I recently sent this open letter to George Monbiot in response to his Identity Politics in Climate Change Hell article

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Hi George

I’ve been following your writing for several years, my views usually agree quite closely to your own and I applaud you for managing to voice genuine global concerns in mainstream media as clearly as you do.

I’m writing because whilst reading your ‘Identity Politics in Climate Change Hell’ article I came to the conclusion that you were missing part of the equation.  I agree that we must engage the business world in seeking out solutions to the climate crisis. However, I think it is important to understand what the modern anarchist movement represents and why it is even more critical to engage it constructively.

The psychologist Clare Graves spent most of his long academic life studying how people value humanity; how they perceive and think it is best to behave in the world.  After many years of empirical research studying his subject he developed a theory that matched the data he had collated. Unfortunately he died in the 1980s before publishing his magnum opus and the core of his theory was lost from the public until recently when some of his students collated his work and published it [1].  While his work could certainly do with further research and peer review, it is the best I have come across in many years of trying to find explanations for why society behaves the way it does.  His theory predicts that problems such as global warming and peak oil would arise; he does not name them, just points out that the current dominant values in society are blind to waste and resource streams.

Graves theory has several names, I am simply going to refer to it as E-C theory, as the book above does. It is a complex theory, far too complex to express it in full in an email; even after years of studying it I am still constantly learning new nuances.  The reason for this is that the model is inherently open-ended and essentially describes how complex systems interact.  I am going to explain a small, much simplified part, but it is important to stress that due to the nature of the simplification, it makes humans seem a lot more simple than they are; the full theory does not do so.  Even with this simplification, this email is rather long; I do hope you find the time to read it.

Graves’ research uncovered five main systems for how people value the world around them. Through library research he predicted a further three. His research also demonstrated that peoples values are complex and are often not centred on a single system and that the way in which they develop is complex, yet also follows a general pattern of linear development, each value system building on the discoveries and failures of the previous one. I am only going to be discussing four of the original five, starting with the third one in out of the seven

We are going to join the picture with the C-P value system, this value system generally has a limited sense of ‘self’ awareness. People centred here realise that they are an individual and so have a strong boundary of what is them and what is not, however they do not have a strong sense of other peoples identities.  As a result, a person centred here will associate a person they are close to as being an extension of their own identity and other people as objects to be used as desired.  The culture associated with this value system is often violent (verbally, if not physically) and tends to encourage gangs to form where the members of the gang associate their buddies as extensions of themselves, because of this, a gang member will protect a fellow gang member, even if that means putting their own life at extreme risk, they will also however beat a fellow member to death if they think they were put at risk by them.  People centred here are essentially self-centred opportunists with little thought for future consequences of their actions and mainly interested in instant gratification.

The next system (D-Q) that clearly develops is one in which the sense of other has become much more fully formed. A very neat, organised, yet dogmatic system arises in which people centred here have developed such a strong appreciation for the consequences of their actions that they can be controlled with the justification of a future reward, one that they may believe they will only receive after death.  This system allows for the rise of civilisation in an empire/monarchist form in which society is hierarchy structured and everyone knows their place.  Vertical social mobility is actively discouraged through rigid class systems.  An interesting aspect of this system is that a single hierarchy does not seem to be able to exist on its own; if there is not another to compete with then a faction will break away.  People outside the hierarchical group are thought of as ‘others’ and are not truly considered human.  A person in this system can be extremely caring and giving to others in their own hierarchy (although often not to those below them) yet at the same time they would vilify an ‘other’ simply for being different.  Logic is valued in this system, but only in an absolute dogmatic sense.  There are facts, but these are as handed down from authority, not developed though logical reasoning.

A person centred in the third system (E-R) has further developed their sense of reasoning to the point that they no longer accept facts as given to them and instead investigate phenomena with their own senses to uncover evidence that supports hypotheses. These people tend to be self centred and out for self gain, but they understand the consequence of abusing those in power and the power of the system and so only break the law if they know they can get away with it. They also value the law, as much as they may grumble about its constraining their lack of opportunity, they appreciate its protecting them from C-P impulses. On a cultural level it is expressed in the concepts of the free market, democracy and the scientific method. People living from this system value the right to live life as they choose to live it, believing everyone has the right to forge a life for themselves, as a result, vertical social mobility is encouraged. However despite the desire for freedom, the very nature of the self-centeredness of this system encourages the creation of hierarchical social structures, which whilst not ridged as they where at DQ, do result in the opportunity for the abuse of power. The problems this system creates largely stem from further limitations in the ability to reason. Whilst this system is genuinely able to rationally appraise a situation, it is only in a reductionist manner. This system evaluates accurately within the blinkered set of information that it considers, but is prone to mistakes and erroneous conclusions due to a lack of consideration for all the many other possible elements that do not exist within its knowledge of the world.  In other words, whilst it is capable of examining that which it can hold, it is not very successful at examining the assumptions with which it is doing the holding.

