Over Thanksgiving my uncle Sam told me a story I’d never heard before. When I was seven I had to take a test to determine if I was ready for the third grade (I had not previously attended regular school). In the math section I did well on all the addition, multiplication, and division questions before me, but got every subtraction problem wrong. The supervising teacher suddenly realized that I had been adding instead of subtracting, and prompted me to try again. I was phlegmatic: I told her I understood subtraction fine, but didn’t feel like doing it. Apparently, she said something like “Oh come on honey, show me you can do it”, forcing me to explain that it just wasn’t a Subtraction kind of day. Having been fully capable of constructing the Fourth Order of Consciousness in the equivalent of second grade, I’ve had nowhere to go since but somewhere else.
We use the term “milestone” a little loosely in English. We often refer to a significant event or experience in someone’s life as a milestone, but on roads milestones don’t usually coincide with places of special interest. They only mark progress. I’d like to write a paper about the turning points in my life, the quantum leaps in my development, but they don’t (and shouldn’t) exist. Even if they did, I’m not comfortable identifying even my current level of development in most of the systems we’ve reviewed, let alone look back and evaluate my past selves. However, I might be able to provide a few milestones of the highway variety: periods of my life indicating that I was going somewhere, and how I viewed development. These reflections, which I’d been avoiding, lead me to doubt some of the implications of the developmental model as it has been presented.
Fermina Daza is little more than a set of actions and reflexes. She is how she feels. And of course, for her, there is no object. Look at her there in your lap, responding to a little scratching under the chin, a gentle rubbing of her enormous belly, or her personal favorite, that spot just above the eyebrows. Don’t be fooled by the way she gazes, apparently grateful, into your face. It’s only a trick to keep you invested. You don’t even exist except to serve her desires. It’s a certain fact that she no longer cries when she is hungry, at least not initially, but this is a learned behavior resulting from the condition that crying doesn’t get her closer to eating. She knows it’s more effective to stick her cold moist nose into your eyes when you’re sleeping. When she’s sad, the whole world sucks. How could it be any different? My little Daza cat is sensorimotoric.
My parents have a dog named Kodai Kuti. If Kodai ever had a sensorimotoric stage, I did not know him then. These days he is firmly embedded in his perceptions. Kodai has needs and feelings of his own, confirmed by his habit of informing my parents politely of his need to go out briefly every night at about nine thirty his consequent retreat to the basement, after which he is not seen or heard again until the next morning. Even so, he thrives on the idea that Mom and Dad are not him. He lives to do their bidding, protect them, make them happy: he would be mortified by their disappointment. He has a strict sense of the order of the universe. Humans come first and then dogs. He loves cats and would never hurt them, but they are poor sensorimotoric beings of a lower order altogether, and owe him a certain freedom. Kodai is preoperational.
In fifth or sixth grade, in the mid-seventies, I developed a love affair with the sixties. This interest may have initially risen out of music: I had no use for what my peers were listening to, preferring Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, or the Mothers. Wherever it came from, I allowed my hair to grow and wore clothes inconsistent with disco. Adults in my community encouraged some aspects of this enthusiasm, especially politics: peacenik, antinuclear, prochoice, whale-loving. At the same time, I took a lot of abuse (verbal and physical) from classmates who wouldn’t accept this limited nonconformity. “Get a haircut, hippie!” I hated this and cried myself to sleep at night. In retrospect I think I was just plain lonely. Nonetheless, for pride or principle I did not conform or change my ways. The hair grew down my back and most of the affirmation I got came from grown-ups.
A clique at school that did not reject me on account of appearances was the drug crowd. Ironically, doing drugs was the one aspect of sixties counterculture I wasn’t interested in. I spent time with them until they went off to do their thing, and then I did mine: mostly reading, and climbing trees, rocks, and buildings. On the other hand I effected a druggie demeanor and once wrote a letter to a guy who did a lot of drugs (or talked a lot about doing drugs), a friend I really wanted to impress, about how I was experimenting with THC in pure form. This I remember because my father found the letter unsent in an office at school. I was in the embarrassing situation of trying to convince him I was lying to my friend. It turned out he wasn’t fooled by the letter, but the incident caused me to think about why I was misrepresenting myself. Still, I did not change.
