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C. Stages in Groups

Societal Streams

      Finally, a separate and very complex issue is whether the nexus-agency of any communal holon itself has developmental lines that are not merely the intersections of the lines of compound individuals. That is, do groups go through their own stages?

      Granted that communal or societal holons have some sort of structure, as all enduring entities do. But do those structures develop in stages?

      The answer to this partly depends, once again, upon one's stance on the relation of individual and collective. The essential point, in my opinion, is that any waves and streams in a group cannot be reduced to combinations and permutations of those of its members ("every we has a life of its own"), but neither do those waves and streams reach escape velocity from individuals and become themselves waves and streams in a higher compound individuality or superorganism (no "we" becomes a "super-I" or leviathan).⁴⁹

     Here is what seems to be happening. We noted that, in individuals, the various modules, intelligences, or streams are basically the types of responses to the questions that life seems to throw at us. Human beings have a wide variety of functional capacities or streams—cognitive, emotional, psychosexual, moral, interpersonal, etc.—the intersections of which provide much of the stuff of collective holons or "we/its."⁵⁰

      In collective or societal holons, these stream or modular intersections tend to differentiate-and-integrate "with a life of their own," and the results are the various "sub-systems" of a society (such as education, military, marriage/family, government, healthcare, religion, etc.). These subsystems are composed in part of the intersections of the correlative or isomorphic individual streams (e.g., cognitive and education, psychosexual and marriage, defense and military); but also in part of occasions that have no parallel in individuals.

     In other words, there appear to be at least two different types of communal streams. The first we have already briefly discussed, namely, isomorphic streams, which means developmental lines whose levels or waves have similar forms in both the individual and the collective (hence, "isomorphic"). Typical examples are when we refer to individuals and groups as expressing a particular value meme in a particular instance (a blue person, a blue group, a blue movement, etc.), or when we say that a communal artifact (e.g., the United States Constitution) expresses a moral-stage-5 notion of justice as social contract. Usually, the components in societal functions that are isomorphic with individual streams are fairly easy to spot—for example, the psychosexual stream in marriage, the cognitive stream in education, the self-defense stream in the military, and so on.

      But there are also what we might call "para-morphic" societal streams, which have few if any correspondence with specific streams in individuals. Isomorphic streams are those parts of groups or collectives that are recognizably similar to aspects of individuals; paramorphic streams are those parts of groups that have no recognizable or obvious similarities with any individual streams or capacities.

      Paramorphic streams arise because many of aspects of the various the sub-systems in a society are not merely complex reworkings of individual intersections but are themselves novel emergents. The things that we do with each other do not always have parallels with what we do with ourselves. Even the simple game of chess has pieces that move with rules that have no obvious parallel in the individual players of the game (as far as I can tell, there is no idea in my mind, or cell in my body, that moves two spaces forward and one space to the right). These collective rules are not so much isomorphic to me as paramorphic to me (forms that "stand alongside" me and you).

      Another very important example has to do with steering mechanisms and the means of control. Individual holons and their streams often have a dominant monad, whereas societal holons and their streams do not. Societal governance systems are therefore paramorphic in most ways (with their cultural dimensions often operating by consensus and their social systems by automatized mechanisms). Let's more closely at what look at what that means.

Cultural Streams and Social Streams

      Let's pause and quickly review our terminology here, since this entire area—stages in groups—can be especially tricky, and we need to make sure we are on the same semantic page before we proceed.

     A collective, communal, or societal holon (or we/its) has an interior and exterior, which we respectively call cultural ( we, intersubjective, LL) and social ( its, interobjective, LR).

      Any aspect of that societal or communal holon that shows evolution, learning, or development is a societal line or stream (or communal stream, collective stream, group stream, etc.). That collective stream or developmental line has its own waves, stages, levels (or, at any rate, that is the topic we will be examining).

     Like any communal occasion, that societal stream can itself be looked at in its cultural dimensions—or cultural evolution (of the we)—and in its social dimensions—or social evolution (of the its). Needless to say, those dimensions cannot be separated in reality, but they can theoretically be focused on separately.

