This phrase gave rise to the title of Robert Coles’s 1993 book, The Call of Service, a meditation on the meaning of voluntary service — the kind we offer to others and the impact it has on us in the process.

I was quite inspired by the book when it came out. Coles himself seemed to exemplify the spirit of service in his writing, in his teaching and in his own personal life.

After reading The Call of Service, I went on to read several other books by Coles and eventually to write an article about his work. I then posted the piece on my website. This was in the early days of the Internet, before most people had discovered e-mail or started searching the Web.

One day, about a year later, the phone rang. When I answered, the voice at the other end said, “Hello, Scott? This is Robert Coles. I just read an essay you wrote about me. It was a very fine piece of work, and I just wanted to say thank you.” He didn’t use a computer, he told me, but a friend of his had run across my article on the Internet, printed it out and mailed it to him.

We went on to talk for almost an hour. He called me one of the “finest interpreters” of his work, which was quite a compliment given that he has been the subject of countless newspaper and magazine profiles, at least a half-dozen TV documentaries, and several major biographies.

He wasn’t very interested in talking about himself, it turned out. He kept on asking me about my work, my family, how I liked living on the West Coast, and so on. It was a warm and inspiring conversation, one that subsequently blossomed into a friendship.

After our talk I asked myself what it was that prompted Coles to call me that day. I can’t be sure, but I believe it was something deeper than just the impusle to say thanks. It was more likely a desire to give something back. It was a gesture born of gratitude, not obligation or duty. A kind of reaching out. And that, I think, is the essence of true service — a desire to acknowledge another and give thanks in whatever small way we can.

To write a book about service is one thing, I realized, but to exemplify it in our everyday lives is quite another. Coles taught me that in a vivid and direct way.

I was reminded of this episode because my essay on Robert Coles — the one that prompted him to call me that day — has just been reprinted as part of a special tribute to Robert Coles in the new issue of Parents League Review. The man and his work are still timely, perhaps more so than when I first discovered him almost twenty years ago. My piece is called A Way of Seeing: The Work of Robert Coles.

There’s been a lot of talk of revolution in 2011, especially in connection with the Arab Spring and the continuing Occupy Wall Street protests. The word revolution conjures up images of political violence and social turmoil, of insurgent militias and defiant chants, of street barricades made from overturned vehicles and ragged crowds armed with makeshift weapons. In recent months, the word has often been paired with images of stormed palaces, angry mobs, even bullet-riddled dictators being dragged through the streets.

For those of us who came of age at the end of the Cold War, the word may have kinder and more benign connotations — the “velvet” transition toward free-market economics, perhaps, or the end of institutionalized racism. It’s also synonymous in many people’s minds with the notion of progress and technological advancement, as in the “digital revolution,” the “communications revolution,” or the “biotechnology” revolution.

But there is another kind of revolution, one that is less apparent but more profound. It’s the sort that begins at the level of perceptions, ideas, and values. We don’t know much about these types of revolutions, because they tend to proceed quietly within the minds of individuals for a long time before manifesting outwardly in the culture at large. They are silent, invisible, and relatively rare in human history.

Writing a century and a half ago, Alexis de Tocqueville described them in a vivid way. “Time, events, or the unaided action of the mind will sometimes undermine or destroy an opinion without any outward signs of change,” he noted. “No conspiracy has been formed to make war on it, but its followers one by one noiselessly secede. As its opponents remain mute or only interchange their thoughts by stealth, they are themselves unaware for a long period that a great revolution has actually been effected.”

Instigating a good old-fashioned revolution is comparatively easy compared to bringing about this kind of “noiseless secession” from the dominant way of seeing the world. It’s easy because the key ingredient of a traditional revolution is anger, bitterness, and opposition to a perceived enemy or system. A bit of public outrage coupled with a revolutionary group and a charismatic leader is not a promising formula for long-term change.

The trouble with mere regime-change is that if and when such an effort succeeds the new leaders typically lack the experience and the constructive attitudes needed to create and maintain a new social order. The negativity then turns inward and breeds divisiveness, in-fighting, and ultimately counter-revolutions. As history clearly shows, most revolutions become self-defeating and even dangerous since the struggle against “the enemy” becomes an end in itself.

The question we need to ask today is whether it’s possible to start a revolution the other way around — whether it’s possible to have a general shift in mood and action first. Such a revolution would build on values and perceptions, not bullets and bombs. It would be constructive, not contentious. It would emphasize design, not criticism. It would be self-organized, not centrally planned. It would take its cues from imagination and vision, not opposition to the status quo.

