Well, are the Arabs ready for Democracy?

 Afghanistan, Africa, cross-cultural, government, heroes and inspirational figures, international relations, meta-programmes, Middle East, morality, NLP, politics, Psychology, racism, religion, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  6 Responses »
Apr 112011
 

On 22 February David Cameron, in an address to the Kuwaiti parliament, hit out at suggestions the Middle East “can’t do democracy”, saying: “For me, that’s a prejudice that borders on racism.”

Even at the time it was blatantly clear that such statements were part of his and French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s campaign to persuade the United Nations to approve military action against the forces of Muammar Gaddafi viciously and bloodily repressing pro-Democracy rebels across Libya.

A little over 6 weeks later, as NATO tries not to apologise for bombing the hell out of the first armoured column the hard-pressed Libyan rebels have been able to assemble in what is now a de facto civil war…as revolutionary Tunisia and revolutionary Egypt wonder what on earth to do next now they’ve gotten rid of their dictators…and Syrian security forces exterminate yet more pro-Democracy protestors on the streets of Deraa, I’d argue it could be construed as racist not to ask the question: “Can the Arabs do Democracy?” After all, thousands of Arabs have died over the past 3 months in the name of Democracy. If we’re not to devalue their lives, we have to ask whether their sacrifice for their cause is justified. We’d certainly ask it if thousands of demonstrators were being killed systematically by the police in cities across Europe!

So, are Arab peoples significantly different in their genetic make-up from the Europeans and North Americans who do do Democracy? Certainly, from the huge amounts of evidence analysed by the likes of Elliott Sober (2000) in the past 20 years, it would appear not. In which case, if there is a difference in the potential for Democracy, it has to lie primarily in cultural factors.

It’s interesting that it’s generally accepted that, while Europe languished in the Dark Ages, the Arabs not only kept Hellenic science alive in Mathematics, Astronomy, Medicine and Philosophy but added to many of the ancient Greeks’ works. It’s even of note that some attribute the first flourishings of European science coming from the Moorish invaders of Spain bringing Arabic science to the continent. From there the European Renaisssance developed and eventually the ‘scientific revolution’ of the 17th and 18th Centuries. Meanwhile, Arabic science – and, with it, Arabic culture largely fossilised. This digression into the development of science is important because, while the link between cultural and scientific development is extremely ‘rough and ready’, there does indeed seem to be an unexplored correlation. Many commentators – eg: Norman Tebbitt in his August 2005 remarks on the 7/7 bombings – attribute the fossilisation of Arabic science and culture in the late Middle Ages to the increasing stranglehold of Islam on Arabic thought. Others attribute it to the political systems in place. Yet others attribute it to the cumulative effect of a plethora of small things such as the Arabic failure to adopt a patenting system as the Europeans did which made science potentially profitable for its exponents.

Whatever, over an 800-year period – arguably starting with the signing of the Magna Carta at Runnymede in 1215 – the Europeans made a slow and tortuous progress to modern Democracy while the Arabs changed little other than for some of their national borders to be imposed upon them (eg: Iraq, Libya) and to accept some of the benefits of Western science and engineering (medicine, transport infrastructure, etc) during the ‘days of empire’.

In terms of political systems, very little has changed. Some countries like Saudi Arabia still have absolute monarchies while others – eg: Egypt, Tunisia, Libya – had their kings replaced with autocratic dictators who were either military leaders or sponsored by the military.

These are, of course, generalisations – Lebanon, for example, stands out as different in many ways – but the post-colonial history of that country is far from being that of a stable, democratic, unified nation.

In terms of cultural vMEMES, Europe could be generalised in the late Middle Ages as being dominated by RED-thinking despots with a power hierarchy of lords and nobles, with the Roman Catholic Church providing some semblance of BLUE structure and PURPLE clan networks largely suppressed and/or dying out in terms of influence. Now Western Europe (and North America) can be generalised as largely dominated by BLUE political structures (democratic systems) exploited by ORANGE-driven political achievers and business corporates – with some sheen of GREEN influencing moral thinking in social matters, particularly in the Scandinavian countries.

In contrast the Arab nations have largely remained ruled by RED despots, with Islam providing a BLUE veneer of conscience and duty. The PURPLE clan (tribal) networks still flourish in many of the Arabic countries but have been quite suppressed in others – eg: Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya. The army generals in these countries function in a similar way to the Mediaeval European king’s lords.

So where have these intense campaigns for Democracy in the Middle East and North Africa come from and what does Democracy really mean to the protestors?

Complex ideas for simpler worldviews…?
I’ll never forget, in late 2000, during the HemsMESH project, hearing Spiral Dynamics co-developer Don Beck talk about irresponsible, profit-oriented ORANGE beaming television images of high value/high status items into homes where the thinking was largely in PURPLE and RED. The danger in this, as Beck saw it, was that RED would drive many of those people to do anything to get those items.  As they lacked BLUE disciplines and ORANGE planning and RED has no concept of time other than NOW, some of those people would deal drugs, commit burglaries, extort others and prostitute themselves to get what they saw as necessary for the ‘good life’ – Robert K Merton’s (1938) version of anomie. Those wo resort to criminal acts to get what is desired are Zygmunt Bauman’s (1988) ‘seduced’ criminalised. Those whose thinking was more dominated by PURPLE would most likely feel more alienated than ever from the ‘others’ – those who have the ‘good life’ – effectively Bauman’s ‘repressed’.

Beck was talking about the residents of the South-East Wakefield former mining villages where, until the mines closed, life for a couple of centuries had been little more complicated than going to school to get the basics of reading and writing until you were old enough to go down the pit (males) or get married, have children and look after the household (females). Until the mines closed, their ‘life conditions’ didn’t require thinking more complex than PURPLE and RED. Then, in less than a generation the mines were gone and incomes severely reduced while ORANGE consumerism tempted them endlessly with the ‘good life’ they simply couldn’t have legally without a substantial upgrade in thinking.

Beck’s concerns can be applied in large measure to the peoples in the Arab states whose life conditions, for perhaps centuries, have required little beyond PURPLE and RED. Where more complex thinking has emerged, it has tended be isolated to the universities or repressed or both. It’s no accident that it’s largely been imported workers from the West (management and technology) and places like the Philippines and the Indian subcontinent (more manual labour) who have got the wealth-producing oil out of the ground in those Arab states which have the ‘black gold’.

But especially with the advent of the internet and more especially with the development of social networking (Twitter, Facebook, etc), the Arab peoples have been exposed to complex concepts previously rarely experienced by the average Arab in downtown Benghazi or the backstreets of Deraa. Like the former coalminers of South East Wakefield, many Arabs are being exposed to ideas with which they do not yet have the mental and cultural sophistication to fully understand and assimilate.

