2020-07-10

Spiral Dynamics and Linguistic Ideologies

Spiral Dynamics, based on the pioneering research by Clare Graves and elaborated by Don Beck and Chris Cowan in their book Spiral Dynamics, is an evolutional model of the human consciousness. Though can be appitlied to the understanding of both individuals and collectives, I find more power of this theory when it's used to measure the evolutionary stages of various collectives, including linguistic ideologies, around the globe. An online article entitled Overview of the Spiral Dynamics Model by Ken Wilber is one of the clearest introductions to this theory in a concise manner.

I've also studied this theory, though purely amateurishly, through the above mentioned book as well as the following series of lectures by Leo Gura, which I relisten to every once in a while:

It doesn't seem to be by chance that I got acquainted with this theory when I decided to leave academia (I'll officially leave it at the end of this September after two years of preparation for a new career). Then I also decided to stop my active involvement with two linguistic movements that used to occupy me a lot for many years - Yiddishism and Esperantism. Back them I couldn't clearly articulate the discomfort I suddenly started to feel with these two linguistic ideologies, but two years since then, I think I know what aroused and still arouses this feeling inside me.

The case of Yiddishism is quite obvious, at least to me, if not to its blind followers. Judging from its characteristics I've seen first-hand, I would say that it belongs to a fairly low stage in Spiral Dynamics. It's a desperate - and in my opinion, unsuccessful - attempt to replace Judaism with something linguistic and cultural, a kind of a new secular Jewish religion for descendants of speakers of Yiddish. Having started to study Hasidism in a traditional approach and not, G-d forbid, in an academic setting about two years ago, I find Yiddishism far more shallow than before.

The case of Esperantism is more subtle. The very idea of unifying the humankind is noble, but trying to do so through a "neutral" common language seems to me very naive now. It must be ranked higher in the scale of Spiral Dynamics, but not high enough. Its limitation is its obsession with language. I've realized that there is a vast suprarational world that transcends our intellect, thus our language, too. Language is not only a limited tool but also limits us. Actually, we human beings are already unified as divine sparks. All we need to do to see ourselves unified in reality is to raise our level of consciousness, first as individuals, then as a human collective. For this we have to go beyond the limitation of language.