Hope and the Future: An Introduction to the Concept of Cultural Maturity

www.CreativeSystems.org.)

CHAPTER 1

Making Sense of Our Time—The

Concept of Cultural Maturity

The future isn’t what it used to be.

— YOGI BERRA

THROUGHOUT MY PROFESSIONAL LIFE, I have worked both as a psychiatrist and as a futurist. As a futurist, I’ve developed conceptual tools that help people make sense of the times we live in and trained leaders for the critical tasks ahead. In this book, I will primarily wear my futurist hat. But my work doing psychotherapy and my thinking about cultural change have frequently overlapped in ways that have affected me deeply. One encounter often comes back to me when people ask me whether I think we should be hopeful when we look to the future.

Alex was fifteen when he came to me for counseling. As he sat before me in his jeans and sweatshirt, he looked like the average American kid. But two days before our conversation, Alex had strung up a rope in his attic and tried to kill himself.

After taking time to get to know him, I asked Alex why he had wanted to end his life. He looked away, then down at his hands. Finally he offered, almost distractedly, Things aren’t going that bad. Then, after a long pause, he spoke to me more directly. It’s not so much about me, he said. It’s about everything. When I look ahead—into the future—I only feel depressed. I just don’t see a life I’d want to live.

Alex visited me regularly in the months following his suicide attempt. Sometimes his reflections were personal, but just as often they touched on larger concerns. I came to value our time together more and more. At one point he deftly turned the tables of the conversation. Tell me, he asked, "what do you think about the future? Do you think anything we do today really matters?"

In fact, I believe these are amazing times to be alive—not simple times, but amazing times nonetheless. Yet it can be hard to put just why into words. Of course, we see stunning technological advances and social issues well worth our creativity and commitment. But Alex’s question went deeper. To know whether anything we do today really matters requires that we reflect deeply on who we are and what life in our time is about.

As I searched for just what to say, I thought about how the cultural stories we have most relied on in the past often fall short of what we need today. We have stories like the American Dream, with its focus on individuality and economic prosperity. We have the Industrial Age’s promise of ever onward and upward technological advancement. We have our many and varied religious traditions. Each of these, in different ways and at different times, has served us well. But none of them—alone or even together—seem sufficient for the challenges we now face.

Today, new narratives are often put forward as alternatives. Some people assume that the transformations of the Information Age will assure a dramatic and vibrant future. Others are more pessimistic, believing that the profound environmental crises we face may be beyond our power to address. Some see, with the end of the Cold War, new hope for a peaceful and democratic world. Others, again less positive, see mostly aimlessness and the decay of traditional values and institutions. Still others offer even more extreme positive and negative interpretations. Maybe we are entering a spiritual New Age? Or instead, a time of moral downfall, of impending Armageddon?

But while these additional stories may reflect aspects of what lies in store, in the end they represent competing, partial worldviews rather than the comprehensive kind of understanding that our times require. This short book offers an overarching viewpoint. Think of it as a response to Alex’s challenge to tell him about the future. Hope and the Future is written more for adults than for youth—significant life experience is needed for the ideas in this book to make solid sense. But Alex’s concerns touch at the heart of it.

The Question of Hope

Should we be optimistic about the future? There are good reasons not to be. As a species, we face immense new challenges—from global terrorism, to climate change, to frightening economic uncertainties. And we humans often do very dumb and shortsighted things, particularly when faced with demanding and confusing circumstances. It is not at all clear that we are up to what our times ask of us.

I will argue here that hopefulness is warranted, at least if we can bring the needed courage and perspective to bear. And I will address what that courage and perspective must accomplish. I will describe the possibility—and necessity—of a critical next step in our human cultural development, of an essential growing up as a species.

I call that new developmental step Cultural Maturity. People tend to assume that Modern Age beliefs and institutions represent ideals and end points. The concept of Cultural Maturity proposes that our Modern Age worldview cannot be an end point, that further changes are necessary—and happening. Possibility is not destiny, and there are many ways in which we could hide from all that this needed growing up will require. But if the concept of Cultural Maturity is accurate, a positive future—indeed, a future of striking significance—becomes very much an option.

