Boomeritis Sidebar A: Who Ate Captain Cook?

Boomeritis Sidebar A:  Who Ate Captain Cook?  Integral Historiography in a Postmodern Age

Carla Fuentes gave a lengthy sidebar on "integral historiography," which is not exactly my field, but certain points jumped out at me, and so, as usual, I furiously copied Kim’s notes.  I also jotted down my own impressions.  I got interested in it when I heard the title, "Who Ate Captain Cook?"—they really did roast and eat poor ole James Cook—and why this happened has apparently become the great debate of the decade in historiography, or the study of how to interpret history (and other cultures in general).  It probably didn’t help that I had just seen Hannibal.  Anyway, Fuentes gave one of her patented fire-on-fire lectures on the topic.

Throughout this seminar, in various sidebars, the profs keep talking about "the four quadrants."  Fuentes finally explained what they are, although nobody seemed bothered by the fact that "four" and "quadrant" are redundant.  From what I could understand, the existence of the quadrants is even worst news for AI.  I had already grasped the fact that AI was in deep trouble because it was caught in flatland, caught in the failure to grasp the spectrum of consciousness.  But now, if I heard Fuentes correctly, the interior spectrum of consciousness in an individual is only one of the four quadrants, and AI doesn’t grasp them very well, either.  Yikes! 

Specifically, it seems that AI understands fairly well the computational and cognitive representation of exterior objects—what IC calls the Upper-Right quadrant.  But AI fails to grasp or even acknowledge the interiors of individuals, or the whole Spiral of development—that much I knew—which they call the Upper-Left quadrant; and it fails to grasp the communal quadrants, both cultural and social, or the Lower-Left and Lower-Right quadrants.  This was much, much worse than I had imagined.  The IC people kept saying that "consciousness is distributed across all four quadrants"—whatever that actually means, it means AI is in deep shit.  Kim scribbled in the margins of her notes: "See ‘An Integral Theory of Consciousness’ and ‘Waves, Streams, States, and Self—Further Considerations for An Integral Theory of Consciousness,’ both published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies and summarized in ‘A Summary of My Psychological Model."  I bet she had read them, too, which was what was so annoying about Kim.  

Anyway, we in AI already knew that AI is having enormous trouble getting any sort of software to perform nuanced interpretations.  The four quadrants point out that interpretation also demands a cultural background and a social system, and thus, until we find ways to allow AI to grow in its own culture, it will never produce real intelligence.  If what I understood about the four quadrants is true, then in order to create a fully functioning AI, we would have to (1) create the appropriate self-replicating hardware of almost infinite information storage that could reconfigure itself at the command of the internal AI; create software that at least registered faithfully the objective sensorimotor world and then demonstrated learning and creativity in that world; this hardware-software and its objective computational strategies is the Upper Right, and so far it is the only item of the four quadrants that AI even acknowledges; (2) create hardware and software that would allow the interiors, or real self-consciousness, to emerge, at which point that self-consciousness would begin its own evolution through its own Spiral of development (the Upper Left); but—and here is the added nightmare for AI: (3) individual interior evolution can only occur in a community of mutual understanding among similarly-depthed individuals (Lower Left); and further, (4) this cultural or intersubjective dimension would have to occur along with an exterior social system capable of supporting it (Lower Right).  Put mildly, AI has its work cut out for it! 

Well, my thoughts got ahead of my story.  Here is Fuentes’s talk, which introduces the quadrants and applies them to the interpretation of history and a lovely dinner featuring the Captain as main course.  Exactly how all this will play out in AI is something I would definitely have to think about….

Carla Fuentes:  "When we talk about an integral historiography, what do we really mean?  The technical short answer is: an ‘all quadrants, all levels, all lines, all states, all types’ approach to the study of history.  Of course, such an integral approach would, if done in a fairly complete fashion, involve dozens, hundreds, thousands of variables.  But less extensive integral-historical studies can still be done, using the general outline, that would advance our understanding of history in substantial and significant ways.  Let me briefly focus on the meaning of quadrants, levels, lines, states, and types, and show exactly what is involved in each case when applied to interpreting history.  Exciting, huh?"  A few in the audience laughed, but most seemed to mumble and groan.

