At the Autonomous stage, a person achieves the ability to acknowledge and cope with the conflict between needs and duties.  “Whereas the Conscientious person tends to construe the world in terms of polar opposites, the Autonomous person… [sees] reality as complex and multifaceted.”  He is willing, for instance, to let his “children make their own mistakes.”

Finally, there is the Integrated stage.  At this stage, the person is able to reconcile inner conflicts yet still cherish individuality.  Loevinger notes the difficulty of studying this stage, both because it is rare, and because it is likely to exceed the ego stage of the researcher.  There is, of course, “no highest stage but only an opening to new possibilities.”

For Anglo-Americans all these developmental theories of consciousness and their associated world-views seem to issue from the ideas of the conscious and the unconscious mind brilliantly publicized by Sigmund Freud in the early twentieth century.  But Freud was merely a legatee of the intellectual tradition begun by Immanuel Kant, who first utilized the concept of a weltanschauung, or world-view, as a natural way of dealing with his seminal idea that humans cannot know things-in-themselves, but only appearances.  Humans do not experience reality; they only experience a view, or appearance, of reality.  It was in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit where the first modern stage theory of human consciousness emerged.  In Hegel’s formulation human consciousness consisted of four major stages: Consciousness, Self-Consciousness, Reason, and Spirit. 

But the problem with stage theories is that the step-by-step metaphor implies that, once an advance has been made from one step to the next, the world of the previous stage is left behind, treated as incomplete and insufficient.  It is a small step from regarding the previous stage as incomplete to judging it as shamefully primitive and simplistic, and from there to a dismissal of the old ways as not merely simplistic, but superstitious, and not merely superstitious, but a deliberate lie.  It was a great theme in the work of Eric Voegelin to examine this tendency and to demonstrate its folly.  For Voegelin the progress from stage to stage is a “leap in being” from “compactness” to “differentiation.”  The leap in being is not a jump that leaves the old ways behind, but a clarification that brings new concepts into focus.

In Integral Psychology, new age writer Ken Wilber correlates about 15 of these systems of human consciousness, including the Buddhist vijnanas, Hindu chakras, Plotinus, the Great Chain of Being, Sri Aurobindo, the Kabbalah, and theosophy.  He showed that there have always been hierarchical models of human consciousness, across time and across cultures, and that the twentieth century has been a particularly fruitful time for development of these theories.

But can these theories of human consciousness shed light upon the class and religious antagonisms of the present era?  For instance, could any of them explain how enthusiastic Protestantism should be flourishing in the present time despite the many prophecies of its demise, and could it explain why so many people should be ideologically mobilized against it?

One of the systems described by Wilber was developed by a contemporary of Maslow, Clare Graves, a professor at Union College, New York.  Teaching classes on Maslow and Skinner in the early 1950s, he found himself unable to answer his students’ need to know which was the “right” theory.  His response was to launch on a 30-year program to find a better understanding of human development that could transcend the conflicting theories then available.

Together with his students, Graves developed a “levels of existence” model of human consciousness that integrated bio-, psycho-, and socio- characteristics into a single stage theory. 

At each stage of human existence the adult man is off on his quest... At the first level he is on a quest for automatic physiological satisfaction.  At the second level he seeks a safe mode of living, and this is followed in turn, by a search for heroic status, for power and glory, by a search for ultimate peace; a search for material pleasure, a search for affectionate relations, a search for respect of self, and a search for peace in an incomprehensible world. (Beck 1996 p16)

Unlike the three stage systems of popular authors like Riesman and Reich that are fashioned to validate the consciousness of the author, Graves’s system rejected the assumption of a final state or consciousness to represent the culmination of human development.  Instead it experienced human nature adapting itself to meet new life conditions and challenges.  It was an open system with an unknown future. 

In the years just before his death in 1986, Graves embarked on a nation-wide series of business seminars with collaborators Don Beck and Christopher Cowan, and brought the theory to the practical world of business organization and development, “astonish[ing] the business people in his audiences… ‘nailing’ the problems they were just then realizing lay ahead.”  His audience understood that Graves’s system established that individuals in a company can “respond positively only to those managerial principles” that are pitched in terms that make sense to them at their current level of existence. (Beck 1996 p29)  It is no use appealing to workers in a factory with promises that a new initiative will provide great opportunities for those who seize the day if they are union members who believe that you succeed in life by “going along to get along.”

In Spiral Dynamics Don Beck and Christopher Cowan developed and popularized Graves’s ideas.  Their system divided human consciousness into eight levels or “waves,” and used a particularly vivid form of communicating them, using a color for each level.

The lowest level is instinctive beige.  It is the level of being at which human behavior and consciousness is scarcely differentiated from the higher apes.  Behavior and consciousness are instinctual, based on biological urges and drives.  Humans are socialized as members of a band, and are concentrated on staying alive.  They create sand or cave paintings to show their prey and how to hunt them.  They transmit their skills by ritual and by practice.

Eventually, the instinctive humans at instinctive beige level break through into tribal purple.  At this level, people have become self-conscious enough to want to understand the way the world works.  They explain it with spirits that dwell in every tree and pond and living thing.  They are socialized in tribes, and are focused on safety and security.  Here, humans barely have an ego, in the sense of experiencing themselves as separate from the group.  They think of “we.”

With impulsive red, the characteristic modern Ego first emerges, where individuals first articulate a sense of individuality separate from the group.  The idea of “what’s in it for me” emerges.  In the red level, people develop the idea that the strong and tough prevail while the weak must serve and obey.  It is the spirit of the first great riverine empires where the ego of the ruler merged with God, and everything that moved was ruthlessly subjugated.  People are socialized into empires; the focus is on conquest and mastery.  It is easy to see that slavery is a natural institution for a red society.

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©2005 Christopher Chantrill