The “Great Turning” is a phrase that has come into widespread use to describe the overarching process that our society is going through that has the potential to take us to a world in which sustainability and cooperation will guide our way of life. We may not even be aware that it is happening, because positive change rarely reaches the level of front page - or even back-page - news!
We are attempting to identify the origin of the term. We know that Craig Schindler & Gary Lapid of ProjectVictory published The Great Turning: Personal Peace - Global Victory in 1989. For years, JoannaMacy has been popularizing the term through her writing and workshops. Her site provides many useful tools.
In 2006, DavidKorten published “The Great Turning - From Empire to Earth Community” to describe the process, as he sees it. “Empire” is a particular form of societal organization based on the principles of domination. “Earth Community” is a contrasting form of societal organization based on the principles of partnership. Guess which one is more likely to lead us to sustainability and cooperation? Korten’s underlying framework of the defining human choice between domination and hierarchy is based on RianeEisler The Chalice and the Blade. Drawing inspiration from ThomasBerry, Dream of the Earth, he makes a compelling case that the defining work of The Great Turning is to change the stories that frame the culture.
This page can be used to post information that adds to our understanding of the thinking of the many people who are using phrase “The Great Turning” in their work. Please add your own thoughts with attachments, links, or discussion.
See Also
- TheGreatTurningWebsite – main website for The Great Turning
- FourMinuteSummary? – a 4 minute summary of The Great Turning, as presented at a Unitarian Universalist gathering
- BookOrMovement? – Is “The Great Turning” a book, or a movement? What’s the difference?
Discussion
Hey all!
This content is the content of the page: What is The Great Turning? …just copied over here.
“Why did you do that?”
Wiki are notable not only because of how they make it possible to work directly on documents together, but also because they make it easy to make language together.
The phrase, “The Great Turning,” is language.
We use that phrase here a lot: “The Great Turning this,” and “The Great Turning that.” “How does [The Great Turning] address race?” …and so on.
What we don’t say a lot here is, “How does What is The Great Turning? address race?”
The issue is document titles.
Documents traditionally have titles, which are then collected into a book, and you look in the table of contents. There you see, “Chapter 1. What is The Great Turning?”
Wiki is a bit different- titles are embedded into the language itself.
So what you want is– whenever you say “The Great Turning,” the first time on a page, you want to link it to this page: TheGreatTurning. (Only the first time, generally, … Or once every screen-full or so, because you don’t want to inundate readers with links for every mention or occurrence.)
Does it make sense?
“Title as Language,” rather than “Title as Table-of-Contents entry” ..?