Violence, Darwin, Eugenics and Judgement: Seeing Through the Problem with Stages

From the moment that humans chose to breed from their strongest plough horses, or to hold back some seeds for next year from their most productive plants, we have interfered with nature.?There is evidence that Siberian hunter-gatherers practiced this 9000 years ago.?Huskies and retrievers exist as breeds because of unnatural selection.?Eugenics goes back a long way.

Darwin never said “survival of the fittest”.?Darwin’s theory was about the survival to breeding age of those who were most adapted to their environment.?Nature is adaptive.?The evolution of cacti represents the way that nature diversifies and over time brought forth species that are more adapted to dry conditions.

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The Violence of Nature

Some humans chose to describe nature as “red in tooth and claw” and to extend the principles of plant or horse-breeding to the management of human existence.?They made judgements about what is and what they believe ought to be.?They made decisions about who should be educated and what they should be educated for and about who should be a slave, a wage-slave or a factory-owner.?They saw nature as competitive and to perpetuate their power by labelling themselves as the fittest, thus entitled to subjugate others.?They were the lions and tigers, the apex predators.?That was their judgement.?Seemingly, this goes back a long way.?Skeletons thousands of years old are found with bashed-in skulls.

Lions and tigers have an effect on their prey populations.?Their immediate interest is in the weakest and slowest gazelle, or the one which is lame.?Their effect over generations on genetic selection is to improve gazelle speed or fetlock strength.?In turn, gazelle improvements call for stronger, faster or smarter hunters.?The apparent competition is not merely destructive; it strengthens both species within the context of that predator-prey relationship.?

Nature is not only about predators and prey, however.?Ecologies develop through the multiple relationships between their parts and potentially innumerable contexts.?In an ecology, everything becomes a potential source of new life.?The deer rubbing its antlers on a tree opens up a place for new insects or other organisms to live, a habitat for new species*.?An established ecology is an organism of a million contexts.?You could even regard it as a super-organism in the sense that its adaptability arises from the resilience of those inter-relationships and the flexibility of the whole to respond to changing conditions.?The forest embodies a wider range of possibilities than the cactus.

In the forest, organisms are mutually beneficial but they are also in competition.?Large and small vegetation competes short-term to reach the available light or to adapt better than other species to the darker conditions of the forest floor.?While there may be wolves and rabbits, nature is not only red in tooth and claw; it is also green and brown.?More than that, it depends on the tiniest and most connected of life-forms, the mycorhizomes, the vast collaborative networks of fungi which distribute resources.?It incorporates the collective intelligence of ants, a species which reproduces at the level of the colony.?A colony grows new ants from eggs just as we grow new skin by replicating cells but the entire population has to split via flying ant swarms in order to inhabit a new location.?It’s complicated.?Individuals and collectives are dealing with many system demands and tensions.

Is it also violent??The mix of competition and collaboration means that sometimes it is.?One species will thrive at the expense of another – getting more light, consuming the other’s potential food source.?Gardeners will know that slugs and snails will completely destroy a tender plant, that climbing vine species can strangle and systemic fungi can kill their host.?*The deer rubbing its antlers on a tree may expand the ecology but to the tree it is violent and may introduce disease.?Deer strip bark from young trees and kill them.?If violence is the damaging of one living organism by another then yes, the natural world is violent.

Is it then caring as well??That question is not asked in the human and emotional sense of the word.?So, rephrasing it in order not to anthropomorphise nature: ?Do members of a species matter to one another and does the fate of one species matter to a different species??There is plenty of evidence that the former takes place and a considerable debate that I won’t pursue regarding the adaptive value of altruism – that there are selection pressures where the success of a genetic family or even at the level of the species’ gene pool is an element in the mix.?It has also been argued that where two or more species have adapted together, they have a mutual interest in the ability of the other to thrive.?The mycorhizomes need the trees and vice versa.

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Humans???

The human species is a relatively recent outcome of natural selection and has an exceptional range and degree of abilities in some crucial areas such as intelligence and tool use.?We manipulate our environment physically, exteriorising our survival with buildings and agricultural systems.?We also use our minds in ways that most animals do not and no others do to the same extent.?We don’t just pattern-sense; we pattern-create, starting in our imaginations.?We pass that knowledge on through language and even create a record of it.?Our world is filled with the resulting artefacts; natural forces are dominated by human ones.?The outcome is that in relatively few generations, without further genetic change, we have colonised almost every environment on Earth and have ambitions even beyond that.

