Spirit and Story Archive

Welcome 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!

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The Spirit of Creative Destruction

By Shari Cohen

I 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 CLAL’s 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 wasn’t 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 won’t 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 Schwartz’s 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 don’t 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 wasn’t 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 don’t 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.  

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