“Journey to Earthland” is a recently released book by the Great Transition Initiative (GTI), a worldwide network of activist scholars with a unique purpose—to advance “a vision and praxis for global transformation”. Few civil society organisations have such a broad focus on transformational strategies towards a new global social-ecological system, as condensed and overviewed in this latest publication by GTI’s director, Paul Raskin. The short and accessible book presents a majestic overview of our historic juncture and expounds the urgent need for systemic change, with a hopeful vision of a flourishing civilisation that has long inspired Share The World’s Resources (STWR) in our complementary proposals for peaceful mass civic engagement.

The phrase ‘Earthland’ adopted by Raskin relates to the Planetary Phase of civilisation that GTI conceptualise as the coming era, in which humanity embraces its increasing interdependence through a new ethos of global solidarity and a transformed political community of cooperative nations. With the first part of the book summarising the evolving phases in human history since the earliest dawn of man, the Planetary Phase is finally “born of systemic crisis”, requiring a corresponding systemic response that can shape an inclusive and sustainable future for all.

Earthland is the idealised outcome of this great transition, brought to life in the final part of the book where three archetypal regions are explored: Agoria (with its market emphasis and socialised economy, or ‘Sweden Supreme’), Ecodemia (distinguished by its economic democracy and collectivist ethos), and Arcadia (accentuating self-reliant economies and a ‘small-is-beautiful’ enthusiasm). Raskin argues that such a compelling vision of “One World, Many Places” may seem remote, but should not be dismissed out-of-hand—just as the idea of sovereign nations may have once seemed an implausible dream.

Central to the book’s thesis is the question of collective action, and the need for a “vast cultural and political arising” that can bring this new world into being. The rationale for a new form of global citizens movement is made throughout the book, drawing upon much of the analysis and propositions in GTI’s canon. It is the missing actor on the world stage, an overarching systemic movement that includes all the many struggles for peace, justice and sustainability, yet remains united under a broad umbrella of common concerns and universal values. Raskin and the GTI make a convincing case that such a movement may be our only hope of avoiding a “Fortress World” or “Barberisation” future, as long as a movement for a great transition can fill the vacuum in political leadership and lay the foundations for a “post-growth material era”, and a true “global demos” or “planetary democracy”.

From STWR’s perspective, the book hits all the right notes in sketching out a more equal and vibrant civilisation that exists within planetary boundaries. It envisages a new paradigm in which economies are a means for attaining social and environmental ends, not an end in themselves; in which economic equity is the prerequisite in a shift towards post-consumerist societies, while poverty elimination is “a galvanising priority”; and in which continued economic growth is equally shared both within and between regions, until Global North-South disparities have vanished.

In the imagined social dimensions of Earthland, we also find a more leisured society where everyone is guaranteed a basic income, and where the pursuit of money has given way to non-market endeavours that enable genuine “sharing economies” and the art of living to flourish. Raskin even outlines the new modes of trade and global governance for a Commonwealth of Earthland, including world bodies that marshal “solidarity funds” to needy areas, thus ensuring a truly communitarian and interdependent economy.

What’s most interesting about ‘Journey to Earthland’ is its almost spiritual exhortations for a shared planetary civilisation, often expressed in eloquent passages that variously define the need for an enlarged sense of human identity that extends beyond national boundaries. “Interdependence in the objective realm of political economy cultivates, in the subjective realm of human consciousness, an understanding of people and planet as a single community,” the author writes. Similarly, he states: “This augmented solidarity is the correlative in consciousness of the interdependence in the external world.”

The author also depicts the “three-fold way of transition” in diagrammatic form, illuminating the need for a fundamental change in human consciousness (the “ontological” and “normative” realms), as well as in the social model (or “institutional” realm). Stressing the “longing for wholeness” that distinguishes the values of a Great Transition, he also cites the origin of these universal values that remain the sine qua non of human life: “All along, the tangible political and cultural expressions of the Great Transition were rooted in a parallel transition underway in the intangible realm of the human heart.”

The real question, however, is how a global citizens movement can actually emerge in these socially polarised times, when even the prospect of uniting Western societies to welcome refugees is a forlorn challenge. Raskin provides a cogent theoretical perspective on how a mass movement can be galvanized, built on cultural or “normative solidarity” and a sense of “emotive unity”. Emphasis is placed on the need for proactive organising strategies, as well as an “integrated strategic and intellectual framework” that can connect the full spectrum of global issues. The times cry out, writes Raskin, for large-scale campaigns with the explicit purpose of catalysing a transformative social movement along these lines. But still we await a truly international effort of this nature to emerge, while most single-issue movements are increasingly entrenched in local or regional struggles as the trends of inequality, conflict and environmental degradation generally worsen.

