Part III

Part I Part II Part III

      "Okay, let's take a breath and see where we are. We are looking at the historical reactions to the orange Enlightenment and especially its unfortunate downsides. We are at the point where the green meme started to emerge and noticed that interpretations and the subjective component of reality (or consciousness itself) are just as important, sometimes more important, than the objective-factual world. Green, of course, is also called the 'subjectivistic self,' precisely because it is so sensitive to these interior dimensions.

      "This post-Enlightenment, post-orange, post-modern world found that, in place of a single universal world of sensorimotor facts, there was (also) a multitude of worlds of different interpretations. In the wake of that somewhat shocking realization, there were two major responses: take the multiple interpretations as given and irreducible, with none inherently superior to the others. This was the standard green-meme approach (that is, the worldview as it evolved in the green structure)--an approach we are calling pluralistic relativism, and an approach that came to define postmodernism itself. Of course, it also became the home of the MGM and boomeritis... and all the nightmares therein. But its positive and healthy aspects should not therefore be forgotten or ignored.

      "The second approach agreed with the first in that there is not a single pregiven world but a multitude of pluralistic interpretations. But it went one step further and organically traced those interpretations over time . And what it found was that in many cases, those interpretations arranged themselves along a nested hierarchy of growth, an organic developmental unfolding of increasingly encompassing waves. In other words, some (not all) aspects of worldviews organically developed over time, with senior worldviews transcending but including their juniors--just as organisms transcended but included cells, which transcended but included molecules, which transcended but included atoms.

     "These organic growth hierarchies were still pluralistic in many important ways, because each stage or wave was seen to be a crucial ingredient in the overall spiral of development. All of the pluralistic worldviews were seen to be fundamentally important in the overall unfolding, and they all continued to play a crucial role at any subsequent stage. Unlike the early developmentalists, who saw each 'higher' wave getting rid of the nasty 'lower' wave, good genealogy discovered that all waves remain crucial in overall development and remain functional in all subsequent waves. Each wave was therefore fully honored and embraced, just as it was, AND some waves were seen to be more encompassing, more inclusive, more caring, and more compassionate than others: self to care to universal care, for example. The waves of development were waves of increasing care and consciousness.

     "That second approach was organic genealogy in its many forms. Not only was organic genealogy the way out of pluralism, it was essentially the second-tier approach to postmodernism, the yellow-turquoise road through the postmodern world (and thus it was, initially, much less common than the green-meme path). It was a constructive postmodernism in that it transcended and included green: it accepted and embraced the pluralism wonderfully freed by the green meme, but then, instead of letting the fragments run riot in a rampage of despair, it wove them together--based on an interior hermeneutic of their own accord--into an integral spectrum of consciousness, a nested holarchy of growth and inclusion that embraced each and every worldview on its own terms, but laced together into a tapestry of increasing care and consciousness.

     "Second-tier or integral postmodernism could succeed at this task because development itself was increasingly understood to be a staggeringly complex affair. It was not that there was one line of development that clunked along through a ladder of linear stages, judgmentally jettisoning previous ones like icky worn-out skin. Rather, there were multiple developmental lines or streams running through the various levels or waves of development, so that individuals and cultures were always a complex amalgam of some capacities being highly developed, some that were only of medium development, and others that showed little or no development at all. Not to mention that authentic altered states are available at virtually every stage (see below). Thus, 'ranking' a person or culture as higher or lower along a single monolithic scale is impossible (which was the crude, if pioneering, mistake made by virtually all early developmentalists, from Joachim of Flora to Auguste Comte). This likewise means that just because one culture exists later in time than another does not necessarily mean that the former is 'higher' in all or even most ways. Earlier cultures could have excelled in some lines and in some states (and we have abundant evidence that many of them did)--but you don't have to get into a PMS snit and trash the many positive gains of the Enlightenment to make that simple point!

