Part II

Part I Part II Part III

      "Okay, you bean bags. For now, all we note is that the best of structuralism (and certainly neostructuralism) is, first and foremost, a second-tier holism. Structuralism in almost any form was badly misunderstood and aggressively attacked by the green meme when it began its PMS riots of deconstruction, which is unfortunate but perhaps predictable. But the fact is, structuralism sees the world as composed of holistic patterns of autopoietic or self-maintaining systems of relationships. When it comes to individuals and cultures, structuralism maintains that all of us contain internal cognitive-linguistic maps that influence how we perceive, and therefore actually co-create, our world. We can find this important structuralist influence in almost every developmental psychology today, which sees each wave of development as possessing a patterned wholeness that influences how individuals at that wave see the world. The memes of Spiral Dynamics, for example, are examples of structures. Jean Gebser's archaic, magic, mythic, rational, and integral worldviews are all structures. So are the stages of Jane Loevinger, Carol Gilligan, Jenny Wade, Patricia Arlin, Cheryl Armon, and so on. We also see it in the postmodern poststructuralist claim that because we construct the world, we can deconstruct it (even if they went a bit overboard there.)

      "Perhaps we can see that, in a sense, 'structuralism' was a very unfortunate name, because it implies rigid and fixed boxes that dictate how people think. Well, no wonder the mean green meme reacted to that! And no wonder the rioting Parisian students in '68 scrawled 'Down with Structuralism' on the walls of the city. 'Structuralism' should have been named something like 'Patterned Relational Holism,' and it perhaps it would have fared better!

      "But perhaps not. As we said, the early forms of structuralism had a series of truly fatal flaws (apart from the true and enduring contributions). First and foremost is that the holistic patterns themselves were conceived as being ahistorical. That is, although they were dynamic transformational patterns in the world, taking raw sensations and fluidly converting them into meaningful perceptions, the patterns themselves were viewed in a very unyielding fashion. The 'deep structure' itself, although constantly dynamic, was said to be synchronic, which means that the rules governing it were not touched by history, nor did they evolve in time; whereas the 'surface structures' of behavior of individuals were said to be diachronic, or existing in time and its fluctuations.

     "Now the early structuralists had their reasons for claiming that the deep structures didn't interact with history." Carla looked up and shot us all that devilish grin. "If you have ever tried arguing with, say, a blue-meme Christian fundamentalist, you will find that it's almost impossible for you to change its mind. You can present a ton of scientific evidence--the fossil record, for example--showing that the universe was not created in 6 days, and it won't have any impact. 'Oh, the fossil record; yes, the Lord created that on the fourth day.'" Everybody laughed; Carla, too. "The structures of these waves--blue, orange, green, any of them, really--often appear impervious to outside influence. That, of course, is one of their strengths in the overall course of evolution--these mental structures are durable, tested ways to survive in particular life conditions, and if they changed on the spot according to every little twitch in the road, humanity would almost certainly never have survived past beige. No, these structures--like every structure in the human organism--the structure of the heart, the brain, the kidneys--are harder to change than the Pope's mind," and Carla again slapped her thigh and laughed out loud. "Oh, I'll get in trouble for that one. It's a good thing I work at IC and not a university; I'd be up on charges faster than Madonna takes her clothes off." Fuentes continued smiling, almost to herself, zinging across the stage. "Let's just say, organic structures are harder to change than a leopard's spots.

     "But, of course, leopards' spots can change--and they did in fact evolve in the first place . That was the fundamental problem with original structuralism: it did not fit with any evolutionary scheme since history supposedly never touched its holistic patterns. Whooah, huge mistake, huh? It was the ahistorical nature of the structures that was their undoing. But, to make a long story short, all forms of neostructuralism today make it very clear that: (1) the deep structures or holistic patterns themselves are in relationships with other structures/patterns/waves at all levels--these holistic structures are holons like everything else in the Kosmos; they are set in multiple contexts that help determine their own meaning. And (2) these deep structures--and not just the surface structures-- themselves evolved . The holistic relational patterns of perception themselves evolved--again: not just their surface structures but their deep structures were molded by time, evolution, and history. Put simply, worldviews evolved, memes evolved, waves evolved. And, many schools add, each subsequent structure transcended and included its predecessor(s), just like virtually all other structures in natural evolution: atoms are transcended but included in molecules, which are transcended but included in cells, which are transcended but included in organisms, and so on. Each whole wave of development becomes a part of the whole of the next. Each wave is a holon, a whole/part, indefinitely--which is the same general idea as: meaning is context-bound, and contexts are boundless: each whole is also a part of another whole, endlessly.

