direct mini-link to this page: http://bit.ly/ToxicGreen
Also known by "Boomeritis", it's currently possibly the pattern which is most slowing down progress toward planetary sustainability, because it is a 'virus' which attacks precisely the people who most want to change the world.
So it is very common to find this 'memetic pathology' in the alternative groups which aim for change, & - the integral model teaches - it is important to make a healthy transition through the green meme to arrive to the yellow (or turquoise) meme of Integral in order to continue evolving as humanity.
To know & name this 'toxic' part of the green meme is possibly the only way of immunizing, healing it & so be able to move on from it, facilitating the emotional & spiritual growth inside ourselves & our working groups, that now requires a jump to the integral levels needed to design in truly systemic ways, & especially in ways that are compassionate with all levels of the Spiral.
Posted on 13 January 2008 by Graham
“Here’s the point: you look out there, at the environment, and with your senses you can plainly see the wonderful, glorious, empirical world of nature. And of course you want to help save nature from destruction, not only because nature is beautiful, but because your own existence depends in many ways on a healthy environment. So you say, stop doing those things that are destroying nature! Stop polluting the oceans, stop dumping toxic wastes into our rivers, stop using fluorocarbons that create an ozone hole, stop burning carbon fuels that pollute the atmosphere and cause global warming- instead let us live in accord with nature, let us adopt energy-efficient production, use renewable resources, practice natural capitalism’ and in all ways honour Gaia. “Congratulations, you have just bought into the world of Flatland. And it is flatland that above all else is destroying Gaia. And thus your very efforts to save Gaia are destroying Gaia”.
-Ken Wilber, Boomeritis (2002)
Last week we looked at the story of the cultural and psychological evolution of human consciousness through the Spiral Dynamics model.
We stopped at Green- the environmental stage that has emerged as a significant cultural form in the last few decades in many western countries, influencing politics, social movements and heralding a New Age of transformation and care for all people and All Beings.
Green however, although representing much advancement in terms of ecological and social awareness over the previous stages of Blue and Orange, has failed to recognize that these earlier stages are necessary for the emergence of green in the first place. The Green belief of the dawning of a new Age of renewal and Global Consciousness cannot be realized because to reach Green requires a developmental process that must include and value all the stages and all their values in some way.
The Post-modern “meme” has a tremendous resistance to this idea however because it tends to be at war with its parents generation of Orange and Blue which extol the virtues of hard work, discipline and tradition. Green has other ideas and rebels against the earlier stages that generated the wealth and processes to make the Green meme possible.
In its rebellion, the Green meme rejects Orange materialism and Blue structure claiming that only its own values of Universal Rights and Ecological awareness are the best.
It also fails to recognize that perhaps yet higher stages that see even more may be emerging from the more progressive ranks of Green; a stage that recognizes not the need for the imposition of a new set of values so much as a deep understanding of the inner developmental process that leads to these values; a stage that not only looks outside at the world of Gaia and the need to care for Her; but that also looks inside at the development of the consciousness that is required for people to care enough about the world in this way and to understand their relationship to their environment.
In these two failings, coupled with a disaffection for the excesses of Religion on the one hand and Rationality on the other, Green makes a fatal mistake: in its distorted, pathological form, it mistakes the simpler, pre-rational and more “natural” and “holistic” -looking earlier stages of Purple and Red as being in some way more developed than modern rational perspectives. This translates as children being having higher consciousness than adults (they are “closer to the source” as one young mother once told me;) animals, trees and plants and even rocks have personalities and spirits with higher consciousness than humans (“more natural”); instinct and intuition being higher forms of knowledge than science or rational inquiry (“more spiritual”).
All these views are very common in New Age Religion which is really just a reversion to much earlier forms of human consciousness, forms which played their own essential evolutionary role in their day, but which will prove quite inadequate to meet the challenges of the modern world.
Instead of looking ahead to what the next Emergent meme may be, Green thinks it has found Nirvana already and in a paroxysm of narcissism and naïve romantic views of what life used to be like back in the good old days it destroys the goose that laid the golden egg- the very scientific method that lead to the deeper Green ecological understanding in the first place.
I can see a lot of people in my surroundings struggling to reach the green meme
and trying to liberate themselves, only to see them fall right back into orange again - or even worse:
snap WAY back into purple, red, blue - because they 'flew too high too soon'.
