Purple - Things without opposites or conflict (e.g. the people, the tribe, the natural way)
The only conceptual structuring is accomplished using simple things without qualities. There is no need for multiple things, since without strong qualities, there would be no difference between "this one" and "that one."
Red - Multiple (uncategorized) things or options, which may conflict but are not opposite
Qualities are attached to things. The emergence of qualities makes personal preferences possible and a desire for power to choose between them soon follows.
Blue - Pure opposites or categories, with a sharp dividing line (e.g. black and white, us and them, right and wrong), hierarchies
Drawing clear boundaries around groups of things that share qualities results in categories and the simple relationship represented by opposition. The most complex extension of this combines categories and opposition with preference and power, resulting in a hierarchy.
Orange - Spectrum with two poles (e.g. black to white with shades of gray), multiple (3+) separate and clearly defined (but not opposing or hierarchical) categories
The difficulty of drawing clear category boundaries leads to shifts in the understanding of qualities. The first shift is from discrete categories to continuous gradations of a particular quality. The second is from simple, hierarchical relationships to more complex and multi-faceted relationships, involving trade-offs between multiple qualities.
Green - Multiple contradictory and irresolvable perspectives, the relationship between a thing and its context
The big picture no longer simply involves relationships between things, but also relationships "inside" of things -- constitutive relationships that make things what they are, such as the relationship between parent and child. A particular focus on the constitutive relationship between a thing and everything that it is not (i.e. its context) leads to the discovery of contextual relativity -- the idea that the same thing placed against two different backdrops is not really quite the same thing after all.
The dawn of contextual relativity calls into question the existence of things and their qualities as existing independently of their relationships (i.e. it kills the myth of the given.) The radical questioning of pre-existing forms and relationships calls into question all previous values and action logics, and suggests that there is no ultimate way to resolve which perspectives are right or true. Pluralism stems from this realization.
Yellow - Manageable tensions between perspectives or contexts, the relationships/interactions between them, networks of differentiable and integrable perspectives
Things, qualities, and relationships begin to shift from being seen as static and passively pre-existing to being seen as dynamic and actively co-creating. This is a shift toward process-based thinking. At first, the focus is on how the interplay of dynamic forces manages to create stable, semi-fixed equilibria and persistent configurations (i.e. forms/things and their relationships.) The result of combining complex sets of relationships with dynamic motion and change is networks/systems thinking -- conceptually, a multi-scale (holarchical) web of interrelations which may be nudged into a new and different equilibrium by changing, creating, or removing relationships, or by changing the qualities of the things which are relating. This is the first seed of process based thinking, although it hasn't fully flowered yet -- the system is still seen as basically static, shifting between discrete states.
Combining an appreciation for dynamism with a skepticism of pre-existing forms leads to a new appreciation of the active character of knowledge (a.k.a. the enactive paradigm.) This conception sees knowledge not as reflecting found or discovered pre-existing objects, but instead as actively created through an interactive process resulting in eventual stability. As a result, networks and systems are not seen as objective and independently existing, but as enacted mental constructs depending on perspective.
Turquoise - Perspectives changing over time, network "flows," collective shifts and realignments
Process thinking matures further. Fluid, continuous processes (rather than discrete, step by step procedures) become the conceptual norm. In this new context, things, qualities, and relationships are reconceptualized as a projection of a process -- much as a square is a projection of a cube onto a flat surface. This reconceptualization implies that all facets of a system are undergoing continuous change, rather than shifting between discrete states. Combining this with simultaneous multi-scale awareness, small scale processes are seen as fractally or holarchically congruent to and correlated with larger scale processes.
These shifts lead to many different approaches to describing network/system behavior which seek to include dynamic continuity: energy fields, tensions between forces, collective flows, and so on. This may sound like purple, but it isn't! These fields, tensions, and flows are not asserted to exist in the world out there -- they are chosen constructs used to describe interpretively enacted forms of knowledge about perspectives, systems, networks, and processes. As Beck and Cowan put it, "this is purple revisited up an hectave."
Having aligned the basics of Basseches' system with Spiral Dynamics, it's not too challenging to overlay his list of moves in dialectical thought on the memes (though there are some oddballs.)
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment