text/Kegan-TheEvolvingSelf1.txt
Bob Keegan. Hello, Bob Keegan. Keegan, how you doing? Well, more importantly, how are the Red Sox? Well, they're still alive and kicking, and they've already made history. No team in history has ever even forced a seventh game after being down 3-0. Ah, well, that alone does your heart good. The whole town is totally exhausted and crazed in a slightly pleasant and maniac kind of way. Well, goodness gracious, it's been a year or two since I've seen you. It has, it has. You're doing fine. I'm doing very well. With your endowed chair. I do have an endowed chair. That is so cool. You have to treat me with renewed respect and awe and reverence. I do indeed, your acreship. But isn't that great? I mean, seriously, developmental studies fell on a little bit of a hard time, I think, because of sort of an extreme concern that somehow it was pigeonholed. People are ranking people or something like that. And now I sense there's a real coming back and appreciation of really what it does, which is an effective way of communication. It's skillful means for helping people. It's a way of understanding and orienting and so on. And so to actually have a chair that is devoted to adult development and learning and education, I think it's fantastic. Yeah, it's a blow against boomeritis. So the Red Sox and boomeritis. Yeah, boomeritis are two things that we definitely want to track here. Now, technically, what are you a professor of now? What are they called, the endowed? I'm the Meehan Professor of Adult Learning and Professional Development. That is so cool. Yeah, and that, you know, to be absolutely honest about it, although I get to be the first holder and occupant of the chair until I become, you know, senile or disgrace the university or something, that title covers it. There's such a multitude of sins and approaches that any renewed epidemic of boomeritis could easily fill the chair with somebody who doesn't take on kind of the hard work of approaching issues of, you know, normativeness and betterness and so on. I would love to talk about that because in a wonderful way, we've kind of inhabited, as you know, parallel universes. We did our first really well-known developmental book almost within one or two years of each other. Every time one of us has ever appeared someplace, somebody always comes up and says, do you know the work of, you mentioned the other one. That's absolutely true. Even more warming to me is that people don't come up anymore and say, well, do you know Ken Wilber's stuff? But it's like, I guess you and Ken Wilber know each other. Or Ken told me to come and see you. Yeah, exactly. We send so many people your way, and I know it's vice versa, but it's always been gratifying in a sense when you stumble on the same territory from parallel universes. Independent ways because you have a sense that you didn't just make this up. You know, I, in the way deep, dim recesses of my mind, think that any intelligent person ought to be able to see what we're doing. Delusion number 304 I'm working on. But part of the real concern really is if you look at developmental studies and they do involve things that are sometimes called hierarchies, that people have such a misunderstanding of that. And a typical hierarchy means that each stage is more inclusive, more loving, more open, and so on. And not that it somehow represses or oppresses. I mean, pathologies are always possible, but that's not the definition of growth hierarchies. And so, you know, you've tiptoed in the best sense, in a positive sense, diplomatic sense, through academic atmosphere that for several decades has not been kind. Right. And so let's do talk a little bit about that because I think the normativeness, the fact that there are waves, stages, levels of unfolding, really point to a greater potential that all of us possess. These are really good news things that we can start to talk about a little bit more now. If people had to choose, you know, a single chart, a single graphic that would be worth their contemplating for a year and then holding on to closely, my candidate would be that picture of your four quadrants with the concentric circles indicating the different levels of complexity overlaid on those four boxes. Right. There's just such a world, a world of integrated curricula that grow out of that picture. And if you remove the concentric circles, you have a powerful idea in the four boxes, but you've lost a lot of the dimension of what you're talking about. Yeah, exactly. And my favorite example, it's very simple, but it's the scale in one of those boxes in the upper right is atoms to molecules to cells to organisms. And those are concentric circles. In other words, the molecules transcend and include atoms. They don't repress. They don't repress them. They don't hate them. And cells include molecules. They actually enfold them. They embrace them. And that's the model that we're talking about in terms of these stages of development. They actually love their predecessors. They don't repress them, hate them, and it's on them. You know, that kind of integral view is exactly what we're talking about. Absolutely. You know, cells to molecules and so on, anyone can agree those are not just accretive increases but represent more complex reorganizations, the less complex elements of which you can see if you choose to look at them. You can look at it within any one of these complex forms and no one runs around feeling that their hackles are up because you said a molecule was more complex than an atom or a particle was less