Resistance Is Not Enough

The Need for a Shared Vision for a New Society

In a recent Note posted on the Crisis and Transition Substack, Clare Strawn recommended a recent article by Rivera Sun, published on Waging Nonviolence, titled, “Resistance to Trump is Everywhere.” Sun’s article provides an inspiring survey of the many grassroots actions Americans are taking to push back against the harmful actions and policies of the Trump Administration.

What drew Clare’s attention in particular was the question Sun ended her article with: “Is overturning Trump’s abusive policies one after another enough? Or do the many strands of resistance have a shared vision for the future of this country that can be articulated and won?”

Here, once again, is the crucially important question of a common vision to guide the transition to a new kind of society.

Envisioning a Life-Centered Civilization

The Crisis and Transition Substack introduced this question early on when we highlighted David Korten’s call in a 2022 Yes! opinion piece to dedicate 2022 to a “public and global” discussion centered around two questions: “What would a truly civilized, life-centered civilization look like? And what is required to bring it into being?”

The goals of this discussion, Korten emphasized, would be to generate “a vision of a life-serving civilization” and to build the “power of the people united by a compelling vision of a possible future that is true to our love of life.”

This is what’s most needed on the part of those who recognize the threat of the polycrisis humanity faces. Resistance is not enough. Reforms are not enough. Electoral politics are not enough. Critical analysis is not enough. Lifestyle changes are not enough.

We made clear early on that “The core purpose of the Crisis and Transition Substack is to become a point of gravity for ideas and conversations that deeply and insightfully address Korten’s two momentous questions.”

Visionary Ideas for Remaking Our World

Jason Schreiner, President of the Prout Institute, wrote a call-to-action piece for the 2022 New Era Convergence, held near Eugene, Oregon, in which he listed the many expressions of a new social vision that he’s aware of. It’s a list worth sharing. Quoting Jason:

“We do not lack ideas for how to imagine remaking our world with post-capitalist, decolonial, egalitarian, regenerative systems. A diversity of voices from different contexts and perspectives are putting forward proposals for what can be done. Representative examples of this upwelling include “another future is possible,” “beautiful rising,” “blessed unrest,” “degrowth,” “democratic socialist green new deal,” “ecological civilization,” “ecological revolution from below,” “eco-socialist green new deal,” “great transition initiative,” “great turning,” “just transition,” “manifesto for a planet on fire,” “next system,” “people’s agreement,” “people’s green new deal,” “plan to save the planet,” “pluriverse,” “red deal,” “third reconstruction,” and “21st Century Economic Bill of Rights.”

Three Observations

While there’s a lot of visionary new ideas floating around, the process of progressive forces coming to a common vision is a challenging undertaking. I’d like to take a deep dive into this difficult but important topic. First, three general observations.

1 — Diversity of Visions

In commenting on his list of the new social visions, Jason notes that, “Some of these ideas and proposals overlap in their aims and methods, although many also vary.” At present, there is no consensus, no common guiding vision of a life-centered society. But this is natural. When confronting the need to shift from one social paradigm to another, a diversity of new visions is bound to arise. Society is complex, and there is a lot that will need to be sorted out before the outlines of a viable new social vision gains broad acceptance. A plurality of alternative futures will be with us for some time.

2 — Depth of Vision

While this Substack generally uses the term “polycrisis” to describe the cluster of major crises humanity faces, when considering the need for a new social vision, it’s better to use the term “metacrisis”, as metacrisis points to there being a singular underlying cause for the diverse crises. Given the simultaneous rise of runaway climate change, unsustainable resource use, unprecedented ecosystem degradation, uncontrolled increase of wealth disparity, and a rising tide of neo-fascism, we must assume that the causal roots of the metacrisis go deep. A reformist agenda won’t suffice. Deep change is required, and this can only come from a new social vision grounded in a new worldview and on new cardinal values to guide the society. Many of the new social ideas Jason lists, progressive as they may be, won’t cut deep enough to fill the bill.