"Kim, is this section any fun?  It sounds about as thrilling as watching paint dry."

"I don’t know, I’ve never heard this one before.  But knowing how wild Fuentes is, if people start getting bored, she’ll do a strip tease or something."

"Really?"  Love that integral historiography.

"Start with the quadrants, eh, kidderrooes?  The four quadrants—and yes, ‘four’ is redundant, since ‘quadrants’ by itself means ‘four areas’"—Fuentes seemed to stare directly at me and smile—"the quadrants refer to the fact that any occasion can be looked at from (at least) four major perspectives, which represent four actual dimensions of the occasion itself: I can look at the interior and the exterior of the individual and the collective, which gives me four basic views that need to be incorporated in any integral or comprehensive understanding of that occasion."  [See fig. 1 in the Introduction to Collected Works, vol. 7, posted on this site, which is a diagram of the four quadrants as they appear in humans.]  Fuentes shot across the stage, a series of light-and-shadows as the lamps played off her.

"Let’s say I am studying a chimpanzee.  Why on earth I would want to is another question.  Okay, I can look at the chimp both as an individual and as a member of a group.  And both the individual and the group have an inside and an outside.  Thus, for the exterior of the individual, I can simply describe the chimp’s observable, empirical behavior as he goes on about his day’s activities.  But to understand his interiors, I have to try to figure out what is motivating the chimp, what his desires are, what rudimentary feelings he might be having, what proto-value systems he has constructed, and so on.  As many of you know, chimps can use a quite complicated system of symbols and signs, which suggests that there is some sort of interior understanding of those symbols—there is some sort of consciousness, meaning, and intentionality. 

"So, the observable behavior of the chimp we call the Upper-Right quadrant, and the interior consciousness (along with its symbols, meanings, values, and motivations) we call the Upper-Left quadrant.  That gives us two very different approaches to understanding the chimp: one is behaviorism, the other is hermeneutics; the former merely describes what an entity does, the latter attempts to understand what it means.

"Go one step further.  No chimp is an island unto himself."  Fuentes looked up and laughed, joined by virtually nobody.  "Well, anyway, no individual evolves, or therefore exists, on its own.  A chimp must therefore also be studied, not just as a whole entity itself, but as a part of other wholes, such as a member of a group (which in turn is a part of even larger wholes, ad infinitum).  And the group, like the individual, can be looked at from the outside and from the inside.

"Studying it from the outside, you simply describe the behavior of the group as carefully as you can (just as when studying an individual using an exterior approach, you simply describe the individual’s behavior as carefully as possible).  You might note the group’s reproduction patterns, its eating habits, its daily activities, its seasonal migration routes, the number of births and deaths, and so on.  But you can also attempt to understand the group from within.  That is, if an individual chimp has some sort of proto-meaning and value system (and nobody doubts that it does), then that chimp certainly shares that meaning with its cohorts, and, in fact, it developed its meaning and values only through a mutual development with others in the group. 

"So, once again, when you study the exteriors of the collective, you ask, ‘What does it do?’  When you study the interiors, you ask, ‘What does it mean?’

"Now obviously attempting to interpret the values of a group of chimps is hard—but hell, folks, interpreting the values of any ‘Other’ is goddam hard!"  Fuentes glared at the audience.  "That is what the culture wars are all about, especially when it comes to history!  How to understand the Other!  The researchers that we admire in the field of primate study—researchers such as Jane Goodall—are precisely those who carefully and meticulously applied all four quadrants to the sentient beings they were studying: they described the exterior behavior of the individual and the group, but they also attempted to find and share some of the interior meanings and values of the individual and the group.  Obviously, you don’t want to anthropomorphize chimp interiors; but at the same time, you don’t want to anthropocentrically deny that other animals have interiors!  So if you want an integral approach to any sentient being, including humans and their history, then you want to include all four quadrants: the interior and exterior of the individual and the collective.  Yes?  Yes!  Okay then, glad that went so easily."  She smiled good-naturedly and zinged back across the stage.

