The Spiral Dynamics perspective understands who this Campbellian hero is.  He is the one who lives in responsible freedom in yellow consciousness.  It is only at this level that people learn that there are all kinds of people in the world, reds, blues, oranges, and greens, that they all have a piece of the truth, and that they are all doing the best they can.  Here is a credo of yellow:

The purpose of living is to be independent within reason; knowledgeable so much as possible; and caring, so much as realistic.  Yet I am my own person, accountable to myself, an island in an archipelago of other people.  Continuing to develop along a natural pathway is more highly valued than striving to have or do.  I am concerned for the world’s conditions because of the impact they have on me as part of this living system. (Beck 1996 p275)

If this seems unexceptionable, it is because the reader already possesses a yellow consciousness and has already internalized the idea of an integrated life, combining reason, feeling, intuition, and community.  The power of this consciousness, this vision, is that it allows its believer to understand how to tolerate the narrow worldviews of the red, blue, orange, and green consciousness, all of which experience reality in true, but limited perspective.  And it is only by understanding the legitimate aspirations of the reds, oranges, and greens that we can construct a road to the middle class for aspiring blues that meets their needs for religion, for education, and for law without violating our own needs and search for meaning.

The crucial base course of the road to the middle class is religion, specifically monotheistic religion, epitomized by Protestantism and Judaism, but also represented by Islam and by Confucianism.  These religions began to emerge in the Axis Time around 500 BC as they replaced the face-to-face culture and instinctive tradition of tribal and village ethos with self-conscious tradition and rules: The Ten Commandments, the Five Pillars of Islam, the Beatitudes, the Five Constant Relationships.  But can these traditions compromise with people exhibiting orange or green consciousness? 

Orange creative consciousness moves a step beyond the personal surrender to self-conscious tradition expressed in the One True Way.  It now experiences life as a game to be won, and the rules of the game not as immutable divine law, but as pragmatic norms that must justify their authority with efficacy or be subject to amendment or replacement.  The appropriate strategy of orange creatives towards the rule-and-role culture of blues is to accept the right of blues to tie themselves up with rules, but to deflect their attempts to make rules for the orange creative who lives to create, not to follow rules with the herd.  Green communitarian consciousness moves even further away from the One True Way.  For greens, the idea of a fixed, immutable truth is anathema.  Truth is relative, and questions of the spirit, insofar as they penetrate to societal affairs, should be resolved by voluntary and bilateral dialogue in a spirit of accommodation and good faith.

Of course, the opposition of orange and green consciousness to the One True Way of blue consciousness is not quite the open and enlightened vision it imagines itself to be.  Orange creatives believe that their gospel of creativity is the One True Way, and are impatient with the blue purposive who merely extols rule following.  The green communitarians believe that the gospel of non-judgmentalism is the One True Way, and are impatient with the unenlightened that lack the understanding to celebrate and practice universal community and caring.  But most will allow that people ought to be allowed to practice their religion provided they do not force their enlightened betters into their superstitious practice.  In the end, however, it is the responsibility of the enlightened to understand and tolerate the ignorance of the unenlightened.  It takes work, the work of putting oneself in the position of the Other.  The advice of Mrs. Patrick Campbell, the Edwardian actress, still remains as the counsel of wisdom: Do anything you want, but don’t frighten the horses in the street.  For when the horses are frightened, they may bolt, and trample the small party of the enlightened ere they can leap to safety.  Plato was sanguine about this at the end of the Parable of the Cave.  What will happen to the enlightened one once he descends from the mouth of the Cave to his fellow prisoners and tries to educate them to the wonders he has seen?  “If they could lay hands on the man who was trying to set them free and lead them up, they would kill him.” (Cornford 1945 p231)  The enlightened ones must tolerate the compact beliefs of the unenlightened, both from principle and from pragmatism.  The people on the road to the middle class need their old time religion.  With a little care and strategy, their religion need not cramp the style of the orange creatives and the green communitarians.

Education is the wearing surface of the road to the middle class.  The people on the road to the middle class want this wearing surface to be hard, durable aggregate that emphasizes the basics—reading, writing, and arithmetic, with Bible study thrown in.  The orange creatives want a bracing education for adventure, and the green communitarians want a road with a soft, adaptable surface, suitable for an education in creativity, in self-discovery, and in awareness of other cultures.  In the mid nineteenth century, when education was driven by parent opinion, the schools focused on the basics, and the reformers who agitated for government education were also interested in basic literacy, because they were frightened by the hordes of illiterate immigrants in the cities, and wanted to teach them basic literacy and American culture. 

But as the nineteenth-century wave of immigrants became literate and assimilated, the schools began to change.  They started, under the influence of John Dewey, to deliver a “progressive” education, less focused on the basics, and more focused on creativity; they began to focus on the educational needs of the middle class rather than the working class.  This development would have been beneficial if the school system had developed a balanced menu of schools, from the basic literacy mill in the inner city to the invitation-to-creativity in the professional suburbs.  Of course, if the schools had been independent private institutions, marketing themselves to various market niches, they would have responded more or less to the needs of children as perceived by their parents.  Instead, the schools remained in the public sector, becoming highly bureaucratic organizations rather than a spontaneous, Hayekian order.  They responded to the most articulate and politically adept and, after the nature of large organizations that strive to avoid the complexity and confusion of a large menu of options, tried to establish a uniform system of one-size-fits-all that failed to satisfy anyone.  Thus the United States of the early twenty-first century has a one-size-fits-all education system controlled by the class of green communitarians, who confess a faith of relativism and diversity, yet demand that all children be sent to the “common schools,” whether they need drilling in literacy and numeracy, an invitation for adventure, or sensitivity training in other cultures.  The government program that began as a deliberate attempt by the dominant political interests to socialize the children of immigrants to literacy and Americanism to help them negotiate the red/blue transition has become a government program driven by the latest dominant political interests to socialize children to green communitarianism and cultural relativism.  Viewed from the Spiral Dynamics perspective, this policy makes a lot of sense—for the education of the children of college professors, museum curators, and foundation officers.  But it makes no sense for the children of city immigrants, who need help negotiating not the transition from orange to green, but from red impulsiveness and victimhood to blue purpose and discipline.  The current system works well for the well born, indifferently for the middle-class, and disastrously for the lowly born.  This is borne out by contemporary cultural commentary at the turn of the twenty-first century.  David Brooks reports in Bobos in Paradise that the bohemians and the bourgeoisie have merged into an upper class that celebrates achievement and creativity.  In “The Organization Kid” in the April 2001 Atlantic Monthly he describes how the current crop of achiever high-schoolers are remarkably focused and goal-driven.  Meanwhile the average test results of American school children come in below the average for western nations, and the inner-city schools remain a disaster area with high drop-out rates, violence, and low academic standards.

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©2005 Christopher Chantrill