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The
Healing Century
with an introduction by Bob Stilger
Robert
Theobald,  1998
Introduction
by Bob Stilger, 2008
Robert Theobald and I
met in the late sixties. He was a noted social commentator. I was a brash
young college student. He became one of my closest friends and colleagues
for the next thirty years. In 1997, Robert was diagnosed with esophageal
cancer and came to live in Spokane
with my family to complete his life and work. Shortly after having his
esophagus removed at the end of 1997, he wrote “The Healing Century” as a
speech for the Ontario Arts Council. Ten years later, his analysis of where
we need to be paying attention is still uncannily accurate.
For the next two years,
until he died at the end of 1999, Robert and I worked under the banner of
Resilient Communities. We believed that beneath the fervor about Y2K there
were actually critical questions being asked about how to make our
communities and our lives resilient enough to navigate the rapids of
change. Similar questions about community resilience are at the core of
Berkana’s current work.
While the commentary Robert
offered ten years ago in The Healing Century remains largely accurate, what
Robert could not have foretold was all that has happened over these years.
People, all over the world, engaged in making communities and lives that
work are finding each other. Ten years ago, World Café was a way to host
conversation known only to a handful of people. The Art of Hosting wasn’t
even a glimmer in anyone’s eyes. Pioneers of Change was a seed ready to be
grown. Shambhala Authentic Leadership Institute was a dream long held by a
small group of people. The Leadership Learning Centers that Berkana
currently works with around the world were in many different stages of
formation and certainly not yet in relationship with each other.
I think Robert would
see this all with a twinkle in his eye and with hope for the future.
The Healing
Century
Adapted from a speech delivered at the Ontario Arts Council, January 1998
Despite the widespread
frustrations of our time, I believe that we can and must live with hope. We
are capable of making a profound positive shift in our thinking over the
next few years. The heart of this shift would be for us to conceptualize
the 21st century as the healing century just as the 20th will certainly be
defined in the future as the economic and technological century. Only a
change toward a more caring and compassionate culture at all levels from
the personal to the ecological can avoid massive breakdowns.
I am all too well
aware, however, that the message of hope I intend to send will only be welcome
to those who are aware that the current directions of the global culture
are unacceptable and unsustainable. If you still believe that our current
commitment to maximum economic growth and international competitiveness,
based on ever-increasing technological competence, will solve our problems
then my message will seem pessimistic and, indeed, highly negative.
We currently face a
series of unavoidable crises which are already visible to those who care to
look beyond the dominant headlines. These crises are due to our past
successes rather than our failures. We have achieved what we wanted to. We
have so far failed to recognize that it is now time to move on and to seize
the new opportunities which are currently available to us. We urgently need
to rework our concepts of success.
I shall start with the
economic, social, environmental, moral and spiritual crises of our time. I
shall show that there must be profound shifts if we are to avoid the
breakdowns that threaten our future.
But before I can even
start on the description of the current crises, we need to understand why
we have no choice but to move rapidly in new directions. The core reality
of our time is that we live in a period of rapidly increasing stress. It
has developed because the twentieth century has seen a profound change in
all the realities of our world but neither our institutions nor our visions
have kept up.
At the beginning of the
20th century, the population of the world was 1.6 billion. It is now almost
6.0 billion . We have moved from an empty world to one that is already
pressuring space and resources and will do so more severely even if the
most hopeful assumptions about population growth are realized. And yet
there are still powerful voices that refuse to support the need for decreasing
births as rapidly as possible.
In the 20th century, we
have moved from a world where natural resources, especially air, land and
water were relatively abundant, to one where shortages loom and are already
causing havoc in certain parts of the world. At the same time, it is clear
that the wastes from our technological, industrial culture are having
severe impacts on the quality of the food we eat, the water we drink and
the air we breathe: many diseases are becoming more frequent such as cancer
and asthma. Nevertheless, many powerful institutions still refuse to
recognize the need for more intelligent development and growth strategies.
In the 20th century, we
have moved from a world in which access to information was still severely
limited to one in which we are all drowning in infoglut. And yet we act as
though it is desirable to publish still more words which few people read
and even fewer absorb. I am convinced that when information doubles,
knowledge halves and wisdom quarters.