This is where STWR’s advocacy position departs from the GTI, despite fundamentally agreeing with their broad analysis and vision for a consciousness shift towards a Planetary Phase of civilisation. To be sure, the greatest hope for the future rests with new solidarities being forged on the global stage, with the welfare of the collective whole being prioritised above the welfare of any one particular group, class or nation. But what does this actually mean in the present moment, when discrepancies in global living standards are so extreme that millions of people are currently at risk from dying of hunger or other poverty-related causes, while 8 billionaires own more wealth than the poorest half of the world? Furthermore, is it realistic to expect the 4.3 billion people who subsist on less than $5-a-day to join a global citizens movement, if their basic socioeconomic rights are not at the forefront of any such planetary endeavour?

From this immediate perspective of a starkly divided world, the answer for how to catalyse a united voice of ordinary people may be unexpected in the end. For perhaps what’s missing from most Western-led campaigning initiatives and protest actions is not the right intellectual strategy, but a sufficient focus on the hardships and suffering experienced by the very poorest citizens within the world population. Perhaps the spark that will initiate an unprecedented demonstration of global unity is not to be found in the human mind at all, but in the simple attributes of the human heart—as Raskin himself appears to intuitively recognise. He writes: “As connectivity globalizes in the external world, so might empathy globalise in the human heart.” The question that remains is: how can that collective empathy be initially catalysed, and on what basis—given the fact that tens of thousands of people are needlessly dying each day without sufficient help from governments or the public-at-large?

This is the starting point for STWR’s understanding of how to unify citizens of the richest and poorest nations on a common platform, based on the awareness of an international humanitarian emergency that our mainstream Western culture tends to largely ignore. Hence our proposal for enormous, continuous and truly global demonstrations that call upon the United Nations to guarantee Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—for adequate food, housing, healthcare and social security for all—until governments finally commit to an emergency redistribution programme in line with the Brandt Commission proposals in 1980.

As STWR’s founder Mohammed Mesbahi has explicated in a different kind of political treatise titled ‘Heralding Article 25: A people’s strategy for world transformation’, such unprecedented protests across the world may be the last chance we have of influencing governments to redistribute resources and restructure the global economy. It may also be the only hope for initiating a global citizens movement, bringing together millions of people for a shared planetary cause—and ultimately paving the way for all the social, economic and political transformations that are inspiringly promoted by the GTI.

Further resources:

• www.greattransition.org
• Journey to Earthland: The Great Transition to Planetary Civilization, by Paul Raskin
• Reflections on Journey to Earthland by diverse global thinkers, November 2016
• The Widening Circle: Campaign for Advancing a Global Citizens Movement
• Great Transition: The Promise and Lure of the Times Ahead, by Paul Raskin et al, April 2002

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The idea of a new, humane global civilization emerging from a mid-21st century “Time of Troubles” is a common theme in near-future science fiction. Probably the most notable example is the post-scarcity moneyless communism of Star Trek: The Next Generation, which emerged from the global collapse that followed the Eugenics Wars. Other examples are Roy Morrison’s 22nd century Eco-Civilization and the future society in Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (founded by the victors of a global civil war against neoliberal capitalism).

Earthland is very much in this tradition. . He begins by outlining several alternative possibilities:

1) Conventional scenarios that involve roughly the same institutional forms as we have today: either something like existing global corporate capitalism, or a limited set of social democratic reforms;

2) Barbarisation scenarios: authoritarian elites retreating into a network of fortress cities and abandoning most of the human race to squalor and poverty, or a total collapse of civilization and a new Dark Age;

3) Great Transition scenarios: an eco-communalist variant of small-scale artisan production and autarkic direct democracies, and a New Paradigm combining such localized economies with a cosmopolitan global society.

Most of the book focuses on developing the New Paradigm transition scenario. Raskin begins by describing a period of “Rolling Crisis” from 2001 to 2023, growing out of the neoliberal order that developed from 1980 to 2001. The foundation of the Global Citizens Movement with its local organizations in most major communities, as an outgrowth of global civil society, wasn’t enough to prevent the full-blown “General Emergency” of 2023-2028. But it provided the nucleus of the society that was to emerge from the General Emergency, without which the world would likely have descended into one of the Barbarisation scenarios instead.

