tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34011061492393862722024-03-05T13:46:09.239-08:00AQALBlogMaking sense of the insights of integral philosopher Ken Wilber, and venturing the "momentous leap" into the Second Tier.Marty Kellerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11592136716581562644noreply@blogger.comBlogger42125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3401106149239386272.post-40553659162345271962022-05-28T16:04:00.001-07:002022-05-28T16:04:41.137-07:00Why Do Left Environmentalists Hate Gaia So?<p>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.</p><p>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.” </p><p>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. </p><p>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.</p><p>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.<span></span></p><a name='more'></a><p></p><p>Humans are natural, not artificial. Our nature is in alignment with all of nature, not contrary to or outside of it. Any attempt to violently alter human nature is violence to all of the Earth. The Marxist left proclaims tenderness towards animal species in danger of extinction, but not toward the species of which they themselves are an inescapable part.</p><p>This myopia, sadly, has a long heritage, admittedly predating its Marxist version. Many have used the gift of consciousness, of the capacity for self-reflection and self-analysis, to despair of their existence, finding fault with any or every aspect of their experience. Humans live with deep-seated self-hatred, based on what some conceive as the irredeemable flaw of death. That we die some see as a sinful failure that somehow we should have been able to prevent. We can observe this in the first part of the Western founding myth, where Adam and Eve are ejected from deathless Eden for their willful disobedience of their Creator. “It’s our fault!” is the subconscious mantra of millions over the course of our history.</p><p>“It’s our fault!” is the mantra of the Marxist left climate alarmists, unconsciously repeating in updated form this ancient mythology. “We deserve our misery!”</p><p>But rather than leaving the imposition of misery to God, they arrogate that responsibility to themselves, with predictably less-than-divine results.</p><p>They also overlook the second part of the Western founding myth, the death and resurrection of Jesus, which eliminated the opprobrium of the Edenic error by offering humanity the chance permanently to identify with its divine origin. Divine misery was absorbed by divine mercy.</p><p>But human myth-making aside, from the perspective of the Earth itself, which serves for secular minds as the creator of humankind, humanity is a triumph of evolutionary depth. For 3.5 billion years, the planet has been evolving life forms of ever greater complexity, until finally one emerged with the capacity for self-awareness. This species, Homo sapiens, is incredibly young, and so understandably is still very early in the process of fully maturing this capacity. </p><p>Thus we can appreciate all of the <i>Sturm und Drang</i> of our history—the slaughter as well as the breakthroughs—as a painful but necessary working-out of the value, role, and ultimate structure of this gift of self-awareness. At this particular point in its unfolding, it is impossible to ascertain what it will take to reach a mature, stable, and universe stage of this capability. We’re not really even prepared to predict what this might look like. All we can say for certain is that we aren’t there yet.</p><p>So perhaps this insight will offer us integralites some appreciation for the Marxist rebellion against reality. Perhaps this too is a necessary if painful element of the grand experiment in emerging consciousness that we are participating in. Confronting our all-too-human tendency toward self-hatred and self-pity is an essential step towards leaping past the impediment these throw in the way of stabilizing the individuation phase of evolution that we have been in for the past five hundred years.</p><p>The planet doesn’t need saving; Gaia is doing fine. Admittedly, some time in the next several billion years the sun will begin to expand as it consumes its ever-scarcer supply of hydrogen, and Mother Earth will burn away. But that is something over which we have no control. The opportunity here is to align with the trajectory of evolution that the planet has been following and, instead of rejecting our nature, instead of pretending that somehow it doesn’t belong here, dig deeper into what it has to offer us as true offspring of Mother Earth. </p><p>Self-consciousness gives us the ability to see what’s going on from the perspective of our mother; might this not be the very purpose of this emergent power? Regardless, the very youth of this power cautions us to be very circumspect in this inquiry, for history shows quite clearly the folly of hubris in this endeavor. At the same time, we can respect role of impulsiveness that we all seem to have that leads us to ignore reason and history and do very damaging things to ourselves.</p><p>The Earth’s climate is always changing; the invitation here is to examine human impact on it as part of nature, and not as something foreign to it. Perhaps that will help some of our friends on the left see what’s really driving their ideology and address the hidden issues instead.</p><div><br /></div>Marty Kellerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11592136716581562644noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3401106149239386272.post-90109770144844878842022-05-04T18:23:00.005-07:002022-05-06T10:14:14.988-07:00Commentary on "The Politics of Pride and Shame" by Steve McIntosh<p>In the new issue of the Institute for Cultural Evolution’s online magazine the <i>Developmentalist</i>, ICE founder Steve McIntosh has a feature article entitled “<a href="https://developmentalist.org/article/the-politics-of-pride-and-shame/">The Politics of Pride and Shame: Integrating 1776 and 1619</a>.” 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 <i>Times</i> that the U. S. is and has always been a racist slave state. </p><p>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. </p><p>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.” </p><p>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 <a href="http://aqalblog.blogspot.com/2022/02/the-integral-model-is-not-dialectical.html">my most recent post</a>, I examined the folly of mistaking the integral model as a dialectical process. </p><p>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 <i>Critique of Pure Reason</i> in laying out his disagreements with David Hume. Georg F. W. Hegel then applied his understanding of the idea to his own philosophical system.</p><p>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.”</p><p>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.<span></span></p><a name='more'></a><p></p><p>Unfortunately, this insight escapes McIntosh’s attention. He asserts that it is the integralite’s task to generate “a synthetic interpretation of American history.” It’s not clear to me whether this error is the result of conscious or subconscious desires for the “progressive” view to be understood as just as valid as the perspectives it purports to replace. As a first tier expression, “progressive” politics cannot help but disdain the politics of modernity—not to mention those of a more traditional mindset. This is the nature of first tier stages.</p><p>The integralite must be ever vigilant regarding his/her own biases and beliefs—not to get rid of them but to acknowledge and take them into account when developing an integral analysis. Otherwise we will find ourselves identifying with a particular perspective rather than embracing them all as constituent dynamics of evolution. I reviewed this prerequisite extensively in a 2015 post, “<a href="http://aqalblog.blogspot.com/2015/12/what-is-integral.html">What Is Integral?</a>”</p><p>In the spirit of that essay, I put the word “progressive” in quotes to illustrate my own bias, which is that the label “progressive” is generally a sorry misnomer, that most “progressives” support some seriously regressive policies and beliefs, particularly in their haste to demonize and repress opposing views. They are, regardless of the sincerity of their beliefs, participating in a <a href="http://aqalblog.blogspot.com/2016/12/transcend-and-exclude-postmodern-u-turn.html">counterrevolution against modernity</a>.</p><p>As an integralite who disagrees with “progressive” politics, I commit to appreciate their place in the evolution of consciousness, to honor them in the light of Wilber’s salient observation that “nobody is 100% wrong.” In order to do that, I constantly examine my own projections, for any time I am emotionally triggered by something or someone I perceive “out there,” there is a corresponding unconscious perception about myself “in here. Practicing this with discipline and patience permits me to identify with the entire political spectrum, even as I disagree with many of its particulars.</p><p><br /></p><p><b><i>Transcendence, Not Synthesis</i></b></p><p>Having followed Steve McIntosh’s work for some time, I cheerfully concede that he is attempting something honorable, even as his misunderstandings inevitably lead his attempts to fail. (See, for instance, my “<a href="http://aqalblog.blogspot.com/2015/03/comments-on-steve-mcintoshs-paper-on.html">Comments on Steve McIntosh's Paper on Modernizing Islam</a>” for a thorough examination of this fallacy.) You just can’t build a castle on shifting sands. Integral theory posits transcendence, not merging or synthesis. And transcendence posits a stable level from which it can be launched.</p><p>This confusion dooms “Politics of Pride and Shame” to fail as an integral approach yet again. The misunderstandings start with the very first sentence: “American democracy is in trouble.”</p><p>McIntosh has on many occasions asserted that he is terrified by what he calls hyperpolarization. He fears, not without reason, that centrifugal cultural and political forces in fundamental disagreement with each other have the real potential to harm or even destroy this country. And so he thinks that integralites have a special insight that, if only the benighted factions of these polarities would stop and consider, could bring about peace and harmony. This veers closely, in my view, to utopianism. </p><p>The truth is that this process of crystalizing opposing worldviews is part of the evolutionary process, and this particular manifestation of it was made inevitable when the green wave started emerging as a mass expression in the 1960s. The current dynamics of disagreement have virulence in part because green has thus far failed to consolidate into a Kosmic wave that transcends and includes orange. Instead, its barren “Boomeritis” variant has prevailed thus far, a dead end version that Ken Wilber justly calls a toxic brew of narcissism and nihilism. The chaotic forces that are showing up as increasing polarization are the result of the unprecedented clash of three different first tier stages of consciousness. I reviewed the implications of this in 2006 in a series of essays I entitled “<a href="http://aqalblog.blogspot.com/2009/08/three-blind-memes.html">Three Blind Memes</a>.”</p><p>The assumptions of Boomeritis green fuel the Woke perspective, of which the 1619 Project by Nikole Hannah-Jones and colleagues at the New York <i>Times</i> produced in 2019 is a genuine expression. As I have written <a href="http://aqalblog.blogspot.com/2016/12/transcend-and-exclude-postmodern-u-turn.html">elsewhere</a> in agreement with Wilber’s analysis, Boomeritis green of course is a valid emergence in the evolution of consciousness, but it is at the same time doomed as a vehicle of transcendence because of its explicit hostility to modernity, reason, and individuality; it seeks to transcend and exclude. So it is folly to think that our problems stem from differing perspectives with the same quality in evolutionary unfolding.</p><p>No. Orange has now been around long enough—roughly half a millennium—to have put down roots as a Kosmic habit, to use Wilber’s term. At the same time, it is far from achieving the same stability as its predecessor amber, which has now had twelve millennia to produce a dependable and predictable identity and worldview. The inability of Boomeritis to find its footing as the appropriate expression of green, one capable of transcending and including orange, is based in large part on the incompleteness of orange. </p><p>But McIntosh does not take this important nuance into account. He assumes that the impulses that led to the emergence of postmodernism and its various intellectual offspring incubated in the Frankfurt School have the same depth, quality, and richness as those that led to the creation of the United States as the first self-consciously orange, modern republic.</p><p>Woke thinkers glorify and idealize democracy but this is based on misguided conceptions of equality in human society. The United States is not, nor has it ever been, a democracy. It is a republic created by and answerable to its citizens, with a government carefully and explicitly established to reduce the chances of tyrannical actions that would deny the rights of any citizen for whatever reason and from whatever source. Sovereignty is vested in the citizenry as a whole ("We the people of the United States"), with each citizen having the exact same power as every other.</p><p>The democracy promoted by those with their center of gravity in Boomeritis is not a universal but rather a tribal creature. In this version of democracy, the “correct” people get to decide policy; the incorrect people—the “basket of deplorables”—are to be suppressed. This is the prescription promoted and defended by the communist Herbert Marcuse in his prescient 1965 essay, “<a href="https://www.marcuse.org/herbert/publications/1960s/1965-repressive-tolerance-fulltext.html">Repressive Tolerance</a>.” And it is the very tyranny that the Founders feared would result from a majority unconstrained by constitutional strictures.</p><p>McIntosh suggests,</p><blockquote><p>For most of our history, patriotic pride served as a powerful binding element that unified our culture and helped define what it meant to be an American. But as our society now begins to better reckon with the sins of its past, a sense of national shame on the left is coming to replace the pride that once helped America cohere as a nation. And in the same way that patriotic pride fosters strong political solidarity, a collective feeling of national shame similarly offers an alternative basis for cultural belonging.</p></blockquote><p>Here, again, we see false equivalents. Whether it is true that “patriotic pride served as a powerful binding element,” he nonetheless consigns an American’s sense of pride in his or her country to a particular segment of the nation, what he calls “the right,” which in McIntosh-speak stands for an amber-centered traditionalism that actually exists almost nowhere in America. This “pride” felt by the right is said to be equivalent now to “a sense of national shame on the left” which “is coming to replace the pride that once helped America cohere as a nation.”</p><p>This is a dubious assertion, at best, for the American left has been at odds with our founding principles since the days of Herbert Croly, Woodrow Wilson, and their fellow travelers in the Progressive Movement. Whether these people actually feel “shame” ought to be verified by some reliable research. But Steve is self admittedly on the left, and we will credit him with his feelings. But here in California, utterly dominated by the “progressive” left, I see more hubris and spite than shame, but that might just be me.</p><p><br /></p><p><b><i>The Shame Game</i></b></p><p>It is quite ironic that he quotes Pascal Bruckner, for this leftist French author is a ruthless chronicler of the disease peculiar to certain people in the West that produces guilt about and disdain for the successes and achievements of modernity. This psychological syndrome is the same that generates McIntosh’s “collective feeling of national shame.” In Bruckner’s eyes, this is essentially a psychological immaturity, a refusal to face facts, an inexcusable disposition to indulge in self-hatred. Overlooking Pascal’s analysis, McIntosh writes,</p><blockquote><p>Shame, however, is not all bad. A growing sense of contrition for the crimes of American history—most notably slavery, Jim Crow, and the brutal conquest of Native Americans—can be recognized as a necessary step toward the further evolution of our society.</p></blockquote><p>It puzzles me that people can conjure up a sense of shame for something they think their ancestors did, but there you are. What psychological contortions do we have to go through in order to take on the guilt and shame of someone else’s deeds? While the West has the original sin of the expulsion from the Garden of Eden as part of our foundational myth, it still requires a willing suspension of reason to feel guilt for what Adam and Eve did of their own volition.</p><p>In <i><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/may/09/tyranny-of-guilt">The Tyranny of Guilt</a></i>, which McIntosh briefly quotes from, Bruckner writes that the leftist admonition that we of the West must all repent</p><blockquote><p>is the message that, under cover of its proclaimed hedonism, Western philosophy has been hammering into us for the past half-century—though that philosophy claims to be both an emancipatory discourse and the guilty conscience of its time. What it injects into us in the guise of atheism is nothing other than the old notion of original sin, the ancient poison of damnation. In Judeo-Christian lands, there is no fuel so potent as the feeling of guilt, and the more our philosophers and sociologists proclaim themselves to be agnostics, atheists, and free-thinkers, the more they take us back to the religious belief they are challenging. </p></blockquote><blockquote><p>From existentialism to deconstructionism, all of modern thought can be reduced to a mechanical denunciation of the West, emphasizing the latter’s hypocrisy, violence, and abomination . . . An eternal movement: critical thought, at first subversive, turns against itself and becomes a new conformism, but one that is sanctified by the memory of its former rebellion. Yesterday’s audacity is transformed into cliches. Remorse has ceased to be connected with precise historical circumstances; it has become a dogma, a spiritual commodity, almost a form of currency. A whole intellectual intercourse is established: clerks are appointed to maintain it like the ancient guardians of the sacred flame and issue permits to think and speak. At the slightest deviation, these athletes of contrition protest, enforce proper order in language, accord their imprimatur or refuse it . . . The duty to repent is a multifunction fighting machine: it censures, reassures, and distinguishes.</p></blockquote><p>Bruckner was writing these words in 2006, well before the great Twitter sewer opened and became a channel for the “clerks” of the Woke religion to issue “permits to think and speak.” Even so, he recognized the dynamics of religious conformity, for they are actually ancient processes honed over millennia of amber societies that enforced their rigid social orders by hiring the gods of mythology to mete out rewards and punishments.</p><p>Bruckner perfectly describes here the purpose of the 1619 project. It is not, as McIntosh chooses to believe, an instrument of national salvation through the adoption of collective shame and reconciliation, but rather an enforcement mechanism for the amber seed that lies in the heart of Boomeritis green, a mechanism that makes it the evolutionary dead end of Wilber’s avowal.</p><p><br /></p><p><b><i>America Through the Integral Lens</i></b></p><p>The emergence of the United States was not merely a political phenomenon; it was a world historical innovation that established a secure home base for the emerging orange consciousness. Integralites would be well served to look at American history as a significant milestone in the unfolding of consciousness, not as a series of particularities with little or no connection to the whole. When we look at American history through this lens, we instantly appreciate both the frivolity and inevitability of the leftist narrative. <i>La gauche, c’est nous</i>. See this opposition as counterrevolution against modernity and appreciate it for what it is. </p><p>Wilber has emphasized again and again that first tier stages understand themselves as unique and absolute, incapable of integrating with the others. Important as orange is as a wave of development, it has no more appreciation for amber than amber does for it. Amber has been trying to eliminate orange for five hundred years; today’s Woke leftists are just the latest iteration of the Catholic Church’s attempts to crush the Protestant movement in the sixteenth century. That’s why it seems so religious in nature; it is a return to the mythological dynamics of amber, which serve to preserve and promote tribal cohesion. </p><p>The founders of the United States, through the fortuitous circumstances that the east coast of the Americas was lightly populated by red-stage hunter/gatherer clans (with a few exceptions), were able to find a space safe from the amber currents of European culture in which to create a nation consciously dedicated as a base for humanity to promote the orange individuation project begun in the Protestant Reformation. </p><p>In doing so, did they do things that some of us—even in those days—condemned as immoral? Of course they did; even as they were exploring the expansion of orange structures, they were operating out of a first tier wave. To their minds, the natives were expendable if they were unwilling to integrate into the leading edge. We may find this inexcusable, but we weren’t there to instruct them in our better ways. This, of course, ignores the fact that we would not have our superior morals if they hadn’t created the first orange polity in human history. Too many of us overlook the fact that we are beneficiaries of their work.</p><p>In our present-day polarization, we are not simply engaged in dealing with “competing narratives,” as McIntosh says. The left’s attacks on the story of the creation and development of the United States are part of a long-established attack on modernity itself. As integralites, we understand this; we are not afraid to name it, for it is a constituent current of the great river of evolution.</p><p>Even for all that, it is useless to attempt to deal with one’s fears about our politics by attempting a feckless “synthesis” of amber, orange, and Boomeritis green. As Wilber points out in his <i>Trump and a Post-Truth World</i>, the ultimate dynamic of the spectrum of consciousness is transcendence, not synthesis. Hopefully one day integralites like Steve McIntosh will see this and turn their considerable gifts to the work of maturing the orange individuation project for which the United States still remains the world’s hope.</p>Marty Kellerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11592136716581562644noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3401106149239386272.post-46177576413940650922022-02-22T16:38:00.003-08:002022-02-22T16:47:45.441-08:00The Integral Model Is Not Dialectical<p>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, <a href="https://newdiscourses.com/2021/05/hegel-wokeness-and-the-dialectical-faith-of-leftism/">“Hegel, Wokeness, and the Dialectical Faith of Leftism,”</a> 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 <i>The Phenomenology of Spirit</i> in 1807.</p><p>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. </p><p>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.</p><p>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 <i>The Marriage of Sense and the Soul</i>, we must be open to a different science of understanding than is available to us at orange, the current leading edge of evolution.</p><p>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.</p><p><br /></p><p><b><i>Stage Emergence is Sloppy and Violent</i></b></p><p>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? </p><p><span></span></p><a name='more'></a><p></p><p>This natural resistance to transcendence characterizes all first-tier stages, for as Wilber has pointed out, the prepersonal and personal levels can see neither the spectrum of consciousness as a whole nor their place in it. </p><p>It stands to reason that, as soon as modernity started gaining serious social momentum in the early 19th century, reaction would also set in. It turns out that this resistance finds its strength in the ever-present utopian fantasy that all humans entertain as a reaction to the certainty of individual death. The awareness of this apparently inexorable fact and the existential dread it engenders accompanies individual identity. </p><p>In amber tribal consciousness such dread is sublimated by the fact that the tribe seems to its members to be permanent. Yes, it is always under threat from other tribes, but the tribe—the locus of identity in amber—seems sturdy and durable. Premodern consciousness is characterized by, among other things, the sense that the world is always simply the way people find it. Time has no direction; it is seasonal and cyclical rather than progressive.</p><p>So we don’t encounter organized explorations of utopias—putative realms of permanent peace and enjoyment—until modernity begins to emerge. Thomas More, the author of the original <i>Utopia</i>, lived during the Tudor period of the early 16th century, when the first stirrings of orange were appearing in England and Holland.</p><p>All we have to do to appreciate the power of the utopian fantasy is to look within ourselves. How many of us, particularly those of us living in modern societies, still become easily disturbed when our preferences are thwarted? How many of us bring into our adulthood an unexamined template of what life is supposed to be and get petulant when people and events deviate from its presumptions? The template is our version of utopia, a world where all disruptions and hurts are dissolved. And who is to blame for any and all deviations from our desired state? </p><p>The fully autonomous human automatically takes responsibility for his emotional and mental expressions; the immature human blames outside people or circumstances for the disturbances of his expected equilibrium. The orange modern project, in effect, is the social production of mature human beings; thus the amber counterrevolution focuses on undermining in every possible way the dynamics that support this maturation process. </p><p>I have stated in other essays that we are still very much in the midst of the orange project, whose completion we can easily see is still far off. Since transcendence to the next stage requires an undetermined minimum of a critical mass of mature adults in orange, we are all best employed in working to support manifestation of the promises of modernity. This includes resisting the counterrevolution.</p><p>In his essential long essay <a href="https://integrallife.com/trump-post-truth-world/">“Trump and a Post-Truth World,”</a> Wilber demonstrates how the cancerous Boomeritis variant of green (the putative next level of consciousness beyond orange) has thwarted the emergence of healthy green. This means that, contrary to the desires of many integralites, orange and not green is still the leading edge of the evolution of consciousness.</p><p>No matter how much it may resemble one, transcend-include-integrate is not a dialectic process. There is much more going on in Wilber’s insight about the process of evolution than a linear formula. Although Hegel may have worked with the hypothesis that Spirit continuously evolves in form and that the laws by which it does so transcend concurrent human understanding, he did little to clearly explain the implications. Likewise Wilber’s explications, while formally correct, are not always fully comprehended by those attracted by the integral idea.</p><p><br /></p><p><b><i>The Disingenuousness of the Dialectical Method</i></b></p><p>I am not a Hegel expert, so I will not dwell much on his philosophy. Indeed, even his contemporaries who presumably studied his works or attended his lectures did not necessarily grasp the fullness of his thought. Indeed, the "young Hegelian" Marx rejected his understanding of Hegel's dialectic of Spirit in favor of his well-known "dialectical materialism."</p><p>But as Lindsay says, dialectics has become “the operating system of the Left,” and like the erroneous use of the word “capitalism” to name liberal economics, it has wormed its way into the political thought and language of the West. Many integralites fail to see this in their own writings and podcasts, and thus can confuse its place in the Integral Model.</p><p>I had a series of conversations with Jeff Salzman, host of the Daily Evolver podcast, a few years ago. He contacted me because he read some of my essays online and was shocked to find that a self-described political conservative might be able to grasp Wilber’s work. He was genuinely curious about how that might be. After some initially cordial conversations, he eventually turned dialectical on me—although I didn’t understand that at the time—and challenged me with a series of queries about how I would solve homelessness, ensure universal access to cheap health care, and other current leftwing concerns. I didn’t see—and I’m sure he didn’t either—that the source of his questioning was a belief in the absolute validity of the dialectical method. He sincerely believed that his were valid political questions, and couldn't understand my unwillingness to accept his premise.</p><p>For instance, thesis: people get sick. Antithesis: people cannot get the care that would alleviate their illness. Synthesis: it is necessary to create a system where all sick people get the care they need. </p><p>Note the subtle disingenuousness of the method. At first glance a reasonable person might say, who can disagree? This was precisely the way Salzman employed his “questions.” But why is this particular statement of the human condition absolutely accurate? The actual antithesis of “people get sick” is “people get well,” if we are willing to accept the Merriam-Webster definition: “the exact opposite of something or someone.” And what would be the synthesis of the two? Certainly not the imposition of one’s desired health care system.</p><p>Lindsay points out that the Marxist appropriation of the Hegelian dialectic is always directive, always driving toward “revolution” as the appropriate gateway to utopia. Because it is employed in the goal of fomenting the revolution, it is always twisted in the way I suggest above.</p><p>In my forthcoming book <i>Creating Our World</i>, I explore how the existential fear generated by the certainty of individual death gives rise to and supports the collective subconscious longing for utopia, for the defeat of death in the material world. This, I contend, is the underlying psychic force that makes utopian political schemes so attractive, even when they are proven to be impossible in rational and historical analysis. “I don’t want to die” is built into the fundamental dynamics of life; all living organisms are designed to resist decay and death, even though resistance is ultimately futile—at least from the perspective of the individual organism.</p><p>The Integral Model makes room for the fear of death without making it, as the utopian longing does, decisive. Thus it makes room for the utopian impulse, for dialectics, for Marxism, for the left and the right without privileging any of them.</p><p>At the transpersonal levels of consciousness, where identity has transcended individuality, we appreciate that everything that arises has its place. We note that which supports evolution along with that which harms or retards it. In the second-tier bands, identifying now as humanity as a whole and beyond, we are free to choose what encourages psychospiritual movement towards larger and deeper identities.</p><p>So we can note the existence of the Woke, of neo-Marxist policy prescriptions, including what Lindsay aptly calls “race Marxism,” of every variety of the opposition to modernity; these belong to us all, even as do the liberating gifts of orange. Integral always looks to see and feel how everything belongs.</p><p>At the same time, as we focus on the spectrum of consciousness as a whole, we work to resist the temptations to rely blindly on our first tier crutches. This is why Wilber rightly insists on the imperative of Shadow work, for if we cannot see our blind spots they will be in charge, keeping us rooted in the awful and sterile first tier food fight. </p><div><br /></div>Marty Kellerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11592136716581562644noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3401106149239386272.post-41229012792906965132021-08-02T15:11:00.002-07:002021-08-02T15:12:58.513-07:00Some Remarks on Wilber's Podcast on Epistemology<p>In his most recent dialogue with Integral Life director Corey deVos entitled “Marx, Mysticism, and Mathematics: Navigating Our Epistemic Collapse,” Wilber <a href="https://integrallife.com/marx-mysticism-and-math-navigating-our-epistemic-collapse/">concludes the series</a> by exploring the evergreen question “what is to be done?” What’s a poor integralist to do in a world full of first tier narcissism? </p><p>I urge those interested in what Wilber has to say to watch the whole thing.</p><p>As for me, I confess myself unimpressed with most of his observations in this final episode, but not by way of negative criticism. We are in the midst of obvious evolutionary phase change, and so it is difficult if not impossible to give a definitive answer to such a tricky and vexing question.</p><p>Wilber lamely falls back onto what he has been saying for at least four years since the “Trump and a Post-Truth World” essay: if we were in teal everything would be better. And, of course, if pigs could fly, Boulder would rule the world.</p><p>I don’t fault him too much for his anodyne sentiment, for it might actually be true, and in the long run of evolution we will eventually find out but, Wilber’s touching optimism notwithstanding, not likely in the near term.</p><p>But ironically in a commentary on Marxist epistemology, Wilber is unwittingly setting up the same straw man that Marx and all his revolutionary progeny found so tempting to employ. Utopian wishful thinking is apparently a universal human trait; its political version says, “if we can theorize a better world, then such a world can and should replace this one. Our promise of this better world should inspire everyone. And if they resist this obvious good, we are justified to apply brute force to eliminate the unreasoning, selfish opposition.” </p><p>This is a version of a fundamental error Wilber identified decades ago: mistaking the map for the terrain. The theory that the proletariat seizing the means of production will create a more just and wealthier world is just that: a theory. The tragedy comes when we let our infatuation with our theories overlook the reality we wish to escape. Lenin, Mao, Chavez, Ibrahim Kendi, and Bernie Sanders have all succumbed to the same hideous fantasy: that their imagined improved humanity is a reality-in-waiting, if only someone has the will to force it into being.</p><p>It beggars the rational mind to have to point this out after the irrefutable evidence of the utter folly of this delusion: the millions of corpses strewn across the planet, the victims of the Marxist utopian lunacy.</p><p><span></span></p><a name='more'></a><p></p><p>And yet here we have Ken Wilber, calmly claiming in the safety of his nice home that teal will make everything better. And who is to bring us to this kingdom of heaven on earth? And whose teal are we talking about, anyway?</p><p>I recognize the bit of cynicism of my commentary, for I am not impressed much by the so-called “integral community,” which, as far as I can tell, is generally still riddled with unrecognized Boomeritis green. As a first tier meme, which to his credit Wilber acknowledges, it has no room for the others. It alone knows best. So let Boomeritis loose on the planet and the results will be as bloody as all the other Marxist horrors. We already see this in the United States and in Great Britain in the Twitter-fed “woke” world, a hideous reversion to amber tribalism which cannot but try to repress anything oppositional. </p><p><br /></p><p><i><b>The Warnings of Robespierre</b></i></p><p>If you think this is an exaggeration, I invite you to read <i><a href="https://newcriterion.com/issues/2020/3/a-wild-dangerous-effervescence">A New World Begins: The History of the French Revolution</a></i>, Jeremy Popkin’s 2019 history of that tumultuous and terrible event. His description of the social and emotional dynamics that led to the indiscriminate bloodletting of the Terror is chilling. This irrational excess began, much like the situation we are in now, with an unstated mass agreement <i>on the part of the so-called revolutionaries</i> to discard reason, logic, analysis, and prudence that unleashed the full vengeance of amber against even hints of orange.</p><p>What began as a resistance to the amber political structure of France, with Louis XVI at the apex, ended in a chaotic and out-of-control mess that saw legalized murder at home and huge armies of revolutionary fervor abroad. For a brief moment in the beginning, the revolutionaries focused on creating a new government organized on the principles of the Enlightenment-inspired Declaration of the Rights of Man, but this never got implemented. Instead, events soon enabled the Jacobin utopian tribalists to impose their own version of the monarchical principle: <i>L’etat, c’est nous</i>. </p><p>So rather than replacing the amber Bourbon regime with an orange republic, the French Revolution instead devolved into nasty tribal warfare that required the dictatorship of Napoleon to quell.</p><p>We have seen time and again how utopian revolutions eats their own children: Popkin describes in excruciating detail how the various Jacobin factions fought for control of the French state, a violent free-for-all that ended up in the Terror. This bloody experiment with state terror (which so inspired Lenin) included a series of betrayals and double-crossings among the Paris-based revolutionaries, such that leaders of each faction took their turn in the tumbrils. Only after the most notorious of these wannabe kings of the <i>sans-culottes</i>, Maximilian Robespierre, lost his head in the Place de la Révolution did the Jacobin <i>auto-da-fé</i> finally run out of steam. From the high point of the adoption of the Declaration of the Rights of Man to the low point of the Directory, the French managed to replace the monarchy with the Emperor Napoleon. Thus in ignominy died the first modern utopian revolution. </p><p>(Of course, the ignominy didn't end with the restoration of the feckless Bourbons. No, France has continued to deal with the legacy of its failed revolution down to this day.)</p><p>In the meantime, another revolution across the ocean managed not only to avoid the amber utopian temptation, it managed to create by popular agreement a new republic actually based upon Enlightenment ideals of individual liberty, popular sovereignty, and multiple check and balances against the natural tyrannical impulse that was given free run in France.</p><p>Even with all its birth pangs, the new United States of America managed to avoid mass outbreak of political utopianism for a century, allowing the new ideals to take hold in the social and political practice of the nation. During this period the country finally rid itself of the amber slave economy and launch its industrial revolution that quickly overtook Great Britain as the strongest and wealthiest nation in the history of the world.</p><p>Alas, nothing good lasts forever. The orange wave of consciousness that birthed the Enlightenment and the United States necessarily provoked a reaction from amber. This is the law of development: each new wave of consciousness, even though it is in part a response to the limitations of the previous wave, nonetheless provokes a defensive reaction by that earlier wave. This is the first tier dynamic in action.</p><p>And so, inevitably, the dynamics of the orange revolution, of increasing individuation and the resulting dynamic political economy, prompted a counterrevolution by amber. This first came in the form of the “progressive” movement, a political program based upon the conviction that individualism was becoming so excessive that it threatened the stability and performance of the nation. This was in part a reaction to the business cycle problems that inevitably creep in when the productive sector gets disconnected from the financial sector. This is a problem that has yet to find a satisfactory solution. </p><p>These business cycle disruptions led to regular depressions and panics, and together with the off-and-on labor unrest these contributed to, caused resentment and fear among large masses of voters. The progressives decided to blame bankers and other monopolists, holding them out as the evidence that individualism led to the greed that these “capitalists” deployed to put themselves above the nation.</p><p>And, not surprisingly, after a period of political trial-and-error in which Theodore Roosevelt played a major role, the progressives made the Democratic Party their home. And the Democrats today, utterly in the thrall of the woke New Left and its Boomeritis values, are the major instrument of the counterrevolution against the Enlightenment values that inspired the establishment and success of their country.