Carl Jung’s Red Book contains an extraordinary personal account of engagement with archetypal figures in a series of induced visions. Robert M. Ellis, who has a forthcoming book on the subject, explains how it can also be an inspiring resource for the Middle Way. This talk was given on Zoom on 19th April 2020, as part of the Virtual Festival of the Middle Way. It is followed by questions from the audience.
Category Archives: Psychology
Who moved my cheese?
I was rather amused recently to pick up the little fable ‘Who Moved my Cheese?’, which my daughter had picked up on her travels. Published in 1998 and written by Spencer Johnson, this was apparently a massive bestseller, interpreted for some reason as being about business – although it’s about business no more and no less than any other area of human life. It deals with basic questions about human motivation and responses to change. Its core message is, interestingly enough, about the Middle Way in some re
spects, though it also seems to slightly miss the point in some others.
What enables this fable to get straight to the point is the way it strips down the complexity of human experience, by setting the story in an apparent endless (almost Borgesian) maze and reducing the focus of all human desires and values to ‘cheese’. We don’t know where ‘cheese’ comes from, or what rules, if any, determine its appearance in the maze (we don’t need to know). All we know is that it appears in the maze from time to time and is the only goal for the characters in the fable. I imagine that Johnson must have started his fable as being about mice in a maze in a psychological experiment, but then decided that mice did not reflect the complexity of human nature closely enough. So instead we have four characters – two mice and two ‘Littlepeople’ (humans that are the same size as mice, and in the same situation).
The mice, Sniff and Scurry, are mainly just a contrast with the Littlepeople, Hem and Haw, said to behave in more straightforward ways due to their smaller brains. This was one area that I found unconvincing, because it seems likely that mice could also get into the same kinds of problems that the Littlepeople do. The problem that frames the story is that all four characters have been accustomed to finding cheese in one place, ‘Cheese Station C’, but then it dwindles and disappears. The mice quickly adapt and scurry off to sniff out cheese elsewhere, but the humans are cognitively attached to only getting cheese in that one place, so they continually rationalise their belief that the cheese will start coming there again. Of the two LIttlepeople, Hem is so stuck that he never leaves Cheese Station C, and gets thinner and thinner, but eventually, with many struggles, Haw overcomes his fear of change and goes off to look for cheese elsewhere. Eventually, of course, he finds it.
So what does this have to do with the Middle Way? Well, the Middle Way is the avoidance of absolutisation, which means getting stuck in particular beliefs that one takes to be the whole story. This is exactly what Hem does, as he absolutises his belief that cheese will return to Cheese Station C and keeps going back there day after day. Haw, on the other hand, illustrates the positive process of the practice of the Middle Way, as he gradually starts to think more provisionally and consider other possibilities. The contrast between them illustrates the adaptivity of the Middle Way – namely, the way in which avoiding absolutisation allows us to face up to changed conditions. To take an overwhelming parallel from the present, Hem could be seen as a climate change denier, stuck in old patterns of thinking, whilst Haw is someone who gradually faces up to the high probability that the ‘cheese’ of a habitable range of planetary temperatures is dwindling and may be about to disappear entirely.
However, there are also aspects of the Middle Way that I think the fable misses. The chief one of these is the tendency for absolutisation to come in opposed pairs of opposites, the attractiveness of which is so strong that the rejection of one absolute is almost bound to result at least temporarily in the adoption of the opposite extreme. This would result in Haw not just reluctantly starting to look for new cheese, but suddenly being struck, as by a revelation, of the falsehood of his previous belief of the Second Coming of cheese to Cheese Station C. He then might become slightly manic in his search for cheese elsewhere, or indeed might fixate on one other alternative cheese station where he believes it’s bound to be. Giving up on absolutes is not just a binary switch from one view to another, but involves a process of navigation between extremes, with constant adjustment and re-adjustment. There is no sign in the fable that Johnson gets this aspect of psychology, constantly illustrated as it is by human behaviour.
Johnson’s attribution of the ‘stuck’ state to one of the Littlepeople rather than to the mice also seems questionable to me, because it assumes that mice don’t get stuck – i.e. that it’s a uniquely human trait arising from our large brains. However, all other mammals and birds have the same bilateral brain structure that we do, which presumably means that the goal-oriented left hemisphere in other animals can become over-dominant just as it can for us. You don’t necessarily have to have a representation in language, as humans do, to be implicitly convinced that your image of the world is absolutely correct. The monkey trap, in which monkeys who put their hand in a jar to get food are trapped by the narrow aperture of the jar as long as they won’t let go of the food, would be an example of another species getting ‘stuck’ in the same way. So I’m not sure that Spencer could not have written a more straightforward fable that was just about mice, rather than inventing ‘Littlepeople’ who are in the position of mice.
