John Dupuy on the Climb from First Tier to Second Tier
Out of all that came the Sergeant Friday attitude: just the facts, ma'am. A scientific way of seeing the world. Let's figure out what holds up in reality, run experiments, repeat them, and watch the universe reveal its mechanics that way. No more mythic tales, no more scripture, no more picture of God with a long beard up in the clouds, angels hovering, Jesus seated at his right hand. Set all of that aside and work with what can be shown. That shift produced enormous progress, and the Constitution of the United States was one of its better products.
Modernism then coasted along for a good stretch. One thing you notice is that each new level arrives faster than the last, as if the interior evolution of human beings keeps picking up speed. Call that stage orange: rationalism, science, capitalism, the value of the individual. Plenty of good came with it. Consider that two people can talk over a computer, record the conversation, and have listeners pick it up anywhere on the planet. Consider that I'm 58, still have all my teeth, and I'm up and running. Orange delivered.
What it handled poorly were the environment and poverty. Those two problems it couldn't really absorb. So green rose up afterward, the postmodern turn, the one that comes next. Green is warmer, more inclusive, more holistic, and it grew directly out of the excesses of orange and the places orange kept failing. It got going in the late 1950s with the Civil Rights movement, then the counterculture, then environmentalism. Everyone gets an invitation to the party: native peoples, Black people, brown and yellow people, gay people, straight people, and everyone sitting somewhere along the middle. That openness is a real gift.
Green also runs into its own trouble after a while, and some of it comes from not knowing how to relate to orange in a healthy way. It tends to look down on the very stage that made its comforts possible.
Then the developmentalists, Clare Graves in particular, noticed something genuinely strange. He grouped green and everything beneath it as first tier. And then second tier switched on, and it wasn't simply one more rung on the ladder or one more loop of the spiral. It was a break of a different order. Graves described a wide gulf of meaning that gets crossed in the passage from first tier to second.
Here is a signature trait of first tier: all the levels despise one another. They refuse to agree, and each is convinced it alone is right. That's where the culture wars come from. Look at the way the government operates right now, pulled to pieces by the fighting between these developmental levels, these memes.
At the integral level, that changes. You start to see that every one of these stages, from fundamentalism and below, through modernism, through postmodernism, belongs to the same human journey. Each carries gifts. Each carries its own baggage.