“The challenges facing the West and liberal democracy are manifold: on the one hand, there is the destructive force of Donald Trump and the apocalyptic rumblings of right-wing populists from within our own ranks – and on the other, there are Russia and China. The challenge posed by China is just one piece of the puzzle in a perfect storm that seems to be brewing. However, it is the most underestimated piece so far.” - Kai Strittmatter in We Have Been Harmonized: Life in China's Surveillance State

Quo vadis europa?
 
What resources does Europe have to offer a regenerative, integrative, and attractive alternative to the obsolete capitalism of the West and the emerging state capitalism of China?
 
Personal background to the question
 
Katja Hellkötter has been running C-Space together with Jan Siefke since 2015, a creative space and place for meeting and learning that is designing new forms of learning, working, and living in Berlin. C*SPACE operates locally in the Pankow district, European as a member of the “European Creative Hubs Net,” and is also globally networked towards Asia.
 
Katja and her family's Easter visit raised many issues that (should) concern us in Germany, Austria, and Europe as a whole. As in the past, our shared history in China was an important common denominator in our conversations, enabling us to gain an alternative perspective on events in Europe.
 
A central theme was the political and economic ignorance of social innovation that we repeatedly observe in our work. Political actors often become competitors because they undermine or copy civil society initiatives and block changes in power structures. Is political innovation currently more urgent than technological innovation? The failure to factor social and ecological capital into economic indicators such as GDP leads to a financing vacuum in the market for NGOs that address important issues.
 
“In fact, social innovation may be of greater importance and have much greater impact than any scientific or technical invention.” - Peter F. Drucker[1]
 
Europe in search of a new systemic identity
 
The result is a Europe in crisis. The dissolution of Extinction Rebellion, the fatigue of the FFF movement, the political drift to the right, and the problems with integrating immigrants are clear signs that previous attempts to address the ecological and social crisis have failed.[2] Radical thought leaders are considering breaking the law to enable systemic change.[3] Europe needs a new, meaningful idea that breaks with previous economic paradigms and sparks enthusiasm for a new way of living together.
 
Under the state-capitalist pressure of an ethnically and culturally more or less homogeneous China, Western capitalist democracy is being challenged and must redefine itself, as economies of scale and authoritarian decision-making patterns will allow China to win in capitalist competition in the short and medium term—even if, in the long term, ecological collapse will mean a bitter end for everyone. We are therefore facing a forced system change that holds both risks and opportunities. If Europe cannot design an alternative system that allows economic, social, and ecological harmony, it is highly likely to become a colony of China. The medium- and long-term consequences of this shift in the dominant culture from West to East should be the subject of a separate debate. However, all Europeans who have lived in China for a long time are aware that there is far too little awareness in this country of what a dominant Chinese culture would mean for Europe.[4]
 
“Not to innovate is the single largest reason for the decline of existing organizations. Not to know how to manage is the single largest reason for the failure of new ventures.” - Peter F. Drucker
 
Realistic utopias – from right to duty[5]
 
Let us reflect on the historical starting point that makes realistic scenarios of transformation possible for Europe. Almost all European nation states adopted a democratic constitution in the 19th century that focuses on the distribution of power and grants citizens rights: voting rights, civil rights, human rights, workers' rights, women's rights, children's rights, etc. This evolution of democracy can be traced back to European antiquity.
 
Against the backdrop of the climate crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic has triggered a comprehensive debate on civic duties, in which the German philosopher David Precht has played a prominent role. Refusing to be vaccinated against COVID-19 has been seen as a moral duty of citizens in order to protect the health of others in an exceptional situation. Analogous to this largely forgotten situation, other duties have been discussed with regard to the ecological and social crisis. What carbon footprint should a person be allowed to have in order not to deprive others of a life worth living? What contribution must a person make to the functioning of local communities? How high can a person's income be without seriously affecting the health and well-being of many others?[6]
 
The common denominator in this current debate is the intersection of changing rights and obligations resulting from limited natural resources and a growing global population. The Anthropocene era is characterized by a circumstance that is less highlighted than the consequence that humans are changing the climate to an unprecedented extent: we no longer live in different ecosystems, but have inevitably become part of a single ecosystem, revealing our mutual interdependence and interconnectedness.
 
“It is time to talk about human responsibility.” - Helmut Schmidt[7]
 
Gross well-being instead of gross domestic product
 
Post-growth economists have identified excessive capitalism as an economic expression of morally unsound greed and have shown that we can lead healthier and happier lives with less consumption of natural resources and fewer working hours. The key to establishing an alternative system should therefore lie in economic incentives that enable new
lifestyles.
 
Jason Hickel calculates that 65% of US GDP – and with it, an immeasurable amount of resources and working time – would be eliminated if the goal of an economy were general well-being rather than national prosperity. According to his calculations, an income of USD 14k would be sufficient in the US to achieve maximum well-being, while the current GDP per capita is USD 59k.[8] System transformation in the Anthropocene is therefore class struggle under new
premises.[9]
 
Coupled with the predictable and already unfolding consequences of automation and machine learning, a rethinking of the concept of “wage labor” is inevitable.[10] We must engage in experiments in model labor markets that either combine traditional wage labor with social and ecological contributions or prohibit work entirely as part of “extractive economies.” Comprehensive ‘distributed value accounting’ of the social and ecological impact of every (professional) activity is necessary if we want to meaningfully separate destructive behavior from regenerative action.
 
