The German philosopher Hegel gave us what is still perhaps the most compelling model of how societies change and evolve. His theory of dialectical progression suggested that cultures evolve in much the same way as ideas or outlooks do. The prevailing concept — or thesis as he called it — over time gives rise to its opposite, its antithesis. The interaction of these perspectives eventually leads to a new concept, or synthesis. The synthesis in turn becomes the thesis of a new triad.

It’s easy to see how this dynamic plays out in politics, for example, where the pendulum seems to swing between liberal and conservative views in an orderly fashion and where the interplay between the two regularly gives rise to fresh and original amalgamations.

Some years ago, social scientist Daniel Yankelovich offered an interesting twist on this idea, one based not on theory but observation. In his long career monitoring social trends in the United States, he found that society tends to lurch, often mindlessly, in a new direction. After a period of resistance and reaction, an integration eventually takes place. He called this pattern “lurch and learn.”

In the 1960s, for example, young people lurched away from the prevailing notion of duty to the search for pleasure. In a similar way, there was a lurch away from work to leisure. “The reaction of young people to their father’s nose-to-the-grindstone way of life was to see in leisure the possibilities of genuine self-fulfillment,” he explained in a 1996 talk. “After that lurch, they gradually found that the kind of self-fulfillment they were seeking often could be fulfilled better through a certain kind of work than through leisure.”

This idea goes a long way toward explaining how new ideas meet profound resistance before being assimilated into the dominant cultural worldview. Those who articulate innovative ideas move the prevailing outlook in a new direction. First, these ideas are ridiculed, as Arthur Schopenhauer famously said, then they are violently resisted. Finally they are accepted as self-evident.

Read more:

• My transcript of Daniel Yankelovich’s talk, with selected passages highlighted for easy reference, is available here.
• Daniel Yankelovich’s personal website

The history of science shows that breakthrough lies not in discovering new facts so much as discovering new ways of thinking about and making sense of them.

More:

• Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is still the best work on the subject
• Arthur Koestler’s The Sleepwalkers is another favorite because of its forceful argument and gorgeous prose.

For many of us, the word revolution conjures up images of political violence and social breakdown, of insurgent militias and defiant chants, of street barricades made from overturned vehicles and ragged mobs armed with makeshift weapons. For better or worse, the idea of revolution often goes hand-in-hand with images of stormed palaces, random violence against the innocent, and decapitated heads on pikes.

For those still coming of age, the word no doubt has kinder and more benign connotations — the “velvet” transition toward free-market economics, perhaps, or the end of institutionalized racism. Today, the word revolution has also become synonymous with the idea of progress and technological advance. It has become a strained synonym for innovation and breakthrough, 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 far more profound. It is the sort that begins at the level of perceptions, ideas, and values. We don’t know much about such 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 captured this 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 observed. “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 prevailing worldview. 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 an especially complicated formula for change.

The trouble, of course, is that if and when such an effort succeeds, the 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 have to ask ourselves 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. This silent revolution 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 — and 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 good intention. I don’t mean the kind of good 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 better 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.

What motivates people to work on behalf of the common good? In a study I’m leading for the Harwood Institute, I’ve been exploring this question with community leaders from across the country — civic entrepreneurs working to reduce homelessness, address poverty, work with inmates, clean up the environment, and generally strengthen our communities. A word that comes up again and again in our conversations is stewardship. They tell me that a sense of caring and responsibility for the commons is at the center of what they do.

This was an unexpected finding. To better understand this idea, I turned to Peter Block’s valuable 1993 book, Stewardship, still one of the best management books I’ve seen on enlightened leadership practices. The book is aimed primarily at business leaders, but it also applies directly to those working to improve our neighborhoods and communities.

Stewardship, as Block defines, means to hold something in trust for another. Traditionally, it was a way of protecting a kingdom in the absence of its ruler, or a way of governing for the sake of an underage king. According to Block, stewardship serves as a metaphor for a different way of thinking about leadership, organizations and communities. It suggests that people are most effective when they participate as caretakers or stewards, when they put service before self-interest, and when they operate from a sense of ownership and accountability.

