the mean green meme

[howstrange]

D.

I just read your very eloquent article on inter-racial dating. It brought to mind the concept of the mean green meme. While getting rid of the laws against IR was a good thing, like Don Beck would say, sometimes getting rid of something you don't want, is not the same thing as getting what you do want. Since the playing field is not balanced, IR will almost always favor the WM and degrade the non-white male. It's a great thing that I, or you, or she, can date and marry whoever we wish, it does not however mean, that such life choices will always have a positive affect towards equality. Can this be a concept that is so unfathomably foreign to the mean green, where they can do nothing but fall back upon the typical " you're a sexist pig" response? Is a leap towards integral needed for the Jens of the world to react any differently? I mean, we are ultimately striving for the same equal balances, are we not?

edit to add the word always ;)

[Dialectic]

And now I'm done, at least for the moment, with mean green. Because as you've seen over the last little bit, mean green can be, well, really mean.

I saw it coming, and I have some experience with this sort of discourse in an in-person academic setting, but it makes me think of all those poor kids out there, particularly the Asian male engineers and comp. scientists, who are seeing all these funny patterns in society, and when they try to make their first comment on it in a sociologically-charged setting, they get massacred by academics and other intellectuals who are full, unvarnished, mean green.

I've seen it happen, and it breaks my heart. There was this one kid at an Asian writer/artist meeting I went to in Toronto, a young Chinese dude who I think was an engineer, who was simply trying to make the point that Asian women seem to have an advantage in being able to get their words out and being successful in print, TV, and movies, and he got jumped on by this super-holier-than-thou-hypersensitive journalist, Ing Wong-Ward, who basically tried to call him an ignorant misogynist. I felt so bad for the guy, especially since he was right, though he may not have been able to make his point very eloquently.

And green, incidentally is only getting stronger and more resolute, especially in the face of hyper-resistant blue and increasingly impatient orange (who themselves are reacting to inefficient and sometimes ridiculous green). This is what worries guys like Wilber. If/when green is solidly in charge, expect efficiency to drop, massive divisiveness and fragmentation, and increased social and economic chaos. Kinda like how the Democrats have looked for the last few years.

Anyway, that's my little rant against mean green. I'll actually address the points you bring up in a later post.

(Thanks so much, incidentally, for taking the time to understand Integral and encourage discussion.)

[howstrange]

(Thanks so much, incidentally, for taking the time to understand Integral and encourage discussion.)


Thanks for introducing it to me. What initially reeled me into Integral Theory was not its relation to AA issues if you would believe. It was how it shed a light, or I should say set a beacon, that guided me out of the horrid rubble of Post-Modernism's desconstruction of the visual arts. I've since been applying the quadrivium perspective and AQAL approach to my art over the last few years, both personal and commercial.. but that's for another topic.

And green, incidentally is only getting stronger and more resolute, especially in the face of hyper-resistant blue and increasingly impatient orange (who themselves are reacting to inefficient and sometimes ridiculous green

Yeah, Wilber really believes the alliance of blue and orange caused by the radical green will result in the Republicans winning the elections, despite Bush's terrible terms in office. I don't want to believe this, but I think he's right. I’m just hoping Don Beck's view of the green is correct. That, while the damage caused by green may be costly, it’s a relatively brief stage. When green reaches critical mass the conditions needed for 2nd tier will occur.


It's already the case I think, sites like this are indicators. It attracts those in transition from green to yellow. From my observations here, If you're an AF and on this site, the chances of being integral or healthy green are high. If you’re an AM on this site, unlike model minority, the chances of being red-blue, ego-ethnocentric are very low. While you guys, the founders, may be too busy with other activities and goals to promote the 44s, perhaps others will see the 44s as a model for healthy activism. I hope.

Anyway, that's my little rant against mean green. I'll actually address the points you bring up in a later post.

I'm looking forward to your response. Reading my initial post again, it looks as if I'm saying that the sole root cause of this argument at hand is the ideology behind the banning of the anti-miscegenation laws. I was just using that as an example of how a mean green assumes that the multiculturalism and equality ingrained in their many doctrines will guarantee equality no matter where or how they are applied. Contexts and multiple POVs don't have to be considered. Ideologies to them, will always trump the realities. White female feminism applied to AA activism is another example of this. Julia Oh's article explores this, and I suppose it's what's playing out in our most recent clash.

[Dialectic]

I just read your very eloquent article on inter-racial dating. It brought to mind the concept of the mean green meme. While getting rid of the laws against IR was a good thing, like Don Beck would say, sometimes getting rid of something you don't want, is not the same thing as getting what you do want. Since the playing field is not balanced, IR will almost always favor the WM and degrade the non-white male. It's a great thing that I, or you, or she, can date and marry whoever we wish, it does not however mean, that such life choices will always have a positive affect towards equality. Can this be a concept that is so unfathomably foreign to the mean green, where they can do nothing but fall back upon the typical " you're a sexist pig" response? Is a leap towards integral needed for the Jens of the world to react any differently? I mean, we are ultimately striving for the same equal balances, are we not?

