Heart-Centered Realism   

Tikkun Magazine, January/February 2008 

Heart-Centered Realism

by Frances Moore Lappe

THE WORD "EVIL" MAKES ME SQUIRM A LITTLE. As a four-year old in Texas in the late 1940s, I visited a Christian Sunday school with a friend. Returning home, I asked my parents: "What does 'hell fire and brimstone' mean?" My parents quickly decided, or so the story goes, that it meant they should found a Unitarian Church. In that church—now Fort Worth's First Jefferson Unitarian Universalist Church—I don't think I ever heard the word "evil."

Many on the Right don't share my uneasiness. They blame the evil Other—whether it's Willy Horton or Osama bin Laden—for our ills. And George Bush rallies Americans to support his (endless) war to rid the world of evil by the masterly honing of fear to stifle questions about just how that's going to work.

While many progressives also blame the bad guys—starting now with Bush and Cheney—we mainly fall silent when it comes to the "e" word. But to contribute positively to our troubled world, progressives need to tackle this question: just what is an effective frame for understanding the root of so much brutality in our world and how to mitigate it? Failing to offer a persuasive conceptual framework is an enormous handicap. We leave ourselves open to charges of being in denial—naively out of touch with the "real world"—which isn't a convincing political posture at any time, but certainly not in today's fear-drenched atmosphere.

To help us get a grip on a progressive stance toward evil, let me offer these gambits. I'll start by defining evil as the infliction of pain and suffering on others—by willful act or willful neglect.

Fortunately, and for the first time in our history, humans can combine three sources of learning to arrive at a theory of evil: 1) historical and anthropological records of human brutality over millennia—including the roughly 180 million killed in genocide, tyranny, and intentional famine during the twentieth century; 2) contemporary cross-cultural comparisons of the prevalence of violence; and 3) laboratory experiments studying human cruelty under controlled conditions.

From them, one conclusion seems inescapable, however painful to acknowledge: Under certain conditions, most humans will inflict pain and suffering on others, even those who have done nothing to harm them.

In his new book The Lucifer Effect, Stanford professor Philip Zimbardo gives us, for the first time, a blow-by-blow account of his infamous 1971 prison experiment. Within only a few days, "normal" young people placed in roles and garbs of jailers and prisoners demonstrated behaviors eerily similar to the horrors at Abu Ghraib. The abuse was so bad that Zimbardo had to stop in six days what was to have been a two-week experiment. Zimbardo's book also reviews evidence from Stanley Milgram's "obedience" experiments, beginning a decade earlier, in which the majority of subjects inflicted what they believed to be painful and even deadly electric shocks on others.

From other studies as well, it is now possible to identify with some certainty the conditions that educe evil human behavior. These include:

• Extreme imbalances of power
• Anonymity
• "Othering" through negative stereotyping
• Rigid ideologies that block people from learning from evidence

But in this sad review, there is also some terrifically good news for the species. We now know what to do—and what not to do.

We know the specific conditions under which the worst in us will likely emerge, so we have clear guidelines. We no longer have to grasp at straws or go for palliatives in efforts to reduce suffering and enhance life. We can turn each of these four conditions on its head and be pretty sure we are moving closer to a world with less brutality and more love in all forms.

Given the limit of a single essay, I'll focus only on the first of these four conditions shown to bring out cruel behavior: extreme power imbalances. What does it mean to turn this on its head? We can make the evidence-based case that standing against evil—in the most powerful way—means working for power's continuing dispersion.

True, this message has long been part of the progressive vision, but inconsistently. Authoritarian strains have claimed that justice sometimes requires revolutionary authoritarian leaders and tactics. Other progressives fear power so much that they eschew talk of it altogether, believing that exhortations for more righteousness and more caring are enough, or are at least our main tool.

Rethinking Power

IN WORKSHOPS OVER THE YEARS I'VE ASKED PARTICIPANTS TO BLURT out the first words that come to mind when I say the word "power." I hear "force," "money," "corruption," "guns," and worse. Power has become a four-letter word—and concept—to many progressives. Aren't we, instead, about "generosity" and "caring"?

But it gradually dawned on me: if power—from the Latin posse, to be able—is our capacity to act, how can we ever hope to bring about a better world if our view of power is narrowly negative? Many progressives emphasize our deep, now-proven-to-be-hard-wired needs and capacities for cooperation, caring, and helpfulness. Great. But we tend to ignore the equally deep human need to "make a dent," as social philosopher Erich Fromm puts it: our need for efficacy. Our species would never have made it to over 6 billion people if we were couch potatoes. Human beings are doers, creators of our world.

