This post began as a response to comments made on the above image I posted which depicts the Spiral Dynamics model with the words: Burn your old ways of thinking. I had initially posted the image many years ago to my social media profile and decided to bring it back again today. In my opinion the tagline has become more relevant now in light of the planetary and societal collapse that only seems to accelerate with every passing day.
Meanwhile our community of practitioners continues to busy itself with the philosophical and intellectual underpinning of what our gurus taught us from the comfort of their air-conditioned, flood-and-fire-resistant bygone era called the Holocene ignoring any and all sense of urgency that defines our new reality. Most of the comments ask what happened to “transcend and include”? My question back to our community is “What if our sense of transcendence is way off?” Most of us, beginning with Wilber practice what I call “Transcend and ignore.” We have become an intolerant, elitist bunch with exclusionary behavior that can’t give a damn about inclusion unless those seeking it buy our seminars, come to our conferences, or speak our cultist language. 99.99% of the world has no clue as to what we do or how to use what we teach to affect real change.
Nowhere is this behavior of exclusion and ignorance more apparent than at the very top when Wilber in a reluctant way eulogized Beck a few months ago in a four-line statement, where he twice repeated “let’s not forget that his contribution was only to a values line”. The bruised and fragile ego of a far smaller man who couldn’t transcend the Red stage of being the Wyatt Earp of consciousness going all the way back to 2006. Where’s the transcendence, where’s the inclusion? Beck wasn’t much better in transcending and including much of what fell outside his worldview as well. This might sound like a harsh criticism for those who we admire, but their pre-occupation with their models that “explained everything”, left out that which requires a far greater degree of explaining; how to train our minds and our species to become an immutable part of nature again, and be in awe of her superior intelligence.
Our challenge TODAY is this: Can we transcend our teachers, add our own take on what they taught us, learn new existential models that factor in our new reality in order to help humanity NOW. Neither Wilber nor Beck spoke about how our models behave in the Anthropocene. Hint: We’re at the mercy of Mother Nature and her evolutionary process happens unconsciously and with utter moral indifference towards all species including the one that has been the most destructive, us. This reality will never fit on the Spiral or the AQAL models. Homo sapiens will become extinct as a function of Mother Nature adapting to a far greater system in collapse and as an automatic, unconscious way for her to reach balance. No Transcendence. No Inclusion. Sorry.
The idea for the word “burn” first came to me from Eastern philosophy. Rumi’s poem “I want burning” has more wisdom in it than anything Beck and Wilber ever wrote. It has everything to do with learning to die in order to live, an Eastern concept that is the polar opposite of what Western Civilization stands for. Are we ever going to start thinking for ourselves, or be in awe of the greater forces of existence, the mystery of life itself beyond any model the brightest human minds can create? Or will we always reduce existential challenges to whether we can fit them into our own unique understanding of our elitist models?
We are in an existential crisis and if we had “transcended and included” we wouldn’t be here in the middle of the Sixth Extinction. The dominant narrative that has defined who we are for the last 500 years is in collapse Will we ever create our own narrative that gives humanity a chance at surviving that collapse or will we remain wanna be armchair philosophers wondering if the next flood or fire will spare us because we’re special. Like Mother Nature I have an utter moral indifference about how special we are.
Don Beck – or ‘Dr Don E Beck’ or ‘Dr Don Edward Beck’ as he frequently preferred to style himself – passed on Tuesday 24 May. He had been relatively inactive for at least a year or so prior to his death.
After my father, he was almost certainly the man who has influenced me most in my life. Yet I wasn’t close to him nor a confidante to any significant degree. I wouldn’t have called him a friend, more a professional acquaintance. However, his influence on my life has been truly profound.
In my tribute to his one-time business partner Chris Cowan – see Fare Thee Well, Christopher Cowan – who died in 2015, I recalled my first meetings with Don & Chris and how their Spiral Dynamics model transformed my life. It not only lead to resolutions of major issues in my own life but reignited and refuelled (with accelerant!) my interest in Psychology and the behavioural sciences. From there I took a deep dive into Psychology and Sociology, becoming an A-Level teacher in both disciplines. However, my explorations of the behavioural sciences were always underpinned by the first thing Don said that caught my attention at the first workshop of his & Chris’ that I attended in 1998. “You don’t have to throw away any of your favourite theories and approaches,” he said. “You can keep all your ‘isms’. They all fit along the spine of the Spiral.”
