About 60 years ago, one of the great thinkers of the last century, Clare W. Graves, a psychologist at Union College, developed a theory of adult human development that he called “The Emergent Cyclical Levels of Existence Theory” (ECLET).  This theory, which states that humans, and societies made up of these individuals, pass through a self-similar transformation on the way up, in an open-ended format. The chart above shows eight levels, but Graves wanted it to be open-ended because he believed that there was no ‘uber human’ that could be perfectly realized.  Don Beck, who was Grave’s lifelong student, further advanced the theory, and named it Spiral Dynamics (SD).  His chart is above, and if I could pick one thing to put on a plate very similar to the one on the Voyager spacecraft, it would be Beck’s chart.  Don Beck worked with Chris Cowan to further develop the theory, and was followed by one of the great philosophers of our time, Ken Wilber, and his own variant of the theory, Spiral Dynamics Integral, and Integral Theory in general.

One of the big ideas that Graves had was that human beings, and the societies they inhabited, would traverse the different levels as the needs of the people and the culture demanded.  There was to be no static assessment — just a fluid interpretation moving up and down.  The way I like to understand this is that Graves, while talking about human values, wanted that conversation to be mostly perceptual — free of moral judgment.  That’s the spirit that I follow when I use his theory.  And a simple example might be in order.

Let’s say you’re this incredibly evolved person, from top to bottom. One of the key elements in SD is that once you evolve to, or past a certain level, you have not just the mode you have evolved to. You also have access to the lower levels, or ‘Value Memes’ (v-Memes for short) of the other levels.  In a simple example, you might be invited to a sharing dinner for a retirement of a dear colleague.  There might be several independent relationships (or friends!) that matter to you at the dinner, and you also might have brought something special as a gift for the person or the group.  All very communitarian.

But if the building caught on fire, and you didn’t know the exit, you’d be pretty happy to hear some authoritarian yell ‘Get out over there!’

I’ve spent the better part of the last six years thinking about Integral Theory and Spiral Dynamics.  There are some elegant thoughts in the chart above, and they’ve really helped guide my own thinking.  But I’m not prone to much mysticism.  Mysticism generally exists to explain big stuff that we can’t wrap our minds around in cause-and-effect.

Much is made in the SD literature (as much as there is out there) regarding the Tier 1 – Tier 2 transition.  The idea is that upon gaining self-awareness, there is much that can be gained as far as insight goes.  I pretty much agree with that.

But my contributions to SD mostly focus around understanding how the Spiral got put together in the first place.  What drives the thread that moves societies and people along up the Spiral?  How do we create the conditions so that people will naturally become more balanced, data-driven thinkers, while reflecting on past lessons?  What ties it all together?  That’s where empathy comes in.  When you add that key ingredient of understanding, then things start falling out and getting simpler.

If you want to follow along, it really helps to memorize the titles of the v-Memes, as well as the dominant social structures at the bottom of the chart.  I’ll go through a v-Meme description of my own devising for the various modes as well.

But the real secret is you have to read, and think about this stuff.  Empathy is about connections, and if there is a key to understanding, certainly some of the most important connections are the ones in your head.  They’re your own gift to yourself.

Takeaways:  Spiral Dynamics is cool.  It explains both the development of human communities, as well as the development of human beings themselves, back and forth in a never-ending climb.  Well, for some of us.  The other big thing is you have to think about it.  SD is a true meta-structure for sentience, and tied together by empathetic development.  That’s the real story of this blog.

Further Reading:  I kinda seized up thinking about this, because the reality is that the reading out there on SD is mostly not-so-hot.  But then I remembered one of my favorite books from my young adulthood — The Foundation Trilogy — that profiles the fall and rise of the Galactic Empire.  If you want to be Hari Seldon, you gotta start with Spiral Dynamics.

