Four Political Jokes with Footnotes
Why Trump is more red than orange, Greens are too green, and what happens when metamodernism walks into a bar.
I am grateful to the apparently kind readers who encouraged me to keep going with my footnoted in-jokes. I am not sure if they were joking, however, and the joke might be on me. I decided to hedge my bets with a few more jokes based on that incorrigible conceptual charlatan called spiral dynamics, which describes cultural evolution, explains personal development, or is an intellectual disgrace, depending on who you ask. Since we are entering party political terrain, I am obliged to say that I am writing in a personal capacity here on The Joyous Struggle, and nothing that follows speaks for any organisation I am associated with.
These jokes are warm-ups for some thoughts on politics in general, informed by my love of prepolitical sanity - let’s not kill each other, or destroy our only home; parapolitical praxis - experimenting with the patterning of power in how we live, and relate, and work, and decide; and metapolitical ambition - what would a politics premised on the transformation of consciousness on a planetary scale look like, and where can we start?
That broader inquiry is waiting in the wings. Over the last couple of weeks, I have been writing about what it means today to ‘get political’ in ways that are commensurate with our personal capacities and the state of the world. I have thoughts on Ruth Levitas’s Utopia-as-method, Arendt’s love of ‘common sense’, whether populism without division is possible, the contours of a new political spectrum, and what else political metamodernism might mean, if Hanzi Freinacht is not, after all, the only way.
But for now, on this blessed Friday evening, here’s an appetiser before dinner.
I don’t expect sane readers to find these jokes funny, but I hope funny readers might find them sane.
US Politics.
Q: Why was the Republican Party so blue?
A: Because the orange one had become so red.1
UK Politics
Q: Why does the Green Party keep losing elections?
A: Because it’s not red enough, blue enough, orange enough or yellow enough. 2
The next joke requires some knowledge of the meaning of ‘metamodernism’, which I wrote about at length here. It is a theory about what comes after postmodernism, and in one line, it means something like “how the internet makes us feel”, but some also see it as a body of thought and practice for a new political movement.
Metapolitics/UK
Metamodernism walks into a bar.
The slightly rude barman says: Who are you, and what do you want?
Metamodernism says: Well, I’m a word, a concept, an ideology, a pattern, a movement, a structure of feeling, a state, a stage, a sensibility, an episteme, an idea, a notion.3
Barman: So, like everyone else in here, you’re an identity crisis seeking alcohol.
Metamodernism. No, actually, I want to change the UK’s political culture.
Barman: And how are you going to do that?
Metamodernism: I’m considering joining the Green Party.
Barman: I wouldn’t advise it.
Metamodernsim: Why?
Barman: They are too green.
The fourth (and mercifully, last) joke helps to explain the third one, and it has what may be the world’s first-ever multiple-choice punchline.
Metapolitics
Why has metamodernism yet to succeed politically?
Because it is too green.
Because it is not Green enough.4
The joke relies on the ambiguous signifier status of green as a proxy for values/ethos/outlook, as well as the name of an established and perennially underachieving political party. Nonetheless, I share it as a serious joke, because the correct answer could well be ‘both’.5
More seriously, one thing I am sensing, and as is argued by metamodern theorists here, is that however imperfect any given cause or person or party may be, we have to find a way to recognise the partial truth of any given perspective, while still also having the courage and resolve to pick a side and support it wholeheartedly, as if our lives depend on it, becuase they might.
I’ll come back to what that might mean in the next post.
There is a theoretical model known as Spiral Dynamics, derived from the research of Clare Graves, that is part of the broader corpus and canon of integral theory associated most directly with Ken Wilber. This developmental stage model works (or misleads/oversimplifies) by summarising cultural codes/developmental level/values/action logics in terms of colours, indicating how individuals and/or culture evolve and continue to evolve. I believe humans do continue to develop into adulthood, and cultures do vary and evolve, so SD can be useful as a conversational shorthand, a kind of epistemic patois, but it should be approached with caution and discernment. Unfortunately, SD is often badly misunderstood as an explanatory ontology and misapplied as a form of social analysis or organisational decision-making, in a way that is unsound and unhelpful.