     "And, in fact, once you see that, then it is a very short step to easily integrate the best of structuralism (each whole is also a part: meaning is context-bound) and poststructuralism (contexts are boundless, or endlessly sliding), which is what one of my colleagues did in a book called Sex, Ecology, Spirituality . But, um, between you and me, don't buy that book, because I'm telling ya, there's no sex in it. I mean, I was ripping through there looking for the dirty pictures, right? Nothing! And the thing costs like $40 bucks. Forget it, man.

     "Okay, to the issue at hand--the Sahlins-Obeyesekere debate. With that background, we can again pick up the story. Sahlins is coming out of the general structuralist background--he therefore knows that we do not merely perceive the world, we co-create it. Upon a sensorimotor world of facts, we construct social realities. (We do not create the sensorimotor facts, although those facts co-create each other , since every holon has four quadrants, even at the sensorimotor level, and thus even atoms are co-creating and interpreting each other--a very technical point explained in SES. For now, the simple idea is exactly as the title of John Searle's recent book put it: The Construction of Social Reality --and NOT 'the social construction of reality.' As we said, the sensorimotor facts are there in some fundamental sense, and upon those facts different worldviews are constructed, worldviews that themselves contain other facts, values, meanings, and depths not found in the sensorimotor world: but that sensorimotor world does not therefore evaporate. The very real downside of both structuralism and poststructuralism was that, in clearly understanding that much of the world is a social construction, they both could slide easily into the mistaken notion that there are no sensorimotor facts of any kind, a notion taken to extremes with a postmodern poststructuralism driven by boomeritis and the demand that 'Nobody tells me what to do!')

     "Now Sahlins is a postmodernist in good standing--that is, he has moved from structuralism to a type of poststructuralism--so he tilts into the 'there are no facts, only interpretations' school. That is, he is a good green-meme historian. But that doesn't detract from the true aspects of postmodern poststructuralism, namely, that the cognitive maps we carry in our heads construct much of the social realities we 'see' around us. This is why Sahlins gives such a brilliant and compelling reading of how a mythic map or worldview might perceive this white dude popping off a huge ship and sloshing ashore on your islands. And how, a few weeks later, it might see something very different indeed and proceed to brutally murder and eat the person they previously divinized. Great stuff, folks!

      "Here is where it starts to get funny, and complicated. Sahlins, as a good green-meme historian, maintains that different cultures have different worldviews, but you cannot say that one is better than the other, or that one has more truth than another, or make any sort of universal judgments of better or worse. He does not believe, as a second-tier historian would, that some universal judgments can in fact be made between cultures. As we have seen, the general PMS theorists maintain that you cannot make any universal judgments between cultures, even though the PMS crowd makes tons of universal judgments about Western culture, the Enlightenment, the patriarchy, and so on. What they mean is, no universal judgments except their own have any value, a fine boomeritis move if ever there was one. And, as we will see, Sahlins himself falls into this performative contradiction quite often.

      "Sahlins, as the sensitive green-meme historian, says, and I quote: 'I want to suggest that one cannot do good history, nor even contemporary history, without regard for the ideas, actions, and ontologies that are not and never were our own. Different cultures, different rationalities.' So Sahlins sees his attempt to get inside the different rationality of the tribal Hawaiians as a sympathetic attempt to understand the Other on its own terms, and not on Western Eurocentric terms. He does not want to impose our Western 'rationality' on the tribal Hawaiian 'rationality.' He does not want to be Eurocentric and ethnocentric.