The result has been the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ – an angry outpouring of long-suppressed dissatisfaction with the authoritarian regimes which have ruled them largely through the shadowy terrors of a police state. They are driven by a RED contagion that flies in the face of the water cannons, the tear gas, the rubber bullets, the baton charges and all too frequently live ammunition. In spite of the appalling injuries and sometimes death inflicted upon their fellow-protestors right by their side, they come back time and time again, more and more determined to get rid of their autocratic rulers.

Apart from the sheer level of violence inflicted by the state upon the protestors - most obviously in Libya but Syria, Bahrain and the Yemen have also seen levels of violence by the state that are totally unacceptable to most North Americans and Western Europeans – there is a problem in understanding what the protestors want and how they might get it. They certainly know what they don’t want – Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, Hosni Mubarak, Muammar Gaddafi, Ali Abdullah Saleh, etc – as if a collective move-away-from meta-programme was running their heads…. But do they know what they want beyond some ephemeral idea of ‘Democracy’…?

This is where there seems to be a clear lack of charismatic, ‘big-vision’ leadership. There are no Mahatma Gandhis or Nelson Mandelas - not even a Gerry Adams! – to articulate what the new Tunisia or the new Egypt might look like…what model of Democracy they might actually try to implement. So far the Arab Spring revolutions seem to be composed genuinely of the ‘little people’ who had simply had enough of the ‘bad guys’ terrorising and exploiting them and got some ideas of what to do about it from the internet.

So the problem of the lack of leadership also leads to what might be termed a ‘vision vacuum’.

History shows that, where there is chaos and a lack of leadership and vision vacuum, then the vacuum can be filled very easily by those who offer quite an unsavoury vision as long as it is a vision that offers hope and order from the chaos and is accompanied by strong leadership. Just think of what Adolph Hitler offered bankrupt and depressed Germany in the 1930s. Just think of what the Taliban offered ravaged Afghanistan after the failed governments that followed the Russian invasion and withdrawal.

Fortunately – so far, at least! – the Arab Spring seems to be running a move-away-from fundamentalist Islam meta-programme. But how long can the vision vacuums last before people became desperate for strong leadership and someone or something to give them vision?

The West is right to be concerned that al-Qaeda or their ilk could take advantage of the vision vacuums.

How Democracy works
Using 4Q/8L, it’s possible to take a sociopsychological analysis of the way Western Democracy works.

Firstly the structure (Lower Right) is largely BLUE in that the political systems are tightly controlled, very bureaucratic and centred on the principle of one (free adult) person/one (secret) vote. The cultures of the Lower Left are all over the Spiral’s 1st Tier but the vast majority of the population’s thinking is in the PURPLE, RED and BLUE zones. There isn’t that sizeable a proportion of the population thinking in vMEMES beyond BLUE. (In 1983 Anne Colby, Lawrence Kohlberg et al found only marginal evidence – around 5% of his samples – of thinking at Stage 5 – the equivalent of ORANGE – in his Stages of Moral Development.) Thus, the ORANGE thinking of key individuals (Upper Left) is able to manipulate less complex thinking in the Lower Left to vote in elections (Lower Right) to their advantage. A prime example of this was the way Tony Blair fought to get and retain Rupert Murdoch’s support for Labour because he knew The Sun - Britain’s most widely-read newspaper – was one of the most powerful weapons in his election armoury. Gordon Brown lost Murdoch’s support in 2009 and the following year Labour lost the election.

Western Democracy is far from being the fair, just and egalitarian concept the West likes to portray it as. Marxists have no hesitation in pointing out how it largely preserves elites. But it does facilitate some social mobility, it does factor in some capacity for change and most people in the Western democracies find it more or less acceptable – and certainly they see it as better than any form of totalitarian or authoritarian government!

If we apply 4Q/8L to the Arab states, we find the Lower Right structure is BLUE enough for the government’s police systems to work but they run on RED power and coercion. There is little BLUE in the Lower Left – in fact, it’s largely fear-conscious PURPLE-dominated. All of which enables RED-led individuals in the Upper Left to use the Lower Right to dominate the Lower Left…until very recently. Now we have an explosion of angry RED in the Lower Left.

Just how much the protestors are driven by RED (and, to some extent, PURPLE) is illustrated by the Libyan rebels who appear mostly incompetent as would-be soldiers and are far too disorganised to take on Gaddafi’s forces who have a strong dose of BLUE military discipline among them. The only time the rebels seem to have real success is when Gaddafi’s forces are reeling from United Nations/NATO airstrikes.

The above analyses of both the Western democracies and the authoritarian Arab states are, of course, full of generalisations. In reality, there are many, many variations which make those generalisations flawed. Nontheless, as a generalisation it can be said that Arab culture and state structures have some way to go before they are ready for Western-style Democracy.

Democracy is said to require:-

  • People be informed enough to take an interest in how they are governed. This assumes a degree of education and intelligence amongst the electorate. Plus, they must have the time and resources to take the interest.
  • It also assumes media, free from government interference, communicating information on the key issues for people to develop an informed opinion. Communicating on issues to the electorate forms a powerful check on what governments do, putting them under scrutiny by the electorate. (Which is why so many leading politicians cultivate the media magnates to win their support.)
  • People doing things the government can’t control. Much in the lives of British citizens is beyond the direct control of governments. Families, religious organisations, clubs and societies, for example, facilitate discussion and debate about public concerns…yet in the UK it is difficult for government to influence them very much.
  • Little desire for radical alternatives. In the UK there is not that much difference between the parties. Those supporting losing parties usually don’t need to fear that their lives will be ‘turned upside down’ as a consequence of their favoured party losing.
    Eg: in the wake of the 2010 general election in the UK, while the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition Government proposed an average cut of 25% in public sector costs, the losing Labour Party conceded that they intended cuts of around 20% – though at a slower pace of implementation.
    Because there is a maximum term a government can serve in a democracy before another election – 5 years in the UK – the losing party have little incentive not to accept defeat. They will get their chance again at the next election.

Clearly there are a large percentage of Arab populations who are poorly educated, with many illiterate. They are not used to having a free media – though much is being made of the ‘free’ rebel radio stations in Benghazi! Plus, there is a minority – hopefully still rather small – who would like to see the revolutionary states dominated by Islamic fundamentalism.

For Democracy to be sustainable, it also has to be embedded as a cultural norm. And there the strong PURPLE tribalism running throughout much of the Middle East and North Africa presents a real problem. A central concept in Democracy is that, after all the attempts to influence and buy influence, the voter should make up their own mind. In PURPLE tribal cultures, there is effectively no secret vote. You vote how your tribal elder tells you to vote.

It would be wrong to say Arab cultures and structures couldn’t very quickly become democratic…but the seriously-flawed experiment in Democracy in Iraq should serve as a warning that change is unlikely to occur quickly, smoothly or painlessly.

