Margaret Thatcher: Saviour or Devil?

 civil unrest, community, Europe, finance, government, politics, Psychology, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  3 Responses »
Apr 212013
 

The responses to Margaret Thatcher’s death a fortnight ago (8 April), both at home and abroad, serve to remind us only too well what a divisive figure she was.

A 'Maggie' fan getting ready for the funeral - copyright © 2013 Wenn

A ‘Maggie’ fan getting ready for the funeral – copyright © 2013 Wenn

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As several tributes have been titled – eg: Ian Dunt at politics.co.uk – she was indeed ‘The Woman who changed Britain’.If you were one of those who saw the need unequivocally for those changes or indeed benefitted from them, then she may be a hero to you. My late father, Ted Rice, thought no less than that she had saved Britain. I once said to him: “You think the sun shines out of her arse!” – and he agreed totally.

If you were one of those who lost out badly or were just deeply offended at the wholesale destruction of traditional working class communities as the result of her policies, then you may well view her as, to all intents and purposes, some spawn of the devil. My distant friend Chris Maguire would sometimes wear a t-shirt emblazoned with “I still hate Thatcher!” It wouldn’t surprise me entirely if Chris didn’t end up at one of those parties celebrating her death.

As for the reports – eg: BBC News – of Tony Blair condemning such parties and Ed Milliband telling hard left Labour supporters to show respect for Thatcher, that would have had about as much effect as if David Cameron had told the right-wing arch-Tories not to regale each other with victory stories of Thatcher ‘handbagging’ other leaders to gain concessions at European Union conferences. (Note: notorious hardliner Dennis Skinner’s refusal to participate in the recall of Parliament to pay tribute on the following Monday (15th) and his co-sponsorship of a (defeated) motion to refuse the postponement of Prime Minister’s Questions on the day of the funeral so leading politicians could attend.)

As someone who has lived in the North of England all my life, was raised in the manufacturing town of St Helens and been engaged in projects concerned with ‘disappeared industries’, such as HemsMESH (coal mining in South-East Wakefield)  and Humber MeshWORKS (docks and fishing in Hull), I understand (to some degree at least) the bitter resentment and simmering hatreds of people from areas which suffered under Thatcher.

It took a conversation a few years ago with Jon Freeman of the  Centre for Human Emergence UK, a man I much respect, to really show me that people who were not particularly political and of my own generation (rather than my father’s) thought highly of

Thatcher’s legacy. But then Jon does come from the South-East which, generally speaking, did rather well out of Thatcherism!

 

Lefties celebrating at the news of Thatcher's death - copyright © 2013 The Windsor Star

Lefties celebrating at the news of Thatcher’s death – copyright © 2013 The Windsor Star

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The extremes of hatred for Thatcher and the extremes of unwavering support for her policies reflect an inability to appreciate viewpoints beyond your own perspective and show the workings of the Assimilation-Contrast Effect. In essence, the more the RED vMEME has invested your self-esteem in a viewpoint, the harder it is to see any merit in your opponent’s arguments. Even your less extreme friend may seem like a turncoat because they don’t support your extremes.

Thus, Blair and even the once-supposedly-‘Red Ed’ Milliband can appear to be closet capitalists supporting the Establishment to the hard left while Cameron can be portrayed by the hard right as just the sort of ‘Wet’ Thatcher appeared to despise.

The problem with being fixed by RED in the extremes of a political spectrum is that it leaves you unable to appreciate all other viewpoints and, thus, effectively deluded and incapable of getting a balanced perspective.

Did Thatcher save Britain? If so, what was the cost?
The argument that ‘something needed to be done’ in 1979 is unassailable. As Andrew Crisell (2002, p194) so poignantly reminds us, in the 1970s the country was plagued by “strikes, sit-ins, lock-outs, occupations, demonstrations, pressure and splinter groups…industrial stoppages were so common and inflation so rampant that Britain became known as ‘the sick man of Europe’.” This culminated in the ‘Winter of Discontent’ of 1978-79 when, as a result of various strike actions and union blockades, rubbish remained uncollected in the streets, many hospitals were forced to take in emergency patients  only and , in Liverpool and Tameside, the dead remained unburied.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, Margaret Thatcher swept to power in the 1979 general election on promises to curb trade union power and to reign in public spending. By 1985, following the collapse of the national miner’s strike, Thatcher had pretty much achieved these objectives.

Thatcher’s policies in these respects can be characterised as coming from BLUE thinking. Unfortunately the BLUE vMEME, in its nodal state, is so focussed on doing ‘what’s right’ that the human cost of such policies is all but irrelevant.

Thus, the Thatcher Government’s withdrawal of subsidies for increasingly-unviable state-owned monoliths such as British Coal and British Steel led indirectly to the wholesale devastation of working class communities in the Midlands, the North of England, South Wales and the Central Scottish Lowlands as their big industrial monoliths were wound down and/or broken up and scores of smaller support industries went to the wall without them.

These communities were largely dominated by PURPLE and RED thinking. PURPLE tends to assign rigid gender roles, such as male breadwinner and female mother/housekeeper. The truncation of hundreds of thousands of jobs for unskilled and semi-skilled male labour in a relatively short space of time turned households inside out. Women tended to take 2 or even 3 part-time menial jobs (such as cleaning) while the men dossed at home, trapped in their ‘ex-miner’ or ‘ex-steelworker’ or ‘ex-docker’ identities, claiming benefits (where they could) and doing black market work (where they could). With this collapse of traditional PURPLE certainties – such as young adult males in the family having gone down the mines for the past 200 years – and the economic pressures put on households, family breakdowns multiplied, divorce rates spiralled and drugs and gangs stole in to further ravage the remnants of these communities. (The former mining town of Grimethorpe in South Yorkshire had the dubious distinction of being the first place in Britain where a bag of heroin could be obtained for just £5.) When PURPLE becomes destabilised, a very unhealthy manifestation of RED emerges to take over, seeing the world as a jungle in which the strongest and/or the most devious survive.

The huge expansion of what Charles Murray (1989) labels the ‘Underclass’ – has its origins in Thatcher’s economic policies – see: Underclass: the Excreta of Capitalism. In a very real sense, the ‘Shameless’ culture which permeates so many of Britain’s sink estates is a by-product of Thatcherism.

It’s not clear whether Thatcher didn’t anticipate the effect of working class communities – or she did but perceived it as worthwhile cost to pay. Either way, she had few effective social policies to counter the effects.

So, yes, it can be argued that Thatcher did save Britain from union power and cut down a bloated and profligate public sector…but the cost was horrific and we are still paying the price 30 years later.

No wonder, on the day of her funeral, in the South Yorkshire former mining village of Goldthorpe, they burnt an effigy of the ‘Iron Lady’!

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Thatcher understood the need for growth!
Margaret Thatcher knew that you can’t just cut back but you also have to stimulate growth of the economy – a basic fact that seems to completely elude her successors David Cameron and George Osborne! See: Have David Cameron and George Osborne ruined Britain?

Margaret Thatcher at the Conservative Party Conference 1980 - copyright © 1980 The Sun

Margaret Thatcher at the Conservative Party Conference 1980 – copyright © 1980 The Sun

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thus, powered by ORANGE, she supported inward investment, hi-tech industries and specialist manufacturing, in which Britain could develop a competitive advantage – strongly encouraged by Michael Heseltine. She also liberated capital so that Britain – and London especially – grew to become one of the 2 or 3 major financial centres in the world. On the back of these innovations, Britain went from being ‘the sick man of Europe’ to the seventh richest country in the world (as measured in gross national income) by 1997. (With Tony Blair more or less following Thatcher’s economic policies – at least during his first term – Britain became the second richest country, according to the  World Bank in 2007.)

The downside, of course, is that the wealth was very unevenly spread, being mostly concentrated in the South-East of England, home of the financial services sector. Real deprivation and poverty afflicted parts of the country, with Cornwall, Glasgow, Liverpool and South Yorkshire meeting the criteria to receive EU Objective One structural funds – meaning they were among the poorest places in the entire EU. (South Leeds would have met the criteria too but affluent north Leeds pulled Leeds as a whole beyond even Objective Two.)

So, it can be argued Thatcher not only saved Britain but launched the country on a new path to prosperity. The problem is that Thatcher’s policies failed to bring a great deal of Britain into that new prosperity. In essence, a few got very rich indeed but an awful lot of people got much poorer. The global financial collapse of 2008-2009 also exposed the over-dependence on the financial services sector of Thatcher and successive governments for growth.

Evaluating Thatcher’s legacy
From a 2nd Tier viewpoint, away from the extremes of the Assimilation-Contrast Effect, Thatcher’s legacy is far from all bad. If the Government in 1979, of whatever party, had had a less strong and determined leader – another muddler like Edward Heath or James Callaghan, say – the economic decline might have continued over decades with the consequence that Britain might have ended up a Greece-like drain on the EU. Instead Thatcher’s hard right and ruthless tactics stopped the rot quite forcibly – and violently on the miners vs police battlefields of West and South Yorkshire.

The likelihood, if Thatcher hadn’t come to power, is that everybody would have suffered a deterioration in living standards as Britain slowly ground to a halt, ever more dependent on begrudgingly-given International Monetary Fund and EU handouts. How that economic decline would have played out in terms of further social unrest is hard to imagine from a perspective of 30 years later.

That being so, it has to be conceded that Thatcher undoubtedly changed Britain and she saved the country for the benefit of those ORANGE-driven wealth creators and those who made a reasonable living as a by-product of that wealth creation. Left behind, more or less to rot, were those – for the most part the traditional working class communities – whose thinking was dependent on there being steady jobs with steady incomes that required little more than low skill labour.

