Interview with Zak Stein: Nuancing stage theory

Zak has always parsed the pros and cons so well. I used Zak as a source for my paper "Can you be at a level of development?" He also participated in the Metamodern Forum discussion on the topic.

"There's more to the life of the mind that just cognitive developmental stages" (6:47).

"Under some conditions stages are clearly the case. In other cases stages don't apply. [...] The [most classical] misapplication of stage theory is [that it is] not suitable [for] social cultural development" (9:37). In that same section another misapplication is normative judgments of people at different stages.

And getting back to the paper I referenced above: "There's no such thing as being at a stage" (14:19). He goes on to note that in different contexts we can display different skill levels of a particular task.

Another thing touched upon in that paper:

 

"It's precisely that dynamic developmental flow between all these different skill domains which are at different levels. [...] It's not about being at a cognitive level; it's about this ability to move fluidly up and down these skill sets and move across different skill domains so you get an ecosystem of skills as opposed to a central processor that gets you more capacity" (aka as a center of gravity) (18:19).

 

At 32:48 he goes into the fallacy of 'ontogeny capitulates phylogeny' applied to social cultural development, a topic we are exploring in the Graeber/Wengrow thread. At 34:03 he mentions their book specifically on the issue. "The problem here is to over essentialize and to use broad sweeps and to have those broad sweeps have normative connotations." 

 

Which is exactly what the English colonizers did to justify genocide and stealing their land. Well actually it was the 'Great Spirit's' land on which the natives were stewards. But such beliefs were concerned primitive so therefore the natives had no right to that land, as well as their very lives.

 

Starting around 37:20 they then get into the obsession of the ultimate meta justification: Increasing complexity is the answer to evolution and development. Zak brings up that if our current complexity is so great then why are we on the brink of environmental, and subsequently human, collapse?

 

It relates to Wilber early on noting that each stage can go off into dissociation instead of integration. As well as the health or pathology at every stage. As I've argued elsewhere I think western civilization took a wrong turn into crapitalism with its dysfunctional dualistic elevation of man over woman, mind over body, individual over society and so on. Which is based on the difference of real v. false reason as described by Lakoff.

This idea was touched on earlier in their discussion (26:25) with the example of a gifted person having a high mental capacity which could generalize to other domains with the same sort of skill level. But Zak pointed out that just having the transferable comprehension of certain underlying abstract principles across domains is still missing the embodied skill prerequisites for a full understanding and hence actual high skill performance in other domains. I.e. real v. false reason.

 

At 47:00 he discusses different cultural capacities. Europeans had a more effective technological capacity than US natives for 'kinetic warfare.' The problem though is when the Europeans generalized that capacity as defining civilization capacity altogether when the natives indeed had more advanced capacities in other domains. Zak called it a "self-insulating, hypertrophied pathology."

 

Starting at 53:35 he brings up the study he did at JFKU on how different levels interpret levels. Suffice it to say that it explains a number of the common misapplications and distortions of integral theory we see in the community.

"So this is basically Graber's argument about the indigenous peoples of the north american continent. They chose to live this way and they were optimizing for values very very different from the values the Europeans were optimizing for" (62:20). He goes on to say he's a big Graeber fan, read everything he's written and finds him meticulous if sometimes a bit sweeping.

 

They end the interview with Zak talking about the other two domains in his model beside development: Ensoulment and transcendence. Development is about gaining capacity and self-improvement. Ensoulment is losing capacity and getting beneath people in service. Transcendence is neither in stepping back to see the total non-dual whole.

 

FYI: A brief explanation of Lakoff's distinction between real v. false reason here.