</p><p><br /></p><p><b><i>The Trimemetic War</i></b></p><p>All of this has occurred in the on-going evolutionary dynamism of orange emerging from amber, with expressions in all four quadrants. </p><p>Our challenge in integrally grasping the magnitude of what’s been going on since the rise of orange modernity starting roughly 500 years ago is that we don’t have much of a cultural (lower left) understanding of the process. Neither our bodies nor our minds have evolved at the same rate as the political economy and our technologies of production and communication have. This creates a disequilibrium across the quadrants that so far has deprived us of both a felt sense of appreciation for the relative speed of orange’s disruption of amber and a mental construct that accommodates it. (I think in the podcast Wilber is trying to assert that this dynamic was first understood by Marx.)</p><p>This deficiency has only been exacerbated by the emergence of green, with all the grotesqueries showing up in its lurch toward a evolutionarily valuable structure. We are, as I’ve noted at length, in an unprecedented <a href="http://aqalblog.blogspot.com/2009/08/three-blind-memes.html">“Trimemetic War”</a> which I define as the three-way struggle among amber, orange, and green for hegemony. </p><p>This is a first tier food fight for which we have no historical analogy. This three-way no-quarter fight may account for the virulence of the American political situation. In our state of fear and confusion, we have swept away the possibility of consensus based upon the common principles of our founding in an orgy of righteousness, demagoguery, nastiness, and mendacity all masking a deep almost existential dread. None of us has a clue about how to bring this war to an amicable and enlightened end which might, in Abraham Lincoln’s words, “achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”</p><p>Fantasizing about a teal regime probably doesn’t do much to get us there.</p><p>But outside of this harmless wishful thinking, Wilber, trying to be more practical, suggests that we integralists engage in what he calls “mini-education.” This is basically engaging in a conversation with people who aren’t yet integrally informed in which we integrally inform them about what they are failing to see. We must use “gentle ways” of doing this, but “if it kicks in correctly,” Wilber avers, “they’ll actually be grateful.” This is because people change our minds only when we have a better idea to change our minds for.</p><p>I’d love to invite Ken over to meet with some of my NPR-listening, government-loving Boomeritis-centered friends and learn from him which gentle ways of showing them the errors of their thinking will kick integral appreciation in correctly. God knows I’ve stopped trying; in my experience it doesn’t work this way.</p><p>I’d like to think Ken knows better than to believe this inanity; he certainly must know that we are not engaging in an intellectual debate here. This is because a central weapon amber uses in undermining healthy green is its relentlessly (and understandably) privileging emotion over reason. People mired in Boomeritis have already unconsciously jettisoned reason and logic and turned to “feels” instead. And every self-aware individual knows better than to argue with an emotion.</p><p>Let’s be perfectly clear here: from its perspective, amber is perfectly justified in weaponizing emotion; from an integral perspective we must appreciate that it doesn’t have a lot of choice. Reason as a psychological tool in evolution only emerges with orange, so of course amber feels threatened by it, and of course it has to fight it off with its own primary psychological tool.</p><p><br /></p><p><b><i>Let’s Get Serious</i></b></p><p>So what can be done is to hone the tools we integralists have, starting with our appreciation for the entire spectrum of consciousness.</p><p>If we truly grok the magnificence and efficacy of every shade along the spectrum, then let’s stop fantasizing about what we might find one or two wave ahead of us and focus on the current challenges. These are two: reinforcing the individuation project of modernity, and challenging green to reject Boomeritis and find its true nature. </p><p>Both stages have a “transcend, include, and integrate” challenge. Orange is still struggling with integrating amber. For individuals, amber’s resistance manifests in the persistence of the effects of childhood trauma which delays or even prevents emergence of the mature autonomous individual. This manifests on the collective level as dalliances with the various flatland temptations that Wilber has identified as the “mean orange meme.” </p><p>Green will go nowhere until it includes all the gifts of orange which the Boomeritis variant rejects. This is why Wilber has correctly diagnosed Boomeritis as addled by narcissism and nihilism, twin saboteurs that threaten the emergence of healthy green. (See <a href="http://aqalblog.blogspot.com/2016/12/transcend-and-exclude-postmodern-u-turn.html">“Transcend and Exclude”</a> on this website for a deeper dive into this important matter.)</p><p>So for integralites, the opportunity is to dig deeper into our own experience, to hone our individual identity as the necessary prelude to experiencing the momentous leap. As Wilber correctly suggests, shadow work is essential, not only for our individual maturation, but in the long run for the species as well. By virtue of the four quadrants, when I do my personal shadow work, I am at the same time participating in collective shadow work.</p><p>For this inquiry, necessary as it is for healing the resisting amber psychological states that hamper our development as autonomous individuals, continues to be of value for the rest of evolution. As Wilber suggested in his very first book, until the moment of final awakening, when identity expresses as “I = I,” there is always something lurking in the shadow of repressed Kosmic awareness.</p><p>Let’s also open our hearts consistently to the compassion that an integral perspective automatically discloses. We are not yet capable as a species of choosing where we are in consciousness—what our “altitude” is. Boomeritis may be a dead end, but it is real and those centered in it are not there by conscious choice. Therefore, difficult as we may find those who don’t see what we see, we can welcome this struggle as another opportunity to dig deeper into our own resistance to the larger truths disclosed in the transpersonal realm. This, too, makes a contribution to the possibility and the shape of human transcendence.</p><p>This is the consistent message that all the great avatars have preached: do whatever is necessary to shift our identity from the tribal, the personal, even the cosmic, to the One that always already is. As we do this, we find our compassion for the causes of the Trimemetic War will help us focus on the specifics of what else we can be doing in these tumultuous times.</p><p>I also hope we hear the call to picking our words with care. This is not always the case with our fellow integralites. Some of it is, of course, unavoidable in the give-and-take of dialogue, or even in the solitude of composition. And so we see throughout the discussion, Wilber and deVos are very sloppy when talking about green, often conflating the Boomeritis variant and its healthy potential. This is quite problematic, for amber narcissism and tribalism essentially constitute an invasive species sucking the life blood out of the actual potential of healthy green.</p><p>Let us be clear: noting this is not condemning it. In our daily ignorance we can easily forget that all of our human behaviors are the ongoing dynamics of the evolution of consciousness looking for the best ways to express as avenues for deepening our collective perspective. The serious troubles that have resulted in Boomeritis variant are just the latest experiment in the unfolding of consciousness, the on-going trial-and-error that the human species itself represents in the greater Kosmos.</p><p>That said, there is value in intellectual rigor about this critical distinction between Boomeritis and healthy green. If we don’t, we will make the same errors that Wilber makes here in his mischaracterization of Marx and especially of his revolutionary acolytes. Yes, Marx had some useful observations about the relationship between modes of production and consciousness. Yes, this has generated a useful inquiry into the larger question of the structures of consciousness. Yes, Marx and Marxism are valid expressions of Spirit and have their place in the Integral Model. But the Model’s commitment to “everything is in” does not require us to value everything equally. The demonstrable errors of Marx’ general epistemology render it useless as a valid method by which to learn about ourselves and our development, except as an example of what not to value.</p><p>Indeed, a rigorous study and appreciation not merely of Marx, but more importantly of all the movements claiming him as their inspiration, bring us to confront the universal human tendency to utopian thinking that I noted at the beginning. It may be that this psychodynamic is rooted in our fear of death and our assessment of death as some kind of defeat brought about by the flaws of our species. Our postmodern neo-Marxist woke world may be the evolutionary dead-end that Wilber has suggested, but it comes from something human that we all share.</p><p>And that may be the ultimate gift that Marx will have given us: to force us to examine ourselves to discover and appreciate what Theodore Rubin calls our self-hate. There is absolutely nothing wrong with us even as every one of us had died or will die. This is the nature of the Kosmos; our task is to embrace it and identify as it, for this is also inescapably true. </p><div><br /></div>Marty Kellerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11592136716581562644noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3401106149239386272.post-81501136404127378662020-12-26T13:46:00.005-08:002020-12-26T13:49:02.157-08:00Truth and a Post-Trump World<p>It was never about President Trump. It was always about us.</p><p>As the political wheels turn in the aftermath of the American elections, we may begin to consider what we’ve learned about ourselves and the evolution of consciousness over the past four years.</p><p>When Ken Wilber undertook this task with publication of his essay “<a href="https://integrallife.com/trump-post-truth-world/">Trump and a Post-Truth World</a>” in early 2017, he chronicled the utter failure of the Boomeritis variant of the green wave of consciousness to serve as the leading edge of the evolution of consciousness. Our coastal elites, who as adolescents expressed the first inklings of green in the 1960s, have fallen far short of realizing its expansive potential. </p><p>Green’s improvement of orange is its acceptance of the egalitarian nature of the human individuality that characterizes modernity. (If the identity expressed in orange is “I = this particular individual human,” then green identity is “I = this particular individual human like everyone else does.”) So far, however, this very young emergence has been undermined by the still-vital tribalism of amber premodernity, which has reduced green’s universalizing egalitarianism into the preening self-righteousness of the Woke against the backward. Boomeritis has failed to transcend and include the gifts of orange, and so it has blindly been recruited into the amber counterrevolution against modernity. </p><p>In his essay, Wilber ruthlessly laid out how this happened as Boomeritis collapsed into a barren combination of nihilism and narcissism. </p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p>[T]he most influential postmodern elites ended up embracing, explicitly or implicitly, that tag-team from postmodern hell: nihilism and narcissism—in short, aperspectival madness. The culture of post-truth. </p><p>. . . <i>Nihilism and narcissism are not traits that any leading-edge can actually operate with</i>. And thus, if it’s infected with them, it indeed simply ceases to functionally operate. Seeped in aperspectival madness, it stalls, and then begins a series of regressive moves, shifting back to a time and configuration when it was essentially operating adequately as a true leading-edge. And this regression is one of the primary factors we see now operating worldwide. And the primary and central cause of all of this is a failure of the green leading-edge to be able to lead at all. [Italics in the original]</p></blockquote><p>Of course, there is no actual agency to leading edges; there is only the tedious trial and error, back-and-forthing that characterizes evolution as its underlying impulse pushes ever outward. This alone is reason enough to neither mourn the Boomeritis detour nor condemn it too sternly. Like happens in our individual lives, we collectively face each day with no predetermined destination, even as what we did yesterday contributes its experience to our overall trajectory. <span></span></p><a name='more'></a><p></p><p>In my <a href="http://aqalblog.blogspot.com/2017/02/greens-failure-as-leading-edge-some.html">commentary</a> on Wilber’s essay, I suggested that, with the collapse of Boomeritis’ experiment as an expression of green, the leading edge remains orange, and that one of the reasons green may have difficulty consolidating into a Kosmic habit that transcends and include orange is that orange itself is still an incomplete experiment.</p><p>Wilber once said—although he fails to revisit this in this essay—that the central task of evolution today is the maturing of orange. No higher waves can mature while standing upon this still-firming foundation. Orange has given us the fulcrum of evolution: the self-actualized, authentic individual; now our challenge is to encourage the development of a critical mass of these.</p><p>The evidence for this seems even more compelling after the four years that have passed since Wilber’s piece and my comments on it. Viewed from a global perspective, it is difficult to see any societies with their center of gravity in orange focusing on political, cultural, or economic policies that explicitly seek to support and enact this encouragement. Shinzo Abe in Japan, Boris Johnson in the UK, Emmanuel Macron in France, Donald Trump in the US all seem at least to sense in their electorates some kind of demand for this in the political realm, but none has offered any vision or macro-policies designed to do so. Conversely, leaders such as Angela Merkel in Germany, Justin Trudeau in Canada, Pedro Sánchez in Spain, and leaders of other left-leaning European governments continue to resist similar demands in their countries, hewing to the internationalist line birthed in the Clinton-Blair years and labeled by some on the left as “neo-liberal.”</p><p>And, of course, the outbreak of the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic and the unbelievably inept response to it by almost all governments in the advanced sector seem to have exacerbated the general prevarication about the value of the individuation project. This occurs in a social environment dominated by elitist control of the mainstream media in the U.S., aided and abetted by their allies in the social media companies. For four years these new robber barons have kept up single-minded, unrelenting, and mendacious criticism of President Trump, whose weaknesses played into their hands. (It’s almost as if these two, Trump and the media, are in a dysfunctional co-dependent relationship, both mirroring each other’s defects.) And now, as an entirely predictable seasonal uptick in flu infections is showing up in the northern zones, the media continue to evince disinterest in the actual science of epidemiology, showing their deep “progressive” preference for elitist social control measures.</p><p>Similar media slants prevail in the UK, whose London-based corporate owners and the BBC ape the American media’s corporatist leftism. Still smarting from the electorate’s embrace of Brexit, they continue to hound the Tories with anti-scientific demands for lockdowns and repression of individual liberties, which Johnson seems quite susceptible to.</p><p>And the early indications are that the new Biden administration will look and act like the third Obama term, suggesting that the coastal elites have, predictably, learned nothing from the Trump experience. They will, of course, find that the regardless of their myopia, the political geometry has changed unalterably.</p><p>Integral theory suggests that all of this has a place in the evolution of consciousness, and our task is to look at what’s going on as dispassionately as we can to find a suitable answer to Chernyshevsky’s question, what is to be done?</p><p><br /></p><p><b><i>The Crucial Experiment That Is Modernity</i></b></p><p>My own repetitive mantra is: cherish and deepen orange. Finish the Enlightenment individualism project. Transcend, include, and integrate amber within this wave. Otherwise, Boomeritis in alliance with amber could force the collapse of orange, which would bring us back five hundred years to amber as the leading edge. Is this what integralites want? </p><p>Among the advances that modernity created to support this project is the science of psychospiritual inquiry. The various traditions of amber spirituality established the basic insights about the unitary nature of reality, but necessarily relegated acting upon these to an elite group of priests, devotees, and practitioners. The exoteric forms of these religious practices served the mythic/membership dynamics of amber, tools by which the tribes acculturated their members and protected themselves against the outside Other.</p><p>One of these traditions, however—Christianity—planted the seeds of orange by insisting that a direct, loving relationship exists between God and the individual. This bond preached by Jesus of Nazareth superseded the Old Testament covenant between Yahweh and the Hebrews, which symbolized the outer limits of amber spirituality. The radical new idea proclaimed in John 3:16 would eventually gain mass expression as orange modernity when the European Renaissance and its subsequent Protestant Reformation sought to create a new social contract, one that explicitly drew upon the tenets of Christian theology to manifest the promised salvation in the world today, rather than postponed to a promised afterlife. </p><p>As the economist Deirdre McCloskey lays out in her <a href="http://www.deirdremccloskey.com/academics/index.php">Bourgeois Era trilogy</a>, the ferment unleashed by this startling new idea and the political economy it brought into being would bring about an increase in per capita social wealth utterly unprecedented in all the thousands of years of amber political economy. She also notes that the backlash against it was swift in coming, so that by the time of the revolutions of 1848 significant elements of European society were pushing back against what modernity had unleashed first in the creation of the physical sciences, then in the radical economic dynamics of the Industrial Revolution, and finally in the Enlightenment political experiment given substance by the American Revolution.</p><p>By virtue of its geographic (but not cultural) isolation from Europe, the United States was able to postpone its own native resistance to the success of the experiment, but only by several decades. Ironically it was the successful repression of its amber slave economy that made it possible for the American “Progressive movement” to introduce more subtle forms of undermining the achievements of the American system as proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence and given shelter in the Constitution. Subtle because the Progressive doctrine insisted—and continues to do so today—that the promotion of individual sovereignty creates a society of greedy self-centered individuals who undermine the good of the whole in single-minded pursuit of their own interests. Therefore individualism is an enemy of a well-ordered society. You can’t get any more amber than that!</p><p>And thus arose the American version of the amber counterrevolution against modernity, one sophisticated enough to use the words and ideas of the American founding against it. By and large these ideas found their political home in the Democratic Party, contra the Republican Party which was explicitly founded to champion free labor and individual initiative. </p><p>That amber would do anything to undermine and eventually destroy orange is completely natural and predictable to those versed in integral theory—and to anyone struggling to establish his own individual identity against his inner demons. As Wilber has shown, amber and orange (and green) are what he calls, following <a href="https://spiraldynamicsintegral.nl/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Graves-Clare-Human-Nature-Prepares-for-a-Momentous-Leap.pdf">Clare Graves</a>, first tier stages of consciousness. First tier comprises the prepersonal and personal stages, and a key feature of each of these is their incapacity to recognize the validity of any other stage. Those of us with our “center of gravity” in amber cannot but assume that our tribe is the absolute reality which must be defended against all comers. Similarly those of us centered in orange know with certainty that we individually are the absolute reality, and green, should it ever find stability, will be equally certain that each of us is entitled to be our own absolute reality.</p><p>This dynamic has given rise to what I call, following an early Wilber term levels of consciousness, the <a href="http://aqalblog.blogspot.com/2009/08/three-blind-memes.html">Trimemetic War</a>, the global clash that results when large numbers of us around the world find ourselves centered in three competing waves of consciousness, each convinced that it alone knows what’s what. The blind spots built into each structure—an evolutionary reality—prevent integration and discourage compromise; thus conquest seems to be the only option. In some places Wilber calls this “the first tier food fight,” a cheeky yet apt observation.</p><p><a href="http://aqalblog.blogspot.com/2016/07/integral-trump-or-center-cannot-hold.html#more">Elsewhere</a> I have gone into greater detail about the counterrevolution against modernity that McCloskey says has been raging at least since 1848 (I date it to the French Revolution). As I study this with ever greater intensity, it becomes clear that this resistance was always unavoidable, given the solipsism of first tier stages. Amber <i>has no choice</i> but to undermine orange, and until orange consolidates itself into a Kosmic groove deep enough to genuinely transcend, include, and integrate amber, orange too must resist amber. Perhaps in the longer term of history we (or a successor species) will come to see the necessity and efficacy of this natural memetic resistance; we are too enmeshed in it to do more than speculate.</p><p>But the deepening of orange is continuing apace even with everything that amber and Boomeritis green are throwing at it. The power and value of individualization is too evident globally to be destroyed. A compelling indicator of this truth is that for the past two hundred years all emigration has been from amber to orange societies, and never the reverse. Messy and messed up as Advanced Sector nations may be, precious few of their citizens ever emigrate to Somalia, Yemen, Laos, or Paraguay.</p><p><br /></p><p><i><b>The Challenge: Healthy Orange</b></i></p><p>Still, orange is far, far from as consolidated and stable as amber is—not surprising given that it is barely five hundred years old as a mass wave of consciousness. Global inertia is from amber to orange, and although the amber-Boomeritis alliance against it sometimes—as now—appears to be making headway, it is difficult to see it prevailing. The material benefits alone—not to mention the psychospiritual advantages, which are more difficult to quantify—will always be a more powerful draw than a return to the stagnant and ignorant world of premodernity. We’ve been to Paris and won’t return to the farm.</p><p>But the farm won’t quit trying to get us back, either by blandishments—such as offered by the greens with their eco-romanticisms—or by force—such as shoved down people’s throats by the reds with their socialist utopianism. </p><p>More difficult to see at first but certainly something we can effectively address is amber’s presence in each of us in orange. Its healthy expression shows up as the longing to belong, while its pathological expression shows up via unhealed childhood trauma that stymied our experience of belonging, of feeling safe in the world. The amber-orange war is raging in us individually, and it seems unlikely that we will deal with its societal dynamics without first getting a handle on its individual psychodynamics.</p><p>It was only at the turn of the 20th century that the systematic study of psychology (as opposed to the millennia-old esoteric study of the inner world) began to yield testable insights about how the mind and consciousness develop in the human organism. Freud and others recognized that vastness of the human subconscious, and their students began to explore the various facets of its mysteries.</p><p>Just before World War II Jean Piaget started his investigation of human cognitive development, and immediately after the war John Bowlby and his colleagues in England turned their attention to the psychodynamics of emotional development when they looked at what they eventually termed attachment. Several decades would pass before Alice Miller published her pioneering work on the impact of childhood emotional trauma on adult development, and in the 1970s Bessel van der Kolk started his investigation of the physiology of trauma. And in recent years the science of neuroplasticity has given us even more information about the role of the brain in the development of consciousness.</p><p>The cumulative impact of all these studies is to offer us both an insight into the persistence of amber psychodynamics that act to retard our fully inhabiting our individual autonomy, and the tools to address them. Ken Wilber started his work in The Spectrum of Consciousness by proposing a marriage of the insights of orange psychology with those of amber mysticism. This integration now shows us the way to fully occupy orange in our individual lives, the platform from which we can build authentic orange societies—and from which transcendence into the second tier can be launched. </p><p>This is the means by which orange can effectively transcend, include, and integrate amber. Indeed, orange rationality can find the way to integrate amber (and red) emotional states as partners in development. Out of this synthesis healthy green can eventually emerge and allow the Boomeritis dead-end embrace of postmodernism’s rejection of Reason in favor of Emotion to wither on the vine.</p><p>From an integral perspective, premodernity is not an enemy of modernity, although from amber’s perspective it is. From an integral perspective, every level of the spectrum of consciousness is vital and to be cherished, just as we treasure each stage of our individual lives. Each has a contribution to offer on the path to unity consciousness. </p><p>This perspective is enfolded in the mystical tradition of all the world’s religions, which aver that awareness of this can only result from a practice (and each has its own version of this) by which the devotee penetrates the misperception presented by the senses and the culture into the blinding clarity of the oneness of reality <i>as an embodied experience</i>. </p><p>These practices are designed, to use Wilberian terms, to shift one’s identity through ever-greater embrace to the whole Itself, to Spirit, so that the identity is now “I = Spirit.” This cannot occur in the first tier except in isolated instances, often supported by second tier institutions like ashrams or monasteries that are deliberately cut off from the surrounding culture so as to reduce its influence on the practitioners.</p><p>These tiny islands of advanced consciousness will continue, perhaps in slightly greater numbers and scope, as humanity as a whole struggles to emerge into a healthy orange expression. Perhaps the consciousness generated there, as the American mystic Thomas Merton (and others) asserted, is adequate to support the rest of the planet’s process.</p><p>In the daily practice of creating and sustaining an orange political economy, we integralites might want to re-examine the “progressive” agenda that transfers ever greater responsibility for self-creation from the individual to the state via various wealth transfer and institutional social programs. These, in the ostensible name of “helping people,” are in fact sapping the process of individuation by eliminating the difficulties whose surmounting are the essential elements the generation of the autonomous individual.</p><p>This belief that the state needs to take care of the individual is a fundamental feature of amber, where tribal identity prevents individuation in the name of tribal (or social) security. In “progressive” ideology this has now been translated into the idea that the interests of society as a whole can be used to sublimate the interests of each individual in the name of “the good of the whole.” And as in all amber cultures, determination of what is actually for the good of the whole is left to the kingly and priestly castes, now called “political leaders” and “experts.”</p><p>The general political response to the Wuhan COVID pandemic has been a display of amber authoritarianism, wherein the previously generally-accepted tenets of epidemiology have been overruled in the name of “saving lives.” In the US, Democrats have almost universally sought to impose authoritarian control over their states and localities without providing any epidemiological justification for their measures, while Republicans have been much more reluctant to do so. At the same time, most “news” media have similarly ignored “the science” in service of pushing fearful stories about “explosions” and “surges” of cases, obscuring fact from fiction and seeking to deprive individuals of the agency to make their own conclusions and choices.</p><p>The curious thing has been the relative passivity of the populations, fear being a fundamental driver of human emotion. Whether and how long this will last remains to be seen. President Trump may have lost his re-election in part because of his erratic and feckless response to the authoritarian cries of “lock ’em up.” In the UK, Boris Johnson has been even more erratic, loosening and tightening the lockdowns impulsively. It is ironic that Joe Biden, who made criticism of Mr. Trump’s COVID policies a centerpiece of his campaign, will inherit the mess that his fellow Democrats at the state level have made of the political economy without the slightest notion of the proper way to respond.</p><p><br /></p><p><b><i>"The Fault Lies Not in Our Stars but in Ourselves"</i></b></p><p>But to focus on individual political leaders too much is to lose sight of the forest in favor of a few unusual trees. The evolution of consciousness is something in which we all participate and to which we all contribute. The contours of our modern orange political economy require our political institutions and leaders to reflect us, however distortedly. Thus they can be a useful mirror into which we look to see our own collective subconscious desires reflected back to us. This, in turn, gives us the information necessary to develop public policies that promote the individuation project of modernity in the face of the amber-Boomeritis counterrevolution.</p><p>The Trump method was to apply a blunt “No” to the excesses of this attack on modernity without developing a constituency for the “Yes” of how to reinvigorate the institutions and policies necessary to strengthening it in the light of the dynamics of the emerging post-industrial political economy. The Johnson method is to find ways to appease the enemies of modernity by adopting their language in areas like climate policy that he must believe do not weaken his own commitment to orange. </p><p>While none of these approaches promises effective championing of the gifts of modernity on the threshold of postmodernity, they at least demonstrate the determination of masses of people to continue the project. What integralites can bring is a conscious claim of championship of these gifts and a focus on their benefits and value.</p><p>As the idealists at the <a href="https://www.culturalevolution.org/">Institute for Cultural Evolution</a> wring their hands over our nasty “hyperpolarization” and promote something they call the “post-progressive project,” the rest of us might find it more useful to continue to critique the “progressive” campaign to undermine modernity and use that analysis to promote public policies that strengthen the individuation project of this wave.</p><p>The gifts of orange modernity are many and of such benefit to the evolution of consciousness that even the amber-Boomeritis alliance will not be able to halt its development. Indeed, each leading edge tends to absorb the attacks upon into its own momentum. After all, the universal characteristic of first tier waves is its determination to survive. As Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in 1888, “<i>Aus der Kriegsschule des Lebens, was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker.</i>” (Out of the school of war of life, what does not kill me makes me stronger.)</p><p>And as Integral Theory postulates, the strength of orange is an all-quadrant characteristic. As we noted above, an over-looked contribution is in the lefthand quadrants, in the spiritual and psychological realms. The autonomous individual is psychospiritually stronger than the tribe. He is an evolutionary advance, and in spite of all of amber’s attempts to quash him, the prime directive itself sustains his development. </p><p>From that perspective it is entirely lawful that evolving humanity created a unique safe harbor where orange was free to work out its needs within a framework explicitly dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. The orange commitment to the individual’s natural right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as he decides for himself could easily have been strangled in its crib if it wasn’t secure from the amber domination of its mother continent. The bloody smothering of similar aspirations in the French Revolution is sober evidence of the fortunes of history.</p><p>Nowhere is this more characteristically stated than in the title of Ben Wattenberg’s great 1990 book about the United States, <i><a href="https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/louis-winnick/the-first-universal-nation-by-ben-j-wattenberg/">The First Universal Nation</a></i>. Not only is the United States the conscious product of the Scottish Enlightenment’s commitment to create a polity of and for sovereign individuals, it is one of the few places even today where people from every civilization across the globe live. The “beacon of liberty” has attracted people from every place and age, committed to the difficult work of forging a nation ever capable of a “new birth of freedom” as necessary, one whose “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”</p><p>This fact of history, that even today people in great numbers continue to attempt to come to the U. S., demonstrates the power and universality of orange’s improvement over amber. </p><p>This is the truth of the post-Trump world, that the struggle of orange to transcend, include, and integrate amber in the face of amber’s resistance will continue apace, with more twists and turns, detours and false starts, lessons to be learned and ignored, tragedies and triumphs. </p><p>The words with which Wilber concluded his essay four years ago are as apt now as they were then:</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p>Understanding this election—as well as similar events now occurring all over the world—as a manifestation of a self-correcting drive of evolution itself, as it routes around a broken leading edge green and attempts to restore the capacity of its leading edge to actually lead (while also seriously starting to give birth to the next higher leading edge of integral itself)—this gives us a glimmer of real hope in an otherwise desperately gloomy situation.</p><p>In the deepest parts of our own being, each of us is directly one with this evolutionary current, this Eros, this Spirit-in-action, radiant to infinity and luminous to eternity, radically full in its overflowing overabundance and excessive in its good graces, wildly crashing off the heavens and irrupting from the underworlds, and embracing each and all in its limitless love and care. And the only ones who should be allowed to work politically for a greater tomorrow—and who should thus work—and those who truly understand that it is not necessary to do so; who see the utter fullness of the Great Perfection in each and every moment of existence, and who nonetheless work to trimtab (or adjust through leadership) the manifestation of more and more and more of the Good and the True and the Beautiful, right here and right now in this gloriously manifest universe, moment to moment to ever-present moment, knowing full well that this entire world is nothing but the dream of an infinite Spirit, yet each and every one of us is directly this very Spirit itself, dreaming the world of our own amazement.</p><p>And we can try endlessly and tirelessly to fix this dream . . . or we can simply wake up.</p></blockquote>Marty Kellerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11592136716581562644noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3401106149239386272.post-85018993220583246342018-06-16T17:08:00.001-07:002019-06-17T16:53:48.097-07:00Mistaken IdentityEver since Ken Wilber inaugurated the Integral Institute to establish a formal platform for launching integral inquiries among both academic disciplines and entrepreneurial and business ventures, the rigor of his earlier work has dissipated and the value of the Integral Model has been watered down by many of his students and critics.<br />
<br />
We find a similar phenomenon among those attracted to the Beck & Cowan interpretation of Clare Graves’ work—although this could be a result of the fact that Graves did not elaborate upon or further develop his research as extensively as Wilber could.<br />
<br />
In particular, we have slammed hard up against the barrier separating first and second tier, and failing to make the Momentous Leap™ in any noticeable numbers, have collapsed back into the higher stages of First Tier.<br />
<br />
This is in large part because the Integral Model, by the very terms enunciated by Wilber in <i>Sex, Ecology, and Spirituality</i> and the unpublished follow-up insights in the so-called <i>Kosmic Karma</i> series found on his web site, cannot be fully internalized as a purely conceptual construct. It cannot be merely thought of; it is not ultimately an object of study, particularly in the modern sense. But because Wilber necessarily had to present it in prosaic terms, missing this critical perception is probably unavoidable.<br />
<br />
Wilber’s Integral Model is a framework for understanding our experience as humans in the unending unfolding of dimensional reality out of the supranaturnal, metaphysical Void which, as Wilber puts it in <i>No Boundary</i>, always already is. It is the attempt to apprehend via a specific injunction that which is dynamic and ever-changing. Thus it is not an academic endeavor but rather a faith walk seeking to embrace and identify with (as), through the amazing range of diagnostics available to humans, the totality of the Kosmos. Thus applying methods of critical analysis of an academic inquiry alone will entirely miss the mark.<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a>This faith walk may employ conceptual understanding as one of the many tools useful to the journey, but it cannot rely on it alone—even though the temptation to employ this single tool is unavoidable. But as Wilber demonstrated in the concluding chapter of <i>The Eye of Spirit</i>, most of us have to keep hammering away until we internalize the futility of the attempt, and give up. This could lead, as mystics in every tradition have averred, to a more immediate, direct knowing that bypasses the mental functions and reveals itself to our awareness intuitionally. This understanding enters through the Eye of Spirit, not the Eye of Mind.<br />
<br />
Most of us attracted to the integral inquiry do not have sufficient practice at seeing the activities and limits of our minds, and thus dwell in First Tier orange/green awareness while thinking (!) that we have entirely transcended the great barrier because our cognitive capacities have done so. By downplaying or ignoring lines of development we taken a detour from discovering what the Model implies. Since each of the five dimensions is essential to reaching the integral embrace, failure to incorporate any one of them automatically cancels the possibility of achieving it.<br />
<br />
Wilber allows that one may be “integrally informed” without having transcended into Second Tier: I may be able to see the way things might work integrally, but my identity—the key indicator of center of gravity of consciousness—is still in First Tier. But since identity is <i>the</i> driver of our movement along the spectrum of consciousness, we may be able to see integrally or holistically while remaining firmly in orange or green.<br />
<br />
One’s identity cannot make the Momentous Leap until one has done sufficient shadow work to uncover the hidden self-beliefs that permeate our individual (orange/green) identity and thereby inhibit a comprehensive assessment of our self-conception. We cannot transcend the individuated self-sense until we can see it as an object of our subjective awareness. And until we can uncover these subconscious self-beliefs, we have almost no capacity to heal the childhood traumas the sealed them into the darkness of unawareness where they reveal their power only through projection.<br />