Thatcher, then, saved us all to an extent. To ORANGE thinkers, she was a godsend who facilitated the generation of wealth by individuals. To those PURPLE-dominated working class communities, she was a devil who tore apart the lifestyles they had unthinkingly taken for granted for decades (and longer!) and offered nothing to compensate them for what was lost.

The question to consider, then, in evaluating Thatcher’s legacy is not whether she had to do what she had to do. But could she have done it differently? Or, could she have done more for those who were displaced and dispossessed by the changes her economic policies brought about? Zygmunt Bauman’s (1988) concept of the ‘seduced’ and the ‘repressed’ is relevant here. The ORANGE culture of the endless pursuit of wealth Thatcher inaugurated led to a 25-year firestorm of wealth creation in this country, seducing many of us into the consumer society it spawned. But what about the repressed – those thousands upon thousands cast upon the human scrap heap and lacking the psychological wherewithal to get off it? Did there have to be so many of them?

And now we’ve got them and the country is buckling on the verge of a triple-dip recession, what do we – what can we do – for them? The repressed are as much Thatcher’s children as the seduced.

Do Arabs need a New Awakening to win True Democracy?

 civil unrest, community, cross-cultural, government, Middle East, politics, prejudice & discrimination, Psychology, religion, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  3 Responses »
Aug 292012
 

Written by GERALD BUTT

Annotated by KEITH E RICE

Gerald Butt wrote ‘Do Arabs need a New Awakening to win True Democracy?’ as the BBC’s Middle East correspondent. It was published on the BBC News web site on 16 August 2012.

Reading it, I was mightily impressed that Gerald’s understanding of the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ effectively provided a Spiral Dynamics analysis of the phenomenon - though without the jargon and the concepts. Accordingly I contacted both Gerald and the BBC who gave me permission to republish his piece here, annotated with a Spiral Dynamics/Integrated SocioPsychology commentary. (The text of my commentary is in red.)

Gerald’s piece is timeless in its analysis of conflict between different value systems and the sheer lack of other value systems - vMEMES - hindering the progress of peoples – in this case, the Arabs – in achieving Democracy as we in the Modern West understand the term.

 I am deeply indebted to Gerald and the BBC for their permissions.

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 Arabs in several countries around the Middle East are relishing the prospect of a new era built on political reform and democratic rule.

This craving for democracy was motivated by a desire to throw off the shackles of the past and finally achieve independence in every sense of the word.

As Gerald, to all intents and purposes, reveals later in the piece, it has to be queried just how much many of those thronging Tahrir Square in Cairo or skittering about in the Libyan desert on the back of machine-gun mounted rebel pick-ups really understood the spirit of Democracy beyond the trite motif of one man/one vote. (Then again, clearly not all Westerners truly understand the concept either!)

This is hardly surprising. For decades, Arabs’ self-esteem had been smothered by the totalitarian rule that followed colonial occupation. Colonialism itself had been preceded by centuries of Ottoman domination.

This long legacy is enduring and invidious. For all the euphoria and the undoubted bravery seen on the streets of Cairo and elsewhere, there remains a fundamental and persistent doubt amongst Arabs that democracy can work for them as free-thinking individuals.

And these doubts are prompting voters to seek the reassurance of religious or ethnic affiliation. This trend, by definition, limits freedom of choice, which is a pillar of independent, democratic life.

Don Beck & Chris Cowan (1996) hold that, often, the first response to the challenges, pressures and opportunities of change, is to slip down the Spiral. Thus, when confronted with the what next? of revolution, the BLUE/ORANGE thinking required for Western-style Democracy is too complex – and, because of that, too scary – for many whose thinking has been driven by the vMEME harmonic of PURPLE/RED. Grinding poverty (BEIGE), ethnic and/or regional tensions (PURPLE) and a stubborn refusal to obey and conform anymore (RED) have played their part in all the Arab uprisings. But, for many such people, used to being governed by ruthless RED/BLUE dictatorships, the jump up the Spiral to BLUE/ORANGE thinking simply cannot develop quickly enough to fill the void left by the collapse of the dictatorship. Therefore, a sideways retreat to the PURPLE/BLUE of safe and orderly institutionalised religion is attractive.

‘Not fair’
In Tunisia and Egypt, for example, post-revolution politics has been dominated by Islamist groups.

The electoral success of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and Salafists has set a pattern that will not be easy to break. President Mohammed Mursi’s promise to create an inclusive society will be hard to keep.

Prime Minister Hisham Qandil, on forming a new government, said it was time for Egyptians “…to stop asking who is a Copt, a Muslim or a Salafi. I don’t see that. All I see is that we are all Egyptians and this should be the main principle.”

This might be the ideal. But the overwhelming desire thus far in democracies in Arab countries has been for representation, first and foremost, on a sectarian or ethnic basis. This has been the case most obviously in Lebanon and Iraq.

Egypt looks like following suit, as the reaction to the formation of a technocrat-dominated cabinet has illustrated.

Egypt’s Salafists complained that their strong showing in the parliamentary elections was not reflected in the apportioning of cabinet posts – they received none.

Muslim Brotherhood supporters felt aggrieved that only two of their members had become ministers; and the Copts were unhappy at the appearance of only one Christian in the cabinet.

“It is not right that Copts get treated in this way,” Bishop Bakhomious, the acting head of the Coptic Church, told a Cairo newspaper. “We had expected an increase in the representation of Copts. The way the cabinet has been formed is not fair on us.”

Egyptian Christians’ unhappiness at the cabinet composition is an indicator of their lack of confidence in the new democratic system.

They feel that only their own strong representation in government would safeguard their interests. As a result, Copts are seeking to form political parties, thus strengthening further the grip of religion on democratic life.

What Gerald is identifying, to all intents and purposes, is the effects of the PURPLE vMEME seeking safety-in-belonging - and belonging requires you to know who you don’t belong to as well as who you do know. Thus, PURPLE emphasises and drives differences. Copts, for example, identify with each other as the in-group and make Muslims and Salafis the out-groups. The other tribalist groupings do exactly the same. In Iraq, Sunni vs Shia conflict has severely restricted post-war reconstruction and destabilised attempts to form a government representing all communities.

As I point out in the Global feature, Stratified Democracy vs Modernisation Theory, attempts to imposed Western-style Democracy on tribal societies are doomed largely to failure unless PURPLE, RED and BLUE needs are tackled in sequence, thus enabling people’s capacity for ideas to move up the hierarchy of the Spiral.

Political Paralysis?
The problem that President Mursi and other newcomers to Arab leadership will find is that democracies are being created in countries lacking political institutions and political parties that cut across sectarian and ethnic lines.

Secular parties, such as they are, were emasculated and discredited during the era of totalitarian rule and offer few attractions to first-time voters.

Give it time, one might say. Europe needed centuries to fine-tune its democratic traditions.

Perhaps new political parties might be established, rooted in Islamic traditions but espousing modern economic and social policies that could appeal to voters from all backgrounds.

Is Gerald asking for a kind of Islamic equivalent of the Church of England where the fundamentalist approach (RED/BLUE) to the religion is largely washed away by scientific rationalism (BLUE/ORANGE) and an increasing valuing of the human spirit freed of restrictions (GREEN)?

Looking at these ideas in terms of vMEMES shows vast gulfs in values and understanding between the different ways of thinking.

But can this process be fast-tracked? The evidence in Lebanon and Iraq points unequivocally to the fact that turning the political machine around, once it has headed off down the sectarian and ethnic route, is well nigh impossible.

Sectarian conflicts can burn themselves out if more complex vMEMES gain influence. An example of this was the withering of the PURPLE/BLUE passion in Eire to recover the ‘6 Counties’ – as the Irish Republic’s economy boomed in the early-mid 1990s and ORANGE’s focus on wealth creation and personal advancement became stronger. But, almost always, the ending of sectarian conflict requires a combination of war weariness and the emergence of more complex vMEMES to change thinking.

As many as 80 parties were formed after the ousting of Tunisia’s President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali

The Taif Agreement of 1989 was supposed to bring an end to political sectarianism in Lebanon. But cross-community politics is as elusive as ever.

Iraq, for its part, has slipped into a political system where Shia, Sunni and Kurdish loyalties are paramount. Iraqi national politics, as a result, is paralysed, while the major sectarian and ethnic groups vie for ascendancy.

Iraqis today face the unwelcome realisation that the removal of Saddam Hussein and the subsequent departure of the US military have failed to bring them true independence as free citizens of Iraq facing a range of political choices that are free of religious association.

Against this background, liberal and secular Arabs are bound to feel uneasy. For them, the euphoria experienced during those early days of protest has passed.

 Al-Hayat columnist Raghida Dergham, writing in November 2011, observed: “We are on a swing of uncertainty, going up in celebration of the ouster of regimes that monopolised power for 30 or 40 odd years, then down in frustration over the alternative that is now coming to monopolise power with theocratic authoritarianism.”

The Arabs, therefore, may have to wait for the next awakening before they can achieve true independence.

 Such an awakening will need to have more complex vMEMES in the mix if a sustainable path to Democracy is to be achieved.