It seems to me the 'green meme ' can only continue to exist BECAUSE it is fighting.
It needs a continuous fight to maintain itself - it is an attempt of consciousness to
break through the 'hatch' of the lower memes. Green is an embryonic attempt to understand
complexity - it acknowledges the fact that reality is not as simple as Newtonian physics
say it is. The instability is the struggle of the consciousness to free itself of misidentifications - clearing the path to reach the yellow meme. There is a lot more stability in yellow - a dynamic balance has been reached,
and a systemic consciousness has arisen. this brings about the freedom the green meme was actually aspiring for. Systemic consciousness is necessary for re-creating, re-designing and re-shaping our society at a global scale. There is no inherent irrational rejection of any lower meme structure, rather an attempt to find out where is the right time, place and circumstance for all the various memetic structures and elements to play their role in such a manner that it benefits the whole system.
"The positive side of green is its effort to treat all points of view fairly, & not leave out any of them.
The negative side is a flatland pluralism which starts by saying all perspectives should be treated with justice & ends up saying that all perspectives should be treated equally.
This flat-land pluralism wipes out all depth, nothing is deeper, superior, wider, has more integrity, more compassion, is more affectionate, or more loving.
Everything is merely equal, in the monochromatic surface of the postmodernist flatland.
The postmodern environment is, as a consequence, an endless irony.
In saying one thing, one wants to say another, but under no circumstance one can harbor a conviction"
(Shambhala interview with Ken Wilber at the moment of publishing Boomeritis)
From an Integral Permaculture Student
Fascinating stuff about the green meme.
Diëgo Van De Keere, 9 Apr 2012
From Let Them Eat Text: the real politics of postmodernism, by Karla Mantilla
"I suggest that postmodernism is nothing more than the new relativism and that relativistic theories emerge as a new line of defense when power structures are becoming threatened.
It is a very insidious and crafty defense because it mouths the words of liberation while simultaneously transforming them into meaninglessness.
The real agenda is masked in clever obfuscation--to preserve the status quo by rendering dissent meaningless and ineffective, unable to gather any social or political power."
Continue reading in Let Them Eat Text
"But, this pluralism is not the way to end with oppression, but of consolidating it, because the notion that all perspectives are equal makes it impossible to criticize social questions (however unfair), because it is supposed that no perspective is superior to another."
Ken Wilber
Despite the fact that the majority of Boomers are still green meme, they have been in the green meme for thirty years & are ready to move on toward yellow & with a more integral second tier focus.
Ken Wilber
by Andrew Cohen:
The method of Boomeritis—its myopic (and hierarchical) demand to eliminate all social, political, economic, and cultural hierarchies in the name of freedom—not only rode roughshod over nuance but produced the very dictatorship of assumption it was assailing in Orange.
In particular its rejection of reason necessarily promoted emotion as the proper basis for decision-making, thereby setting up an unavoidable clash with the still majority operating from the rational/egoic conventional Orange meme.
And because it is a First-Tier wave, Green could make no room for accommodating Orange; the reverse being also true, we have found ourselves in an infuriating and frustrating memetic civil war.
...
(but the good news is ...)
Green necessarily paves the way with its recognition that all humans participate in the same awareness and its conviction that the world works best when each of us is free to experience this for ourselves without arbitrary repression.
This “sensitive self” thrilled by this new insight, cannot accept this as a mere cognitive insight but must act upon it.
It is this engagement with the challenge of liberating billions of individual egos from any and all oppressions that puts us right up against the obstacles both internal and external.
Thus translation through mature Green will, for most people, be of limited duration, for we will be unwilling simply to see what is possible without seeking to make it manifest.
Boomeritis online
Integral Permaculture is a self-consciously Yellow-meme stage of the development of permaculture itself, in which we recognize the need to to apply all permaculture design tools (and more) to our own ways of thinking, as well as recognizing that we are at all times filtering our thinking through whatever (emotional, ethical, etc.) stage of development we are at.
"Whereas all the earlier stages of human consciousness tend to compete with each other and identify with their own beliefs which they hold t be the most appropriate, a dramatic transformation occurs at Yellow, which is the first “meme” to recognize that its perception of the world is a result of a developmental process.
It is not just that world views are relative and contextual as is held by the post-modern Green stage, but that they are sequential, each new stage transcending but including the previous ones.
Yellow holds its views less tightly, recognizing that there may be yet deeper stages ahead, that the evolutionary process is not yet finished.