<br />
The capacity to uncover and heal these is the key to growing into full individualized autonomy, <i>i.e</i>., to fully inhabit orange/green, has been developed in only a rare number of people to date—Wilber’s rather enthusiastic 5% assertions notwithstanding. Review of the “integral” output by various people claiming to offer an integral perspective does nothing to nullify this observation. This is not a knock but merely an observation.<br />
<br />
Once our center of gravity has transcended First Tier as a result of this work, we no longer identify as this particular body/mind; rather we identify as someone/thing much larger, <i>e.g</i>., as humanity as a whole. That does not mean we no longer see or experience our individuality, for it remains the vehicle by which the larger awareness acts. Remember: the evolutionary dynamic is <i>transcend--> include-->integrate</i>. We <i>include</i> awareness of the individual self-conception, but we no longer <i>identify</i> as this entity.<br />
<br />
Now instead we lean into being one with the humanity of every individual we encounter, an embrace that includes awareness of and appreciation for the group dynamics we humans generate as part of our social nature. This apprehension of “being one” is not a conceptual construct but a felt sense in the now integrating body/mind/soul. It is a knowing that cannot be comprehended by the Eye of the Body or of the Mind. Yet, as Wilber points out so masterfully in <i>Marriage of Sense and the Soul</i>, it can be verified by the Eye of Spirit via the three elements of the scientific method manifesting in Second Tier perspectives.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<br />
<b><i>Missing Integral Ingredients</i></b><br />
<br />
What I observe in most writings and discussions from people claiming to have their center of gravity in “integral” awareness—something rarely defined, by the way, or at least not universally agreed upon—is how far from an actual integral (I am using “integral” as a marker for Second Tier, i.e., transpersonal, consciousness) perspective we usually are. (See “<a href="http://aqalblog.blogspot.com/2015/12/what-is-integral.html">What Is Integral</a>” on the AQALBlog for a more thorough examination of this question.)<br />
<br />
What is missing almost universally is the awareness and acknowledgement of the individual self that is speaking, analyzing, opining. If I am not aware of the source of my own beliefs, judgements, and opinions, I cannot engage in an actual integral dialogue, for by leaving my own out I cannot incorporate all perspectives. That is because I do not see my perspective as one of many, and therefore I cannot locate it in the Integral Model. This is, of course, characteristic of First Tier stages of consciousness, the unexaminable assumption that mine is a perspective of absolute truth. None of these stages, even green, can distinguish and embrace the other stages as necessary and proper elements of the evolution of consciousness and of the Kosmos as it is.<br />
<br />
The emergent discontinuity that launches us into Second Tier is the novel capacity to see our own individual awareness, our own system of beliefs and self-concepts that characterized us at the earlier orange and green stages which are now transcended and become objects of our new subjective awareness.<br />
<br />
The hard truth is that, for the most part, those longing to understand ourselves as “integral” are in fact still mired in Boomeritis green. As Wilber so devastatingly points out in <i>Trump and the Post-Truth World</i>, the toxic postmodernist creed that perverted green just as it showed potential for becoming a mass emergent has aborted the greater possible expression of green that could have yielded yet a further discontinuity that would transcend and include orange. The Boomeritis variant of green, which neither transcends nor includes orange, is in fact a gussied-up version of amber hijacked by the postmodernists to serve their counterrevolution against modernity. Their deadly injection of nihilism and narcissism into the birthing of green has ensured that what could have been a powerful new wave of consciousness was strangled in its cradle, ensuring that green would not yet become the new leading edge of consciousness evolution.<br />
<br />
Until those of us yearning for teal become aware of this dynamic, we will continue to inadvertently (to put it charitably) serve the counterrevolution and thereby, ironically, subvert the possibility of mass evolution of consciousness into Second Tier, which Wilber asserts is the best antidote to our current mess. And while this may be true, I am unconvinced as I argue extensively <a href="http://aqalblog.blogspot.com/2016/12/transcend-and-exclude-postmodern-u-turn.html">here</a>. If postmodernism has thwarted green as the leading edge of evolution, that is in great part because orange has not yet become stable enough to serve as a platform for transcendence. The work is still the development of a healthy orange in individuals and the cultures that support us in significant enough numbers to support transcendence into green.<br />
<br />
I offer for consideration that an acid test for demonstrating our integral awareness is the capacity to account for the Donald Trump phenomenon. When we dismiss or disparage the President and the political expression he represents, we fail to speak from an integral frame—simple as that. The Integral Model seeks to include all phenomena without judgement, something that simply cannot be accomplished from any First Tier stage. Thus people’s analysis of Trump is a great marker of their center of gravity. Wilber’s <i>Trump and the Post-Truth World</i> offers an example of how an integral analysis of President Trump and our era works.<br />
<br />
This does not, obviously, require agreement with Mr. Trump or with the political currents that he is a manifestation of. But it does require a dispassionate awareness that accepts him as an authentic element of humanity’s moving through our <span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">evolution of</span> consciousness. It does require us to seek to understand our own opinions about him and, if we are feeling gut-level revulsion (or devotion, for that matter), to discern whether and what degree of projection may be involved. Failure to do this is neither good nor bad, but it is evidence of whether we have actually made the Momentous Leap.<br />
<br />
When we identify as humanity (at teal and higher), then all currents and permutations that we seven billion generate moment to moment belong to the picture without judgement. All the good, all the bad, all the ugly simply are, and Second Tier perspectives take this as given, for they are generated by a higher and more comprehensive identity than can be found in First Tier.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b><i>The Problem of the Left </i></b><br />
<br />
It seems, although I cannot prove this, that a significant number of individuals attracted to explicit notions of integral perspectives can be found on the political Left, among which I do not count myself. One giveaway is the persistent and unexamined reference to an integral “movement,” as if the evolution of consciousness were a mere political campaign. This may account, in part, for the determination of so many of us to see in this or that left-leaning politician the integral Mahdi, come to free us from our First Tier chains.<br />
<br />
Another giveaway is the persistent unwillingness to address the excrescences of postmodernism, and to face the fact that its initial expressions devised by mostly leftwing academics in France were explicitly part of the counterrevolution against modernity birthed by the Bolsheviks and their fellow-travelers in Europe. Postmodernism is a political movement, part of a two-century old campaign to quash individuality and the polities (specifically the United States) that support and encourage the emergence and self-conscious social and political organization of sovereign, self-actualized individuals.<br />
<br />
Even Ken Wilber, who bursts forth from time to time with fairly compelling and accurate denunciations of the mess bred by the postmodernists, fails to look clearly and dispassionately at the political agenda that drove invention and propagation of the madness in the first place. This permits him to adopt leftist shibboleths like their agenda on climate change, which in turn undermines the clarity of his analysis of and prescriptions for addressing the sterility of Boomeritis green in its pretense as the “leading edge of consciousness evolution.”<br />
<br />
Michael Walsh has authored two books that are essential to appreciating the evil mess that would eventually birth postmodernism concocted first by the likes of Antonio Gramsci and György Lukács, and shortly thereafter by Max Horkheimer, Felix Weil, Theodore Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and the others associated with “Critical Theory” invented at the Frankfurt School starting in the 1930s. First in <i>The Devil’s Pleasure Palace</i> (2015) and then in <i>The Fiery Angel</i> (2018), Walsh uses the lens of the great (and often obscure) works of Western art that so precisely reveal to us our actual human condition to examine the leftist assault on Western civilization and its production of orange modern consciousness, culture, and social capital.<br />
<br />
Walsh maintains that a central distinction of Western civilization from its siblings around the globe is its willingness to embrace rather than suppress the ambiguity of being human. The earliest amber cultures arising in the major cradles of civilization developed the rigid social and spiritual order of the tribal hierarchy to support their survival. But starting with the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers, the School of Athens of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and the great tragedians of 5th century BC Greece, the seeds of what became modern orange consciousness were planted.<br />
<br />
For the next several millennia, these seeds slowly yielded a new perspective about humanity which not only embraced but sought to profit from the way humans uniquely comprised the natures of both devils and angels. This perspective, greatly nourished by the rise of Christianity, would clash with the amber notion of the depravity of our nature, which required that the gods and their human representatives on earth keep a firm grip on society, lest our degeneracy lead to our demise. Eventually as orange emerged, this peculiarly amber assumption would evolve into an embrace of the utopian possibility, which would also require control by the gods and their appointees.<br />
<br />
Other cultures, principally Oriental and Islamic, similarly presumed a rigid social and spiritual hierarchy comprising corrupt humans. These continue to this day to have their collective center of consciousness in the amber, mythic/membership stage.<br />
<br />
From the works of the Greek philosophers, dramatists, and epic poets down to the art of great 20th century composers, painters, and poets, Walsh shows the consistent themes of what we eventually called humanism that underwrote the emergence of modernity as a mass expression in the sixteenth century. It was this civilization, and this one alone, that gave birth to orange, green, and the possibility of teal and the transpersonal.<br />
<br />
And, tragically but lawfully, as soon as orange began to create social, political, and economic institutions to encourage this trend toward individual dignity transcending tribalism, amber began its great and ongoing counterrevolution, starting explicitly in the French Revolution and continuing to this day in postmodern leftist parties and platforms. It was no accident that utopian currents in the West have naively allied with the West’s long-term Islamic adversary. Islamic, and particularly Arab, culture has resistance to modernity built into its faith tradition, which demands that the ummah follow the prescriptions of the Quran in order to remain in the good graces of Allah. And so the postmoderns of the <i>dar al-Harb</i> subconsciously and catastrophically find fellow travelers in the <i>dar al-Islam</i>. (For a more detailed analysis of Islam’s imperviousness to modernity, see my essay “<a href="http://aqalblog.blogspot.com/2015/03/comments-on-steve-mcintoshs-paper-on.html">Comments on Steve McIntosh's Paper on Modernizing Islam</a>.”)<br />
<br />
(Many integral writers, Wilber included, fail miserably to accurately comprehend conservative and right-wing currents in the U. S., often conflating them with those similarly labeled in Europe. Although outside the scope of this essay, it is important to point out that they confuse conservative-leaning orange with amber. Conservatives in the U. S. are simply not royalists or aristocrats yearning for some American version of a Bourbon or Stuart restoration; they are rule-of-law individualist supportive of what they view as the original faith of the Founders.)<br />
<br />
Walsh lays out the evidence and states not only his vigorous defense of Western civilization, but also the somber warning that the counterrevolution could prevail, and that amber could indeed subdue orange. This would, in his view, lead to a clash between Islamic forces and the Boomeritis utopians in the West which the West would now be unprepared to win. Some, like Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoĝan recently did, understanding history much better than most of us in the West, speak of a new “<a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5825383/Erdogan-denounces-Austrian-decision-close-mosques.html">war between the cross and the crescent</a>.” Unlike the Western utopians, they understand that the long-simmering clash of civilizations between Christian Europe and Muslim Asia and Africa, as old as the Crusades, is still as spirited today as it was when Pope Urban II organized the First Crusade in 1095.<br />
<br />
The postmodern Left, willfully ignorant of historical reality—amber is unaware of the four quadrants—thus casually consigns Islam and its adherents to the invented political category of “the oppressed,” thereby inadvertently becoming allies of a political and cultural expression otherwise dedicated to wiping out the values that the Left ostensibly champions. A return to a pre-Westphalian imperial order would be slow-motion suicide which, as Wilber points out in <i>Trump</i>, is what we are left with when nihilism and narcissism unite.<br />
<br />
Those in the integral inquiry should be able to see this, and, if we disagree with Walsh’s argument, should be able to develop an integral response that honors the hypothesis and refutes it from an integral, <i>aka</i> more inclusive, perspective.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<br />
<b><i>Repeat after Me: Healthy Orange is Key</i></b><br />
<br />
We can await such responses but I wouldn’t hold my breath. As I note above, levels or stages of consciousness are organized around identity: who am I? The answer to that question yields the world that each particular identity sees; these are the stages, and they are distinct because the identity claimed in each stage is distinct.<br />
<br />
As Jesus observes in Matthew 7:16, “you shall know them by their fruits.” Here he is speaking of “false prophets,” who “come to [us] in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.” So too with the stages of consciousness: we can know them by the world they see and proclaim.<br />
<br />
First Tier identity moves from its earliest stages into tribal (“I am my tribe”) and then into individual (“I am this particular bodymind”). Second tier is called transpersonal because here identity transcends “this particular bodymind” and expresses in and as a universal (“I am humanity”). Almost none of us has adopted this transpersonal identity, and thus almost none of us has a truly integral center of gravity.<br />
<br />
But the possibility of such an emergence was created only in the West, and nowhere else on the planet. Not only in our willingness to embrace the ambiguous nature of humanity with our propensity to crawl in the dirt with the worms and soar into the heavens with the angels, but in our liberation of the individual to act freely across these possibilities in defiance of the tribal order.<br />
<br />
In <i>The Fiery Angel</i>, Walsh offers this concluding observation regarding this state of affairs:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The history of our art reveals, and constantly revisits, the norms of Western culture. But no matter how “transgressive” we might wish to be, the fundamental things apply: the relationship of mankind to God; the physical and spiritual bond between men and women, and its absolute primacy in the world of human creation; and the need for heroes. Iconoclasm comes and goes, often literally, but it must be seen as an aberration, the yeast in the ferment of history, if we are to have faith in our culture, our civilization, and our future; it cannot be the norm. Likewise with revolutionaries, manqué and otherwise. We must learn to distinguish between those who are the fulfillment of Western foundational principles, such as the men who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution, whose revolution was against their own, and our, imperfection; and those whose transient “truths” have ended up, like Marx himself, on the ash heap of history, no matter how many icons they smash along the way to the boneyard.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
History, therefore, is neither an arc nor a plot. Neither “his story” nor “her story.” It is our story.</blockquote>
He then presents the declamation of the Women of Athens in the concluding scene of Aeschylus’ <i>Oresteia</i>, where “the trilogy ends on a pre-Christian note of forgiveness, of a world restored, with the transformation of the Furies into the Eumenides.”<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
All the tropes of Western civilization are there, present at its creation. In 458 BC: the childless children of the night (what music they make), the bravery in the face of dread and danger, the healing power of justice and forgiveness, and, above all, the light of the sacred flame, borne by the eternal feminine, to illuminate the conflict between reason and unreason that is Man’s endless and unwavering lot—to provide for us a beacon, and inspiration, and a goal.</blockquote>
In <i>Trump and the Post-Truth World</i>, Wilber seeks to remedy the miserable impotence of postmodernist Boomeritis green as the “leading edge” of consciousness evolution by a feckless exhortation to a mass emergence of teal. This, alas, is also edging close to utopian thinking.<br />
<br />
How many times can I say it? Ain’t gonna happen, at least until such time as orange becomes stabilized enough to permit mass transcendence.<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>The authentic healthy self-actualized individual is the fulcrum of
evolution.</i> Only an integrated and
autonomous individual self can be transcended; only an integrated and
autonomous individual self can be ally with others to develop authentic
self-government to liberate the soul. A mere 20% of us live in cultures more or less
centered in orange, and most of those have both premodern and postmodernist
termites gnawing away at their foundations.
Until orange wakes up and reclaims its heritage and drive, the collapse
that Wilber addresses may just be permanent.
Amber will reassume its earlier prominence, and with that will come the
horrible collapse of standards of living, life expectancy, male and female
equality, health, and all the other gifts of modernity.</div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
It is problematic that the current
state of integral dialogue does not recognize that, for the most part, we
remain in First Tier. The lack of genuine
integral analysis, along with the tendency of too many in the integral inquiry
to fail to recognize the truly toxic effects of postmodernism, results in many
integralites inadvertently participating in postmodernism's war on orange and
thus on transcendence. Surely we seek
the integral to follow the better angels of our nature by working toward,
rather than against, the Momentous Leap.
This means promoting healthy orange within ourselves and our societies,
fending off all its enemies for the sake of ever greater depth.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
Michael Walsh gets the last word:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
That this [the <i>Oresteia</i>] comes at the very beginning of Western civilization, not its end, ought to tell us something. The battle fair for Pallas’ town continues. We have our guides, if only we will heed them.</blockquote>
<br />Marty Kellerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11592136716581562644noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3401106149239386272.post-2009086534992187182017-02-04T16:45:00.004-08:002017-02-04T16:57:24.861-08:00Green’s Failure as “the Leading Edge”: Some Comments on Wilber’s “Trump and a Post-Truth World”I’m happy to welcome Ken Wilber back to the resistance to the postmodernist, Boomeritis green worldview that has generated such nasty and revolting behavior among so many otherwise decent and civilized people in the Advanced Sector.<br />
<br />
In his recently published “<a href="https://integrallife.com/trump-post-truth-world/">Trump and a Post-Truth World</a>,” Wilber surgically dissects the contradictions, pomposities, and insecurities that riddle almost every Boomeritis green analysis of and policy prescription for today’s lawfully chaotic world.<br />
<br />
This is particularly welcome as it seemed that, with his post-Wyatt Earp emphases on “integral spirituality” and “the fourth turning,” he had withdrawn his sharp insights into what his own model revealed about our political economy, thereby leaving the field of integral political analysis to the very Boomeritis green perspectives he knows and now has pronounced to be a spiritual and cultural dead end.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
What virtually all of the above [Trump] voters had in common was <i>ressentiment</i>—they resented the cultural elite, whether in government or universities or “on the coasts,” and they wanted, if “revenge” is the wrong word, it’s not far off. But there was, I am suggesting, another and very strong, hidden current in all of this, and that was the antagonistic reaction and turning away evidenced by a leading-edge that had gone deeply sour and dysfunctional, and wasn’t even serving the 25 percent of the population that were themselves at green. The deeply self-contradictory nature of “there-is-no-truth” green had collapsed the very leading-edge of evolution itself, had jammed it, had derailed it, and in a bruised, confused, but inherently wisdom-driven series of moves, evolution was backing up, regrouping, and looking for ways to move forward. This included activating an amber-ethnocentric wave that had always been present and very powerful, but that had, for the most part, been denied direct control of society starting around a century or so ago (as orange and then green stepped in).</blockquote>
As I’ll indicate below, while I think much in his analysis of the amber and orange wave is weak or incomplete, his critique of the Boomeritis variant of green is dead-on, including his recapitulation of a potentially strong and vibrant “healthy”—or, as I prefer, “mature”—version of the actual and necessary postmodern green which is struggling to survive suffocation by the Boomeritis believers.<br />
<br />
<i><b><br />Diagnosing the Postmodernist Madness</b></i><br />
<br />
Wilber, when he’s set his mind to it, has been consistent in his critique of this very immature version of green since the 1995 publication of <i>Sex, Ecology, and Spirituality</i>, and emphatically in the 1997 release of <i>The Eye of Spirit: An Integral Vision for a World Gone Slightly Mad</i>. <br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a>“Slightly” mad?<br />
<br />
He was savagely attacked for what he wrote in <i>Eye</i> by, of course, the very folks who had adopted the Boomeritis assumptions embedded in the meanderings of the (mostly) French postmodernist “thinkers,” who were actually leftists championing the ongoing counterrevolution against the orange, modern, individual, rational world that had the audacity to jettison the tribe and, like Prometheus, declare independence from the gods.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
If there was one line that summarized the gist of virtually all postmodern writers (Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Bourdieu, Lacan, de Man, Fish, etc.) is that “there is no truth.” Truth, rather, was a cultural construction, and what anybody actually called “truth” was simply what some culture somewhere had managed to convince its members was truth—but there is no actually existing, given, real thing called “truth” that is simply sitting around and awaiting discovery, any more than there is a single universally correct hem length which it is clothes designers’ job to discover.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
So it ended up that for postmodernists, all knowledge is culturally bound; there is no universally valid perspective; therefore all knowledge is based on a mere interpretation announced from a privileged (therefore oppressive) perspective; knowledge is not given but is constructed (created, built, fabricated); there is nothing but history, and therefore what any culture takes as “true” today will dramatically shift tomorrow; there is no universal moral framework—what’s true for you is true for you, and what’s true for me is true for me—and neither of those claims can be challenged on any grounds that do not amount to oppression; the same is true for value: no value is superior to another (another version of egalitarianism); and if any truth or value is claimed to be universal, or claimed to be true and valuable for all, the claim is actually nothing but disguised power, attempting to force all people everywhere to adopt the same truth and values of the promoter (with the ultimate aim of enslavement and oppression); it is therefore the job of every individual today to fight all of the authoritarian truths handed to them from yesterday and to be totally, radically autonomous (as well as not entertain any truths themselves that could or should be forced on anybody else, allowing everybody their own radical autonomy as well—in short, to not entertain anything called “truth” at all, which now was seen as always being a power-grab). You simply deconstruct every single truth and value you find (which, again, usually slid into nihilism and its tag-team member from postmodern hell, narcissism). In short, the aperspectival madness of “there is no truth” left nothing but nihilism and narcissism as motivating forces.</blockquote>
Unfortunately, Wilber spends little time examining the particular historical circumstances in which this poisonous belief system arose, and so much of the analysis he offers is flawed. Boomeritis green and postmodernism did not arise in a vacuum. Without the particulars of history it is difficult to truly appreciate the depth to which we have sunk ourselves following this dead end journey, much less discover a reasonable path to transcendence.<br />
<br />
The first expressions of green arose on the crest of the wave of the best modernity had to offer—and its Boomeritis variant promptly rejected it in an act of narcissistic hubris as astonishing as any that Sophocles or Euripides explored in their amber-era dramas. Modernity was characterized by the rise of individual consciousness, which in turn unleashed the four quadrants with their championing of the scientific method and entrepreneurial creativity. It had also, as Wilber again points out with devastating accuracy, generated a higher moral order that for the first time could revile slavery and the discounting of women as equally human as men. <br />
<br />
It is that higher moral order that made it possible for humans to create cultures and societies dedicated to the principle that all are created equal, endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And, as the American founders knew well, a new civic order had to be created, implanted, and deepened among the predominant amber world that would guarantee the deepening and success of this radical new insight. <br />
<br />
“A republic, if you can keep it,” Ben Franklin reputedly said in response to an inquiry about the work of the Philadelphia convention in 1787.<br />
<br />
As optimistically as the best of us in orange might see it—and in the intervening 230 years modernity has generated an unprecedented exponential increase in human social capital—we have nonetheless been engaged in a titanic struggle by those committed to “keeping it” to bring along those determined to undermine and discard it. As Franklin’s comment squarely implied, the outcome was never—and still is not—predetermined.<br />
<br />
<br />
<i><b>Modernity's Failures Birthed Green's </b></i><br />
<br />
I have chronicled at length the nature of amber’s counterrevolution against modernity, and the devious role that Boomeritis green has played as an enthusiastic ally equally committed to the demise of orange. All of this is suggested by Wilber’s accurate observation of the self-involved nature of first tier levels: each cannot believe other than that its perspective is the only valid one.<br />
<br />
Further, the entire evolutionary struggle is complicated by the very incomplete state of the maturing of orange—we are far, far from fulfilling its promise as a basis significant enough to form a platform for emergence of a mature green. This is why so many modernists are susceptible to falling for Alinskyite attacks against them: they haven’t developed the self-confidence of the authentic self-actualized human being. They secretly fear that what the Boomeritis group say about them is actually true, that they are greedy, sexist, racist, homophobic, etc., and that these, far from being universal characteristics of all humans in first tier, are the specific products of modernity.<br />
<br />
They could not perceive that Boomeritis green, being an even less mature expression of its possibility than orange is, inherited orange’s own immaturities and simply (if unconsciously) reflected them back. Rather than taking up the challenge, most of us in orange succumbed to our own flatland tendencies and fell to the temptation—impossible for the prepersonal and personal stages to avoid—to simply engage in a new round of the first tier food fight.<br />
<br />
But this is also why green, equally non-self reflective, has yet to solve its Boomeritis problem.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The catch-22 here was that postmodernism itself did not actually believe a single one of those ideas. That is, the postmodernists themselves violated their own tenets constantly in their own writing, and they did so consistently and often. Critics (from Jürgen Habermas to Karl Otto-Apel to Charles Taylor) would soon jump all over them for committing the so-called “performative contradiction,” which is a major self-contradiction because you yourself are doing what you say either cannot or should not be done. For postmodernists, all knowledge is non-universal, contextual, constructivist, interpretive—found only in a given culture, at a given historical time, in a particular geopolitical location. Unfortunately, for the postmodernists, every one of its summary statements given in the previous paragraph was aggressively maintained to be true for all people, in all places, at all times—no exceptions. Their entire theory itself is a very Big Picture about why all Big Pictures are wrong, a very extensive metanarrative about why all metanarratives are oppressive. They most definitely and strongly believe that it is universally true that there is no universal truth. They believe all knowledge is context bound except for that knowledge, which is always and everywhere trans-contextually true. They believe all knowledge is interpretive, except for theirs, which is solidly given and accurately describes conditions everywhere. They believe their view itself is utterly superior in a world where they also believe absolutely nothing is superior. Oops.</blockquote>
Oops, indeed! <br />
<br />
And this slurry of sterile mythological cant has sloshed around in our Advanced Sector cultures for four decades now, fueled first by the blind allegiance of European communists and the American New Left to the Soviets, Maoists, liberation theologists, and class ideologists, and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, to the Gramscian notions of “multiculturalism,” “social justice,” and other half-baked beliefs incubated in the academy (birthed by the Frankfurt School) to be added to its anti-capitalist ideology.<br />
<br />
All of this got to ride along with the emerging postmodern Information Age political economy that began to emerge during the 1980s, which began to spread increasing economic, cultural, and then political disruption throughout the post-World War II institutions designed to serve the modern industrial era that lasted, as it turns out, barely half a century. <br />
<br />
So we have arrived, as Wilber asserts, at a smashing, spectacular—and utterly predictable—dead end.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
And thus postmodernism as a widespread leading-edge viewpoint slid into its extreme forms (e.g., not just that all knowledge is context-bound, but that all knowledge is nothing but shifting contexts; or not just that all knowledge is co-created with the knower and various intrinsic, subsisting features of the known, but that all knowledge is nothing but a fabricated social construction driven only by power). When not just that all individuals have the right to choose their own values (as long as they don’t harm others), but that hence there is nothing universal (or held-in-common) by any values at all, leads straight to axiological nihilism—there are no believable, real values anywhere. And when all truth is a cultural fiction, then there simply is no truth at all—epistemic and ontic nihilism. And when there are no binding moral norms anywhere, there’s only normative nihilism. Nihilism upon nihilism upon nihilism—“there was no depth anywhere, only surface, surface, surface.” And finally, when there are no binding guidelines for individual behavior, the individual has only his or her own self-promoting wants and desires to answer to—in short, narcissism. And that is why the most influential postmodern elites ended up embracing, explicitly or implicitly, that tag-team from postmodern hell: nihilism and narcissism—in short, aperspectival madness. The culture of post-truth.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
. . . <i>Nihilism and narcissism are not traits that any leading-edge can actually operate with</i>. And thus, if it’s infected with them, it indeed simply ceases to functionally operate. Seeped in aperspectival madness, it stalls, and then begins a series of regressive moves, shifting back to a time and configuration when it was essentially operating adequately as a true leading-edge. And this regression is one of the primary factors we see now operating worldwide. And the primary and central cause of all of this is a failure of the green leading-edge to be able to lead at all. Nihilism and narcissism brings evolution to a traffic-jam halt. This is a self-regulating and necessary move, as the evolutionary current itself steps back, reassess, and reconfigures, a move that often includes various degrees of temporary regression, or retracing its footsteps to find the point of beginning collapse and then reconfigure from there. [Italics in the original.]</blockquote>
And so, through almost sixty pages of devastatingly concise analysis, Wilber throws out what I believe is an unattainable challenge: he avers that those with their center of gravity in Boomeritis green must admit defeat and come over to the right side of green. They “must” take on “the self-correction that evolution is looking for.”<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The leading-edge cannot lead if it despises those whom it is supposed to lead. It cannot go forward one more step if it has no idea of what a true “forward” means (which it doesn’t if it has no belief in “truth” itself). It cannot move into a greater tomorrow if it denies “greater” and “lesser” (growth holarchies) altogether, and instead simply sees all values as absolutely equal (which we saw it doesn’t really believe anyway, because it definitely believes its values are superior—what it needs to understand is that the capacity to embrace its green values is itself the product of several stages of development or a growth holarchy, and hence —even if it just wants to see more green get produced—then it categorically must get behind that genealogy or growth holarchy as a truly valid—and “true”—way to move forward in a pluralistic postmodern world).</blockquote>
But in truth, this is teal (or higher) speaking to Boomeritis green, which is incapable of hearing this as anything but babble. It’s a first tier wave, for Pete’s sake; it alone is correct, and it certainly isn’t about to heed the words of some <i>soi-disant</i> pandit criticizing its denizens so hurtfully even if he does live in Boulder.<br />
<br />
<br />
<i><b>Green Requires Mature Orange</b></i><br />
<br />
Wilber always was optimistic with his numbers and with evidence of the world conforming to his beliefs; after all, he’s human like the rest of us. This seeing the integral glass as half-full leads to assertions not particularly backed up by compelling evidence:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Given that green is the present (ersatz) leading-edge, with some 25 percent of the population, its fairly large numbers make it at least a possible candidate for making this change itself, given that it is now widely self-conscious that something is very, very wrong with what it has been doing (and Trump’s election has cemented this suspicion—for every green that simply blames and hates Trump, another green starts to ask what it has itself done to help bring this about). The realization is slowly dawning that elite urban green, not just ethnocentric rural amber, drove Trump into office (a dynamic virtually nobody saw, hence the shock everywhere at Trump’s election—and a dynamic that green has a profoundly difficult time understanding, or rather, admitting).</blockquote>
Given the well-organized and publicized temper tantrums thrown by the opposition about everything the President is doing, it’s not likely that we’re going to see a mass outbreak of responsibility from “the elite urban green” for driving “Trump into office.” More likely anyone urging a mature self-reflection on this possibility will be hounded into silence by the harpies of the new nihilism.<br />
<br />
No, too many people have identified with the tribe of Boomeritis green; like all those with amber perspectives they are scared to death that the demands of individual autonomy will kill off their tribe, which is the source of their security and belonging.<br />
<br />
Don’t get me wrong; if Ken or his friends at the Integral Institute want to set up revival tents in Central Park or Golden Gate Park and preach redemption to the Boomers of urban America, I’m in.<br />
<br />
But even Wilber knows it doesn’t, alas, work this way.<br />
<br />
So what’s the alternative? Why, he suggest, if maturing green won’t work, join the integral bandwagon! <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The other possibility that would work to help the present self-correcting dynamic of evolution actually get some traction would be to introduce not a healthy green (although that would always help), but to directly introduce a turquoise integral-stage leading-edge. This will happen, come what may, at some future point. But there is no reason some aspects of it cannot start to take hold now. The reason this would be so effective is that while green can push itself and strive to be more open, understanding, and compassionate toward all previous levels (which now exist as stations of life in society), the integral stage does this automatically, inherently, and in a much deeper, more authentic fashion. We saw that the integral stage is the first developmental stage in all of history that feels that every previous stage has a great deal of importance and significance. It does not necessarily agree with them, but it fully accepts and embraces them (though not their limitations)—if nothing else, each previous stage is indeed a stage in an overall human development, and no stage can be skipped or bypassed. Loathing previous stages is deeply, deeply suicidal. The integral stage thinks that each previous stage is important, while each previous stage itself thinks that only it is important.</blockquote>
All of this is very nice, indeed, but highly speculative at best. Wilber admits as much:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
But the stunningly far-reaching effects of a truly integral leading-edge is something that we of today can barely fathom—and for the simple reason that humanity has never, at any point, had anything like this in its entire history. Never have we had a leading-edge that truly embraced and included every previous stage. We have no precedents for this whatsoever; we have no idea what this might be like. It is so dramatically different than any previous situation that it almost falls into the category of science fiction.</blockquote>
