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Elizabeth Debold is a Senior Editor for EnlightenNext magazine. Follow her on Twitter @EvolveWomen.

Women Creating the Future — Live in London

“Women are to blame for the ills of society!” “The UK doesn’t need a Minister for Women!” These provocative, ever-so-slightly “man bites dog” statements are the titles of Lee Chalmers’s recent blog entries on the new HuffPost UK. No wonder Arianna Huffington and her crew invited Lee as one of the kick off bloggers for their new venture across the pond. Lee is smart, edgy, knowledge-able, insightful, courageous and did I say “smart”? Now, if you know Lee, you realize that her eye-catching headlines are not the expression of a right wing misogynist, but the canny appeal of a clear-sighted visionary who has a passion for women stepping up to the plate and making a difference. As she writes in her “Women are to blame” post about conservatives’ view that women should stay home to protect men’s jobs:

New research shows that 43% of educated western Gen X women (aged between 33 and 46) have opted to be childfree. In a world that gives very little status and absolutely no financial reward to having children, this is a rational choice for a person to make. Rational when viewed from the level of the individual, the level we value in western culture, but utterly catastrophic for the species.

The political right understand this. They see that the writing is on the wall for humanity if women are not willing to assume their place as the mothers of us all. And this is problematic because women are not going to quietly go back to this life of unpaid, low status, grindingly hard work. Society cannot go back, we can only go forward. We evolve or die.
Rather than wishing for what has come before we need to ask hard questions of ourselves and create something new. What structures do we need to create that allow women to contribute to society with their brains as well as their wombs? If the majority of our graduates are now women and we want that talent in our businesses and political parties, are we willing to change how we work in order to allow them to contribute whilst ensuring that we still have enough children? These are not just questions for women, these are questions for all of us.

Faced with the complexity of these challenges it’s understandably easier to say ‘let the women stay at home and raise children.’ Easier to wish for what worked so well for society before. And this is not about men dictating the terms, it’s easier for women to say this too. It’s been our role for so long that we are compelled to it. We often unthinkingly slide into this function and then lead lives of confused desperation because we haven’t yet figured out how to do it differently.

Women are capable of more than childrearing, difficult and valuable as that is, and culture needs us to give more, it needs our intellectual contribution as truly equal partners to men. The challenges we face in the future such as peak oil, population aging, water shortages, require the best minds of our generation and those may be sitting in female bodies. Do we really want to ignore that potential contribution and encourage women to go back home? I think quite the opposite, we should be encouraging women to take their place in business and politics and solve the problem of making life more family friendly, so both men and women can share life in both the private and the public worlds.

How we move into the future–not just a future that’s a direct line from the past but one that takes us into a very different way of living and relating–will be the topic of the interview that Lee will be doing with me on July 30th at EnlightenNext London’s Midsummer Renaissance Festival. I’m privileged and excited to have such an accomplished, thoughtful and provocative person asking the questions and engaging with me in the all-important topic of “Women Creating the Future.” If you are in London, don’t miss it. If not, stay tuned because we’ll be posting video and audios from the event in the coming weeks.

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Jul 27, 2011 | 0 comments | View Post

The Power of Evolutionary Spirituality with Ursula King — Live in London

by Elizabeth Debold

EnlightenNext London has created a summer festival that is going to be a flat out celebration of philosophy, dance, music, and Spirit–a tantalizing and uplifting combination designed to make the spirit soar. It’s the Midsummer Renaissance Festival on July 30-31. Most of the EnlightenNext editorial team will be there to engage in dialogue and interviews with some extremely fascinating people. On July 30, I will be interviewed by Lee Chalmers–Lee is both a business consultant, a champion for women (check out her latest post in HuffPo UK), and is edging her way into politics. We’re calling the talk “Women Creating the Future.”

On July 31, I’ll be in dialogue with University of Bristol theologian Dr. Ursula King. Ursula has an expertise in the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin–a Jesuit priest and paleontologist who was one of the 20th C.’s most authentic and powerful voices of a new, evolutionary spirituality. Ursula always transmits a palpable enthusiasm–which literally means divine inspiration–for humanity’s spiritual evolution. Our dialogue takes for its title a line echoing Teilhard: “Discovering Fire for the Second Time.” The “fire” that Tielhard refers to is a particular kind of love, or Eros, that burns from the Divine into Creation. In fact, in the audio below, Ursula recites Teilhard’s quote in an interview that I did with her in 2009 about her book, The Search for Spirituality where we speak together about the evolutionary fire that has brought us to where we are today.

Ursula King abrev. audio 5 min (click here)

What I particularly appreciate about Ursula is her impatience with retro ideas of spirituality–trying to take the deep wisdom from the past and stick it, unchanged, into the present. She’s not against the great religious traditions, but sees that they have to be updated for our times. And I completely agree with her about the need for a world-embracing spirituality that is not at all divorced from life and that calls us to evolve our humanity. I hope that our dialogue on July 31st points us in that direction!

Well, that’s just a taste of what’s to come. If you are in the UK at the end of July, please come and say hello, and check out this vibrant midsummer scene!

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Jul 22, 2011 | 3 comments | View Post

In Search of True Scenius: 5. Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris

by Elizabeth Debold

Over the weekend I had the delightful experience of seeing Woody Allen’s latest: Midnight in Paris. Now, Woody Allen and I go way back—to the early stuff, like Bananas (1971), or even Take the Money and Run (1969). But when Allen moved on from Love and Death toward Crimes and Misdemeanors, I moved on from Woody Allen. It’s only been recently, spurred on by my editor-in-chief Andrew Cohen’s enthusiastic endorsement, that I’ve begun to watch him again. Midnight in Paris is charming and funny—Allen at his lightest, enthralled by the luminosity and history of Paris. And of course, the painfully hilarious dialogue that reveals the viscera of his characters in a few deft lines. But it’s not just a charming movie. Allen is ruminating on the relationship between the past and present—why is it, he is asking, that we so often romanticize the past, believing that there was a time when human life was so much better than now? Why do we create these ideas of a Golden Age where everything was more and better than the present?

It’s an interesting question. Allen, to a great extent, implicates the present in his query about our fondness for temps perdu. (WARNING: This post is going to be something of a spoiler—so you might want to watch the movie first.) The present, says his protagonist Gil Pender (played by the adorable Owen Wilson), is where the mundane happens. His character’s nostalgia for a better, more creative and romantic life, sets his heart on the past. But Allen’s character, of course, isn’t the first to be mesmerized by a fantastic past. The idea that the past is better than the present is a notion that harkens back to the Greeks. They imagined a Golden Age followed by periods of increasing decline—from Silver to Bronze, Iron, and the unnamed but grim present. The Hindus also spoke of a similar decline, landing us in the horrible Kali Yuga, where we are now. (And the Brahma Kumaris, a contemporary spiritual group building on Hindu ideas, also has a similar belief system.) Moreover, the entire myth of Eden is about a perfect world that we lost in our fall from grace. This notion of a past Golden Age has been a striking feature of most cultural worldviews that understand life as an immense cycle beginning in heavenly perfection and passing through increasing periods of decline.

Freud wondered if our sense that there was a time of perfect happiness that we’d lost came from the experience of exiting the womb. In some dim but definite imprint, the transition from floating in bliss in utero to the abrupt assault of the birth canal and ultimate abandonment left us in mourning for the loss of something that we couldn’t ever quite name. Golden age ideals may also serve another function: they may be a way that humanity has made sense of evil. The belief is that once we were good, pure, and lived in peace and harmony…and that gradually we have lost touch with that perfection. From a spiritual standpoint, this is not untrue. The development of self-identity creates the illusion of separation from All, the primordial unity of all things, the ground of Being.

