Conservatives And The Creative Impulse Part Ii - Road to the Middle Class

IN PART one of this essay we examined the deep philosophical difference between the bared breast and the broken bra strap, and how they symbolized two kinds of creativity: the impulsive creativity that has long been championed by the left and the ruled-based creativity that has been practiced but not particularly championed or even understood by conservatives.

Then we posed the question: how might conservatives champion rule-based creativity over the destructive “No More Rules!” creativity of our friends on the left. We needed a new psychology to provide context for a conservative creativity-of-the-rules that could meet and beat the left’s vision of creativity as a victory over repression. But where could such a miracle be found?

Fortunately for us, some American psychologists have already developed such a psychology. It is a stage theory that extends Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, but in a way that powerfully supports the conservative view of humanity and society. Developed by Clare Graves in the 1960s and 1970s it was published and popularized by Don Beck and Christopher Cowan in Spiral Dynamics in 1995. (Link here for more details.)

Spiral Dynamics views human consciousness through the metaphor of an eight-turn colored spiral, an expression of faith that “the psychology of the mature human being is an unfolding, emergent, oscillating, spiraling process marked by progressive subordination of older, lower order behavior systems to newer, higher order systems as man’s existential problems change.” It starts with instinctive beige and then proceeds step by step to tribal purple, power-obsessed impulsive red, rule-following purposeful blue, adventurous creative orange, and caring and sharing communitarian green. Then comes the jump to integral yellow, holistic turquoise, and more.

This all reads like the usual psychobabble, but the question is does it work? Here’s how it could tell the story of the American Dream, tracing the journey from helpless immigrant at Ellis Island to wise compassionate conservative.

America’s immigrants, “huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” arrive in the city barely able to function in the new land. Many of them are impulsive red, knowing only power and powerlessness. Powerless victims, the impulsive reds spiral downwards until they find salvation in the life of rules, learning to live as purposeful blue in the world of the enthusiastic Christian and the respectable middle class. But the children of the middle class want a little adventure. Finding that life in safe suburban Scarsdale a hell they yearn to bend the rules a little and treat life as an adventure. They become creative orange, playing the business game or the arts game to win the glittering prizes. In their turn the children of inventive entrepreneurs reject the hero’s journey of creativity. They choose instead the inner journey of spirituality and long to cooperate and share rather than create and compete. They become communitarian greens. Beyond green, of course is integral yellow where the compassionate conservative, shall we say, comprehends all the levels below and understands, with writer Ken Wilber, that each stage “transcends and includes” the ones before it. Above this ridge, of course, new peaks will rise.

We can use the system to analyze our political parties. The Democratic Party is clearly a coalition of caring communitarian greens and helpless red victims organized to hate blue bigots and orange corporate exploiters, while the Republican Party is a coalition of blue believers and orange business entrepreneurs organized to extol rules and enterprise, committed to lifting reds out of victimhood and restrain the self-congratulation of elite green altruists.

In the academy, we have a spiral tangle. We have people who speak lovingly of green cultural diversity, orange creatives competing for the glittering prizes, professors insisting on the sanctity of the blue rules of academic freedom and tenure, and a red power obsession with the idea that rules are a mask for power.

Spiral Dynamics has an important message for people that believe that rules are a mask for power. It insists that each level builds upon the previous levels, so you cannot build creativity unless you build it upon the rules. But if you cut out a level, then you regress to the level just below. If you insist upon “No More Rules,” or “bourgeois rules are a mask for power” you will regress to the world of pure power and you will have no rules, no creativity and no community. And that, of course, is exactly what conservatives have insisted all along.

For over a century, conservatives have desperately needed a system that could replace the Lockean, Humean world that Kant demolished but could also ace the Fichtean, Freudian impulsive ego. With the psychology of Clare Graves and his followers we can now address our opponents in the culture war with confidence. If we want it, we can have a psychology of creativity that fits the facts and they don’t.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

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Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches... they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

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