The other day a friend started haranguing me about “greenwashing”—token ecological gestures that corporations make to mask their environmentally destructive practices. I suggested that the practice reveals a corporate vulnerability to public opinion that opponents can turn to their advantage. He brushed this thought aside, as if anxious to convince me how hopeless it was trying to stop corporate malfeasance. I began to wonder if harping on the magnitude of problems might actually be keeping us from doing anything about them.

I’ve begun to feel lately that such lamentations are related to the ineffectuality of progressive politics in recent years. The left is floundering in part due to a failure to grasp the essence of a cultural shift that is slowly but surely transforming the world. The right is desperately fighting this shift, using time-honored strategies, tactics, and slogans. The left remains confused, standing in opposition to the right while sharing, unconsciously, many of its underlying assumptions and values. What is this cultural shift, and why are so many resisting it? Consider these more or less random examples:

• In surveys taken during the late 1990s, two-thirds to three-fourths of Americans polled said the United States should contribute more to peacekeeping efforts. Globally, there was a 300 percent increase in such efforts during that period, mostly by European nations. But the United States showed an initial reluctance to send peacekeeping troops to Afghanistan.

• In recent years animal rights activists have mounted increasingly successful attacks on medical experiments that inflict severe pain on monkeys, dogs, and rats. Experimenters and others have countered that such suffering is justified because it leads to less pain for our own species.

• Julia Butterfly Hill became a national heroine when she spent two years in an old-growth redwood to preserve it from loggers. But she and other environmentalists are often scorned as sentimental “tree-huggers.”

In all three conflicts, one side is feeling a connection—with different cultures and species—that the other side does not feel. These contrasts are symptomatic of a much larger ideological conflict being played out in the world today. This is not a conflict between nations, between political systems, between religious traditions, or between left and right. It is a conflict taking place within every nation, every political system, every religious tradition, and, indeed, every individual. It’s a gradual but massive collision between two competing cultural systems. I call them the Culture of Division and the Culture of Connection.