Born Expecting the Pleistocene
by Mark Seely
p. 31
Not our natural habitat
The mismatch hypothesis
Our bodies including our brains—and thus our behavioral predispositions—have evolved in response to very specific environmental and social conditions. Many of those environmental and social conditions no longer exist for most of us. Our physiology and our psychology, all of our instincts and in-born social tendencies, are based on life in small semi-nomadic tribal groups of rarely more than 50 people. There is a dramatic mismatch between life in a crowded, frenetic, technology-based global civilization and the kind of life our biology and our psychology expects [14].
And we suffer serious negative consequences of this mismatch. A clear example can be seen in the obesity epidemic that has swept through developed nations in recent decades: our bodies evolved to meet energy demands in circumstances where the presence of food was less predictable and periods of abundance more variable. Because of this, we have a preference for calorie-dense food, we have a tendency to eat far more than we need, and our bodies are quick to hoard extra calories in the form of body fat.
This approach works quite well during a Pleistocene ice age, but it is maladaptive in our present food-saturated society—and so we have an obesity epidemic because of the mismatch between the current situation and our evolution-derived behavioral propensities with respect to food. Studies on Australian aborigines conducted in the 1980s, evaluating the health effects of the transition from traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyle to urban living, found clear evidence of the health advantages associated with a lifestyle consistent with our biological design [15]. More recent research on the increasingly popular Paleo-diet [16] has since confirmed wide-ranging health benefits associated with selecting food from a pre-agriculture menu, including cancer resistance, reduction in the prevalence of autoimmune disease, and improved mental health.
[14] Ornstein, R. & Ehrlich, P. (1989). New World, New Mind. New York: Simon & Schuster.
[15] O’Dea, K., Spargo, R., & Akerman, K. (1980). The effect of transition from traditional to urban life-style on the insulin secretory response in Australian Aborigines. Diabetes Care, 3(1), 31-37; O’Dea, K., White, N., & Sinclair, A. (1988). An investigation of nutrition-relatedrisk factors in an isolated Aboriginal community in northern Australia: advantagesof a traditionally-orientated life-style. The Medical Journal of Australia, 148 (4), 177-80.
[16] E.g., Frassetto, L. A., Schloetter, M., Mietus-Snyder, M., Morris, R. C., & Sebastian, A. (2009). Metabolic and physiological improvements from consuming a Paleolithic, hunter-gatherer type diet. European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 63, 947=955.
pp. 71-73
The mechanisms of cultural evolution can be seen in the changing patterns of foraging behavior in response to changes in food availability and changes in population density. Archaeological analyses suggest that there is a predictable pattern of dietary choice that emerges from the interaction among population density, relative abundance of preferred food sources, and factors that relate to the search and handling of various foods. [56] In general, diets become more varied, or broaden, as population increases and the preferred food becomes more difficult to obtain. When a preferred food source is abundant, the calories in the diet may consist largely of that one particular food. But as the food source becomes more difficult to obtain, less preferable foods will be included and the diet will broaden. Such dietary changes imply changes in patterns of behavior within the community—changes of culture.
Behavior ecologists and anthropologists have partitioned the foraging process into two components with respect to the cost-benefit analysis associated with dietary decisions:
search and handling. [57] The search component of the cost-benefit ledger refers to the amount of work per calorie payoff (and other benefits such as the potential for enhanced social standing) associated with a food item’s abundance, distance, terrain, proximity of another group’s territory, water sources, etc. The handling component refers to the work per calorie payoff associated with getting the food into a state (location, form, etc.) in which it can be consumed. Search and handling considerations can be largely independent of each other. The residential permanence involved with the incorporation of agriculture reduces the search consideration greatly, and makes handling the primary consideration. Global industrial food economies change entirely the nature of both search and handling: handling in industrial society—from the perspective of the individual and the individual’s decision processes—is reduced largely to considerations of speed and convenience. The search component has been re-appropriated and refocused by corporate marketing, and reduced to something called shopping.
