Finally comes the assumption of phased progress, through material, relational and spiritual stages. It seems plausible that individual plants and animals might be limited in physical size by surface-to-volume or skeleton-to-weight ratios, such that at some point physical growth and expansion become increasingly problematic and further development proceeds in a non-materialistic direction. Integration, consolidation and restructuring allow an organism to develop capacities without extending materially. Once reengineered and realigned for spiritual fulfillment rather than physical growth, an organism can live out its days realizing its potentialities, be these genetic reproduction or in the case of humans, perhaps some higher contribution to society’s body of accumulating and evolving knowledge, artifacts and institutions, what Teilhard de Chardin termed the “noosphere”. The noosphere embodies human development at the societal level. It embodies society’s development.[1] In both biological maturation and human societal development, the assumption of material, relational, and spiritual developmental phases subsumes a supportive external environment, and for this reason alone a healthy maturation is never certain. Environmental factors might limit physical growth and hasten restructuring, or limit restructuring and hasten spiritualization, or thwart all three.
As a corollary to phased development we will find that the restructuring that occurs in a system’s middle developmental phase, its adolescence if you will, typically involves a diametric reorientation of developmental direction. The pattern appears in caterpillars and other animals, human beings, society’s institutions, plants and more. The parallels are intriguing and suggest the depth and scope of the pervasive societal transformation we may still be entering or are in the midst of.
We can easily recognize this phased development path in caterpillars and butterflies. The caterpillar orients to the earth and materiality, and busies itself eating and growing in physical size. In the middle, pupa stage, the insect finds a place up off the ground, spins a cocoon and digests much of its former self, rearranging its liquefied building blocks to regenerate a restructured form. Eventually, it emerges and flies off in a display of color as a butterfly to pollinate and procreate, orienting by tenuous materiality of smell and ingesting only the condensed nutrients in nectar, if anything at all. This three-stage process of organic development may not be so obvious in other life forms, but nearly all animals go through a middle phase with the onset of reproductive maturity, which restructures and reorients the animal in preparation for reproductive actualization.
And so perhaps it becomes conceivable that human society, in the adolescence of its information age, like many other living systems in their adolescence, might be ripe to unexpectedly and diametrically reorient its development, in society’s case away from the consumerist material aspirations that have characterized progress since the beginning of the industrial age and now appear increasingly problematic to sustain for too many more decades and certainly centuries. What today seem to be impossibly dysfunctional governance institutions, might surprisingly become diametrically transformed. Might the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe in the 1980’s or the more recent Arab Spring, or the rise of democracy in Africa since the beginning of the information age in the 1960’s mark revolutionary and diametrically reoriented reforms in social structures? The internet certainly has been transformative and brought non-materialistic improvements and reorientation in societal structure.
Humans develop along all three physical, intellectual and spiritual dimensions from birth, but the salient feature of childhood is physical growth, which tapers off and ends some time in adolescence. Childhood unfolds within a protective family environment of nurturance (usually), but in adolescence the child begins to look out from the family, reorienting to face the indifferent or hostile greater society, seeking his or her place in that society and learning to accept responsibilities, in diametric contrast with the inward self-centered orientation and irresponsibility of childhood. As adolescence unfolds, a human being sets about acquiring marketable skills, i.e. formal or informal education, and otherwise restructuring and realigning him/herself with that outside world. Finally, in full maturity, the human being moves out into that world and makes his or her contribution to society, developing spiritually. Of course, intellectual and spiritual growth are life-long processes, hopefully, and so the image offered here is intended merely in suggestive terms.
Abraham Maslow proposed an analogous theory of human psychological development in which human wants are ranked hierarchically, and humans are hypothesized to pursue them serially.[2] While Maslow does not explicitly do so, his wants hierarchy can be divided into the initial material wants (food, shelter, warmth), secondary relational wants (belonging and status) and ultimate spiritual wants (what Maslow terms “self-actualization”), a three-stage process similar to the one hypothesized here. Although criticized as unverifiable and unscientific, Maslow’s ideas have in recent years inspired the academic Positive Psychology movement in Social Psychology, approaching its subject indirectly, speculatively and optimistically, as I will do with my hypothesis below. Positive Psychology explores how a person’s environs might be redesigned to promote vitality, health and developmental unfolding, but without ever directly measuring vitality, health or wellbeing, and thus striving to maximize these variables indirectly without explicitly identifying them. The Positive Psychology movement contrasts with a more mainstream Social Psychology approach, analyzing social pathologies.[3] Restructuring the legal and governance environments within which individual live and work, might release psychological benefits perhaps difficult to measure but valuable nonetheless, and contributing to society’s development and progress.
