---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 12 Jan 1998 16:04:35 -0800
From: Robert Theobald <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: text of speech to be given in Toronto
After considerable soul-searching, I have decided to send this lengthy
e-mail to you. It is the text of a speech which I shall give in Toronto.
While the first third covers familiar ground, I believe that the rest is
quite new and that the whole represents a new level of clarity for me.
I see a couple of uses for this material. First, you may want so suggest
to people in the Toronto area that they may want to come to the meeting to
be held at the OISE at 4pm on Monday January 19th: the address is 252 Bloor
Street West.
Second, you may have some people to whom you want to provide a shorter
statement than that contained in Reworking Success about why immediate,
fundamental change is required. You are welcome to distribute this in any
way which seems useful.
THE HEALING CENTURY.
It is my intention to bring you a message of hope today. I shall argue
that we are capable of making a profound positive shift in our thinking
over the next few years. The heart of this shift would be for us to
conceptualize the twenty-first century as the healing century just as the
twentieth will certainly be defined in the future as the economic century.
I shall prove that only a change toward a more caring and compassionate
culture at all levels from the personal to the ecological can avoid massive
breakdowns.
Given that my audience is drawn primarily from the arts community, I shall
propose at the end of my speech that the change we require must be driven
by the arts. We are in need of a profound shift in the mythic structures
on which we draw and this can only occur outside our rational and logical
frameworks.
I am all too well aware, however, that the message of hope I intend to send
will only be welcome to those who are aware that the current directions of
the global culture are unacceptable and unsustainable. If you still
believe that our current commitment to maximum economic growth and
international competitiveness, based on ever-increasing technological
competence, will solve our problems then my message will seem pessimistic
and, indeed, highly negative.
My whole discussion this evening is based on my belief that we face a
series of unavoidable crises which are already visible to those who care to
look beyond the dominant headlines. These crises are due to our past
successes rather than our failures. We have achieved what we wanted to.
We have so far failed to recognize that it is now time to move on and to
seize the new opportunities which are currently available to us. We
urgently need to rework our concepts of success.
Fortunately, the Chinese have taught us that crises bring both danger and
opportunity. Danger predominates when we ignore changing realities as our
dominant communication systems are doing today. Opportunity emerges when
we commit to breaking the psychic trance that numbs us at the current time.
I hope this evening to support the mindquakes we need if we are to see
the radically different world which is already emerging around us.
The first part of my talk will deal with the economic, social,
environmental, moral and spiritual crises of our time. I shall show that
there must be profound shifts if we are to avoid the breakdowns that
threaten our future. I shall move rapidly through this part of my talk
realizing that I shall not convince you by my arguments if you are not
already in sympathy with what I am saying. The second part will deal with
the processes that will support the discovery of a radically different future.
But before I can even start on the description of the crises I need to say
why we have no choice but to move rapidly in new directions. The core
reality of our time is that we live in a period of rapidly increasing
stress. It has developed because the twentieth century has seen a profound
change in all the realities of our world but neither our institutions nor
our visions have kept up.
At the beginning of the century, the population of the world was 1.6
billion. It is now 5.6 billion. We have moved from an empty world to one
which is already pressuring space and resources and will do so more
severely even if the most hopeful assumptions about population growth are
realized. And yet there are still powerful voices that refuse to support
the need for decreasing births as rapidly as possible.
In this same century, we have moved from a world where natural resources,
especially air, land and water were relatively abundant, to one where
shortages loom and are already causing havoc in certain parts of the world.
At the same time, it is clear that the wastes from our technological,
industrial culture are having severe impacts on the quality of the food we
eat, the water we drink and the air we breathe: many diseases are becoming
more frequent such as cancer and asthma. Nevertheless, many powerful
institutions still refuse to recognize the need for more intelligent
development and growth strategies.
In this same century, we have moved from a world in which access to
information was still severely limited to one in which we are all drowning
in infoglut. And yet we act as though it is desirable to publish still
more words which few people read and even fewer absorb. I am convinced
that when information doubles, knowledge halves and wisdom quarters.
