Stardate 20020930.1920

(Crew's log): It's very rare for me to quote a very long letter which has been sent to me. But the one that Matt Cline wrote to me was both informative and amusing, and I have gotten permission from him to quote nearly the entire thing (excluding certain pleasantries which are not topical).

I read with interest your post on Stardate 20020921.1332, where you tried to come up with a way in which someone could actually believe the "root causes" argument. Before I begin, though, I should probably note my own perspective: I'm a 22-year-old philosopher currently working as a Web developer, I'm a post-Fundamentalist-Christian atheist, and I would rather cut off my left testicle than vote Republican. :) [Wait until you grow older. – SCDB]

Having gotten that off my chest like a good post-modernist, I have some ideas about the origins of the "root causes" argument. They begin with Spiral Dynamics, a school of thought about consciousness that goes back to the work of Dr. Clare W. Graves in the 1960's and '70's. Spiral Dynamics theory talks about individuals and societies evolving through a sequence of worldview-memes -- modes of thought that determine how people think of themselves, their societies, and outsiders.

A very important note is that each meme includes and extends the previous memes, like concentric circles. No meme is ever "left behind", it's just absorbed into a larger whole.

Although Graves himself used a different notation, today the most popular way of referring to these memes is by color. There's a page with an OK -- but not great -- explanation of the colors; here's my own quick interpretation:

• BEIGE is concerned with individual survival: food, water, shelter.
• PURPLE systems are clan- or family-based, usually animistic and tribal.
• RED emphasizes the power of individuals, and tends to be heavy on personal shame & honor -- warrior-culture stuff.
• BLUE is represented by your typical theocracy or fundamentalist religion. Heavy on the good-vs.-evil rhetoric, Blue sees itself as a truth-force competing against evil enemies.
• At ORANGE, the individual ego is differentiated from the power-structure that surrounded it. Orange is typified by Descartian Modernity - focused on logic, or for that matter on any objectifiable strategic thinking. (Global capitalism is an Orange-level phenomenon.)
• GREEN is self-referential and pluralistic -- post-modern, in the good senses of that term.

The model goes up beyond Green, but I'm going to stop there for now, because most of the people advocating root causes are Greens -- sort of. I say "sort of" because much of the contemporary expression of the Green meme is tainted by a seductive fallacy. (More on that later.)

Note that the Green meme itself is healthy: the realization that everything exists and functions contextually is profound, and the desire to honor other cultures instead of annihilating them with military might (Red-Blue) or buying them out (Orange) is compassionate.

However, Green walks a perilous balance. All of the other prior memes make value judgements based on an implicit, unstated absolute that is assumed to be universal. Blue makes value judgements based on whether or not something agrees with its theology, because after all who wouldn't want to be a part of this religion ("No Jesus, No Peace")? Orange makes value judgements based on whether or not something turns a profit or is logically valid, because after all who wouldn't want to be rich?

Now Green comes along and says that none of the prior bases for value judgements are in fact absolute. This is really really new, and in and of itself is a Good Thing, an amazing insight. Green realizes that people and cultures are different enough that, when one tries to impose its truth upon another, only carnage results. More specifically, Green is the first meme that even thinks of this as carnage. The term "Cultural Genocide" doesn't make any sense to anybody but a Green -- Red sees its neighbors primarily as target practice, Blue values other cultures only inasmuch as they are potential converts, and Orange doesn't care what you believe as long as you buy, buy, buy.

On an international scale, Green is very sensitive to anything remotely resembling imperialism. We've all heard the litany from those opposing the war on Iraq; the U.S. is just being an imperialist bully. However, Green's desire for equality and diversity can go too far, becoming pathological and destructive. The desire to promote diversity and create equality can be perverted into an ideology that attempts to reduce everything and everyone to the lowest common denominator. (Ken Wilber, a prominent philosopher in consciousness studies, calls this the "mean green meme", or "MGM".) This means (among other things) that successful, powerful nations like the U.S. must be deconstructed, and poor, "victimized" nations like Iraq must be propped up; the "playing field" must be leveled in the interests of diversity. The MGM becomes trapped in a vicious retro-Romanticism, glorifying the nobility of (for example) the "Arab Traditionalist" culture -- never mind that that Red/Blue culture exhibits all the typical Red/Blue problems, stuff that Green would never tolerate in its own culture!

In short: since the U.S. and (to a lesser extent) Europe are the most powerful cultures on the planet today, the MGM typically assumes a very simple mantra: Everything Western is bad, everything non-Western is good.

The WTC attack initially threw the MGM into a tough bind. If everything non-Western is good, and everything Western is bad, then how come a non-Western society had just done something really, well, BAD? The only answer that the MGM could offer is that the attack must be the West's fault. The attackers, whom most people would call murdering scum, were in fact justified in their hatred of the U.S. You even had a radical fringe claiming that al Quaeda was not responsible, the whole thing was set up by the FBI/CIA/NSA/whoever [or Mossad – SCDB], to enrage the U.S. into attacking innocent Muslims. What the MGM could not and cannot admit is that the Purple/Red "Arab Traditionalist" culture that created Osama Bin Laden and his ilk is backward, unsuccessful, and diseased.