complex than an atom or something like that. I know that maybe when you were writing Boomeritis, but long before it came out at one of the meetings in your house, when you started talking about what the experience is, what the weather emotionally is like when you get back this kind of, oh, you must be some kind of a Nazi or you never heard of postmodernism or something because you have a notion of these hierarchies, I realized that you were a kindred spirit in a whole other way than I'd imagined just from reading your books. You know, here's kind of a fellow sufferer in a way who has had to deal with that set of reactions. Right. Go ahead. No, no, I definitely want to pursue that. I just wanted to add an irony to it because most of the things that people object to when they think about hierarchies are exterior social hierarchies, like a caste system. Mm-hmm. Where a few select people, for whatever reasons, seem to have a great deal of power and they seem to be oppressing or holding down or actually literally enslaving other people. Yeah. That's what they tend to think of when they think of hierarchy. Yeah. Now, interiorly, that's not what a hierarchy is. That's not how it works. It's almost the opposite. But the irony is that if we take any of the developmental stages or hierarchies, yours classically five major orders of consciousness, each of them more enveloping and embracing and loving in that sense, the exterior dominator social hierarchies are put into place almost exclusively by people at the lower levels of an interior hierarchy. And that by definition, people at the higher stages of an interior hierarchy would never do something like that. So the only cure for the exterior hierarchies that they got so mad at us for is increasing the interior hierarchies you and I are talking about. Right. That's the irony, I think. Yeah, I think that's beautifully put. It kind of reminds me that often this critique will come most passionately from students who identify with a particular oppressed group. And what I'm always wanting to say is kind of the notion of an order of consciousness that can step back from the given arrangements of society, which given arrangements are always in some way broken and unequal and are disadvantaging people, including the people that you, you may care the most about or with whom you identify. The notion of an order of consciousness that can step back from that and not just take it as somehow a law of nature that a certain group should be oppressed is the greatest ally that you would have on behalf of your group. Absolutely. Just what I was saying from another angle. Exactly, exactly. A few things that have always struck me about this. One is that for many years at Harvard, I taught a lifespan developmental course that actually, it became my first big development book, The Evolving Self. Yeah. It was as much an attention to childhood and adolescence as it was adulthood and even more so in many ways. And I probably felt I wasn't adult enough myself really to be teaching a course on adult development alone back then in my early days. But in any case, one of the things I noticed spending a lot of time with people around these same rhythms and dynamics with respect to childhood is that the attention level and the sense of personal assault and insult and so on, which we're talking about, never came up when the very same issues were being discussed with respect to child development. When you show people Piagetian exercises and show them on film, you know, little kids who are shown two identical beakers filled with the same amount of liquid and then it gets poured into a taller and skinnier one and they say that there's more now in the taller and skinnier one. And when you pour it back, they say, well, now they're the same size. And the fluidity of the preoperational child, which delights people and when they see the development of these concrete capacities to hold on to these categories, nobody feels like something insulting or demeaning is going on. And no one feels any reluctance to say that there is some greater adequacy to the little boy who has come to the realization that he's never going to be older than his older brother or isn't going to change his gender or any of these, quote, illogical things. that come out of the minds and mouths of three- and four-year-old kids. Everyone is willing to accept what is basically the very, very same drama in its earlier acts. But it's when it becomes, wait a minute, you know, you're talking about me and my kind or something like that, that it becomes a whole different issue. Yeah. Well, and again, ironies abound because on the one hand, the concern for exactly that of oppressed groups and people that are treated unfairly, people that are disadvantaged, that concern itself comes into being only at a fairly high level of development. And so people that are raising these concerns, we tend to look at them and say, yes, that's right, you don't realize how rare your concern is. And it's coming from a very high level of development and that's not a bad thing to say. That's to say, let more of that abound. Yeah, that's either the beauty or some people find it the sneakiness of this whole perspective that you can turn any objective into itself, a piece of data, a piece of data that reflects back on the order of complexity you're using in speaking. But I mean, it isn't that different from that wonderful Einstein quote that there's something like we will never be able to solve today's problems with the same order of complexity we used to create them. We're