In the Wikipedia article on ‘Who Moved my Cheese?’ (which you could read for an alternative summary of the story), one of the criticisms that have been made of it is mentioned. Managers have apparently given the book out to their employees to encourage them to respond ‘flexibly’ to re-structuring or redundancy – a procedure that obviously involves interpreting the story far too narrowly. The employees could just as reasonably give the book to their managers to encourage them to respond ‘flexibly’ to a demand for better pay and conditions! The conditions we need to adapt to are not those created by those who have assumed authority, because those people could also do some adapting in solidarity with others, rather than adopting the demand for provisionality as a tool of power. The people who give and take away the cheese are not the managers but rather the conditions that really are beyond our control, and perhaps even our explanation. The use or abuse of the story in business seems to have contributed to a lack of understanding of its universality.
So, I wouldn’t make excessive claims for this little book. You’re unlikely to get very much more from reading it than you will from my summary or that on Wikipedia. It offers some insights, but also lacks a few more. Nevertheless, it is interesting that it has apparently struck such a chord with its readers and been so accessible. It may be worth picking up if, as it did for me, it crosses your path.
Why the left fails – and how it can succeed
The UK is still reeling from the election results of a few days ago, in which Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party not only won a majority, but did so by capturing many traditional working-class seats across the north and midlands of England. Australia has experienced a similar election recently, whilst the US got there first with the surprise election of Trump in 2016. The devastating surprise in all of these elections seems to lie in how far working class people are prepared to vote against what seem clearly their own interests: namely, against improvements in the public spending they rely upon, and in favour of grossly inconsistent right wing governments, supported by big business interests who evade tax and impose exploitative working conditions on them. That’s even before we get onto the pressing issue of climate change, where all our interests are deeply threatened, and the right wing responses are generally either denialist or inadequately weak. The jokes about turkeys voting for Christmas have abounded.
But beyond that, how can we helpfully understand and learn from the underlying problem here? Very few analyses seem to drill down to the most basic issue, which is one of human judgement. Applying the Middle Way, one tries to avoid absolute assumptions, whether negative or positive – which in this case probably means avoiding the single cause fallacy. Why, then, do so many working class people – whether in Workington, Brisbane or Des Moines – persist in voting like turkeys? It’s very easy to take one kind of explanation and absolutise it, in accordance with the particular political concerns your experience has equipped you with, but in the process avoid the most basic underlying issues. We can blame leaders, we can blame biased and sometimes false media coverage, we can blame party policies and manifestos, we can blame party tactics, or even voter stupidity. All of these factors are no doubt part of the picture, but they need to take their place in relation to the question of human judgement. What actually decides the values that actuate people when they cast their vote?
In understanding this, I’ve found the following video from Rebel Wisdom helpful. It mentions a couple of things that I think are very relevant. One of these is the analysis of six foundational political values by Jonathan Haidt (authority, loyalty, sanctity, care, justice, freedom) – see my review of his book. Another is an idea that comes from Ken Wilber – the pre/trans fallacy: namely that people often react against a later stage of integrative development that has incorporated the more helpful elements of an earlier one, because they mistake it for the earlier stage. I do recommend watching the video if you have time, although it’s 35 minutes long. It doesn’t answer all the questions that I think need to be asked (which I continue with below), but it provides a very good starting point.
Where this video leaves us is with the idea of “performative contradiction”, namely the idea that the left contradicts itself unconsciously by committedly extolling the values of care and justice, but doing so in a way that feels exclusive to working-class people. Whilst I think that’s a good point, I also think it’s not sufficient to leave it there, because it has the implication that the left is to blame for being too exclusive by being intellectual, middle class etc, when these are largely just part of the conditions that middle class left wingers are working with.