In this same century, most of those in the developed countries have seen
our standards of living increase to the point that more stuff does not add
to our satisfactions. There is a growing commitment to breaking out of the
consumption race - a trend which has shown up over recent Christmases as
people refuse to buy, buy, buy.
In this same century, more and more people are recognizing that there can
be no single correct view of the world. Competing viewpoints now strive
for acceptance. None of our traditional understandings enable us to deal
with these radical divergences of view. We are now learning to explore the
skills of dialogue and common ground work in order to close the gaps in
understanding. This will prevent conflicts from escalating into violence.
In this same century, our understanding of how the world is, and should be
structured, has changed dramatically. Scientific theorists no longer
believe that Newtonian models of reality can be used to describe complex
human and natural interactions. They are moving to new explanations such
as those contained in fractal, chaos and complexity theory.
It is this last shift which is perhaps the most dramatic, although largely
unseen solvent, of past realities. Our institutions are based on the
belief that people at the top should have the power to coerce and dominate.
These institutions are now increasingly ineffective because people no
longer accept that traditional leaders have the ability to decide how they
should live their lives.
It is these shifts, and many others, which are bringing about the crises
that I shall now describe briefly. These changes are irreversible. A new
world is already being born around us. We can choose to ignore its
imperatives and suffer terrible costs. Alternatively, we can work with the
positive forces that are already developing to create the higher quality of
life which is possible for the future.
The economic crisis.
Economists have managed to hide the most basic economic reality from the
public. To listen to the discussions, one would think that the real issue
is how to produce enough. In reality, the core problem has been how to
ensure that demand kept up with production so that factories could keep
humming and services would be purchased.
The solution in the nineteenth century was for the colonial powers to send
goods to their dependencies and to accept debt in return. The United
States also benefited from this strategy. The early twentieth century
approach was to provide workers with a living wage.
The late twentieth century strategy has been to encourage people to go into
debt. Demand has also been generated by the movement of people in many poor
countries into the middle class. On the other side of the equation
ever-increasing inequality makes it more difficult to maintain levels of
consumption.
Demand has also been maintained by high investment in certain developing
countries, notably the Asian tigers. The current Asian crisis has exposed
the dangers of the strategies which have been used over recent decades.
There is now massive overcapacity in the world in many areas of production
such as computers and automobiles. The conventional view is still that the
economies of the United States and Canada are so strong that the Asian
crisis will have little negative effect.
Others share my deep concerns. It is now possible for Asian countries to
sell goods at prices far below those achievable by Western producers. The
consequences of this reality seem potentially far more serious than most
analysts seem willing to recognize. We may well see deflation rather than
inflation: this can carry acute dangers for economic systems.
I am not predicting a recession or slump; there are far too many variables
to be sure about the future. I am arguing that the comfortable assertions
we have so far heard about North American fundamentals being sound seem to
contain a high level of wishful thinking. The last weeks suggest that
complacency is finally being eroded: one has to hope that it will not be
succeeded by ill-conceived measures fostered by panic.
The social crisis.
Regardless of our economic future, it is now abundantly clear that the
existing social system is currently producing profoundly dangerous trends.
The overwhelming world-wide direction is the development of a super-rich
class in all but a few countries. At the other end of the income ladder
more and more people are becoming mired in poverty:
Within this overall pattern, there are different developments in various
parts of the world. In Europe and Canada, unemployment is at levels which
would have been totally unacceptable as little as a decade ago. This is
leading to increasingly acute xenophobia and the dangerous increase in the
acceptability of extreme right-wing nostrums which deny the fact that we
live in an interconnected world.
In the United States, levels of unemployment have fallen to levels which
were considered impossible at the beginning of the nineties. But more and
more jobs are at low income levels and do not provide benefits. Poverty
problems are hardly being touched by the apparent prosperity of the country
and the demand for food is outrunning the potential of food banks. Extreme
hardship continues to spread and charitable giving is falling rather than
rising.