going to have to somehow step out of this or it's just going to be some kind of a lateral move. Yeah, yeah. It's certainly the case that if you're talking about levels of complexity and everything, in a sense, can be pegged at a level of complexity, then that can always be turned back. But that doesn't mean it isn't so. No, I absolutely agree. I completely agree. One of the things that in the same way of transferring, so to speak, the focus here that I've developed that has worked fairly well in my own courses where I'm introducing people into all of this is to try to create opportunities by which people have an opportunity to rather quickly come to the recognition and experience that they themselves are judges, evaluators, and higher archivists. Exactly. And it's not some nasty theory that's been brought into our civilized midst and is sort of stinking up the environment, but that every single one of us is just inevitably making judgments about more and less adequacy. Right. And one of the ways I've done this is for years I've shown people a therapy tape, which you may have seen has been used in millions of contexts, of Carl Rogers, working with this generous woman, Gloria, who agreed to go and talk to three different therapists and talk about her real issues and give them an opportunity to sort of demonstrate the different ways they do therapy. Right. And that's the usual way that the film is used. But I've used it because she is somebody who is very much in what I call the socializing mind and who is just kind of trying to step out of that and who is looking very much to Rogers, for example, as the wise therapist to sort of settle all these things and answer all these questions. And he, through his own client-centered response, is continuously trying to take a stand that she can look to herself for answers to these questions and that this whole notion of granting to others the right to decide whether she's a worthy human being and so on is at the crux of her developmental issue, which I would agree is absolutely dead on. And so he's trying to resist taking up his assigned role by her as a provider of directions and signals and they can see her. She finally says to him, you know, you're being very nice to her but you're not answering my question and I want to know, you know, should I do this and should I do that around these very intimate and complex personal issues? And he keeps coming around to joining her empathically kind of like behind her back and looking out into the world as she's looking at it and refusing to take up his position as the answer-providing expert and so on. And before I do any presentation of developmental theory, I show them this and ask them, what are they noticing? And what are they noticing? And what stands out for them? And how would they describe ways that she's putting the world together? And they're, you know, very bright and they name all these ways in which she is trying to get the world to tell her, especially respected authorities and so on, how she should operate. And then I ask them, if she were to make progress or if you were the therapist and you were to come to feel like, you know, we're getting somewhere because there's some way in which she's different in a way that I really would think of as getting better in some sort of a way. Right. You know, is that a question, you know, you can entertain? Are there ways you would, the hopes you would have for her anyway? And people seem to have no trouble with that. They don't jump right up and say, what do you mean better? And what do you mean progress? I mean, they can see right away what she's struggling with and they start naming basically the features of, I guess, green or self-authoring or whatever it would be. Right. And I put it up on the board and now you've named two different ways of operating. Now, what would you say about these two different ways? I mean, are they just different strokes for different folks or is there some sense in which you think one of these is actually better? And at the very least, you can always get the conversation and the battle if there's going to be one about notions like betterness externalized from a battle between me and the students to a battle between some of the students and others of the students. Right. And there'll always be people who'll say, wait a minute, this is better. She'd be happier, she'd be more effective, she'd be a better mother, she'd be projective, acting less of her own stuff onto her own kid. You know, they start to become a champion of all the people that they can see are at certain risks because here she is in the leadership responsibilities operating this way. And so, before we've even gotten too far into the class, we can step back and see kind of, okay, who's making judgments? Who's talking about betterness? Who has hierarchies? Right. Right. This developmental theory or this evil professor, you know, or you. And that's, at least we've opened the field and I can feel like I can get in there each week without feeling that I'm going to have to be defending myself sort of because the battle has been externalized in the class rather than they're all on one side and I'm saying, hey, you can talk about hierarchies without being a Nazi. Yeah, yeah. Well, so much of the battle is indeed semantic and that's what's so, another sort of striking irony or at least peculiarity about this because hierarchy, again, has got a reputation of being this fascist, this caste, oppressive system of which there are those kinds of systems in place out there and they're not