As for the joke, in the model, Red corresponds to dominance, respect, and action, with an underlying “I take what I want” ethos found in warlords, gangs, and authoritarian leaders. Blue is classically old-school conservative, concerned with order and conformity to moral codes, found in corporate logics and traditional religion. Orange is about a particular subset of enlightenment values, “science & progress” as Coldplay put it, but it is also the driving forces behind capitalism, like innovation and competition, and it’s strongly felt in, for instance, tech culture and finance. Green leans egalitarian and humanistic, and is concerned with values like empathy, inclusion, and fairness, consensus decision making, the primacy of feelings, and a proclivity for social justice advocacy found in activist movements, therapy culture, and some progressive politics.
The joke plays on the double meaning of orange and blue. It’s about the current US President’s face often looking orange, with a nod the fact that he was backed by many as a kind of “business leader” (ie also orange) but who has proven to be altogether more authoritarian (ie red) to the dismay of some of those in the Republican party who are more classically ‘blue’ in the old-school conservative sense, as well as leaning orange in the business sense, while being represented by the colour red. Blue, of course, is also the colour of the democrats, and can also mean sad, so there’s a lot going on. And it’s nice that at a purely visual level, red is associated with anger and feels like an escalation of orange.
All of these codes reflect partial truths and have their shadows. There is a ‘second tier’ beginning with ‘Yellow’ that recognises the partial truth, value, and context specificity of such outlooks, and which does not see any of them as higher or better than the others as such, just perhaps more recent in the context of recent (Western) history. The Wikipedia overview of SD is not bad, but more could be said about prevailing critiques. There is, after all, something monstrous - literally Handmaids Tale like - about labelling people or cultures with colours. The weakness of the empirical basis and the thinness of the underlying theory, combined with the generality of the claims, means that spiral dynamics will always risk looking like a tool for the worst kinds of mid-brow imperialism. Hanzi Freinacht offers a good critique of SD in The Listening Society where he distinguishes between mental complexity stage, emotional state, cultural code, and existential depth for a more complex angle on ‘developmental profile’ that is not simply a level, but even here the idea that some people are of a higher ‘value’ than others will be resisted.
And yet, I also have to acknowledge that many who find spiral dynamics for the first time experience a kind of relief, because it can help to make sense of professional or personal scenarios with the kinds of broad brush strokes that provide some epistemic therapeutic relief in a way that details sometimes don’t. I also believe SD can occasionally be a useful descriptive heuristic if and only if it is used as a kind of shorthand, and held lightly and reflexively alongside other models and perspectives (or as the basis of a joke). I would even go so far as to say that if you do not approach spiral dynamics as a form of play, it is better to steer clear of it.
This joke is also serious, and in two ways. Part of me feels a political party named after a single colour can never hope to win. Everyone knows there are so many other colours, so the party’s name itself screams out: Narrow! Fixated! Partial view! Single-minded! In the spirit of nama rupa, that things take on the form of their names, the Greens are a hopeless case. I am joking, I think, but I also feel it. I mean, how can the explicit green, alone, without any other colours, expect to win against all the other implicit colours? At an intuitive level, it feels like Green could always do more or less well, but like any other colour, it will never win a decisive majority to govern the whole colour palette, and it wouldn’t seem fair if it did. Like I say, I’m joking, I think. But it’s not a green joke.
In case you’re curious, I have been working on climate change and philosophical dimensions of our ecological crises for over a decade, so there is some natural affinity with the Green Party’s historical championing of environmental causes, but I don’t (yet) see myself as ‘a green’ in a party political sense. There are a few things I like, so I am tempted. I know and admire and have worked with some leading Greens, as already mentioned, and the fact that they are the only major political party that questions the presumed wisdom of indefinite economic growth is important, totemic even, because there’s a kind of radical sanity there in my view. The party also seems to have a grasp of systems thinking and structural violence; of first, second and third-order effects of policies. And they see that the UK will work best when Scotland, England, Wales and (Northern) Ireland have as much autonomy as possible, which matters to me as a Scot.
