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B. Structures in Groups

      Such is a brief overview of structures/stages in individuals. How about in cultural holons? Are there stages of development in collective holons? If so, what does it mean to say that a group is "at" a certain level of development? This topic, needless to say, becomes complicated very quickly; moreover, we haven't yet discussed the social or interobjective aspects of individuals and groups, particularly their techno-economic, institutional, and ecological aspects (which place constraints on behavior and often impose their own stage sequences on events; these will be discussed in the next Excerpt). Nonetheless, a few general considerations of "structure/stages in groups" may be offered at this point, considerations we will refine as we go along. We will begin with a look at "structures" in groups, and then focus on any possible "stages."

Isomorphism

     Traditionally, structuralism has attempted to describe the patterns or structures in both individual/intentional holons (UL) and communal/cultural holons (LL), and most structuralists have found what they generally call isomorphisms between individual and cultural structures. This means that the behavioral patterns of individual subjective holons tend to mirror similar patterns in the intersubjective networks of which they are members.⁴¹ This is not surprising in that the quadrants tetra-evolve and are tetra-enactive, with many analogous patterns appearing in various quadrants (although this is never a simple one-to-one relation, inasmuch as different perspectives on the same occasion are, indeed, different; that some forms are isomorphic does not mean that all forms are).

     "Isomorphic" comes from "iso," equal, and "morphic," form: forms or structures that are equal (or very similar). As used in adequate structuralism, isomorphic means that some interior behaviors in an individual, when looked at in a 3p stance, show a similar form or structure to communal or collective events when looked at in a 3p stance. Put more simply, if a group's behavior has all the characteristics of, say, the value structure of blue (conformist-absolutistic), then we say that the group and the individual are both isomorphic for blue.

      However, the situation becomes complicated very quickly, especially because the study of societal or communal occasions involves the difficult issue of the relation of "individual" and "collective." If you believe that a society of organisms is itself an organism (a leviathan or Gaia), then you will approach the study of groups quite differently than if you believe societies are not themselves individuals. Part of the difficulty with the early, pioneering structuralists is that they hadn't come to terms with some of these fundamental issues, and thus their efforts (e.g., Levi-Strauss) were skewed from the start.

      What I will do in this section is present my own conclusions on the nature of structures/levels/stages in groups, and you can decide what parts of it make sense to you.

      To begin with, it seems important to understand that, whatever you think of the relation of a group and an individual, neither of them is ever "at" a level. When it comes to an individual, we saw that a person can be at one level in one line and simultaneously at a completely different level in other lines, so it is nonsensical to say that a person is at a level. But even in a single line, nobody is ever "at" a level. Most often, a person "at" one level will give 50% of his responses from that level, 25% from a lower level, and 25% from a higher level.

      For all of those reasons, no individual is ever at a level. The most you can say is that in a particular situation that elicited a particular module response (e.g., a moral response, a needs response, a values response, etc.), this particular person's response at that particular time happened to be of this particular class (e.g., the class called "red," "blue," "orange," etc. in the Gravesian values line; or preconventional, conventional, postconventional in the Kohlberg moral line; or preop, conop, formop in the Piagetian cognitive line; or belongingness, self-esteem, self-actualization, self-transcendence in the Maslow needs line, etc.). To simply say that a person is "blue" or "formop" or "preconventional" is meaningless (and mean).

Horizontal Outlaws

      Still, here is where saying that an individual is "at" a level has a limited usefulness (and this is the only way the concept is used by adequate structuralists). We just mentioned the fact that, for example, if confronted with a condition that elicits a moral-module response, I might give 25% of my responses from stage 2, 50% from stage 3, and 25% from stage 4. Even though, in this example, I contain moral-stage-2, moral-stage-3, and moral-stage-4 holons in my own compound individuality, the contents of those holons themselves are usually incompatible. (The senior holons do indeed transcend-and-include the juniors, but they do so by subsuming them, not by treating them as equivalent or compatible). I obviously cannot act as both a stage-2 impulsive hothead and a stage-4 rigid conformist at the same time. In other words, although I might contain several different levels in that moral line, I can only act on one of those levels in any specific moment. Conflicting agencies cannot easily drive a single act of behavior, much as I cannot turn left and right at the same intersection.