Northern Ireland…quiet for now?

 community, politics, prejudice & discrimination, Psychology, racism, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics, terrorism  No Responses »
Jun 282011
 

It all seems to have quietened down again but the explosion of sectarian violence in east Belfast last week was truly shocking - both that it happened at all and the scale of it. Petrol bombs and pipe bombs are deadly enough but when guns are used…as local MP Naomi Long told the BBC: “When you have guns back on streets, it is very clear that the intent here is to take life. There is no other reason why people would bring a gun onto the street…”

The violence must be deeply disturbing for the majority of people in Northern Ireland who will dread a return to ‘The Troubles’. And it will be truly alarming for many politicians, economists and business people who thought, 13 years after the Good Friday Agreement, that the peace process was too deeply embedded in Northern Ireland culture for the province to regress back to open and large-scale sectarian violence.

But how ever shocked, disturbed and alarmed we may be, we should not be surprised. Nor should we be lulled into a false sense of security by the news that east Belfast has been mostly (though not completely) quiet since last Monday (20th) and Tuesday (21 June). There were plenty of young men from both sides of the divide on the streets Wednesday night (22nd) but community stewards were proactive in discouraging them from further violence.

The underlying problem is that relatively little has been done in those 13 years since Good Friday to address the deep-rooted tribalism which underpins the sectarian divisions and has its foundations in history.

The large-scale settling of the northern 6 counties (Ulster) by Scottish Presbyterians in the 17th Century inevitably led to the further disadvantaging of the (mainly Catholic) indigenous Irish, already subjected to stern (and often brutal) rule by their English colonial masters following the Irish Confederate Wars (1641-1653) and the Battle of the Boyne (1690). It also led to a sense of 2 large tribes, marked out by different religions and different racial/national characteristics, in competition for the same territory. That tribal competition has gone on now for over 4 centuries, sometimes in open conflict, sometimes in festering tension. The 1707 Act of Union between England and Scotland, for the indigenous Irish, made getting rid of the Scottish (now British) invaders synonymous with getting rid of their English (now British) rulers.

The history of Nationalist/Catholic-Unionist/Protestant conflict in Ireland is, of course, much more complex than portrayed in this paragraph; but, nonetheless, it does set out the core issue: there are 2 large-scale tribes competing for the same territory. There is a distinct timeline from 1707 to Good Friday, with such punctuations as the Fenians, the Irish Republican Army and the Provisionals on one side and the various Unionist paramilitaries such as the Ulster Defence Association and the Ulster Volunteer Force on the other.

Until the issue of tribalism is dealt with, the peace in Northern  Ireland will always have the kind of fragility that the violence last week  exposed so unequivocally.

Failing to deal with tribalism – sophisticated politics and populism
Time and time again tribalism has caught sophisticated political rulers out, often resulting in barbaric tribal warfare. In recent times, just for starters, we’ve seen the tribal genocide of Hutus against Tutsis in Rwanda, Yugoslavia torn apart by a level of barbarity and ethnic cleansing not seen in Europe since Adolph Hitler’s storm troopers marched East, the former Soviet Union wracked by various tribal rivalries that frequently resulted in large-scale bloodshed - see ‘Tribal Warfare in South Ossetia’ as an example – and the Americans’ decidedly-vague post-invasion plans for Iraq shredded (in part at least) by Sunni-Shia internecine warfare . On a smaller scale, Spain has similar problems with the Basques that the UK has had with the Nationalists in Northern Ireland.

Tribalism is all around us. As Desmond Morris (1981) pointed out, it’s in the chants on the football terraces when the teams play and in the streets around the football grounds when the rival groups of fans clash. We also see tribalism in the not-always playful rivalry between Yorkshire and Lancashire, deriving its ethos from the Wars of the Roses over 600 years ago. When I lived in Hull, triabalism manifested itself in the divisions between East and West Hull and on the huge, sprawling Bransholme estate on the northern edges of the city, where the North Bransholme, South Bransholme and Kingswood tribes each guard their territory from the others. Even in my current hometown of Harrogate, one of the most wealthy and affluent middle-class towns in the north of England tribalism is unavoidable - with gangs of kids from the secondary school tribes arranging mass fights on the Stray (the lawned common land that runs around the edges of the town centre), one school versus another.

It may even be demonstrated soon, via Alex Salmond’s plans for a referendum, that a majority of Scots want their tribal independence from England!

One of the most socially-unacceptable forms of tribalism in a modern Democracy is racism but tribalism is at the centre of the formation of every in-group and the demonisation of every out-group.

Tribalism is driven by the PURPLE vMEME’s need to find safety in belonging. For this vMEME, knowing who you belong to and differentiating your group from groups you don’t belong to is critical and totally normal – which raises the ugly question: Is racism natural…?

Abraham Maslow (1943) established the need to affiliate as coming before the need for self-esteem and this fits with Henri Tajfel & John Turner’s (1979) Social Identity Theory - see Prejudice & Discrimination – which proposes that it is our investment of our self-esteem in our in-group which leads us to compare our group with others and to seek to dominate or drive out other groups. Muzafer Sherif et al’s (1954/1961) Robber’s Cave Experiment is just one of a number of studies which shows how competition over resources (such as land, food supply, weapons, etc) can amplify the In-group/Out-group Effect. The formation of strategy to dominate or drive out the other groups requires both leadership and management - thus, the need for the RED.vMEME to take assertive, or even aggressive, action to ensure the investment of individual self-esteem is protected through the success of the group.

Leaders need to be strong to impose their vision on the group and they must be seen to be at least protecting and preferably advancing the interests of their group. If the leaders are on the Psychoticist side in their temperament, then this RED-Psychoticist centre of gravity is likely to be ruthless and cruel in their treatment of the out-group. It’s perhaps no coincidence that some of the greatest wartime leaders have been utterly ruthless in their treatment of the enemy. Hitler’s war crimes speak for themselves but Winston Churchill connived all too willingly in the firestorm bombing of Dresden while US President Harry Truman not only sanctioned the atomic bombs being dropped in on Hiroshima and Nagasaki but in 1948 advocated nuking the Russians. Even Barrack Obama made sure he was photographed in the White House operations room earlier this year, watching live the execution of Osama Bin Laden from a soldier’s helmet cam.

Thus, the nature and vision of the leader are critical to how and in what direction tribalism is exploited.

So why then, if tribalism is such a fact of life and leaders need to be strong and biased in the interests of the tribe, do tribal divides catch the political leaders out so often?

The answer lies in the fact that much of the political and philosophical elite in countries think in the higher, more complex and more sophisticated 1st Tier vMEMES most of their time in public office. BLUE (do the right thing), ORANGE (individual material progress) and GREEN (egalitarianism) either despise PURPLE and RED thinking as retrogressive or simply don’t understand it. No wonder commentators frequently record that ordinary voters feel disconnected from leading politicians and the political process. The more populist politicians are often despised by their more sophisticated political colleagues…but, in fact, the populist politicians are actually better able to understand the (PURPLE/RED) concerns of the ‘common man’. Accordingly, it is usually a more populist politician who is to be found leading and/or exploiting tribal aggression. Recall Slobodan Milošević’s rousing speeches to Serbian farmers in Kossovo in the late 1980s and early 1990s as the perfect example of RED exploiting PURPLE tribalism to build up his own power base.

Tribalism is alive and thriving in Northern Ireland
The ongoing problem of tribalism in Northern Ireland is recognised by some social and political commentators. For example, The Workers Party (2005) stated: “The people of Northern Ireland are now more deeply divided than ever. Sectarian antagonisms between Catholics and Protestants are as intense as ever. Recent studies show that sectarian attitudes and practices are present even among children as young as 5 or 6 years. This is at the root of the current political instability….”

A couple of years ago Johann Hari (2009) wrote in his blog: “The Good Friday Process has - from the beginning - been focused on the small elite of politicians at the top. Ian Paisley and Martin McGuiness have been sitting together – inspirationally - but in the streets and estates beyond Stormont, Northern Ireland has been becoming even more divided. Dr Peter Shirlow, of the University of Ulster, has conducted the most detailed survey of inter-communal relations in Northern Ireland – and found an almost completely segregated society. Only 5% of the workforce in Catholic areas are Protestants, and vice versa. Some 68% of 18 to 25-year-olds had never had a meaningful conversation with a single person from ‘the other side’. The young are more likely to fear and hate the ‘Prods’ or ‘Taigs’ than any other group. We have been fixing the ceiling, while the foundations fracture.

You can see this when you visit Belfast or Derry. To a British person, they feel like any familiar CloneZone town - except they are layered with a strange hatred you cannot grasp. Taxis will either take you to green or orange areas - never both. Even the KFC is covered with a mural memorialising a centuries-old battle. The cities are sliced by vast 40ft tall steel walls, keeping Catholics and Protestants apart. And there are more of them now than ever before. Talk to the kids, and they will gleefully tell you the other side stink, or are stupid, or lazy. We are currently spending £1.5bn a year keeping the two sides physically apart.”

In this Sunday’s Observer, writing about the violent flare-up in east Belfast, Sean O’Hagan added in another factor: “Like their Republican counterparts in towns like Lurgan, where support for the Real IRA is strong, the youth of Protestant east Belfast feel that they have somehow been sold out by the mainstream parties that claim to represent them. They are economically disenfranchised, have little hope of ever finding meaningful employment and, in many instances, live in communities in which they have been brought up to hate the police and distrust their tribal opposites.”

O’Hagan neatly links the tribalist traditions to the economic disenfranchisement: “For most of the time, save for these sporadic outbursts of violence, they are also bored. For many young people in these areas, the worst years of the Troubles have been mythologised to the point where many feel they have missed out on the one thing that gives their lives any real meaning: the chance to fight for a cause they believe in. They provide fertile fodder for extremists.”

