It one stops to ponder the role of the yellow meme in the ongoing emergence of new modes of thought and sets of values, it becomes clear that yellow must be about more than inclusiveness. Green has already included all people, so what's left? Wilber talks about yellow and 2nd tier as advancing to "Kosmos-centric" awareness. He seems to mean meditative and spiritual awareness, as well as an expansion of care to all beings. These are genuinely good things, extending pluralism and engaging in contemplative practice. They are, however, not new -- and if there's one thing that defines a meme, it's new thinking. So what sort of radical novelty does yellow bring to the table? What is yellow about?
Is yellow about synthesis? Yes, in part. Bringing together interpretations of the various fields of human experience is important to understanding the connections between them and forming more detailed, comprehensive, and useful explanations. We should take care, however, not to confuse synthesis with mere organization. To synthesize perspectives means more than to systematize them, and it means more than the creation of a single, monolithic, panoptic perspective. Synthesis is not about mixing everything together, but about finding useful combinations of any size among the perspectives available to us.
Is yellow about synergy? Yes, in part. Finding the ways that different perspectives can work together is crucial in a world where numerous modes of thinking and sets of values are here to stay. This means more than finding common ground and common purposes. Yes, it demands of us that we find ways to work together even when we don't agree, but it also demands that we find ways for our differing purposes to strengthen and assist each other.
Is yellow about discernment? Yes, in part. Yellow's discernment is not concerned with truth and falsehood, nor with certainty and uncertainty. It is concerned with what we choose and how we choose it. Since we are faced with a multitude of perspectives and interpretations we could adopt, we must find ways to distinguish between them and decide which are helpful and suitable to the situations we face. We must make judgments, concerning not only what is positive and to be embraced, but of what is unhelpful, unhealthy, and unacceptable, which is to be rejected. I can personally attest that it is easy to slip from rejecting a perspective to rejecting those who hold it. This does not, however, excuse us from the responsibility of selecting an interpretation, continuing to sharpen and strengthen it, and ultimately to take action upon it.
If these are the facets of yellow thought, what lies at the core? Like all memes, yellow is tailor made to handle the problems created by its predecessor. Green left us with two unpleasant alternatives: total acceptance of all perspectives, even those that are intolerant and unaccepting, or total rejection of all perspectives and the resulting self-induced psychosis. In many ways, the legacy of green is the dissolution of the sense of certainty and of the illusion of given meanings. Where green placed or even stranded us squarely in an ocean of perspectival possibility, yellow gives us the tools to chart an interpretive course, to propel ourselves through the process of creating meaning, and to navigate the straits and reefs we'll inevitably encounter as we seek to explain the world around us.
Topics
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
You have suggested that our occasional difficulties understanding each other stem from our differing definitions of the green and yellow memes. So I thought I'd take another look at your definition of yellow above.
ReplyDeleteYou cite synthesis, synergy, discernment, and tools to chart an interpretive course.
Well and good. 100% agreement that those are the cognitive capacities necessary to achieve the perspective we are calling yellow. I believe you would agree that yellow also requires an intention to serve the highest good of all people, true? Or more accurately, the yellow skills in the cognitive line make it possible to succeed at intentions on the values line. I can have the skills without the intention, and the intention without the skills. But I need both to have any hope of manifesting worldcentric behavior, which really is the goal of all this theorizing, right?
In fact, isn't it true that while orange first makes possible the worldcentric view, orange cognitive development sometimes expresses as valuing only other oranges! (I'm rembering the early sci-fi classic "When Worlds Collide." To save humanity from an approaching asteroid, scientists built a rocket to take all the other scientists worldwide to safety.) Similarily, green has a tendency to value most highly other greens.
So personally, the only reason I care about achieving yellow on the cognitive line OR the values line is to make it possible to for me and my neighbors to act in ways that serve the highest good of all people.
And furthermore, I can have the skills and the conscious intention but still be blocked by unconscious shadow elements. So to truly manifest behavior that is worldcentric or above, I need at least three things: skills, intentions, a means of minimizing shadow. So the really interesting question is, how do I develop those three things?
Agreed so far?
I have posited that there is also something I'll call the "belief line" to distinguish among the many varieties of the spiritual line. I think perhaps the place where you and I differ (and where I differ somewhat with Wilber) is in the relationship of the belief line to the mastery of skills, intention, and shadow.
Beck and Cowan, of Spiral Dynamics fame, make a distinction between schema and thema. A schema is the underlying sort of cognitive process that distinguishes a meme from any other. It's a structure, an kind of organization, a particular focus. (I would say that a meme's schema is defined by the particular moves in thought that underlie the meme's thinking.) Then there are the thema -- the particular thoughts that tend to arise within a particular schema. Whereas the schema represents form, the thema represents content.
