第5章 The Two Sides of Power (第1/2页)
TO EXPLAIN WHERE I have arrived in my understanding of power and love and social change, I have to explain how I started.
I grew up in Montreal and studied physics at McGill University. In the summer of 1981, as I was finishing my undergraduate degree, I attended a meeting of the Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs in Banff, Alberta, where I heard a speech about the crucial energy and environmental challenges arising out of the increasing complexity and fullness-of people and ideas and things-of the world. I decided to shift my studies from physical to social sciences, and I went on to do a graduate degree in economics and public policy at the University of California at Berkeley. After graduation, I worked at a variety of research institutions in North America, Europe, and Asia, and then in the corporate planning department of Pacific Gas and Electric Company in San Francisco.
My father had taught me the value of industriousness-of doing my job well, whatever that job was-and of self-determination and self-improvement. His favorite story was of Henry David Thoreau, who had lived in the woods at Walden Pond and after two years had come out with his axe sharper than when he had gone in.
I was young and ambitious and keen to make my mark on the world.
GENERATIVE POWER
In 1988, when I was twenty-seven years old, I moved from San Francisco to London to take a job in the global strategy department of the energy company Royal Dutch Shell. What I loved most about working for Shell was the power. I enjoyed getting the diplomatic memos: "The government of Côte d'Ivoire has reiterated their request that we desist from referring to them as the Ivory Coast." I once got a mistaken phone call asking me where a $300 million payment for a fuel oil delivery should be deposited. I liked Shell's practical role in providing the world with energy: the company invested hundreds of millions of dollars a year in research and development, drilled for oil thousands of feet underwater, and produced fuels by heating oil sands and cooling natural gas. I reveled in being a small cog in this big and important machine.
I was at Shell at the height of capitalist confidence. The Berlin Wall had just fallen, the Internet boom was starting, Francis Fukuyama had published "The End of History," Tom Wolfe was writing about Manhattan financiers as "Masters of the Universe," and Margaret Thatcher was pronouncing that "There Is No Alternative" to the Anglo-American free enterprise model. The dominant cultural meme was that in all spheres-economic, political, social, legal, international, intellectual-a contest among competing powers produced the best outcome.[11] From my office in a London skyscraper, it seemed to me that if everybody just did their job and pushed forward their part-engaged in civilized, manly jostling-the whole would grow and prosper.
My experience at Shell, and elsewhere in the world of business, was of an almost single-minded emphasis on the pragmatic use of power-the kind of power that a former physics student could recognize. It seemed to me that businesspeople understood power the same way Martin Luther King Jr. did: "Power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose."[12] Their actions seemed to accord with Paul Tillich's explanation of power's generative root: "the drive of everything living to realize itself, with increasing intensity and extensity." This drive can be seen in the force of a growing seed: the force that "guerrilla gardeners" employ to turn vacant urban lots into parks, when they surreptitiously plant seeds that break through the concrete.
At Shell I could see how my own drive for self-realization, along with that of my colleagues, produced furiously competitive intellectual creativity and growth. The head of our department, Arie de Geus, wrote a book called The Living Company. This helped me also see how the company's living drive for self-realization, along with that of other companies, produced furiously competitive commercial creativity and growth.[13]
In all of this I saw the generative aspect of power: the universal drive to "get one's job done." Power expresses our purposefulness, wholeness, and agency. Although power is the drive to realize one's self, the effect of power goes beyond one's self. Power is how we make a difference in the world; it is the means by which new social realities are created. Without power, nothing new grows.
At Shell I was head of the strategy group that constructed scenarios-plausible alternative stories-of social-political-environmental contexts in which the company might find itself. In 1991, Pieter le Roux, a professor at the left-wing University of the Western Cape in South Africa, contacted me because he wanted to use the Shell methodology to help a group of South African opposition leaders develop a strategy for effecting the transition away from apartheid. Nelson Mandela had just been released from twenty-seven years in prison, and the negotiations between the opposition and the white minority government had started in earnest. Le Roux's project sounded interesting and worthwhile to me, and my Shell bosses were happy, after years of being vilified for not having divested from South Africa, for the opportunity to rebuild the company's relationships with the opposition. So in September 1991, I traveled to Cape Town to facilitate the first workshop of what became known as the Mont Fleur Scenario Exercise.[14]
What I found exhilarating in meeting these leaders-from political parties, trade unions, community organizations, universities, and companies-was their powerful purposefulness. Every one of them was committed to addressing, from their particular idological and institutional base, South Africa's tough challenges, and they had already realized that they could be successful only if they worked together. White businessman Johann Liebenberg later remembered, with surprise and pleasure, his conversations with the black leaders who had hitherto been his adversaries: "This was new to me, especially how open-minded they were. These were not people who simply said: 'Look, this is how it is going to be when we take over one day.' They were prepared to say: 'Hey, how would it be? Let's discuss it.'"[15] I felt excited to play a part in this important social change process.
What I saw in these workshops, and through the window they provided me onto the dynamics of South Africa's extraordinary transition, changed my understanding of what was possible in the world. I saw that a team of leaders from across a social system could, even in the most complex, conflictual, and challenging of contexts, exercise their power collectively to change that system for the better. I was inspired by what I was learning about this generative power.
What I saw also changed my understanding of what was possible for me. I saw that I had a job to do-a way of making a difference in the world-in supporting such teams. In 1993, I resigned from Shell and moved to South Africa. Since then I have been doing this kind of work there and elsewhere.
