In my musings about late 60s activism in the USA and here in Australia, I noticed a contrast between the hippie movement's emphasis on spirituality and deep renewal, and the Australian political activists' focus on causes and actions. So just like that (Shazam!) I've come across something that beautifully bridges the divide.
The Buddhist influence is very clear in this book but you don't have to be a Buddhist to appreciate it or use it. Its ideas could easily be adapted for any spiritual environment, or for none. What it aims to do is to provide readers (and workshop participants) with tools and processes to sustain themselves and remain active in the face of seemingly overwhelming global crises.
They start out by outlining three stories about our time - that is, three ways of viewing the world we now live in. The first, Business As Usual, sees our society going on as it is indefinitely, with continued economic growth fuelling growing prosperity. If we live in this story we focus on the daily realities of work, family and leisure and don't think too much about the future. This is the story our politicians and oligarchs would like us to live in because it ensures that they stay in place.
The problem with this is that it is not sustainable, and this leads to the second story, the Great Unravelling. In this story, our world is on a trajectory to inevitable disaster. The threats of pollution, resource depletion and climate change will inevitably catch up with us and our world will collapse, leading to vast suffering and the loss of all we know.
This is, in a sense, a realistic worldview because at least it takes these realities into account. However, it is also a pathway to nihilism and despair. Hence the third story, the Great Turning. In this story, we are working to avoid the Great Unravelling by building alternatives - simpler lifestyles, circular economies, renewable energy, just distribution of resources and so forth.
The point is not which of these stories is correct in objective terms because these are not objective facts, they are choices. Will we put our heads in the sand and carry on as we are, sink into despair, or work for change? Living in the story of the Great Turning is what gives us our best chance of avoiding or minimising disaster and creating a world that humans and all creatures can live in. However, this story is hard work, because there is always resistance to change and we face defeats and frustrations aplenty. If we are to maintain this over time we need strong spiritual and psychological foundations that can sustain us through the length of the journey.
In order to build this sustainable practice they envisage our journey as a spiral with four stages. These are not followed once in order to get us to a destination, they are something we journey through over and over again. Here are the four stages.
1. Coming From Gratitude
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| Image by Dori Midnight from www.workthatreconnects.org/spiral/ |
2. Honouring Our Pain for the World
This process involves acknowledging and taking seriously the pain we feel over things like global hunger, species extinction, habitat destruction, war, resource depletion, etc, and the fears for the future these generate. We are often inclined to push these thoughts away, distract ourselves and not talk about these bad things because they are too painful. Yet this pain is essential if we are to act. Ideally, we will create supportive places and relationships where we can talk about such things and support one another, so that the thoughts don't just overwhelm us.
3 Seeing with New Eyes
A number of chapters in the book talk about different aspects of changing the ways we see the world. These include changing the way we see ourselves (as connected to families, all humanity, all life rather than as isolated individuals), our understanding of power (moving from 'power over' to 'power with'), our sense of community (slowly widening from our neighbourhood to our nation, the global family of humanity and all creatures, seeing ourselves as intimately connected to the web of life) and the way we see time (focusing past the immediate to understanding the time-line of the earth, the time-line of humanity, the possible trajectory of the future beyond our own lifetime). Such changed perspectives give us fertile grounds for action and enable us to think beyond the immediate (the next payday, the next election, the next campaign) to where we see ourselves headed and our place in the sweep of history.
4. Going Forth
Finally, they talk about how these things would prepare us for, and move us to, action. Grounded in these practices and ways of thinking, we are enabled to start working with others to bring about the Great Turning. First is 'catching an inspiring vision' - there are so many things we could work on, but we need to choose and this will be guided by what inspires us and excites us (or makes us particularly angry). Different ones of us will be inspired by different things, but all are necessary for the Great Turning to come about.
Second is 'daring to believe it is possible'. For any process of change there will be voices, both outside us and within us, that tell us it can't be done. Often we will meet obstacles and failure before we succeed. Wilberforce and his fellow anti-slavery campaigners worked for over two decades before their laws were passed and came close to giving up. The struggles over climate change are the same - we seem to have been slugging away for decades with alarmingly meagre results. Yet if we listen to these voices we guarantee failure - everything is impossible until it happens.
Third, 'building support around you' involves finding other people who support your vision and who will work with you towards achieving it. It's rare that anything important will be achieved by one person acting alone, normally we seek help, build alliances, solve problems together and support each other through frustrations and setbacks.
Finally, 'maintaining energy and enthusiasm' addresses how we keep going for the long haul, remembering to take time to recharge and refresh, dealing with setbacks, reminding ourselves of our gratitude and of the community (human and non-human) which is working with us.
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Macy and Johnstone's hope and belief is that approaching the Great Turning in this way sets us for the long haul, and keeps us going when things get hard. They are the practices that have enabled Macy's five decades of peace and environmental activism, and Johnstone's three.
Unlike the hippies, there are no hallucinogens here, but there are plenty of spiritual exercises drawn mostly from the Buddhist tradition but also from Johnstone's psychology practice and elsewhere. These are used to ground us, help us visualise, help us connect, help us to broaden our view of the world. Alongside this there is practical activism drawn from the authors' own lives, those of their friends and associates and those of luminaries like Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr.
As I said, this provides a way of bridging the gap between the hippies and the activists. Like the hippies, they recognise that the Great Turning is as much a spiritual awakening as a political movement, and they lay the groundwork for this awakening. On the other hand, they see this as grounding for action, with people redirecting their lives towards building the new world they are seeking through political action, institution building, research and community change. They seek to avoid the kind of burnout and compromise that can be the fate of ungrounded political activists, as well as the kind of withdrawal and quietism that can be the endpoint of hippie spirituality.
If I've learned anything over my four decades of trying to make change, it's that it's hard work and the results are often meagre. There are strong forces that want to keep things as they are. If you don't have something, or several things, grounding you it's easy to get disheartened and join the system. You need a strong set of beliefs or values, a community of like-minded people, and a set of practices that keep you focused on the goal and keep you alive and energised. None of us is perfect - we often undermine ourselves, drop the ball, make the wrong choices. But if we have this grounding, we can keep on going, learn from our mistakes and put our small shoulders to the giant wheel of the Great Turning.
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