In getting to where we are, millions of people have made millions of choices about where to live, how to live, who to mate with and what tools to use.?A few individuals among those millions are known – the leaders, the inventors and the pioneers.?A few have their portraits hanging in an ancestral corridor or hall of fame.?Most do not, yet their contribution, too, lives on in the generations that they sired and the hedges that they planted; every one of them adapted as best they could to the contexts and conditions of existence they found themselves in.?They farmed together for generations or migrated together when conditions changed.?Sometimes an individual or sub-group would split from the collective and set out for completely new places, across continents by horse and covered wagon or across oceans on balsawood rafts and papyrus boats.?This is still the case with those who go to the city to seek their fortune or who pay the people smugglers and arrive hidden in vehicles lorries or on inflatable boats.

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Does Psychology Matter?

How and why do we make these choices??What are the forces that shape human activity??Answering these questions is the domain of human socio-psychology.?Do we need to know or is this all pointless navel-gazing, spurious analysis, imposing points of view on a milieu that is better left alone??The above depiction of the natural world argues that competition and collaboration are inbuilt to evolution and that competition can contribute to the development of capacities.?It likewise argues that even without animals there are aspects of violence that are built in to the competitive aspect and equivalents of caring that are also present in the interdependency.?Do these dynamics play out in human existence and do they matter?

We don’t all think the same way.?Human life is filled with small and large disputes.?Some disputes are between people who value the same things – like religions disputing the right ways to God.?Some disputes are between people who value different things, those who prioritise economic success arguing with others who prioritise human feelings or sustainability.?Values are about why we think what we think and they sit beneath the choices of what to think, shaping and driving them.?

It is possible to see these collections of Values in terms of their commonalities.?Some people think that it is right and important that competition takes place and that it is natural for some humans to dominate others.?That thinking system leads to wars, slavery, emperors and serfs.?Such people might say “it’s a dog eat dog world” (even while dogs in fact don’t usually eat other dogs).?Their mindset prioritises individuals.

Some other people see the world quite differently.?They do not accept the chaos that results when all are fighting for superiority.?Their priority for order leads them to seek right ways and collective codes, whether attributed to tablets of stone or to Marxist principles.?That kind of order places the collective above the individual and prioritises collaboration over competition.?

These priorities shape the ways that individuals will behave and they shape the systems we live by.?The Mafia live by one set of codes and Convents by another.?The codes of omerta and of confession are not merely about silence or speech; they stem from different “whys”.?However, in case it should seem that these descriptions make collectivist priorities superior to individualist ones, note that there are other potential outcomes.?Individualist codes also lead to heroism and to people who will make more effort to be the best that they are capable of being.?Like athletes they will optimise their own performance and they will forge new paths that the collective has not seen.?They are the ones who set out for new opportunities.?Equally, the collective order can become a constraint, creating inflexibility by eliminating new ideas or change from within or unable to adapt to change from without.??Human systems then are not different from other parts of nature.?Collaboration and competition exist in tension.?Either may be seen by the other as violent in essence, not only in physical terms but in the ways they impose on others, whether that be the demand to obey the Emperor or the restrictions on freedom when pre-marital chastity is demanded.??In case this should seem too theoretical or philosophical we can look at our own families and our marriages.?We don’t always agree; we either adapt and accommodate or we split.?My imposition is your accommodation, and vice versa.?If there is harmony to be found it is in the dynamics of those interactions, yet we know equally that they spill over into dominance and non-voluntary compliance.?Emotional and physical violence happen here too.?????

There is no clear boundary line between voluntary accommodation and coercion.?Human systems and ecosystems are subject to the same tensions, the same dynamics of balance between individuals or between individuals and collectives.?They may not be easy to identify, but does it help for us to identify those that we can?

Human systems are both natural and unnatural.?The deer may not know or care what happens when it eats bark or damages it by rubbing its antlers*.?Humans are different.?We breed dogs and select crops.?We anticipate the effects of our actions – not always and not always well, but we do, both in relation to our material world and in relation to one another.?We are interested in their emotional responses as well as their actions.?The ways that humans think are an element in our ecosystem.

The study of psychology is as inevitable an outcome as any other intellectual endeavour.?It helps us to know.?We analyse and study, we describe and discriminate things that are alike and unalike.?We look at the relationships between entities and seek to predict their behaviours.?We try to understand what works and we make choices regarding what we think might work better – better for me, better for us, better for the planet.?We may favour our personal needs, just as the gazelle does not stand still for the lion but may see some juicy foliage to eat a little further away.?We may seek the benefits of collective harmony and of staying close to the herd.

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What Should Psychology Do?

From the above it is possible to justify that the value of psychology, as with other sciences, is to gather data on who people are, why they think what they think and from that to draw conclusions about how we increase the potential for people to be all that they can be and live the highest quality lives that they wish to live.?How do we get the best from our organisations??How do we avoid the inbuilt tensions of living systems escalating to the point of destructive behaviours and actual warfare??