ReplyDeleteIn the post above, I'm describing the schema -- the cognitive capacities. You're right to point out that the thema side is also important. However, I think you miss the mark in terms of what yellow's thema are.
Remember that the memes (as described by Beck and Cowan) alternate between a focus on the individual and the community. Where orange seeks the individually-attained highest good of all rational agents, and green seeks the communal validation of all perspectives and identities, yellow seeks to interact, as an individual, with the network of perspectives in a healthy way.
Because it is an individually focused meme, yellow's "world-centrism" is more similar to orange's world-centrism than green's. Yellow thinking acknowledges that gains for the network may mean losses for certain individuals. Actions taken that improve the overall health of the spiral may not be good for some people.
(Not even their highest good, whatever that might mean. It strikes me as a way to rationalize imposing whatever we've chosen as being good even though it seems bad. Saner, in my mind, to simply acknowledge that the action we've chosen is bad for some people, and either accept that harm, or chose another course of action with acceptable consequences.)
In order to have any hope of manifesting yellow-driven behavior, one would first have to think yellow. Cultivating that kind of thinking is one of the major themes of my writing. I agree that taking it into action is a logical next step. However, I stress that before one uses yellow to justify certain actions, one ought to very clear about defining what is yellow and what isn't. Total agreement with others isn't necessary, of course, but one should at least be very clear with oneself. With only a vague idea of what yellow entails, it's too easy to fall into "I'm a second-tier thinker" self-congratulation without thinking too hard about what that really involves. (Rule of Thumb: If you can't articulate it, your definition is probably not clear enough yet.)
Once one can clearly identify yellow thought, it becomes much easier to spot non-yellow thinking, whether it results from consciously underdeveloped areas or repressed shadow material. You can work on shadow material all you want, but if you can't think yellow beforehand...you still won't afterward. I wish shadow was the primary block to taking action on yellow thinking. I tend to think it has more to do with thinking yellow in the first place.
Now I think I see the problem. To my mind, one of Wilber's major contributions in transcending Spiral Dynamics was the insight that it speaks only to one developmental line among many, the values line, and that that line develops independently from the lines of cognition, emotional maturity, etc. If you do not accept this, then my further distinction that all those lines can develop independently from what I call the belief line (belief in the nature of ultimate reality) would of course make no sense to you as well.
ReplyDeleteBut if I'm correct, I'm rather surprised, because to me the evidence for separate development of the lines is abundant: everywhere from the brilliant sociopath who takes others' perspectives in order to take advantage of them and on to the person of average cognition capable of extraordinary acts of altruism outside their group. How do you explain those? And also please clarify, you do accept that development from ego-centric to ethno-centric to world-centric represents forward movement, right?
Wilber doesn't say that the lines all develop independently. He makes it very clear that he believes that "cognitive always leads." Or, to put it another way, he says that every other line depends on the development of the cognitive line as a prerequisite.
ReplyDeleteThis viewpoint has a certain appeal: it wouldn't make sense to have values or beliefs that are more complex than you are capable of holding in mind and thinking about. The limitations of your cognitive capacities would in effect limit the complexity of the values or beliefs you could hold. This would mean that although one might espouse the sophisticated philosophical positions of others, they would be "down-translated" to the level of complexity that one is capable of dealing with. That seems to be what I see going on around me. As the quote goes "Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." In other words, purple can't see the orange world -- it's too complex for purple to make sense of, and so it looks like magic. And similarly, orange can't make sense of green, green doesn't get yellow...
I see that as development takes place, the sphere of things with which one is concerned tends to expand in parallel with the increase in the capacity to handle complexity. The more information you can process and the more ways you have to process it, the bigger your world gets. Such a development is definitely forward, in that the stages proceed from ego- to ethno- to world-centric, and always in that order. I think ego-ethno-world-centric is a bit of an over-simplification, but the pattern seems to hold.
I also see that there are multiple lines of development, and that they develop semi-independently. The examples you cite intuitively demonstrate that the lines don't necessarily all develop at exactly the same rate. Of course, how you process information will tend to affect how you interact with others (the social line), the way you feel about what's happening around you (the emotional line), and so forth. So the lines are distinct, but definitely inter-related, and particularly dependent on the forward progress of the cognitive line.
In terms of the belief line...it isn't a line, technically speaking, because as you've defined it ("belief in the ultimate nature of reality"), it stops at orange. Relativistic, contextual green thinking has no place for an ultimate, non-contextual nature of reality. Since the later memes build on green, they don't have a place for that either.
I can go with, "the lines are distinct, but definitely inter-related, and particularly dependent on the forward progress of the cognitive line."