Even more the election of Hamas in Gaza in 2006 is a cautionary tale on how Democracy can go badly wrong if the ground is not properly prepared. The campaign was marred by tribal and gang political violence but the election itself was judged fair by the UN.

And let’s never forget Hitler and the Nazis were democratically elected in 1933!

What now?
It’s a pity the revolutionaries of the Arab Spring have tried to drive out all politicians associated with the old regimes and have refused to accept gradual transfers of power and interim arrangements.

Given the brutal, exploitative and deceptive natures of the old regimes, the mistrust of anyone associated with them is understandable. In light of this, the proposals being put forward today by Jacob Zuma’s African Union delegation to the Libyan rebels are clearly inadequate. The government remains in power, their military entrenched around Ajdabiya and Misrata and able to regroup, and NATO airstrikes are halted. In return for which, the rebels are invited to talk to Gaddafi’s government about a transition to Democracy. No wonder Gaddafi endorses the proposals! Given his past record on broken ceasefires and ruthless repression of opponents, the rebels would be crazy to accept.

However, transitional arrangements, if firm, transparent and monitored by, say, the United Nations, could give the Arab states the breathing time they need to put in at least some of the educational and cultural development programmes they need to create the groundwork for Democracy to begin to work.

Don Beck’s (2000) concept of Stratified Democracy - see Stratified Democracy vs Modernisation Theory – posits that the form of government (Lower Right in 4Q/8L) has to be in line with the cultural level of thinking (Lower Left). Thus, Western Democracy (BLUE with an ORANGE leading edge) is a step too far for peoples whose thinking has mushroomed suddenly from cowed PURPLE to furious RED. What is needed is an interim form of government which rules with some semblance of the old, familiar iron fist but is sympathetic to the concept of Democracy and has committed to a clear and transparent process of transition. But that process may take time – bearing in mind that Walt Rostow (1960) reckoned it could take a century to develop a largely tribal African nation into a Western-style consumerist society – and the process will need to be managed and monitored very carefully indeed.

In this sense, the Egyptians may actually be on their way to getting it right. The interim military government seems committed to turning Egypt into a modern democracy; but, rather than rushing at it, they seem determined to take the time to develop a system that is right for Egypt and sustainable in the long term. Of course, the military government also appear to be using some of the old regime’s secret-police-and-torture repression methods and the violence against demonstrators in Tahrir Square this past Friday night (8 April) does not bode well for the future. But the calls of the demonstrators illustrate just how difficult the transition process may prove. The demonstrators were not telling the government what they wanted for the future of their country - a visionary move-towards. Rather they were telling the government more of what they didn’t want – a nihilistic RED move-away from - getting rid of more old regime members of the government and stopping Hosni Mubarak hanging onto the wealth he amassed from exploiting Egypt.

In  thinking about how the Arab states progress towards Democracy, it may  be salutary to consider the former totalitarian communist regimes of Eastern Europe. Many of them. such as Poland, the Czech Republic and the Baltic states, have successfully morphed into liberal, capitalist democracies over a 20-year period – though not without much turmoil. They also had, under Communism, much stronger BLUE in the systems and structures of the Lower Right, giving them a more advanced starting position when their totalitarian regimes collapsed.

Nonetheless, many of the challenges the post-totalitarian Eastern European states faced will be similar to those the post-autocracy Arab states will confront in the coming months and years.

Prisoner abuse and the mess in Iraq

 American Foreign Policy, human rights, international conflict, meta-programmes, Psychology, Spiral Dynamics  9 Responses »
May 102004
 

So Donald Rumsfeld has not only admitted to Congress that, yes, American soldiers have been doing rather nasty and degrading things to Iraqi detainees but there is, in fact, far worse to come - including videos! (It’s already been confirmed that two Iraqis have died in US custody – one with ‘strangulation’ identified as the cause of death on his post-mortem report! – and there will almost certainly be more come to light if allegations of firing on unarmed prisoners from a prison watchtower are accurate.)

However, the abuse, according to Rumsfeld, has not been ‘systematic’ but merely the actions of some ‘bad apples’. As his President, George W Bush, points out, there are some 200,000 American troops in Iraq and the vast majority are doing a demanding and highly-dangerous job with bravery and integrity.

In the larger scheme of things, the average ‘GI Joe’ in Iraq is probably epitomising Bush’s case on a daily basis.

Unfortunately for Bush and Rumsfeld, the International Committee of Red Crossty, Red Cross, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have them squarely in their sights.

According to the Red Cross, they recorded regular abuses at Baghdad’s Abu Grhaib jail between March and October 2003 – the worst being in the October – and presented the evidence to Secretary of State Colin Powell, National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice and Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in January this year. Partly as a result of this presentation and partly from some internal whistleblowing, a low profile investigation was launched. It is claimed Bush was not told – becoming only aware when the now-notorious photographs of sadomasachistic and sexual abuse were broadcast on CBS-TV’s 60 Minutes on 28 April.

Amnesty and Human Rights Watch, however, have been alleging abuses at Abu Grhaib and other prisons for most of 2003. Amnesty filed its concerns with the US Government and the Coalition Provisional Authority as far back as the July – 3 months before the Red Cross were finally stung into action. Amnesty claims it received no response and was consistently denied access to American detention facilities.

For an America supposedly dedicated to bringing ‘freedom and democracy’ to Iraq, the revelations have been, as Rumpsfeld put it to Congress last Friday, “a catastrophe”.

The whole issue of abuse of Iraqi prisoners may prove to be a very personal catastrophe for Tony Blair. With the Daily Mirror – without any advance warning – having published photographs on 1 May of British soldiers maltreating Iraqi detainees, the Ministry of Defence is now admitting to serious concerns that abuse has taken place – the Mirror’s photographs are thought to be fake reconstructions of a real event. Although at least one Iraqi has died in British custody – the abuse by British troops is thought to be on nothing like the scale of Abu Grhaib. (In contrast to the American non-response, Amnesty International say the British government has been engaged in dialogue with them about their concerns since last May.)

According to the polls, the majority of the American public supported the war on Saddam Hussein’s regime. With mass demonstrations in the UK in late Winter 2003 against the proposed war, Blair had to make it an issue of his personal integrity and overstate the (notorious ’45 minutes’) threat posed to get Parliament to approve military action. While Bush, at least until the outbreak of serious violence in Falluja and Najaf this April, generally enjoyed public support, Blair has been on the receiving end of relentless criticism from both politicians and the media almost since the official cessation of hostilities.

The ferocity of the American response to the April uprisings has not gone down well with either the British media or the British public. The revelations about Abu Ghraib have further underminded British taste for what is more and more perceived to be ‘America’s war’ – complemented by suspicion about just when the Blair and/or the Ministry of Defence first knew about the abuses – British or American.

The last thing Blair needs now is abuse by British soldiers to be proven – even small-scale abuse and even if it only involves a few rogue elements. 