Even though “we can barely fathom this,” he then goes on to assert that “[w]e already have around 5 percent that is already at integral, and it might reach 10 percent within a decade or two.” This is surely mistaken. He doesn’t say five percent of what population group; if it’s the Advanced Sector comprising the US, Canada, western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, then you’re talking about roughly fifty million people. Really? Fifty million of us have made the momentous leap and now have our center of gravity in second tier? <br />
<br />
Maybe he meant just the United States. Five percent of us comprise sixteen million, or twelve million if we just include adults. Again, really? Just where are these teeming millions, and why hasn’t their impact been more decisive?<br />
<br />
No, this is all at best an optimistic belief. I dare say the actual number is far under a million globally.<br />
<br />
Wilber once said—although he fails to revisit this in this essay—that the central task of evolution today is the maturing of orange. No higher waves can mature while standing upon this still-firming foundation. Orange has given us the fulcrum of evolution: the self-actualized, authentic individual; now our challenge is to encourage the development of a critical mass of these. <br />
<br />
Arthur Young, in his brilliant investigation of the evolution of consciousness <i>The Reflexive Universe </i>(published in 1976, the year before release of<i> The Spectrum of Consciousness</i>), argues that individuation is the fulcrum, or “turn,” upon which the trajectory of Kosmic evolution stands. I agree.<br />
<br />
In hypothesizing about “the stages through which man as an individual monad evolves,” Young asserts that individuation involves “a combination of all his human faculties: intelligence, emotion, intuition, will, and, above all, <i>integration of all his talents into a single whole</i>” [italics added]. <br />
<br />
Young’s description of the levels of consciousness as they have unfolded to the present day parallels Wilber’s; he is quite clear on the distinction between amber and orange, and is quite insistent on appreciating mature orange as the only fulcrum from which transcendence into the transpersonal can possibly proceed.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
It is often insisted that spiritual growth can forego this worldly competence [i.e., of mature self-autonomy], a position to which religious persons incline, but I would urge that however noble the surrender of personality, like the sacrifice of worldly goods, this sacrifice can only be authentic after personality has been fully achieved.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
In other words, I insist that merging into a superorganism [i.e., the momentous leap], if at all, can occur only after the individuation has been completed. For just as the third substage [amber] sees the separation of the self from the group, so the fifth substage [teal] would see the end of individuation and reunion of the self with the group, bringing to it the value learned from the experience it gained as an individual.</blockquote>
The impact of orange emergence on the trajectory of evolution is unmistakable, but so too is the evidence of how far we have to go to the point where the majority of us in orange have truly developed such “integration of all our talents into a single whole” that we at once can see and embrace ourselves as truly autonomous and, having fully occupied it, feel free, if not compelled, to leave this stage behind.<br />
<br />
Although the Advanced Sector as a whole has its center of gravity in orange, that orange still requires a lot more deepening before it achieves the maturity that amber has reached. We are, most of us, still bedeviled by separation and other childhood traumas that, festering in our subconscious, prevent us from mature autonomy. The outward signs of this inward conflict are everywhere, reflected in a myriad of additive behaviors, fiscal and ecological deficits, and a compulsion to over-dramatize events personal and public. But most telling is the increasing absence of logic and reason in our choices and relationships. It’s as if our entire lives resemble a typical Drudge Report.<br />
<br />
Much of this, of course, is the result of the disastrous adoption by Boomeritis green of the toxic memes of leftwing postmodernism; but that was only possible because of the incomplete development of orange.<br />
<br />
So if Boomeritis green was the leading edge and it has now collapsed upon itself, we are back to orange, my friends, and the possibility of green. What percentage of us have even achieved a mature, post-Boomeritis green? I’ll bet that’s not even 5%.<br />
<br />
The great American author and mystic Jacob Needleman captures succinctly the condition of orange and green in the introduction to his latest book, <i>I Am Not I</i> (2016). The book discusses the deepest questions of consciousness and identity. Not long after he began his career as a professor of philosophy, Needleman “discovered there exists in many people a yearning for metaphysical thought, for ideas about reality and human life that bring the hope of discovering a great purpose in the universe and, correspondingly, in one’s own given life.”<br />
<br />
Yet how people explored these great questions was impaired by the shallowness of the culture; matters of “ultimate meaning and purpose” are<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
questions that the current scientific worldview delegitimizes through its materialist standards of logic and evidence. It troubled me to see how so many contemporary explanations of higher human faculties—love, art, religious feeling, and even scientific thought itself—reduced these faculties to mechanically “evolved” automatisms, serving such goals as meaningless physical survival and meaningless physical or egotistical pleasure. It troubled me to see the dominance of toxic ideas and concepts that offer no hope for the attainment of the transcendence that is the unique possibility written into the very essence of human consciousness. Such toxic ideas and the worldview they engender cannot help but have a dark effect on the aspirations and morals of entire peoples, whether consciously or unconsciously.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I was especially concerned about how this situation plays out in the education and development of the younger generation of men and women, as represented by the students at the university. They come to my classes immersed in habits of thought and explanation that flatten both their perception of the world and their sense of identity. It is so even when they show up already intensely interested in philosophical questions, or great works of art and literature, or the astonishing discoveries of modern science. . . . Always, in almost all of these young men and women, their entrenched standards of thought and understanding, shaped by a toxic tangle of ideas about the universe, human nature, and Great Nature itself, have locked their minds in an airless reality devoid of intrinsic meaning and purpose.</blockquote>
So we have arrived here, where our mass media reflecting our collective psychospiritual impoverishment demonstrate on an hourly basis that “airless reality devoid of intrinsic meaning and purpose.” We flock to social media, those vessels of shallowness and channels of our id, to demonstrate this “toxic tangle of ideas about the universe.” We shout at one another in an ever-increasing cacophony that effectively hides from ourselves and each other the universal truth that all we really want is to be loved.<br />
<br />
This Boomeritis nightmare was gestated in the immaturities of orange, especially those that desiccated “explanations of higher human faculties—love, art, religious feeling, and even scientific thought itself” into a mechanistic flatland. <br />
<br />
<br />
<i><b>What Is to Be Done?</b></i><br />
<br />
Integralites might just want to acknowledge the mundane truth that orange still needs a lot of work and that, as a <i>mass</i> expression, it is still the leading edge. Yes, yes, there are of course sturdy shoots of green and possibly even teal popping up here and there among various individuals, but the inescapable fact that Donald Trump’s election was a result, among other things, of the Boomeritis dead end brings us integralites right back to orange. <br />
<br />
Strengthening and maturing orange is now, however, a tougher challenge than it was forty years ago, thanks to the postmodern long march through our cultural and political institutions initiated by the New Left and its takeover of the American academy and the Democratic Party in the early 70s. The orange cultural norm of personal responsibility has been severely vitiated by the postmodernist self-esteem, social justice, and anti-religion tropes. Not for nothing do conservative figures ridicule “snowflakes,” “trigger warnings,” and “safe spaces” on our campuses. It has had the desired effect of making the central feature of orange—self-actualization and the discipline it requires—a merely partisan assertion. The hollowing out of reasoned debate and the politicization of science for partisan ends is a further strike against the institutions central to the nurturing of a culture of healthy individuation. <br />
<br />
I suggest that, in the chaos of the collapse we all have participated in, we integralites owe it to the health of the Spiral to engage in serious dialogue about how to support or devise cultural, political, and economic institutions that encourage the re-engagement of the self-actualization that is, as Maslow pointed out, an intrinsic necessity for the human who has his or her junior needs permanently satisfied.<br />
<br />
We cannot skip stages. Until orange evolves to its fullest potential, mass emergence of the next levels of consciousness will remain beyond our realization.Marty Kellerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11592136716581562644noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3401106149239386272.post-87791870673194719042017-01-12T12:13:00.001-08:002017-01-12T12:16:51.507-08:00The Trumpet Shall Sound<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Behold, I tell you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.</i></div>
<div style="text-align: right;">
—I Corinthians 15:52</div>
<br />
Integralites have spilled gallons of ink (literally and figuratively) on the Donald Trump phenomenon; I am no exception (although my spillage is perhaps somewhat more modest in quantity). Last summer I penned “<a href="http://aqalblog.blogspot.com/2016/07/integral-trump-or-center-cannot-hold.html">Integral Trump, or the Center Cannot Hold</a>” in an attempt to apply an integral lens to this weird, unsettling, and unexpected dynamic. At the time I was less interested in Mr. Trump the human being and more in both what he had tapped into in the United States and how that fit into an obvious global dynamic that includes the election of Narendra Modi as Indian prime minister, the depredations of ISIL and Bashar al-Assad, Brexit, the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, the reconsolidation of dictatorships in Russia and China, and other political disruptions. Further, I was and am most interested in answering the question, what then must we (integralites) do?<br />
<br />
Additionally, I have been skeptical about attempts to “colorize” political leaders, starting with Ken Wilber’s boasts that Al Gore and Bill Clinton were reading his works and leading up to current integralite labeling of people like Angela Merkel, Barack Obama, or Bernie Sanders as “integral leaders.” It is unclear to me how, without a rigorous analysis of our own wishes and beliefs, we can avoid projecting onto folks like these our own worldviews. I took a <a href="http://aqalblog.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-integral-case-for-president-obama.html">close look</a> at this phenomenon during the last American presidential election when Boulderite Terry Patten claimed Mr. Obama “the best hope we have for more integral politics and policies” in urging all of us to vote for his re-election.<br />
<br />
There is also the evergreen assumption among many integralites that waves of consciousness, including this first transpersonal one, generate a particular and specific political economic policy perspective, a belief rife with the mythic amber worldview that integralites have presumably transcended, included, and integrated.<br />
<br />
Until someone demonstrates otherwise, I will continue to insist that levels of consciousness are not political platforms. I tend to agree with Ken Wilber’s long-held assertion that “left” and “right” are <i>types</i>—the fifth element of the Integral Model. That means that within each level folks can skew “liberal” and “conservative” and remain consistent with the contours of each stage of consciousness. Even in Spiral Dynamics, an integral model I find inadequate for understanding the evolutionary phenomenon, many caution against the tendency to assign specifics to the SD levels. <br />
<br />
We can demonstrate this by making the case that Donald Trump and many of his faction offer a non-left Boomeritis green perspective, rather than the orange (or earlier) version that most integralites presume.<br />
<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a>Finally, and most importantly, any integral analysis of Mr. Trump—or of any particular phenomenon of current history—must in fact apply the entire AQAL lens. It must look at exteriors <i>and</i> interiors in both individual and collective expressions. It must account for the Trimemetic War resulting from the clash of three major distinct mass perspectives. It must account for the variations in individual and mass behavior that emanate from various altitudes in our lines of development. It should appreciate the way the types flavor human leanings and activities. Finally it must at least make a nod towards the role the three major states of consciousness play in Kosmic unfolding’s present (at least in our little corner of it) condition.<br />
<br />
It is of course extremely difficult to resist the temptation to take people and events as we perceive them in our first tier experience and go to town offering critiques of them <i>as if they exist in no other context than the feeling of the moment</i>. This is, after all, what we have been trained to do and what we have habituated ourselves to accept as absolutely real. That is the gift and trap of first tier waves: the presumption that my perspective is absolute and therefore all others are relative to mine. Evolutionarily this feature was necessary to not only individual and tribal survival, but to the process of transcend-and-include. Without consolidation of the levels of consciousness into predictably reliable probability waves, there would be no foundation from which transcendence could occur. How can we transcend a loose and shifting level? We would keep falling back into the dynamics of the earlier, not-yet-firm stage, as if we were dancing on psychospiritual quicksand.<br />
<br />
But the reality of the challenge notwithstanding, integralites face the challenge of developing a method for seeing the world integrally, opening the Eye of Spirit, as Wilber might put it, which takes in all earlier ways of seeing without discarding or minimizing them. <br />
<br />
When we accomplish this—which I believe cannot fully occur without our center of gravity actually making the momentous leap into second tier—we experience an astonishing empathy for ourselves and our world. We become less enamored of the specifics and more of the generality. We identify more with what we as humanity are up to as a whole than with what any of us individually may be doing, while appreciating these contributions (positive or negative) nonetheless. We cherish our own individual reactions to the <i>Sturm und Drang</i> of daily life. We cherish centers of gravity in first tier waves. We cherish our enmeshment with the hierarchy of needs, and enjoy how we all are necessarily directed by it. <br />
<br />
So with these notions in mind, how then shall we talk about Donald Trump, the <i>disruptor magnus</i> who has come to play such a large part in our personal and collective discourse?<br />
<br />
<br />
<i><b>Current Elements of Global Transformation</b></i><br />
<br />
My own bias is looking at the world through the Narrative of the Atman Project: that the story we are writing is how the Kosmos created consciousness of itself through the mechanism of human beings, and that this involves a particular trajectory requiring the invention of the mature, self-actualized individual human to act as the springboard to a self-actualized humanity acting as an agent of Spirit to inaugurate an era of self-consciousness evolution.<br />
<br />
If we are willing to not only tell but participate in this story, then we recognize the essential value in developing the capacity to distance ourselves from what we are doing, thinking, and feeling in any given moment, for otherwise we are writing the story blindly. Thus: integral.<br />
<br />
I have developed at length in posts on <i>AQALBlog </i>the story of the Trimemetic War, the clash of three mass waves of consciousness that create the world we have today: amber, orange, and Boomeritis green. One of the great failures of most integralite analyses has been the insufficient appreciation of the decisive role of the emergence of orange modernity in our evolution. The rise of individual identity in a world long habituated to tribal identity is a disruptor as powerful and earth-shaking as what we are undergoing today; in fact, everything happening now is the result of this merely five centuries old Kosmic temblor. <br />
<br />
The first consequence of its emergence was the immediate push-back by people and institutions still centered in amber; that push-back has continued unabated although in different forms since the sixteenth century. It is not only seen in external struggles, including the great wars of the twentieth century, but also in the ongoing struggle of individuation to mature on a mass basis.<br />
<br />
A major driver of the Trimemetic War is the specific amber nature of Islam, whose 1.6 billion adherents across the globe constitute (in general) a well-developed and –entrenched center of the premodern simultaneous resistance and attraction to modernity. The identification of the <i>ummah</i> as the tribe of Allah (<i>dar al-Islam</i>) makes it difficult for most Muslims to accede to the modern call to individuation, and thus the institutions of the modern world have by-and-large spectacularly failed to gain even a foothold in most Muslim societies.<br />
<br />
The second consequence of orange’s emergence was the unleashing of rationality and the scientific method as a powerful dynamic in human thought and relationships. Again, it is difficult for us who have benefited from their existence and centuries-long deepening to appreciate what a radical shift these methods of inquiry and dialectic have engendered. Difficult, that is, until we go inside and look at our challenges for self-actualization on a personal level. <br />
<br />
This also makes it hard for those of us living in the Advanced Sector to appreciate and understand premodern societies like the Arab world and Africa. As the implications of Moore’s Law result in an exponential increase in computational power, speed, and bandwidth, the Advanced Sector citizenry is best equipped to assimilate new technologies and adapt ourselves to the new social geometry they are inviting. In this way the gap between amber- and orange-centric societies will only widen, and the friction between them increase.<br />
<br />
The third consequence of the radical shift created by modernity has been a serious, on-going spiritual crisis that arose from effective rational attacks on mythological religion, particularly on Christianity in Europe. It’s now been 135 years since Nietzsche pronounced God dead and identified his killers:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?</blockquote>
We in the West have been struggling to find satisfactory answers to Nietzsche’s fundamental and disturbing questions. For the most part, we modernists have merely (and usually unconsciously) switched our allegiance to new gods adorned most carefully in rational raiment and make-up. The unfolding of modernity is besmirched with post-Christian creeds whose adherents were as bloody-minded in enforcing conformity with their beliefs as anybody in Tomás de Torquemada’s cabinet. <br />
<br />
The <i>soi-disant</i> rationalists of the French Revolution led the way with their Cult of Reason. In their longing for a rationalism that could slake the human thirst for identification with the divine (or the transrational, if you prefer), Jacques Hébert, Antoine-François Momoro, Joseph Fouché, and their fellow rationalists failed to grasp the transcend-and-include dynamic necessary to solving their dilemma. Across the channel Edmund Burke was accurately diagnosing their failure and prescribing an alternative method for the rational to co-exist with the divine. In the Trimemetic War to date Burke has yet to defeat Robespierre (except in U. S. which benefited—until the rise of the Progressives—from little opposition to the goals and methods of its revolutionaries as agents of the Scottish Enlightenment). <br />
<br />
<i><b><br />Enter Trump</b></i><br />
<br />
Into this cauldron of evolutionary chaos steps Donald Trump, a leader reflecting in many ways the Boomeritis tendency to supplant Reason with Emotion and to believe in his own truth. In the “Integral Trump” post I posited that Trump (and Brexit) represent an orange-centric counter-counterrevolution against the arrogance and inevitable errors of postmodernism and its Boomeritis followers.<br />
<br />
Much like Barack Obama did eight years ago, Mr. Trump has attracted a wide variety of projections from supporters and opponents alike, all reading into his public persona the version of the world they most believe in. The speculation about his motives, his philosophy, his intentions, and his character have naturally increased dramatically since his surprise victory last November. It is difficult to get a satisfactory conventional-style reading on him for many reasons, not least because of his entirely unconventional path to the White House. In this unlikely achievement, he has overthrown many verities that used to prevail in American politics, and in such a way as to leave most of us mystified.<br />
<br />
Because he is anti-establishment, many of us have succumbed to a species of the pre/trans fallacy: is he hell-bent on re-establishing a supposed previous regime of, say, Reaganite government, or is he a truly revolutionary character seeking to establish a brand-new, truly postmodern, system?<br />
<br />
Ah, we mostly don’t know, and if Trump has his center of gravity in a rightwing version of Boomeritis green we probably will not soon be gratified. <br />
<br />
The case of Arnold Schwarzenegger as governor of California might be instructive. (I spent five years in his administration.) In many ways he was a lot like Trump—much verbal braggadocio, puzzling off-the-cuff remarks, not a small touch of narcissism, and a registered Republican. And when one looks back at his seven years in office, it is impossible to discern a consistent governing philosophy that informed his decisions and public policy prescriptions. (My personal assessment was that his lodestar was approval from his left-leaning Hollywood cronies.) This pattern suggests a Boomeritis green orientation.<br />
<br />
In general, what characterizes this orientation is its endearing determination to end what it views as the social, political, and economic oppression of have-nots combined with its uncritical and emotion-driven belief that government is the only and an effective instrument of achieving this goal. It should escape no one’s notice that Mr. Trump, in his victory speech in the early hours of November 9, made two explicit promises: <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
We are going to fix our inner cities and rebuild our highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, schools, hospitals. We're going to rebuild our infrastructure, which will become, by the way, second to none. And we will put millions of our people to work as we rebuild it. We will also finally take care of our great veterans who have been so loyal, and I've gotten to know so many over this 18-month journey. The time I've spent with them during this campaign has been among my greatest honors.</blockquote>
Government (<i>aka</i> taxpayers) to the rescue!<br />
<br />
Of course, at the same time he has promised to repeal Obamacare and an unspecified number of regulatory roadblocks to business success promulgated by Mr. Obama’s team (among other things), thereby establishing that his Boomeritis is not of the leftwing variant.<br />
<br />
His cabinet appointments—to the extent that I have studied them—appear in the main to be fairly mainstream conservatives, by which I mean that their political philosophy tends to support lesser government and more freedom in civil society at as an orienting direction to proposing public policy and managing federal affairs.<br />
<br />
His assault on the left establishment and its MSM clerisy can also be seen as coming from a Boomeritis green lens, a green civil war if you like. The flaw that Boomeritis mars mature green with is its rejection of orange’s gift of Reason as a method of human mentation and relationship (see “<a href="http://aqalblog.blogspot.com/2016/12/transcend-and-exclude-postmodern-u-turn.html">Transcend and Exclude</a>,” below). One of our challenges in analyzing Mr. Trump’s political philosophy—if any—is his habit of eschewing dissemination of a consistent platform in favor of a scattershot Tweetstorm of seeming disconnected fulminations, <i>bon mots</i>, and witticisms. This has much in common with the left’s consistent inability to mount reasoned defenses of its own policy prescriptions in favor of denigrating its opponents’ alleged moral failures instead. Perhaps this is why Mr. Trump generates such over-the-top denunciations from these folks. <br />
<br />
(This is why shadow work is so essential to transcendence and escaping the Trimemetic War, and why its non-adoption by most of us continues to fuel this first tier food fight. Projections all the way up, all the way down.)<br />
<br />
<i><b><br />Momentous Change is Upon Us</b></i><br />
<br />
Regardless of Mr. Trump’s personal center of gravity, his election has more to do with world dynamics and the accelerating breakdown of the institutions of the Industrial Age that beset the globe than with his person. He may or may not contribute something of value in the way of proposing and establishing new institutions to stabilize our post-industrial, Information Age political economy, but he is in power because a decisive group of American voters—like Brexit voters in Great Britain earlier in the year—no longer had faith in the left establishment’s prescriptions for stability.<br />
<br />
The shattering of the presumed authority of the clerisy in the US and London to offer a supposed disinterested version of “the truth” represents an obvious turning point in the global political economy. The recent <i>Buzzfeed</i> “leaking” of documents purporting to show Mr. Trump as a willing stooge of the Kremlin and the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/jan/12/buzzfeed-editor-ben-smith-defends-decision-to-publish-trump-dossier">bizarre defense</a> by its editor-in-chief Ben Smith merely underscores the radical nature of the devolution unfolding before our eyes—and in which we are all participating. The <i>Guardian </i>quotes Mr. Smith, to whom we should give credit for honesty:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
We are now in an era when you have to engage in false statements. It’s an environment where you no longer have the luxury and where the legacy media has at times turned away from saying there’s all the crazy stuff on the internet and said we’re not going to touch it, we’re going to stay out of it, we’re just going to let it spread. I think this is a place where sunlight is a disinfectant.</blockquote>
In this little example we can see that the disruption is neither of the right nor the left, but of a far deeper and more profound universal movement.<br />
<br />
As I have written in earlier posts, the Trump/Brexit dynamic seems more a revolt against the (leftwing) postmodernist counterrevolution against modernity than a call to a better and more relevant program to promote an authentic postmodernity.<br />
<br />
It is entirely possible that the new crop of leaders coming onto the scene as a result of this current round of turmoil will fail as dismally as the previous group; after all, it took centuries of struggle for orange industrial governing structures to become firmly planted in human societies. The irony is how brief its moment in the sun turned out to be!<br />
<br />
Momentous change is upon us, whether we would risk it or not. It remains to be seen whether Trump’s accession to the presidency will signal the open reconfiguration of RH geometry of political economic structures that toward which the dynamics of Kosmic evolution have been building, like pressure on our slowly moving tectonic plates, to disrupt the unsustainable status quo and force something new into being.<br />
<br />
We integralites might do well to heed the suggestion in the quotation from Corinthians that heads this post. The trumpet of the new world has sounded, and we shall be changed. The question is, what will it take for the dead to be raised incorruptible, for transcendence to lift us all up to the next level of human (and Kosmic) possibility?<br />
<br />
Peace will come in the Trimemetic War only when two major shifts are completed: first, orange has to get its act together to permit mature individuation among a critical mass of us; and second, amber has to give way to orange among a critical mass of us globally.<br />
<br />
Integralites may dream, like the lotus-eaters in Tennyson’s <a href="http://www.bartleby.com/42/638.html">great poem</a>, of “our island home . . . far beyond the wave,” but I suggest a rather more mundane task that keeps us, in spite of all odds, sailing “through wandering fields of barren foam.” The maturing of orange is our great task, promoting a society that comprises genuinely self-actualized human beings. <br />
<br />
There will be opportunities to reinvigorate this noble work in the emerging counter-counterrevolution that Mr. Trump and others are leading against those committed to killing off modernity and individuation in a vain belief that the tribe is a better guarantee of security. It may be a clich<span data-dobid="hdw">é</span> to say it, but we cannot go back; the only way is forward.Marty Kellerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11592136716581562644noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3401106149239386272.post-73930455570845623922016-12-23T17:03:00.001-08:002016-12-23T17:06:11.636-08:00The Fake News Head FakeWe only need pay attention to find ever-present examples of how a particular narrative about the way things are dominates our culture. One can hope that the latest fad in the MSM clerisy of swooning over the sudden appearance of alleged “fake news” might help us all consider the question of how we help create our culture with our mass delusions and blind spots. <br />
<br />
Since the development of in the Advanced Sector mass media with the widespread affordability of the radio after World War I, we created the possibility of inculcating specific memes of taste, belief, and prejudice as “mainstream” currents of the culture. This was grafted onto and reflective of the existing methods of mass communication based upon newspapers and pamphleteering, which were by and large generated by very specific political economic interests. <br />
<br />
The concurrent rise of dictatorships left and right allowed for the sharpening of these emerging mass media into an instrument of general propaganda, creating a blueprint for mass manipulation available to any amoral enough to take advantage of it. So powerful was this invention that George Orwell famously wrote of how it might be applied much more aggressively in times when technology might make a monopoly feasible even in the democratic West. <br />
<br />
Even those on the Left note from time to time that—at least until the appearance of the worldwide web—almost all news outlets—newspapers, magazines, radio, and television—were commercial ventures, governed by the laws of financial survival. Those that became, in the way of these things, the flag ships of the mainstream media, were well-positioned to become monopoly instruments capable of dictating not only tastes and fashions, but political and cultural beliefs more generally.<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a>A nation that can be lulled into assuming that a figure like Walter Cronkite is a disinterested, avuncular paragon of “objective” news is a nation capable of being herded, without its awareness, into a particular mass belief system. Long before Joe McGinniss first laid out how this could happen in his 1969 ground-breaking <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/The_selling_of_the_President_1968.html?id=2bNxAAAAMAAJ&hl=en"><i>The Selling of the President 1968</i></a>, moguls of the MSM in New York and Washington were slowly but surely creating the framework of what was acceptable and what was beyond the pale through their control of the small number of mass media outlets.<br />
<br />
Walter Shapiro, writing 43 years later in the <i>Columbia Review of Journalism</i>, <a href="http://www.cjr.org/united_states_project/good_old_days_nixon_campaign.php">notes</a> how McGinniss grasped the methodology employed by the MSM in opinion shaping—but not, of course, how journalism itself is used in the exact same way:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The Big Think message from McGinniss’ book is that—horrors—presidential candidates are packaged just like cigarettes. The original dust jacket for <i>The Selling of the President</i> makes this metaphor explicit by showing Nixon’s face superimposed on an open pack of smokes. As Jim Sage, a prescient Nixon adman, tells McGinniss, “We’re moving into a period where a man is going to be merchandised on television more and more. It upsets you and me, maybe, but we’re not typical Americans.” (The <i>Mad Men</i> era appeals precisely because of that small twinge of guilt, which would probably be lost on 21st-century media consultants like David Axelrod and Stuart Stevens.)<br />
<br />
Part of the tension in the book comes from the resistance to this new era of media manipulation from one man—yes, Nixon’s the one. “Richard Nixon did not trust television,” McGinniss writes. “He refused to look at himself, even on a newscast. He refused to use a teleprompter, no matter how long the speech. Television was just one more slick trick and he was a poor boy from the West.” (The notion that a teleprompter equals unethical artifice would be lost on Obama and, to a slightly lesser extent, Romney).</blockquote>
And here, in one essay, we encounter the trick by which the MSM hides its role in plain view: it is <i>politicians</i>, Mr. Shapiro assures us in that journalistic voice trained to sound oh-so objective, that engage in the nasty and crass activity of selling us their candidates. We, he is assuring us without the hint of a wink, are reporting this to you as disinterested observers concerned only with “the truth,” as you can tell by our language, unlike they who cravenly employ all the tricks of mass merchandising to convince you of the same thing.<br />
<br />
Hidden in the rhetorical devices of reporting and commentary is the straightforward “objective” fact that Mr. Shapiro, like most reporters and commenters, are paid to do their work, and that the money to pay them comes from commercial enterprises engaged 24/7 in the activity of selling themselves to us without appearing to be doing so.<br />
<br />
(State-run media like the BBC or non-profit-run media like NPR behave in the same manner, although how they joined the for-profit MSM in the clerisy is a different but equally instructive story.)<br />
<br />
Ironic, no, that Mr. Shapiro reports that Richard Nixon refused to be taken in by the game, and resisted participating in it in order to win elections. But even Mr. Nixon had to accept the way the culture had been shaped in the previous two decades since World War II during which democratically-elected governments regularly and unabashedly employed mass media ruthlessly to fashion public opinion as an instrument of war-winning.<br />
<br />
We have been trained to ignore the way the media operate from their own particular interest because commercials (what media buyers buy specifically) are presented separately from the rest of the content. This visual separation has been part of the method since newspapers started selling advertising to help their bottom lines in the nineteenth century. And even though we have access to wide-ranging information about how the financiers of news media influence the content beyond their commercials, we have been lulled by the sheer volume and consistency of the format into not seeing and therefore not believing the connection.<br />
<br />
<br />
<i><b>The Real News</b></i><br />
<br />
To the student of the history of our culture and the media, it should be no big deal to appreciate that news outlets rarely had any incentive to follow and report on the real news: the underlying dynamics that generate the day-to-day activities of humanity. Why report on that boring old forest when there are so many interesting trees? Remember: once we entered the era of mass marketing, the goal of each media organ has been to make itself profitable. Thus it needed to cater to whatever audience it judged to be most exploitable.<br />
<br />
The unflattering truth is that most of us are not in the market to study and appreciate long-term trends; if such things truly interested us <i>The Economist</i> or <i>Foreign Affairs</i> would dominate world markets instead of <i>Better Homes and Gardens </i>and <i>Game Informer</i>. This is, of course, related to the general level of consciousness we have attained on average, which limits the attraction of communications in general and news information in particular. The center of gravity of even the most advanced cultures is still in the orange modern rational wave, and that imperfectly so. This is also being challenged by the even more imperfect, extremely young green wave dominated by the unfortunate Boomeritis version.<br />
<br />
So it is no surprise to the integralite that there is little demand for what we will call here the real news. No demand, no supply.<br />
<br />
This lack of curiosity by a critical mass of us permits the clerisy to maintain its role as an arbiter of the general culture in spite of the opportunities to subvert it introduced by the entirely decentralized worldwide web. As Antonio Gramsci wrote in his <i>Prison Notebooks</i> from his cell in Turi, Italy, the objective conditions for the dictatorship of the proletariat would not arise from economic development alone, as Marx had believed. The hearts and minds of the workers had first to be won over to the inevitability of the anti-capitalist revolution before they would act in their own interest and overthrow the bourgeoisie.<br />
<br />
Nonetheless, the human predilection toward bread and circuses does nothing to change the reality of the big picture, and the one that we can see today is quite unprecedented at least in our planet’s history. The central fact is what the exponential acceleration of technology in general, and of cyber space in particular, is offering to the creative genius and reproductive imperative of humanity. <br />
<br />
As Ray Kurzweil theorized in his now 10-year-old <i>The Singularity Is Near</i>, the trajectory of the creation of human social wealth is on a steep upward curve, especially when compared to the all the centuries since the end of the last great Ice Age when humans invented agriculture until the nineteenth century. Since that time the transformations we introduced with the rise of modernity and the Industrial Revolution have rattled with increasing force and frequency the worlds we thought we knew and could count on.<br />
<br />
The impact of Moore’s Law is almost entirely unappreciated by most of us, and is the story most ignored by the MSM clerisy and the arbiters of our mass culture.<br />
<br />
We certainly are quick to enjoy the various fruits of this new world, from smartphones to fracking, from instantaneous communication with almost anybody in the world to an infinite variety of entertainment including games and porn. Yet few of us stop to consider the global disruption the ever-faster introduction of newer technological wonders is having on our societies and cultures. <br />
<br />
Beginning with the end of the Cold War and humanity’s abject failure to foresee the world we were about to enter into, we have been struck by increasingly powerful blows which have undermined and weakened the institutions we created after World War II to support the spread of modernity and industrial political economies. <br />
<br />
The major benefit of modernity—the creation of a political economy capable of enlarging and enriching the human species exponentially—has made an enemy of entrenched premodernity by rendering it materially impoverished. The vast majority of humanity still lives in premodern cultures, but every one of those has been affected by the lure of modern wealth. Some have responded by accepting the challenge to modernize while others have resisted and hunkered down in opposition.<br />
