What happens to people who have become thoroughly socialized into the blue realm of purpose and discipline?  They begin to develop their ego again, now that it has been safely civilized by authority and the rules and roles of blue.  They emerge into creative orange, where people play the game to win.  This is an ego realm, like red, only now the ego does not operate by power alone, but by contract, by trading, by “adding value,” and through creativity.  Socialization is enterprise related.  The British Empire metamorphoses into the British Commonwealth.

Some people found, beginning in the nineteenth century, that this entrepreneurial world of life-as-a-game lacked something.  What about community, they said?  What about caring?  What about the universal brotherhood of man rather than the cramped community of tribal affiliation?  So was born the communitarian green level.  Here the focus is on community and harmony, everyone working together to achieve consensus, respecting and encouraging diversity.  Here the socialization is towards community, and the focus is equality and caring.

The green level completes the First Tier of human development in the Spiral Dynamics universe.  Graves called these first six levels the Subsistence Levels.  But then comes a momentous leap that starts on the Second Tier, the “Being” levels.  And the first level is integral yellow.  It turns out that there are people in the world who have discovered that treating life as a game is trite, but that replacing the bracing challenge of entrepreneurism with touchy-feely caring and equality is less than a complete solution either.  These people start to develop a systems perspective.  They start trying to imagine ways in which the virtues of competition and cooperation could be combined.  They want to integrate the different levels of being into a smoothly functioning system, not because they want to rule the world, or because they want to be world champions, but because they perceive that if everyone gets to participate at their highest potential, everyone benefits, from the individual, to the group, to the community, to the clients and customers.  A crucial aspect of yellow is that, for the first time, the human is conscious of the validity of the other levels of being.  He understands why some people exhibit blue beliefs, and others orange. Thus yellow preserves the compassion of green while transcending and extending it.  Yellow is compassionate towards others not just because he “cares” but because he understands.

The highest level that Spiral Dynamics has explored is holistic turquoise.  It extends yellow from a purely systems/integrative concept to a holistic understanding where “universal forces permeate all forms of life, energy, and existence, ordering their movement, changes and patterns.”  After turquoise comes coral, which, the authors say, is unclear to them. (Beck 1996 p47)

Beck and Cowan recognize that their system is merely a metaphor.  Consciousness cannot really be divided up into convenient levels; it is continuous and indivisible.  Their system is just a convenient classification system, an aid to understanding similar to the concept of the triune brain, composed of the reptilian brain stem that is enclosed inside the mammalian mid-brain that is wrapped inside the human neo-cortex.  Closer examination blurs these boundaries.  The human brain is a complex arrangement of organs and circuits, interconnections and activities that defies crude simplification. 

The Spiral Dynamics model self-consciously asserts that people do not experience life entirely in one level.  In advancing from one level to another, a person transcends the old level, but still includes it as part of their consciousness.  Thus the advanced green communitarian still retains their beige instincts, their purple magical feelings, their red impulses, their blue purposefulness, and their orange competitiveness.  But she experiences the world as a caring green communitarian, and easily persuades herself that green caring and sharing is the only true reality, lacking tolerance for the less evolved that live lower down the food chain.  It is common for greens to look with scorn on the orange experience of life as a game, and to regard rigid blue believers as completely benighted.  The reciprocal relationship is even worse.  Red impulsives just do not understand the blue emphasis on discipline and rules that seems to them a sucker’s game, and orange entrepreneurs regard green communitarians as soft in the head.  Each step up the hierarchy is like experiencing a new dimension.  The person higher up regards the person lower down as a fool for not being able to see the world as he does, and the person lower down thinks the person higher up is hallucinating and imagining things that just don’t exist.

This lack of understanding is true only at the First Tier, the six levels from beige to purple to red, to blue, to orange, to green.  The “momentous leap” to the Second Tier is the ability to understand that people experience the world differently: that red impulsives experience the world as a power struggle, and orange entrepreneurs experience it as a game to be won, and that none of the levels on the First Tier understands any of the others.

We are now ready to analyze the phenomenon of enthusiastic Protestantism and also the phenomenon of the critics who rail at it, and to answer the question posed above that wondered Protestantism should flourish two hundred years after German philologists exposed the human origin of Holy Scripture, and why modern secularists should be mobilized so fiercely against it.

Enthusiastic Protestantism is a movement of people in transition from the red impulsive level of consciousness to the purposeful blue stage.  When people join a Protestant sect, they are groping for a new consciousness that will help them deal with life in a more successful way than the impulsive red level.

This crisis of consciousness occurs for most people as they attempt to master life in the city.  When people live as peasants, as 90 percent of humans did until recently, life is routine, almost instinctive.  Indeed, a mindless conservatism in the peasant is almost essential.  Crops must be planted in season, and reaped in season; hay must be stored for winter feeding—or else the peasant starves.  Moreover the harvest needs protection.  In the tenth century, Viking raiders chose October, the time just after the harvest but before winter, to raid the coasts of northwest Europe and grab grain, women, and slaves.  The farmers need a warrior class to discourage these raiders.  In such an environment, society relies on a warrior aristocracy for its safety, a class barely less predatory than the piratical raiders.  Aggressive people get on top, and weaker people go along to get along.  Land is the ultimate source of wealth.  He who controls land has life; he who controls lots of land has power.  Power is everything.  But life in the city is different. 

| <<prev | 1 | 2 | 3 | (4) | 5 | next>> |

print view

Click for Chapter 11: A Likely Story

Your comments are welcome. Please e-mail to Christopher Chantrill at mailto:chrischantrill@gmail.com, and take the RMC test here.

©2005 Christopher Chantrill