Explaining to a friend, I got a pretty good succinct explanation: "Integral Theory is the consolidation of all areas of human thought into one."
While not descriptive, it at least gets the idea across.
Showing posts with label Integral Theory. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Integral Theory. Show all posts
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Problem, singular, and integral (theory) solutions.
I've been saying this for years!
An Op-ed from Thomas Friedman. Beyond the corniness of Friedman, this is something that really needs to be said (which I guess could be true of much of Friedman's posts.)
The point of the article:
"We’re trying to deal with a whole array of integrated problems — climate change, energy, biodiversity loss, poverty alleviation and the need to grow enough food to feed the planet — separately. The poverty fighters resent the climate-change folks; climate folks hold summits without reference to biodiversity; the food advocates resist the biodiversity protectors...
'We need to stop thinking about these issues in isolation — each with its own champion, constituency and agenda — and deal with them in an integrated way, the way they actually occur on the ground,” argued Glenn Prickett, senior vice president with Conservation International. “We tend to think about climate change as just an energy issue, but it’s also about land use: one-third of greenhouse gas emissions come from tropical deforestation and agriculture. So we need to preserve forests and other ecosystems to solve climate change, not only to save species.'"
Notice the word "integrated" above. As I struggle to explain Integral Theory to everyone, one thing I keep coming out with is that it's mostly a different way of looking at things, a different set of lenses through which to look at the world, one which tries to take into account that reality is unified.
What this means is that if there's a problem, it's most likely either one of viewpoint, or one of orientation.
How can a change of viewpoint change everything?
Well, remember when fire was magic, some random event or act of the gods? Of course not. Every advance that we make occurs because of a shift in viewpoint, a greater, deeper, or wider understanding, or a more encompassing, more connected worldview.
There are no problems in the Universe. You have problems. There are two ways to eliminate them: externally and internally. If you no longer care about something (internal) it's not a problem. If you remove the external cause of the problem, it's not a problem. Both are important. You won't be a very good human if you ignore the external reality of problems. You'll probably starve to death. But you also won't be a very good human if you don't grow past some of your problems. You'll be waiting for your mother to feed you, and you'll starve to death. Both are shifts in viewpoint: you either change your view of what you are and what your relationship to the world is, or you change the way you look at the outside world, which changes what you can do to it and in it.
The shift in perspective that Friedman is discussing is from one where each act in the universe, or process (a series of acts and reactions through time) is basically unrelated to each other (SDi 5) to one which recognizes that every act has consequences for every other ongoing process, or that every process and system is linked to each other (SDi 6). You could also view this in terms of input and output, in the movement from an understanding of inputs and outputs occurring separately to one where every output is a different process' input, creating cycles.
Much of where modernity has gone awry is in disrupting cycles between the output of one and the input of another, creating waste, which doesn't exist in the natural world.
This is not to say that man has no right to tinker with what's there: as mentioned in the end of the article, we can make nature better, or rather, better for us, which is the process of solving problems externally. (Very simply, making a roof underneath which to hide from the rain.) What we need to understand is that instead of creating a different framework to solve every problem we have, we already have been given the perfect framework within which to work, we just need to recognize it as such.
An Op-ed from Thomas Friedman. Beyond the corniness of Friedman, this is something that really needs to be said (which I guess could be true of much of Friedman's posts.)
The point of the article:
"We’re trying to deal with a whole array of integrated problems — climate change, energy, biodiversity loss, poverty alleviation and the need to grow enough food to feed the planet — separately. The poverty fighters resent the climate-change folks; climate folks hold summits without reference to biodiversity; the food advocates resist the biodiversity protectors...
'We need to stop thinking about these issues in isolation — each with its own champion, constituency and agenda — and deal with them in an integrated way, the way they actually occur on the ground,” argued Glenn Prickett, senior vice president with Conservation International. “We tend to think about climate change as just an energy issue, but it’s also about land use: one-third of greenhouse gas emissions come from tropical deforestation and agriculture. So we need to preserve forests and other ecosystems to solve climate change, not only to save species.'"
Notice the word "integrated" above. As I struggle to explain Integral Theory to everyone, one thing I keep coming out with is that it's mostly a different way of looking at things, a different set of lenses through which to look at the world, one which tries to take into account that reality is unified.
What this means is that if there's a problem, it's most likely either one of viewpoint, or one of orientation.
How can a change of viewpoint change everything?
Well, remember when fire was magic, some random event or act of the gods? Of course not. Every advance that we make occurs because of a shift in viewpoint, a greater, deeper, or wider understanding, or a more encompassing, more connected worldview.
There are no problems in the Universe. You have problems. There are two ways to eliminate them: externally and internally. If you no longer care about something (internal) it's not a problem. If you remove the external cause of the problem, it's not a problem. Both are important. You won't be a very good human if you ignore the external reality of problems. You'll probably starve to death. But you also won't be a very good human if you don't grow past some of your problems. You'll be waiting for your mother to feed you, and you'll starve to death. Both are shifts in viewpoint: you either change your view of what you are and what your relationship to the world is, or you change the way you look at the outside world, which changes what you can do to it and in it.
The shift in perspective that Friedman is discussing is from one where each act in the universe, or process (a series of acts and reactions through time) is basically unrelated to each other (SDi 5) to one which recognizes that every act has consequences for every other ongoing process, or that every process and system is linked to each other (SDi 6). You could also view this in terms of input and output, in the movement from an understanding of inputs and outputs occurring separately to one where every output is a different process' input, creating cycles.
Much of where modernity has gone awry is in disrupting cycles between the output of one and the input of another, creating waste, which doesn't exist in the natural world.
This is not to say that man has no right to tinker with what's there: as mentioned in the end of the article, we can make nature better, or rather, better for us, which is the process of solving problems externally. (Very simply, making a roof underneath which to hide from the rain.) What we need to understand is that instead of creating a different framework to solve every problem we have, we already have been given the perfect framework within which to work, we just need to recognize it as such.
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
What does it feel like to be Integral, and what are we doing?
Warning: Jargon.
Originally, this was a reply to a question on Open Source Integral, "What does it feel like to be Integral?" It deals with the question, as well as with what Integral is and what it's doing, also touching upon Ken Wilber's role in "integral." It's slightly modified.
To answer the question directly, integral probably feels different a little bit to everybody going through it, though I'd suspect there are quite a few similarities. There's an openness to experience, much less resistance (and so anxiety) to life and what's around, but the only real way I can say it is that I feel much more like myself: less like I have to act, and so much more willingly an actor, because it's fun. Maybe in short it's just that: simply more myself. I believe that's probably true for most, though what you've got to grow into and what blocks you need to remove are certainly different for everyone. A large part of the transition into integral for me has been allowing myself to open up to my emotions (though I would not say that's true for everyone,) and so life has become fuller; again, I feel like I'm more me more of the time now, and noticeably, joyfully so. Along with that there's the openness mentioned: all this richness and open emotion flows in and out. I'm much more aware and accepting of it, and much lest graspy or resistant to it-- that is, this fullness is equally a wonderful emptiness--there's an embracing and simultaneous awareness of what the mind would consider exclusionary opposites, for example, a grounded solidity in the midst of hundred-cycle-per-second change. When I do get anxious over something, or feel a tension in my body (1,000 times a day) I'm aware of it very quickly, and can note where it's coming from internally/externally, largely releasing it. There's also, for me, a marked sense of autonomy that comes from the release of anxiety about personal agency, along with a greater comfort in actually relinquishing any control over to the second by second rhythms of the world.
Other than that, I have to lightly disagree with a slightly dismissive tone in this thread [at OSI] in regards to Wilber. I do not worship Ken Wilber, though perhaps I used to, when I was jealous of him for the first couple of years after I'd read him for the first time. (Haven't we all been?) I'd love to have come up with AQAL, but actually coming into an integral level of being, rather than merely intellectualizing it, that's just not there anymore. I'm myself, and so better at that than KW could ever be, and joyous about it, because we're the same thing, and what's in store for me is just who I am. How could anyone else do it? Still, I feel much of the conversation here is bashing on or devaluing Wilber without a real appreciation. I certainly don't think that you have to understand Wilber to be integral (or even have ever heard of him) but you have to at least wrestle with him until you can definitively say where he goes awry. Some of the comments expressing a common sentiment against certain aspects of Wilber's variety of integral I think Wilber would whole-heartedly agree with, because he makes them explicit himself. They're not missing from his theory, they're in it.
In any case, I sympathize with the orignal poster, who mentions that a large awkwardness with the theory is the clunkiness and large amount of jargon. The language problem reminds me of my students here in China. In order to become comfortable speaking English they've got to learn a whole deal of commands and other 'class-functional' words just so we're using as little Chinese as possible (like, "what does that word mean,") that are usually more complex than their English level. There's so much to learn before you even get to really using it for yourself, and so i would suggest that the third-personness of the original poster's previous integral experience was because he hadn't gotten to the point where he'd internalized it, and that the yearning to do so from a personal standpoint likely shows that he's growing much more wholly into an integral awareness/living. It was third-person because 'not-you,' not because of any weakness in the theory (of course third-person,) but because he was still acclimating to the a gigantic instruction manual, so to speak. Anyone at an integral level of consciousness ought to recognize much of KW's work without having to talk and debate so much about it. I did much the same thing as he did, but never quite despaired about it. Now I see it as my intellectual understanding (where I could arrange and understand all that outside of me) helped to pull me up into an overall integral level of consciousness, beyond my simple verbal/rational mind.
In addition, there are quite a few areas where the main stream of Integral theory needs some retuning, in the very least as far as presentation is concerned. For example, the word "evolution." Evolution means reorganization of self in order to adapt to a changing environment, and so technically, yes, the higher up the spiral you go, the more evolved you are. Human evolution is taking place not only at the physical level, but at the mental level, and faster. Of course, for "8s," who are supposed to be tuned into how their actions are taken at each level, this word can't possibly be the right one. Talk about someone as being more evolved and you turn off most of the "lower tier," not just the greens. It's elitist in the worst way. This, of course, is only an apparent elitism-- the word as it's used within the integral culture is not a judgment of overall worth, but fitness, but try telling that to someone you're calling "less evolved." Is there a solution to this? I usually say people "with" a level 8 consciousness rather than "who have," but still. "Higher/lower," or "later/earlier," you're still going to run into the problem. In the trajectory of the universe, you see a clear trend towards systems of greater complexity which become better and better able to replicate and then improve themselves over time, from the primordial soup to humans, and then within the human mind. So how to say this without offending? This is what we're doing now, trying to figure out a way to pass this knowledge down the spiral in the best and most helpful way possible to facilitate further growth. But I also find that many integralists have a far less than humble attitude, and watching them speak about "higher levels" and this and that, one gets the sense that they are making overall value judgments, and are PROUD of it, which I think would be a mistake, something that may turn off quite a number of people who would otherwise be helped greatly. There's a technical term for the professors in college who lord their superiority of knowledge over their students rather than give them a patient, friendly hand: assholes.
