Why Do Left Environmentalists Hate Gaia So?

Behind the endless, mindless blather about “anthropomorphic global warming” is secret contempt for Mother Earth on the part of those leftists and useful idiots retailing this line.

Like most Marxists and neo-Marxists, climate alarmists operate through the lens of an oppressor/victim polarity, in which they champion the victims by targeting the oppressors for elimination, all in the cause of “creating” a “better world.”  

For the alarmists, the victim is Mother Earth herself, allegedly ravished by the greed and shortsightedness of careless human beings contemptuous of the delicate balances that nature would otherwise maintain without their depredations.  The villain is human nature, that monstrous internal psychic structure that they see pulls humans toward the worse angels of our nature.  

The Marxists and their various offspring have been attempting to remake human nature for over a century, with predictably disastrous results, starting with the blasphemy of “Soviet man.”  We see this in the current lunacy of “sexual reassignment” surgery.  In a straight line from Vladimir Lenin to Klaus Schwab, these mad schemers let nothing so pesky as reality interfere with their utopian campaign.  Like the religious leaders of the medieval Roman church, they have convinced themselves that they have a divine sanction to do God’s work, dissenters be, literally, damned.

Among the various truths they pretend don’t exist is this very inconvenient one: humanity and our nature are entirely a product of Mother Earth herself.  Like the oceans and the mountain chains, like the billions of species of flora and fauna on land and sea, we humans were birthed by Gaia and are utterly in accord with her evolutionary trajectory.

Commentary on "The Politics of Pride and Shame" by Steve McIntosh

In the new issue of the Institute for Cultural Evolution’s online magazine the Developmentalist, ICE founder Steve McIntosh has a feature article entitled “The Politics of Pride and Shame: Integrating 1776 and 1619.”  In it, McIntosh seeks to find common ground between the historic consensus of the American founding and the radical Woke version offered by the New York Times that the U. S. is and has always been a racist slave state.  

In my view, in his analysis McIntosh demonstrates a consistent misunderstanding of the integral model.  He seems to think that “transcend and include” is some kind of blending or selecting neat stuff from the different waves of consciousness evolution and throwing them together to concoct a harmonious expression.  Thus, for example, his ongoing project to create what he calls a “post-progressive” politics.   

It is, as he concludes the article, “a dialectic of progress and pathology” that “can help us make peace with, and bring justice to, our collective interpretation of American history.”  

Alas, there’s the dreaded “D-word,” of the Marxist creed about the alleged arc of history that is supposedly calling us to create the communist utopia just as soon as all the opponents can be converted or eliminated.  In my most recent post, I examined the folly of mistaking the integral model as a dialectical process.  

Dialectics as a method of philosophical inquiry goes back at least to the dialogues of Plato, in which opposing arguments are contrasted with each other.  Centuries later, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant applied the concept in the Critique of Pure Reason in laying out his disagreements with David Hume.  Georg F. W. Hegel then applied his understanding of the idea to his own philosophical system.

But Karl Marx, according to author and Woke critic James Lindsay, turned Hegel’s method of inquiry into a method of preordaining a desired outcome.  Marx was using “dialectical materialism” in an attempt to realize the ancient utopian longing for a perfect society, updated for his narrative about and critique of the emerging modern world.  That’s why Lindsay calls this Marxist method “the operating system of leftists.”

What we might label the McIntosh Fallacy mistakes the Integral Model’s dynamic of transcend-include-integrate as just a version of the Marxist thesis-antithesis-synthesis.  Synthesis has nothing in common with transcendence, which is what the integral model examines.  For example, the emergence of orange out of amber is not the result of a synthesis of amber’s internal contradictions.  Orange, characterized by Wilber as the rational/egoic wave, is a discontinuity utterly original, unanticipated—and unanticipatable—by anyone in amber consciousness.  Individual identity, the innovation of orange, could only be experienced in amber as a mortal threat, not as the next stage of evolution.

The Integral Model Is Not Dialectical

Classical liberal analyst James Lindsay has been offering a series of podcasts on the Hegelian roots of Marxism and its various hydra-headed offspring that front the Marxist counterrevolution against modernity.  In this first of this series, “Hegel, Wokeness, and the Dialectical Faith of Leftism,” Lindsay does a deep dive into Hegel’s understanding of dialectics.  It is important, he asserts, to have a robust appreciation of this concept, for it is “the operating system of leftists,” a “method of worship in a broad religious movement that started primarily with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,” dated from the publication of The Phenomenology of Spirit in 1807.

The familiar formula “thesis—antithesis—synthesis,” Lindsay says, is actually a Kantian formula; Hegel instead asserts the progression is “abstract—negative—concrete.”  The emphasis on negation is the foundation for the Marxist’s love of relentless critique, for all abstract understandings of reality fall short of completeness and therefore are subject to “improvement” that will now be demonstrated as a concrete (and presumably dependable) emergence.  

Informing this notion is the belief in the perfectibility of reality in general and humanity in particular—what we could call the utopian temptation.  The universe is always becoming and therefore whatever we perceive and hypothesize as real is always transforming.  There is nothing to which we can hold; we are victims of a process we can never control.  But we are entitled to rebel against this inexorability and to do whatever we can to reverse it.

Integral theory, as a “both/and” proposition, holds that the universe both is and also is evolving.  To use Ken Wilber’s term, Spirit is simultaneously immanent and transcendent.  This insight should humble us immediately, for like all koans the seeming contradiction is impossible to understand conceptually.  As Wilber forcefully demonstrates in The Marriage of Sense and the Soul, we must be open to a different science of understanding than is available to us at orange, the current leading edge of evolution.

The Integral Model makes room for the Hegelian thesis without embracing it as absolute Truth (which Hegel would no doubt decry).  We examine it and the various resulting Marxist religions as versions of Spirit unfolding Itself—as are all inquiries into the nature of reality.  Still, we start an integral analysis of Hegel’s thought and influence by noting that he is writing at the very beginning of the modern period in central Europe—i.e., in first tier culture.  Whether Hegel himself had an integral perspective, surely most of those he influenced did not, emphatically including Marx.

Stage Emergence is Sloppy and Violent

My hypothesis is that all elements of the counterrevolution against modernity stem partially from the natural defense that each stage of consciousness necessarily has against emergence.  From Amber’s perspective, modernity’s introduction of individual identity and sovereignty threatens its very existence.  Individuality absolutely undermines the hegemony of the tribe, for if its individual members can make their own way for life, what purpose does the tribe serve?