      "Which is exactly what Obeyesekere accuses him of. Obeyesekere suggests that Sahlins is being Eurocentric, ethnocentric, and racist to the core, especially in pretending not to be. Obeyesekere claims, with considerable evidence, that the idea that the Hawaiians would see Cook as a god was a European myth itself, reflecting the godlike assumptions of how great European culture was: the poor natives are so stupid they thought we were really gods! To make matters worse for Sahlins, Obeyesekere is a Sri Lakan, a non-European (which, in the eyes of PMS, gives him a major trump card right there), and Obeyesekere himself suggests that, being a non-European, he can spot European bullshit when he sees it, and Sahlins's entire account falls pretty much into that category.

      "Sahlins, you can imagine, went ballistic. The one thing you don't want to call a green meme is insensitive. Them's fightin' words, son. The ensuing all-out brawl, carried in the pages of everything from the New York Review of Books to the Times Literary Supplement , and wonderfully full of ad hominen barbs from both sides, involved, in fact, a classic fight between a green-meme historian and an orange-meme historian. Even though Obeyesekere is Sri Lakan, he was arguing for a universal practical rationality on the part of the natives. He maintained, with considerable evidence, that the natives did what common sense and practical rationality would do--the same kind of practical rationality you and I might use. As a theorist sympathetic with Obeyesekere's orange-meme historiography put it:

The actions of the islanders toward the English can be explained in ways that are perfectly understandable in human terms [i.e., universal terms] without recourse to any structuralist [or poststructuralist] cultural theory. On Hawaii, the English were more warmly received from the outset, but a killing at the point of first contact taught the islanders the power and menace of the strangers. In both cases, once it became clear to the natives that the English were only visitors and not conquerors, things improved to the point where something like normal diplomatic relations between people from such divergent backgrounds could be established [because they share to various degrees the same universal world]. This is the commonsense view, so derided by [Sahlins, Dening, etc.], to which all the evidence clearly points. Why have structuralists been so reluctant to accept it? (88)

      "By 'structuralist,' of course, he means structuralism and especially poststructuralism, both of which agree that the world is not the sum of facts, but the sum of facts and interpretations (even if they overdo the latter). The orange meme wants to argue for one world of common facts, which the scientific historian can discover; the green meme wants to argue for a pluralistic world of irreducible interpretations, which the postmodern historian must co-create. (The integral approach insists on both, as we have seen, and has a specific methodology which includes both--see below.)

     "Obeyesekere, as the good orange-meme historian, even has a perfectly good, commonsense explanation for why Island natives ate the visitors: as with so many tribes, the Islanders had ecologically depleted and despoiled the surrounding areas, and cannibalism was one of the few sources they had of protein. They were being perfectly rational in response to circumstances. And suggesting otherwise is simply patronizing, Eurocentric, racist nonsense. The very claim of 'Otherness' and 'heterogeneity' of cultures, constantly mouthed by postmodernists from Edward Said to Lyotard, is just a thinly disguised new form of imperialism, says Obeyesekere and his supporters.

      "Yeow. Well, you can see the battle lines here. Yet once again, I want to suggest that both the orange and green approaches have important points that need to be incorporated into any truly integral historiography. They are both half-right, half-wrong--the constant refrain of the integralist."

     Carla Fuentes's diminutive size was obscured by an energy aura that seemed about the size of a standard Mercedes. She continued to sizzle across the stage, never really touching down.

      "As we have seen, the orange scientific historian is correct that there is a world of sensorimotor facts that are independent of any particular human mind. (Third tier would claim that although they are independent of human minds, they are not independent of Mind or Spirit, but that is another topic! [See 'On the Nature of a Post-Metaphysical Spirituality,' posted on this site.]) There are trillions of sensorimotor facts that pre-existed the emergence of humanity--the existence of atoms, stars, molecules, planets, galaxies, most forms of plant and animal life--and those dimensions of reality continue to exist with or without us (although holons at those levels mutually co-create each other; see SES). And when we humans behave in the sensorimotor world, we leave material artifacts that are also factual, even if those facts have information embedded in them that can only be seen from higher levels of development.

