Learning Level I is most easily understood as what Is going on in stimulus-response learning. Mom calls out, "Dinners ready!" and you start salivating. A hand Is extended and you shake it

More Interesting - and particularly significant for us human beings - is Learning II. Learning II is the process of deriving the premises (or, If you prefer, rules) that operate within a particular context. For instance, suppose you are a child and your schoolteacher Is In the middle of a stirring lecture on the Plains Indians. You are bursting with questions and blurt out, "But who was their president? Who told them what to do? Did the kids have to go to school? Your teacher scowls and inform you that it is not polite to Interrupt and to keep your questions until the end. Now that teacher just taught you something, but not about he Plains Indians. You learn from that experience (or a string of such experiences) When someone Is giving a lecture, do not interrupt with questions. And now, thirty years later, you are listening to a lecture and, even though you may be bursting with questions, you hold them until the end. This is Learning II - the establishing of premises or rules operating in a context - and ft is absolutely pervasive for us. A doctor has her premises about how disease works, a politician has his premises about how government works, each of us has premises about how we work (that Is, who we are). Now here Is the thing to notice: when the physician's patient dies when he should not have, or recovers from a terminal illness when he should not have, the doctor does not respond with. "Well heck, maybe I should take another look at this medical model I've been using." Instead, the patient died - or lived - because of unknown complications, genetic predisposition, an act of god, and so on. The politician whose efforts to crush the opposition has generated even more opposition does not smack himself in the forehead and moan, "What have I been doing?" I need to reevaluate my Ideas about how the world works!" No, obviously he has not applied enough force, or not applied ft in the right places, or it is not the right time. This ought to sound familiar. The important lesson here is that the premises we hold about a context are not easily challenged by intermittent failures of those premises. In fact, our ability to explain failures of the premises reinforces their validity. This clears the way for applying the same old solutions and, consequently, generating again and again the same old problems. Is there a way out of that rut? There is, but it requires jumping to a level of understanding that encompasses more than the stream we are currently in; we have to jump to a level that allows us to perceive how streams form. And this brings us to Learning III.

If Learning II Is discovering the premises that are operating within a particular context, then Learning III is discovering how we form premises, regardless of the context. Learning Ill asks the question, "What are the patterns that determine how we human beings construct our worlds?" Learning III is what propels us out of the grinder of a particular world view so we can see who is turning the crank. I do not want to pretend to you for a minute that this Is an easy jump. Even so, it occurs to me that if we were to bring a modeling approach to bear on questions of that type, not only might they be answered with some revelatory and useful models, but in the tumultuous process of trying to come to grips with such experiences we would be at the same time acquiring for ourselves the conceptual and experiential thinking patterns, of Learning III itself! And let me propose a likely candidate to begin this venture Into multi-type learning: and that is, the uniquely human pursuit of explanation.

When my daughter, Kyra, was 10 years old, she decided (on humanitarian and political grounds) to become a vegetarian. So for three years she avoided meat of any kind. As she headed into puberty, however, her body started giving her the ol' elbow: "Hey, take a look at that hamburger! Doesn't that look great? Hey, is that fried chicken I smell? Lady, I could use some of that!" Kyra was in a turmoil for some months. One day, exasperated with the whole conflict, she declared she just had to have some meat and dove into a hamburger. Now she enjoyed that burger on one level, but on another she was still very troubled. It seemed a betrayal. She resumed eating meat, but she continued to be bothered about her fall. Now, Kyra had some allergies and, so, often had a stuffed-up nose. After three days of eating meat again, she was walking through the house when she suddenly came to a halt. She had just realized that her nose was clear! And she instantly knew why: Obviously her nose clearing was due to the fact that she was eating meet. Exaltation immediately followed. This was apparently all she needed to realize In order to feel okay about being an omnivore, and she relaxed. As a father, I was grateful. But as a thinking person, I was wondering, "What the heck just happened here?

What happened was an explanation. Once the language thing gets going, so does the explanation thing, and very powerful it is, too. The human phenomenon of "explaining" is not an adjunct to our experience, nor is It the yoke we must bear for having strayed far from our natural gate. It is quintessentially human. Of course, it can be the source of misery, both for us as individuals, for us as societies and cultures, and for the planet of which we are a part, It can also be the source of wonder and greatness and new understanding. Our explanations can take us deeper Into the mysteries of the world, and those explanations con be scientific, mystical, mechanistic, relational, philosophical, psychological, practical… anything. And our explanations also help keep us the same. Kyra explains her nose, the doctor explains the remission, the politician explains the uprising, and we explain ourselves. Anything so central, not only to our daily, individual lives, but to us as groups, organizations, communities, countries and a species ought to be something we understand.

And, of course, In doing that - modeling how explanation really works - we would be opening ourselves to Level Ill. We would be moving Into a position of exploring how we create a human world. And one can hope that as our facility and ease with Learning Ill grows, so will our desire and ability to move ourselves toward what we want to become.

As you can see, I am proposing a bigger frame within which to think of experience, namely, the frame of society, culture and (we're dreaming here, so let's fly) humanity. Actually, "within the frame" is Incorrect. It seems to me that the structures of our experiences are the frames of a society. A society or culture does not exist apart from the people who live it. Our shared experiences of who we are as Americans or Canadians or Samoans or Chinese or Brazilians or Italians; our shared experiences of who we are as Christians or Moslems or Jews or Buddhists or atheists; our shared experiences of who we are as mothers or fathers or husbands or wives or lovers; our shared experiences of who we are as doctors or artists or therapists or teachers; all of these shared experiences weave us together into societies and cultures. And when any of the experiences of who we are changes, so too does society. "We" become different.

We need a big picture, a picture that we can dream and think our way into, that can serve as the organizing principle for our ideas and efforts. So. what DO we want to become?

A big picture that I have been finding useful and Interesting was originally sketched for us by Clare Graves, then expanded and deepened by Beck and Cowan under the name of Spiral Dynamics. I'm sure many of you are already familiar with this model of societal and cultural development, and I won't turn this into a seminar on their very important model. But I do want to point out a few of its elements, since I think they establish a direction that is worthy of our efforts and to which modeling can make a significant contribution.

The basic idea here is that cultures go through stages of development driven by a characteristic set of values. This set of values operates much like genetic code. The genetic code provides fundamental Information about how to generate the complexity of a living organism. Similarly, these value sets provide fundamental Information about how to organize the great complexities of society and culture. To capture this analogy, Spiral Dynamics uses Richard Dawkins' notion of "memes," which he defines as "a unit of cultural transmission." For example, the value memes of the first stage are concerned with basic survival of the Individual - food, water, shelter, procreation. As a way to keep these stages straight, Beck and Cowan have also assigned them colors, and this first stage is called the Beige Meme. The second is the Purple Meme, and is concerned with protection through kinship groups. The third - the Red Meme - Is about wielding individual power. The fourth meme, Blue, is about conformance to accepted truth. The Orange Meme Is fifth and Is characterized by the individual search for truth. And the sixth meme - Green - Is concerned with group acceptance of differences. And that is about where most of us in this room are now.