In thinking about how to tell the difference between the memes, even as they are shaped by each other, I've created the following list of the most typical conceptual structures used by each meme. If you're looking to tell what meme you're listening to, look for the underlying structure rather than the content. In particular, look for the structure of the reason or justification for something, rather than the apparent structure of the thing itself. (The memes are most clearly differentiated when you consider why we do things, rather than what we do.)
I've listed only a few for each meme, although there are a cluster of favorite structures for each meme. Add whatever else you can think of in the comments.
Purple - Things without opposites or conflict (e.g. the people, the tribe, the natural way)
Red - Multiple (uncategorized) things or options, which may conflict but are not opposite
Blue - Pure opposites or categories, with a sharp dividing line (e.g. black and white, us and them, right and wrong), hierarchies
Orange - Spectrum with two poles (e.g. black to white with shades of gray), multiple (3+) separate and clearly defined (but not opposing) categories
Green - Multiple contradictory and irresolvable perspectives, the relationship between a thing and its context
Yellow - Manageable tensions between perspectives or contexts, the relationships/interactions between them, networks of differentiable and integrable perspectives
Turquoise - Perspectives changing over time, network "flows," collective shifts and realignments
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Weird coincidence - the same thought occurred to me a few days ago. A few ideas that I generated out of it:
ReplyDelete1. Sometimes you hear that 1st tier memes are characterized by dogmatism and exclusion. I think your example of blue interpreting green is useful to keep in mind to understand exactly what that means.
2. If there are 8 basic memes, and every meme can internalize the values of every other meme, doesn't that mean there are 64 memes - 8*8?
3. In light of this, isn't Wilber wrong to claim that everyone interested in Integral theory is by definition, at the integral level?
I like your point about how supposedly second tier ideas can be expressed in a dogmatic and exclusionary fashion. I think that may very well result from what I'm calling "downward translation" -- when someone thinking at one level of complexity looks up the spiral and tries to translate ideas of higher complexity.
ReplyDeleteI don't think that each meme can internalize the values of every other meme, at least not without significant distortion. It's helpful to distinguish between the schema (structure) and thema (resulting ideas), as Beck and Cowan do in the SD book. Then it's easier to see that any meme can adopt the thema of another meme, and attempt to overlay it on the schema or structure of its own thinking. I think I'll stick with 8 memes and account for the possible variations by looking at schema and thema.
In regard to Wilber and integral vs. yellow, I agree entirely. This isn't the first time I've heard this argument made -- others in the SD community have made it too. Cherie Beck pointed out the strong presence of what she calls "integral blue" and "integral green" in a tweet not that long ago.
Another claim that Wilber makes that I think is somewhat problematic is whether Buddhism/Taoism/Advaita Vedanta is "third tier". Did the author of the Lankavatara Sutra pass through Orange, Green, Yellow, Turquoise, etc., before they existed? Or could it be that Wilber, at second or third tier, interprets the sutra through an integral perspective, but perhaps originally it was written from a blue perspective?
ReplyDeleteIn the link above, Wilber writes "Beck and Cowan found that the acceptance of holarchy, or nested hierarchy, is one of the defining characteristics of second tier". Is this a case of confusing schema and thema? I'd appreciate your thoughts!
"Third tier" seems to follow from Wilber's assertion that meditative states are "higher" than cognitive states -- something he's played with since Wilber-I, and seems to take turns embracing and rejecting. I find this to be an inappropriate conflation of two very different kinds of things. Personally, I like the Wilber-Combs lattice incarnation of his theory, since it points out that cognitive structures and meditative awareness are different sorts of things. I'm of the opinion that meditative states and cognitive growth, while they may be inter-related, need to be adequately differentiated first, before we start looking at how they affect each other.
ReplyDeleteFrom that point of view, I find third tier pretty ridiculous. Yes, the meditative traditions have real value, and the authors of contemplative texts do have real things to teach us, but those things are not necessarily more cognitively advanced than our modern pictures (I'd argue quite the opposite), even if they point at something we moderns seem to have largely forgotten.
As far as holarchy goes, I think it's one of the sorts of thema that yellow thinking concocts, but it doesn't necessarily take yellow cognition to think you understand it. There are certainly people out there who take yellow thema and interpret them with orange schema (and so on.) This process inevitably results in distortion, because the cognitive framework being used to try to understand the idea is less complex than the framework the idea was built on. Some parts of the idea are inevitably lost.
It's like trying to run modern software on punchcards -- you might technically be able to execute some of the code, but without the context of modern hardware, a good chunk of the meaning is lost. Just because the punchcards run through the machine doesn't mean that the software did what it was intended to.