GETTING A GRIP: CLARITY, CREATIVITY AND COURAGE IN A WORLD GONE MAD, by Francs Moore Lappe (due out in October 2007)

THE REAL WEALTH OF NATIONS: CREATING A CARING ECONOMICS, by Riane Eisler

Review by David Belden

"Today socialists and leftists do not dream of a future qualitatively different from the present," wrote Russell Jacoby in 1999 in The End of Utopia. "To put it differently, radicalism no longer believes in itself.... Almost everywhere the left contracts, not simply politically but, perhaps more decisively, intellectually."

Already that judgment sounds off. Radical hope is being reborn from unexpected sources, including ones the Left has often denied and rejected: the personal, the religious, and the spiritual. A new intellectual understanding of the primacy of caring relationships is emerging. With it comes a sense that all of us living beings, human or not, are deeply interdependent. We are beginning to understand that we can be oppressed by the lack of meaning in our lives, and, after a certain material level has been achieved, that may be the most alienating aspect of our lives. The creative vision we need to transform society and radically extend democracy will build from our deepest discoveries of meaning.

Is "Anti-Globalization" a Tired Replay?

It is true the traditional Left is old and tired, its vision dimmed.

One way to look at globalization is as a replay on a vast scale of what happened on a national scale in the first industrial countries. In the nineteenth century, European and U.S. capitalist entrepreneurs raced away from community accountability. Some of the things they did were great for the people, while others were terrible and caused huge suffering and destruction of nature. It took innumerable struggles, organizing efforts, conflicts, creative innovations, and leaps of empathy and cooperation to create a culture and expectation of accountability, backed by a set of laws and institutions to make it real and enforceable. That culture and those institutions are called freedom, democracy, fair trade, social safety nets, civil rights, civil responsibilities, equal pay, pluralism, truth in labeling, collective bargaining, and all the other good things that were indeed achieved to a greater or lesser degree in today's leading industrial nations.

When globalization hit in our time, this process was far from complete. But many reforms had happened. When you read Howard Zinn's leftwing bible, A People's History of the United States, you can easily get the impression that the American ruling classes in 1976 were just as unaccountable as they had been in 1776; but it's not true. Massive and genuine victories had been achieved. We do not have unfettered capitalism. Unfettered capitalism is when there are no meat inspectors, no rigorous FDA drug testing, no restrictions on monopoly, no safety nets, no trade unions, no moratorium on nuclear power stations, no high standards.

One achievement many people are unaware of is that in the twentieth century, for the first time in history, major cities started to maintain their own populations without needing a constant inflow of migrants from the countryside. Previously they could not because their death rates were sky high from disease and poverty. That's every city from ancient Rome through Tenochtitlan to Victorian London. Healthy cities are a joint achievement of wealth-creating business, wise government that took citizen welfare seriously enough to tax and spend the new wealth on sewage, public health and schooling, people's struggles for better wages, conditions, and democracy, and professionals (scientific, engineering, medical, educational, political) and civil servants with consciences. Many were inspired by religion, many by Progress, many by socialism—many by all three simultaneously.

With globalization, capitalists have taken advantage of new technologies to leap ahead again and escape much of the accountability to which we the people had painstakingly tamed them. Again, there are benefits and losses. But if the people are to decide which are which and to set the standards for healthy community life, then those incessant struggles, organizing efforts, and innovations are all to be done again on a global scale. It's enough to make a labor organizer weep.

But we did it once. We will do it again.

There is a key difference between then and now, however. Then we had a dream: socialism. Now we don't.

It's Hard to Replay the Old Achievement Without the Old Dream

What can we learn from the failures as well as the successes of people's movements, often called the Left (though the people are always far more varied and inclusive than "the Left")?

It seems that for major changes to happen people need a real sense that their suffering is shared with many others, and that there is hope of doing something about it. When pain is privatized so that we are all sold individual remedies, from drugs to shopping to purely personal spirituality, we sink into political passivity. When the big boys manage the economy so there are no Great Depressions then there may be no corresponding energy to create New Deals, and the Old Deals can be eroded piece by piece.