“Very few events have as much impact on civilization as a change in the basic principles of organizing work.” - Peter F. Drucker
 
Conditional vs. unconditional basic income
 
One of Europe's great advantages is its widespread federalism, which makes it possible to test these new forms of wealth distribution in small municipalities and still relatively small federal states and to transform the transform the democratic systems of the 19th century into meritocratic systems of the 21st century. The networking of organizations and individuals who want to support this experiment is now more urgent than ever: Europe needs a new model that inspires through inclusion but at the same time demands a contribution.
 
"If Europe were a person, I would have to rush out and fight for her. For my heroine, who gave me 70 years of peace.” - Klaus Maria Brandauer

Endnotes:
[1] The Essential Drucker, 2002
[2] https://www.mingong.org/blog-de/uber-die-natur-eines-volksfeindes
[3] https://ark.greensteps.me/library/chris-packham-is-it-time-to-break-the-law
[4] http://www.mycountryandmypeople.org/01-blog-2133823458/tiananmen-july-1st-youth-parade-a-reason-for-concern
http://www.mycountryandmypeople.org/01-blog-2133823458/thoughts-on-the-china-international-import-expo
Kai Strittmatter: Die Neuerfindung der Diktatur
[5] https://www.mingong.org/blog-en/a-lucid-manual-for-transformation-by-architect-friedrich-von-borries
[6] https://www.mingong.org/blog-en/on-failing-democracies-and-spheres-of-justice
[7] https://brennstoff.com/ausgaben/es-ist-zeit-%C3%BCber-verantwortlichkeiten-des-menschen-zu-reden/
https://www.helmut-schmidt.de/helmut-schmidt-im-ringen-um-die-idee-eines-weltethos
[8] Jason Hickel: Less Is More - How Degrowth will save the world
[9]  https://kontrast.at/andreas-kemper-interview-klasse/
https://www.darkmatteressay.org/blog/on-waging-war-and-democratic-decline
[10] https://www.mingong.org/blog-en/martin-ford-enlightened-marxist-or-apolyptic-technocrat

Back in 2002 when drifting in Kunming (oh, how great it was to escape the industrial complex of Western Europe) I met a young woman in LanBaiHong Cafe (where many foreign seekers were hanging out then) who had a book with her that caught my attention. It was Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way. I stroke up a conversation an learned about the objectives and methodology of that book: a 12 weeks course of discovering your creative self through different routine exercises like long hand writing or solo dates with this yet unknown part of yourself.

I intuitively knew that I had struck gold and asked Alexandra for a copy. Purchasing that book on amazon and delivering it to China was then and now a rather futile undertaking, so Alexandra gave me her copy to create a duplicate in a 印刷店， one of those street level printing shops, where entire libraries were recreated overnight. I still remember that I got those clips which were typically used by Chinese students to organize their lecture papers back then and started to work myself into this encounter with my creative self.

Back then I humbly taught English and German at a Kunming college, but had the luxury of lots of time for myself. I would go two our three times a week for two hour or longer runs into the mountains around still smallish Kunming, contemplating the red soil landscape and taking breaks deciphering the characters on wild gravestones. At the age of 26 I was still uncertain of what I should do with my life. Wang Shuo's novels made me consider becoming a professional translator of modern Chinese literature, but those things seemed to be too far off for somebody from a proletarian background like me.

The Artist's Way gave me confidence and practice to turn myself into a wordsmith. I have never translated a Chinese book. I have never written one myself. But I have found deep joy and purpose in writing long essays on different subjects. This blog and two others are the result of that encounter with Julia Cameron's work. More than 20 years later, with my own children already growing wings, I feel its once more time to dig for gold (and escape the Western industrial thread mill).

Julia has released two more books which are geared towards people of other age groups, well age might not be the most important factor, it is more about the outlook that you have on life and which of course is mostly connected to age. While The Artist's Way could work for people of any age, whether fresh out of university or high school, or in between jobs, The Artist's Way for Parents is clearly for those of us who have taken on the responsibility of raising the next generation of our species.

Then there is another tomb titled It's never too late to begin again, which is the artist's way for people who have passed their early adulthood and are mature adults or elders at some crossroad between giving up and starting over. I am not there yet, but I have recommended that book as personal coach to business executives who are on their way out of the corporate rat race and afraid of falling into a void.

Whatever title it is that you choose, it indeed is never to late to begin again.

We all have an affinity for the natural world. This tug towards life is strongest at an early age, when we are most alert and impressionable. Before their minds have been marinated in the culture of television, consumerism, shopping malls, computers, and freeways, children can find magic in trees, water, animals, landscapes, and their own places. Properly cultivates and validates by caring and knowledgeable adults, fascination with nature can mature into ecological literacy and eventually into more purposeful lives.