"All right, so let’s take this and apply it to the study of history, which is first and foremost the study of the Other.  Either the Other in (cultural) space or the Other in (historical) time.  Or both.  When we study other groups, they are usually Other at least in space, separated from us by some sort of distance; and they are often Other in time, separated from us by history.  When we study our own history, we are also studying an Other in time: namely, ourselves as we were yesterday; and the actual space has also changed to some degree, hasn’t it?  But then, time and space are two parts of the same curved universe, wouldn’t Mr. E say?  So here it is: All history is the study of an Other in spacetime.  And in order to understand any Other in spacetime, we need the four quadrants.  Is that clear?"

The audience was totally silent.

"I thought so.  Okay, okay, okay, you numbskulls.  We can do this in a much more fun fashion by looking at the recent food fight in anthropology between Marshall Sahlins and Gananath Obeyesekere.  This was, and is—it’s still unfolding—the funnest, sharpest, nastiest dustup we have had in the field since Derek Freeman dismantled Margaret Mead in the 1980s.  To make matters more interesting, this present argument is generated almost solely by the fact that neither of these gentleman is taking an integral approach (as neither Freeman nor Mead did), and therefore they are each using the true half of their positions to demolish the false half of the other guy’s position.  Naturally, both of them think they have won the debate.  Well, they both did win, half way.  But they have both left out the crucial other half of the story. 

"Their dustup is, in fact, the standard fight in today’s academic culture wars: the fight between facts and interpretations; or between ‘scientific historiography’ and ‘hermeneutic historiography’; or between modernism and postmodernism; or between orange and green; or between the Right-Hand and the Left-Hand approaches.  It all boils down to this:  On the one hand (i.e., the Right Hand), we have the modern, orange, scientific meme, which believes that fundamentally there are only empirical facts in the world (‘The world is sum total of facts,’ as the logical positivists would put it), and thus there is one, true, universal, empirical account of history that tells things the way ‘they really were.’  On the other hand (i.e., the Left Hand), we have the postmodern, green, pluralist meme, which believes that there are ‘no facts, only interpretations,’ and thus it believes that there is no objective reality and therefore there is no single metanarrative governing history or its interpretation; that there are instead multiple, local stories, none of which can be reduced to universal abstract frameworks; that accordingly we do not discover history but invent it, or create it as our own interpretations.  Both camps, of course, absolutely despise the other. 

"And both of them are half-right, half-wrong.  It is not a contest of facts versus interpretations—it is NOT a contest between ‘there are no interpretations, only facts’ and ‘there are no facts, only interpretations.’  Both facts and interpretations are integral to every event, because every event has Right- and Left-Hand dimensions. 

"FACTS—that is, the objective, sensorimotor aspects of all occasions (i.e., the exterior aspects of both individuals and collectives—or the Upper-Right and Lower-Right quadrants)—those aspects do indeed present themselves as facts, as objectively real occasions—and, all things considered, they are indeed objective facts (or close enough for practical purposes!).  A diamond will cut a piece of glass, no matter what culture they are found in.  And apples fall from trees to the ground in every culture they are found in.  Those are facts, not interpretations.  And facts are grounded in a good-enough objectivity (as all Right-Hand occasions are).  End of that part of the discussion!" Fuentes smiled.

"But all exteriors have interiors; all facts have interpretations.  We cannot separate facts and interpretations in any occasion; but that does not mean that we can therefore deny the distinction between them and use that illegitimate blur to jettison one of them, which is exactly what both parties do.  Orange claims to present just the facts and dispense with interpretations (which is simply the way that orange itself interprets the world!); and green dismisses facts and insists that there are only interpretations (which it claims is objectively or factually true for all cultures!).  Well, a pox on both their houses, eh?

            "So here is what we at IC suggest: using empirical, objective, scientific methods, you can approach any event and attempt to determine its exterior, objective, ‘factual’ features.  All of the Right-Hand aspects of events are concretely factual in that sense; they are located in sensorimotor space, you can see them, touch them, feel them, put your finger on them, more or less.  Atoms, molecules, cells, organisms, ecosystem, modes of production (foraging, horticultural, agrarian, industrial), the biosphere—you can see all of those.  They are empirical, they are there.  An apple will fall to the ground at the same speed in a foraging, horticultural, and industrial culture.  Even a postmodernist will jump out of the way of an oncoming bus, because that bus is a fact, not an interpretation!  I will believe an extreme postmodernist IF he will stand in front of the oncoming bus, announce that it is not a fact but merely an interpretation, and then stand there.  I will then apologize to the corpse.  But until a postmodernist does that, he can just shut the fuck up!"  Fuentes yelled, then laughed, then looked at everybody, her wide grin returning to a soft smile that hinted how non-seriously she took herself.