In the 20th century,
most of those in the developed countries have seen our standards of living
increase to the point that more stuff does not add to our satisfactions.
There is a growing commitment to breaking out of the consumption race—a
trend which has shown up over recent Christmases as people refuse to buy,
buy, buy.
In the 20th century,
more and more people are recognizing that there can be no single correct
view of the world. Competing viewpoints now strive for acceptance. None of
our traditional understandings enable us to deal with these radical
divergences of view. We are now learning to explore the skills of dialogue
and common ground work in order to close the gaps in understanding. This
will prevent conflicts from escalating into violence.
In the 20th century,
our understanding of how the world is and should be structured, has changed
dramatically. Scientific theorists no longer believe that Newtonian models
of reality can be used to describe complex human and natural interactions.
They are moving to new explanations such as those contained in fractal,
chaos and complexity theory.
It is this last shift
which is perhaps the most dramatic, although largely unseen solvent, of
past realities. Our institutions are based on the belief that people at the
top should have the power to coerce and dominate. These institutions are
now increasingly ineffective because people no longer accept that
traditional leaders have the ability to decide how they should live their
lives.
It is these shifts and
many others, which are bringing about the crises that I shall now describe
briefly. These changes are irreversible. A new world is already being born
around us. We can choose to ignore its imperatives and suffer terrible
costs. Alternatively, we can work with the positive forces that are already
developing to create the higher quality of life that is possible for the
future.
The Economic
Crisis: Economists
have managed to hide the most basic economic reality from the public. To
listen to the discussions, one would think that the real issue is how to
produce enough. In reality, the core problem has been how to ensure that
demand kept up with production so that factories could keep humming and
services would be purchased.
The solution in the 19th
century was for the colonial powers to send goods to their dependencies and
to accept debt in return. The United States also benefited
from this strategy. The early 20th century approach was to provide workers
with a living wage. The late 20th century strategy has been to encourage
people to go into debt. Demand has also been generated by the movement of
people in many poor countries into the middle class. On the other side of
the equation ever-increasing inequality makes it more difficult to maintain
levels of consumption.
The Social
Crisis: Regardless
of our economic future, it is now abundantly clear that the existing social
system is currently producing profoundly dangerous trends. The overwhelming
world-wide direction is the development of a super-rich class in all but a
few countries. At the other end of the income ladder more and more people
are becoming mired in poverty.
Some countries
previously poor are growing rapidly in economic terms. But the current
pattern is that most of the population remains mired in poverty while a
small proportion enters the middle class and some people become super-rich.
The social contracts in these areas are being disrupted by the growth
patterns and discontent is growing rapidly.
Finally, there are all
too many countries where poverty has worsened over the last several
decades. The gap between the wealth of the rich countries and the penury of
the poor nations has become even more extreme. At the same time the amount
of money that the rich countries have been willing to provide in aid has
declined.
These trends will
intensify so long as we maintain the paradigm in which we currently think.
They will lead to massive breakdowns not only through social unrest but
also because of massive epidemics of old and new diseases.
The Moral
Crisis: I
do not personally understand how anybody with a moral conscience can accept
the trends which are currently developing. Is there nothing which will
shock us into a realization that we already live in an intolerable world?
I am told that things
have to get bad enough before we shall be prepared to change our thinking
and our actions. On my worst days, I fear that human beings can accustom
themselves to anything. We seem prepared to turn our eyes away from the
massive tragedies in the world and hope that they will not affect us. This
assumption is naïve for we are moving inexorably toward a more
interconnected world.
Political and business
elites throughout the world are clearly out of touch with the vision and
beliefs of most citizens. There is a need for a new movement which will
express the belief that we can provide for everybody’s need but not for
everybody’s greed.
The
Technological Crisis: Our current prosperity is based on an incredible growth
in technological knowledge. It has enabled us to subdue diseases. It has
provided us with a level of comfort and convenience that would have been
thought inconceivable at the beginning of this century.
Unfortunately, these
gains have bought new dangers. On the health front, we have been creating
highly resistant bugs which defy current medications. We are just realizing
that the race between mutations and new knowledge will inevitably be lost.
Similar dangers loom in terms of our agricultural practices.
