Metamodern Spirituality | Nuancing the Stage Theory Discussion (w/ Zak Stein)

Zak Stein is a writer and educator with a doctorate in human development and education from Harvard University. Working with Kurt Fischer, he helped further hone and nuance developmental stage theories as part of the neo-Piagetian consensus. Deeply influenced by integral philosophy, he has also articulated many crucial critiques of the movement in an attempt to emphasize the dynamical and contextual nature of stage assessments. Here Zak and Brendan discuss just what the science tells us about the reality of stages; the problems around their simplification, reification, and misapplication; the question of how well they map onto socio-cultural development; the importance of processual vs. categorical thinking; and what development can and can't do as part of a metamodern spiritual metanarrative.
0:00 Introduction
1:12 Static Stages or Dynamic Processes? A Metapsychological Clarification
10:18 Being "at" a Stage? Development as an Ecology of Skillsets
19:23 Non-Linear Growth and Ranges of Operation: Fractal Skill-Chunking across Domains
24:05 The Car Mechanic and the Quantum Mechanic: Transferable Skills and the Importance of Embodiment
28:55 Roots of Cognitive Complexity
31:57 The Recapitulation Theory: Does Phylogeny Map Ontogeny?
36:50 The Growth to Goodness Issue: Complexification and Pathology
41:31 Better Heuristics than Stages? Learning Processes, Capacity Asymmetries, and Dynamics of Teacherly Authority
48:18 Theory vs. (Mis)Application: Are Stage Theories Just "B.S. and Colonial as Hell"?
59:41 Generalizing Developmental Space
1:05:30 Development as Metanarrative? Stage Theories and the Religion that's not a Religion
Zak's website:
www.zakstein.org/
⚡ Support my work on Patreon:
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www.BrendanGrahamDempsey.com

[@benlevi3147]

Being a Spiral Dynamics integral practitioner for 20+ years (taught w/Don Beck), I applaud Zak's perspectives, and agree with him. A couple important notes: 1) ALL MODELS ARE WRONG, SOME ARE MORE USEFUL THAN OTHERS. Helps keep us all humble. I believe SDi to be a useful model. 2) A model is a tool, and thus influenced by the tool user. That's why Don certified hundreds of people in SDi, so he could ensure that the model was communicated in a healthy way. SDi is about how we evolve what is important to us, how those values dance together between "express-self" and "sacrifice-self" ways of thinking, and most importantly, how those values change as our perceptions of our life conditions change. As Zak points out, there are a myriad of models that describe the amazing complexity of human-ness. If they're useful, may they assist in humankind's evolution. A good model is psychoactive that way.

[@BrendanGrahamDempsey]

Well said.

[@AdultDevelopmentInstitute]

I have mapped Constructed Development Theory to SD and can demonstrate how we move from (for example) Green to Yellow. However, at the more esoteric levels, such as Turquoise, I have yet to see evidence of efficacy and specific growth.

[@roselotusmystic]

🙏

[@edwardberge2536]

Zak has always parsed the pros and cons so well. I used Zak as a source for my paper "Can you be at a level of development?" He also participated in the Metamodern Forum discussion on the topic. "There's more to the life of the mind that just cognitive developmental stages" (6:47). "Under some conditions stages are clearly the case. In other cases stages don't apply. [...] The [most classical] misapplication of stage theory is [that it is] not suitable [for] social cultural development" (9:37). In that same section another misapplication is normative judgments of people at different stages. And getting back to the paper I referenced above: "There's no such thing as being at a stage" (14:19). He goes on to note that in different contexts we can display different skill levels of a particular task. Another thing touched upon in that paper: "It's precisely that dynamic developmental flow between all these different skill domains which are at different levels. [...] It's not about being at a cognitive level; it's about this ability to move fluidly up and down these skill sets and move across different skill domains so you get an ecosystem of skills as opposed to a central processor that gets you more capacity" (aka as a center of gravity) (18:19). At 32:48 he goes into the fallacy of 'ontogeny capitulates phylogeny' applied to social cultural development, a topic we are exploring in the Graeber/Wengrow thread. At 34:03 he mentions their book specifically on the issue. "The problem here is to over essentialize and to use broad sweeps and to have those broad sweeps have normative connotations." Which is exactly what the English colonizers did to justify genocide and stealing their land. Well actually it was the 'Great Spirit's' land on which the natives were stewards. But such beliefs were concerned primitive so therefore the natives had no right to that land, as well as their very lives. Starting around 37:20 they then get into the obsession of the ultimate meta justification: Increasing complexity is the answer to evolution and development. Zak brings up that if our current complexity is so great then why are we on the brink of environmental, and subsequently human, collapse? It relates to Wilber early on noting that each stage can go off into dissociation instead of integration. As well as the health or pathology at every stage. As I've argued elsewhere I think western civilization took a wrong turn into crapitalism with its dysfunctional dualistic elevation of man over woman, mind over body, individual over society and so on. Which is based on the difference of real v. false reason as described by Lakoff. This idea was touched on earlier in their discussion with the example of a gifted person having a high mental capacity which could generalize to other domains with the same sort of skill level. But Zak pointed out that just having the transferable comprehension of certain underlying abstract principles across domains is still missing the embodied skill prerequisites for a full understanding and hence actual high skill performance in other domains. I.e. real v. false reason. At 47:00 he discusses different cultural capacities. Europeans had a more effective technological capacity than US natives for 'kinetic warfare.' The problem though is when the Europeans generalized that capacity as defining civilization capacity altogether when the natives indeed had more advanced capacities in other domains. Zak called it a "self-insulating, hypertrophied pathology." Starting at 53:35 he brings up the study he did at JFKU on how different levels interpret levels. Suffice it to say that it explains a number of the common misapplications and distortions of integral theory we see in the community. "So this is basically Graber's argument about the indigenous peoples of the north american continent. They chose to live this way and they were optimizing for values very very different from the values the Europeans were optimizing for" (62:20). He goes on to say he's a big Graeber fan, read everything he's written and finds him meticulous if sometimes a bit sweeping. They end the interview with Zak talking about the other two domains in his model beside development: Ensoulment and transcendence. Development is about gaining capacity and self-improvement. Ensoulment is losing capacity and getting beneath people in service. Transcendence is neither in stepping back to see the total non-dual whole.

