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The Hunger for Meaning

Alan Fricker
Sustainable Futures Trust
30 Akatea Rd, Petone, New Zealand
tel: 04 589 1575 email: frickera@actrix.gen.nz

Abstract

The global crisis is a crisis of meaning - a search for story as to how we now understand the world. The search for new meaning is explored through the congruence and convergence in the insights of several authors from the secular world, four in particular two of whom are from the business world. Technology and materialism have made us mercenaries with no commitment and responsibility to the collective future, to morality, and to society. They reflect the false life energies we pursue in our search for meaning. Our innate desire to seek meaningful connection with the living world and a transcendent purpose in the universe is compromised. Yet this purpose is essential for evolutionary survival where we engage with the interior, subjective dimensions of reality, not just in our personal but also in our collective lives. The modern concepts of stewardship and partnership help in that transformation, of ourselves and in our systems of governance, from command and control structures to interdependent structures.

Introduction

We are in crisis - ecological, social, economic crisis - because we do not have a good story. We are between stories. The old story of how we understand the world, both mythic and religious, and how we fit into it is no longer effective. We have yet to learn the new story [1].

Africans speak of two hungers - the lesser hunger for things that sustain life, and the greater hunger for ‘Why?’. Both the global crisis and the new millennium have heightened our hunger for meaning. The how and the why we have this greater hunger, and how we might satisfy it, are explored from a secular perspective through the insights of several authors, four in particular two of whom come from the business world.

These insights have a congruence and a convergence, towards our essential humanity as reflected by Gordon Sherman [2] .. There is a teasing irony: we spend our lives evading our own redemption. And this is naturally so because something in us knows that to be fully human we must experience pain and loss. Therefore we are at ceaseless effort to elude this high cost, whatever the price, until at last it overtakes us. And then in spite of ourselves we do realise our humanity. We are put in worthier possession of our souls. Then we look back and know that even our grief contained our blessing.

In the secular world of today, we are being directed into finding meaning in and through money. Initially money was a medium for the exchange of our surplus goods. Ironically in the developed world of super-abundance, money is now essential to obtain not just our wants but even our basic needs - love, support, food, clothing, shelter. Money has become the thing of value itself [3].

Money should have value, real value not just material value, and it should have function. It has become de-coupled from useful material value but is unsure of its function. Marjorie Deane and Robert Pringle [4] - economist and banker respectively - in their book on central banking endorse a purpose for money as being: an instrument of policy to achieve social ends, that goes beyond price stability, to employment, public services and social cohesion. Money should also be part of nature, above monarchs, central banks and parliaments, to achieve ecological sustainability. Putting these together money should be seen as the property of the community, to be passed on to future generations in as good a shape as we found it, a part of the environment to be protected from corruption. In short, it should become a language. Language is our ultimate means of communication. Effective communication, according to the neurobiologist Humberto Maturana [5], is not just a transmission of information, but rather a coordination of behaviour between living organisms through mutual structural coupling. This is evident for instance in the ritualised mating behaviour of many species. However we shall begin with the market and come back to coordinated behaviour.

The Market

Charles Handy has been business executive, professor of management, and now author. His book The Hungry Spirit: Beyond Capitalism, a Quest for Purpose in the Modern World [6] begins with the market. The market is the engine of capitalism, a philosophy to deliver the means but not the point of life. It is a liberating, not a defining, creed, where money is a means, not an end. Capitalist societies, he says, assume they can satisfy the greater hunger by satisfying the lesser.

The market is essential for the efficient means of production and distribution of goods but is effective only where there is real competition and equal access. There are however three kinds of efficiencies:

· allocative efficiency - that works only within prescribed boundaries,

· potential efficiency - that includes excluded resources, such as the unemployed, and

· adaptive efficiency - that takes a long time horizon and needs investment.

Allocative efficiency alone leads to low profits, low growth, high unemployment, and collapse. Stimulating potential, and particularly adaptive efficiency, requires market intervention. Getting the balance is the key task, but adaptive efficiency is best in the long run.

Efficiency however generates energy and growth, but for whom, and for what, and for why? There are all sorts of goods and services which are just “stuff” - chindogu in Japanese. Is this all we are working hard for?