      Finally, I have just suggested that societal or sociocultural streams can have isomorphic as well as paramorphic aspects. Isomorphic means that the collective developmental lines show obvious similarities or parallels with individual developmental lines; paramorphic means they do not. (Paramorphic and isomorphic can occur in either or both cultural and social evolution, as we will see.)

     In this section, I am going to focus mostly on the LR or social system and the developmental streams in the LR—in other words, on social evolution and its waves (in both iso and para forms). Obviously these cannot be separated from their LL or cultural dimensions; but, as we will see, the sheer materialities of the social system make it a profound influence on the other quadrants in general and on societal streams in particular.

     As we saw in Excerpt C, something is internal to a holon (in any quadrant) when it is following the agency or regnant nexus of the holon. This is true for social (LR) holons as well. The internality of a social network (or system of its) consists of those items that are internal to, or follow, the regnant nexuses or governing patterns of the system.

     We also saw that this means that social systems are composed not of individuals or organisms but of their exchanges or communications: what is internal to the system is the communication, not the organisms. Organisms are not strands in a Web, their intersections are. Organisms are members of a system, their interactions are components or parts of the system.⁵¹ That network or social system also includes any material components or artifacts that are following the functional patterns of the system and thus are internal to the system as well.

     Thus, when it comes to a social network (or system of its), those "it" items include both (1) the behavioral intersections of the members of the network and (2) the exterior artifacts that are the material components of the network. Both of those aspects are indeed "it" or "its." The exterior behavior of an organism and the exterior artifacts are both third-person dimensions of being-in-the-world.⁵²

      Because both of those items are "it" or "its," then if we are careful, we can refer to both the intersections and the artifacts as internal parts, components, threads, strands, or elements of the system, in that those items do indeed compose the system (and thus they follow, or are internal to, the system and its overall behavior). This means, as indicated, that no organisms or individuals are elements, strands, links, or parts of the system, only their exterior intersections or communications (and their exterior artifacts): individuals are members or partners, their intersections are components or parts, of the social system.

     (Remember the chess game: the chess rules, governing the moves or intersections that can be made, and the artifacts—the chess pieces and their definitions—are internal to the game, not the humans playing it; only their intersections that follow the chess rules are. Humans are in the game when their intersections are internal to it).⁵³

     A social system or network, unlike a cultural system or network, always has some sort of physicalboundary, because all exteriors, including exterior intersections and exterior artifacts, are located in sensorimotor space (which, of course, is true for all exterior or RH occasions). A forest has a physical boundary, a circle of friendship does not.

     (Cultural membership involves shared values, shared identities, shared interiors; social membership involves shared geography, shared ecology, shared exteriors. To be a member in both cases is to be interactively both inside and internal to the collective boundary.)⁵⁴

     A member of a social system is thus a sentient being whose physical organism is inside the physical boundaries of the system and aspects of its interobjective behavior are internal to the physical system (are following the behavioral patterns or regnant nexus of the system). A social member's interactive behavior is thus both inside and internal. Other organisms that are inside the physical boundaries of the system but are not following its internality codes are "foreigners," "aliens," "externals," even though they are inside the boundaries of the system (just as a parasite is inside a cell but external to its identity, because it is not following the internality codes of the cell).

     Thus, if I am driving through a local ecosystem, I am inside its physical boundaries but I am not an actual member of the ecosystem. A more extreme example is that I could be wearing a self-contained space suit and walk through the Redwood Forest in California. I am clearly inside the physical boundaries of that ecosystem but I am certainly not a part of it; my interactions with other organisms are not internal to the system, and thus I am not a functional member or partner of the ecosystem. I am external or alien to that system (my behavior is exterior-inside-external, not exterior-inside-internal).⁵⁵

     Whereas cultural streams involve various types of "we," social streams involve exterior behaviors and artifacts—and this is where it starts to get interesting.