But what would integral be without Wilber? Along with the above idea of a bottom-to-top development certainly anything that could legitimately be called integral has to deal with the four quadrants, that is, that every 'thing' that exists has four aspects, which are epiphenomenal, and yet separable. Why? I have spent years tracking this down, and the shortest answer is that reality is contradictory, that is, since the mind cannot grasp reality in thought, what is real will always seem to be contradictory, because the mind can't follow both logical conclusions. Too quickly because it's a different discussion and because you all likely know what I mean anyway: zero, one, and infinity are all actually three different conceptual ways of looking at the same thing, which is existence, consciousness. Try to think about one absolutely without the others: it doesn't work. A world of oneness without second would be a void with no differentiation, but even here the concepts collapse: that void would be infinite, that is, the void (0) of oneness (1) would still be infinite. Similarly, everything has an inside and an outside reality that are different and yet entirely the same, a plurality and individuality that are separable and inseparable. Ask "yes, but where's the last (ultimate) oneness," or "where's the lowest denominator," and you're thinking, and you'll never quite get it like that. The lack of any possible logical end in itself points to the truth in this. Without zero, no one, without inside, no out, without plurals, no singulars.
Similarly, I see a great difficulty in any integralism without the concession that reality is non-dual. It seems the very foundation of integral thought and life. The looseness and freedom and wonderful bursting emptiness of integral life comes with the experiential knowledge that the categories are only artificial approximations, and that every line drawn is only another way of illuminating the great unity, of which you are both a part and the whole.
So where are these complaints coming from, really?
What is Integral? What are we doing here?
Integral Theory (and the Integral Life) I think, is directed towards health, wholeness. That's the endgame, right? Integral Theory is a sort of map, a map of our species and our thought, but ultimately it only has use as a tool for our growth, as individuals and as a kind. That is, it is the first attempt at what the conveyor belt to a realized culture that Wilber sometimes talks about might look like. I feel as if many people here are critical of Wilber merely because it's the first time the whole map has been put together, and so, for lack of detail, their home isn't on it.
But there's rejection here where there could be shivering excitement. There's plenty of inference here about integral life beyond or outside Wilber, but I haven't really seen any thing concrete mentioned. We want to know what you're doing! If there's something missing, go live it! We're on the frontier, yeah? We're on the frontier of manifested consciousness as far as we can tell, so be pioneers! Wilber's model seems sparse only if you aren't filling in the gaps with your own engaged life. Of course there's so much to be done without him: he's only one person! His ILP box set perhaps seems like a poor representation of the possibilities of the integral life, but it's not meant to be definitive, it's meant to be suggestive, and that's made explicit. You have to engage with your own life to find the best ways to exercise and challenge yourself in every facet. How? Well, here's one example, the box set, (which I don't and haven't used) play around with it. (play)
The integral wave of consciousness is in its first stage as a mass phenomenon (not just isolated individuals), which means that you and I are determining what it is and means concretely and not just in the abstract, right now, but also means that 1- a lot of people are just coming into it from green and 2- b/c of this we're only starting in a large way to paint integral over structures which come from much earlier forms of consciousness. Hell, even the level-five worldview is still just opening over much of the world. Every person/culture that goes through it leaves their paw print. I feel like Wilber is being criticized for both not making the map more lush and interesting when he can only illuminate the views from his integral life and provide a larger framework, and also for laying the groundwork too thoroughly, as if telling you that when you're in college you'll have a great time, take a number of classes, be there for most likely between three and five years, meet plenty of interesting people, grow greatly personally and intellectually, etc. etc. preempts anything fun you'll actually do. We're all growing into greater recognitions of what reality is. That growth will be one-hundred percent personal, though the recognition is eternal. We may not have named this world, but it's ours for the making.
But that world will be colored within this framework, at least as long as it takes to start to flesh the higher levels out, when we can see where the holes are. The truth, I feel, is that if we are to succeed in getting through the problems the world is facing today, we're doing it through Wilber's influence or we're not doing it at all.
So what are we doing? We've lived in a valley all our human life, sending explorers up and over the mountains occasionally, but not caring as a species (or needing, or able) to go see it. Wilber was not the first out there, but he was the first to come back and explain to a large group of us just what was to be gained outside of our valley and how to do it, and how some of the major explorers did it before us. In any case, we're the first sizable chunk of the population to have camped in the gigantic and fertile plain on the other side. So what do we do? Not a rhetorical question. Let's get some answers.
For me, at this point, I am trying to explicate to my understanding what integral is and means, both within the community, and to the rest of the world. I believe that we are in a transition period in the movement, between when the news really got out with Wilber and when there will be a core and sizable group of people at an integral level, and that it's crucial to get to the next stage: having a fair number of people with influence, or power, or authority, operating and creating at an integral level of consciousness before too long. Much of what I do on this blog is aimed at using real life examples to illuminate integral theory and promote, flesh out, and examine integral thinking. I am also doing the internal work necessary: rounding off my weaknesses and fears, augmenting my natural talents, meditating, etc. etc.
One thing I think very important is to have the language debate. Is there a way to discuss this in depth in terms more intuitive, or is there a point at which you just simply have to explain the theory (I've gotten this down to about a five minute spiel that works pretty well) outright? Unfortunately many people here, rejecting the language, reject the theory, it seems.
How do we keep this alive? Keep it going? I think it will have it's own natural momentum, whether here on the web or somewhere else, or (most likely) with no real centralized base, but spread all over the place. But the most important thing is that you bring your energy to it, of course. You don't have to write ten pages, but keep up with others, offer pointers or criticisms, and take it out to the world. Engage.
One more minor point off another comment: I agree that some of Beck's (and Wilber's) takes on the spiral are off-putting and need adjustment, but "second-tier" is certainly not bogus. There is a huge gap (I call it usually the existential gap) between the realization that the world is without inherent meaning (green 6) and that that's a good thing (Yellow/Teal 7.) Second tier consciousness, while characterized by many things, is rooted in the knowledge that we are both the subject and the object, and I don't think this is something that, on a tactile (and so effective) level, anyone on a six and lower can quite get. It is a leap.
Originally, this was a reply to a question on Open Source Integral, "What does it feel like to be Integral?" It deals with the question, as well as with what Integral is and what it's doing, also touching upon Ken Wilber's role in "integral." It's slightly modified.
To answer the question directly, integral probably feels different a little bit to everybody going through it, though I'd suspect there are quite a few similarities. There's an openness to experience, much less resistance (and so anxiety) to life and what's around, but the only real way I can say it is that I feel much more like myself: less like I have to act, and so much more willingly an actor, because it's fun. Maybe in short it's just that: simply more myself. I believe that's probably true for most, though what you've got to grow into and what blocks you need to remove are certainly different for everyone. A large part of the transition into integral for me has been allowing myself to open up to my emotions (though I would not say that's true for everyone,) and so life has become fuller; again, I feel like I'm more me more of the time now, and noticeably, joyfully so. Along with that there's the openness mentioned: all this richness and open emotion flows in and out. I'm much more aware and accepting of it, and much lest graspy or resistant to it-- that is, this fullness is equally a wonderful emptiness--there's an embracing and simultaneous awareness of what the mind would consider exclusionary opposites, for example, a grounded solidity in the midst of hundred-cycle-per-second change. When I do get anxious over something, or feel a tension in my body (1,000 times a day) I'm aware of it very quickly, and can note where it's coming from internally/externally, largely releasing it. There's also, for me, a marked sense of autonomy that comes from the release of anxiety about personal agency, along with a greater comfort in actually relinquishing any control over to the second by second rhythms of the world.
Other than that, I have to lightly disagree with a slightly dismissive tone in this thread [at OSI] in regards to Wilber. I do not worship Ken Wilber, though perhaps I used to, when I was jealous of him for the first couple of years after I'd read him for the first time. (Haven't we all been?) I'd love to have come up with AQAL, but actually coming into an integral level of being, rather than merely intellectualizing it, that's just not there anymore. I'm myself, and so better at that than KW could ever be, and joyous about it, because we're the same thing, and what's in store for me is just who I am. How could anyone else do it? Still, I feel much of the conversation here is bashing on or devaluing Wilber without a real appreciation. I certainly don't think that you have to understand Wilber to be integral (or even have ever heard of him) but you have to at least wrestle with him until you can definitively say where he goes awry. Some of the comments expressing a common sentiment against certain aspects of Wilber's variety of integral I think Wilber would whole-heartedly agree with, because he makes them explicit himself. They're not missing from his theory, they're in it.
In any case, I sympathize with the orignal poster, who mentions that a large awkwardness with the theory is the clunkiness and large amount of jargon. The language problem reminds me of my students here in China. In order to become comfortable speaking English they've got to learn a whole deal of commands and other 'class-functional' words just so we're using as little Chinese as possible (like, "what does that word mean,") that are usually more complex than their English level. There's so much to learn before you even get to really using it for yourself, and so i would suggest that the third-personness of the original poster's previous integral experience was because he hadn't gotten to the point where he'd internalized it, and that the yearning to do so from a personal standpoint likely shows that he's growing much more wholly into an integral awareness/living. It was third-person because 'not-you,' not because of any weakness in the theory (of course third-person,) but because he was still acclimating to the a gigantic instruction manual, so to speak. Anyone at an integral level of consciousness ought to recognize much of KW's work without having to talk and debate so much about it. I did much the same thing as he did, but never quite despaired about it. Now I see it as my intellectual understanding (where I could arrange and understand all that outside of me) helped to pull me up into an overall integral level of consciousness, beyond my simple verbal/rational mind.
In addition, there are quite a few areas where the main stream of Integral theory needs some retuning, in the very least as far as presentation is concerned. For example, the word "evolution." Evolution means reorganization of self in order to adapt to a changing environment, and so technically, yes, the higher up the spiral you go, the more evolved you are. Human evolution is taking place not only at the physical level, but at the mental level, and faster. Of course, for "8s," who are supposed to be tuned into how their actions are taken at each level, this word can't possibly be the right one. Talk about someone as being more evolved and you turn off most of the "lower tier," not just the greens. It's elitist in the worst way. This, of course, is only an apparent elitism-- the word as it's used within the integral culture is not a judgment of overall worth, but fitness, but try telling that to someone you're calling "less evolved." Is there a solution to this? I usually say people "with" a level 8 consciousness rather than "who have," but still. "Higher/lower," or "later/earlier," you're still going to run into the problem. In the trajectory of the universe, you see a clear trend towards systems of greater complexity which become better and better able to replicate and then improve themselves over time, from the primordial soup to humans, and then within the human mind. So how to say this without offending? This is what we're doing now, trying to figure out a way to pass this knowledge down the spiral in the best and most helpful way possible to facilitate further growth. But I also find that many integralists have a far less than humble attitude, and watching them speak about "higher levels" and this and that, one gets the sense that they are making overall value judgments, and are PROUD of it, which I think would be a mistake, something that may turn off quite a number of people who would otherwise be helped greatly. There's a technical term for the professors in college who lord their superiority of knowledge over their students rather than give them a patient, friendly hand: assholes.