Domestication, hands down the most dramatic and far-reaching example of cultural evolution, emerges originally as a response to scarcity that is tied to a lack of mobility and an increase in population density. Domestication is a way of further broadening the diet when other local sources of food are already being maximally exploited. Initial experimentation with animal domestication “occurred in situations where forager diets were already quite broad and where the principle goal of domestication was the production of milk, an exercise that made otherwise unusable plants or plant parts available for human consumption. . . .” [58] The transition to life-ways based even partially on domestication has some counter-intuitive technological ramifications as well.
This leads to a further point about efficiency. It is often said that the adoption of more expensive subsistence technology marks an improvement in this aspect of food procurement: better tools make the process more efficient. This is true in the sense that such technology often enables its users to extract more nutrients per unit weight of resource processed or area of land harvested. If, on the other hand, the key criterion is the cost/benefit ratio, the rate of nutrient gained relative to the effort needed to acquire it, then the use of more expensive tools will often be associated with declines in subsistence efficiency. Increased investment in handling associated with the use of high-cost projectile weapons, in plant foods that require extensive tech-related processing, and in more intensive agriculture all illustrate this point. [59]
In modern times, thanks to the advent of—and supportive propaganda associated with—factory industrial agriculture, farming is coupled with ideas of plentitude and caloric abundance. However, in the absence of fossil energy and petroleum-based chemical fortification, farming is expensive in terms of the calories produced as a function of the amount of work involved. For example, “farmers grinding corn with hand-held stone tools can earn no more than about 1800 kcal per hour of total effort devoted to farming, and this from the least expensive cultivation technique.” [60] A successful fishing or bison hunting expedition is orders of magnitude more efficient in terms of the ratio of calories expended to calories obtained.
[56] Bird & O’Connell [Bird, D. W., & O’Connell, J. F. (2006). Behavioral ecology and archaeology. Journal of Archaeological Research, 14, 143-188]
[57] Ibid.
[58] Ibid, p. 152.
[59] Ibid, p. 153.
[60] Ibid, p. 151, italics in original.
pp. 122-123
The birth of the machine
The domestication frame
The Neolithic marks the beginnings of large scale domestication, what is typically referred to as the agricultural revolution. It was not really a revolution in that it occurred over an extended period of time (several thousand years) and in a mosaic piecemeal fashion, both in terms of the adoption of specific agrarian practices and in terms of specific groups of people who practiced them. Foraging lifestyles continue today, and represented the dominant lifestyle on the planet until relatively recently. The agricultural revolution was a true revolution, however, in terms of its consequences for the humans who adopted domestication-based life-ways, and for the rest of the natural world. The transition from nomadic and seminomadic hunting and gathering to sedentary agriculture is the most significant chapter in the chronicle of the human species. But it is clearly not a story of unmitigated success. Jared Diamond, who acknowledges somewhat the self-negating double-edge of technological “progress,” has called domestication the biggest mistake humans ever made.
That transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture is generally considered a decisive step in our progress, when we at last acquired the stable food supply and leisure time prerequisite to the great accomplishments of modern civilization. In fact, careful examination of that transition suggests another conclusion: for most people the transition brought infectious disease, malnutrition, and a shorter lifespan. For human society in general it worsened the relative lot of women and introduced class-based inequality. More than any other milestone along the path from chimpanzeehood to humanity, agriculture inextricably combines causes of our rise and our fall. [143]
The agricultural revolution had profoundly negative consequences for human physical,
psychological, and social well being, as well as a wide-ranging negative impact on the planet.