Some countries previously poor are growing rapidly in economic terms. But
the current pattern is that most of the population remain mired in poverty
while a small proportion enters the middle class and some people become
super-rich. The social contracts in these areas are being disrupted by the
growth patterns and discontent is growing rapidly. The euphoria in the
Asian Tigers is turning to disillusionment in many cases.
Finally, there are all too many countries where poverty has worsened over
the last twenty years. The gap between the wealth of the rich countries
and the penury of the poor nations has become even more extreme. At the
same time the amount of money that the rich countries have been willing to
provide in aid has declined.
It is my judgement that these trends will intensify so long as we maintain
the paradigm in which we currently think. It is also my judgement that
these trends must lead to massive breakdowns not only through social unrest
but also because of massive epidemics of old and new diseases. The threat
of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse riding again is all too real.
The moral crisis.
I do not personally understand how anybody with a moral conscience can
accept the trends which are currently developing. Many of you will have
seen the coverage of the Calcutta slums which were shown in the period
before the Mother Theresa funeral. Is there nothing which will shock us
into a realization that we already live in an intolerable world?
I am told that things have to get bad enough before we shall be prepared to
change our thinking and our actions. On my worst days, I fear that human
beings can accustom themselves to anything. We are prepared to turn our
eyes away from the massive tragedies in the world and hope that they will
not affect us.
Let me come closer to home. I have been visiting Toronto consistently for
two years for a variety of reasons. I have watched the quality of life in
your city and province decline. I have seen the progressive loss of the
social solidarity which seems to me to have distinguished Canada from the
United States.
I do not believe that the current developments represent the wishes of
Canadians: I am reinforced in this view by the latest MacLeans end-of-year
poll. Unfortunately, the political and business elite is clearly out of
touch with the vision and beliefs of most people. There is a need for a
new movement which will express the belief that we can provide for
everybody's need but not for everybody's greed.
The ecological crisis.
The response from economists and politicians to what I have said so far is,
of course, well known. All we have to do, we are informed, is to be more
committed to what we have been doing for the last twenty years. The
medicine we have been taking is good for us: the doses have just not been
large enough.
Fortunately, I am an economist and I can tell you that this attempt to
demand unquestioning obedience to a set of destructive dogmas is based on
blind faith rather than reason. The strategies which are being tried will
not yield positive results however ferociously they are applied. We have
been hoodwinked.
At some point, our increase in population and production will overstrain
ecological systems. The argument about when this happens is not yet
settled but this statement is unarguable. Some believe we have already
moved beyond sustainability. Others think that there is still some
flexibility in the system.
The harsh truth, however, is that we shall exceed ecological limits at some
point in the next century unless we move beyond an economic system which is
only viable on the basis of materialism and maximum economic growth. And
as we do not know where the real limits are, the only prudent course is to
move as rapidly as possible to limit population, production and wastes.
The spiritual crisis.
Those people who concentrate on economic statistics are seeing the end of
the nineties as a golden age. Those who look more broadly at the overall
realities of our time bemoan the fact that leaders are not taking advantage
of the current economic prosperity to deal with the crises I have described
above. They argue that the failure to look beyond the immediate is
undermining our capacity to produce a high quality of life for the
twenty-first century.
There is broad agreement on one issue among those who look at the future -
there will be enormous change in the next decades. It is the direction of
this change which is not agreed. It seems fair to say that the argument is
between those who believe that economic growth, supported by technological
change, remains the wave of the future and those who are convinced that the
true crisis lies much deeper and can be best described as spiritual.
I am one of those who holds this latter view. I am aware that the word
spirituality is still booby-trapped for many people. The essential point I
want to make is that our current emphasis on what can be measured and owned
is disguising what we all really want and need from life. I believe that
we are hungry for authentic relationships with other individuals and with
the natural world. I believe that we are mammals and that we cannot escape
our long evolutionary history.