But what would integral be without Wilber? Along with the above idea of a bottom-to-top development certainly anything that could legitimately be called integral has to deal with the four quadrants, that is, that every 'thing' that exists has four aspects, which are epiphenomenal, and yet separable. Why? I have spent years tracking this down, and the shortest answer is that reality is contradictory, that is, since the mind cannot grasp reality in thought, what is real will always seem to be contradictory, because the mind can't follow both logical conclusions. Too quickly because it's a different discussion and because you all likely know what I mean anyway: zero, one, and infinity are all actually three different conceptual ways of looking at the same thing, which is existence, consciousness. Try to think about one absolutely without the others: it doesn't work. A world of oneness without second would be a void with no differentiation, but even here the concepts collapse: that void would be infinite, that is, the void (0) of oneness (1) would still be infinite. Similarly, everything has an inside and an outside reality that are different and yet entirely the same, a plurality and individuality that are separable and inseparable. Ask "yes, but where's the last (ultimate) oneness," or "where's the lowest denominator," and you're thinking, and you'll never quite get it like that. The lack of any possible logical end in itself points to the truth in this. Without zero, no one, without inside, no out, without plurals, no singulars.
Similarly, I see a great difficulty in any integralism without the concession that reality is non-dual. It seems the very foundation of integral thought and life. The looseness and freedom and wonderful bursting emptiness of integral life comes with the experiential knowledge that the categories are only artificial approximations, and that every line drawn is only another way of illuminating the great unity, of which you are both a part and the whole.
So where are these complaints coming from, really?
What is Integral? What are we doing here?
Integral Theory (and the Integral Life) I think, is directed towards health, wholeness. That's the endgame, right? Integral Theory is a sort of map, a map of our species and our thought, but ultimately it only has use as a tool for our growth, as individuals and as a kind. That is, it is the first attempt at what the conveyor belt to a realized culture that Wilber sometimes talks about might look like. I feel as if many people here are critical of Wilber merely because it's the first time the whole map has been put together, and so, for lack of detail, their home isn't on it.
But there's rejection here where there could be shivering excitement. There's plenty of inference here about integral life beyond or outside Wilber, but I haven't really seen any thing concrete mentioned. We want to know what you're doing! If there's something missing, go live it! We're on the frontier, yeah? We're on the frontier of manifested consciousness as far as we can tell, so be pioneers! Wilber's model seems sparse only if you aren't filling in the gaps with your own engaged life. Of course there's so much to be done without him: he's only one person! His ILP box set perhaps seems like a poor representation of the possibilities of the integral life, but it's not meant to be definitive, it's meant to be suggestive, and that's made explicit. You have to engage with your own life to find the best ways to exercise and challenge yourself in every facet. How? Well, here's one example, the box set, (which I don't and haven't used) play around with it. (play)
The integral wave of consciousness is in its first stage as a mass phenomenon (not just isolated individuals), which means that you and I are determining what it is and means concretely and not just in the abstract, right now, but also means that 1- a lot of people are just coming into it from green and 2- b/c of this we're only starting in a large way to paint integral over structures which come from much earlier forms of consciousness. Hell, even the level-five worldview is still just opening over much of the world. Every person/culture that goes through it leaves their paw print. I feel like Wilber is being criticized for both not making the map more lush and interesting when he can only illuminate the views from his integral life and provide a larger framework, and also for laying the groundwork too thoroughly, as if telling you that when you're in college you'll have a great time, take a number of classes, be there for most likely between three and five years, meet plenty of interesting people, grow greatly personally and intellectually, etc. etc. preempts anything fun you'll actually do. We're all growing into greater recognitions of what reality is. That growth will be one-hundred percent personal, though the recognition is eternal. We may not have named this world, but it's ours for the making.
But that world will be colored within this framework, at least as long as it takes to start to flesh the higher levels out, when we can see where the holes are. The truth, I feel, is that if we are to succeed in getting through the problems the world is facing today, we're doing it through Wilber's influence or we're not doing it at all.
So what are we doing? We've lived in a valley all our human life, sending explorers up and over the mountains occasionally, but not caring as a species (or needing, or able) to go see it. Wilber was not the first out there, but he was the first to come back and explain to a large group of us just what was to be gained outside of our valley and how to do it, and how some of the major explorers did it before us. In any case, we're the first sizable chunk of the population to have camped in the gigantic and fertile plain on the other side. So what do we do? Not a rhetorical question. Let's get some answers.
For me, at this point, I am trying to explicate to my understanding what integral is and means, both within the community, and to the rest of the world. I believe that we are in a transition period in the movement, between when the news really got out with Wilber and when there will be a core and sizable group of people at an integral level, and that it's crucial to get to the next stage: having a fair number of people with influence, or power, or authority, operating and creating at an integral level of consciousness before too long. Much of what I do on this blog is aimed at using real life examples to illuminate integral theory and promote, flesh out, and examine integral thinking. I am also doing the internal work necessary: rounding off my weaknesses and fears, augmenting my natural talents, meditating, etc. etc.
One thing I think very important is to have the language debate. Is there a way to discuss this in depth in terms more intuitive, or is there a point at which you just simply have to explain the theory (I've gotten this down to about a five minute spiel that works pretty well) outright? Unfortunately many people here, rejecting the language, reject the theory, it seems.
How do we keep this alive? Keep it going? I think it will have it's own natural momentum, whether here on the web or somewhere else, or (most likely) with no real centralized base, but spread all over the place. But the most important thing is that you bring your energy to it, of course. You don't have to write ten pages, but keep up with others, offer pointers or criticisms, and take it out to the world. Engage.
One more minor point off another comment: I agree that some of Beck's (and Wilber's) takes on the spiral are off-putting and need adjustment, but "second-tier" is certainly not bogus. There is a huge gap (I call it usually the existential gap) between the realization that the world is without inherent meaning (green 6) and that that's a good thing (Yellow/Teal 7.) Second tier consciousness, while characterized by many things, is rooted in the knowledge that we are both the subject and the object, and I don't think this is something that, on a tactile (and so effective) level, anyone on a six and lower can quite get. It is a leap.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Thinking Integral (Response to Shaman Sun)
I just read this piece the other day on a blog called Shaman Sun.
It's basically evaluating the totemic role Ken Wilber and AQAL play within "Integral Theory." Wilber's work has been criticized for several different things, some of them raised in this article, including, mostly, 1- it is too complicated, 2- it is too simplistic, and 3- it confuses the map with the territory, that is, it pretends itself to be life, and not merely representative of it.
I will try to defend his approach, as I see each of these arguments as perhaps not groundless, but at least misguided.
For number one, I have to admit I find it frustrating trying to explain all of the jargon involved in integral theory, but have been able to work out a five-minute version. Much of what I'm trying to do is explain this way of looking at reality simply, trying to get people to grasp some of it. Of course, to really get into it, some of the terminology is unavoidable; that is, it's there for a reason: it's certainly possible to explain, say, the difference between someone with a pre-conventional and post-conventional level of consciousness, and even why they may be confused by someone with a conventional level of consciousness, all without using spiral dynamic nomenclature, but to do the roundabout over and over again in every article or post or conversation is a real pain in the ass. I also suspect that any academic theory has much the same problem, which is what makes professors often such boring people outside of the classroom. Just kidding.
It is difficult to get to the meat and bones of an academic theory because the complexity is fairly high. However, just as with any theoretical "step-up," say, from pre-calculus to calculus, where there are a necessary group of skills/ terminologies to be mastered at the lower level in order to manipulate them at the higher one, once the terms are familiar, and what they stand for internalized as experiential knowledge, they are no longer so daunting. Certainly I am not the only Integral Student to see levels and lines and stages and states everywhere I look every day. BUT NOT LITERALLY (complaint number three.) I actually do think that for the complexity of our world, Wilber's model presents a remarkably simple, and yet accurate theory. Which brings us to-----
Number two- it's too simplistic. "With all the complexity in the world, all the randomness and messiness and infinite variety, how could a model ever get it right?" I actually think what Wilber's theory does so brilliantly is make room for all of the mess. It doesn't include it all, that would truly be too complex, but it makes room for it. It took me until the release of "Integral Ecology" to see a practical example of what Wilber talks about when he says that so much more research is needed, and that the AQAL framework can be applied to different areas of research, the operative word being "framework." AQAL itself may not be so messy, but it's just the outline. Integral Ecology (which, disclosure, I have only read a summary of and listened to an hour-long talk about between one of the authors and Wilber) takes that framework and then tries to see the messy study of ecology through it (there are over two hundred different "ecologies.") If it succeeds, it does what any good framework does: takes all that messiness and gives you a method of relating all the different pieces together in a (post?) logical way.
As for complaint number three, "but this isn't the world!" (closely related to the above) it seems to come from a relativistic standpoint used to making this objection against any system of thought. I am, however, still brought to near-confusion when I hear it, since Wilber says so clearly and directly that this map, and any map, is just a map, and enjoins the interested to personal practice beyond intellectualizing and philosophizing. It seems to me to be a keystone of the theory: enter into your own life to see, as it must be experienced. Along with the above, that's where the messiness comes in. Nobody is a level five. No society is at some particular level. It's all fluid. Another connected keystone is that reality is non-dual, and so, just as with the messiness above, it must be remembered that a) all of this applies to you and can be realized directly and b) all of the lines are, if not arbitrary, somewhat artificial. It is, in other-words, built-in to the theory.
Why has this been missed? Perhaps because explicating the framework itself has been Wilber's intention, and that this labor is so large that little room is left to mention the above, though it is slipped in quite often. If it takes five thousand words for a discussion that's the bulk of the chapter, and then there's one twenty word sentence in the chapter saying, "oh yeah, don't forget, this is only a map, you've got to observe how it actually fuctions in real life."
As for Manuel DeLanda, I must conceed ignorance of his work. It sounds interesting and it's certainly integral, but what do we mean by that word? AQAL is comprehensive. It is an integral theory in that it tries to tie everything together. But, there is another way to use the word "integral," and that is, "at the first stage of second-tier thought (Yellow/Teal in Spiral Dynamics SDi.)" DeLanda seems to be a lower-right quadrant (that is, based on the external nature/behavior of groups of people (or whatever holon you're looking at)) theory coming from the stage seven (integral) level of human consciousness. It is in this a way a huge improvement over previous views assuming the coherancy/individuality of holons, but is not integral in the broadest sense.
I do agree that the postmodernists come as a reaction against, a call that the Emperor's got no clothes, something important and necessary before you actually consider what the Emperor looks like naked, and that they had less to offer in this respect.
And no, Wilber doesn't exactly detail the relationships between every thing, other than to say that "it's all actually the same thing," but this is the key insight. Without this, there'd be no question of detailing, investigating, and discovering all of the details, because there'd be no one looking, and nowhere to hang them. Certainly Shamansun's call at the end for "a more dynamic theory of social science [to] emerge in the 21st century, one that is more analogous to the messiness [of] biological evolution," is to be heeded. But the theories that emerge, and continue to emerge, will be within the general framework established by Wilber, at least until it's fleshed out enough for us all to see what's there, and what's missing.
