Back to Nature #4: The Trouble with Green

The Trouble with Green

“Here’s the point: you look out there, at the environment, and with your senses you can plainly see the wonderful, glorious, empirical world of nature. And of course you want to help save nature from destruction, not only because nature is beautiful, but because your own existence depends in many ways on a healthy environment. So you say, stop doing those things that are destroying nature! Stop polluting the oceans, stop dumping toxic wastes into our rivers, stop using fluorocarbons that create an ozone hole, stop burning carbon fuels that pollute the atmosphere and cause global warming- instead let us live in accord with nature, let us adopt energy-efficient production, use renewable resources, practice natural capitalism’ and in all ways honour Gaia. “Congratulations, you have just bought into the world of Flatland. And it is flatland that above all else is destroying Gaia. And thus your very efforts to save Gaia are destroying Gaia”.

-Ken Wilber, Boomeritis (2002)

Last week we looked at the story of the cultural and psychological evolution of human consciousness through the Spiral Dynamics model.

We stopped at Green- the environmental stage that has emerged as a significant cultural form in the last few decades in many western countries, influencing politics, social movements and heralding a New Age of transformation and care for all people and All Beings.

Green however, although representing much advancement in terms of ecological and social awareness over the previous stages of Blue and Orange, has failed to recognize that these earlier stages are necessary for the emergence of green in the first place. The Green belief of the dawning of a new Age of renewal and Global Consciousness cannot be realized because to reach Green requires a developmental process that must include and value all the stages and all their values in some way.

The Post-modern “meme” has a tremendous resistance to this idea however because it tends to be at war with its parents generation of Orange and Blue which extol the virtues of hard work, discipline and tradition. Green has other ideas and rebels against the earlier stages that generated the wealth and processes to make the Green meme possible.

In its rebellion, the Green meme rejects Orange materialism and Blue structure claiming that only its own values of Universal Rights and Ecological awareness are the best.

It also fails to recognize that perhaps yet higher stages that see even more may be emerging from the more progressive ranks of Green; a stage that recognizes not the need for the imposition of a new set of values so much as a deep understanding of the inner developmental process that leads to these values; a stage that not only looks outside at the world of Gaia and the need to care for Her; but that also looks inside at the development of the consciousness that is required for people to care enough about the world in this way and to understand their relationship to their environment.

In these two failings, coupled with a disaffection for the excesses of Religion on the one hand and Rationality on the other, Green makes a fatal mistake: in its distorted, pathological form, it mistakes the simpler, pre-rational and more “natural” and “holistic” -looking earlier stages of Purple and Red as being in some way more developed than modern rational perspectives. This translates as children being having higher consciousness than adults (they are “closer to the source” as one young mother once told me;) animals, trees and plants and even rocks have personalities and spirits with higher consciousness than humans (“more natural”); instinct and intuition being higher forms of knowledge than science or rational inquiry (“more spiritual”).

All these views are very common in New Age Religion which is really just a reversion to much earlier forms of human consciousness, forms which played their own essential evolutionary role in their day, but which will prove quite inadequate to meet the challenges of the modern world.

Instead of looking ahead to what the next Emergent meme may be, Green thinks it has found Nirvana already and in a paroxysm of narcissism and naïve romantic views of what life used to be like back in the good old days it destroys the goose that laid the golden egg- the very scientific method that lead to the deeper Green ecological understanding in the first place.

Psychological Models of Human Development

The psychologist Jean Piaget (1962) was one of the earliest to research the theory that there are distinct phases of cognitive development that a child will go through as it matures. Maslow (1943) amongst others suggested similar models of psychological development and produced a “hierarchy of needs” model showing how, as the more basic physical needs of the individual are met- food, shelter, relationships- so higher needs of “self actualization” can be pursued.

Clare Graves (Beck and Cowan 1996) suggested that these stages of individual development also had collective or cultural forms: he borrowed the word meme from genetics to describe broad stages of psychological development that resulted in a society stratified by culturally distinct values. These “V-memes” or Value-memes-are represented by colors corresponding to a sequence of values and coping mechanisms of psychological needs:

1 BEIGE -as natural instincts and reflexes direct; automatic existence, as in a new-born child. 2 PURPLE – according to tradition and ritual ways of group; tribal; animistic; parochial 3 RED – asserting self for dominance, conquest, and power; exploitive; egocentric; in contemporary societies, criminal organizations, Hell’s Angels, Mad max; 4 BLUE – obediently as higher authority and rules direct; absolutist; conforming; traditional values of church and state; The army, the boy scouts; 5 ORANGE- pragmatically to achieve results and get ahead; multiplistic; competitive; capitalist; materialistic; 6 GREEN -responds to human needs; affiliative; relativistic; “the sensitive self”; ecological consciousness, the Environmental movement; equality and social justice for all.; 7 YELLOW -build functional niche to do what one chooses; existential; systemic; “spans the spiral” with the ability to meet the core psychological needs of the other memes 8 TURQUOISE -experiential to join with other like thinkers; holistic; transpersonal

According to developmental models, to revert to some earlier stage of human consciousness- that of hunter-gatherers for example, who often had animistic and superstitious beliefs- would be like getting kindergarten children to run the country. The kind of scenario that might ensue has been explored in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.

