PART I PART II Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 PART III Page 1 Page 2 PART IV Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 NOTES Notes 1-28 Notes 29-40 Notes41-63 PRINTER FRIENDLY Download in pdf format (451 KB)

     ⁴¹ Technically, when aspects of the inside-interiors of an "I" (which are governed by a particular internal agency) enter into networks of mutual exchange with other "I's," those exchanges are internal to a nexus-agency that is often isomorphic to the individual agency. I.e., the agency of the individual "I" and the nexus-agency of the "we" are isomorphic in important (but not all) ways. Each individual holon exists in networks of relationships with similar-depthed holons, and therefore the agency of the individual holon in the exchange network and the nexus-agency of the exchange network will share many similarities or "isomorphisms." Like exchanges with like, and thus the agency of both are "alike."

      E.g., a compound individual (whose interior center of gravity is, say, at a blue wave) will exist in many different types and levels of exchanges with other compound individuals, but the exchanges will be mutual and mutually understood only when those exchanges are occurring with other holons who are also exchanging blue tokens. In these cases, structuralists will often say that the individual and the group are behaving in "blue" ways, which simply means, in AQAL metatheory, that the probability of finding a certain type of interior holon in an individual and the probability of finding it in the group of which the individual is a member are similar. That is, the probability of finding a holon of type "x" internal to the agency of an I and internal to the nexus-agency of which similar I's are members is essentially the same.

      Thus, for example, atoms exist in networks of other atoms. The agency or defining pattern of an atom and the agency or defining pattern of the system of which it is a member are in some ways isomorphic patterns—at the very least, they share the same level of vertical depth or complexity (a group of atoms is not on a higher level than atoms, but is simply the collective dimension of atoms—i.e., UR and LR dimensions—individual and social are not different levels but different dimensions of the same level). Cells and atoms cannot exchange cellular tokens, only atomic tokens; and therefore atoms cannot talk to cells at all, not mutually, although cells can "talk down" to atoms and atoms can "look up" to cells, and hence influence each other through asymmetrical influences known generally as upward and downward causation, which in AQAL metatheory refers to the complex relationships between fundamentals and significants.

      In technical detail, the surface structures that are inside an interior I and internal to the patterns of the agency of that I, are represented by tokens or signifiers that are exteriorly communicated to another I, who decodes those exterior signifiers and converts them into interior signifieds. If those interior signifieds reconstruct or enact a phenomena similar enough to the original referent (the surface structures that were inside-internal to the first I), then "mutual understanding" can occur. In order for that to happen, the original referents must be internal to an agency or code in the sender (or the first I) that is isomorphic to an agency or code in the receiver (or the second I), or else the message cannot be decoded at all. The original referent will not be evoked because there is no way for the signifiers to be translated into appropriate signifieds. It's all Greek to the receiver. But this also means that the networks of exchange—or the nexus-agency—must also be conductive to the patterns of the signifiers, or else the message cannot get through the communicative channel or network.

     In short, the pathways of the communicative tokens or signifiers must share a similar-type agency in the sender, the receiver, and the channel. This is basically what structuralists mean when they say an individual and a group are "isomorphic."

     ⁴² There are also the social systems and patterns of interobjectivity and their nexus-agencies with which individual behavior also must tetra-mesh, which we will return to the next excerpt. Since there is no intersubjectivity without its correlative interobjective dimensions, the examples that I give of cultural nexus-agencies will always have some sort of social-ecological dimensions as well, even though we will be focusing on the former in this excerpt.

     ⁴³ "Institutional" means sanctioned by a recognized legitimation process of the body politic and embedded in social systems, including, in this case, the Constitution and the sociocultural habits that followed in its wake, a Constitution that itself expressed predominately the moral-stage-5 intentionality of its framers, including a blue-to-orange values structure and a self-sense of conscientious-to-individualistic.

     ⁴⁴ Where "nation" here means the federal legal nexus-agencies governing both the interactions of all states and the interactions of citizens as members of the nation, or those compound individuals whose interactions are internal to the nation; there are also laws governing the interactions of foreigners or aliens, or those inside the nation but external to its membership (i.e., inside its physical boundaries but not inside its culture).