Again the hopelessness of these young men’s economic circumstances destabilises PURPLE’s drive to attain safety in belonging, You can hardly feel ‘safe’ in your community when the community is blighted by poverty, unemployment and despair. And, when PURPLE is destabilised in this way, unhealthy RED will rise up to fight the perceived threat. If the populist leaders then threw in a bit of ‘duty’ and ‘cause’ to feed justification to whatever nascent BLUE might on the vMEMETIC horizon of their audiences then the followers transform into that most dangerous of men: the RED/BLUE zealot….

How then to deal with the 2 factors: tribalism; and the populist leaders who exploit that tribalism?

We could, of course, ‘take out’– jail, assassinate – the leaders and that can certainly have a powerful short-term effect. It is rumoured that one of the reasons the Provisional IRA started serious negotiatons with the British Government in the early 1990s was the degree of success the British Army and secret services had had in taking out high level Provo leaders.

But the tribalism will still be there for the RED vMEME of some other would-be leaders to exploit. In fact, positively-oriented RED leadership – RED in a vMEME harmonic perhaps with ORANGE or above – can have a profoundly-beneficial effect for the community. It’s said that Northern Ireland first minister (unionist) Peter Robinson got directly involved in the negotiations with east Belfast community leaders after last Tuesday’s violence. Certainly the RED of the ‘community stewards’, who calmed the would-be rioters on the Wednesday evening in what were quite dangerous circumstances, must have been very strong!

But, if unhealthy, exploitative RED can be a real problem in situations such as east Belfast, it can only exploit what is already there or has the very real potential to be there.

PURPLE tribalism is the deeper issue.

Dealing with tribalism, honouring tribalism
From one point of view – the GREEN vMEME’s point of view – tribalism is wrong because it discriminates against those who are ‘not of our tribe’ and does not treat everyone as equal.

You can see this viewpoint underpinning The Workers Party paradigm when they
write: “There is a need to create a new political space which is neither Unionist nor Nationalist, Protestant or Catholic. This should be the political priority…for all those concerned with the future of Northern Ireland.”

The problem with this theoretical foundation is that, when the PURPLE vMEME is dominant in the culture, then tribalism is natural. People who think they can eradicate tribalism are deluded. It’s a natural consequence of a certain pattern of psychological development.

Repeated, peaceful exposure to those of another culture certainly has been shown to reduce stereotyping and, consequently discrimination – and this is a principle reason why Hari advocates developing a programme of integrated schools in Northern Ireland. He writes: “A major 6-year study by Queen’s University, Belfast, has looked at the long-term consequences of being schooled alongside ‘The Enemy’. They interviewed adults who attended these schools – and found that, whatever their parents’ attitudes, they were ‘significantly more likely’ to oppose sectarianism. They had more friends across the divide, and they identified as ‘Northern Irish’, rather than ‘British’ or ‘Irish’. Their politics were far more amenable to peace: Some 80% of Protestants favour the union with Britain, but only 65% of those at integrated schools do. Some 51% of Catholics who went to a segregated school want unification with Ireland, but only 35% of those from integrated schools do. The middle ground - for a devolved Northern Ireland with links to both countries, within the EU - was fatter and happier.”

Hari’s evidence most definitely shows a reduction in sectarian attitudes – but the bigots are still in the majority. Integrated schools will only provide a partial solution – and that solution is fragile and likely to crumble if placed upon sufficient pressure. (They had integrated schools in Bosnia and Chechnya!)

Rather, what is needed is a recognition of the tribes and that tribalism can be healthy. An honouring of these things, if you will. After all, to feel safe in your community, proud of it and your identification with it can only be beneficial, both for the individual and the group. That element of tribalism, surely, is healthy! What is needed, though, is the means to minimise inter-group strife which, Tajfel & Turner tell us, is a natural output of Social Identification.

Ways to do this might include:-

  • Facing the tribes with daunting challenges that they can only overcome by co-operation. This was how Sherif et al resolved the Robber’s Cave tribal conflicts. This concept is at the heart of Samuel Gaertner et al’s (1993) Common In-Group Identity Model.
  • Creating common umbrella identities into which the tribal identities can fit - eg: English and Scots are both British identities. Andrew Tyerman & Christopher Spencer (1983) failed to reproduce Sherif et al’s inter-team conflicts with different boy scout groups because the different groups not only saw themselves as sharing the common super-identity of ‘scout’ but they also bought into scouting values. Tyerman & Spencer even found it relatively easy to increase co-operation between the different scout groups!
  • Facilitating the tribes learning from one another – so that they can see value in the ‘others’ and what they do. An example of this in Northern Ireland could be inter-community forums where solutions that one tribal group found to a problem such as getting the local council to spend money on maintaining children’s playgrounds are shared with other groups.

Preferably such strategies should be played out together as they can be mutually reinforcing.

With any attempt to tackle the unhealthy aspects of tribalism, there needs to be the understanding that, once there is healthy, co-operative tribalism and a reduction in sectarianism, the struggle to tackle the unhealthy aspects of tribalism is not over. As they learned in the former Yugoslavia, after more than 40 years of Marshall Tito’s particular version of totalitarian Communism – as we in the UK are learning in the Scottish independence debate - tribalism may be subsumed into a larger identity…but it doesn’t go away.

Therefore, there needs to be constant monitoring of the state of the tribalism and periodic adjustment to the strategies needed to keep the tribes co-operating rather than warring.

Maslow’s Hierarchy – How good is it?

 morality, Psychology, spirituality  2 Responses »
Dec 212010
 

Written by TREY HARRIS

 

I recieved this interesting e-mail today from sometime correspondent and Spiral Dynamics list contributer Trey Harris… 

I realize that in a lot of circles, questioning Maslow might seem like blasphemy. But I’m not in those circles, and I’d love to posit that Maslow’s model, while useful, is not complete and, in fact, is a bit misleading.

(I’m rather new to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, and came to it after my experience with Spiral Dynamics, so my understanding of it may be fundamentally flawed by viewing it through these spiral-colored glasses. Please keep this in mind as you read on!)

I have a bit of an issue with the “Self-Actualization” tier on the hierarchy. Maslow’s original intent may be different, but it seems as though most commentary on the Hierarchy considers this to be a catch-all category of all Needs that are growth-based (rather than deficit-based). While he later split out the categories of Cognitive & Aesthetic Needs, I would say there are still a couple specific sets of Needs that have at least as much impact as either of those:

1) Purpose/Meaning: It’s very common to hear that the main reason our consciousness is special among animals is that we are aware of our own death. And, as far as I’ve ever heard, this is true. And I believe this awareness of our life cycle leads directly, in a majority of cases, to questioning our purpose and the meaning of life. This category would also relate to the need for goals and direction.

2) Charity: I believe there is something fundamental about making it through the first three stages of Needs that allows someone to open up a capacity for sharing with those in need. Whether it’s medical/psychological help, monetary assistance, or simply extra attention, many people are driven by the need to give back. Gandhi and Mother Theresa might be examples of people driven by this Need.

3) Innovation: There are many people driven by the need to advance civilization, to innovate for innovation’s sake. They’re not trying to achieve because they lack self-esteem, or because of some cognitive need to understand things better, but simply because there is a desire to blaze trails. Neil Armstrong, Lewis & Clark, and The Wright Brothers all made their names because of this (complex) Need.

The other Levels can be split, as well. When we talk about Physiological needs, are we talking basic survival or better nutrition & exercise? When we discuss Safety needs, do we mean shelter or Customs Agents? Belongingness and Love can be split between Familial Love and Intimate Relationships, and Esteem can be separated into Internal and External rewards.

Most of these split levels (save maybe the Esteem segments) won’t occur at the same developmental stage (i.e., someone in need of their next meal is not thinking about getting to the gym), so the pyramid model would be incapable of maintaining these distinctions.

In fact, I think there is a flaw with the whole concept of this being a “hierarchy,” wherein one set of needs cannot be met until the others are fulfilled. For instance, I know plenty of people pursuing self-actualization (Level 5 or 7) who haven’t exercised (Level 1) in years. There are plenty of people who are driven by a need for cognitive understanding (Level 5 in the Adapted model) precisely because they did not fulfill their need for Love and Belonging (Level 3).

Thoughts? How is my understanding of this model flawed?

Trey Harris, MNLP MTD MHt
Washington, DC

Wanted: Suitable Latvian Men for Latvian Women

 community, education, gender, mental health, Psychology, schemas & memes, sex & romance, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  1 Response »
Oct 162010
 

This article on the BBC News the other day (13 October) really caught my eye…about there being a shortage of suitable men for the women of Latvia.

Of course, there have been many shortages of men before. Usually after wars there are shortages of men since men do most of the fighting. Even in the one and only truly ‘total war’ of World War II, far more men were killed than women. Eg: the Germans lost over 5 million men and the Soviet Union an estimate of upto 10 million.

(If just some of the anecdotes I’ve heard are true, British and American soldiers in the ruins of Berlin in 1945 could have almost any German woman they wanted, especially if they had chocolate, cigarettes, nylons, etc, to give away.)

However, a significant shortage in peace time is unusual. Paradoxically statistics show that more male babies are born in Latvia than girls. However, a high early male mortality rate means there are 8% more women than men in the country. Among the under-30s, there are almost 9,000 more men than women. However, this is inverted between the ages of 30-39 so that there are almost 3,000 more women than men. This equates to men being 3 x as likely to die between the ages of 30 and 39. Overall women live 11 years longer than men, the highest disparity of life expectancy between the sexes in the EU.

