When Dr. Don Beck speaks about our most pressing humanitarian
issues, he reveals disarmingly intuitive insights into what
often appear to be irreconcilable situations. Having developed
and championed Spiral Dynamics—arguably one of the most
accurate models of cultural development—Beck's thirty-year
career has led him from corporate boardrooms to government
offices to inner-city schools. Most notably, he spent eighteen
years traveling to and from South Africa, where he tirelessly
committed himself to helping catalyze the peaceful transition
out of apartheid. Willing to risk his own safety to create open
channels of communication across highly polarized racial
divides, Beck conjured a vision of a future beyond apartheid
that played no small role in convincing the de Klerk government
to release Nelson Mandela from prison.
In the spring of 2004, Beck established the Copenhagen Center
for Human Emergence (CCHE)—the first public
institution
dedicated to this new paradigm of solution-
making, and the next
and perhaps most significant chapter
of his work. Beck's
ongoing conviction is that we must understand the fundamental
and often widely differing ways in which both individual human
beings and entire
cultures think about things and prioritize
their values. Only then can we address the root causes of social
fragmentation and conflict and create a form of global
governance that will guide the emergence of a new society in the
twenty-first century.
WHAT IS ENLIGHTENMENT: Why do you feel that the
old models of global governance are no longer adequate for
addressing the problems and challenges we face?
DON BECK: Since the dawn of civilization one hundred
thousand years ago, humans have migrated over islands,
continents, mountain ranges, steppes, deserts, and other
landforms, and have even escaped Earth's gravity. We have formed
clans, tribes, holy orders, enterprises, and egalitarian
communes. There are now six billion of us, and while we are more
culturally fragmented than ever before, we are also more
interconnected. Everything is both global and
local—everywhere. Yet the models for global
governance that we have in the League of Nations, the United
Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and
others simply do not have the complexity of understanding to
deal with the fragmentation we're facing. In short, our problems
of existence have become more complex than the solutions we have
available to deal with them.
While on the surface it often appears that conflicts are
tribal or involve competing empires, or ideologies, or even
national interests, the real issues are in the underlying
worldviews—the deeper human dynamics that can
dramatically differ from one culture to another. It is
these underlying cultural dynamics that shape the actions and
choices we make, that determine how we live our lives, how
cultures subsequently form, and why they often collide.
WIE: Can you give an example of how perceiving the
fundamental differences between cultural worldviews could change
our perspective and therefore the ways in which we endeavor to
solve global problems?
BECK: The issues surrounding the Arab and Muslim world
are awakening us to the fact that there are very different
thought structures and value structures in different parts of
the planet, and if we don't know how to deal with these, it will
come back to haunt us. It already has. For example, we went into
Iraq with a disastrous assumption coming from the White House,
based on our free-market, multi-party democracy, in which each
person is a free and independent agent acting on their own
behalf. We assume that everyone else in the world is like us.
And so we entered Iraq believing that democracy would be
embraced there—that anybody, no matter who they are, can
become anything they want and will do so once given the
opportunity.
What this fails to take into account is that a tribal
worldview is still very, very powerful in the Muslim world, with
the primary emphasis being on the extended family and the
intermarriage of cousins. Because these cultures come out of
heavy tribal enclaves and power-driven kingdoms, nepotism is
almost a civic duty. Even today, the Arab countries are not
really nation states, and they are nowhere near being
democracies. The “people of the sand” have not yet
developed the infrastructures that would support a
one-person-one-vote/majority-rules system. I mean, it's just
insane to think that's got any chance. At the same time, money
has poured into these tribal family kingdoms from the West
because of oil, benefiting immensely those in the royal family
lineages. And those who don't benefit become the “Arab
street,” and that's where the anger is generated.
So the real source of terrorism is the brotherhoods that are
assaulting the current system, assaulting the patronage and the
family heritage of the old order that has kept the commoner out
of the booty, and which is keeping fifty million Arab males
trapped in archaic kingdoms. And these terrorist brotherhoods
are networks, as opposed to regiments of armies. So dropping
bombs on them is simply going to spread the problem.