DEGENERATIVE POWER
How do we come to notice something that we are not noticing? I was once working in my office, and my sunglasses were in my shirt pocket. I went into a dark closet and leaned over to pick up some supplies near the floor, when I heard a sound that I couldn't place. As I went out, I unconsciously filed away that anomalous event-the unexplained sound-and went back to what I was doing. Later I saw that I had misplaced my sunglasses and began looking all around for them. Then I remembered the unexplained sound and realized it had been the sound of my sunglasses falling out of my pocket onto the closet floor.
During the first years after I left Shell and started working as a facilitator of social change teams, I kept hearing sounds of a second kind of power that I didn't know how to interpret. My first interpretation of what had happened at Mont Fleur-the interpretation that I was working from-was that the team had decided that their power, their drive to realize themselves as individuals and as a nation, could more effectively be exercised working with rather than against one another. They had used four bird images to summarize their shared understanding of the different ways the future of the nation might unfold: an "Ostrich" scenario of white denial, a "Lame Duck" scenario of an overconstrained new black government, an "Icarus" scenario of the new government flying too high too fast, and a "Flamingos" scenario of rising slowly together. But when Pallo Jordan, one of the intellectual leaders of the African National Congress, heard these scenarios presented at a party meeting, he thought they were ridiculously naïve about the essentially violent dynamics of power in the South African context. "What is all this about ducks and flamingos?" he asked incredulously. "The only birds that matter here are hawks and sparrows!"
It is not surprising that Jordan and I had different perspectives on power. I came from a peaceful and unfettered background, and I had encountered South Africa for the first time in 1991, one year after the hopeful transitional negotiations had started and several years after the hopeless, violent clashes between the government and the opposition in the 1970s and 1980s. Jordan is black, which in apartheid South Africa means he grew up as a second-class person. He had spent decades in exile working for the African National Congress and had only just returned to the country to engage directly in these tough negotiations. Power looks different to people who have to struggle for it.
Now I realized what I had been hearing: power has two sides. The generative side of power is the power-to that Paul Tillich refers to as the drive to self-realization. The degenerative, shadow side is power-over-the stealing or suppression of the self-realization of another. Tillich recognizes both sides: "Power actualizes itself through force and compulsion. But power is neither the one nor the other. It is being, actualizing itself over non-being. It uses and abuses compulsion in order to overcome this threat. It uses and abuses force in order to actualize itself. But it is neither the one nor the other."[16] Power-over abuses force and compulsion to suppress or oppress or dominate another.
Like Pallo Jordan, my wife Dorothy is black and grew up in South Africa and was involved for years in the anti-apartheid struggle. When later we visited Guatemala together, she noticed something that I didn't. The position of aboriginal people there reminded her of blacks in South Africa: they were treated as if they were invisible. Not to see another person, or to see her or him as a nonperson, is the extreme manifestation of power-over.
The most common understanding of power is as power-over. When Stephen Lukes, a professor of politics and sociology at New York University, wrote his classic 1974 book Power: A Radical View, he equated power with domination. But thirty years later, in the second edition, Lukes revised his view: "It was a mistake to define power by saying that 'A exercises power over B when A affects B in a manner contrary to B's interests.' Power as domination is only one species of power."[17] Power-over is a subset of power-to.
Degenerative power-over arises out of generative power-to. When I am exercising my power-to and I feel myself bumping up against you exercising yours, and if in this conflict I have the capacity to prevail over you, then I can easily turn to exercising power over you. My drive to realize myself slips easily into valuing my self-realization above yours, and then into believing arrogantly that I am more deserving of self-realization, and then into advancing my self-realization even if it impedes yours.
Many whites in South Africa valued their self-realization above that of others, and they deployed an ideology-apart-heid-to justify their behavior. We can see analogous dynamics across races or ethnic groups or classes or genders in every society. Thus, the seductively beautiful face of power-to morphs, as in a horror movie, into the viciously terrible face of power-over.
Once I had seen the two sides of power starkly in South Africa, I could recognize them more easily elsewhere. After I left Shell, I consulted to several companies and business associations in Houston, Texas. I found the business culture of Houston unusual and fascinating. The businesspeople there were unconstrained in their enthusiasm for independent, unregulated, entrepreneurial power-to. The can-do property developers I met owned private companies with names like "John Smith Interests," which I understood to represent an unabashed celebration of the advancing of an individual's own interests and power.
These same businesspeople were also enthusiastic in their support for voluntary philanthropy and civic engagement. They were more aware than people I had met elsewhere of their role in the evolution of their social reality. Houston had grown from being the twenty-first largest city in the United States in 1940 to fourth largest in 1990. It had become what it was not by accident, but as the result of the intentional decisions made by people such as themselves, and they felt a responsibility to continue this public work. The ideology of Houston businesspeople promoted individual self-realization in alignment with collective self-realization.
In this community, the very epitome of power-to was Ken Lay, the founder and chairman of Enron, the $100 billion natural gas, electricity, and telecommunications company. Enron had been named "America's Most Innovative Company" by Fortune magazine six years in a row, and Lay was admired as an entrepreneurial genius. At Shell, young staff who considered themselves to be sophisticated strategists were in awe of Enron's deal making. The company was one of Houston's biggest employers and charitable donors, and it had sponsored a popular new downtown stadium. When Lay visited our Houston workshops, the other business leaders treated him like a god. Lay symbolized the virtues of the free marketeer whose unfettered power-to produced both private wealth and public good.
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