WHAT TRANSCEND AND INCLUDE MEANS: The Pros and Cons of Each AQAL Level

The following is my attempt to address a few issues often brought up within the Integral Community.  An understanding of Integral Theory would facilitate understanding it, but I’ve tried to write in in a way that would be accessible to most people.

“Transcend and include” is a central concept in the idea of evolution through the AQAL levels of Integral theory.  As you progress from Traditional to Modern to Post-Modern you are supposed to retain the best parts of the previous level as you migrate to the world view of the next level.  It often doesn’t happen that way because each level believes that it is the only right way to look at things, often rejecting with enthusiasm the values and perspectives of the previous level.  Once one achieves an Integral, Second Tier level, one is open to the value and contributions of each of the previous levels.

Itemizing the pros and cons of each level seems to be a necessary task in order to filter out what gets included and what gets transcended.  Although I have come across a few indirect mentions of this in various readings and podcasts, I feel that it would be valuable to spell these our more directly.  This is what I am attempting to do in this article.

Let’s start with the Traditional / Pre-Rational / Amber level.  This is a particularly important topic because this level represents one of the largest portions of the population, and failure to understand them is at the heart of the current culture wars and the current social tension.  In fact, members of this Traditional level are not all the “basket of deplorables” to which Hillary so unfortunately assigned them.  It is the fact that they are all viewed as some kind of uncivilized, substandard group of people that has led to the reactionary results of the recent American election, and we would be well advised to make sure that we don’t fall into the same mistake here in Canada.

The Traditional level has many strengths.  These have been notably demonstrated during the disasters and tragedies of the last few months.  During the string of hurricanes that hit southern Texas and Florida there were countless stories of individual and group heroism in selfless aid, sharing and community solidarity.  This was a demonstration of Traditional positive values.  They are loyal to community and family.  They are group centric, and feel a moral obligation to that group.  Their trust in their religion gives them strength and hope when pure reason would fail.  There is a spiritual commitment to that religion that translates into a sense of awe about the world and a personal relationship with that spirituality.  In small towns, there is a sense of pride and decency which helps prevent things like delinquency and graffiti.  I have personally sensed that strong community citizenship in the many Midwestern and western towns I’ve visited through the years.  Contrary to being “deplorable”, there is a real core of conservative decency.  These are all valuable traits which undoubtedly enabled the settlement of the New World in the face of many hardships.

However, there are many shortcomings within all of this.  Group-centric more often than not means that the positive qualities of which we speak are only extended to members of that home group.  People who are outsiders or who are different are not included.  This is also true of ideas.  When you are using words like “conservative” or “traditional” you have to understand that they are aimed at preserving the past and are very resistant to change.  Change is a threat to the group and the comforting stability.  Values are linked to a literal interpretation of the rules that define the group, -in N. America this most commonly being one form or another of Christianity.  As it is a pre-rational stage, it doesn’t know how to shine the light of logic or reason onto those rules or customs and so they are inflexibly and stubbornly accepted.  This and the exclusivity caused by group centric beliefs give rise to the more negative traits of discrimination, racism, sexism and a variety of other prejudices, including a suspicion of education and intelligence.  These are the qualities of a smaller world and have to change when one accepts a larger world.

Of course, science and culture do not stand still.  As they evolve they become a threat to tradition.  Galileo was persecuted for suggesting that the Earth was not the centre of the universe.  In modern times that persecution and rejection is aimed at people who believe in evolution and who do not believe the literal, Biblical age of the Earth as 8 000 years.

Often, this cultural confrontation leads to the Traditional level rejecting science and progress in its entirety, and those in the rational levels see this as barbaric.  Intellectualism and science are often ridiculed by the Amber level.  When the rational levels (Orange and Green) view this, they’re likely to put all of the Amber characteristics into one basket and label it deplorable.  That’s a mistake on many levels.  Not only does it deny the many positive characteristics of the Amber level, but it also places them in a defensive position from which they are far less likely to evolve.  When you are defensive, it makes it harder to “transcend”, and those who do are often lacking in the “include” as the jump can often be a traumatic one.  Those who progress from Amber to Orange often divest themselves of all traces of the previous level.  Like the adolescent who has just discovered the power of reason, they turn it on everything else in a frenzy of rejection.  All forms of spiritual involvement are given the hatchet, and often so are the group centric practices of loyalty and obligation.

A similar analysis can be made of the Orange / Modernist / Rational level.  Its strength is obviously the power of reason and science superseding superstition.  It dawned with the Age of Enlightenment, which led to the Industrial Revolution and scientific breakthroughs culminating in the cure of many diseases and putting a man on the moon.  Primitive beliefs about the cause of disease were replaced with an understanding of bacteria and infection, in turn leading to how one can cure them.  Those at the Orange level can respond reasonably to argument and logic (although they don’t always do that).

But the flip side can be the narrow absolutism of materialism.  It leads to determinism, the questioning of free will, capitalism at its worst, and Social Darwinism.  The vitality and awe of the human experience is thrown out with the Amber superstition, leaving the barren landscape of existentialism.  Like Ayn Rand’s character in the novel “We The Living”, it looks out on the world and judges its value only in terms of human need, pragmatic creativity and functionality.  It is beautiful if it was a beautiful human creation.  It can be sterile, opportunist and exploitive due to economic and materialistic pragmatism.  Again, because it believes that it is the only valid world view, it ravages everything outside of its boundaries and in time exaggerates everything within.  While it is a plus that it respects achievement, it is a negative that it respects only achievement and at the cost of so many other values.