It's basically evaluating the totemic role Ken Wilber and AQAL play within "Integral Theory." Wilber's work has been criticized for several different things, some of them raised in this article, including, mostly, 1- it is too complicated, 2- it is too simplistic, and 3- it confuses the map with the territory, that is, it pretends itself to be life, and not merely representative of it.
I will try to defend his approach, as I see each of these arguments as perhaps not groundless, but at least misguided.
For number one, I have to admit I find it frustrating trying to explain all of the jargon involved in integral theory, but have been able to work out a five-minute version. Much of what I'm trying to do is explain this way of looking at reality simply, trying to get people to grasp some of it. Of course, to really get into it, some of the terminology is unavoidable; that is, it's there for a reason: it's certainly possible to explain, say, the difference between someone with a pre-conventional and post-conventional level of consciousness, and even why they may be confused by someone with a conventional level of consciousness, all without using spiral dynamic nomenclature, but to do the roundabout over and over again in every article or post or conversation is a real pain in the ass. I also suspect that any academic theory has much the same problem, which is what makes professors often such boring people outside of the classroom. Just kidding.
It is difficult to get to the meat and bones of an academic theory because the complexity is fairly high. However, just as with any theoretical "step-up," say, from pre-calculus to calculus, where there are a necessary group of skills/ terminologies to be mastered at the lower level in order to manipulate them at the higher one, once the terms are familiar, and what they stand for internalized as experiential knowledge, they are no longer so daunting. Certainly I am not the only Integral Student to see levels and lines and stages and states everywhere I look every day. BUT NOT LITERALLY (complaint number three.) I actually do think that for the complexity of our world, Wilber's model presents a remarkably simple, and yet accurate theory. Which brings us to-----
Number two- it's too simplistic. "With all the complexity in the world, all the randomness and messiness and infinite variety, how could a model ever get it right?" I actually think what Wilber's theory does so brilliantly is make room for all of the mess. It doesn't include it all, that would truly be too complex, but it makes room for it. It took me until the release of "Integral Ecology" to see a practical example of what Wilber talks about when he says that so much more research is needed, and that the AQAL framework can be applied to different areas of research, the operative word being "framework." AQAL itself may not be so messy, but it's just the outline. Integral Ecology (which, disclosure, I have only read a summary of and listened to an hour-long talk about between one of the authors and Wilber) takes that framework and then tries to see the messy study of ecology through it (there are over two hundred different "ecologies.") If it succeeds, it does what any good framework does: takes all that messiness and gives you a method of relating all the different pieces together in a (post?) logical way.
As for complaint number three, "but this isn't the world!" (closely related to the above) it seems to come from a relativistic standpoint used to making this objection against any system of thought. I am, however, still brought to near-confusion when I hear it, since Wilber says so clearly and directly that this map, and any map, is just a map, and enjoins the interested to personal practice beyond intellectualizing and philosophizing. It seems to me to be a keystone of the theory: enter into your own life to see, as it must be experienced. Along with the above, that's where the messiness comes in. Nobody is a level five. No society is at some particular level. It's all fluid. Another connected keystone is that reality is non-dual, and so, just as with the messiness above, it must be remembered that a) all of this applies to you and can be realized directly and b) all of the lines are, if not arbitrary, somewhat artificial. It is, in other-words, built-in to the theory.
Why has this been missed? Perhaps because explicating the framework itself has been Wilber's intention, and that this labor is so large that little room is left to mention the above, though it is slipped in quite often. If it takes five thousand words for a discussion that's the bulk of the chapter, and then there's one twenty word sentence in the chapter saying, "oh yeah, don't forget, this is only a map, you've got to observe how it actually fuctions in real life."
As for Manuel DeLanda, I must conceed ignorance of his work. It sounds interesting and it's certainly integral, but what do we mean by that word? AQAL is comprehensive. It is an integral theory in that it tries to tie everything together. But, there is another way to use the word "integral," and that is, "at the first stage of second-tier thought (Yellow/Teal in Spiral Dynamics SDi.)" DeLanda seems to be a lower-right quadrant (that is, based on the external nature/behavior of groups of people (or whatever holon you're looking at)) theory coming from the stage seven (integral) level of human consciousness. It is in this a way a huge improvement over previous views assuming the coherancy/individuality of holons, but is not integral in the broadest sense.
I do agree that the postmodernists come as a reaction against, a call that the Emperor's got no clothes, something important and necessary before you actually consider what the Emperor looks like naked, and that they had less to offer in this respect.
And no, Wilber doesn't exactly detail the relationships between every thing, other than to say that "it's all actually the same thing," but this is the key insight. Without this, there'd be no question of detailing, investigating, and discovering all of the details, because there'd be no one looking, and nowhere to hang them. Certainly Shamansun's call at the end for "a more dynamic theory of social science [to] emerge in the 21st century, one that is more analogous to the messiness [of] biological evolution," is to be heeded. But the theories that emerge, and continue to emerge, will be within the general framework established by Wilber, at least until it's fleshed out enough for us all to see what's there, and what's missing.
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Controlling/Managing the Chinese people?
I'm a little late on this due to my 24-hour weekend working cycle, but if you hadn't heard about Jackie Chan's recent remarks in China: here's a short debate in the Times about it.
There's a mini-debate in Chinese watching circles about whether or not the word he used would best be translated as "managing," rather than "controlling." The word under discussion, "Guan," (“管”) , usually does mean "managing" but this seems fairly unimportant given the context of insulting Hong Kong and Taiwan for being "chaotic" while speaking to an audience including high-level Central Party members. Certianly the essence was "China needs Authoritarianism."
Much of what I found interesting, as often happens with China blogs on the NYTimes, were the comments. Without getting too much into it, There seem to be two sides of the debate, a sure way to miss the meat of the argument entirely: Chan is a moron (or is in it for the money) and Chinese people yearn to be free, or Chan is right, Chinese people have been successful under the control of the Central Party, and would fall apart if not. Unfortunately, of course, little attention is paid to the arguments themselves, and more is paid to ad-hominem attacks on people writing. Basically, everyone in the comments is either rabidly pro-China, or anti-Chinese government. Notice also the conflation here: most of the pro-Chinas take any criticism of the government by foreigners (in public, published places) as being anti-China, as in the country (something the government actively inculcates), even though among themselves, and in private, they are often quite critical of the government.
All of this friction, for an integral thinker, should point to competing vMemes, through even the debate about whether Chan was cynically only doing this for CCP approval. So what's the deal here? Anyone watching China knows the friction created is largely between the up-and-coming 5s in the country and the authoritarian 4s. Moreso than in most cases, the power of the 4s has been used to help foster in some respects the emergence of the 5s as a powerful new class, and for this often the new capitalists in China are the most vocally in favor of the government. Nonetheless, there are plenty of 5s in the country that see right through this, and Gordon Chang is right when he says that voices of online protesters and self-organized groups to aid victims of the BeiChuan earthquake last year to help the survivors before even the governement did displays the yearning and capability for a more open society.
The biggest mistake in all of this whole thing is locating this with something inherantly "chinese." Chan's words "we chinese" make it seem as if there's some sort of essence in the Chinese people that makes them incapable of democracy (something Beijing promotes against reality and the benefit of its own people) and will always do so.
Of course, some of what he's saying is correct. China is still mostly at an authoritarian 4 level, and much of the country is still at a 2. Creating a "one-person, one-vote" system would be likely disasterous at this point, as one of the commenters notes, drawing comparisons with some African countries, and south-east asian. Democracy is not the cure of all ails. However, it ought to be clear that it is the only successful way to run a fully modern country is through a representative democracy. Even if you cannot establish democracy at the highest levels of government, at the local level it ought to be implemented, something which will give the populace experience with it for later down the road. Of course, for all its unintentional help, the CCP is rabidly anti-democratic, which is to say the small concessions made to democracy in village elections are unlikely to be expanded.
The word "chaos" is also interesting. Here, Chan notes the 4s fear of chaos/anarchy, one made stronger by chinese memories of the cultural revolution. Will China ever be able to embrace the kind of "chaos" Chan finds in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and become stronger as a result, or will the party simply not be able to let go this far? Much of the question of whether or not China will be able to fully transform itself into a modern country rests on this. Control only goes so far.
There's a mini-debate in Chinese watching circles about whether or not the word he used would best be translated as "managing," rather than "controlling." The word under discussion, "Guan," (“管”) , usually does mean "managing" but this seems fairly unimportant given the context of insulting Hong Kong and Taiwan for being "chaotic" while speaking to an audience including high-level Central Party members. Certianly the essence was "China needs Authoritarianism."
Much of what I found interesting, as often happens with China blogs on the NYTimes, were the comments. Without getting too much into it, There seem to be two sides of the debate, a sure way to miss the meat of the argument entirely: Chan is a moron (or is in it for the money) and Chinese people yearn to be free, or Chan is right, Chinese people have been successful under the control of the Central Party, and would fall apart if not. Unfortunately, of course, little attention is paid to the arguments themselves, and more is paid to ad-hominem attacks on people writing. Basically, everyone in the comments is either rabidly pro-China, or anti-Chinese government. Notice also the conflation here: most of the pro-Chinas take any criticism of the government by foreigners (in public, published places) as being anti-China, as in the country (something the government actively inculcates), even though among themselves, and in private, they are often quite critical of the government.
All of this friction, for an integral thinker, should point to competing vMemes, through even the debate about whether Chan was cynically only doing this for CCP approval. So what's the deal here? Anyone watching China knows the friction created is largely between the up-and-coming 5s in the country and the authoritarian 4s. Moreso than in most cases, the power of the 4s has been used to help foster in some respects the emergence of the 5s as a powerful new class, and for this often the new capitalists in China are the most vocally in favor of the government. Nonetheless, there are plenty of 5s in the country that see right through this, and Gordon Chang is right when he says that voices of online protesters and self-organized groups to aid victims of the BeiChuan earthquake last year to help the survivors before even the governement did displays the yearning and capability for a more open society.
The biggest mistake in all of this whole thing is locating this with something inherantly "chinese." Chan's words "we chinese" make it seem as if there's some sort of essence in the Chinese people that makes them incapable of democracy (something Beijing promotes against reality and the benefit of its own people) and will always do so.
Of course, some of what he's saying is correct. China is still mostly at an authoritarian 4 level, and much of the country is still at a 2. Creating a "one-person, one-vote" system would be likely disasterous at this point, as one of the commenters notes, drawing comparisons with some African countries, and south-east asian. Democracy is not the cure of all ails. However, it ought to be clear that it is the only successful way to run a fully modern country is through a representative democracy. Even if you cannot establish democracy at the highest levels of government, at the local level it ought to be implemented, something which will give the populace experience with it for later down the road. Of course, for all its unintentional help, the CCP is rabidly anti-democratic, which is to say the small concessions made to democracy in village elections are unlikely to be expanded.
The word "chaos" is also interesting. Here, Chan notes the 4s fear of chaos/anarchy, one made stronger by chinese memories of the cultural revolution. Will China ever be able to embrace the kind of "chaos" Chan finds in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and become stronger as a result, or will the party simply not be able to let go this far? Much of the question of whether or not China will be able to fully transform itself into a modern country rests on this. Control only goes so far.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
And over the horizon?