That is, until the big boys erode so many checks and balances that volatility sweeps through the system again. Those who seek to escape accountability are rarely wise and good, whether in the courts of Louis XIV or George W. Bush, or the CEO suites of hedge funds and multinationals. So less accountability in the end brings more risk, more crashes. Do we have to wait for more exceptionally bad managers and warmongers, like Bush and Cheney, before more people start to vote again? Do we need more Katrinas, or some truly shocking results of global heating, like tens of millions of refugees from African desertification or Bangladeshi floods invading rich countries, before we get a grip and act? Perhaps that would galvanize, if the hope of better was strong.

What will turn us from anxious individuals into engaged citizens, or perhaps even revolutionaries?

That word "revolution"—or the way it has been used and understood on the Left—is one reason the Left has been increasingly marginalized and ineffective. The word too often implies that things are so wrong with America or Europe that they cannot evolve into something better. It implies that the victories to date are of little consequence. You may think the Left has become social democratic rather than revolutionary. But how many times have you seen a left magazine celebrate on its cover what is good about America, as Tikkun did in its last issue? One Tikkun intern felt queasy just to see it, even though he agreed with it, for fear of what his fellow Leftists would say.

Why is that? Why are we so uncomfortable with the idea that in many ways America and capitalism are reformable, and in many ways have been reformed, and we, the people, did it? America's working classes have voted with their feet over the last century, choosing the goodies offered by this society—enjoying union wages when they could, moving up into the middle class when they could, securing Social Security and civil rights, watching TV, driving to the mall, the movies and church—rather than trying to replace the whole system with an untried alternative. They chose reform over revolution.

Have you ever heard of an environmental movement meeting that simply celebrated the reforms the movement has achieved? I can't remember one. Think of the improvements in air quality in industrial nations, the rivers cleaned up and hosting dozens of fish species again, the forests that have regrown, the corporations like General Electric that are already changing their tune.

The future looks less bleak if we understand how many struggles we have won before. The new vision has to be grounded in the many victories already made, and in the reformability of our world.

Why do celebrations of liberal/Left success happen so rarely, if they happen at all? I wonder sometimes if we are half in love with predictions of doom, or with our own helplessness. The hypercritical view of our society may give us the excuse we need to see ourselves as haloed and our enemies as devils. Or perhaps we have learned that the only way to galvanize people to act is through fear, threat, and demonizing. If that is true, it may be because we still lack a convincing hopeful vision.

So the task is to develop a new dream to replace the socialist vision, which started out inspirational and ended up unconvincing. It painted a beautiful picture once, but it turned into a grim image of suffocating state power and state planning, fueled more by the demonization of capitalists and markets than by believably hopeful futures.

But if the new, realistically hopeful vision is essentially one of slow, piecemeal reform in an endless struggle to keep up with the companies in their race away from accountability, can it possibly galvanize us the way the socialist dream once did? Is a moderate vision enough, especially for our brightest young people? No. It's too boring.

But then, if life really is endless struggle, no utopia in sight, socialism a lost dream, what is the great hope to give joy to our feet? Where is our replacement for Karl Marx, a prophet with a new analysis and a new vision that seems to be actually practical as well as visionary? It has to have the tension of both. Jacoby quotes Adam Michnik, one of the liberators of Poland from Soviet rule: "to be a realist means to demand the impossible."

In short, we need to get a grip and to envision a truly caring economy. Two books by wise women this year help us to do both. Come meet two of the midwives at the rebirth of radical hope.

Beyond "Them"

One of my favorite images from Francis Moore Lappe's Getting a Grip, concerned a lapel button. She writes:

Pointing fingers at those up there—the president, the CEO—isn't enough. Bemoaning our victimhood isn't enough.

Jack Shipley, a 66 year-old, part-time rancher near Grants Pass, Oregon, helped teach me this lesson. Jack is a leader in the Applegate Partnership, entrusted by the state with watershed protection planning for an eight-hundred-square-mile chunk of Southern Orgeon.

"The environmentalists criticize us for talking to loggers," Jack told me a few years ago. "But how can we find solutions if we don't include all people who are part of the problem?" he asks. So members of Jack's group ... began wearing a signature around town: one word with the familiar "no" slash through it. The word is "They."

Both Lappe and Riane Eisler in her book The Real Wealth of Nations, give plenty of examples of people making change in whatever system they inhabit by bringing stakeholders together irrespective of their initial opinions or class status. The necessary ingredients include a passion to change things, a freedom from too much ideology, a readiness to both enter into conflict and to mediate it through the kind of facilitation that enables people to hear each other's real needs, and the learning of partnership and communication skills.

