Spiral Dynamics IV — A Comparison with the Bicameral Mind Theory
A little over a year ago I wrote a post about Spiral Dynamics, which is a framework for understanding the development of human psychology. Initially, I was critical of it but my perspective has been changing. So I have using it as a touchstone for understanding how my own beliefs about human psychology have been changing.
How We Think vs. What We Think About
One of the main reasons I have been uncomfortable with Spiral Dynamics is that human beings have been biologically “modern” for several hundred thousand years. I assumed that, since our brain hardware is the same, people now think in pretty much the same way they always have.
The book The Secret of Our Success helped me understand that humans are biologically designed to transmit culture, which can change faster than evolution. But perhaps an even bigger change in perspective came from reading The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind and understanding that many functions of consciousness itself are comparable to “software” changes that evolve along with culture.
In other words, people don’t just change what they believe, the meaning of belief itself changes over time with the emergence of the self as a mental tool. The people who wrote something like the Illiad had some pretty strange beliefs. But now it seems clear that for them, gods weren’t just beliefs as we now understand the term. The gods were a mental construct that took the place of what we now consider conscious decision making (although you could argue that is still somewhat true).
So I want to compare what Spiral Dynamics and Bicameralism (as I understand them) have to say about various stages of human development. Also, bicameralism is largely concerned with a very particular transition time period about 3,000 years ago, but I think we can interpolate a bit for other periods. The specific dates are not that important, but I will associate the stages with specific historical developments.
Phase I: Beige (100,000 years ago or more)
Human beings emerge from Africa and spread across the world.
Spiral Dynamics: Instinctive/Survivalist. People are concerned with Food, Water, Shelter, and Sex. Very little sense of self.
Bicameralism: Language is just beginning to emerge, so people don’t really have any self-concept. Jaynes does mention a few anecdotes about people responding in a herd-like way to calls of danger.
Comments: Look to modern primates to get a baseline for what life and society were like for the earliest Homo Sapiens. Primates definitely have social structure, so we should assume early humans did too (i.e., primate-like bands of about 150). Humans were social animals from the get go. Hierarchy existed before language or any kind of spirituality.
Phase II: Purple (starting about 50,000 years ago)
The emergence of language and culture is shown by archaeological evidence of early communities like Göbekli Tepe. Along with language comes the emergence of spirits. Some form of Animism probably dominates the mentality of humans in this period.
Spiral Dynamics: Magical/Animistic. People are concerned with keeping spirits happy. The individual is subsumed by the group, and people obey group authority.
Bicameralism: Jaynes doesn’t say a whole lot about this period, but I think we can assume he would agree with Spiral Dynamics that individuals were subsumed in the group and instinctively obeyed authority. He would emphasize that humans still had no self-concept and were not conscious in the modern sense.
Comments: Modern hunter-gatherer bands retain many elements of pre-agricultural culture. But interaction with other cultures has probably introduced a level of linguistic and psychological complexity that hadn’t really emerged yet in the Stone Age. I think the emergence of language may have been what initially enabled the emergence of larger communities (as opposed to technology).
Phase III: Red (starting about 10,000 years ago)
Civilization flourished in Ancient Egypt and the fertile crescent. The emergence of agriculture led to a population explosion in certain areas of the world. And with population density comes the need for new forms of social control. Some would argue that grain farming itself was a form of social control.
Spiral Dynamics: Impulsive/Egocentric. This is an individualistic age concerned with expressing your ego.
Bicameralism: This is the “Bicameral Period” where men hear the voice of god directly as auditory hallucinations. They definitely do not have a well developed ego. The voice of god represents social authority, and in this period, people literally hear and obey.
Comments: This period probably represents the biggest gap between the two frameworks. Perhaps the epic poems, which relate tales of people interacting with gods, can make it seem like the people of the age had major egos. But the main point of the Bicameral theory is that the gods were kind of a bridge between animal instinct and ego. I can’t say whether people had regular auditory hallucinations, but it seems natural that at the dawn of civilization social control was more complete than ever.
Phase IV: Blue (starting about 3,000 years ago)
As society grew too complex for ancient forms of social control, many Bronze Age civilizations collapsed. New forms of social control emerged to bring order to the chaos. These writing-based institutions (i.e., law, religion, morality) enable the emergence of more complex societies. Historians begin to tell the story of these new nations — think Persian Empire, classical Greece, Rome, and the early European Nations.
Spiral Dynamics: Purposeful/Authoritarian. People and society are concerned with law, order, and religion. Life has new purpose.
Bicameralism: Jaynes argues that this period is largely about trying to compensate for the loss of communion with the voice of god. The self and the narrative “I” enable decision making in a world where the gods are silent. People developed the concepts of good and evil in order to make decisions themselves (as opposed to just obeying to the direct commands of the gods).
While people became biologically modern hundreds of thousands of years ago or so, people only became psychologically modern about 3,000 years ago with the emergence of individual consciousness and the tools such individuals use to make socially acceptable decisions.
