Spirit and Story ArchiveWelcome to Spirit and Story, where you will find the latest thoughts and reflections by CLAL faculty and associates on the contours of our contemporary spiritual journeys. Every other week you will find something new and (hopefully) engaging here! To access the CLAL Spirit and Story Archive, click here.To join the conversation at Spirit and Story Talk, click here.
The Spirit of Creative DestructionBy Shari CohenI have never been a zealot -- well, excluding a few banner-waving
years during college. But even then, I could barely keep myself from almost immediately
falling into the stance of outside critic. In fact, I have typically been plagued by a
kind of liberal ambivalence toward any cause. But now years after giving up on most
progressive politics as being dogmatic, after spending years puzzling over the
implications of the communist experiment and why it went so far awry, after having become
a political realist and pragmatist disturbed by the polarization of much political debate
I find myself pursuing, with a nearly religious faith, a commitment to the need for
a leap of imagination, one that lifts us out of existing practices and mindsets. As important as the leap, or moreso, is the
mechanism for making it a particular type of interdisciplinary structured, yet open
conversation. Choreographing such conversations has been my work over the past two years
as director of CLALs Jewish Public Forum -- a think tank that brings together groups
of academics, business leaders, cultural figures and policy makers to broaden the
conversation about the Jewish and American futures. I have come
to see these conversations as having the character of a sort of spiritual practice. But it
wasnt until this past Passover that I understood how much this practice could be
seen to have deep roots in one of the most central Jewish rituals the Passover seder. I began to think about how the seder might inform the creation of a new kind of
mechanism for social change. The seder fosters a leap of imagination, deeply rooted
in the past and completely open about the future. It is a ritual motivated by the
imperative to set aside time to focus on using our power both to shape our reality and to
reinvent amid changing conditions, while remaining aware of our limitations. It is about a faith that if we debate the most
central issues of society and the human condition we will be able to create a better
future. The seder pushes us to ask two types
of questions. On the one hand, it includes questions about important issues: To what are
we enslaved? How do we remember without making memory an idol? What power do we have over
our destiny? On the other, we are presented with questions about the process of
conversation itself: How do we integrate a multiplicity of approaches to knowledge,
commitment, and inquiry into the conversation? How do we ask the right questions? How do
we communicate across generations? The seder is habit-making and habit-breaking, offering
a set of guidelines rituals for undermining inertia, while remaining
cognizant of the past. At the most
recent Jewish Public Forum event, in January 2001, I looked around at the forty-odd people
assembled -- at the astrophysicist, the sociologist of science, one of the major Jewish
leaders of the last twenty years, a young Catholic theologian, an anthropologist of Korean
Americans, a leading high tech executive, several rabbis. As they debated such issues as
how we will form loyalties in an increasingly wired and fast world, and what the
implications are of life span extension for our sense of the sacred, I again wondered:
What gave me the chutzpah to think that, in two
days, a group gathered at a conference called Playing the Jewish Futures: Scenarios
on Religion, Ethnicity and Civic Engagement could make headway on so large a
question as the future of religion, ethnicity, identity, and community the future
of how people will connect to purposes larger than themselves? I think that
what gave me and the others involved this kind of chutzpah
was the very combination of imperative and faith at the root of the seder. Imperative because we live in an era in which
human technological power has reached God-like proportions, from tinkering with the genome
to designing highly intelligent human-like machines. And we have the responsibility to
think about the human implications of this power: What does it mean for human communities,
for how families function, for how we organize societies, for our work? Faith because we believed it was worth coming
together and talking in a way that was going to make us vulnerable by pushing us to the
edges of our expertise and our existing assumptions.
