Vision Statement
People of vision are part of a revolution in autonomy as well as responsibility. In the world of the noosphere, densely interconnected communication networks of people who cherish their communities and care deeply about life on this planet are creating something never seen before: a “meta-sphere of governance.” Grounded and responsive to each individual, this movement involves every area of the Earth in a conscious, self-organizing, life-serving planetary process. The Earth Herself is becoming a vast teaching-learning community, a new order of democratic biology, as individuals and groups learn as they participate and create together a new arena for social evolution.
All of this requires a move toward politeia, a Greek word much juicier than politics which derives from it. Politeia is civic society carried to its utmost. It implies that all free citizens are actively involved in creating and maintaining their community, empowering each other to further their common social agenda. In our time especially, it requires the plumbing of our emotional depths, the manifesting of our minds’ best thinking and, above all, the courage to follow through. As psychologist Arnold Mindell says, “Creating freedom, community, and viable relationships has its price. It costs time and courage to learn how to sit in the fire of diversity. It means staying centered in the heat of trouble.”
As faith, hope, and love are to religion, so politeia is to politics. Politeia is a kind of culture, virtually identical to what Paul Ray and others have referred to as the integral culture. Duane Elgin and Colleen LeDrew track this culture in their “Global Paradigm Report”:
An integral culture . . . seeks to integrate all the parts of our lives: inner and outer, masculine and feminine, personal and global, intuitive and rational, and many more. The hallmark of this integral culture in an intention to integrate—to consciously bridge differences, connect people, celebrate diversity, harmonize efforts, and discover higher common ground. With its inclusive and reconciling nature, an integral culture takes a whole-systems approach and offers hope in a world facing deep ecological, social, and spiritual crisis.” [Duane Elgin and Colleen LeDrew, Global Paradigm Report: Tracking the Shift Under Way, YES! A Journal of Positive Futures, Winter, 1997, p. 19.]
Here is my vision of six forms within which a politeia can operate towards the regenesis of society. Many of these ideas are already being practiced in forward-thinking communities around the world, but they are, unfortunately, still the exception rather than the norm. If the possible society we all dream of is to be made manifest, they must become second nature.
1. A politeia of participation provides all members of society with opportunity to influence political and economic institutions affecting their lives and fosters personal responsibility to fulfill these tasks. No one in our time is innocent of responsibility; each of us has a role to play. Think about what your role might be. Perhaps your community needs a safe place for teenagers to hang out, or the local independent bookstore needs support. Perhaps schools, or senior centers, or battered women’s centers need volunteers. Imagine it, write about it, read about it, talk to encouraging friends about it. Get some allies and do something about it, one step at a time. Or as a Seattle environmental activist who had just celebrated her hundredth birthday said after telling the story of her remarkable life, “You do what you can. And then you do some more."
2. A politeia of rediscovery rekindles spontaneous generosity and neighborliness, and honors the capacities of others. In this world of human snowflakes, a neighborhood is an extraordinary collection of ingenious, eccentric, brilliant, skillful, weird and wonderful types. One of the reasons people watch sitcoms is that the actors and script writers play out the lives of typical families and communities in only slightly exaggerated form. What if you turned off the TV and turned on your neighborhood instead? You might find stars of human possibility waiting to be discovered. The greatest of all human potentials is the one that recognizes and evokes other people to bloom. Seek out ways of encouraging each person’s capacity by improving and deepening the processes of human life: our birthing, our parenting, our nutrition, our health, our fitness, our family and community life, our education, our arts, our sciences, our ways of growing old, and our ways of dying beautifully. These concerns make us fully human.
3. A politeia of creativity activates the artistic process to recharge our imaginations. You and your allies might organize a festival of way-out ideas, new inventions, creative visions, modes of expression. Get together a group to paint a community mural, landscape the town square, start a craft co-op, bring local businesses and schools together to design and build a playground. There’s nothing the human imagination working in community cannot accomplish.
4. A politeia of healing moves us beyond the polarities of left vs. right, or us against them, and promotes cooperation, understanding, and networks of mutual aid. In this regard, I think of the work of Leah Green who helped facilitate compassionate listening between Israelis and Palestinians. What if you were to create a meeting place where, once a month, conflicting groups—skateboarding teens and local police, public utility companies and conservationists—could talk to each other? Before the session, act out a compassionate listening dialogue to model the technique, making your interaction heartfelt and even funny so that people lose their resistance and want to try. You’ll find that when people start to dialogue in a spirit of fairness and deep listening, critical issues can be addressed with wisdom and integrity.
5. A politeia of celebration encourages music, songs, humor, dances, rituals, and myths of possibility to be played out, performed, and celebrated. Building community in the new millennium requires that we create social theater to tell the New Story of a world in transition. A woman I know in a small town in rural Georgia took the stories of her area’s local history and created a pageant called Swamp Gravy in which everyone in the community participated. What if we each became a local impresario for Jump Time talent, from pre-schoolers and seniors? If we each encouraged schools, community and civic groups, churches, and neighborhoods to get involved, we might trigger a renaissance of theatrical and musical engagement in our communities as a fertile seedbed for new ideas and vision.
6. A politeia of hope encourages an attitude of wonder and astonishment before what can be. It treats the problems and scarcities before us as opportunities to clarify what is really important. In this, we might well take a lesson from the Iroquois people who, before their council meetings, spoke their praise and gratitude for everything, naming their blessings with words and songs of wonder. Think how different it might be if your local school board meeting began with gratitude for the community’s blessings and with hopeful declarations rather than with partisanship, discouragement, or resentment. Hope give us energy and motivation, and avails the human mind of its finest treasures.
We have come to that stage where the real work of humanity begins. This is the time and place where we partner Creation in the recreation of ourselves, in the restoration of the biosphere, and in the assuming of a new kind of culture—what we might term a culture of kindness, in which we live daily life reconnected and recharged by the Source so as to become liberated in our inventiveness and engaged in the world and our tasks.