Conscious Choice: The Coming Giant Wave of Change

August 2003

The Coming Giant Wave of Change

by Jim Kenney

Imagine an ocean moment...two waves converging in the same time and space. One is powerful but subsiding, the other just gathering momentum and presence but not yet cresting. At the point of their meeting they are nearly equal in amplitude and influence. As they cross, who can say which is rising, which descends? In that moment there is only the chaos of wave interference, as the medium of interaction is utterly changed.

Now take another moment and imagine modernity as a powerful wave of cultural values that crested half a century ago and is now slowly beginning to subside. A second wave of countervailing values rises equally slowly, building until its cresting amplitude begins to rival the declining energy of the older wave.

In American culture the modern wave with all of its interrelated values, models, assumptions, and predispositions has long been dominant; but in our own time we have begun to discern evidence of the weakening of its essential dynamics and to recognize the growing strength of a countervailing value wave. Take the example of patriarchy. There’s certainly no more characteristic feature of modernity than the cultural assumption of the native superiority of the male and the concomitant notion that men should dominate every aspect of public and private life. To be sure, patriarchal assumptions have been part of the human social order for most of recorded history. Today, however, patriarchy’s long dominance has been so powerfully challenged that it seems particularly unlikely to continue.

And that’s just the beginning. To the elements of the new wave we can add: a new commitment to human rights, an unprecedented range of concern for social and economic justice, a profound awakening of the long dormant human sense of respect for the Earth, and a growing and vocal movement insisting that war has outlived its usefulness and legitimacy.

Before you protest that the state of the world seems to reflect just the opposite, consider that we live not in the time of the ascendancy of the new wave but in a time of crossing. The values, assumptions, and habits of thought that harbored racism, tolerated injustice, nurtured patriarchy, presided over the rape of the planet, and refined the art of war have been challenged as never before. Their influence has sharply lessened, but their institutional and cultural infrastructures remain powerful and largely in place. At the same historical moment, however, a compelling array of contrasting values, understandings, hopes, and dreams is taking shape in a new cultural evolutionary wave ascending to take the place of the ebbing older tide.

And Here’s the Proof

Evidence of the transition abounds. Consider the dramatic transformation of cultural attitudes and structures in the wake of the movement for the liberation of women or the hesitant but persistent "greening" of global values that found expression at the Johannesburg Earth Summit in 2002. The current global anti-war movement, to cite a more recent example, has given rise to protests and concern on a scale never before witnessed yet tempered by a range of thoughtful new analyses of violence and the human condition.

The struggle for human rights, in the 55 years since Eleanor Roosevelt fought for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on the floor of the new United Nations, has brought issues of racism, sexism, and social injustice to the fore in global politics. The growth of interreligious and interspiritual movements in America and around the world has shaped a powerful counterpoint to regressive and reactionary religious fundamentalism. Taken as a whole, the address to issues of peace, justice, and sustainability now forms the core of a new world activism confronting the dangers of what one could term "globalization from the top down."

In a sense, the younger wave represents a new global order of a different sort, a "globalization from the bottom up." The transition is evident in an emerging worldwide consensus of values sharing a central focus or pulse. We can discern its animating presence in each of the developments we’ve noted: the long, slow shift from ethnocentrism to worldcentrism. Each failing cultural dynamic of the older wave — sexism, racism, intolerance, fundamentalism, injustice, imperialism, eco-abuse — manifests the essential blindness of ethnocentrism, the conviction that one’s own group, gender, race, class, nation, or species is somehow inherently superior to every other.

Make no mistake, the values of the declining wave still possess tremendous influence and command significant institutional infrastructures; but their radical disconnect with changing human and planetary realities becomes more and more apparent. The belief that the other is "alien" and always deficient in some critical regard requires at the very least a deep ignorance of that other, an ignorance that becomes more difficult to maintain with every new interhuman network link or interspiritually shared "aha" experience. And that’s the undeniable advantage of the worldcentric value wave.

Perhaps the clearest mark of the steady progress of cultural evolution shows itself in the reaction we begin to feel in the presence of stark ethnocentrism. The unapologetic hater — the racist, sexist, homophobe, eco-predator, war hawk, or cultural despoiler — every day becomes more of an anomaly and an embarrassment to those who realize that they live in an age of transition. In an age that learns more every day about other ways of life and about the wonderful complexities of interdependent existence, worldcentrism has just the right wavelength.

Jim Kenney is co-editor of Interreligious Insight: A Journal of Dialogue and Engagement, director of Common Ground, and executive director of the Interreligious Engagement Project (IEP21) working with global religious communities to address the world’s critical problems.

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