      This is why any particular behavior in an individual tends to express a single type, class, or level of response, even though the individual may contain a multitude of levels in numerous lines. In that specific sense, although we can never say a person is blue, or is orange, or is preconventional, or postconventional, we can say that in that one instance, his or her behavior was indeed blue, or was moral-stage-4, or expressed self-esteem needs, and so on.

     In short, single deliberate behaviors tend to be driven by single intentions; those intentions can come from any module or stream that is elicited by the present situation; within that elicited stream or line, although the person will contain different levels or waves, when the person acts, that behavior is generally driven by the intentionality stemming from a single wave, because conflicting agencies lead to paralysis, not action. Therefore, in that very narrow sense, we can say that the person was "blue" at that moment.

      Essentially the same thing happens with a group. Although a compound network (like a compound individual) is never "at" a level, some of its behaviors are, and for the same reason. For example, a group might vote to enact a particular law; all members agree that they will obey this law if a majority votes it. But a given law, like a given behavior, cannot easily incorporate conflicting demands. You cannot, at the same time, drive at 55 miles per hour and at 60 miles per hour. Single laws, like single deliberate behaviors, usually reflect single agency, and to that extent, the group, in that instance, is acting from a single structure of intentionality (in the particular module the communal law is regulating). The group law or regnant nexus in this case is: everybody must drive at 55 miles per hour.

     If you follow that law, you are inside a circle of citizenship; i.e., you are inside the law-abiding circle when your interactions are internal to the law or nexus-agency of that circle. But break that law, such that your interactions are external to the communal rules and laws, and you are rather literally an outlaw and can be fined or imprisoned. In that specific sense, we say the group or collective holon has a structure or pattern that can be elucidated: the nexus-agency of the communal holon can be identified and described, and in this case it includes the rule-governed behavioral pattern of 55 mph, or face fines and imprisonment.

      Many cultural regnant nexuses are consciously implemented, as in that example. But many, perhaps most, of the regnant nexuses of communal holons are unconscious, preconscious, background, contextual, or otherwise not directly prehended by the individuals whose interactions are nonetheless being governed (or molded) by those patterns of cultural intersubjectivity and nexus-agency.⁴² Those "transformational (or internality) codes," of course, are what the pioneering cultural structuralists, from Gebser to Althusser to Barthes to Foucault, were attempting to elucidate, and what adequate structuralists ever since have been exploring; they are the "wholeness patterns" of a collective holon, the patterns that, following which, one is a recognized member of the collective, or an "in-law," and breaking which, one becomes an "out-law."

     Many of those cultural codes (or patterns of intersubjectivity), as we were saying, are unconscious to those individuals whose intersections are molded by those networks. Part of the emancipatory work that many structuralists have pursued is an attempt to expose those hidden, unconscious networks and then assess whether they are, in fact, fair and just according to a higher set of standards than those that might have created the societal structures and rules in the first place. That is, many of the sociocultural structures unearthed by structuralists are actually preconventional (egocentric) or conventional (ethnocentric) structures, which humans at postconventional waves wish to redress.

     This emancipatory component of structuralism is a fruitful area of inquiry; it has continued to motivate, for example, the Frankfurt School (a type of critical inquiry that I believe needs to be included in any integral approach, if not necessarily with their specific details). If development in general moves from preconventional to conventional to postconventional—a movement that can only be spotted by zone #2 methodologies—then a profound motivation of doing adequate structuralism is to help individuals and cultures move from egocentric and ethnocentric stances toward more worldcentric waves of compassion, care, and consciousness.

     (On the other hand, simply asserting that we should all learn a worldcentric ecology, or embrace a global compassion, is a noble but pragmatically less-than-useful project, because worldcentric waves are the product of development, not exhortation. As noted, the "new paradigm" approaches exhort a goal without elucidating the path to that goal—they are cheerleaders for a cause that has no means of actualization, which perhaps explains the deep frustration among new-paradigm advocates who know they have a better ideal but are disappointed at how little the world responds to their calls.)

     We will return to the topic of unconscious structures (and possible emancipation from them) in a moment. For now, all we need note is that patterns such as linguistic signs and symbols, semantic fields of meaning, various worldviews, background belief systems, interpretive codes, regulative intentionalities, intersubjective fields of feelings, discursive and nondiscursive practices, cultural networks of symbolic interaction: such are a few of the nexus-agencies that various schools of cultural studies, genealogy, archaeology, cultural anthropology, neostructuralism, and other investigators of intersubjectivity have elucidated—all of which, for simplicity's sake, we call cultural anthropology in figure 2.