Social Streams and Artifacts

     Whereas the behavior of compound individuals has some sort of intentionality (or drive or motivation or will), artifacts themselves do not. Artifacts, as artifacts, have no interiors (although their subholons do). A painting of a woman, for example, has no consciousness (although the molecules in the paint do). The "agency" or defining pattern of an artifact is imposed on the artifact by the intelligence of the sentient being that produced it (whether the artifact is a bird's nest, an anthill, a gun, an airplane, a dollar bill, a surgical scalpel, a school building). Likewise, the behavior of an artifact is supplied by the network of sentient beings (compound individuals or organisms) that are utilizing the artifact.

      A cardboard milk carton, for example, is an artifact that is part of the collective holon (is a material component of the social system) as long as the milk carton is actually incorporated in the functional exchanges in that society. The milk carton's behavior, like the behavior of all artifacts, is not initiated by the artifact, which lacks intentionality, but by the sentient beings using the artifact. The milk carton's behavior and actions are thus being moved around by the intentionalities of various individuals in that society; if the milk carton is being moved around by a machine (e.g., a milk truck), that machine itself is an artifact whose intentionality came from the sentient beings who built it. A milk carton is a functional aspect or part of the overall social system when it is actually being used by that system, which means that it follows various collective patterns or regnant nexuses of the system—for example, where and how it is used, how it is disposed of or recycled, how much it costs, and so on.

      If, however, a particular milk carton is, let's say, tossed aside in a forest and is left there, that milk carton is no longer a functional part of the social system that produced it; it might still be inside the larger physical boundaries of the social system (e.g., if the forest is inside the nation), but it is no longer internal to the social system, it is no longer following the behavioral patterns of that system. It is, however, now inside the physical boundaries of the ecosystem of the forest, and as it begins to decompose, its own elements—cells, molecules, atoms—now enter into exchanges and interactions with the other members of the ecosystem (at the corresponding levels: cells with cells, molecules with molecules, atoms with atoms), and thus the milk carton—or what's left of it—is now both inside and internal to the ecosystem, although it is inside and external to the human social system that produced it. Very quickly, of course, it is no longer a "milk carton," since that particular identity (or agency) was derived from its functional partness of the system that produced it. That artifactual holon decomposes into its structural subholons—polymers, molecules, cells, atoms, quarks—that are now members in various networks of relational exchange of the local ecosystem at any of its corresponding levels.⁵⁶

      To return to the human social system and its streams, and tie this in with artifacts. Much of the "stuff" of social streams involves material artifacts and the ways that those artifacts are functionally moved around. The concrete accoutrements of social occasions are systems of material artifacts (and the exterior intersections of the organisms utilizing them). These exterior-material artifacts include everything from techno-economic modes of production (the actual materialities of a bow and arrow, a digging stick, an animal-drawn plow, a steam engine, a computer, an internet system); architectural buildings (wood, straw, stone, concrete, steel); modes of transportation (foot, horse, buggy, car, plane, rocket); types of media and modes of communication (drums, ideographs, alphabet, typesetting, digital); foodstuffs (nuts and berries, hunted meat, grains, refined grains, processed pablum); types of weapons (spear, bow, crossbow, gunpowder, gun, bomb, airplane, warship, hydrogen bomb, neutron bomb); types of money, forms of business exchange, types of medical tools, and so on, and so on, and so on....

      All of those artifacts, as artifacts, are dead. They are insentient material entities that do not have intentionality, interiority, prehension, life, etc. Thus, those artifacts, as artifacts, do not show stages of development (since growth and development only occur in living, sentient holons, not their dead artifacts. Birds show development, bird nests do not).

      However, the consciousness that produced those artifacts does show growth, development, and evolution. Therefore, in a special sense, we can speak of growth and development in technology, agriculture, architecture, medicine, transportation, and so on, based on the degree of growth in the intentionality, cognition, or consciousness producing those artifacts. An Intel digital chip is more technologically advanced than a steam engine, not because it is more complex (it isn't), but because the degree of cognitive capacity required to produce a microchip is significantly greater than that required to produce a steam engine. Likewise, a steam engine is more advanced or more evolved than a plow, which is more evolved than a digging stick (in that the intentionality or consciousness that created them is more evolved in each case).

