Field's End May 2009 Roundtable presenter Dr. David C. Korten
Before a full house at the Bainbridge Public Library last Tuesday evening, visionary and author Dr. David C. Korten outlined a multi-tiered strategy for writers to follow if they want to change the world through their words.
Korten, who chairs the Positive Futures Network and contributes richly to the local magazine: Yes! Building a Just and Sustainable World, has spent his adult life helping to promote change from the grassroots upward.
This ran counter to early expectations: from his own background, growing up in a family who operated a music store in Longview, Wash., Korten first imagined he would take over the business as a young man. He did not portend his move toward what he described at the Roundtable as “an intellectual activism,” the move that would ultimately define his career path.
Korten has authored several books, including The Great Turning and Agenda for a New Economy, which have each contributed in some way to an expansion of free thinking among the mainstream over the last two decades.
Korten posited that three things need to work in concert with one another for a writer’s words to light a spark that can lead to meaningful change:
1. A big idea. This could be the big question a writer is always returning to in his or her own work.
2. The attachment of that big idea (and the manuscript it evolves into) to a movement. If a writer’s words can advocate for a movement, that writer may be able to find more readers and supporters in the same way that grassroots movements spread and take hold.
3. Access to media. This used to be a problem for writers, but not with the advent of the Internet, new publishing and information technologies, and social networking (Web 2.0, even Web 3.0). Freedom of expression has never been easier to disseminate than it is today.
A fourth element, Korten pointed out, might also be a combination of good luck and timing.
Korten also drove home the point that activism is only one part of the larger conversation about change. Even as he confirmed himself an activist, he was quick to point out that ”Resistance alone is futile.”
“Human beings need story,” he maintained, suggesting that despite this, the stories that human societies already share, our “cultural myths,” are often what prevent us from reaching our potential. When looking more closely at our shared cultural mythologies, Korten said he discovered that, in truth, “our cultural story doesn’t offer any good reason for why the human species should survive.”
Based on this understanding, he asserted that it is up to writers and artists to help change the frameworks of those cultural stories in order to invite movement beyond marching and sit-ins and sign-carrying. Various diverse modes of expression can lead to an amplification of a resistance movement beyond its grassroots beginnings, he said.
Korten also pointed out that, once new truths found their way out to the masses through small pockets of activism and grassroots organizing, it didn’t take long for them to spread and be embraced by the mainstream. These messages, once unified in the public sector, almost certainly demanded a kind of social mobilization, he asserted.
But writers have their work cut out for them. “How do we change the whole frame” of our cultural stories? he asked, suggesting that writers turn to the grassroots with their big ideas as a testing ground for challenging large-scale models.
For his part, writing has always evolved around answering the question, “Why are human societies failing?”* From his perspective, this is not a dreary conversation. In fact, Korten has turned the dialog in a more proactive direction by framing his answers in positive solutions, perspectives, and stories, working toward what he and his cohorts have called “The State of the Possible.”
This, perhaps, is the destination that all writers interested in change-making should consider as they research and compose in order to answer their own big questions.
Links:
David Korten
Postitive Futures Network
Yes! Magazine
Agenda for a New Economy
The Great Turning
“The State of the Possible”
*This actually worked in the reverse for his most recent book, Agenda for a New Economy; he was led by the answer first to develop the manuscript, which was composed, produced, published and released almost instantly in the late fall of 2008