Don was not just the initial catalyst for all this but he functioned off and on as a sort-of mentor and allowed me to republish several of his writings on this site. He supported me practically too. In 2002, when I was struggling financially, he sent me $1000 to help keep the website afloat.
After the Beck-Cowan split Following the acrimonious split between Don and Chris in 1999, I endeavoured to keep in contact with and learn from both men. However, I never saw Chris in person again, our communications gradually diminishing until they effectively ceased after 2009.
Don, however, was heavily involved in the HemsMESH project (1999-2001), supervising it remotely and coming over from the US on several occasions to contribute directly. On one of those occasions, a public meeting with locals, Don debuted a ‘truth meter’ – a supposed electronic true-or-false voting system that could tell whether people were expressing their real views. He worked the PURPLE and RED vMEMES in the room like a magician delighting children with his ridiculous ‘meter’ – leaving Christopher ‘Cookie’ Cooke to put forward themes in a more cerebral manner for the BLUE, ORANGE and GREEN present. At another HemsMESH meeting, Don went totally off-track and started talking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Off-topic he might have been but his exposition on why the PURPLE/BLUE vMEME harmonic led Palestinian kids to throw rocks at Israeli tamks, with the real risk to life of the soldiers firing back, left me sheerly marvelling. I felt as though my jaw was down on the floor!
While he may have been able to expound at length and in real depth from the 2nd Tier, from what I knew of him I felt he was often personally more comfortable thinking and interacting in PURPLE and RED. Loyalty was very important to him and I suspect he struggled with dissent from his perceptions. I well remember him threatening to throw me of the Spiral Dynamics integral list-serve when I challenged his assertion that George W Bush might be operating from YELLOW in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq war. The late Tom Christensen told me in 2015, just before the publication of his Developmental Innovation compendiums, that Don had refused him permission to use the term ‘Spiral Dyamics integral’ in the title because he thought Tom was trying to take over leadership of the ‘constellation’, as Don liked to call practitioners who had trained with him. How true that was I can’t say, but certainly Tom gave the impression Don thought Tom was being disloyal to him.
Don often talked about the difficulties of being an introvert in an extravert’s world. I, too, am an introvert. So when we met again in 2009 at his one-day London workshop, ‘Spiral Dynamics in Action: Dancing the Integral Vision’, we of course hugged, delighted to see each other again after so many years. And then what? We sat side by side at lunch, barely talking, 2 introverts with limited social skills caught up in our own individual thoughts!
After the spurt of activity later in that year which produced the short-lived Centre of Human Emergence UK, I didn’t see Don again for close on 9 years. However, we remained in sporadic contact. He contributed artifacts and recollections to my chronicling of his work in South Africa and his role in the dismantling of Apartheid; and there was (very briefly!) talk of me accompanying him on a trip to a peace conference in Jerusalem. There was even idle talk of me writing his biography.
I last saw Don in May 2018 at Said E Dawlabani’sSpiral Dynamics Summit on the Future in Texas. At 82 years old, a survivor of heart surgery a few years before and with his wife Pat terminally ill with cancer, he seemed frail and, at times, distracted. But he managed to get up on to the speaker’s platform and spoke as powerfully as when I had first heard him 20 years before. Like the disciple of a guru, I was thrilled to bits when he congratulated me on my presentation.
Don with the new ‘Spiral Dynamics in Action’ book (Photo courtesy Said E Dawlabani)
Don Beck’s Legacy There are others who know Don’s history much better than I do and are far more qualified to evaluate his legacy…but here are some thoughts.
His work in South Africa is arguably his crowning achievement and yet you won’t find much, if any, mention of him in any of the Nelson Mandela biographies or other books on the early 1990s transition. Don is not even indexed on the Nelson Mandela Foundation web site – though, after much searching, I did find an article in which he is discussed. Yet he was commended by both Mandela and political rival Mangosutu Buthulezi; and honoured by a joint resolution of both houses of the Texas Congress for his work in South Africa. Could it be that Don simply was not good at raising his own profile?
It could be argued that Beck & Cowan were poor custodians of Graves’ legacy in that they largely failed to get academic recogntion of the criticality of Graves’ work to understanding human nature. However, both men would have argued that they were more concerned with making a difference in the ‘real world’ with practical applications of Graves’ concepts. Don, though, did succeed in getting German researcher Marc Lucas to include Gravesian materials in his groundbreaking fMRI studies into neural activities when making values-based decisions. (Lucas’ work is discussed in A Biological Basis for vMEMES…?)