      Most social (LR) streams consist of those kinds of material artifacts and the behavioral intersections of the sentient beings producing and driving them. They are developmental streams to the extent that the intentionality or consciousness of the sentient beings that produced them develops or evolves; this intentionality becomes part of the internality codes of the system of which the artifact is a functional component.

     At this point in the discussion, however, we enter the fascinating and complex world of artifacts and their relation to the consciousness that produced them—that is, the relation of Left-Hand intentionality (individual and cultural) and Right-Hand behavior (individual or social)—a topic that is also quite beyond the scope of this Excerpt. Once again, however, a few important items need to be noted.

Consciousness Evolution and Artifacts

     Individual-interior or subjective (UL) developmental streams (such as cognitive intelligence, musical intelligence, kinesthetic intelligence, artistic intelligence) produce exterior (UR) behavioral artifacts (such as a written book, an artwork, a painting, a hand tool, a sewn dress, a spoken idea, a mathematical formula, a cooked meal).⁵⁷ Those physical behaviors and artifacts become parts of a social system if they are in any way shared or exchanged with other members of a group (friend, colleague, family, tribe, company, nation, world), because if they are exchanged, those exchanges themselves follow various patterns, relationships, habits, intersubjective contexts, regnant nexuses, or shared currents of the group (or we/its) in which the exchange occurs. (If they didn't follow a pattern, they would be completely random and meaningless activities, which they are not if they are exchanges.)

     The "I" can grow, the "we" can grow, and so can their artifacts (in the special sense described above). For example, cultural streams can grow; the "we" can grow, in the sense both that the "I's" in a "we" can grow, and this impacts the "we"; or the "we" itself can grow, in the sense that a type of group learning can occur that would not occur, or does not occur, in any "I" alone. "We know better now" means that both you and I know better now, based on experiences that we have shared and that neither of us alone would have had. In that sense, a cultural stream can show development (which is what we mean by cultural growth, cultural development, or cultural evolution).

     Isomorphic cultural development means that the development in the "we" shows obvious similarities or parallels with that in the "I" (such as various types of cognitive growth in both, or values growth, or mathematical growth, or psychosexual, linguistic, musical, moral, spiritual, etc.). Paramorphic cultural development means that the development in the "we" is showing patterns that have no obvious parallels in the "I." The most common forms of paramorphic development involve all those aspects of a "we" that are not, in fact, leviathan-like. As we saw, an individual exerts control in part via a dominant monad, a cultural nexus never does so; thus most cultural-social governance systems are paramorphic. (The ways that a cultural and dialogical "we" reaches a consensus as to the behavior that its social system will follow are profoundly different from the way that my "I" decides whether I will lift my arm or not.) One of the finest overviews of sociocultural evolution is still Habermas's Communication and the Evolution of Society (which, of course—and of necessity—draws significantly on cultural evolution disclosed by zone #2 methodologies, including developmental structuralism, and social evolution disclosed by zone #4 methodologies, including a reconstructed historical materialism [see below]).

     If we now focus specifically on social evolution—or the social dimension of streams and their growth—we find the influence of artifacts starts to enter the picture in a profound way. When an individual-I or a cultural-we produces artifacts (which they do whenever they move or act, since their exterior behavior is itself an artifact of their intentionality), then we have UR artifacts and LR artifacts. An individual might write a poem, a group of men might build a log cabin (the former is an artifact of an individual holon, the latter, an artifact of a communal holon.)

     Every "I" and "we" has some sort of exterior behavior and artifacts, and those exterior aspects (both UR and LR) come together in social systems. The social systems, considered in themselves, consist of the sum total of the exterior intersections of their members (their exterior behavioral intersections and communications), the physical artifacts involved, and the rules, patterns, or regnant nexuses of the system that both the intersections and the artifacts are following (or are internal to).