And, in turn, we can examine the Post-Modern or Green stage.  The larger scale advancement of the Green / Post-Modernism / Trans-Rational level in the 60s and 70s brought a broader, more inclusive world view often described as Pluralism and a greater degree of relativism in looking at alternative points of view.  It led to a greater movement towards racial and gender equality, above and beyond the formal adjustments that were made under Modernism.  It began greater acceptance of issues around sexual identity and Gay rights.  It began to be more inclusive of other cultures, ascribing to them a degree of internal validity.  All of this acts as an interesting bridge to the Teal or Second Tier world view which embodies the next level in Integral Theory, i.e. the Integral Level.  Compassion was extended not only to other lifestyles and cultures, but also expanded to Nature in general though new environmental awareness.  The ideas of consciousness, self improvement, and things like transactional psychology emerged to extend the world view to the internal (UL) realm.  Parts of spirituality were reclaimed as people realized that pure reason may have thrown the baby out with the bathwater when Modernism reacted against Traditionalism, and as a result trans-rational thought began to consider that logic and reason were not the be all and end all.  Placing materialism on a pedestal had the same detrimental effects as dogmatic traditionalism.  And yet, reason had to be held in the equation in all of these new initiatives in order to give it some grounding.  Hence there was an attempt to justify the new spirituality in terms of Quantum Physics, -sometimes a more successful attempt at justification than at other times.

But like all of the other levels, there is an inevitable dark side potential, interestingly being called “mean green” by Integral thinkers.  As was the case with the other levels, there is the tendency to go overboard.  Pluralism often became relativism, where other aspects of foreign cultures were not only considered for merit, but were automatically validated regardless of what it was.  Instead of each opinion having some truth to it, the tendency was to say that all opinions were in fact true, meaning that there was no truth.  This led to two very damaging consequences.  The first was a dominance of relativism and nihilism that did not allow any form of examination or discrimination when dealing with other points of view.  Everything had to be accepted, which means that there was only “include” and no “transcend”.  There was no selection of values to carry forward or leave behind.  There were no positive and negative aspects because total inclusion demanded that you include everything without any such discrimination, leading to a sort of Nihilistic world view.

In a bizarre twist, this morphed into a second consequence.  Everything had to be accepted, except non acceptance.  For that there was extreme intolerance, leading to things like micro aggressions, political correctness, safe spaces and protests against many things that should be regarded as free speech.  To be clear, each of these things have appropriate applications.  People who are psychologically vulnerable need safe spaces and extra consideration.  Hate speech should not be regarded as free speech without special consequences.  But the trend got out of hand and in many cases these principles are being used as the norm, not the exception.  I called it bizarre because imbedded in this there is an inherent paradox.  On one hand Green wants to be tolerant of other cultures and ways of life.  On the other hand they are extremely intolerant of the social levels such as Amber and risk referring to them as a “basket of deplorables”.

Each level, as we’ve seen, has its positive and negative sides.  There seems to be a pattern.  Understanding this allows us to make other conclusions.

First, it answers the original question about “transcend and include”, making it clear that we can leave behind the negative while updating the positive within the previous level and carrying it forward to the new level.

Second, it allows us to understand how an Integral, Second Tier world view can value aspects of each level without necessarily having to accept the more unsavory parts of them which don’t meet new standards of inclusion.  In my opinion, one of the biggest issues in our current state of cultural polarization is the inability of levels to see the positive in the other levels.  This isn’t surprising as each First Tier level tends to see itself as the only valid world view.  However, Second Tier has to learn this lesson, and even Green has to begin to have some sensitivity towards it.  This is the real reason that political Progressives lost so much in the Heartland of America.  Those people felt ignored and demeaned.

Third, it draws attention to the idea that horizontal development is just as important as vertical development.  This means that within any given level there is a lot of personal work to be done.  Integral theory is not just about levels.  Lines of development are just as important.  Making progress in all lines of development such as emotional intelligence, social interaction and spiritual development all are going to have an impact on successful transition to higher levels, not to mention that good, even development just does a lot to help make a good person.  Similarly, shadow work is an essential component at every single level, playing a huge part in the positive vs. negative characteristics.  As I read somewhere recently (can’t remember or I would give credit) and evenly balanced compassionate Amber person is in many ways much better company than a Mean Green person, just as a “nice” ten year old is often a better person than a disturbed adult.

If this is truly a pattern, it should be apparent in the Red / Warrior level.  I feel that it is, with independence and personal achievement being important qualities on the positive side, while lack of empathy, egocentrism and lack of nuance becomes a problem in our modern society.

Similarly, there should be positive and negative aspects to Teal / Turquoise, although I’m not really prepared to go into those here at this time.  Unless the switch to Second Tier magically changes the pattern, it is something that should be seen as an important factor in transition and inclusion.  And since “magic” is more of a Red / Amber thing, my money is on the pattern replicating.

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