The Animal in Man
At a meeting in South-East WakefieId in October 2000, I recall Spiral Dynamics co-developer Dr Don Beck saying: “When a country goes to war, its government had better prepare the people for tales of their troops committing attrocities.”

Don is echoing a First World War British colonel who said: “I’ve seen my own men commit attrocities and should expect to see it again. You can’t stimulate and let loose the animal in man and then expect to be able to cage it up again at a moment’s notice.”

That ‘animal’ is what Spiral Dynamics terms the RED vMEME - the most extreme manifestation of what Sigmund Freud (1923) termed the ‘Id’. The animal’s motif is: “I’ve got the power and I can do whatever I want.” Freud saw sex and aggression as being the two prime drivers of the Id – and that’s exactly what a number of the photos from Abu Grhaib depict!

So, what  Don Beck is saying is that, in the heat of battle, we need the RED express-self-without-consequences vMEME to be high in a soldier’s consciousness. (We don’t, after all, want soldiers worrying too much about taking a bullet or getting blown up – they might refuse to fight or run away!) But that ferocious RED will not always be subsumed on demand by the order and discipline of the BLUE vMEME. In effect attrocities are an almost-inevitable by-product of war.

Historically warfare is littered with attrocities. For example, in Burma in World War 2 British troops frequently executed Japanese prisoners (in total defiance of the Geneva Conventions). (At least the Japanese took prisoners – even if they then worked many of them to death.) In the 1950s torture of rebel prisoners by the British and the French was commonplace in Kenya and Algeria respectively. The My Lai massacre in March 1969 was the single worst attrocity committed by American troops in Vietnam. Amnesty International has alleged abuse and torture by British troops in Northern Ireland while the latest ‘Bloody Sunday’ enquiry still rumbles on…. Etc, etc, etc.

Don Beck, like the First World War colonel, is saying that attrocities will happen. So those in government need to accept that, obviously have means to try to prevent it but also have a way of managing it when it happens.

This is especially difficult when there is a ‘free press’. The Pentagon tried to dissuade CBS-TV from running the Abu Grhaib photos and failed. Parliament, in all its BLUE pomposity, has called into question the motives of Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan for publishing photos he didn’t know to be real, which have damaged the reputation of British forces and may expose them to greater danger. The fact is that the harmonic of RED and ORANGE which drives so much of the Western media is generally more concerned with sales and advertising revenue than the ‘greater good’ – whatever their protestations to the contrary.

Demonsing the Other Side engenders Abuse
Every side in a war portrays themselves as the ‘good guys’. So attrocities are problematic. The good guys aren’t supposed to do that kind of thing. It becomes particularly problematic when a side claims to be fighting a ‘moral war’. The war against Saddam is arguably the most moral war fought by American forces since World War 2. Then General Patton, one of the senior American commanders in the European theatre, conceded: “There would unquestionably be some raping.” He described the anticipated rapes as “a little R&R” for the troops. Hang on! Wasn’t it the Nazis who were supposed to be like that?!?

Or, maybe it’s okay to maltreat the other side’s women if you can demonise them as ‘Nazis’ or ‘Nazi women’ or ‘women of Nazis’ or ‘women who are complicit in Nazis running their country’…?

The PURPLE vMEME likes to discrimate between ‘our tribe’ and ‘your tribe’. The more obvious the distinctions between tribes the greater the discrimination – and in times of trouble that discrimination readily turns into demonisation.

In World War 2, for all that they were ‘Nazis’ and spoke a different language, the Germans at least were similar in appearance to the British and Americans troops they fought against. Not so the ‘slant-eyed, yellow-skinned Japs’. Treatment of German prisoners by the Allies was, in general, markedly more humane than that of Japanese prisoners (when they were taken alive).

In Iraq, it’s almost a PURPLE set-up: American soldiers in Star Wars stormtrooper uniforms, mostly white/some black, largely Christian vs a civilan population, swarthy-skinned, men in ‘dresses’, almost everybody with ‘teaclothes’ around their heads, universally Muslim. And PURPLE’s village gossip mentality turns it into a pastiche of: The Great Satan vs the hijackers who flew planes into the twin towers.

With PURPLE drawing that kind of demarcation – reflected in Donald Rumpsfeld having to remind himself (and Congress?) that “Iraqis are human beings” – licence is given for RED to do as it will. Mikhail Bakhtin (1941/1965) calls it ‘Authorised Transgression’.

Of course, it works both ways. RED, licenced by Iraqi PURPLE’s demonisation of Americans, had a great time killing the four American contractors in Falluja in early April – the incident which triggered the American seige – and then mutilating and burning their bodies.

‘Bad Apples’?…or ‘Systematic’?
So far we’ve looked at the effect of the PURPLE and RED vMEMES in this type of situation. Now let’s look at the role of BLUE.

Following the Second World War, there was much concern about how an advanced civilisation like Germany could have conducted the Holocaust as well as a near-genocidal campaign against the Slavs of Russia and Eastern Europe.

One sociologist who researched this issue was Theodore Adorno who developed the ‘Fascism Scale’, designed to measure what he called the ‘Authoritarian Personality’ (Adorno et al, 1950). This type of person would have rigid beliefs and a general hostility towards other groups, be intolerant of ambiguity and submissive to authority figures.

Adorno didn’t know it at the time (1950) – because Clare W Graves had yet to commence the remarkable project from which Spiral Dynamics would be developed – but he was effectively measuring Graves’ D-Q (BLUE) system.

In one of the variations of Stanley Milgram’s notorious Obedience’ experiments, Milgram’s assistant Alan Elms (Elms & Milgram, 1966), Elms found that high scorers on Adorno’s Fascism Scale administered stronger ‘electric shocks’ than low scorers when ordered to do so by an authority figure. (The shocks and the cries and pleas for help were fake; but nearly all Millgram’s ‘volunteers’ believed they were electrocuting the ’victim’ for real.)

The US Army, like any effective modern military force, has a high BLUE Obedience culture. It has to have for such a disciplined structure to work. In basic terms, subordinates obey superiors – for the most part unquestioningly.

In most documented accounts of military attrocities, torture and abuse, the authority figures have condoned the activities – either implicitly (turned a ‘blind eye’) or explicitly. In some cases they have ordered them directly – as with the infamous Lieutenant William Calley at My Lai.

The BLUE vMEME, in its quest for conformity to the right way to live, is highly responsive to instructions from the correct authority figure. In the Army, the correct authority figures are superior officers.

One of Calley’s soldiers, when explaining why he personally had killed over 50 Vietnamese at My Lai, said, “Because I felt like I was ordered to do it, and it seemed like I was doing the right thing.”

So has BLUE been involved at Abu Ghraib – or has it just been a rather unfortunate excess of RED ‘animal’ licenced by PURPLE demonisation? In other words, a few ‘rotten apples’ or systemised abuse?