     Because there is no good term that includes all of those various approaches—from cultural studies to neostructuralism to cultural anthropology—and because all of those terms have been abused by the culture wars in academia—I will often use the neologism culturology to refer to the objective study of intersubjectivity, or a third-person look at first-person plural dimensions of being-in-the-world, whether that applies to ants, apes, or humans.

Vertical Outlaws

      The simple "55 mph" example suggests how a single structure can govern a compound nexus; here's an example of how levelsof structures often become involved in a group nexus.

     A town in Kansas recently voted to outlaw the teaching of evolution because it conflicted with its community values or "community standards"; specifically, it was claimed that the scientific theory of evolution conflicts with Biblical teachings. It appears that, in this particular instance, and in response to the challenge presented by the theory of evolution, the values module or stream has been elicited in many of the members of the township. It also appears that a majority of those members are behaving according the level in the values line called "blue" (or saintly/absolutistic).

      In terms of AQAL metatheory, we would say that the majority of town members were insisting that the public and educational intersections of all town members should be internal to a nexus-agency whose exchanged values conform to blue structures. That is, the aspects of your subjectivity that can legitimately or "legally" enter the public sphere (or that can traffic at public intersections) must be internal links in an intersubjective network whose nexus-agency (internality code or regnant nexus) is isomorphic with the value patterns of blue (mythic-membership, absolutistic/saintly, ethnocentric, conformist, etc.). Under those circumstances, the teaching of evolution will therefore fall outside the law (outside the boundary of the town's sociopolitical "we"; more specifically, outside and external to its regnant nexus)—and thus, falling outside the law, it will be illegal to teach evolution; if you do so, you are therefore an "outlaw" and can be fined or imprisoned.

      If you were a Foucault of the future, studying this situation, you would look at those rules of discourse (the "discursive structures," or the things that you can, and cannot, officially or legitimately discuss), and attempt to discern the patterns they are following, particularly their "exclusion rules"—what is not allowed—and their "transformation codes"—what is allowed. You would further look at the types of social practice and nondiscursive (nonverbal) modes of interaction—from the shape of the school buildings, to the types of discipline used to instill the transformation codes, to the ways in which those who teach evolution are deemed "mentally ill"—or, in this case, are "sinners" with a "sickness of the soul" (because evolution is "evil"); and thus those sinners instill a disturbing nihilation that must be treated with therapia: emotional torture, confession, conversion—all being instances of a knowledge that is in fact thinly disguised power parading as truth and goodness. (For "nihilation" and "therapia," see below.) The ultimate aim of such archaeology and genealogy is, of course, an emancipation to some degree from the binding power of those cultural structures of unfreedom.

      So the township passes a law outlawing the teaching of evolution. In America, however, that nexus-agency can be overruled by senior nexus-agencies, including the Supreme Court, whose actions are institutionally driven by intentionalities that are at a particular level or higher; for the Supreme Court: implicitly by cognitions of formop or higher, by values of orange or higher, by morals of stage-5 or higher, and by a self-identity of conscientious or higher.⁴³ (In other words, the internality codes of the legal network of behavioral injunctions that govern, by force if necessary, the interactions of citizens of the United States, when considered as members of a federal holon, contain regnant nexuses that are isomorphic with those structural levels in those lines.)

      In this example, the Kansas township was attempting to act in a way that was outside a higher law (in that states, in that particular area, are legal subholons in a federal holon); the township was therefore found to be acting illegally and unconstitutionally according to a higher level of nexus-agency (or regnant nexus) governing the nation.⁴⁴ The township accordingly (under threat of legal action) repealed that law.

      We can see in this example that the structures or codes of a group's nexus-agency embody at least two important items. One, they embody various types of horizontal translation patterns (such as exclusion and rarefication), or all of the translation injunctions and rules, both positive and negative, implicit and explicit (such as, "Do not teach evolution"). In this case, evolution is marginalized discourse.

     But we can also see in this example that the structures or codes of a group's nexus-agency implicitly embody, in addition to horizontal translation codes, vertical levels of development in any of the lines that happen to be involved in the behavioral patterns that are subject to the group's regulation. We can use the more abstract "levels of consciousness" measure and say, for example, that the Kansas township, operating at level-4 consciousness, attempted to implement a law (a horizontal translation rule or regulation) that the Supreme Court overruled from a level-5 consciousness. Or we can be more technical and say the group was acting from a cultural level isomorphic to the ethnocentric/blue level in the values line, which was overruled by the Court acting from a cultural level isomorphic to the worldcentric/orange level in the values line.

