Spiral Dynamics stinks

Maybe we need to rethink emergence.

1. This is a famous image exemplifying the phenomenon of emergence as it was conceived in the early years of complexity research. To the unassuming eye, there are just some dots. The dots don’t change. But suddenly, you see a sniffing Dalmatian in the image, a tree, and its shadow. The “meaning” of the image emerged. But this “meaning” is purely cognitive. The dots didn’t change. But you did something with your attention, with your mind, in order to create meaning, and it ‘emerged’. (Therefore, there is no meaning crisis, because even the narrative of ‘meaning crisis’ creates meaning.)

2. We tend to think that certain cultural meta-memes, epistemes, or cultural states of development ‘emerged,’ but what do we actually mean by this? That they popped into existence out of thin air, OR that we suddenly were able to observe certain patterns and meanings? Did the dots appear, to stay with our example, or was it our cognitive construction of certain meaning that did the deed?

3. We tend to think that ‘modernity’ emerged in the 17th/18th century in the West, with its attributes of the scientific method, free speech, secularism, democracy, and the variety of modern values. Spiral Dynamics makes ample use of this idea, although we now know that there are cultural variations and “multitudes of modernity” (see S. N. Eisenstadt) that blows that idea completely out of the water. We know that there have been, in recorded history, at least four or five instances of “modern” societies in Islam, Greece, and Egypt (compare Wengrow & Graeber, Casagrande). They may have lacked, basically, electricity, but electricity was never looked at as THE defining hallmark of modernity. They exhibited the traits we usually associate with modernity (that is, we “see the pattern” and act acordingly).

4. Regarding modernity, it rather seemed that “modernity,” or the attractor of modernity, went through a series of historical iterations over the last 2,500 years to arrive at its full-fledged form. And while we recognized the pattern of modernity only recently, the ‘dots’ may have been there from the beginning. In other words, our understanding of these dot´s may have changes of time and depending on zeitgeist etc.

5. Let’s look at the famous “red value meme” of Spiral Dynamics and its foremost attribute and expression: war. What is war and “red,” if not the exersice of force/violence onto others? Even to the untrained eye, we see the nature of war changing over time—being local, tribal, and purely physical in the beginning; then becoming organized, armed, leading to nation-state wars, use of gunpowder, becoming global (“pluralistic”) in the 20th century with WW I & II, and additionally the development of the nuclear bomb. In the 21st century, this process and nature shifted again into terrorism digital and analog, and drone technologies. In other words, the red value meme iterates or ‘evolves’ over time, becomming more global and “distanced” and “methologiocal”.

6. Let’s look at the so-called ‘Integral’ or post-postmodern stage/episteme. Some claim it emerged out of thin air due to the immense genius of Ken Wilber. And while I don’t question his achievements, rarely is the development of Integral itself looked at from the ‘left’ quadrant, its milieu, and its historical context. Nothing ‘emerges’ culturally out of thin air. C.G. Jung, Jean Gebser, and Sri Aurobindo already exhibited extraordinary examples of such an integral worldview, but we can see the cultural genesis of Integral especially in the advent of hermetic orders in Britain (and the story of Western esotericism in general) at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. For all intents and purposes, these groups—consisting of politicians, artists, writers, adventurers—exhibited all integral traits: They had developmental scales, their own version of the Wilber–Combs Lattice; they incorporated techniques from Buddhism and Hinduism (aka “life-practices) and ‘occult’ shadow work. Indeed, they were the ones who brought the first Buddhist temple to England. Their method was, like Wilber’s, basically syncretistic (compare Wilber’s “Integral Psychology” with the famous “Liber 777” from that era: structurally they are the same book). Their motto was “The method of science, the goal of religion.” They may have lacked our scientific understanding of the world (which mainly includes genetics, relativistic physics, quantum theory), but they used the scientific method to achieve religious goals. We could call them a “pre-integral” iteration of Integral.

7. Indeed, the integral value meme might have—similar to the modern value meme —gone through different cultural iterations over the last 2,500 years, going back to the quasi-integral forms of alchemy, even further to Mithraism (which already had very early forms of developmental scales), as well as techniques to achieve them (see The Rites of Eleusis). In other words, the Integral that we know might be the ‘rational/modern version of Integral,’ while previous structure-states of that attractor might include (pre/post)modern ones.

8. Which indicates that our ‘modern’ notion of hierarchical stages that emerge over time might not be the best map at hand. Indeed, much criticism of Wilber’s work regarding structure and language derived from its “modern” hierarchical approach; so the case could be made that the developments of the aforementioned hermetic traditions in the West might indeed be a “blue” or traditional iteration of Integral; and indeed their symbolic language appears quite mythological. This would imply that Wilber’s Integral Theory and Spital Dynamics is at the modern state of development, and that we can expect a postmodern and a post-postmodern iteration of Integral soon.

9. We can complete this list of value memes and cultural stages and their iteration through recorded history with ease.

10. Through this lattice of cultural stages that iterate through recorded history, we might also explain political polarization because we can now balance or tare the current iterations of the different episteme or stages with each other. They are not only spiral or vertical structures but also horizontal in time. Meaning, there is at the same time a modern version of Premodern, Modern, Postmodern, and Integral fighting with postmodern/pluralistic versions of Premodern, Modern, and Postmodern and so on, which all have structurally different political bias.

11. The implication here is that all the stages or epistemes emerged at the same time with consciousness, and that “Consciousness” is functionally not able to be differentiated from all the stages, all the time.