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)
individual
(upper)
communal/
collective
(lower)
interior exterior
Our means of understanding these quadrants are:
Left Hand Paths Right Hand Paths
(interior) (exterior)
interpretative monological
hermeneutic empirical, positivistic consciousness form