The Power of Worldviews
There is a very illuminating body of work formed by the nexus of Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory and the social psychology research of Clare Graves popularized by Don Beck and Chris Cowan in their book Spiral Dynamics. The work describes a series of evolutionary stages that societal worldviews go through that is somewhat analogous to developmental stages as seen in cognitive development a la Piaget, moral development a la Kohlberg and the worldview stages mapped out by Gebser. Wilber has taken the substantial similarities of data from these different fields of research and come up with the idea of "altitude," as expressed in this introductory summary.
However, my interactions with the ideas in the community of people familiar with this body of work and claiming fluency in it both online and in-person has proved to be a little disappointing for reasons that will hopefully become obvious as we proceed.
The ubiquitous misinterpretation of both integral Theory and Spiral Dynamics by the dominant Pluralistic worldview and it's very common shadow form - the extreme relativist and magical-thinking regressive worldview make me want to do some writing on the power of worldviews that addresses these somewhat pervasive mistakes. This will be Part One - with a more direct exploration of the misinterporetations to follow soon.
Read the rest.
Julian makes some very good points in this post, that are useful both to us who follow integral theory and those who are novices.
Tags:
No comments:
Post a Comment