      "Historically, we see this second-tier road through the postmodern world in the works of scholars such as Schelling, James Mark Baldwin (America's greatest psychologist), the remarkable Jean Gebser (pioneer in worldview genealogy), Jürgen Habermas (the world's greatest living philosopher), aspects of the late Foucault (as he began to move beyond rupture genealogy toward organic genealogy), Aurobindo (the world's greatest philosopher-sage)..." Carla paused and looked up. "Have I used enough superlatives to tilt the case my way?" Fuentes kept laughing to herself. For some reason Kim started laughing too, and I'm not sure I understood any of it. "And down to today with Robert Kegan, Carol Gilligan, Bill Torbert, Jane Loevinger, Jan Sinnott, Jenny Wade, Susanne Cook-Greuter, Clare Graves, Spiral Dynamics, and many, many others.

      "Okay, with all of that we have come full circle, or come back, anyway, to Sahlins and Obeyesekere. Remember those guys? Natives, James Cook, a Friday night luau featuring the Captain's liver? I hope all of you realize that this debate is frightfully complex and sophisticated, and that I am trading on the loosest of the generalizations when I say this, but here it is in a nutshell: Obeyesekere is basically representing an orange-science historiography, and Sahlins, a green-pluralism historiography. Since both of those are first-tier memes, neither can see that they are both essentially correct--or, as we always say, both are half-right, half-wrong. Of course there are a set of sensorimotor facts involved, which, as facts, are not open to very much interpretation--they either did or did not occur as generally described (e.g., exactly what date did the Lono and Ku festivals start and end? How many were in Cook's party the night he was murdered? Where did it happen? Who did it? With what?) It turns out that Obeyesekere, by a very careful, very impressive reading of these types of sensorimotor facts--facts that in most cases neither side contests--is able to poke several very large holes in the specific interpretations of Sahlins, which he does not convincingly counter. But Sahlins's general overview position--that the natives had a different worldview than the European practical rationality--is so persuasive that in those areas he is clearly the most convincing historian, and the majority of those following the debate seem to agree.

      "Evidently, both of them are onto an important piece of the puzzle. Sahlins, as a good green-postmodernist, actually smuggles in a ton of universal-orange science facts while denying the validity of universal-orange science altogether; and Obeyesekere actually argues for the irreducibility of the interpretive worldview of the Other, even as he sneaks his own orange interpretation into the natives' minds when they aren't looking. But we needn't go over that ground again: any truly integral, second-tier historiography would consciously, openly, transparently use a judicious combination of facts and interpretations, brought together by an integral methodology that specifically allocates a space for each in numerous, complex interactions.

      "Now, in this simple overview, I have briefly used the 8 major interpretive schemes elucidated by Spiral Dynamics. We feel that if Sahlins used the red-meme interpretation for most of the natives' actions, they would make much more sense. As it is, Sahlins attempts to reconstruct from scratch a type of old-fashioned structuralist mythology that just doesn't fit with the sensorimotor facts--and remember, interpretations are not fully bound to, or reducible to, sensorimotor facts, but they must mesh with them in a general fashion or nobody would accept the interpretation in the first place. No mythic system whatsoever maintains that in the earth realm apples fall upward and men give birth. Some of Sahlins's interpretations of the latter ilk--badly askance with the facts, which Obeyesekere skillfully demonstrates and Sahlins cannot adequately defend.

      "We here at IC think it would be different using a more sophisticated genealogical array of interpretive schemes, such as the work of Clare Graves and Spiral Dynamics. But we certainly don't insist on this particular model! A historian might find useful any number of interpretive possibilities. But if that historian wishes to escape the insuperable difficulties and contradictions of being merely an orange-science historian or a green-pluralist historian, then the only viable way that has been demonstrated so far is to include--in ADDITION TO orange facts and green interpretations--a second-tier genealogical array of interpretive development.

     "In a book called Integral Psychology , one of our colleagues here at IC assembled over 100 genealogical maps of consciousness unfolding, taken from the premodern, modern, and postmodern sources (including those of Spiral Dynamics, Bob Kegan, Jane Loevinger, Plotinus, Aurobindo, Lady Tsogyal, St. Teresa....). What is so astonishing about all of them is a very general agreement as to the broad contours of consciousness flowering, especially if we hold these maps lightly , and see their unfolding waves as simply orienting generalizations in this blooming, buzzing confusion that we call the world. At the very least, these 100 maps offer the historian a rich smorgasboard of interpretive schemes that might help him or her help make more sense of various Others in space and time, as long as these are taken as suggestions, not rigid categorizations.

