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Through an Integral Lens: A Look at Spielberg's Munich

Posted August 15th, 2009 by Emine

 

I wrote this about three years ago; it was my first foray into applying integral. I thought it might still be of interest despite the 'oh so didactic' ending...
 
Munich: 2005, by Steven Spielberg. Starring: Eric Bana, Daniel Craig, Ciaran Hinds, Mathieu Kassovitz, Hans Zichler, and Geoffrey Rush.
 
Steven Spielberg’s 2005 movie is out on DVD and I heartily recommend it. This movie is not only a great thriller but is also an excellent statement of the final impasse in which the green worldview finds itself. It is an historical thriller set in the aftermath of the 1972 massacre of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. It recounts the story of the secret Israeli hit team assigned to track down and kill 11 Palestinians thought to have planned the massacre – and the human toll it takes on the team.
 
Spielberg has been lauded by critics for his green lens in portraying the human anguish of the Israeli hit team, for illustrating how violence can easily degenerate into tit-for-tat killings, accomplishing precisely nothing, and for embracing the humanity of all. He has also been criticized widely through the amber and orange lenses. He has been criticized for not giving the Palestinian cause enough or fair play, as well as for portraying the slaying of the Palestinians as being “morally equivalent” to the slaying of the Israeli athletes. All the critics are indeed right, but only if you take an integral view of things. Israeli and Palestinian causes are indeed very different if you look through an amber lens. The assessments, usually based on legalities and fairness, depend on whose ethnocentricity you champion, and the arguments can go on for decades, as they have. With an orange lens the Israelis often do look more restrained, reasonable, and strategically oriented than the Palestinians. And, yes, all tends to look pretty much the same – pure human tragedy-- if you look through a relativistic green lens. It is the integral lens that allows you to see all these as truths, each grounded in its own, very real world.
 
Shifting the integral lens from the critics to the movie itself, you do see a different reasoning, a different level of consciousness, behind the Israeli and Palestinian actions. With some risk of oversimplification, the core Palestinian worldview is based in narrowly ethnocentric red while the Israeli core worldview is closer to world-centric orange, though it keeps choking on its own amber ethnocentricity.
 
In the film the extreme Palestinian view is illustrated by Ali (Omar Metwally) the leader of a PLO group with whom the team ends up sharing a safe house. At one point Ali and Avner (Eric Bana), the leader of the Israeli team, have a private conversation, sharing a cigarette on the stairway. Ali thinks Avner actually belongs to the Red Army. “You don’t know what it is not to have a home.” Ali says “We all pretend to care about your international revolution, but we don’t care. We want to be nations. Home is everything.” When Avner says “You are Arabs, there are lots of places for Arabs,” the response is that the Arabs hate Palestinians. At one point Avner remarks: “You kill Jews and the world feels bad for them and thinks you are animals.”  “Yes,” says Ali, “but then the world will see how they made us into animals. They’ll start to ask questions about the conditions in our cages.”
 
These together reflect a narrowly ethnocentric red world under strain, filled with aggression, hostility and selfishness and dominated by power. It is a world populated mainly by victims and victimizers, predators and prey. It is clear that coming from this viewpoint one would be quite indiscriminate in choosing one’s targets, and could, ultimately sacrifice oneself for the cause. There is nothing to lose, and one’s honor, one’s very sense of self, to gain. The strategy is mayhem and it makes perfect sense – through that red lens, in that very real, inseparably subjective-objective red world. In the movie, all this juxtaposes powerfully with an earlier, world-centric green statement Avner makes to his wife: “The only home I’ve ever had is you.” If you have a narrow red lens you belong with a very specific group, to a very specific place on earth; if you have a wide green lens, you are at home pretty much anywhere.
 
The red-amber aspect of Israeli society, where history weighs most heavily on the present, is represented by Avner’s mother, who refers to Israel as “a place to be a Jew, among Jews, subject to no one...whatever it takes.” The core tension in the movie though is an amber-orange one illustrated beautifully by Golda Meir (Lyn Cohen) as she ponders Black September, the group that carried out the Munich massacre: “These people, they’re sworn to destroy us. Forget peace for now. We have to show them we are strong. We have laws, we represent civilization…But I don’t know who these maniacs are or where they come from. Palestinians? They are unrecognizable. You tell me what law protects people like these. Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values. I’ve made my decision.”
 
The amber ethnocentric world, populated by “us” (saints) and “them” (sinners), is a deterministic, well ordered world, where laws and justice, tradition and conventional morality are central. The world-centric orange world, with a wider, more inclusive concept of morality, is one where due process is key and where strategic thinking and success play important roles.         This decision to set up the hit team is an amber ethnocentric, but also an instrumentally strategic orange choice against an enemy that has more of a face. The goal is beyond just harassing the “other,” or indiscriminately championing a cause. As you move from a narrower red lens towards a wider green one, the face of the enemy actually becomes more and more defined, making it harder to kill indiscriminately. The goal is to be seen as strong so the integrity of Israel can be maintained – albeit without due process. The decision to hit the Palestinians who planned the massacre is the response of a people who have an amber-orange lens and inhabit an amber-orange world.
 
