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Dear Network
I've been following the discussions with great
interest and have found various contributions highly informative. I'm in
catch-up mode in that, whilst being engaged in the World Values Survey, in
particular as director of the New Zealand series, I am not a specialist on World
Systems. So I fear that my comments would usually be too much on the
intuitive level, whereas most WSN members are obviously teachers and researchers
deeply versed in retrieving and generating fast-moving information and
ideas.
This sounds as if I'm a spectator, and so I am, but
I'm immersed in the write-up of our latest survey. We put out a small
book in November, 1999 (Paul Perry and Alan Webster, 1999, New Zealand
Politics at the turn of the Millennium : Attitudes and Values About
Politics and Government, Alpha Publications. pb 103pp. Distributors,
Addenda: PO Box 78224, Grey Lynn, Auckland, New Zealand.
Ph/Fax 64 09 834 5511. Email: addenda@xtra.co.nz)
This book and survey accurately tapped the near
revolution in voter-values following a decade of unrelenting free-market
ideology with all of the run-down of social services through a scandalous
privatization agenda. New Zealand went from being a wonder of the world in
its swing to right-wing economics to a very decisive voter rejection. The key
issue was the effects of the policies on the wellbeing of the poorer sector
of society among whom the indigenous Maori and the immigrant Pacific
Islanders are far over-represented. The new Labour government has espoused
'Third Way' economics, which to some of us is a short-term moderate populism
that will meet difficulties in the form of the underlying individualistic
materialism of the Labour voters, not to mention the back-lash of the business
sector. However, Helen Clark is riding high and great mates with Tony
Blair.
My main reason for writing is to say I am well on
with writing a more complete book from the study. I am inspired in part
by the Chase-Dunn and Boswell book, which I like very much, but also by
the Spiral Dynamics model of Clare Graves, developed further by
Don Beck and Chris Cowan. I propose to use the 'levels of culture' that
they base upon an evolutionary-developmental principle, as a framework for our
empirical structure of values. There is a match between our value-factors and
the Spiral levels, and these in turn are associated with Ethnic National
Identities and with Class and Education Level. Since the Spiral Dynamics model
aspires to being a world model in which the spiral is created by the
interaction of individual needs and conditions of existence it has occurred
to me that WSN people may know of it have opinions about it.
I should be very grateful for any responses and I
suppose, with some trepidation, I need to know whether people have negative
criticisms of the model. More correctly, I'm sure there are criticisms, some of
which would follow from the initially psychologistic starting point. After all,
it is really a needs theory married to conditions of existence - and strongly
endorsed, may I say, by Ken Wilber. I'm reasonably happy with all that, but my
experience of 30 years as a psychologist and human developmentalist teaching in
a social sciences faculty in which a powerful role was played by critical
sociology has led me to try to be integral.
Alan Webster
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