I’ve been thinking out some complex issues and data. In particular, my mind has been stuck on the issue of liberal and conservative.
This relates to personality types and traits, but furthermore it relates to genetics. Scientists have discovered specific genes that correlate with specific tendencies of political attitudes. That isn’t exactly surprising as trait research has already determined many psychological differences are passed on from parent to child. But this is particularly paradigm-shifting on the level of politics.
I plan to write more about this, but I just wanted to outline my thinking for the moment. There are multiple facets that interrelate in ways I’m trying to determine.
There does seem to be an evolutionary angle that would be very important. Different genetics enhanced species survival as humans developed ever more complex societies. One theory I came across proposed that liberal genetics are a more recent evolutionary adaptation. As humans spread out from Africa, specific traits became more desirable: curiosity, openness to new experience, adaptability, empathy, diplomacy, ability to imagine new possibilities and consider multiple perspectives, etc. These are all traits that research has proven are correlated with each other, and they together seem to create the framework for the liberal attitude. Still, the older genetics remained useful because any given society would still need the majority of its population to be fairly conservative in order to create social stability and cohesion.
This development happened when humans were still hunter-gatherers, and so at that time the genetic differences wouldn’t have been as magnified. With the rise of settled agrarian cultures, an entirely new way of social organization became possible. This was a traumatic time in the devlopment of the human species. It’s been a while since I’ve read Paul Shepard, but as I recall he saw this era as being pivotal where something irreversibly switched in the human brain. This was the beginning of civilization.
I was just tonight reading again some of Derrick Jensen’s The Culture of Make Believe. I consider him to be one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. I’d forgotten much of the specific ideas in this book, but one particular thing stood out. He goes into great detail about how civilization rests on the back of slavery. Every civilization was built with slave labor (including the early democracies). Even the modern industrialized nations with their supposed democracies and free markets are dependent on slave labor and sweatshops in the third world countries. Many of the earliest immigrants to the Americas were indentured servants and slaves. Civilization as we know it would collapse if there wasn’t some class of people enslaved or in oppressed servitude.
(I also wonder how this fits in with prostitution as the oldest profession and temple prostitutes who lived in servitude. In early civilization, prostitution represented the civilizing of primitive desire as the temple prostitutes served the highest ideal of their societies and the temples they worked in were at the center of those cultures. The example that comes to mind is “The Epic of Gilgamesh” where the wild man is civilized by a prostitute.)
Jensen’s explanation of all of this is just brilliant. Combined with Shepard’s work, this explains a lot about how we became this way. The earliest records of humans are about the laws upholding civilization and these laws speak about slavery (e.g., Code of Hammurabi). The Old Testament in various stories and the 10 commandments promotes slavery. The Christian Gospels even promote slavery. The Greeks, Egyptians, and Romans all were dependent on slavery. Until modern times, few people even thought too much about slavery being a bad thing.
However, some people back then began to question such issues. During the Axial Age, the origins of modern Enlightenment ideals began to take root. Those early ideals were in complete conflict with the very structure of civilization and that conflict persists to this very day. So, where did this conflict come from?
Earlier in social development, humans perceived the world animistically. According to Julian Jaynes, the very understanding of the individual as clearly separate from the world didn’t even fully exist throughout much of early civilization. It was a slow shift while individuality formed. As division of labor in society became more important, so division of labor within the human mind became more important. The world and the gods stopped being experienced as immediately alive realities. The world became objectified and so did humans. Individuality and objectivity go hand in hand, and this is what allows for the objectivication of humans in the form of slavery.
This growing sense of individuality came to a crisis point during the Axial Age. The brutality of slavery had become very apparent, and people began hoping for something more. People were less satisfied to simply be in servitude whether to other people or to the gods. The divine had become distant within hierarchical society, and in response the desire for divine closeness became extremely strong. Humans started to perceive the divine as being among humans which is reminiscent of the animistic past, but this divine closeness was now built on a relationship of individuals as equals. The first communes formed which was out of which Christianity took root. However, Christianity and all of the Axial Age religions were brought back in line with hierarchical slave society, and the brief glimmer of the Axial Age prophets was almost entirely forgotten for the next thousand years.
However, it was never entirely forgotten. The Axial Age ideals were the liberalism of their day. I wonder if that liberal urge that kept popping up relates back to the genetics that first formed when humans left Africa?