I believe this kind of movement is possible. In fact, we’re already seeing signs of it all around us — and I’m not talking about the Occupy Wall Street protests, though some of the people spearheading the effort clearly embody a new vision. This silent revolution I’m talking about gathers into its framework a wide range of innovative ideas drawn from across a host of disciplines, from science and technology to psychology and education. Its leaders can be found all over the world. They make up what might be called an invisible network — a global underground of individuals from different cultures and backgrounds who are committed to a more humane and sustainable world, who embody a value-system based on compassion, kindness and respect for diversity, and who see the fulfilment of our highest capacities as human beings as the single most important goal as we look to the future.

The revolution comes as a response to breakdowns on many fronts — the environmental crisis, the deepening divide between the world’s richest and poorest, the crisis of confidence in institutions, and the bankruptcy of once-dominant ideologies and systems of belief, such as communism and free-market economics. But the revolution is not a reaction to crisis so much as a reflection of an emergent culture rising to take the place of the one we have now. It is evolutionary, not revolutionary.

I must confess that for almost two decades now, I’ve devoted much of my professional life to seeking out these quiet revolutionaries — to learning from them and to trying to articulate and disseminate their ideas in as clear and compelling a way as I can. In the early days, I had some trouble identifying these instigators. I used to think all good ideas were equal. It was only later that I understood that ideas and intentions go hand in hand. The mark of a good idea, I learned, is that it’s backed by a noble intention. I don’t mean the kind of noble intention we pay lip-service to; I mean the kind that is born from a faith in human virtue and possibility, from an animating vision of a more humane and sustainable world.

The German philosopher Hegel once remarked that great revolutions are always preceded by “a still and secret revolution in the spirit of the age.” This revolution is “as hard to discern as to describe in words.” Those who fail to recognize it as it gathers strength, he said, are always astonished by the sweeping changes left in its wake.

That’s what we are in the throes of today — a still and secret revolution, one that will ultimately change how we see ourselves, how we define our collective purpose, and how we take care of ourselves, each other, and the planet.

Update: If you haven’t already seen it, check out this YouTube clip in which Charles Eisenstein brilliantly describes the vision I’m talking about as a revolution of love.

His question was not easy to answer. Memorable conversations, I find, often have less to do with the person you’re speaking with and more to do with the insights they lead you to. Nevertheless I came up with a half-dozen names.

To my surprise, all of them were women.

“Why do you think they were all women?” he asked.

I ventured something about how women seem more grounded in their own experience and their own inner authority.

That was true for him as well, he said. Some of the most remarkable women he had met combined the qualities of the thinker, the philosopher, the mystic and the activist. Unlike many of the brilliant men he knew, he said that women seemed to understand the importance of grounding their ideals in practice.

Years later, I mentioned this exchange to Adam Curle, the distinguished peace scholar and international mediator. He had spent more than half a century trying to understand the roots of violent conflict. Over the course of his career, he had also negotiated settlements and facilitated behind-the-scenes talks in places like India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Northern Ireland, South Africa, and Sri Lanka.

Echoing what Theobald had said, he told me that many of the best mediators he had worked with were women. He thought it might be because “women are not so impressed by hierarchy.”

“There is a certain competitiveness among men that can impede development of friendship and common understanding,” I offered.

He agreed, saying that he often found himself “slightly in awe” when he would meet a president, prime minister, or other important figure.  ”I realize that in a lot of relationships between men, there is a kind of subtle, sensitive ‘who’s on top and who’s on bottom.’ Women don’t have that.”

He went on to say whenever he had worked with women, they immediately created an easy rapport with men, especially those in positions of power. “Women are not intimidated,” he noted. “They don’t have a need to secure their position in a hierarchy. They seem to be more concerned with fundamental things.”

I’ve thought often about these conversations with Theobald and Curle. Odd as it may sound, I’ve found myself in more than a few situations in the intervening years — in professional meetings or encounters with dignitaries, for example — when I’ve asked myself, “what would a woman do in this situation?”

I think most men would benefit from doing the same.

Here’s a handful of recent Twitter entries on random subjects like kindness, grievances, consensus, and the limits of humility. If you don’t already, feel free to follow me on Twitter here.

• The trouble with opinions is that they drive wedges between people. Stories unite, opinions divide.
• I look forward to the day when journalists, producers and filmmakers describe themselves not as independent but as interdependent.
• Technological advances have to proceed in step with social advances or they lead to recklessness and misery.
• I shudder every time I hear someone say that the iPad, and other devices like it, allow us “to consume content.”
• Sooner or later we come to recognize that most of our problems in life are tied to grievances we simply refuse to let go.
• The only change that matters in the end is the kind that starts with me.
• Sometimes a loving act may be perceived as unloving — refusing to commiserate, for example.
• I think consensus is better to strive for than to attain.
• I used to say “I don’t know” a lot. Humility is good, right? Then a wise friend told me: “Stop pretending you don’t know and live your truth.”
• Why do we know more at 25 than we do at 50? Because it takes half a lifetime to fully confront our own ignorance.
• We don’t need our kindnesses returned, we need them passed on.
• Gratitude is the highest form of devotion.