     ⁴⁵ See Integral Psychology for discussion of self-dissonance.

     ⁴⁶ Which is to say, the internality code of the nexus-agency of the compound network can only cohesively translate a certain degree and type of communicative intersections.

     ⁴⁷ Again, this is not to imply that any cultural holon can do otherwise, but only that, with the increasing development and evolution of consciousness, the boundaries of the "we" can get larger and larger until all sentient beings are members of a Kosmic solidarity. However, even in that ideal case, there are humans who will not develop to the levels of consciousness capable of holding a Kosmic solidarity, and thus, even in an "enlightened society," where all individuals are still begin at square 1 and must evolve through the spectrum of consciousness, there will always be inlaws, outlaws, prelaws, and translaws. Any sort of "ideal society" is not ideal because it has no outlaws, but because it arranges their therapia as humanely as possible given its present level of unfoldment.

     ⁴⁸ Cultural solidarity is the semantic of intersubjectivity; structural integrity is the syntax of intersubjectivity.

     ⁴⁹ The only time that individual I's are subsumed into a super-I is when individual holons are actually taken up and incorporated (in their entirety) into a new and higher holon, as when many different atoms are incorporated into one molecule, or many different molecules are incorporated into one cell, or many different cells into one organism. That does not happen, however, when many different organisms come together into an ecosystem, where they are partners, not parts, and members, not cogs, in the social system. Again, Gaia is not a giant critter that contains individual organisms as cells in its single body. Gaia is the harmonious song sung by a choir of organisms, it is not itself a really big organism.

     ⁵⁰ Although, again, it is not that individual precedes communal, or vice versa, but that they tetra-arise.

     ⁵¹ This is true for both cultural and social holons. An individual subjective holon (UL) is a member of a cultural network, intersubjective holon, or "we" (LL) when its intersections with other subjective holons follow the regnant nexus of the "we" of which they are members. An individual objective holon or organism (UR) is a member of a social network, social system, or interobjective system ("its," LR) when its behavioral (exterior) intersections with other organisms follow the regnant nexus of the system of its of which they are members.

     ⁵² An organism's behavior (or "it" dimension) is internal to a system of its when the organism's behavioral intersections (and communications) with other organisms are following the regnant nexus of that system, and it is external to the system when they do not. Likewise, a material artifact or "it" is internal to a system when its behavior is following the patterns of the system (as we will see in several examples below).

     ⁵³ Technically: what is internal to any social system (or dynamic system of holistic its) is the sum total of the exteriors (intersections and artifacts) that are the third-person components (elements, parts, links, threads, strands) of the third-person plural network, web, or system, along with its internality codes or defining patterns (regnant nexuses), all of which are third-person dimensions of being-in-the-world. The member organisms are not internal to the system, although their relevant interactions and artifacts are.

     ⁵⁴ "Interactively" means "intersubjectively" for cultural membership and "interobjectively" for social membership; in other words—and as always—the individuals themselves are not internal to the collective, only their relevant interactions or intersections.

     ⁵⁵ This is a very important point that we will return to in Excerpt E, where we will see that organisms can be members of different levels of a local ecosystem. What that means is that, in the exterior holarchies of increasing physical complexity, the interobjective behavior (or intersections) of various organisms are holarchical parts of systems at different levels, and thus the organisms themselves are actually members of various levels of interaction (or levels of ecosystems), and the level is determined by the complexity of the interactions and their components. Quick example: a wolf, hunting in a pack, lets out a warning call to the members of the pack. That vocal, physical vibration is part of a physical social system—in this case, the social system of communication among member wolves—and thus those particular wolves have dimensions of their being-in-the-world that are both inside and internal to that specific social system of wolf hunting. Those physical sounds also fall on several surrounding trees, but have no discernible or significant impact on them, nor are they registered as communicative sounds by the trees, which are therefore not part of (i.e., not members of) the small, local, wolf-pack social system itself. However, the wolves and the trees are participating in exchanges involving biochemical life functions, vegetative physiology, cellular and molecular interactions, and so on—the wolves and trees are members of various local social systems at those levels, but not at the level of evolutionary complexity of vocal communication. Thus, the trees are actually external to several ecosystems that the wolves are members of. Both the wolves and the trees—and all sentient beings—exist in holarchical levels of ecosystems and social systems (or holarchical levels of relational exchange), based largely on the levels of evolutionary complexity of the organisms themselves (which determine the levels of the interactions with other same-depth holons). This allows us to construct holarchies based on complexity or depth, not merely on size or span (which typical ecotheories do, and which is disastrous). As we will see, as complexity or depth increases, size or span decreases, and thus ecotheories based merely on bigger size are generally regressive.

