Arriving in the city, the peasant from the countryside must find a meaning that corresponds to the life of the city.  The old country ways no longer serve, and the newly arrived city dweller must learn how to thrive in the city. 

A crucial part of the journey from red consciousness to blue consciousness is the break from red exploitation to blue self-emancipation, from subordination to self-government, from status to contract.  In red empires, in red feudal relationships, the exploitation relationship is eternal and immutable.  In red empires, the powerful have the right to exploit for every reason imaginable: because they have the power, because they own the land, because they are better fed, because they are better organized, because they have held power since time immemorial, because the Vikings or the Mongols might turn up next October.  For the subordinate member of such a relationship to emerge into freedom requires first of all a belief that such freedom exists, and then that it is possible to attain it.  This is a factor understood by the leaders of all political organizations.

In Spiral Dynamics, Beck and Cowan present the transition from obedience to the liege lord to obedience to the Law, from red idolatry to blue’s abiding truth.  “In both Judeo-Christian and Islamic history, the Purple and Red tribes requires a vengeful, wrathful God to bring them out of chaos toward authoritarian order.”  Yet this wrathful God offers himself in sacrifice in atonement for the sins of the world; the rigid rules of discipline and purpose are softened by the gentle rain of compassion and forgiveness.  Even the warrior aristocracy developed a taste for rules.  Magna Carta was an effort by the King John’s barons to replace the red relationship based on naked power with a blue legal relationship based on immutable principles.

Beck and Cowen also illuminate the bifurcation of western society in the nineteenth century, how the well-born sons of the middle class abandoned the rules and roles of Protestantism and broke away into the intuitive world-view of Romanticism and the global community of socialism.  The sons of blue craftsmen no longer wanted to live as good disciplined blue soldiers, but wanted to ascend to the creative world of inspiration and creativity.  The sons of orange businessmen wanted to build a world that transcended the petty haggling of the market and its chaotic creativity.  They wanted the world to be organized sensibly and cooperatively in rational socialist argument.  The best and the brightest wanted to move on from the dull routine of traditional rules and roles.  They possessed the discipline and purpose of the middle class from their parents and they wanted to journey on to orange creativity or green community.  But while these sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie were venturing forward in their tens of thousands, a massive immigration was occurring as millions of red peasants flooded into the great industrial cities.  These people needed to take the next step, to the blue consciousness of purpose and discipline.  They obtained them, as we have seen, from a multitude of social structures, most notably enthusiastic Christianity, but also education, mutual aid, living under law.  For those not yet ready for the momentous step there was red socialization in protective semi-red urban tribes of the nineteenth century: the labor union, the political machine, and the criminal gang.

The illumination of Spiral Dynamics shows clearly how Protestantism is admirably fitted to help people negotiate the transition from red consciousness to blue.  As we have seen, the transition occurs when mankind tries to deal with life beyond the face-to-face life of the agricultural village, and was symbolized by the great world religions that began to appear about 500BC and substitute rules and reciprocity for power and subordination.  But that is not the end of the story.  Once men and women have assimilated to the city, they yearn to grow beyond the simple rules and roles of blue consciousness. 

It is time to rehearse all this in the light of the theory of consciousness espoused by Spiral Dynamics and construct a likely story of the world so far.

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©2005 Christopher Chantrill