Tuesday, November 4, 2008

color coding of Americans

White, black, red, blue, redcoat, browncoat, it seems like we like to put some sort of easily definable color coding on each one of our categorized groups of cultures. Perhaps it's an American thing; I don't know. I do know that it could be dangerous to us as a people to section ourselves off from one another in order to easily identify our friends. But the more I thought about it, the more it seems to be a natural outgrowth of our ever expanding group consciousness. Think about it. Don Beck and his Spiral Dynamics easily put people into several groups based on their unfolding levels of evolutionary psychology. At first this seems to be destructive to us as a people. However, by doing so, we are able to see the strengths and weaknesses of each other and how we can relate to and rely on each other for specific reasons. If you are some sort of quasi-Darwinian purist, this is basically some form of natural selection stage where diversification of the species is readily needed in order to properly network and divide our energies to more effectively tackle certain goals. I like to think of myself as a reformed Darwinian, now struggling with spiritual humanist tendencies, but see the diversification and categorization, not as a preordained step in evolution, but as a natural occurrence in the chaotic and methodical unfolding of spirit in ourselves. While this does not necessarily facilitate throwing the Bible out the window or condemning Darwin to a fiery stake in the town's center, it does serve a purpose in the networked interwebbed reality that we are all dealing with. Just a thought.

-Dennis Edmons

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