Huston Smith has had a profound influence on me. He introduced to me the idea that there is an identifiable transcendent unity at the core of the enduring wisdom traditions — a common vision as to the nature of ultimate reality, knowledge, ethics, and spiritual life — despite the great surface variety of doctrines, practices, and cultures. He refers to it as the “primordial tradition” or “perennial philosophy.”

I had encountered the idea of the perennial philosophy from Aldous Huxley (his book by that name is one I keep at my bedside), but I never realized the extent to which people of various mystical traditions shared a common vision. I found that deeply thought-provoking, and more than a little inspiring.

This outlook is common to people everywhere and at all times, Smith says, with a single notable exception: the modern West. Our contemporary Western worldview differs from what might otherwise be called “the human unanimity,” as he calls it, because of an unfortunate “misreading” of science.

In several of his books, he shows how science presumes to be the authoritative way of establishing truth, yet ultimately reveals only partial truths. Strictly speaking, Smith says, a scientific worldview is a contradiction in terms since the world science deals with is one limited to space, time, matter/energy, and mathematics. “Values, life meanings, purposes, and qualities slip through science like sea slips through the nets of fishermen.”

The triumphs of modern science have blinded us to the fact that it is an inherently restricted form of knowing, that what can be measured empirically is not exhaustive of reality, that there are other higher domains that can be apprehended only through contemplation, intuition, and inner experience.

According to Smith, this latter idea stands at the center of all the great wisdom traditions, from Taoism to Vedanta, Zen to Sufism, Neoplatonism to Confucianism. The primordial tradition views reality as hierarchically ordered, consisting of at least three realms: earth, human, and celestial, correlated with body, mind, and spirit.

This suggests, in effect, that 1) things are not as they seem, 2) that the other-than-the-seeing represents infinitely “more,” 3) that this more cannot be known in ordinary ways, 4) that it can, however, be known in ways appropriate to it, 5) that these appropriate ways require cultivation, and 6) that they require tools or practices. (For more on this last point, please see my post on Spiritual Practice.)

Smith has helped me recognize that the best hope for Western culture is not to go back to some idealized past, but to retrieve a more expanded and timeless view of reality, to recover a lost dimension of human understanding. In his words, we need “to reknit the rich coherence of a fully human consciousness which the cramped and aggressive rationality of modernity has bruised so badly.”

For more on Huston Smith, please see my review of his book Beyond the Postmodern Mind

These links were culled from my Twitter feed. If you don’t already, feel free to follow me on Twitter.

• The long-term trend is clear — the world is becoming increasingly free and democratic. But there have been setbacks in recent years. Growing human rights abuses in places like Russia and China are perhaps especially worrisome. See Freedom House’s 2010 Freedom in the World Survey
• American Grace, a new book by Robert Putnam and David Campbell, documents a new and remarkable trend in America: the mass defection of young people away from organized religion. See American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us
• Quality work and multitasking are incompatible. People simply can’t do two or more thinking tasks simultaneously. See E-Mail is Making You Stupid
• In a provocative article in Fast Company magazine, Richard Watson cites two interesting studies. The first claims that we last, on average, three minutes at work before something interrupts us. The other suggests that constant disruption has a greater effect on IQ than smoking marijuana. See The Rise of Connectivity Addition
• According to an interesting piece in the New York Times, unhappiness often comes as a result of letting our minds wander. While there’s no doubt that distraction can lead to discontent, it can also lead people to creative solutions, which might make them happier in the long term. See When the Mind Wanders, Happiness Also Strays by John Tierny
• Arnold Schwarzenegger represents yesterdays California Dream, Richard Rodriguez observes in a terrific video interview with Sandip Roy. But tomorrow’s California Dream belongs to men like Steve Jobs and Sergey Brin. See Richard Rodriguez talks about California
• Spiegel Online reports that some 47 percent of Americans no longer believe in the American Dream. See Is the American Dream Over?
• For the eighth straight year, reports Time, Norway has topped the United Nations’ quality-of-life list in its annual Human Development Index. Oh, come on, Norway. The competition isn’t even fun anymore. See Norwegians Have It Better Than You
• Quantum mechanics is getting weirder and weirder. Experiments show that “reality is truly in the eye of the beholder.” See After a Short Delay, Quantum Mechanics Becomes Even Weirder in ScienceNOW

Given that the term has come to define a vast sector of American society — one that encompasses more than 1.5 million organizations and accounts for some 10 percent of the nation’s GDP — it would seem we could come up with a better phrase, or at least one that’s more descriptive.

