Transcending Rigidity: The Four Phases of Spiritual Development, Part III: The Patterns of History

In essays I and II, we explored the basic dynamics of spiritual development, following the Four Stages outlined by M. Scott Peck in his book The Different Drum.[1]

 So far, we have looked at how the Four Stages of Spiritual Development functions on an individual level (before proceeding, I suggest reading essays I and II). In this essay, we will expand our focus to see how the Four Stages also functions on a collective level, in society and culture. 

As cultures seek to establish meaningful values to guide human life—as we all, together, try to make sense of the world and our place in it—we are in an endless quest to avoid chaos (Stage 1), establish authoritative values and boundaries for right behavior (Stage 2), even while constantly questioning established authorities (Stage 3), as we try (or not, perhaps) to become spiritually maturity (Stage 4). These dynamics can help us understand the societies in which we live and, ultimately, how to find meaning in a confused world. 

Societal Shifts

 In 1793, the streets of Paris ran with blood. During the Reign of Terror, the blood-letting and chaos into which the French Revolution descended, anyone too closely associated with the Ancien Régime­ (the old political order) was carried into the streets and executed. Though the revolutionaries of 1789 had envisioned a new societal order based on science, reason, and logic—the virtues of the Enlightenment—Paris in 1793 was anything but enlightened. 

What caused this sudden explosion? Societal change is most often a gradual process. And indeed, The Reign of Terror only seems at first glance to be a sudden outburst when, in fact, it had a long preamble: decades of discontent with the monarchy, growing doubts about the Church, and famines which drove countless Parisians to starvation and despair. Yet beneath the violence was the same longing that drives all revolutions: the quest for a new world. This hope for a bright tomorrow, for us or for those who come after us, drives us all. It is the stubborn hope and quest for meaning in a world which often seems meaningless. 

Societies seek continuity and stability so that its culture can define what is meaningful, such that it can be pursued.[2] And this cultural pursuit of meaning mirrors the individual’s pursuit: just as individuals develop towards spiritual maturity (or get stuck in a stage of development, or regress to a previous stage), so do cultures writ large. The word “spiritual” here, again, is used in its broadest sense and is not necessarily referential of religion. “Spiritual” includes the array of an individual’s (or culture’s) psychological and emotive processes involving humankind’s deepest and most sacred—and in this sense spiritual—longings and aspirations. Our search for love, beauty, and meaningfulness all fall under this definition of “spiritual”, whether someone believes in God or not. By this definition, all individuals and all societies are spiritual, whatever their creed, dogma, or lack thereof. And all societies are shifting continually, moving through the Four Stage of Spiritual Development as the society seeks spiritual fulfillment. Indeed, movements between the stages happen in the world around us all the time. If we zoom out from the individual to the societal level, we see movements through the stages in every era of human history; they are movements of the zeitgeist, the defining spirit of a cultural milieu. And the paradigm of The Four Stages helps us understand them.

The radicalized revolutionaries of Paris attempted, through violence, to deconstruct their Stage 2 world, defined as it was by the boundaries delineated by supreme institutions—the monarchy, aristocracy, and Church. From one perspective, the French Revolution was a movement from Stage 2 to Stage 3; the revolutionaries doubted and radically deconstructed the Stage 2 dogma of church and state which stood in the way of a new world order. From another perspective, they were simply moving towards a newStage 2, in which the authority of science and reason would replace the authority of the Bible, the Pope, and the monarchy. This is how history works: Stage 2 breaks down and moves into Stage 3 and ultimately the values of Stage 3 form the boundaries of a new Stage 2. This is the most common pattern in history.[3] But that’s not what we witness in 1793—not immediately, anyway. Then, the nation reverted to the chaos of Stage 1. Obviously people don’t like to stay in chaos—we love stability, certainty, and predictability too much. But regressions into chaos do happen. Sometimes deconstruction takes a wrecking ball, so it seems.

The same movement—from Stage 2 to 1—can happen in reverse. In the 1970s, Iranian zealots revolted against what they viewed (accurately enough) as a licentious, corrupt sovereign. They were reacting against the perceived chaos of Stage 1 and moved their society into the highly rigid and legalistic strictures of an Islamic society. In other words, they moved their nation into Stage 2, to a formal, institutionally- centered theocracy. 

And again, the most common pattern is a movement from Stage 2 to Stage 3. Consider an example from recent history: In the United States in 1962, the Students for a Democratic Society issued thePort Huron Statement, in which a younger generation decries the world being inherited from their forebears.[4] One sees in it the concerns of a people discontented withthe security of Stage 2 (in this case, the security and prosperity of white bread, post-World War II American society) and beginning to name and denounce the cracks in the dam of American life. The critique within thePort Huron Statementrepresents a movement of deconstruction, calling into question established values and boundaries. Indeed, in the first three, short paragraphs, the authorities of Stage 2—American might and fervor for what we might call “the American way” and “the American dream” and the values of “the Greatest Generation”—are essentially declared bankrupt.[5] There is racism in the South, nuclear antagonism across the hemispheres, general dread about the growth of the industrial-military complex, and deep conviction that the status quo being handed down is not good enough. The statement, then, represents a classic example of doubt, rejection of values, and thus a movement from Stage 2 to Stage 3. 

The Port Huron Statement is the front edge of cultural change—indeed, of what is now called “cultural revolution” (there’s that word again)—that shock-waved across American society in the 1960s. The “hippies,” with dreams of an “Age of Aquarius”, helped uproot the conservative sexual norms of the 1950s and introduced a new, liberalized sexual ethic which, again, represents a movement from Stage 2 to 3. The cultural revolution of the 60s is another example of deconstruction, not unlike the French Revolution, in an attempt to find meaning. Thus does history move forward.

