Integral Evolution: An Interview with David LoyeRead the whole interview.
Russ Volckmann
David Loye is one of those people that the longer you get to know them the more you begin to discover a bit of their depth and breadth of perspective and creativity in the world. His publications speak for themselves. His network with leading scientists and thinkers around the world is equally impressive.
Actually, my first contact was with David’s wife, Riane Eisler, author of the Chalice and the Blade (among other books written with and without David). Despite the fact that they live over the hill from me, I did not meet her face to face right away. Rather, I interviewed her over the telephone for the Integral Leadership Review, which I publish and edit. When I first approached her about doing the interview she suggested that I should interview David, but I did not know David Loye’s work at all. In that interview I discovered more about Riane’s work and the extent of their partnership. In fact, they are prime movers of a partnership approach to leadership that they promote through a nonprofit center and in a Master’s program at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco.
My conversation with Riane piqued my curiosity about David’s work and I bought one of his books, Darwin’s Lost Theory of Love. Here I found evidence of the extraordinary scope and depth of David’s work that made him a natural candidate for an interview. The only question was would I use it in Integral Leadership Review or in Integral Review: such is the quality of his interests and intellect.
Before doing the interview, I borrowed a copy of one of David’s earlier books. When I went to their house to pick it up I met them both. They are quite a team and I recommend their work to all.—Russ Volckmann
Russ: David, welcome to Integral Review.
David: Thank you for having me.
Russ: I know you have a background in psychology. I’d like to hear a little bit about the nature of your background and then explore where you’ve gone from there.
David: Well, I started by going to the New School for Social Research during the evenings and got my masters and finally my doctorate. Then I had a brief time at Princeton as a visiting lecturer, after which I went on to UCLA School of Medicine as a research psychologist in the Neuropsychiatric Institute. I have a doctorate in Social Psychology, but my master’s was in pre-clinical. That’s roughly my background. I wound up primarily as a research psychologist.
Russ: And during what years did you do your degree at the New School?
David: Oh, gosh, that was back in the Stone Age.
(laughter)
David: It must have been in the fifties.
Russ: That preceded a lot of the work that was being done around more humanistic approaches to psychology.
David: Yes, my grounding was primarily in Freud and Jung, but most importantly Lewinian Field Theory.
Russ: Kurt Lewin’s work.
David: Yes. Kurt Lewin's work was the most formative thing for me. His work underlies not only social psychology but leadership training, as well.
Russ: In what ways was his work influential on you?
David: He was the first really true systems psychologist. There is no other psychology to match it. That’s the reason it’s been so influential. It wasn’t hooked into just Gestalt or Freud or anything. It was a fluid, highly visual-oriented psychology that could be applied to all kinds of social, political and economic problems, problems in marriage and so on. He was a great innovator in action research, which has always been my passion.
Russ: That underlies the field of organization development where I spent 22 years of my life, and apparently it related to work that you did as well. In what way were you involved in action research?
David: My early work was in the study of right/left, liberal/conservative differences. I did a lot of experiments. One of my basic books in that area is called The Leadership Passion: The Psychology of Ideology. That was very definitely action-oriented. Ever since, practically everything I’ve written, I’ve wound up laying the groundwork for whatever the area was that I was looking at by pulling together what attracted me to the works of others. Ever since, I’ve always written a closing chapter or appendices or something that applies it directly, as Lewin did, to solving all kinds of social and economic and political problems.
Russ: So this was an interest of yours as far back as the fifties.
David: Oh sure. My first book actually was The Healing of a Nation. It was heavily action oriented. It won top national awards and including one that earlier had been won by Gunner Myrdal for research on racism and how to eliminate it. It was the Anisfield-Wolfe award.
Russ: What was the thesis of The Healing of a Nation?
David: The Healing of a Nation didn’t come out until 1971, at the climatic years for the whole civil rights push. It preceded the anti-war movement that came along later. It was the heyday for doing something about race.
Russ: My senior paper in college in the early 1960s was about the impact of Gandhi’s
philosophy of Satyagraha on the civil rights movement in the U.S. We have some commonality there. And what would you say were the major theses or suggestion to come out of your book?
David: I dedicated the book to Kurt Lewin and to the great black sociologist W.E.B. DuBois. I did two things in it. One, I took the perspectives of DuBois and Lewin and suggested what in terms of their work could make a difference in ending racism in America. The significance of that book within my total output from then on was in the title, The Healing of a Nation. The perspective is that we are a sick nation. We must take a socialpsychiatric perspective on the healing of the nation. In it, I wrote my first “Program for a President” in which I took Lewin’s work and fitted it in with my previous experience with television of how to actually fairly quickly move us ahead on the whole thing of racial differences.
Russ: As we’re both aware in the current political campaign, the whole issue of racism has been brought to the forefront once again. What were your recommendations and how have you seen them play out?
David: My recommendations were primarily to launch what amounts to an electronic version of what became known as the Town Hall meeting, which was also hot back then. In politics it was later brought up by Ross Perot, but he didn’t do much with it. Actually, no one has done much with it. Howard Dean picked up on part of the idea by launching the first really sophisticated use of the Internet, which Obama,, of course has perfected beautifully. That is the approach I was suggesting back in the early days of television.
Russ: Of course John McCain has advocated the use of Town Hall meetings in the
presidential campaign—
David: Yes, but his Town Hall is just the old style. He’s not using the power of technology and communication to link a whole nation together.
Russ: Your recommendation preceded even the extraordinary communication capability of the Internet today.
David: I had never thought of it that way. That’s true. Oddly enough, back in that time, I sent the book to then-Vice President Mondale and he actually read it, which seldom happens when you send books to well-known figures. He wrote back that it was an interesting idea for that time, but politically unfeasible.
Tags:
No comments:
Post a Comment