Uniquely amongst the memes, Yellow recognizes the importance of all the stages and works to meet the psychological needs of each stage."
(see full article here)
from Diëgo, student of the Academy:
Fascinating stuff about the green meme.
I can see a lot of people in my surroundings struggling to reach the green meme
and trying to liberate themselves, only to see them fall right back into orange again - or even worse:
snap WAY back into purple, red, blue - because they 'flew too high too soon'.
It seems to me the 'green meme ' can only continue to exist BECAUSE it is fighting.
It needs a continuous fight to maintain itself - it is an attempt of consciousness to break through the 'hatch' of the lower memes.
Green is an embryonic attempt to understand complexity - it acknowledges the fact that reality is not as simple as Newtonian physics say it is.
The instability is the struggle of the consciousness to free itself of misidentifications - clearing the path to reach the yellow meme.
There is a lot more stability in yellow - a dynamic balance has been reached,
and a systemic consciousness has arisen. this brings about the freedom the green meme was actually aspiring for.
Systemic consciousness is necessary for re-creating, re-designing and re-shaping our society at a global scale.
There is no inherent irrational rejection of any lower meme structure, rather an attempt to find out where is the right time, place and circumstance for all the various memetic structures and elements to play their role in such a manner that it benefits the whole system.
Boomeritis: a video montage of this post-modernism "disease", narrated by What Is Enlightenment? magazine's Tom Huston, from a retreat with Andrew Cohen
Boomeritis, a term coined by philosopher Ken Wilber, describes a curious condition afflicting the baby boom generation. In short, "high cognitive pluralism mixed with low emotional narcissism." AKA: a smart, progressive person with a big ego. :-) It's a disease that began infecting human beings during the sixties revolution, when millions of rebellious American and European teens, took full advantage of the rights and freedoms afforded them by Western society and explored the entire spectrum of their egoic autonomy. Busting through every limitation, subverting every authority, and ingesting every psychedelic drug they could get their hands on, they each tumbled out, squinting and dazed, into the bright sunny dawn of the Age of Aquarius.
And although that new age, obscured by the rose-colored glasses of hippiedom, wasn't all it was cracked up to be, it did mark the birth of an actual new stage of human consciousness and culture. Historians, sociologists, and philosophers call it postmodernity, and its defining characteristic was the capacity to allow a variety of differing viewpoints, cultures, and worldviews to peacefully coexist in an egalitarian embrace. Today this multicultural consciousness is also frequently called "pluralism" for its ability to honor and respect a multidimensional plurality of perspectives, and is recognized as being the singular fuel behind the revolutionary fire of the sixties—having ignited the flames of feminism, civil rights, animal rights, gay rights, ecological activism, Vietnam war protests, sexual liberation, and even rock 'n roll. The Beatles' song "All Together Now," for example, perfectly captures the fundamental sentiments and sensitivities of the pluralistic stage of development.
But every social revolution has its downsides, and postmodernity had, and continues to have, plenty of its own. Perhaps the most obvious and unfortunate side-effect of postmodernity's noble intentions to include and embrace all worldviews and cultures—leaving no individual or social group behind to be marginalized or oppressed—is that by idealistically championing "equal rights," it ends up flattening all value judgments into an ultra-egalitarian pancake. Wilber has dubbed this postmodern landscape "flatland"—a world in which no value distinctions, no judgments, and no hierarchies are allowed, and in which it's considered "politically incorrect" to judge another person, group, or even worldview as being fundamentally better or worse than any other.
The psychologist Jean Piaget (1962) was one of the earliest to research the theory that there are distinct phases of cognitive development that a child will go through as it matures. Maslow (1943) amongst others suggested similar models of psychological development and produced a “hierarchy of needs” model showing how, as the more basic physical needs of the individual are met- food, shelter, relationships- so higher needs of “self actualization” can be pursued.