The way we make decisions always demands some kind of ethical perspective.?We have built democracy on the basis that people should have a say in their future.?We have general perceptions regarding “the greatest good of the largest number”.?Nevertheless, the Chinese Communist Party and of the American Republican Party have widely divergent views on how this is best achieved.?It is easy for a Western mind, looking from our context, to think that the CCP doesn’t share that goal.?The purpose here is not to discuss the ethics themselves, nor the relative merits of those systems.?It is to ask how we achieve the most understanding of the ways such choices arise.

Similarly, all societies have some viewpoint on how to raise and educate children.?The majority of the world’s young people experience some form of collective attempt to support that process.?Here, too, priorities vary between the view that the child should become everything that she is capable of and aspires to be and the idea that they are educated to be contributing members of the society.

Education offers us an excellent mirror for the choice-making involved.?The view that a child being all they can be is also often aligned to the perception that this will also produce the best possible society.?The inverse is also true in that it can potentially be seen as best for the child that they are optimally fitted to meeting what society requires because that will enable them to have a sense of place and to feel valued.??The latter may more quickly seem like the best economically and is widely adopted with that reasoning, but both views can be given an economic justification.

Just about all of our significant human decisions are driven by our varying views of “why?” Whichever educational choice you might favour in the above example has its source in your perception of what is most important to you and what you consider constitutes a mature and healthy basis for decisions.?This leads quite directly to the conclusion that the way we think does indeed matter and it then also follows that understanding how differences in those ways of thinking show up in the dynamics of our lives also matters.?Whatever causes or prevents change in those perceptions, and the contexts and circumstances in which they appear to deliver desirable results (whatever your criteria for that evaluation might be) matters too.

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Descriptions and Labels

There is a mindset typically referred to as modernism. Its priorities are individualistic and material-centred, with the result that it variously strategises, analyses, concretises, systematises and potentially weaponises its knowledge. ?It is inherently arrogant in the sense that by always striving for the best, it is always prey to the illusion that it has found it, and that everyone else would benefit, particularly those who are obviously inferior and should have it imposed on them, whether they want it or not, especially if that is also to their own benefit. ?It was the logic of "What's good for General Motors is good for America". ?GM notwithstanding, the upside of the modernist system is that lots of people got mobility, improved surgical techniques and global communications.

Over time, that mindset generates a reaction, an inevitable response. A new mindset develops that rejects the material-centred priorities and looks for a human-centred replacement. ?As a result, this postmodernist mindset seeks to value diversity, fairness, care and compassion, trusts feeling over analysis and strongly rejects what it sees as the hostile imposition of modernistic thinking. ?It, too, can fall prey to its own illusions, seeing everything through the superiority of its collectivising lens, denigrating heroic individuality, believing its own view of collective benefit to be a universal view and thus, that it should be imposed on those who disagree until they come to their senses. It romanticises some worldviews, and lives off of the material benefits that modernism created while basking in moral superiority.

The polarity is obvious. These mindsets have little in common, except perhaps 1) the retained individualistic undercurrent for postmodernists that an emerging focus on people also involves being the best person one can be.?Therefore it is right and proper to be successful and prosperous and self-fulfilled.?More significantly, 2) that each thinks they are right and the other is wrong. ?Greedy exploiting capitalists vs tree-hugging hippy flakes.

Out of that tension emerges the philosophical or academic conflict around cultural imperialism and colonialism.?Any thinking that retains aspects of the analytical and systems-oriented way of thinking is perceived to be concretised, materialistic and inherently weaponised, even when it is not used in that way, and merely because it has some similarities of form.?Four legs good, two legs bad.?That similarity of form is seen by definition as damaging, therefore none of its findings can possibly be legitimate or provide value.?The mere fact of its analytical language defines it as wrong.?Worse still, the use of words like stages means that any distinctions that it describes must be divisive and thus do harm to the perception of wholeness and the desire for harmony.?The notion that this attitude is itself divisive, since it makes all of modernism wrong, does not impinge on the belief.?Diversity and inclusivity tip over into a new form of absolutism.

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The Trend Towards Absolutism

Absolutism has become quite a “thing”, inhabiting many conversations such as those about feminism, gender identity and racism.?While this article doesn’t go into those topics, it is useful to observe the way that those debates have become very polarised. ?There is rarely any middle ground.?There is also a regular feature of using terms very loosely, so that anything that resembles the object of disapproval is lumped in with it.?Again, two legs bad, four legs good.?Both tendencies are also present in debates about “stage theory”.

A recent Facebook post by educator and author Nora Bateson began with that polemic stance.?“Stage theory is BS,” she wrote. “And it is colonial as hell.”?Since there was no way to know which theory was being referred to, or even what the boundary might be to the stage theory category, the resulting dialogue was intense and confused – even after Nora had clarified that “It is Piaget, Kegan, Integral …. All of those forms of expressing the stages of development…. As if that were not a second-order cybernetic catastrophe”.