This does not mean I am a technophobe. But I believe we can no longer
assume all technologies will automatically benefit us. Rather we must
learn how to make decisions in ways which will enhance the quality of life
of this and future generations. Our challenge is to find the future which
will enable the continuation of the extraordinary journey which has taken
place on this planet over millions of years.
Discovering the future.
It is easy to fall into despair when one recognizes that the current ways
we think and act are disastrously flawed. Indeed some spiritual counselors
would argue that a black night of the soul is necessary to move to a point
where one is willing to contemplate the level of changes which are required
to shift our consciousness sufficiently to discover an alternative way of
facing the future.
I want to propose to you this afternoon that the only way to break out of
this monstrous set of problems is to conceptualize the world in which we
live in a totally different way. I shall state a number of beliefs which I
am convinced make it possible for societies to have a totally different
feel and structure. The world in which I choose to live, which is based on
these beliefs, has totally different patterns and potentials than those of
the industrial era.
This set of beliefs is grounded in a profoundly different view of reality.
It goes beyond the logical analysis I have made about the breakdowns now
going on in the society and proposes a more positive vision of how we as
human beings can interact with each other and nature. It starts from the
following assumption.
All organisms possess a drive to health.
This vision is so different to that which has driven our culture for so
long that it is difficult to even broach this subject within our dominant
modes of thinking. We have become so used to "fixing" things that this is
the often the only approach we consider. We fix our hyperactive children
with Ritalin, our depression with Prozac, our lack of self-worth with
alcohol and drugs. We fix our social problems with legislation. All too
often we fix our environmental difficulties with more intervention to cure
past failures. And we fix our illness problems with drugs which cause
resistance in the next generation of germs and viruses: this is causing an
increasingly recognized threat to our ability to deal with past and future
diseases.
And yet we have abundant evidence that there are alternatives to our
current strategies. Anybody who looks at the available evidence will find
that bodies will often cure themselves if given time and space -- indeed
some of the cures which are clearly on the record can only be classified as
miraculous. The most dramatic recoveries from environmental problems have
the insults which have been causing the degradation have been removed and
natural forces freed up to work - this has been true, for example, in the
Great Lakes and the Hudson River. In the social field, it has been the
commitment of individuals and groups that have led to the most remarkable
turn-arounds in neighborhoods and communities rather than legislation.
Most people most of the time want to develop themselves and help others
develop. This is the natural order of things. It is this order which has
been broken by our industrial norms which have pitted us against each other
and against nature. We have come to accept that we must live in ways which
are destructive to our own dreams and to those of others. John Maynard
Keynes, arguably the greatest economist of our times, made this point in an
essay entitled "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren." He said
that our descendants would be able to recognize for the vices they actually
are those actions we now proclaim as the highest virtues.
The time has now come to make the moral shift he foreshadowed. If we are
to survive the twenty-first century, we must abandon the negative vision of
the world in which we live and learn to live through a positive vision of
hope. We can talk, as Matthew Fox does, about replacing the concept of
original sin with that of original blessing. Or we can talk about the
reenchanctment of the world and our lives; a theme used by a growing number
of authors.
Before I leave this topic, I need to be clear. I an only too well aware
that the drive to health is blocked in many people, institutions and
systems. There are a huge number of reasons for these blocks. But we
shall work very differently with them once we recognize that our task is to
break through to the inherent, natural, healing forces which exist in most
people most of the time.
I am not arguing that all people can be healed. There are people who have
been so warped by their experiences that there is so way their behaviors
are going to change. I am not a Utopian. I believe that the systems we
bring into existence must recognize that a small proportion of people will,
for any forseeable future, try to take advantage of others.
Nevertheless, our global culture can only survive when we accept that it is
the drive to health which is fundamental. It is true that we fail all too
often. But we need to concentrate on our positive efforts rather than to
be fixated on our failures.