3 — Problem of Totalizing Ideologies

A new social vision of the depth that is required raises the concern that many have with “totalizing ideologies” or “totalizing systems”. The following quote from an article by Yvonne Aburrow, who writes on pagan spirituality, gives a feel for the totalizing ideology problem:

“A totalizing system is one that seeks to subsume all other paradigms within its paradigm, rather than accepting that other paradigms exist alongside it. It regards itself as a complete and universal system which can explain all experience and needs no supplemental systems. A totalizing system ignores local contexts or seeks to explain them through its paradigm. A totalizing system assumes that its style of religion / philosophy / theology / culture is best for all humanity, and it may seek to convert others or impose it on them.”

So those who want a life-centered society will somehow have to adopt a new shared worldview that posits new cardinal values while maintaining space for human diversity and social pluralism.

Two Ways Forward

I see no way that we can ignore David Korten’s call to work out a vision of a life-centered civilization. The cost of not doing so is unimaginable. It’s a task we must take on, despite the formidable challenges.

In my exploration of this undertaking, I’ve come across two promising pathways forward. Neither of them can get us all the way to a full vision of a life-centered society, but they can give us something immediate and practical to work with.

1 — Defining Shared Values

As reported above, Jason Schreiner compiled a list of new social visions that “imagine a remaking of our world with post-capitalist, decolonial, egalitarian, regenerative systems.” Note that he identifies the social visions on his list on the basis of values that they hold in common — egalitarian, regenerative, decolonial — all of which are inherently post-capitalist in nature.

A couple of years ago, I worked with a group that took up envisioning how a natural catastrophe of sufficient magnitude could provide an opportunity for transition to a life-centered society. Essentially, we took the “shock doctrine” strategy used by neo-liberal capitalism to restructure local economies during times of crisis (i.e., to open them to global markets and privatizing public goods) and reversed it. Rather than using disaster to consolidate neoliberal restructuring, we envisioned the possibility of disaster to jump start the restructuring of a post-capitalist society.

When it came to defining what that post capitalist society would look like, we by-passed fitting it to a new social vision and instead defined it on the basis of the following set of post-capitalist values:

Inclusive

Regenerative

Equitable

Cooperative

Decentralized

The specific values, or wording of the values, that we came up with is not crucial. What’s important is that, similar to Jason, we were able to point to a post-capitalist vision through defining a set of shared life-centered values.

As it turns out, coming up with a list of shared values is a far easier task than coming to agreement on a new social vision. Let us say that we could survey people within Paul Hawken’s “blessed unrest movement”, asking them to identify the five most important values that they regard as essential for a life-centered society. What we’d find, I predict, is a high degree of consensus. Not unanimity, but enough agreement to constitute a sufficiently shared post-capitalist value base to enable people to work toward common goals.

2 — A Design System Based Social Vision

Permaculture, as many readers may know, is a system of regenerative design and practice that’s applied mainly (though not exclusively) to land based settings. Permaculture is a global movement, practiced in diverse ecological contexts, in diverse cultures, and in diverse settings. And, in all cases, if done well, it successfully creates working systems — gardens, farms, food forests, agroforests, land-based communities — that are both productive and sustainable. Permaculture creates, in its realms of application, what David Korten would likely recognize as life-centered systems.

Permaculture does this without need for a totalizing ideology. Instead, it makes use of a regenerative design system that is guided by three core values: care for the earth, care for people, and equitable use of the earth’s resources (“fair share”). These values are operationalized through a set of twelve design principles, a zone system of planning, and a toolkit of permaculture compatible practices — hügelkultur, tree guilds, water harvesting, sheet mulching, companion planting, etc.

What if a similar approach could be applied to Korten’s call for a vision of a life-centered civilization? That is, instead our task being to come up with an ideological vision — and risking the constraining limitations of a totalizing ideology — what if we could take a design system approach to envisioning a life-centered society?

In a future post, I’d like to take up showing what this might look like.