Briefly on Integral Politics

[Dialectic]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQRUu_4W2j8

You have to know a bit of the diction to follow.

Red = Tribal/ Pre-conventional morality
Blue = Mythic/ Conventional/ Ethnocentric morality
Orange = Early Rational/ Post-Conventional/ "Classical Liberal" (individualist, super-capitalist, autonomous, abstract) morality
Green = Mid-Rational/ Post-Conventional/ Ethical-Contextual (conscious of feminist, race, sexual-orientation, colonialist, systemic effects) morality

Breakdown of the parties is what we've been discussing for a while:
Republican is largely Blue-Orange (with Orange constantly trying to pacify the agrarian Blue base)
Democrat is largely Orange-Green (with love for Red because Red is unconventional, but in the other direction; this is why you see, for example, Crips standing together with progressive liberals over the death of Tookie Williams; or why you tend to get violent rioters at what are supposed to be peaceful anti-globalization rallies). Because morality and cognition become more complex with each progressive level, with fragmentation at a maximum at Green, the Democratic party has a very difficult time presenting a united front vs. the Republicans: Green naturally splits and Red's nature is to be a fuck-you foraging chaos maker (when in the presence of higher structures).

America has at best been Orange with pockets of Green in the coast cities and border states with Canada, but post 9/11 regressed to Blue with strong polarization with Green. (Canada's center of gravity is, I think, at a healthy Orange-Green, which is why you don't see extreme capitalist or Marxist ideologies taking a strong hold here, because the Canadian character is, generally, "reasonable" and moderated, a benefit we can have, incidentally, because we gain so much from being in close relations with the greatest superpower in the world.)

[angi]

Why do Democrats get the "higher" evolution? IMO, both parties are the same level of incompetency and lack of progression.

[Dialectic]

Haha, it looks like that a lot of the time, doesn't it?

They get the "higher" or "more inclusive" designation because, value-wise, they are closer to "green" than the Republicans: contextual values recognizing the dignity and equality of races, sexes, sexual-orientations, cultures, religions are considered more "sophisticated" and compassionate compared to the Orange "Classical Liberal" values of "pure" equality and autonomy regardless of where you come from; when Orange values are implemented, as we saw all over the world in the 19th and 20th centuries, and have seen return for a bit in the last decade in the U.S., it actually results in gross inequality and massive suffering. Mix this with Blue conservative Christianity, which only really has a hold on the Republican party, and you've got "less inclusive" consciousness.

Incidentally, I sometimes refer to moral and cognitive development somewhat interchangeably, but they're separate. They are linked dependently in one direction: moral development requires cognitive development, but cognitive does not require moral.

By moral, I mean the values described above: caring only for your own welfare, then your family/tribe's, then your people's, then all peoples, then all sentient beings. The later ones in the list are more "evolved" or "inclusive" than the earlier ones.

By cognitive, I mean the ability to reflect on ideas, to construct "hypothetical worlds." Cognitive development moves, very broadly, from "pre-operational" to "operational" (or "concrete operational") to "formal-operational" and then post-formal stages.

This means that at first, when you're very young, you're not much of a thinker. If you take a tall cup of water and pour all that water into a shorter fatter cup, young kids will say there is now less water, when there's the same amount. This is pre-operational: you can't conduct basic rational and calculating thinking. Eventually, you're able to think in a fairly reasonable manner, and your thoughts operate well on the "concrete world." You still aren't very reflective about things, but your thinking ability gets you by in the physical world. When you reach formal-operational, you can now formulate hypotheses, imagine worlds which and consequences which don't actually exist, and think critically. Post-formal stages involve thinking about thinking and putting together systems of concepts, something not all humans in this era are guaranteed to be able to do.

So to step back, we have broadly three phases of moral development: pre-conformist (everything is about me/my tribe and what I want!), conformist (I have to think/act in an acceptable way to my people, and right and wrong are dictated by long-held belief and tradition), and post-conformist (morality is fluid, my people don't have everything right, I have to think for myself).

We have broadly three phases of cognitive development: pre-op, con-op, and form-op.

These phases roughly correspond with each other: pre-op/pre-con, con-op/con, and form-op/post-con.

But they don't necessarily arise together. Moral development requires cognitive, but not vice versa.