It’s harder to be non-conformist at St. Johns College, where you either spend four years reading dead white men or leave. By my second year I’d started “rebelling” by reading womanist prose on the side. (This was conformist rebellion: everybody was doing it.) Junior year I got heavily into Lao Tzu (balanced with Heraclitus), the I Ching, and D.T. Suzuki. I especially liked the Bardo System. The Third Bardo is ordinary life; as the Second develops, everything gets messed up; in the First Bardo all is clear. Suzuki said the First is just like the Third except your feet are a foot off the ground. The Bardos have a distinct echo in Kegan’s “Evolving Self”, where he talks about evolutionary truces and the more difficult times in between. Also, “differentiation precedes integration”. In those days, the Second Bardo was where I wanted to live. I guess I still do.
Perhaps any serious treatment of epistemology will treat the same subtexts and use similar vocabulary. Even so, I find the parallels between Kegan and Plato striking. The “Theaetetus”, Plato’s principle work on knowing, was a major influence on me in school. Young Theaetetus first describes knowledge as “nothing else than perception” (pretty clearly Kegan’s First Order). Under Socrates’ guidance, he quickly rephrases it as “sensible perception” (Durable Goods). When Socrates has made hash of this definition, Theaetetus suggests it could be “true opinion” (Abstraction, Hypothesis). This doesn’t satisfy Socrates either, so Theaetetus turns subject into object and posits that knowledge is reasoning about true opinion (the Fourth Order). At this point Socrates leaves to go to court, and the dialogue ostensibly ends without an answer.
I wrote a number of essays (and my final thesis) trying to develop the idea that Plato did not intend his readers to end where Socrates and Theaetetus left off. I thought, and still believe, he meant us to make the final switch and raise the ante, turning the subject of his pursuit into the object. Theaetetus could not have successfully defined knowing as a static idea because it is not only something we have (theoretically), but something we do. The dialogue itself plots the process of knowing: first we perceive, then we make sense out of what we perceive, next we form an opinion, and then critique our own thought. When our system becomes our perception we start over on a new level. This infinitely iterative process is what knowing is: an asymptotic spiral in the direction of Truth. As the old professor says in the last book of Narnia, “It’s all in Plato!”
I went to Bolivia to replace a guy named Bret, and worked with him for a few months. Bret was a Myers-Briggs True Believer. His interest was contagious, not least because I had just retaken a battery of personality tests, and knew I was an “INTP”. (In retrospect I see I was effected by all of Bret’s enthusiasms, occasionally positively and once or twice to my benefit.) I read “Please Understand Me”, and adopted its language for a while. I was never totally won over, though. From my perspective, there were two main problems. First, our partners were Aymará, Mosetén, and Trinitario native Andeans and Amazonians. Myers-Briggs is appropriate for North American majority culture. To be useful in our setting, we would have needed different tests, several entirely new sets of typings, and a means of comparing them against each other.
Bret and I lived in the main Habitat office, along with another guy named Joe (one of my best friends ever). Homeowners and interested parties dropped in all the time for business or pleasure. According to our literature, Joe (an “ENFP”) and Bret (an “ENFJ”) should have been relatively comfortable with this constant invasion. In fact, they desperately wanted to build another house for themselves, far away. I was supposed to be the most territorial, but in fact, I didn’t care. Anyone can poke holes in a personality test, especially one that’s statistically based. But I decided that in order to be “true”, the number of Myers-Briggs types would have to be five billion rather than sixteen. As it is, it’s only as accurate as the I Ching (that is, it scientifically steers you in the direction of what you already know, helping you unconsciously discover your own truth).
My main purpose in Bolivia was never to ensure the success of the projects, but to support the success of the people I worked with. My “campesino” partners in the jungle had very few organizational skills and almost no self-confidence. It would have been really easy to direct the project and tell them what to do. It’s what they expected. What I wanted was a situation where everyone’s contributions were valued, where we would create the program together. Depending on my artificial authority as the gringo, I took a kind of active hands-off approach. It was incredibly frustrating at times, but it worked out. If you help someone, in Third World Development, you’re teaching them that they need you, which is anti-development. If you don’t help, what good are you? It’s a thin line. My job was to partner with my Bolivian friends, giving them all my trust and respect.
