Cultural Leadership in the Networked Revolution

The Living Institute Leadership Program (LILP) will be a one or two year certificate program that educates people to be leaders in the tradition of cultural activism. This training could be applied in many fields, including facilitating general cultural change, environmental activism, sustainability, social justice, political activism, organizational development, social entrepreneurship, education, health care, the arts. Each of the potential faculty will identify with different areas of specific focus in these fields. Each of these areas is also a place for broad cultural leadership in our current evolutionary activation state in Western culture.  As we go forward with dialogue, the particular foci of the program will clarify, based on mutual interests and what is being called for in the culture. The Living Institute Leadership Round Table dialogue is in process with potential faculty members. Lectures, workshops and conferences will be part of this program. A key theme will be orienting students to the extensive, complex network of interconnected and related programs, institutions, grad schools and individuals around the world that are participating in a kind of awakening phenomenon that has an existential crisis and spiritual emergence quality in Western culture.

The Living Institute cultural activism network tradition arises from within the explosive, revolutionary, deconstructive theme in the 20th century that has enacted an existential crisis in Western culture’s sense of identity and reality. Drawing on the existential and spiritual emergence models, it can be shown that coming to the edge of destruction, as we have, calls forth the deepest possible potential for spiritual and psychological renewal at an individual, community and cultural level. As Rick Tarnas spoke of at the Living Institute’s Transforming the Modern World conference (April 18 – 20, 2008), and writes about in Cosmos and Psyche, we are now entering an archetypally situated, and cosmically framed, period of revolutionary evolution comparable to the 1960’s and to the early Romantic period of the late 18th/early 19th centuries. There is a need to educate people in how to harmonically amplify and constructively engage these explosive change energies, so that it isn’t just deconstructive, but, in a complex, dialectic sense, reconstructive. A re-enchantment of the alienated, post-Enlightenment  world, as Morris Berman has spoken of in The Re-enchantment of the World, and Charlene Spretnak has echoed in The Resurgence of the Real: Body, Nature, and Place in a Hypermodern World, which develops ‘ecological postmodernism’ as a re-grounding of the human project in the dynamic processes of the Earth community.

Aftad Olmer, founder and president of Meridian University (a San Francisco graduate school and research centre that draws on the archetypal psychology tradition), focuses his work in this area on “assisting organizations and learning communities in tapping the creative potential of diversity, conflict, chaos”. He has this to say about our current situation in his “The Spacious Center: Leadership and the Creative Transformation of Culture” paper.

The center and periphery of a culture interact differently during steady-state periods and periods of change. During steady-state periods, the center of a culture is conventional—dense with rules, norms, taboos, and consensual notions of the ‘truth’—while the periphery is marginalized and remains disenfranchised, disempowered, and often scapegoated. In contrast, during periods of instability and conflict, the periphery is in dynamic interaction with a culture’s center. During such times, the center is more responsive to the different and the unknown. By engaging and recognizing differences that were previously denied, suppressed, and trivialized, a culture’s web of habits transforms as it responds to the perspectives and practices found at the periphery. The dynamic interaction between a culture’s center and its periphery keeps the culture vital and adaptive, providing cultural leaders with opportunities for creative cultural transformation. Cultural leaders choreograph this interaction in ways that are creative and transformative. In this way, cultural leadership is distinct from political and administrative leadership. While political leaders primarily make rules and administrative leaders primarily enforce rules, cultural leaders like Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Mother Teresa, find principled and imaginative ways to transgress those rules that inhibit the emergence of cultural sovereignty and creativity. Their actions engender new and unexpected meanings. The recognition and creative transgression of rules and norms is at the heart of cultural leadership. Cultural leadership entails an ability to surrender through creative action to the necessities, meanings, and possibilities inherent in the present moment. Cultural leaders are able to transmute how they are personally affected by the culture into creative action that midwives the future.

These leadership and change themes have been, and continue to be, brought into many programs in graduate schools, growth centres and diverse organizations around the world that derive from or relate to the archetypal, humanistic, existential, somatic, transpersonal and related traditions that emerged from the 1960’s. What used to be peripheral and counterculture is becoming an influential network of interconnected points of awareness and action. “We live in a networked world” says the Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs in the Jan/Feb, 2009 issue of Foreign Affairs. This publication of the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations speaks from the knowledge base of the US power elite, the centre. The theme of the networked periphery influencing the centre is also in the process of being enacted.

The California Institute of Integral Studies (www.ciis.edu) where Rick Tarnas teaches), Naropa University (www.naropa.edu), Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center (www.saybrook.edu) (where Kirk J. Schneider teaches) and JFK University (www.jfku.edu) provide examples of grad schools in the humanistic, transpersonal, existential and somatic depth traditions that have transformative leadership degree programs focusing on cultural evolution, through  areas such as politics, community, social justice, environmentalism, sustainability, organizational development, business, administration, education, clinical issues. Hollyhock Leadership Institute (www.hollyhockleadership.org), a successful, non-grad school, Canadian version, is a part of this work, having graduated 3000 trainees and served 200 organizations since 1997, as is Parker Palmer's Center for Courage and Renewal (www.couragerenewal.org), having trained 160 facilitators in 35 states and 50 cities. Esalen Institute (www.esalen.org), in Big Sur, California, continues to offer programs in this tradition. Meridian University (with Aftab Omer) is also part of this, as is the newly formed Meridian University’s Center for Social Healing (www.meridianuniversity.edu) (with Michael Meade, Joanna Macy and others), based in the archetypal ‘imaginal’ psychology tradition, “dedicated to research, education, and consultation that engages the schisms and enemy making dynamics of our time”. Toronto’s Centre for Social Innovation (www.socialinnovation.ca) is a “social enterprise, catalyzing social innovation … for social entrepreneurs, in the social mission field”, with 100 social mission groups sharing desk space for the purpose of creating “original action in a participatory culture” through “diversity, interconnections, discovery, serendipity”. The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (www.oise.utoronto.ca), part of the University of Toronto, also has a focus on personal and social transformation, with a holistic creativity theme, in their Transformative Learning Centre, as well as their Adult Education and Community Development Program, and the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning.