Furthermore competition in itself is not strictly necessary to achieve efficiency. All competition does is set standards, generates energy, rewards winners, and punishes losers. Competition does indeed create jobs, but it also loses them. The fruits of competition do not necessarily bring contentment, and unfortunately the pursuit of efficiency tilts society towards the few and away from the many. Competition does not even have to be on price. It can be on service, as it is in the highly regulated domestic economy of Japan.

Higher prices but more jobs is a reasonable trade-off for a fair society.

Technological development, over the last 50 years in particular, has created an age of extraordinary freedom and choice, provided we have equipped ourselves with marketable skills. We, particularly the young, have to be infinitely flexible and mobile, and ideally multi-skilled. Societal change is moving us, perhaps forcing us, into finding our own individual sufficiency. We are, in effect, all mercenaries now. In such a world, writes Zygmunt Bauman [7], it is wise and prudent not to make long-term plans and invest in the distant future; .. it is prudent to be guided in today’s choices not by the wish to control the future, but by a reluctance to mortgage it. In other words, ‘to be provident’ means now, more often than not, to avoid commitment. To be free to move when opportunity knocks. To be free to leave when it stops knocking.

Without commitment to the future, there is no sense of collective responsibility, and therefore no morality. Taxes are now seen as the only way we discharge our responsibilities. These may be rational responses to a chaotic world where the future is there to be invented, but it makes for a lonely world. Max Frisch [8] suggests .. We can now do what we want, and the only question is what do we want? At the end of our progress we stand where Adam and Eve once stood; and all we are faced with now is the moral question.

Carving out one’s own future is meaningless and dangerous until we work out what we do want. You can’t in all equity, propose one set of rules for yourself, and something different for everyone else. Without some commonly accepted agreement on the purpose of life, and a proper balance between what we can expect and what is expected from us, society becomes a battleground, where the devil takes the hindmost. It is a moral question, and our most urgent priority in the new century.

As things stand we seem to be saying that life is essentially about economics, that money is the measure of most things, and that the market is the sorting mechanism. We are trapped by our own rhetoric, but have nothing else to offer.

The same applies to corporations. A company, in law, is a person, but the concept of company ownership is deeply flawed. The company’s value lies in the accumulated skills and experience of its people who are free to walk away at any time. Shareholders are notional owners, effectively investors with interests and responsibilities different from true owners. Some organisations are buying back their shares. A corporation that owns all its stock is then legally responsible only to itself. In effect that is already the situation. Keeping all the various stakeholders happy does not mean it is accountable to them. What then is the net profit for?

We are increasingly at the mercy of a few professional managers, who are not the owners but use their company profits for whatever they see fit. Those few in supranationals float across nation states, bigger than many of them, and owe allegiance to no one. They, and many large companies, are in effect centrally planned economies, with no serious hint of democracy. They are the very anathema of capitalism. They have enormous power, for good or ill. Corporations too cannot evade the existential questions of “What do we want?”, “What is our purpose?”, and in particular “Why are we here?”

Misrecognition

We ask these questions because, according to Michael Lerner, we are misrecognised. Lerner picks up the story from the personal perspective in The Politics of Meaning: Restoring Hope and Possibility in an Age of Cynicism [9]. He is a psychotherapist and editor of the Jewish magazine Tikkun.

Lerner says that the self is in need of meaning which it cannot furnish by itself, which is a paraphrase of Martin Buber’s ‘I needs We to be I’. Being human is a desire for meaningful connection - to each other, other species, the world and to a transcendent purpose in the universe.

We are born in physical connection to our mothers. We survive because of a loving, caring and supporting connection. We have an intrinsic need for recognition from others to become ourselves, not just through childhood but throughout life. The people who surround us however are often so emotionally buried within their own painful lives it is hard for them to see us clearly. All too often the recognition we are given depends on our willingness and ability to perform within their predetermined categories, responding to their needs for us to fit their already existing picture of the world.

We are systematically misrecognised, first by our parents, then teachers, then employers. We are surrounded by a world filled with people who are desperate to be recognised, and yet adopt a depressive stance in which they imagine no one will see them for who they really are. They have come to believe that their own isolation or loneliness is the ‘reality’ to which they must adjust. It is this psychological dynamic that underlies our willingness to deaden ourselves to the world. We reflect our experience of the world and thus, in turn, misrecognise even our own progeny. Thus we are unable to transcend and to experience the true life energy, and to reciprocate love, care and support. We become alienated from our innermost selves but are unable to fully repress the hunger for meaning.