Transitions?
An article in the Times magazine about a group trying to organize sustainable communities for what they believe will be an awesome and coming crash of our civilization. It's more interesting as a look at where we are now than as where we may be twenty years in the future.
The thrust of the movement:
'“Sustainability,” Hopkins recently told me, “is about reducing the impacts of what comes out of the tailpipe of industrial society.” But that assumes our industrial society will keep running. By contrast, Hopkins said, Transition is about “building resiliency” — putting new systems in place to make a given community as self-sufficient as possible, bracing it to withstand the shocks that will come as oil grows astronomically expensive, climate change intensifies and, maybe sooner than we think, industrial society frays or collapses entirely.'
'For a generation, the environmental movement has told us to change our lifestyles to avoid catastrophic consequences. Transition tells us those consequences are now irreversibly switching on; we need to revolutionize our lives if we want to survive.'
'It was all surprisingly easy to imagine. Lately, an apocalyptic bile has been collecting in the back of America’s throat. Our era has been defined by skyrocketing line graphs, and it’s easy to wonder if we have finally pushed something just a little too far and are now watching everything start to teeter over. Maybe it’s not our dependence on oil, but the carbon we have plugged up the atmosphere with. Or global population. Or credit derivatives. We’re all starting to career down the other side of that hill — which hill, specifically, is up to you. But it’s the shadowy side, and none of us can see the bottom.'
What makes this different from any other apocalyptic movement? Its dovetail with conscious capitalism and rising Level 6 sensibilities in the mainstream.
'...most people in Sandpoint presumably hadn’t heard anything about Transition. But the ones who had often found a way to interpret the movement as extensions of their own visions. Having watched second- and third-home owners, retirees and tourists rush into Sandpoint, many latched on to Transition’s vague promise of building a better, quainter community. A minister told me she was glad that Transition wasn’t “a greenie, hippie, far-out thing.” But Michael Boge, the City Council president, seemed to complain of exactly that, telling me he didn’t understand why the group had to cheapen a good idea by “inventing a new word for it and wrapping themselves in that catchphrase.” (The new word Boge objected to wasn’t “Transition”; it was “sustainability.”) Still, Boge, who owns five drive-in restaurants and is active in a long-distance motorcycling club called the Iron Butt Association, told me that he felt allied with Transition’s ideals. “I’ve bitched about this to my friends for years: we need to make a concerted effort to get off fossil fuels,” he said. “And I truly believe that with the country and God behind us, we can do it.” Transition was a prism, offering a slightly different view of Sandpoint depending on how each person turned it, but always shooting out lots of rainbows.'
As noted above, though, this is does not exactly appear to be an integral movement, but more of a snapshot of what's emerging from (more and more) mainstream 6s.
For example, in response to a woman asking if they couldn't just make a rule to cremate everybody:'“Well,” Millard said, “it takes a lot of energy to cremate people. Besides, now we’re getting into rules.”' Straight-up 6.
There's more in this to believe that this is more of a reaction against the evils of modernity than an actual constructive growth into the future:
'Millard’s sketch happened to look a lot like the master plan of Fourierism, one of the most popular secular utopian movements in American history. In the early 1800s, Charles Fourier, a Frenchman, proposed, in a series of jargon-filled writings, a self-sufficient community model called a “phalanx.” A central estate or “phalanstery” would be surrounded by tradesmen’s workshops, cultural institutions and farmland. Fourier was horrified by what he saw at the outset of the Industrial Revolution. His fears may sound familiar: that dishonest lending and capitalism in general would lead to the enslavement of humans by big companies; “industrial feudalism,” he called it. And, not unlike Transition, he aimed to overhaul society one phalanx at a time. Fourier claimed to have reduced all possible human personalities to a number of essential types. From there, it was simple math. He calculated that if precisely 1,620 men, women and children were collected in a 6,000-acre phalanx, they would — all by merrily following their individual passions — end up satisfying all the phalanx’s essential needs. “The new amorous world,” he wrote, would rise out of “the new industrial world” by the force of “passional attraction.”
Transition insists that initiatives be completely bottom-up organizations. There’s no central oversight, and the movement is expected to evolve slightly differently wherever it springs up. The trajectory of each initiative shouldn’t be controlled too tightly even by its local leaders; Step 11 in the handbook is really more of a mantra: “Let it go where it wants to go.” Like a Fourierian phalanx, a Transition Town should be the product of the passions of its residents — all of its residents, equally. Unlike Fourierism, though, Transition doesn’t claim its method is mathematically guaranteed to succeed. It simply posits that our best hope is to “unleash the collective genius of the community” and hope all the right pieces spill out. “We truly don’t know if this will work,” Rob Hopkins asserts in a mission-statement-like document called the “Cheerful Disclaimer!”'
There's even the sense that the founders of the group want this to happen, which makes sense. Because society today has so recklessly shit in the salad bowl, it's all going to come crashing down, taking everything despicable with it. This is not to say that anyone is consciously aware of this, but 'Transition’s message is twofold: first, that a dire global emergency demands we transform our society; and second, that we might actually enjoy making those changes.' Why in the world would we enjoy this? because humans naturally should enjoy living in this sort of world, so tossing off all of the old barriers to natural humanity would make us all really happy.
Another hallmark of first-tier thinking here is that there's no conception that when things get tough resources-wise, things are going to get rough violence-wise. There's no thought about level 3s coming in to take over whatever sustainable resources a place like this has created; the overall vision is just of people coming together and living peacefully in sustainable communities because that's the way people naturally are. This narrow, if innocently-optimistic-and-lovely-in-its-own-way view of human nature is a call sign of the green 6s. It isn't, however, how everybody is approaching the project: '“Some people on the food group want to feel good,” he told me, “and some people want to figure out how to feed 40,000 people in case the trucks stop rolling.”
Michael Brownlee, the keynote speaker from Boulder, sat silently in his chair during the charter-school meeting. That night, he told me that the unflinching cheeriness of everyone involved made him optimistic. But he also worried that people didn’t yet understand that “just because you’re passionate about a particular issue like transportation or water or local food doesn’t mean that you have the skills to do the research, analysis or planning around that issue.” He later added, “If I knew how to convey how serious, how urgent the situation is without sending people into fear and helplessness, it would take a great burden off of me.”'
All in all, though, despite the limits of level 6, there are quite a few important contributions being made here. After all, we only have one planet:
'Now, maybe because our various crises have escalated, or because it costs so much to disappear into your own parcel of wilderness, opting out no longer feels like a possibility. One of Transition’s more oblique arguments may be that we can’t escape anymore. We have to work together to remake the places where we already live.
Lanphear told me, “As long as we get the work going in the right direction, it doesn’t matter who gets the glory or the credit.” Richard Kühnel chose to see it in an even more positive light. He told me, “I feel whoever wants to participate and whose ideas are aligned with ours, that’s who the Sandpoint Transition Initiative is” — whether those people know it or not.
What Reuter said he felt was wonderful about the Sandpoint Transition Initiative was how quickly it was rejuvenating people’s faith that the changes they craved were worth working for. “To say the group has only created a community garden so far really isn’t sufficient,” he told me. “It’s something really more substantive: they’re bringing people to the process.” It was easy to argue that at the initiative’s core, in place of any clearly defined philosophy or strategy, was only a puff of enthusiasm. But Reuter seemed to argue that enthusiasm is an actual asset, a resource our society is already suffering a scarcity of. “There’s just something happening here that’s reviving people’s civic sense of possibility,” he later said. “Politics is ‘the art of the possible,’ right? I think what the Transition Initiative is doing is expanding what’s possible in people’s minds. It is expanding people’s ability to dream bold. And that’s what we need to do: dream bold. Because people have been limited by their own imaginations.”'
An article in the Times magazine about a group trying to organize sustainable communities for what they believe will be an awesome and coming crash of our civilization. It's more interesting as a look at where we are now than as where we may be twenty years in the future.
The thrust of the movement:
'“Sustainability,” Hopkins recently told me, “is about reducing the impacts of what comes out of the tailpipe of industrial society.” But that assumes our industrial society will keep running. By contrast, Hopkins said, Transition is about “building resiliency” — putting new systems in place to make a given community as self-sufficient as possible, bracing it to withstand the shocks that will come as oil grows astronomically expensive, climate change intensifies and, maybe sooner than we think, industrial society frays or collapses entirely.'
'For a generation, the environmental movement has told us to change our lifestyles to avoid catastrophic consequences. Transition tells us those consequences are now irreversibly switching on; we need to revolutionize our lives if we want to survive.'
'It was all surprisingly easy to imagine. Lately, an apocalyptic bile has been collecting in the back of America’s throat. Our era has been defined by skyrocketing line graphs, and it’s easy to wonder if we have finally pushed something just a little too far and are now watching everything start to teeter over. Maybe it’s not our dependence on oil, but the carbon we have plugged up the atmosphere with. Or global population. Or credit derivatives. We’re all starting to career down the other side of that hill — which hill, specifically, is up to you. But it’s the shadowy side, and none of us can see the bottom.'
What makes this different from any other apocalyptic movement? Its dovetail with conscious capitalism and rising Level 6 sensibilities in the mainstream.
'...most people in Sandpoint presumably hadn’t heard anything about Transition. But the ones who had often found a way to interpret the movement as extensions of their own visions. Having watched second- and third-home owners, retirees and tourists rush into Sandpoint, many latched on to Transition’s vague promise of building a better, quainter community. A minister told me she was glad that Transition wasn’t “a greenie, hippie, far-out thing.” But Michael Boge, the City Council president, seemed to complain of exactly that, telling me he didn’t understand why the group had to cheapen a good idea by “inventing a new word for it and wrapping themselves in that catchphrase.” (The new word Boge objected to wasn’t “Transition”; it was “sustainability.”) Still, Boge, who owns five drive-in restaurants and is active in a long-distance motorcycling club called the Iron Butt Association, told me that he felt allied with Transition’s ideals. “I’ve bitched about this to my friends for years: we need to make a concerted effort to get off fossil fuels,” he said. “And I truly believe that with the country and God behind us, we can do it.” Transition was a prism, offering a slightly different view of Sandpoint depending on how each person turned it, but always shooting out lots of rainbows.'
As noted above, though, this is does not exactly appear to be an integral movement, but more of a snapshot of what's emerging from (more and more) mainstream 6s.
For example, in response to a woman asking if they couldn't just make a rule to cremate everybody:'“Well,” Millard said, “it takes a lot of energy to cremate people. Besides, now we’re getting into rules.”' Straight-up 6.