Here’s how I expressed it in a letter to Habitat’s Vice-President in February of 1993:
“If I was granted a wish, it would be that Habitat in general understood two concepts I’ve learned in Bolivia. First, we can’t be “just a housing organization”. Either we work towards development, or we’re part of its opposite, which is exploitation. There is no neutrality, no third way. Second, development organizations can’t “develop” in the active sense. They can build things, provide services, and create industry, but that is all and it isn’t much. Only people can develop, and people can only develop themselves.
“We can reinforce the message that our partners are worthless and depend on our money, our ideas, and our say so. Or we can enter into a partnership; if we’re willing to receive their gifts we can work to help them discover their potentials, embrace freedom, learn leadership, and earn back everything that poverty and oppression have stolen from them. It’s our choice.”
As the years went by my ideas got more and more radical, further and further away from the policies (or conventional wisdom) of the central office, and further beyond the even more staid traditions of my partners. Success of the organization implied failure of development; the least qualified applicant was the best person for the job; if other people accepted my ideas I was failing in my work (even though I saw my job as one of idea creation); we were necessarily moving forwards, especially when it looked like we were going backwards. I simultaneously risk hubris and making a complete ass of myself, but in the context of my objectives in Bolivia, and perhaps only because of this context, I believe I operated at the Fifth Order of Consciousness or beyond. Unless I’m misinterpreting Kegan (probable), I thought it was my job.
Anyone who drives a wreck like I do has foregone windshield wipers as long as possible in a rainstorm, thinking they can make out the road well enough, only to be amazed by what it’s really like to be able to see with a clean windshield. I had the same experience in Part Four of “In Over Our Heads”. I’d thought I was understanding it, but when I got to Chapter Nine the whole book suddenly leapt into focus. I was outraged. It was too easy, too superficial. Everybody thinks like this. It was a scam to make me feel good or something. Then, on page 323, the leader thinks:
“I am standing up for something right now, for the importance of our suffering through this inevitably frustrating and awkward process of cobbling together a collectively created plan for getting where we want to go. And once we have that plan, you know what? I’ll want to lead by continuing to stand up for the likelihood of its incompleteness, and for our need to keep seeking the contradictions by which it will be nourished and grow.”
And here I thought, “That was me, and damned if I didn’t meet a degree of resistence here and there ... ”
The problem, of course, is that I do not see myself as particularly insightful or “conscious”. Even if I was, I am (or at least used to be, five or ten years ago) a far cry from Kegan’s condition of middle age. Besides, I construct Third Order thoughts, and First Order thoughts. I’m susceptible to idiocies of every stripe. The simple path, the safe path, would be to declare myself wrong: embedded in the Third Order and suffering “institutional” delusions. I guess I’ve decided to leave that to someone else. I’m going to borrow from Plato and say Kegan is wrong, not about Orders of Consciousness, or even about the developmental model itself, but about who experiences these things, and when. There are just too many young people and ancient people (Theaetetus, to name one example of both), who contradict with their lives Kegan’s so-called empirical studies.
A stage of development is hierarchical, but it is also “preferential”, like a Myers-Briggs personality or the cast of three pennies and a worn-out copy of Wilhelm. The subject of “In Over Our Heads” becomes object. Consciousness is itself the reiterative process of passing through all the orders (and many stages in between, unique to each of us individually), until we arrive where it seems to us prudent or agreeable to rest. Like knowledge itself, this point is determined more by external conditions than innate ability. Half of North Americans aren’t capable of Formal Operational thought, except in their field. Just as a “conflictual relationship creates the parties” rather than visa versa (p. 320), order of consciousness is created by motivation and context, instead of the other way around. Anyone is capable of Fifth (etc.) Order thought, given the right environment. As a society, however, and outside our ivory towers, we don’t want modernism, let alone post-modernism.
I am comfortably completely uncomfortable with this conclusion ...
philes/debutant.html; written/revised 01 September 2011
copyleft 2011 James Gosselink