     ⁵⁶ That is, the artifact as artifact ceases to exist; the sentient holons composing it—molecules, cells, atoms—thus revert to their own individual self-identifies with their own intentionalities; those holons are not artifacts but real holons, and thus they, unlike artifacts, can become actual members in the ecosystem, which happens when their own intersections become internal to the system. The ecosystem itself has many artifacts as parts of it own material components, such as bird-nests, anthills, lion's lairs, coral reefs, etc., and they remain part of the ecosystem as along as they, like the milk carton, are actually a functional unit in the system; their identity, like the milk carton's, is not intrinsic but extrinsic, or imposed on them by the sentient holons that built them (e.g., the bird that built the bird-nest). Sentient holons, on the other hand, have both intrinsic and extrinsic value (and all of them have Ground value).

     ⁵⁷ Technically, the individual behavior is Upper Right, not the artifact, although it is common to treat individual artifacts as an "upper right" occasion. An individual interior (subjective agency or intentionality, UL) produces exterior (UR) behavior, some of which produces artifacts, such as spoken and written words, tools, material products, and so on. The UR quadrant technically means the exterior dimension of the individual holon, and that does not include its artifacts per se. The four quadrants are dimensions of an individual sentient holon, and an artifact is not a sentient holon.

     However, notice: the UL subjective agency is a member of a LL cultural-we when its intersections with other subjective agencies are internal to that we (i.e., an intersubjective circle); and its UR physical behaviors are parts of a LR social system when the intersections of those behaviors with other organisms in the system are internal to that system (i.e., an interobjective system). Because those exterior intersections always include some sort of artifacts (such as physical signifiers and communicative tokens), then it is acceptable to include artifacts in the LR, because a social holon is composed of the exterior occasions internal to the system, and those include exterior behaviors and exterior artifacts.

     This is why it is technically correct to place items such as "agrarian mode of production" in the LR (but only if that mode is actually being inhabited by sentient holons; if not, then, like the milk carton, the agrarian artifacts revert to their individual holons—molecules, cells, atoms, etc.—that are members of, say, the local ecosystem, but are no longer components of the human social system).

     ⁵⁸ See the work of Janet Chafetz for insightful discussion of some of this research.

      Spiral Dynamics often says that "life conditions" bring forth various memes, but that is not quite right. What actually happens is that a new and higher level of consciousness (a new and higher meme) emerges, and it can conceive and create higher artifacts, which may become part of the LR quadrant of overall "life conditions." It is not life conditions that create the meme, but the meme that literally creates the life conditions.

     Once that happens, then the life conditions of the LR can indeed act as a strong pull on individual consciousness. But to say that life conditions elicit memes or activate a certain intelligence is to subscribe to a naive realist epistemology. Memes create life conditions, which in turn inculcate similar memes in others under the influence of the same life conditions created by the original memes. There is not a pregiven world whose conditions elicit consciousness, but consciousness that enacts and constructs various worlds and conditions (which then enter subsequent tetra-enaction).

     ⁵⁹ By "James Watt" I mean the handful of pioneers in industrial technology, and the communities of learning that implemented them socially.

