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Genius, Power and Magic
"Let timid doctrinaires depart from among us to carry their servility and their miserable fears elsewhere. This people is its own master. It wishes to be the brother of other peoples, but to look on the insolent with a proud glance, not to grovel before them imploring its own freedom."
--19th Century Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi
I�ve just come from our district�s school board meeting where I sat through an hour of public comments about the conflict between a student Christian group and a Gay/Straight Alliance (GSA) in a local high school. I listened as right-wing attorneys, parents and students invoked the protection of diversity, tolerance and, astonishingly, liberalism to support the expression of their anti-gay position. For the health of our community, perhaps it�s time to clarify the proper social function of these pseudo-progressive mantras.
Not unlike the individual Christians who spoke to the school board, Western society as a whole has fallen victim to a misunderstanding of some of our central tenets. Ideals at the heart of modern society�namely liberal pluralism, expressed by honoring diversity�have been almost criminally reduced to the toleration of all views.
Generally, this modern view claims that no view is inherently better than another. The Ku Klux Klan has as much right to express themselves as the Anti-Defamation League, and woe befall the one who suggests otherwise. Taken to the extreme, Princess Diana and Jack the Ripper are put on equal footing! According to this feeble egalitarianism, this political correctness, all views are to be cherished as an example of our �rich diversity.�
Notice that only this liberal pluralism itself is superior. It claims to reject all hierarchy while affirming its own position on top of the heap. �No view is better than another, except mine� is an inherent contradiction. This may be the official position, but it�s hypocritical and inaccurate.
In fact, the universe is made up of rankings. Everything is not equally part of the whole because everything is a holon that is part of a holarchy, which is a ranking of degrees of wholeness.
Arthur Koestler was the first to use the term �holon� to describe an entity that is itself a whole and at the same time part of another whole. For instance, an atom is a whole atom but also part of a whole molecule, which is itself a whole molecule and also part of a whole cell, which is also part of a whole organism, and so on.
This development sequence or �stack��atom to molecule to cell to organism, and so on�is called a natural hierarchy, an evolutionary order of increasing wholeness and inclusion. Each senior level includes all the constituent holons that make it up and at the same time transcends the sum of those parts. It has more wholeness�is higher�than its parts because it includes them. That is why we say that evolution �includes and transcends.�
To differentiate between a natural hierarchy and a pathological or dominator hierarchy, and because a natural hierarchy is really just an evolutionary stack of holons, we call it a �holarchy.�
Pathological or dominator hierarchies occur when one holon decides it wants to be only a whole and not a part�like a cancer cell dominates a lung, or a patriarchal demagogue dominates a society, or a needy ego dominates an individual�s life. Like the movement of Fear, this is always a move toward separation instead of communion.
The views of the Nazis, for example, are part of the holarchy of human development, but a pathological version of a low level of development. Their worldview does not include or transcend very much, and, as an additional bonus, sabotages the possibility of the higher development of its adherents, not to mention threatening the development of those it rejects and attacks. Such worldviews are pathological because they cripple the evolution of human development.
If we look at the holarchy of morality, we see a movement from preconventional (infantile survival) to egocentric (individual needs), to conventional (social normality) and ethnocentric (tribal mythology), to postconventional (personal achievement), to worldcentric (attending to the wellbeing of all) and beyond. Attitudes that reject, attack and divide can occur at most levels of moral development, but those of the KKK, the Nazis and the Religious Right are arrested in their development at the ethnocentric level.
Of course, the right wing lawyers and the Christian parents and students from tonight�s school board meeting, and the Religious Right in general, do not (I hope) want to put same-gender-loving, bi-attractional and gender-queer people into concentration camps like Nazis. The majority of them are not advocating enforcing Levitical law. They�re probably not interested in burning crosses on our lawns.
At the same time, the right to free speech, the right to express oneself and one�s belief system or worldview, must exhaust itself the moment one begins to cause harm. The evolutionary mantle of diversity, liberalism and tolerance cannot shelter pathology, especially when pathology is camouflaged in spiritual drag, and especially in the public education of our children. If modern society continues to endanger its development by defending the value of expressions of low-level, pathological worldviews instead of healing and correcting them, disaster looms.
It�s time that we grow up and put our amazing human genius to work discerning that which is truly helpful to human development from that which imperils it. We have to use our miraculous power-to-choose in defense of the possibility of being more wholly human, and each of us must excavate the genuinely creative magic that lies within every human heart: our magical ability to Love.
"Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
Begin it now."
--Johann Wolfgang Goethe
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