Fostering the Generative Society
Many years ago, Sigmund Freud indicated that our capacity to both love deeply and engage in productive work defines our quality of life (and perhaps our level of sanity). The first architect of generativity, Erik Erikson, similarly emphasized the integral connections between love and work. Both are needed to foster generativity. Love resides in the internal Push, while work resides in the external Pull of generativity. Erik Erikson spoke of this requirement on many occasions, perhaps most eloquently and succinctly in Insight and Responsibility: “As adult man needs to be needed [loved], so . . . he requires the challenge emanating from what he has generated [work] and from what now must be ‘brought up,’ guarded, preserved–and eventually transcended.” (E. Erikson, 1964, p. 131) Like Erikson, we wish to emphasize the integral connections between love (Push) and work (Pull), as both are needed to foster generativity.
Agency and Communion
This integration is played out in the vital connection between agency and communion that McAdams (2001, p. 405) and then Snyder and Clary (2004, p. 232) emphasize in their portraits of generative society:
“[A]t the heart of generativity is communion and altruism, on the one hand, and agency and narcissism, on the other. Accordingly, along with other-oriented concerns for future generations, generativity may have as the self-oriented aim ‘creating something in one’s own image, a powerful act of self-expansion.'”
In our interviews with Sage leaders, the role played by agency and hard, persistent work is clearly evident. Furthermore, we see in our study of civic engagement that generative work is sustained in a community that appreciates and honors this agency (as we noted above regarding the creation of an appreciative society). We also discovered that generative agency shows up in many forms.
This, in turn, means that there must be multiple ways in which agency is supported in any society that wishes to be generative. An insightful and more detailed account of this need for multiple support mechanisms was offered by Dollahite, Slife and Hawkins (1998, p. 475):
“Generative agency is holistic (choice is embedded in a web of other choices, contexts, and constraints), temporal (choices and constraints change over time), spiritual (choice is enhanced and challenged by spiritual connections and convictions), capability-oriented (the exercise of choice brings greater capabilities), and moral (people are accountable for their choices).”
As a sociologist, Kai Erikson focuses on distal Pulls to generativity. She is aligned with the second half of the equation: communion. Kai points out that communion is a fundamental building block in all societies and in the formation of our own personal sense of identity and security:
“Human beings, like all social animals, have an innate tendency to gather into collectivities containing individuals who regard themselves as being of like kind. That is, it is in our nature to seek communion with other human beings. But the ways in which we do so, the people to whom we find ourselves drawn, and the groupings that emerge from all this must be understood as products of social life. . . . Most people belong to a number of [social groupings.] . . . The most important question one can ask of these nested [social] identities is: which of them are crucial enough at any given time to provide a sense of communion, a sense of security, a sense of being at home among one’s own kind.” (K. Erikson, 2004, p. 56-57)
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