However, if we take the six foundational values of Haidt and probe them further, we can start to ask what the values of working class people may be, and why they are opposed to those of middle class left wingers. The obvious answer seems to lie in those values identified by Haidt as more collective ones: authority, loyalty and sanctity. Haidt’s major point is that conservatives combine these three values with the others (care, justice and freedom), but ‘liberals’ (in the American sense) concentrate only on care, justice and freedom and fail to understand why anyone values authority, loyalty or sanctity. This is also somewhat hypocritical of the left, of course, because left wingers, being human, do have their own values of authority, loyalty and sanctity, but they tend to confine them to private life (family, friendships, religion, maybe business or professional relationships). Left wingers just don’t feel it’s appropriate to make political judgements on the basis of authority, loyalty or sanctity, meaning that they are more likely to be anti-elite, internationalist and anti-religious.
But do the working classes share these ‘left wing’ or ‘liberal’ types of value? It seems obvious to me that the majority do not, and the psychological preferences of the majority help to create cultural trends that subsume many more (such as the popularity of Brexit). Why, then, have working class voters in industrial towns across northern England traditionally voted Labour? Obviously care, justice and freedom are of some concern to these voters, but they are not prepared to use them as a sole basis of judgement without a good helping of authority, loyalty and sanctity to help them along. In traditional industrial northern England (where I spent much of my childhood) these sources of authority, loyalty and sanctity were clearly present in working class culture. Socialist leaders, some of working class origins, provided authority. Working class solidarity itself, particularly exercised through the unions, the pubs and the churches, provided the basis of loyalty. In the past, voting Tory would have been an unthinkably disloyal thing to do. Sanctity, too, was present in the power particularly of non-conformist Christianity in the earlier Labour movement. Even in the 1970’s, when I was growing up amongst the small towns south east of Manchester, the churches of each town would all parade with their banners and assemble outside the town hall, dressed up in pride for the ‘Whit Walks’ every Whitsuntide Sunday: a display uniting the sanctity and solidarity of the churches, the town and civic society (see this link for pictures: one of which is here). 
However, under the impact of social and economic change, these sources of value are largely gone: church attendance has plummeted, pubs have closed, and unions have been seriously weakened. The left has become an increasingly middle class phenomenon, including those who may have been born into the working class but adopted middle class culture and expectations. The working classes are left to rudderless individualism.
I think there’s a further theoretical perspective that can shed light on this: that’s the work of Robert Kegan on the stages of adult psychological development. Kegan extended the work previously done by Piaget on how children develop, in the process identifying some quite well-definable stages in both the cognitive development and the changing values of adults. The video below gives an introduction to the five stages of development in Kegan’s thought.
The vast majority of adults are at either what Kegan would call the ‘interpersonal’ stage (stage 3), or at the ‘institutional’ stage (stage 4). In the interpersonal stage, we rely to a greater extent on other people’s approval as the basis of our values, so we could expect this to largely correspond to the ‘conservative’ six values thinking in Haidt’s analysis. If your relationship with others is the prime basis of your values, then authority and loyalty will continue to be important to your judgement. Care, justice and freedom will also be part of the mix, but not by themselves in too much abstraction from the social context to which you feel your loyalty. It is only when people are able to move on to stage 4 that they are likely to be able to adopt those ‘liberal’ values: justice, care and freedom applied systematically beyond the bounds of immediate group loyalties. If they are able to move beyond stage 4 into the ‘interindividual’ stage 5, they will then see the limitations even of these systemically applied values and how their interpretation is limited by contextual assumptions – but only a relatively small number of people manage this. Mistaking stage 5 for regression to stage 3 is the pre/trans fallacy mentioned above.
The crucial factor in people’s lives that helps them to shift from stage 3 to stage 4, according to Kegan, is likely to be either university study or the demands of a profession. To do either of these, generally speaking, you are forced to adopt more systematic habits of mind, and to adopt a standpoint beyond that of loyalty to your background group or social class. However, when you get a university degree or join a profession you almost by definition become middle class, and in the process are likely to adjust your peer groups, your housing, your location, and your voting habits. I can’t find any research that has been done on the correlation between Kegan’s stages and social class, but I would be astonished if there does not turn out to be a strong correlation when such research is done.
So, to return to the main theme, why does the left fail? Why do the working classes fail to support it? My hypothesis for the key answer is that they fail to support it because they are still at stage 3, and thus because they still require authority, loyalty and perhaps sanctity as an element in the basic values of what they will support. The reason is thus not primarily leadership, policies, media or tactics, although these all undoubtedly interact with people’s basic values and produce smaller short term changes in voting habits. With the growing individualism in society, the working classes have lost whatever basis of loyalty to the left they ever had. Instead, the conditions that produce systematic thought about the application of care, justice and freedom (along with systematic thought about how to respond to issues like climate change) are overwhelmingly those of university education.