     Any aspect of a social system showing growth, development, learning, or evolution is called a social stream, and that growth is called social evolution. Of course, the physical, exterior, interobjective, social stream of its (or third-person plural) cannot be separated from the interior, intersubjective, cultural stream of "we's" (or first-person plural)—every communal occasion is at least a we/its (or an I/it/we/its); at this point we are simply focusing on the social dimension and the immense gravity (rather literally) that it possesses.

     If the "we" or "I" components of a communal stream show growth and development (consciousness development), that development is manifested in the behavioral, social, and artifactual components of the stream. It is usually easier to read development from the artifacts of the stream (e.g., microchip, steam engine, plow) than from the intentionalities that produced the artifacts (e.g., formop, conop, preop), simply because the artifacts are physical, obvious, and concrete, and thus leave less room for misinterpretation.

     With reference to social streams, the isomorphic aspects of those streams refer to behaviors of systems that are similar to behaviors of individual organisms (e.g., an individual organism has an immune system, a collective system has a type of immune system or defense mechanism). The paramorphic aspects of social streams refer to systems behaviors that have few or no parallels in those of individual organisms. These particularly involve all of the vast materialities of the artifacts that are coursing through the system. These massive networks of material artifacts and "its" do indeed have a life of their own, even more so than a "we," and for the simple reason that, unlike a "we," which can continue to reach consensus among its members, artifacts often settle into autonomous routines, simply because they are dead.

The Staggering Weight of the Social System

     Unlike human beings, many artifacts live on and on and on. Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, the Great Wall of China, the Tower of London, and countless other artifacts, precisely because they are material, survive long after their creators have been recycled. It is this simple stubbornness of dead material that makes social artifacts so... persistent, so influential, so full of gravity.

     Which leads to the whole Marxist dimension of artifacts (which we briefly touched on in the Introduction, Excerpt A). The material forces of production (foraging, horticultural, agrarian, industrial) exert an extraordinary, often over-powering influence on the sentient beings utilizing them—whether those sentient beings themselves produced the artifacts or not. A person using a computer for much of his communication with others has his consciousness subtly molded by that mode of communication, whether or not he himself could invent and produce a computer. Likewise, on a bigger scale, when an entire society meets its subsistence needs using horticulture, every single member in that society has his or her consciousness molded, from birth, by the relentless ever-present realities imposed by that pervasive horticultural mode (whether they like it or not, created it or not, want it or not).

     This is why, if you look at the data of researchers such as Lenski, you will see with monotonous uniformity that the various societal types (foraging, horticultural, herding, maritime, agrarian, etc.) share a staggering number of similarities, no matter how wildly their cultural traits differ. Virtually every matrifocal (or matriarchal) society is horticultural; there simply are no matrifocal agrarian societies. An astonishing 97% of herding societies are patriarchal. Wherever you find a "Great Mother" religion, you find a maritime or horticultural base. Slavery reaches its peak in horticultural societies, and is outlawed only in patriarchal industrial societies. Bride price is most prevalent in horticultural societies; and so on....

      Looking at that type of data, it's easy to see why Marx maintained that, to paraphrase: "It is not the consciousness of men that produces their material existence, but their material existence that produces their consciousness." The mode of techno-economic production—and the LR quadrant in general—has such a profound influence on individual consciousness that is it easy to get carried away and slip into a LR-quadrant absolutism (and end up with historical materialism).

     Still, the enduring contributions of Marx are clear enough (to highlight a few as reinterpreted with AQAL metatheory): the LR quadrant in general, and the material modes of production in particular, exert a profound influence on the other quadrants in the tetra-enaction and tetra-evolution of being-in-the-world. Because these material artifacts and modes outlive individuals, they are a significant part of the fabric of social cohesion and social reproduction (along with cultural habitus), forming part of the sociocultural background that enmeshes individual consciousness and behavior. Evolution in the social stream places demands and constraints on the other quadrants (particularly cultural and individual); often, if various social streams run ahead of cultural streams, a legitimation crisis occurs and a cultural revolution or transformation is required to re-balance the quadratic scales.