The Ecological
Crisis: The
response from economists and politicians to what I have said so far is, of
course, well known. All we have to do, we are informed, is to be more
committed to what we have been doing for the last several decades. The
medicine we have been taking is good for us: the doses have just not been
large enough. There must be further technological fixes to current
technological issues.
Fortunately, I am an
economist and I can tell you that this attempt to demand unquestioning
obedience to a set of destructive dogmas is based on blind faith rather
than reason. The strategies which are being tried will not yield positive
results however ferociously they are applied. It is our commitment to
continue to pursue past success criteria which is the cause of our current
problems. We have been hoodwinked.
At some point, our
increase in population and production will overstrain ecological systems.
The argument about when this happens is not yet settled but this statement
is unarguable. Some believe we have already moved beyond sustainability.
Others think that there is still some flexibility in the system.
The harsh truth,
however, is that we shall exceed ecological limits at some point in the
21st century unless we move beyond an economic system which is only viable
on the basis of materialism and maximum economic growth.
The Spiritual
Crisis: There
is broad agreement on one issue among those who look at the future—there
will be enormous change in the next decades. It is the direction of this
change that is not agreed. The argument is between those who believe that
economic growth, supported by technological change, remains the wave of the
future and those who are convinced that the true crisis lies much deeper
and can best be described as spiritual.
Our current emphasis on
what can be measured and owned is disguising what we all really want and
need from life. I believe that we are hungry for authentic relationships
with other individuals and with the natural world. We can no longer assume
all technologies will automatically benefit us. Rather we must learn how to
make decisions in ways which will enhance the quality of life of this and
future generations. Our challenge is to find the future which will enable
the continuation of the extraordinary journey which has taken place on this
planet over millions of years.
Discovering the
Future
It is easy to fall into
despair when one recognizes that the current ways we think and act are
disastrously flawed. Indeed some spiritual counselors would argue that a black
night of the soul is necessary to move to a point where one is willing to
contemplate the level of changes which are required to shift our
consciousness sufficiently to discover an alternative way of facing the
future.
I want to propose that
the only way to break out of this monstrous set of problems is to
conceptualize the world in which we live in a totally different way. I
shall state a number of beliefs which I am convinced make it possible for
societies to have a totally different feel and structure. The world in
which I choose to live, which is based on these beliefs, has totally
different patterns and potentials than those of the industrial era.
This set of beliefs is
grounded in a profoundly different view of reality. It goes beyond the
logical analysis I have made about the breakdowns now going on in the
society and proposes a more positive vision of how human beings can
interact with each other and nature. It starts from the following
assumption.
All organisms
possess a drive to health: This vision is so different to that which has driven our
culture for so long that it is difficult to even broach this subject within
our dominant modes of thinking. We have become so used to “fixing” things
that this is the often the only approach we consider. We fix our
hyperactive children with Ritalin, our depression with Prozac, our lack of
self-worth with alcohol and drugs. We fix our social problems with
legislation. All too often we fix our environmental difficulties with more
intervention to cure past failures. And we fix our illness problems with
drugs which cause resistance in the next generation of germs and viruses:
this is causing an increasingly recognized threat to our ability to deal
with past and future diseases.
And yet we have
abundant evidence that there are alternatives to our current strategies.
Anybody who looks at the available evidence will find that bodies will
often cure themselves if given time and space—indeed some of the cures
which are clearly on the record can only be classified as miraculous. The
most dramatic recoveries from environmental problems have occurred when the
insults which have been causing the degradation have been removed and
natural forces freed up to work. In the social field, it has been the
commitment of individuals and groups that have led to the most remarkable
turnarounds in neighborhoods and communities rather than legislation.
If we are to survive
the twenty-first century, we must abandon the negative vision of the world
in which we live and learn to live within a positive vision of hope. At a
different level, we do need to remember that while ecological systems do
tend to recover if given a chance, there are all too many examples of times
and places where they have been so stressed that they move permanently into
new and less, desirable forms.
The move toward health
needs to be accompanied by several other shifts in consciousness if we are
to be able to live well in the 21st century.
Issues need to
be examined in positive rather than negative terms, in search for strengths
and breakthrough potentials: Western culture has a profound bias toward examining the negative
rather than the positive. In this area, as in all others, there is a need
for balance. We need to search for the strengths that people, organizations
and cultures have without ignoring the fact that these strengths, taken to
extremes, inevitably lead to weaknesses.
