Trying to Explain the French and the World

Does it seem cynical that, in the misery of the recent French riots, all the commentators are projecting their ideas upon the suffering French and deftly demonstrating how their ideas show exactly how the French got into their mess and how they could get out of it?

Not really. That’s what humans do. We try to understand the world according to the template that we carry around. We keep at it until our template utterly fails us. And even then we may still continue to worship it.

For economist Arnold Kling understanding the world means attacking the social model of Berkeley cognitive scientist and
liberal George Lakoff. Lakoff divides the world into people that want government to act like a “strict father” and those that want it to act as a “nurturant parent.” You can figure out which US political party is the Daddy party and which is the Mommy party in this formulation. Lakoff believes, as a liberal, that the correct government model is the nurturant parent one.

Kling, as an economist and a libertarian, asks the obvious question. Enough with this parent stuff, already. Why not junk the parent model and have an America without a parent. Just as we have separated church and state, why not separate family and state?

To the traditional Left and Right, one question raised by the riots is how the French welfare state affects Muslims and other minorities. The Right worries that it provides too much support for "alien" immigrant "parasites." The Left worries that it does not provide enough education and employment opportunities.

To libertarians, the welfare state is something that is economically ineffective and morally wrong for everyone, not just for ethnic minorities. Families and non-coercive institutions, such as charities and churches, ought to provide for basic needs. Education and health care ought to be primarily the responsibility of families, not of the state.

But the bigger question is: Why do most people, excepting a tiny minority called libertarians, want the state as parent, differing only in their preference for a Mommy state or a Daddy state? How can we explain this?

We can turn to a model that does a better job of understanding what is going on than the models of Lakoff and Kling. It is called Spiral Dynamics.

In the Spiral Dynamics model there is no binary opposition, between Mommy and Daddy state or between family and state, but a hierarchical model of people in different stages of existence. First of all there are red impulsives, people that experience the world as a cockpit of power and themselves as the victims. But some of them climb out of this power hell and become blue purposives. They believe in the One Truth and, in our western model, the love of the Lord Jesus Christ. The children of blue purposives often rebel against the totalism of One Truth. They discover that you can change the rules, if you want. Life is a game, they believe, and they become orange creatives. But the children of creative egos often rebel against the life of the ego. They believe in sharing and caring, the demolition of power structures and hierarchies. They become green communitarians.

The power of this model is that it can accomodate both the binary world of Lakoff, his strict vs. nurturant parents, and the world of Kling and his separation of family and state. Strict parents are blue purposives believing in the One Truth. Nurturant parents are green communitarians, visualizing world peace. And libertarians are orange creatives, believing that you can settle everything with agreed-upon rules.

But what about men of power, you ask, like Mao, Stalin, and Hugo Chavez? They don’t appear in the models of Lakoff and Kling. But we can understand them in the Spiral Dynamics model. They are red impulsives that worship power. Their natural modus operandi is to organize helpless victims into political armies in their march to power.

As things get serious in the years ahead, it is going to be important to have the best model, the one that understands the world as nearly as possible. It may be a matter of life and death.

Spiral Dynamics is not that model. But it is a start.