The Amphetamine of the Intellectuals (John Michael Greer)

  One of the most inescapable dimensions of the crisis of industrial society is the hard fact that six and a half billion people now live on a planet that can support, at most, two billion sustainably. While today’s wildly skewed distribution of wealth and access to resources certainly won’t help, no amount of redistribution can change the harsh realities that a species in overshoot faces as its resource base falls out from under it.

  Round in Circles: a review of David C. Korten’s The Great Turning 

  John Michael Greer -- The Archdruid Report

  Part Two: The Amphetamine of the Intellectuals

  March 14, 2007 -- As the first part of this review suggested, David Korten’s widely praised book The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community proposes what amounts to a political solution for the predicament of industrial society.

  Korten argues that replacing current “developmentally challenged” politicians with new leadership drawn from the upper ranks of today’s progressive social change movements will foster a shift from a society based on the old ideology of Empire to one based on his preferred ideology of Earth Community. This shift, he claims, is the only effective response we can make to the crisis of industrial civilization he surveys so eloquently in the third chapter of the book. Yet it’s only fair to ask just how Korten anticipates that a society guided by his “emerging values consensus” will deal with, say, the immense practical challenges of coping with peak oil

  You can read The Great Turning from cover to cover without finding an answer to that question. Look up “peak oil” in the index, and you’ll find that the only places in The Great Turning that mention it at all belong to the section of the book dedicated to showing just how awful Empire is. Like global warming, terrorism, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and the likely implosion of an unstable economy founded on the smoke and mirrors of hallucinated wealth, peak oil appears only as one of the “sorrows of Empire” for which Earth Community is Korten’s solution. The sections of his book devoted to describing Earth Community never stoop to mention these troubles at all, much less propose solutions to them.

  The nearest approach Korten makes to a discussion of such practicalities is a claim that once Empire is replaced by Earth Community, people will no longer want possessions they don’t need, and this will free up enough resources that everyone will be able to have their needs met. As a response to our current predicament, of course, this isn’t even remotely adequate. One of the most inescapable dimensions of the crisis of industrial society is the hard fact that six and a half billion people now live on a planet that can support, at most, two billion sustainably. While today’s wildly skewed distribution of wealth and access to resources certainly won’t help, no amount of redistribution can change the harsh realities that a species in overshoot faces as its resource base falls out from under it.

  At the same time, Korten’s suggestion that everything will work out if we just learn to share is more than he has to offer for most of the other dimensions of our contemporary crisis. Quite a bit of his vision of Earth Community, in fact, has an uncomfortable resemblance to sound bites from a political stump speech. His response to the bitter poverty that burdens more than half of our species, for instance, amounts to proclaiming that every human being has the right to a worthwhile means of livelihood, backed up by unemployment, retirement, and health care plans, irrespective of their ability to pay. It’s a fine slogan, but without an awareness of the massive challenges that need to be faced to provide these things to six and a half billion people in a deindustrializing economy – an awareness Korten nowhere displays – a slogan is all it is.

more

READ MORE: The Archdruid Report