Finally, at a different level, I need to remind us all that while systems
do tend to recover if given a chance, there are all too many examples of
times and places where they have been so stressed that they move
permanently into a new, and less, desirable forms. The underlying threat
of the twenty-first century is that the human pressures and wastes of an
excessive population will break the natural equilibrium in ways which cause
the four horsemen of the Apocalypse to ride once again.
This move toward health as the natural state needs to be accompanied by
several other shifts in consciousness if we are to be able to live well in
the twenty-first century.
We need to live as if we are on a journey rather than travelling toward a
fixed destination.
Many years ago I produced a dialogue on work. One of the authors caught
the way we used to view life. He argued that we "prepared to work,
prepared to retire and prepared to die." His point was that we were always
looking to the future rather than enjoying the present. Life was
conceptualized as having a destination and our success or failure was to be
measured in terms of whether we eventually reached the destination we had
set for ourselves.
In the future, we shall live as though we are on a journey. We shall
recognize that all our choices determine where we move throughout our lives
and that major breakpoints often emerge from apparently trivial causes. We
shall come to understand that we can only live well if we concentrate on
the moment in which we are actually living.
I have been fascinated to see the emergence of this journey rhetoric in
popular culture. The implications are, of course, deep and wide. If we
cannot plan our lives, then most of the tactics and strategies we have
learned during our educational process are no longer valid. Instead of
strategically planning the future, we need to develop a vision which
permits us to make the choices which are best for us as we move through an
endless series of choice points.
One is more intensely conscious when one lives one's journey. One no
longer exists in a cultural trance accepting the norms and values of others
as absolutes. On the other hand, one is also intensely aware of the need
to understand the patterns of behaviors of friends and colleagues so that
shared decisions and directions are possible.
We need to operate in partnership rather than be forced to act through
top-down power or while pretending that everybody's skills and knowledge
are equal.
One of the largest changes in the last fifty years is around our thinking
about leadership and authority. When I was growing up it was widely
assumed that those at the top of systems understood what was needed by
virtue of their position. Today, this assumption is increasingly
challenged. But despite the doubts of more and more people, we still hope
that there will be some individual who will come along and resolve all the
problems of the world. Although we know, intellectually, that it is not
going to be possible for an elected leader to order the future, the
rhetoric of elections suggests that the fate of the country, and possibly
the world, is in the balance.
The alternative view which has emerged to challenge the traditional
top-down authority is that of flat systems where everybody is equally
competent. Today, a growing number of systems are paralyzed because there
are no processes which permit decisions to be taken. There are no accepted
standards of judgement within institutions and society as a whole. To make
matters worse, issues can be opened and reopened on an endless basis: there
is no willingness to accept what has been decided and to move on to the
next issues that need to be considered.
Part of the problem here is that we have attempted to substitute the law
for the process of public debate and dialogue. There are two reasons for
this. One is that people seem less and less willing to take on the
responsibilities of citizens. The other is that we want tidy solutions
rather than the messy process which is inevitably part of a
well-functioning society.
It is past time that we recognized that neither top-down nor flat systems
will enable effective decision-making. In Riane Eisler's term, we need
partnership approaches. This means that we are constantly in tension
between two choices. On the one hand, we are aware that we have the skills
in certain areas to make good decisions but we also know that if we do so
people will not learn. On the other hand, we know that we need to let
people try out their wings but there are certain choices which are critical
and where one's superior knowledge needs to be applied so as to avoid
catastrophic failures.
This shift toward partnership is part of a far broader area of change. Our
current thinking is largely based on dichotomies between right and wrong,
good and evil, top-down and flat. We are discovering that the real world
is far more complex and less clear-cut. Shifting to be able to deal with
uncertainty and continuous choice is one of the primary challenges of the
twenty-first century.
Issues need to be examined in positive rather than negative terms, in
search for strengths and breakthrough potentials.
Western culture has a profound bias toward examining the negative rather
than the positive. In this area, as in all others, there is a need for
balance. We need to search for the strengths that people, organizations
and cultures have without ignoring the fact that these strengths, taken to
extremes, inevitably lead to weaknesses.
