From: Steve Peterson (peterson.steve@verizon.net)
Date: Mon May 26 2003 - 02:25:58 BST
Hi, DMB, (Platt, all),
Steve:
Wilber's Integral Psychology is definitely on my list for summer reading. I
assume that he goes into greater detail in working psychologists such as
Kohlberg, Maslow, Erickson, and Piaget into his system than he does in SES.
The reason I feel that I want to look much deeper into child development and
the MOQ is because, unlike you, I don't see the stages of Kohlberg, for
example, fitting so neatly into the MOQ levels. Kohlberg's research was
based on giving young boys scenarios such as a man steals a drug that his
wife needs for survival because the drug maker was charging a ridiculously
high price that the man couldn't afford. He listened to the boys
explanations of why they think he was right or wrong to classify the boys
into his moral levels. My problem is that all the levels require a degree
of intellectual sophistication to support any explanation of the morality of
the choice. It seems to me that we would have to see the emergence of a
child's participation in social patterns before learning language, so the
conventional stage of moral development would be too late to indicate the
onset of the social level. I guess the preconventional /conventional /
postconventional stages of moral development would not represent emergence
of a particular type of pattern in a person's development, but rather
dominance by a particular type of pattern.
Also, though Wilber integrates such psychologists into his system which
seems to make it easy to then translate into Pirsig's, Wilber does not have
a social level. Because he looks at social and individual aspects of all
occasions, he doesn't seem to see a social level as a stage of human
development. His stages are most generally described as matter, body, mind,
soul, spirit. Like Pirsig's MOQ levels, I can understand these as levels of
awareness, but Wilber is missing a social step perhaps between body and
mind. (At least such a stage would seem to be needed if my hypothesis about
humans developing through the MOQ levels as stages of development.)
If not for this problem, the project I suggested would be a simple
translation of Wilber into MOQ terms since he has already done the work on
integrating cognitive, moral, cultural, and spiritual development in terms
of consciousness.
I think Wilber may think of the social level as a stream of development with
stages of its own rather than as a stage of development in itself. I really
didn't want to get too much into the child development project until I have
more of a chance to read and think about it. But I'd be very interested to
hear the thoughts of Platt and DMB and any other Wilber readers to know how
they see the MOQ social level in Wilber's work. Is Wilber missing the
social level?
(Like we all probably do with all of our second favorite writers, I sure
wish Wilber would read Pirsig and then write about it.)
Thanks,
Steve
> Hi Steve and Sam:
>
> Steve said:
> : My hypothesis is that a child should progress through the MOQ levels as it
> : matures in the same order that the levels evolved.
> :
> : Within this same proposed project, I want to also compare Kolberg's
> : hierarchy of moral development (Pre-conventional, conventional,
> : post-conventional levels) with the MOQ levels.
> :
> : Has anyone already looked into the MOQ from a child development point of
> : view that I could read in the archives? Does anyone think that this sounds
> : like an especially good or bad project?
>
> dmb says:
> Cha Ching! YES! Our personal development echoes the stages of our collective
> evolution. This is the picture that both Wilber and Pirsig paint. Everthing
> evolves. Unfortunately, you won't find much detail about developmental
> psychology from Pirsig. There's no contractradiction or anything. Its just
> that Pirsig could only afford to present a limited number of detailed
> examples and that's just not his area. But! If one is curious to know what
> Pirsig means exactly when he says that we each percieve Quality differently
> because of the static patterns of our own particular experiences, we
> suppliment the MOQ with guys like Wilber and all the developmental
> psychologist on which his work is based... I've become convinced that a
> psychological understanding of things, as new and imperfect as the
> discipline might be, is indispensible to solving the problems of SOM's
> flatland. How did Pirsig put it? History is biography? Something like that.
> I mean, its hard to ignore the interior and moral dimensions of things when
> we see how critical human development is to the overall health of our
> civilization. How did Mao put it? All wars are a symptom of neurosis and
> pathology? Something like that. (He said it to Nixon.) Its hard for
> intellectuals to ignore morality when when science is applied to the
> examination of moral development.
