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.
In the context of the Green Party, as you may know, for a long time they had spokespeople rather than leaders, and then co-leaders, and they had two leaders (Caroline Lucas; later Natalie Bennett) before the present one. Some of their recent success is attributed to having a single leader, and, for now at least, he appears to be a good one (though Caroline Lucas was once I believe the country’s favourite politician, and mine too; even though she led a party with only herself as an MP). The Greens have also been a bit notorious in the past for extensive consultations and strenuous collective decision making processes, which is both a strength in terms of carrying the whole party and a weakness in terms of agility and responsiveness to context.
I don’t see metamodernism as particularly pro-hierarchy, any more than it is pro-equality or pro-collaboration or competition. It’s more that it sees the true but partial validity of all these things. I think those who identify with metamodernism (and I’m not entirely sure I do) would also be keen to highlight the pre/trans fallacy in this context. There are dominator hierarchies that are pre-egalitarian, pre civil rights etc, and then there are natural hierarchies within and between other species, and context specific hierarchies in human affairs, for instance in legitimate teacherly authority in educational settings, or between consultants and junior doctors when taking decisions in emergency wards. If I attended a seminar on black feminist thought, I would expect you to have a legitimate kind of hierarchy over me in that context.
I remain egalitarian at heart, in my Scottish blood, if only because I was drip fed “a man’s a man for a’ that” in the poetry of Robert Burns. And yet I think there are risks in equality being valorised to the extent that it distorts and obscures other values.
It would be neglect for instance if I loved all other children as much as I love my own, but there js an an equality in respecting that other parents will feel the same way, and we respect and look after each other accordingly.
So I think what I’m getting at with making a nod to hierarchy is connected to what Hanzi calls the problem of “allergies and infatuations”. It may be changing now, but for a long time it felt like the greens were allergic to hierarchy tout court, and infatuated by equality in all things; even if hierarchy is sometimes legitimate and functional, and true equality can only arise by treating different people differently (for instance someone with dyslexia being given extra time in written exams).
This answer took longer than I thought, but I’m grateful for the question. And yes, you were definitely one of the people I was referring to at the beginning of the post, whose encouragement to keep going with the jokes was appreciated. 🙏
Hi! Thanks for your reply. I didn't know all those things about the Green Party so it was useful for me to read. My question was less about the intricacies of the party as such, and more about what its general trajectory says about hierarchy and metamodernism. I appreciate your thoughts on that too. Although, to use my black feminist hierarchy (PS. I would call it 'expertise' or 'lived experience' rather than hierarchy), I refer to bell hooks's work in 'Teaching to transgress', where she argues — as I also do in my latest book — that the teacher-student relationship is reciprocal if diagonal, and the idea of a hierarchy in many of these assumedly 'natural' hierarchies is limiting even then. Hierarchy connotes power and value, and the teacher (doctor, expert, etc.) does not automatically have more value or power than the student, or junior, or non-expert. I see your points, but I can't help wondering whether the Green Party was ahead of its time, and more aligned with the kind of world it sought to create, and paid a price for that. On this, I remain a student.
Our cultures want to supersize everything, including supersizing the transformation of consciousness. Does it necessarily follow recognition of the supersized metacrisis that turning its tide requires reversing that wave with a supersized opposing force, like a giant concrete wall for it to crash against, then recede? Or might it be better dissipated, washed up against a shore of smaller stones, individuals' consciousness transformed in myriad permutations, a proliferation of flowerings and crystalizations?
The latter, as in restoring wetlands, may be more ecologically sound, even in our landscapes of consciousness. Besides, we should save some of the pleasures of final enlightenment to future generations, some portion of heaven yet wild and uncolonized. A park for indigenous angels?
This in response to the footnotes. Koestler's thesis is that humor occurs in the clash of contexts. If he's right, we should be laughing at the world more. Can laughing at grand theories bring them down to usable size?
Concerning our/ your epic investigation into threeness, add Charles Sanders Peirce.
"Merely to say that Peirce was extremely fond of placing things into groups of three, of trichotomies, and of triadic relations, would fail miserably to do justice to the overwhelming obtrusiveness in his philosophy of the number three. Indeed, he made the most fundamental categories of "all things" of any sort whatsoever the categories of "Firstness," "Secondness," and "Thirdness,"......"(Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.) Further evidence that "The Combinatorial Hierarchy" is of general significance." This comment is not a joke.
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.
Thanks Minna.