There's more in this to believe that this is more of a reaction against the evils of modernity than an actual constructive growth into the future:
'Millard’s sketch happened to look a lot like the master plan of Fourierism, one of the most popular secular utopian movements in American history. In the early 1800s, Charles Fourier, a Frenchman, proposed, in a series of jargon-filled writings, a self-sufficient community model called a “phalanx.” A central estate or “phalanstery” would be surrounded by tradesmen’s workshops, cultural institutions and farmland. Fourier was horrified by what he saw at the outset of the Industrial Revolution. His fears may sound familiar: that dishonest lending and capitalism in general would lead to the enslavement of humans by big companies; “industrial feudalism,” he called it. And, not unlike Transition, he aimed to overhaul society one phalanx at a time. Fourier claimed to have reduced all possible human personalities to a number of essential types. From there, it was simple math. He calculated that if precisely 1,620 men, women and children were collected in a 6,000-acre phalanx, they would — all by merrily following their individual passions — end up satisfying all the phalanx’s essential needs. “The new amorous world,” he wrote, would rise out of “the new industrial world” by the force of “passional attraction.”
Transition insists that initiatives be completely bottom-up organizations. There’s no central oversight, and the movement is expected to evolve slightly differently wherever it springs up. The trajectory of each initiative shouldn’t be controlled too tightly even by its local leaders; Step 11 in the handbook is really more of a mantra: “Let it go where it wants to go.” Like a Fourierian phalanx, a Transition Town should be the product of the passions of its residents — all of its residents, equally. Unlike Fourierism, though, Transition doesn’t claim its method is mathematically guaranteed to succeed. It simply posits that our best hope is to “unleash the collective genius of the community” and hope all the right pieces spill out. “We truly don’t know if this will work,” Rob Hopkins asserts in a mission-statement-like document called the “Cheerful Disclaimer!”'
There's even the sense that the founders of the group want this to happen, which makes sense. Because society today has so recklessly shit in the salad bowl, it's all going to come crashing down, taking everything despicable with it. This is not to say that anyone is consciously aware of this, but 'Transition’s message is twofold: first, that a dire global emergency demands we transform our society; and second, that we might actually enjoy making those changes.' Why in the world would we enjoy this? because humans naturally should enjoy living in this sort of world, so tossing off all of the old barriers to natural humanity would make us all really happy.
Another hallmark of first-tier thinking here is that there's no conception that when things get tough resources-wise, things are going to get rough violence-wise. There's no thought about level 3s coming in to take over whatever sustainable resources a place like this has created; the overall vision is just of people coming together and living peacefully in sustainable communities because that's the way people naturally are. This narrow, if innocently-optimistic-and-lovely-in-its-own-way view of human nature is a call sign of the green 6s. It isn't, however, how everybody is approaching the project: '“Some people on the food group want to feel good,” he told me, “and some people want to figure out how to feed 40,000 people in case the trucks stop rolling.”
Michael Brownlee, the keynote speaker from Boulder, sat silently in his chair during the charter-school meeting. That night, he told me that the unflinching cheeriness of everyone involved made him optimistic. But he also worried that people didn’t yet understand that “just because you’re passionate about a particular issue like transportation or water or local food doesn’t mean that you have the skills to do the research, analysis or planning around that issue.” He later added, “If I knew how to convey how serious, how urgent the situation is without sending people into fear and helplessness, it would take a great burden off of me.”'
All in all, though, despite the limits of level 6, there are quite a few important contributions being made here. After all, we only have one planet:
'Now, maybe because our various crises have escalated, or because it costs so much to disappear into your own parcel of wilderness, opting out no longer feels like a possibility. One of Transition’s more oblique arguments may be that we can’t escape anymore. We have to work together to remake the places where we already live.
Lanphear told me, “As long as we get the work going in the right direction, it doesn’t matter who gets the glory or the credit.” Richard Kühnel chose to see it in an even more positive light. He told me, “I feel whoever wants to participate and whose ideas are aligned with ours, that’s who the Sandpoint Transition Initiative is” — whether those people know it or not.
What Reuter said he felt was wonderful about the Sandpoint Transition Initiative was how quickly it was rejuvenating people’s faith that the changes they craved were worth working for. “To say the group has only created a community garden so far really isn’t sufficient,” he told me. “It’s something really more substantive: they’re bringing people to the process.” It was easy to argue that at the initiative’s core, in place of any clearly defined philosophy or strategy, was only a puff of enthusiasm. But Reuter seemed to argue that enthusiasm is an actual asset, a resource our society is already suffering a scarcity of. “There’s just something happening here that’s reviving people’s civic sense of possibility,” he later said. “Politics is ‘the art of the possible,’ right? I think what the Transition Initiative is doing is expanding what’s possible in people’s minds. It is expanding people’s ability to dream bold. And that’s what we need to do: dream bold. Because people have been limited by their own imaginations.”'
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Why Isn't the Brain Green? / HAPPY EARTH DAY!/ The Emerging Integral World
(a short apology to those of you who are not familiar with Integral Theory. I try to use as little jargon as possible, but sometimes it doesn't work. I will be putting up posts soon for cross-reference of technical terms.)
Why isn't the brain green?
An article in the New York Times.
The short answer is that while we all have the capacity for global-level concern, most people have not developed to this capacity. Humans 20,000 years ago had no need to think globally, and so biologically there's nothing that would make a human "green." Even asking the question is a little odd; why in the world would we have developed a concern for the environment millennia before we had invented/discovered the concept? Embedded in the question is the assumption that being green is a good thing for the brain absolutely, as if somehow the brain ought to be green, but this is like saying that a bacterium ought to be concerned about the health of the human host. Humans aren't bacteria on the world, of course; it is a comparison of scale, and the difference between the two, that humans have the ability to understand their reality mentally and alter their behavior based on it, is important. Human evolution is primarily taking place not biologically, but conceptually or memetically, or if you insist, mentally, though the last word is not quite precise enough. The brain isn't green because it's not a biological necessity. "Greenness" is something that becomes necessary only when the human organism is acting on a global level. Fortunately, unlike bacteria, we might be able to stop ourselves from being so biologically/physically successful that we destroy the conditions permitting our own physical existence.
And to the article, which has a number of interesting points:
Firstly, nobody seems to care about the environment this year.
'At the top of the list [naming American citizens most pressing worries] were several concerns — jobs and the economy — related to the current recession. Farther down, well after terrorism, deficit reduction and energy (and even something the pollsters characterized as “moral decline”) was climate change. It was priority No. 20. That was last place.'
Something in this is reminiscent of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. You can't be worried about something largely intangible (at this point, at least) if you don't have a job or a house or food to eat, and so in a recession, there's no climate change. The article glosses over this without mentioning this hierarchic (holarchic) aspect. 'Weber’s research seems to help establish that we have a “finite pool of worry,” which means we’re unable to maintain our fear of climate change when a different problem — a plunging stock market, a personal emergency — comes along. We simply move one fear into the worry bin and one fear out." It's not that our pool is finite, though, it's that more pressing physical fears trump the abstract ones, or, SDi level one problems (not having food, say) trump any problems at the higher levels. If you're so hungry you're digging through rancid garbage heaps you're probably not too concerned about expressing the unique snowflake of yourself through romantic photos of the rain.
Of course, much of the impetus of the article is that Climate Change, far from being something abstract and in the future, is coming to a neighborhood near you. Until it does, for most people, it's just not a real problem; that is, "Climate Change" will never be a problem, higher food prices from desertification of agricultural land will be a problem, and even more directly, having less money from spending more on food will be the problem. The higher up the spiral you are, (the higher your cognitive/memetic level) the more real the problem is to you, which is to say no problem is ever abstract. No matter how you try and make the problem seem a problem, without direct apprehension of a problem, there simply isn't one. The article describes this in the following way:
'There are some unfortunate implications here. In analytical mode, we are not always adept at long-term thinking; experiments have shown a frequent dislike for delayed benefits, so we undervalue promised future outcomes. (Given a choice, we usually take $10 now as opposed to, say, $20 two years from now.) Environmentally speaking, this means we are far less likely to make lifestyle changes in order to ensure a safer future climate. Letting emotions determine how we assess risk presents its own problems. Almost certainly, we underestimate the danger of rising sea levels or epic droughts or other events that we’ve never experienced and seem far away in time and place.'
The problem isn't real for most people. Even if they can cognate it, or, say, have an emotional reaction to the idea of their children growing up Mad Max, unless it holds their attention it'll be gone soon, as they fall back into their operative consciousness.
'And even if we could remain persistently concerned about a warmer world? Weber described what she calls a “single-action bias.” Prompted by a distressing emotional signal, we buy a more efficient furnace or insulate our attic or vote for a green candidate — a single action that effectively diminishes global warming as a motivating factor. And that leaves us where we started.'
The "we" in this article used over and over again is intended as "us humans," but I'd propose that it actually shifts back and forth, mostly covering 5th-level rational operating humans, people at around the same basic level as the NYTimes itself, no coincidence. Articles like this could be taken as evidence of the push of a large number of the "East-Coast rational-liberal" demographic, again, NYTimes readers, into the 6th level memes, or at the least as a record of the struggle moving between 5 and 6. The single-action bias noted above is seen when somebody is trying to make a change in their life, and brings us back to the question of the article, "Why isn't the Brain Green?" "We" want it to be, so "we" do a few things to pull us in the direction, though obviously the "we" hasn't fully arrived there yet. One practices and practices and practices behavior one knows is beneficial, and, with persistence, can eventually make that behavior part of their daily consciousness. One tries and tries and tries again over a number of years to eat more healthily, and eventually five years down the road, even if one hasn't reached their original ideal, not only eats more healthily, but does it naturally, without thinking or struggling, enjoying it. This is the process the above is chronicling: people's actions as they try to do something they think is better than what they are but don't yet own it. There are plenty of people who live every decision in their lives with a full environmental consciousness. They just aren't the mainstream.
Interestingly, the title of the article itself relies on an "Overdrive 5" mentality that we are the brain, that all behavior originates in the brain. Of course, had the title been, "why isn't the mind green?" the answer would have been, "because some people's mind's aren't." In either case, "greenness" is something learned/ grown into, it is not a given, except as a potential.
So what do we do as integrals if we don't want the world to warm into hell?
Most often, people think of the problems as technical. But, as climate change is being caused by people's behavior, so must human behavior be the basis for combating it. As logical as that seems, 'the notion that vital environmental solutions will be attained through social-science research — instead of improved climate models or innovative technologies — is an aggressively insurgent view.'
So, what changes are we talking about? Obviously, the more people at a level 6 or higher in the world, the more likely that, naturally, things will be handled in a more environmentally-sustainable way. Equally as obvious: we're not going to get there any day soon. Interestingly, the article takes a rather integral framework for dealing with this problem.
'If you don’t think or feel there’s a risk, why change your behavior? In response, researchers like Leiserowitz have investigated messages that could captivate all different kinds of audiences. Reaching a predominantly evangelical or conservative audience, Leiserowitz told me, could perhaps be achieved by honing a message of “moral Christian values,” an appeal possibly based on the divine instruction in Genesis 2:15 to tend and till the garden.'
To deal with the problem integrally, we need to give incentives to every level of development to create a sustainable (not merely environmentally so) sound community. For 5s, the emphasis can be on the business opportunities of conscious capitalism. As mentioned above, religious 4s could be persuaded that it is God's desire that they take care of the Earth.