So I like the Green Party epistemically - what it thinks about and how it thinks about it - but I am wary of it aesthetically - how it feels and how it makes me feel. I say ‘aesthetically’ rather than ‘morally’ because I think how things appear and seem is more relevant to how people vote than what is perceived to be right or wrong. I am not quite sure what makes me hesitate, but it’s something about what I perceive to be a judgmental atmosphere, a self-righteousness, a fear of hierarchy, even when hierarchy is necessary, and an idealism that is not altogether real. And the reservations are what the next joke is alluding to.
Right at the start of Metamodernism and the Perception of Context I say:
Metamodernism is a feeling, and all that constitutes the feeling and flows from it. When we consider the mystery of consciousness and the human drama playing out on this charming anomaly of a planet, feelings are far from trivial – they have cosmological significance. The metamodern feeling co-arises through the perception of our context writ large; it is aesthetic in nature, epistemic in function, historical in character, and it serves to call into question the purpose of the world as we find it, and the meaning of life as we know it
The subtitle is “the cultural between, the political after, and the mystic beyond”. Each of these points of emphasis corresponds to a different school of metamodernism, and each of them matters for any metamodern political movement worth its salt.
That said, most politicos associated metamodernism with The Listening Society by Hanzi Freinacht, where the idea of political metamodernism is introduced and developed.
The first option refers to the spiral dynamic green mentioned in the first footnote above, and the second refers to the political marker ‘green’ that informs environmental policy issues, including the Green Party. If you can tolerate spiral dynamics as a shorthand, the contention is that the Green Party is too ‘green’ in the spiral dynamic sense, and insufficiently aware of its ‘green shadow’ which means, for instance, feeling uncomfortable with actually winning and what it might take to win, including business and marketing, or making money, or a degree of love for competition, and less antipathy towards hierarchies including leaders, or absolutes, for instance as manifest in national security...
To really be metamodern, you need to be not just the politically correct and inclusive both/and which is often coerceive and either/or in disguise (because either you’re equally inclusive or you’re immoral). Instead, you need to be both Both/And and Either/Or, Or Bothbothandandeitherorveredelverbessern to give it a Germanic flavour, or if you are really serious about having fun: Sowohlalsauchundentwederoderveredelverbesserung. Getting that project right could even mean the beginning of a new political strategy. Perhaps the next phase of political metamodernism is to be better at being both kinds of green, and yet perhaps more Green than green (but not actually the colour green).
I noticed and developed this idea in my paper on Jordan Peterson in Integral Review.
“… Those with both/and sensibilities say that truth may be scientific and objective but it is also subjective and relative, and power and culture are also our guides. The either/or sensibility neglects context and perspective and uniqueness. However, in its insistence on its own exclusive truth, postmodern both/and self-righteousness subtly contains the either/or it purports to transcend. That is why “it’s all relative” is an absolutist statement, and Blake’s celebrated line “to generalize is to be an idiot” is, by definition, an idiotic thing to say. The challenge is that both claims remain somewhat true. The truly inclusive approach – the real “both/and” – contains “either/or” and “both/and.”…We learn from relativism but don’t submit to it; we have a both/and perspective but don’t lose our either/or discernment or resolve. That kind of perspective is the cultural pattern that is waiting to manifest, but it is palpably lacking in Peterson and in most reactions to him.”
Jonathan, your jokes are getting better, i.e. funnier. I laughed out loud at all except the Metamodernism walks into a bar one. I appreciated your even handedness about SD. There are many models of individual and socio-cultural development. E.g. Kegan, Piaget, Torbert. They slice movement of development differently — different number of levels— but they are pretty much the same in describing the first three or four levels, so I’m convinced that there is a “there” there. You might be interested to know of Jenny Wade’s book Changes of Mind in which she includes male/female and masculinity/feminine in her analysis, saying that Orange and Green are both at the same level of Action Logic — with Orange/Achiever being Masculine expression Ang Green the feminine.
As one of the readers who enjoyed your last jokes post, I thank you for this offering. Such a great way to tickle the mind.
In your aesthetic assessment of the Green Party in the footnotes you reflect on the party not being hierarchical — even when it perhaps ought to be. I’d be curious to hear more about that reflection. I’m fascinated more specifically in where hierarchy sits (no pun intended) in metamodern thought. It seems to belong to another temporality/sensibility namely. Or perhaps it’s more hidden, or, there may be an adjacent value system in metamodernism.