It seems like there has always been this push and pull within human society that is shown in the the earliest historical records. Since civilization began, this concept of progress formed. Civilization is dependent on endless progress and this seems to relate to its dependence on slavery. In order to maintain a slave population, the early civilizations (as well as later civilizations) were forced to be constantly at war by attempting to conquer other people. Enslave or become a slave. Endless progress, endless growth, endless conquering, endless usurpation… which continues to modern civilization as well (even if endless wars now have a larger global context).
This is where I’m feeling a bit murky. Civilization is simultaneously built on this ruthless progress, but civilization wouldn’t have been possible without those early liberal traits of diplomacy and whatnot. This seems to be a part of that internal conflict that is the very fabric of civilization. As society became more hierarchical and more divisioned, the liberal traits of curiosity and experimentation were focused towards technological innovation. Even fairly early in Greek society, a well-educated leisure class had already taken hold (with Socrates being the ultimate representative). The liberal instinct in some ways became even more important as empathy and diplomacy would’ve been absolutely vital during this time of cultural clash.
There was a shift that happened after the Axial Age. The liberal instinct had a temporary burgeoning in society, but the liberal instinct was looked upon with ever greater suspicion as Empire building became the central impulse. The Roman Empire as it was inherited by Christianity was quite oppressive, and it didn’t take long for the heresiologists to oppress the liberal impulse within Christianity itself. This is where many see the proper beginning of Western civilization.
Ever since that time, the conflict between the liberal and conservative impulses has led to much violence. But, with the Protestant Reformation and the Renaissance, the liberal impulse began to have greater influence than it had in a long time. Also, progress began to happen more quickly. The liberal impulse is the gas pedal of civilization, but this is balanced with the brake of the conservative impulse. The fight between the two hasn’t been pretty.
The main issue isn’t specific beliefs or values. Liberalism and conservatism are relative tendencies. What was liberal during the Axial Age has become the norm for modern Western civilization. Generally speaking, even modern monotheists have forsaken their own texts in denying slavery. The conservative impulse wants to hold on to what has become the norm which is perceived as being traditional. It’s not important, however, that the perceived traditional values actually correspond to the actual historical tradition. For example, family values have been centrally important for all of Christian history, but what Christians today consider as family values isn’t what the early Christians considered family values (and Jesus himself didn’t value family at all). So, liberal and conservative are dependent on the historical context which is always changing with the endless progress that we call civilization.
This has served us moderately well up to this point. Even so, we find ourselves at a new crisis point and so some people conjecture that we’re experiencing a new Axial Age. It does seem that the level of cultural mixing in modern society hasn’t been seen in Western civilization since the earlier Axial Age. The religious sensibility forming now is to Christianity as Christianity was to Judaism, and I think this would explain why fundamentalists have essentially created a new religion that has little to do with early Christianity (which fits into the ideas of Karen Armstrong).
Much of what I’ve talked about can be explained using the model of Spiral Dynamics which would add a lot of much-needed detail. The history following the Axial Age I somewhat explained in my post Just Some Related Ideas and Writers which basically follows a Jungian view of Western development. But there is a further aspect that is more central to my thinking at the moment. Along with Jensen’s The Culture of Make Believe, I’ve also been re-reading Compass of the Soul by John L. Giannini. The two books make for good companions as they both analyze Western society from different perspectives.
Giannini’s book is helpful because he is coming from the Jungian tradition, and more importantly he combines his roles as Jungian analyst and MBTI practitioner. He carefully considers Jung’s view on personality as it fits in with Western sociohistorical development. He sees a split in our society between tendencies towards the personality types of ESTJ and INFP with the former dominating the Western psyche since sometime shortly after the inception of Christianity. Essentially, ESTJ and INFP are just a more complex way of saying conservative and liberal.
However, this more complex language is helpful because it’s grounded in decades of psychological research. Also, it brings me back to where I began this post.
(I want to note one other book: The Trickster and the Paranormal by George P. Hansen. The author discusses two issues relevant to this post. He discusses Max Weber’s theory about how rationalization and bureaucratization increases as society becomes more complex and hierarchical. He also discusses Ernest Harmann’s boundary types. He mentions research that shows thick boundary types with their conservative attitudes tend to promoted to upper management in hierarchical organizations. Any major organization is hierarchical and so our society in general is ruled by thick boundary types which is just another way of stating the theory Giannini puts forth. These highly promoted people tend to have thicker boundaries than even the average person and so the people at top perceive and behave differently than the lower classes. A seeming implication of this is that even Washington Democrats will be more conservative than the average liberal.)
The reason I’m so interested in all of this is two-fold.
The most obvious reason is that the conflict between liberals and conservatives is the most intense that I’ve seen in my lifetime. And it’s a rather personal issue as I’m liberal and my parents are conservative.