[@TheDionysianFields]

The first ten minutes of this are as important as any piece of work out there in the world today. Brilliance.

[@TheExceptionalState]

Wonderful talk guys. Thank you!

[@ethansenser1177]

Really appreciate this video. Have been struggling to find ways to understand these sorts of development theories in a way that isn't normative and this conversation was really helpful - at the very least, in helping me give myself the grace to take my time in working through that struggle!

[@RavenJack23]

Love me some Zak Stein. Great conversation.

[@jimmuir5802]

It would have been useful had Zachary explored more of Graves theory in the context of his conversations about stages because Graves was all about complexity and capacity. Further, nothing I heard dealt with Graves' pursuit of a psychology of the modern individual. It seemed to me that Stein dismissed stage theory in relation to the individual, while Graves was intensely concerned with that. I thought SDi bridged that well, which is probably what attracted Wilber in the first place

[@rikarddahl9131]

Great clarifying discussion

[@AdultDevelopmentInstitute]

Check out Constructed Development Theory. It takes neo-Piagetian ideas further and actually shows us how to transition between stages. No other system does that.

[@BrendanGrahamDempsey]

Super interested. Any sources you’d recommend?

[@AdultDevelopmentInstitute]

​@@BrendanGrahamDempsey​ - I left a comment but it seems to have disappeared. Anyhoo, please contact me as it's my theory. I am on KZbin giving all kinds of talks and conferences, but also check ResearchGate for CDT as a lot is there. My first few papers are in the system and not yet published. Shouldn't be long though. By all means get in touch and we can have a Zoom chat... :)

[@differentme.2024]

Could it be that we need to 'adapt our capacities' to include (importantly) by choice, our 'soul capacities' when road blocks, life sequences of change, especially unexpected changes in these days?

[@jeffbarney3584]

@42:00 Nazi Dr writ large. It seems yes that is what we have been dealing with in the social space also as relates what you and Jonathan Rowson talked about re., shared values. Yikes. Public opinion as authoritarianism. Great conversation. Would love for you to get into the epistemics of what the individual human is

[@nikomitropoulos5292]

What skillsets are most transferable

[@kaveinthran368]

1:20 can anyone write down the full name of the scholars mention here?

[@BrendanGrahamDempsey]

Robert Kegan, Jean Piaget, Ken Wilber, Michael L. Commons, Kurt Fischer, Lawrence Kohlberg, Carol Gilligan, Clare Graves

[@Jimmy-el2gh]

M Power baby...nice!

[@B1bLioPhil3]

Will this be on Spotify?

[@BrendanGrahamDempsey]

Yes, shortly

[@BrendanGrahamDempsey]

Now posted: anchor.fm/metamodern-spirituality/episodes/14--Nuancing-the-Stage-Theory-Discussion-w-Zak-Stein-e1b3fpq

[@jgarciajr82]

Eventually skills become an art. That's what it sounds like.

[@nikomitropoulos5292]

44:29

[@DarkMoonDroid]

Zak was interrupted too much. His idea have large arcs. I think he was going to answer the big questions about 4 times, but he was interrupted. How is this happening again? He has what I need in order to wade thru the current swamp. I can't read his academic works. It would take me the rest of my life to extract what I need right now. I hope he unpacks this more somewhere out here...

[@DarkMoonDroid]

1:08:38 This is what we missed out on.

[@MarmaladeINFP]

This doesn't seem quite correct. The cognitive can't be conflated with and equated to the merely mental, rational, and intellectual. Everything is cognitive, including the social, moral, and spiritual. That is because to be embodied means that no human experience, ability, etc --- be it stage, stage/phase, or transition ---- involves development and utilization of neurocognition by way of brain structures.