From David Sobel: Place-Based Education - Connecting Classroom with Communities (The Orion Societey, 2nd edition 2013).

Notes:

• We need teachers and above all headmasters who are ecologically literate. Ecological literacy of school management is currently the most serious obstacle in the sustainable education of the next generation. Headmasters who don't understand the value of place-based education, won't make the effort to implement new pathways of teaching and continue to execute the curriculum which they think has worked so far.
• Making it easy for teachers and understandable for school management why place-based or bioregional education must override state-mandated curricula and high-stakes tests, which put everyone on the same page and discourage attention to significant nearby learning opportunities, is currently the most important task at hand. The more teachers and headmasters understand the necessity of place-based education and easier it is made for them to implement it, the faster we will manage a genuine transformation of our education systems.
• If we want to save the next generations from the 6th mass extinction, we need to spread educational biodiversity which currently falls prey to the bulldozers of standardization. Most schools continue to hover like alien spacecrafts, luring children away from their home communities and the places where they could make a difference.
  

This little book might well hold the key in transforming our industrial, PISA driven and competitive education systems into something different. It is nothing more than a white paper, but the concept of an inner, other and outer focus entails three learning avenues which have the potential to shape the next generation into self confident, caring and active human beings.

If you have read other books by Daniel Goleman, like Focus - The Hidden Driver of Excellence or Working with Emotional Intelligence, you will better understand why we need to train self-awareness, empathy and systems understanding. This booklet explains however in a nutshell, what inner, other and outer focus are and how they can be created. I have not found anything new in Goleman's first three chapters, so I skip them here and concentrate on chapter 4 and 5.

What I miss: the systems understanding in regard to why social & emotional learning (SEL) and systems understanding do not scale proportionally to the effort Goleman and Senge are making since meanwhile 3! decades. They overlook that it takes economic equality in form of fairly paid jobs or a basic income in order to learn these new skills. As long as most of humanity is barely making it or is caught in a competitive rat race, its hard to imaging that such a transformation can ever take place.

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He has no time to be anything but a machine. How can he remember well his ignorance—which his growth requires—who has so often to use his knowledge? We should feed and clothe him gratuitously sometimes, and recruit him with our cordials, before we judge of him. The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.”
[Henry David Thoreau, Walden or Life in the Woods]

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Peter Senge points at the problems capitalism has bestowed at us, but does not make it a core issue: It is useful to remember that in the factory model we have inherited through the Industrial Age, school was never about tapping and cultivating this innate potential. It was never about growing human beings - it was designed to train factory workers en masse. Though almost everything has changed in the reality for our students since this model was first implemented almost 200 years ago, the basic design of school has only been adjusted incrementally, not fundamentally. We still have fixed grades that most students move through en masse, with rigid curricula guidelines, and expert teachers who are supposed to endorse them.

Things have not changed and during the last 10 years since this booklet has been published, we have seen more wealth accumulation than ever before - accelerated by Covid-19, but caused by a techno-capitalist elite which exploits planet and people in the same way as aristocrats and industrialist did two centuries ago. As long as education remains embedded in the economic systems our social power structures put forward, there is little hope that a full transformation can ever take place.

While I am skeptical of transformation within the field of education only, I found Senge's systemic perspective invigorating. He describes the lack of "practical life" in education and the deprivation of purpose and meaning: "You don't try to teach kids something that has no meaning to them, something that does not connect in any way with their lives. But unfortunately, that's still the modus operandi for 80-90% of school curricula."

Senge is also realistic about what it takes to transform even a single school and gives practical advice: "A simple rule of thumb is the more you're really innovating, the more you're stretching the norm, the more you must involve parents - for two fundamental reasons. One is that parents can either get very threatened or they can become be really engaged. The second is that kids don't live in schools. To be really respectful of the world of the child, you must reach out.  Whether or not you realize it, you are not really educating kids, you are educating families."

He continues to describe this lack of practical life in education: "The roots of our problems with implementation run deep, starting with the academic training of educators, who learn theory in college and graduate school, which they are then supposed to implement in practice. But this fragmented view contradicts how we all learn. We did not learn to walk by first listening to lessons, nor did we first take in lectures on gyroscopic motion in order to learn bicycle riding. Our learning unfolded in a continual iteration between thinking and acting. The fragmentation of theory and implementation tends to render implementation a kind of messy stepchild compared to the more elegant work of theory."

Merging theory and implementation, guiding children into real world experiences, where they can practice hands-on skills is not only a method to create engagement, it is also what our labor markets require: "More and more businesses already understand that they need people who can think for themselves, are self-motivated, self-directed learners, and who can work effectively in teams, especially in confronting truly complex problems. They just need to have their faith restored that schools can actually be effective in developing such capacities."

With climate change as Damocles sword hanging over humanity, schools need to deliver. The real challenge is not about becoming smarter or more clever - in particular not in a narrow academic dimension when machine learning composes better papers and is capable of combining different disciplines. The real challenge is in tapping and developing our deeper intelligences of self, other, and system at a time when we really need them.