Post-green
My friend who runs the Big River Zen Center has convinced me that I should Ken Wilber’s ‘integral vision’ A Theory of Everything. I haven’t gotten too far into it and fundamentally disagree with his essentialist approach to hierarchies and his faith in nested hierarchies, but that’s for another time. Today I had a short talk with two of the wonderful women who provide care for Sienna that seems to call into question Wilber’s developmental stages.
Wilber offers a color-identified set of developmental stages that are supposed to hold true both individually and socioculturally (Huge assumptions there! Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny?). The basic trajectory is from brutal, hunter-and-gatherer selfishness (beige) through monotheistic purpose (blue) and then Enlightment reason (orange) to contemporary post-modern heterarchy (green). Beyond this lies integral visions that move beyond relativism to a reassertion of hierarchy and structure that unifies, well, everything.
So this morning I was recounting last night’s misadventures with Sienna to the daycare women. We went out to dinner at one of the indian restaurants around 27th and Lexington (Much better quality than 6th Street. Chinese Mirch deserves special mention). Sienna was okay until we ordered. Then she started getting fussy but manageable. We made it through dinner–constantly interrupting our conversation with Babo and his brother–and she mercifully fell asleep as we entered the subway. Unfortunately, she woke with a vengeance about halfway home. She was crying and screaming on my shoulder in a subway car half full and staring at me. Painful. I offered the observation that I know that in the past I was one of those staring people who wondered why the parent couldn’t do any better and what the hell were they doing bringing their kid on the subway anyway. The daycare women’s observation was that you never really know until you have a child and that you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.
It seems to me that this is a practical, everyday transcendance of selfish relativism that fractures Wilber’s nested hierarchy. Of course, somehow Wilber’s hierarchy allows for different degrees of development in the different spheres of one’s life (even though they are integrated?!), and this is probably the response. But if this represents a world view, then it seems that one does not have to go through all the stages.
Mr. Big River?
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