      "Okay, then! Let me conclude by telling you our basic suggestions for an integral historiography.

      "We call this approach, as many of you know, an 'all-quadrants, all-levels, all-lines, all-states, all-types' approach. And we suggest that individuals adopt these features more or less in the order they are listed: that is, start with 'all quadrants' and see if that makes sense to you; then add 'all levels'--or add the major genealogical levels or waves of consciousness (which are also some of the major ways that human beings interpret the world), and see if that makes sense to you; if so, then add the 'all lines' aspect--namely, the idea that there isn't just a single scale of genealogical unfolding: there are numerous developmental lines or streams proceeding through the various levels or waves); and then, if you want, add 'all states'--a person can have a peak experience or altered state at virtually any stage of development (although those states will then be interpreted through the lens of the stages of development that are present); and then add 'all types,' not in the sense of rigidly categorizing people into typologies, but in the sense that, if you do use typologies, make sure you try to choose among as wide a variety as possible so as to marginalize as few as possible.

      "Well, that's a bit much, perhaps? Then just start with the quadrants. Let me give you a quick run through the quadrants, giving examples of each, to show what is involved in an actual methodology. As many of you know, the four quadrants (the inside and outside of the individual and collective) are just a variation on the 'Big Three'--or the three dimensions of reality registered by virtually all known cultures: the beautiful, the good, and the true--that is, a subjective-aesthetic dimension of 'I,' a moral dimension of 'we,' and an objective dimension of 'it'--art, morals, and science, for example. These three dimensions are the realm of 1 ^st person, 2 ^nd person, and 3 ^rd person--I, we, and it. (We include 'we' and 'you' in second person to emphasize mutuality.) The four quadrants simply point out that the 'it' or 3 ^rd person dimension also has singular and plural forms--or it and its (giving us an I, we, it, and its quadrant).

     [You can see a simple diagram of this in the Introduction to CW7, posted on this site, and it is fully elucidated in SES, summarized in A Brief History of Everything , and hyper-summarized in A Theory of Everything. ]

      "Now, most traditional western historiography, since the Enlightenment, has been done by the orange-meme, which, with its scientific inclination, attempted to focus mostly on presenting 'just the facts' as they unfolded historically. When it came to the low-level interpretations required by this approach, these historians simply used their orange-meme interpretations (of 'practical rationality'--e.g., Obeyesekere) without realizing that they were merely interpretations, and that there were other, sometimes more legitimate or appropriate, interpretations of those facts.

     "Still, this general approach has its place, because it focuses on the Right-Hand quadrants, or the objective, sensorimotor aspects of all occasions (and clearly the Right-Hand quadrants are crucial ingredients of any integral approach). In the Upper-Right quadrant, this approach focuses on describing, as accurately as possible, the behavior of individuals, and any objective factors that impinge on an individual's behavior. In the Lower-Right quadrant, it focuses on the behavior of objective systems--from social systems to ecosystems to techno-economic bases of production to concrete modes of communication. This is the classic field of objective social sciences, physical anthropology, archeology, and so on, approached with tools ranging from dynamic systems theory to chaos and complexity theories to social data research techniques. It attempts to present 'just the facts' when it comes to social systems and their interactions with individuals, ecosystems, geophysical systems, and other objective realities. When it comes to historiography, these Right-Hand approaches attempt to describe individual and collective behavior over time, and to do so as empirically as possible.

