Comparison Chart on Developmental Models
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It looks like I’m going to be busting these ideas out in bits and pieces before I post my really long and more comprehensive introductions to the developmental or “integral” approach to race. (I’ve been discussing this stuff for years in the forum but not so much on the frontpage.)
The following is a pretty chart comparing different developmental models and correlating their various stages. I’m not a big fan of Integral Institute’s use of “altitude” and the rainbow colors, but it doesn’t hurt and it’s a marketing thing.
Basically, all humans and human societies go through these “internal” psychological stages. These stages are also correlated with “external” social/ technological/ economic/ political stages, which are largely influenced by biogeographical conditions (availability of crops and domestic animals, climate, isolation, population density, etc.).
To gain a comprehensive understanding of what my position is, I implore everyone to read at least these two books: Guns, Germs, Steel by Jared Diamond and Sex, Ecology, and Spirituality by Ken Wilber. If you understand them properly, they will floor you and give you properly comprehensive and “big-picture” view of, well, everything, and you’ll start to make all sorts of connections in your experience and knowledge that you might not have seen previously.
(Also, you don’t have to necessarily agree with every detail of what they present, as long as you accept the legitimacy of their general approaches: that we can make cross-cultural statements, that there are correlations across domains of knowledge, that development actually happens, and that “biogeographical” causation is a real and legitimate way to understand development and evolution. For example, if you don’t agree with Wilber’s particular explanations for the rise of patriarchy, or Diamond’s particular explanations for Europe’s recent military and scientific dominance, it’s ok, as long as you accept that biogeographic forces, whatever they may be, are a significant causative factor.)
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