That is a huge topic, and in case you are not instantly familiar with 2nd-order cybernetics, it took the original cybernetics, which is the study of causal relationships in systems and feedback loops as applied to the study of ecologies, social systems, technologies, biological systems and cognition, and applied that study to the practice of cybernetics itself and to the cyberneticists who practiced it.?In particular it deals with the problem of circularity.?

The charge is that the action or the process of seeing stages or using the language of stages, is itself circular: that there is a self-defining aspect to using the language of “stages of development” such that even if there were no stages, that choice of language imposes them on human reality.?Viewed in this way, there can be no possibility that a theory which describes stages will be other than hierarchical, linear and colonialist.?Hence, “stage theories bad”.

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Misuse and Abuse

If we look again at the modernist to postmodernist transition, this response is understandable.?Stage theories had been applied in bad ways, from the misuse of Darwinism to justify eugenics to the weaponising of human development perspectives to justify dominance and subjugation of those who were regarded as less developed.?The boundaries between racism and colonialism are very blurred.?Slave-ships appear justifiable when you treat some humans as “less” and colonialism is the same dominance applied in situ.

It is worth observing that slavery, colonisation, conquest and all such abuses existed long before modernism.?Neither the Roman Empire nor Genghis Khan required theories of development as justification for their action.?Their worldview was rather simpler – conquer or be conquered, the human equivalent of predator-prey.?Thus even when we observe the consequences of modernism we should be aware that earlier ways of thinking existed within.?The tribal leaders in Afghanistan are not modernists and neither are the Taliban.?Ultimately, all of human history has accustomed us to hierarchical thinking.?I will need to come back to the question of hierarchies later.

Are Sequences Valid???????????????

Earlier, reasons were presented why an understanding of such mindsets is potentially valuable.?At the next level of detail that brings up questions what we observe and how we describe the differences we see.?Does the process of asking inherently do violence to those we study??Do the types of question prejudice or constrain the possible answers??If there is a historical trajectory or an inbuilt influence on the order in which mindsets have arisen, does that imply that later = better?

Therefore we need to pursue the questions a) of the potential prejudice in our questions, b) of whether sequences are valid in relation to human development, and c) whether they are unavoidably damaging, prejudiced or not.?In essence, are they BS and are they deserving of all the implications that go with “colonialist”?

Let me say that I have every sympathy with the postmodern perspective that modernism has a great deal to answer for.?Similarly, I can’t disagree that much of human history has been brutal and exploitative, filled with people who thought their way of life should be imposed on others, and so on.?It is also obvious that these features of human existence are still present, and that some of them have even worsened, such as level of income gap between rich and poor.?I am not in any way arguing against the need for change.?Yet ultimately that leads to other questions such as “what kind of change?” and “how chosen?”?Any answer is informed by the relationships that inhabit our view of sequences and stages.

Here we are pitched back into the question of circularity.?Our language is filled with the conceptions we have built over time and contains much of what has been important to us.?There is a reason why Eskimos have many words for snow.?Even without an education system, children would learn to see the world as their parents and grandparents did.?In education there is an inclination to test whether children have learned what we consider to be key elements and to believe that by age P they should understand element Q.?We make children OK or not OK and we measure our teachers by how successful they have been in getting pupils to that stage.?

This article is not about education itself but about the implicit expectations and judgements and the fact that language is filled with cultural priorities.?We don’t test children in England on their vocabulary for snow, though railway delays one winter were explained by the announcement that it was “the wrong kind of snow”.?In a multi-cultural society, what degree of conformity imposition is taking place as we teach children whose first language is Hindi or Hungarian??Is that OK when they are immigrants who live among us and “must assimilate”??Is it OK as we export our languages (Anglophones in particular) and teach them in indigenous locations, or even as we translate English-derived educational systems into other languages, and in doing so maybe reshape them, people and languages alike?

The questions we ask are important because they shape the possible answers.?Lawyers know this, as with the famous example “When did you stop beating your wife?”?There the manipulation is obvious.?That is not always the case and there are excellent examples of how to construct political surveys to achieve the answer that favours the client party.?The questions assume the framing of the answers.?At the end of this logical chain is the question of whether even the fact that we think there is a sequence will lead us to find one??That is, do our habits and traditions of thinking linearly impose sequential constructs on individual or societal development which are not actually there??And do such impositions lead almost inevitably to abuses – measuring where people are on the scale, judging them as inferior and believing that we can treat them as less and tell them how to be??That in essence is the challenge to developmental sequences.?It can seem almost incontestable, and to justify completely the contention that stage theories are BS.?

But hold on. Beneath that theoretical argument is the need to deal with practical realities.?I suspect that no-one would argue that infants develop teeth one by one, gradually acquiring a set, losing and replacing their milk teeth along the way and eventually arriving, according to their genetic predisposition to wisdom teeth, at 28 or 32.?Nor would there be any argument against the general contention that children begin with little language or knowledge, with limited motor and co-ordination skills, and that they develop these over a period of years.?Such generalities are species-wide and true regardless of culture.

