David Korten's book reviewed by Mark Satin
Mark Satin is the editor of Radical Middle, an online political journal with an editorial direction which balances sensibility and radical change. Mark has written a pretty cutting review of David Korten's The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community. Read the full review here
I'll admit I've never been a fan of Korten's ideas. I just find it to belong in the category of ungrounded romantic idealism, and I also simply happen to think that any 'anti' position just serves to create deeper divides.
I also have a different kind of value than Mark Satin around the importance of spiritual practice, but I also get where he's coming from, and agree to an extent that spiritual practice is not necessarily a prerequisite for developing a 'mature' [political] worldview.
Satin captures the jist of my beef with guys like Korten and the whole stable of anti-capitlist 'cultural creatives' (and subtly points to their tragic misunderstanding of the concept of 'transformation')':
“Corporate-free economies”
Korten bears a special animus toward corporations -- ultimately he’d like to see “corporate-free economies that mimic healthy ecosystems.” He would eliminate the “limited liability” corporations now enjoy, for owners (i.e., stockholders) and managers alike, effectively bringing many of them to a quick end.
Although he describes corporate malfeasance in rich detail, and outdoes Marx by arguing that corporations were cleverly foisted on an unknowing public by political and economic elites, Korten doesn’t mention any of the advantages of the corporate structure (e.g., it’s an easy and efficient way for individuals to pool capital) or any of the benefits corporations have brought us (e.g., affordable goods, rapid productivity growth, astonishing technologies).
My old book New Age Politics took an equally one-sided view of the corporation.
One problem I have with this now is that envisioning a world of “corporate-free economies” is a non-starter. While it's tempting to hurl thunderbolts at the world, activists need to speak to the world as it is and to people as they are. Otherwise they’re just teaching alienation.
Another problem I have is that -- precisely because corporations are such powerful engines for good and harm (not to mention remarkable human creations) -- I’d rather we devoted our intelligence and energies to improving them, rather than to taking them down and ultimately eliminating them.
Many good people are trying to improve them. But Korten doesn’t discuss the work of the extraordinary management consultants that are trying to teach corporations to operate more humanely now, even those that are inarguably on the so-called Culturally or Spiritually Conscious wavelength such as Dan Goleman, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Marc Sarkady, Jim Collins, Peter Schwartz, and Jay Ogilvy. Nor does he discuss any of the laws now being proposed by business and legal scholars that would induce corporations to move away from their obsession with the short-term bottom line.
He does suggest in passing that public policy should favor “patient investment over speculative trading.” But he doesn’t elaborate. His heart isn’t in reform. He is about Transformation.
Read the full review here
