Blair and Bush are politicians, practitioners of the art of the possible, attempting to reform the gigantic government establishments they have inherited.  But their successors will need a new vision to inspire them, one that takes a bolder step towards imagining a political world illuminated by the Spiral Dynamics perspective.  In creating such a vision it is well to start with the words of F. A. Hayek, one of the earliest and most penetrating critics of the welfare state.  In Law, Legislation, and Liberty he wrote about the difference between a spontaneous order such as “society” and an organization such as “government.”  A spontaneous order such as society is millions of people acting independently, and yet interconnected to each other in a web of transactions that aggregate into astonishing complexity.  Government, on the other hand, is an organization, and is designed precisely to limit spontaneity.  Society, we could say, has almost unlimited bandwidth, but the U.S. Congress has the limited bandwidth of a committee of 535 individuals.  Hayek writes:

[It] is impossible … to replace the spontaneous order by organization and at the same time to utilize as much of the dispersed knowledge of all its members as possible. (Hayek 1973 p51)

The welfare state of the twentieth century was precisely an attempt to replace the spontaneous order of social interaction with specific organizations planned and controlled by government to do specific tasks.  Its efforts and accomplishments were limited and disappointing because, by replacing spontaneous order with specific organization in the execution of education and welfare, government radically reduced the bandwidth of knowledge and energy that could be brought to these tasks.  In contrast, the Fourth Great Awakening was a phenomenon of spontaneous order, a social outburst of millions of people responding to a sense of uneasiness.  It is trying to tell us that the society of the future must not be founded on the organization model but founded as a spontaneous order in which millions of human actions are all brought to bear upon the national political space, and mediated there by the venerable institutions enshrined in the U.S. Constitution to write laws that will allow the spontaneous order of society to solve problems rather than the privilege the rigid organizations of government for tasks beyond their competence.

This book has made much of the needs of the people on the road to the middle class, how their need was for religion, education, and law.  It argued against the micro-management of people on the road to the middle class and the painstaking organization of basic human needs and services related to education, health, and welfare, upon which the welfare state has strained so mightily.  Government is needed to maintain the road, uphold and enforce the rules of the road, and keep it clear of brigands and robber barons.  It did not need to nag and nanny every American to eat their broccoli.  But even if this were stipulated, and the welfare state were abolished in favor of a compassionate and spontaneous order that respected religion, encouraged parents once more to take charge of their children’s education, and taught them how the law defended the weak against the strong, only one group of Americans would be satisfied, the people struggling on the red/blue transition.  There remain the people on the blue/orange transition, people preparing to attempt a life of adventure, and the people on the orange/green transition, those moving beyond rules and beyond ego to caring and sharing.  A restored road to the middle class will not be tolerated if it destroys the road to creativity and the road to community.

As this book has shown, the previous attempts to build roads to creativity and community have been highly unsatisfactory.  Nineteenth century Romantics imagined a world in which bourgeois structure would be destroyed and only creativity would reign.  Nineteenth century socialists imagined a world in which bourgeois enterprise would be smashed and only caring and sharing would remain.  The Romantics and the socialists failed because they tried to break up the road to the middle class.  The Spiral Dynamics perspective predicts the result of these experiments.  By denying the rules, the Romantics declined into Decadence.  By denying creative spontaneity, the socialists declined into mindless bureaucracy.  Instead of crying with Victor Hugo “No more rules… genius conjures up rather than learns,” (Grana 1964 p54) the Romantics should have cried: “Transcend the rules!  Use the precious gift of creative intuition to vault from the shoulders of the present to the unimagined heights of the future!”  Instead of marginalizing the creative egos of capitalists and entrepreneurs, the socialists should have harnessed their inventiveness to devise how networks of caring and sharing could transcend creativity and enterprise instead of replacing it.

There was a reason why the Romantics and the socialists wanted to destroy the status quo. They were afraid.  The Romantics were afraid of the bourgeoisie.  They feared that the bourgeoisie would come and put a stop their naughty goings-on, like the British army officer who puts a stop to Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  And the socialists were terrified by the capitalists that they experienced as robber barons trying to take over the world and exploit it.  How could there ever be a world of voluntary caring and sharing until the capitalists and their mad cult of Individualism had been smashed?  So the green communitarians were afraid of the orange capitalists; the orange creative artists were afraid of the blue bourgeoisie.  And the bourgeoisie?  They were afraid of the mob, the red proletarians.

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©2005 Christopher Chantrill