Ken Wilber on Why Development Matters More Than the Masculine/Feminine Binary
Carol Gilligan's fourth stage is the one she labels integrated. At this point a woman holds both the masculine and feminine modes together inside her own awareness. In the integral framework, that same stage gets the name integral. The question is why this particular sequence of stages should matter to anyone outside developmental psychology.
Consider a claim you hear constantly: that an inflated patriarchy has left Western culture starved for feminine values, and the cure is a fresh dose of them. The sentiment is everywhere. But it flattens the whole picture. It drops out evolution, it drops out developmental depth, and it ignores the kind of work Gilligan did.
The problem is that feminine values are not a single thing. There is stage one, which is egocentric. There is stage two, which is ethnocentric. Those two stages happen to be the earliest and the most populated. So when someone says the West needs more feminine values without specifying which, they are, whether they mean to or not, calling for more of the narcissistic and the racist and the sexist varieties. Even feminists will tell you those values are doing enormous damage.
What actually helps is more of the stage three and stage four feminine values. The same goes for the masculine side. Masculine values at stages one and two are what build patriarchy in the first place. Masculine values at stages three and four build partnership and the collaborative kinds of society people say they want. Declaring feminine good and masculine bad gets you nowhere. You have to ask which level you are talking about.
Leave the developmental map out of any territory and your understanding of that territory breaks. You end up not with a full and workable account of the world but with a fragmented one, a view that is partial and in places simply wrecked. And when enough of these broken views pile up, you get the roster of global problems nobody seems able to crack. Feed a broken approach into a global problem and the solution that comes out is broken too. For psychology to be any use here, it has to be an integral psychology.
That brings in the integral psychograph. Running up the vertical axis on the left are the six to eight major levels of human growing up, each one assigned a color. Above those sit three to four higher levels, the third-tier stages, which matter a great deal but currently touch well under one percent of the population. The real action stays within the six to eight major levels, up through turquoise in the diagram.
The reason these levels get rainbow colors is practical. Because the levels apply across every line of development, no single name fits them well. Any word you pick tends to flatter one line or one kind of intelligence over the others. So the levels get colors, or numbers, and here both are used at once. A handful of name sets do hold up reasonably well, as long as you keep their limits in mind. One such set adapts the scheme of the developmentalist Jean Gebser. In the Gebser worldview column you find archaic, magic, mythic, rational, pluralistic, and integral, with the super-integral or third-tier stages becoming available to more people as evolution keeps going.
Along the horizontal axis sit some of the major developmental lines, the multiple intelligences, each with its own version of these levels or stages as the various pioneering developmentalists first mapped them.