     The point is that the structures of collective behavior embody not only horizontal solidarity but vertical solidarity, breaking either of which results in a communal-holon boundary violation. (Any boundary violation, as we will see below, is a threat or "nihilation" that must be met with "therapia," or treatment to restore boundaries.) Of course, the descriptions of structures are in third-person terms, whereas the experience of solidarity is the quintessential first-person plural (or intersubjective) experience; the point is simply that structures are the outside view of that inside feeling.

     (The outside view we call "internality codes," "structures," "regnant nexus," and the like, whereas the inside feelings cannot be described but only felt—"you had to be there"—although we do use terms like "first-person plural," "knowledge by acquaintance," "felt-meaning," "mutual understanding" and the like to convey those inside apprehensions. The point is simply that, whether looked at from within or without, intersubjectivity has horizontal and vertical dimensions.)

     To use the more abstract measure, the internality codes of any communal holon embody not only horizontal translation rules (such as, You must drive 55 miles per hour, or, You must not teach evolution), but also vertical levels of development in any lines thus regulated. The horizontal rules stem from basic levels of consciousness within which the group's members tend to operate, basic levels that define the scope of the event horizons (or the degrees of consciousness) within which the members' intersections will be internal to a "we." Thus, the "law" is defined not just by horizontal patterns but by vertical patterns as well.

     Again, much of these structural patterns are unconscious to the members of the group. It is the structuralist who, after the fact, subjects the group's intersubjective patterns to a third-person inquiry and thus discloses possible structures or regnant nexuses of those intersubjective patterns (i.e., it is only third-person inquiries that reveal holistic patterns.) Such a methodological inquiry, conducted as a third-person plural investigation of first-person plural realities, has found that various interactions of group members are internal to a nexus-agency whose patterns, textures, codes, rules, or flow-patterns can often be specified or described. Those codes represent kosmic habits in both vertical and horizontal dimensions that embody the collective requirements of the societal holon in order to recognize its own members and thus reproduce itself in spacetime.

Center of Gravity

      The Kansas township is an example of what it means to say that a group is "at" a particular level in a particular line (i.e., the group is behaving as if from one level; in this case, level 4). Not only do compound individuals and compound networks sometimes act (as if) from one level, it is empirically the case that sometimes they consistently act as if from one level. In AQAL metatheory, this is summarized with the concept center of gravity. That is, individuals and groups have something like a center of gravity that expresses the sum total of their overall inclinations in all levels and lines. In individuals, the center of gravity is usually in the vicinity of the proximate self in the self-identity stream; and in groups, it usually "resides" in the communal action systems (whether educational, governmental, medical, etc.). All of this is encapsulated in the simple formula that these conceptual constructs are referring to probability waves, or the probability of finding particular types of occurrences in particular spacetime regions of the AQAL matrix, whether in individuals or groups. The center of gravity is simply the probability space in which you will most often find a particular holon, and it is a useful concept to just that degree.

Nihilation and Therapia

      The reason that something like a center of gravity seems to exist is that healthy pluralism is one thing, morbid fragmentation, quite another. In the individual, wildly uneven development in the various lines induces something like "self dissonance," an internal stress and tension that can lead to significant dissociation, an inner dissonance that the self-sense accordingly seeks to minimize (failing to do so can result, in extremis, in pathologies such as multiple personality disorder and schizoid splitting).⁴⁵

      A similar dynamic seems to be operating in groups. To the extent that a group of individual "I's" recognize themselves as a "we," then to just that extent they defend the boundary of that "we" against both inside and outside disruptions. Here I might point to the work of sociologist Peter Berger on what he calls societal cohesion, nihilation, and therapia. Briefly:

     Any social group, as a group, operates with some sort of regulating principles and patterns (explicit or implicit) that hold the group together and give it some sort of cohesion (which we are calling its nexus-agency, pattern, or structure; its regnant nexus). Even a pluralistic group is held together by a majority adoption of pluralistic principles or attitudes (a process Berger also calls legitimation, another term for consensus cultural cohesion). If anything threatens the legitimacy or the "life" of the group (i.e., if any occasion breaches the boundary defined by the internality codes of the nexus-agency of the group), then group members experience that breach as what Berger calls nihilation—as a painful, frightening, or death-like experience. The group then seeks to evade and/or repair the damage to its collective identities, values, properties, or agencies using what Berger calls therapia, or therapies to restore its cohesion boundaries.