Secondly, I suffer from obsessive curiosity syndrome. I feel compelled to try to understand the society I was born into. There seems to be a narrative to our culture and I suspect that it’s our collective unawareness of this narrative that keeps us stuck in it. We play these roles we are given and we come to identify with them. Some of this is genetics and so can’t be changed, but genetics are just predispositions. I want to believe that the liberal and conservative impulses don’t have to be eternally at odds. Maybe I’m just a dreamy-eyed liberal with my head in the clouds.
- – -
Let me give this some more contemporary context.
I’ve been doing some web research on personality types/traits, political attitudes, and career predispositions. Here are some of the ideas I’m tossing about at present:
The problem with liberal and conservative as labels is that they’re highly relative.
The vast majority of scientists and journalists identify as liberal (or at least they do in the US), but it just means that these groups of people identify as more liberal than how they perceive the general population of their particular society. In the most general usage, conservative means what is traditional or conventional and liberal means what is not limited to the traditional or conventional. As such, liberal journalists are only moderately liberal. They’re liberal because they aren’t perfectly aligned with the average person (or rather they don’t perceive themselves as such), but they’re clearly moderate in their being closer to the mainstream than they are to radicals on the fringe.
However, different societies will vary greatly in their political spectrum. It’s probably true, though, that scientists and journalists in any society will be comparatively more liberal because those professions seem to demand a liberal mindset (at least liberal in terms of personality traits).
The further issue is how close is the correlation between liberal as political self-identification and liberal as personality trait. Research on personality traits show that they can’t be categorized as either/or, black/white. Some people are on the extreme ends, but most people are near the middle.
There is no one way to define these terms. Liberal and conservative can apply to many issues, and so a person can be simultaneously liberal on some issues and conservative on others. And any given issue can only be labelled as liberal or conservative relative to the context of the societal norms and the historical era. Many political positions that seem conservative in a modern industrialized society would be deemed liberal (even radically liberal) in pre-modern and non-industrialized societies. Liberal and conservative are labels that are inseparable from confounding factors of individual and collective development.
With development, other issues such as intelligent and morality have to be considered as both of those relate to intelligence. There is a correlation between liberalism and IQ (i.e., traditional methods of testing intelligence), and so that probably explains much of the reason for scientists and journalists identifying as liberals. As a personality trait, liberalism signifies openness towards new experiences and curiosity towards new information. Higher education is largely defined by new experiences and new information.
Nonetheless, plenty of people with more conservative personalities go to college as most of the population is fairly conservative personality wise (or rather according to MBTI statistics the conservative SJ temperament represents the largest portion of the population; the question then is how well does the SJ temperament represent the normal definition of political conservatism). These college educated conservative types tend to be drawn to careers in law, politics, and business. Most interestingly is the fact that policymakers tend to identify as conservative. But, even in liberal fields, the top administrators in hierarchical organizations (which includes every major private and public organization) will be more conservative than what is the norm even for the general population. Scientists may be liberal, but the administration of scientific labs and the corporate funding for science likely is controlled by conservatives. Journalists may be liberal, but the editors, owners and CEOs of media companies are generally more conservative.
(The so-called liberal media bias is false. It may have once been true when newsrooms were independent and reporters were more free to do their own thing. But in recent decades (because of pressures to increase profits) reporters have been increasingly told what to do by upper management (this is based on a lot of research I’ve done and isn’t an just an ideological claim). However, this isn’t to say that media is precisely conservative biased in any simple sense. Let us just say there is conflict of biases where the conservative bias at the moment has gained the upperhand.)
Social liberals are going to be more interested in intellectual inquiry and social conservatives will be more interested in ideological norms. Because of this, most social scientists and those interested in social science will be moral liberals (research supports this conclusion). As for moral conservatives, they’re either less interested in or else actively mistrust social science research and theory. For example, the evidence that certain psychological traits and types (personality, moral inclinations, political ideology, behavior, etc.) are largely inheritable undermines the idea that everyone is completely responsible for themselves as individuals (which is a major aspect of moral conservatism). The tendency to see human nature as complex is more attractive to the social liberal, and so the liberal attitude is more open to the possibility of nature being equal to or greater than nurture (which could explain why they have a more open view of family values). The reason why evolution vs creationism seems so central to the culture wars may be because it reflects on the large-scale the same issues of nature vs nurture (I’m a bit unclear on this point).
I’ve come across the theory that conservatives tend to look at media and art in terms of how it serves or undermines their ideology (i.e., the perceived ‘norm’). This would be supported by the Christian cultural critic who I heard speak a few years ago. She discussed the need of morally conservative Christians to use film and pop culture to promote their views. Immediately after this talk, I went over and looked at a William Blake exhibit which presented his vision of the relationship between religion and art.