>
> Sam said:
> just to throw in some more ingredients to the mix, I personally like
> Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and also Erikson's 8-stage theory of
> development (both of which end up describing something akin to an
> 'autonomous individual', as I understand it.)
>
> dmb says:
> Yes! And even though you're suspicious of Wilber, he too likes Maslow,
> Erickson and others and includes their views in his own work. (I'd say that
> personal autonomy is an important feature of the 4th level, but to say its
> the essence we have to ignore the exterior and collective dimensions of that
> level of values.) But given that you like these developmental hierarchies,
> how is it you can reject Pirsig's?...
>
> Sam said to Paul:
> My worry is that this then ties into a Platonic perspective, ie quality
> increases with abstraction, or, in different terms, you pursue the good/DQ
> through intellectual ascent. I'm not sympathetic to that point of view, but
> I'm happy to hear from people who are.
>
> dmb says:
> As I and others have repeatedly tried to point out, this notion of the 4th
> level as mere abstraction doesn't look like the MOQ that I know. Pirsig says
> flat out that the 4th is more moral than the 3rd. I honestly don't know why
> you REFUSE to admit that Pirsig ain't Spock. I mean, the MOQ is largely an
> attack on amorality, especially at the intellectual level. The intellect
> that you're objecting to is SOM, which is exactly what Pirsig objects to.
> This is the whole point of Lila, no? Not just to attack SOM, but also
> replace it with the MOQ, which paints morals as the center and substance of
> everything. Your insistence that a footnote from LILA'S CHILD defines the
> intellectual level as the ability to "manipulate symbols" also reduces the
> 4th level to mere abstraction. But given that Pirsig says all of life is an
> ethical activity, it seems quite unfair and wrong-headed to accuse Pirsig of
> such a thing.
>
> But more to the point, I almost answered Steve's question by accident
> earlier today, even mentioning Kohlberg's moral stages. Just as explicitly
> but even more specifically, we see that Wilber, via Kohlberg and others,
> that the developmental stages are not just cognitive, ie levels of
> abstraction, but also have a moral dimension that goes along with a
> particular sense of identity and outlook. Its all part of the way we look
> and the world and these various dimensions all develope together. That
> doesn't mean that smart people are always more moral. Unfortunately, we tend
> to see cognitive abilities as seperate from moral character and that tends
> to produce all kinds of lop-sided development and such, but I'll save that
> level of detail for another day.
>
> Wilber from his INTEGRAL PSYCHOLOGY: (emphasis is Wilber's)
> "Each time the self's center of gravity identifies with a new and higher
> basic wave of unfolding (level), it doesn't just have a new sense of
> IDENTITY, it has a new and higher VIEW of the world, with a wider and more
> encompassing set of MORALS and PERSPECTIVES. The pivotal figure here is
> Lawrence Kohlberg, whose work, building on tht of Baldwin, Dewey, and
> Piaget, demonstrated that moral development goes through six or seven
> stages. The individual starts out amoral and egocentric ("whatever I want"
> is what is right), moves to sociocentric ("whatever the group, tribe,
> country wants" is what is right), to postconventional (what is fair for all
> peoples, regardless of race, color creed).
>
> dmb says:
> Finally, the answer to Steve. I'd already identified the postconventional
> level with Pirsig's 4th. I'd now also add that, roughly speaking, it looks
> like the preconventional would be associated with Pirsig's 2nd level and
> sociocentric is clearly Like the MOQ's 3rd level. But please put the
> emphasis on "roughly" when I say "roughly speaking". I was looking at some a
> list of eight developmental stages. It included characteristics and examples
> and even quatified the percentage of the population at the various levels,
> so it was pretty easy to see that these stages are demonstrable in the real
> world. But the curious thing is that is was finer that Pirsig's. I mean, all
> eight of the stages could fit in to Pirsig's top two. It was as if we could
> break the 3d level down into five seperate and smaller stages. The intellect
> could be divided into three distinct phases. In Wilber's model there even
> stages of development beyond the intellect, stages in the spiritual realm.
> That's why I ask you to put the emphasis on "roughly".
>
> Thanks for your time,
> DMB
>
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