     Finally, it my own conclusion, after a long look at the historical evidence through an AQAL lens, that the mode of production does not determine consciousness in any strong sense, as Marx thought, although it profoundly influences individual and cultural consciousness (via tetra-enaction). However, it does appear (and this is a conclusion to be presented in volume 3 of the Kosmos trilogy) that the mode of techno-economic production is the single strongest determinant for the average level of consciousness in a society.

     Thus, if the mode of production is foraging, the average level tends toward magical (purple); if the mode of production is agrarian, the average level tends toward mythical (blue); if industrial, rational (orange); if informational, pluralistic (green). Individuals in those societies can be higher or lower than the average (precisely because the social mode does not determine the consciousness), but the average itself (or the cultural center of gravity in the LL) parallels those systems in the LR: cultural center of gravity and social level of development are often isomorphic.

     Theoretically, of course, that is easy enough to understand, at least with AQAL, in that a particular cognitive level produced the corresponding material artifact (e.g., preop invented foraging modes, conop invented horticultural modes, formop created industrial, postformal created pluralistic). Once an individual consciousness (UL) has conceived a particular invention (e.g., the steam engine), and behaviorally communicates it (UR) to others such that they understand it (LL), then that group of individuals might eventually produce that artifact on a large scale and make it part of the social institutions of that society (LR).

     At that point, the material artifacts themselves, which were created and produced by a particular level of consciousness, in turn tend to inculcate the same level of consciousness that produced the artifact. Individuals brought up in foraging societies tend toward magical consciousness; in agrarian societies, toward mythical consciousness; in informational, toward pluralistic consciousness, and so on. Even though they did not themselves produce the artifact, they are growing up within the realities supported (and tetra-enacted) by those systems of material artifacts, which then have an enormous influence on them (like it or not, want it or not).

     (There is actually a fair amount of research on this. For example, when men and women raised in an orange-industrial mode, which tends towards equality between the sexes, take up life on an kibbutz where agrarian modes predominate, then the men do the plowing and the women congregate in the kitchen, and soon enough blue-value structures tend to emerge, with strong polarization between the sexes, gender asymmetry in social and political relations, men dominating the public/productive sphere, women taking over the private/reproductive sphere, etc. Likewise, individuals who become members of street gangs begin to evidence a higher probability of red-meme values and behavior, and so on.)⁵⁸

     Again, individuals in those cultures can be higher or lower than the average, but the single strongest (not sole, but strongest) influence on the average level of consciousness is the techno-economic mode of production. By the way, I ran this conclusion by Alastair Taylor, co-author of the monumental Civilization Past and Present, and he replied, "I think that is exactly right."

The End of Slavery

      That is why James Watt did more to free slaves around the world than any other single human.

      Amory Lovins has done work that he summarizes as the "slave power" made available to various societies by virtue of their techno-economic infrastructure. There are various ways to calculate this, but here are a few just to indicate what is involved. Each man, woman, and child in a modern industrial society has the equivalent of 50 slaves, which is the average amount of work that machines do for people in industrial societies. In agrarian societies, it is around 4, and in foraging societies, around 1.5.

      That is one of the main reasons that industrial societies, and ONLY industrial societies, could outlaw slavery. Since every man, woman, and child already has 50 slaves, you can magnimously forgo any more of that. But agrarian, horticultural, and foraging societies all needed and used slavery for their own survival, and hence none of those societal types could afford to do without slavery. The first humans—that is, the first Africans—were the first to enslave Africans, and the practice of one human enslaving another human has continued more or less uninterruptedly, in all parts of the world, until the Western Enlightenment, or the industrial-rational societal type, which finally delegitimated it.

      Of course, this is a four-quadrant affair, with "slave power" being a key ingredient in the Lower Right. In the Lower Left there was the equally important emergence of postconventional and worldcentric morality, which found slavery intolerable to its legitimated sense of justice. Not so the previous societal types, all of which were at ethnocentric or lower levels of social justice. 50 slave power in the LR coupled with worldcentric morality in the LL gives powerful impetus to abolition (as well as to feminism, which also emerged in large-scale only in industrial-rational societies).

