Spiral Dynamics vMemes

Green - Human Bond

Although in the Beck-Wilber model Green values belong to the dastardly "postmodernist" "lower tier" and are to be refuted as much as possible, I would see this antagonism as more due to the right wing ideology of the Beck and Wilber position, which is antithetical to the left wing ideology of the Green social reform movement. See Ray Harris, Left, Right or just plain wrong? - Politics in the integral movement, (February 2004) and Richard Carlson, Integral Ideology: An Ideological Genealogy of Integral Theory and Practice, (August 2008).

The following is from a page that is no longer on the Web. Once again, I've added the graphics:

"GREEN 'Communitarian' MEME 6th Awakening

Graves Code: F-S

Basic Theme: Seek peace within the inner self and explore, with others, the caring dimensions of community.

Characteristic beliefs and actions:

• The human spirit must be freed from greed, dogma, and divisiveness
• Feelings, sensitivity, and caring supersede cold rationality
• Spread the Earth's resources and opportunities equally among all
• Reach decisions through reconciliation and consensus processes
• Refresh spirituality, bring harmony, and enrich human development

Where seen: John Lennon's music, Netherlands' idealism, Rogerian counseling, liberation theology, Doctors without Borders, Canadian health care, ACLU, World Council of Churches, sensitivity training, Boulder (Colorado), Green Peace, Jimmy Carter, Dustin Hoffman in 'The Graduate,' animal rights, deep ecology, Minneapolis-St Paul social services, the music of Bruce Cogburn, Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream company." ( Beck & Cowan, p. 46-47)

In my own understanding, Green belongs with the "second tier" as part of the holistic stage of personal and social transformation. Alternatively, "Green" can be considered an intermediate tier between first and the second.

The problem seems to be that there are two distinct types of consciousness included under "Green", one revolutionary and anti-establishment, concerned with external social reform and activism, the other, which extends into and overlaps with Turquoise, more New Age, spiritual, and inward-looking. In fact the Cultural Creatives include both.

A lot of misunderstanding in the exoteric/secular branch of the Integral Movement seems to be tied up with a confusion between right wing shadow projection of the movements leaders like Wilber and Beck, and lack of precesion with what "Green" stands for.

Now I am not denying that there can be a clash of worldviews, and those with a less inclusive worldview will be totally against those with a more inclusive worldview. Unfortunately Wilber confuses a large number of only distantly related types under "green meme" or postmodernist, as does Steve McIntosh ( Integral Consciousness and the Future of Evolution who doesn't share Wilber's right-of-center greenophobia), which makes the whole idea so vague as to be meaningless

• The Baby Boomer generation, taken as a whole, who are perceived to be "narcisstic" (Andrew Cohen has really jumped on this bandwagon, as is evident from anyone who peruses his magazine, it is full of refernces to "narcisstic boomers", ignoring the fact that X and Y generations can be just as narcissistic, and for that matter, Cohen and Wilber themselves are baby boomers! (as is yours truly, albeit on the tail end) or for that matter that Cohen as abusive guru represnetrs the very values he opposes.
• a certain group of academics called "postmodernists" who reject the idea of a knowable empirical reality and instead, following Wittgenstein, focus on linguistic analysis, or following Derrida, on deconstruction of already established beliefs and ideas, or rejection of essenses or metaphysical givens (Wilber himself incorporates postmodernism into his Integral Theory, but adds his own "minimal metaphysics" to it.
• activists who work to reform injustices in society, and to evolve Western society beyond its original materialistic, specieist, chauvanistic, racist, consumerist, and exploitative bias
• hippies, alternative lifestyle types, etc
• the New Age
• Emerging holistic spirituality, "cultural creatives", and secular spiritual evolutionaries. Wilber himself belongs to this last category, which I refer to as the holistic stage of transformation

My own understanding therefore is that Green/Postmodernist as used by Beck, Wilber, McIntosh and others is an overlap between several categories, such as dualistic and holistic, or materialistic and New Age. Just as the Intermediate zone is a transitional stage between Esoteric/Gnostic and Realisation, so the same applies here.







Links




Dr. Don Beck: The Never-Ending Upward Quest - 2002 interview with J Roemischer, in Andrew Cohen's Enlightennext magazine. Don Beck explains the origibnal idea of the "Mean Green Meme" as a rhetorical strategy he and Wilber adopted to help advance Green to upper tier pdf. Ken Wilber Online: Pragmatic history of consciousness - Wilber on the Mean Green Meme and advancing to Second Tier. Even so, one cannot but feel that this tactic was counterproductive.

The Mean Green Hypothesis: fact or fiction? by Natasha Todorovic - shows that Beck and Wilber's "Mean Green Meme" thesis cannot be confimed by any actual data. The fact that this model is supported although there is no evidencxe for it shows that Integral Theory has become caught up in ideology and divorced from empirical reality.

Rescuing the Green Meme from Boomeritis, Ray Harris - argues that Wilber's criticism of the "mean green meme" is unfair, and leaves the real culprit of the hook: the "mean orange meme"











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page by M.Alan Kazlev
page uploaded 2 November 2009, last modified 9 December 2009