The generalities present a continuum.?So are there predictabilities and expectations??Again, this is to some degree undeniable.?For instance, we know the typical range of ages relative to the number of teeth.?We might measure that progress in order to know if there is a need to check the child’s diet or some other aspect of their physiology in order to assist that process.?We don’t want them to be less than their potential.?A good friend’s delightful granddaughter was well below normal height at age 5.?For two years she has received growth hormone injections and is now more in line with her peer group.?Is this measurement and treatment wrong??Is it, in a sense, colonialist, demanding that she be other than who she is??Or is it maximising who she can become? ?Whose decision is it to make? ?The reality is perhaps that if your crawling infant is struggling to walk upright, you would give more time to helping them practice and that helping is natural too.???

However comfortable you feel with such examples in biological development, does that acceptance change when we ask questions about cognitive growth???This is where we hit some more contentious questions.?There is a debate about Piaget, the grand old man of child development, whose four stages achieved wide acceptance but who was criticised by others such as Lev Vygotsky who believed Piaget under-estimated the importance of culture, language and context and along with Jerome Bruner preferred to view development as a continuum.?

Of course it is a continuum in the sense that there are no switches that are suddenly turned on and therefore there are inevitable and long overlaps where more than one stage is present.?And of course it is influenced by culture and environment – Piaget would not have disagreed with that.?The “nature vs nurture” debate is likewise old and deep, in this case playing out in the distinction between cognitive constructivist and social constructivist views. Such debates persist over the decades precisely because there is no simple binary resolution.?Both sides hold aspects of the truth.

The Piaget example is just one illustration of such arguments.?It is not purely theoretical because it leads to different formulations of the best way to educate.?Metaphorically, if you measure everyone by the same standards, for example tree-climbing success, you meet the challenge of regarding a fish or an elephant as less well educated because it cannot climb a tree and you bias your teaching towards gibbons and cats. ?That can lead to a society which puts fish and elephants on its rejects pile and sees no reason to educate them at all.?We have to be vigilant about our preconceptions.?At the same time, both Piaget and Vygotsky viewed children as actively constructing their own knowledge of the world; they are not seen as just passively absorbing information and both theorists accepted that cognitive development involves qualitative changes in thinking, not only a matter of learning more things.?Both saw qualitative shifts as real.?Both shared the preconception that cognitive development is important.?The difference was over causes, and what to do about them.

So how do we deal with a world in which qualitative changes within a continuum are recognisable and can be identified and agreed upon??If the continuum (ordering sequence) is real, then there is an element of linearity, however variable or culturally shaped may be the journey. ?And if the qualitative changes are real and identifiable, then the stages are there.?They have not been imposed or artificially created.?More than that, they may tell us something about what propels the continuum, why and when change happens and how to work in harmony with nature.

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Cognitive Constructivism vs Social Constructivism

Piaget and Vygotsky had different premises.?Were the differences in minds – cognitively constructed (Piaget) – or did they stem from the culture – socially constructed (Vygotsky)??It can seem that answering that question is our way to knowledge.?But the question contains a crucial flaw.?It is essentially polarised.?It doesn’t allow for the possibility is that both parts can be answered “yes”, and that the shaping of a child’s development is a product of both mind and culture.?This recognition is the source of a general thread in regard to human thinking.

There is a famous historical debate in biology about whether a species can pass on to its offspring characteristics that have been acquired during its lifetime.?That possibility, known as Lamarckism, was regarded as a heresy, a total opposition to the Darwinian view of genetics which is that characteristics arise through mutation and through the selection over time of one characteristic as more fitted for survival.?What we know now is that it is not as simple as that.?Biology has discovered epigenetics – the way in which the range of possible expressions of what is in the genes can respond to the living environment – and that this can include the environment of the parent.?The middle-ground is no longer excluded.

Again, this illustration is not merely theoretical.?It affects many areas of societal discourse.?Are humans divided into black and white, into male and female, hetero-or homosexual??Are criminals genetically predisposed or are they the product of societal conditions??Does vaccination against Covid benefit the population or harm it??Are our individual freedoms to be unmasked in public arenas totally sacred or does society have a right to make demands??Whatever view you may have on any of these topics, one thing is hopefully obvious.?The nature of the debate is often intensely polarised and acrimonious.?Anyone who doesn’t agree with me 100% is seen as being in total disagreement and must be entirely wrong, with the consequence that resolutions to the dispute are considerably harder to find.

I would like to suggest that there is a need for general agreement that either-or conversations are less generative than both-and conversations.?The former lead to closed loops and are anti-evolutionary.?The latter lead to open loops, potential and possibility.