This goes back to the beginning and the list of people's priorities of concern: there is no singular problem, there are many manifestations of one problem, and they need to be dealt with as one problem with many heads. Integrally tackling Climate Change means improving our economies and the stability of our societies, it means dealing with energy, and terrorism by helping to cultivate healthy societies in other parts of the world, it even means re-instilling and fostering a sense of moral community, though it would likely look a little different than the ideal of those who answered the above survey with "moral decline," even if grounded by the same basic sentiment.
The author of the article is a little skeptical about this at first, saying that some of these practices being researched (what the main content of the article is) seem to manipulate the natural decision making process, but comes to the conclusion that there is really no natural decision making process; one cannot make a decision in an absolute vacuum. I'd add that the "nudges" the author talks about are done by every society that has ever existed; it's called "acculturation." The difference here is that we are becoming conscious of this, and of how to manipulate this, which most of the best leaders were likely quasi-aware of in any case. One of the biggest factors, the article mentions, is whether decisions are made individually, or in a group.
'The subjects in half of the 50 test groups would first make their decisions individually and then as a group; the other half would make group decisions first and individual ones second. Weber and Handgraaf were fairly confident, based on previous work, that the two approaches would produce different results. In Amsterdam, Handgraaf told me, he had already seen that when subjects made decisions as a group first, their conversations were marked far more often by subtle markers of inclusion like “us” and “we.” Weber, for her part, had seen other evidence that groups can be more patient than individuals when considering delayed benefits. “One reason this is interesting is that it’s general practice in any meeting to prepare individually,” Handgraaf said. Or, to put the matter another way: What if the information for decisions, especially environmental ones, is first considered in a group setting before members take it up individually, rather than the other way around? In Weber’s view, this step could conceivably change the decisions made by a corporate board, for example, or a group of homeowners called together for a meeting by a public utility. Weber’s experiments have also looked at how the ordering of choices can create stark differences: considering distant benefits before immediate costs can lead to a different decision than if you consider — as is common — the costs first. Here, then, is a kind of blueprint for achieving collective decisions that are in the world’s best interests'.
The most interesting of these "nudges," as mentioned above, is the group dynamic.
'“We enjoy congregating; we need to know we are part of groups,” Weber said. “It gives us inherent pleasure to do this. And when we are reminded of the fact that we’re part of communities, then the community becomes sort of the decision-making unit. That’s how we make huge sacrifices, like in World War II.”'
As a more concrete example of this type of thinking:
'In 2005 and 2006, Orlove observed how the behavior of the region’s poor farmers could be influenced by whether they listened to crucial rainy-season radio broadcasts in groups or as individuals. Farmers in “community groups,” as Orlove described them to me, engaged in discussions that led to a consensus, and farmers made better use of the forecast. “They might alter their planting date,” he said, “or use a more drought-resistant variety of seed.” Those in the community groups also seemed more satisfied with the steps they took to increase their yields.'
Some of the feel of this is coming from the transition between level 5 memes, which are individualistic, and level 6, which are communitarian, but the thrust of this seems to be integral: everybody makes an individual decision, there are no decisions mandated by the collective, but one's individual decisions are made in the context of an open, fluid, and continual conversation with the community. It is possible to encourage individual thinking and innovation without devolving into groupthink, a staple of an unhealthy manifestation of level 6.
Another interesting quote:
'“Remember when New York tried to enforce its jaywalking laws?[...]You can’t enforce stuff that people don’t believe should be done.”'
This sums up much of the article: unless it's organic, change, and policy to help produce it, doesn't work. Taking a much wider view, all of this is natural, just as the nudging is a natural part of the decision making process. Societies get to a certain point, then they clean themselves up. There's nothing you can do to push that process along artificially. This, however is often taken as a level 5 mantra when confronting environmentalism: business will naturally get cleaner, just leave it alone! That is the thrust of the following Op-Ed from John Tierney, also from the Times: "Use Energy, Get Rich, and Save the Planet!" Of course, the backlash is also natural, that is, the environmental movement itself is natural, not simply some freakish reactionary outgrowth to late stage-capitalism, a point the Tierney Op-Ed doesn't make explicitly.
While this is and has been true, we're not dealing with relative levels of environmental cleanliness between countries, we're dealing with one non-interchangeable world. In the past, a country could clean up after industry became cleaner, because the pollution could be diffused throughout the rest of the planet and eventually eliminated through natural cycles, like plants cleaning air. The scope, now, is bigger. Not only are we (as a planet) making pollution on a much larger scale than one hundred years ago, we are doing it as a whole planet, not individual countries, and the worry is that there will be a point beyond which the life on the planet won't be able to clean it up again, and that this point will be here before the 2060 that Tierney says could well be the end of carbon even without policy pushes. Additionally, when rich counties got richer, they often got cleaner not just from cleaning up industry, but from moving it to other areas of the world. But where do high-polluting factories go when China and India get rich? And then after that?
What die-hard level 5s often miss in the environmental debates is that when a canary dies in a mine, nobody is worried ultimately about the canary. The difference between the canary, and, say, the 400 or so dead zones on the ocean floor, is that we have no choice but to go on living in the mine.
So, there will be a day when everybody up and down the spectrum of humanity feels the environment is, in one way or another, the biggest issue we have to deal with. That's what we're trying to avoid.
'“Increasing personal evidence of global warming and its potentially devastating consequences can be counted on to be an extremely effective teacher and motivator,” she wrote, pointing to how emotional and experiential feelings of risk are superb drivers of action. “Unfortunately, such lessons may arrive too late for corrective action.”'
Why isn't the brain green?
An article in the New York Times.
The short answer is that while we all have the capacity for global-level concern, most people have not developed to this capacity. Humans 20,000 years ago had no need to think globally, and so biologically there's nothing that would make a human "green." Even asking the question is a little odd; why in the world would we have developed a concern for the environment millennia before we had invented/discovered the concept? Embedded in the question is the assumption that being green is a good thing for the brain absolutely, as if somehow the brain ought to be green, but this is like saying that a bacterium ought to be concerned about the health of the human host. Humans aren't bacteria on the world, of course; it is a comparison of scale, and the difference between the two, that humans have the ability to understand their reality mentally and alter their behavior based on it, is important. Human evolution is primarily taking place not biologically, but conceptually or memetically, or if you insist, mentally, though the last word is not quite precise enough. The brain isn't green because it's not a biological necessity. "Greenness" is something that becomes necessary only when the human organism is acting on a global level. Fortunately, unlike bacteria, we might be able to stop ourselves from being so biologically/physically successful that we destroy the conditions permitting our own physical existence.
And to the article, which has a number of interesting points:
Firstly, nobody seems to care about the environment this year.
'At the top of the list [naming American citizens most pressing worries] were several concerns — jobs and the economy — related to the current recession. Farther down, well after terrorism, deficit reduction and energy (and even something the pollsters characterized as “moral decline”) was climate change. It was priority No. 20. That was last place.'
Something in this is reminiscent of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. You can't be worried about something largely intangible (at this point, at least) if you don't have a job or a house or food to eat, and so in a recession, there's no climate change. The article glosses over this without mentioning this hierarchic (holarchic) aspect. 'Weber’s research seems to help establish that we have a “finite pool of worry,” which means we’re unable to maintain our fear of climate change when a different problem — a plunging stock market, a personal emergency — comes along. We simply move one fear into the worry bin and one fear out." It's not that our pool is finite, though, it's that more pressing physical fears trump the abstract ones, or, SDi level one problems (not having food, say) trump any problems at the higher levels. If you're so hungry you're digging through rancid garbage heaps you're probably not too concerned about expressing the unique snowflake of yourself through romantic photos of the rain.
Of course, much of the impetus of the article is that Climate Change, far from being something abstract and in the future, is coming to a neighborhood near you. Until it does, for most people, it's just not a real problem; that is, "Climate Change" will never be a problem, higher food prices from desertification of agricultural land will be a problem, and even more directly, having less money from spending more on food will be the problem. The higher up the spiral you are, (the higher your cognitive/memetic level) the more real the problem is to you, which is to say no problem is ever abstract. No matter how you try and make the problem seem a problem, without direct apprehension of a problem, there simply isn't one. The article describes this in the following way:
'There are some unfortunate implications here. In analytical mode, we are not always adept at long-term thinking; experiments have shown a frequent dislike for delayed benefits, so we undervalue promised future outcomes. (Given a choice, we usually take $10 now as opposed to, say, $20 two years from now.) Environmentally speaking, this means we are far less likely to make lifestyle changes in order to ensure a safer future climate. Letting emotions determine how we assess risk presents its own problems. Almost certainly, we underestimate the danger of rising sea levels or epic droughts or other events that we’ve never experienced and seem far away in time and place.'
The problem isn't real for most people. Even if they can cognate it, or, say, have an emotional reaction to the idea of their children growing up Mad Max, unless it holds their attention it'll be gone soon, as they fall back into their operative consciousness.
'And even if we could remain persistently concerned about a warmer world? Weber described what she calls a “single-action bias.” Prompted by a distressing emotional signal, we buy a more efficient furnace or insulate our attic or vote for a green candidate — a single action that effectively diminishes global warming as a motivating factor. And that leaves us where we started.'
The "we" in this article used over and over again is intended as "us humans," but I'd propose that it actually shifts back and forth, mostly covering 5th-level rational operating humans, people at around the same basic level as the NYTimes itself, no coincidence. Articles like this could be taken as evidence of the push of a large number of the "East-Coast rational-liberal" demographic, again, NYTimes readers, into the 6th level memes, or at the least as a record of the struggle moving between 5 and 6. The single-action bias noted above is seen when somebody is trying to make a change in their life, and brings us back to the question of the article, "Why isn't the Brain Green?" "We" want it to be, so "we" do a few things to pull us in the direction, though obviously the "we" hasn't fully arrived there yet. One practices and practices and practices behavior one knows is beneficial, and, with persistence, can eventually make that behavior part of their daily consciousness. One tries and tries and tries again over a number of years to eat more healthily, and eventually five years down the road, even if one hasn't reached their original ideal, not only eats more healthily, but does it naturally, without thinking or struggling, enjoying it. This is the process the above is chronicling: people's actions as they try to do something they think is better than what they are but don't yet own it. There are plenty of people who live every decision in their lives with a full environmental consciousness. They just aren't the mainstream.
Interestingly, the title of the article itself relies on an "Overdrive 5" mentality that we are the brain, that all behavior originates in the brain. Of course, had the title been, "why isn't the mind green?" the answer would have been, "because some people's mind's aren't." In either case, "greenness" is something learned/ grown into, it is not a given, except as a potential.
So what do we do as integrals if we don't want the world to warm into hell?
Most often, people think of the problems as technical. But, as climate change is being caused by people's behavior, so must human behavior be the basis for combating it. As logical as that seems, 'the notion that vital environmental solutions will be attained through social-science research — instead of improved climate models or innovative technologies — is an aggressively insurgent view.'
So, what changes are we talking about? Obviously, the more people at a level 6 or higher in the world, the more likely that, naturally, things will be handled in a more environmentally-sustainable way. Equally as obvious: we're not going to get there any day soon. Interestingly, the article takes a rather integral framework for dealing with this problem.
