Ken Wilber on Growing Up: Why Developmental Stages Get Left Out
In the maps of human development that reach toward higher, more mature future stages, there's wide agreement on three or four of those upper stages too. I'll return to that shortly, because those stages may be describing where we are actually headed. For the moment, let me sketch a shorter model, one with only four stages, just to make the mechanics visible.
I want to use this example partly to show how much weight the "growing up" piece carries. Notice that something along these lines is almost always missing whenever people propose fixes for our current problems. It gets dropped entirely, and the results are frightening. Even a fair number of psychological schools skip over it. That's a real failure.
So here is Carol Gilligan's account of moral development in women. Gilligan became famous worldwide with her book In a Different Voice, which argued that men and women reason along different lines. Men lean toward autonomy, rights, and justice; women lean toward relationship, care, and responsibility. You could compress it by saying men tend to stress agency while women tend to stress communion. Men also tend to think in hierarchical terms, women in relational or non-hierarchical ones.
Feminists in particular ran with that observation. Since many held that hierarchies are the root of every social ill, and that patriarchy caused nearly all of them, and since (the reasoning went) only men participate in hierarchies, the whole thing could be pinned on men. That conclusion made a wreck of Gilligan's second major point in the same book. Her second point was that women's non-hierarchical thinking is itself the product of four hierarchical stages of growth. Those are her own words for them. Her four stages of female development are variations on the same basic six to eight major levels of human growth, the basic stages of growing up.
Before I list her stages, hold onto one distinction, because everything turns on it: there is an enormous gap between dominator hierarchies and growth hierarchies. Dominator hierarchies deserve every bad thing said about them. They oppress, enslave, dictate, control, the way a caste system does. Growth hierarchies run the other direction. Each higher level takes in more, embraces more, feels more, loves and cares more.
Most hierarchies in nature are of the growth kind. Think of the plain sequence from atoms to molecules to cells to organisms. Each higher level contains the one beneath it. Cells don't hate molecules, don't oppress them, don't shut them out. Cells include molecules, hold them, you could even say love them. The growing-up hierarchy I'm pointing at is that sort, a growth hierarchy and not a dominator hierarchy. Please keep that in view.
Gilligan's stages, in her phrasing: stage one she calls selfish, because the woman cares only about herself. The integral framework labels this egocentric. Stage two she calls care, where the woman stretches her concern out from herself to a group or several groups. The integral framework labels this ethnocentric. It's ethnocentric precisely because it runs hard on us versus them, with us as the special ones, the chosen, and them as the infidels, the pagans, the non-believers. Stage three she calls universal care, where concern reaches every human being regardless of race, color, sex, or creed. The integral framework calls that one worldcentric.