There couldn’t have been a better contrast between the conservative and liberal views. Blake’s art was inspiring because it didn’t represent ideology in any simple way (i.e., no overt political messages, no promotion of group norms). Instead, Blake’s art pointed towards truths that transcended mere politics. I sensed that Blake wasn’t limiting himself to his own preferred bias.
Is the conservative view of art as ideology comparable to the conservative view of news as ideology? I’ve noticed that many conservatives don’t see a difference of the bias of Fox News from the bias in more liberal news, but to many liberals this is an insult. I’ve noticed that quite a few liberals seem to idealize intellectual objectivity as a moral value, and they’re not content with the cynical view of extreme conservatives. The social conservative tends to see humanity as fallen and traditionally this fallen nature included the failure of human reason. Social conservatives are more mistrusting of reason which explains why they mistrust science (be it Darwinian evolution or climate change).
By the way, this also relates to the tendency of most comedians to be liberal. Humor is very much related to curiosity and openness to experience.
Anyways, it’s all very interesting. Journalists, Scientists, and comedians all are dominated by self-identified liberals and Democrats. I remember offhand that only 6% of scientists (including in the hard sciences) identify as Republican. That does seem to be saying either something about human nature (psychology, genetics, etc) or something about modern culture… or, as I suspect, a bit of both.
- – -
I’m, of course, speaking of liberal and conservative in their most extreme manifestations (i.e., exaggerated stereotypes). It’s important to keep in mind that as personality traits the population distribution is found mostly in the middle rather than on the polar opposite ends.
Also, liberal and conservative don’t always equate with Democrat and Republican. For example, earlier last century Republicans were the liberal party especially in the South. So, when I speak of liberal I’m talking about an attitude based on personality traits and not party affiliations which represent shifting labels of shifting demographics. I was looking at data from the Pew Research Center. Their definition of liberal corresponds with Democrat only slightly more than it corresponds with independent. I’m willing to bet, though, that if Democrats dominated for a couple of decades the number of liberals identifying with independent would increase just as how recently many have left the Republican party.
As for psychological attitudes, I do wonder if the way society is structured is causing these genetic traits to become increasingly magnified. I was thinking that this possibility could be a contributing factor to the present intense political conflict.
Here is a theory I’ve been thinking about the last couple of years.
I’ve looked at mappings of demographic data. Liberals are concentrated in urban areas in and around cities. Conservatives are spread out in rural areas. However, a confounding factor is that ever since the Industrial Age began people have been slowly migrating to cities. This is how liberals became concentrated in cities in the first place, but the population in general has now become concentrated in cities. For this reason, cities are more ideologically diverse and so liberals have been forced to adapt to diversity which happens to be one of their talents anyhow.
The other result is that rural areas have become less diverse and more extremely conservative. This makes me wonder if conservative politics has become more radicalized partly because of this concentration. Even the moderate conservatives would tend to move to the cities leaving behind the most extreme conservatives (those who are so resistant to change that they’d rather remain even in poverty-stricken areas).
Ignoring the possible genetic component, our political system by itself would magnify the concentration of extreme conservatives in the rural areas. American democracy is representative. In an attempt at fairness, sparsely populated rural areas get more representation per capita. What this means is that extreme conservatives get more representation per capita. The result of this is that public debate gets pushed to the right.
This is important as sometimes presidents get elected even though the majority of the population voted against them. How does a president lead a country when he doesn’t represent a majority of the population?
Also, the media focuses on the extremes. The rural areas represent the far right-wing. The Republican politicians tend to be moderate conservatives, but the more radical conservatives of rural areas hold great sway.
- – -
I don’t know what to make of this, but it’s very interesting. It seems our entire political system is rather messed up. I’m hoping by placing US politics in a larger context that I’ll be able to see beyond the polarizing tendency of public debate as it gets shown in the media.
Anyways, it goes without saying that all of this is largely speculation and hence tentative. I am basing my speculations on actual data, but it is very complex. Trying to disentangle the threads is difficult if not impossible. The challenge of making sense of it is only slighly lessened by the fact that some great minds before me have written some insightful books.
Filed under: Christianity, history, Humanity, Philosophy, Psychology, religion, science, Sociopolitical | Tagged: Axial Age, Carl Jung, civilization, conservative, Derrick Jensen, development, Ernest Hartmann, George P. Hansen, history, John L. Giannini, Julian Jaynes, Karen Armstrong, liberal, Max Weber, MBTI, Paul Shepard, politics, Psychology, religion, society | 4 Comments »
Marmalade
Access: Public 
Marmalade said
Prerational and Transrational Spirituality: The Difference Is?