For humans, malnutrition and the emergence of infectious disease are the most salient physiological results of an agrarian lifestyle. A large variety of foodstuffs and the inclusion of a substantial amount of meat make malnutrition an unlikely problem for hunter gatherers, even during times of relative food scarcity. Once the diet is based on a few select mono-cropped grains supplemented by milk and meat from nutritionally-inferior domesticated animals, the stage is set for nutritional deficit. As a result, humans are not as tall or broad in stature today as they were 25,000 years ago; and the mean age of death is lower today as well. [144] In addition, both the sedentism and population density associated with agriculture create the preconditions for degenerative and infectious disease. “Among the human diseases directly attributable to our sedentary lives in villages and cities are heart and vascular disorders, diabetes, stroke, emphysema,
hypertension, and cirrhoses [sic.] of the liver, which together cause 75 percent of the deaths in the industrial nations.” [145] The diet and activity level of a foraging lifestyle serve as a potent prophylactic against all of these common modern-day afflictions. Nomadic hunter-gatherers are by no means immune to parasitic infection and disease. But the spread of disease is greatly limited by low population density and by a regular change of habitation which reduced exposure to accumulated wastes. Both hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists are susceptible to zoonotic diseases carried by animals, but domestication reduces an animal’s natural immunity to disease and infection, creates crowded conditions that support the spread of disease among animal populations, and increases the opportunity for transmission to humans. In addition, permanent dwellings provide a niche for a new kind of disease-carrying animal specialized for symbiotic parasitic cohabitation with humans, the rat being among the most infamous.
Plagues and epidemic outbreaks were not a problem in the Pleistocene.
There is a significant psychological dimension to the agricultural revolution as well.
A foraging hunter-gatherer lifestyle frames natural systems in terms of symbiosis and interrelationship. Understanding subtle connections among plants, animals, geography,
and seasonal climate change is an important requisite of survival. Human agents are intimately bound to these natural systems and contemplate themselves in terms of these systems, drawing easy analogy between themselves and the natural communities around them, using animals, plants, and other natural phenomena as metaphor. The manipulative focus of domestication frames natural systems in antagonistic terms of control and resistance. “Agriculture removed the means by which men [sic.] could contemplate themselves in any other than terms of themselves (or machines). It reflected back upon nature an image of human conflict and competition . . . .” [146] The domestication frame changed our perceived relationship with the natural world,
and lies at the heart of our modern-day environmental woes. According to Paul Shepard,
with animal domestication we lost contact with an essential component of our human nature, the “otherness within,” that part of ourselves that grounds us to the rest of nature:
The transformation of animals through domestication was the first step in remaking them into subordinate images of ourselves—altering them to fit human modes and purposes. Our perception of not only ourselves but also of the whole of animal life was subverted, for we mistook the purpose of those few domesticates as the purpose of all. Plants never had for us the same heightened symbolic representation of purpose itself. Once we had turned animals into the means of power among ourselves and over the rest of nature, their uses made possible the economy of husbandry that would, with the addition of the agrarian impulse, produce those motives and designs on the earth contrary to respecting it. Animals would become “The Others.” Purposes of their own were not allowable, not even comprehensible. [147]
Domestication had a profound impact on human psychological development. Development—both physiological and psychological—is organized around a series of stages and punctuated by critical periods, windows of time in which the development and functional integration of specific systems are dependent upon external input of a designated type and quality. If the necessary environmental input for a given system is absent or of a sufficiently reduced quality, the system does not mature appropriately. This can have a snowball effect because the future development of other systems is almost always critically dependent on the successful maturation of previously developed systems. The change in focus toward the natural world along with the emergence of a new kind of social order interfered with epigenetic programs that evolved to anticipate the environmental input associated with a foraging lifestyle. The result was arrested development and a culture-wide immaturity:
Politically, agriculture required a society composed of members with the acumen of children. Empirically, it set about amputating and replacing certain signals and experiences central to early epigenesis. Agriculture not only infantilized animals by domestication, but exploited the infantile human traits of normal individual neoteny. The obedience demanded by the organization necessary for anything larger than the earliest village life, associated with the rise of a military caste, is essentially juvenile and submissive . . . . [148]
[143] Diamond (1992), p. 139. [Diamond, J. (1992). The Third Chimpanzee. New York: HarperCollins.]
[144] Shepard (1998) [Shepard, P. (1998). Coming Home to the Pleistocene. Washington, D.C.: Island Press]
[145] Ibid, p. 99.
[146] Shepard (1982), p. 114. [Shepard, P. (1982). Nature and Madness. Athens Georgia: University of Georgia Press]
[147] Shepard (1998), p. 128.
[148] Shepard (1982), pp. 113-114.
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!