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The Sociograph

      We can now look specifically at stages in groups (or societal streams and their waves). Some prominent societal streams include: maturation/education, marriage/reproduction, bodily health/medical, cognitive/technological, leadership/political/governmental, group identities/collective egos, religious/spiritual, physical defense/military, cultural defense/worldview, moral defense/ethos, needs/collective goals, artistic/aesthetic, techno-economic (base), business/markets, object relations/foreign relations, behavioral regulative/legal, linguistic/communication/media, modes of play, games, work, and death-ritual.⁶⁰ Those can tentatively be called the various streams or lines of a societal holon. (Of course, each societal stream has LL and LR dimensions, and each of those has iso and para aspects).

     A societal stream represents a specific stream of we/its, which means that compound individuals are members of the specific we/its when their interactions are internal to the we/its. Certain modular streams or subsystems of a society are participated in by virtually all members of that society (e.g., linguistic); others subsystems are participated in by many, but not necessarily all, members of that society (e.g., higher education, types of work, modes of play); other subsystems are participated in by only a few members (e.g., artistic production, medical care-giving).

     Because those are societal streams or developmental lines, those are some of the subsystems of a societal holon that can show development or the capacity for societal learning. Societal learning means that the members of a we/its can evaluate their own responses to a particular challenge and adjust their behavior accordingly, so that there is at least the possibility of learning more adequate responses to those challenges. Of course, a society might regress in its capacities; but that also means, it might progress. To deny social progress is to deny that groups of human beings can learn.

      If we keep all of the various qualifications in mind, we can construct a sociograph of groups that in some ways parallels the psychograph of an individual. (See fig. 6.) The modular streams in a society (whether paramorphic or isomorphic) can, as with all streams, develop in a relatively uneven manner, so that a society can be highly developed in some capacities, medium in others, and low in still others. Just as individuals cannot be ranked, but their developmental lines can, so societies cannot be ranked, but their streams can—according to stream-specific (paradigm-specific) criteria which do not violate the nonexclusion principle.

Figure 6. Sociograph

     For example, human rights and issues of slavery. As we saw earlier, and as Gerhard Lenski and others have documented, the only societal type (among foraging, horticultural, herding, maritime, agrarian, and industrial) to officially outlaw slavery was the industrial; all previous societal types, including tribal and horticultural, patrifocal and matrifocal, had some degree of slavery. (In AQAL metatheory: rational-industrial societies found slavery to be a prelaw condition that was unacceptable to the cultural solidarity and ethics of a worldcentric stance, and hence banned that behavior from the internality codes of their structural integrity. Those who trafficked in slavery henceforth were criminal outlaws. In a one-hundred year period, from 1770 to 1870, every industrial nation on earth outlawed slavery, a monumentally historical event and a first for humankind.)

      On the specific scale of human slavery, then, premodern tribal and traditional societies score very low. On that particular scale, modern societies are categorically better, higher, more moral, and more evolved. (That is intra-stream judgment, or a judgment within a paradigmatic stream, and thus is allowed by the nonexclusion principle.) The relation of a society to slavery is a strong indicator of a type of isomorphic stream of interpersonal relations. Those high on that developmental scale will treat others as they would treat themselves; those low on that scale treat others as objects.

     (In fig. 6, the society represented is very low on the interpersonal scale, which means there is a high incidence of degrees and types of sanctioned or legitimated slavery; this would be typical of, say, a horticultural society.)

     According to Lenski's extensive research, the percentage of premodern tribal societies with slavery was 10%; simple horticultural, 14%; advanced horticultural, 83%; agrarian, 54%; industrial, 0%. That is a specific type of societal stream that can be entered directly on the sociograph.

     Likewise, on the medical/health scale, if one measures physical health by physical longevity, late-modern societies added approximately three decades to average life expectancy, thus significantly outpacing tribal and traditional accomplishments. The average age in tribes was 23; agrarian, 33; industrial, 45; informational, 73.

      (By "tribal" and "traditional," of course, I mean those societal types as they originally existed, not as they might exist in today's world. What are known as "indigenous" cultures in today's world can be at any number of levels in any number of lines—an indigenous culture can be tribal, traditional, modern, postmodern....)

      There is another complexity that needs to be kept in mind when adjudicating intra-stream societal development, namely, there exist not only stages but states. I myself have seen little convincing evidence that original tribal societies were at higher levels of development in various lines than are modern or postmodern societies (in their healthy versions). In fact, it seems that most of what is claimed to be a higher level of development in premodern societies is actually referring to various higher states (not stages) that were often accessed in tribal traditions. For example, the notion that original tribes possessed an abundance of "ecological wisdom" has not weathered critical scrutiny very well, with much of that wisdom appearing to be due to lack of means, not presence of postconventional awareness. But a greater access to certain altered states is both plausible and empirically supported.