     The same principles of cohesion, nihilation, and therapia are at work in individual holons (because they are essentially at work in all holons; these principles are a simple set of definitions of what is required for a stable identity pattern—individual or collective—to endure in space and time). Whenever the boundary of any individual or communal holon is threatened—which means, whenever the "wholeness" aspect of any whole/part is threatened—it experiences or proto-experiences a nihilation or death-like perturbation in its AQAL configuration, and must therefore, upon pain of dissolution, take remedial steps to repair the damage—hence, therapia (and that occurs whether in an ant colony, a coral reef, or a Kansas township).

     The main difference between how this nihilation/therapia works in individual and communal holons is that in individual holons, the agency or regnant nexus is often associated with a dominant monad, which means that its regulation often involves one sentient being, such as a molecule, actually becoming internal to another sentient being, such as a cell, so that the molecule becomes a literal subholon in the senior cell; whereas in collective or systemic holons, the regnant nexus itself never contains a sentient being as a dominant monad within which other sentient beings become internal subcomponents (as in a giant leviathan), but rather the intersections of the sentient beings become internal to a nexus-agency of which they are members. That regnant nexus itself can be commandeered, taken over, and controlled by dictatorial sentient beings, but never in the sense that other sentient beings then become internal to the dictators, only in the sense that the fascistic holons now have some degree of power over the interactions of the sentient beings inside, not internal, to the network. The types of power exerted in both are dramatically different (which is another reason that the leviathan or Gaia views of ecology often become confused and tend toward fascism, in theory and in practice; in other words, an organism is an "I," an ecology is a "we," and whenever ecology is called an organism, there is a hidden "I," often that of the theorist; see Excerpt E).

     In the Kansas township example, the dictatorial government of the town controlled the intersections of its teachers, not because those teachers became subholons in a bigger sentient being or leviathan, but because their public interactions were subject to political-legal force if those interactions did not conform to city ordinance (or the internality codes of the collective holon defining legal membership). The town experienced nihilation (in this case, a threat to its level-4 values) and thus responded with its own therapia or attempted cure (in this case, a banishing and outlawing of the offending speech acts)—a cure that the Supreme Court, in turn, experienced as nihilation and responded with its own higher-level cure.

     Of course, some of these "therapies" look rather barbaric to outsiders, and some look more healthy, but no collective (or individual) holon is without them. On the morbid side, some premodern therapies include cannibalism and human sacrifice; some traditional therapies include the Inquisition and burning at the stake; some modern therapies include frontal lobotomies; some postmodern therapies include politically correct thought police. On the happier side, therapia that appear to heal have included shamanic voyaging, religious rituals, democratic justice, and multicultural sensitivity (resp.).

      The essential point is that groups, as groups, have a type of center of gravity which itself constitutes something of a boundary phenomena. Groups, like individuals, can tolerate only so much internal dissonance without coming apart at the seams.⁴⁶ Groups have a series of regulative patterns or laws, some explicit, some implicit, expressing their Kosmic habits of stability and duration in spacetime. Outsiders are thus "out-laws," which threaten the existence of the social cohesion patterns necessary for individual and group existence. To say that groups initiate therapeutic actions in order to diminish nihilation and protect their boundaries is only to say that all holons do so. The "barbarism" does not lie in the therapia itself, but in the level of the expansiveness of the boundary being protected—egocentric to ethnocentric worldcentric to Kosmocentric.

The Politics of Consciousness

      This raises an important, related issue. In A Sociable God, I began drawing attention to two different types of outlaws: "pre-laws" and "trans-laws." Both of them, although as different as night and day, are treated the same by the group's lawyers and cops—both prelaws and translaws are lumped together as outlaws that threaten nihilation and therefore must be met with aggressive therapia.

     Many of history's great pioneers in consciousness evolution were actually translaws who were treated as common outlaws and crucified, burned, banished or otherwise placed aggressively on the other side of the boundary of the "we." Nihilation is threatened not only by holons outside the we-boundary on the same level of consciousness, but by any holons on significantly different levels of consciousness. The politics of consciousness is the study of the types and levels of awareness that are legitimated by a group's nexus-agency, and, conversely, the types and levels of awareness that are de-legitimated, excluded, banished, marginalized, scapegoated.