It is haunting to watch the red worldview clash with the amber-orange. At one point Avner says to Ali “You can’t take back a country you never had,” presumably referring to the fact that Palestine was under an English mandate at the time of Israel’s creation, “you people have nothing to bargain with.” Ownership, legal codes, and nation states are meaningful in the amber-orange world. This argument makes perfect sense to Avner, but it is not much likely to have any impact on Ali. Neither ownership nor legal boundaries, but use-rights carry meaning in the red world. Ali, wearing the key to his father’s house in old Palestine on his neck, says he is set on getting back “the olive trees, the stone huts, and the chalky soil” his father used to have. And so you watch as each trumps the other in his own mind, without any real communication or mutual understanding at all.
 
The hit team itself is held together by an amber, ethnocentric, commitment to the integrity of Israel and a basic orange, world-centric, commitment to hitting specific targets and minimizing collateral damage. The make up of the team members varies around these shared values. Steve (Daniel Craig), the get-away man, has a heavy dose of the red worldview. He is bombastic, ready to “kill all the pigs” who planned the massacre, convinced that “unless we act like them, we will never defeat them.” Both Robert (Mathieu Kassovitz), the nervous toy maker turned bomb diffuser, turned bomb maker, and Hans (Hans Zichler), the urbane documents man, who compulsively calculates how much each hit has cost, are quiet men with amber loyalties. Overall, Robert seems to be the more amber craftsman, and Hans the more orange accountant. They concentrate on their jobs and struggle with their consciences alone.
 
At the other end of the spectrum, Carl (played with beautiful restraint by Ciaran Hinds), the clean-up man, is the orange-green conscience of the group and the movie itself: “it is strange, isn’t it, to think of yourself as an assassin,” he remarks, and identifies himself as the worrier. He is focused, meticulous, and grounded in his actions. His priority is to spare innocent lives. He is the one who is able to take multiple perspectives, a central characteristic of the humanist green worldview: After the first hit, when the team is celebrating with wine, he quotes, “And God said to the angels, why are you celebrating. I just killed a multitude of my children.” And later: “What, you think the Palestinians invented bloodshed? How do you think we got control of the land? By being nice?” When his teammates complain about his qualms, he bursts out “I am keeping my sanity by occasionally reminding myself that, in spite of everything, I am, at least in principle, still a human being!” The only time he loses his grounding is when his amber loyalty to Israel is questioned, clearly an unresolved issue in his psyche. He also has some integral characteristics. He is able to maintain a contemplative stillness in the midst of mayhem. He is detached, but fully aware of all the available information, including the personal, as he tries to construct the bigger picture. “Stop chasing the mice in your skull!” Avner tells him. He gives perhaps the ultimate green-orange explanation of himself: “If I can’t kvetch, I can’t do my job.”
 
The team leader and hero, Avner, struggles hard with all these issues. He tries to maintain some coherence in himself and negotiates with a very shady, and very intriguing, outside world so that they can get the job done.
He leads the team with a very light hand. The team is diverse, gathered from Israel (Avner), France (Robert), South Africa (Steve) and Germany (Carl and Hans). It is clear none has been forced to accept this mission. And within the group Avner creates space to voice disagreements. There is a solid division of labor, but not much of a hierarchy. There is no pressure to conform, and it is easy to exit. When Carl is skeptical and asks “In Tel Aviv they showed you evidence for this?” Avner says “you want to wire Ephraim (their case officer, played by Geoffrey Rush), you do it. You are on your own.” And when Robert becomes deeply troubled before a hit, Avner is the first to say “You need to go and rest somewhere. You don’t have to do this one. When I need you again, I’ll find you.” Non-hierarchical organization, toleration of diverse opinions, low need for conformity, and ease of exit are all characteristics of an orange-green group, held together by the shared values required to do the job at hand.
 
Ultimately, though, all parties meet at vengeful red violence in a messy and dangerous red world. The mounting, indiscriminate, reprisal attacks by Palestinians, the increasing pressure as others begin to hunt down the team members, the team’s own reprisal killing of the woman who assassinates Carl, all combine in a downward spiral, where Steve’s earlier red remark, “all that matters to me is Jewish blood!” threatens to make sense. All the members of the team begin to suffer terribly. The competing imperatives are too much to bear: infrared survival, magenta loyalty to the team, red revenge, amber loyalty to Israel, orange imperative to spare innocent lives and do the job, green need to see the basic humanity of all.
 