pleasant things. Right. But the whole idea that, therefore, you are going to be free of judgment because hierarchies are these judgmental things and you're going to not have any judgment, that's where people get caught up because it really is a self-contradiction because they're really not free of judging. They're really not free of valuing. It's like in the 60s we said, you know, all values are relative but middle class values are really screwed. We know where to draw the firm line when we have to. You know what this reminds me of? I've been wondering actually what you'd say to this is whether or not these forms of relativism and of passionate objection and concern to these questions of normativeness and betterness and so on aren't better considered in a more differentiated way and is coming from a number of different developmental perspectives that the idea of the mean green meme doesn't quite capture because it tends to suggest a rather monolithic character to the relativism. I mean, just for example, what I've noticed is that there's one kind of relativism that is really about the transition from the third order to the fourth order. A person who is just coming to discover that they have been taking as truth and as reality a set of values that they have imbibed and internalized from the valued surround of their family or tribe or whatever. And that's a very, very important truth that they've come to that this is just a constructed truth that a lot of people might be buying into but it doesn't necessarily have to be the only truth and that they are beginning, just beginning to kind of see the self as an operation that can somehow make choices about these different values and begin to put together any kind of ideology of one's own. There's a passionate form of relativism and objection to hierarchies that comes up very often at that time in development. And they haven't even gotten to the green beat yet. That's in contrast to the four or five kind of thing, the sort of deconstructive post-modernism that is a stepping away from even my own ideology or self-authorship and recognizing its limitation. And you know how in the first move it's a move away from the self-defined by its loyalties and connections to the surround whereas the second one is a move away from defining myself only according to a specific ideology with which I've become identified. You know what I mean? I do. I think there are at least two, maybe even three, I could even add a third if we got into the transpersonal domains where relativism comes up and there's certain truth to it and not just something that is mistaken or self-contradictory or a performative contradiction and so on. And the Mean Green meme was met just as a kind of caricature poke at some of the boomeritis folks of course and I don't mean to cover all the bases with that. It's just I wanted some bumper sticker I could hurl back it down while they were calling me dirty names. First how are you? The first one you're talking about in a sense three and a half moving from sort of an embedded Exactly, yeah. Yeah, I think it's true. I think one of the ways to put it in sort of more generalized terms is when people are coming out of a conformist embedded stage of development of which most developmentalists recognize several of those but there is a stage where people go through and they just are so embedded in their culture they can't see it and they just accept it as my country right or wrong and so on. And then usually they start moving towards a stage that's post-conventional or it's more universal or it is more self-offering and at that point just the idea that what my country says isn't always right is almost shocking and liberating and all of a sudden it does appear very relativistic at that point because if what my mom and dad told me and what my country told me and what the Bible told me isn't necessarily true then anything goes. So that's fairly high it's not regression to level one or level two or not necessarily regression to egocentric or any of that kind of stuff. Right. And I think you're exactly right that is indeed one kind of relativism that comes up and then another more sophisticated is several developmentalists have the one we're talking about Green Meme or Claire Graves actually called it the relativistic stage and in Jane Lovinger it's the individualistic stage and it's a very very different differentiated structure and it's differentiated the universal systems of formal operational thinking into multiple systems and that's a step up but it doesn't see how to hook those systems together so it gets lost in a pluralistic world of nothing but relativism and as soon as you try to find some higher unity they accuse you of going for you know universal abstract oppressive schema that kind of thing. And that's a violation of the sort of ideology of postmodernism which is kind of itself a contradiction in terms of relativism well certainly almost any of these levels if they try to be absolute in themselves they end up contradicting themselves because they don't cover the other levels but that certainly postmodernism got hoisted on its own petard louder and more sharply than anybody else because it came down so hard in the fact that there are no universals except theirs and there is no meta context except theirs and there is no big picture except they gave a very big picture why everybody else is big pictures don't work and so everybody from Habermas to Carl Otto Appel jumped all over them with what they called a performative contradiction. You people are assuming what