Going a step further, I would like to suggest that there are some deep roots, many arising from our religious systems (all of them) but also from other credos and formulaic “right ways”, that caused the basis of many conversations to be about fixed rights and wrongs.?This is built in to both our upbringing and our education systems.?We are taught how to gain approval and qualifications from being right and ticking the correct box in the multiple choice grid.?That makes our decision-making inflexible and insensitive to either changes of context or contingencies of shifts in the exterior conditions.?It makes us prone to following one path even after the evidence begins to show up that is has ceased to work.?We get overshoots, blaming, recrimination and corresponding excesses from the new “right answer”.?The oscillation never ends.?Integrated, responsive, contingent, adjustable and flexible choices are prevented.???

Accordingly, my contention is that we need to be willing to see both continuums and stages and to be flexible regarding which viewpoint will assist us at different points or with different aspects of our enquiries.?We humans are not so conspicuously successful right now that we can afford to reject possible toolkits of sources of intelligence.?We need all the help we can get.

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Complexification

The objection to developmental theories is that stages indicate sequences.?It is presumed that this implies that earlier stages in the sequence are of less value than later stages.?Unfortunately there have been times when policies have been created or justified as if that implication were correct.?No doubt there are theories which do carry that implication and in many cases they may contain an unconscious bias or a hidden agenda.

It is an evolutionary fact that humans evolved first in Africa and were black-skinned.?You and I, if not recently out of Africa, can for a small fee track the sources of our DNA back through that very long migration and adaptation to cooler environments with less sun.?We are hopefully well past the time when moderately intelligent people could believe that later means in any way superior.

The same applies to the development of human thinking systems.?Black skins were adapted to sunny conditions.?Whiter skins are adapted to cloudier ones.?Tall, thin Nile-delta populations are also heat-adapted to equatorial conditions.?Shorter, squatter Eskimos are adapted like seals to cold and the benefits of more body-fat insulation.?As the human race spread across continents we developed greater complexity and diversity in the range of our genetic options.?Thinking systems changed too.?Shifts over time and growth in numbers went alongside a gradual change from hunter-gatherer and herd-follower to settled agriculture, livestock management and from that to villages, towns and cities. With those developments came added requirements for the ways that we need to think in order to thrive.?While no later stage in that trajectory is inherently better than any earlier one, there are shifts in the capability of those mindsets to deal with greater complexity.?These mindset shifts are at the core of the adaptive process that is described by the Graves Theory/Spiral Dynamics model.

More individualistic development methodologies, such as Loevinger, Kegan, Torbert and Cook-Greuter, have commonalities with each other as well as with the collective trajectory of societies as just described.?Such systems have different maps and they cut the continuum at different points with varying degrees of granularity.?In their different ways, all describe the ways that people think rather than who they are.?They are not typologies because people have the potential to develop and change.?Maslow’s system is somewhat different, because it is based on the way that people perceive their needs, and accordingly what they value.?Although it is called a hierarchy, the needs form a stack that is dependent on what is below.?The more basic needs do not cease to be part of a person’s make-up as they focus on more advanced ones.?But people generally cannot give priority to the needs of connection or personal fulfilment or transformation when they are hungry or struggling to thrive economically.

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Hierarchy

Here is the nub of the challenge that all such systems and anything that involves “stage” terminology or developmental sequences are unavoidably “colonial as hell”.?There is nothing inherently prescriptive about any of them.?At the same time there are elements to all of them where later or more complex stages are identified as being associated with increased capacities – a larger bandwidth of perception, expanded cognitive complexity, an increased level of skill with leadership, and correlation in some cases with non-stage measures such as emotional or spiritual intelligence.

How are we to deal with these developmental realities, from number of teeth to cognitive capacities, to cultural scales to complexity of thought.?What is the answer to the challenge that by even assessing such dimensions, let alone by offering descriptions of identifiable shift points, we are doing violence to people – particularly to those who have developed differently??How do we deal with the charge that our view of priorities carries cultural biases that are not relevant to other cultures and that we thereby diminish them and make them less??How can such apparent hierarchies not be simply wrong?

The conclusion that this paper has been leading to is that all the features we are concerned about are reflections of the way that living systems function.?Human systems extend the same principles into our socio-psychological space.?The requirement is to balance co-operation and collaboration (emphasis on “I” or “We”) to manage inherent conflicts and tensions, to cope with complexification, diversification and scale.?We have to accommodate shifts over time in the relative viability of past developments in relation to changes in the contexts and conditions.?All of these are natural processes.?This is what life is like, as much for humans as for every other species.?Our human ecosystem has been true to all of these dynamics and we are trying to manage our future by making the best use of the mindsets that we have and to manage the human ecosystem in its relationships to the planetary ecology as a whole.