There are a few key ideas to understand the developmental model:

Firstly, you cannot skip stages. You cannot run before you can walk. Each stage builds on the earlier ones – including them but transcending them also in certain important ways. The stages can be pictured as concentric circles, like layers of an onion, a “nested holarchy”; this image makes it clear that while the higher stages contain all the earlier stages, the reverse is not true. Someone at say Orange “contains” beige, purple, red and Blue, and has access to these stages; particular behaviour may be emanating from the earlier stages but the “default” mode will still be of Orange. Purple, however, would not “have access to” the higher stages: for this, it would be necessary to first grow through each stage in turn.

Secondly, this is a naturally occurring growth hierarchy- not a dominator hierarchy. As such it is an elite to which everyone, in principle, is invited. The hierarchy of needs is fundamental- it is hard to reach the higher stages with an empty belly- but other factors also play important roles. Merely increasing wealth and privilege will not always lead to “raising consciousness”.

Thirdly, the principle characteristic of each successive stage is that it sees a bigger picture that the stage before; the view of the world is expanded and the concerns that the new stage has will be expanded. While the earlier stages in childhood are primarily narcissistic and concerned with the individuals’ own needs, the later stages become more concerned with the needs of first the whole community, then the nation perhaps as in patriotism, or an identification with a religious tradition; and this in turn gives way to eventually global concerns and concern for the well-being of all beings and the whole of nature. These widening circles of compassion/identification are bolstered by an increased cognitive awareness that sees things as parts of systems. This ability of the higher stages to think systemically is crucial in understanding how important the higher faculties are and how they can contribute to addressing the current global problems.

“The ego-centric and the ethno-centric stages of awareness could not care less about the global commons because they do not themselves possess a global awareness. And that means that Gaia’s main problem is not toxic waste dumps, the ozone hole or global warming. Gaia’s main problem is that not enough human beings have evolved from ego-centric to ethnocentric to world-centric levels of consciousness, yes?” -Wilber, IBID.

Growing into Freedom

Rousseau claimed that “man is born free, yet everywhere is in chains”. Wilber has pointed out that in psychological terms, the reverse is true- as new-born babies, we are helpless and dependent; as we grow, a lack of understanding of the world or our own bodies can lead to frustration and a desire to rebel; wisdom only comes with age and experience and it is more the control of desires rather than the egotistical insistence on their fulfillment that brings contentment. From this point of view, freedom is something that we must grow into.

From ego-centric (Beige, Purple and Red) to ethno-centric (Blue and Orange) to World Centric (Green and Yellow) each successive stage represents a “wider circle of embrace”.

In this sense, the developmental model provides an explanation for all the different values, points of view, political persuasion, belief systems and opinions that we find in the post-modern world.

It is not just that there are different views which should all be given an equal value; some are deeper, contain more levels or layers than others.

It was simpler in the earlier stages of human development- for most of human history, there has only been two or three stages present. With the advent of Green from the 1960s onwards and the subsequent (speculated) emergence of Yellow the world becomes much more complex, with many different stages of value-orientation which generally have a poor understanding of each others’ point of view- and which find themselves often in competition with each other.

“You cannot solve a problem from the same level that Created it”- Eintein.

E.F. Schumacher, in A Guide for the Perplexed gave an example of this from the French Revolution. The writers of the constitution for the new Republic could see a conflict between the two competing values of Liberte and Egalite: Too much Freedom leads to more inequality in a free-for-all competition of the market place: the strong get stronger at the expense of the weak, as can be seen in the western world. Too much enforced equality on the other hand as in the old Soviet Union and eastern European socialist countries seems to involve the loss of freedom. The reconciliation comes from a third quality from a higher level- fraternite. This inner quality of a sense of obligation for the good of the whole- that we are all brothers in a sense- requires a wider identification with all people.

Next week we shall look at some criticisms of this model; what the next stage of Yellow might actually look like; and how we might apply this model to meeting the challenges of Peak Oil and Climate change.