     "Classic Right-Hand approaches to anthropology and history have discovered, for example, that in the Lower-Right quadrant, humanity generally developed from foraging to horticultural to agrarian to industrial to informational. Those basic anthropological facts and their historical order are not contested (even by green pluralists, although they would not use the word 'developed,' believing instead that these are all equivalently valued modes, although they contradictorily devalue the industrial). The point is that, in the Lower Right, these unfolding modes of production are a crucial ingredient of humanity's trek through time, so important that the various forms of historical materialism (Marxism and Neomarxism) have made the Lower Right the single greatest determinant of the other features of history (and therefore humanity). If you look at recent statistical analyses of, say, the percentages of each societal type--foraging, horticultural, herding, maritime, agrarian, industrial, informational--that engage in various cultural practices (from bride price to war, from games of chance to circumcision, from female deities to male deities), you can't help but be struck by how powerfully the Lower-Right quadrant affects the consciousness of culture and of individuals: you can see how Marx was led to state that it is not the consciousness of individuals that determines their social-economic conditions but the social conditions that determine their consciousness. Again, he overstates the case. Still, although we at IC do not give such a privileged or dominant position to the Lower Right, it is clearly 'one-fourth' of the story, so to speak, and needs to be fully included and honored in any integral approach. Indeed, the influence of the 'base'--the Lower-Right quadrant--is really quite stunning. It is, perhaps, the single strongest determinant of the average level of consciousness in any given society. Classic Lower-Right approaches include Comte, Feuerbach, Marx, Lenski.

     "Numerous historians continue giving wonderful accounts of this quadrant and its important role in history (even if most them continue to over-value it). See, for example, the rollicking Guns, Germs, and Steel . That's for the Lower Right. As for a reminder of the importance of the Upper-Right quadrant in historiography: did you know that the Enlightenment might never have occurred without the high caffeine content of the coffee that became wildly popular at the time? Check it out:

     "As important as the Right-Hand paths and methods are, there have always been approaches to understanding the Kosmos--and humanity's place in it--that investigate not just the exteriors and their behavior but the interiors and their meaning. These Left-Hand approaches attempt to understand the interiors: consciousness, meaning, interpretation, depth, the within, values, intentions.... This is generally the province of the interpretive, introspective, hermeneutic, and phenomenological cultural studies. As we have seen, the major approaches here have been pluralistic relativism and organic genealogy. Both of these approaches share a pluralistic orientation, in that they agree that there is not a single, pregiven world of monovalent interpretations that are universally true for all peoples. Pluralistic relativism claims that there are a multitude of pluralistic ultimates, each more or less equally valid, with no universal or cross-cultural metanarratives available that can pronounce on judgments of worth. Developmental or organic genealogy agrees that that is often the case, but points out that substantial research suggests that many of these worldviews themselves developed over time, and that within the hermeneutic horizon of the worldviews, they themselves suggest or agree that some are more developed, some are less developed, and the more developed themselves legitimately make normative judgments about their less developed juniors. This gives us a scale of adjudication--not all views are of equal worth in all circumstances--that allows us to escape the performative contradictions that plague the pluralistic relativism schools.

      "But, you see, you can use the four quadrants themselves whether you are a pluralistic relativist or a developmental genealogist, because the four quadrants are four equal dimensions present in all occasions. When it comes to just the quadrants themselves, there is no hierarchy or ranking involved, because all four are irreducible and crucial ingredients of any event. All cultures have access to first, second, and third person realities, and the four quadrants simply remind us to take all of those dimensions into account when trying to understand any event, human or otherwise. This is why even green postmodernists are very comfortable using the quadrants, which is great. And certainly a move toward a more integral approach.

      "To return to the Left-Hand approaches to historiography. These approaches stress the importance of including the interiors, even if, like their Right-Hand counterparts, they often go too far and dramatically overemphasize the importance of their quadrants. In fact, sometimes the Left-Hand approaches go so far that they deny the existence of the Right-Hand realities altogether! As we have seen, most forms of (extreme) postmodernism claim that there are 'no facts, only interpretations'--that is, no Right-Hand dimensions, only Left-Hand. The classic postmodern move actually denies all quadrants except the Lower Left --it denies all realities except cultural interpretations ('the social construction of reality')--it even attempts to reduce individual subjective consciousness (the 'death of the subject') to nothing but a play of the vast impersonal cultural system of social-linguistic signifiers and/or nondiscursive power formations (an approach which bizarrely slides into a Lower-Right type of collective-exterior approach--but that's another story [see Sidebar E ]).