So progressives can make the compelling case that power's ongoing generation and dispersion is necessary both to mitigate evil and to meet our deep positive human needs to be problem solvers. Not to mention the obvious: solutions to today's gargantuan global crisis depend on the buy-in and active engagement of billions of us, which will never happen unless we participate in creating solutions.

In other words, we now know that power's dispersion is needed to protect us from the worst in us. It is also necessary to unleash the very best. Rethinking and remaking power, then, is a matter of human survival.

This power perspective unleashes an invigorating rationale for what I call "living democracy"—not a new "ism" but a new way of seeing self in society that both accepts our capacity for evil, under conditions that heighten social distance and fear, while celebrating our need not only for fairness and community but for power understood as our capacity to create. In this way of seeing, we also come to embrace power not as a thing wielded but as a quality of all human relationships. Power is always relational.

Looking through a power lens, we realize that democracy involves far more than political life and we can perceive our economic model's anti-democratic consequence: based on a single rule—highest return to existing wealth—it inexorably concentrates power when democracy depends on its wide dispersion.

Progressives should stress that truly grappling with the roots of evil requires us to democratize both political and economic life: that we rethink democracy as a culture characterized by a value-driven participation in power—no longer something simply done to us or for us. Doing so involves not just making current rules—such as the minimum wage and anti-monopoly laws—more fair and effective. Living democracy also means remaking underlying rules that govern our economy: for example, closing the power gap between employers and workers.

A pipedream?

Hardly. In part it means restoring rights many Americans alive today were born with: significant protection of the right of workers to organize, for example. The United States once enabled 40 percent of private employees to choose a union. Today the percentage is about 8 percent and each year 20,000 U.S. workers are fired or have their wages cut because of their organizing efforts. It also means moving the United States to ratify and honor core International Labor Organization Conventions, as most of the world's countries have done.

At a deeper level it means effectively confronting the economic dogmatists persuading Americans that the concentration of economic power is our only option. In The Lexus and the Olive Tree, the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman writes "... [T]here is no more mint chocolate chip, there is no more strawberry swirl, there is no more lemon-lime. Today there is only free-market vanilla and North Korea."

"Free-market vanilla" is code for corporate globalization, with its centralizing power. And Friedman is wrong.

Even in this era of global corporate expansion, business enterprises are also spreading in which equitable sharing of power is right there in their DNA. They are cooperatives, organized on the principle of one person, one vote. Their membership has doubled worldwide in a generation and more people are now members of cooperatives than own shares in publicly traded companies.

Co-ops also provide more jobs worldwide than do multinational corporations. In India, a network of over a 100,000 village dairy cooperatives, owned by nearly 11 million members, provide several times more jobs than does India's much-touted high-tech sector. In Italy's wealthy Emilia Romagna region, 5,000 diverse, networked cooperatives generate over 30 percent of economic output. When I visited there in 2006, one member explained why he was working in this movement: "I tried working for a corporation but it wasn't for me. Too anonymous. I tried then working for myself. I was too lonely. Now I'm with the cooperative. This is the interpretation of life that I enjoy."

Closer to home, the dairy co-op Organic Valley, launched by desperate Wisconsin farmers in the late 1980s, now has almost 1,000 member farms. Their profits return to rural communities, not to faraway corporate headquarters.

The effectiveness of democratic economics is striking: a recent ranking by the elite World Economic Forum found that the three countries ranked highest by share of their economies contributed by cooperatives were among the four ranked highest for economic efficiency.

But imagining the wider emergence of a more and more democratic, and thus just, economy, reducing the preconditions for evil still feels impossible here, you say. And I agree, if one has given up on removing the power of concentrated wealth over public decision-making and feels resigned to live in the "best democracy money can buy," as writer Greg Palast so aptly summed up ours.

But the reign of despair about money in politics may come to an end as a well-kept secret leaks out: Clean Elections—voluntary public financing—is working across the board in two states, Maine and Arizona. And in 2008, Connecticut will join this leadership club. Most elected offices in these states—in Maine it's about 80 percent—are now held by those who took no private funds beyond small qualifying donations from a specific number of citizens necessary to get on the ballot.

Without Clean Elections, "I wouldn't have dared to try," says Mainer Deb Simpson, forty-five, who was a waitress and single mom when elected to the state legislature in 2000. She now co-chairs the state judiciary committee. Armed with proof that the approach draws candidates and voters in and keeps money out, citizens in fifteen states are crafting similar laws.

Note that we needn't be deterred in this spreading revolution by the recent Supreme Court's ruling against restrictions on campaign spending and affirming the conflation of the right to spend and the right to speak. Voluntary public financing doesn't run afoul of this legal view.