There are many others. The Canadian Humanistic and Transpersonal Association (CHTA) (www.chata.ca) has begun the creation of a directory of these and related programs, currently listing 150. Many in turn list others, such as Paul Hawken’s WiserEarth website (www.wiserearth.org), which serves people who are concerned with transforming the world  as a community directory and networking forum that maps and connects global non-governmental organizations, businesses, governments and individuals addressing the “central issues of our day (climate change, poverty, the environment, peace, water, hunger, social justice, conservation, human rights and more)”. This is connected to Hawken’s, Blessed Unrest, which chronicles and lists in book form the tens of thousands of individuals and organizations around the world addressing these issues. The websites of the Association for Humanistic Psychology (www.ahpweb.org), Association for Transpersonal Psychology (www.atpweb.org) and International Transpersonal Associations (http://atpweb.org/googlegroup) provide similar global linkups. Follow the link to 'Collegial Contacts in the Humanistic, Existential, Somatic, Transpersonal and Related Fields' to explore these extensive, networked global connections.

The Living Institute Leadership Program’s cultural activism focus is on transforming our “culture’s web of habits”, in Aftad Omer’s terms, much in the same way that psychotherapy transforms an individual’s complex web of habits. The LILP educates cultural leaders who can function, in a sense, as cultural therapists, focused through particular fields of cultural concern (such as sustainability, multiculturalism, social justice, organizational change, education), and also, in an archetypal, depth manner, complexly interacting with the cultural ground and zeitgeist.  Richard Tarnas speaks of kairos, Malcolm Gladwell of the ‘tipping point’, and dynamical systems theory of deep sensitivity to subtle input at a systemic bifurcation point, where the system is about to go to a new level of existential organization. It would seem, from many perspectives and on many levels, that we are in just such an intense period of change in Western culture, and, through various translations, also globally. President Barack Obama, the community organizer who speaks with psychological reflection and approaches problem solving from a relational perspective, is a highly visible, centrally situated manifestation of this. The network of global interconnections in the archetypal, humanistic, existential, transpersonal and related depth traditions is a complex, systemic manifestation of the same thing, calling for, and enacting, transformational cultural change.

Now is the time. This is the place. We are the people. Let’s do it.

A Green Leaders conference focusing on environmental issues through ecospirituality (drawing on the work of Thomas Berry and others) and ecopsychology (drawing on archetypal psychology) is in the works for spring/summer of 2010. As well as addressing issues in the planetary ecological crisis, these themes will be presented as key ingredients in the possible resolution of Western culture’s existential, evolutionary crisis, which the ecological crisis is inextricably intertwined with. We are negotiating with the Dharma Centre of Canada (www.dharmacentre.org) to be co-sponsors of this endeavour, and will also be approaching other institutions. As well as the general cultural activation re green themes, the Hon. George Smitherman’s proposed Green Energy Act, with its ‘green economy, renewable energy, conservation culture’ highlights (www.ontla.on.ca/web/bills/bills_detail.do?locale=en&BillID), makes this very timely in Ontario.

The LILP will integrate with the Living Institute Wilderness Program, which will involve various lectures, workshops, programs and destination workshops with a focus to educate and integrate wilderness experience, knowledge and practices into daily life. The various models and methods to be considered in the LIWP are drawn from: aboriginal spiritual practices, with respect for the originators of these traditions; wilderness tripping (traditional methods of traveling through the land); the edible forest (practices and workshops explaining what local wild food is available and how to find and prepare it); utilizing small urban “wild” areas to regenerate oneself; how to create small urban gardens to supply oneself with fresh food (indoor and outdoor); permaculture concepts and practice; living off the land, ethical practices of hunting and harvesting animals for food and materials; green living practices, composting, alternative energy and water supply; medicinal plants and usages that could be grown at home; eco spirituality and practice (with Dr Dennis O’Hara); ecopsychology, drawing on archetypal psychology and ecology; eco and spiritual architecture and design; art and nature workshops. Segments will include lectures and workshops, with local weekend or evening short programs that will be a teaching in themselves, and designed to establish the future focus of programming and interest in destination workshops. Read more

The Archetypal Review of Culture (ARC), an online magazine/journal soon to be published by the Living Institute, will provide a cultural leadership voice from this program. The Archetypal Review of Culture will highlight, and comment upon, cultural events from an archetypal, existential, humanistic and transpersonal depth perspective, so that how people see the world, and the actions they may take in the world, may be shaded by these traditions. The publication will include opinion pieces, scholarly articles, book, movie and periodicals reviews, poetry, photos and video footage, current events news and reviews, reports of conferences, network activities. Because it will published online through an email link (www.archetypalreviewofculture.org) it can include direct links to other online activities. I invite you to make a contribution in any of the areas listed above, or in some other area of interest to you in this field. Read more.

The Living Institute Leadership Round Table dialogue among potential faculty has begun, centering on the question “what is leadership”. Dennis O’Hara (Director, Elliot Allen Institute for Theology and Ecology, St. Michaels College, University of Toronto, naturopath, health care ethicist), Harvey Weisfeld (entrepreneur, values-driven business model, social activism), Kelli Nigh (educator, holistic curriculum development, journal editor, theatre, arts) joined Caroline Mardon, Director, and Jim McNamara, Programs Director, of the Living Institute, in the inaugural meeting.