      Of course, because of tetra-evolution, if there was not also a LL development of postconventional/worldcentric morality (the social contract of moral-stage 5), then the abolition of slavery would not have happened, either, because those 50 slave-power units would be used to drive tribal and ethnocentric endeavors. However, because the cognitive levels of ethnocentrism could not have invented the level-5 industrial technology that would create 50-human power societies, it would take the rise of modernity to both implement abolition AND, due to "levels and lines" in the sociograph, allow ethnocentric pockets of modern cultures to use modern technology for ethnocentric ends: hence, Auschwitz, which could never happen in premodern cultures (because they lacked technological capacity) and would never happen in a truly modern culture (operating with worldcentric morality), but could happen only in that hybrid made possible by "levels and lines": higher technology, lower morals. Unfortunately, the critics of modernity blame modernity for exactly the part of that horrifying mix that is not modern, and they eulogize tribal for the part of the mix that is actually the culprit.

     ⁶⁰ All of those functions are present in all known human communal holons, including tribal, although they are not necessarily differentiated into discrete stations, roles, or institutions; many of them remain fused or predifferentiated.

     ⁶¹ Once a single person—e.g., James Watt—invented the steam engine, using a very high level-5 cognitive development, almost anybody could use it, no matter what level they happened to be at. If you grow up in a society whose techno-economic mode is, say, level 5, then it is true that that mode will act as a strong force helping bring awareness up to level 5. But in itself, any level-5 artifact is simply a piece of matter that, if you can read the instruction manual, you can use.

     ⁶² Part of the problem with the word "patriarchal" is that it is impossible to define. It cannot simply mean an asymmetry in sexual relations (because any woman giving birth—which a man cannot do—would be engaged in a patriarchal act). Nor can it mean a society in which "valued goods" go more often to males, because that demands a definition of what the researcher is including as "valued" (e.g., a society in which males have a higher average job salary might also be a society in which women have more access to relational and caring modes of being, and thus focusing only on salary and calling that society "patriarchal" is simply a biased and entirely derogatory judgment). The fact is, "patriarchal" is largely a boomeritis jargon term that is impossible to define in any meaningful sense. Most of what postmodern (green) scholars called the "modern patriarchy" is actually not a product of modernity (orange), nor of industrialization, nor formal rationality—all of which have pejoratively been labeled "patriarchal"—but rather are the products of the previous epoch, the mythic-membership (blue) era, including rigid social hierarchies, the existence of slavery, calcified gender asymmetries, and the concentration of public/productive wealth in male hands. Virtually all of those factors—blamed on "patriarchal" modernity—were actually undercut and dissolved by "patriarchal" modernity. In any meaningful sense, the Western Enlightenment marked the beginning of the end of patriarchy, not its height.

     Likewise, what postmodernity calls the "other of reason" is actually the "other of myth." But these deep confusions are part and parcel of boomeritis, and the chance of reversing them among green-meme scholars is virtually nil, but I point it out for what it's worth. See Boomeritis for a further discussion of these topics.

     ⁶³ What about two scales used most often: male/female asymmetry and spirituality? The former is the focus of much culture wars, and thus even-handed scholarship is hard to come by. Janet Chafetz deals with these issues as fairly as any scholar I am aware of, and she finds that in most quality of life scales for females, the modern industrial societies score as high, or higher, than any previous societal types.

      As for spirituality, there are some cultures, such as the Tibetan, where not only higher states but higher stages of consciousness were fairly common, or at least were officially sanctioned for monks and practitioners (higher stages were legitimate for that societal holon). Modern and postmodern societies, by contrast, appear to score lower on that scale.

      But that is not quite accurate. The idea is not whether a larger percentage of individuals in that traditionalist society were practicing higher levels of consciousness compared to the percentage in a postmodern society, but whether the structures (or regnant nexuses) of a postmodern society allow those types of practices to occur, or whether they possess what Foucault called exclusionary principles that outlaw those practices. And the answer is, postmodern societies do indeed fully allow those spiritual practices in groups of individuals who so choose to pursue them. On the other hand, the center of gravity of the traditionalist societies would rarely allow modern and postmodern gender relations, for example; nor democratic representation; nor public education for women. In other words, the exclusionary principles of such "spiritual" cultures actually score significantly worse than those in postmodern cultures.

      Thus, we can indeed admire the profound advances made in a particular line of development by certain premodern cultures, but only if set in a balanced sociograph that gives, as it were, the overall story.