The concept of Cultural Maturity supports hope most immediately by making clear that a positive way forward exists. It provides a future narrative to replace what we have known—and a compelling one. If there is a single core crisis in our time, it is a crisis of purpose—in the end, a crisis of story. To make good choices in times ahead—and to continue to advance—we must have new ideas and images to guide us. Ultimately, we need a new defining story just so we will have the courage to continue. Without some way to see order in events that can often seem arbitrary or chaotic, we, like Alex, can lose hope.

The concept of Cultural Maturity also supports hope by providing practical guidance. It offers specific tools for taking on the tasks ahead. This book will examine the assertion that not only are more and more of the challenges we face as a species difficult to address, effectively addressing them will demand new human capacities—that we learn to think, act, and relate in some fundamentally new ways. The concept of Cultural Maturity helps us make sense of what these needed new capacities involve and what happens when we apply them. It also describes how, when we are ready for them, they can be learned and practiced.

In addition, the concept of Cultural Maturity supports hope by clarifying how the needed new ways of thinking and acting may be more readily realized than we might imagine. The developmental nature of a term like maturity points toward how, at least as potential, the needed new capacities are built into who we are. If this conclusion proves true, then the future becomes more about commitment and perseverance than about inventing new abilities from scratch. This book will look at both evidence for this conclusion and at ways in which we are already beginning to acquire the needed new capabilities in many parts of our lives.

Cultural Maturity is not as easy a notion as a simple phrase like growing up might suggest. At the very least, this is a specific kind of growing up, less about the fresh freedoms of adulthood than the greater sense of perspective and proportion that comes with life’s later maturities.¹ And to understand it deeply, we must appreciate the changes in ourselves that underlie the new capacities it describes. But the concept of Cultural Maturity is accurately a single encompassing idea. And as with any notion whose time has come, when we are ready for it, it can seem like common sense. What is different is that this is a degree of common sense that before now we could not have fully grasped, nor really tolerated.

Culture in Evolution

The concept of Cultural Maturity is unusual because of the bigpicture vantage it reflects. In contrast with future-oriented social commentary that stops with the next election cycle, business cycle, or news cycle, it is concerned not just with immediate issues, but with humanity’s long-term well-being. Just as much, it is unusual because of the developmental picture of change it draws on. While most people recognize that humanity has advanced over time, we tend not to appreciate the depths of the changes through which advancement has taken place. And certainly we tend not to appreciate the depths of the changes needed in our time.

In fact, a look to history supports the conclusion that all major historical hinge points reflect change of a generally developmental sort. Events around the globe in recent decades, most notably in the Middle East, illustrate this kind of change. we’ve seen dramatic shifts with the overthrow of long-entrenched authoritarian regimes and at least the beginnings of more democratic structures. Much of the excitement people feel with these changes comes from the recognition that these countries are witnessing the beginnings of a fresh chapter in culture’s story (however messy these change processes can be).

I find it curious that even people who recognize that events such as those in the Middle East today involve a next-chapter sort of change tend not to apply this developmental way of thinking to modern realities. The kind of change that produces the emergence of democratic principles happened for people in the modern West well back in our history—in the U.S. with our original emancipation from colonial rule and the first forging of constitutional documents. The changes described by the concept of Cultural Maturity are similar to those we see in other parts of the world today in that they are also products of their times. But Cultural Maturity has to do with a further essential chapter in our human evolutionary story.

Understanding that new chapter is the task in these pages. We will examine how Modern Age belief is profoundly limited when it comes to addressing the important questions before us, and how if we hold to such belief as dogma, it undermines our going forward. We will also examine how Cultural Maturity’s changes provide a new sophistication in our worldview that can both inspire in our time and offer concrete guidance for addressing the challenges ahead.

Most people today recognize—consciously or not—that something like what the concept of Cultural Maturity describes will be increasingly necessary. We understand that a sane and healthy future will require us to be more mature in our choices—or at least more intelligent. People see that the growing availability of weapons of mass destruction, particularly when combined with our ever more globally interconnected world, means that we must bring greater insight to how we relate to one another. And we appreciate that making good longterm choices in a world with limited energy resources will require a newly sophisticated engagement of hard realities. Our more immediate frustrations also frequently reflect an acknowledgement of the need for greater maturity. More and more often today, people feel disgust at the childishness of political discourse, and at how rarely the media appeal to anything beyond adolescent sensibilities.