The final value system I am going to outline in this email is F-S. People centred in this system respond to E-R by developing the ability to investigate the assumptions within which they are investigating the world around them.  This results in an appreciation for many possible solutions to a problem, an appreciation for the many different people, cultures and ways of living that are different from their own; as a result it swings people back towards a community centred perspective on life. Unlike D-Q, the sense of community is not centred on their culture, but on all the people that they interact with.  People in this system are capable of thinking outside the box and of considering the problems that the E-R system creates.  Academic examples of F-S thought include Einstein’s Theory of relativity and Godel’s incompleteness theorems. Culturally, this system introduces concepts such as human rights (beyond the borders of their own lives) and ecological concern, however we do not yet have an example of a society that has fully embraced this system. By examining groups of people who utilise this system we do know something of what an F-S society would look like. It would be non-hierarchical with little opportunity for the abuse of power, rather than managers and leaders we would have facilitators and inspiring friends.  The system of organisation would be more peer to peer based and consensus driven, resulting in a society more resilient to catastrophe.  This system also produces its own problems, the search for consensus can be lengthy and protracted and a large amount of energy is invested in social connections.  Since society at large has not yet reached this value system, exploring further usually presents more problems than solutions; from the perspective of whatever the current value system is, it is easy to confuse the one that is two steps on, and think that you are implementing it, when really it is being translated down to the current one and the problems are simply externalised and thus become ignored rather than resolved.

These value systems are not concrete absolutes but brief moments of clarity as the chaotic processes of the mind briefly coalesce in a point of clarity. It is important not to take them too literally, yet they do provide a lot of insight into how society as a whole is progressing, the kinds of problems we are likely to face when a system is dominant and the varieties of solutions that will help.  (The process of development between systems has been researched and a great deal is known about it, however this is beyond the scope of this email).  I also feel the need to stress again, as it is often miss understood, that I am simplifying what goes on here, people are not these systems, these systems (several simultaneously) exist within people, sometimes one is dominant, but often not.

Finally I can come back to your article about Ewa Jasiewicz’s and Anarchism. The central issue that grated with me lies with the semantics of ‘Anarchism’. It means different things to different people.  The original definition of Anarchy is that of ‘A state of lawlessness and disorder.’ [2], in common usage, my experience is that this usually refers to situations where countries with a D-Q system of government, often a dictatorship or similar, has collapsed, and people are running around the streets looting, pillaging and raping as the society dips, hopefully temporarily, into a CP system of immediate needs.  However the modern Anarchist movement is actually something quite different, it refers to a system of government that is non-authoritarian, within that, there are many conflicting definitions [3].

The nature of the F-S system is that it does away with the need for central control and so the F-S system is inherently anarchistic. How a nation could organise itself in this way is unknown and will probably never be fully realised; all the systems that I have described are abstracted absolutes of reality.  We do not really have an idealised ‘free’ market economy at present, nor a system of government that could lie anywhere on a linear scale between the systems that I have described.  What we have could more closely be described as multiple systems running concurrently that are centralised somewhere around the E-R system.  If the nation was centralised around the F-S system, then we would likely see far less central control and it would have far less power than it does now, that does not mean it would not exist, just as dogmatic religion, where non believers are eternally damned, still exists in a country that is governed by laws that grant us (to a large extent) freedom of speech and beliefs.

The reason I am writing is not because I disagree with your position on engaging the state and corporate worlds, but in how you underestimate the power and meaning of the ‘anarchist politics’ that you experienced.

We do need to engage every facet of society to find solutions and one of the hardest parts will be finding solutions that work for people who are not centred at F-S, without making the situation worse.  Finding corporate and state solutions will buy us more time and will encourage many more people to consider the problems that lead to F-S values, however they will not provide permanent solutions, that can only happen from the very set of values that has evolved in response to the problem.

A final point. I am not familiar enough with Ewa Jasiewicz’s writtting to say how much I agree/dissagree with her, and am not doing either here.  I will say, that just becasue someone claims to be something it does not mean that they are, not everyone at the climate camp will have been living from F-S values.

I’ve posted this letter to my blog at www.skyshine.co.uk, My introduction to E-C theory there is more comprehensive, but unfinished. I do however include many links to further reading on the web.

1. http://www.clarewgraves.com/neq/neq.html

2. http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=define%3A+anarchy&btnG=Google+Search&meta=

3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism