The Great Turning is anything but naive, and though it uses the rhetoric of Utopian fantasy it does so in pursuit of a far more pragmatic agenda.
John Michael Greer -- The Archdruid Report
Part One: Politics By Another Name
March 7, 2007 -- Over the last few months, as my posts on this blog have strayed from the brass tacks of dealing with peak oil’s consequences, and wandered deeper into the murky territory of mythic narratives and cultural history underlying the predicament of industrial society, quite a few people online and off have asked about my opinion of David Korten’s 2006 book The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community. The questions come naturally, since Korten deals with many of the same issues I’ve tried to address in The Archdruid Report -– the centrality of the stories we tell about the world, for example, and the role of history in defining the choices we face in the present -– but proposes a different and, to many people, more appealing response than the hard road of personal responsibility and acceptance of natural limits I’ve advocated.
Still, most often up to now I’ve ducked questions about Korten’s book. My initial take on it -– based, I freely admit, on nothing more solid than a few minutes spent flipping through its pages at a local progressive bookstore -– was that it was just one more naive utopian fantasy projecting its author’s dream of a world he likes onto the inkblot patterns of the deindustrial future. But I finally made time to read it, and it turns out I was quite wrong. The Great Turning is anything but naive, and though it uses the rhetoric of Utopian fantasy it does so in pursuit of a far more pragmatic agenda.
This may be less of a ringing endorsement than it sounds, because that agenda actually has nothing constructive to offer the world as we approach the difficult years in the twilight of the industrial age. Still, it answers a question of some importance to the peak oil movement. For several years now I have been wondering when the first significant figures on the edge of the political mainstream would start trying to coopt peak oil as a weapon in the quest for political power. With the publication of The Great Turning, that moment has arrived.
You have to read The Great Turning carefully to make sense of its political dimension, because the basic narrative that provides its structure obscures that dimension very effectively. The narrative starts by defining two organizing principles for human culture, leading to two possible futures. The first principle Korten calls “Empire.” He spends many pages defining exactly what Empire is and what it does, but those can be summed up readily by describing it as an early 21st century progressive Democrat’s version of evil incarnate. Thus it predictably includes every policy supported by the current US administration. The inevitable future of Empire is what Korten calls the “Great Unraveling,” something not too different from the model of catabolic collapse I’ve proposed here and elsewhere.
Korten’s second principle is Earth Community, which can be summed up with equal facility as everything an early 21st century progressive Democrat considers good. The future toward which Earth Community moves, in Korten’s view is the “Great Turning,” a worldwide change of heart in which people everywhere up and abandon all their Empire-derived bad habits and create a peaceful, just, and sustainable society for all. While Empire has had things pretty much all its own way since before the beginning of recorded history, Earth Community is inherently stronger because, well, it’s so much nicer than Empire, not to mention the Great Unraveling. And this, Korten says, is why believers in Earth Community need to adopt the tactics lately used by the neoconservative movement, seize control of the cultural dialogue, and convince the masses to follow their lead into the brave new world of the Great Turning.
more
READ MORE: The Archdruid Report