There is evidence emerging that the R2I – Resistance to Interrogation – programme is being deliberately employed in Abu Ghraib. This involves sexual jibes and stripping prisoners. Major-General Antonio Taguba, in charge of the US military investigation, has discovered that US military intelligence officers and private intelligence contractors – including CACI International – have influenced the way the abused prisoners have been treated. Whether this has been by direct instruction or by suggestion is not yet in the public domain (to my knowledge, at the time of writing) but interviewed guards have apparently stated that they thought it was their duty to ’soften up’ the prisoners for questioning.

It’s worth noting here that the Washington Post has claimed that in April 2003 the US Defence Department authorised interrogation techniques for the notorious Camp X-Ray in Guant á namo Bay, Cuba, which included stripping inmates, subjecting them to bright lights and loud music, and depriving them of sleep. The Post also claims that similar methods have been authorised for use in Iraq with detainees with links to terrorist or insurgent groups.

Undoubtedly, human rights groups would consider such techniques to be abuse and possibly torture – and there is no doubt of the higher authority from which they originate.

Interestingly, the Amnesty International allegations take in Camp X-Ray as well as Bagram and Kandahar in Afghanistan – and that may link to Taguba’s discovery that Afghan prisoners are being flown into Abu Ghraib by ‘other government agencies’ for interrogation.

Such manipulaton smacks of some pretty powerful ORANGE strategic thinking.

A few ‘rotten apples’? The abuse scandal appears increasingly to have more of a systematic element. How far the ‘abuse element’ went up the Pentagon/Defence Department hierarchies we have yet to find out, but the Washington Post claims include one that some of the techniques used in Guant á namo Bay had to be authorised by Donald Rumsfeld himself. Claims that the Americans are liberators now look rather grubby and stained. Some observers last year joked that it was difficult at times to tell who was the madman with the weapons of mass destruction: Bush or Saddam Hussein. Whether he knew about the abuses or not, whether he is genuinely apologetic or not, Bush’s regime is now tarnished with some of the approbium he so readily heaped upon the former dictator.

2nd Tier Hegemony?
Last year some informed observers stated that they perceived elements of what Spiral Dynamics calls ’2nd Tier thinking’ in the American approach to Iraq – and beyond.

This approach reputedly comes from the so-called ‘Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz Doctrine’ – devised by Donald Rumpsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz when they were out of White House favour during Bill Clinton’s presidency.

This ‘Doctrine’ is aimed at securing American global economic – and, where necessary, military - hegemony in the first decade of the 21st Century. Supposedly it even includes a strategy for taking on China – increasingly acknowleged as developing into the world’s second largest economy by 2010. George W Bush is said to have been much influenced by this Doctrine. Few have seen the core documents – so some caution is needed when commenting upon the Doctrine.

One can see how a ‘Pax Americana’ – spreading the values of ‘democracy and freedom’ around the world – might appear to have 2nd Tier characteristics to some. And since TURQUOISE is said to be willing to sacrifice some for the greater good of all, a war to rid the world of a near-psychopathic ‘evil’ threat like Saddam would fit too. I’ve even seen one comment that maybe the concept of abusing prisoners to obtain critical information reflects YELLOW’s pragmatism!

Franky, I can’t see it. The sheer narrowness of White House/Defence Department thinking and the lack of forward thinking doesn’t seem very 2nd Tier to me.

During the short war the American military were apparently equally surprised by the speedy collapse of the regular Iraqi army (RED trying to run an under-resourced and antiquated BLUE machine?) and the ferocious resistance of the irregular Fedayeen fighters (PURPLE loyalty to Saddam and/or their land?).

The Coalition Provisional Authority seemed to have no real plan of what to do with Iraq once Saddam Hussein was ousted. Resoration of basic utitlities has been painfully slow – leaving people coping at times with basic BEIGE survival needs. The abysmal failure from the start to ensure adequate security – remember the stories of American troops standing by while hospitals and museums were looted? – undermined PURPLE safety needs, leading to a real lack of confidence in the conquerors and facilitating the growth of RED lawlessness.

The Americans have been bounced into many key decisions – from the decision to hand over nominal sovereignty on 30 June to restoring elements of the Iraqi Army they disbanded to police Falluja after the ill-fated seige.

And now, either lack of control (the ‘bad apples’) and/or ill-designed control (systematic, abusive interrogation methods) has produced the abuse scandals, further inflaming Iraqi PURPLE hatreds and justifying RED animal excesses against Coalition troops.

A great deal of what has gone wrong in Iraq was predictable, having an open mind and using a tool like Spiral Dynamics. (Didn’t anybody in the White House, the Pentagon or the Defence Department run a Move Away From meta-programme to work out what could go wrong?)

If the war and occupation of Iraq does not come from the 2nd Tier – and it doesn’t look that way to me  – then it is tempting to assign RED revenge/take-the-law-into-our-own-hands and/or ORANGE oil-greed motives to the Americans. But I wasn’t party to any of the decision-making processes – so I simply don’t know. To speculate probably isn’t helpful.

What is needed now is an honest acknowledgement and thorough analysis of the mess and an assessment of the options available.

It’s notable that Tony Blair is now leading the call for Pakistan to get heavily involved in providng troops to Iraq under a new United Nations mandate. As both a staunchly Muslim state and an ally in the United States’ war against the Taliban, they probably stand some chance of being acceptable to both sides.

Perhaps Blair is yet capable of redeeming himself. I was much impressed with the way he sold the war on Afghanistan to moderate Muslim states – in a way Bush probably couldn’t have done - even learning pertinent parts of the Qu’ran to support his case. At the time I wondered if Blair was indeed capable of YELLOW pragmatism. The way he then tied himself to Bush, come what may, in a largely-futile attempt to influence policy over Iraq has proved very damaging to his credibility domestically, in Europe and around the moderate Muslim world.

Now, though, Blair might be able to influence Bush after all. The President desperately needs some new thinking in his policy making – as Albert Eistein reputedly said: “Problems cannot be solved by the same complexity of thinking which created them.”  This means, to some extent at least, breaking with the closet group of advisers (Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Condoleeza Rice – even Colin, if appropriate) - to allow the input of fresh and different thinking.

Studying the 1961 ‘Bay of Pigs’ fiasco, Irving Janis (1972) noted President Kennedy had a similar closet group of advisers at the time - Janis termed this kind of limited input conferring ‘groupthink’ and observed that it is at its most closed when under external pressure.

Bush needs to break out, not close in. He needs a way out of the mess – a new vision, if you will, before his presidency terminates in ignominy. Blair needs to regain his lost credibility. Bush taking Blair’s advice to heart for once might give them both an important first step.