Our spiritual pain is interpreted as a personal problem which in reality is a collective yearning. The internal pain acts out in many and diverse ways but the crisis of meaning is ruled out of public discussion. The problems are analysed and dealt with in isolation from each other in a typically reductionist manner, eg. searching for genes that predispose an unsocial behaviour, or building more jails.

That we are unable to transcend our dilemma is in large part due to our political structures. The Conservative Right positions itself as the defender of spirituality whilst championing the ethos of materialism and self-interest and simultaneously blaming its negative effects on the Other. The Right enables people to feel better about themselves even if they do nothing about it. The Socialist/Liberal Left recognises liberty and rights, and will tolerate a spiritual dimension provided it is ‘left outside’. Most human rights advances come from the Left even though continually losing ground to the Right. The Right will continue to get away with this for as long as the Left continues to fail to accommodate this hunger. The fight against oppression however is not a preserve only of the Left. Both the Right and the Left fail us. We act out our search for meaning in the false life energies of wealth creation, as spectators rather than as participants, through sex, identifying ourselves with celebrities, adrenalin-rush experiences, and so on. Meanwhile we consume the very thing that sustains us - the Earth. In transcending our spiritual hunger for meaning we will be able to respond to the ecological crisis.

There is further misrecognition - that of the significance of society and of our role within it. Modernity has brought much dignity, but in its wake has come the disorder and fragmentation of the new society which places emphasis on the individual. The new society is a much more open society than the former closed society. The society though pre-dates the individual. It is only because of society that there is the individual [10]. Self-serving interests can only bring about the destruction of society. Much more responsibility is thrust upon the individual in an open society than in a closed society.

Yet we have the tension, indeed a paradox, between the personal need for the modern individual to be infinitely flexible and mobile that Bauman speaks of and the collective needs of society to be paramount.

Modernity has freed us from coercive community (feudal systems) and oppressive religious community. Many hungry for human connection have sought meaning in a variety of modern communities but have been disillusioned with the patriarchy and privilege often therein and turn back to the market again. At least in the market there is no hypocrisy - everybody tries to maximise their own self-interest. The challenge however is to transform into new societies which retain the ‘good’ of the old and allow the ‘freedom’ of the new, yet which are sustaining, socially and ecologically.

Recognition

Ken Wilber [11], scientist, philosopher and Buddhist, offers some insights on this transformation in his A Brief History of Everything. Wilber sees the whole of history, and therefore the future, as a process of evolution or transcendence. That evolution must now be cultural rather than biological in the Darwinian sense - evolution through the development of human consciousness, not only on the personal plane but on the social and cultural planes too. But we need to do so collectively. The process of transcendence is an inclusive process - we transcend and include. There are no dualities. There is no black and white, right or wrong, right or left - only a continuum of reality that transcends towards spirit.

Wilber positions himself outside of humanity observing reality from somewhere in space. He draws from the great philosophers, theologians and mystics of history and presents a framework and model of reality to help us understand our dilemma. He uses Arthur Koestler’s concept of a holarchy, a natural hierarchy where the levels are interdependent, unlike the more conventional hierarchy of dominance, and not dissimilar to Peter Block’s concept of stewardship that follows. He also presents a model of reality based on four quadrants (Figure 1). There are two material, exterior, objective dimensions of reality, one for the individual and one for the collective. Similarly there are two for the immaterial, interior, subjective dimensions of reality without location.

We are most familiar with transcendence of the subjective, interior, personal dimension through the work of psychologists like Abraham Maslow. Holarchies and transcendence pertain to the other quadrants too. Our systems of social, technological, and economic organisation must transcend too. We must transcend in all of them more or less together if we are attain unity. If we get stuck in any one quadrant pathologies may emerge, eg. the highly intelligent, rational, accomplished Nazi.

According to Wilber we are stuck in flatland, the two exterior quadrants of the physical world of location, the world of objective nature. Within this world the ego-camp (those who see humans as apart from and above nature because of our moral capacity) do battle with the eco-camp (those who see humans as a part of nature). Wilber believes the ego-camp and the eco-camp only have part of the picture. They overlook the interior subjective world without location - the world of subjective mind. Our future, and that of the planet since we have great influence if not control over all other species and itself, depends on if, how and when we are able to transcend and include objective nature and subjective mind to find spirit. (The conventional model of sustainability that has three overlapping circles of economy, society, economics where the common intersect is sustainability is, in the author’s opinion, stuck in the objective exterior world, the world of flatland, of objective nature.)