Clare Graves (Beck and Cowan 1996) suggested that these stages of individual development also had collective or cultural forms: he borrowed the word meme from genetics to describe broad stages of psychological development that resulted in a society stratified by culturally distinct values. These “V-memes” or Value-memes-are represented by colors corresponding to a sequence of values and coping mechanisms of psychological needs:
1 BEIGE -as natural instincts and reflexes direct; automatic existence, as in a new-born child. 2 PURPLE – according to tradition and ritual ways of group; tribal; animistic; parochial 3 RED – asserting self for dominance, conquest, and power; exploitive; egocentric; in contemporary societies, criminal organizations, Hell’s Angels, Mad max; 4 BLUE – obediently as higher authority and rules direct; absolutist; conforming; traditional values of church and state; The army, the boy scouts; 5 ORANGE- pragmatically to achieve results and get ahead; multiplistic; competitive; capitalist; materialistic; 6 GREEN -responds to human needs; affiliative; relativistic; “the sensitive self”; ecological consciousness, the Environmental movement; equality and social justice for all.; 7 YELLOW -build functional niche to do what one chooses; existential; systemic; “spans the spiral” with the ability to meet the core psychological needs of the other memes 8 TURQUOISE -experiential to join with other like thinkers; holistic; transpersonal
According to developmental models, to revert to some earlier stage of human consciousness- that of hunter-gatherers for example, who often had animistic and superstitious beliefs- would be like getting kindergarten children to run the country. The kind of scenario that might ensue has been explored in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.
There are a few key ideas to understand the developmental model:
Firstly, you cannot skip stages. You cannot run before you can walk. Each stage builds on the earlier ones – including them but transcending them also in certain important ways. The stages can be pictured as concentric circles, like layers of an onion, a “nested holarchy”; this image makes it clear that while the higher stages contain all the earlier stages, the reverse is not true. Someone at say Orange “contains” beige, purple, red and Blue, and has access to these stages; particular behaviour may be emanating from the earlier stages but the “default” mode will still be of Orange. Purple, however, would not “have access to” the higher stages: for this, it would be necessary to first grow through each stage in turn.
Secondly, this is a naturally occurring growth hierarchy- not a dominator hierarchy. As such it is an elite to which everyone, in principle, is invited. The hierarchy of needs is fundamental- it is hard to reach the higher stages with an empty belly- but other factors also play important roles. Merely increasing wealth and privilege will not always lead to “raising consciousness”.
Thirdly, the principle characteristic of each successive stage is that it sees a bigger picture that the stage before; the view of the world is expanded and the concerns that the new stage has will be expanded. While the earlier stages in childhood are primarily narcissistic and concerned with the individuals’ own needs, the later stages become more concerned with the needs of first the whole community, then the nation perhaps as in patriotism, or an identification with a religious tradition; and this in turn gives way to eventually global concerns and concern for the well-being of all beings and the whole of nature. These widening circles of compassion/identification are bolstered by an increased cognitive awareness that sees things as parts of systems. This ability of the higher stages to think systemically is crucial in understanding how important the higher faculties are and how they can contribute to addressing the current global problems.
“The ego-centric and the ethno-centric stages of awareness could not care less about the global commons because they do not themselves possess a global awareness. And that means that Gaia’s main problem is not toxic waste dumps, the ozone hole or global warming. Gaia’s main problem is that not enough human beings have evolved from ego-centric to ethnocentric to world-centric levels of consciousness, yes?” -Wilber, IBID.
Rousseau claimed that “man is born free, yet everywhere is in chains”. Wilber has pointed out that in psychological terms, the reverse is true- as new-born babies, we are helpless and dependent; as we grow, a lack of understanding of the world or our own bodies can lead to frustration and a desire to rebel; wisdom only comes with age and experience and it is more the control of desires rather than the egotistical insistence on their fulfillment that brings contentment. From this point of view, freedom is something that we must grow into.
From ego-centric (Beige, Purple and Red) to ethno-centric (Blue and Orange) to World Centric (Green and Yellow) each successive stage represents a “wider circle of embrace”.
In this sense, the developmental model provides an explanation for all the different values, points of view, political persuasion, belief systems and opinions that we find in the post-modern world.
It is not just that there are different views which should all be given an equal value; some are deeper, contain more levels or layers than others.
It was simpler in the earlier stages of human development- for most of human history, there has only been two or three stages present. With the advent of Green from the 1960s onwards and the subsequent (speculated) emergence of Yellow the world becomes much more complex, with many different stages of value-orientation which generally have a poor understanding of each others’ point of view- and which find themselves often in competition with each other.
“You cannot solve a problem from the same level that Created it”- Einstein.