Sorry for the delay in response, Howstrange! I took a trip to San Diego with Lopan and ZG, and then one to New Jersey/ New York the week after, and work and all sorts of other little chores have been taking up my attention.

(On another note, though, you can all thank work that I've been putting up more stuff on the front page recently! God, office jobs are so boring ....)

You bring up a very good point about how increased freedom may actually hurt equality. I addressed the subject directly here:
http://www.thefighting44s.com/archives/2007/08/11/legal-vs-moral-rights-rights-vs-responsibilities-freedom-vs-equality/

This ties into a whole bunch of problems that green is not really able to address:
1. Freedom and equality are opposed.
2. Standing up for an ethnic identity involves being ethnocentric.
3. Forcing pluralism is another form of cultural absolutism (the classic performative contradiction).
4. The moral platform of the advocate is that the victim has the right to tell the oppressor what to do, but not vice versa. This, in turn, encourages a competition for the greatest victimhood, which in fact disempowers the group. You can't really be loud and proud and have respect of yourself and others when you're trying to be the smallest and weakest and most damaged at the same time. It'll fuck you up. This, combined with the Western/ American hyper-obsession with rights, creates a hyper-fragmented culture of narcissism in which everyone's complaining and scrambling to get their piece of the pie without regard for anyone else (though they'll pay lip service to everyone else). You can see this very clearly in, for example, an advocate who dismisses WM/AF as even being a serious issue.

You can see, here, that green is riddled with contradictions. It wants maximum freedom and equality. It wants ethnic pride but considers ethnic focus to be racist. It imposes pluralism, which is supposed to be non-imposing. And it wants to be a victim and a free and equal individual (which victims are not) at the same time.

And when these contradictions are pointed out, it either dismisses them or tries to address them using ultimately very weak or self-contradictory reasoning.

Mean green then goes around trying to tear down all the structures that don't agree with it (does that sound very pluralistic?), with its focus being blue, orange, and anything that looks like blue and orange, like integral.

It also tends to really like red, because what happens when you have a hyper-fragmented culture of narcissism is you end up with little tribes with only their own limited interests in mind, which is exactly what red is. We see this in concrete operation when we look, for example, at anti-globalization protests, where red tribal anarchists, who are egocentric as hell and don't really give a shit about the issues at stake, just want to wreck shit up, and they're always found next to green, who doesn't really know what to do about these guys, and enjoy their company on a certain level. This fragmentation is also the reason green finds it really hard to get anything accomplished, because every little sub-interest group has to have their say and feel heard.

So to answer your question directly, no, green cannot fathom that what they say and do, and the effects of their actions, tend to have self-contradictory results, and in some cases they're actually hurting more than helping. They can't see this because they go around tearing down all the structures that helped make them what they are, because at this point they've been trained to think that anybody who doesn't think like them, and says that maybe maximized freedom and/or maximized equality may not be such a good or workable thing, is some sort of "-ist."

What our moral responsibility would be is to try to encourage that "leap" to integral thinking, which appreciates all the different types of views out there and tries to work with them without letting them colonize all the rest and rip the system apart. Unfortunately, it's really difficult to significantly influence and change people in their 20s and older, so the key is to influence systems and institutions, so that we can inculcate more inclusive and integral thinking/ doing in the subsequent generations.

[Dialectic]

Thanks for introducing it to me. What initially reeled me into Integral Theory was not its relation to AA issues if you would believe. It was how it shed a light, or I should say set a beacon, that guided me out of the horrid rubble of Post-Modernism's desconstruction of the visual arts. I've since been applying the quadrivium perspective and AQAL approach to my art over the last few years, both personal and commercial.. but that's for another topic.

Haha, AA issues isn't what got me interested in Integral either. What reeled me in was his integration of religion/ spirituality, along with his ability to index broad world views and knowledge, something I had been looking for for years. It had always fascinated me since I was young: how can we have a world where one person, say, believes in ghosts and haunted houses, and another can be part of a SWAT team? They live in entirely different worlds. Was there some way to explain that, to reconcile them?

And yes, the best part of integral and AQAL is it gets you through the PM wasteland in every field of human inquiry, where many, many people are stuck at the moment.

The reason I'm applying integral to this AA stuff (which I certainly didn't have in mind when I started doing integral or 44s) is because I saw that this sort of thinking was desperately needed, and it offered a level of clarity which I think few in any field of inquiry possess.