<br />
At the same time a new dynamic has been injected by the rise of postmodernity and its leftwing variant, Boomeritis postmodernism. Postmodernity or postindustrial society remains inchoate as a discernible system distinct from modernity; a world of postmodern institutions arranged to support this emerging world does not yet exist. The various prototypes such as the United Nations and the European Union have been incapable of delivering on their promised goals mostly because of their refusal to account for human nature.<br />
<br />
This mixing of premodern, modern, and postmodern dynamics I have called the Trimemetic War, and it is, I submit, the second major news story that our clerisy and cultural arbiters can neither see nor report about. They are reduced to describing its effects—Islamist terrorism, Brexit, the Trump victory—without a clue as to the causes. The Trimemetic War is, of course, intricately connected to the world of Moore’s Law, and appreciating their symbiotic relationship would be of benefit to citizens of the Advanced Sector.<br />
<br />
Not surprisingly, our leadership seems as perplexed and shortsighted as the rest of us. And as change accelerates, the distance between social stability and chaos may seem to widen ever faster. Disruption is now the rule, yet we have no conversation that incorporates and “normalizes” this foundational truth. We are unhappy that the institutions we used to depend on are no longer dependable, but we spend more time lamenting their passing rather than inventing the new ones that will stabilize the disruption.<br />
<br />
Real news would explore this exciting new global dynamic. It would examine the technological disrupters not merely as discrete activities of the inventors and explorers but as elements of a new emerging world driven by nonlinearity in all of its facets. It would commit itself to looking ahead and not in the rearview mirror. <br />
<br />
Integralites are well poised to provide leadership in this endeavor, for we may be the one-eyed folks in the room full of the blind. We at least recognize how the many strands of human life both interior and exterior are expressions of a single truth, even as we may not always agree on what that truth is seeking to affirm. In our willingness to examine our selves, discover the shadow, withdraw projections, and forsake first tier judgments, we are groping toward and creating a new social configuration. It is far too early to draw useful conclusions from the various strands of the integral inquiry, especially because much of what is self-labeled “integral” is anything but.<br />
<br />
The clerisy’s obsessing about the “fake news” that they themselves have habitually indulged in for so long can serve as a turning point; inadvertently they are calling forth a renewal of the age-old human quest for knowledge and truth as it manifests in our time.<br />
<br />
The real “fake news” stems from our inability to see the forests <i>and</i> the trees, and our unwillingness to learn how. The great irony for our impoverished clerisy, defending the temples of progressive faith whose walls have already been irreversibly breached, is that the gifts of modernity are yielding amazing and unimaginable new vistas for the great project of humanizing ourselves. <br />
<br />
The great Bob Seger once <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_ZALaEfRP0">sang</a> about this great and unstoppable disruption and how integralites especially might embody it; this is the real news.<br />
<br />
In your time innocence will fall away<br />
In your time mission bells will toll<br />
All along the corridors and river beds<br />
There’ll be signs <br />
In your time<br />
<br />
Towering waves will crash across your southern capes<br />
Massive storms will reach your eastern shores<br />
Fields of green will tumble through your summer days<br />
By design<br />
In your time<br />
<br />
Feel the wind and set yourself the bolder course<br />
Keep your heart as open as a shine<br />
You’ll sail the perfect line<br />
<br />
And after all the dead ends and the lessons learned<br />
After all the stars have turned to stone<br />
There'll be peace across the great unbroken void<br />
All benign<br />
In your time<br />
You'll be fine<br />
In your timeMarty Kellerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11592136716581562644noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3401106149239386272.post-76038825127799703352016-12-08T17:09:00.002-08:002016-12-21T10:24:23.612-08:00Transcend and Exclude: the Postmodern U-TurnKen Wilber has argued, and I completely agree with him, that humanity’s current task is the extension and maturing of the orange, modern, individualistic wave of consciousness. Globally, only around 20% of us have our “center of gravity” in orange, although the contributions of those at orange have radically altered all of us for the better in the past 200 years. And, as I have explored <a href="http://aqalblog.blogspot.com/2015/12/the-evergreen-sustainability-of-utopia.html">previously</a>, we have yet to fully integrate the earlier waves so that even our current occupation of/by orange has a long way to go to operational maturity among a critical mass of us.<br />
<br />
This challenge is complicated by the emergence of green in a very immature and reactionary version he calls, appropriately, “Boomeritis.” The mass appearance of green as a wave distinct from orange can be dated to the 1960s, even as we can see expressions of it showing up in the mid-nineteenth century.<br />
<br />
The discontinuity from orange that green has generated is that individual identity (the gift of orange) is the birthright of every human being, no exceptions, and thus no one person or group can be privileged over another. In the long run, for green to mature into a separate and superior wave with probabilistic characteristics that transcend and include all the inferior waves, it will have to demonstrate and express this embrace consistently.<br />
<br />
To date, the Boomeritis version of green which appears to predominate in Europe and the United States does not yet transcend and include, much less integrate, the earlier stages. Indeed, in its left-wing postmodernist expression, it explicitly <i>rejects</i> the rational domain which, as a necessary condition for individual identity, was a categorical advance over amber. This transcend-and-exclude dynamic has all kinds of impacts on our current situation, most of them (apparently) leading away from the expansion of consciousness.<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a>Since they both showed up at about the same time, we cannot say with certainty which came first, left-wing postmodernism or Boomeritis green. We <i>can</i> say that, for most of its history since the French Revolution, leftist political-economic perspectives have been a reaction to modernity, not a leap beyond it. <br />
<br />
Some of these expressions have accepted the advances of modernity—particularly in their political and economic structures—and have sought to ameliorate what its practitioners see as negative impacts on humanity. But the Boomeritis green perspectives, with their emphasis on deconstruction and “multiculturalism,” not only reject modernity but seek to return to a simpler world of squabbling tribes dominated by an unelected oligarchy, this time not comprising a hereditary aristocracy but a group of “experts,” who, they aver, can be counted on (like the speakers of Asimov’s <a href="http://www.asimovreviews.net/Books/Book009.html">Second Foundation</a>) to guide humanity past our defects into utopia.<br />
<br />
The development of this oligarchy of experts has been long in the making, tied initially to the nineteenth century enthusiasm for scientific knowledge as a method for understanding and manipulating everything in the cosmos. Thus the analogies implied by Newton and Descartes that the universe as a clockwork mechanism whose workings and metrics could all be discovered and their lessons assimilated by human reason; perhaps this could be applied to humanity as a whole!<br />
<br />
However, as Deirdre McCloskey points out in <a href="http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/bourgeois-equality/"><i>Bourgeois Equality</i></a>, the third volume of her Bourgeois Era trilogy, the revolutions of 1848 resulted in a split between those political expressions that championed the emerging industrial revolution with its underlying shift from tribal to individual identity (orange) and those who joined the reaction against it. Thus by mid-century there were many who sought to use their notions of “science” to bolster their rejection of the advances wrought by the discovery and widespread application of the scientific method, grounded as it was in Reason. These included both the socialist and progressive movements. <br />
<br />
Noting how, after the first decades of the nineteenth century when orange ascendancy seemed to carry all before it in England and northwestern Europe, the clerisy—the intellectuals and other opinion leaders—soured on the transformations it was driving, McCloskey writes,<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Something strange has happened in the minds of the clerisy since the Great Conversion, something worth understanding. As a Marxian might put it, the cultural superstructure since 1848 has contradicted the material base. Whether an inevitable tendency to contradict itself or some less neat explanation is appropriate, the loss of faith in the bourgeoisie at its hour of triumph had grave consequences in politics beyond the economy. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
. . . But anticapitalism came in part also because trade-testing disturbed the society without at first enriching ordinary people greatly. It did enrich them eventually, and spectacularly, but too late in the nineteenth century to scotch the feeling in the clerisy that laissez-faire individualism in politics had failed. When trade unionism, the Bismarckian welfare state, Progressivism, and socialism arrived, they corresponded with the big rise in real wages, and gave the impression of causing it—when it was in fact caused by rising productivity from trade-tested betterment. To this day progressives believe that without minimum wages and trade unions our wages would fall to $2 an hour. Their bit of anti-economic illogic is that without state-enforced minimums there would occur “a race to the bottom.” The argument ignores the competition among bosses that yields wages equal to what employees produce at the margins.</blockquote>
But she keys on to the unfortunate point, that the mass enrichment that resulted in spectacular increases in real wages, living conditions, literacy, and leisure time lagged by about two generations, and thus provided the counterrevolutionaries impelling arguments against the Great Conversion from the amber to the orange political economies.<br />
<br />
World War I seemed to justify the unleashing of the demons of rage against modernity, even as most could not foresee that the war was the first of many subsequent bloody struggles by amber to knock out orange. The driving force of the war, German imperial ambitions to rival if not prevail against the British Empire, was amber in origin, the German industrial revolution notwithstanding. While Bismarck may have understood and adapted to modernity, Wilhelm II and his<i> Junker</i> cabinet did not. Contrarily, while the British aristocracy was in the main hostile to the industrial order, it had long since accommodated itself to its blessings and riches. <br />
<br />
Thus World War I was essentially an amber attack (the Central Powers) against a perceived orange political and economic threat (the Allied Powers). <br />
<br />
The fallout of that war, with its unprecedented and unforeseeable violence and bloodshed, undermined bourgeois confidence in the dynamics of modernity and bolstered the counterrevolutionaries on both the Left and the Right. Even as the United States turned its back on Woodrow Wilson’s longing for a “living Constitution” that would suppress the detested individual sovereignty that was the basis of American founding principles, Europe never fully recovered its confidence in its part as a co-creator of the Great Enrichment.<br />
<br />
And of course, the Great Depression of the 1930s opened the floodgates of popular demands for “experts” to be hired to “fix the problems of capitalism” which were presumed to be the causes of such widespread misery. <br />
<br />
All of the extremist political revolutions of the time, from the Bolsheviks and Mussolini’s fascists, through Hitler and all the vicious copycat offshoots that sprang up across Europe, were iterations of the amber counterrevolution against modernity. <br />
<br />
Unlike the institutions of the modern political economy, which tended to be far more practical, non-ideological, and market-tested, those of the Left were permanently seized by enthusiasm for the post-capitalist utopia, which they believed was made possible by the orange scientific revolution that also enabled the detested bourgeoisie.<br />
<br />
With God being declared dead among the clerisy of Europe, the new faith in the perfectibility of man through expert redesign became the unofficial creed of the Left and of many in the corridors of its rent-seeking financial aristocratic allies.<br />
<br />
It was also in the 30s that Antonio Gramsci developed his theory of cultural hegemony, and that Max Horkheimer propelled the Institute for Social Research of the Frankfurt School (and soon to infest Columbia University in New York) into the business of guiding “the long march through the institutions.” Gramsci and Horkheimer rescued Marxism from its utter failure to overthrow the capitalist order politically by agitating to do so culturally. This perspective soon inveigled itself into leftist movements around the world, and we are living with the fruits of its investment today.<br />
<br />
<br />
<i><b>What’s Happenin’ Here Ain’t Exactly Clear</b></i><br />
<br />
These events occurred before the invention of post-structuralism and the mass emergence of green in the 1960s, and so it is difficult for Americans and Europeans to assess them in modern terms. The first part of the 20th century was dominated by the bloody wars against the institutions and products of modernity, but for the most part the theoretical struggle was conducted in the language of orange, not amber. Indeed, Marx believed he was offering a “scientific” analysis of what he called “capitalism,” and thus presented his mix of reaction, romanticism, and revolution in modernist language. In fact, Marx would not have been possible without the emergence of the four quadrants with its validation of scientific inquiry separated from religious and mythic dominion. <br />
<br />
Yet even though what he produced didn’t really stand up to any actually scientific analysis—and was thoroughly debunked by the facts on the ground by the time of the Bolshevik Revolution—thousands hungry for relief from the disruptions of modern industrialization signed up for his program anyway. That Marxism (in all its various permutations) operated as a mythic belief system rather than as a useful and accurate analysis of current events is evidence of its role as a counterrevolution against modernity, rather than—as its mythology affirmed—as a harbinger of a second-tier, transpersonal political economic program.<br />
<br />
(Those having difficulty grasping this essential truth need only let their eyes wander southward toward the socialist paradises of Cuba or Venezuela.)<br />
<br />
It is a stubborn fact about the scientific method that neither opinion, longing, denial, nor violence can eliminate the truth—although postmodernists will assail this assertion with great conviction. This willful denial notwithstanding, for green to mature into a viable and therefore transcendable stage, it will have to embrace reason rather than reject it, and in order to get there, it will have to discover the impulse that led to its rejection in the first place.<br />
<br />
As Wilber puts it, <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Although each wave is holistic and integrative, each succeeding wave transcends and includes its essentials (in a prehensive unification—which we reconstruct as tetra-hension), and thus each is more holistic, more inclusive, more encompassing.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
In short, in healthy unfolding, each wave is holistic, each succeeding wave is more holistic. Preceding waves are not thereby rendered useless or wrong or illusory, but continue to contribute their enduring truths, holons, enactments, and expressions, which are now enfolded in the ongoing spiral of unfoldment—just as atoms and molecules continue to function in healthy cells.</blockquote>
The difficulty is that, as a first tier wave, green nonetheless suffers from the conviction that it alone is the fountain of truth, and that all opposition is heresy and must be opposed if not destroyed—<i>aurantia delenda est</i>. On the other hand, green’s actual distinction from orange provides the basis for an eventual settling down into a discernible structure that transcends, includes, and integrates the earlier waves. This will require the rejection of the main premises of leftwing postmodernism, the assertion that all truths are relative, context-dependent, and malleable.<br />
<br />
<i><b><br />The Gifts of Postmodernity </b></i><b>v</b><i><b>. Leftwing Postmodernism</b></i><br />
<br />
This challenges integralites to make the very important distinction between “postmodernity” as a descriptor of the realm that transcends modernity, and “postmodernism” as a leftwing doctrine that arises from the amber counterrevolution against modernity. Wilber tackles this in several of his important and rather neglected works, <i>The Marriage of Sense and Soul</i> (1998), and the web-published (and tentatively titled) <a href="http://www.integralworld.net/Excerpts.html"><i>Kosmic Karma and Creativity</i></a> (2002). In the latter work, which is an extensive analysis of this distinction, he writes,<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The result of the postmodern slide was famously stated by Bret Easton Ellis as, “Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found . . . , which one reviewer summarized as, “Everything reduced to the flattest surface . . . There is no within.” The nihilism and narcissism of extreme postmodernism, pluralism, and poststructuralism, especially in their deconstructive forms, increasingly came to the fore, eventually dominating academic discourse and ironically marginalizing alternative modes of discourse (ironic in that the postmodernist pluralists ended up exemplifying the marginalizing activity that they attacked). The postmodern poststructuralists all started sounding the same, as out of their mouths came the green meme, a vast anonymous system without a subject.</blockquote>
Although Wilber asserts that the principal architect of postmodernism, Michel Foucault, soon grasped the nature of the issue and offered a corrective, he also notes that Foucault never completed his reconsiderations of his initial errors.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Still, it is easy to see the direction in which he was headed. The whole point . . . is that, indeed, human action cannot be adequately accounted for by any combination of “mental intentionality” (UL), “physical causality” (UR), or “social causality” (LR), but must be supplemented with an understanding of the fields and networks of intersubjectivity (LL). That necessity bids us stay close to the intersubjective interiors that are being elucidated . . .<br />
<br />
Foucault came to see [the importance of] interpretive analytics. “This new method,” comment Dreyfus and Rabinow, “combines a type of archaeological analysis which preserves the distancing effect of structuralism [the exterior, objectifying, component], and an interpretive dimension which develops the hermeneutic insight that the investigator is always situated and must understand the meaning of his cultural practices from within them [the interior, intersubjective component . . . ].”<br />
<br />
And so it came about, in this wonderfully fractured fairy tale, that Foucault himself, after having led the wild goose chase of postmodern poststructuralism, circled back again to the enduring contributions of an adequate structuralism, which means, a third-person approach to first-person realities that actually honors both the third person and the first person, both of whom are, in the last analysis, sentient beings to be trusted.</blockquote>
Thus the postmodernist contribution, as heralded by Foucault, was the rejection of premodern or modern givens, and the realization that we are all constructing our reality moment-by-moment; its major error was the rejection of the accumulative trajectory of history as a facilitator and source of the activity of constructing reality.<br />
<br />
Into this breach stepped the leftwing postmodernists, who in their utter rejection of the gifts of modernity employed poststructuralism with its deconstruction paradigm in its critique of the orange project. They stopped studying Foucault when his insights undermined their political aims. It’s too bad, although not surprising given the unconscious amber perspectives that were using these new weapons in an old fight.<br />
<br />
The British conservative Roger Scruton, in his chapter on Foucault in <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/dec/10/fools-frauds-and-firebrands-thinkers-of-the-new-left-roger-scuton-review"><i>Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left</i></a>, also notes the shift in Foucault’s later work. In his analyses beginning with the first volume of <i>History of Sexuality</i> (1976), Scruton writes, <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Foucault was suffering from AIDS, and had begun to shake off his former persona as an <i>enfant terrible</i>. The Solidarity movement in Poland had a deep impression on him: not only as the first genuine working-class revolution in history, but as one directed <i>against </i>communism and in favour of a national identity. Foucault spoke out in favor of Solidarity, in vain, to influence the government of François Mitterrand to take punitive measures against the communist authorities in Poland. And in volumes 2 and 3 of the <i>History of Sexuality</i> he began to write in a new way, giving careful accounts of the ancient texts that interested him, and referring at every point to the work of other scholars.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
. . . The impression created by these later works is of a Foucault who has been “normalized.” His command of the French language, his fascination with ancient texts and the by-ways of history, his flamboyant imagination and beautiful style—all have been put, at last, to a proper use, in order to describe the human condition respectfully, and to cease to look for the secret “structures” beneath its smile. . . . And, reading these later works, I was constantly drawn to the thought that Foucault’s belligerent leftism was not a criticism of reality, but a defence against it, a refusal to recognize that, for all its defects, normality is all we have.</blockquote>
One might say that the leftwing postmodernists, steeped as they are in a Boomeritis green that refuses to enjoy and appreciate the gifts of the earlier stages, seek in their first tier way to force the establishment of a new “normal”—one which they believe, in the way of the mythic/membership world of amber, they can impose on the rest of us.<br />
<br />
Many integralites have yet to grasp the distinction that Wilber has so meticulously established between postmodernity and its unfortunate offspring postmodernism. It is too early to tell if this mass version of green is a U-turn or a necessary if messy experiment on the way to a genuine transcendence of orange. As the left in America and abroad comes to terms with Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, whom they see as the symbol of all that they disdain about modernity and particularly its rambunctious American expression, we might begin to see the answer to this question.Marty Kellerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11592136716581562644noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3401106149239386272.post-62971816721677229742016-07-04T13:29:00.001-07:002016-07-05T09:39:40.455-07:00Integral Trump, or, the Center Cannot Hold<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>"But I have no power to make other men see the truth . . .”</i>—Albus Dumbledore,<i> Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban</i></div>
</blockquote>
We are progressing deeper into a most dangerous period of human history, a period whose beginnings we can trace to the years between the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Communist Party in 1991. Elements of human social, cultural, and political economic development—dynamics of the Trimemetic War—are splintering and diverging in ways too numerous, subtle, and unprecedented to properly keep track of.<br />
<br />
I originally sketched out the contours of the Trimemetic War ten years ago in a series of essays entitled <a href="http://www.integralworld.net/keller5.html">“Three Blind Memes,”</a> where I wrote:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Let us look at our world today. Green is struggling to emerge and replace Orange in the advanced sector. Given the intensity of the civil war between them, it is perhaps not surprising that Green has yet to prevail. Still, in two generations it has secured a solid foothold. Orange is struggling to emerge and replace Amber is two critical areas of the world, China and India, as well as in lesser economic powerhouses like Russia, South Africa, Brazil, and the nations of Eastern Europe. We see Amber tribal states like Iran and Pakistan, where Orange has only a tentative presence, seeking the benefit of its technology by developing nuclear power with its potential for conversion to weaponry.</blockquote>
Written after 9/11 but before the collapse of the housing bubble with all the attendant collateral damage in 2008, we simply note that the centrifugal forces driving disintegration of the modern political economic institutions of the post-World War II era are accelerating.<br />
<br />
They are accelerating in great part for two principle reasons: first, on a daily basis the dynamics of our Information Age political economy introduce exponentially greater disrupters of previously reliable structures and containers; and second, the “hole in the soul” of the Advanced Sector introduced when modernity split from our premodern, tribal past remains grievously aching and raw, its unhealed pain in our collective subconscious demanding more and more of us even as we seem increasingly powerless to respond effectively.<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a>The combination of these trends outwardly appears as chaos, rage, confusion, arrogance, disdain, and addictive behaviors both individual and collective. Surely we feel, as did William Butler Yeats in 1919, that<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;<br />
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,<br />
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere<br />
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;<br />
The best lack all conviction, while the worst<br />
Are full of passionate intensity.</blockquote>
In America the situation is explosively reflected in the seizure of the GOP nomination for president by the thoroughly postmodern Donald Trump. His triumph, in part, is a reaction to the behavior of the incumbent president, the first truly committed postmodernist to occupy the office. Putting icing on this chaotic cake is the Bernie Sanders campaign, another romantic Boomeritis attempt to correct severe imbalances and dislocations by championing even more imbalance and dislocation via ever-expanding state intervention into civil society.<br />
<br />
But Europe, too, has been manifesting similar symptoms in its own idiosyncratic ways. The British vote to leave the EU, the immigrant crisis, the green utopianism, the endless dithering over Syria, ISIL, and Iran, the complete inability to deal with Putin, the sluggish economy, the fragile banking sector—all reflect this disruptive situation that has been unfolding now for the past quarter century.<br />
<br />
Asia—particularly in China and Japan in their own ways—also reflects the turmoil. China’s furious drive to industrialize introduced by Deng Xiaoping’s Four Modernizations policy starting in 1978 underwrote its goal of becoming the world’s second-largest power. Its progress was, however, severely disrupted as the globe sank into “recession” in 2008, and further damaged by the poorly mitigated environmental harm its industrial mania generated; it is now in a moment of hesitation and uncertainty. On the other hand, Japan, having fully modernized during its recovery from the devastation of World War II, began faltering at the commencement of its “Lost Decade” in 1991, from the effects of which it has never fully recovered.<br />
<br />
Few other regions of the globe offer any cause for optimism, either. Africa, a continent of great promise, remains mired in its post-colonial inability to generate stable political economies. Central and South America also have significant potential for development, but as the cases of Brazil and Venezuela caution, the foundational preconditions for sustainable progress remain out of reach for the majority of their citizens.<br />
<br />
<br />
<i><b>Modernity: the Target of the Trimemetic War</b></i><br />
<br />
I call this period “dangerous” not out of fear or foreboding—although I am possessed of both from time to time—but simply because of our seeming inability to respond collectively with wisdom, common sense, and confidence to the ever-multiplying dynamics that are rearranging our world. That our world <i>will</i> be thoroughly rearranged seems to me beyond debate; <i>how</i> and <i>into what </i>it will be rearranged is not at all obvious—or even discernible. Can we find a way to re-center ourselves and proceed more appropriately? More explicitly, how should integralites orient ourselves to deal with the world that humanity is producing?<br />
<br />
The dangers we face seem of a piece with all such circumstances throughout our history when one phase or center of power started faltering, to inevitably be replaced by another. Whether it’s the decline of the ancient Egyptian, Persian, Macedonian, Roman, or Han dynasties, or the downfall of European monarchies at the end of World War I, we humans have experienced cycles of expansion and collapse for millennia. At the same time, as I note in “Three Blind Memes,” we humans have never before faced a circumstance in which three distinct worldviews were at war with one another. We have no precedent from which to derive applicable lessons.<br />
<br />
In the face of this unique dynamic it would seem foolhardy to seek them anyway. At the same time, we could at least review our history if only to appreciate how these three worldviews have arisen and might be interplaying. We might be able to derive some comfort in the face of overwhelming dynamics that appear indifferent to individual influence. After all, while many people suffered during our earlier upheavals, humanity as a whole continued to flourish and eventually expand both in numbers and quality of life.<br />
<br />
One can argue, as Ian Morris does in his excellent history <i>Why the West Rules—for Now</i>, that from the rise of the Agricultural Age the scale of what he calls human “social development” rose imperceptibly slowly and, for the vast majority of us, with almost no significant material impact on our daily lives. From the end of the last Ice Age c. 10000 BC until two centuries ago, the change in social development barely inched up from its starting point. This relatively stable economy at the macro level nonetheless went through those expansion/collapse cycles at the ground level; it would seem, therefore, that these occurrences did not negatively impact human civilization as a whole. Should this seeming paradox not offer a rich variety of historical examples to help us get through our own period with some modicum of long-term optimism?<br />
<br />
What we generally fail to appreciate, however, is that with the rise of modernity starting in 17th century Holland and 18th century England, a new and unprecedented element was introduced into the cycle: the rise of individual identity and the concomitant rearrangement of society to support this phenomenon. Until approximately the period of the Protestant Reformation, for thousands of years human identity was tribal; that is, we saw ourselves primarily as inseparable seams in a tribal, clannish, or regional garment. <br />
<br />
Modernity was characterized by the introduction of a radical new version of identity: the individual as distinct and unmoored from the tribe. This thoroughly disruptive new feature of our evolution has been spreading over the globe in fits and starts since the late 18th century, generating an exponentially enormous spurt in the rate of social development. <br />
<br />
Deirdre McCloskey, in her Bourgeois Era trilogy that seeks to explain the origins of this revolution, asks us to<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Look at the numbers. Average daily expenditures by Haitians and Afghans expressed in present-day U.S. prices at “purchasing power parity”—and so allowing for inflation and the relevant exchange rates among currencies—are well below $3 a day, which before 1800 was what the average human more or less everywhere expected to make, earn, and consume. So it had been, always, back to the caves. Imagine living each day on the cost, spread over all your activities, of a gallon of milk. If you’ve been to Liberia or Afghanistan it’s not hard to imagine. Today, after two centuries of increase, recently accelerating, the world figure, an average than includes even the extraordinarily poor Liberians and Afghans, has arrived at an unprecedented $33 a day.<br />
<br />
. . . Since 1800 the ability of humans to feed and clothe and educate themselves, even as the number of humans increased by an astonishing factor of seven, has risen, per human, by an even more astonishing factor of ten. Do the math, then, of total production. We humans now produce and consume seventy—7 x 10—times more goods and services worldwide than in 1800. . . .<br />
<br />
In the best-run countries, such as France or Japan or Finland, all of which not so long ago were $3-a-day poor, real income per person, conventionally measured, has by now increased to roughly $100 a day. Income has risen, that is, not by 30 percent but by a factor of thirty, which is to say many hundreds of percent.</blockquote>
It is difficult for us today, even in our own unique version of dangerous times, to appreciate the radical significance of this revolution to the course of our history. McCloskey explores the origins of this revolution in depth, but suffice it to say that it was generated by <i>the shift in identity from tribe to individual</i>—and like all revolutions, this emergence has generated resistance, reaction, and counterrevolution. <br />
<br />
The Great Enrichment, as McCloskey characterizes the rise and spread of modernity, and the resistance, reaction, and counterrevolution against it, has characterized our history since 1800.<br />
<br />
In this period cycles of expansion and collapse continued as before, but they were qualitatively different from all those that preceded it in the long economically stable and impoverished centuries upon centuries of premodernity—those years when almost everybody lived forever with no hope or expectation of improvement on no more than $3 a day.<br />
<br />
<br />
<i><b>Orange as the Fulcrum</b></i><br />
<br />
In order to understand the difference, we must start to appreciate more profoundly the internal dynamics that the leap into modernity required and caused. Even today, in our mighty postindustrial Information Age, our interiors have not at all caught up with, much less integrated, all the implications that this discontinuity introduced into our human experience.<br />
<br />
(In all my reading of integral material and discussions with integralites, I rarely discern the slightest awareness of this challenge—other than from the pre-Wyatt Earp Ken Wilber. [Gosh, was that ten years ago already?] Mostly people appear distracted with dewy-eyes by what they want to see in the integral possibility, quite impatient with Wilber’s previous admonishment that you can’t skip steps. Unfortunately, with the rise of the Integral Institute and Wilber’s making peace with the Boomeritis tendencies in Boulder in return for the benefits of a modest commercial venture, he no longer polemicizes against this tendency. This belief in step-skipping is a form of magical thinking, a retrogression which, though perfectly understandable, has driven much of the violence of the past two centuries—and is likely to produce much more.)<br />
<br />
I do not have the scientifically-verifiable evidence so beloved of the modern mind to “prove” that much of our turmoil derives from an internally-generated lag in coming to terms with the gifts of the modern on both an individual and a global basis. I explored this a bit in <a href="http://aqalblog.blogspot.com/2015/12/the-evergreen-sustainability-of-utopia.html">a previous post, </a>and I think it’s important enough to continue to investigate, as it offers a satisfying explanation of what’s going on today. (“Satisfying,” of course, isn’t the same thing as “accurate.”) This is especially necessary in light of the postmodern monster rampaging through our modern institutions hell-bent on restoring the premodern world through chaos and violence, all sanctimoniously in the name of “progress.”<br />
<br />
(That some integralites participate in this excess without retching mystifies me. Here I align myself firmly with <a href="http://onecosmos.blogspot.com/">Robert Godwin</a>, author of <i>One Cosmos under God</i>. But I suggest those truly with a center of gravity in the transpersonal realms where authentic integral awareness dwells are still rather rare, the <i>soi–disant</i> “integral community” notwithstanding. But more of that later.)<br />
<br />
It bears repeating that the gift of the modern, the discontinuity that distinguishes it from the previous structures of consciousness, is the rise of individual identity. This singularity produced a disruption in the previous amber order of things that is still reverberating throughout humanity. That we in the Advanced Sector grew up during the apotheosis of modernity means that as a society and culture we had no embodied experience of premodernity; our entire experience and consciousness was shaped by immersion in the RH manifestations of modernity: steady economic growth with its significant contributions to the individual standard of living; vastly expanded social surplus and leisure that could be invested in a wide range of individual and social luxuries never before available to the common man; a political system firmly grounded in the modern nation state, offering relative peace and stability to its citizens; an astonishing array of scientific breakthroughs that contributed to economic expansion; and a platform from which to begin to deal with the social disruptions of modernity.<br />
<br />
And, as McCloskey demonstrates, the gifts of the modern are so powerful that those still in amber cultures cannot help but be attracted by them—even as they might simultaneously be repelled. This human civil war has been playing out ever since orange emerged from amber, for from amber’s perspective the independence of the individual poses an existential threat to the survival of the tribe. If the majority of the tribe’s members decide to step out on their own, that they no longer need the tribe to fulfill their destinies, how long will the tribe remain intact?<br />
<br />
No wonder the counterattack has been so furious and sustained!<br />
<br />
Thus what we now know has not yet happened is that the lines of development in the LH realms have not caught up to those in the right, and it is here where we find the source of our unhappiness, confusion, and self-violence. For the counterattack is not only played out in the political and economic realms, it is also played out in the personal and collective psychological and spiritual realms.<br />
<br />
<b><br /><i>Postmodernity</i> v. <i>Boomeritis</i></b><br />
<br />
And what of the gift of green postmodernity? It, too, bears its own unique threat to modernity, obscured though it is by its Boomeritis malformation. For the postmodern reveals the universality of individual dignity, that every human possesses a unique individual identity, and that no one person’s self-authorship can be privileged over anyone else’s. It also dismisses the presumption of “the given,” of the notion that all the Kosmos yet to be revealed exists in a predetermined structure by whose logic we are bound. These threaten orange assumptions that each person’s perspective is an absolute, for if you and I are the same in our identity, how can I maintain the uniqueness that seems to characterize my day-to-day experience? How do I keep from sliding back into the tribe? They also undermine the myth that the answers to our questions are “out there” if only we seek them hard enough. Instead, the postmodern insists that we are creating reality as we go along, transcending and including the past but not, alas, following a preordained path. The universe is not a clockwork mechanism.<br />
<br />