Sociologist Baiba Bela explains the high male mortality rate: “Car driving, alcoholism and accidents in the workplace are mainly riskier for men than for women.” Statistics show that many Latvian men are also heavy smokers – so add that to the list of high risk behaviours.

This ‘express-self-now-and-to-hell-with-the-consequences’ nihilistic behaviour is clearly the output of the RED vMEME. The nihilistic element of these behaviours also illustrate what Sigmund Freud (1920) meant by Thanatos, the death instinct of the Id (peak RED) driving the individual to self-destruction. The gender difference in the numbers of people engaging in such risky behaviour can be explained by high levels of testosterone, the male sex hormone, which Hans J Eysenck attributed as the key factor in producing a Psychoticist temperament in many males. RED motivation and Psychoticism together make for a highly dangerous combination in males, leading to frequent behaviours dangerous both to themselves and others.

It would appear a substantial number of Latvian men have a RED/Psychoticist ‘lock’ or centre of gravity.

How did Latvian men get into this state?
Psychoanalyst Ansis Stabingis attributes high rates of Depression and suicide amongst Latvia men to the country’s rapid transition from Communism to Capitalism 20 years ago which suddenly put massive pressures on men to succeed financially. “There are demands about how [men] should live. And if they cannot meet those standards, they… fall into Depression…. And then they start to use some alcohol or some gambling because they cannot solve that problem.”

Capitalism and consumerism are driven by the ORANGE vMEME’s drive to create a better future for itself. As Zygmunt Bauman (1988) has noted, consumerism tends to divide people into those he calls the ‘seduced’ – those who have taken in the memes that life is about having designer goods and a luxury lifestyle and have the means to buy into it – and the ‘repressed’ – those who have taken in the same memes but do not have the means to buy into it.

When the world-wide economic crisis broke in 2008, unemployment in Latvia was pushed up by around 20%. Male suicide levels, already amongst the highest in the EU, rose correspondingly by 16%. Many of those who taken in consumerist memes and were only too willing to be seduced into the Western luxury life style now found they were actually slipping into the lifestyle of the repressed – wanting but no longer with the means to buy.

In Integrated SocioPsychology terms, the RED vMEME is motivated to establish self-esteem and esteem from others. When RED is confronted with failure – loss of job, drastic reduction in income, failure to achieve the lifestyle standards of the seduced – then RED simply cannot be shamed. It must either find someone else to blame for its misfortune or it will start to break the selfplex (an individual’s sense of self) down and/or become self-destructive (Freud’s death instinct). With a loss of self-esteem, RED is much more likely to engage in risky behaviour dangerous to itself. After all, if I’m no longer worth much, who cares if I risk everything for the little pleasure I might be able to get?

Latvia, like the other Baltic states and Russia, has long had a hard drinking culture. As software engineer Agris Rieksts told the BBC: “It is kind of perceived that it is manly, that the more alcohol you can handle, the more of a man you are. Everybody understands that it is kind of absurd. But it is still there.”

So there was a readymade alcohol culture for the newly repressed and depressed to drown their miseries in.

The undesirable male mate
In such circumstances, you might think that Latvian men between 30 and 39 could have their pick from so many available women. And the fact that Latvia has the highest rate of single mothers in the EU might well indicate that the men have indeed been ‘busy’. However, the fact that Latvia has the highest rate of single mothers in the EU can also be meta-stated to tell another story: that the Latvian women want babies but they don’t want serious ongoing relationships with the available men.

As Dace Ruskane. editor of women’s magazine Lilit, says: “The smartest girls are alone. The really beautiful girls are alone – if they are smart.”

There is an increasing stereotype of the Latvian male as a depressed drunk with little or no ambition. In his non-work time he either hangs out at sports bars or slobs out in front of the TV. Ruskane comments: “He just sits in front of the TV and knows he can get a woman. And if she doesn’t suit him, he will get another. Smart women simply don’t want to have such men as their partners.”  That, according to one woman who spoke to the BBC, is “why all my friends have gone abroad and found boyfriends there.”

The lack of male desire to better oneself is, according to Baiba Bela, encapsulated in the single statistic that there are 50% more women enrolled at the University of Latvia than men.

The existence of the ‘undesirable male mate’, while perhaps of particular concern to the men-starved women of Latvia, is by no means a Latvian-only phenomenon. 2 years ago then-Shadow Secretary for Innovation, Universities & Skills David Willetts drew attention in the UK to young women preferring to raise their children as single mothers rather than be partnered long-term with a man who had no means of support and no apparent prospects. Willetts was much influenced by the American sociologist William Julius Wilson (1987) who almost certainly was the first to identify the ‘unmarriageable male’, amongst the black underclass in inner city Chicago. (See ‘NEETS – are the Tories on the Right Path?’)

Wilson’s view is that the restructuring of the American economy (and the Western European economies) towards more knowledge-based industries (with much traditional heavy industry going to low wage economies, first Eastern Europe and then Asia) has led an underclass to develop of unskilled and unemployed American males (both black and white). The economic prospects of these males are so grim that effectively they are unmarriageable.

Norman Dennis & George Erdos (1992) confirmed the presence of the unmarriageable male in the UK, describing him as weakly socialised and lacking a sense of responsibility to be a functioning adult in the community, taking on the roles of husband and father.

Though their route to this state is a little different – Latvia was one of those Eastern European nations which most benefitted from being a low wage economy in the 1990s and early 2000s – Latvian men are now similarly undesirable as economic propositions…and drunk and depressed into the bargain!

Whither the Latvian man?
It will be interesting to find out just what kind of impact the BBC News article has on the collective psyche of Latvia. Certainly the article has been picked up a smattering of international news outlets, including the Herald de Paris, and several blogs; but, in the week of the Chilean miners, more Israeli rumblings about a possible strike on Iran and many in the Western world obsessing with just how savagely George Osborne is going to shred Britain’s public sector next week, it never did have much chance of making major news.

Since RED won’t be shamed, it’s more than likely that many Latvian males will simply shrug off the article – if they even register it! – with the selfplex defence mechanism of denial and reach for the next drink. It’s not hard to understand why so many Latvian women do turn to international dating agencies and web sites, with a few sadly ending up in the hands of the pornographers and human traffickers.

As for the Latvian Government and its policymakers…welcome to the late 20th/early 21st Century phenomenon of the undesirable male mate. He’s becoming a significant social problem throughout much of the Western world; but, in a country where there is a relative scarcity of men, he has the potential to become that much more a problem.

There again, as the Western countries struggle to reshape their economies in the wake of the global financial crisis and the unskilled and semi-skilled work continues to drift East, will the unmarriageable male, with his self-destructive behaviours, grow in numbers until he is a major problem throughout the Western world?

Is restricting immigration discriminatory?

 community, cross-cultural, government, Psychology, racism, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  29 Responses »
Jan 072010
 

At last, it’s starting to become OK to talk about immigration. Of course, it’s been a hot topic for the British National Party (BNP) , their British National Front predecessors and the far right for years – in fact, decades really, stretching right back to Enoch Powell’s infamous ‘rivers of blood’ speech back in April 1968. The GREEN vMEME’s staunch opposition to anything that could possibly be associated with prejudice and discrimination has inhibited rational discussion of these issues. Now, thanks to the emergence of the cross-party Balanced Migration Group (BMG) , led by Frank Field (Labour) and Nicholas Soames (Conservative), the barriers to acknowledging the problems that immigration is creating for the United Kingdom are at least beginning to crack.

Over the past year, from interacting with Jon Freeman and Rachel Castagne at June’s ‘A Regent’s Summit on the Future of the UK’ to dialogue with staunch BNP supporter Man of the Woods in the comments on ‘Should the BNP appear on the Beeb?’, I’ve come to have much more of an appreciation of how a number of people feel really passionately about this kingdom…as Man of the Woods calls it, ‘my ancestral land’. The real eye-opener for me, though, with regard to how attitudes are changing towards immigration, was Matthew Kalman’s contribution to that Blog. Matthew, someone I’ve long thought of as a self-challenging visionary more than capable of 2nd Tier thinking, appeared at first glance to be reflecting BNP concepts. Then I realised Matthew was reflecting the fears, concerns and aspirations of those he deals with and that this was leading him on something of a journey to question the GREEN-sponsored multi-culturalism which has led to ethnic minority identities being celebrated more than national identities over the past decade or so.

In terms of what the BNP wants set against the general consensus of the mainstream political establishment, acknowledging some simplification of the issues, this can be reduced basically to a values conflict – between the PURPLE tribalism espoused by the BNP and the GREEN egalitarianism of the political establishment. The earlier half-hearted and cack-handed attempts of the Government to develop policies on citizenship and immigration and now the emergence of the Balanced Migration Group are slowly but surely beginning to move us beyond GREEN’s presupposition that, if you want to restrict people of a different ethnic origin from entering this country, then you are prejudiced. As a kingdom, we are heading (hopefully!) towards being able to debate these issues rationally.

With it being said that that one new immigrant arrives in Britain every minute, a new British passport is issued to an immigrant every 3 minutes and every 6 minutes a new home needs to be built for an immigrant, clearly immigration is exerting substantial pressures on both the physical and sociopsychological infrastructures of the United Kingdom. In that context, it’s hard not to empathise with the BMG’s declaration yesterday urging the parties to make policy statements in their manifestos for the upcoming General Election to prevent the British population reaching the projected level of 70 million-plus by 2029. (The bulk of this anticipated population explosion is anticipated to come directly from new immigrants and indirectly from the children of immigrants being born in this country.)