It’s a bold vision, one that contrasts sharply with the conventional view of leadership. “The governance system we have inherited and continue to create is based on sovereignty and a form of intimate colonialism,” Block writes. “We govern our organizations by valuing, above all else, consistency, control, and predictability.” But this top-driven, patriarchal approach to management comes at a high price. Without the spirit of democracy, organizations become places of helplessness and compliance, places that stifle creative expression and ultimately fail to create product, guarantee quality or serve customers.

According to Block, the best hope for reforming our organizations lies in reshaping the politics of our work lives — how we each define purpose, hold power, and balance wealth. In practical terms, this involves nine principles:

1. Maximizing the choices for those closest to the work
2. Eliminating management classes by reintegrating the managing and the doing of the work — ”no one would be able to make a living simply planning, watching, controlling, or evaluating the actions of others”
3. Allowing measurements and controls to serve the core workers by means of, among other things, team and peer agreements
4. Yielding on consistency across groups and supporting local solutions
5. Making service the highest priority
6. Deglorifying management job titles and demystifying staff functions
7. Eliminating secrecy in the organization
8. Demanding a firm commitment from each participant with the recognition that freedom and accountability “are in every case joined at the hip”
9. Redistributing wealth since “reward systems need to tie everyone’s fortunes to the success of the team, unit, and larger organization”

Block explores the challenges standing in the way of reform at some length. Much of the difficulty, he points out, stems from our deep-seated assumptions about the role of leadership. Leaders maintain that they are needed to “set the vision” and to assume ultimate responsibility, while followers often look to superiors to take care of them. “We cannot be leaders without followers, and we cannot be good parents unless we have good children,” he observes. “This dependent mindset justifies and rationalizes patriarchy and keeps it breathing.”

Shifting away from patriarchy must begin with an understanding of how we have helped to create it in the first place. Therefore it requires not only structural and policy changes but also a new way of thinking for each member of the organization. Reform efforts implemented from the top down are guaranteed to fail. “We do not need common vision, least of all one articulated by a small group at the top. We need common mission, a common membership contract, but not a process to induce common values.”

At bottom, Block says, stewardship and self-governance go hand-in-hand. Our workplace is a microcosm of democracy. What we do there “makes a difference. This is where democracy will revive itself, not in the voting booth. Our own unit becomes the place where the economic war will be won and democracy rediscovered.”

A Harris poll found that a full 90 percent of Americans would change their lives dramatically if they could. The survey showed that most people don’t like the way they live now, but they simply don’t know how to change.

The statistic goes a long way toward explaining why advertising has become so heavily dominated by ads promising a better life. These days, a product, seminar or service has to hold out the hope of a vastly new and improved life to stand any chance to succeeding.

The publishing world is an especially egregious example of this. The industry is increasingly oriented toward how-to, self-help, and personal development literature (”The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Changing Your Life,” etc.).

To say that something has changed one’s life used to actually mean something. Today it has become so banal as to be practically meaningless.

The most radical act we can commit today, I believe, is to say: “I’m happy, I don’t need to change my life.” It represents a powerful shift of attitude, one that begins with acceptance of what is and opens up a space for appreciating what we do have. From there, it’s not hard to focus in on the qualities we love and want more of. What it does is focus our attention on what is right and good with the world, which ultimately creates more of the same.

When we refuse to accept the idea that there is something wrong with the present situation and that we need to change our lives, paradoxically we create a state of mind where positive changes are possible — perhaps even inevitable.

I was dazzled by Ken Wilber’s book Sex, Ecology, Spirituality when it appeared in the mid-1990s. Rarely had I encountered a writer and philosopher who expressed himself with so much energy and clarity of insight on the difficult business of human consciousness. His grasp of the complexities of evolutionary theory, systems thinking, metaphysics, contemplative tradition, postmodernism and other daunting subjects was not just impressive, but masterful. Here, I thought, was someone who could finally make some sense of our strange predicament at the turn of the millennium — someone who could help us distinguish between frontier and fringe thinking and clear a path through the thicket of psychobabble that makes up so much of what’s being written today about personal growth and human consciousness.

After finishing the book, I went on to read every book of Wilber’s that I could get my hands on. The love affair lasted several years. But by 1999 I found myself having increasing reservations about his method, and perhaps also about the man himself. I wrote about some of these in a review of his book One Taste that appeared in the Spring 2000 issue of Parabola Magazine (see my review here).