As someone who was very involved with worker co-ops thirty years ago, I was astonished to learn from Lappe that since then co-op membership around the world has more than doubled to over 800 million—more than the number of people who own shares in public companies. Coops provide more than 100 million jobs worldwide, one-fifth more than those provided by multinational corporations. I learned that Fair Trade has lifted more than a million coffee-producing families out of destitution. That made me doubly proud of the elders in my church who were selling it to us after services and glad that Starbucks, Costco, Target, and Cost-Plus have got in on the act. I learned how Brazil's fourth largest city made access to healthy food a human right, which reduced the infant death rate in the city by 56 percent in a decade. The many examples added up to a sense of great movement and possibility. This is also evoked brilliantly in Paul Hawken's new book Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming

But the best part of Lappe's book to me was when she suggested a whole new vocabulary for us to use. We are not anti-globalization (sounds backward, selfish, isolationist), we are pro-democracy, anti-corporate control, anti-economic concentration. We are not activists (sounds like rabble-rousers, extremists with their own agenda), we are engaged, active, empowered citizens. We are not simply for Democracy (sounds limited to voting and government), we are for "Living Democracy: a way of living in which the democratic values of fairness, inclusion, and mutual accountability infuse all dimensions of our public lives, including economic life." We are not supporting nonprofits (defined in the negative) but social-benefit organizations, citizens' organizations. When we talk of taxes it sounds like a burden, a rip-off of "our" money, so let's talk more of membership dues for a strong, healthy society. We don't want regulations (connotes Big Brother, top down, intrusive government, inefficiency), we want high standards and public protections—protecting ownership diversity, competition, health, and the environment—and "values boundaries" within which the market serves the community. There are many more.

It's a fresh look constructed by an original mind, a woman who is grappling with real life problems worldwide and who is pragmatic and out-of-the-box in seeing where entry points for change can be made. She writes that in 1975 when she wrote her famous book, Diet for a Small Planet, she assumed that things would get better, or worse. In Getting a Grip, Lappe writes:

But it hasn't turned out that way. Things are moving fast in two directions at once: they are getting very much worse and they are getting very much better. The real challenge is saying sane in this both/and world: it is holding both realities. Helping me is a new kind of humility taking root inside. I can now look at all the positive developments emerging and admit I would have given them almost zero probability of success when I was my children's age. That's humbling ...

All this makes me think twice about any verdict on the future. It is not possible to know what's possible.... Believing we can accurately predict outcomes, as cynics claim to, has become for me the utmost in hubris. And because this is true, we are free. We are free to act assuming that our action—no matter how "small" it appears to us—could be the tipping point setting off tectonic shifts of consciousness and creativity.

If this book isn't inspirational and helpful, then I don't know what is.

But it isn't an all-encompassing theory. It isn't a Das Capital to set an agenda for economic research and idealistic policy wonks for a hundred years. That may be just as well, for pragmatic compassion and cooperative innovation with no preset limits may be just what we need. But what if that kind of partnership in itself is the basis of the new theory? What if all current systems have a dominationist and a partnership version of themselves, so that either capitalist or communist states could evolve towards partnership by the creative actions of involved citizens, business managers, bureaucrats, anyone?

A Deeper Theory

This is the vision of Riane Eisler, the Austrian American systems theorist best known for her book The Chalice and the Blade, which first set out the Domination/Partnership dichotomy.

Though some of her "caring economics" ideas may sound strange to us now, I believe they will become our shared common sense.

The first idea is that modern economics actually describes less than half the economy. Unpaid work and the freebie inputs of nature do not receive their due. Not measured, they are therefore not understood and supported.

We do already get this, in part. Our planet is forcing us to recognize that it is not an endlessly patient garbage dump or provider. Even economists now discuss how best to internalize the external environmental costs of producing the things we all use and consume every day. But we have hardly begun to think about the cost of neglecting the other unpaid sectors of the economy: the household and voluntary community sectors. Economists are barely aware of how much society owes to (mostly) women's work in caring for children, wage earners, and those who can't earn. The Gross National Product (GNP) is increased by all manner of harmful activities, including vast sums in policing, prisons, healthcare, and pollution cleanups that arise from not caring enough in the first place. Alternatives to the GNP that measure our well-being are still considered fringe.

