Maturing society

In THE GREAT TURNING, From Empire to Earth Community, David C.
Korten says that the values and behavior of a society reflect
the predominant level of social maturity of its members.  He
summarizes the work of numerous developmental psychologists in
a list of the stages of social growth of an individual.  In
the “Magical Consciousness” stage of early childhood, a person
has only a rudimentary sense of cause-and-effect reality in a
small world of needs-providers that the child barely
recognizes as people with their own lives.  In later
childhood, the discovery that people can provide order and
security, but need to be bent to his will, gives rise to the
“Imperial Consciousness” stage.  Real identification with
other people,-albeit sometimes small groups of people,-begins
in the “Socialized Consciousness” stage, adolescence and
beyond.  The third stage individual identifies with and adopts
the norms of reference groups of “gender, age, race,
ethnicity, religion, nationality, class, political party,
occupation, employer, and perhaps a favored sports team.  (He)
is commonly militantly protective of (his) own group and prone
to take any criticism of it as a serious affront….It is the
consciousness of the Good Citizens, who have a “Small World”
view of reality defined by their reference group.”  The large
majority of Americans plateau at this level.

Loyalty to one’s identity groups can, it seems to me, provide
for some people the same kind of structure and comfort as
faith in a deity does for them.  And, just as faith can become
an end in itself, turning from faith in an arguable deity to a
less examinable faith in faith itself, so, too, loyalty to
groups with possibly shifting values can be turned into a more
stable and secure loyalty to loyalty itself.  Once secure in
such comfort loops, many people may prefer to just stay that
way.

Psychologists Phillip Shaver and Mario Mikulincer, cited in a
too-fluffy Newsweek article (July 8, 2007), assert that
emotionally insecure people tend to be xenophobic, exclusive,
belligerent.  Secure people, on the other hand, tend to be
carefully trusting, inclusive, cooperative.  Similarly, David
Korten says that third stage people who are secure in
themselves have a better chance of expanding their social
reference beyond cliques to envelope all of humanity.  In one
evolutionary step, the exclusivity that produces racism
disappears, injustice and war fade into the past.  

It’s not an easy step, with every imperial institution trying
desperately to hobble us.  Yet analysis of surveys covering a
good part of the twentieth century suggest, Korten says, that
in the 1960s barely five percent of Americans had grown past
this third stage, while that number grew to about twenty-six
percent by the late 1990s.