The questions I had revolved around the certitude with which he puts forth his views, the definiteness of his assertions. They were always explanatory rather than exploratory. I had thought someone with his intellectual gifts and spiritual insight would be more sensitive to complexity, to metaphor, paradox, mystery. If anything, I felt he did a violence to ideas that were, by definition, boundary-spanning — such as liberal political theory or ecopsychology or the role in psychology of myth — by forcing them into narrow categories that served his own theoretical interests. I was constantly amazed by his misrepresentations of great thinkers such as Huston Smith, Gerald Heard, Stan Grof and others. 

My initial euphoria upon discovering Wilber some years ago gave way to a deepening sadness that this was the man being heralded as one of today’s most original and significant philosophers. The notion that he represented some sort of “Einstein of the consciousness movement,” as somebody once said, struck me as preposterous.

Even so, I was excited when Wilber spearheaded the launch of Integral Naked, a website featuring audio interviews with brilliant and visionary thinkers, about five years ago. I was an enthusiastic early supporter of the site. But, again, my excitement gradually gave way to a sinking feeling that what Wilber and his friends had created was a little club of people calling themselves “integral thinkers” who used a common vocabulary but were in fact increasingly insulated from the world around them — not because they were uninterested or uninformed about the world at large but because they were convinced they had the best system or theory that could explain what was going on (exemplified by such grandiose book titles as A Theory of Everything and A Brief History of Everything). I eventually unsubscribed to Integral Naked. My reasons for pulling the plug are summarized in this open letter to the site.

In recent years, Wilber’s Integral Institute has become more firmly established and Integral Naked seems, from what I can tell, to be going strong. But Wilber’s critics have grown more numerous. And he himself seems increasingly insular and cantankerous. In a now infamous blog entry, Wilber embarrassed himself in front of the world, as his biographer Frank Visser put it, “by abusing and insulting those of his critics who did not ‘understand’ his work, and invited those who ‘did’ to come to his integral ’sanctuary.’ His main complaint was the low level of the criticism he had received so far, especially from Integral World authors.”

It was a depressing blog entry, to say the least, and perhaps also a cautionary tale about what happens when we go too far in defending our own intellectual constructs. Ideas at their best are meant to edify and inspire, not divide and isolate. When we find ourselves growing hard and brittle in defense of our own theories, then we have given our own constructs more power than they deserve.

Read more:

• My review of Ken Wilber’s One Taste
• Why I Unsubscribed From Integral Naked
• A Roundup of Criticism of the Work of Ken Wilber — From integralworld.net
• Wilber Watch — Frank Visser’s Blog

Some 1,000 people came together in Canberra, Australia, over the weekend for a free-spirited “ideas summit” — a gathering of experts, activists, politicians, and celebrities aimed at soliciting innovative ideas to strengthen Australia’s future.

Over the course of two days, some 8,000 ideas were submitted. By the end of the weekend, the number had been narrowed down to 40. The proposals focused on addressing environmental sustainability, strengthening civil society, and generally promoting the common good. They included ideas for:

• A preventative health agency to be funded by a junk-food tax 
• Providing incentives to lure Australians to work in rural communities
• Delivering fresh fruit to schools once a week
• Making Australia the “greenest” economy in the world by 2020

The ideas summit — the first of what is hoped will become an annual event in Australia — is a beautiful example of how to encourage new ideas and innovative thinking.

Too often we expect bright ideas to emerge from corporate boardrooms, from forward-thinking political figures, or from the latest management books when, in fact, they tend to come from the grassroots. What we need are better ways to harness those ideas — by creating a context for conversations around pressing problems, helping people network, and ensuring that good ideas are given a propert hearing and some exposure in the media.

The Australians have shown that this isn’t an elusive ideal, but a smart and practical way of working for a better tomorrow.

Read more:

• Australia 2020 — Official website
• Australia ‘Ideas Summit’ Yields Wide-Ranging Proposals — From Huffington Post

Over the past six months, I’ve been talking with civic leaders from across the country about what it means to build community. The process has challenged some of my preconceptions. Community is not something you can build, they tell me. It’s a quality that has to be brought forward and actualized, in the same way a sculptor reveals a statue by chipping and hewing at the marble. Switching metaphors is important, they insist, because it’s only when we abandon the idea of “building” in favor of “sculpting” that we can see community where it already exists. You have to foster what’s already there, not attempt to create something from nothing. That’s the essential starting point for bringing about change and making a difference.