Governance

There are many ways whereby we might seek to transcend and transform our world view. Whereas formerly we sought to do this individually, as religious mystics for instance, we now need to do so collectively within our systems of organisation, social, technological and economic. Our system of governance as described by Peter Block is an appropriate place to start. Block comes from the corporate world, as a trainer in organisational transformation and author. His book Stewardship: Choosing Service over Self-interest [12] picks up the story.

Our governance structures derive from the military model of command and control. The model has been very successful for the dominant West not only in terms of wars, but also colonisation and trade, both overt and covert. Rather than still being autocratic our structures are now patriarchal, the softest being parental. The structures are founded on achieving predictability through control and compliance. They are effective when we know what we want. When we are divided, or uncertain, on what we want they are inappropriate. Patriarchy and technological development has served Western nations well in delivering a high standard of living and a high quality of life. The model is no longer delivering, and cannot be expected to in a finite world. Indeed it would seem the overall quality of life is deteriorating, even though individuals may still gain enormously. Quality of life now has more to do with the interior subjective dimensions of reality. Developed nations are increasingly finding that we do not know what we want from our governance structures.

Many enlightened companies encourage enterprise and empowerment but the patriarchal structure either remains or reinvents itself. We ourselves do not help these innovations. Our complaint is generally not about the weaknesses of patriarchy as a system of governance, it is that we believe we need a better patriarch - or matriarch.

The concept and practice of stewardship that Block advocates has been around from biblical times. It was to hold something in trust for another, usually an underage king. In the modern context it is now the earth for the next generation. Today, we chose service over self-interest most powerfully when we build the capacity of the next generation to govern themselves.

The desire to serve arises through a longing in each of us to invest in things that matter, and to have the community in which we live and the organisation in which we work be successful. We wish to live our democratic values through our workplaces, so that our spirit is answered in service. We are willing to be accountable for the well-being of the larger organisation by operating in service, rather than in control, of those around us. It is accountability without control or compliance. Despite this willingness however we are reluctant to act out this desire as our experience is often that of self-interest in others and thus we conform to our experience - the misrecognition that Lerner speaks of.

Block outlines a governance system based on stewardship through partnership. Partnership acknowledges our interdependence and is willing to give choice to the people we choose to serve. It is not the relinquishing of control but the sharing of control. Stewardship focuses our attention on aspects of our workplaces that have been most difficult to change, namely the distribution of power, purpose and rewards. Stewardship means giving control to customers whilst being accountable for them. Customers, in this context, are not just external customers but internal customers too, our ‘subordinates’. Ultimately it is our customers, that is those with whom we are in non-controlling relationships, who determine our own future. Stewardship turns our system of governance upside down, but through partnership it becomes practical and viable.

The practice of stewardship requires putting information, resources, and power in the hands of those people closest to doing the work. It brings us face-to-face with the issues of empowerment and dependency. Most of us choose safety when we take a job. When the open hand of partnership is offered we know there is a price to pay - that of uncertainty and anxiety. But we are reluctant to close the chapter on safety and begin the one on adventure. We choose dependency when we avoid ownership and responsibility - we give in to our own self-interest. We cannot be stewards of an institution and expect someone else to take care of us. Intuitively stewardship makes sense but rationally it is difficult to accept, for we are reluctant to let go of the belief that if I am to care for something I must control it.

The process of replacing leadership with stewardship however cannot be initiated from the top. It must emanate from within the individual or the work group. Senior management can encourage and facilitate, but cannot initiate. Our desire to serve is also our desire for freedom, to express ourselves as we really are through our work. Otherwise we are created by circumstance and become an object without dignity. The choice of service therefore begins as an act of faith.

Other Ways of Learning

The discourse so far has been very cerebral - analytical, rational, and structured - in a language appropriate for the dominant world view. It draws from the writings of rational, Western males. But they are drawing on more than their knowledge and rationality, they draw on their experience, their intuitions, their feelings, and their spirituality. Biography is replete with stories of people who have found meaning where no meaning existed - stories that rise from poverty, discrimination, deprivation, and abuse, and shine like golden beacons. The subjects, and their authors, invariably are women -people like Christina Noble, who endured an awful childhood and marriage, and yet had the vision and found the strength to work with and for the abandoned children of Vietnam and those that live in winter in the sewers of Mongolia. How do you express that kind of meaning in a rational, cerebral, intellectual manner? You can’t - you can only do it through living it and through story.