Eisler's profound point is that the cost of this neglect is not just that we shortchange all those in need of caring (that is, all of us), but rather that the value of everything else in the economy gets skewed. The monetary value of goods and services is not simply a result of their physical scarcity but of how much we want them. The reason we pay plumbers five times as much per hour to look after our pipes as we pay child care workers to look after our children is not, as current economic theory tells us, simply because plumbers are harder to find. The deeper reason is that plumbers are harder to find because plumbing is understood to be an exacting trade, requiring serious certification, whereas it is thought that any number of women can do day care without any training at all. It is a result of a male-dominated value system, one that does not privilege caring. Underlying all economies and political systems, Eisler argues, are the quality of relationships between men and women, parents and children, and how much caring is valued. When gender and parent/child relationships shift towards the truly partnerist (her word), then the structures of society, whether they start out capitalist, communist, pre—or post-industrial, will all transform towards a partnership society.

In the 1970s, when feminism burgeoned, there was a lot of talk about revolutionary vs. bourgeois feminisms. The women that the revolutionaries labeled "bourgeois feminists" were those who appeared to only want female equality in mainstream society—that is what young women today probably think feminism is and was. It has been remarkably successful. The revolutionary feminists came in different stripes. They ranged from the most radical lesbian separatists who, as far as I understood it, wanted female-only societies, to those women and men, gay and straight, who thought that a feminist revolution would liberate men as well and bring in some version of the elusive socialist utopia. To me then, the particular excitement of feminism as a revolutionary approach was that so many of the unreformed "enemies" were the radicals' own fathers, brothers, sons, spouses. This, unlike class-based or religious-based revolutions where you could more easily demonize your opponents, compelled the revolutionaries to wrestle with people they at least partly, and maybe wholeheartedly, loved. In retrospect, the main result of those familial ties (along with all the pressures of earning a living) seems to have been to reinforce bourgeois feminism and sap feminism's potential to act as the force that would change everything.

Riane Eisler has the tools and in part the tone of a bourgeois feminist: academic credentials, research facility, words of praise for caring capitalist companies, appreciation of how caring can pay money dividends, and policy wonk arguments about government programs. But she is really a stealth revolutionary feminist who wants to change everything.

This revolution is one that happens, as Lappe would say, by increasing the power of everyone (seeing power, goodness, and resources as abundant goods) rather than by seizing the power from the ruling class (a theory of revolution that is based on a vision of power and resources as scarce, and life as a zero-sum game).

At times (at public meetings, in a personal interview and in her book) it seemed to me Eisler was asking for a kind of spiritual renewal. She doesn't like to use the word "spiritual" (any more than she uses the word "feminist") because not enough people can identify with it. Nonetheless she seemed to be calling for a renewal movement whereby individuals change and become more caring and as a result, society changes. At other times she said firmly that she was a systems person and it wasn't about individuals being good or bad but about how the system they are in affects them: so Ms. and Mr. Average, when put into a dominationist society become society become more callous, but put into a partnerist society become more caring. Both of these patterns of change surely happen in real life, but I am still not clear why she thinks Sweden, one of her favorite countries, became more partnerist than, say, Russia or England. This is one of many research topics for those who want to follow up on her work.

A Renewal of Culture Leads to a New Sense of Agency

In recent times "culture" seems to have been a word belonging to the political right, in the sense that poverty is blamed on the culture of the poor, and the success of the West is attributed to Judeo-Christian or Euro-American culture. Thomas Sowell's classic Race and Culture argued the conservative case for the primacy of culture over environment in stimulating fashion. David Landes in The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some Are So Poor, argues that any sane economist in the year 1500 would have expected Brazil, so rich in natural resources, to become the economic behemoth of the New World, not the rocky Atlantic seaboard that became the thirteen colonies and then the United States. It was culture that made the difference, he argues.

To many on the Left the focus on culture amounts to blaming the victim: "it was your culture that did you in." Better to say it is about resources and who controls them. But both Eisler and Lappe write much about culture. For them culture is about how we listen to, respect, and treat each other. This is where we can all start. The fact that it is in our power to change our culture does not just lay us open to some blame for our situation: it also opens the possibility that we can be agents in social transformation. Barry Barkan, in his article on the Elders Guild in this issue, would agree.

