This material is exciting to me. It is based very much on what I wrote about as the third collection in “Self Identity and Globalization”. Briefly, it is mostly a way of reframing or organizing a large amount of what already exists within the field of psychology, but it often exists in incomplete chunks arranged and presented in haphazard manners.
Information management through stages of change in a psychological economy embedded within a stream of social reality which is based in a changing physical environment.
Any Buddhists out there will recognize the emphasis here on anicca, and for the rest of us, we can think of this as fluidity or change in this context.
While ignoring or downplaying the importance of anger and trauma were significant (in my opinion, unconscionable) problems in my psychology education, probably the biggest problem my peers seemed to experience was the lack of cohesion. We were presented a disparate set of perspectives and information and then encouraged to try to stretch our willingness, attention, and comprehension to honor as much of it as possible. It was as if the assumption was that collecting data was more important than selection. This was quite possibly true for psychologists twenty or thirty years ago, but the world has shifted to a focus, at least in academia, on selection, compilation, and presentation.
Information is being produced and haphazardly compiled faster than any single field of endeavor can possibly digest and apply. Just as Americans now face a greater societal problem with obesity than with starvation, students and professionals face a greater difficulty with selection and compilation than with availability of information. So what I have to say here comes out of the drive to develop some basic heuristics about when to apply what information how. We live in a world of surplus, and we absolutely need to find ways of understanding that more suffering is currently created by surplus (obesity, population expansion) than lack (starvation).
I will break down my definition of progressive psychology and take it piece by piece to demonstrate how this compiled definition helps organize the what aspects of a massive amount of information. Within this massive amount of information, there is a vast amount of really solid work that is simply not getting around very clearly. I will only briefly describe how to recognize when various aspects of this information should be applied. In other words, this essay is more about clear organization rather than application, but it involves a mix of technical aspects and theory rather than being very abstract.
That’s a pretty horrible introduction, but there are a lot of bases to cover, and if we do not set up the context in a way that at least allows success, we will not succeed, and the rest of what we work on will be mostly sound and fury rather than effective progress. I’ll try to tie it together from here on out.
“Information management”. I basically described why this phrase begins my definition. It will take some degree of effort for older generations to understand not only that we have an information glut but also that it doesn’t need to be intimidating. The ways in which we communicate and understand ourselves are changing, and in an Information Age, this requires competence in selecting, compiling, and presenting information. While the economy and academia used to be organized around proprietary holdings (like a stockpile of nuclear weapons), the economy is reorganizing around the improvement and distribution of resources. Any ideas that you stockpile will simply become obsolete as global social reality moves past you. So again, we are not dealing in squirreling away what we can, but we are rather dealing in more fluid exchanges.
“Through stages of change”. The old guard and frantic new students should be happy about this piece of the puzzle. Although change is constant, the way humans go about making decisions concerning change has a relative consistency, especially concerning consistent change (as opposed to sporadic changes or haphazard attempts at sporadic change). So human decision making can be broken down into understandable chunks and those chunks line up in a particular order: precontemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, maintenance, and possibly relapse. Although we have more overall information than we can digest, we can feel confident about understanding how we digest and apply information. And when people feel confident and engaged, they are much more likely to select their information or food carefully and digest well. The better we understand these stages within ourselves and others, the better we can apply our attention and energy. Being worried about the availability of so much information is like being worried about having a lot of food on hand–the only thing we have to fear is stupidity itself (granted, if history is any judge, it is a reasonable fear). When we are at different stages, we may choose to deal with information in different ways; when we choose appropriately, we will get better results.
“In a psychological economy”. This area is where most of traditional psychology has tended to focus. People continue to jabber on about ids, egos, archetypes, etc. All that is well and good, but what idiom organizes all those fascinating metaphors and competing perspectives? Well, when you combine neurophysiology, evolutionary psychology, and the phenomenology of attention, you arrive at what I call psychological economy. Basically, this has been spoken of mostly in terms of emotions and motivations along with how do deal with them and what they mean. What I mean by economy is that attention is finite. (Whether people want to believe in some sort of infinite awareness or consciousness is up to them.) Because attention is finite, we have to make choices about how to deploy our attention. Evolution, directed by God’s hand or not, has provided us with certain inherent ways of deploying attention so that we do not have to mentally think about every single datum of stimuli. When we deal with these emotions and motivations well, they end up being experienced as infinite energy in the words of Chogyam Trungpa. When emotions and motivations do not feel like infinite energy to us, there is something we can do differently either in what we do with our attention or with how we deal in stages of change, social reality, and physical environments. In all this, though, it is important to recognize that emotions may phenomenologicaly feel like infinite energy, but attention is finite. This means that decisions must be made, so information must be managed.
