image by べンジャミン

Yesterday we talked about the process by which development occurs—allowing the subject to become the object. Put another way, when we disidentify with what we think we are, we can examine it objectively and make decisions rather than following patterns.

Today and tomorrow, I’d like to spend a little time exploring some of the current stages of cultural development we mentioned in yesterday’s piece, because understanding where we are and where we are headed will help us make the next great leap.

Before I get too far into this, I will say that although the stages of the spiral are real, they are not hard and fast.  Development is a fluid and messy process. The line between levels is never clearly marked, and there is no initiation ceremony for a person moving from one stage to another.

In his great book Integral Consciousness and the Future of Evolution, Steve McIntosh uses an analogy to explain this: “Think about the wavelengths of color we see in a rainbow—although we can’t draw hard lines between them, and although we can identify millions of subtle shades, when we look at a rainbow we do see distinct gradations and specific hues. Each color is a whole in itself, yet it is formed in the relation between its neighbors above and below on the spectrum. And we can see something very similar in the distinct stages found within the developmental spectrum of consciousness and culture.” In our discussion, it’s important to keep this in mind.

I am also painting these stages with a very broad brush in an attempt to get at the heart of them. It’s important to be able to step back and look at our development from a wide perspective, so that we can see where we’ve come from and where we are going. But there’s a lot more to each stage than what I will describe here. I recommend McIntosh’s book for a deeper discussion.

All that being said, my introduction to postmodernism came in college, where I majored in Literary and Cultural Studies, but it could have easily been called The Study of How The Man Screws Us All. My classmates and I studied oppression in detail, throughout history and up to the present day. We learned how the great traditions of Western literature valued only the contributions of privileged white men, and spent a lot of time ripping through their works, looking for and finding evidence of sexism, racism, and other exclusionary ideas in them.

Most of all, we learned how each of our identities is made up of bits of our cultures, and that the circumstances of our lives fully dictate who we are. These ideas were wrapped up in the philosophy of postmodernism.

Our lessons themselves were polite, but what we were learning was filled with anger and derision. Looking back at Western history through the lens of the present, we were horrified and often felt oppressed by it. When I graduated from that program, I (and many of my classmates) sank into a deep depression. If our world was such a mess, and each of us was completely created by and embedded in that world, then what course of action was possible?

Throughout my studies, I often wondered, where does choice enter into the picture? I was born into a lower middle class background full of loss and chaos, yet I had been able to escape the oppression of classism and go to one of the best universities in the nation. I had great fortune in being born with a flexible and ravenous mind, but I also made many good choices that popped me out of the impoverished fate that my education taught me I shouldn’t have been able to escape.

I finally came up with a worldview that made sense to me: Oppression is real, but if I wanted to succeed in life, I had to see myself as exempt from it. I could accept the determinism I had learned in school as a large-scale, societal truth, but I couldn’t accept it in the choices I made in my own life. And neither could anyone else who wanted to succeed.

In the years following school, I made a lot of progress with this worldview. I was able to get a good job and overcome my bad childhood financial training, learning to pay my bills on time and save a bit for the future. I was able to see destructive patterns of low self-worth and extricate myself from their clutches.

But I always struggled with the postmodern ideas I learned in school, simultaneously having sympathy for the downtrodden and also knowing that at least some of them could change their fates if they had the right support and put in the right kind of effort. I was learning, though I couldn’t yet articulate, the idea that both internal and external supports need to be in place in order for people to lead happy and healthy lives.

A bit more than a year ago, when I first learned about Integral theory and Spiral Dynamics, my experiences in and after college started to make more sense to me. I had been taught postmodernism, and because I found postmodernism ultimately unfulfilling, I was instinctively looking for the next stage.

What that next stage is, how the previous levels of development are creating it, and why we need to get there will be the subject of tomorrow’s post.