Credit Card Suicides??

 community, meta-programmes, Spiral Dynamics  No Responses »
Mar 132004
 

For an hour or so on the morning of Thursday 11 March it was one of the lead stories on the news broadcasts. Then, understandably, the unfolding horror of the Madrid train explosions wiped it off the news as surely as the bombers wiped out some 200 commuters.

Yet the story of Stephen Lewis stayed with me. A 37-year-old family man, with a reasonable job and a salary of £22,000 (not unreasonable; around the national average), had killed himself in July 2003 after running up over £65,000 in credit card debt. With his window, Susan, still being harrassed by the credit card companies seeking to recover their money, she and MP John Mann were working the broadcast studios and newspaper offices that fateful morning of 11 March to draw attention to the human cost of Britain’s credit card boom.

Stephen Lewis, it appears, in his desperation, had been running up debts on some of his credit cards to effect demanded minimum payments on others. As a short-term strategy, that was sustainable as long as Lewis could support it by taking on new credit cards. At the time of his death he had a staggering 19 cards! Yet obviously the overall debt would have kept on mounting. Inevitably, the default notices, debt recovery section phone calls and solicitors letters mounted too, finally proving too much for Lewis.

The story had some disturbing parallels with that of Mario Opalka which had emerged earlier in the week.

Opalka, a 44-year old town planner, had hung himself in January after running up £53,000 on internet casinos. He had been subsidising his gambling through credit cards. Again he had 19 of them, with credit limits upto £6,000 each.

Commenting on the Lewis case, Malcolm Hurlston of the Consumer Credit Counselling Service, told The Guardian: “In the past week we have counselled one client with 39 cards and another with 37, so although 19 may be extreme, it is by no means exceptional.” Britain’s credit card companies have been selling their products quite aggressively for some time now. For example, television adverts extol the virtues of certain cards over their rivals, easy-to-complete applications for cards drop through letter boxes on an almost-daily basis and 2-3 cards salespeople from different companies are there to accost travellers on most railway and motorway service station concourses during the daytime.

The availability of ‘easy money’ – high street banks and specialist lending banks such as HFC and The Associates are as much a source as the credit card companies – has been good for the economy, they say, fuelling consumer spending. Yet Britain’s average household debt is the highest in the European Union and increasingly such a cause for concern that the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee is now taking it into consideration in its monthly deliberations on the setting of base interest rates.

So what is going on?

A Psychological Perspective…?
In Spiral Dynamics terms, the ORANGE vMEME is driving the credit card boom. ORANGE quite simply sees that lending money in attractive ‘packages’ (cleverly mixing rates of interest with deferred payment schedules, ‘freebie’ gifts, discount schemes, easy routes to yet more money, etc) will generate greater amounts of money for itself.

Its narrow focus on achieving its own goals and the Big Picture and Move-Towards meta-programmes it tends to run mean it all too easily misses those pitfalls the BLUE vMEME excels in spotting.

Go back 40-50 years and the banks and building societies in the UK – the main sources of money for the man in the street – were very BLUE in their approach to lending. Getting money out of them was not that easy. BLUE’s running of Little Detail, Procedures and Move Away From meta-programmes meant lots of detail in the application, lots of checks and, as often as not, sitting in front of a posturing bank manager and trying to convince him (always a ‘him’ in those days!) personally that a) you wanted the money for a worthwhile reason (a holiday in Spain would have been considered a frivolous waste by most of them!) and that b) you quite clearly had the means to pay it back within the specified period.

As the culture of lending has moved more from BLUE to ORANGE, so the checks have been fewer and in less depth. ORANGE is too focussed on its targets of so much money lent and so much money made to bother with all that BLUE drudgery of checking. Beside which, checking might mean turning more would-be borrowers down and that would make it harder to meet those sales targets!

But what of the people who receive all these wonderful offers of easy money? To examine their thinking in Spiral Dynamics terms…

  • ORANGE is likely to take the money and use it for strategic ends, with some thought as to being able to repay, dependent on its goals being achieved.
  • BLUE is unlikely to borrow unless it has a certain route to pay it back and it is for a worthwhile cause.
  • RED…ah, this is where the problem really comes! Instant gratification is one of the hallmarks of RED thinking – so easy money simply by filling in a form or making a telephone call is very appealing. RED will use that money to fulfull its whims and indulgences – healthy or unhealthy – and since RED doesn’t really think into the future and doesn’t therefore register consequences, the issue of repayment is something to be considered another day. ‘Right now I can do all this with all this money!’ And, when the debt recovery people start getting heavy, why there’s another 2 credit card applications just dropped through the letter box – so the starter debit from credit card 2 can be used to stall the debt recoverers from credit card 1 while the starter debit from credit card 3 can be used to indulge more whims and dreams.
  • PURPLE is less likely to borrow. being much more conservative in nature; but much will depend on the family’s traditional attitude towards borrowing. Indebtedness can be an accepted way of life throughout generations where the PURPLE vMEME is dominant. PURPLE’s need for security means it may sometimes borrow today and accept (often rather stoically) the resulting longer-term penury. Like RED, PURPLE has little sense of consequence except where consequences have been played out in the familial past. Even then the consequences are often accepted rather phlegmatically as part of life. (Hence, the historical influence of the pawnbrokers and the loan sharks among the traditional working classes.)

Since a significant percentage of the British population is centred in the PURPLE-RED zones, ORANGE’s offers of easy money will be taken up quite readily, often without any conception of how to manage repayments. Even for people who have accessed higher vMEMES, the lure of such easy money can excite their RED so much it overrides BLUE’s prudence.

It is those whose thinking has migrated to BLUE or who are in the RED-BLUE transition who will suffer at the hands of the debt recovery people. They will suffer from guilt at having failed to do the ‘right thing’ – ie: keep up the repayments. Those with high PURPLE may also suffer as they may feel they have betrayed and left vulnerable their family.

Mario Opalka told his son, Jonathon, of his indebtedness just two weeks before his suicide. Although Jonathon tried to explore potential solutions with his father,  he says his father was “ashamed”. (Mario had taken up internet gamling after his wife had died of cancer. So one might assume a pattern of damaged PURPLE compensated for by RED indulgence and then punished by PURPLE-BLUE guilt.)

At one level, the lenders wanting the money back is not only desirable but necessary – perhaps for survival! If the BLUE Procedures and Little Detail meta-programmes of the accountants don’t focus on turning theoretical assets into liquid assets, the paper profits generated by the salespeople will turn into cash liabilities – and then the lenders are in debt! The British financial institutions will long remember the Midland Bank getting into serious difficulties in the late 1980s through over-lending – thus making it vulnerable to takeover by HSBC.

So what to do…?
From what must have been a terribly distressing experience, Susan Lewis has put forward 3 proposals: the number of credit cards one person can be given should be limited; there should be a limit on the amount of credit anyone is given; and proper credit checks should be carried out.