Story is an essential part of learning, of finding meaning. There are many ways of learning [13]. The present paradigm is largely through knowing (instruction). But we also learn through doing (riding a bike), through being (our experiences), and through insight (revelation). We learn from all of these ways, but the dominant way is knowing. Yet most new scientific discoveries happen in insight - of the prepared mind, serendipity. Initially they are considered heretical, until proven by the scientific method. Our mode of teaching in insight is through story - stories of our experiences, our inspirations, our visions. Not just word stories of course, but in our art, music, and theatre.

Here is a story of an organisation, an institution - but it may not be immediately recognisable as such. It is a story about stewardship, partnership, and empowerment. It is a story about effective communication that leads to coordinated behaviour. It is a story about other ways of learning.

Just Listen, Listen, Listen

Until the late 1950s there were still elders among the Indian tribes in the north east of British Colombia who remembered the traditional method of hunting. The male heads of families were assigned trap lines by the tribal elders. These trap lines criss-crossed the reservation and lay like a huge cobweb on the landscape. The men sustained their families from their trap lines during the summer. They trapped or shot small animals and game birds, caught fish, and gathered berries and plants. They were familiar with each other’s trap lines but only hunted and gathered from their own for that was the custom.

Just before winter arrived they needed to put aside a store of food. They needed some of the large animals, such as caribou, deer, moose and bear. They gathered in the meeting house to tell their stories. Each male family head in turn told the story of his trap line. They told their story of the last few weeks, not just of the large animals they had seen, but of those that had recently passed through from their droppings, grazing patterns, marks on the foliage, and so forth. They could tell the sex, size, health, time and direction of movement. They each told their story until at last all had spoken when they immediately went off to bed.

The following morning the hunt began. But there was no more talk, no discussion, for they knew instinctively what they were to hunt, where and when they would find the animals and how they would hunt them. For they had all been listening very intently the night before, forming a very detailed eagle-eyed picture of the large animals in the territory - the types, their numbers, their condition, and particularly their movements like a continuous movie unfolding within their minds. And they knew which animals to take, and how many, to maintain the balance so that there would be food for the next winter, the winter after that, and every winter.

References

[1] Berry T. Dream of the earth. San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1988, 123.

[2] Hawken P. Ecology of commerce: how business can save the planet. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1993, 17.

[3] McMurtry J. Unequal freedoms - the global market as an ethical system. Toronto: Garamond Press, 1998.

[4] Deane M and Pringle R. The central banks. USA: Viking Penguin, 1995.

[5] Capra F. The web of life - a new synthesis of mind and matter. London: HarperCollins, 1996, 279.

[6] Handy C. The hungry spirit - beyond capitalism, a quest for purpose in the modern world. London: Hutchinson, 1997.

[7] Handy C. The hungry spirit - beyond capitalism, a quest for purpose in the modern world. London: Hutchinson, 1997, 71.

[8] Handy C. The hungry spirit - beyond capitalism, a quest for purpose in the modern world. London: Hutchinson, 1997, 72.

[9] Lerner M. The politics of meaning - restoring hope and possibility in an age of cynicism. Mass: Addison-Wesley, 1996.

[10] Geering L. Building a responsible society. Wellington, NZ: St. Andrews-on-the-Terrace, 1998.

[11] Wilber K. A brief history of everything. Boston: Shambhala, 1996.

[12] Block P. Stewardship - choosing service over self-interest. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 1993.

[13] Wildman P and Inayatullah S. Ways of knowing, culture, communication and the pedagogies of the future. Futures, 1996; 28(8): 723-741.

Figure 1: The Four Quadrants

interior (left) exterior (right)

INTENTIONAL

BEHAVIORAL

individual

(upper)

truth

truthfulness

justness

functional

fit

communal/

collective

(lower)

CULTURAL

(WORLDSPACE)

SOCIAL

(SYSTEM)

interior exterior

Our means of understanding these quadrants are:

Left Hand Paths Right Hand Paths

(interior) (exterior)

interpretative monological

hermeneutic empirical, positivistic consciousness form