A population of 70 million-plus and continuing to rise would almost certainly make the UK the most crowded member of the European Union.

So we have 3 pressures of concern regarding these issues:-

  • the seemingly-unstoppable rise in immigration
  • the increased support for the BNP and the far right emanating from the real fears and concerns about this amongst the ‘indigenous peoples’ of the UK
  • the effect of BNP and far right hostility towards ethnic groups stimulating some members of those groups towards anti-social behaviour – eg: the Anti-Nazi League and, far more worryingly, radical Islamic fundamentalism

Is it always wrong to discriminate?
That it is wrong to discriminate – because that means not everyone is treated equally – is one of the GREEN vMEME’s presuppositions.

But, from a 2nd Tier perspective, could it sometimes be in the interests of the whole to discriminate against a part?

And is discrimination inevitable anyway?

Simply to categorise people  - eg: into ‘British citizens’ and ‘residential non-British citizens’, ‘black’ and ‘white’, ‘Lancastrians’ and ‘Yorkies’, ‘English’ and ‘Scots’ – invites discrimination, according to Henri Tajfel & John Turner’s Social Identity Theory (1979). Categorisation leads to identification with your own ‘in-group’, absorbing its values and norms, while demonising the out-groups via derogatory stereotypes. In Integrated SocioPsychology terms, this is the PURPLE vMEME’s building of the tribal identity. Then, because RED finds its self-esteem invested in the in-group, it pushes the in-group to be superior to the ‘out-groups’.

As Muzafer Sherif et al (1961) showed in the classic Robber’s Cave Experiment, competition increases in-group/out-group rivalry substantially. Moreover, Marilyn Brewer & Donald Campbell, in their 1976 study of East African tribes, found that competition over basic resources such as land and water, really ramps up the hostility.

As its population threatens to mushroom completely out of control, the UK is faced with an enormous debt problem that means, whichever party wins the election, we shall see the promised ‘swingeing cuts’ in public services. With the UK economy showing few signs of emerging from recession, the cuts are likely to be long and deep. Thus, as standards of living fall in real terms, rivalry – even outright hostility – will grow as in-groups look to target out-groups for the blame. Differences in names, language, colour of skin and ethnic origin make it easier to tell who’s not in your in-group. It’s not racism per se because racism is really just a manifestation of tribalism. And tribalism, by default, is ethnocentric. It’s perhaps no surprise that Lord Carey, former Archbishop of Canterbury, in his support for the BMG declaration, is talking about ‘Christian heritage’ and that immigration policy should have “a bias towards Christian values”. Obviously as a churchman, it’s Carey’s job to promote Christianity; but he’s also making the point that Christianity traditionally is the religion of the ‘indigenous peoples’ of the UK. It’s a sort of other-side-of-the-coin to the English Defence League’s stance against the perceived ‘Muslimisation’ of England. Unfortunately it all too easily slips into a kind of pastiche of the neo-Christian white ‘indigenous’ Briton vs the Muslim Asian immigrant.

Underneath the rhetoric and bluster, if we use the Spiral Dynamics map, we can see RED-driven firebrands like Nick Griffin and some of the more radical imams manipulating the PURPLE anxieties of their communities and using sheens of BLUE nationaliism and religion to do so.

Of course, if we’re to going to follow the BNP down the ‘race route and judge the priority or superiority of one group of people over another group of people by the colour of their skin and their ethnic origin, then the ‘whities’ had better be careful. For 40 years overt racists have used the lower IQ scores of Afro-Americans on Stanford-Binet tests – first brought to prominence by Arthur Jensen (1969) – to justify discrimination by whites (average: 100) against blacks (average: 85). The problem with this is that we now know Asians score higher than whites – especially East Asians (average: 106 – J Philippe Rushton & Arthur Jensen, 2005)!

Heck, not only do they breed faster than us – but they’re smarter too!

There are, of course, huge controversies around both the concept of race and the concept of intelligence – and neither concept may turn out to be as valid as claims make them out to be. Nonetheless, the higher IQ scores of Asians on white-originated IQ tests certainly knock claims by whitey to be superior.

So, on what other basis can there then be discrimination? If you go down Man of the Woods’ route that these are our ‘ancestral lands’; then, while I’ve got a lot of empathy with that concept…if a land really does belong to its ‘indigenous people’, then what the hell were the Europeans doing during the ‘Age of Empires’, invading other peoples’ lands and subjugating them – if not outrightly enslaving them?!?!?

(NB: I’ve put ‘indigenous people’ here in inverted commas because the English are, of course, one of the most bastardised peoples in the world in terms of racial stock, counting Celts, Picts, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Vikings, Normans and Jews amongst our distant ancestors. Who exactly were the original ’indigenous peoples’? Smallish waves of Poles, Slavs and more Jews came to these shores as refugees during World War II – and that’s before the docking of the Windrush in 1948 started the trickle that became a flood of Afro-Caribbean, African and Asian immigarants!)

From a 2nd Tier perspective, we have to say that, if there is to be discrimination – which seems to natural to all the 1st Tier vMEMES until the emergence of GREEN – it should be primarily in the interests of the majority and the health of the kingdom as a whole. Therefore, if imposing a cap on immigration – as the BMG is urging – is discriminatory, then so be it. There are far more people in this kingdom who primarily espouse PURPLE values than espouse GREEN values. So keeping the kingdom safe for the majority of its people and ensuring they have the resources to feel safe and secure is important. Allowing our population to grow beyond the 70-plus million will inhibit those vital measures. So a cap or other similar restriction is necessary.

The opportunities an immigration restriction measure will create
In a sense we have the BNP to thank for forcing this debate upon a reluctant, GREEN-led political establishment. The BNP has acted like a lightning rod for all the seething discontentment amongst the PURPLE-dominated traditional white working classes; and the party has channelled that discontentment into a significant electoral force.

However, from a 2nd Tier perspective, we know that all life has value – that all humans have value and that GREEN is basically right in its drive to create equal opportunities for all. What GREEN doesn’t get is that, while everyone might be ‘equal in the eyes of God’, not everybody is equal in practicality; therefore, there need to be multiple opportunities tailored to different needs. What GREEN also doesn’t get is that the lower vMEMES don’t see the world its way. Which is why we need 2nd Tier thinking to create and manage precarious and shifting balances between the competing needs and values of different vMEMES.

An immigration cap and/or other restrictions might be said to discriminate against those who want to come to this kingdom; it might also be said to discriminate against those who are already settled in this kingdom and wish to see other people from their country of ethnic origin settle here. Interestingly, however, it should be noted that increasingly pollsters are claiming support for restrictions on immigration amongst the ethnic minorities.

A substantial reduction in immigration would give us the breathing space to deal with the effects of 50-plus years of large-scale immigration. In 2004, in the wake of reports on race riots in Oldham, Bradford, Leeds and Burnley during 2001, Trevor Phillips, then head of the Commission for Racial Equality, declared multi-culturalism dead. “We need to assert there is a core of Britishness,” he stated.

If the vision of multi-culturalism – distinct plural cultures living side by side in harmony – is indeed dead, then what kind of Britain should we aim for in our multi-ethnic land…and what role would the assertion of ‘a core of Britishness’ play in it?

It was to address these sorts of issues that the Centre for Human Emergence UK was set up last June. However, time is not on our side. As the BMG acknowledge, it will take several years to get immigration back down to manageable levels. In the meantime PURPLE’s need for stability and security is being ravaged by the recession, with the rate of job losses and house repossessions only decreasing very slowly. These ingredients mixed together have the potential to create a social powder keg – which could be ignited by some pretty short fuses!

The Thatcherite Project is ended. Whither Britain?

 community, government, regeneration, society, Spiral Dynamics  11 Responses »
Jun 062009
 

As Gordon Brown sits in 10 Downing Street and contemplates the terrible drubbing the small turn-out of disillusioned voters inflicted on Labour in Thursday’s local elections – 273 Labour seats lost – while hoping desperately that yesterday’s emergency reshuffle of his Cabinet will at least temporarily stall the intra-Labour campaign to oust him and that Sunday’s European election results will not be as bad as predicted, there is one crumb of comfort for him in all this….

The Thatcherite project, which, with his roots in traditional Socialism, he must have hated, is at an end.

Margaret Thatcher’s philosophy of the pursuit of individual wealth in an unregulated market, with few or no social responsibilities, was an ethos driven by the ORANGE vMEME. And, for quite a time, that philosophy seemed vindicated. After being the ‘sick man of Europe’ in the 1970s, Britain once again become an economic powerhouse and a country of standing on the world stage, with Thatcher seen clearly to exert influence on those ‘leaders of the free world’, Ronald Reagan and the first George Bush. Thatcherism reached its Capitalist zenith in 1989 with the collapse of European Communism and even China starting to crawl towards a sort of market economy in the aftermath of Tiananmen.

But, behind this apparent ‘miracle’ lay a country torn asunder geographically, socially and economically. The new wealth, built on technology and financial services, was concentrated primarily in London and south-eastern England. Most of the traditional ‘heavy’ manufacturing industries in the Midlands, northern England, the Scottish Lowlands and South Wales were allowed to die in the face of competition in the emerging global market. Some, such as mining, were deliberately dismantled as a means to break the power of the trades unions which had so undermined the economic viability of much of British industry in the 1970s.