      I believe that the evidence is abundant that original tribal societies often had a much richer access to various altered states of consciousness (as officially sanctioned or legitimated by the regnant nexus of the tribal holon). Of course, because states of consciousness do not generally show development (if they did, they would be stages), they cannot technically be entered on a psychograph or sociograph, but because they are so important, states most definitely should be factored into any sort of adjudication process. One way to do so is to include a polyphasic scale on any sociograph. "Polyphasia" means "many states." Although polyphasia is technically not a stream (because states do not show stages), it still serves as important reminder that development is only a part of a larger story.

      In tracing the sociographs of various cultures across epochs, one can't help but be struck by the ways in which allowable states of consciousness become part of the internality codes of various cultures—that is, the ways in which certain altered states are "allowed" or "disallowed" by group identities, group values, and collective egos. Some cultures are enthusiastically polyphasic, allowing or even encouraging multiple states of consciousness; whereas other cultures are more "monophasic," officially sanctioning one or two states of consciousness while outlawing the others—which means, most altered states of consciousness were viewed as nihilation, and various forms of (often unpleasant) therapia were brought to bear on the adventurous souls taking such journeys. For those societies, this was often justifiable (wild prophets can wreck havoc on stable structures); still, that is simply to say that those societies score well on the social stability scale, and quite poorly on the polyphasic scale.

      Most of the championing of tribal consciousness is a celebration of polyphasia, a specific celebration I share. Particularly as one moves from tribal to traditional, and then again to modern, one almost always sees an increasing distrust of nonordinary states of consciousness—again, often for good-enough reasons (on a societal level). Still, a more polyphasic stance within modern moral structures is something I personally think is worth championing.

Uneven Societal Development

      At the same time, other scales need to be factored into the calculus of torment. As noted, most of the ills blamed on modernity are actually due, not to modernity, but to the tribal elements in modernity. Auschwitz is not the product of the orange meme, but the product of the red meme getting its hands on orange technology.

     Part of the "problem of modernity" is simply that, on the sociograph, the technological stream can run far ahead of the interpersonal stream. Although original foraging tribes did not have the cognitive capacity to produce, say, a gas chamber, once formop (level 5) cognition had done so, the technological results of that higher cognition could be commandeered by groups at much lower levels of development. (We see the same problem today with terrorist tribes getting their hands on biological weapons, weapons they themselves could not invent but can deploy.) On the other hand, such a wildly uneven sociograph is impossible in original foraging tribes not because they were integral but undeveloped. You can only do so much damage to the environment, and to other sentient beings, with a bow and arrow, and that relative lack of damage does not necessarily mean presence of postconventional awareness.

     "The problem of modernity" is that often modern societies have 5 or 6 major levels of development leading to their center of gravity, and something can go wrong at every level, leaving subpockets of culture that are not well developed but that do have access to the technological fruits of higher development—and that sociograph, which is tribal interpersonal mixed with formop technological—is a prescription for horror.

     One of the difficulties in tracking social progress (or the lack thereof) is that, when it comes to artifacts, it often takes only a few individuals to create an artifact, whereas millions can then use it, no matter what level they are at. Once a plow is invented, almost anybody can use it; same with a computer, an automobile, a gun, an atomic bomb. Because those are all exterior material artifacts (and not interior stages of development), almost anybody can pick up the piece of matter and use it, even if they could never invent or produce it themselves.⁶¹

     If you take a level-5 technology, such as gas chamber, and put it in the hands of a tribal level-3 ethnocentric stance, the result is Auschwitz. Auschwitz is not a moral level-5 endeavor; it is not a pure product of modernity, but a product of tribal consciousness getting its hands on modern technologies, even though it could not produce them itself.

     Part of the problem, then, with increasing social and cultural evolution is that, precisely because societal development is also "levels and lines," you can have very high development in some lines (e.g., technological) coupled with very low development in other lines (e.g., moral), and the result is an epic nightmare that neither tribes themselves, nor modernity itself, would have produced. A level-5 moral response is worldcentric, not ethnocentric, and thus on its own would never engage in such ethnic cleansing. (To conclude, however, that tribes are more moral is exactly the wrong conclusion; in that particular capacity they are less moral, but also less technologically capable of inflicting that tribal morality on other sentient beings.)

      The debate in this entire area has been severely polarized, unfortunately. There are those who maintain that societies cannot be ranked, and those who maintain that societies can be ranked. I agree with both. Events within streams—such as slavery and physical health—can indeed be ranked. (And all cultures themselves engage in such ranking, including partnership cultures.) Likewise, centers of gravity can be ranked; so can access to polyphasic states; so can degrees of cross-stream integration. But the uneven nature of sociographs makes it virtually impossible to simply say, this society is better than that one. Societies, in that sense, cannot be ranked.