E.F. Schumacher, in A Guide for the Perplexed gave an example of this from the French Revolution. The writers of the constitution for the new Republic could see a conflict between the two competing values of Liberte and Egalite: Too much Freedom leads to more inequality in a free-for-all competition of the market place: the strong get stronger at the expense of the weak, as can be seen in the western world. Too much enforced equality on the other hand as in the old Soviet Union and eastern European socialist countries seems to involve the loss of freedom. The reconciliation comes from a third quality from a higher level- fraternite. This inner quality of a sense of obligation for the good of the whole- that we are all brothers in a sense- requires a wider identification with all people.
Next week we shall look at some criticisms of this model; what the next stage of Yellow might actually look like; and how we might apply this model to meeting the challenges of Peak Oil and Climate change.
Posted by Marty Keller at 10:30 AM, 31 March 2010
copied from AQUAL Blog
Andrew Cohen, in the summer 2006 issue of What Is Enlightenment? magazine,wrote that
[t]o consciously evolve is to surrender unconditionally to the truth that there is no other and at the same time to accept responsibility for what that means in an evolving universe—a cosmos that is slowly but surely becoming aware of itself through you and me. one without a second is simultaneously awakening to itself as it develops, as it evolves, and it is that one, as you and me, alone, that can now begin to take responsibility for endeavoring to consciously create its own future.
At the leading edge of this consciousness evolution, which is basically at the Green mature rational egoic wave, what is necessary for us to assume responsibility for how this evolution occurs? I assert that what we must focus on is consolidation of healthy Green, for that will lead almost immediately into the transpersonal waves and the integral embrace.
We face this developmental challenge even as Green must deal with assaults from its two junior stages. As I wrote in the “Three Blind Memes” series below, the world is enjoying an unprecedented collision of three powerful First Tier memes: Amber premodern (which can also be understood as the preconventional, traditional, mythic/membership, rule/role stage), Orange modern (conventional, rational/egoic, scientific), and Green postmodern (postconventional. vision/logic, sensitive self).
Amber, as the oldest member of this triad, arose as part of the shift in the human social and economic structures from hunter/gatherer to agriculture, some 13,000 years ago.
Orange first appeared as an identifiable feature during the so-called Axial Age around 600 BCE, but did not manifest in significant numbers until after the Italian Renaissance in the fourteenth century CE.
Green first appeared around the turn of the nineteenth century, but showed up in sufficient numbers only in the 1960s.
One of the characteristics of this evolutionary trend is the accelerating rate of new memetic emergence. It took Amber around 40,000 years to emerge from the previous Red magic wave, but it took Orange less that 13,000 years to arise from Amber. And Green required less than half a millennium to appear.
On the other hand, assessing the impact of this trimemetic geometry requires us to account for the fact that Green is so new that it simply has not had the time to settle into what Wilber calls an identifiable “Kosmic habit” with a high degree of probability that it will manifest in a predictable way. Its “boundaries” are still very porous and blurred, and its structure is pliable.
Wilber has pointed out that all the waves of consciousness have both healthy and pathological expressions. Transcending any one wave generally requires that one has translated—i.e., lived into fairly completely—that wave in a healthy manner along enough lines of development to become open to the Kosmic pull of transcendence into the next level.
Although we can identify stunted versions of Amber, it has flourished long enough (thirteen millennia) to have developed a remarkably stable and consistent probability wave. The Amber “center of gravity” tends to pull deviations back toward itself, and we thus can expect that in almost all instances people operating out of Amber, both individually and collectively, will manifest predictable behaviors and awareness. Pathologies that develop as deviations from this dependable pattern also act to demonstrate Amber’s contours.
Orange, being much younger, still has a significant pathological version that Wilber calls the “Mean Orange Meme (MOM)”: the tendency to reduce all the quadrants to externals by downplaying or rejecting the internals. Wilber also calls this the “Flatland” fallacy. Even though the major contribution of Orange was the differentiation of perspectives into the Four Quadrants, an unexamined reliance on empiricism leads to the rejection of the interior quadrants and the grotesque assertion that what is real is only what can be measured—overlooking the role of the measurer himself!
In fact, the dominance of the MOM in much of western culture helped stimulate the emergence of Green. The manic drive to reduce our reality to externals has led to the creation of consumerist culture, where all human activity is about the production and consumption of external items without regard to any effects these might have on the emotions, the mind, or the soul of either individuals or society.