At the aggregation level of society’s bureaucratic institutions, organizations, in archetype, develop similarly. A company in its initial pioneer stage looks inward and upward hierarchically to the knowledge and guidance of a pioneer individual at the center who started the company and knows all its workings. As a company grows, it systemizes operations and comes to live by the processes, protocols, and institutional arrangements which span the company, constitute its structure, and come to define that company in this middle or “scientific-management phase” of its development. Finally, and hopefully, as the company evolves into its mature stage, it reorients its developmental focus toward the periphery, empowering employees to make decisions and striving to provide a nurturing work environment, thereby improving and perhaps maximizing workplace morale indirectly by inviting employees’ best efforts, and enabling each to develop spiritual potentialities, in diametric contrast to how the company began[4] [5]. Most firms never reach this actualization phase, but in the technology and some service industries in the forefront of society’s economic evolution in the information age, many companies do embrace decentralized decision-making and employee empowerment.
Plants pass through vegetative, flowering and seed phases, but to characterize these as material, structural and spiritual requires some imagination. The following depiction is my own but takes inspiration from Wolfgang Goethe’s “The Metamorphosis of Plants”.[6] Additionally, vegetative, flowering and seed phases can each be described as having relatively material, structural and spiritual sub-phases. And cross-sectionally at any given moment, plants display sub-systems which can be depicted as relatively material, structural and spiritual.
The initial vegetative phase begins with germination, when hypocotyls and cotyledon emerge from the sprouting seed as rudimentary root and leaf systems. In the middle sub-phase of the vegetative stage, the plant builds out the structural extension of branches to support the horizontally oriented leaves so that they may gather the sun’s energy and it also extends branching root structure of the primary and secondary roots, radiating downward to gather water and nutrients. In Goethe’s view, the essence of the plant is carried by the leaves, while the root and stem systems merely give them support, not unlike how an animal’s nerve sense system in the head carries an animal’s spiritual essence, and is supported by organs in the chest or thorax and abdomen. The initial vegetative phase culminates in a final sub-phase when growth through extension halts and development condenses into a calyx, the platform which supports the subsequent flowering phase. In the flowering phase, the plant reorients its growth from the material expansion of the vegetative phase to a relatively stationary developmental phase in which the plant extends itself through seductive attraction, reaching out to the insect world for symbiotic assistance with pollination. The sepals are the flower’s most materialistic component, protecting the bud with relatively heavy leaf-like structures. The flower’s petals are thinner structures, introducing color and scent to attract insects. The reproductive organs face inward, to bring pollen to the surface of the pistil. The sub-phases of flowering are first the bursting out and flowering itself, followed by the interactive seduction of insects to facilitate the exchange of pollen among individual plants and to bring pollen to the pistils, and finally the inward oriented fertilization of the pistil. The final seed phase begins with embryogenesis, when the fertilized zygotes develop into seeds, surrounded by seed casing and fruit. Once formed, the seeds separate from the host plant’s nurturing fruit and reorient themselves for dispersal in the seed’s second sub-phase, making their way to the ground, carried either by gravity and the wind or through a bird or other animal’s digestive system, in the process exposing themselves to a hostile environment in which only a fraction find their way intact to fertile soil. In a final sub-phase, the seed works its way into the soil and lies dormant through winter, its material development arrested but extended through time. The seed phase is spiritual, in comparison to vegetative and flowering phases, insofar as the seed condenses the plant into a dense essence, puts itself at the mercy of the elements and animals, and endures through cold until spring.
Science has comparatively little understanding of metamorphoses, just when they will occur, what mechanism triggers them, and how the process works, whereby one system transforms itself into another entirely different system. It has better understanding of growth within specific childhood, adolescent or mature phases, where development may be, by comparison, relatively continuous and predictable by extrapolation. Even in physical matter the phase changes from solid to liquid to gas are problematic, because such “mixed phase” regimes, in which parts of the system complete a phase transition while others have not, have violent and hard to control dynamics. Metamorphic phase changes are not strictly discontinuous affairs, but rather build gradually, and so puberty in human beings can span a number of years, just as the evaporation and eventual boiling of liquids into gases occur gradually over a range of pressures and temperatures. Phases elide into each other, and fully transform only eventually, confounding scientific analysis.
[1] See Boulding, op. cit. [2] Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being, (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1962) [3] See e.g., Craig Lambert, “The Science of Happiness”, Harvard, January-February, 2007, p. 26ff [4] Business development phases== Lievegood? [5] See Thomas J. Peters, Robert H. Waterman, In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies, (Harper Collins, ; 1982), and Peter Drucker, Management, (London: Pan,1977). [6] Goethe, The Metamorphosis of Plants, describes the expansive and contractionary sub-phases within each of the vegetative, flowering and seed subphases. Botonists sometimes describe the plant cycle differently, distinguishing numerous sub-phases or a separate senescence phase when the plant dies off.
[1] See Boulding, op. cit. [2] Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being, (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1962) [3] See e.g., Craig Lambert, “The Science of Happiness”, Harvard, January-February, 2007, p. 26ff [4] Business development phases== Lievegood? [5] See Thomas J. Peters, Robert H. Waterman, In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies, (Harper Collins, ; 1982), and Peter Drucker, Management, (London: Pan,1977). [6] Goethe, The Metamorphosis of Plants, describes the expansive and contractionary sub-phases within each of the vegetative, flowering and seed subphases. Botonists sometimes describe the plant cycle differently, distinguishing numerous sub-phases or a separate senescence phase when the plant dies off.