Comments: Spiral Dynamics rightly points out the emergence of elements like law and religion in this period. It blows my mind to think that such fundamental concepts as self, morality, and purpose didn’t exist before this point. However, I think Spiral Dynamics goes astray here for a very subtle reason. “Self” and “morality” emerge together as twin concepts. But if we don’t understand that the self didn’t exist beforehand (in the “Red” period) all we see is the emergence of new social control tools (i.e., morality) to govern the self. But it is a mistake to view morality as something that simply constrains the ego. The need to distinguish good and evil consciously practically defines the ego.
So at first it seems like the blue period represents a swing away from individualism to a more communal outlook. In reality, individualism itself emerges as a more complex form of social control that addresses the limitations of the voice of god in organizing ever more complex societies. But it does so only in conjunction with new concepts like law and morality.
Phase V: Orange (starting about 300 years ago)
Technology like the printing press enabled much wider distribution of the written word, which triggered a new level of knowledge transfer and exposure to different ideas. As a result, science begins to challenge religion as the primary framework for understanding the world.
Spiral Dynamics: Achievist/Strategic. People are concerned with learning, progress and achievement.
Bicameralism: Jayne’s doesn’t really distinguish this period from the last one. After the fall of bicameralism, he just sees one giant and continuous struggle to cope with the loss of the voice of god. Since people already became psychologically modern in the Blue period, subsequent psychological development is more gradual.
Comments: I think the emergence of science as a concept distinct from religion has a huge impact on human psychology. The voice of god isn’t just silent at this point. God is dead. The enlightenment provided new opportunities for learning, growth and advancement, but existential anxiety began to take hold of the human heart in a way much deeper than at any previous point in human history. God is like a psychological umbilical cord. Embracing science is like cutting the cord. We are now fully human, and very vulnerable.
Phase VI: Green (starting about 150 years ago)
Science and technology are ascendant. Our sense of self is mediated by machines, and we sense that our own creations may soon become conscious themselves. Thus, men begin to take the place of gods.
Spiral Dynamics: Communitarian/Egalitarian. People are concerned with overcoming dogma, greed and divisiveness.
Bicameralism: We continue to struggle with the loss of the voice of God. Schizophrenia and hypnotism provide glimpses into our bicameral past.
Comments: By this point, Spiral Dynamics seems to have more to say than the bicameral mind theory. I think the “Green” view of the modern age has to do with the emergence of Marxism, environmentalism, and critical theory. To me, these philosophies kind of represent the phenomenon of left-brained rationalism turning on itself.
To a certain extent, the unbounded optimism of the Enlightenment has been replaced to a certain extent with a growing sense of fear. Millenials, especially, seem to feel like they are a bit unmoored as a generation. While exciting at first, it is now clear that technology cannot provide the same sense of purpose that God once did. What do we do now?
Moving Forward
Spiral Dynamics provides a “second tier” of values that will begin to emerge in the next phase of history:
I used to be really skeptical, but now I have a little better understanding where this is coming from. Stress, anxiety, and a need for purpose are probably fundamental elements of consciousness that are with us for the duration. Now we have to deal with that. We have to find a way to integrate our angsty and empty self with those parts of us that are natural, instinctive and stress-free.
The march of technological progress is not going to fill the void. So we have to consciously develop new forms of consciousness to make existence bearable. One form that this new consciousness takes is to purposefully embrace a loss of consciousness, or a release of the self.
Take meditation, for instance. Meditation is not new, but I think there is an emerging form of medication that might be a bit new. Meditation used to be a part of a belief system. Now it is an alternative to a belief system. People realize that the self is the problem, and they seek some way of letting go.
Personally, I don’t think this is the answer. People want a simple, off-the-shelf solution. But I don’t think it’s a thick enough cord to carry the burden people want it to carry.
There is an old movie, Simon, in which a person is put in a sensory deprivation chamber and when they come out they have the mentality of an amoeba and have to come back through all of the stages of evolution:
Perhaps in a way, if we are to be healthy, we need to integrate all the stages of our psychological evolution. But we can’t do it by simply pretending we don’t have a self. We have to provide ourselves opportunities to live in something like a primitive environment — specifically, a primitive social environment.
So, I bring the discussion back to tribe building. A tribe can be viewed as a many-tiered shell into which we can descend in order to balance or anchor the self. It involves complicated things, like developing thick relationships with members of our family and engaging in a faith community, because even the most primitive social groups of our primate ancestors were still complicated. It is beige, purple, red, blue, orange and green.
Maybe meditation is a part of it, too. But the proper loss of self isn’t achieved in a sensory deprivation chamber. It happens when we can provide the right kind of stimulation that makes our ancient brain feel at home. It involves nature, family, and God. Only by embracing our deep and complicated legacy can we truly partake of the peace that belonged to our primitive ancestors.