We create Golden Ages out of our deepest longings, our idealistic hopes for what life should be based in what we feel we are missing in the present. In the context of a world of endless conflict, violence, brutality, and strife—which has been the case for most of human existence—the ideal of a paradise of peace makes sense. Or, to use another example, no wonder, then, that feminists have painted pretty pictures of equality onto prehistoric cultures that have left behind little more than lumpen female figurines. Desiring equality in the present, we find it in the past.

But Gil Pender, a wealthy hack writer who wants to write a great novel, doesn’t want to go back to some blissful Golden Age. He wants to go to where the action was/is: Continue reading…

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Jul 11, 2011 | 19 comments | View Post

Boy and Girl Brains?

by Elizabeth Debold

This past weekend, I had the pleasure to meet two teen girls adopted from China by friends of mine. The girls are poised between childhood and adulthood where the big questions—who am I? What am I going to make of my life?—are looming. During a conversation, someone mentioned something about “girl brains.” The phrase went by quickly, and I almost didn’t notice it. Then one of the girls asked directly: “Are the differences between the sexes biological or cultural?”

After our conversation, I began to wonder: how does this popular notion that women and men have different brains affect these girls’ ambitions, hopes, and dreams? Despite all of the celebration of how great the female brain is—how it will be much more useful in the world of the future—it seemed that she had already begun to wonder if she had gotten the lesser version. She’s smart: she’s perfectly capable of deducing that there is a connection between the gap between men and women in positions of leadership and the much-touted difference between male and female brains. This gap is certainly something that we all have to grapple with. But it’s not simply caused by innate brain differences between women and men. In fact, the whole notion of innate, genetically programmed, immutable, hard-wired brain differences between males and females is suspect–at least to the degree that is presented in popular media.

Oh, yes, I know. At this point, it’s widely understood that contemporary neuroscience has proven the existence of hard-wired differences between females and males that directly relate to the gender differences we see in the world. We’ve got Louann Brizendine writing The Female Brain (2006) and, more recently, The Male Brain (2010). Simon Baron Cohen’s The Essential Difference (2003) argues that autism is an effect of the “extreme male brain.” Or even books like Why Men Never Remember and Women Never Forget (2005) by Marianne Legato. Not to mention the classic Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. (And then there are all those hormones!) Most aware adults these days have come to accept the fact that these differences are a fact, even if we might find it a bit troubling. It all lines up: the world is as it is, neurology has proven that women and men have dramatically different brains, and every new discovery in evolutionary psychology shows us why these differences were advantageous to the evolution of the species.

We roll our eyes when we hear that in the nineteenth century earnest doctors (all men) presented evidence that thinking or intellectual stimulation caused the womb to wither. How archaic! We smile knowingly when we are told that it was believed that because women’s skulls were smaller, hips broader, etc. etc. that meant that women should stay at home and raise children. While it is easy for us to fall into grumbling ruminations about oppression, it’s far more interesting to take a wide-angle view. In the modern era’s split between the public world (the economy, politics, science, academia, law) and the private world (the home), society became gendered. Women were mistresses of the domestic sphere and men, well, masters of the universe. Continue reading…

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Jun 02, 2011 | 8 comments | View Post

Being CEO of Planet Earth

by Elizabeth Debold

Planet Inc. CEO book I’m sure that more than a few of us, when we ponder the actions of different world leaders, may wonder, “Why don’t they just _________?” Fill in the blank. And some of us may even, half-jokingly, have thought that we could do a better job than so-and-so in running the world.

But what would it actually take to be the CEO of The Planet, Inc.? That’s a half-serious question that two leading integral thinkers, Annie McQuade and Erika Ilves of Source Integral, are answering through a Facebook campaign, book, and series of YouTube videos. As they say on their Facebook page, “Project Planet Inc. is about structuring the global public discourse on the future of our species and building a planetary problem solving network & platform to take on the Super Wicked Challenges of the 21st century.”

