"True journey is return..." - Shevek
Even though I never seem to remember its author's name, William G. Perry's scheme for cognitive development comes to mind nearly every day. It shares common traits with Milton Bennett's developmental model of intercultural sensitivity, as well as Carol Gilligan's stages of the ethic of care and Lawrence Kohlberg's model of moral development, both of which Jean Piaget's constructivist work deeply influenced. (Geek snort.) As a humanist, I find much social science inherently problematic, reliant upon assumptions that elide contextual differences. These criticisms equally apply to Perry, Gilligan, Kohlberg, and Piaget, of course, as the extensive literatures on educational psychology illustrate. But these theories, and particularly Perry's, continue to undergird my philosophical metanarrative of life in powerful ways.
Written at roughly the same time as Perry's model, science fiction master Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed reads like a fictionalization of one individual's pursuit of full cognitive development. The book's (mass market paperback) cover strikingly describes it as "an astonishing tale of one man's search for utopia." It's misleading in a very clever way. This book is not about "utopia" as the elusive, perfect place, that "no place" of Thomas More. Le Guin's vision of utopia is a state of mind, of cognitive enlightenment, of the realization that the perfect place--the state of true freedom--is nowhere but in ourselves, an epistemological nirvana.
Written at roughly the same time as Perry's model, science fiction master Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed reads like a fictionalization of one individual's pursuit of full cognitive development. The book's (mass market paperback) cover strikingly describes it as "an astonishing tale of one man's search for utopia." It's misleading in a very clever way. This book is not about "utopia" as the elusive, perfect place, that "no place" of Thomas More. Le Guin's vision of utopia is a state of mind, of cognitive enlightenment, of the realization that the perfect place--the state of true freedom--is nowhere but in ourselves, an epistemological nirvana.