Wedding day, Alicia, me, Conor and Braden

It’s not easy to pigeonhole culture. But we can start with the British Dictionary’s definition: “the total of the inherited ideas, beliefs, values and knowledge that constitute the shared bases of social action.” Cultures  dictate aggregate societal views of relationships, as well as various mores, and as such are inextricably wound up with the levels of empathy in a society.  More tribal or authoritarian cultures are less empathetic, and more belief-based.  More evolved cultures tend to be more empathetic, and have more space for reason.

As such, cultures state what relationships are externally defined, as well as what space exists for independently generated relationships.  My preferred concept for this is that cultures provide the sidebars for the fundamental organizational principles in a given society, and as such, can bring reinforcement for certain types of lower-empathetic behavior, as well as provide ladders for higher-level modes of empathy that may not be widespread in a given society.  Cultures can bring out the best or worst in us.

One of my favorite ways of figuring out how empathy works in a given society is to look at their literature, or even more fun, their movies, and see how people interact.  Or rather, how they’re allowed to interact.  Great works of literature, of course, are signs of the times.  Reading Homer’s Odyssey lets you know that life in Chthonic transition Greece was not very empathetic, and certainly no picnic.  When Odysseus returns home, his son Telemachus hangs the various servant girls in the suitors’ court.  Can you imagine how the press would cover a mass hanging of women today?

Current cultures in transition also show empathy levels in love stories.  In the U.S., for example, it’s not enough to have formal roles for the various family members.  In the movie Meet the Fockers, everyone in two families — one very traditional authoritarian, and one more of the peace-and-love hippie variety — have to form independently generated, trust-based relationships.  Of course, this is very difficult, if not impossible, for reasons that we will cover (if you want to hold on to a term, the problem is what I call v-Meme mismatch) and some version of uncomfortable hilarity ensues.  Well, sort of.

Movies out of China are particularly fascinating.  In Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, you know that the main character, Li Mu Bai, is gonna die when he falls in love with the daughter of the governor, and that there’s going to be even more carnage when the other beautiful woman in the film, Shu Lien, falls in love with Li Mu Bai.  The plot is complicated, but the bottom line is that even 15 years ago, Chinese society didn’t allow people to fall in love and get married.  In fact, for that transgression of independent relational generation, pretty much everyone gets killed, and no one gets laid.  Things are changing — but the fact that the movie is an icon in China tells you something.

One can also see devolution of cultures as well.  For those film buffs, contrast the typical current puff fare of ‘girl meets boy’ with the usual ‘they have a crisis’ and then ‘they get married and live happily every after.’  In relational terms, that would be usually some impulsive, magical connection, followed by independent relational generation, and finishing up with external relational definition and approval by society (husband and wife).  Everyone has to get a title to be bona-fide.  Contrast that to almost 50 years ago, and the movie The Graduate.  Dustin Hoffman sleeps with his potential mother-in-law, and gets the girl.  How about that?

Takeaways:  Culture is core to how empathy both manifests, and evolves in societies.  Watching movies and monitoring relational health, as well as physical health of the characters, is a great way to see how much latitude folks get in picking who they hang out with, as well as how things are changing over time in that culture.

Fun to watch:  Cinema Paradiso — what does this tell you about conflicting empathetic levels in post WWII Italian society?  (and hey — it’s a fun, great movie!)

Jumeirah station, Dubai, UAE

One of the more interesting thoughts that I’ve had about empathy is how it has to work to both generate and synchronize time scales in the brain.  Why?  Or rather how does that work?

If one understands that empathetic connection, at whatever level of the pyramid we’re at, is the bedrock of how the communication channel between two people (or more) works, then one starts realizing that the context of the relationship must also provide cues on how time is processed.  It is, in many ways, similar to how two computers have to be synchronized in order to talk to each other on the Internet.  There are protocols that must be followed — from external (like a meeting time) to independent sources (watching someone’s face in a round of poker.)