In more and more fields of study and work, the emphasis is shifting. For
example, community work increasingly looks at potentials rather than
deficits. The result is to set free potential which has been hidden by an
emphasis on the difficulties which neighborhoods and communities are
experiencing. The same thing happens as people are reminded of their
potentials.
The problem with this line of argument is that it is all too often taken to
extremes. There is great strength in positive thinking. But if one
forgets the shadow side, people are all too likely to ride roughshod over
the needs of others who have less strength, power or position than they do.
There is a need to respect the needs of others as well as to search for
one's own bliss.
In addition, it is all too possible to forget that there are real limits.
The belief in the possibility for endless maximum economic growth is an
example of what can happen on a societal level when positive thinking loses
all sense of context and reality.
All people and situations are unique. Our tendency to rely on statistical
realities disguises more than it reveals.
Just as the journey rhetoric is becoming common in ordinary discourse, so
is the argument that everybody is unique. Interestingly, one hears it
particularly in financial ads which proclaim the ability of financial firms
to look after each investor separately. The fact that this claim is bogus
does not detract from the fact that these companies are tapping into a deep
desire of people to be seen as their own person.
But we need to remember that this is a profoundly new trend. Only a short
time ago, people wanted to be seen as part of the crowd. Their behaviors
were defined by age, sex, class, color, sexual orientation. These patterns
are now breaking down and it is less and less possible to be sure how
people will think because of these obvious characteristics. People are
learning to think for themselves and to make up their own minds.
Our tendency to think in terms of averages and statistical norms are
however deeply ingrained. One of the examples that fascinates me is in
terms of family size. It is now obvious that there has to be a rapid
decline in the number of children born. The normal proposal is that each
family should have a smaller number of children. I have never heard
somebody suggest that the obvious answer is that many people should not
have children because they do not want to be parents while some people, who
have great nurturing skills, should have larger families.
Once we think in terms of uniqueness, the issue of diversity is
transformed. It becomes clear that fixation on obvious characteristics can
separate rather than unite. A deep understanding of this reality would
make it possible to transform the currently sterile debate about helping
those who deserve more help from the society than others. We would see
that we should be concentrating on the dispossessed, regardless of age,
sex, colour etc.
Effectiveness requires people to be profoundly present in the moment. This
is only possible if people have time to center themselves through the
reduction of stress and fatigue.
How often have you been in meetings when you had an eerie feeling that
people were really agreeing with each other but were just arguing about
words? Have you sometimes actually stopped the flow of the discussion and
said "But aren't you actually saying the same thing?"
There are at least three critical reasons for this failure to communicate.
The first is that people are typically aiming to advance their agenda and
listening to the flow of conversation in terms of how they can use it.
They are not concerned with the potential synergies which could emerge
through the presence in the room of this particular group of people.
The second is that people are so tired, so stressed, so overloaded that
they are rarely "present" in their activities. They are thinking about
their other responsibilities and urgencies. There is little chance that
they will connect with new ideas and potentials if they are caught within
their ongoing problems and crises.
The third is that we have been taught to listen for disagreement rather
than agreement. Out style is to respond with "but" rather than "and." We
do not look for the agreements we can share but for the disagreements we
have - or often can create. This style reaches its true absurdity in
academic settings where totally unrealistic sets of assumptions are
accepted as true and we argue about details. In the process reality gets
totally lost.
It is fair to say that my life was transformed when I recognized that the
way to work with people was to enter a conversation looking for the point
where there was common ground. Once I could find it, I could build on it
and it often took us in directions which none of us anticipated.
People can only learn what they are ready to understand. Surfacing issues
that people do not yet grasp or are denying etc. is a waste of time.
Teaching and organizing take on a very different flavor in these conditions.
