human renewal and the renewal of relationships – we will not be able to bring about ecological healing. Both understand that changing the world has everything to do with making urgently present a compelling story.

There are, of course, differences in approach – for example, on the role of religion and spirituality. Both understand that the Spirit is in the world, and the world is in the Spirit, and so both give a major role to spirituality. But Korten, though raised a Christian, finds institutional religion divisive and so speaks only of Spirit, even though he draws often on the witness of world religions. For him, it is the insatiable energy of the Spirit that drives the creative evolution of the universe, and human creativity in it.Source: ignatius.com

Pope Francis, on the other hand, although well grounded in modern science and interfaith dialogue, is a herald of the Christian faith tradition. He delights in proclaiming how we are with Jesus in His incarnation and with all of created nature, God’s family. Not surprisingly, Pope Francis’ vision of the end-game – the fulfillment towards which all this interconnected, interactive evolution is heading – is drawn from the Christian understanding of salvation and resurrection. Korten, on the other hand, settles for the belief that we cannot be saved unless we save nature.

On ecology – pollution, climate change, loss of biodiversity – the proposals of David Korten and of Pope Francis are remarkably similar. However, since Laudato Si is primarily concerned with establishing ecology as an integral dimension of Catholic social teaching, the pope’s position is not only morally urgent (as is Korten’s) but also integrated with our call to holiness. He wants us to hear the cry of the poor and the cry of the earth as one.

Pope Francis presents the scientific record alongside the urgent facts about the suffering of the poor, so that we may, “become more fully aware, to dare to take what is happening to the world into our own personal suffering and discover what each of us can do about it.”

Both authors are very concerned about massive unaccountable power in today’s globalized world. What both of them are getting at is that privileged large corporations, because they have the technological knowledge and the resources to wield power through massive advertising and control of financial institutions, markets, property and especially money, are able to reshape our laws, our education system, our present culture in their own interests and way of thinking. The repeated message of our authors is that neither technological progress nor the market, nor maximizing profits, nor even economic growth alone can guarantee human development and social inclusion. In fact, these same forces, treated as absolutes, have been enslaving us to money and destroying the earth.

Source: tes.comBoth see the need not only of radical changes in economic and government institutions but, most crucially, in individual and societal consciousness: mindsets, culture and lifestyles. They both value what civil society and NGOs are already doing worldwide to move us forward. They recognise dialogue as more effective than confrontation in bringing about change. And Laudato Si, without ignoring the intellectual themes emerging in our time, goes on to proclaim a Creator and Redeemer whose Spirit, given and received generously, can free, reshape and transform anyone’s habit-encrusted will and imagination.

In brief, both David Korten and Pope Francis have integrated science and faith to proclaim a story in which we, together with all our communities, organizations and institutions, can be joyful actors able to change the future of our civilization.

William Ryan, SJ, is a special advisor to the Jesuit Forum for Social Faith and Justice, Toronto.

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