Given that we have not yet as a culture fully integrated the gifts of the modern, we are even farther from absorbing the gifts of the postmodern, as the prevalence of Boomeritis suggests. Green’s struggle to break free of orange seems to make common cause with amber, attacking from both sides, as it were, our fragile individual identity and the social institutions we created to support and reflect it. <br />
<br />
The even more fragile condition of green, whose probability wave is extremely volatile given its relative youth, renders it extremely susceptible to detours like the enticements of the French-style leftwing postmodernist dialectics created by Foucault, Derrida, Althusser, Lacan, and the like. Hidden in the Orwellian doublespeak of this monstrosity is just another version of the pre/trans fallacy: anything anti-modern may be used in the drive to destroy it. But since the modern left began in the French Revolution as a premodernist revolt against orange, authentic green will ultimately have to confront and shed retrograde Boomeritis fantasies in order to transcend, include, and integrate orange. For the most part almost no one centered in Boomeritis green is bothering with transcending and including, to say nothing of integrating!<br />
<br />
Kim Holmes’ recent book <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZmfdDbx_RY"><i>The Closing of the Liberal Mind</i></a> offers a clear road map for understanding how liberalism, once the wellspring of the modern revolution, was hijacked by the counterrevolution fancying itself postmodern, and poisoned the well for an authentic and expansive liberalism grounded in the yet-to-be-realized gifts of the postmodern. In its place we now have fellow citizens living with this devious, tribalist, anti-rational mindset—“authoritarian wolves in sheep’s clothing,” in Holmes’ characterization—that in the Trimemetic War is undermining everything that gave rise to the Great Enrichment. It is essential that integralites understand the difference between authentic green postmodern insights and the postmodernist movement birthed in the Frankfurt School and in Paris as a determinedly left-wing counterrevolution against modernity itself. Wilber devotes a great deal of energy examining this crucial issue in both <i>Sex, Spirituality, and Ecology</i> and <i>Marriage of Sense and the Soul</i>, as well as in his unpublished works on integral post-metaphysics. It is well worth revisiting his insights.<br />
<br />
But still, it’s the first tier food fight, and all’s fair in love and war.<br />
<br />
<br />
<i><b>The Trimemetic War Here and Now</b></i><br />
<br />
Perhaps now we can begin to make sense of what is happening in the world, for at the very least we can hypothesize that the triumph of Donald Trump in the US and of the Leave vote in the UK mark the mass emergence of a counter-counterrevolution: orange against the <i>de facto</i> amber-green alliance. <br />
<br />
And this is powerfully influenced by amber’s unrelated war against orange, as embodied in the various Islamist rebellions that have been erupting out of the Middle East for the past several generations. As we seek to understand the interplay of the three major structures of consciousness in the first tier food fight, let us appreciate the push of amber—the oldest and most stable of the three.<br />
<br />
For the most part, Islam, unlike any of the world’s other major religions (except Judaism), was and is a system of belief founded in a particular time and place to address real problems of the day, in Muhammed’s case the thoroughly amber world of the Arabian peninsula of the seventh century AD. Any universal truths to be discerned in the Quran cannot be abstracted from his practical goal in disclosing it: to purify and unite the Arab world in an <i>ummah</i> governed by the laws of Allah. <br />
<br />
From the beginning the Muslims discerned no distinction between the principles of rule and the polity that applied them; the caliphate that the jihadists seek to restore is the ideal polity that nurtures the <i>Dar al-Islam</i>, the tribe of Allah. As I have written <a href="http://www.integralworld.net/keller1.html">elsewhere</a>, Muslim nations in general, and Arab countries in particular, are the primary centers of amber consciousness today, and the specifically amber nature of Islam makes it relatively impervious to modernization.<br />
<br />
Thus for some time to come, these nations will constitute a home base from which amber’s counterrevolution against orange (and green, although Boomeritis doesn’t understand this) will be conducted in the political arena.<br />
<br />
There are, of course, other nations where amber still predominates, but none of these are as dominated by a mythic religion with the pull and drive of Islam. Thus as the Advanced Sector continues to offer the gifts of the modern, the premodern world will continue to struggle with its love-hate relationship with it.<br />
<br />
And so, complicating the orange counter-counterrevolution against green postmodernism’s war against it are the incursions, as we have seen in Paris, San Bernardino, and Orlando, of Islamic-based counterattacks against orange.<br />
<br />
And as we have also seen, orange and Boomeritis green have very different interpretations of and responses to these bloody incursions. Orange sees them as a straightforward attempt to destabilize and undermine Western power and self-confidence, while Boomeritis sees them as just rewards for Western imperialism and alliances with backward authoritarian regimes like those of the Saudis and the Mubarak-al Sissi cliques in Egypt. On the other hand, amber does not distinguish between orange and green, whether of the mature or Boomeritis variant; in amber’s view they both champion the destruction of the tribe and are thus to be resisted.<br />
<br />
If this were the only amber front in the Trimemetic War we might at least be able to appreciate why it behaves as it does, and account for its impact as history unfolds.<br />
<br />
But, alas, it is not. We actually confront an amber fifth column as it were, not just in our own societies but in our own psyches, for the individuation project launched by modernity is far from complete. The number of authentic, self-actualized individuals who have fully transcended, included, and integrated the earlier waves of consciousness appears to be a minority even in orange cultures. The prevalence of addictive behaviors, magical thinking, and fear-based reaction formations is evidence of the power of internal amber dynamics to impede the emergence of self-confident, self-affirming individuals centered in robust orange. The susceptibility to reverting to the tribal need to congregate with the like-minded and avoid different opinions is further evidence of amber’s continuing subversion of orange in the LH quadrants. The self-governing republic of citizens imbued with the civic virtue necessary to voluntary sharing of individual sovereignty envisioned by the American founders remains beyond our grasp when we have yet to master our own internal fears and contradictions.<br />
<br />
It is a truism of developmental theory that one cannot skip stages. Further, it is evident from a careful study of human history since the emergence of orange that it is no mean feat for a structure of consciousness to solidify completely enough to permit genuine transcendence. Perhaps amber could not give birth to orange until it had reached a certain degree of viability as a probability wave; it had to be strong and ripe enough to serve as the foundation of its own transcendence. If this is a general principle of development, then it is understandable why green has thus far failed spectacularly to emerge as a genuine discontinuity from orange, and remains pitifully permeated by red’s magical thinking and amber’s tribal yearnings.<br />
<br />
Yet integralites generally appear uninterested in the challenge of nurturing and encouraging healthy and mature orange. Most are so enamored by their conjectures of a world centered in second tier that they have little time for the hard work of helping Spirit make that possible. At the same time most, but not all, have also been attracted to integral theory from a Boomeritis perspective with its toxic postmodernist romanticism. <i>Yet there will be no transcendence of the individual ego until the individual ego is mature and healthy enough to support transcendence.</i><i><b><br /><br /><br />The Indispensability of Mature Orange</b></i><br />
<br />
Wilber himself has consistently urged that those genuinely interested in and committed to this possibility engage in serious and in-depth shadow work—“an absolutely crucial and foundational part of anybody’s growth and development,” he has written. This seems to me to be, along with a solid meditation practice, the <i>sine qua non</i> of transcendence of this particular stage. But shadow work is hard and often excruciatingly painful, and requires not only personal commitment but a dependable group of similarly committed people within which to practice. Wilber suggests in his <a href="https://www.integrallife.com/integral-life-practice/3-2-1-shadow-process">“3-2-1 shadow process”</a> a useful outline of how this work is done, but assumes that anyone following the formula will therefore be doing shadow work. Perhaps a truly blessed individual can apply this tool successfully on his own, but for most of us, it’s not going to happen. We require disinterested mirrors to reflect back to us what we cannot or will not see concealed in our subconscious minds.<br />
<br />
As long as we harbor the unhealed trauma that we experienced in the pre-personal stages of our development—the preverbal first two to three years of our lives—we are at their mercy. This is how amber, which is the environment of this trauma, fights the individuation drives of our later stages of adolescence and adulthood. Until we can see how this happens and embrace these psychospiritual turbulences with compassion and unconditional love, they will impede our growth toward authentic individuality—and thus the promise of orange remains unfulfilled. For most of us, the work of transcending, including, and integrating amber still remains to be done.<br />
<br />
This brief look at the multi-dimensionality of the Trimemetic War gives us just a flavor of the challenges coming at us from all directions. And while I believe wholeheartedly that this is all Spirit unfolding itself in this particular time and place in the dimensional world of Form, I also recognize the difficulty we face in finding equanimity in the middle of this seemingly ever-increasing chaos.<br />
<br />
In a recent blog <a href="http://onecosmos.blogspot.com/2016/06/summa-vocation.html">post</a>, Godwin addresses the essential truth of our predicament. Commenting on Fritjhof Schuon’s <i>Survey of Metaphysics and Esoterism</i>, he writes:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I'm looking at the foreword, written by Bruce Hanson, [who says,] “At the level of being we are, of course, human; which is to say, every child who is born of human parents comes into the world with a human essence.”<br />
<br />
In this highly qualified sense we are “created equal.”<br />
<br />
However, “it is quite another matter to achieve our humanity in our existence; that is, to realize to the fullest degree the very promise which is already in our nature.” Thus the gap—or abyss, depending—between what we are and what we are supposed to be—between Is and Ought.<br />
<br />
This also goes to both the source and end of our freedom: the very reason for the existence of the human station “is to choose, and to make the right choice” (Schuon).<br />
<br />
. . . “So, to become human is the religious task of humankind. Biological nature develops us only up to a certain point, and then we must individually, with great deliberation and full consciousness, seek the rest” (Burton).<br />
<br />
This can sound like new age do-it-yoursophistry, but “Schuon is quick to point out that it is not through our own efforts, ultimately, that we become ourselves.” We cannot pull ourselves up by our own buddhistraps.<br />
<br />
Rather, he emphasizes our dependence upon grace, <i>i.e</i>., "that energy which embodies the will of Heaven. If we are to individually fulfill and express our nature, we must first recognize our radical dependence upon that Power which constituted us in the first place" (Burton). Certainly Christianity teaches the hidden power of abandonment to Divine Providence: like Father, like Son, like us. A blestavus for the restavus!<br />
<br />
"If the human person will unconditionally make himself available to the work of that Power we call grace, grace will do the rest." It seems to me that this involves an undoing of the Fall; or, the insinuating Fall of evening was precisely adamn doing of the opposite of what we ought to be doing. And eating.</blockquote>
Precisely, indeed! We are engaged in the great Atman Project, the challenge of becoming fully human, realizing the deep divine potential embedded in each of us. “Biological nature develops us only up to a certain point, and then we must individually, with great deliberation and full consciousness, seek the rest,” pretty much describes the current human condition. This work cannot be done other than individually, the successful achievement of which offers us a chance to do it collectively. As integralites, in other words, we must set our intention to support the maturing of orange, the only stage in the spectrum of consciousness that champions the work of individuation. <br />
<br />
Amber and green, being first tier structures, are at war with orange—which is also at war with green. Authentic green, however, remains mostly a potential; the actual version of green haunting our world is the Boomeritis, leftist postmodernist version that uses the genuine longings of the actual insights of green as a disguise for its amber project to retribalize the world. This complicates the Trimemetic War by sowing confusion among all the parties; this is perhaps why things seem so chaotic and disintegrating. There appears to be no center of certainty from which we can undertake the humanizing of our species. “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”<br />
<br />
Still, this confusion is, like everything in our worlds, a product of our own making. So as integralites we might consider rededicating ourselves to <a href="http://nypost.com/2016/07/03/what-really-makes-america-great-you-the-individual/">serving the individuation project</a> by seeing everything that happens through the eye of Spirit: how does this—Trump, Sanders, Clinton, Brexit, terrorism, you name it—impact the maturing of orange? How am I serving as an exemplar through my own spiritual practice dedicated to becoming a full, authentic, consciously self-creating human person? For what awaits us at the consummation of this task, as another great poet, writing during a similarly tumultuous time in our nation’s history, declared, surpasseth all understanding:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,<br />
And what I assume you shall assume,<br />
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.<br />
<br />
I loafe and invite my soul,<br />
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.<br />
<br />
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air,<br />
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,<br />
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,<br />
Hoping to cease not till death.<br />
<br />
Creeds and schools in abeyance,<br />
Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,<br />
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,<br />
Nature without check with original energy.<br />
<br />
. . .<br />
<br />
I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,<br />
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.<br />
<br />
The last scud of day holds back for me,<br />
It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow’d wilds,<br />
It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.<br />
<br />
I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,<br />
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.<br />
<br />
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,<br />
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.<br />
<br />
You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,<br />
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,<br />
And filter and fibre your blood.<br />
<br />
Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,<br />
Missing me one place search another,<br />
I stop somewhere waiting for you.</blockquote>
</blockquote>
Marty Kellerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11592136716581562644noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3401106149239386272.post-77518463678497773352016-02-20T16:18:00.001-08:002016-07-02T11:33:21.004-07:00The Opportunity in Trimemetic ChaosSelf-described “atheistic libertarian” Brendan O’Neill, editor of the British e-magazine <i>Spiked Online</i>, has written an important article entitled <a href="http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/the-crisis-of-character/17691#.VoKuT-IeFkk">“The Crisis of Character,”</a> which looks at the progress of the postmodernist campaign to hollow out the advances in human evolution achieved by Western civilization. The attack on modernity has many fathers going back to the rages of François-Noël “Gracchus” Babeuf during the French Revolution, but this particular viciousness was created and promoted by the embittered clerisy at the Frankfurt School and its promulgation of “critical theory.”<br />
<br />
The signal contribution of the orange modern stage of Kosmic evolution is the liberation of the individual from the tribe. The critical importance of this to the spectrum of consciousness seems to elude many integralites. Only the individual, confident in his self-identity as such, can prepare the way for transcendence into the transpersonal, second tier stages where identity shifts to a much more comprehensive collective such as humanity as a whole. This development can only occur when the individual is free to release his self-identity, and this can only occur once we fully occupy our discrete autonomous self.<br />
<br />
I have written <a href="http://aqalblog.blogspot.com/2015/12/the-evergreen-sustainability-of-utopia.html">elsewhere</a> about how underdeveloped the structure of this stage of evolution remains in both LH quadrants. As Ken Wilber has noted, <a href="https://integrallife.com/integral-post/integral-age-leading-edge">integral postmetaphysics</a> suggests that the stages of consciousness behave as probability waves of interiority; the more we occupy and work them, the higher the likelihood that they will conform to predictable patterns. All the prepersonal stages up to orange have been around for millennia and therefore present relatively stable structures.<br />
<br />
Orange, Wilber’s “rational/egoic” stage, is only five hundred years old as a mass phenomenon of development. Further, it is the center of gravity of consciousness for only 20% of humanity. Even among the 20% the evidence strongly suggests that we still have quite a way to go before orange displays the same stability as the prepersonal stages.<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a>Integral postmetaphysics also suggests that no future stages to emerge are guaranteed; that is to say, neither the inevitability nor the structures of the transpersonal as a mass meme are predetermined. As we always have since the earliest hominids dropped out of the trees, we will have to make it up as we go along.<br />
<br />
Don Beck and the Gravesians aver that, as Said Dawlabani, author of <i>Memenomics</i>, <a href="http://www.memenomics.com/2015/12/13/emergence-from-a-momentous-day-to-a-momentous-leap">puts it</a>, “in most cases, we ascend to higher levels of sustained bio-psycho-social development when solutions to our Existential problems can no longer come from the current system.” This neo-Marxist view, recapitulating Marx’ assertion in <i>The German Ideology</i> that “life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life,” nonetheless offers grains of truth. As long as we recognize that there are no <i>pre-existing</i> “higher levels of sustained bio-psycho-social development,” the transcendence impelled by the failure of “the current system” to solve “our Existential problems” is new territory to be structured by the trial-and-error efforts of increasing numbers of humans blessed (or cursed) with a radically new awareness.<br />
<br />
So now, in the past fifty years we have created green (which I <a href="http://aqalblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/immediate-challenge-healthy-green.html">see as actually higher orange</a>, since it is an improvement on but not a radical advance over individual identity). Green’s contribution is the awareness that every human is capable of and entitled to the dignity of autonomous-self identity, extending orange’s creation of individual dignity to everyone universally. However, as a brand new stage, its structures are tentative and plastic; the current predominant Boomeritis variant with its postmodernist rejection of Reason is highly unstable and infected with regression to amber with its tribal identity.<br />
<br />
Contributing to the hodgepodge nature of this wave is the incompletion of orange. This is characterized by the aggressive and stubborn presence of neuroses and other mind parasites born in the prepersonal stages of development, whose traumatic experience remains unhealed and unintegrated in both the individual and collective shadow. Although it is easy enough to examine oneself to become aware of this as it impacts us individually, it is tougher to pinpoint in the collective.<br />
<br />
Surely, as social scientist Brene Brown <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCvmsMzlF7o">has demonstrated</a>, the persistence of alcohol and drug addictions, indebtedness, and obesity among large numbers of us is evidence of unhealed psychic trauma in our culture. The recent explosion of postmodernist self-deconstruction is yet another indication of something gone amiss.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b><i>“Identitarian” Politics</i></b><br />
<br />
O’Neill starts to put his finger on it by observing the recent rash of “identity as” rhetoric and social compulsion, emblemized by the Caucasian Rachel Dolezal justifying her masquerade as an African American by asserting that she “identifies as black.”<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Ours has been branded an era of identity politics. The New York <i>Times</i> calls 2015 “the year we obsessed over identity.” Many have observed, often critically, that Western campuses in particular have become hotbeds of identity politics, or what is sometimes referred to as the “identitarian left,” which now defines itself, and engages with others, through the prism of identity rather than on the basis of ideas or shared or conflicting material and political interests. In student life and new-left circles, people are “identified as,” or they self-identity as, white, black, men, women, gay, straight, bi, trans, agender, non-binary and so on, and their politics takes place entirely at this level. . . . Politics is no longer the sphere in which interests are expressed and convictions crash, but rather has become an arena for the pitting of personalised identities against one another: a new caste system, in effect. The individual with conviction has given way to the insecure possessor of an identity, whose primary concern is with the protection of his or her identity from ridicule or assault. We enter the public sphere as self-ossified categories rather than as thinking, convinced persons; as ciphers, representing something, rather than characters, containing something.</blockquote>
“A new caste system,” indeed; others call it the “retribalization” of our culture.<br />
<br />
While the emergence of orange and its modern culture has generated unprecedented material prosperity for an exponentially expanded humanity, it has failed to address the amber counterrevolution and thus has laid itself open to the postmodernist determination to reverse its accomplishments in the name of “re-enchantment” and other utopian fantasies. I have called this global dynamic “the <a href="http://aqalblog.blogspot.com/2009/08/three-blind-memes.html">Trimemetic War</a>,” the conflict of three disparate perspectives jockeying for hegemony in our individual and collective consciousness—each desperate to knock the next higher out of the arena.<br />
<br />
Ken Wilber has said that the greatest challenge to humanity is the stabilization of orange, and O’Neill is pointing to yet another reason to take Wilber at his word on this. <br />
<br />
It is a conundrum to the intergralite that the advances of modernity, particularly in the physical sciences, have produced useful tools for the counterrevolutionaries to deploy in their drive to eviscerate orange’s achievement of tribal transcendence. (Is there any way to avoid the complications of the Trimemetic War?) Marx famously helped himself to the fruits of the aristocracy, burying himself in the reading room of the British Museum endowed by Sir Hans Sloane to ferret out data scattered throughout its vast collections to support his faith in scientific materialism as the basis for social organization. <br />
<br />
From his efforts and those of thousands inspired by the achievements of scientists in RH inquiries, institutions invariably arose dedicated to the social “sciences,” confident that our interiors would yield measureable insights with the same tools we used to investigate the physical universe. The exemplar of the postmodernist institution established to house assaults on modernity is the Institute for Social Research at the Frankfurt School with its promulgation of “Critical Theory.”<br />
<br />
Wilber has noted that a signal characteristic of first tier stages is their conviction that their perspectives are “correct,” and that therefore all those others are deviant and erroneous, if not downright dangerous. Thus the postmodernist disdains the supposed disenchantment of the world brought about by the modernists, but the premodernists are never acquiesced to the transcendence of modernity in either the individual or collective LH quadrants. This fundamental memetic conflict generates war, both in our souls and in the exterior world where our inner life plays out.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b><i>The Conundrum of Trimemetic Chaos </i></b> <br />
<br />
The integralite will, properly, concern himself more about the function of that war in the evolution of consciousness than its fruits. Clearly the conflict is fundamental and purposeful, and at the very least serves as a challenge to our beliefs about accessing the “peace that surpasses understanding.” <br />
<br />
Yet properly appreciating how the elements of the conflict impact understanding and its development through the stages of consciousness can be a useful contribution to how we embrace and behave in the current phase of Kosmic evolution.<br />
<br />
Thus we start by embracing this reality just as it is. Trimemetic war is upon us, whether we want it or not. Is it serving an evolutionary purpose? How could it be otherwise? It is tempting to convict the “identitarian left” as rogues outside the mainstream of evolution, but surely that is a partial judgement more redolent of first rather than second tier. <br />
<br />
Is there a purpose to the systematic undermining of orange’s radical emergent, individual identity? Perhaps about this achievement there is less than meets the eye, or perhaps its radical divergence from amber requires a lengthy “toughening up” period before it can settle into a dependable probability wave upon which we can confidently rely as a stage from which to make the momentous leap.<br />
<br />
This raises a more comprehensive question: how does this unprecedented and unnerving Trimemetic War itself serve the course of Kosmic evolution? Throughout history we can clearly see how devolutionary chaos served to clear out room for critical emergents, much like forest fires clear away underbrush to open up space for younger trees to sprout and grow. The Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction made the emergence of mammals possible. The last Great Ice Age paved the way for the invention of agriculture and tribal societies. The collapse of Rome eventually made the Renaissance possible. <br />
<br />
O’Neill appears to grasp the subtlety of this analysis in the conclusion of his essay.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
What is today referred to as the rise of identity politics is in truth the hollowing out of the institutions, beliefs and freedoms around which life and identity were shaped and cohered for centuries. It is a crisis not merely of politics, or class, or the left; it is a crisis of character, a questioning of what it means to be human, an uncertainty as to how we become fully human. Addressing the emergence of new, weak identities, and the corresponding creation of a therapeutic industry and new forms of moral censure to prop up these identities, will require more than ridiculing the new left or the so-called “identitarian movement.” It demands nothing less than the reconstruction of public life, and the rediscovery of our faith in the strong individual who both makes and is made by the world, rather than simply needing to be consoled by it. It requires that we refuse to acquiesce to alienated, subjective identity-making, and instead recreate the conditions in which people can develop their identity through the exercise of moral autonomy, and through creating and engaging in new institutions, new ideas and new societies.</blockquote>
“It is a crisis of character, a questioning of what it means to be human, an uncertainty as to how we become fully human.” This is the essential point. The accumulated RH wealth, both quantitative and qualitative, unleashed by modernity’s Great Enrichment, has not yet been fully reflected in our interior lives. We are still at war with ourselves, uncertain about the value of the autonomous individual liberated from the secure and stable tribe. This war is obvious in our culture and our politics, but so far we most of us repress the inquiry into how it rages within. <br />
<br />
It seems clear that the Great Enrichment, launched by the rise of the four quadrants and the distinct spheres of Good, the Beautiful, and the True, was a necessary precondition for the hard work of the consolidation of healthy orange. The ethic of scientific inquiry established a universal method for discovering, testing, and establishing fundamental principles beyond those pertaining to the physiosphere. <br />
<br />
In this period of trimemetic chaos we have the opportunity to apply to the Individuation Project the vast intellectual and spiritual riches made available through the gifts of modernity. This crisis of identity that O’Neill so skillfully analyzes calls us to more firmly establish “the conditions in which people can develop [our] identity through the exercise of moral autonomy, and through creating and engaging in new institutions, new ideas and new societies.” The revelations of the integral can be a significant contribution to this renewal.Marty Kellerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11592136716581562644noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3401106149239386272.post-41421339536973666342015-12-22T09:13:00.002-08:002016-02-26T15:41:44.470-08:00The Evergreen Sustainability of Utopia<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">If the evidence of the
origin and nature of the Great Enrichment is so compelling—indeed, we in the
Advanced Sector enjoy its historically unprecedented benefits every day—why
then does its antithesis, socialism, continue to compel such widespread allegiance
that many of us seek to dismantle the American system that is its highest expression?</i><br />
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
I asked this of the eminent author and economist Deirdre
McCloskey at a recent public forum in London, and somewhat to my surprise she
admitted she could not answer the question.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And yet McCloskey is perhaps better prepared to do so than
any living economist that I’ve encountered, now that Milton Friedman and
Friedrich Hayek are no longer with us.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
She prominently established the foundation for a
satisfactory answer to this important question in the first two books of her
soon-to-be-completed <a href="http://www.deirdremccloskey.com/academics/index.php">Bourgeois Era
trilogy</a>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Particularly in the second
book, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bourgeois Dignity</i>, she
demolishes every theory of the right and the left about the factors that
created this massive shift in the trajectory of human political economy, and
points out that it occurred because of a singular change in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">collective inner consciousness</i> of human
beings in Holland and England during the seventeenth century.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Now, McCloskey doesn’t actually say “singular shift in the collective
inner consciousness”; what she does assert is that there was a discernible and
decisive shift in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">rhetoric of social
value</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
. . . three centuries ago in places
like Holland and England the talk and thought about the middle class began to
alter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ordinary conversation about
innovation and markets became more approving.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The high theorists were emboldened to rethink their prejudice against
the bourgeoisie, a prejudice by then millennia old.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>. . . The North Sea talk at length radically
altered the local economy and politics and rhetoric.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In northwestern Europe around 1700 the
general opinion shifted in favor of the bourgeoisie, and especially in favor of
its marketing and innovating.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The shift
was sudden as these things go.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a great shift occurred in what Alexis de
Tocqueville called “habits of the mind”—or more exactly, habits of the
lip.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>People stopped sneering at market
innovativeness and other bourgeois virtues exercised far from the traditional
places of honor in the Basilica of St. Peter or the Palace of Versailles or the
gory ground of the First Battle of Breitenfeld.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=3401106149239386272#_edn1" name="_ednref1" style="mso-endnote-id: edn1;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt;">[1]</span></span></span></span></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It’s a shame that, in the very beginning of her insightful
argument, she pulls back from examining the habits of the mind whose transformation
resulted in those “habits of the lip.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Rhetoric, after all, is a product of inner consciousness and
perspective.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Talk is the crystallization
of thought seeking social viability.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>That people “stopped sneering” happened for a reason, and McCloskey’s
argument would be more deeply served by examining and applying that reason.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<a name='more'></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It is, in fact, only by understanding (as best we can given
our limitations) our interior lives as individuals and cultures that we can
appreciate the stubborn resistance to universal embrace of the principles and
dynamics that generated (and continue to generate) the Great Enrichment.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Habits of the Mind Are Foundational</i></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory offers a method for describing
what happened several centuries ago to change the habits of the lip, for it
insists (among other things) that our Kosmos is a four-dimensional entity, comprising an
interior/exterior, single/collective complex of perspectives.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=3401106149239386272#_edn2" name="_ednref2" style="mso-endnote-id: edn2;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt;">[2]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thus the Integral Model suggests that for
everything we can see and measure “objectively,” there is a corresponding
interior analogue—a thought, belief, emotion, hunch, etc.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The decision to measure and comment on what we
see and hear necessarily precedes the acts of measurement and commentary.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Our interior world is structured, analogous to the
exterior world, as a series of ever-deeper dimensions in human spacetime, and
the structures of these dimensions can be examined and both described and
experienced (relatively) discretely.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=3401106149239386272#_edn3" name="_ednref3" style="mso-endnote-id: edn3;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt;">[3]</span></span></span></span></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So what McCloskey so masterfully observes about what
happened in seventeenth century Holland and England has, according to Integral
Theory, an interior correlate.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Rhetoric—the spoken word, what we hear when we speak to one another—has
an interior, pre-spoken source.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Understanding
that source and its place in the evolution of consciousness more powerfully
illuminates McCloskey’s important insights.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The Swiss cultural anthropologist Jean Gebser labeled the
predominant mode of consciousness in human history since the end of the Great
Ice Age and the replacement of hunter/gatherer by agricultural socioeconomic
structures the “mythic/membership” wave.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=3401106149239386272#_edn4" name="_ednref4" style="mso-endnote-id: edn4;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt;">[4]</span></span></span></span></a>
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This long period of human development
was dominated by a mythical view of the world in which human creative power was
projected onto a hierarchy of divinities who wrote the rules by which they
would agree to act as patrons of the various farming land-based group or
tribe.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Members of these tribes or clans fulfilled the highly
delineated roles necessary for group cohesion in a dangerous and mysterious
world; unquestioningly following the rules governing these roles was essential
for survival of one and all.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The gods dictated the laws and rewarded the compliant while punishing the rebellious.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Thus we see a multitude of gods and religions across both
the centuries and the globe as agricultural societies matured and great
land-based empires arose.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This premodern
era was characterized on the exterior by hierarchical imperial polities large
and small, and by an interior unconscious presumption that group belonging was
one’s life purpose. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The great writer and psychologist Robert Godwin, in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">One Cosmos under God, </i>dives deeply into
how this mindset saw the world and its own place in it:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
. . . Greek gods were at best
indifferent and unpredictable, at worst downright hostile and sadistic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If they took an interest in human affairs,
“it was often to punish rather than to help . . . the gods were like judges in
a totalitarian state, who might—or might not—mete out punishment to anyone at
any time.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They were “more like cruel
adolescents who delighted in the cunning ways they spread pain and confusion.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Yes, in this era we hired the gods to keep social order, and
woe betide him or her who stepped out of line—as the story of Prometheus so
chillingly warns.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But most of us had no
curiosity about our condition, embedded as we were in societies whose
communications were mostly oral and whose sense of time was linearly
cyclical.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Godwin, quoting the German
chronicler of consciousness evolution Erich Neumann, writes that</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
“the unconscious state is the
original, basic psychic situation that is everywhere the rule.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As a result, the average <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">peasant</i> had little sense of a true, individual “self,” separate
from the collective:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.0in;">
To them their identity in this
life was irrelevant . . . [T]here was also no awareness of time . . .