            "The point is simply that a good-enough objectivity inhabits all the Right-Hand quadrants.  And the orange-scientific approaches to history are dedicated to discovering (not inventing) those objective facts.  That is entirely appropriate and correct, as far as it goes.

"But what those objects mean, well, that is a Left-Hand affair: an affair of the interiors, of hermeneutics, of consciousness and introspection, mutual understanding, shared meanings and values and motivations and cultural contexts.  Not just what does it do?, but what does it mean?  And here science fails us rather completely.  You can’t see meaning.  It’s not empirical.  You can’t see it with a microscope, telescope, photographic plate, MRI or CAT or PET or nuttin.  Meaning, value, mutual understanding, interpretation—all of these escape the net of narrow empirical science.  They are, rather, the province of the Left-Hand approaches—of phenomenology, hermeneutics, verstehen approaches, mutual understanding, introspection, interpretation, empathic resonance.  What does it mean?  Both for me and for the Other?

"Furthermore, there appear to be many different types and even levels of interpretation.  We have been tentatively using Spiral Dynamics, for instance (while not denying the usefulness of other models).  Using Spiral Dynamics as an example of a possible interpretive repertoire, then for any given sensorimotor fact, you can have a red interpretation of its meaning, a blue interpretation of its meaning, an orange interpretation, a green interpretation, a yellow interpretation, and so on.  This does not mean the sensorimotor fact is not there; it simply means that the meaning and value of the fact reside in the stage (the actual structure) of the consciousness that perceives the fact.  And therefore an integral historiography would take ALL OF THAT INTO ACCOUNT—it would include the vast array of Right-Hand facts and the full spectrum of Left-Hand interpretations—as I will try to demonstrate in several examples that follow—particularly the Sahlins-Obeyesekere food fight."  She again laughed, popping along on the furiously sizzling energy that was Carla Fuentes.

"But let’s start with a very simple example to show what is involved.  In the main lecture we used the case of Christopher Columbus.  The facts are these: Columbus was born in Genoa, Italy, in 1451; in the mid 1470s he made his first trading voyage in the Aegean Sea.  He eventually approached King Ferdinand V and Queen Isabella I of Spain, who agreed to sponsor an expedition sailing across the Atlantic in search of a western passage to China.  The fleet of three ships—the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria—sailed from Palos, Spain, on a date that we call August 3, 1492.  Land was sited on October 12, and they landed on Guananhani in the Bahamas.  In this and three subsequent voyages, Columbus landed on spots now called Cuba, Haiti, Panama, Antigua, and Trinidad, among others.  He died in Spain at the age of 55.

"Now, it very important to note, right at the beginning, that those facts are uncontested by either school.  Those empirical facts, discovered by orange historical science, are uncontested even by green postmodernism.  Of course, green is very, very quiet about that, because it wants to throw up a huge smoke screen of Theory, radical hermeneutics, and poststructural posturings in order to claim that there are no facts, only interpretations.  But in actuality it accepts all of those basic facts discovered by orange historical approaches.  You see, green wants to claim that Columbus was a cultural criminal, and it can only do so if it accepts the above facts so it can get its story going.  So it very quietly accepts those facts, and then goes on about its business of claiming that there are no facts, only interpretations. 

"It then gives to those facts a green—and often mean-green meme—interpretation: Christopher Columbus was a carrier of patriarchal, analytic-dissociative, marginalizing, hierarchical, crushingly oppressive values, which brutally disrupted the peaceful, pluralistic, loving paradise of the indigenous peoples, infecting them with smallpox, pellagra, the heartbreak of psoriasis, tooth decay, and the first of what would eventually become airline food.