When Green Attacks Orange, Amber Wins

I’m following up on my post, “Our Collective Dark Night” in which I spoke about being grateful for traditional, modern and post-modern contributions to humanity that are under fire in the US and around the world. Now I want to look at the challenge of valuing each of these structures of consciousness and culture from an evolutionary and developmental perspective, an integral perspective. In doing so, I hope to cast some light on the title of this post.

To greatly simplify, traditional culture (amber) places great value on fundamentalist, law and order. Modern culture and consciousness (orange) expands to embrace science and its contributions to our daily lives. Post-modern culture and consciousness (green) expands further to embrace equality for everyone. Unfortunately, at times the different structures war with each other, and the more evolved structure throws out the baby with the bath water instead of both transcending and including the hard won gains, the best and essential pieces, of the earlier stages of development. I want to focus on green and orange in particular.

Here is the deal: Post-modernity or Green, is the most developed stage of consciousness and culture to have evolved so far. But it is antagonistic towards Modernity or Orange in many ways. For example, when it insists that capitalism is evil and should be eliminated, it fails to transcend and include the best of capitalism and can lessen our sense of economic interdependence.
When Green insists that there is no objective truth, that all truth is dependent on context, it can support climate change deniers who can now challenge scientific evidence about the effects of climate change and say that’s just your opinion, there is no objective truth that the climate is changing.

When Green says to believe all women who accuse men of sexual assault and ignore due process, Green weakens one of the fundamental protections that is in place against arbitrary tyranny.
Also, Green, in wanting to do away with the dominator hierarchies that originated or persisted through Modernity, often wants to do away with all hierarchy, including natural hierarchies such as parent/child, teacher/student, etc., that allow us to learn and to grow in healthy ways.

In wanting to do away with the oppressive structures of Orange, a good thing, Green can leave us with no structures, a bad thing. That can allow Amber to rush in with fundamentalist structures, such as rigid definitions of right and wrong, to fill the vacuum.

Hopefully, emerging Integral leaders can support Green to not shoot itself in the foot and instead INCLUDE the best of Orange while also transcending its limitations and problems.

By John Mariner,
Licensed Clinical Social Worker