The problem is not in our history of describing such shifts in such a way as to identify shift-points in that continuum.?It is not with the idea that mindsets and ways of thinking are different.?It is with the ways that we manage the conflicts between those mindsets. ?Most of all it is in our history of making judgements.

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Judgements

The outcomes of the past and the trends, like human eugenics that we now regard as abominations, didn’t derive from the tools that we used or from theories that described stages as such.?They result from the mindsets themselves.?The tools are not the issue.?Even when some of those stage theories have implicit judgements built in to them and when they lead to choices like enslavement, it is not the presence of stages that is at fault.?It is the mindsets themselves and the ways that those codes and priorities, when they stray from a process of balancing life’s inherent tensions into a rigid binary right and wrong mentality, embed dysfunctionality into the choices that are made.?Instead of those choices being contingent on conditions, rather than being reflective of the contexts and in place of a responsive adaptation to those inbuilt life-tensions, they were solidified and made into certainties.?As Mark Twain said, “It ain’t what we don’t know that gets us into trouble, it’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.”?Yesterday’s certainties generate today’s problems.

This is the damage that is built in to the modernist way of thinking which placed material success above everything else and defined efficiency in its own narrow terms of money and productivity, eliminating from consideration all recognition of the damage done to mental and social health and to any notion that what we wanted to be better at was producing human happiness.

Similarly, damage is built in to the postmodernist way of thinking when it fails to see that modernism has made people better fed, warmer and more comfortably housed, delivered increased economic capacity that finances the care of the old, ill or mentally damaged and made possible any educational system whatsoever.?These have become an essential part of modern living.?These benefits and the human operating systems that created them cannot be simply jettisoned in order to deal with everybody’s hurt feelings or to protect us from the consequences of past victim-perpetrator scenarios. ?Their unsustainable outcomes for the planet cannot be dealt with merely by destroying them.?Although we are still faced with inequalities and with the results of past abuse, we have to deal with that in an empowered way, which doesn’t happen by turning everyone into a victim of something.

The systems of the past all reflect a notion that there is some kind of utopian ideal.?Whether religion, communism or capitalism, democracy or dictatorship, all of these fixed systems have been imaginary “right ways”, none of which are real and none of which have worked.?All have set up the conditions which were subsequently seen as unacceptable.?When we believe in these utopian ideals, we judge everything that is not like them and it is the judgement that creates paralysis.

What Does the Future Need from Us?

Neither postmodernism nor modernism is capable of taking us forward.?They judge each other and they both discard whatever systems were present before them.?When we extend such right-wrong polarities into either-or ways of thinking, we paralyse ourselves and our society, reducing our range of options and perpetuating the inflexibilities.?Instead of improving on the past, we carry more of the dysfunction into the future.?Rather than creating something new we take with us blends of reaction, acceptance, rejection and resistance based on past experience.?These constrain our choices, make us blind to overshoots locked in from previous decisions and, in consequence, both un-responsive to rapidly changing conditions and unable to navigate complexity.

When life presents us with something that is not to our liking, we only have two kinds of response available.?We can change ourselves internally in order to adapt to what we don’t like.?Or we can change what is on the outside, directly altering it or moving somewhere that fits us better.?With choices relating to other people, these options are aspects of the individualist and collectivist preferences.?When we are prioritising our individual preferences we look for others to change.?When we see others or groups as more important, we look at how to adjust to them.

We can extend these perspectives into our view of history.?If we view the past as too much oriented towards changing others, we will judge our predecessors as immoral, seeing their actions as violent and as failing to allow people to be who they are.?We will judge them for being judgmental.?When we see the past as over-tolerant, too inclined to judge themselves when there was a need to confront, we will be critical of their flakiness and lack of moral assertiveness.

Neither of these perspectives are sufficient to create a healthy future.?Only by blending both and by steering our course between extremes which are both capable of becoming intolerable can we find a healthy and functional blend of changing ourselves or changing the world.?I believe we instinctively know this and are aware when our unwillingness to change ourselves, for instance to consume less or fly less frequently, is perpetuating the problem.?We know when expecting everyone else to change while we stay as we are amounts to hypocrisy.?Our future depends on this flexibility.

We also know that others are prey to the same weaknesses that we are and that allowing other people to be who they are has its boundaries.?They are entitled to think as they choose and not be judged merely because they are not the same as us.?At the same time it is legitimate for us to expect that their actions are not harmful to others.?That concept is the base of our legal system and our acceptance of government.

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Beyond Judgement and Towards Balance/Integration

Our problems are not with stages, but with judgement and excess.?Whatever the system, if the stages identified are real, then they exist because they have a contribution to make.?They are not dispensable, so the error is to treat them as if they are.?The error is in the judgement of a stage, not in the observance of its existence.?Rejection is shadow-creation.?Rejecting stages and stage theory wholesale does nothing to change their existence and expressions in reality. Such blanket rejection merely prevents people from understanding what is and thereby making better choices for themselves and society as a whole.