      The great dignity of modernity, then, was that it was the first societal type that, on a widespread scale, had enough human power in the LR and enough worldcentric morality in LL to outlaw slavery. (Modernity has it own disasters and dissociations, of course; but those can only be discussed in the integral context of its dignities and differentiations).

     And precisely because the LR quadrant is the heavy-handed quadrant, the quadrant that affects people no matter what level of interior development they have, then the single most important (not the sole, but the most) important factor in abolition of slavery was the industrial techno-economic base, because that gave every person 50 human-power, and even a red-meme thug will thus feel less need to enslave his neighbors under those circumstances. Thus, James Watt did more to free the slaves around the world than any other human in history.⁵⁹

Excursis: Marxist Structuralism

      Let me very briefly mention one more item simply to show the power of both zone #2 and zone #4 methodologies, and then we will look directly at some developmental stages in groups.

     The example of abolition shows how powerful the LR quadrant can be in terms of its capacity to emancipate or enslave. Various sociocultural theories and practices have taken these factors into account, and this is part of what we have been calling the emancipatory interest contained in various paradigms. For emancipatory interests involve not only finding higher levels of consciousness that are Freer and Fuller, but finding behavioral and social systems that can allow those to manifest.

     True emancipation, in other words, is very much a four-quadrant affair. Freedom (at any level) is not Freedom (at that level) unless it can fully manifest in all four quadrants. Part of the problem with the "new paradigm" approaches of the Cultural Creatives is that they speak of higher consciousness, but have no way to reach that consciousness nor ground it in social institutions of the LR. Again, they offer a vaporware freedom, which is one of the reasons we need to combine the emancipatory interests of the Left-Hand quadrants—e.g., shamanism, Freud, Buddha—with those of the Right-Hand quadrants—e.g., Marx, Locke, Lincoln.

      Emancipatory interest in any form, we have seen, is often inherent in the third-person perspectives of being-in-the-world, because they can stand back and see bigger pictures. We saw that this emancipatory interest is especially true of zone #2 methodologies (such as structuralism, which is a 3p x 1p). But it can be true as well in social system analysis ( 3p x 3p), if and when that analysis is coupled with a developmental focus on evolving structures and streams (e.g., of production and techno-economic modes), since those reflect the artifacts of the evolution of consciousness, an artifactual developmental (historical material) analysis that Marx pioneered. As Marx would put it, certain forces of production are necessary in order to free relations of production from slavery. But that theoretical overview comes only from incorporating third-person "big picture" capacities into your theoretical framework, two of the most powerful being structuralism (zone #2) and social systems analysis, in this example, Marxism (zone #4).

      If you put those two paradigms or methodologies together—structuralism and Marxism—you will have what is probably the most powerful European version of emancipatory social practice yet offered. Throw in the structural components of Freud, and you have a set of methodologies, critical theories, and social practices that embody a very profound, if not yet integral, set of emancipatory paradigms. This overall Marxist/Freudian/structuralism has driven everything from Gramsci and Althusser and Jameson to the Frankfurt School—Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, and Jürgen Habermas—as well as truly brilliant notables such as Walter Benjamin and Georg Lukacs (and down to the "post"-structuralist reworkings of Zizek, Laclau, Mouffe, whose "poststructural" elements are variations on, not rejections of, the general themes). With the exception of Habermas, I find some truly deep problems with their specific details, but the fact remains, that general school is the only serious, sophisticated, emancipatory theory (and practice) offered by the modern and postmodern West.

     I believe much of its enduring insights can be rescued and reconstructed in a more adequate AQAL configuration. Be that as it may, the power of that approach was that, drawing on the structural capacities of zone #2 and the developmental systems analysis of zone #4, it was able to give a compelling (if not convincing) overview of higher levels, deeper structures, wider modes of being-in-the-world that were both Freer and Fuller for human beings, and thus drive an emancipatory interest that has always been at the core of the healthy liberal or progressive impulse in the human heart.