Steve, who already has a strong red streak, weathers the descent the best. Avner is nearly undone by anxiety and paranoia as the stress builds up and sustaining an inner coherence among competing values becomes close to impossible. Robert finally refuses to participate in the reprisal killing with a deft translation within his ethnocentric amber worldview: “We are Jews Avner; Jews don’t do wrong because our enemies do wrong.” “We are supposed to be righteous. That is a beautiful thing. That is Jewish. That is what I know, that is what I was taught. And now I am loosing it and if I lose that, that’s everything. That is my soul.” And Hans becomes despondent after acting out his own vengeful side and concludes in light of all that has happened that “killing Palestinians is not exactly cheap.” Carl, Robert, and Hans are all assassinated.
 
At the film’s end, Avner moves deeper into the aperspectival green worldview and withdraws from the world. He makes his home in Brooklyn, where his wife and daughter now are, and refuses to return to Israel. He suffers from post traumatic stress and dips into an egocentric magenta world, focused only on the safety of his family. He is thoroughly confused, “I don’t know where I should be”; tortured, “did I commit murder? I want you to give me proof that everyone we killed had a hand in Munich”; indignant “if these people committed crimes, we should have arrested them like Eichmann”; and totally disgusted with the world, “anyone is capable of anything!” “Tell me what we have accomplished” he yells at his case officer, “there is no peace at the end of this, no matter what you believe!” It is the first time the word “peace” has been uttered since Golda Meir said “Forget peace for now. We have to show them we are strong.” Perhaps tellingly, the only other team member who survives this world is Steve, the one with a heavy dose of the red worldview.
 
There is no real resolution. Where do we go from here? And that is precisely the question Spielberg asks himself and us.
 
There are no easy answers. If you are rooted in an ethnocentric amber worldview you will always champion your own group against “the other,” be it Israeli or Palestinian. If you have a narrower red lens, nothing else will matter more. If you have more of a world-centric orange worldview, you will try to win through smart strategy, sparing lives if you think you can afford to. If, on the other hand, you have a wider world-centric green lens, then what lights up is the precious fact that we are all human. Perhaps even more disconcertingly: if you engage, the best you can do is to interact at the highest level that is common to all parties – in this case red. Where do we go from here?
 
While in Spielberg’s narrative the green lens is the most humane one, it does not, nor is it likely to, bring up the answers. In the green world all humans and human societies exist on a flat plane. They are totally alike and wonderfully, but entirely quirkily, different and diverse at the same time. And so, if you do have a green lens and your world begins to fall apart, you are bound to think, like Avner at the end, that the world is simply a crazy place, with no rhyme or reason or hope. You withdraw into your shell, where the craziness of the world cannot touch you. Or, in the broader scheme of things not addressed by the movie, you try in vain to convert everyone to your way of thinking, in the mistaken belief they could just as easily adopt your own better way of looking at things, denouncing the very diversity you champion in the bargain. Or, perhaps, you work to prevent change in the name of preserving all that wonderful diversity, which is equally in vain.
 
The real challenge is to truly embrace life, its depth, and its dynamism; to honor every person and every group with whatever lens they come and to figure out ways for us all to be able to live together. With that noble goal you begin to exit green.
 
Looking through the integral lens, the world begins to make sense again, but a different kind of sense. Not one where you are convinced your worldview is the only valid one, nor one that you need to persuade others with. It is a view of the world where you see that each stage of development, each level of consciousness brings its own cohesion—its own logic and its own very real, inseparably subjective-objective, world. A world where the individual and the collective, the subjective and objective tetra-mesh; and where tetra-emergence and tetra-evolution occurs, or fails to occur, each level transcending and including its predecessor,  in reasonably predictable ways—from egocentric(infrared, magenta) to ethnocentric(red, amber) to world-centric(orange, green) to Kosmos-centric(teal, turquoise -- ie integral).
 
What you see is no longer the static, totally quirky or haphazard world seen through the green lens, but a comprehensible and dynamic one. You can, finally, not only acknowledge, but also consciously adopt each and every worldview and inhabit each and every world, instead of only being able to react. You recognize that the essence of each is already within you, transcended, but included. It is only when you can inhabit all the worlds and can recognize the developmental impulse that you can discern all the alternatives. It is only then that you can begin to formulate effective policies, not only to support healthy diversity, but also to manage the (translative or transcendent) change which is, in fact, inevitable—at least until it is time for a new, still broader worldview to emerge.
 
In other words, in the specific context of the question set up by Spielberg, we need to use the integral lens to consciously descend (Agape, as opposed to being catapulted down like the team, which is Thanatos) to the red, amber, and orange levels, explore what alternatives are available in those worlds within the unique circumstances at hand and start building the most effective bridges in line with the developmental impulse. This is something that cannot be done with any of the other worldviews, both because the lower levels simply cannot see the higher and because in those worlds you are convinced yours is the only right viewpoint. The integral world is the only world where you can consciously use all the lenses and come up with policies that are not even visible to others.
 
Munich gives us a glimpse of the extraordinary human suffering that is and that awaits us, if we don’t step up, look through the integral lens and enter the integral world. And that is only the beginning of the work we must do.