The MOM’s tendency to treat all reality as objective empirical data also diffuses holistic systems analysis, since the effects of the interactions of interdependent groups of phenomena are not always easy to measure. So even while Orange was facilitating the development of the Industrial Age with all its attendant benefits to individual human life, it was also blind to the long-term effects of the application of various by-products (such as toxic chemicals) in industrial processes to the general environment and thus their inimical effects on those very benefits.
The individual version of the Orange pathology is extreme linearity of thinking and rejection of spiritual values, unlike healthy Orange which gravitates toward what Jung called individuation. In Abraham Maslow’s model, this manifests as the self-actualized individual. The person applies reason in his inner inquiry as well as in his scientific examination of the cosmos.
As Wilber points out, if the Red magic/animistic wave is egocentric (“I am the center of the world”), and the Amber mythic/membership is ethnocentric (“my tribe is the center of the world”), then healthy Orange rational/egoic is the beginning of worldcentric awareness (“I am an autonomous part of the world”). A person’s recognition of her individual sovereignty comes simultaneously with her awareness that she has choice about her relationship with the world from which she is separate.
Green’s distinction from and improvement upon Orange is its mature individualized-egoic realization that humanity comprises billions of equally autonomous personal egos (“I am equally an autonomous part of the world with everyone else”), and that no metric can be found in Reason to privilege one over any other. It expands Orange’s focus on the individual to initialize an awareness of humanity as a group. It is the mature version of worldcentric consciousness, and as the highest wave in the First Tier, it is the doorway to what Wilber calls the “kosmocentric” (“the Kosmos and I are one”).
Green seeks to raise all humans to the equally highest level possible. It applies the rationality of its embedded Orange consciousness to the challenge and asks the questions Orange cannot yet recognize. If, for instance, modern science has developed the technology to produce enough food to feed all humanity, why are so many still starving—and why are so many obese? If it has developed a sophisticated understanding of chemical reactions and effects on human health, why do we still permit so much pollution of our skies and water? If it has demonstrated the relative physical and psychological equality of men and women—as well as between members of various races and sexual orientations—why hasn’t it resulted in political economic equality for all people?
These kinds of questions drive Orange nuts, because they infer structures that in Orange’s emphasis upon individuation it simply does not see. They demand a nonlinearity that Orange’s development to the “formal operations” level has not yet made possible. Thus Green represents the postformal development into what Wilber calls “early vision/logic,” the capacity to “range over multiple perspectives and differing domains of knowledge, seeing the interconnections, relationships and analogies between systems of knowledge, and integrate these seemingly disparate systems” (Jeff Meyerhoff). Green’s commitment to diversity and relativity arises from its new-found ability to acknowledge these differing perspectives as existing independently from its own. Its penchant for multiculturalism is a product of the validation of the fact of this variety.
In the Lower Right, Green is now able to discern systems and the impact of any one system on others, if not on them all. Just as the individual in whom Green is opening up now recognizes the mutual autonomy of all individuals, so too does he recognize the mutual autonomy of discrete systems of social organization. Thus arises a rudimentary understanding of holism, the sense that all parts operate interdependently in a global system.
So although we can identify as tendencies the characteristics of Green as differentiated from Orange, we must remember that these are only probabilities. As Wilber has shown in his work on postintegral metaphysics, the levels of consciousness are not “given.” They are generated out of the experience of the previous levels and at the same time are shaped by the specific inputs of the newly arising wave.
This tender youth of Green is the main reason why its current majoritarian expression, the variant Wilber calls “Boomeritis,” or the “Mean Green Meme (MGM),” appears rather more pathological than robust. Much of Green’s explicit worldview has been shaped by several crucial experiences that have helped funnel its structure into the Boomeritis variant.
The first is the school of criticism now known as poststructuralism. Starting as a method of literary criticism, poststructuralism sought to illuminate assumptions embedded in the cultural hypotheses that appear in our literature. Philosophers such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault examined one of the fundamental elements of thought: the universal existence of opposites. We understand one thing basically only as it contrasts to its opposite. We know day only because we also know its converse; would we even consider the notion of “day” if “night” never appeared?
They then noted the tendency of our culture to favor one of the pair of opposites over its reverse: male over female; day over night; white over black; etc. They suggested that, since none of these terms have meaning except in the context of their opposite, there is no reason to support one over that opposite other than personal (or cultural) preference. They therefore suggested that one can derive a greater field of meaning from a text when one collapses the implied preference and looks at it afresh. If I know that I am unconsciously favoring “day” over “night” when reading, say The Odyssey, I can find new meaning in the text if I “deconstruct” that preference and now read it with that new awareness.