Though he was later to dissent from the way Ken Wilber tried to develop Spiral Dynamics in a less scientific and more ‘spiritual’ direction, Don’s post-Cowan partnership with Wilber introduced Graves’ work to a whole new audience of those who subscribed to Wilber’s Integral Theory concepts. Hence, Spiral Dynamics integral. Don also took Wilber’s All Quadrants/All Levels model and ‘spiralised’ it into the powerful analytical tool 4Q/8L.
Don’s passing feels like the end of something. There are plenty of people using Graves/Spiral Dynamics who have been trained by or worked with Don who will keep those concepts alive. As well as those already mentioned, key figures include Jim Lockard in France, Jon Freeman in the UK and Peter Merry and Auke Van Nimwegen in Holland. Then there are those who have trained with Chris Cowan and still subscribe to his widow Natasha Todorovic’s very management consultancy-oriented take on Spiral Dynamics. But Don somehow gave his constellation hope, vision and a sense of unity which seems to have faded a little over the past year or so. Hopefully some of those key figures mentioned will emerge into leadership to take Don’s vision forward.
For me, while I’ve had my criticisms of him and we’ve certainly not seen eye-to-eye at times, my memories of him and the differences he made to my life are precious and indelible.
This post is in response to a Ken Wilber interview by Raquel Torrant that took place in October 2016, and the reaction of the integral community after the election of Donald Trump.
The more I read about Wilber’s perspective on so called Second Tier, the more I realize that Integral Theory is mostly philosophical/Intellectual and out of touch with political, economic and social reality. Its elitist views are rarely applied to solve problems in a First Tier world. The only exception, of course is if we believe that individual advancement and shadow work are ways to save the world from impending cataclysms. To me those pursuits are representatives of a very narrow and unhealthy expression of both the Orange and Green systems of the First Tier. Because of their thin, elitist, and personal growth focused nature they can easily become closed systems that only embolden the very shadow they’re trying to come to terms with. Well, it seems that the shadow of most of the integral movement has broken and it’s manifesting in very unflattering ways. The universe couldn’t have picked a more befitting event than the election of Donald Trump to show how un-integral the movement is.
My assessment could be somewhat subjective and I must say that I was shocked by Trump’s election for a few days. While I have since regained my stratified Spiral view of the American electorate and refrained from engaging in polarizing conversations, I have not seen the same coming from the integral community, or my blindly liberal-progressive friends. If they were really centered in Second Tier values, we wouldn’t be experiencing the visceral anger and hate coming from so many online integral groups worldwide. What has helped me regain my perspective is the reminder of what was instilled in me over the last 15 years, that it’s always about Value Systems.
My primary gripe with Wilber’s followers is what they were taught about Second Tier values, and more specifically how vastly different they perceive the Yellow system than the original Spiral Dynamics theory does. Wilber has naively overlooked the important work that the Seventh Level of development has to do in aligning the healthy expressions of all the systems in First Tier. Yes, systemic Second Tier consciousness is not going to appear magically, nor would it appear by us passively waiting for more people to become Second Tier thinkers. We have to role up our sleeves now and fix the damage that the First Tier systems have done to our planet. This is half of the mandate of the Beck-Graves Yellow system that rarely appears in integral consciousness.
The work is not just environmental or psychological. It’s cultural, political, and economic. We have to design healthy habitats for tribal Purple in rural America, for egocentric Red gangs in inner cities, for nationalistic and patriotic Blue in white suburban America, and enterprising and scientific Orange and humanitarian and egalitarian Green in big cities and urban locales.
The problem with integral practitioners is that they have relegated this entire Gravesian conception to a “values line”, which again shows the closed system views of the elite and explains their post-election suffering and dysfunction. To solve problem in the age of Trump, followers of Integral Theory have to acquire a deep understanding of an essential part of the Gravesian model called Life Conditions. To put it in language integralists understand, we call it the functional quadrant. It implies that you start in the trenches where dynamic change is taking place. You study the challenges facing people at every level of development mentioned above. Then you begin to design solutions commensurate with that particular level of development. This is what was meant by “transcend and include” that is at the heart of both frameworks. Sadly, it seems that the integral crusade has unconsciously moved into a psychology of “transcend and ignore.” That’s where the healing begins, not with the integral community suddenly realizing their shortcomings and begin to hastily consult the Gravesian model to get a quick intellectual fix that will be relegated again to a “line” on an elitist and out of touch model for development.
