Essentially if someone exhibits, inhabits, manifests a Pluralistic life what more is there? Or is living a Pluralistic life insufficient to be considered Green or perhaps on-the-edge of Integral?
As Ray says, these are all exterior surface features that may or may not reflect interior deep features. It is very difficult to gauge one’s interior development based on the visible behaviors that we can observe. If anything, it’s because we don’t know what these people are like in different contexts, or behind closed doors. Everyone puts on an “act”. Even you. Even me. The question is, how aware are we of our degree of authenticity or inauthenticity at any given moment?
Stages of development refer to the various complexities of interior thought that different people are capable of (at least in terms of the cognitive line), which ends up producing different views, values, and behaviors (each of which correspond to other developmental lines, which typically lag a stage or two behind the cognitive). It’s a person’s capacity to take multiple perspectives, and to fold these multiple perspectives together in different ways. At the green level, it’s s capacity for genuine systemic thinking (which is why the healthy forms of progressivism/wokism tend to emerge out of mature green, and the unhealthy forms often come from lower-stage enactments of those ideas), radically inclusive values, and worldcentric concerns. It describes a cognitive capacity for perspectivism, pluralism, and constructivism.
This is why, for example, someone can have an Orange cognition, and “play an orange game” while interacting with others, while coming from a predominantly Red stage of values, ethics, intrapersonal capacities, etc. But we can’t see the main drivers of a person’s behavior, only the behavior itself, which is often too little information for us to accurately reconstruct the person’s interior.
Also important to note that, when a “later” stage gets adopted by the rest of society, it has a way of re-translating prior stages.
For example, as I’ve mentioned before, in 1958 only something like 8% of the population supported interracial marriage. These days it’s more like 94%. Does that mean that everyone suddenly popped out of the amber stage, into Orange and Green? Well some of them, maybe, but studies suggest that upward of 60% of people continue to have an amber center of gravity today – yet interracial marriage still has such high majority support. How could this be?
Simple: once Green was adopted by society (and all the civil rights legislation that emerged from this stage), this effectively reformatted what it means to be “ethnocentric” in America. Later stages exert a regulatory force on prior stages.
And this is real progress, and progress that should be celebrated! But we should be clear what kind of progress it actually represents. It’s a progress of better/healthier horizontal translation, not necessarily one of vertical transformation.
So when it comes to something like “Green christianity”, which certainly exists (but much more rare than traditional Amber versions), all of those participants would definitionally have needed to first grow through Orange, because there is no skipping stages. Which means, if you are a Green Christian, you probably no longer believe that Christ was literally born from a biological virgin, you probably no longer believe that Moses literally parted the Red Sea, you probably no longer believe that Noah literally filled a boat with two of every animal on the planet. There is still Faith, there is still Mystery, there is still God — but enacting these things no longer requires you to believe in the various kinds of traditional myth that has surround them for centuries. A Green Christian would be perfectly fine with using a person’s preferred pronouns as a sign of respect (though they would likely resist the idea that such speech be made mandatory, if they have integrated their Orange in a healthy way.) A Green Christian would never identify themself as a “Christian nationalist” (even while perhaps being a patriotic Christian American in their everyday life.)
So when it comes to “ethnocentrism”, there are all sorts of ways to draw the “us vs. them” line. It doesn’t only need to be based on ethnicity. It can be drawn on partisan lines, religious lines, nationalist lines, etc. Which means that, even if you have multiple ethnicities in your Church, if that Church is still emphasizing myths and beliefs and narratives over a) direct experience, b) empirical reality, or c) minimally-rational humanitarianism, then chances are it’s still an Amber church.
And here’s the thing — there is nothing wrong with that. It only becomes a problem when Amber attempts to assert its views on everyone else. Which can be anything from banning abortion, to banning gay marriage, to banning books, to forcing schools to hang “In God We Trust” signs. (Which is the same criticism I have for the Amber ethnocentric segments of the left, who also try to assert their views on everyone else.)
This is why it’s important to make room for all stages, but equally important to govern from the highest stages available. We live in a society with a value stack that runs from Amber through Orange to Green, with a dim possibility of Integral emergence in the future as life conditions continue to present themselves.
Which means that our solutions need to find a way to align that values stack, rather than privileging the earlier stages in the stack over everyone else. Amber is at its best when constrained by Orange, Orange is at its best when constrained by Green, and Green is at its best when constrained by Teal. And there are versions of Christianity, for example, at every one of these altitudes, even if they don’t necessarily think of each other as being “real Christians”.
And it’s not like these structures ever go away as we continue to grow and develop. We don’t lose ego altogether when we evolve into ethnocentric stages. We don’t lose ethnocentricity altogether when we evolve into worldcentric stages. Rather, the earlier structures are reformatted and “put in service” of the higher stages. I just talked to Ken about this over the weekend in our latest episode.
For example, we here in Integral Land have our own ethnocentricity — e.g. my job is to create integral content for integral people. That is a “soft” ethnocentrism, an “integrated” ethnocentrism, which is put in service of my higher worldcentric and kosmocentric values. We can still have an “us”, we can even still have a “them”, but the line between them becomes far more permeable and far less opaque. I’ll still save my own family in a fire before everyone else’s. I’ll still put my own oxygen mask on before my kid’s, because that would be an act of ego-centrism that is in direct service to the larger ethnocentrism I feel for my own family. Et cetera.