The General Emergency was followed by a twenty-year period of reform, from 2028 to 2048, in which nation-states pursued a mixture of conventional social democratic policies and attempts to promote resilient economies. Although the Global Citizens Movement was initially dominated by moderates willing to let national governments take the lead in reform, it was increasingly radicalized as reformist efforts achieved limited results and stalled out in the face of obstruction by neoliberal institutional forces.

In the 2040s, the GCM developed a new consensus in favor of more radical action and achieved political dominance in a growing number of nation-states, local governments, and multilateral bodies. Its Earthland Parliamentary Assembly — originally an internal deliberative body for the movement — became the federal legislative body for the emerging network of national and local GCM governments. When this growing collection of GCM-dominated governments reached critical mass, it culminated in the formation of the global Commonwealth of Earthland in 2048.

The Earthland of 2084 is a patchwork federation of pre-existing nations and metropolitan centers, bioregions, and autonomous regions in former nation-states. Raskin classifies Earthland’s component regions into three broad categories: Agoria, Ecodemia, and Arcadia. Agoria, with an economy still organized primarily around corporations (albeit with multiple stakeholder governance and a radically altered market incentive structure), would be most recognizable to someone from the early 21st century. Ecodemia, with an economy organized around economic democracy and worker-owned/community-owned firms, would be the least recognizable. Arcadia emphasizes local self-reliance and small-scale artisan production. Of course, none of these models is exclusive or monolithic, and larger regions have considerable local variation (like the Arcadian Pacific Northwest in the larger Agorian North American region). All three regional forms also have large, thriving informal and household sectors.

The average per capita income has roughly tripled since the early 21st century. In areas of the Global North, it is actually slightly lower; but with the elimination of parasitic super-rich rentier classes and wasteful production, the actual standard of living for most Americans and Europeans is significantly higher. Population has stabilized around 8 billion, compared to predictions of a 12 billion population peak early in the century. Average work weeks are 12-18 hours (the “pathologically acquisitive” work far more, but it’s not necessary to do so to live comfortably).

Although population patterns range from highly urbanized areas in Agoria to small towns and villages in Arcadia, there is a common emphasis everywhere on mixed-use communities. Residences and workplaces are integrated in ways that minimize automobile ownership and commuting.

The dominant form of democracy varies from representative in Agoria, workplace-based in Ecodemia, and direct in Arcadia. Aside from setting the gross parameters of the system (like minimum global standards for basic income and carbon emissions quotas), the Commonwealth and regional governments strike me as more like governance platforms on Bauwens’ “Partner State” model than states in the classic sense (“administration of things rather than legislation over people”).

At the outset, I mentioned the common theme in speculative fiction of a near-future “Time of Troubles” characterized by multiple intersecting terminal crises, and a new humane civilization emerging in the medium-term from the ashes. In most of these scenarios, the emergent successor societies feature technologies of abundance, reduced dependence on work, decentralization, communitarianism, and governments which — if they still exist at all — function as neutral administrators rather than engines of political and class domination. In my opinion, the unconscious cultural perceptions behind these fictional scenarios make a great deal of sense. Our current system is manifestly unsustainable and in its last days. At the same time, the organizational and technological building blocks already exist to create a society of plenty that’s freer, more humane, and more ecologically desirable. We’re already in the process of putting these building blocks together through our cooperative labor. It’s just a matter of minimizing the harm that the forces of the old world can do to us on its way down.

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The following contribution by Evelin Lindner on Dignism is part of a broader discussion on a necessary Great Transition Initiative, which was launched by Paul Raskin and has been recently updated with a new essay,“Journey to Earthland: Making the Great Transition to Planetary Civilization”.

The author, Evelin Lindner, focuses on the need for more respectful and ‘dignitarian’ relationships between human beings, something which is very close to our heart at the P2P Foundation, where we attempt to work on a coherent P2P Hierarchy Theory based on the material located here. We recommend reading John Heron’s citation on that page which summarizes our own approach to the matter. Linder’s work seems closely related to Robert W. Fuller’s work against Rankism and for Dignitarianism.

Evelin Lindner: In my view, Journey to Earthland is one of the most important documents of our time. I have immense admiration for Paul Raskin and his seminal work over so many decades. Yes, as he writes, “the race for the soul of Earthland is on” (66)!¹ Is a global citizens movement possible? If so, can it “take shape at the requisite speed, scale and coherence?” And can it be global enough?