Except it is learned from the outside — different social structures and cultures have different senses of time.  And if you’re put inside one, you either have to adapt or be ignored.

Consider a tribal social structure.  Anyone who’s worked in these situations know the meaning of ‘Indian time.’  It can be used in a derogatory fashion.  But it is also insightful, and for someone that has worked in parallel with tribal cultures, a useful construct.

The short version is that there are two time scales in tribal societies — a long time ago, and somewhat in the present.  One can add perhaps a nature-based, animistic trigger to some of this (the Lakota had a ‘Moon of Popping Trees’ for the middle of the winter, when things were so cold the trees would literally freeze.)  A friend of mine doing work in Mongolia told me of a story once where she was told to meet someone ‘tomorrow’ — but tomorrow turned out to be a week later.  In Barry Lopez’s classic book, Arctic Dreams, he talks about walking with Inuit hunters and have them calibrate time in terms of distance, blurring the two variables.  Looking across the horizon, they would pronounce the distance in terms of some time in the future.

Other social orders have other time scales.  Survival-based social structures only have the now.  Authoritarian structures have the Now where the boss is.  Before the railroads, the clock in a town was set by high noon in the town square.  After the railroads, which required a legal hierarchy in order not just to make sure the trains ran on time, but also that they didn’t wreck into each other, the government gave us time scales.  Time is self-reinforcing along many self-similar orders.  It’s no surprise that the British Empire established Greenwich Mean Time as the time where the day starts.  That’s the advantage of having a map of your holdings that stretches around the world.

Since relationships are where we practice the vast majority of our information processing, it should come as no surprise that the various social orders affect the way we view time — or if we view time (or consequentiality) at all.  And that such repetition should beat down in our fundamental neural circuits?  Why do you think we use expressions like ‘we just didn’t click’?

Takeaways:  Empathy and social connection directly create and calibrate our brain’s notion of time, as well as our ability to think consequentially.  Reflecting on our own temporal scale will tell us how much are able to care about both the small stuff (our next dental appointment) and the big stuff (like global warming)  which will all be tied back to how we construct relationships.  Which is all about empathy.

Further reading:  neuroscience plods along, failing to account for our connectivity — but this fine scale stuff is still interesting. 

Chuck on a high-water Lochsa River, Idaho, Spring 2011  (Allison Thomas photo)

For those that like to guess, you might think that writing down a complicated line like ‘Independently Generated Relationships’ is a complicated, professor-ese way of saying that you’ve got some mates.  And at some level, this is true.  But it also reflects on the neural process that one goes to pick those friends.  Do you pick friends based on position or status?  Or do you pick friends because they’re nice to you, or you find them funny?  One is belief-based, status-oriented thinking.   The second is extremely data-driven.

Likely, you might have met someone with whom you share a label with.  For me, in my youth, that would have been associated with the term ‘kayaker’.  I was a passionate whitewater buff from about 17 to 46.  I was fascinated with wild country, and those that also loved wild places.  But in the end, because of the inherent danger of the sport, for the most part, I ended up paddling with people I trusted and knew.  When your life is on the line running Class V, you need people that you know what they’ll do in a given situation.  And the only way you can build that is with strong, rational empathy.  You have to assess the information stream coming from that individual.  Labels don’t work.  It’s the type of  relationship that maximize validity — you’ve shared an experience with someone.  You know they can do it because you — no one else — watched them do it before.  It’s in your own brain.

Very often, independently generated relationships are performance-based.  If you’re crunching on a big project, and you need a critical part machined, if you’re an engineer, it doesn’t help to take a hierarchical position with your machinist — that somehow, they’re a lesser person than you.  If you’ve developed a strong trust relationship with that person, it’s very likely that you’ve seen their work.  You know their sense of timescale.  Likely that you’ve also treated them in an egalitarian fashion.  And if you’ve done the empathetic relational work, it’s also almost certain that the person, if they spot an error you’ve made, will communicate back to you what that error is.  One of the key signs of relationships that maximize validity is duplex communication and confirmation.  Both parties know the relationship is data-driven, and actively provide data in both directions.