In the context of the Green Party, as you may know, for a long time they had spokespeople rather than leaders, and then co-leaders, and they had two leaders (Caroline Lucas; later Natalie Bennett) before the present one. Some of their recent success is attributed to having a single leader, and, for now at least, he appears to be a good one (though Caroline Lucas was once I believe the country’s favourite politician, and mine too; even though she led a party with only herself as an MP). The Greens have also been a bit notorious in the past for extensive consultations and strenuous collective decision making processes, which is both a strength in terms of carrying the whole party and a weakness in terms of agility and responsiveness to context.
I don’t see metamodernism as particularly pro-hierarchy, any more than it is pro-equality or pro-collaboration or competition. It’s more that it sees the true but partial validity of all these things. I think those who identify with metamodernism (and I’m not entirely sure I do) would also be keen to highlight the pre/trans fallacy in this context. There are dominator hierarchies that are pre-egalitarian, pre civil rights etc, and then there are natural hierarchies within and between other species, and context specific hierarchies in human affairs, for instance in legitimate teacherly authority in educational settings, or between consultants and junior doctors when taking decisions in emergency wards. If I attended a seminar on black feminist thought, I would expect you to have a legitimate kind of hierarchy over me in that context.
I remain egalitarian at heart, in my Scottish blood, if only because I was drip fed “a man’s a man for a’ that” in the poetry of Robert Burns. And yet I think there are risks in equality being valorised to the extent that it distorts and obscures other values.
It would be neglect for instance if I loved all other children as much as I love my own, but there js an an equality in respecting that other parents will feel the same way, and we respect and look after each other accordingly.
So I think what I’m getting at with making a nod to hierarchy is connected to what Hanzi calls the problem of “allergies and infatuations”. It may be changing now, but for a long time it felt like the greens were allergic to hierarchy tout court, and infatuated by equality in all things; even if hierarchy is sometimes legitimate and functional, and true equality can only arise by treating different people differently (for instance someone with dyslexia being given extra time in written exams).
This answer took longer than I thought, but I’m grateful for the question. And yes, you were definitely one of the people I was referring to at the beginning of the post, whose encouragement to keep going with the jokes was appreciated. 🙏
Hi! Thanks for your reply. I didn't know all those things about the Green Party so it was useful for me to read. My question was less about the intricacies of the party as such, and more about what its general trajectory says about hierarchy and metamodernism. I appreciate your thoughts on that too. Although, to use my black feminist hierarchy (PS. I would call it 'expertise' or 'lived experience' rather than hierarchy), I refer to bell hooks's work in 'Teaching to transgress', where she argues — as I also do in my latest book — that the teacher-student relationship is reciprocal if diagonal, and the idea of a hierarchy in many of these assumedly 'natural' hierarchies is limiting even then. Hierarchy connotes power and value, and the teacher (doctor, expert, etc.) does not automatically have more value or power than the student, or junior, or non-expert. I see your points, but I can't help wondering whether the Green Party was ahead of its time, and more aligned with the kind of world it sought to create, and paid a price for that. On this, I remain a student.
Our cultures want to supersize everything, including supersizing the transformation of consciousness. Does it necessarily follow recognition of the supersized metacrisis that turning its tide requires reversing that wave with a supersized opposing force, like a giant concrete wall for it to crash against, then recede? Or might it be better dissipated, washed up against a shore of smaller stones, individuals' consciousness transformed in myriad permutations, a proliferation of flowerings and crystalizations?
The latter, as in restoring wetlands, may be more ecologically sound, even in our landscapes of consciousness. Besides, we should save some of the pleasures of final enlightenment to future generations, some portion of heaven yet wild and uncolonized. A park for indigenous angels?
This in response to the footnotes. Koestler's thesis is that humor occurs in the clash of contexts. If he's right, we should be laughing at the world more. Can laughing at grand theories bring them down to usable size?
Dear Jonathan
Concerning our/ your epic investigation into threeness, add Charles Sanders Peirce.
"Merely to say that Peirce was extremely fond of placing things into groups of three, of trichotomies, and of triadic relations, would fail miserably to do justice to the overwhelming obtrusiveness in his philosophy of the number three. Indeed, he made the most fundamental categories of "all things" of any sort whatsoever the categories of "Firstness," "Secondness," and "Thirdness,"......"(Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.) Further evidence that "The Combinatorial Hierarchy" is of general significance." This comment is not a joke.
Michael Horner