Evolution and Spiral Dynamics - A New Approach to the Culture War: A Five Part Series
Part 1
Today, I begin a writing experiment with the help of Claude AI to create a virtual conversation in which I interview an Evolutionist, David Sloan Wilson, and a Developmental Psychologist, Don Beck. Before this conversation, I learned of David’s work through his books, This View of Life (2019), and Evolution for Everyone (2007). I have spent more time with Don Beck’s Spiral Dynamics, Mastering Values, Leadership, and Change (2005) (co-authored with Christopher Cowen).
With David and Don’s virtual “help,” I hope to explore a puzzle I’ve been trying to understand from the perspective of Spiral Dynamics. My question centers around a major pivot point in our Culture Wars: Why is the transition from the Blue to the following Orange and Green stages so difficult? (You can find a list of the five central stages I discuss in this series here.)
Part 1: The Sticky Question at the Center of the Culture Wars
Gary: Gentlemen, thanks for sitting down with me. I’ve been chewing on something that connects your two bodies of work in a way I haven’t seen anyone else write about, and I wanted to get your reactions to the intersection I see.
Don, in Spiral Dynamics, you discuss the transition from Blue to Orange and Green, which extends moral concern for others beyond one’s in-group. But that transition seems to face strong cultural headwinds. People at the Orange and Green stages can be dismissive or even hostile toward Blue, causing defensiveness and entrenchment.
David, I’ve been reading This View of Life, and your description of how small groups have what amounts to a genetic predisposition to resist scaling up. You say they resist extending trust and cooperation beyond the people with whom they have relationships. That hit me like a thunderbolt. It occurred to me that what you’re describing might not just be a cultural barrier but something more like a biological barrier sitting right at that developmental transition point.
Am I reading this right? Is the Blue-to-Orange and Green cultural transition fighting our biologically evolved small-group psychology? If so, how can we overcome the problems this creates?
Don Beck: Gary, I’m not aware of anyone addressing this problem in the way you frame it. We tend to talk about stage transitions as if they’re formulaic matters of cognition or values added to the right life conditions and the right dissonance, and people naturally move. But you are right; there’s a stickiness to Blue that I’ve always felt went deeper than just cultural conditioning. When I was working in South Africa, the tribal bonds, the sense of “my people,” weren’t just ideas people held. They were felt in the bones. You couldn’t just argue people out of them.
So yes, I think David’s work gives us a biological explanation for something I’ve observed empirically for decades.
David Sloan Wilson: I think this connection is important, but let me be precise about what the evolutionary theory says. This is a little complicated, so take it slowly.
Multilevel selection theory holds that natural selection operates at multiple levels—akin to developmental levels—within and between groups. Cooperation within groups evolved largely because of competition between groups. You cooperated within your group to successfully work with other groups. Our capacity for cooperation is real, but it was created in a context where the group had boundaries. The in-group/out-group distinction isn’t a bug! This will be a surprise: it’s the mechanism that enabled larger-scale cooperation.
I will explain this shortly. For now, I’ll just say it requires building new institutional and procedural structures that can do at a larger scale what person-to-person accountability does in small groups. This group-to-group cooperation isn’t a genetic change. Its a Cultural evolution that has to create a structure that works with our small-group psychology rather than pretending it doesn’t exist.
Beck: And see, that’s exactly where I think the Spiral framework adds something. Because I think new social technologies emerge at each stage. Blue itself was a breakthrough when it came online, and it is to everyone when they first enter it. Blue’s order and authority figured out how to get beyond Red’s warlordism by creating myth-based membership stories and codes of conduct that could organize thousands or millions of people who’d never meet face-to-face. That was already a scaling solution. But it scaled through identity fusion. You had to be one of us because you believe what we believe, and you worship the way we worship.
Wilson: Right. And from an evolutionary perspective, that’s a predictable solution. You’re essentially creating a symbolic in-group substitute for a direct relationship. Religion, nationality, ethnicity — these function as what I’d call cultural group markers that allow cooperation to scale beyond Dunbar’s number[1]. But Blue still can do this if they maintain in-group/out-group logic, which is vital to their ongoing existence.
Beck: Exactly. So the jump to Orange and Green isn’t just “think bigger.” It’s putting people in situations, especially in work settings, where they’re expected to cooperate with people who might be different from them. Now they have to create identity similarities by holding similar jobs, working for the same company, or going to the same college or trade school. These new shared identities are less organic, less longstanding, less compelling than Blue relationships like family.
Wilson: Young people who leave home for the Military, a trade school, or college may be challenged by the task of leaving a group of people very similar to themselves. These familiar groups worked for them and felt right to them, but now they encounter people they’ve never met before, which can be jarring. As an evolutionist, I would predict that this would be hard. Not impossible, but they’re swimming upstream against a fast current.