Think about it: in order to care for, say, the whole world, to relate to all people, to recognize that one religion isn't better or righter than another, you have to be able to take another person's point of view. You need to be able to construct a hypothetical world in your head and see things from another perspective. This is a high-level operation: formal-operational. So if you are worldcentric, you are automatically form-op. But notice, just because I'm really good at constructing hypotheses, that doesn't mean I'll necessarily be a person who cares and is compassionate to the whole world: I can simply not see certain points of view and not construct certain hypothetical worlds. Karl Rove is a good example of this: sophisticated post-form-op thinking combined with conventional/early-rational values.

I'm sure many of you know some pretty intelligent people who aren't that "good" (hyper-capitalists, for example) or perhaps only apply their reason to certain aspects of their lives. Religious scientists and engineers are a good example of this; many of them can apply reason to every aspect of their existence except for their religious beliefs. The religion puts up a psychological block unassailable by reason; in fact, they don't even understand why it is unreasonable not to apply reason to those beliefs (so it blocks higher level meta-reasoning, or thinking about thinking, as well). This is not to say that you can't be religious and be a good scientist; it's that a true scientific "religiousness" would not embrace any of the dogma and ethnocentrism prevalent in all religions and would acknowledge the legitimacy of all religions minus the ethno-baggage. This, of course, is not the standard religious stance, so in that sense the scientist would not be "religious" though we (as perhaps slightly more "enlightened" beings) might say this person is more "deeply religious" than your standard religious acolyte.

[atlasien]

I believe that atheist Republicans and Libertarians often still have a worldview associated with fundamentalism, because they worship Capitalism and the Corporation. It's a religion with Capitalism as God, the Corporation as Jesus and the State as Satan. Libertarians add Ayn Rand as the Virgin Mary.

To me capitalism-worship is as illogical as worshipping the sun. Yes, the sun is a powerful force that gives us light and warmth. It can also give us heatstroke and skin cancer.

A more logical view is that a corporation is a collection of flawed human beings. The state is another type of collection of flawed human beings. Neither is something good in and of itself.

[Dialectic]

I completely agree that people can be ideologically capitalist, just as people can be ideologically Marxist. In a similar vein, people can "worship" science, just as people worship religion. I cannot, however, go so far as to say that being ideologically capitalistic or scientific is morally and intellectually equivalent to being a religious fundamentalist.

Religious fundamentalism springs from ethnocentric conformity and a concrete-operational cognitive base. You cannot, and are discouraged from, imagining other possibilities and points of view. Placing great faith in religion requires no abstract reflection: simply belief and role-conformity.

Placing great "faith" in capitalism or science is a higher-order operation, since it requires abstract reflection and hypothetico-deductive reasoning. It requires you to see into other potential worlds (new experiments, new thoughts, new market possibilities, new ways of living and doing). This is not to say that some people are not raised in strongly capitalistic/ scientific households where they do blindly follow their parents' doctrine for a while, but most eventually come to understand the reasoning behind it. While the reasoning may sometimes be faulty or incomplete, there is some legitimate rationality behind supporting some form of capitalism and science, whereas ethnocentric religion is not founded on any reasoning. Advocating for church-state separation alone (which capitalism requires, to say nothing of the stance of science) demonstrates a degree of rationality beyond what a fundamentalist can stably present.

One simple example of this distinction in rational complexity is if you're a true capitalist or scientist, you don't give a shit if I'm gay. At worst you won't give a crap about me either way, but if I can make you money or get you knowledge, you'll be my friend. If you're a fundamenalist, you give a big shit if I'm gay. You hate me because of it: I'm an abomination, I'm disgusting, I'm a threat to society, and I'm against God or Buddha or Old Man or African maleness or whatever. You have no good REASON to hate me (though you think you do, but reasonable people know better), you just do.

There has been a trend in academia and pop-social commentary to conflate different levels of complexity and say they're all the same: America's a big "tribe" (it's not), Aboriginal and Western systems of governance are not more or less complex, just different, and worshipping anthroporphic gods and idols is the same as "worshipping" materialism in its scientific or capitalistic forms. This sort of approach doesn't recognize the varying degrees of complexity in these systems and the progress that humanity has indeed made in its brief history on this earth.