When we disagree with people, we normally assume that the other person
"hears" what we are saying and is reacting negatively to it. In reality,
the most important disagreements occur when the other person is unable to
grasp the basic point which is being made. The argument is not between one
idea and another but rather between a new idea and a total incomprehension
of what is being said.
I call this the "black hole" problem. The way to deal with a black hole is
not to become more intensely focussed and, probably, more angry. People do
not learn truly different ideas by being beaten on the head. The process
is far more indirect. "Mindquakes" occur indirectly as people are invited
to look at the world in different ways.
It is this realization which leads us directly to the role of the arts. It
is the arts which can give people the space to think outside the box: to
see the world from a new viewpoint. It is this subject which I now take up
and with which I shall close my speech.
The role of the arts.
I do not claim to do an arts scholar in any sense. However, when I was at
Cambridge University, I listened to Nicholas Pevsner give a series of
lectures about the Renaissance. His overarching theme, at least as I heard
it, was the way in which artists of this period changed the way in which
people looked at the world. Painting moved from being two-dimensional to
three-dimensional through the introduction of perspective.
The question I would ask those of you in the artistic community is what
role you should be playing in the shift in perspective which I have
suggested is vital and urgent. I believe that the deep structures which
determine the outlines of the world in which we live are set at a mythic
level rather than by rationality or logic. It is the arts which can move
us from one vision of reality to another.
I use the arts in the broadest sense here. Throughout our culture we are
denying the need for the arts and the humanities. We are turning our
universities into technical schools which teach short-term information:
universities continue to show their priorities by the programs they choose
to support and cancel. We prefer bean-counters to people of vision. We
ask the arts to support themselves within a consumption system which must
inevitably prefer the trivial to the challenging. And, above all, we
distrust the people and feed them pap rather than the substantial diet
which will enable them to find their own future.
The tragedy, of course, is that this direction will create a
self-fulfilling prophecy. It is true that technology can solve many of our
short-run problems. But the holes which now exist in our spirits and souls
cannot be filled by technology. Our addictions will worsen until we
reconnect to each other and to the natural world.
There are two possible answers to the current challenges to the arts. One
is to accept the market rhetoric that dominates the rest of the culture.
If you move in this direction you may possibly be financially viable but
you will be doomed to fit more and more closely within the materialistic
norms of our times. You may continue to function but you will lose your
own souls.
Alternatively, you can enliven the old traditions supported by those who
believe in the importance of the liberal arts and the ability to think.
You can argue for the right to think freely outside the box. You can
reclaim the role of the arts as the breaker of old boundaries and the
creator of new dream and visions.
>From my perspective the key question is whether we shall see an effective
movement launched to challenge the current materialistic and technological
drives of our culture? As a rational analyst, I fear that we shall not.
The inertia of the current system is enormous. There is a tendency to do
what seems to be necessary without looking for the alternatives which exist.
The tragedy behind this rational conclusion is that a deep, inchoate
yearning for profound change already exists and its visibility only awaits
an effective catalyst. My lifetime's work has shown me that people are now
ready to challenge the current conventional wisdom. Many know that their
lives, their work, their professions, their political parties are without
the deep meaning for which they yearn. They are waiting for a wake-up call
that will give them the faith and the courage to believe that their actions
will make a difference. We do not have to convince people of the need to
change direction: this work has already been done. We need to have the
imagination and the skills to propose spaces in which humanity can explore
the dramatic changes required to regain our souls.
This is a time for courage and risks. It is a time to argue for a higher
vision of human purpose than that we have accepted in recent years. It is
time for us to see the challenges and to resolve to meet them. This is a
moment when the actions of each of us can make a profound difference.
Blessings and Peace,
Robert
East 202 Rockwood Blvd, #1,
Spokane, Wa 99202, USA
509-835-3569
e-mail:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
QLN Network: http://www.transform.org/transform/qln/index.html
Theobald: http://www.transform.org/transform/tlc/rtpage.html
Vital Connections: http://www.islandnet.com/ideas/vital
The answer to almst all tough questions is "It all depends."