Generations succeeded one another in a meaningless, timeless blur . . . Any
innovation was inconceivable; to suggest the possibility of one would have
invited suspicion, and because the accused were guilty until they proved
themselves innocent by surviving impossible ordeals—by fire, water, or
combat—to be suspect was to be doomed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>All knowledge was already known.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">And nothing would ever change</i> [italics
in original].</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
. . . Only two powers ran the world
(itself evidence of severe psychological splitting), the logical outcome being
that life revolved around the notion that “the evil one must be fought and the
good one placated.”<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=3401106149239386272#_edn5" name="_ednref5" style="mso-endnote-id: edn5;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt;">[5]</span></span></span></span></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This state of our interior affairs lasted for millennia, but as we well
know eventually something radically different began to emerge among discernible
masses of people in northwestern Europe such that a new society began to arise
from the old in Holland and then England by the end of the seventeenth century,
as McCloskey (and many others) documents.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
What occurred was the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">shift
of identity</i> (the answer to the question, “Who am I?”) <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">from the tribe to the individual person</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Since the end of the Great Ice Age until the
fifteenth century the answer to that question was, “I am my tribe.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Now a new identity was emerging from this
foundational perspective: “I am my own person.” </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Wilber reviews this emergence extensively in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Up from Eden</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sex, Ecology, and Spirituality</i>, as does Gebser in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Ever-Present Origin</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Barry Sanders also provides a compelling
description in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Is for Ox. </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The power of this shift was such that even in
its earliest stages people were remarking on and celebrating it, such as the
Renaissance Florentine scholar Giovanni Pico della Mirandola in his <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Oration on the Dignity of Man</i> published
in 1486—a mere thirty years after Gutenberg printed his Bible on his new (for
the West) invention, providing a tool essential for the individuation project.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Of course this new identity didn’t rush through the
populations like wildfire, but on the other hand from the perspective of
history it <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">did</i> happen relatively
fast.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The mythic/membership stage,
arising around 10,000 BC, has existed from almost 12,000 years; the upstart
stage has been around for only about 500 years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But so radically different from the prevailing system was it that in
that relatively short time it thoroughly altered the substance of human
existence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The overwhelming evidence of
this is the Great Enrichment.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In his <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Why the West
Rules—for Now</i>, Ian Morris offers a scale of social development to chart the
economic progress of humanity from the invention of agriculture.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Its elements include energy capture, social
organization, war-making capacity, and information technology.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He shows that, for all the centuries of our
history from the invention of agriculture, nowhere on the planet did any
society exceed a measure of 47—until two hundred years ago where particularly
in the West we have shot up to an astounding 906 as of 2000!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In other words, in the past two centuries
human social wealth grew 19 times richer than what we had in the previous one
hundred eighteen.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=3401106149239386272#_edn6" name="_ednref6" style="mso-endnote-id: edn6;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt;">[6]</span></span></span></span></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
When identity was liberated from tribal bonds, human
creativity soared.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The individual can
create so much more easily, speedily, and exhilaratingly than the collective. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At the same time, a collective of <i>free</i>
individuals can voluntarily agree to promote, distribute, and benefit from these
creations farther and wider than the rule-bound insular collective. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Moreover, one’s creative capacity becomes an
element in one’s personal identity such that it generates a virtuous circle of inventiveness
and productivity.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Human history has been on a wild ride since this revolution
in consciousness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The most critical
development was the founding of the United States of America, a self-aware
project of the Scottish Enlightenment, upon the principles of individual
sovereignty ruled by a remarkable system of self-governance designed to
reinforce and benefit from those principles.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Within a very short period of time the U. S. became a magnet
for people around the world but especially from northern Europe who sought to make their own fortunes unbounded by the strictures of a more rigid social
system.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For over a hundred years the
United States provided an open and free society—particularly once it abolished
slavery after a bloody civil war—that supported, encouraged, and celebrated
inventive wealth creation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Its global
dominance at the end of the period of two world wars marking the failure of Europe’s
imperial system was the apotheosis of the individuation project as the clearly
superior method of organizing wealth creation.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The rising tide of the wealth created by the revolution
of modernity was lifting all boats worldwide, and the communist counterrevolution
signally failed to match, much less surpass as promised, the hated capitalist
world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By the time of the collapse of
the Soviet Union and the ditching of Marxist economics in China in the same
decade, the evidence of the unparalleled superiority of the system that
McCloskey calls “technological and institutional betterment at a frenetic pace, tested by unforced exchange by the parties involved” (or “trade-tested progress” for short) was inescapable.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And yet.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In spite of the evidence of its success, first Europeans and
then Americans permitted ourselves to begin doubting this arrangement that
produced our ever more prosperous lives.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>We were impervious to neither the critiques of this new political
economy leveled by socialists in Europe and Progressives at home starting in
the late nineteenth century nor the psychospiritual shocks produced by World
War I and the Depression.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Why would this be?</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
My hypothesis is that our interior self-sense has not yet
fully absorbed the implications of the exterior wealth we have generated.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We see, but cannot yet trust and
believe.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And this is because we have not
been able to fully establish a deeply-rooted modern psychospiritual
understanding that absorbs and answers the concerns that generate tribal
counterrevolution rather than wars with them.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Let me explain.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Unprecedented and Disruptive Gift of the Modern</i></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
As Wilber points out, the structural dynamic of the
evolutionary process sees each new wave of consciousness emerge out of and
transcend the current one, such that the newer entity, while entirely new and
unique, nonetheless incorporates all earlier stages.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the physical realm we see this as atoms
emerge out of subatomic particles, molecules emerge out of atoms, chemical
compounds emerge out of atoms, and so on.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Each new entity includes the earlier, less complex elements while having
its own unique substance and configuration.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In human evolution, the same is true of the stages of
consciousness, in both their individual and collective dimensions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Out of our simplest, most primitive stage of
awareness came ever deeper and more complex modes and perspectives.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By the time we reached the Paleolithic Age of
our hunter/gatherer social structure, our consciousness had reached what Gebser
and Wilber call the magic stage.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=3401106149239386272#_edn7" name="_ednref7" style="mso-endnote-id: edn7;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt;">[7]</span></span></span></span></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The interior psychological structures that characterize the
premodern, mythic/membership level of consciousness developed over the course
of multiple millennia, solidifying through use and custom into a predictable configuration.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This arrangement in turn reified and
undergirded the social systems that were the vessels of human social
reproduction.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Magic dominated our consciousness for tens of thousands of
years until the end of the last Ice Age when hunter/gatherers began
domesticating plants and animals; from this activity arose the
mythic/membership structure we spoke of above.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This dominated human social evolution until quite recently when,
beginning with the Renaissance, humans began to cultivate individual autonomy
no longer dependent upon tribal beliefs and demands.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By the beginning of the 18th century this process was advanced enough in Holland and England that the
political economy both adapted to and self-organized to nurture and accelerate
this new stage of awareness.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The emergent features of this new consciousness were radical
indeed compared to what we humans were used to, and something for which we were
completely unprepared.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>An entirely new
realm of interior awareness opened up, making possible for the first time the
capacity to conceive of oneself as an object of contemplation separate from and
superior to all other objects of awareness.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Gebser calls this new dimension “perspectival” in contrast
to the “unperspectival” two-dimensionality of mythic/membership mind.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“The conception of man as subject is based on
a conception of the world and the environment as an object.” Citing the
evidence of something astir in the paintings of Giotto at the turn of the 14th
century, he writes about “the latent space hitherto dormant in the night of
collective men’s unconscious is visualized; the first renderings of space begin
to appear in painting, objectified or externalized from the psyche out into the
world—a consciousness of space whose element of depth becomes visible in
perspective.”<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=3401106149239386272#_edn8" name="_ednref8" style="mso-endnote-id: edn8;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt;">[8]</span></span></span></span></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Barry Sanders points out the critical role that the rise of
literacy now plays as a new medium for self-awareness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Regarding this new “psychic inner-space” he
observes in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Is for Ox</i>:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
A person must first hold the
abstract notions of space and volume in mind before perspective can be
described and analyzed, and certainly before it can be translated onto paper as a
vanishing-point perspective.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That level
of abstraction flourishes in literacy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Vanishing-point perspective requires more than mere seeing; it requires
abstracting and shaping reality through conception and perception.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Tuscan painters<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>. . . found themselves in a more volumetric
space, and they depict a world that have been conceptualized differently.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The new space gets “produced” through a
reciprocal relationship negotiated between a literate mind and experience.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=3401106149239386272#_edn9" name="_ednref9" style="mso-endnote-id: edn9;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt;">[9]</span></span></span></span></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This radical psychic discontinuity that liberated
perspective birthed individual identity, and that social innovative led almost
directly to the new habits of the heart and lip that McCloskey rightly
identifies as the ultimate source of the Great Enrichment.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But this revolution is highly incomplete.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As transformative as it has been to our
social and physical environment, our inner worlds still remain demonstrably
schizophrenic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The “individuation
project” is still unfinished.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even as
Western culture has altered itself (and the globe) fundamentally in response to
the enormous psychic energy unleashed by the modern perspective, we most of us
still harbor deep fears, neuroses, and illusions that in the dead of the night
question the viability and sustainability of what we have wrought.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We have not stepped fully into healthy
autonomy, but remained infected by our tribal and mythical pasts in ways that
inhibit our thorough maturation.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Counterrevolution as Unhealed Childhood Trauma</i></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Until the process of transcending and including also <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">integrates</i> the earlier stages of
consciousness, we will feel at war with ourselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As the individual human grows through these
stages from conception, we absorb psychic stresses and traumas that remain
unhealed even as we age physically.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>From
infancy to childhood to adolescence, we move through at least four identifiable
and distinct phases.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If during any or
all of these traumas bruise us sufficiently and without healing they will act
as impediments to the maturing of both the originating and subsequent stages.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The psychologists Alice Miller and Theodore Reuben are among
many who have identified the kinds and severity of childhood traumas that occur
outside the conscious awareness of both children and parents.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the Advanced Sector, whose culture is
centered in modern, personal, and individuated presumptions, this early
distress usually remains repressed and hidden from ordinary awareness as we
grow, so that it lives, as it were, in shadows from which it continuously
impacts our development in unaccountable ways.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Unhealed trauma subverts healthy psychospiritual growth into
fully autonomous adulthood.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This shows
up in the adolescent and adult mind as what psychologist Robert Godwin calls “mind
parasites”: “self-serving entities that have no business taking up space in our
minds, and which prevent us from claiming our divine birthright.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
. . . when the ordinary mechanism
for learning from experience is damaged, it does not simply leave a vacuum in
the psyche.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rather, the means for
discriminating true and false—for testing reality—is actually replaced by an
omniscient, “dictatorial affirmation that one thing is morally right and the
other wrong.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In short, the domain of
learning is hijacked by a specific parasite, an omniscient knower who forbids
contradictory knowledge on the grounds that it is not just wrong but
immoral.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
. . . it is during infancy that we
experience a relatively boundaryless mental state, with an understandable
confusion of inside and outside, and a consequent ability to anxiously project
out what we don’t like, or to magically import what we do.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In their normal operation, these processes
are actually essential to the development of a healthy mind, as they are the
ground-floor input/output mechanisms that keep the mind an open system, linked
with other minds and therefore susceptible to emotional growth and evolution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But in the wake of inadequate, abusive, or
neglectful parenting (or even just the “ambient trauma” of a “bad fit” between
parent and child), these normal processes may become visibly hypertrophied,
leading to very strange results which are <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">easily
</i>detected in both their personal and historical forms.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
One of the reasons for the failure
to appreciate mind parasites has to do with their very nature: their most basic
“trick,” as it were—no different from any virus—is to hijack the machinery of
the mind in such a way that the mind does not recognize what has happened.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In addition, this early programming is mostly
stored in the pre-linguistic, emotional centers of the right brain, making it
beyond the reach of language, and therefore all the more likely to be “acted
out” in an unconscious manner . . . Not only that, but once the parasites are
hardwired in, they tend to “reproduce” their own dysregulated states.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>. . . Thus, until one has systematically
identified and eliminated (or at least learned to control) these viral specters
of childhood from the mind, one will continue to unwittingly do their bidding,
even if it means making oneself miserable in the process.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=3401106149239386272#_edn10" name="_ednref10" style="mso-endnote-id: edn10;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt;">[10]</span></span></span></span></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This parasitic hardwiring ensures that when, as adults,
situations reminiscent of these early childhood traumas arise, we will revert
to the emotional state we produced in our struggles to survive them without
being in the least bit aware that our now present experience is actually a
habitual reawakening and replaying of an original one now lost to our conscious
memory.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The first two-three years of life, this “pre-linguistic”
period, is the realm of magical “thinking,” during which time “the newly
emerging images and symbols do not merely represent objects, they are thought
to be concretely <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">part of the things they
represent</i>, and thus “word magic” abounds:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
Up to the age of 4-5, [the child]
thinks that he is “forcing” or compelling the moon to move; the relation takes
on an aspect of dynamic participation or of magic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>. . . Closely akin to this participation is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">magical causality</i>, [where] the subject
regards his gestures, his thoughts, or the objects he handles, as charged with
efficacy, things to the very participations which he establishes between those
gestures, etc., and the things around him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Thus a certain word acts upon a certain thing, a certain gesture will
protect one from a certain danger; a certain white pebble will bring about the
growth of water lilies, and so on.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=3401106149239386272#_edn11" name="_ednref11" style="mso-endnote-id: edn11;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt;">[11]</span></span></span></span></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So consider the challenge to maturation into a fully psychologically
healthy adult with reliable mental acuity that is created when trauma occurs in
the pre-verbal period of magical belief: we will fail to regularly and easily
distinguish magical assumptions from rational ones.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Our mind parasites will promote this, keeping
alive the original emotional mood in which are embedded these magical impulses
that will have more reality to us than thoughts that contradict them.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Traumas originating in later phases of development,
particularly in adolescence, will have similar impacts upon maturation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Adolescent disturbances will have the
tendency to freeze mythic belief structures: those that establish our security
in our tribe in return for us knowing and playing our roles as expected.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Teenagers are notorious for focusing on how we
fit in to our crowd, and unless we develop the internal strength to “go it
alone” without reference to our peers’ opinions, we will be stuck to one degree
or another validating the rigid structures that guarantee our crowd can defeat
yours and thus enable our own survival.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It turns out that the self-government experiment of the
Scottish Enlightenment launched by the Americans in the late eighteenth century
depended—as the Founders knew full well—on developing a citizenry
preponderantly dominated by mature individuals no longer seduced by magical and
mythical thinking.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Alas, they launched
this a century before useful knowledge of human psychology became available;
thus they had few tools beyond exhortation to encourage, not to mention
guarantee, this collective maturation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
What they did do—and this was an achievement impossible to
overstate—was establish a government unable to interfere with or influence much
this social development, being wise enough to accept that government in its
arrogance and myopia could only make it worse.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>They created a society in which the emerging modern individuation
project could proceed relatively uninhibited by the kinds of tyrannical social
structures that predominated in Europe and the rest of the globe.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To this boisterous and chaotic experiment
they attracted the adventurous and restless of Europe, those to whom the
experience of America revealed both the stultifying limits of their own
premodern cultures and the glorious possibilities they suddenly saw for
themselves outside those boxes in the New World.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
They let loose the political economy that Adam Smith
foresaw, creating and nurturing a vast free market to permit the
“trade-testing” McCloskey identifies as the practical means of rewarding and
incentivizing continuous innovation and improvement.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But they failed—through no fault of their own—to generate
the citizenry that could sustain this.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The experiences of Europe that culminated in the unmitigated disaster of
World War I undermined the self-confidence of the American elites, a process
begun in the decades before with the mixed messages of the Progressive
Movement.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The massive explosion of
wealth creation after the American Civil War created new social tensions along
with unimagined opportunities, but the open and free markets of America
ironically also divided and diminished the capacity of its leaders, falling
far short of the statesmanship of Abraham Lincoln, to guide the nation towards the better angels
of its nature.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There followed “the war to end all wars” a century of bitter warfare,
characterized by a violence and instability that could not help but activate
our magical and mythical mind parasites.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>If the emergence of a nation of free individuals nonetheless still led
to the unimaginable excess of the twentieth century, then perhaps the whole project
of modernity was fundamentally flawed and must be replaced by something kinder
and gentler.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Defending the Fundamentals of the Great Enrichment Is the Great
Imperative</i></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And yet, even in the face of the senseless slaughter of
millions and the devastation of thousands of square miles of human
inhabitations, the Great Enrichment continued its exponential spread across the
globe almost without pause.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At the
beginning of the twentieth century, we humans numbered 1.6 billion; by the end
we were more than 6 billion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>GDP per
capita rose from $1,000 to almost $8,000, and life expectancy expanded from 33
to 70 years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And we have already seen
the more comprehensive metrics offered by Ian Morris, showing the same
exponential growth curve worldwide.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
As a whole, we humans have yet to draw the appropriate
conclusions and wholeheartedly organize ourselves accordingly; clearly rational
evidence is insufficient to the task.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It
appears that we are still facing the same challenge and obstacle that the
Founders identified as a potentially fatal flaw: the development of a mass
culture of civic virtue mature enough to handle the trials of self-governance.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Our inability to do so is analogous to the inability of a
drunk with diabetes and kidney failure to give up drinking: something inside
us, something hidden and demonic, blocks our progress toward health.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Socialism attracts because the idea of it satisfies the
unhealed child within so many of us: it offers security from an identifiable
enemy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It promises that we will no
longer have to struggle, suffer, and still possibly fail at making our own way
in the world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It assures us that we can
have a peaceful world devoid of risk and randomness where everyone gets what he
needs. Our conscious minds may say no, but our traumatized and unhealed souls
say yes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The sad evidence of this fact is the impossibility of
carrying on a rational dialogue with most socialists, steeped as they are in the degenerative postmodernist disdain for Reason—but then again it’s
equally as difficult for most of us to change habits just because evidence
suggests we should.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In spite of the tremendous transformations we humans have
experienced as our consciousness has deepened since the birth of the modern, we
have yet to reach back and heal that which still throbs painfully in the
shadows.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Our society accurately reflects
this failure back to us: as the social researcher Brene Brown <a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_on_vulnerability?language=en#t-144845">has
chronicled</a>, “We are the most in-debt, obese, addicted, and medicated adult
cohort in U.S. history.”<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=3401106149239386272#_edn12" name="_ednref12" style="mso-endnote-id: edn12;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt;">[12]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Seeing these not as moral failings but
information about our collective inner condition is the beginning of wisdom.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It is, indeed, in dealing with the habits of the heart that
we will generate even more creative habits of the lip, leading next to the
rhetoric of vulnerability and healing so that we cure ourselves of—or at least
learn to control—the mind parasites that find solace in magical and mythical
thinking.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We may have at the beginning
of the modern era stopped sneering at the innovator, the renegade, the heretic,
but now this toxic self-violence has crept back into public discourse.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This counterrevolution is but a desperate
attempt to stop the hand of time, to freeze our world into a dependable environment,
to take from our lips this cup of self-creation, self-responsibility, and
self-governance.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Fortunately the disclosures about the dynamics of the mind
and soul generated and sharpened by modern inquiry offer us information about
the possibilities for transcendence that our Founders could not have.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And although our times are quite chaotic and
the way forward is murkier than ever, the principles are timeless.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We have within our passionate hearts the
wherewithal to complete the modern individuation project and move to an even
more powerful and human-centric mode of consciousness, one that actually does
what the socialists merely dream of.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
We are poised to generate out of this human inner civil war
a new birth of freedom, dedicated to the proposition that all of us are created
with the equal right and responsibility to make of our lives as we choose, and
that government of free, mature, and self-accountable people shall not perish
from the earth.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div style="mso-element: endnote-list;">
<br clear="all" />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<div id="edn1" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=3401106149239386272#_ednref1" name="_edn1" style="mso-endnote-id: edn1;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">[1]</span></span></span></span></a>
McCloskey, Deirdre, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bourgeois Dignity</i>,
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), p. 7.</div>
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<br /></div>
</div>
<div id="edn2" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=3401106149239386272#_ednref2" name="_edn2" style="mso-endnote-id: edn2;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">[2]</span></span></span></span></a>
See Wilber, Ken, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Integral Vision</i>,
(Boston: Shambhala Books, 2007).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>“Kosmos” is Wilber’s word for the multi-realmed Existent: the world of
physical, biological, noetic, and spiritual dimensions.</div>
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<br /></div>
</div>
<div id="edn3" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=3401106149239386272#_ednref3" name="_edn3" style="mso-endnote-id: edn3;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">[3]</span></span></span></span></a> I
say “relatively” because, as Wilber demonstrates, these structures exist on a
continuum whose internal “boundaries” are more zones of gradation than concrete
and impervious borders.</div>
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<br /></div>
</div>
<div id="edn4" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=3401106149239386272#_ednref4" name="_edn4" style="mso-endnote-id: edn4;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">[4]</span></span></span></span></a>
Gebser, Jean, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Ever-Present Origin</i>,
(Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1986)</div>
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<br /></div>
</div>
<div id="edn5" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=3401106149239386272#_ednref5" name="_edn5" style="mso-endnote-id: edn5;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">[5]</span></span></span></span></a>
Godwin, Robert, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">One Cosmos under God,</i>
(St. Paul: Paragon House, 2004), pp. 162-3.</div>
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<br /></div>
</div>
<div id="edn6" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=3401106149239386272#_ednref6" name="_edn6" style="mso-endnote-id: edn6;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">[6]</span></span></span></span></a>
Morris, Ian, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Why the West Rules—for Now</i>,
(New York: Picador, 2010), pp. 135-71. </div>
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<br /></div>
</div>
<div id="edn7" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=3401106149239386272#_ednref7" name="_edn7" style="mso-endnote-id: edn7;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">[7]</span></span></span></span></a>
Wilber adopts a version of a color gradation scheme developed by Don Beck and
Christopher Cowen in their book <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Spiral
Dynamics</i> to indicate the various stages on the spectrum of consciousness;
cf. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Integral Psychology</i>, (Boston:
Shambhala Books, 2000), pp. 195 ff.</div>
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<br /></div>
</div>
<div id="edn8" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=3401106149239386272#_ednref8" name="_edn8" style="mso-endnote-id: edn8;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">[8]</span></span></span></span></a> Gebser,
op. cit., p. 11.</div>
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<br /></div>
</div>
<div id="edn9" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=3401106149239386272#_ednref9" name="_edn9" style="mso-endnote-id: edn9;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">[9]</span></span></span></span></a>
Sanders, Barry, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Is for Ox</i>, (New
York: Vintage Books, 1994), p. 72.</div>
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<br /></div>
</div>
<div id="edn10" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=3401106149239386272#_ednref10" name="_edn10" style="mso-endnote-id: edn10;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">[10]</span></span></span></span></a>
Godwin, Robert, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">op. cit.</i>, pp. 139-45,
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">passim</i>.</div>
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<br /></div>
</div>
<div id="edn11" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=3401106149239386272#_ednref11" name="_edn11" style="mso-endnote-id: edn11;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">[11]</span></span></span></span></a>
Wilber, Ken, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sex, Ecology, and
Spirituality, </i>from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Collected
Works of Ken Wilber, Vol. 6, </i>(Boston: Shambhala Books, 1995), p. 225.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The quote if from Jean Piaget.</div>
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<br /></div>
</div>
<div id="edn12" style="mso-element: endnote;">
<div class="MsoEndnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=3401106149239386272#_ednref12" name="_edn12" style="mso-endnote-id: edn12;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt;">[12]</span></span></span></span></a>
Brown, Brene, “The Power of Vulnerability,” TedX Talk, Houston, 2010.</div>
</div>
</div>
<br />
<br />Marty Kellerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11592136716581562644noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3401106149239386272.post-12429761911000989142015-12-06T22:13:00.000-08:002015-12-09T19:22:34.412-08:00What Is "Integral"?Over the course of the past two years I have begun paddling
to more islands in the integral archipelago.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It started with conversations with Jeff Salzman at the Integral
Institute’s <i>Daily Evolver</i>, morphed into a year-long dialogue with Layman Pascal
on integral politics on the Institute’s web site, went on to a reconnection with my
old Log Cabin colleague Rich Tafel, now a senior fellow at Steve McIntosh’s Institute
for Cultural Evolution, and finally leading to a handful of Facebook pages
dedicated to various integral expressions.