Of course, the social upheavals in Vietnam-era America were perceived by many not as forward movement but as a regression from Stage 2 into chaos. What we see, as always, depends on our own perspective and whatever stage we are in.[6] Nevertheless, the pattern of doubting and deconstructing what came before in order to build a new edifice—or perhaps a new foundation—is always the pattern. Each generation looks back in critique at the generation that came before. This societal pattern is mirrored at the individual level by what happens in nuclear families. As children become adolescents, they begin to question the Stage 2 boundaries outlined by parents, caregivers, and authorities. In some sense, we are all meant to challenge authority and to deconstruct Stage 2; it’s simply part of our development. But then we are left with the task of creating new boundaries, or embracing—in a new way, no doubt—the ones which came before. The film The Big Chill captures this tension well, as former 60s radicals are portrayed fifteen years later far removed from the radicalism of their youth and, in some instances, having become the new, conservative boundary-makers just a few years down the line.[7] Indeed, many 60s radicals became power-brokers in a 1980s America defined by the pursuit of wealth. Authorities come, authorities are dismantled, and then new authorities are put in place, and we march back and forth between Stage 2 and Stage 3. This is the pattern and patter of history, with occasional regressions into the chaos of Stage 1 (a la the French Revolution).

And of course, there are occasional glimpses into the spiritual maturity which marks Stage 4. Martin Luther King, Jr’s “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963 (a year after thePort Huron statement), marks one of these glimpses. Perhaps we are at times even attaining ground towards Stage 4, as Dr. King envisioned. Yet looking at the current political gridlock and mode of discourse in the US, it’s easy to conclude we are regressing, as a culture, into the tribalism of Stage 2. All the while, whatever the stage of our culture, rest assured it isgrappling for a narrative in which we can find purpose and meaning. Nevertheless, despite a continual proliferation in our technology, our narratives about what is meaningful are up in the air. In fact, our technology serves in part to mask our inability to find meaningful narratives from which to live and covering the underlying despair now growing across American society.[8] We are wealthier than ever, yet wealth by itself cannot provide narratives of meaning.

In the next essay, we’ll explore how our society and culture is now stuck between Stage 2 and Stage 3, as we try to find new narratives of meaning in which we can anchor ourselves.

[1] Peck, M. Scott. The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology Of Love, Traditional Values And Spiritual Growth. Touchstone/Simon & Schuster. 1985. Pages 187-199. Note: the language “Chaos/Boundaries/Deconstruction/ Union” overlaps with but varies from Peck’s language. I find this language, though altered, is helpful as shorthand.

[2]Society being the ordering of systems and power structures to support a large group of people and culture being that society’s pursuit of truth and beauty through the exploration of art and science.  Consider an example: Athens went to war in the fifth century BCE to maintain societal security—that is, to protect the population and its culture through strength of arms. The army as a power structure of society made space for the poets, philosophers, and high culture of Athens. The society ensures the culture’s survival such that it, safe and secure, its culture can address the great philosophical questions—“Why are we here?”, “What is beauty?”, “How do we live meaningfully?” and so forth. On one hand, this is obvious; yet the principle functions with increasing subtlety. The conflict between security and privacy in our contemporary world—a la Facebook and Google—maps to the same struggle between a power structure and the preservation of beauty (even if power is now represented by the reach of a corporation and beauty is simply the maintenance of privacy as a common good.) Indeed, societies are always in this tension: how does one maintain order while creating enough space for beauty and art? The question becomes pointed the more authoritarian or totalitarian a society becomes. Individuals are in this same tension, between the need for security and the desire for thriving. As are individual relationships. Psychologist Esther Perel, for example, describes all marriage relationships as a tension between the desire for stability and the drive towards romance. (See Esther Perel in “Why is Modern Love So Damn Hard?” at https://estherperel.com/blog/why-modern-love-is-so-damn-hard [September 19, 2019]). 

[3]Such patterns—generally movements from Stage 2 to 3—are usually long in emerging. It took centuries for Christian thought to overtake and supplant Stoicism, the dominant Greco-Roman philosophy, just as Judeo-Christian culture held sway for centuries before succumbing to the new science of the Enlightenment and the advent of a materialistic, Darwinian era. And we can still look back on The Enlightenment, over two centuries ago, as the clearest, dividing line between us and the Medievals.

[4]1 We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.

2 When we were kids the United States was the wealthiest and strongest country in the world; the only one with the atom bomb, the least scarred by modern war, an initiator of the United Nations that we thought would distribute Western influence throughout the world. Freedom and equality for each individual, government of, by, and for the people—these American values we found good, principles by which we could live as men. Many of us began maturing in complacency.

3 As we grew, however, our comfort was penetrated by events too troubling to dismiss. First, the permeating and victimizing fact of human degradation, symbolized by the Southern struggle against racial bigotry, compelled most of us from silence to activism. Second, the enclosing fact of the Cold War, symbolized by the presence of the Bomb, brought awareness that we ourselves, and our friends, and millions of abstract "others" we knew more directly because of our common peril, might die at any time. We might deliberately ignore, or avoid, or fail to feel all other human problems, but not these two, for these were too immediate and crushing in their impact, too challenging in the demand that we as individuals take the responsibility for encounter and resolution.

Accessed at https://history.hanover.edu/courses/excerpts/111huron.html[September 23, 2019]

[5]“Greatest Generation” being a phrase coined by Tom Brokaw in his book of the same name.  Random House. 2001.

[6]While remembering that these stages are merely descriptive and no one is simply “in” one stage across the board.

[7]The Big Chill. Dir. by Lawrence Kasdan. Columbia Pictures. 1983.

[8]Suicide rates, especially among younger white men, who have traditionally been the most privileged), have skyrocketed. See, for example, https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/suicide-rate-america-white-men-841576/[September 24, 2019]