The voting figures for the recent UK general election show big disparities, not just by region, but by age and education. According to YouGov, age and education are now clearly the most important indicators of voting intention. The following graphs show just how big that disparity is. 
But it needs to be remembered that these are not just social categories – they are also psychological ones determining how people make judgements.
So, how can the left succeed? Not by wooing the working classes back, but by coming to terms with the fact that the basis of left wing support is education – and that this means that in the longer-term, conditions are on their side. All they have to do is maintain the support of a majority of educated voters, and wait for higher levels of education to filter through the population. Of course, anything they can do to support and spread education is also part of the key to success. Reforming education itself so that it is more effective – including basic knowledge of the political system and more effective teaching of critical thinking skills for all – would also help.
The removal of unnecessary divisions on the left would also help a great deal to get them into power sooner rather than later. In the UK Labour and the Liberal Democrats are competing with each other and splitting the anti-Conservative vote in many seats, with the first past the post system making this disastrous in its effects. These parties need to merge or ally themselves in order to stand a chance, because they are largely fishing in the same pool of educated voters. the only differences between them lie in the degree of emphasis between the three ‘liberal’ values, with Labour emphasising care and justice rather more, and the Lib Dems trying to strike a balance between justice/ care on the one hand a freedom on the other. Their commonalities are much more important than their differences. Both parties now face a change of leadership, and it is to be hoped that the new leaders see the sense of creating an alliance rather than competing. In the Labour party, though, this means facing down those who are attached to the Marxist belief that social change must be instigated by the oppressed themselves: Haidt and Kegan between them have shown that this is wrong.
In my personal judgement, in the embodied situation I find myself in politically, a Middle Way judgement means that one needs to support the left. However, I can well understand that people will reach different political judgements by sincerely applying the Middle Way in different circumstances. I support the left, not because of any absolute commitment to care, justice or freedom (I think these need to be balanced with the other values, making me in some ways a small-c conservative – see blog on this), but because I think justice, particularly, has been neglected in the Western world since the rise of neo-liberalism in the 1980’s, and because systematic thinking is overwhelmingly needed to address climate change. My political views are pragmatically led. This is not the time for exaggerated suspicions of the state, nor for any other distraction from the big picture of the conditions we need to address and the best way of getting there. Nor is it time to give up hope. Tony Blair had many weaknesses with his strengths as a leader, but he seemed to be right in one well-known statement of his priorities: “Education, education, education”.
The MWS Podcast 149: David Robson on the intelligence trap
My guest today is David Robson, David is an award-winning science writer and editor, who specialises in writing in-depth articles probing the extremes of the human mind, body and behaviour. He was a features editor at New Scientist for five years and is currently a senior journalist at BBC Future. He regularly features on the BBC World Service discussing scientific issues, and his writing has also appeared in Guardian, the Atlantic and the Washington Post. His first book ‘The Intelligence Trap: Why Smart People Make Stupid Mistakes and How to Make Wiser Decisions was published earlier this year and this will be the topic of our discussion today
Stream podcast from the Itunes Library
Fractal adaptivity
Should the concept of adaptivity (or adaptiveness) not itself be adaptive? In my work on Middle Way Philosophy, I’ve often found myself arguing that a traditional way of thinking about a concept that may have worked in a past context is too restrictive for the present one. Moving on from the limitations of Buddhist ways of thinking of the Middle Way as lying between ‘eternalism’ and ‘nihilism’ is one example of this, and another (that I’m working on for my next book) is the need to move on from Jungian accounts of archetypes as innate features of the ‘collective unconscious’. In both cases, the alternative needs to be a more universal and thoroughly functional account of the concept, helpful to all people in all places rather than tied to a limiting paradigm. We owe a huge debt to the people who developed these concepts, but need to pass on the flame rather than worshipping the conceptual ashes. So it seems, also, with the concept of adaptivity itself, which for many people is strongly tied to a Darwinian paradigm.
