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January 10 - January 28, 2020
When you take up that thread, when you begin to deliberate about the evolution of society as a whole, you must admit that your own position on an ideological scale must always be partial, inherently harmful and limited in some respects.
All these positions still believe in those little shards that were one part of the greater whole. Once you see the larger process and identify with the dialectic of society as a whole, each of these positions is revealed as a partial, silly belief, a childish dream. There is something endearing, almost cute, about being so blinded by the current forms of liberal democracy, that you think that you can take one position within it, and it just so happens to be the right one. It is innocent, in a way. It is very much like when people in pre-modern times used to believe in Jesus or Mohammed just
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The truth is that you don’t have the truth; that you never will. And even if you turn out to be right about something, there will always be a time when your opinion is outdated or at least incomplete. Whatever direction you move in, it will lead to contradiction, self-destruction and decay, sooner or later. Your perspective or opinion always has a systemic limit, a breaking point; it always breaks down under its own weight, just like any engine, organism or economic system. You never get to be the good guy in the end. You are not innocent.
second, even deeper, belief of the liberal innocent: That you can choose not to act, and just be a normal citizen, and that you are thereby innocent. The belief holds that, if you “don’t want to control others” and “just live your life”, you are innocent; that only the politicians, reformists and dictators bear the true responsibility.
Ours is a meat-eating, animal-exploiting, cruel, capitalist, alienating, unfair, oppressive, unscientific, undemocratic, unsustainable society. If you partake in it, you are complicit in its crimes, mistakes and vices. And if you tolerate this, your children will be next. When I make suggestions about how to improve society, and you say no, but offer nothing in return, you are not being innocent, a liberal defender of freedom—you are killing children and burying them in invisible graves.
Once you see, with a transpersonal perspective, that you are the whole process of evolving language games, that you are the polarities and dynamics of the social and political developments, you also recognize that all of your positions, all of your opinions, all of your choices, both do good and cause harm. You are causing harm, doctor. You are causing harm.
When we identify with ideas, ideals and deeper political movements, we are also challenging other patterns of thought, other “memes”. The metamodern thinker and activist challenges modern society. This is not revolution on the barricades, and no harm needs to come to human bodies. But people are deeply invested in their ideas and worldviews. To challenge their ways of thinking and sensing is also an act of cruelty and aggression; shattering people’s beliefs, their sense of security, self, ethics and reality. Nothing could be less innocent. But the gods of modernity are false idols—the
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Okay, so before we go on, you should know that stage-based adult development theory puts your mind on crack. Developmental theory of this kind is incredibly useful, but equally seductive, and it can lead to pretty grave delusions and downright arrogant and nasty attitudes or behaviors if you are not careful.
Unintelligent people don’t like theory. They don’t understand that the word theory just means “seeing”, and that without it you miss out on seeing vital aspects of reality. Don’t be like that. Theoreticians built this world; the rest of y’all just live in it.
A moral philosopher can still help us come to the right conclusions, given we agree on the premises, but they seldom seem to drive the ethical development of society. It’s because they don’t have their behavioral science and psychology straight. They don’t understand that humans are, in a manner of speaking, behavioral robots.
There is no “default human” from which moral philosophy can start.
The terrible truth is this: Adult human beings are not equals. We are as different from one another as adults from children, albeit in various ways and in different regards.
There is no reason to believe that we do not also vary greatly in terms of overall developmental stages (the four dimensions being cognitive development, cultural coding, state and depth, as we will discuss).
“Introduce hierarchy! Who would do such a thing? And why? Is it not a pretext for claiming that some people should be put above and beyond others, some unfair privileges unduly legitimized? After all, we are still working hard all over the world to get rid of the postcolonial heritage, of male privilege, white privilege, Eurocentrism, the exploitation of the global South, discrimination against animals, anthropocentrism in relation to the rest of the biosphere and the many hidden injuries of class! And you want to discuss hierarchy?
Do not go there to see with your own eyes! In the name of equality, choose ignorance! Do not ask forbidden questions!” You are correct, dear reader. This can be bad news.
And to study development, we must admit that there are hierarchies—that some opinions, behaviors or psyches are, at least in some sense, more developed. It is possible to take this stance without being an asshole. The risks associated with developmental blindness are simply so much greater, the consequences so much more harmful.
progressive thinker and activist of today must know and accept hierarchy; a rebel heart must love hierarchical development—and use it, against all masters, against all unjust hierarchies, and against the chaos and entropy inherent to the cosmos.
radical acceptance, a pervasive non-judgment
difference between natural hierarchies and dominator hierarchies. Dominator hierarchies are the ones that you cannot find any universal arguments for and that are used to legitimize exploitation:
Natural hierarchies are different—no exploitation is inherent to the hierarchy; it builds on a universal argument that benefits all parties, and it is limited to the specific area in which that benefit can be argued for.
Remember, however: All dominator hierarchies disguise themselves as natural ones, to make them appear as “the triple-N” of all hidden oppression: Natural, Normal, Necessary.
Developmental stage is not the same as skill. 5. Humility. The fifth principle is humility. Hierarchical models with several stages are more humble, not less, than non-hierarchical visions of reality.
You are thereby in effect creating a hierarchy yourself: The people who have your opinion are placed “above” the people who don’t—it’s better to be against hierarchy than to be for it, right? The very preference creates a two-step hierarchy, in a sense. By doing that you just made several moves that are anything but humble. To start with, you are reducing the richness of possible answers to just your own position “and all others”. This means that you are squeezing together many, perhaps very qualitatively different, answers and labeling them under one category (the non-correct one). There is
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Rather counter-intuitively, hierarchy, understood correctly, serves openness and humility towards the perspectives of others.
hierarchical stage theories of human development have different dimensions and that development in one dimension does not necessarily translate into development within another.
