Developmental Diversity

Workshopping an idea: Developmental Diversity.

I have been interested in a number of adult developmental frameworks in the past few years. By adult development, I mean here across a range of different indicators: The capacity to hold complexity and paradox, capacity to hold different perspectives, capacity to prioritise perspectives depending on criteria also largely of one's own choosing (or consent).

Part of the treasures of any society, then, is its ability to also hold and nurture and support developmental diversity. I mean this as an alternative to "disability". At the same time, I acknowledge that the term "disability" invites a conversation into the ways that some manifestations of the diverse expressions of human development are experienced by self and others as "disabling" from fullest enjoyment and participation in culture according to one's ability or potential.

In other words, I propose the idea of developmental diversity to both support existing disability rights/justice frameworks, while at the same time to precipitate an additional conversation about developmental possibility.

Developmental diversity spans a spectrum of human potentialities. It does not pretend mere relativism, in which developmental differences are seen as all "equal" in capacity or potential. It understands difference and hierarchy simultaneously: That there are some developmental stages for certain people who are more able to hold complexity and paradox than others, to hold more diverse/different/divergent perspectives with less angst than others, that are simultaneously more able to prioritise these perspectives depending on criteria of their own choice than others, after sincere self-interrogation and study, while they are also more able to cultivate an ability to articulate the reasoning behind this choice in a way that could be comprehensible to as many people from a range of developmental abilities as possible.

Developmental diversity, then, is not even exactly a theory or a principle, either. It is a lived experience of the fullest of one's own potential: That we can be so attuned to the diversity of our own developmental capacities (e.g. I can do some things well, I need more support for some other things), that we naturally and simply experience instantaneous compassion and empathy for other people, including people who may be "so different" from ourselves... Others' supposed differences become seen partially also as representations of part of who we are in ourselves, that we may keep more hidden or that we are hindered from knowing of ourselves.

Developmental diversity is a statement of fact. We live in a world in which different individuals and peoples have different developmental abilities, also developmental contexts which both liberate and constrain the abilities that we begin to, or that we can adopt. While developmental diversity is an observable fact of all cultural contexts, it is also a prescriptive way of living, in which the plain recognition of this fact itself can be existentially reorienting for some people.

Myself included.

I can spot the reality of developmental diversity in my society (e.g. some people are more mathematical, some more emotive, some people can see racism more easily and truthfully than others, some people can identify with "Europeanism" with more ease than others, some people can understand sexism in ways that I can never understand because of, for example, lived experience of being women which would shape their own development in a way that it is more privvy to some other forms of sexed/gendered phenomena than I could be). By recognising that there is a diverse range of lived experiences, genetics, cultural contexts, and "languaging" that people experience in the world, and that this affects how people "develop" (that is, qualities which signal their unique expressions of adaptivity) in their cognitive/perspectival abilities, I am immediately more empathic to how I can relate to different people, if at least by simply remaining agnostic and curious.

Even when people engage in behaviours that are pathologically offensive and horrid, murderous and unjust, I immediately see that they are representations of some part of myself that I have kept tamed, hidden, or transmuted. For example, the violence of young men drawn to fundamentalist expressions of religion, are related to my own early worldviews, shaped by ethnocentrism and listless testosterone. I know that feeling, and I know the injustice of not having alternative role models who could teach me kindness, courage, resilience, forgiveness and critical engagement.

I see the work to be done around this, then, does not only entail "going overseas" or leaving my own context in order to shape global outcomes... It is also in fostering a relationship to that sort of energy here in my own contexts.

For example: How do I relate to lost boys here? How am I complicit in a personal or professional world in creating a world with lost boys? What is the call from lost boys? What spiritual leadership is being called for?

And this is just one example.

Developmental diversity is, by its nature, also somewhat synonymous with "spiritual diversity" (insofar as "Spirit" can be seen, in one definition, as but the principle of growth and development), with an added connotation of materiality around it.

Just some thoughts for now...