     "Thus, for example, I might write a book. The book itself is a material object that can be investigated scientifically--it weighs this many grams, it was printed on this date by this publishing house, it was bought by this person, it was sold to this person, the author died on this date, he was buried in this spot, 22 people attended his funeral, his ashes were scattered at this location, his book went on to sell 124,000 copies, it was translated into 14 foreign languages, and so on, and so on, and so on. And orange scientific historiography has always tried to stay as close to those facts as possible, which is fine--and a very important part of the story.

      "But the meaning of the book? The actual meaning of what the author wrote? Ooops. No amount of science will or can tell you that. That is an interpretative affair, an affair of hermeneutics, an affair of cultural backgrounds, linguistic practices, individual and cultural meanings, values, intentions, motivations. And none of those exist independently of the specific human minds perceiving them. And the green-meme historian knows this. That part of history is an interpretive affair, and we do not discover interpretations, we make them or co-create them. [See 'Integral Art and Literary Theory, chaps. 4 and 5, The Eye of Spirit .]

      "In other words, much of culture--and therefore cultural anthropology, ethnology, and history in general--is composed of texts. Not just books, but any and all communications that demand interpretation, which is to say, all communication: symbols, signs, rituals, celebrations, utterances, speech behavior, fantasies, visions, rites of passage, everyday communication, simple talking, story telling, motivations, intentions, you name it: open your mouth and somebody has to interpret what the hell you are saying. Linguistic intersubjectivity is a major carrier of this interpretive demand, so much so that Derrida went a bit overboard and claimed, ' There is nothing outside of the text! ' Well, there are all sorts of things outside of linguistic interpretation, but nothing that is finally outside of interpretation, because the Left-Hand quadrants go all the way down, and even atomic holons are interpreting each other. But that does not deny the existence of the Right-Hand aspects, which are objective events in spacetime that are more-or-less open to scientific scrutiny.

      "But scientific scrutiny is only half the story. Not just what does it do, but what does it mean? Scientific historiography can tell you much of the former, but hermeneutic historiography addresses the latter. Both are important; neither can be dismissed. But hermeneutics is clearly the more difficult half of the discipline, because it is dialogical, not just monological. Nevertheless, just because it is difficult, slippery, sloppy, and sliding, doesn't mean interpretation can be tossed out as so much postmodern trash. Interpretation is an intrinsic part of the Kosmos at all levels, and there is no escaping that particular fact. Moreover, different mentalities will interpret the same event in diametrically different ways--aye, there's the rub.

      "Now, given that interpretations are built into history because they are built into the Kosmos at all levels, there are several ways to proceed. If you had to pick one insight that defines postmodernism, it is that we do not merely perceive the world, we interpret it (and therefore co-create it)--an insight that can be traced to Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dilthey, Heidegger, and down to today with Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard and crew. Moreover, different people in different times and places have created different interpretations of the world--have created different worldviews. So, given that inescapable situation, how do we proceed? How do we proceed in science, in philosophy, in historiography, and so on? Given the multiple mess that is culture--given the rambunctious plurality of worldviews --how do we even begin to understand the Other(s)?

      "The Enlightenment, of course, basically gave us orange science, economics, and liberalism, all of which, in their early forms, shared orange's belief in a simple, monological, universal world, a world of sensorimotor facts, and thus the issue of multiple worldviews simply did not come up. What orange science did, once it emerged and broke free from mythic membership and the blue meme, was to take its newly discovered formal rationality and use it to investigate the sensorimotor world. Now it so happens that the fundamentals of the sensorimotor world, the world of empirical facts, are indeed universal. Diamond, cut, glass, yada yada yada. Enlightenment science therefore set out to free the world from mythic superstitions about sensory facts, and for the most, it succeeded brilliantly. Its positive accomplishments simply cannot be overrated or over-praised.