An ambitious project, to say the least. But what they are managing to do in the process is teach the perspective of Ken Wilber’s integral theory. Through a series of YouTube videos, they offer instruction on the different knowledge areas that our planetary CEO needs to master in order to lead “Team Human.” First, McQuade and Ilves argue, our Planet Inc. CEO needs to be able to identify with “all of us”–or hold a worldcentric perspective. In a series of seven short videos, they explore the boundaries that one needs to cross in order to embrace all of us who are part of The Planet Inc. Continue reading…

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May 22, 2011 | 1 comment | View Post

The Gender Situation & the Situation Room

by Elizabeth Debold

A few news events have caught my eye this past week—particularly, the Orthodox Jewish newspaper that photoshopped Hillary Clinton out of the iconic Situation Room photo and The Atlantic Monthly’s report “Danger: Falling Tyrants” by Jeffrey Goldberg on the move toward democracy in the Middle East. But it was an email exchange with one of our former editors/writers, Maura O’Connor, who is reporting from Afghanistan where she’s embedded among US troops, that made me think about these events in the context of our responsibility, as sophisticated postmodern individuals who are living in a pluralistic global society. We often literally brush up against those who have very different worldviews—radically different ways of understanding reality and human relationship.

Maura told me that she and a friend, another young American female journalist, were talking about whether to wear headscarves in Afghanistan. Maura covers her hair out of respect for their religion—much as, she noted, we cover our shoulders when we go into Catholic churches. Yet her young colleague, often doesn’t. She wants to show the Afghan women that they don’t have to cover themselves and believes that showing her hair, contrary to custom in this Muslim country, was a way of taking a stand against their oppression and supporting them. I would imagine that she saw her actions as a way of inspiring change. While her actions were obviously well intentioned, and may even in some way inspire the kind of culture change that she hopes, they may also have very unintended consequences, and be met less than enthusiastically by both men and women in Afghanistan.

That’s where my rumination over these events begins. Continue reading…

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May 20, 2011 | 14 comments | View Post

In Search of True Scenius: 4. The MIT Media Lab

by Elizabeth Debold

If you are looking for “scenius”–a scene that produces genius–check out MIT’s Media Lab. Since it opened its doors in 1986, the Media Lab has pushed the boundaries of the possible by creating an interdisciplinary space in which scientists, technologists, artists, and other bright lights can bounce off each other to envision and create the future.

This week the Media Lab was again in the news–announcing the appointment of a new director, Joi Ito. Ito is an unusual choice to run a prestigious lab at a major university. He’s never finished college (found Tufts’ computer science and the U. of Chicago’s physics a bit pedestrian). But Ito has made his mark as a venture capitalist and Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has shaped the internet and how we use it in large and small ways.

Ito’s first encounter with the Media Lab speaks to the conditions for scenius that they have carefully created–beginning with the gorgeous, open building (see inset photo) designed for collaboration:

As I walked into the building, I felt like a pilgrim from the Middle Ages entering a cathedral. I was in awe and a bit of shock wondering if I would fit into an “institution” like the Media Lab and MIT.

After a day of non-stop meetings with a bunch of the faculty and students, I realized that I’d found my tribe. Everyone was super-smart, driven, working on very cool stuff. They weren’t afraid to try anything. There was extreme diversity but also a common DNA. I felt a sense of mission that seemed driven by the physical proximity created by the space and the empowering brand and legacy of the Media Lab. It created a power to think long-term with agility that I’d never seen anywhere else.

People talked matter-of-factly about getting sensors from this lab, maybe we need a tissue scientist, and robots from that lab, and visualization from this lab to take this research in this other direction.

It was a firehouse of interconnections and creativity – I was completely energized and felt totally in my element. …

I had created a life for myself that was scattered across non-profits, venture startups, relationships with large research institutions and networks of people all over the world in my search for long-term yet agile solutions.