Malcolm Hurlston seems to think the credit card companies should manage borrowers through internal processes. “Rather than focusing on the number of cards, however, we would like to see creditors paying more attention to how the customer is dealing with the debt. Any customer paying no more than the minimum amount each month on a number of cards is already over-indebted, with debts about to spiral out of control. Minimum payment information needs to be shared among creditors so they can make better decisions.” Hurlston’s proposal seems to me better (in terms of management theory) but perhaps idealistic. ORANGE will only allow a form of systematic management where either it is under external threat if it doesn’t or it clearly can see the benefits of that form of management to its strategic goals. And ORANGE will break the rules of the system wherever it sees fit. Think of the way commercial companies tend to treat ISO 9000. Something to be complied with rather than embraced. (ORANGE despises it but uses it as it suits and goes through the motions of compliance for external accreditation. BLUE loves it but will gum up the processes with rigidity if allowed to.)

John Mann seems not to trust the credit card companies to process manage borrowers: “The system isn’t working, and if the industry won’t regulate itself, politicians will have to step in.” The regulatory approach espoused by Mann and Mrs Lewis and the borrower-management processes suggested by Hurlston both offer potential real solutions and both require BLUE. The problem is that BLUE will function efficiently only to the degree allowed by ORANGE which is a much more complex way of thinking. (Which explains how so many ISO 9000 assessors and other kinds of ‘inspector’ get the ‘wool’ pulled over their eyes!) The fact is that the ORANGE ‘genie’ is out of the cultural ‘bottle’ and we can’t go back to the kind of BLUE thinking which dominated lending 40-50 years ago. (Nor should we want to, considering ORANGE’s wealth-generating capabilities!)

BLUE regulations and processes certainly have their place – and perhaps are essential for this industry. However, ORANGE also needs watching from a more complex point of view which understands what ORANGE does, which understands how it will exploit less complex thinking sytems (PURPLE and RED) and how it can outwit BLUE. Yet a point of view which doesn’t want to stop ORANGE generating wealth.

Perhaps would-be borrowers should be psychologically-assessed to determine their capability of handling debt and what amount of debt? The obvious checks are not always the ones we need to make: Stephen Lewis was on a not-unreasonable salary and at the time of his death was still within his given credit limits.

There are not necessarily easy straight-forward answers to what is at heart a multi-vMEME issue. But, until we understand the complex inter-vMEME issues at play here, we are unlikely to be able to propose solutions that will stick. As so often, it’s a case of starting with the right questions!

Formation more than Education

 education, Neurological Levels, NLP, Spiral Dynamics  3 Responses »
Jan 242004
 

I find that one of the more interesting aspects of my part-time return to secondary school teaching is that of being a form tutor.

The role has a pastoral element built into it not obviously present in classroom teaching or general schooIl management.

For someone interested in the development of children and young people and how their psychology affects their performance at school (and beyond), the role of form tutor offers possibilities of making the kind of difference that most other roles in school life don’t.

What’s more, a good form tutor can create a climate of trust that enables members of his or her tutor group to open up and confide some of the turbulence going on inside their teenage heads.

Recent examples I’ve had to deal with include a 14-year old girl distraught because her mother had started calling her “fat” and “ugly” over the past few months – having previously tended to tell her daughter how beautiful she was. Investigation revealed that the catalyst for the change in Mum’s behaviour was the arrival on the scene of a new serious boyfriend. It looked pretty much to me like Mum was belittling her daughter because the daughter (who was quite well-developed for her age!) could be seen as competition for the attentions of the new male on the scene. If that may sound far-fetched to some, evolutionary psychologists have found much evidence for this kind of behaviour. The mother’s intent was almost certainly subconscious but the flattening of her budding sexuality caused a lot of damage to the girl’s RED self-esteem.

Discussions around the intense feelings aroused by first falling in-love and telling the daughter that Mum’s emotions were likely to balance out a little more after the first phase gave her some reassurance. What really made the difference though was telling her how I had overheard some Year 10 boys saying how much they fancied her. That put a smile back on her face!

On another occasion one of the girls in my tutor group approached me somewhat hesitantly to say how she felt one of the other teachers was victimising her in class. For a student to initiate a serious complaint about one teacher to another is no easy thing. Students – particulary Years 8-10 (when RED is pretty much to the fore) – tend to perceive teachers in ‘us-and-them’ terms and, indeed, the ethic encouraged among teachers is to close ranks and defend colleagues. (Given how vulnerable teachers are to accusations of impropriety and/or unprofessional conduct, this is hardly suprising.) Assuring the girl that her complaint would be taken seriously and offering advice on how to handle her relationship with the teacher in question in the short term enabled the girl to at least function after a fashion in that class while the matter was investigated.

And then there are relationships with parents which develop in ways they often don’t from the classroom teacher perspective.

Unfortunately BLUE’s Procedures meta-programme means that much of tutor time is spent on administrative tasks – chasing up absences and checking whether planners have been signed and homework recorded. Important as these tasks are, they can take away from relationship building.

The Bigger Picture…?
Since the mid-1980s successive secretaries of state (of whatever political persuasion) at the Department of Education have been – not altogether incorrectly! – obsessed with academic performance.

Undoubtedly some of the strategies – most notably the introduction of numeracy and literacy hours in primary schools – have produced impressive results. However, many of the initiatives have failed to have the desired effect. There is serious concern whether the Education Action Zones have provided value for money and criticism is starting to build over the successor Excellence in Cities schemes. (There is now even some evidence that improvements in literacy in primary schools may have peaked and there may even be something of a backwards slide.)

There is perhaps more debate than ever over what to do to improve academic attainment. There has been some relaxation of the National Curriculum in England and Wales. In Scotland it has been dumped as a statutory requirement. Wales has axed Standard Assessment Tests (SATs) at Key Stage 1 and is considering the same for Key Stages 2 and 3. And the January 2003 publication of ‘14-19: Opportunity & Excellence’, along with the establishment of the Pathfinder concept, is starting a process of massive change in the way education and training for that age group is delivered.

Yet there is still relatively little on the pastoral side. Connexions is the Government’s big idea and the fact that the service is oversubscribed in many schools is indicative of just how needed action is on this front.

Children in the early years tend to carry their parents’ memes. Memes – a concept developed by Richard Dawkins (1976) – are transmittable values, beliefs, attitudes and even memories. Parents’ memes will be reflected in children’s behaviours. As an example, one of the teachers at my school recently rang home to dicuss a Year 7 boy who was consistenly underperforming and misbehaving and who displayed a couldn’t-care-less attitude. His mother’s response was: “Well, I didn’t do well at school either and it hasn’t done me any harm.” Hardly surprising then that achieving in the classroom is not on this boy’s list of priorities!

It’s also no coincidence that the majority of parents who attend parents’ evenings – ie: they are concerned enough about their children’s progress at school to make the time and effort – are those whose children tend to work hard and do at least reasonably well in class.