     "Of course, these postmodernists--like their counterparts on the Lower Right, the historical materialists--had good reasons to get so excited about the role of their favorite quadrant: the Lower Left (or cultural background) is an extremely important, unavoidable, irreducible dimension of any occasion, and its has a profound effect on individuals, on the course of history, and on our understanding of it. But to incorporate that profound realization we needn't go to extremes and deny the existence of the other quadrants or attempt to reduce them to cultural interpretations. What we need to do, rather, is simply realize that the world is not merely the sum total of exterior facts, but also includes interior consciousness, intersubjectivity, meanings, values, and intentions--and their own way, their existence is as 'factual'--as ontologically real and irreducible--as that of objective facts. These 'subjective facts' need to be placed alongside 'objective facts' as irreducible realities in the Kosmos.

     "Classic investigators of the Upper-Left quadrant (the interior of the individual, or the spectrum of consciousness as it appears in an individual) include Plotinus, Augustine, Freud, Jung, Buddha, Asanga and Vasubandhu, William James, Clare Graves, Abe Maslow.... Classic investigators of the Lower-Left quadrant (cultural context, background, group identities, hermeneutics, interpretation) include Nietzsche, Dilthey, Heidegger, Gebser, Taylor, Kuhn....

     "An 'all-quadrant' historiography therefore proceeds by conscientiously attempting to acknowledge, investigate, and elucidate the realities in all four quadrants of existence: the intentional, behavioral, cultural, and social, using the techniques and methodologies that have, for the most part, already been developed by specialists in each of those quadrants. For the Right-Hand quadrants: the individual and social sciences--behaviorism, empirical-analytic measures, monological surveys, statistical analyses, and the extensive variety of evolutionary and systems sciences (including chaos and complexity theories); for the Left-Hand quadrants: the hermeneutic, introspective, phenomenological, intersubjective, dialogical, interpretive, and genealogical methodologies. See, for example, Brief History and The Eye of Spirit for an elucidation of many of these suggestions.

     "So that's the 'all-quadrant' part. If you are comfortable with that, you might decide to add the 'all-level' part. This is simply adding a genealogical or organic-developmental aspect to the quadrants. You don't have to do this, it goes without saying, yes? You can use pluralistic relativism and local hermeneutics for your interpretive dimensions--you can be 'all-quadrant' without adding 'all-level.' But we feel that a substantial amount of evidence warrants the addition of a developmental component to the quadrants--we believe, actually, that all four quadrants evolve (or 'tetra-evolve' together in mutual interaction), and that acknowledging these organic patterns adds considerable richness to historiographical interpretations.

     "Moving from 'all-quadrants' to 'all-quadrants, all-levels' is often the hardest part for many people, and we try to be very sensitive in deciding when to suggest this move. Almost nobody has any trouble with all-quadrants; most people, in fact, immediately see their importance and move to use them right away. But levels or waves is more difficult--and yes, frankly, it is green that usually resists the notion of levels, while yellow intuitively embraces it from the start. (Recall that research suggests that the intuitive understanding the hierarchical Spiral is one of the defining characteristics of yellow and second-tier in general.)

      "Based on research to date, it certainly seems that some developmental levels are universal. For example, in the cognitive line of development, as far as we can tell, children everywhere develop images, then word-symbols, then concepts, then rules. We know of no exceptions to this general sequence (it is cross-cultural and universal). This sequence emerges in an order that cannot be altered by social conditioning or environmental circumstances (because each senior level includes as components the elements of the junior, which is why you cannot skip stages--just as you cannot go from atoms to cells and skip molecules).

      "Likewise with the moral line of development. Infants begin their moral development at a type of preconventional stage, which means that they have not yet been socialized into their particular culture. This does not mean that infants show no moral capacity, only that it has not yet been given the form and structure of the local culture. As that begins to happen, children move from preconventional to conventional: they become socialized and conventionalized, often ending up in a type of conformist or group-bound ethics. IF they continue their growth (and not all do), they can move beyond some of their culture's norms and mores and become postconventional--they can norm the norms, reflect on their culture's ethics and decide whether or not they are worthy of embracing.