And we had to be willing to set aside time to engage in a process that
wont give us answers any time soon. At this
event, we were using a method called scenario planning which was developed in
a business context at the offices of Royal Dutch Shell in the 1970s -- and brought
into broad use by Global Business Network to help corporations and organizations, both
large and small, think about the future in a period of uncertainty. But as Peter Schwartzs
book about this method, Art of the Long View, so
nicely demonstrates, this is an approach to collective human inquiry that has power way
beyond corporate settings. Interestingly, it happens that in the last several years, under
the banner of creative destruction (a term coined by political economist
Joseph Schumpeter to talk about capitalist change and the need to destroy in order to
create), it has been in the business community that some of the most fearless thinking
about the future has taken place. Scenario
planning is, at its core, about human power to shape reality while recognizing human
limitations. The method allows groups to escape from being overwhelmed by the large
social, political, economic and technological forces that are changing every aspect of our
lives. It pushes groups to engage in
rigorous, yet imaginative analysis of those large scale trends, and then to ask what is
possible, what is likely, what can and cannot be controlled. It is one
thing to talk about the future of General Electric. But in using such a method to talk
about the future of what many see as fixed and sacred categories that dont belong to
any single organization -- religion, ethnicity, tradition -- we were making a very strong
statement about human agency. Implicit our use of this method as it is in the seder -- is the claim that it is up to us to
construct a humanly rich, meaningful and ethical future rather than to rely on what we
have inherited from the past. Instead, we need to draw upon inherited traditions, rituals
and insights from the past while inventing new practices and modes of leadership to
facilitate this process. As
conversational choreographers, my colleagues and I often stumble and feel our way along. We cannot fully anticipate each dimension of what
we are unleashing. At the conference we were,
in retrospect, asking a great deal from every individual in that room we were
asking for much more than their time. The process was incredibly empowering, but also
forced people to experience their limits. We were putting the authority not just of
religion, but also of science and other forms of knowledge up for discussion. This became
particularly acute at one moment during the workshop, in a heated exchange between a
leading futurist and a molecular biologist. The futurist claimed that due to new
technologies being developed to extend human life span, over the next twenty years the
human condition will change more than it has in the last million years. He pointed out
that at the beginning of the century the average life span was 35-50 years. It has doubled
over the last one hundred years and will double again in the next twenty. The biologist
was appalled, asking him where he got his information.
She objected that his claim just wasnt true. While average human life
span is being extended, she argued, maximum human life span is a different story, and new
research is unlikely to make significant headway in our lives or those of our children. Another
participant suggested, as a way of resolving the controversy, that maybe, for the first
time, we will have to put a question mark over the presumption that humans are mortal.
Both the futurist and the biologist could live with this. What had happened was that each,
at least in the eyes of the group and maybe in their own as well, was forced to contend
with the limits of their expertise and their normal modes of thinking. The exchange ended
in a new framing of the issue: all agreed that we just dont know, but that the
possibility that this type of technology could be developed is itself radical for human
self-conception, for ideas about mortality and religion. In this exchange, as in the meeting more generally, each individual
was speaking analytically and personally at once. But each had to give way because the
process was designed to avoid incorporating fully developed theories from any particular
field. In some ways, for the period of the meeting, everything was up for grabs. For
academics, this is particularly difficult, so structured is academia to foster investment
in particular theoretical frameworks for looking at the world. For practical people who
are not used to looking at such big, messy questions, the process challenged their results
orientation, asking them to stand back and rest in ambiguity. For religious people, or
ones who feel their identities to be given, the meeting challenged their sense of
sacredness. But like the
seder, the workshop functioned as a container
for the ambiguity and intellectual and personal stretching and risk that we were demanding
of the people in the room. What made this meeting different from all other meetings was
the breadth of the questions and the challenge of interdisciplinary exchange. At the end,
participants went home to their professions and disciplines and their religious or secular
worlds and approaches. Ultimately, we were doing this not for a corporation, but for the
purpose of thinking in new ways about the human condition in a period of change. This made
the stakes for each individual both less and more important than they would have been if
we were directly addressing participants day-to-day work. The stakes were lower
because most of the participants are not engaged in thinking about the future of religion,
or of Jewish identity, on a regular basis. Participants
were chosen for precisely that reason. On the other hand, the conversation was more
important than most participants daily activities because the questions being
considered were so very central to our future as a society. No commitments to the results
were expected, since these would unfold over time. The only commitment required was to set
aside the time to ask these kinds of questions. As one participant put it, The only
thing that was sacred was a commitment to the approach itself. I have,
strangely enough, become a real optimist in the years I have been engaged in this work.
Perhaps it is naïve. But unlike social movements which create dogmatism because they are
based on a particular social outcome, and unlike revolutions which try to restructure
society with no attention to the constraints of human nature or of history, and unlike
academic work with its lack of personal engagement, this work offers a glimpse of how we
might create a more human, and thus more Jewish, future. To join the conversation at Spirit and Story Talk, click here.To access the Spirit and Story Archive, click here. |