January 21, 2021

Identifying

(Disidentifying)

“ I contain multitudes” Walt Whitman

Corporate Social Responsibility, Humanitarian Aid or Social Innovation? What we call it may depend on our worldview. Global Warming and Climate Change are linguistic frames that describe contemporary life conditions in ways that make sense to different groups of people. Tools like Frame Theory (Lakoff) and Spiral Dynamics reveal a spectrum of world views composed of powerful cultural memes. Values tend to express in patterns that relate to world views. These memes operate as deep structural codes that aggregate ideas, values and behaviors, expressing shared values irrespective of national, religious and ethnic boundaries. For example, Green Design, Eco-Efficiency, Stewardship, Sustainability and Flourishing are different ways of describing a change objective in ways aligned and resonant with the distinct value sets that together comprise a spectrum of cultural world views.

Working from the 1950s through the 1970s, American psychology professor Clare Graves developed an influential stage theory of collective meaning-making with practical applicability. Graves became curious about seemingly incommensurable values sets that persist and express as deep patterns across societies, and across long timeframes. He conducted extended research on the reciprocal relationship between human beings and their life context or “life conditions” which he defined as “bio-psycho-social” to denote the complex interplay of internal and external factors that influence our biology, our thinking, our feelings and our sociality. Graves’ theory of human societal emergence was depicted using the form of a double-helix as a visual aid to describe the evolutionary - involutionary dynamic typical of the emergence of new ways of coping with problems of existence that in turn spur the emergence of challenging life conditions that require further adaptations, and so on. Graves’ theory operates on the micro (individual) level as well as the meso and macro- (organizational and societal) levels. Graves further demonstrated that emergent world views (or “vMemes”) drift toward increasingly the complex because they reflect the integration of collective human achievements over time. Each worldview evolutionarily rests on the foundation of, while also building and elaborating upon, its predecessors. Graves’ double-helical model showed that from the perspective of deep time, these emergent world views and their corresponding vMemes exhibit a distinct dialectical pattern that he characterized as alternating between emphasis on Self and emphasis on Other, Or individual and collective. Graves’s schema used alphanumeric codes to describe patterns of evolving life conditions and patterns of evolving human adaptive world views and values memes (vMemes).

In 1996, Chris Cowan and Don Beck, former students of Clare Graves published Spiral Dynamics: Mastering Values, Leadership and Change, building upon while also simplifying Clare Graves’ model of the collective semiosphere, they dubbed this evolutionary phenomena Spiral Dynamics. Congruent with other developmental stage theories that describe the evolution of human societies through archaic, indigenous, tribal, traditional, modern, post-modern and post-postmodern (Gebser), Spiral Dynamics describes the macro societal emergence of vMemes (values memes), the deep societal codes that act as strange attractors. In the Spiral Dynamics model, collective human development is structured in distinct hierarchical stages - however movement among and between stages is neither linear nor rigidly progressive.

Spiral Dynamics gives us a heuristic to assist our interpretation of global media messages, trends, political positions, conflicts and current events on levels deeper than the headline news. According to Spiral Dynamics theory, vMemes are evolutionary emergents within a meta-pattern that takes the form of a double-helix expressive of the evo-involutionary impulse. The color-coded schema of Spiral Dynamics denote aggregate world views, for example, the ethnocentric values of the tribal worldview, the structuring and ordering under the rule of God in the traditional worldview, the sovereign rational free will in the modern world view, the radically progressive and inclusive seeking of justice characteristic of the postmodern worldview, and the hopeful yet pragmatic marriage of science and spirit that characterizes the post-postmodern worldview.

vMeme codes are dynamic adaptive cultural intelligences. On the collective level we contain the full spectrum of values. On the individual level, we human beings are so complex, we can and do occupy positions across world views, and this composite picture of our identity and values is constantly changing as we grow and develop with respect to capacities and intelligences. Just as we retain the memories of our child and adolescent selves even as we mature into adulthood, we enact different forms of mind in situational and preferential ways. Is there a set of values or perspectives on reality that you find yourself relying on on day-to-day? Or when you’re under stress? We may find that we can identify with one or more worldviews and that depending on context- such as family or workplace -one or the other may be more dominant. We may also notice that colleagues, friends, family members and collectives may be identified with a sets of values or straddling different vMemes. The point is not to label or categorize self or other, but rather to have more precise tools for listening into the deep needs and wants of the human spectrum. This frees us up to consciously choose to message toward the developed world, or not, or toward our tribe, or not, rather than defaulting to communicating only with people “like us”, which contributes to sexism, racism and ethnocentrism.

Spiral Dynamics, as a practical theory, stresses that the entire spectrum of world views are evolutionarily interdependent and irreducible. Integration requires differentiation. The one requires the many. Attention to the full spectrum of world views is necessary to adequately address reality because all perspectives are valid, and each worldview has a unique functional contribution to the whole. An evo-devo perspective at societal scale, Spiral Dynamics is a biopsyschosocial meta-model of societal evolution that allows individuals to “be who they are” (Beck). Spiral Dynamics integrates the postmodern interpretation of race as not essentially meaningful as a category yet denoting political structures that are indeed real structural impediments. Race is understood as an expression while vMemes are much deeper, governing codes that do not correlate to race, ethnicity, nationality or religious affiliation.

The Spiral Dynamics framework allows us to see beneath idiosyncrasies of culture and nurture to observe deeper vMeme patterns across humanity and across time. In doing so Spiral Dynamics is profoundly inclusive and respectful of the elegant fit between human world views and the life conditions with which they are intimately intertwined. We can observe uncannily predictable patterns across centuries and agnostic of race, nation, and ethnicity. Spiral Dynamics does not imply that ethnic and national identity have no significance whatsoever. On the contrary, in giving us a framework from which to honor diversity, it allows everyone to have a voice and a contribution that is conditioned not by culture and ethnicity alone, thus providing a bigger more balanced view of humanity at large - a view in which the developed world is not the center, but rather a participant in a much bigger evolutionary story.

Developmental models, like any heuristic, have their limits, but held lightly as an orienting generalization, they are helpful in any multi-stakeholder design effort. Spiral Dynamics lends itself to bias-neutral decision- making frameworks, perspective taking, problem-opportunity framing, and conflict negotiation. This integrated approach to diversity is being practiced, researched, and tested at global scale by organizations such as the UNDP and Centers for Human Emergence. In The Crucible: Forging South Africa’s Future Don Beck tells the story of its use in the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Spiral Dynamics • Developmental/emergence model. • Describes values codes (memes) in individuals and across cultures. • individual, organizational and geo- political nation-state levels. • Framing and understanding the forces of human interactions and behavior.

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