      "But look how much orange science was leaving out! By sticking to sensorimotor or Right-Hand occasions, it was leaving out all the interior domains--consciousness, introspection, interpretations, worldviews, and so on. It would have been fine if empirical science simply said, 'Our methods cannot reach those important domains, so we will remain silent about them.' But science went one step further slipped into scientism by saying, 'Those domains do not exist because our limited, partial, idiotically narrow methods can't reach them.' Well, okay, it didn't exactly say that, did it? But that is exactly what it did--it denied the existence of the interiors altogether. And there was the real downside of the Enlightenment.

      "The green-meme was the first to spot this catastrophe, and the first to really notice that the universe is a world of interpretations, not merely facts. And thus, as we were saying, where do you go from there?

      "There are two major courses of action that you can take in the face of the multiple interpretations that do indeed constitute our world, and the postmodern world took both of them: pluralism and genealogy. The former was descriptive, the latter developmental.

      "Pluralism--or pluralistic relativism--simply means that the interpretations that any person or any culture makes about the world should be judged by their own standards and criteria. A 'meta-narrative'--which is a very bad thing, if you don't know--is defined as any account of an Other that ascribes to that Other something other than the Other would ascribe to itself. That's perfectly clear, eh?" The audience all laughed.

      "In other words, metanarratives are 'bad' in the sense that we really shouldn't impose our interpretations on others--i.e., on the Other. You look at a Van Gogh painting, you see angels of light descending on nature, I see a swaying wheat field. How dare you say that your interpretation is correct? And worse, how dare you take your fucking armies and invade my territory just so you can shove your interpretation of the world down my throat? This is called imperialism by any other name.

      "I mean that point very seriously, friends. How are you to say your interpretation is better than mine? This is really the essence of the first major path through postmodernity: interpretations are inescapable, and all interpretations have an equal right to existence. Pluralism, relativism, and egalitarianism go hand in hand down this particular, and very important, road of postmodernism. This is also, you might note, by far the most popular postmodern route. Names associated with pluralistic relativism include Derrida, Lyotard, aspects of later Wittgenstein, Michel de Certeau, Edward Said, Richard Rorty, Stanley Fish, and so on.

      "The second major path through the post-Enlightenment, postmodern world--that is, the world in which both facts and interpretations are irreducible--is the genealogical. Now the first major approach, the pluralistic, is basically a type of hermeneutic across space: you find an Other--another text, another person, another culture--and you attempt to describe it from within, you attempt to understand it, you treat it with respect, care, and concern. You do not impose your interpretations or your judgments on the Other.

     "The second major approach to postmodernism does all of that, plus one more thing : it follows the Other not just across space but across time. It attempts to understand the Other as the Other unfolds in history, and it attempts to see if there are any patterns in that temporal unfolding. This is genealogy in the broadest sense.

     "If you're curious, and I just know you are, there are two major subsets of genealogy: ruptures and development. The ruptures school, associated with Bachelard, Canguilhem, early Kuhn, and early Foucault, sees the various stages of development as being almost entirely random, with no connecting logic--only ruptures--between them. These changes don't really merit the word 'stages'--they are simply shifting epistemes, unanchored in any reality or any developmental patterns. This rupture genealogy actually shares much with the first road of pluralistic relativism, and both of those schools are generally comfortable with each other.

     "The second genealogical subset is the developmental: it follows the various stages or waves of the Other across spacetime, and it looks carefully at those waves to see if there are any patterns in the unfolding.

     "Now, as with any of these schools, there is a 'good' way and a 'bad' way to do developmental genealogy. The bad way--which almost all the original genealogists followed, of course--was to take your interpretation of the world, imagine that it is the highest stage of development in the entire universe, and then read the historical development of the Other as a series of halting lurches toward to your own glorious stage. In the wake of the Enlightenment, of course, science was thought to be the pinnacle of progress, and so most of the early developmentalists tended to judge how 'high' or 'low' a culture was by how far away from Newton it stood. Coupled with a wacky interpretation of Darwinism, these social evolutionists did basically everything you do not want to do when you do developmental studies. They stood outside the cultures of the Other, took their own favorite interpretations of the world text (i.e., positivistic, reductionistic, Right-Hand only, a demented flatland Darwinism, egoic-rationality is the highest stage, there are no important altered states, etc. etc. etc.), and then used that ridiculous scale as an absolute, universal scale of human development against which all Others could be judged. Well duh....