      Claiming, for example, that premodern partnership societies were better than modern patriarchal societies is as unfair as it is unjustifiable (given that, for example, it was only modern patriarchal societies that outlawed slavery, created representative democracies, supported the rise of feminism, and increased average lifespan by three decades).⁶² On the other hand, saying that certain premodern societies seemed to score better on some scales (such as the polyphasic) than do some modern societies is at least something of a testable hypothesis. So is using a scale of physical longevity, bride price, genital mutilation, slavery, and cannibalism, scales on which modern societies score considerably better than do premodern and traditionalist societies (using the intra-stream enfoldment principle as the adjudicating measure; see Excerpt B).⁶³ The problem is that those wishing to appreciate premodern societies for some of their undeniable accomplishments often find it necessary to whitewash the rest of those societies, when an integral sociographic approach would allow both their strengths and weaknesses to be acknowledged in a larger, non-ideological framework.

      The only point I would like to emphasize in this very brief overview is that the psychographic, sociographic, and polyphasic studies of societies should, in all cases, be guided by the integrative principles of nonexclusion, enfoldment, and enactment, in my opinion. Such an integral appreciation of the relative strengths and weaknesses of various cultural occasions is just in its infancy; there are as yet no integral studies of any cultures.

     But the future of such studies is bright, I believe, in that they are an attempt, on the societal scale, to parallel an integral methodological pluralism and thus arrive at something of a more balanced appreciation of all those occasions that are arising in the Kosmos anyway.

      Of course, for integral metatheory, any such judgments on the relative or manifest plane—involving degrees of intrinsic and extrinsic value (which can indeed be greater or lesser among holons)—are set in the context of Ground value (which is radically equal for all holons). All three types of value judgments—intrinsic, extrinsic, and Ground—are surely part of any integral holding in consciousness, where the one thing we do not want to do is champion merely one of those three value sets to the exclusion or marginalization of the others.

Let's See What She Thinks: A Final Word on Zone #2

      The third-person perspective of being-in-the-world has always offered one great gift: it curbs narcissism, curbs the ego, curbs the inclination to take my first-person view as if it were the only view that mattered. When I say, "What you do think?," then I am checking my own perception with yours; and when we both say, "Let's ask them what they think," then we are signaling our desire to get as much feedback as possible from as many sources as possible, and that we are willing to learn to adjust our perceptions based on more opinions from more sources.

      The third-person approaches to the exteriors ( 3p x 3p) have always been the basis of what any society took as its science and technology, exemplified in its tools and techniques of hunting, agriculture, architecture, astronomy, medicine, engineering, communications networks, automobiles, and airplanes. The third-person approaches to the interiors ( 3p x 1p) were always the basis of its knowledge of the inward landscape of awareness, dreams, ideals, values, virtues, visions. Starting with the earliest shamans, maps were made of these interior voyages, maps that were third-person descriptions of first-person realities, maps that were always versions of: "Many other people have made the interior journey following this map and these instructions, and when they did so, they found these incredible vistas; follow this map and you, too, can see and feel these extraordinary dimensions of your own being, dimensions that can liberate you from the binding power of lesser, narrower visions."

      These third-person maps of first-person realities have been the theme of this Except, and they were, by any other name, structuralism—the look of a feeling, the way that a joyful song, which can only be known by singing, looks from the outside. Sing those songs, and you have hermeneutics; write down their melody, and you have structuralism.

      These maps could be very simple and elegant, or incredibly complicated and sophisticated; and, of course, they reflected the times in which they were drawn (they were an AQAL configuration), with many of their interpretations being a bit outmoded (which is not a fault or a lack but a sign of Spirit's moving on). But all of them had one absolutely crucial thing in common: they instinctively drew on zone #2 of the indigenous perspectives of being-in-the-world: the way interior realities look from the outside.

      Whether these maps were presented as shamanic upper and lower worlds, the Great Chain of Being, the 10 sefirot, the 7 chakras, the 8 vijnanas, or the 5 koshas, they all pointed to deeper, higher, wider vistas of awareness laying on the other side of the ordinary, through a gate of ego death, and onto a plain of dazzling possibilities holding the inner secrets of the Kosmos.

     No society has ever been without its vision holders; the only difference has been in the nobility of the vision. To whom are we to look?—awakened sages or Wall-Street advertisers, shamanic revelations or deconstructive narcissism, growth to goodness or wallowing in ego? Structuralism, by whatever name, has always pointed to the deeper and higher waves of awareness that are the birthright of all sentient beings. Therefore, choose your visions carefully, for as even the earliest sages counseled: you become what you contemplate.

      A full-spectrum structuralism, as part of an Integral Methodological Pluralism, calls us to the highest potentials pioneers have glimpsed, implores us heed previously ignored whispers from within, shed density gladly and float all the way to stars, a secret journey to the center of the Kosmos revealing a light of which the sun is embarrassed imitation, luminosities the stars steal in order to twinkle at all, a compassionate bliss that overtakes the universe in cascading waves of exalted release, drenches the world in chocolate-flavored fullness, licks its lips as it tells the tale.

      Maps of the soul, paths to the stars, charters of the far shores of consciousness, an atlas of Atman, songs of the Self Supreme, sketches of Spirit, drafts of the Divine, these third-person maps of first-person realities, these great, great gifts of zone #2.....