ReplyDeleteHowever, I think the cognitive skills necessary to master green develop in most of the population by about age 16. I don't know the data on this, but looking around me, I'd say synthesis, synergy, discernment are available in most people by early 20's, and then maturing throughout life. Certainly the average soccer mom couldn't raise a healthy family without a good dose of those capacities. Though of course, people vary hugely in the extent to which they can or do exercise those capacities. So I really don't think lack of cognitive capacity is what's keeping a large portion of the world's population from worldcentric behavior. And then on the other hand, there's Bernie Madoff, no slouch in the synergy department, but apparently still at egocentric. So I think the evidence points to a much less critical role for cognitive capacity than you seem to assign it.
But I could be wrong. You are obviously no slouch in the synergy department yourself, so perhaps you perceive something I don't. But if you want to be able to communicate it more broadly, we're going to need some concrete examples eventually. What problems could be solved if we had better capacity for synergy and synthesis? (I'm not sure discernment is a cognitive capacity). The recent inability of emminent economists to agree on causality of the great depression has actually made me less hopeful about synthesis.
And as to my "belief lne" stopping at orange, you yourself said green holds a different view about the ultimate nature of reality than orange, So even accepting your definitions for the moment, the line "stops" at green, which sounds pretty suspicious. But even if it does, how then do you account for the predictable developmental variations beyond mythic god, to impersonal, to immanent, to non-dual? These stages unfold throughout history and over lifetimes. Are you really collapsing them all into sub-stages of blue? None more valuable than the other?
And finally, I actually think the belief line splits at orange and goes two directions, one with Spirit and the other without. Both paths can support a worldcentric ethic IF the person chooses it. So perhaps what we're arguing about is which path provides better tools to accomplish the common aims of worldcentric (and beyond?).
You're missing that synergy, synthesis, and discrimination (as I'm describing them) are skills that develop after the realization of contextuality, and are capacities related to systems and network based thinking. That is to say, these skills are specifically focused on networks of perspectives, and someone who does not grasp the perspective-bound and interpretive nature of "truth" and "reality" does not have the skills I'm talking about.
ReplyDeleteYou remember our conversation about people learning green thema while using blue schema at the meetup a while back? Certainly nearly all adults have the cognitive capacity to understand "Don't exclude people, respect everyone's viewpoint, and treat everyone equally." But do they understand that as a rule, as a guideline for what works, or as a natural result of context-bound interpretation? I'd wager, based on my experience, that the distribution is heavily weighted toward the first two -- toward blue and orange. In other words, nearly everyone has the cognitive capacity to hear the message, the "what," but not necessarily to fully understand the reason, the "why."
If two people's thinking leads them to the exact same behavior, but one of them is thinking red and one is thinking green, are they both acting world-centrically? I have to say no. A behavior doesn't tell you why someone is doing it. For example, one might express respect for someone's perspective either due to relativistic pluralism, or simply because doing so helps one gain power over them. The key then is not world-centric behavior, but world-centric thinking. A concrete example of world-centrism, then, would be demonstrated not by what people do, but by how they think, how they express their thoughts, and how they reason about which actions to take. "World-centric" thinking, which takes all people into account, depends on being able to handle sufficient complexity to think beyond "my group," and think about "all people." (This capacity/schema is what underlies the development of orange ideas/thema concerning freedom, liberty, and self-determination.)
As for "world-centric" green thinking, green schema don't depend on the conceptualization of an ultimate nature of reality. There's something radically novel about the way green thinks as compared to orange, and it has to do directly with an abandonment of the notion that there is one ultimate truth, one supremely privileged perspective, from which to understand the ultimate nature of reality. You can talk about green thinking as being just another way of seeing the ultimate nature of reality if you like, but green thinking wouldn't express itself that way.
The "belief line," as you've defined it, attempts to colonize the other memes with a blue/orange perspective -- one that believes in an ultimate nature of reality, thinks everyone's beliefs are structurally similar, and tries to fit every other perspective into that particular structural framework. This works sort of OK for the memes prior to blue, but pretty terribly for the memes after orange. The previous memes are simpler, and therefore "ultimate reality" is conceptual overkill for those perspectives. The later memes are more complex, and trying to understand them in terms of "ultimate reality" is like bringing a knife to a gunfight. Because post-blue "spirituality" (sort of a misnomer) is more complicated than mere belief, attempting to understanding it in terms of belief hinges on reductionism -- making the complex inappropriately simple.
On further reflection, a better word than "reductionism" (which multiplies the number of things under consideration and therefore introduces added complexity) would be fundamentalism. One might define it as "an insistence on simplicity."
ReplyDelete