     "No present-day, postmodern developmentalist does any of that, although their critics always assume they do. 'Good' genealogy, rather, consists of an attempt to hermeneutically understand the worldview of any group of people in terms that they themselves would agree with . The first step in good genealogy consists of an interpretive entering into the worldview of those whose history and lineage is being delicately traced. The worldview or worldviews are then hermeneutically described over time, with each wave always put in terms that the individuals themselves feel reflects their perceptions sympathetically (or, if they are deceased, that they would likely accept, as far as can be determined). This is NOT a metanarrative in the Lyotard sense because it does not ascribe to the Other anything significant that the Other would not ascribe to itself. This is one of the many reasons that good genealogy falls under the rubric of postmodernism.

     "There has been approximately one century of good genealogical studies. What they have found is that, in this pluralistic universe of multiple worldviews, some worldviews actually develop over time , and this development can be traced. Not everything in human consciousness or culture evolves, but some of it does, and any approach that claims to be integral will of course include these developmental and evolutionary currents.

      "Let me give one example of a good genealogy. Carol Gilligan, in a wonderful book called In a Different Voice , examined a group of women's attitudes toward abortion, among other things. She discovered, through careful dialogical research grounded in mutual understanding--that is, she talked with the subjects about how they felt and recorded their responses in terms that the subjects themselves agreed with --she discovered that most women start at a stage that was focused on the self and its immediate needs. That worldview, if it changed or developed over time, developed into a worldview that focused on helping others that are close to the person--Gilligan called this the 'care' stage. If that worldview changed over time, it changed into a worldview that was concerned with helping not just those close to the person, but all others who need help--Gilligan called this the 'universal care' stage. Everybody at those three stages agreed with her descriptions of them. Nothing was imposed on the women; their own views were simply dialogically drawn out.

      "When Gilligan then looked at the overall results, she noticed that the women's moral responses to her questions unfolded or developed in three waves or stages: selfish to care to universal care. Gilligan herself called these 'hierarchical stages.' Why 'hierarchical'? Because each stage transcended and included its predecessors--but not vice versa. That is, each stage possessed all the capacities of its predecessor, plus something new. Each stage was an organic, nested growth, and thus, each was indeed deeper or higher in its moral capacity. When a woman moves from the selfish stage to the care stage, she can care about herself but also about others: she has everything found at the selfish stage PLUS an added capacity that the selfish stage lacks. Likewise, when she moves from the care stage to the universal care stage, she has added yet another capacity: she can care for herself, for those close to her, and for all others around the world who need help.

     "That, of course, is a nested hierarchy of growth. Having discovered that organic pattern of growth--at least for that group--Gilligan could then indeed make some moral judgments about the degree of development of individuals in the group, but those judgments are inherent in the responses of the group, they are not imposed on the women by Gilligan--they are inherent in the hermeneutic of the subjects themselves, not imposed from without. The developmental flow pattern, to be authentic, must grow from within and be elucidated from within. Further research then determines just how many different groups of women follow that growth pattern. In some cases, we find that developmental sequences are limited to one subculture; in others, to a large culture of many subgroups; and in some, the developmental patterns appear to be universal--but that claim is ALWAYS subservient to further research data. No responsible developmentalist has EVER imposed a developmental scheme on any culture without appropriate interior hermeneutic research supporting those suggestions (although virtually every critic claims they have, which frankly tells us a bit more about the critic than about the developmentalists).