      "So when we say there are universals to the cognitive and moral lines of development, for example, we mean those very general sequences and waves, such as the ones I just described. We do not necessarily mean the specific details given those lines by specific researchers like Piaget and Kohlberg (there are, in fact, some problems with their formulations, although continued research clearly indicates that much of their work is still valid). I believe that it is of the utmost importance for 'good genealogy' that you take the loosest, most generalized approach possible to the levels and waves of development. When you are tying to make universal judgments--and you have no choice but to make universal judgments (even the anti-universal pluralists make numerous universal truth claims, as we have seen, only they try to hide theirs)--but when you are making universal judgments, the standards for doing so become extraordinarily high, because the potential costs of misjudgment are so high.

     "So that is why we at IC recommend (1) definitely continuing research into the detailed, specific, technical models of development, such as those offered by Clare Graves, Jane Loevinger, Susanne Cook-Greuter, Jenny Wade, Robert Kegan, William Torbert, James Mark Baldwin, Jan Sinnott, Carol Gilligan, Patricia Arlin, Cheryl Armon, and so on. But (2), when you are doing historiography, or when you are offering universal overviews of any sort, then use the most generalized developmental schema that you can--such as egocentric to ethnocentric to worldcentric, or impulsive to conformist to autonomous, or preconventional to conventional to postconventional, and so on. (Of course, you can use the more detailed stage models in a particular culture, but if and only if a reasonable amount of organic genealogy conducted in that culture has given you permission to do so.) Also, if you remember that a person at any stage of consciousness can have an altered state or peak experience of any of the transpersonal-spiritual realms, then there is no credible evidence that denies that some aspects of consciousness develop in a genealogical sequence.

     "Now that simple sequence--say, preconventional to conventional to postconventional--is enough to get you from 'all-quadrants' to 'all-quadrants, all-levels,' because now you can use that genealogy to realize that each of the basic waves has a very different worldview , with different values, different needs, different perceptions, different drives, and so on. This gives you something that mere hermeneutics and pluralism cannot: a scale of depth. And this is enough to rescue your entire approach from the self-contradictions of pluralistic relativism.

      "Once you have started using levels of development--and this, we believe, will help move your own center of gravity from green to yellow--then you might be more open to the specific research suggesting just which developmental scales are universal and which are bound to particular cultures. Some scales are clearly universal, or shared by all humans--we gave two examples; others are shared by all humans in a particular culture; others only in a particular subculture. Integral Psychology contains charts with over 100 developmental scales from premodern, modern, and postmodern sources. We feel that the general similarity in so many of these maps suggests a good-enough universal current of development running throughout humanity--a great River of Life, as it were--and that the various developmental models are each merely rough snapshots of this great River. All of the developmental models are limited because none of them can capture the River in all its rushing, roiling glory. But many of them are useful because they suggest various features of the River that can be universally seen. Exactly which of the details of the models are universal depends, in the last analysis, on actual genealogical research, which is why we make no specific universal claims unless research corroborates that. The two (very general) universal genealogies I gave above--for cognitive and moral development--are of this general sort, and so we feel justified in using those scales as we attempt hermeneutical understanding of the Other--any Other, at least on this planet!

      "I personally believe that the 8 major waves first outlined by Clare Graves do appear to be universal at this time, which is why we often use the Graves levels (and Spiral Dynamics) for a genealogical hermeneutic. But keep in mind that this is still only one index of development, and it does not deny the usefulness of dozens or even hundreds of other models, each of which might tell us something important about the great River. But the evidence suggests to me--and many other scholars--that the general waves discovered by Graves unfolded phylogenetically as well ontogenetically. As long as we self-consciously criticize these conceptions every time we apply them, then we are justified in moving forward in this genealogical hermeneutics.

      "Some scholars feel that all 8 Graves levels do not (yet) have enough evidence to warrant using them for a good-enough universal hermeneutic and historiography. They sometimes feel more comfortable with Jean Gebser's simpler genealogy: archaic, magic, mythic, rational, integral. Others feel comfortable with only the three, very general waves: preconventional, conventional, postconventional. All of those choices are okay with me, tell you the truth. The essential point is that, because only organic genealogy can overcome pluralism, then any of the above will serve you well enough in your quest for a more integral, more inclusive, more expansive historiography.