Gary: Ok, we can see why the “graduation” from Blue to Orange and Green stages can overly challenge our ability to handle the number of people we have been biologically built to handle. So that is one hurdle to overcome when leaving Blue. Then a person has to surmount the rather cold reception they get from the Orange, rational, empirical, scientific level.
Green comes on later, but it is very active in our media and institutions, so while the young “Blue-in-transition” is not ready for Green, he or she has plenty of cultural opportunities to engage with its value system. The first is as advertised: warm, inclusive, sensitive, and environmentally aware. Healthy Green corrects the cold rationality of Orange. But Green’s earnestness for justice can manifest in the second way it shows up. This is the paradoxical tendency among some Greens, who espouse sensitivity and inclusiveness, to be hostile and condescending toward those who do not live up to Green values.
It seemed to me that neither Orange nor Green was offering attractive alternatives to Blues in the tricky part of leaving their stage. Anyone leaving any stage has trepidation during the transition. This really came home to me in the last election when so much anger and abuse were thrown at the opposition. People considering leaving the new version of the Republican party and having to live up to the performative requirements of Democrats might easily conclude they had no place to go.
David, as I understand Ostrom’s 8 Core Design Principles (CDPs), I can see how they lay a foundation for groups that make the transition to larger scales, and a diagnostic tool for groups that fail that transition. From the perspectives of Orange and Green, they offer insight into the forces promoting or undermining the transition, including their own unconstructive behaviors. Is this a useful application?
Wilson: Gary, I think you’re identifying one of the most practical applications of the design principles that could support people and groups moving on from Blue, or any stage. Let me explain.
Elinor Ostrom’s work — and what we’ve built on it with the CDPs — essentially answers the question: What does it take for groups to cooperate successfully at any scale? By the way, I think any scale encompasses all developmental stages because succeeding stages involve larger numbers and greater complexity. The principles aren’t arbitrary. Just as Clare Graves empirically discovered the first iteration of stages that would become Spiral Dynamics, Ostrom’s model emerged from a large study of groups confronting the “Tragedy of the Commons” phenomenon worldwide. The patterns she discovered were so robust that they became the functional requirements that track what evolution has already solved at the small-group level. Things like shared identity and purpose, equitable distribution of costs and benefits, fair conflict resolution, monitored agreements, local autonomy nested within larger structures, and so on.
Beck: When you list them this way, David, I hear a description of what healthy Blue accomplishes. A well-functioning Blue system already does most of those things. At least internally, because their worldview does not yet recognize the need to cooperate with outsiders, people who are different in some manner. Similarly, a teenager preparing to move on to the next stage does not yet realize the new people, cultures, and social relationships they will encounter.
Wilson: Exactly right. And that’s why I think Gary’s insight has real teeth. He pointed out that the Blue-to-Orange/Green transition is especially hard. Luckily, the design principles work for any transition being navigated. They describe functional requirements for cooperation at any scale or across any stages. So when a group is trying to expand its circle — moving from ethnocentric to worldcentric, in the language you both use — the design principles tell you what must be preserved and extended, not just what must be left behind. The CDPs are stage-transition enablers! Most transition efforts ignore that, either because they don’t know about them or because they make a half-hearted attempt to use them.
Gary: They didn’t try it, and it didn’t work.
Beck: Oh, I like that!
Anyway, let’s address the other part of Gary’s question, the diagnostic angle. Because you can take the principles and look at how, in detail, Orange and Green violate them, and suddenly you have an explanation for why their attempts to pull Blue forward so often backfire.
For example...
Gary: Wait, we need to review the principles first, so we know what we are talking about. David, this is the core reason for this discussion, at least for me. I felt, when I saw them, that they could be the key to the resistance of many at the Blue stage, as they moved to the world-centric stages, Orange and Green.
To be continued…
A note on my work. This series was developed in conversation with Claude AI, my research assistant, who helped me organize my ideas—an exercise that can easily overwhelm my ADHD brain. Claude also helped me refine sentences that were working too hard and, I hope, made them more digestible. Over several weeks, as I conceived this series, I used our conversations to test ideas with Claude’s representation of Wilson and Beck that I have been noodling for some time. So, the prompts are mine. The link I discovered between Wilson and Beck’s theoretical work is mine. I have made some changes in Wilson and Beck’s responses to make their language more natural to my ear, and in a few cases, more representative of what I understand to be their point of view.
[1] Dunbar arrived at the number of 150 people with whom you can maintain stable social relationships by studying the correlation between neocortex size in primates and the size of social groups they lived in. The human neocortex can handle about 150 stable relationships. This includes relationships like family, friends, coworkers, etc. (Seems pretty high to me!)
Very creative use case for Claude. A dialogue/debate between top researchers in two fields that creates an interdisciplinary field of play. Look forward to further posts!