      Illustrative examples of the politics of consciousness can be seen in the cultural responses to countercultural movements—from the Reformation/Counterreformation to the Sixties—as well as in the countercultural responses themselves to movements that transcend their own levels of consciousness. The Reformation of the 15 ^th and 16 ^th centuries, for example, which established Protestantism as a viable alternative to Catholicism for large-scale cultural cohesion, was, at that time, a countercultural movement that represented early orange's attempt to break the hegemony of blue; it was met with a Counterreformation that included, among other things, the Spanish Inquisition, the Roman Inquisition, and the Holy Office, as a panicked and intensified blue lashed back with brutal therapia. You don't need an Inquisition when everybody believes the myths.

     In the Sixties, the green center-of-gravity movements came to dominate academia in the humanities, where they often displaced a traditional orange liberal education. Thirty years later, as countercultural green became the cultural norm in academia, new countercultural movements attempted to emerge beyond green; and green, sensing the threat, instituted its own inquisitors, which the media promptly dubbed "politically correct thought police." This inquisitorial therapia was especially aimed at any higher or post-green levels of consciousness, which were now perceived (correctly) as a threat to the hegemony of the interpretive codes dominating academic discourse.

     (Several students went through a catalog of the California Institute of Integral Studies and made a list of the number and types of exclusionary practices and rules found in the discursive formations of the course offerings; the degree and extent of the exclusionary practices in "integral" endeavors offered illustrative examples of Foucauldian power structures. Some of today's countercultural forms of nihilation/therapia are explored in Boomeritis.)

     This is not to suggest that collective holons can do otherwise; short of Emptiness, there are only boundaries, and all boundaries experience identity, therefore threats to identity, therefore nihilation, and therefore the need for therapia. It is to suggest, however, that boundaries can expand—egocentric to ethnocentric to worldcentric to Kosmocentric....

     With regard to prelaws, holons of a lesser depth (or lesser authenticity) are a threat to the communal holon because they cannot (or do not) responsibly participate in the exchanges and interactions that are internal to the nexus-agency (or the togetherness codes) of the various "we's" that constitute the cohesion of the communal holon (a cohesion necessary for the existence and survival of both the individual and the group). In that sense, it is entirely appropriate, from the view of the communal holon, that prelaws are outlaws. They do indeed threaten the immune system or boundary of the collective holon (hence the need for therapia).

     Of course, there are relatively healthy and relatively unhealthy versions of the treatment of prelaws, where "unhealthy" means that the modes of detection of deviancy and their punishment or correction are excessive, or considerably beyond the degree required by that particular level of development of the cultural holon. Therapia, in other words, can go into overkill. Still, no known cultural holon is free of some sort of perception of outlaws and therapia; the wonder is that most forms of therapia function relatively well (when judged on a realistic, not utopian, scale).

      As for translawsor postlaws, holons of a greater depth (or greater authenticity) are also a threat to the communal holon, although of a different order (a difference spotted by the structuralist or cultural anthropologist, rarely by the culture itself). Translaws threaten the legitimation process of any "we," but this time from above, not below—the translaw represents love resisted, not hate imprisoned. Classic translaws, treated like outlaws/prelaws, include Socrates, al Hallaj, Jesus of Nazareth, Giordano Bruno, Meister Eckhart... it's a long list.

     More mundane examples from recent history include, as briefly noted, the reception that orange center-of-gravity culture gave to the green center-of-gravity student and countercultural movements of the Sixties, a counterculture often called, appropriately enough, the "cultural creatives" (whose healthy versions ushered in civil rights, health reform, and environmental protections); and the subsequent treatment that those green countercultural movements in turn gave to the emerging integral (second-tier) center-of-gravity movements. Although green often pictures itself as "integral," we have seen that it is pluralistic and actually resists integral; the resultant paradigm clash is a legitimation crisis that is becoming more intense as an integral age at the leading edge attempts to emerge, an edge that is translaw to the prevailing law and regnant nexus of allowable discourse in the counterculture of the cultural creatives.⁴⁷

     At this time, integral discourse is still largely marginalized and suppressed in both cultural and countercultural centers. However, there has of late been encouraging, potentially profound shifts (hence the possibility of "an integral age at the leading edge"). As an ironic twist, many of the most respected conventional academic universities are becoming open to integral approaches faster than are the countercultural centers—you can, for example, legitimately study transpersonal developmental theories more accurately at Harvard than at CIIS or Naropa. One of the reasons for this turmoil in countercultural centers is that countercultural movements themselves are often a mixture of prelaw and translaw, and the prelaw elements effectively derail any further evolution. As the conventional/cultural centers continue to naturally evolve and progress into postconventional and previously translaw areas, it is a relatively seamless move; whereas the prelaw elements ensconced in countercultural centers make progressive expansion almost impossible. This is one of the great ironies explored in Boomeritis.