In more and more fields of study and
work, the emphasis is shifting. For example, community work increasingly
looks at potentials rather than deficits. The result is to set free
potential which has been hidden by an emphasis on the difficulties which
neighborhoods and communities are experiencing. The same thing happens as
people are reminded of their potentials.
The problem with this line of argument is
that it is all too often taken to extremes. There is great strength in
positive thinking. But if one forgets the shadow side, people are all too
likely to ride roughshod over the needs of others who have less strength,
power or position than they do. There is a need to respect the needs of
others as well as to search for one’s own bliss.
In addition, it is all too possible to
forget that there are real limits. The belief in the possibility for
endless maximum economic growth is an example of what can happen on a
societal level when positive thinking loses all sense of context and
reality.
Effectiveness
requires people to be profoundly present in the moment. This is only
possible if people have time to center themselves through the reduction of stress
and fatigue: How often
have you been in meetings when you had an eerie feeling that people were
really agreeing with each other but were just arguing about words? Have you
sometimes actually stopped the flow of the discussion and said “But aren’t
you actually saying the same thing?”
There are at least three critical reasons
for this failure to communicate. The first is that people are typically
aiming to advance their agenda and listening to the flow of conversation in
terms of how they can use it. They are not concerned with the potential
synergies that could emerge through the presence in the room of this
particular group of people.
The second is that people are so tired,
so stressed, so overloaded that they are rarely “present” in their
activities. They are thinking about their other responsibilities and
urgencies. There is little chance that they will connect with new ideas and
potentials if they are caught within their ongoing problems and crises.
The third is that we have been taught to
listen for disagreement rather than agreement. The dominant style of our
culture is to respond with “but” rather than “and.” We do not look for the
agreements we can share but for the disagreements we have—or often can
create.
It is fair to say that my life was
transformed when I recognized that the way to work with people was to enter
a conversation looking for the point where there was common ground. Once I
could find it, I could build on it and it often took us in directions which
none of us anticipated.
People can only
learn what they are ready to understand. Surfacing issues that people do
not yet grasp or are denying etc. is a waste of time. Teaching and
organizing take on a very different flavor in these conditions: When we disagree with people, we normally assume that the other
person “hears” what we are saying and is reacting negatively to it. In
reality, the most important disagreements occur when the other person is
unable to grasp the basic point that is being made. The argument is not
between one idea and another but rather between a new idea and a total
incomprehension of what is being said.
I call this the “black hole” problem. The
way to deal with a black hole is not to become more intensely focused and,
probably, more angry. People do not learn truly different ideas by being
beaten on the head. The process is far more indirect. “Mindquakes” occur
indirectly as people are invited to look at the world in different ways.
From my perspective the key question is
whether we shall see an effective movement launched to challenge the
current materialistic and technological drives of our culture. As a
rational analyst, I fear that we shall not. The inertia of the current
system is enormous. There is a tendency to do what seems to be necessary
without looking for the alternatives which exist.
The tragedy behind this rational
conclusion is that a deep, inchoate yearning for profound change already
exists and its visibility only awaits an effective catalyst. My lifetime’s
work has shown me that people are now ready to challenge the current
conventional wisdom. Many know that their lives, their work, their
professions, their political parties are without the deep meaning for which
they yearn. They are waiting for a wake-up call that will give them the
faith and the courage to believe that their actions will make a difference.
We do not have to convince people of the need to change direction: this
work has already been done. We need to have the imagination and the skills
to propose spaces in which each of us can explore the dramatic changes
required to regain our souls.
This is a time for courage and risks. It
is a time to argue for a higher vision of human purpose than that we have
accepted in recent years. It is a time for us to face the challenges and to
resolve to meet them. This is a moment when the actions of each of us can
make a profound difference.
***
Robert Theobald worked
on fundamental change issues for four decades. In the sixties he was known
as the father of the guaranteed annual income concept and over the next 40
years was a speaker, writer and consultant who consistently invited people
to wake up to the world we were creating. His work and ideas touched
hundreds of thousands of people across the globe. Robert completed the last
two years of his life in Spokane.
He wrote “The Healing Century” while recovering from esophageal cancer and
looking out to a century he ultimately would not see. His last book
published in the US
was Reworking Success.
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