From supplying missing things to building empowering relationships

IT'S EASY FOR PROGRESSIVES TO SEE A "POWER FRAME" AS LACKING spiritual uplift, as a cop-out, cave-in alternative to the purer path of moral exhortation. But to be credible to ourselves and others, and therefore to be truly uplifting, our moral case must be grounded in reality, and that's what the power, relational lens offers.

An example of the significance of the shift: The Network of Spiritual Progressives calls its ambitious Global Marshall Plan a "Strategy of Generosity." Immediately, the language sets the frame: The goal is giving more—contributing to a view of the world divided between givers and receivers, the active and the passive. Even though the second plank of the plan stresses a goal of "empowering people," the frame of generosity diverts us from focusing on the underlying rules within global corporate capitalism that are dis-empowering, creating a world where the wealthiest few hundred people control the equivalent of the total annual income of the poorest 3 billion.

The Global Marshall Plan's third point calls for righting the inequities in trade agreements that now privilege the rich. Excellent! But the generosity frame in which the plank is set can blur the fact that it is the poor who are presently the contributors: in 2006, $658 billion, net, moved from poorer countries of the Global South to wealthier countries. Replacing a generosity frame with an empowerment frame would help us see changes in trade relationships as justice—a consequence of healthy and fair power relationships.

A case illustrating the two frames is hanging in the balance now: whither agricultural development in Africa. The Rockefeller and Gates Foundations are putting over $150 million into what they call a Green Revolution for Africa. Its focus is research toward developing improved seeds and using small shopkeepers to sell them. Attention is on supplying missing "things"—improved seeds—and on reinforcing the current economic structures. The initiative appears to ignore a very different approach underway in many countries in Africa: Networks of small farmers are effectively reclaiming degraded land and increasing both crop diversity and yields by developing and sharing their own seeds, in addition to their tools and knowledge. Their focus is on relationships and the generation of new power, widely dispersed.

The first approach might actually require more "generosity" than the second in terms of money transferred. The second requires that donors build relationships with local farmer organizations, listen to their ideas about what is most empowering for them, and work to support it.

On caring and courage

MANY PEOPLE ARE SUSPICIOUS OF PROGRESSIVES FOR WHAT PSYCHOLOGISTS CALL A "situational" perspective on evil. Blaming the "situation"—poverty or bad schools and so on—for anti-social behavior takes the bad guys off the hook, they say.

But we can make clear that, actually, it is the "dispositional" view of many on the Right—that evil lies within certain individuals—that takes most of humanity off the hook, and, therefore, ultimately dooms us. Acknowledging the capacity of most of us to become brutal puts all of us on notice for our responsibilities to create real democracies protecting us from that possibility. "Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible," writes Reinhold Niebuhr, "but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary."

So progressives can get off the defensive. We are the hard-nosed, heart-centered realists. We can honor and build on both religious and civic traditions calling on humanity to transcend evil. We can come together in the realization that our God-given and/or nature-evolved capacities allow us to transcend evil by learning from evidence. Identifying with some certainty the key elements of life-serving social orders that bring forth the best in us while protecting us from the worst, we can rethink and reclaim our power to manifest love and to minimize evil.

From the power lens, things get personal very fast.

While a generosity lens encourages us to give our fair share, a power lens requires us to ask: How does my life—my employment, purchases, political engagement, and more—abet the emergence of fair, creative power? How am I learning and modeling the skills and the courage to stand up against illegitimate authority, including that of group pressure not to challenge the givens of our power-concentrating, democracy-destroying economy?

If true, then what the world needs most right now might not be more caring people, exactly. (Could it be that virtually all of us are caring enough?) The much bigger problem may be that expressing our caring—our deep need for connection—is now stifled by power-concentrating systems driven by fear. Maybe, then, what we most need are people courageous enough to explore the root causes of evil and to face their fear of being out of step, people willing to do the work of pushing forward the very frontier of democracy itself, bringing to life a culture of relational power permeating economic life as well as political and cultural life.

If we are confident in our caring but less so in our courage, we can rethink courage, too. In part courage is simply our capacity to walk with fear, including our fear of seeing the world through new eyes. And we can take heart from the insight of Oxford historian Theodore Zeldin, who writes that history teaches us that curiosity is the greatest antidote to fear.

So let's get curious concerning history's lessons about evil, their practical implications, and the hope-filled consequences of courageously facing the facts. Only in so doing can we join with others in creating truly living democracies able to manifest our caring.

Frances Moore Lappe is the author of sixteen books. Her first was Diet for a Small Planet, and her newest is Getting a Grip: Clarity, Creativity & Courage in a World Gone Mad. www.smallplanetinstitute.org.

Lappé, Frances M. 2008. Heart-centered realism. Tikkun 23(1):26-31.