you're saying can't happen. Shame on you you mean green man. Well you know from a psychodynamic perspective it's almost like there's no frame on the world for which we have less sympathy and generosity than the one which we have only newly and perhaps perilously begun to extricate ourselves from. It's a reformed smoker. Yes. Yes. Right. So if I've begun to move away from this identification with the received tradition and my sense of my own coherence through my similar internalization of my family or my tribe or something like that and I realize these are just positions that people are staking out then when someone comes along with any kind of a theory or a framework to me it smacks right away it sounds a lot like this world which I've only Yeah. newly finally escaped from. Yep. And it's the same thing at the four and a half kind of thing that if you start introducing any kind of a framework then this seems like oh well wait a minute that is just an invitation back to the old illusion which I have finally come to recognize is an illusion that there is some kind of wholeness within any given ideology and I know they're all partial and they're all going to advantage someone and they're all going to leave someone out but what happens when you present a kind of framework that is all about that very activity and the detecting of those sorts of limitations but it's sort of hard to see that when it's like wait a minute you're just trying to offer me another ideology and I want to live in a world that relativizes ideologies and then there isn't any category for something like an interdependent framework that the fifth order is about. Right. And that fifth order that interdependent integral integrative connecting is a very high level of connection that doesn't override the relative independence of the other systems. That's also something I think the postmodernists had a hard time understanding and so what they ended up doing and rather sometimes in a cheating little bit of way which is why they were nailed with a performative contradiction is they really split the world into two different kinds of narrative spheres. One is all of the culturally bound knowledge of which there are no exceptions. All knowledge everywhere is culturally bound. There are no context transcending claims. All knowledge is social construction and all knowledge is hooked to interpretations that cannot be reduced to empirical facts. Now they maintain that all of those are true for all cultures at all times for all humans. Yeah, it's a universality about the non-universalizable nature of human existence. So they created a meta-narrative of their own that they loaded with all of their absolute and universals that were not open to interpretation not open to disagreement. They simply were true for all people at all times or you are an oppressive swan for not seeing this. And then all the local knowledges are relative and pluralistic and so on. And they didn't allow that there was a type of argumentative access to their meta-narrative absolute disclaims. And that's where I think they got undone. But it doesn't mean that we disagree the fact that a great deal of knowledge is local and contextual and culture bound and so on. As a matter of fact it's one of my four questions. It's inescapable. But boy they got caught right at that four and a half stage and never quite made it into the integral leap. But on the other hand I think it really is kind of a stage. I think it was an appropriate stage. But Jacques Derrida died last week. And God bless him and he was amazing and I think well Foucault was my favorite of the post-modernists because I think Foucault approached genius status and Foucault had the advantage as we know starting as a structuralist. So he could say a few things and not just deconstruct things. But I think really post-modernism the extreme versions have kind of run their edge a little bit. I want to come back to that and I thought I would toss in the third relativism I was talking about. You went from the transpersonal it's the same kind of thing which is at some point people have these spiritual experiences of oneness with everything. Everything is relative at that point in that sense because then everything is transparent, shimmering, it's just a fleeting shadow almost illusory. Not in a put-down sense which is that there's this grand oneness that you can awaken to and then everything is relative within that grand oneness but it's not a oneness that as Plotinus would say it's not one plus one equals two kind of one. It's just an underlying ground or emptiness in which everything arises and then there's another kind of relativity that can be experienced then. Part of the problem with the boomeritis thing is that a lot of Zen and a lot of Taoism and so on which is sort of absolute relativism if you will got interpreted as supporting post-modernism and that just isn't true at all because this is a realization and an awakening where you feel one with everything and not a way that you think in your head about relative cultural context and so on. But... I'm trying to think of who it was that talked about this distinction between a more negative deconstructive kind of post-modernism and a more positive reconstructive post-modernism. Yeah, well I think it's in the air. I've sort of counted myself as a positive or constructive post-modernism in the sense that we accept the relativity of a great deal of knowledge and the culturally bound or interpretive aspects of a great deal of knowledge. But not all of it and not even that assertion itself.