That old discussion on the Integral Pod hit upon something that is on my mind. I think that its easy for the rational to be confused with the transrational when someone is trying to differentiate their experience from the prerational. This reminds me of the analysis of the theory of the Mean Green Meme. Here is what I said in the Integral Ideology thread in the God Pod:
“Jim linked to an article about the Mean Green Meme. In that article, Todorovic looked to the statistics to see if it supported this hypoethesis. According to this view, the criticisms of Green Meme are more likely to come from Blue and Orange than from Second Tier Yellow. She explains that the supposed Second Tier criticism is actually First Tier criticism masking as Yellow which she calls Yellow False Positive.”
Many people are attracted to Integralism because its a very rational model. It does give room for the non-rational, but still its primarily rational. I don’t know if a transrational model is possible. So, if we become too identified with the model, we by necessity become stuck in the rational. Where does this leave the transrational? Can the the term ‘transrational’ within a rational model be anything more than a placeholder for the unknown, a finger pointing at the moon?
The nonrational is another category I’m interested in. There may be some states that are neither specifically prerational nor transrational. How does Integralism deal with this possibility? So far in my research, I’d say it doesn’t to any great extent. I’ve done some web searches about Integralism and Wilber using terms such as ‘paranormal’, ‘supernatural’, and ‘liminal’… but not much came up in the results.
My sense is that Wilberian Integralism hasn’t yet fully come to terms with the nonrational. Even the category of the transrational feels somehow inadequate. I think part of the problem is the medium. Rational language and linear modelling are inherently limited. I suppose poetry and art more capable of expressing the transrational and nonrational than any Integral theory ever will be able to do. This is why I’ve been thinking about how can the imaginative and playful be emphasized more within Integral theory. And in general I’ve been wondering how the rational and nonrational can be experienced without conflict, without either trying to supplant the other.
Balder said
Hi, Marmalade,
An interesting post! Thanks for your reflections here – they resonate with a number of my own interests and concerns.
Was the person who was suggesting that Spiral Dynamics might be better understood as descriptive than prescriptive possibly me? I don’t expect I’m the only person to have thought of this or discussed it, but this is something I explored on the Integral Multiplex (and possibly also the I-I pod) a number of months ago. My suggestion was that typical descriptions of Orange, for example, often appear to presuppose elements that might be better regarded as historical accidents rather than developmental necessities, and that there may be a wide number of “ways forward” as Amber societies mature – that, while there are social and cultural constraints that might work to encourage development in a particular direction, there still may be a wide degree of freedom in how a post-Amber society takes form (wider than conventional descriptions of Orange appear to allow for). I was using these two particular levels just as an example; the suggestion would apply across the board. Though conceivably, the lower levels are likely harder to shift, just because they have greater historical force behind them.
I agree with you that possibilities such as this do have the potential to “bungle up” the pre/trans fallacy – or, rather, the application of the pre/trans fallacy. But I do think that it would still be a valid tool. Because even if a particular trajectory isn’t the only available one, it would still be possible to distinguish – and also to potentially confuse – earlier and later stages of that trajectory.
You wrote: I must admit that I’ve been more interested in the potential of a Theory For Anything (TFA) and less interested in a Theory Of Everything (TOE). But I don’t know what a TFA would look like.
This is an interesting idea and I’d like to hear more about what you mean here. I relate it to another “vision” with which I’m involved – the Time-Space-Knowledge vision, which I have practiced for a number of years and which I’ve also explored in relation to Integral Theory. Where it differs primarily from Integral is that is more a visionary mode of inquiry and “engagement” with experience than a “map” of the world. With Integral Methodological Pluralism, we get more into the territory of active exploration and engagement (and begin moving away from strictly “mapping” the world or various worldviews). This is why I became interested in exploring Integral in relation to TSK, because TSK already has this open-ended, inquiry-centered orientation. Starting with basic “elements” of reality (time, space, and knowledge), without taking any of them for granted or at face value, it opens various ways to explore the nature and dynamics of our world, ultimately with an interest in the potential of transformative vision. It is a “way” that invites intimate engagement with reality through radical questioning and inquiry, and so in that sense serves (for me) more as a theory for everything rather than a static representation of everything.
Concerning your discussion of George P. Hansen’s perspectives on models and rationality, I am also interested in these questions. If you’re interested, I have a paper online which looks at some of them from the points of view of Integral and TSK. Here is a link to the relevant section of the paper:
TSK and Instrumental Knowledge.
