I awoke the morning after I agreed to become one of Conscious Choice’s new columnists with Sheldon Harnick’s “The Merry Minuet” on my mind, a 1958 satirical song by the famed Broadway lyricist. It’s a song about hatred among nations, and ends with “What nature doesn’t do to us/Will be done by our fellow “man”. The song provides a nice lead into two important themes: the times we are living in right now; and who I am to be writing about them. The hatred that exists between different groups of human beings has never gone out of date, and in my lifetime there has not been any significant change in the ongoing aggression between individual humans or between groups of human beings.
I was asked two questions to consider as the basis for this column. First, what are the people of the world missing, and second, what is it that we need in order to live creatively in these torturous times. Although I could not pretend to have the answers to these questions, I did feel that I knew where to start looking.
By way of introduction, I am by profession a psychotherapist who has been in clinical practice for 37 years. I am also an ordained minister and a graduate of the University of Wisconsin, who came of age in the 1960s. I underwent a dramatic change in social and political consciousness while I was still a student at Madison. By the time I came to Chicago to work for St. Leonard’s House as Chaplain to the Cook County Jail and the Chicago House of Correction, I had become a neophyte political activist. I marched in civil rights and anti-war demonstrations, did draft counseling, and helped found a radical therapy collective in Lincoln Park. Like many young people of that time, I was hopeful that we were engaged in a historic movement that would create a social and cultural revolution in the United States and perhaps the entire world.
There is a scary parallel between what those of us in “the movement” experienced later in the 1970s and what young political activists and social reformers are experiencing today. It would seem that whenever people espousing the values of peace, love, understanding, mutuality, freedom and justice for all begin to organize for social change, “it’s as if an alarm were going off somewhere in the depths of…culture, triggering a massive retaliatory response.” I’ve taken this quote from the book Rebalancing the World, written by Carol Lee Flinders, because I believe that Flinders’ thought points directly towards the answers to the questions of what is missing and what is needed, if we are to transform life on the planet.
Flinders chronicles the evolution of human culture from the tribal life of the hunter-gatherers to the emergence of the Agricultural Revolution, which she posits created a highly significant bifurcation of human values. She calls the tribal values “the Values of Belonging” and the agricultural values “the Values of Enterprise.”
The “Values of Belonging” include empathy, self-restraint, balance, generosity, egalitarianism, an affinity for alternative modes of knowing, playfulness, inclusiveness, nonviolent conflict resolution, openness to Spirit, and living fully in the present moment. Do these not sound familiar!
She contrasts these values with the “Values of Enterprise”: control and ownership of land and animals, extravagance and exploitation, secretiveness, hierarchy, competitiveness, businesslike sobriety, exclusiveness, aggression, recklessness and violence, and of course, materialism.
Flinders sees the Values of Belonging gradually and inexorably suppressed, devalued, and subsumed by their Enterprise counterparts. This is not unlike what David Korten says in The Great Turning, when he differentiates between “Empire” and “Earth Community,” and when he says that the Imperial Consciousness has subsumed the Cultural and Spiritual Consciousness.
Most of us are aware that the Values of Belonging are still present today in some form and are individually espoused by environmentalists, human rights advocates, feminists, artists, and educators. Flinders believes that these values were “handed off” by the emerging culture of enterprise to two distinct groups, women and the clergy, and that it is through the family and certain religious institutions that these values of belonging have been preserved. Her answer to the question of what the world needs now is a “rebalancing” of the two groups of values, combining the values of belonging and the values of enterprise.
Flinders’ argument goes beyond the important insights of feminists and spiritualists, and removes castigating judgment from the “usual suspects,” patriarchy and men’s need for dominance, although she does offer a scintillating critique of where those values have lead us. Her work offers important understandings for each being to be able to contribute to a revolution of values.
In upcoming columns in Conscious Choice, I hope to explore the dynamics that exist between these two sets of values more fully. Meanwhile, get yourselves a copy of Rebalancing the World and take a look for yourselves at Flinders’ manifesto of balance.
Tom Goforth is a practicing psychotherapist, alternative healer, and published poet who lives in Chicago.