In the basic Darwinian view, adaptivity is a matter of the continuing survival and reproduction of an organism in changing conditions. The organism passes on its genes to its descendants with minor mutations, some of which are better adapted to new conditions and others of which are not. ‘Natural selection’ then ensures that the better adapted organisms survive and reproduce, whilst the less well adapted die out. This kind of adaptivity , however, is a relatively crude. It takes a very long time for significant adaptation to occur, only operates at the level of entire species or sub-species, and requires the maladapted to perish in the process. Nevertheless, many thinkers still seem to think of this as the only acceptable understanding of adaptivity. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, for instance, expresses a valuable perspective on the long-term value of our ability to adapt to extreme and unpredictable events, or ‘fat tails’ as he calls them. If our perspective is too short-term, and we fail to take these events into account, even if we appear to be well-adapted to a more limited immediate range of conditions, we lose. However, the kind of adaptiveness he has in mind appears to be only that of survival (even if not strictly only of a species). In this he seems to follow a strand of thinking in evolutionary biology that reduces all other forms of adaptation to that one.
However, adaptation is clearly a much more complex concept than that. It is a feature of a system, and systems may operate at different levels where their goals may not be just the survival of the system (practically necessary though that remains), but rather the fulfilment of a variety of needs. As systems evolve greater complexity, their goals also become more complex. Whilst survival is always the grounding condition on which the development of other goals depends, a hierarchy of ‘higher’ goals can develop in dependence on them. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs expresses those adaptive goals for humans, working up from the social adaptations of belonging and esteem to the individual one of what Maslow called ‘self-actualisation’.
But how can we understand Maslow’s insights in the context of adaptation? After all, a reductive evolutionary biologist would probably say that all of these needs boil down to survival in the end, and that even self-actualisation is only adaptive because it helps us solve problems or get on with others in ways that help us survive. I don’t agree that that’s the whole story, though, and it has recently occurred to me that talking in terms of a fractal structure may help to explain the relationships between different types of adaptivity. In a fractal structure, the features of a larger system are reproduced (potentially infinitely) at smaller and smaller scales, the Mandelbrot Set (pictured) being an example of th
ese relationships mathematically turned into an image.
To think of adaptivity in a fractal way, we’ll need to think of a hierarchy of successively smaller systems (smaller both in time and space) dependent on the larger one, but in which the same basic pattern of conditions operates. Exactly how you divide up levels of adaptivity may be a matter of debate, but I think we can distinguish at least four levels: biological, cultural, individual and imaginative. In each case there is a means of transmission of certain features that operates only at that level, a specific selective force that depends on the fulfilment of needs in different conditions, and both reinforcing and balancing types of feedback. I’ve suggested what the features of these four levels might be in the table below, though I’m sure this sketch can be refined.
When we get to the ‘higher’, or more distinctively human, forms of adaptivity, it is our use of symbols to create meaning that seems to be the basis of adaptivity, but operating in three different ways. At a cultural or social level, shared symbols and beliefs help societies to adapt, although rigidity in those symbols and beliefs can also become maladaptive. At this level, safety, belonging and respect start to become important in addition to survival. At an individual level, the development of an individual capacity for meaning and belief through neural links allows that individual to meet all their needs, including self-actualisation. Again, however, rigidity of belief can be maladaptive – this time for the individual. Within the individual, and within a shorter time-frame rather than a whole life, there is finally an imaginative level of adaptivity that is created by our ability to use symbols hypothetically and thus simulate possibilities in our minds. This imaginative process boosts our adaptivity as individuals, helping us to adapt far more quickly than we could do by merely waiting for our previous habits to fail us in new conditions. However, once again, maladaptivity for the individual occurs through the reinforcing feedback of imaginative reconstruction in loops of anxiety or obsession.
I think that these ways of understanding adaptivity help us to distinguish the Middle Way clearly from other kinds of adaptivity to a context. The practice of the Middle Way does not consist in just any kind of balancing feedback loop, but rather the development of awareness required for provisionality. If we can examine alternatives hypothetically, we can not only be freed from reinforcing feedback at the imaginative level, but also start to make an impression on the more basic levels. Provisionality applied consistently and courageously can change both long-term individual development and social beliefs, slow and frustrating though that process may seem when we see our societies going through damaging reinforcing feedback loops. Whether we can successfully influence the biological level is much more debatable.
However refined our thinking as individuals, however, we are still subject to the more basic conditioning of the biological level. As we are increasingly discovering through the climate crisis, the very existence of the more complex and refined systems, both social and individual, is under threat if we cannot maintain the basic conditions for our survival as a species.
Pictures: Maslow’s hierarchy of needs by factoryjoe (Wikimedia Commons). Mandelbrot Set picture of unknown origin. Table of levels of adaptivity by the author.