For the past forty years, I have been living globally, at home on all continents, to nurture a global “dignity family.” In other words, I am working day and night to nurture precisely the very solidarity of a global citizens movement that Paul describes: “This augmented solidarity is the correlative in consciousness of the interdependence in the external world. The Planetary Phase, in mingling the destinies of all, has stretched esprit de corps across space and time to embrace the whole human family, living and unborn, and beyond” (77).

Do we, as humankind, understand how dire our situation is, and how radical our responses must be? There is “dewy-eyed sanguinity” and stoic optimism on one side, and “world-weary cynicism” on the other side (110-111), while what is needed, is largely missing: a due and measured sense of alarm. It is as if people in a burning house or on a sinking ship discuss their feelings, while failing to act.

Do we, as humankind, have the means to act? Did our ancestors see pictures of our Blue Planet from the perspective of an astronaut? Were our forebears able to see, as we do, how we humans are one single family living on one tiny planet? Did our grandparents have access to as comprehensive a knowledge base as we have about the universe and our place in it? They did not. The image of the Blue Planet is revolutionary. It anchors humankind in the universe in ways no generation before was able to experience. For the first time, humankind can now act on and manifest the fact that we are one family. All the necessary information is amply available, more than ever before. A small window of opportunity is open for humankind at the current juncture in human history, for a few years to come perhaps, an opportunity to create a decent future for coming generations, rather than leave a ramshackle world to them.

I very much appreciate Paul’s discussion of constrained pluralism and unity in diversity. Many people I meet around the world believe that the relationship between unity and diversity is zero-sum and that if one wants more unity, one has to sacrifice diversity, and vice versa. They therefore think in dualities: “cosmopolitanism versus communalism, statism versus anarchism, and top-down versus bottom-up” (84). There seem to be very high mental hurdles that keep people from grasping that unity in diversity is not a zero-sum game, but that both unity and diversity can be increased together, and that the benefits are immeasurable (see, for instance, Jean Baker Miller’s work on zest in relationships and mutual growth as an outcome of waging good conflict).² The two prongs of unity and diversity, global responsibility and regional autonomy, are both essential and complementary.

For making unity in diversity work, it is not enough, however, to transcend dualities. What is needed, in addition, is to embrace processual thinking, to go from clinging to fixities to moving in flux. The tension between “Many” and “One” must be balanced by all involved in a never-ending process; it can never be “cemented” once and for all in the way past systems tried to. This means that appropriate societal systems need to be created, and dignifying communication skills learned, which allow for fluid adaptations of this balance, without violence. It means moving away from a world that clings to illusions of fixity, where violent protests are launched whenever the balance is felt wanting. In short, maintaining unity in diversity is a never-ending balancing act that requires a high degree of cognitive sophistication, interpersonal sagacity, and dignifying communication skills.

However, among the challenges we face in achieving this balance are two “blind spots” that I have observed even among the most progressives all around the world regarding the affective and institutional dimensions of global citizenship.

The affective dimension speaks to the cultural solidarity that Paul Raskin rightly sees as the glue that holds together the movement towards a new Earthland and to the reshaping of the secular story to include the deeper moral and spiritual aspirations of humans and what it is to be human. As I observe it, not only the academic community lacks what might be called emotional-relational literacy. To say it in a caricature, the traditional professor/director was a man who had a female secretary who did all the relationship building work for him: she apologized to those he had insulted, and she even bought his flowers for his wife’s birthday. By saying so, I do not wish to blame the professor/director or the secretary in this story, since this was “the way it was.” However, in today’s world, in which cooperation is essential, it becomes dangerous to maintain this habitus. Cooperation requires trusting relationships as the very foundation for any voluntary inclination of people to rely on each other and work together. After living globally for the past forty years, I observe, unfortunately, that the work of creating trusting human-to-human connections largely fails to be done: it is still seen as an inconsequential “female” task that is “miraculously” self-executing, and the need to engage in it intentionally is simply ignored. What happens instead is that a “male” script of throwing one’s weight around turns society into a scary battlefield where mistrust becomes the “smartest” strategy of survival. And this happens in a situation, where, if we wish to nurture a global citizens movement, people from different backgrounds will have to come together, and relationship-building work will need to be carried out much more deliberately than thus far. No technical innovation, no ever so “professional” approach can achieve this. Notions such as “family,” “friend,” “colleague,” or “stranger” will have to be brought together into a new sense of being part of a global dignity family.