Just as you can be blind by not understanding the stages of human development, so you can be blinded by staring too much at them. Like the sun, really: Without it, you walk in darkness—but if you keep staring at it all day, you also go blind. It’s when the sun shines on other things that you see them more clearly.
But all in all—not understanding the hierarchical stages of human development leaves you more judgmental, more prejudiced, more arrogantly narrow-minded, less competent to understand and empathize with others, and less likely to successfully interpret and predict behaviors (and the events in society).
The point is not to obsess about hierarchy. The point is that if you see hierarchies clearly and don’t imbue them with emotional value, you can relate to them in a more rational and detached manner. There is no need to pretend that we are the driving instructor when we are the student driver—and both parties benefit. The aim here is of course to create a more equal and egalitarian society, where hierarchy matters less, and only in ways that make sense.
direction in which the hierarchical development goes: towards greater inclusivity, understanding and acceptance of others and towards challenging one’s own certainty.
We are looking for clear patterns in the thoughts and behaviors of people—even in our ways of sensing and experiencing the world—and how these patterns tend to evolve under favorable circumstances.
This way of framing it usually wins people’s sympathies. Surely I, at fifty-five, must have developed and “matured” since I was eighteen? But unfortunately, there is little reason to be very optimistic about such age-related development. Most people, the vast majority, stall in their (hierarchical stage) development relatively early during adult life.
Stages are different: They represent a logical sequence, where later stages build upon earlier ones; the later stage transcending and including the earlier stage.
But, except perhaps for the psychiatric tests, none of these personality tests have anywhere near the explanatory power and importance as differences in developmental stage—with stage, we’re talking ten times stronger correlations or more. Developmental stage explains a lot of why a person acts like she does: her reasoning, morality, aesthetics, leadership style, close relationships, values, income (even more than class background), and much else.
There is all the reason to believe, however, that the development of a human’s psychological health may interact in complex ways with her development into higher stages. Usually this means that a healthy, not too painful, psychological development supports higher stages of development, but not always. Psychopathologies (mental imbalances or sicknesses) of different kinds can also spur psychological development, either by causing discomfort and thereby making us work harder to challenge our current equilibrium—or simply by removing some psychological property that would otherwise have been an
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So what is “a stage” anyway? It is an equilibrium at a certain degree of complexity, a form of self-supporting balance within your mind, brain, organism—located within an open system of continuously ongoing interactions with the environment.
Changes of stage usually happen in relatively short leaps that bridge more stable and longer periods of equilibrium. But such stage changes are relatively rare in the lives of adult human beings.
The pattern that emerges is that you go from earlier stages with simpler, more black-and-white and mechanical or linear ways of functioning, towards being more self-critical, more nuanced, diverse, and—a recurring theme—towards more dialectical forms of thinking and acting.
Another recurring pattern to all of these theories is that you go from focusing on more narrow frameworks (like yourself) towards wider ones (like universal principles, the network of relations you partake in, etc.).
Robert “Bob” Kegan’s development of self-perception, wherein the sense of “self” is studied in people. People advance towards more abstract ideas of who they “really are” in the higher stages—he uses five stages and has good data for it. Each stage gains the ability to reflect critically upon the earlier stage, how they used to see themselves. Only older people, in their fifties and older, are thought to reach the highest stages.
Clare Graves’ model, developed and popularized by Don Beck and Chris Cowan as Spiral Dynamics, in which people are thought to belong to “vMemes” (value memes) that are named with color codes, RED (warrior society), BLUE (traditional), ORANGE (modern), GREEN (postmodern), YELLOW (metamodern) and so on.
Ken Wilber’s theory, in which a person’s spiritual and cognitive development are taken to be two aspects that don’t always match—a theme that I will elaborate upon.
Michael Lamport Commons’ neo-Piagetian MHC: the Model of Hierarchical Complexity. This model is by far the most scientifically viable and consistent one, and the one that indisputably has the strongest empirical evidence, the strongest explanatory power, and the widest applicability.
So the fundamental tension here, among the global theories of adult development, is between more holistic ones and the more reductionist Model of Hierarchical Complexity (MHC) of Michael Commons. In this sense, Commons’ theory stands alone against all of the others. Whereas Kegan’s psychoanalytically influenced theory (drawing on the humanities rather than behavioral science) relates to intimate things such as the evolving sense of self, the MHC does nothing of the sort.
holistic adult development theories are on to something, but that they all fail to grasp quite what it is. They all make the same mistake: They smash together different forms of development into one and the same model, and force these (interrelated but still distinct and often independently developed) dimensions into the same stages.
Some of the theories mix things up even worse. Robert Kegan’s theory mixes up stage with Eriksonian life phases, which turns him into a hopeless “gerontophile”: Age is glorified to an almost religious extent.
Wilber’s model comes closest to understanding these issues. He speaks of two kinds of development: one of spiritual states and one of cognitive stages.
Perhaps his worst sin is to overemphasize spirituality so that he, for instance, in his detailed maps over human development, places the Indian mystic Sri Aurobindo’s later stages of spiritual development right on top of Michael Commons’ stages of cognitive development—a deeply confused move.
What all of the holistic models are on to is that purely cognitive development (which is what Commons’ theory describes) leaves out something crucial. But when they attempt to put that “other stuff” in, their models become blurred and much weaker—and certainly much less clear, logical and elegant—than Commons’ theory.
Here is what I believe: Commons is the only one that has discovered one of the four fundamental dimensions of development—that of cognitive development. That’s why his model shows up with so much greater clarity and consistency—and better research results.
starting with Commons’ MHC for cognitive development, then continuing with code, state and depth, each of which will get simplified but workable definitions.