The trouble is that many of the ideas put forward as an alternative simply miss the mark. Take, for example, the “voluntary sector.” The word accurately describes the activities of many charities, yes, but these organizations represent just a fraction of the total number of nonprofits in the U.S. And besides, the word implies that all those who work in the for-profit sector somehow do so involuntarily.

Other examples include the “third sector” and the “independent sector.” Hildy Gottlieb, director of the Community-Driven Institute, has made a compelling case for the term “community-benefit sector.” In a recent Harvard Business Review blog post, Dan Pallotta pitched the term “humanity sector.” And in an article some months ago in the Chronicle of Philanthropy, Suzanne Perry suggested the “delta” sector.

Part of the reason we’re stuck with the term “nonprofit,” I believe, is because the field is so conceptually ambiguous. Much of what falls under the rubric of the nonprofit sector does not actually involve social service, community benefit, or even doing good. There are many nonprofits that are advocacy-driven, faith-based, or politically motivated, even though their tax-exempt status would suggest they are serving the public interest in some way.

In the academic literature, the field is often described as “civil society” or “the public sphere,” suggesting a kind of middle ground between public and private, between government and the free market. I realize that these terms encompass more than just nonprofit organizations (including, as they do, churches, neighborhood associations, book clubs, and the like). But they get closer, I think, to the real sphere of activity we’re talking about here.

These terms also avoid the unhelpful do-gooder connotations of terms like “the community benefit sector” and “the humanity sector.”

I prefer the term “civic sector,” or what the organization Ashoka: Innovators for the Public refers to as “the citizen sector.” Both of these terms put ordinary people — citizens — at the center of the equation (as distinct from business and government). And as I see it, that’s really what this burgeoning sector is all about: the role of ordinary individuals, people like you and me, in inspiring new solutions, creating change, and making a real impact.

See also:

• Civil Society and the New Global Order — an essay of mine on the rising importance of this sector in shaping our global future
• My review of Benjamin Barber’s A Place for Us
• Six Reasons to Use the Term Community-Benefit Organization by Hildy Gottlieb
• Let’s Call It the Humanity Sector by Dan Pallotta
• Goodbye “Nonprofit Sector,” Hello “Delta Sector” by Suzanne Perry

Here is an excerpt from Burns’s 1978 book, Leadership:

Transforming leadership … occurs when one or more persons engage with each other in such a way that leaders and followers raise one another to higher levels of motivation and morality…. Their purposes, which might have started out as separate but related, as in the case of transactional leadership, become fused. Power bases are linked not as counterweights but as mutual support for common purpose.

Various names are used for such leadership, some of them derisory: elevating, mobilizing, inspiring, exalting, uplifting, preaching, exhorting, evangelizing. The relationship can be moralistic, of course. But transforming leadership ultimately becomes moral in that it raises the level of human conduct and ethical aspiration of both leader and led, and thus it has a transforming effect on both.

Perhaps the best modern example is Gandhi, who aroused and elevated the hopes and demands of millions of Indians and whose life and personality were enhanced in the process. Transcending leadership is dynamic leadership in the sense that the leaders throw themselves into a relationship with followers who will feel “elevated” by it and often become more active themselves, thereby creating new cadres of leaders. Transcending leadership is leadership engagé. Naked power-wielding can be neither transactional nor transforming; only leadership can be. [...]

Woodrow Wilson called for leaders who, by boldly interpreting the nation’s conscience, could lift a people out of their everyday selves. That people can be lifted into their better selves is the secret of transforming leadership.

For more, please see my book review of James MacGregor Burns’s Leadership.

If you believe in something your very belief renders you unqualified to do it. Your earnestness will come across. Your passion will show. Your enthusiasm will make everyone nervous. And your naïveté will irritate. Which means that you will become suspect. Which means you will be prone to disillusionment. Which means that you will not be able to sustain your belief in the face of all the piranha fish which nibble away at your idea and your faith, till only the skeleton of your dream remains. Which means that you have to become a fanatic, a fool, a joke, an embarrassment. The world — which is to say the powers that be — would listen to your ardent ideas with a stiff smile on its face, then put up impossible obstacles, watch you finally give up your cherished idea, having mangled it beyond recognition, and after you slope away in profound discouragement it will take up your idea, dust it down, give it a new spin, and hand it over to someone who doesn’t believe in it at all.