Many still argue that Thatcher had little choice if she was to enable Britain to be competitive in the embryonic globalisation. I’m not much of an economist to argue that point and I can see the rationale behind much of what she did. (Hey, she made so much sense to me in Spring 1979, I voted for her!) But the social costs of her policies were horrific. The traditional working class, as emerged in this country since the Industrial Revolution, was largely disoriented and, to some extent, disenfranchised by the results of her policies.

The dissolution of a social class
In Spiral Dynamics terms, the traditional working class in Britain was mostly dominated by the PURPLE vMEME. Some of the attributes of PURPLE are its attachment to the land and its demarcation of kinship roles by age and gender. Thus, the male ‘breadwinner’ of the house with his wife in the mother/housekeeper role, with parents (usually hers) in the next street who were there for support (from advice to babysitting). The work done by the males was largely unskilled and manual in nature – so not much need for formal education beyond the basics. (Though schools, as the place where the young of the community learned these basics, were often treated very respectfully.) These working class communities were often centred socially around the pub or the working men’s club which many of the males would visit most nights and take the wife to (as a treat) on either a Friday or Saturday night.)

The RED vMEME, as a cultural entity, was relatively low profile except clearly manifest in the corner shopkeepers, the union radicals, the ward councillors and political activists and other community leaders. However, the RED of most men took pride in being the breadwinner for their families.

For sure, this is an incomplete picture and a stereotype – but it’s a stereotype that largely held true for millions of working class families from the end of World War II through into the early 1980s.

Margaret Thatcher’s policies allowed such communities to be devastated. With the traditional heavy industries in terminal decline and mass unemployment of unskilled males by the late 1980s, the very notion of the working class as it had been was in question. The RED self-esteem of those former male breadwinners was trashed, leaving many of them with nothing but nihilistic self-destruction in booze, cheap drugs and gambling their redundancy money and benefits to obliterate their misery, hopelessness and sense of uselessness.  Small wonder that the small former mining town of Grimethorpe was the first place in Britain you could buy a bag of heroin for £5! Small wonder that male small-time crime and the black market for short-fix cash-in-hand jobs have mushroomed!

What was left of British industry – the new light techonology-driven businesses – by the end of the 1980s tended to prefer low-waged part-time female workers. This resulted in many women holding down 2 or 3 such jobs. Paradoxically such determined enterprise was the making of a number of their daughters who saw hard work and initiative at school as a potential way out of their dire circumstances. With the sons modelling their fathers’ sense of ‘no future’, it’s perhaps one partial explanation of why the daughters of such communities have tended to do better at school than their sons over the past 15-20 years.

The ‘Shameless’ TV programme gives us an exaggerated version of such dysfunctional communities and the way they survive in spite of what society has done to them. What many in the affluent middle classes in the South East may not have realised is how true much of ‘Shameless’ was – and in how much of the rest of the country there were/are Shameless-style estates

As a member of the HemsMESH team working in the former mining villages in South East Wakefield in 1999-2000, I still remember the palpable sense of hopelessness on the streets. Working on projects on Hull’s mammoth Bransholme estate in the early 2000s, I was amazed initially at the poor take-up of train-to-work schemes available in other parts of the city or the surrounding parts of East Yorkshire. Then I realised that, in their heads they were still fishermen or factory workers or manual labourers, their PURPLE keeping them trapped in their traditional identities stuck on home turf. There might have been low-paid government training schemes galore; but nobody was working with the identities and values of these people imprisoned in their own minds.

In the early years of Tony Blair’s government especially, when it seemed the opportunities for more wealth for the middle classes might actually be endless, this underbelly of the dysfunctional remains of the traditional working class was largely ignored. Yet these communities were often in real poverty. The former steel towns and mining villages of South Yorkshire and the deserted docklands of Liverpool actually met European Union Objective 1 criteria – which meant they were amongst the poorest places in the EU which was then obligated to help them financially. Hull would have met Objective 1 criteria but for the affluent East Yorkshire towns surrounding it; ditto poverty-stricken south Leeds but for the wealthy financiers in north Leeds.

I’m not sure I can argue with Thatcher’s policies economically; but she either didn’t anticipate the huge social misery her government’s actions would lead to…that or she simply didn’t care.

And now the middle classes are fallen
While the increasingly large middle classes grew ever more affluent, the successive governments of Thatcher, John Major and Blair could get away with making token gestures to help the remains of the working class communities devastated by the loss of the traditional heavy industries.

But the bankers and financiers who took what, in retrospect, were clearly ridiculous risks in the interests of personal gain – those incredible 6 and 7 figure salaries and even bigger bonuses! – were even more Thatcher’s children than the ‘Shameless generation’ trapped on sink council estates.

ORANGE, shorn of BLUE regulation and understanding little of GREEN’s concerns beyond making the odd token gesture towards environmental issues, pursued personal wealth ever more relentlessly, recklessly and ruthlessly. And they have brought Capitalism to its knees. Banks bust or sitting on huge amounts of public funds to prevent them going bust but not daring to lend. Businesses going into liquidation in truckloads. House prices collapsed. And fortunes wiped out in repeated stock market crashes – all those ‘little people’ Thatcher talked into buying shares now without their retirement ‘nest eggs’ or nothing to fall back on to pay the mortgage now the jobs are gone.

In terms of the amount of money involved, the MPs’ expenses scandal is relative peanuts – but, for so many, it symbolises the personal-wealth-regardless-of-cost ethos of the Thatcher legacy. And it provides a focus for the anger of the middle classes either becoming economically disenfranchised like their working class brethren or potentially faced with it.

Now, it’s too big for the government to gloss over with train-to-work or back-to-work schemes. It’s now no longer a small  but significant disoriented minority in poverty. Now the entire country faces poverty!

Gordon Brown’s government has cushioned the country from the worst so far by a phenomenal level of borrowing. When it seems no one has any real idea how to resolve the global financial crisis, clearly no one has any idea how this country will pay back what it now owes. Even with a relatively buoyant economy, it would take several generations to get the National Debt back to where it was when Blair stepped down from government.

It’s a principle long ago established by Abraham Maslow (1943) that, under pressure, thinking reduces in complexity to tackle lower-level needs.

Thus, under pressure, with the survival of the little you’ve got threatened, dysfunctional PURPLE forms a survival harmonic with BEIGE – and PURPLE’s dislike of those who are ‘not of our tribe’ turns ugly. It goes from a latent fear to active hatred. Thus, the increase in electoral support for the British National Party, with its near-explicit racism. But xenophobia is not exclusive to the working classes. As ORANGE’s personal wealth programme stalls or fails completely, BLUE springs up to form a harmonic with PURPLE against ‘Johnny Foreigner’. Thus, the United Kingdom Independence Party have been able to steal what should have been guaranteed votes for the Conservatives.

Expect more and more RED-led demagogues who will exploit PURPLE fears, feeding racism under the guise of nationalism. It’s in contexts like this that the extremes of politics – Fascism or Communism  - do well, as indeed do fundamentalist religions.

Whither Britain? – a call to intellectual arms
So Capitalism – or, at least, the unrestrained Thatcherite version of it – is finished. Bankers are now rated even more lowly than politicians, journalists and estate agents. The attack on Sir Fred Goodwin’s house earlier in the Spring was applauded by many. Don’t be too surprised if eventually a leading financier gets assassinated. An awfully lot of ‘little people’ have lost an awful lot of money due to the likes of Goodwin. Those with RED strong in their selfplex, particularly if they are of a Psychoticist temperament, will need someone to be avenged upon. (Of course, with the current media frenzy over expenses, it might well be a politician who cops for it!)

But what’s to replace Thatcherite Capitalism – and how will it work? No one seems to know. It appears we’re in uncharted waters.

And what happens to a debt-saddled Britain, with its disenfranchised poverty underbelly being added to every day, its economic rationale no longer viable and its leaders openly despised by a public increasingly ready to listen to the extremists? The bulk of our manufacturing industry was disappeared long ago and the replacement economic ‘fool’s gold’ of financial services has been shown to be just that.

Of course, the picture I have painted of our kingdom’s malaise is somewhat simplistic – what else could it be in such a short space? – but it does sum up a great deal of what we are faced with and how we were got into this awful mess.

So, what do we do? Whither Britain?

When the old ideas clearly aren’t going to work or are just going to make things worse, then it’s time for some, new fresh thinking.

Thankfully we have in London town 27-28 June 2009 Dr Don Beck, one of the foremost experts in the world on large-scale societal change. A veteran and partial architect of the early 1990s changes in South Africa which led to the dismantling of Apartheid, Dr Beck is currently working on a number of key  initiatives, not least the development of a Palestinian state sufficiently mature to  be a viable partner to Israel in the Middle East Peace Process. Along with a team of UK-based seasoned Spiral Dynamics practitioners (including myself), Don will seek to establish new opportunities for the UK at this critical juncture in our modern history, using some of the most advanced sociopsychological tools in the world.

Effectively this is a summit to find a way forward for our kingdom.

The 2-day sessions are open to anyone, regardless of their prior knowledge of Spiral Dynamics and sociopsychology tools. What matters most is that you care about our planet and about our country, for the future of our children and developing a viable culture in which wealth and responsibility are balanced in the interests of all.

I truly hope you will be motivated to be there. The more voices we have and the more commitment, the more likely we are going to be able to make a telling difference.

To find out more about this critical workshop programme, click www.spiralworld.net/html/don_beck_event.html

Don’t implement Macpherson!

 community, human rights, Spiral Dynamics  No Responses »
Aug 132004
 

It seems Conservative Party leader Michael Howard has once again indulged in an announcement of policy deliberately designed to court controversy and to wind up liberal thinkers.