John Seely Brown often talks about ‘The Power of Pull’ – how instead of stocking assets and resources, we should pull them, as we need them. Instead of pushing intelligence, orders and ‘stuff’ from the center, one should create a context where we can pull them from our networks. Instead of planning every detail, one could embrace serendipity and chart a general trajectory, pulling the things together in a highly contextual and agile way.

The Media Lab seemed like it had all of the right elements to tackle this problem and attract all of those people like us who thrive in the chaos and complexity that scares most people away.

A mandate to think creatively, super bright individuals working at their edge, surprising juxtapositions, diversity yet commonality of purpose. These all seem to be important elements of scenius.

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May 01, 2011 | 2 comments | View Post

Are Women Leading the Way? (Think About This)

by Elizabeth Debold

Are women leading the way at the forefront of culture, or still struggling beneath the weight of historical discrimination? While young women are attending college in higher numbers than young men, and women now constitute more of the workforce, the numbers of women in leadership positions at the top of business and academic worlds still aren’t budging and, according to some leading women who have their eyes on the horizon, they aren’t going to any time soon. In the following excerpt from “The Puzzle of Postmodern Women’s Leadership,” the most recent blog post for EvolveWomen, EnlightenNext senior editor Elizabeth Debold explores the role that women will need to play in order to create a new culture:

“Popular thinking holds that women have the inside track to a way of working and living that is attentive to relationship, less exploitative in general, and more nurturing; in other words, women, simply by expressing the values that come from our responsibilities as caretakers, are going to change the world. But how will this be realized without actual women taking up the very real challenge of leading?

…For us women, the precious and creative blessing of agency—the capacity to choose our direction—is wrapped up in millennia old habits that lead us away from the daring needed to change culture at the deepest level. That’s what it’s going to take. Not a superficial change but a profound one, at the level of our most fundamental motivations. This is not cosmetic surgery. It’s spiritual surgery. And the end result will be the evolution of who we are as women.”

To read the full post, click here.

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Apr 21, 2011 | 0 comments | View Post

The View from the Center of the Universe

by Elizabeth Debold

An Interview with Joel R. Primack and Nancy Ellen Abrams

Ever since Copernicus proved that the universe doesn’t revolve around Earth, humanity’s place in the cosmos has steadily continued to shrink. But according to physicist Joel Primack and cultural philosopher Nancy Abrams, we may be far more central to the universe than we think. EnlightenNext speaks with this dynamic husband-and-wife duo about the fascinating ways in which science is coming to understand our true cosmic significance, revealing a surprising new context in which to answer the perennial spiritual questions: Who are we? and Why are we here?

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Apr 13, 2011 | 0 comments | View Post

In Search of True Scenius: 3. Bob Dylan

by Elizabeth Debold

The 1960s was an explosion of scenius–a remarkable time of creative ferment that lifted so many in that generation to express real genius. It was a time when boundaries were broken and both the inner and outer frontiers of the possible were pushed wide open. It would be difficult to list all of the scenius enclaves that spontaneously happened at that time. Just to name a few: the women’s consciousness raising movement, the rise of rock ‘n’ roll, and the Civil Rights movement.

Amidst the creative turmoil of that decade, Bob Dylan stands out as its chief bard and poet. Here, in a rare interview some years ago by Ed Bradley of 60 Minutes, he speaks about how he experienced then a powerful spontaneous creativity that he never has since. That’s the power of scenius–so many individuals pushing an edge that creates a collective context that gives rise to genius.

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Mar 30, 2011 | 17 comments | View Post

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Author Archive for Elizabeth Debold

Women Creating the Future — Live in London

The Power of Evolutionary Spirituality with Ursula King — Live in London

In Search of True Scenius: 5. Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris

Boy and Girl Brains?

Being CEO of Planet Earth

The Gender Situation & the Situation Room

In Search of True Scenius: 4. The MIT Media Lab

Are Women Leading the Way? (Think About This)

The View from the Center of the Universe

In Search of True Scenius: 3. Bob Dylan

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Author Archive for Elizabeth Debold

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