Global Mind Change: The Promise of the 21st Century by Willis Harman


“. . . it is critically important . . . that our science is adequate. It is impossible to create a well-working society on a knowledge base that is fundamentally inadequate, seriously incomplete, and mistaken in basic assumptions. Yet that is precisely what the modern world has been trying to do.”

 

(This entry is excerpted from a book review at Change Management Monitor)

Overview

Harman’s basic thesis is:

We are living through one of the most fundamental shifts in history - a change in the actual belief structure of Western society. No economic, political, or military power can compare with the power of a change of mind. By deliberately changing their images of reality, people are changing the world.

But the task is not easy. People are threatened by the awareness…of impending change in their lives. The prospect that ‘truths’ they have known all their lives might be superseded by some other beliefs can be especially threatening. Thus there is a tendency to ‘fight back’ - to actively oppose the change.

I believe the key challenge is not to try to resist a change that may well be inevitable, nor is it to be zealous in fomenting a change prematurely. It is, rather, trying to help our society understand the nature and necessity of the forces of historical change we are experiencing, to go through the change with mutual cooperation and caring, with as little misery as possible.

 

The failure of the growth-based capitalist economy

To illustrate the inadequacy of the basic assumptions on which the management of Western societies is based, Harman quotes the enormous rise in global insecurity resulting from the quest for national security; the central position given to economic institutions and the associated discouragement of frugality and encouragement of consumption to use up production in a world of finite resources; the associated heavy discounting of the future and the assumption of an ability to ‘control nature’ rather than regarding ourselves as part of it.

He then briefly summarises the interrelationships between three of the chief aspects of the current global problem: widespread poverty and hunger, environmental degradation and the weapons dilemma. He argues that the problems have their origin in:

. . . basic assumptions, starting with the prevailing reality view. Since modern culture ascribes no ‘reality’ to inner experience, transcendent values have no power and materialistic values prevail. Thus it seems reasonable for society to be characterized by economic rationalization of an ever-increasing fraction of social behaviour and organization . . . Economic rationality becomes predominant in social and political decision making, even when the decisions it leads to are unwise by other standards (such as the well-being of future generations) . . . Humankind’s relationship to the Earth is essentially an exploitative one.

He goes on to argue:

Even the most powerful institution can change or crumble when there is a strong challenge to its legitimacy . . . The basis for such a legitimacy challenge is typically a combination of one or more of the following: The old order is not functioning effectively to achieve agreed-upon goals, it is not functioning in accordance with consensually approved values, or it was never duly constituted in the first place. What passes relatively unnoticed is that the modern growth-based capitalist economy fails on all three counts. It is not achieving societal goals . . . economic values are an inadequate guide for an institution which so powerfully affects all aspects of society; and the corporation was never originally chartered to have such freedoms as it currently enjoys.

 

Paradigm shift

There is a radical re-perception spreading among Western societies affecting, according to Harman, some 10% to 40% of the population of countries in the industrialised world. Harman identifies five aspects of this re-perception:

  • a search for wholeness
  • a search for community and relationship
  • a search for identity (including ethnic, gender, sexual preference and other forms of identity)
  • a search for meaning shown in ‘an evident re-spiritualization of Western society, with emphasis on self-realization, transcendent meaning, and inner growth leading to wisdom…’
  • a sense of empowerment (expressed in the protests against the Vietnam war and a host of effective movements since)

and five value emphases associated with it:

  • humans in harmony with nature
  • humans in harmony with one another
  • individual self-realization
  • decentralization and an ecology of cultures
  • globalization of global issues (global management of those affairs that, by their nature are global concerns)

He argues that these values are coalescing towards a ‘new metaphysic’ and that it will have an impact throughout society, including the business sector, which is beginning to realign both its internal values - towards individual development and empowerment and also its values to the external world. Three elements in this emerging worldview appear to be

  • increased emphasis on connectedness - not only of things but also our inner, subjective experience
  • a shift in the locus of authority from external to internal
  • a shift in the perception of cause from external to internal - the growing assertion that ‘we are co-creators of our world and that ultimate cause is to be sought not in the physical, but in mind, or consciousness’

The final chapter argues that society is in a period of transition, with the old order visibly in decline but the shape of the new order not yet discernible.

The decline of the old is in the face of four challenges:

  1. The challenge of environmental sustainability: The present social and economic order does not appear to be sustainable in the long term, in terms of effects on the Earth’s ecological and life-support systems.
  2. The equity and justice challenge: Power tends to concentrate - those who have economic, technological and political power are in the best position to gain more, so that without some effective countervailing force, democratic tendencies are thwarted, both within and between countries.
  3. Increasing marginalization of people and cultures: All the world is urged toward Western industrial monoculture, and a widening fraction of the population is treated as superfluous to the needs of the global economy.
  4. The worldview challenge: At a more fundamental level, the worldview that prevails in the most powerful institutions (strongly influenced by science) is increasingly challenged as being flawed, misleading and destructive of humane values and meanings.

Each of these he examines in some depth, showing how the very success of the current order has contributed to, even caused the growth of the problems that challenge it.

In discussing the third challenge in the context of employment, he writes:

The fundamental question as we look ahead is not how we can stimulate more demand for goods and services and information, nor is it how we can create more jobs in the mainstream economy. The key question is a much more fundamental one. It is basically a question of meaning: What is the central purpose of technologically advanced societies when it no longer makes sense for that central purpose to be economic production - because that is no longer a challenge and because in the long run economic production does not lead to a viable global future? The question is fundamentally spiritual, not economic.

After a brief essay on the history of work and the genesis of our current attitudes to it, he identifies that ‘the real question is whether the assumption of production-focused society is fundamentally obsolete.’ If it is, ‘the assumption that income distribution should be strongly linked to jobs in the mainline economy needs to be reassessed.’

He also argues that what is needed is a new ‘central project’ for society which will give meaning to work (as the conquest of the frontier was the ‘central project’ of the nascent North America). He argues that this central project is to create a ‘learning society’ in which employment exists primarily for self-development and is only secondarily concerned with the production of goods and services.

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Published::
11.3.07 / 7am
Category:
Appropriate Science and Technology, Change in Change, Democratic Democracy, Ecosocionomics, Global Governance, Learning for Life, Life's Necessities, Man, Means, Paths, Ends, Spirituality, Unity in Diversity
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