Most of us also recognize something further. We see that it is essential, given the magnitude and the subtlety of the challenges we face and the potential consequences of our decisions, that our choices be not just intelligent, but wise. Cultural Maturity is about realizing the greater complexity and depth of understanding—we could say wisdom—that human concerns of every sort today demand of us.²

People today often express concern that we in the modern West might be in a time of decline. Certainly we are in a time of major change. The concept of Cultural Maturity proposes that there is no reason that the future needs to be one of decline or collapse—at least not if we respond to today’s challenges with the necessary sophistication. What we see, ultimately, is the possibility of a new, more mature—even wise—kind of human identity and significance.

Cultural Maturity’s Changes

Cultural Maturity involves two related change processes that are each today fundamentally reordering the human experience. The first change process concerns our relationship as individuals to culture as a whole; the second concerns basic changes in how we understand.

We can see evidence for the first kind of change in an increasingly common recognition: Cultural absolutes—such as nationalistic notions of identity, clear moral codes, and socially defined gender roles— no longer provide the same reliable guidance that they once did. Part of this loss is a simple product of globalization. It is hard to hold to absolutist convictions when they so obviously collide with other people’s completely different, yet just as absolute beliefs. But the concept of Cultural Maturity proposes that this challenging of past absolutes also has deeper, more developmental roots. Before now, culture has functioned like a parent to the lives of individuals. It has provided us with our rules to live by, along with our sense of connectedness, identity, and security. Cultural Maturity’s societal growing up makes culture’s parental function increasingly something of the past.

Today’s questioning of traditional cultural assumptions is often given emphasis in postmodern writings, and it has inspiring aspects. Challenging old certainties offers new freedoms and reveals new options. But it can also affect us in disturbing ways. The weakening of traditional guideposts can leave us feeling overwhelmed and disoriented, set adrift in an increasingly complicated world. If we are to have real hope, we can’t stop there. The questioning of traditional assumptions can thus be at best only a beginning.

The second kind of change that comes with Cultural Maturity provides an antidote to postmodern aimlessness. Cultural Maturity brings with it changes in ourselves—specific cognitive changes. These changes alter not just what we think, but how we think. In doing so, they make it possible for us to engage human purpose in deeper and more encompassing ways than in times past. As you will see, they also make possible the conceptual tools needed to address the future’s increasingly complex and demanding challenges. Cultural Maturity’s cognitive changes offer that we might again have guidance—not of the old cut-and-dried sort, but guidance that is ultimately more powerful.

We will examine how Cultural Maturity’s changes stretch us in very basic ways—often in ways that can feel disturbing. But I will argue that we as a species really have no choice but to take on the challenge they present. We will look at how the most critical questions before us remain impossible to address—or fully make sense of—without the new skills and capacities that Cultural Maturity’s changes make possible. We will also look at how we have made at least first-step progress toward realizing those new skills and capacities.

The Only Game In Town

I find a simple image helpful for representing the challenge that Cultural Maturity’s changes today present. Think of a doorway marked by a threshold. (See Figure 1-1.) The other side of that doorway represents a territory of experience that is beyond us to fully understand when we are limited to familiar assumptions. Today we reside at an awkward in-between time with regard to Cultural Maturity’s changes, straddling that threshold. These are not easy circumstances. But they are circumstances that make the times we live in and the choices that each of us now make particularly significant.

Fig. 1-1. Cultural Maturity’s Threshold

Later, I will add detail to this image that makes it more specific to the changes that we confront in our time (the basic image could represent any change of a next chapter sort). I will also introduce a critical further recognition: Cultural Maturity’s changes are of a particularly fundamental sort—both different from change processes we have seen in the past and of particular consequence. The general path that has gotten us to where we are through each of history’s defining change points has, in an important sense, reached a dead end—there is really no way to continue forward as we have even if we wanted to.³ Over the course of the book, we will examine how Cultural Maturity’s changes address this seemingly dead-end circumstance. If what I describe is accurate, Cultural Maturity becomes, in effect, the only game in town.

Cultural Maturity is a specific concept within Creative Systems Theory, a comprehensive framework that helps us understand, among other things, how human systems grow and evolve. Within Creative Systems Theory, Cultural Maturity is a highly delineated and rigorously substantiated notion. It refers to a particular kind of maturational dynamic that happens at a predictable point in formative processes of all sorts. In this book, our interest with the concept of Cultural Maturity is more immediate and basic. I want to make clear—hopefully