Yeah, Wilber really believes the alliance of blue and orange caused by the radical green will result in the Republicans winning the elections, despite Bush's terrible terms in office. I don't want to believe this, but I think he's right. I’m just hoping Don Beck's view of the green is correct. That, while the damage caused by green may be costly, it’s a relatively brief stage. When green reaches critical mass the conditions needed for 2nd tier will occur.

The current blue/orange alliance in the U.S. seems to be collapsing. Rove was a genius for bringing them together, but the blues don't trust this administration anymore, and the oranges always thought they were crazy.

The Dems are learning now about the benefits of having some blues on your side, with the re-injection of Christianity in their marketing, which could shift the balance in their favor. I think, speaking very broadly, that the last few years have "forced" some greens to become more integral, because they have learned that they must work with the various levels of the spiral for the health of the whole, and our increasing global focus is only going to help that.

It's already the case I think, sites like this are indicators. It attracts those in transition from green to yellow. From my observations here, If you're an AF and on this site, the chances of being integral or healthy green are high. If you’re an AM on this site, unlike model minority, the chances of being red-blue, ego-ethnocentric are very low. While you guys, the founders, may be too busy with other activities and goals to promote the 44s, perhaps others will see the 44s as a model for healthy activism. I hope.

I'm looking forward to your response. Reading my initial post again, it looks as if I'm saying that the sole root cause of this argument at hand is the ideology behind the banning of the anti-miscegenation laws. I was just using that as an example of how a mean green assumes that the multiculturalism and equality ingrained in their many doctrines will guarantee equality no matter where or how they are applied. Contexts and multiple POVs don't have to be considered. Ideologies to them, will always trump the realities. White female feminism applied to AA activism is another example of this. Julia Oh's article explores this, and I suppose it's what's playing out in our most recent clash.

I hope my responses have been decent! It's very late, and I'm just writing off the top of my head.

I had originally wanted to write more about mean green, but I don't think I'd be writing much that you haven't read before, and I don't like focusing on criticizing negative stuff, as it just gets everyone negative. Two very good examples of mean greenness you can look up on this site, however, are almost all of urbia's posts (she's a Reappropriate reader), which are filled with obnoxious condescension, as well as some of atlsien's, which tend toward the hyper-sensitive and defensive/aggressive, like when she criticized the Economist article on marriage or my IR post. Her criticisms were completely irrational and showed more about her than the stuff she was criticizing. Cattygurl also had some extreme green tendencies, which I'm sure you saw.

As for the 44 contribution to AA activism, I don't take it all that seriously, because I doubt we're accomplishing all that much. We're a little-read website focusing on a very niche population segment. Out of those who do find us, we alienate tons of them from all sides of the political spectrum. Ultimately the site is just something we get a kick out of running, and if anyone feels a bit more enlightened after reading us, that's a bonus (as is pissing off people who think they're saints but have no rational response to our arguments that they might actually be hurting other people and themselves).

[Scowl]

I finally got what you meant with all the "You can't tell me what to do!" lines. Was that just for the benefit of those readers who are learning about integral theory?

[Dialectic]

Are you referring to my front page post about adolescent-type behavior in advocates? ("You can't tell me what to do, but I can tell you, because I'm the big victim here!!")

All of my recent analytical features/ posts have applied integral reasoning to the issues they discuss, although it's never explicit, because integral has its own special language, which I want to avoid in pieces written for a general audience.

The key to understanding all my positions is to accept a few key truths presented by integral: that people develop through moral phases, and that every situation can be analyzed from four broad points of view, all of which are important and relevant.

Everything flows from this.

Coming back to racial issues, the reasoning is so simple, but conventional pluralists refuse to see it. If we're advocating along racial lines, we're trying to take power away from the race which has it, which means that we stand for getting power to our race. Hopefully, at some happy point in the future, we won't have to do this anymore, but right now, it's still gotta be done.

In the case of race representation and how it's undermined by IR, again, it's so simple. If you claim to stand for us and marry a white person, there is either a real or perceived conflict of interest. A real or perceived conflict of interest leads to a reasonable apprehension of bias.

(These terms are all used in law, where you can't have a judge or tribunal member handle your case if there's an appearance of a conflict of interest and therefore an apprehension of bias.)

How do we know you're really going to do everything to rep us when you've got him whispering in your ear? How do we know everything you do will be in our best interests when you'll also be looking out for him?

Law is an interesting field because it's the domain where high-falutin' social and moral and intellectual positions get put into practice, and you see how things work on the ground. It's where the rubber hits the road.

But so many of these social advocates with their humanities degrees, they have so little experience dealing with practical realities in the big picture, and how to go about systematically implementing a philosophy, that they can't get over their own form of rancid pluralism.

So, uh, you claim to stand for us, but you go home with him?

Please.