That’s the thing about independently generated relationships — because of their duplex nature, they are fundamentally error-correcting.  You can’t make significant, complex technology without them.  If you’re building something like a commercial airplane, with a minimum of 300,000 parts, there is an inherent error rate that exists in its assembly.  And without a constant stream of feedback on what goes together and what doesn’t, you simply can’t get the bugs out.  The rareness of existence of that rational empathetic culture globally is one of the main reasons that commercial jets are built in only a handful of locations in the world.

And here’s the other thing.  In order to have a team of individuals design a plane, on a very basic level, they must also be rational.  At some level, every plane is different.  You need the lower levels of scaffolding: expert knowledge of materials and components; advanced algorithms for stress analysis and propulsion;  codes and inspections by the FAA.  All matter.  But without duplex information flow, it’s all for naught.  Too many exceptions.  Too many heuristics.

As one relates, so they think.  If you want rational people, they have to have rational relationships.  That describes a situation where some level of agency is required in order to develop the people to fulfill tasks requiring complex thinking.

Takeaways:  Independent relationships are built on data exchange, which leads to trust, differentiation (I’m good/not good at something someone else is good/not good at,) and agency — someone’s fundamental responsibility to themselves, that gives them the ability to act independently.  Friendships are a key type of independently generated relationship — but they’re not the only one.

Endless stairs, Anhui Province/Huangshan, Anhui Province, China

One of the things that starts happening once you set up the relational dichotomy of independently generated, trust-based, data-driven relationships vs. externally defined relationships is that certain behaviors, thoughts and actions also clearly start falling in the various bins associated with these two fundamental empathetic/relational types.

One of the biggest is the difference between trust and loyalty.  Trust is inherently associated with something inside yourself, and ties itself back to data you’ve collected on the other person.  One can march down through the various idioms — trust is earned; trust is fragile; trust, once broken, is hard to regain.

Loyalty, though, is completely different.  No surprise that members of the military or government take loyalty oaths.  They are asked for explicit declarations of faith in institutions, or the people who are placed in authority by those institutions.  There’s many an infantryman who might have felt loyalty to their country, but did not trust their commanding officer.

It’s also interesting how it’s quite easy to pull up temporally dependent definitions of trust — as trust is fundamentally based on a data collection exercise.  It’s what we in the sciences call a time series — a fluctuating variable charted out over time.  Contrast that to loyalty — it’s what scientists and mathematicians call a binary scalar value.  Either you’re loyal to your country or not.  A loyal friend or not.  Loyal fan or not.  You can’t be sorta loyal, just like you can’t be sorta pregnant.

Words like this give insight and clues into how the brain processes different empathetic modes, and how different relational types either develop, or don’t develop timescales in the brain.  In the land of externally defined relationships, time seems not to have as much meaning to the individual.  Relationships, defined by the outside, elude control of a person.  Friendships, though, depend on time — calibrated by that time series of data known as trust.  And that creates interesting synchronization potentials in the brains of people that engage in that kind of relational development, that don’t exist at all in individuals immersed in organizations immersed in external definition.

One of my old girlfriends was Chinese.  She had lived an amazing, but tumultuous life, passing through the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and the Tian’namen Square Incident (she was there) before emigrating to the United States.  “I am a very loyal woman,” she would tell me.  But I never felt she trusted me at all!

Takeaways:  There are many traits that naturally fall out under the Independent/External relationship dichotomy.  Trust and loyalty are just an example.  Trust depends on data and some rational process, loyalty depends on belief and emotion.  All corollaries can tell us important things about how the brain processes time — and that has enormous consequences for how we synchronize actions with others.

Further Reading:  Nothing better than the life of Musashi — a samurai turned Zen monk, who swings back and forth between both relational types.