Finally the personal and the political are coming together in a way that tackles economics, business, and world development. This brings family relationships, personal responsibility, listening, and spiritual, psychological, and mediation skills into the center of politics. It gives us agency.

Like Lappe, Eisler has hope for us all. She argues strongly for starting where we are. Don't wait for a revolution—be the revolution. She summarizes studies of both capitalist companies and governments that are more successful because of adopting caring policies. She reports on attempts to measure the costs of caring and not caring. She paints the big picture of what a truly caring economy would look like. And she presents many steps, small and large, that we can take to help us get there. Many conservatives and MBAs will find this exciting, along with many on the Left—and that's the kind of vision we need. Eisler wants the book to be used as a toolkit for change. You will be familiar with some of the actions she advocates, less familiar with others. But even the small steps we take can be so much more exciting if understood as part of this big shift towards partnerism. It's like the old story about the two men breaking rocks: one says he's breaking rocks and the other says he is building a cathedral. Whom would you rather join?

For example, why abolish the corporation when its useful features can be preserved and mechanisms brought in to shift it to fulfill the social functions, which alone justify its special status in law? Those purposes are not necessarily best achieved by government fiat, which can always be reversed, but by thoroughgoing inclusion of all stakeholders in the strategic and daily decision-making of the enterprise. That is what Lappe calls "living democracy" and Eisler calls partnership. It would gladden the heart of William Greider of The Nation, whose excellent book The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy reports on many ways to make companies more socially responsible.

But going beyond Greider's reformism, Eisler's approach helps us to see why the socialist vision has gone stale: it did not go deep enough into the quality of our personal relationships with each other, nor of the culture which forms and is formed by those relationships.

What is Lost by Not Embracing the "Spiritual?"

This new radicalism is built less on anger and blame and more on positive qualities. It's not that the bitterly angry, combative sections of the old Left lacked utopian dreams. The trouble with an angry focus on the evils of class or race enemies is that it tends to romanticize the victims, so the utopias we dream of seem easy to obtain. Of course the workers will run things better. Of course, the oppressed will be more humane and kind. We have all known the flaws in that at least since Orwell's Animal Farm, but we haven't paid attention to the remedy.

Perhaps there hasn't appeared to be a remedy. People are people: tribal, fractious, selfish. Of course, the Zionists/Proletariat/Colonized behaved badly once they got to power. "Feelings of Great Love" look good on Che Guevara posters, but on the ground the Left has been tribal, fractious, self-righteous.

But the remedy has been building slowly, often created by women, often by people with a deep spiritual commitment to nonviolence, to communication, to conflict resolution. The remedy is made up of the full panoply of skills of personal team-building relational work, and of the variety of practices (from individualized yoga and meditation to shared or congregational rituals) that connect people to a vision of an interdependent world where there is no "them." The team-building skills include those of listening, confronting, mediating, and cooperating. The skills that foster an interdependent vision and an inner spiritual health include a wide range, many of them developed in our time by exiles from the Left, people who were burnt out by conflict and failure, who just needed to regenerate. We all regenerate in our own ways, but many of us need communities in which to do it, and hence the rediscovery by leftists of spiritual communities.

When Lappe writes of how she has been learning that her fears are not her enemies but can be her teachers, I think of my father, a deeply sincere Christian committed to making a better world, whose daily "quiet time" writings were often marked by reassurances from his God that he need not be controlled by fear.

Eisler eschews that kind of spiritual or religious vocabulary, because she is going for a wide audience in a secular time, and Lappe's approach seems to be similar. But how secular is our time? In The Spirituality Revolution, David Tacey wrote of the world's most secular countries, "There is more of a feeling now that the Spirit and the life of the Spirit is part of our common range of human experience. According to the Soul of Britain project sponsored by the BBC in 2001, 76 percent of Britons indicated an interest in spiritual matters, even though only 7 to 10 percent of them attend church regularly. Underneath what appears to be increasing secularism lies a deep thirst and hunger for the sacred."

In this religious century, when most of the world is "still" religious, and living democracy will be extended in most places by believers or by nobody, the next radical step is to claim the spiritual connection. The intellectual analysis will not be complete without it, nor will the hopeful feet on the ground.

David Belden, D.Phil., is the Managing Editor of Tikkun.

Reviews by David Belden