“Embedded within a stream of social reality”. The “embedded” part just means that what any of us experience individually is shaped within social reality. Even when we bring something new to that stream, we expand the stream, so the novelty we might create is not outside of that stream. The second important part is that social reality is not and has never been a predetermined given. (Another way of phrasing this, for the deterministic theists, is that, we may be able to determine the course of water flowing down a hill or drain that we have created, but the water doesn’t presciently cognize its course. It just does what it does under certain conditions. In the same way, perhaps God has a plan, but it is probably impossible for people to know it in minute detail if it exists.) My point here is that we make choices. We choose to go to war with Iraq and talk to North Korea. Our choices affect what happens within our global human social reality. The third point here is that this social reality streams, it changes, it flows. Heraclitus made a similar point about never stepping in the same river twice. (So while perhaps none of the points I’m making are new, I have not seen this selection and compilation before.)
I have met a surprising number of adults who feel thoroughly challenged by the fact that social reality changes, that they may need retraining for a new job in a couple years, that we have to make decisions about language in America, etc., but once someone accepts that changes occur, they free up attention and motivation (psychological economy) for changing along with everything else. A solid understanding of stages of change will be helpful in recognizing how to address reluctance. And, if we learn to focus on and communicate the right information in reasonable ways (information management), we will all be better off. For those thinking something like, “Well, who is to decide what the right information is?”, I say we are. Even raising such questions is an example of free choice, of how one is deploying one’s attention and understanding. (It’s located on the precontemplation-contemplation end of the stages of change.)
“Which is based in a changing physical environment.” While this may seem like the most obvious part of the definition, it is probably the one we are worst at. As a global culture, as a whole, we are only beginning to admit that we live in a single environment. (Okay, astronauts take vacations from this world.) Some religionists even continue to deprioritize this world as less valuable than some “next”. Regardless of comparative value between worlds, I am not sure how being careless here will make for a better situation there. So even though we haven’t done well with our environment yet, it is quite natural for any species to overpopulate when there is an abundance of food. Following seasons of overpopulation, natural forces continue to have their effects, and disease, famine, internecine conflict, etc. reduce populations once again. Although we may be the first species to be capable of seeing and comprehending what effects overpopulations have, we may not be any wiser in our decisions about how to act than any of the rest have been. It’s okay; if we fail to moderate the eat-fuck-expand cycle, evolution will probably try again. While there are even spiritualists who deny gravity, and there are definitely plenty who deny the benefits of population control, the whole discussion takes us back to information management (yes, overpopulation and limited food production [similar to famine] along with resentment led to genocide [internecine population control] in Rwanda) and stages of change on a large-scale level. We are only in precontemplation concerning global population size, but we are in the stage of contemplation for environmental controls (at the center) and some parts of our group have moved right into the action stage for environmental clean-up and protection.
There are perhaps only two important aspects of this perspective. The first is that change occurs and it is occurring obviously. The second is in situating traditional psychologies in a current conceptual understanding. I think that this perspective will seem obvious to some and simply perspectival to others. I think it is both. It is no more absolute than any other perspective, but some perspectives fit sustainable progress at any give time and place while others do not. Every approach to psychology that I have seen fits coherently into this perspective, adding something valuable. Every single individual has much to add to our common and unique experiences of this social reality we create, but there are abiding truths about humans and the rest of nature that are quite reliable. Adequately situating various techniques and approaches and applying them in a timely manner adds to the quality of life.
Rather than trying to come up with a monolithic meta-theory, I have tried to develop a framework for situating comprehensibly how various perspectives and techniques relate to one another. This allows people to develop particular areas of expertise while realizing some of the limitations of those areas when they are not paired with complementary approaches. It can be helpful to cover all of the bases even if those bases are not covered in-depth or with great alacrity. Essentially, recognizing the unavoidability of psychological economy creates space for us to begin where we are at and move forward in a way that is balanced rather than either trying to be everything to everyone in perfect amounts or viewing actual potential as less than it is. This framework allows for a fallible but aspirational progressive psychology.
Our societies are currently struggling to find ways to define human agency and identity in practically applicable global ways. This means that individuals are currently struggling to find ways to define human agency in practically applicable global ways. It’s okay that we haven’t already worked this out perfectly, but it is foolish to avoid or fear the task.
Copyright 2007 Todd Mertz