Dear People Whom God Loves,
Before continuing with Ken Wilbur, I’d like to take a little sidetrack with Lawrence Kohlberg and Carol Gilligan. They write of moral development into six stages and merely touch on a seventh that I won’t consider.
Kohlberg’s study was exclusively with men. He found the stages that they went through in valuing human rights. All of these stages have to be gone through in sequence. You can’t skip over anyone of them. Also you can’t understand or value stages above where you are. You may get a glimpse of the stage above you before you enter into it. Stages above you just seem wrong and you think that the stage you are in is absolutely right and stubbornly and righteously discount anyone who is in a stage above.
Stage I Everything is about “me”. Other people don’t count.
Stage II I will do something for you if you do something for me.
Stage III I will have concern for those in my social group, and I will
conform to my group’s values.
Stage IV I will obey the law. What the law says is what is good.
Stage I will see that the law is not always right, and the law
should be changed by social contract.
Stage V Absolutely everyone has rights that must be respected. In Stage
I, it is o.k. to hurt anybody. No one has rights. In Stage II, I will respect the rights of those who are useful to me. In Stage III, I will not discriminate against those in my social group. In Stage IV, I will not discriminate against those that the law protects. In Stage V, I will work to get the law changed to protect others that the law does not protect. In Stage VI, I will work against discrimination against anyone regardless of whether or not they are protected by law or custom.
Gilligan’s study was done with women. She found the women went through the same stages as men. She did find a difference. She found that focus with women was not so much about expanding growth in expanding rights, but in expanding care and compassion to more and more people.
I find these studies valuable, not just to see how “high” we are, but to acknowledge our need to grow. We tend to want to draw people up to the stage that we are and, at the same time, to prevent them from going further.
I see three things (there are others) that can help our growth.
1. Listen to people who think differently
2. Associate with different kinds of people
3. Meditate and let God change us.
Smile, God Loves You,
Father Clay
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