At the same time, any stage can be expressed in a way that is unbalanced.?Some people will behave in those ways.?The solution is not to eliminate that stage (even assuming that were possible) or to exclude all people who are operating from that stage as if they are inferior or worthless.?No competent system or model would work that way.?Instead it would be seeking to help all stages to be expressed within healthy degrees of balance and to avoid extremes.

In the same way any competent system or model and any sustainable way of living would recognise that since all stages reflect something that was needed by the system and none are dispensable, the task is to support a healthy balance of expression between the stages.

What then, constitutes a healthy balance??From the outset, the thrust of this article has been that living systems make their own demands, and that those demands are contextual, reflective of the conditions that are present.?Since conditions change, those shifts in context will alter which thinking systems are most supportive of our ability to thrive.?Our task is to respond.

We cannot afford to eliminate potential responses.?We have to live in the moment and function in present time. Wherever our reaction is to perceive a potential response as tarnished by some kind of historical failure, or a resonance with previous expressions and applications of that thinking, we should pull ourselves up short and instantly question ourselves because we have traded our awareness in the moment for a trigger from the past.?Of course, if something was simply a bad idea in the past, such as slavery, our awareness in the presence will continue to tell us that.?The point is that we don’t cease to plant cotton or sugar cane because slaves used to harvest them.?It is in the nature of a volatile and complex system that our adaptability needs to function better than ever.

Summary and Conclusion

While this article has been quite discursive and has pulled its components apart, the key elements are relatively few and quite simple.

1)????All living systems demonstrate the same need to deal with inbuilt tensions

a.????The tension of individual and collective needs

b.????The tension of adapting to the presence of new forms

c.?????The tension of competition and collaboration

d.????The inbuilt reality that any part of the system may damage another part simply by existing and that “violence” is in that sense unavoidable

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2)????All systems in their trajectories of change over time show up as both continua and as identifiable points within the continuum and the identification of stages provides more data and enables us to understand the dynamics of interaction between the elements better.?This enhances our predictions, provides better understanding of risks, helps us inform people more fully and make more informed choices.

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3)????Human psychological and sociological systems are subject to the same dynamics and the same inbuilt tensions as other living systems.?Expanding scale demands of us increased abilities to manage complexity, including the presence of more sub-systems that are persisting from the past.

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4)????Human systems evolve in response to the perceived inadequacies of what has been before.?At any point, the new is evolving via its compensations for the old and its rejections of what no longer works.?This has led to dynamics of polarisation, of idealising the new, demonising the old and expecting that we will find “right” answers.?This causes us to expect it to be possible to make reliable “either-or” selections.

5)????Recognising that we have been through such cycles previously, have experienced that previous utopian solutions turned out to be flawed and learned that no single answer has ever been satisfactory should lead us to understand that we need inclusive, both-and choosing processes, with mindsets that integrate and depolarise all options.

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6)????Since all the stages and elements are recognised as inherently valuable, and that value is context-dependent, we are less easily confused about hierarchy.?Hierarchies are not absolute or permanent, and instead reflect the priorities of what is needed in what context, for what purpose.

7)????Since all the stages and elements together with the people who occupy those niches are inherently valuable, there is no requirement for any of them to change.?No-one has to be pushed/pulled up an imaginary ladder or denigrated for being where they are.

8)????The health of the system as a whole depends not on shifting people from where they are, but on supporting them to function in balance and health in those niches, and on articulating the system so that balance between those niches is optimised and there is less inherent tension and conflict.

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9)????Because the need for this new integrative mindset is evident and because a platform of multiple prior mindsets is present, some individuals will naturally emerge with the new mindsets and motivations required to support the design of new sub-systems that assist the functional optimisation of the whole.

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10)?(Corollary) None of this requires that anyone, at any level should be or become enlightened.?This remains an option on the curriculum for those who wish it.

“Scholarly analysis […] is only a fraction of the task, for analysis has always been

a means of control.?It is more important now to respond.”

?Mary Catherine Bateson, Foreword to Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 2000 edition

* I have unintentionally offended Nora Bateson and apparently upset a number of other people, by not explicitly attributing her examples.?I apologise for that.?It was exactly because they are her examples that I was choosing to reframe that they appear at all.?The paper was written against the background of an extended dialogue in which those examples appearedbut I should not have assumed that all people would be familiar with their origin.

I have great respect for Nora and her work, and have distanced myself from other attacks on her.?There is much that we agree about and I believe that we largely share the same wishes for our human future.?And it is precisely because I believe that this particular divergence of viewpoint is important to those shared goals that I felt it necessary to write this article.?I hope that it will be read with that spirit in mind.