This is how one can believe in the "Root Causes" argument without some sort of appeal to "Karma" -- not that this argument is any less fallacious than an appeal to Karma, but at least it's different. :)

UPDATE: I just read your response to Steven Leeds on SD 20020930.1439. Leeds' very question appears to indicate that he's "infected" with the MGM; having grasped that all definitions of "good" are relative, he then assumes that "good" does not exist. The first is the key Green insight; the second is the classic MGM fallacy.

I really appreciate your response; you answered exactly as I would have. Green is the first meme that can realize that its principles are axiomatic; as I mentioned earlier, previous memes simply assume their own value-judging criteria to be self-evident.

Once we recognize that value judgments are axiomatic, cultural interaction does change, but not to the extent of "West bad, non-West good". Rather, we become involved in dialogue with other cultures, seeking to learn and understand their axioms, and vice-versa. Instead of saying, "Your culture is bad/evil/etc," we can say, "What is most important for your culture? What goals does your culture seek to meet?"

Invariably, axioms will get compared, and people will begin to prefer some axioms over others. People don't prefer these axioms because they tie in to any metaphysical Good or God (that's back to Blue -- the way back never leads forward); people prefer the axioms that match their own stage of development.

For example, you list two axioms in your response to Leeds:
1. The more people that are happy, the better.
2. The more people that follow the will of the Prophet, the better.

Axiom number 1 -- as you mean it, I've oversimplified things here -- is mostly Orange (although it can also apply to Green); axiom number 2 is Blue to the core. To revisit your comments about the gradual Western "cultural takeover" of the Arab world: Barbie is an Orange phenomenon, as is the superhighway and the situation comedy. (The Internet, particularly the World Wide Web, has the unfortunate distinction of being an Orange/Green transitional medium, and suffers an existential identity crisis because of it.)

The current division in the Islamic world is a great demonstration of a culture that's in axiomatic transition. A growing number of people no longer accept axiom #2, especially when presented with an alternative, axiom #1. The West has not forcibly imposed our axioms on these cultures - at least, I haven't seen any evidence that we're airdropping Barbie dolls, Simpsons episodes, or Fellowship of the Ring DVDs on the Middle East. (Although the Fellowship idea has merit, IMHO.)

To be blunt: If people in the Muslim world still believed, really believed, in axiom #2 -- that is, if they were still Blue -- then nothing we could do apart from military conquest would make a damn bit of difference; they'd still believe axiom #2, Blue to the bone. Our culture is appealing to the Muslim world because they're starting to agree with Orange axioms. Western culture has been described as "seductive" -- but it's only seductive for people moving from Blue to Orange. It just so happens that a whole damn lot of the world, particularly the Second and Third Worlds, are making that transition right now. (I think Western culture is seductive to those moving to Orange because we do Orange so God-damned well!)

Again, it's not that we are insidiously polluting the native culture; it's that the West is the most prominent source of Orange-level culture right now. For people living in a Blue society but ready to move into Orange, our culture is going to be very, very attractive -- because it meets their new needs, needs that their surrounding Blue society doesn't even recognize (and, in fact, usually condemns).

Now, these Blue societies could see the writing on the wall and begin to Orange-ize themselves; increasing individual autonomy, decreasing theocratic rule, encouraging people to think for themselves. And the secular Islamic states are doing just that. It's the holdouts that are the problem. A Blue society that's flexible enough to make the transition to Orange will survive with much of its identity intact; a Blue society that's too inflexible to make the change will (one way or the other) shatter and be destroyed, totally replaced by a society that's more up to the job of meeting contemporary needs.

The web site about this that Matt sent makes clear that Dr. Graves doesn't like to imply any kind of better/worse evaluation of these various stages, and I'll take them at their word. Nonetheless, this still strongly implies the idea of some sort of more-or-less linear sequence of cultural/social advancement, and I tend to be highly suspicious of any reference to ladders.

I've seen these kinds of things before, where someone will list some sort of sequence of stages of advancement in some social or mental realm, and one thing you invariably find is that the person who is making the list will invariably already occupy the top rung of it, with the implication that everyone else is struggling, consciously or unconsciously, to achieve the same enlightenment as the list-maker has already. And you also tend to find that others who become fans and advocates of these systems also invariably claim to occupy one of the very highest rungs. It always seems extremely self-congratulatory and even smug, and I always find it a bit repulsive.

Our whole cultural concept of progress has been polluted by the mental model of the ladder. This has been a dramatic source of trouble for many laypeople who try to understand evolutionary theory, because they start with the assumption that humans represent the pinnacle of evolution, the goal of the process, and then tend to assign evaluations of worth and sophistication and success based on how close a given species is to the pinnacle, so that primates are the next rung down, and mammals are below that, and so on. The proper model, as Stephen Jay Gould said many times, is the bush. There is no hierarchy, no trend, no goal; there's just branching.