Structural Integrity

     We have often noted that any cultural holon or "we" can be approached from the inside or the outside (fig. 2). As briefly noted earlier, cultural cohesion—the cohesion of any "we"—is, when approached from within, nothing other than cultural solidarity, or the felt-meaning and shared-touch explored by hermeneutics; and, when approached from without, the cultural cohesion of the "we" appears as the structural cohesion or structural integrity of the "we"—that is, appears as the internality codes, regulative patterns, rules, laws, transformational codes, or nexus-agencies that embody the dynamic but stable patterns of any enduring and ongoing "we."

     In short, cultural solidarity represents zone #1, and structural integrity, zone #2, of any "we"—the inside and outside features of an interior "we" (the inside and outside of a first-person plural holon).⁴⁸ Just as there is vertical and horizontal solidarity, there is vertical and horizontal structural integrity (which means that the regnant nexus of a "we" embodies both horizontal translation patterns and vertical levels of consciousness, by whatever name).

     For example, when we examine the impact that a prelaw or a postlaw has on the communal law—such that they are both treated as outlaws—then from the outside we might attempt to describe the regulations, rules, or patterns of discourse that the prelaws and postlaws are violating. In the Kansas township example, we saw that a level-4 rule violated the laws of a level-5 federal holon and thus was overruled. In the case of an Integral Age at the Leading Edge, yellow-level discourse is outlawed and suppressed by green-level regnant nexuses governing most academic discourse in cultural and countercultural institutions. The structuralist is interested in those rules not only as a scholarly pursuit, but often with a vested emancipatory interest in freeing discourse and praxis from those oppressive regimes.

      When viewed from the inside, however, those cultural structures do not appear in third-person terms but in first-person feelings, awareness, and vital meanings, a rich texture of we-ness and togetherness that is the heart of any communal occasion. No individual or cultural holon says, "Let me see how closed and narrow I can be," but rather operates, mostly with good and decent intent, within the boundaries and horizons of its own enacted worlds, worlds that an outside study might determine are at, say, a particular level of consciousness, but whose inside feel is simply one of belongingness and togetherness (at whatever level). A violation of the communal boundary or togetherness codes—a nihilation—is not an academic description but a painful feeling of threat, disruption, being unfairly attacked and harmed—truly a nihilation, a death-like experience, whether posed by prelaws or translaws. And attempts to restore the togetherness boundary—the various forms of therapia—are, for the most part, also decently intended and are simply part of the immune system or any individual or social holon. As we have often said, boundary threat and defense are inherent in any finite holon.

      The emancipatory interest of structuralism—the emancipatory interest of an interior holism that tracks degrees of consciousness and wholeness—simply asks: since you must defend a boundary, which boundary do you want to defend? A red boundary, a blue boundary, an orange boundary, a green boundary, a yellow, a turquoise, a coral, a silver, a platinum...? In the manifest world there are only boundaries that represent the number of perspectives that will fit into your awareness, so choose your boundaries with care....

     Still, there is no upper limit to boundaries; the manifest world continues to expand correlative with the amount of love sentient beings can bring to it; but lesser, smaller, narrower boundaries are still relatively more exclusive, they cut into the Kosmos in more brutal ways, leave awareness bloody and torn where togetherness could abound. It is simply that the greater the degree of the evolution of consciousness, the more transparent the boundaries themselves become to Emptiness, so that, at this point in time, a platinum wave seems to exhaust (transcend and include) the sum total of Forms that have evolved to date, an embrace of which thus leaves the Witness one with All Form, not as a passing nondual state but a permanent trait or acquisition. A millennium from now, as more and more Forms continue to emerge and evolve, there will likely be a dozen higher (post-platinum) waves that one will have to embrace in order to be one with All Form, as Spirit continues its own game of playful hide and seek, which is the game you started when you yourself got bored with being God.