Best wishes,
Balder
Nicole said
Bruce and Ben, thanks, I tend to side more and more with Ben in these discussions. I guess it’s because he is so darned persuasive! Or something.
I’d really like to hear your take on TSK, Ben, as I have been meaning to dig into it, but this week will not be my chance…
Ben, does this discussion here help? http://multiplex.integralinstitute.org/Public/cs/forums/50052/ShowThread.aspx
or what about this application here? http://www.quantumintegralcenter.com/articles.cfm?mode=display&article=4
this looks like a good article: http://www.integralworld.net/chamberlain3.html
Balder said
Bruce and Ben, thanks, I tend to side more and more with Ben in these discussions.
Gee, thanks, Nicole!
Seriously, I assume you mean side with Ben against any number of others, since I’ve only had a couple conversations with him so far…
And for the record, I appreciate his perspective as well.
Best wishes,
B.
Marmalade said
Balder, so far we seem to agree on some things. Its hard for me to say what I agree or disagree with at the moment. I’m presently in exploratory mode and it will take me a while to get my bearings… if ever. ;) There is so much out there about Integralism that I can feel lost and confused sometimes.
“Was the person who was suggesting that Spiral Dynamics might be better understood as descriptive than prescriptive possibly me?”
It might’ve been. I can’t remember when it was that I noticed those ideas. Would you mind linking to your comments from there?
I’ll be getting back to this blog soon… maybe this evening. For right now, I’ve been reading through and formulate a response to Julian’s blog post about Christianity.
Marmalade said
I can’t speak for Nicole, but my guess is that her agreement is partly with my view of personality types. It seems to me that certain types have more of a preference for certain kinds of thinking such as NTs preference for rationality. From this, I conclude that some differences are just differences. Nicole and I have been discussing typology quite a bit lately and she seems to find it helpful.
BTW there is a particular theorist within the typology field who interests me the most. Her name is Lenore Thomson. She wrote the book Personality Type: An Owner’s Manual, and there is a wiki about her work. Her view of typology touches upon my own thoughts about a TFA. Basically, a TFA to me is a perspective of perspectives. Some relevant pages from the wiki:
Rhetorical Stances
Beyond Personality
Philosophical Exegesis
Marmalade said
Here is the first thread I started at Open Source Integral.
TFA and Perspective of Perspectives
Discussion didn’t really get going in the thread and I never came to any conclusions. I was just throwing around ideas and possibilities. And that is still what I’m doing. I gave up on the idea of a TFA, but I’m glad its come up again in this discussion. It seems some kind of TFA should be possible. I probably should first figure out what purpose a TFA should serve.
Balder, I looked at your paper. I’m curious about it, but it will take me a while to process it. Its a nice addition to Wilber’s models. Time and space also come up in explanations of typological function-attitudes, but typology is less abstract in how it speaks about them.
Nicole said
Yes, Ben, your ideas on typology but so many more, actually. Funny since in many ways we are so different, but I had a long chat with Centria (Kathy) last night on the phone, and of course you were one of the people who came up, since we both think you’re so interesting and intelligent. I was saying that to me you have felt like a soul brother, and she said she saw that energy in some of our blog discussions, like the Rilke ones…
And yes, Bruce, I can see you appreciate Ben as well. Good! I appreciate you too, very much, I hope you know. For example what you offered in balance in that very immoderate Mod Pod discussion lol.
Ben, I will wait to hear more about your thoughts on TSK, it does seem very intriguing for you.
Perspective of perspectives eh?
:) Yes, that’s my Ben…
Balder said
Hi, Ben,
Thanks for introducing me to Lenore Thompson. Her work seems very promising and interesting to me. The typological system I’ve studied the most is the Enneagram. A thought that has occurred to me from time to time is that Integral needs to better integrate typology. It does explicitly include it – AQAL (or AQALALASAT) stands for all quadrants, all levels, all lines, all states, all types – but I have noticed that, in typical discussions in Integral circles, the only types that get much mention are masculine / feminine. I have also found that frequently, when people are “assessing” or categorizing each other, they will go very quickly to labels which describe level or altitude, apparently not considering that there may be different typological expressions of the same level. In my case, I have looked at this through the Enneagram, talking about how certain features of a 9 or a 3, for instance, might give the impression of a level, but that actually it’s just more of an overall mode of interaction that can be expressed at any number of levels.
If you haven’t already, and if you’re interested, I think you should write something on Lenore’s work to introduce it to the Integral community.