Evidence shows that, in the teenage years, young people tend to be socialised more by their peers – often going through a partial rejection of their parents’ values. This is a normal and in some respects quite healthy part of the RED vMEME’s journey to establish personal identity beyond the PURPLE belonging of the family. This was termed ‘Negative Identity’ by psychologist Erik Erikson (1964), an element of ‘Identity Diffusion’ which the adolescent must overcome to achieve his/her own ‘Identity’.

Even when undergoing a partial (and usually temporary) rejection of the family, the young person’s PURPLE vMEME still has belonging needs. So now the young person tends to find a new degree of belonging in a peer group. But with RED predominant in the mix, the task is to build self-esteem often through recognition within the group.

How that building of self-esteem takes place will depend to a great extent on whether the dominant memes held by the group are those compatible with and including academic success or more centred on delinquency and anti-social behaviour. In his famous study of 14-15 year olds back in 1967 David Hargreaves established that it tends to go one way or the other. The RED vMEME’s drive for recognition and self-esteem does not stop because of the failure to achieve academic success. Rather, it finds ways to ways to achieve its goals through less ‘socially-acceptable’ means. Most teachers in most secondary schools are familiar with this model: the poor performers academically who score kudos with other poor performers by the trouble they cause in class and around the school building. Detentions then replace merits as badges of this kind of success. Nicholas Emler (1984) calls this ‘Reputation Management’.

Thus, the parents’ memes brought into primary school will often be predictors for the kind of memes displayed in secondary school. The child entering infant school, whose parents place no value in formal education, will most likely be an academic failure by the time of leaving junior school and a truant/disruptive student by mid-secondary school.

This isn’t, of course, a route set in stone. All kinds of things can bring about a change in values and, therefore, a change in attitude. For example, Frederick Gough Comprehensive, a school I know in Scunthorpe, is located in a fairly ‘rough’ part of the town. Its school population is not the type one would readily associate normally with good behaviour and academic success. Yet Frederick Gough has been doing substantially better than another, neighbouring secondary which draws upon largely the same catchement area but has had severe behavioural problems and low academic attainment. (A litmus test of a school’s ability to manage behaviour is the willingness of supply teachers to service it! In fairness, it should be pointed out that the other secondary has recently acquired a new headteacher and the description here of the school hopefully will soon be obsolete.)

So what is the secret of Frederick Gough’s relative success? One factor may be that there is a significant emphasis on pastoral care: every student receives a number of one-to-one sessions with his/her form tutor. These function with varying degrees of success, with some form tutors clearly more effective than others and some students memetically more ‘damaged’ than others. Nonetheless, considering its natural population, Frederick Gough does rather well and the emphasis on pastoral care is almost certainly a significant factor.

Where, for all its reforms and intended reforms, the Government is still largely missing the point is that they are targeting ‘education’ at the levels of ‘Skills & Knowledge’. The Neurological Levels model of Robert Dilts (1990) allows for change at any level to impact upon the other levels but makes the case clearly that, for change to be really effective, it has to be at the upper levels of ‘Values & Beliefs’ and Identity. That means dealing with memes – preferably the earlier in childhood the better.

Understanding ‘Formation’…?
Giving pastoral care takes a teacher beyond education and into ‘formation’ – the forming of the character and the personality.

We often hear or read terms like ‘formative influences’ or ‘formative years’ – but how often do we really think through what they mean?

I personally didn’t have a clue what formation meant until I was involved on a quality systems project with the Hospitaller Order of St John of God in the mid-1990s.

A worldwide Roman Catholic lay order dedicated to health care – especially of the ‘disadvantaged’ – the English Province had been pioneering new ways of helping people with severe learning disabilities maximise their quality of life. As the number of ‘brothers’ in the English Province was in marked decline, most of the management and delivery of services was carried out by ‘civilians’ – some of whom were not even Christians, let alone Catholics!

In this situation I found myself fascinated with the few new recruits the brothers did have and how they inducted them into lifelong formation which meant for them celibacy, service both to God and to mankind, no personal possessions, religious study, etc, etc – essentially a life of ‘active monasticism’. But note: this was not ‘lifelong learning’; this was ‘lifelong formation’.

Formal education and training, important as they were, were just part of the formation. The brothers were concerned with the development of the whole person. The character and nature of the inner person, if you will, was the centre of this. The brothers were operating at the levels of Identity and Values & Beliefs. How successful they were was reflected in how rare it was for a brother to leave the Order. Not unknown but very, very rare.

As my knowledge and understanding of Spiral Dynamics and related Psychology has grown over the intervening years – and particularly since my part-time return to teaching in 2001 – this concept of formation has seemed more and more relevant.

If we are to be successful in dealing with people, then we have to deal with the whole man or woman. Not just their training and education.

If we take the example of back-to-work schemes for the unemployed in places like Hull’s Bransholme estate, it’s no wonder they are relatively unsuccessful because the training provided is aimed at the Skills & Knowledge level. If the values of the intended recipient are not in accord with the values embedded in the scheme, then there is a memetic discrepancy. While employable skills are obviously important, bringing about change so that people actually value having a job is the key to take-up of these schemes.

The earlier one can make memetic interventions in a person’s life the better. Cathy Byrne, Headteacher of The Parks Primary School (on Hull’s Orchard Park Estate) – featured as a Services case study – has stated that she believes interventions should begin (where necessary) at nursery school age and possibly even younger.

If we are to transform our schools and enable them to actually hit all those targets the Department of Education burdens them with – if, indeed, we are to transform our society (greater prosperity, less crime, less drug and alcohol abuse, happier and more sustainable families, etc, etc) – then we have to go beyond education and training. We have to deal with lifelong formation.

To do that, we have to go beyond single institutions or sectors. A cross-boundary approach is needed which can address all relevant aspects which impinge upon the people and issues in question..

Back in 1999 Richard Dunn, then Headteacher of Hemsworth High, near Pontefract, agreed to let a team, in which I was involved, work with the school on what became known as the HemsMESH  project. This was the first attempt to use Spiral Dynamics on a macro level in the UK. Dunn’s rationale for this was that he and his staff had improved the school’s score of 5 A*-C GCSEs as much as they could via internal actions at the school. He recognised now the need to engage parents and the wider community – which the MeshWORK approach offered. Though the term wasn’t used at the time, Dunn knew that further improvement in student performance was a formation issue.

As the pace of change in Western societies grows ever quicker – often stimulated by ORANGE’s development and manipulation of new technologies – frequently bringing with it both huge benefits and immense social dislocation, creating what seem to be ever-widening ‘values gaps’, the need to address formation gets overlooked all too often in the drive to train skills and implant knowledge.

Yet formation is clearly the key to what kind of people we are, both as individuals and as societies.