journal

considering the developmental bridge of the culture war

James

31 Aug 2020 • 3 min read

I recently read Developing ethical, social, and cognitive competence by David Chapman, particularly the "The communal-to-systematic transition has become more difficult" section, and am thinking that this difficulty is a significant part of the mess that I'm still trying to get a grip on. It's essentially the main causally-dividing line of the culture war, I think. And it's a mortar that later development has sent sailing back to explode on a bridge that many-to-most adults, left and right, haven't crossed.

What I'm referring to is that the (valid!) critiques which postmodernism makes of the modern systematic worldview make it harder for people to grow from socialized-traditional-communal to self-authored-modern-systemic, as they sow distrust of the latter.

This would be presumed to fit the "3 and 5 alliance against 4", in terms of the Kegan stage numbers. But here I run into the "adult development vs societal-conscious development" tension - my long-standing feeling that Kegan and Spiral Dynamics don't quite map nicely to each other. Chapman's charting of pre-rational, rational, meta-rational (in that post, though called communal, systematic, fluid in the post up above) is the best attempt I've seen, as I can then map those Kegan-ish interpretations onto SD's blue, orange, and yellow with green==postmodernism there in-between orange and yellow.

I'm sensing, too, that Chapman's model of monism and dualism thus maps to the collectivism (monism) and individualism (dualism) of the Spiral Dynamics stage alternation. Which, since I take that to really only make sense in the first tier of SD stages, means that green can and should claim that collectivist slot between Kegan 4 and Kegan 5, and that it really does make sense to talk about "4.5" as its own stage. (Regarding the word "stage", I do espouse the "river dam" view of stages: development is a river, continuous and always flowing, but stages are where large amounts of water pool behind a chokepoint of some sort.)

So then, Chapman claims:

"Political leftism tends to monism, and rightism to dualism. The communal mode tends to mistake the logic of stage 4 for rightish ideologies, particularly capitalism. However, stage 4 is not inherently rightist or anti-leftist."

I hear that and then slot both American evangelicalism/traditionalism and hard wokeism as blue/ethnocentric-level communal "monisms". The "4.5 postmodnernism" has the side-effect of inducing more of the stage-3 folks (ha, social-ists and communal-ists are both taken already) to just flip sides - the "new religion" critique of wokeism that has already been raised by conservatives. It seems usefully true to me to acknowledge that some fraction of the current social justice surge comes from a place of pre-trans fallacy against the modern worldview. Capitalism, as Chapman notes, is a particularly obvious lightning rod, where I think we could do a lot of damage by retreating developmentally rather than transcend-and-including.

As for the "more difficult transition" from socialized-traditional-communal to self-authored-modern-systemic... I don't know what the counter is. The problem model seems accurate, though maybe within that it's the (typically) self-authored transcending of socially-determined external value systems that is the crux. Can "systematicity" be developed without requiring the forsaking of the communal along the way? I suppose that seems a bit like a "can we bring the pendulum down to halfway without swinging the other direction?" question, when I really mean "can we dissolve the paradox of this polarity?" and how.

The how question, and "how fast" also so that we can avoid societal collapse, takes me back to the "vertical prejudice of development" quandary that the Adult Development community hasn't solved yet. It's another false equality, that of development and goodness - but one that plagues the AD folks trying to explain any development model, because de-fusing goodness from level/stage/achievement is considered to be a fairly advanced developmental move itself.

We may just have to bite that bullet and socialize these models anyway, under the banners of "maturity" and "capability". We need more people to be more mature and capable - which is something that we already accept for the developmental process of children. So maybe the socialized "we" already understand development, so long as it's in the rear-view mirror instead of awaiting us. Phrasing it as "acceptance of lifelong development" makes it sound both possible and the obvious key to more self-aware intentional common-knowledge developmental expansion.

It's quite ironic that the post-conventional people can all say "it's all good, it's all developmental" while the conventional mindset still traps itself by trying to defend its own worth/value by rejecting that growth. And yeah, I know I can see the irony from the outside, while it looks very different from the inside. I've been there! To be continued, I'm sure...