This poststructuralist insight came right as the Baby Boom generation found itself matriculating at colleges and universities in historically unprecedented numbers. It quickly expanded from a focus on literature into a rough sort of philosophical approach that was fed by the second crucial impact on the formation of the Mean Green Meme: the radical rebellion against our parents’ generation sparked by the futility of the Vietnam War.
In this instance a number of ironies come into play, primarily the fact that America’s industrial might had reached an apex in the 1950s, producing a level of surplus value that provided its citizens an unparalleled standard of living. This wealth not only allowed our parents to raise this huge generation at a level of comfort no other generation had ever known, but to also provide this group of youth access to a post high school education. Perhaps if we weren’t subject to the draft, or if either side had won a swift victory in Southeast Asia, we might not have had our consciousness raised about the issues of the Cold War and kept relatively quiet. Perhaps.
But history unfolded as it did, and our generation awoke to possibilities that our parents and grandparents could only dream of—even as their work, genius, and sacrifices helped provide them.
The combination of our rebellion against Orange political economic structures and the insights of the poststructuralists resulted in the Boomeritis worldview. From its base in academia, both in the United States and in Western Europe, Boomeritis Green spread into the European socialist parties, the American Democratic Party, and the labor movement on both continents. (The latter was fueled by the impact that the new postindustrial economy was having, after the mid 1960s, upon production, distribution, and employment first in the American, and then not long after in the European, political economy.)
The gift of Green—its insistence upon liberating each individual from the restricted institutions and assumptions of modern Orange industrial societies—led it to build upon the successes of the American Civil Rights movement by giving rise first to the women’s liberation movement, and then an entire range of other “group rights” campaigns.
The method of Boomeritis—its myopic (and hierarchical) demand to eliminate all social, political, economic, and cultural hierarchies in the name of freedom—not only rode roughshod over nuance but produced the very dictatorship of assumption it was assailing in Orange. In particular its rejection of reason necessarily promoted emotion as the proper basis for decision-making, thereby setting up an unavoidable clash with the still majority operating from the rational/egoic conventional Orange meme. And because it is a First-Tier wave, Green could make no room for accommodating Orange; the reverse being also true, we have found ourselves in an infuriating and frustrating memetic civil war. (See “Three Blind Memes: The First Tier Food Fight” below for a more detailed analysis of this situation.)
Ultimately it would be a mistake to dwell too much on the goofiness of Boomeritis Green, because Green is inherently a very unstable meme. Over the fullness of time I believe it may actually disappear as a distinct wave, and be absorbed into Orange so that we will have “low” Orange and “high” Orange. For now, its very freshness means that, as a memetic probability wave, a significant range of structural elements will be present. But given that it is actually the highest and most mature form of individual egoic consciousness, it will ultimately have to access and be informed by reason; the emotional foundation of Boomeritis, like a house build on a sand dune, simply cannot last.
But the real basis of Green’s instability is that what currently distinguishes it from Orange leads directly to the Second Tier.
How long can I remain in the consciousness that we are all equally autonomous rational/egoic individuals before the question of our interdependence and intersubjectivity comes to the fore? The willingness to give up Orange’s “me against the world” framework sooner or later leads from “me” to “us” consciousness—which launches right into Second Tier awareness. As soon as self-identity transcends the personal self, our attachment to the individual body/mind as “who we really are” loosens, and we begin to identify with greater and greater realms of being.
This is the beginning of kosmocentric consciousness: the body/mind is merely the vessel or expression of the Kosmos’ self-knowledge. As I see my “self” in the collective, consciousness makes “the momentous leap” from the group of all the waves of consciousness necessary to make a human being into the group of those necessary to make a world and ultimately a universe.
Green necessarily paves the way with its recognition that all humans participate in the same awareness and its conviction that the world works best when each of us is free to experience this for ourselves without arbitrary repression. This “sensitive self” thrilled by this new insight, cannot accept this as a mere cognitive insight but must act upon it. It is this engagement with the challenge of liberating billions of individual egos from any and all oppressions that puts us right up against the obstacles both internal and external. Thus translation through mature Green will, for most people, be of limited duration, for we will be unwilling simply to see what is possible without seeking to make it manifest.
© Unity Politics