'If you don’t think or feel there’s a risk, why change your behavior? In response, researchers like Leiserowitz have investigated messages that could captivate all different kinds of audiences. Reaching a predominantly evangelical or conservative audience, Leiserowitz told me, could perhaps be achieved by honing a message of “moral Christian values,” an appeal possibly based on the divine instruction in Genesis 2:15 to tend and till the garden.'
To deal with the problem integrally, we need to give incentives to every level of development to create a sustainable (not merely environmentally so) sound community. For 5s, the emphasis can be on the business opportunities of conscious capitalism. As mentioned above, religious 4s could be persuaded that it is God's desire that they take care of the Earth.
This goes back to the beginning and the list of people's priorities of concern: there is no singular problem, there are many manifestations of one problem, and they need to be dealt with as one problem with many heads. Integrally tackling Climate Change means improving our economies and the stability of our societies, it means dealing with energy, and terrorism by helping to cultivate healthy societies in other parts of the world, it even means re-instilling and fostering a sense of moral community, though it would likely look a little different than the ideal of those who answered the above survey with "moral decline," even if grounded by the same basic sentiment.
The author of the article is a little skeptical about this at first, saying that some of these practices being researched (what the main content of the article is) seem to manipulate the natural decision making process, but comes to the conclusion that there is really no natural decision making process; one cannot make a decision in an absolute vacuum. I'd add that the "nudges" the author talks about are done by every society that has ever existed; it's called "acculturation." The difference here is that we are becoming conscious of this, and of how to manipulate this, which most of the best leaders were likely quasi-aware of in any case. One of the biggest factors, the article mentions, is whether decisions are made individually, or in a group.
'The subjects in half of the 50 test groups would first make their decisions individually and then as a group; the other half would make group decisions first and individual ones second. Weber and Handgraaf were fairly confident, based on previous work, that the two approaches would produce different results. In Amsterdam, Handgraaf told me, he had already seen that when subjects made decisions as a group first, their conversations were marked far more often by subtle markers of inclusion like “us” and “we.” Weber, for her part, had seen other evidence that groups can be more patient than individuals when considering delayed benefits. “One reason this is interesting is that it’s general practice in any meeting to prepare individually,” Handgraaf said. Or, to put the matter another way: What if the information for decisions, especially environmental ones, is first considered in a group setting before members take it up individually, rather than the other way around? In Weber’s view, this step could conceivably change the decisions made by a corporate board, for example, or a group of homeowners called together for a meeting by a public utility. Weber’s experiments have also looked at how the ordering of choices can create stark differences: considering distant benefits before immediate costs can lead to a different decision than if you consider — as is common — the costs first. Here, then, is a kind of blueprint for achieving collective decisions that are in the world’s best interests'.
The most interesting of these "nudges," as mentioned above, is the group dynamic.
'“We enjoy congregating; we need to know we are part of groups,” Weber said. “It gives us inherent pleasure to do this. And when we are reminded of the fact that we’re part of communities, then the community becomes sort of the decision-making unit. That’s how we make huge sacrifices, like in World War II.”'
As a more concrete example of this type of thinking:
'In 2005 and 2006, Orlove observed how the behavior of the region’s poor farmers could be influenced by whether they listened to crucial rainy-season radio broadcasts in groups or as individuals. Farmers in “community groups,” as Orlove described them to me, engaged in discussions that led to a consensus, and farmers made better use of the forecast. “They might alter their planting date,” he said, “or use a more drought-resistant variety of seed.” Those in the community groups also seemed more satisfied with the steps they took to increase their yields.'
Some of the feel of this is coming from the transition between level 5 memes, which are individualistic, and level 6, which are communitarian, but the thrust of this seems to be integral: everybody makes an individual decision, there are no decisions mandated by the collective, but one's individual decisions are made in the context of an open, fluid, and continual conversation with the community. It is possible to encourage individual thinking and innovation without devolving into groupthink, a staple of an unhealthy manifestation of level 6.
Another interesting quote:
'“Remember when New York tried to enforce its jaywalking laws?[...]You can’t enforce stuff that people don’t believe should be done.”'
This sums up much of the article: unless it's organic, change, and policy to help produce it, doesn't work. Taking a much wider view, all of this is natural, just as the nudging is a natural part of the decision making process. Societies get to a certain point, then they clean themselves up. There's nothing you can do to push that process along artificially. This, however is often taken as a level 5 mantra when confronting environmentalism: business will naturally get cleaner, just leave it alone! That is the thrust of the following Op-Ed from John Tierney, also from the Times: "Use Energy, Get Rich, and Save the Planet!" Of course, the backlash is also natural, that is, the environmental movement itself is natural, not simply some freakish reactionary outgrowth to late stage-capitalism, a point the Tierney Op-Ed doesn't make explicitly.
While this is and has been true, we're not dealing with relative levels of environmental cleanliness between countries, we're dealing with one non-interchangeable world. In the past, a country could clean up after industry became cleaner, because the pollution could be diffused throughout the rest of the planet and eventually eliminated through natural cycles, like plants cleaning air. The scope, now, is bigger. Not only are we (as a planet) making pollution on a much larger scale than one hundred years ago, we are doing it as a whole planet, not individual countries, and the worry is that there will be a point beyond which the life on the planet won't be able to clean it up again, and that this point will be here before the 2060 that Tierney says could well be the end of carbon even without policy pushes. Additionally, when rich counties got richer, they often got cleaner not just from cleaning up industry, but from moving it to other areas of the world. But where do high-polluting factories go when China and India get rich? And then after that?
What die-hard level 5s often miss in the environmental debates is that when a canary dies in a mine, nobody is worried ultimately about the canary. The difference between the canary, and, say, the 400 or so dead zones on the ocean floor, is that we have no choice but to go on living in the mine.
So, there will be a day when everybody up and down the spectrum of humanity feels the environment is, in one way or another, the biggest issue we have to deal with. That's what we're trying to avoid.
'“Increasing personal evidence of global warming and its potentially devastating consequences can be counted on to be an extremely effective teacher and motivator,” she wrote, pointing to how emotional and experiential feelings of risk are superb drivers of action. “Unfortunately, such lessons may arrive too late for corrective action.”'
Sunday, January 4, 2009
Integral Academic Healing
This article is a perfect example of the need for integral thinking.
Basically put, anthropology is divided into two camps: the right-handed (objective) approach, evolutionary anthropology, and the left-handed (subjective) approach, social anthropology.
The simple dividing line between them is whether people's behavior can best be explained in terms of animal mate-finding drives, in an entirely impersonal sense, or whether behavior must be viewed through the lens of culture.
Of course, this seems almost silly. Can't it be both?
That's the problem; each side claims basically to have the "inside-track" on why humans REALLY do what they do, and so they are both wrong. There is no possibility of separating evolutionary drives from human culture, or (at least as far as humans are concerned) vice-versa.
That's the basic story. Now to the article, to illustrate the issue better.
"The schism between the two is simple but deeply ingrained. Academics in the subject clearly align themselves with one side or the other; once that choice is made it defines their career."
-Firstly, the schism is as simple as is possible, do you ignore the subjective or the objective, and as deep as possible, the most basic division. Secondly, the "once that choice..." part shows a basic problem within academia at the present time: it's not just that your field is interesting, or helpful, it's that your field is right, and everyone else's field is only properly viewed from one's own, and this often dismisses fields entirely. Not only cross-field, but, as here, within one field.
Basically put, anthropology is divided into two camps: the right-handed (objective) approach, evolutionary anthropology, and the left-handed (subjective) approach, social anthropology.
The simple dividing line between them is whether people's behavior can best be explained in terms of animal mate-finding drives, in an entirely impersonal sense, or whether behavior must be viewed through the lens of culture.
Of course, this seems almost silly. Can't it be both?
That's the problem; each side claims basically to have the "inside-track" on why humans REALLY do what they do, and so they are both wrong. There is no possibility of separating evolutionary drives from human culture, or (at least as far as humans are concerned) vice-versa.
That's the basic story. Now to the article, to illustrate the issue better.
"The schism between the two is simple but deeply ingrained. Academics in the subject clearly align themselves with one side or the other; once that choice is made it defines their career."
-Firstly, the schism is as simple as is possible, do you ignore the subjective or the objective, and as deep as possible, the most basic division. Secondly, the "once that choice..." part shows a basic problem within academia at the present time: it's not just that your field is interesting, or helpful, it's that your field is right, and everyone else's field is only properly viewed from one's own, and this often dismisses fields entirely. Not only cross-field, but, as here, within one field.
"A lot of anthropologists are interpretivists; they are interpreting what they see. They're not working within the framework of the scientific method," says Ruth Mace, professor of evolutionary anthropology at University College London. "That's all well and good, but why should we be more interested in one person's interpretation over someone else's interpretation unless we have got some commonly accepted grounds for testing competing hypotheses?"
-There's a little too much in here. Humans are always interpreting, even math is an interpretation, that is, 2+2 is an abstraction, with correlates in our experience of reality. Denigrating somebody as an interpretivist is forgetting that you can't really use the word "reality," without the qualifying "our experience of..." Dr. Mace also isn't counting a rather thorough, and evolutionary, means of testing competing hypotheses: bunk gets junked. That is, the best and most likely hypotheses pass on, in the long term, because people start to agree with them because they work better, let alone the fact that commonly accepting grounds is a form of interpretation. Of course, she has a point in the end, and that is that it is certainly worthy and important to ground understandings in the world of experimental data. It's just not a litmus-test for validity.
"The scientific method is a common currency across all scientific disciplines, most of the social sciences included. In that way, disciplines can speak to each other."
-An example of the "all through my field" way of looking at things. As Dr. Ingold says, "They already assume they have the correct answer."
Now, it's not all bleak. The integral idea is growing in the world, and mostly from the ground-up, that is, not with the explicit help of people grounded in integral theory, but because it's practical, and leading/fringe thinkers in their respective fields are beginning to understand the limits of choosing either one (interior reality) or the other (exterior reality.) Dr. Whitehouse, the main example in the article, being one of them, along with the Royal Anthropological Institute. Dr. Barton's quote exemplifies this, " I don't think there's any future for an anthropology that doesn't combine the different approaches and perspectives." That, of course, has been the integral call for quite some time, substituting "understanding of humanity and its/my/your interaction with reality" for anthropology. (Though ironically in a way that could be thought of as being anthropology, I think we can mostly agree the scopes of these two projects are rather different.)
Of course, looking at the comments below, this magical age is still far-off, and of course, won't happen for at least another generation, as things change most not when individuals change their mind, but when generations die off. However, if a truly integral understanding can begin to pull all of this together, it could be a catalyst. That, of course, is in danger of falling into the same trap: everything must be viewed from an integral perspective, or it's not valid. This is not what I mean. The integral perspective itself is, of course, not really a single perspective, it's the injunction to state the weaknesses clearly just as you state the truths of your work and viewpoint. Every concept and argument is resting on a point of impossibility, there is nothing without caveat. Even the caveat. So live your life.
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