I love this quote. It’s a reminder to slow down and reexamine what we’re doing.

The fierce drive to accomplish something and make a name for ourselves too often takes us down the wrong path. In the end, the qualities we’re looking for are those that go with being free of worldly success.

Ultimately, the aim must be to become indifferent to what people think of us — to become immune to applause and unmoved by criticism. There is integrity in that.

The goal must be to be present with what we’re doing — so present that we do it gracefully, effortlessly. There is great joy in that.

Success, when it does come, tends to be relatively short-lived in any case. That means that we’re all thrown back on ourselves sooner or later. When that day arrives we have no choice but to find something more lasting to pin our hopes to.

And that, I believe, is what Merton was saying.

Incidentally, he became very successful himself. But he understood what few of us, in our quest for worldly recognition, realize — that celebrity, when freed of the trappings of ego, is simply another path of service.

The subject of her research has long been considered peripheral to the main business of economics. But today, as we face a global recession and a very serious environmental crisis, her work has special resonance. She’s shown that the three dominant economic models used for dealing with collective resource management — the tragedy of the commons, the prisoners’s dilemma, and the logic of collective action — are all inadequate. They are not necessarily wrong, but the conditions under which they hold are very specific. Her research suggests that there are other viable systems that work. For example, she has looked at Swiss grazing pastures, Japanese forests, and irrigation systems in Spain and the Philippines based on sound principles of collective decision-making that are both democratic and empowering to ordinary people.

Ostrom was the first woman to win the economics prize, which is significant. And with the exception of the prize to Amartya Sen (for his work on welfare economics) it’s one of the few awards that have recognized alternatives to the traditional neoclassical economics. I’m confident that her ideas will help us broaden our thinking to make resource management more democratic, more participatory, more community-based, and above all more responsive to everyday citizens.

Read more:

• My review of Elinor Ostrom’s book Governing the Commons

One of Hegel’s great contributions to Western philosophy was a theory he called dialectical progression. As he saw it, ideas and worldviews tend to evolve through a series of stages. First there is an idea or concept, a thesis. Over time it inevitably gives rise to its opposite, its antithesis. The interaction of the two in time leads to a new concept, a synthesis, which in turn becomes the thesis of a new triad.

J.N. Findlay, in a wonderful lecture on Hegel, rightly noted that the theory had been grossly oversimplified and misused. But he went on to say — and this strikes me as central to the notion of paradigm shifts and conceptual revolutions — that the dialectical method always involved “higher order comment” on a thought position previously achieved. In the dialectical process, you operate at a given level of thought and then proceed to stand outside it. That is to say, you’re taken in by an idea and accept all of its basic assumptions. But over time, as the idea is taken to its logical limits, its shortcomings become more and more apparent. At that point, you “become conscious,” in a sense, and begin to see the idea from the outside. It’s not unlike a gestalt-switch, only it’s more rational and linear.

“In dialectic,” Findlay pointed out, “one sees what can be said about a certain thought-position that one cannot actually see in it. And the sort of comment made in dialectic is not a comment on the correctness or truth of what is said in a certain manner or in terms of certain concepts, but a comment on the adequacy or logical satisfactoriness of the conceptual approaches or instruments one has been employing.” In this sense, each stage transcends and includes the one that came before it.

This observation ties in with what Thomas Kuhn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Boulding, Arthur Koestler, and others have observed about how systems of knowledge, or frames of reference, evolve not by an orderly and incremental step-by-step process, but by occasional upheavals in which accepted truths are overthrown and reordered.

Critics of Kuhn and his followers like to play the old relativism card, saying that his notion of shifting paradigms was flawed because it said nothing about the effectiveness of one paradigm or another in getting closer to the truth. But my understanding of the evolution of paradigms is that each one represents, in Findlay’s words, “a series of improving definitions of the absolute.”

For more on this, see:

• My review of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn
• My review of Conceptual Revolutions by Paul Thagard
• My review of Paradigms in Progress by Hazel Henderson
• Literature review: Understanding Change: Strategies for Innovation and Renewal

The basic principle also applies to ideas. Sometimes the best way to introduce a new concept is to marry it to one that is already firmly established. The early scientists understood this when they depicted the atom as a microscopic solar system, or when the early web developers pitched the Internet as an “information superhighway.” A concept that is fuzzy or abstract often has a better chance of flourishing if combined with one that is already well-rooted.

What’s interesting to note is that grafting, as it was traditionally defined, meant “the healing in common of wounds.” It referred to the process by which the old and the new rub against each other. It was always a time-consuming and painful thing. But if a healing took place, common suffering could become the basis for a powerful and mutually sustaining bond.