Personally, I have doubts that a type model is sufficient in itself, and would not expect it to work well as a theory for anything. I don’t think everything can be reduced to or explained in terms of horizontal types. But I do think that it is a very valuable lens you can adopt – one of several different perspectives on perspectives that AQAL incorporates.
Best wishes,
Balder
Marmalade said
I find it difficult to speak about any particular thing using only one model. It often leads to making exaggerated claims. We need multiple models in order to fine-tune our ability to discern differences and to discern their potential meanings.
I was feeling challenged to speak clearly in one of Julian’s blogs. Rational can mean so many things to so many people even within the Integral community. There is this idea that if someone is being rational they must either be orange or second tier, but nobody at green could be rational.
Why do some people seem to think that second tier is just a more complex version of orange with green being a temporary irrational blip in development? And why do so many equate rationality with a materialistic worldview? Why do people who idealize rationality feel such a strong need to deny anything spooky? How would someone act if they were well-developed in orange and yet had come to be centered in green? Or, considering someone who is a more intellectual type (ie NT), how would they think rationally if they were strongly green?
I’ve noticed too that the only type that gets much Integral discussion is gender. Here is something I said about it in another thread at OSI:
There is the matter of whether a type is used consciously or not and this relates to development, and there is a specific order that each type will likely develop each function. This is highly theoretical and I don’t know what research has been done on it. Another theory presents how each function itself develops which is equivalent to saying that each function represents a separate line of development. There is some correlation of MBTI with models of psychological development.
For instance, how the Judging functions(Thinking and Feeling) have much similarity with Gilligan’s work on gender differences and the hierarchy of development that either gender will tend to follow. Typology brings a slightly different slant to this. Statistics have shown that their is a slight preference of males for Thnking and females for Feeling. Also, Thinking males tend to have stronger Thinking preferences than Thinking females, and Feeling females tend to have stronger preference for Feeling than Feeling males.
However, this gender preference is only around 60-70%, and that leaves a good portion that doesn’t fit the social expectations. David Deidda recognizes that gender patterns are only general. He says that his advice for men doesn’t apply to less masculine men and does apply to more masculine women. As a Feeling guy, I don’t entirely resonate with his advice.
———-
Here is something Wilber said about gender in
“Based mostly on work by Carol Gilligan and Deborah Tannen, the idea is that the typical male orientation tends to be more agentic, autonomous, abstract, and independent, based on rights and justice; whereas the female orientation tends to be more permeable, relational, and feelingful, based on care and responsibility.”
That makes me wonder. A tendency towards the abstract is considered more masculine and I’ve heard people make this observation before. But the MBTI research has shown no correlation between abstract cognition and gender. My theory on this is that there are different types of abstraction. An NF appears less abstract because their way of abstracting is less structured as they aren’t Thinking types. So, the definition of abstract used in gender studies is probably NT biased… maybe because most scientific researchers are NTs (?).
Anyways, you’re probably right that a type model couldn’t be a TFA. But it could be a decent model of a Theory Of Theorizing (TOT). Typology gets at the intricacies of our cognitive and perceptual biases. For instance, personality research has shown that certain types and traits are most prevalent in certain professional fields. That is partly the basis of my suspicion that Integralism has a personality bias. Different types of personalities will tend to be attracted to different types of theories, and some types of personalities won’t like abstract theorizing whatsoever. And none of it necessarily has anything to do with what developmental stage they’re at.
I’ll start a thread about Lenore Thomson soon, but not today.
Marmalade said
Theory for Anything v. Theory of Everything
Integrating validity claims & multiple perspectives
Theory of everything?
Holons Within, Holons Without
Marmalade said
Hey Balder, I noticed you started a thread about AQAL and TSK at the II Multiplex.
And another thread of yours about TSK.
I noticed you’ve blogged about TSK.
And so has Davidu.
Ronpurser has some videos about TSK on youtube.
Also, is this the thread you were referring to earlier about Spiral Dynamics?
Nicole said
Ben, when you put it like this, it does seem very odd! supposedly so advanced and not really dealing with personality types, and generalising in such limited ways about men and women…
Balder said
Hi, Ben,
Thanks for collecting all of those links together. Yes, I’ve talked about TSK (by itself and in relation to Integral) on a number of forums online. I also have a TSK pod here on Gaia. I am also friends with both Davidu and Ron Purser. A small world!
And yes, that thread on Spiral Dynamics is exactly the one I was thinking of.
Best wishes,
B.
