Spiral Dynamics and Historical Periodization

[bmcnicho]

Something I’ve observed from studying history is that its periodization (terms like ancient, classical, medieval, renaissance, modern etc.) is broken up into smaller chunks near the present and larger ones in the ancient past.  For example, we make fine distinctions between the 1970s and 1980s but lump together all of ancient Egyptian history into only a few periods.  Therefore, you would expect that a thousand years from now the 70s and 80s wouldn’t be viewed as distinct and the entire period from 1945 to today would be thought of as the post-WWII era.

Relating this idea to spiral dynamics, the stages purple, red, and blue each lasted for thousands of years but orange has only been around for a few hundred years, green has only been around for about 60 years, and they’re saying yellow is already starting to emerge.

So maybe orange, green, and yellow could more accurately be thought of as merely more advanced versions of blue.  The one value they all have in common is cooperation on a large scale, as contrasted with red which is based opon struggling for power, and purple which is based on tribal unity.  Maybe under this model, the stage after blue would be more equivalent to yellow/turquoise.

Now, I would definitely agree that the traditional model is more useful for our purposes of personal development.  I’m just providing another perspective here.

I think that the main point here is that both history and personal development are continuous processes that don’t actually have any “periods” or “stages”.  There’s nothing objective about these boundaries, they’re just useful ways of conceptualizing things.

[Leo Gura]

Of course reality has no categories, we create them. But at the same time some categorization schemes are more useful than others.

Careful with your assumptions.

Human evolution is accelerating. The world is changing a lot faster today than it was 5000 years ago for the Egyptians. And Egyptian history has been broken up into more than a few periods. There is close to 5000 years of ancient Egyptian history. We would probably break it up into a lot more periods if we had more accurate records. Modern history is a lot more dense because we have much better records of it.

I would just take the Spiral Dynamics model as it is, without trying to re-invent it.