Spiral Dynamics by Don Edward Beck
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I read this book because it offered an easy structure of how to classify ego growth. Plus it was from psychologists. But unlike psychology (or perhaps like psychology), this book is a mirror: it takes what is supposed to be a science of describing development and treats it as a prescriptive model for how things are supposed to be.
Having gone through the gambit now, there are a couple features I find to be puzzling. What is the swing between self and group as the focus important? And the expansion of the ego self — while expressible as a kind of hegelian dialectic (and synthesis) — why should we expect a self to follow this kind of progression? For those of you reading this review and not sure of what I am talking about, it’s simple. Hegelian synthesis happens when two unlike phenomenon, perhaps subject and object, find themselves at first in opposition, but then later coming to terms with how the boundaries between them are mentally constructed, find themselves in unity, absorbed into common ground. What Hegel is saying about our classification is simply that the process of learning also involves the process of reclassifying things so as to make greater abstractions of what difference lies between them. So to go back to why we should expect the self to follow this kind of progression: why should ego develop follow along the parameters set by the authors of this book? Why should rule based grounding qua self be between self qua domination vs self qua acceptance?
What gives the authors a bit of a cop out here is to also say that ego development in a particular spectrum can happen anytime regardless of environment. This makes sense too; that ego development has to do with how the ego sees things, or how the ego creates the world. But it is with this lesson that we step away from spiral dynamics as a science and enter the field of metaphysics. Without a determinable metric from which to gain a vantage point, we find ourselves immersed in dogmatic fields from which we cannot find any kind of orientation.
But that’s also part of the problem of the book too… that when talking about ego development, different egos reading the book will find themselves seeing the different ego positions differently. So to say it another way; depending on who you are, the book you are reading will change. This much is said in the first chapter. So how do we understand what book we are reading in the first place?
There are commonalities in the language, but we are talking about the relationships between points that makes the difference. So this book really only works by grounding itself as an objective field, using common language. But that really forces us out of understanding and into a list-view… that is to say, this book reduces people into stages without giving any kind of justification or deeper understanding as to what ego development is all about.
Perhaps I miss the point of the book. Perhaps all this is meant to do is provide some kind of application rather than a theory to understand why we are the way we are or why we should change from position to position. Again, Hegel can provide us answers to how synthesis works, and needs to work, as we reach the limits of each stage… but that’s crow-barring a theory which doesn’t distinguish what specific limitations of each stage carry… and in fact, there isn’t any explanation as to why each of the features in the spiral should be arranged the way they are, expect that one gets more and more abstract with each stage.
All in all, not a book that is terribly interesting intellectually, but it is useful if only as a quick and easy guideline.
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