The latest in Howard’s increasingly-desperate Dirty Harry-esque hard right wing policy announcements would have the Tories not implementing a key recommendation of the 1999 Macpherson Report – namely that police officers have to document all instances of ‘stop & search’ that they carry out. Howard’s proposition is that, assuming the search of the person stopped indicated no further action was required, the average 7 minutes required to document the action would deter officers from investigating potential suspects.

On one level it was an entertaining piece of political theatre – very RED! It is also seems to confirm the view of some commentators that Howard is either incredibly self-referenced or else caught in some form of groupthink that insulates him from any common-sense opinions external to his closest advisers.

At another level, Howard is tapping into the sense of many that the country is ‘going-to-hell’. “The clear distinction between right and wrong has been lost in sociological mumbo-jumbo and politically correct nonsense,” he said when making his policy announcement. “There is now a palpable sense of outrage that ‘so-called’ human rights have tipped the balance of justice in favour of the criminal and the wrong-doer, rather than the victim and the law abider.”

The crumbling of rigid BLUE morality under pressure from ‘do-gooder’ GREEN is a common theme in a number of analyses of what’s going wrong with Western society. It’s an issue that Spiral Dynamics co-developer Don Beck has drawn attention to several times in the past few years; and it is reflected in my own ‘A Downward Spiral…’

Beneath Howard’s moral concerns, however, he is, perhaps unwittingly, giving cause to the deep xenophobic PURPLE tribalism that always lurks beneath the surface in any kind of multi-culturalism in society, ready to undermine it.

Doreen Lawrence, mother of the murdered black schoolboy, Stephen Lawrence, at the centre of the Macpherson Report, seized upon this aspect straightaway. Within hours of Howard’s announcement, she was denouncing the policy to journalists and broadcasters. If the Tories carried through this policy, she stated, it would put community relations with the police back by 10 years.

The Nature of Racism
Lord Macpherson found the Metropolitan Police to be riddled with ‘institutional racism’. His proposal to document stop & searches – with the searched person retaining a ‘receipt’ from the searching officer(s) – was one of a number of recommendations aimed at de-institutionalising that racism and driving it out of the force.

In Spiral Dynamics terms, ‘institutional racism’ means that the ‘higher authority’ and organising structure of BLUE have effectively licensed and enabled the racism that is natural for PURPLE. (see: Is Racism Natural…? )

Let’s be clear here: PURPLE is not racism. Racism is one of the manifestations of PURPLE’s not-of-our-tribe ethic. Not-of-our-tribe sentiments are not just about colour of skin but can relate to any aspect of ethnicity. More than 500 years after the Wars of the Roses, the lingering distrust between some Yorkshire people and some Lancashire people is due to PURPLE thinking. The PURPLE vMEME is active as a principal driver in the desire of many Scots and Welsh to be distinct – even independent – from the English. And when the monolithic BLUE structures of Communism crumbled in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, repressed PURPLE tribalism produced a whole series of vicious ethnic wars and reintroduced the world to ‘ethnic cleansing’. PURPLE is an element of what’s going on in Darfur, even as I write.

Wherever one set of people distinguishes their collective Identity from another set of people with feeling (rather than intellectually), then the PURPLE vMEME is at work.

This ‘not-of-our-tribe-ism’ by default denotes the ‘other lot’ as lesser beings and this makes PURPLE very vulnerable to manipulation by more complex vMEMES. Slobodan Milosovich’s RED warlord use of tribalism in Kosovo and the British National Party’s very BLUE intellectual justification of racial division are just two examples of the way PURPLE gets used in this way.

The GREEN-BLUE Conflict
In the same way that racism is a manifestation of PURPLE thinking, egalitarianism is a product of the GREEN vMEME.

So GREEN egalitarianism stands opposed to PURPLE ‘not-of-our-tribe-ism’. GREEN, being a far more complex vMEME, can use the BLUE legal structures to repress PURPLE not-of-our-tribe-ism. Hence the raft of equality-oriented legislation in Western societies in the latter half of the Twentieth Century as GREEN thinking increasingly dominated intellectual debate.

It is this GREEN using BLUE to repress undesirable PURPLE that underlies Lord Macpherson’s proposal to document stop & searches.

The scenario would be that the police officer’s I-can-do-whatever-I-want-to RED, including indulging my PURPLE not-of-our-tribe-ism by harassing young blacks – and all under a facade of BLUE authority – is constrained by subjecting the officer to real  BLUE accountability: the documentation of the stop & search.

Unfortunately, statistics show time and time again that young black males are convicted of a very high percentage of crimes committed in areas where they live or are in close proximity to. Leaving aside prejudice in the judicial system, there are a whole series of sociological factors (unemployment, lack of opportunity in the white world, imported cultural traditions, etc, etc) linked to a whole series of psychological factors (confusion of cultural Identity, low self-esteem, poor self-efficacy, negative identity, etc, etc) which explain why a disproportionately high number of young black males end up with criminal convictions. But the inescapable fact is that a significant number of young black males in inner city areas do commit crimes.

Purple/RED rap culture actually celebrates this and the ORANGE entertainment industry promotes it in films and music.

Thus, the media stereotype of the young black ‘gangsta’ becomes an element in the demographics of the ‘fear of crime’ – and it is the fear of crime which Michael Howard’s policy announcement is playing on.

One of the downsides of the ascendancy of GREEN thinking in intellectual debates has been the progressive undermining of rigid BLUE morality in Western society – embodied in the permissive hippie culture of the 1960s but actually beginning in the 1950s. The decline of BLUE morality has led not so much to the ennobling freedom of the human spirit, as many hippie ‘gurus’ intended, but to the unshackling of RED lusts and self-indulgence, with the energy focussed on instant fulfilment – all exploited to the hilt by ORANGE consumerism. The knock-on effect of all this has been the undermining of traditional PURPLE ‘family values’ – including some of the rituals and taboos that form the fabric of a healthy and functional society.

Just some of the results of this are a virtual epidemic of broken marriages and one-parent families, gangs of unruly teenagers terrorising estates, wide-scale drug abuse and alarming rises in crime rates – with ‘gun crime’ now an established modus operandi in many inner city neighbourhoods

No wonder the ‘blue rinse brigade’, who comprise a substantial section of what’s left of the Tory vote agree totally with Michael Howard’s assertion that “The clear distinction between right and wrong has been lost in sociological mumbo-jumbo and politically correct nonsense.” Howard is absolutely correct in that statement…but he’s only got part of the bigger picture and making police officers less accountable, with the potential for re-unleashing PURPLE/red abuse of young black males, is hardly the answer.

Taking responsibility
What is needed, as Don Beck has frequently stated, is the need for more BLUE structure in society.

We can’t put the GREEN genie back in the proverbial bottle and you can’t turn the clock back. Nor should we. The large-scale emergence of GREEN thinking has brought with it many benefits. Without GREEN, women would still be ‘chained to the kitchen sink’, blacks would still be officially second class citizens, blue/ORANGE capitalist industry would still be polluting the planet with complete abandon, and there would be an awful lot more wars.

But we can re-emphasise BLUE values to redress the balance somewhat. Tony Blair is onto some of this when he talks about rights and responsibilities. He’s also on the right track when he talks about being “tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime”.

At a BLUE level we do need effective and efficient policing. We also need to punish wrongdoers – and for them to be seen to be punished as a deterrent to others. Michael Howard has dusted off the litany from his days as Home Secretary that “Prisons work”. Reoffending statistics make that supposition highly dubious; but I will never forget a police inspector in South East Wakefield telling me: Prisons do work for the first three months on a person’s first incarceration. After that they learn to adapt.” So perhaps we need much shorter sentences in much more unpleasant conditions? The kind of experience no sane person would want to repeat in a hurry? The kind of fist-in-the-face encounter that RED does actually learn from…?

The problem with prisons is that GREEN, with its concern for ‘human rights’, has driven much of the agenda in recent years. While prisons are far from pleasant places, few convicted felons are actually terrified these days of a further sentence. GREEN needs to be in a background monitoring role, making sure prisoners can actually survive the experience both physically and psychologically and then resourcing them for life beyond the prison gates.

At a PURPLE level we need to encourage couples to work at marriages, to regard ‘playing away from home’ as taboo (especially for men) and to learn how to be responsible parents. (Even OFSTED – the Office for Standards in Education – has started to turn its attentions to parents as the next ‘big step’ in improving performance in many schools.)

And we need to restrain ORANGE’s manipulation of RED’s desire for indulgent thrills and instant excitement by glamourising violence and promiscuous sex. (When was the last time you saw a television drama portraying a middle-aged couple, happily married for 20 years, having full-on, naked, uninhibited, multi-orgasmic sex….?)

As to racism, we need to create a bigger PURPLE Identity that all the tribes can buy into. Creation of such an Identity almost certainly requires macro-working the Spiral to involve the RED, BLUE and ORANGE vMEMES.

An example to model which could give us more ideas on how to do this might lie with those youths who were shown in the audience at a televised England vs Pakistani cricket match last year. Undoubtedly of Asian extraction, their faces were painted in the red and white of St George and they were cheering on the England players. When questioned by reporters, they revealed their parents or grandparents came from Pakistan. Somehow these young men had made the transition in Identity that made them see themselves as ‘English’.

Michael Howard’s problem is that he keeps trying to out-BLUE Tony Blair. What he should be doing is learning to out-Spiral Blair!

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.