Growth Hierarchies

What Gilligan had stumbled upon was a truth now widely acknowledged by virtually all developmentalists: namely, that there are two major but very different types of hierarchies, usually called dominator hierarchies and growth hierarchies. Dominator hierarchies are all the nasty things that postmodern multiculturalists say they are: oppressive, power-driven, suffering-inducing, dominating. We see these in everything from the caste system to la cosa nostra–style criminal rings to slave networks everywhere. In these dominator hierarchies, the higher you go, the more people you can control and oppress. Growth hierarchies, on the other hand, are exactly the opposite. Where each higher level in a dominator hierarchy is more excluding and more oppressive, each higher level in a growth hierarchy is more inclusive and less oppressive (or, stated conversely, is more loving—and we actually have empirical research demonstrating this). Because of their unifying and integrating nature, growth hierarchies are often called “holarchies.” The evolutionary leaps that we are looking at in this presentation—the major developmental stages from egocentric to ethnocentric to worldcentric to integral—is exactly a type of growth holarchy. Each higher level is more inclusive, more caring, more loving, more conscious, and more embracing.

The archetypal growth holarchy in nature is the one that unites all of its fundamental units: this holarchy goes from quarks to atoms to molecules to cells to organisms. Each of those levels “transcends and includes”—it both transcends (or goes beyond) and includes (or fully enwraps) its predecessor: a whole quark is part of an atom; a whole atom is part of a molecule; a whole molecule is part of a cell; a whole cell is part of an organism. Each level is a whole that is a part of the next-higher whole. Arthur Koestler calls each of these units a “holon,” or a “whole/part,” a whole that is also a part of a larger whole. Reality in general is composed primarily of holons.

The central point is that, with these growth holarchies, the higher level does not oppress or enslave or dominate the lower level; it enfolds it, it includes it, it embraces it—if anything, it loves it. Cells don’t despise molecules, molecules don’t hate atoms—again, if anything, they love them, they embrace them. And the whole of evolution (at least as it has appeared so far) is the construction of these ever-higher, ever more whole, more unified, and more integrated elements—wholes that are parts of ever-higher wholes. This is the “order out of chaos”—the Eros—that leading-edge science sees as an inherent drive in the universe at large. And more to the point for us, it is an inherent drive in human beings as well—and any sane and comprehensive overview of human growth and development (not to mention any attempts at effective “social engineering”) would want to take these growth holarchies into account, starting right at the beginning.