Marmalade said
Nicole,
Integral has such a focus on development that types can get short shrift. I think Wilber was trying to remedy that with his further developments of the quadrant model, but I’m still uncertain what I think of the quadrants. The quadrants are useful, and the same probably goes for other similar models. In some ways, quadrants seems more of a convenient way to categorize things than necessarily an accurate representation of fundamental structures.
It might be helpful to compare certain aspects of integralism and typology. Wilber uses internal and external as categories, but in some ways it feels like a crude division. OTOH Introversion and Extraversion are attempts to explain how the human brain actually processes information. And yet there seems a basic conception that both systems are getting at. Introversion/Extraversion is likely the most accepted and understood traits in all of personality research. It touches upon something fundamental to human experience. I get the sense that Wilber is trying to get at this same human experience but coming at it from a standpoint that emphasizes objectivity (ie categorization).
I don’t know if that makes sense. Its just something that has been on my mind for a long time.
For whatever reason, I have a bit more interest in types than in developmental lines and stages. Types can speak more to our immediate experience… whereas development speaks more to potential future experience. As long as someone is moderately intelligent and aware, they can grasp the fundamentals of a system such as MBTI. But a system such as Spiral Dynamics is only meaningful to someone who is already fairly developed. I think Spiral Dynamics requires more abstract thinking to understand it than does MBTI. MBTI has its complex abstract theorizing, but it has been honed for the purposes of therapeutic insight and so has been designed in a very user-friendly fashion.
So… MBTI is a system that can be understood by all of the types it describes. Spiral Dynamics can’t be understood by all of the vmemes that it describes. That isn’t a weakness of Spiral Dynamics, just a challenge of any developmental model. MBTI is also a developmental model, but in its most basic form the developmental aspects aren’t directly emphasized.
I’d love to see someone attempt to create an integral theory of types similar to how Wilber has created an integral theory of development.
Balder,
Your welcome. I like collecting links. Its a hobby of mine.
BTW I don’t think it was your Spiral Dynamics thread where I saw these criticisms/questions being brought up. If I remember correctly, it was an older thread. Anyways, I was happy to read your comments about this. I haven’t yet read through the whole thread, but I plan on doing so.
Nicole said
Yes, yes, Ben, I agree totally.
While I was looking for more useful links I found this about Haridas_Chaudhuri
Are you and Bruce familiar with him?
Balder said
Yes, I’m familiar with him. His integralism is rooted more in Aurobindo’s model, which was initially one of Wilber’s big influences as well. Wilber ended up going in other directions, though recently he has returned to Aurobindo, using a number of Aurobindo’s stages of consciousness as the highest levels of his model of development.
Marmalade said
Nope, never heard of him.
Marmalade said
I just commented on Julian’s blog The Transformative Power of Development: A Three-Part Distinction:
Balder, I appreciated what you said here:
“If rationality begins with 3p, and transratonality begins at 5p (or expanded 4p), then it just isn’t correct to call a temporary state experience at a rational level (3p) transrational. Because transrational is a structural designation, not a state designation.”
I’m starting to understand the importance of separating states and stages. So, if transrational is a structural designation, then does that mean the pre/trans fallacy doesn’t apply to stage designations? If transrational isn’t the correct label for a temporary stte, then what is?
Even though I didn’t mention it in my comment, I was thinking about the category of the nonrational. I was considering that it might be appropriate to speak of rational and nonrational in terms of states. But if states are differentiated from stages, then pre/trans doesn’t apply. This makes sense to me.
My understanding of the nonrational is that it isn’t specifically developmental in Wilber’s sense, but it does relate to the process of development as the liminal is inherent to initiation rituals. States aren’t static even if they aren’t dynamic in terms of linear development. Maybe states follow more of a cyclical pattern. This could help to show the connection between the theories of Grof and Wilber.
Nicole said
interesting! but i am being called away … back later or tomorrow
Marmalade said
Leaving? You just got here! Called away… sounds mysterious.
Oh well… I hope the rest of your day goes well.
Nicole said
ah, just family. i urgently was required to watch a Nicholas Cage movie, light and funny. not much punishment there lol. and then to bed.
Marmalade said
I see. Just spending some quality time with family and Nicholas Cage.
What movie was it?
I’m watching some Outer Limits episodes right now.
Nicole said
cool! It was um… hang on… LOL! I remember the second part of the title – Book of Secrets – anyway you will find the whole title somewhere else – i know i mentioned it earlier to you. you see the depredations of old age, Ben.
Marmalade said
You have depredations?
Sounds horrible.
Is that a medical condition?
You probably should see a doctor about that.
I hope they find a cure for it before I get old.
Nicole said
LOLOL!