Currently, there is a worrying trend that weakens even further the relational literacy available in populations. Young mothers now sit in front of their crying babies with their cell phones, not knowing what to do with their baby. Brigitte Volz, a consultant in early childhood development in Germany, has observed that, because of this, parents no longer are able to attune to their offspring’s signals. Society as a whole will need to understand its responsibility to create a context that enables parents to give their children an adequate start into life. What is urgently needed in educational settings is the highest level of attention to creating resilient connections, rather than merely delivering instructions.

New relational neuroscience shows that the human brain and physiology functions best when people are embedded in webs of caring relationships. Isolation and exclusion activate the same neural pathways as physical pain. There are long-term physical and mental health benefits that flow from feeling loved and life-long mental damages from being neglected. While damage in otherwise healthy adults may be healed, in children, it can become structural. The brains of neglected children are smaller than those of loved children, since brain cells grow and cerebral circuits develop in response to an infant’s interaction with their main caregivers. Nature and nurture are entangled; the genes for brain function, including intelligence, may not even become functional if a baby is neglected during the first two years of life. In cases where brains have not developed properly due to neglect in the first two years of life, youths may later be incapable of responding to the incentives and punishments that otherwise guide society away from crime, and they may become persistent offenders. Growth-fostering relationships are needed instead. What becomes important, if a society wishes to sustain social-psychological health among its members, is a focus on the quality of relationships, rather than the idolization of mathematics and quantities.

My second point concerns the institutional dimensions of global citizenship, in particular, global economic arrangements. In my view, even if present-day economic arrangements were to work perfectly well in a Newtonian machine model, they do not work for human beings. In my book A Dignity Economy, I analyze the social and psychological damage caused by the priority that the current world system gives to “market pricing,” instead of to “communal sharing,” to use Alan Page Fiske’s terminology.³ Chapter headings in my book include “When abuse becomes a means of ‘getting things done,” “When fear becomes overwhelming and debilitating,” “When false choices crowd out important choices,” or “When our souls are injured by the Homo economicus model.”

To conclude my two points, I observe two blind spots among even the most progressive people around the world—first, regarding emotional-relational intelligence, and second, with respect to the salience of global constitutive rules, and how they constrain what happens locally.⁴ No Great Transition will be possible if whole generations are too incapacitated, socially, cognitively, and psychologically, to even embark on it. No Great Transition will be possible if we do not learn to nurture a whole new quality of relationships among each other. While a new quality of relationships can be nurtured in small groups for a certain period of time, as we do in our global dignity movement, it cannot flourish at the necessary scale in a world with global economic constitutive rules that incentivize the opposite. Margaret Thatcher, then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, is reported to have explained the aims of the Washington Consensus by saying that “economics is the method: the object is to change the soul.” By now, “greed” has transmuted from a vice to a virtue, giving a new “modern” justification to traditional masculine role descriptions of domination and disdain for “female” nurturing, it has created a “generation me” of “excellent sheep,” who are in danger of creating a psychologically and cognitively stunted next generation, unable to develop the relational wisdom that is needed now.⁵ All of this stands in the way of a Great Transition.

Endnotes

1. All in-text page numbers refer to Journey to Earthland.
2. Jean Baker Miller, “What Do We Mean by Relationships?” (working paper no. 22, Work in Progress series, Stone Center Wellesley Centers for Women, Wellesley, MA, 1986).
3. Evelin Lindner, A Dignity Economy: Creating An Economy Which Serves Human Dignity and Preserves Our Planet (Lake Oswego, OR: World Dignity University Press, 2002); Alan Fiske, Structures of Social Life: The Four Elementary Forms of Human Relations — Communal Sharing, Authority Ranking, Equality Matching, and Market Pricing (New York: Free Press, 1991).
4. On “constitutive rules,” see, for instance, Charles Taylor, “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man,” The Review of Metaphysics 25, no. 1 (September 1971): 3–51; Charles Taylor, “To Follow a Rule…,” in Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives, ed. Craig Calhoun, Edward, LiPuma, and Moishe Postone (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1993), 45–60; John Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (New York: Free Press, 1995).
5. Jean Twenge, Twenge, Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled—and More Miserable Than Ever Before, revised (New York: Atria, 2014); William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life (New York: Free Press, 2014).

Author Evelin Lindner is the founding president of Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies, a global transdisciplinary fellowship of concerned academics and practitioners. Her published works include Making Enemies: Humiliation and International Conflict; Gender, Humiliation, and Global Security; A Dignity Economy; and the forthcoming Honor, Humiliation, and Terror.

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