      "Once you are comfortable with levels, its easy to add lines (and thus go from 'all quadrants, all levels' to 'all quadrants, all levels, all lines'). If you have acknowledged waves, the streams part is easy. The simple point is that there is not a single, monolithic, universal ladder of development--a single scale against which all individuals and all cultures can be monologically judged as being 'higher' or 'lower.' That is exactly the core of bad genealogy and involves pretty much everything you want to avoid. So study those bad approaches well, kids--this is what you do NOT want to be when you grow up.

      "The constructive postmodern approach to genealogy consists of the realization that there are numerous developmental streams that move through the general waves of development in a relatively independent fashion. At this time, there appears to be at least two dozen developmental lines for which we have some sort of empirical evidence [see The Eye of Spirit and Integral Psychology ]. Accordingly, an individual can be at a fairly high level of development in some lines, medium in others, and lower in still others--all at the same time. Thus, overall development is a wildly individual and idiosyncratic affair, and there is little that is linear in about it.

      "Now add the concept of 'all states,' and you can see how truly nonlinear overall development is. A person at any level/wave/stage of development can have an altered state or peak experience. These peak experiences not only happen to most people at some time, they have been crucial motivators in many great historical events. Whether you see them as 'mere hallucinations' or glimpses into 'higher realms' (or both), you probably cannot understand history very well without them. From Joan of Arc to Rasputin, from Martin Luther King, Jr. to Moses, altered states have been primary motivators of humanity.

      "Lastly, and very quickly, 'all types.' Some typologies are vertical, and therefore often involve a type of developmental scale. If so, we include those in the 'all-levels' part. But many typologies are 'horizontal' and simply involve useful classifications of the types of character, gender orientation, style, inclinations, and so on, that are available to men and women. As usual, we really do need to be careful that these aren't used to pigeonhole people. At the same time, a good typology can be extremely useful in gaining various kinds of self-understanding. Think of the many good uses that have come from the Myers-Briggs classification, based on Jung's 4 major types (thinking, feeling, sensing, intuition). More recently, many people have found the Enneagram to be a very useful typology. In its horizontal form, it consists of 9 types that can be present at any of the major stages of development, so that, for example, you might be cognitive yellow 5, moral orange 9, and so on. [See A Theory of Everything for more on this.]

      "One of the most important typologies now in play is that of Carol Gilligan, who, in addition to outlining 3 general stages in the hierarchy of female development, suggested that men and women progress through the hierarchical stages of development with a different style or voice: men tend to be more agentic, using a logic of rights and justice; whereas women tend to be more relational, using a logic of care and responsibility. Frankly, although research clearly supports her 3 hierarchical stages, research supporting her claim on the male-female typology at each stage (autonomous versus relational) is very spotty (the latest research shows that 'in reporting moral reasoning, men use the terms of care and responsibility as often, or more often, than women'--pretty much the opposite of Gilligan's claims); but other research is more positive. In any event, since our motto is 'Follow the Evidence!,' we always try to let research decide these issues. What we do in the meantime is make sure that our model can accommodate the research. Should it support Gilligan's claims in this regard, then we include the Gilligan typology as being applicable to virtually every major stage of development: that is, males on average tend to develop through the hierarchical levels or waves of consciousness using somewhat more agentic moral responses, and women on average develop through the same hierarchical levels using more communal responses. As usual, the intra-gender variations are greater than the inter-gender variations, so there is a great deal of variability here. But many theorists--from Deborah Tannen to Lesa Powell to Belencki et al.--have found suggestive evidence that men and women do speak with a different voice, even if they develop through the same, basic, gender-neutral levels. Tracking this different voice in history would then be a good idea, right?

      "Okay, boys and girls, that's the overall picture: a quick summary of an integral model of historiography that is 'all quadrants, all levels, all lines, all states, all types.' You get the general picture, yes?"

Part I Part II Part III