My first reaction to this concept is to see, yet again, the idea of a ladder, or stations on some sort of cultural railroad track, a sequence of steps that everyone or every culture grows through on the way to the one-and-only destination. I like the categories, in fact, but I dislike the structure in which they've been embedded, and whether Dr. Graves actually thought of this as some sort of predefined sequence, it's evident that many and indeed most of those who embrace this will be thinking in these terms, and will think of themselves as being Green (or one of the steps beyond that) and thus superior to the Oranges like me.

I deny the idea that there's only one place where I can go, one kind of advancement I can make.

One of the interesting things I saw in the discussion of these things comes from that web site. One of the ways of comparing these stages that they list is labeled "What people in each world seek out in life..."

For Orange, they say "opportunity/success; competing to achieve results; influence.
For Green, they say "Harmony/love; joining together for mutual growth; awareness.

That set off an alarm bell. In other words, Orange is Capitalism and Green is Socialism. For those who have made the transition to Green and truly believe in it, Socialism becomes the only reasonable way to run a society, and it will actually work if almost all of the people in that society are Greens because that in itself prevents the biggest downfall of Socialism as historically practiced, which is the Free Rider problem. If reward is divorced from degree of effort, then there's no incentive to work hard, and the productivity of the entire system suffers badly as everyone in it coasts. (This is the most important reason why the USSR ultimately failed, it turns out.) The Green solution to this is that people won't want to coast because they will be thinking in terms of community instead of the individual. They won't be Free Riders because it's self-evidently wrong for a Green.

In an unquoted section of the letter, Matt refers to my "ruthless engineer's pragmatism". I like that phrase. I do. But it has to be understood that this is something all engineers learn if they become successful in the business. There's no room in engineering for prejudice and presumption. Designs based on faulty assumptions don't work, and our output must eventually be exposed to real world use and must survive there. Our goal as engineers, our entire reason for existing, is to create solutions for problems, and our creation is successful or unsuccessful solely as a function of how well it actually does solve the problem. We have to be ruthlessly pragmatic because the universe is.

Computer programmers may well be even more ruthlessly pragmatic, overall, than any other kind of engineer. Other engineers can engage in designs to tolerance, and there may be some variation possible in their work. If a civil engineer overdesigns a bridge, he may make it so heavy that it won't stand on its own. At the other end, if he underdesigns it, it may fail. Between those two there's a range where the design will work, but if it's slightly overdesigned then the only real effect is that it may cost a bit more to build than it might have. In any case, they always deliberately overdesign just a bit, and as a result they don't have to have an absolutely complete understand of the environment in which the bridge will exist.

But when we program, we must put our programs into a computer to run them, and it's a virtual environment which is more unforgiving than any other field of human activity I know of. If there is a flaw in your design, the computer will eventually find it, and if you and the computer disagree, you are wrong. It's a truism in the computer industry that Programmers call their mistakes bugs, because no one could acknowledge making as many mistakes as programmers do.

Programming teaches you humbleness. And if you last ten years in the industry, it also teaches you ruthless pragmatism. (Computer religion is a failing of the young. Very few programmers over the age of 35 have any kind of computer religion, and every one of those that I've ever worked with was incompetent.)

Anyway, as a matter of ruthless pragmatism, one of the problems with this idea of advancement is that every time Socialism has ever gone up against Capitalism, Capitalism has chased Socialism out of the stadium.

I do not claim that Orangeness is the ultimate state. I can see ways of developing from where I am, ways that our culture can continue to advance and improve. But they don't travel through Green space, and while it may be true that Greenness has things to offer, I see it overall as a downward step from Orangeness.

Nonetheless, I can see where the Mean Green Meme definitely represents an alternate explanation to my original idea of Karma as explaining why some people actually do feel, somehow, that they need to explain why it is that the attack a year ago was actually our fault. And, as Matt says, this alternate explanation is ultimately no more defensible than the idea of Karma as being responsible.

Matt also describes the Internet as an "Orange/Green transitional medium", and it occurs to me that some of the reason that the first-wave bloggers are appalled by those like me is because they are, for the most part, Green and they see those like me correctly as Orange, and since they view blogging, and the Web itself, as a medium for support and spread of Greenness, our Oranging of the Web is profoundly troubling. We're turning back the clock. (Hell, some of us are actually using it to try to prove that America should fight back.)

As mentioned, I don't like ladder concepts and mental models. Reality is rarely that clean. One aspect of the ladder concept is any kind of idea of historical inevitability. Which, as I understand it, is part of Marxism now, which teaches that Capitalism will eventually collapse, after which Socialism will pick up the pieces. Like Apocalyptic Christians, being a Marxist must be very frustrating since the world refuses to end on schedule.

Even when it comes to cultural memes, I view the world as a bush, spreading according to competition and mutating as a function of human creativity, and I don't consider anything about it to be inevitable except that the future won't be like today. The most important way in which memetic evolution and competition is different from the biological is the fact that people can discard one set of memes and adopt another, but the memes themselves still mutate and spread, and I see no reason why Orangeness must become Green, and a lot of reasons why it won't.

And, I suspect, there's a deep and perhaps unacknowledged recognition among a lot of the Greens out there that this is also true. To some extent, like the Arabs they feel as if they should be winning, and yet somehow it doesn't seem as if they actually are. No wonder they, too, are becoming angry and violent.