     "But, of course, notice: once Gilligan has found that there are three stages of moral unfolding for these women, wouldn't a woman at stage 1 rather indignantly deny that there are higher stages? And since she is denying higher stages, isn't Gilligan's assertion that this stage-1 woman is at a lower stage than stage 2 and stage 3--isn't that assertion a metanarrative in the bad sense, because the women herself does not agree with that categorization of her experience? No, Gilligan's judgment is not a metanarrative: Gilligan has simply pointed out that if the stage-1 response changes, then in every case she found, it changed to a stage-2 type of response (it went from selfish to care). The stage-1 woman, who has NOT changed to stage 2, therefore has not had the experience of stage 2 that would allow her to authentically deny stage 2's validity in terms acceptable to those at stage 2. In other words, the stage-1 woman is actually committing an invalid metanarrative in that she is ascribing to stage 2 things that stage 2 does not ascribe to itself. Every stage-2 woman, on the other hand, has experienced stage 1, and thus the stage-2 woman can, in a non-metanarrative way, say that stage 2 is higher, wider, deeper than stage 1. In other words, the denial of hierarchical stages is itself an invalid metanarrative. From Ferrer to Tarnas to Hickman to Delores to Beliot, you can see these invalid and inauthentic metanarratives parading as sensitive, caring, empathic resonances, whereas they are hermeneutic violence by any other name.

     "Okay, fine, but why even do these types of studies? Well, here's one answer. I don't know about you, but as a woman, when I first read In a Different Voice , I was checking my responses as fast I could. What the women said made sense to me, and how Gilligan summarized it all made sense to me--and by God or by Goddess, I wanted to be stage 3! I did not want to be stage 1 or stage 2. I was glad that many, maybe most, of my responses were of the universal care stage--stage 3--but in several instances I was shocked to find care and even selfish responses dominating. And by analyzing my responses with the developmental scale Carol discovered, I tell you, I grew up a little bit just reading that book.

      "So that's one of the major reasons that we do developmental studies. Folks, if you want transformation and growth, you have to know which to grow, yes? Organic developmental studies can suggest a lay of the higher land, thus helping orient us to our own higher potentials, or at least suggesting various types of higher potentials. Of course, we have to hold all these maps very, very lightly--but what else is new? 'Holding lightly' does not mean 'toss on the trash can.' Moreover, there are exceptions to every rule and every scheme, and you do not have to be involved in pigeonholing or rigid categorization to find useful hints in carefully researched organic maps. We keep calling these 'organic' because, like all natural organisms--from amoeba to roses to robins--they show growth and development.

      "But here's the other thing, the incredibly important thing, that organic genealogy does: it gets us out of the dead-end of pluralism and extreme postmodernism. Genealogy rescues us from pluralistic relativism, from flatland egalitarianism, from the deconstructive postmodernism that is the epidemic of our age. Genealogy is the cure for the postmodern nightmare that has ruined not only academia but much of culture at large. In short, genealogy is the cure for pluralism.

      "And I'm sure you can see exactly how it does so, yes?

      "Take Gilligan's example. The pluralistic postmodernist would claim that, apart from such obvious injunctions as 'don't harm another,' all individual and cultural perspectives are essentially equal, and thus all of the women's responses are equally valid, because who are we to judge what is higher or lower? Who are we to take an abstract standard and impose it on these women, saying that some of their responses are lower or higher than others? Let all the stages run rampant, let all the responses be given an equal respect in this glorious egalitarian world.

      "Well, we have had three decades of the selfish stage running rampant, haven't we? Boomeritis is exactly part of the result. The reason that genealogy is the cure for pluralism is that delicately done research on cultural patterns as they unfold over time suggests various organic patterns that the culture itself announces (which is why this is not an exteriorly imposed metanarrative). These flow patterns suggest judgments inherent in the cultural unfolding itself (and inherent in various patterns of social learning), patterns that are not imposed from without, and thus these natural, internal, organic patterns help us establish a moral compass in the midst of the otherwise flatland, rudderless display that is pluralistic relativism. Moreover, these unfolding holistic patterns show us how to actually arrive at a wave of consciousness development where all stances can be treated fairly, impartially, worldcentricly--which is the actual, stated aim of authentic postmodernism anyway.

Part I Part II Part III