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I have been highly critical of a lot of stuff that I have
read in many of these encounters, much of it based on my sense that there is a
lack of intellectual and spiritual rigor in so much of what we are moved to say
and communicate.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Now I don’t like being
critical—and I choose to notice the arrogance that much of my response seems to
come from—mostly because I fancy myself a lover not a fighter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Still, something within compels me to keep
diving ever deeper into this transpersonal realm, and to share what I discover
with other inhabitants of the archipelago.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
One source of discord might be a disagreement on exactly
what “integral” is.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If we all mean
slightly different things, then we fail to have a useful dialogue if at the
same time we assume that we have a common meaning for the word.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We simply talk past one another and, if we’re
not careful, assume something’s wrong with that other guy who just won’t get
what I’m saying when in fact he’s thinking something slightly different.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The main sources of divergence seem to be from various
Wilberians and Gravesians seeking to interpret Wilber's and Graves' work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s too
bad Wilber went whole hog into Spiral Dynamics and then abruptly pulled back
and recast the color scheme.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Further complicating
the picture was Don Beck’s development of Spiral Dynamics Integral and the break
with Christopher Cowan.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Also, since
Spiral Dynamics concentrates on the vMemes, or the values line of development,
it is not strictly speaking an integral model, which of course Beck sought to
address with SDi.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Further aggravating the situation is the complication
offered by the various iterations of Wilber’s map-making, of which at least
five have been identified by Wilber.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>From
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sex, Ecology, Spirituality</i> through <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Integral Psychology</i>, Wilber has offered
slightly differing versions of the stages of the spectrum of consciousness, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">aka</i> the Spiral.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was his adoption of Graves’ notion of “the
momentous leap” from the personal to the transpersonal waves that introduced
much of the variance of understanding among the integralites of what exactly
lay on the far side of the leap.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Indeed, he originally adopted the term “integral” from Jean
Gebser’s classifications of the waves of collective consciousness extensively
chronicled in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Ever Present Origin</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Gebser called the inchoate transrational emergence
he detected back in the 1930s the “integral/aperspectival” wave.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By that he meant that, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">contra</i> the rational (orange) individuation stage which was
characterized by the development of inner space that permitted self-reflection
(individual self-conceptualization) and thus recognition of perspective itself,
the awareness of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">perspective-taking as an
activity of being</i> was now arising among humans.<br />
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<a name='more'></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The final challenge to a consensus view of “the integral” is
the scarcity of actual reporting from the other side of that Jordan River by
our contemporaries.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Indeed, plenty of
reportage is available from mythic sources, going all the way back to the
Vedas, but from people alive today I don’t find much. (I’m probably just not
hanging out with the right people.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But
that is unsurprising; I find no compelling evidence that any increasing numbers
of us are making the leap, Wilberian and other assertions notwithstanding.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Second Tier = Transpersonal</i></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So in the attempt to connect the integral dots, this is how I
think of and work with “integral”:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana; mso-fareast-font-family: Verdana;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">1.<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span>Integral awareness is a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">characteristic</i> of the first waves of second tier, transpersonal
consciousness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Transpersonal” is a
better word than “integral,” which in current usage invariably refers to the cognitive
line of development and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not</i> to the center
of gravity in teal (yellow in Gravesian nomenclature).<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana; mso-fareast-font-family: Verdana;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana; mso-fareast-font-family: Verdana;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">2.<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span>The leap to second tier is momentous because the
disidentification with my personal self-conception has no precedent in human history
and thus has no reference points for communication of the experience.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While it is analogous to the radical shift of
identity from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">my tribe</i> to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">my individual bodymind</i>, at the same time
it lifts identity out of a specific and limited locus into the realm of the
transconceptual collective, freeing us from the self-contraction of “me” into
the amorphous and expansive space of “us.”<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana; mso-fareast-font-family: Verdana;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana; mso-fareast-font-family: Verdana;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">3.<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span>Since there is no collective brain, so too there
is no collective thought or conceptualization.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Thus the transpersonal is also transmental; how we “know” in second tier
includes but transcends mental knowing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some
other mechanism exists in the lower quadrants that facilitates collective
awareness, such that the collective (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">e.g</i>.,
humanity) has a means of self awareness <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">as
a collective unity</i> as opposed to as a collection of individuals.<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana; mso-fareast-font-family: Verdana;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana; mso-fareast-font-family: Verdana;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">4.<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span>Thus second tier awareness is not fully
accessible by first tier means.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Neither emotion
nor mentation are adequate to expression of aperspectival awareness; they are
necessary but not sufficient.<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana; mso-fareast-font-family: Verdana;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana; mso-fareast-font-family: Verdana;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">5.<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span>In first tier we have access to instances (peak
experiences?) of second tier awareness in experiences ranging from the gross madness
of the mob to the subtle mysteries of intuition and inspiration. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But, as Wilber notes, we perforce interpret
these experiences via our first tier perspectives.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We cannot fully name these until we live in/from
second tier.<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana; mso-fareast-font-family: Verdana;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Verdana; mso-fareast-font-family: Verdana;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">6.<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span>The “aperspectival” nature of second tier
awareness is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not</i> recognition of
multiple perspectives; that is properly in the realm of green.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rather, transpersonal awareness sees the
unity of all perspectives and identifies with the generation of first tier
perspectives rather than with the objects of those worldviews.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If in second tier “I am humanity,” then “I”
am aware of the universal human capacity to generate prepersonal and personal
perspectives.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The new object of “my”
awareness is humanity as a unity; I am now the forest rather than an individual
tree.</div>
<br />
Almost all approaches to second tier experience shared among
integralites is conceptual.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While this
makes sense given Wilber’s appreciation that the cognitive line of development
invariably leads all the others, it creates a serious problem in the
exploration of this radically different territory, because as I note above,
second tier is transmental.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Most of us
confuse second tier cognitive awareness with actual second tier
center-of-gravity awareness, but this is surely erroneous.<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The work necessary to prepare to complete the momentous leap
includes serious and effective shadow work, for we are not able to identify as,
say, humanity until we integrate all the dynamics of our personal identity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And we cannot integrate these while we remain
unaware of them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Developing the capacity
to regularly identify and withdraw projections is the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">sine qua non</i> of the momentous leap.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This also requires the commitment to notice judgements about ourselves
and others and to release the imperatives these judgements demand.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Why?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Because unless I
“own” all the psychospiritual dynamics within, I remain chained to personal
consciousness via projection of repressed shadow dynamics onto the “other,” the
“not-me.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As long as I maintain the boundary
separating me as a separate individual from the rest of us, I remain in first tier.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Unless I recognize judgement as an act of
violence and separation, I remain emotionally tied to maintenance of my
personal boundary and righteousness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And
that line will not vanish until I grok the truth that all my psychodynamics are
in fact universal human psychodynamics flourishing <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">exactly the same</i> in all of us.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
We evidence this awareness when we find ourselves called to
scrutinize continuously our interiors for evidence of hidden and repressed
beliefs and emotions so that we can instantly withdraw our projections and be
with our self and the world as they are rather than as we have individually imagined
them.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
We also evidence this awareness when we begin to speak more
and more regularly as “we” more than as “I,” when, for instance, in discussing
politics we say that “we generate left and right” and focus on how we do that
rather than on the things we do from left and right.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
We evidence this awareness when we integrate and acknowledge
what we discover in our subconscious without judgment, appreciating that
experiencing and reacting to traumatic events early in our lives were
inescapable elements of development not only for ourselves but universally for
all of us.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
As Wilber pointed out in his first book <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Spectrum of Consciousness</i> the process in which the momentous leap
is but a milestone is about expanding the boundary between what’s on the inside
and the other side of our face.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Everything “out there” (including, it turns out, the boundary) is but a
projection.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Withdrawing <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">all</i> projections eventually leads us to
the experience of “no outside” (the “no boundary” of the title of Wilber’s second book),
or non-dual consciousness.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The point is that the boundary between first and second tier
is the distinction between self-as-I-the-individual awareness and
self-as-we-humanity consciousness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At
green I notice that everyone has his/her individual perspective; at teal
(yellow) we <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">are</i> the multiple
perspectives of mankind.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">It Ain’t Integral Analysis If It Don’t Include the Analyst</i></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In almost no “integral” writings do I see any attempt to
demonstrate this awareness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Unless we acknowledge
our own personal perspectives, we almost always speak with an absolutist voice,
making assertions of truth that are in fact assertions of particular perspectives,
histories, emotions, and circumstances.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Indeed,
these are “true” at their level; each level has its own integrity which
provides a platform for certainty <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">at that
level</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However, even at green where
we begin to see multiple perspectives we recognize the partiality of those
truths.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So nothing is “wrong” with speaking with an absolutist
voice; it’s just generally not the voice of the transpersonal.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I did an analysis of a typical example of this failure in <a href="http://aqalblog.blogspot.com/2014/10/global-warming-and-cross-currents-of.html">“Global
Warming and the Cross Currents of Evolution”</a> posted here last year
where I analyzed the Institute for Cultural Evolution’s “Campaign Plan for
Climate Change Ameliorization,” an element in its “Depolarizing the American
Mind” aspirations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Steve McIntosh,
Carter Phipps, and their colleagues have set about applying integral techniques
to “fixing” poor broken America and healing our allegedly toxic political
polarization.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I noted the intellectual
poverty of an integral analysis that completely leaves the analyst out of the
discussion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“We” are nowhere to be found
in ICE’s work except as an implied conception of “us” whose source is simply
assumed to be good, whole, and self-evident.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
An authentic integral analysis—and not one merely using
integral cognition—starts from the perspective of “all of us.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And immediately it should be plain how
difficult that is both to access and to communicate.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Certainly from an orange/green perspective
the attempt is arrogance itself, since from first tier we cannot apprehend “we”
except as a projection of “me.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Regardless, however, of the difficulty, the transpersonal is
precisely that: beyond personal identity—not I-the-autonomous-individual, but we-that-also-includes-me.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Perhaps we can notice the distinction between seeing this
conceptually and experiencing and communicating it from-the-inside-out, as it
were.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If first tier is monological,
second is dialogical.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There are almost
no media for exploring and expressing this, and certainly exchanging the
written or even spoken word among ourselves is wholly inadequate to the task.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The various commercialized evangelisms emanating from
integralite sources, while mostly stuck in first tier assumptions, are
nonetheless evidence of the push by Spirit to manifest in a radically different
and deeper way.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Therefore it is my conviction that our insights about and
even experience of the transpersonal will remain isolated on our separate
little islands of the integral archipelago until we develop a dialogical
communication tool that facilitates the “we” to shine through the various “I’s”
that comprise the us.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The good news is that many of us are groping in the right
direction, and just as the personal ego finally began escaping the tribal
gravity, so too will the collective ego escape the gravity of first tier.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Exactly when and how that will happen remains
a mystery; but the very intentional work we are doing hastens the moment of
emergence.</div>
Marty Kellerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11592136716581562644noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3401106149239386272.post-70741177777623574612015-11-16T16:13:00.000-08:002015-11-17T16:32:23.068-08:00Reaping the WhirlwindSome commentators have noted the obvious connection between the massacre in Paris last Friday and the lunacies on American college campuses that the MSM can no longer ignore.<br />
<br />
Most do not get the underlying evolutionary dynamics producing these particular effects and so have no idea about what’s really going on, much less about what an appropriate and effective response might look like.<br />
<br />
I wrote about <a href="http://aqalblog.blogspot.com/2009/08/three-blind-memes.html">these dynamics</a> in this blog nine years ago after the violent “protests” erupted in various corners of <i>Dar al-Islam</i> (the Muslim world) when the Danish newspaper <i>Jyllands-Posten</i> dared to publish <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/11341599/Prophet-Muhammad-cartoons-controversy-timeline.html">satirical cartoons</a> of the Prophet Muhammad. It was, I asserted, a useful example of a battlefront of the trimemetic war that has become the salient feature of human evolution since the mass emergence of green fifty years ago. This war is a clash of “three blind memes”—amber, orange, and green—that dominate human consciousness today, and struggle against and among one another in ways totally unprecedented in human history.
<br />
<br />
(I call these memes “blind” because, as Wilber has noted, they are first tier structures and as such blindly assume that their perspectives are absolute and thus that anything to the contrary is a threat to be suppressed.)
<br />
<br />
Never before have we experienced the co-existence of millions of people whose center-of-gravity of consciousness resides in three distinct waves, all of which are powerfully antagonistic toward each other. This is perhaps simple enough to grasp, but subtler currents are in play that make it much more difficult for most of us to appreciate the complexity of what is unfolding.
<br />
<br />
It is a product of Wilber’s last great original insight laid out in his work on <a href="https://www.integrallife.com/integral-post/integral-age-leading-edge">integral post-metaphysics</a> about the nature of memetic structure. It is, he theorized, more of a LH probability wave than a RH concrete configuration; the longer people operate within a particular structure, the more likely its manifestation will be predictably within a definitive range of characteristics.
<br />
<br />
Thus amber, which we have been working out of for at least twelve millennia, is the most predictable and stable of the three. Orange, only half a millennium old, is far less stable, and green, only a half a <i>century</i> old, is still all over the place. Since the Integral Model posits that each emerging wave <i>transcends and includes</i> all earlier waves, the degree of stability of these earlier waves will significantly influence how quickly the newer waves will solidify into predictable patterns and thus in turn become susceptible of the next transcendence.
Conversely, the more stable the structure, the more influence it has on later emergent waves.<br />
<br />
What has become clear to me as I’ve dug deeper into my interior is how relatively unstable orange still is, and how this falling-short-of-maturity so powerfully impacts green.
<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a>Orange is the locus of the emergence of individual identity from the tribal. Its gifts have been numerous and unprecedented: liberation from the tribe manifests in, among other things, liberation from social and economic stagnation. Once orange established itself in northwestern Europe and America, global per-capita wealth, health, and longevity exploded. But its shadow has harbored amber jealousy, which results in self-sabotage, seen individually in violent self-denigration and socially in acts of terror committed by both state and non-state actors.
<br />
<br />
This dynamic began almost simultaneously with the mass emergence of orange; the French invented state terror during their revolution against the <i>ancien régime</i> at the very beginning of the modern age, thus establishing the pattern that has played out again and again since, mostly recently just a few days ago at the Bataclan and other locations in the City of Lights.
<br />
<br />
From the tribal perspective, individuation can appear as a death threat. If a member of the tribe no longer needs it, then the very social cohesion that binds the tribe together is absolutely and eternally rendered obsolete. Islam, <a href="http://aqalblog.blogspot.com/2015/03/comments-on-steve-mcintoshs-paper-on.html">as I have written elsewhere</a>, is one of only two major religions explicitly and consciously established to promote and support a particular tribe (Judaism is the other); it is a gloriously and permanently premodern creed. It established and disciplines the <i>Dar al-Islam</i> as a self-conscious society explicitly distinct from and superior to the<i> Dar al-harb</i>. As such it is impervious to the kinds of evolution that Christianity made room for; to “modernize” Islam would be to kill it off.
<br />
<br />
That is not to say that, politically, Muslim cultures cannot find a way to live with modern and postmodern polities; it is to say that this accommodation will only be practical and not fraternal in nature. It is also not to say that Muslim cultures do not struggle with the temptations of modernity; they do indeed and, with the exception of Turkey and Tunisia, the <i>modi vivendi</i> reached by various Muslim nations have reached differing levels of mass tolerance.
<br />
<br />
It is, as many in the West have rightly noted, a significant global challenge. But few appreciate that it is primarily the product of combined and uneven evolution of consciousness. The majority of us—almost 80%—still live in cultures whose center of gravity is in amber, but all of these have been irrevocably impacted by modern orange-centered cultures.
<br />
<br />
At the same time, the enormous inertia of amber as the most stable of all predominant levels of consciousness equally and less obviously impacts orange and green. We can understand this best perhaps by looking at how it affects us in the Advanced Sector as individuals, appearing as neurosis, addictive compulsions, and other forms of psychospiritual self violence. These are the result of emotional trauma that all humans in post-amber cultures experience in the first three years of life as the infant begins the arduous task of differentiation and individuation.
<br />
<br />
Few of us get through this process unscathed. We perforce interact with all the unhealed trauma living in our parents’ subconscious with no way either to understand what is happening or to determine the healthiest way to navigate the unsettled state our bodies and brains experience. We merely react to defend ourselves as a matter of survival; the structure of this defense mechanism automatically becomes the default mode of our self conception for the rest of our lives, unless by grace we become sufficiently aware and take steps to complete the healing we could not command in those early days.
<br />
<br />
These “mind parasites,” as Robert Godwin calls them in his excellent <a href="http://www.primal-page.com/godwin3.htm"><i>One Cosmos under God</i></a>, result because, as we continue to grow into childhood and adolescence, this painful experience remains repressed in our subconscious, still in need of total healing. Fully mature individuals get there because they have been able to transcend, include, <i>and integrate</i> all the earlier levels. The degree to which integration has not occurred determines the thoroughness with which we occupy all later levels.
<br />
<br />
Remembering Wilber’s observation that the cultural center of gravity draws its children to that level while obstructing those that seek to transcend it, we can appreciate the bind that most of us find ourselves in when, having reached our forties we still have a difficult time finding peace and equanimity within. We are drawn through the stages of development even if we haven’t completely integrated them on our way, stuck with whatever underdeveloped or traumatic material we encountered.
<br />
<br />
Since ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, this same dynamic plays out in our collective consciousness. Even as the Advanced Sector’s center of gravity of consciousness is now in orange-leaning-into-green, we all experience the unhealed trauma of the shift from amber to orange without awareness of the activity of collective mind parasites. <br />
<br />
<br />
<i><b>The Trimemetic Complication</b></i><br />
<br />
Green brings an entirely new category of challenges. It transcends orange’s innovation of individual identity by the new awareness that <i>all</i> humans are capable of and entitled to our individual self-identity and dignity. But because it inherits both amber’s rebellion against orange <i>and</i> orange’s unhealed traumas along, its ability to act upon this awareness is severely distorted, resulting for the most part in the variant that Wilber has called “<a href="http://aqalblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/boomer-reflects-on-boomeritis.html">Boomeritis</a>.”
<br />
<br />
We see this reflected politically in the postmodern socialist (or self-identified “anti-capitalist”) tendencies that bring amber religious certainty to green insights and thus seek to impose a green-tinged amber order upon the globe. Nowhere is this more pronounced than in the prognostications of the left about the global climate. Green consciousness produces awareness of the interrelationship among people, economic activity, and the environment; amber consciousness produces a top-down formula for social organization to achieve a mythical global temperature, even if it involves the violence of forced CO₂ emissions reductions.
<br />
<br />
We also see it in the nasty thought control tendencies at US universities coming into public awareness recently. The postmodern ideology that divides us into victims and oppressors is a genuine amber perspective, hijacking green’s authentic insights about the equality of human dignity and turning into a Western version of <i>jihad</i>.
<br />
<br />
The recent superciliousness at Yale, the University of Missouri, and other campuses, reflecting the violence inherent in the victim studies worldview, will only grow more acute as this amber perspective collides with the orange defense of individual liberty and dignity and the green insight of the universal applicability of orange’s innovations. The violence that characterizes Islamist <i>jihad</i> against modernity is the offspring of the same dynamic—amber’s rage against the blasphemy of orange individuation. It’s the gods’ revenge against Prometheus acted out yet again.<br />
<br />
Thus the trimemetic war has the feel of <i>bellum omnium contra omnes</i>, of a chaotic if not catastrophic disintegration of the foundations of social certainty that has birthed Beelzebub’s demon children. It recalls the great modern artist Francisco de Goya’s chilling 1797 etching “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.” <br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkrcnAvFgiMkH4IV7vUrjkncxLSmRM8UrL62ecvaLxuwnK8oTq81D9McfWgVgeRkVAvh9AfUDaqSpwAAWNOJRs-p2NbEKD5p1KFZ9twOU7hjqzwhG8nE7PgYcMz7u0CAKCL3x-H55Sbr39/s1600/goya-2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkrcnAvFgiMkH4IV7vUrjkncxLSmRM8UrL62ecvaLxuwnK8oTq81D9McfWgVgeRkVAvh9AfUDaqSpwAAWNOJRs-p2NbEKD5p1KFZ9twOU7hjqzwhG8nE7PgYcMz7u0CAKCL3x-H55Sbr39/s320/goya-2.jpg" width="211" /></a></div>
<br />
These monsters are the demands of the mythic for all humans to conform to our tribal roles, the only way to guarantee that the tribe will survive in our dangerous world. That our times might feel like this is the result of green’s incredible and understandable immaturity as a new wave of consciousness. It does not yet embody the <i>gravitas</i> of its powerful and compelling improvement of orange, and thus has at least temporarily been hijacked by the subconscious amber rebellion against orange. It is a sad irony that, for the most part, it has been turned against the truth its emergence came to tell; yet this condition is no different from orange’s so far incomplete transcendence, inclusion, and integration of amber.
<br />
<br />
We cannot know how temporary the Boomeritis pause of green’s development is. We have never before experienced trimemetic turbulence. We could be on the doorstep of amazing and breathtaking breakthroughs, or of a long and dismal new dark age.
<br />
<br />
It is a sign of our alienation from our authentic experience that we find ourselves compelled to engage in systematic acts of self violence, from addictions and incivility to beheadings and bombings. The rage that we keep the lid on is individually and collectively the key to the peace that surpasses understanding. <br />
<br />
The good news is that we humans have discovered the yoga to access and recreate this; it's the same mechanism we employed to create the chaos out of which it is emerging in the first place.
We manifest the world we want; let us now resolve ourselves to do the serious and grueling work of vulnerability and healing so that the world we want offers the best of what we know is possible while still cherishing our defects and imperfections. The irony is that the only way to peace is to embrace the war within. Until then, we will keep sowing and reaping the whirlwind.
<br />
<br />
<i>“Let the one who does wrong continue to do wrong; let the vile person continue to be vile; let the one who does right continue to do right; and let the holy person continue to be holy. Look, I am coming soon! My reward is with me, and I will give to each person according to what they have done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End. Let the one who is thirsty come; and let the one who wishes take the free gift of the water of life.”</i>—Revelations 22.
Marty Kellerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11592136716581562644noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3401106149239386272.post-38695615315628721722015-03-25T12:36:00.001-07:002015-05-25T21:55:22.862-07:00Comments on Steve McIntosh's Paper on Modernizing IslamThe <a href="http://www.culturalevolution.org/">Institute for Cultural Evolution</a> (ICE) and its co-founder Steve McIntosh have just released a new white paper entitled “<a href="http://www.culturalevolution.org/docs/ICE-Fostering-Evolution-in-Islam-White-Paper.pdf">Fostering Evolution in Islamic Culture</a>,” and have requested comments.<br />
<br />
The purpose of the paper is to propose a method for Western societies to address the challenge the “difficult and dire problem” of “the ongoing rise of radical Islamism” we have been witnessing since the end of the Cold War. The underlying assumption of the paper derives from ICE’s “aim to create significant forward movement in the evolution of the American political landscape, and apply this new ‘evolutionary’ perspective to the developmental challenges of a complex, globalizing world.” ICE believes that it is possible to “positively influence the evolution of American culture in realistic and measurable ways” by “applying groundbreaking insights taken from Integral philosophy, developmental psychology, evolutionary theory, and the social sciences to help create significant forward movement in the evolution of the American cultural and political landscape.”<br />
<br />
Now, apparently, not content with this demanding undertaking, we are invited to apply this same thinking to “Muslim culture” as the beginning of a remedy to the problem of radical Islamism.<br />
<br />
I truly love and appreciate these efforts to uncover what, if anything, can be done to consciously expand consciousness on a mass basis. Having studied this for some time, my own conclusion is “not at this time,” but what do I know?<br />
<br />
Still, I find many flaws in the ICE proposition and its analyses, and this particular paper has its share. Perhaps its author might be willing to consider them. <br />
<br />
Where to begin?<br />
<br />
The paper makes regular reference to “traditional Islamic culture” as if that is a uniform system encompassing the 1.6 billion Muslims around the world. But this is, at best, a misnomer, for many distinct cultures with their own peculiar history, political economy, and customs embrace Islam, from Arabic, Turkish, Egyptian, and Persian to Kazakh, Afghani, Punjabi, Indonesian, and many others. While they all have Islam in common, they also are all centered in amber consciousness, which, as I will point out, is the actual issue.<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a>So without accounting for the differences among these various societies, it is not possible for “the West” to develop strategies to deal with a non-existent generic “Islamic culture.”<br />
<br />
This is especially important because McIntosh asks us to “learn more about the beauty and truth contained within the teachings of Islam” without ever stating what those are. As integralists we automatically take note of the truth contained in each human endeavor, but we also say what they are.<br />
<br />
<i><b><br />Divergences between Christianity and Islam</b></i><br />
<br />
Discerning the beauty and truth of Islam is especially challenging for the postmodern Westerner because, unlike Judaism and Christianity, Islam is not a particularly doctrinal religion, nor, as we will see, is it designed to accommodate a modernizing world. The teachings of Islam focus on encouraging society as a whole behave according to the will of Allah, which is what the Quran purports to reveal. This revelation given to Muhammad is whole and complete and not susceptible to human tinkering. The Quran is not a religious version of the living Constitution, ever adaptable to the whims of a particular age; it is a universal and perfect explication of Allah’s will for His people.<br />
<br />
Further, Islam is not a salvific religion. It does not adopt the Judeo-Christian belief that the nature of man is fallen and thus in need of redemption. Muslims do not believe that humans are inherently sinful and that the goal of life is to overcome this depraved condition. Christianity, of course, takes this to the extreme step of asserting that God entered into His creation as a man in order to redeem humanity from its original sinful condition through His own death and resurrection. Humans can shed our depravity by acknowledging God’s loving act of sacrifice through accepting Jesus the Christ as our personal savior.<br />
<br />
None of this resonates with Muslims. Allah does not intervene in history; He is aloof, transcendent, and unapproachable. He sets the rules and expectations as revealed by a series of prophets of whom Muhammad was the greatest and last. It is up to humanity to surrender its will to the will of Allah, but Allah reserves to Himself the ultimate disposition of the souls of each person upon his or her death. Nothing a person does during life impacts Allah’s decisions in the least. Each Muslim hopes that by living a righteous life he or she will gain heaven, but unlike Christians nothing he or she does can guarantee it.<br />
<br />
Because Islam is far more an orthopraxy than an orthodoxy, it focuses on behavior, not on belief. Pious behavior is essential to the spiritual health of society as a whole; thus individual righteousness is essential to the<i> ummah</i>. This should not be surprising given that Muhammad lived in a highly fractious tribal world—itself just another element of the amber wave that dominated all mankind in the seventh century AD. In that environment where kinship-based tribes and clans constantly fought over the trade routes and natural resources of the Hejaz, the angel Gabriel appeared to Muhammad during one of his spiritual retreats and began the recitation of what became the Quran, which Muhammad made the basis for uniting the local tribes into a single <i>ummah</i> or community of believers. Submission to the will of Allah—the meaning of <i>islam</i>—was to be the unifying activity.<br />
<br />
And how does one submit? By agreeing to undertake the Five Pillars of Islam: declaring the Oneness of Allah whose prophet is Muhammad, praying five times daily, fasting during Ramadan, giving alms to the poor, and making the <i>hajj</i> once before dying. These simple actions are easily done by any and all humans regardless of sex, culture, or financial situation, and thus constitute a powerful means of developing social unity.<br />
<br />
Unlike the other great world religions, Islam was founded as a successful spiritual polity in a particular time and place, and its traditions stem from this unique fact. The way this came about is the foundation upon which successors to Muhammad as leaders of the <i>ummah</i> built their laws. As Bernard Lewis and Buntzie Ellis Churchill write in <i>Islam: the Religion and the People</i>,<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The prophet Muhammad, according to the traditional narrative, began his career in Mecca as an opposition leader and, for some time, was engaged in a struggle against authority as established among his people and in his birthplace. When his position became untenable, he moved to Medina, where he formed a government and, from this external base, finally accomplished the forceful overthrow and supersession of the old order at home.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
In this supersession, as in all else, the Prophet is seen as the model and pattern of behavior. This pattern of resistance, migration, and return became a paradigm for Islamic leaders and movements which sought to challenge the existing order and establish a new one in its place. It was followed by many political-religious leaders. Some of them—like the Abbasids who came to Iraq via eastern Persia in the mid-8th century CE and founded Baghdad; the Fatamids, who came to Egypt via North Africa in the 10th century CE and founded Cairo; and the Ayatollah Khomeini, who returned to Iran via France in the late 20th century CE and founded the Islamic republic—were successful. Many others, in the course of fourteen centuries of Islamic history, tried and failed. There will surely be more.</blockquote>
So when we seek to discover the beauty and truth of Islam we might acknowledge its unique contribution: the promotion of a Godly <i>ummah</i> which alone guarantees the conditions for people to most effectively surrender to the will of Allah. As Karen Armstrong writes in <i>Islam</i>, Muhammad’s achievements, particularly in channeling the words of the Quran to humanity, “expressed the Islamic experience of ‘salvation,’ which does not consist in the redemption of an ‘original sin’ committed by Adam and the admittance to eternal life, but in<i> the achievement of a society which puts into practice God’s desires for the human race</i>” [emphasis added].<br />
<br />
Not only in the context of seventh century Arabic culture but in the context of the tribal amber wave in general, Muhammad offered refinements that had the potential to tame the worst tendencies of tribal culture and proffer the ideal of a universal <i>ummah</i> that brings all of humanity into its benevolent embrace.<br />
<br />
Thus Islam, unlike any of the other major religions of the world, specifically addresses and proceeds from the amber worldview. The principles of Christianity, particularly after the Neo-Platonists made their contributions, were a major contributor to the emergence of the modern; it is an explicit project of the Axial Age. The focus of the Eastern religions on transcending the world of samsara made them adaptable to the range of cultures from premodern to post-postmodern. The Buddha offered the Four Noble Truths as the method of detaching from the world of Form. Hindus and Taoists similarly focus on transcendence beyond the world of appearances.<br />
<br />
Thus calls for “modernizing Islam” will have to deal with its specificity as an amber institution. The key feature of modernity, the discontinuity which makes it radically different from premodern culture, is the emergence of the individual as the central truth of human identity. A religion dedicated to the spiritual health of the <i>ummah</i> has the community as its identity, not the millions of individuals comprising it. The Muslims demonstrate this central truth of their experience by requiring everyone on the <i>hajj</i> to wear the identical simple white garments so that no one is distinguished by anything other than their belonging to the community of believers.<br />
<br />
By conflating all nations that adhere to Islam into a single “Islamic culture,” McIntosh downplays or overlooks the impact of history on the trajectory of today’s Muslim world. While Arab culture experienced a “golden age” during the 500 years of the Abbasid caliphate, other non-Arabic Muslim cultures experienced different stresses and triumphs. The Arabs along with the Persians were then subjected to the radical upheavals of the Mongol invasions of the late 13th century, and even though most of the Mongols who settled in these regions ultimately adopted Islam, their depredations so weakened the caliphate that within several centuries the Turkish Ottomans were able to supplant them as the dominant tribe in the Middle East. In the meantime, the Mughal Empire arose in India with a completely different historical trajectory from that of the Arabs, Turks, and Persians.<br />
<br />
<br />
<i><b>The Inextinguishable Amber Nature of Islam</b></i><br />
<br />
The point of this is that what characterizes today’s Islamic world is its premodern political economy. Not one nation or country adhering to Islam is a modern industrial society. And while it is undoubtedly true as McIntosh observes that “from the perspective of many Muslims, modernity is simultaneously attractive and repulsive,” it also remains true that modernizing their cultures would require Islam to cease its focus on the <i>ummah</i> in order to develop a culture of individual freedom, responsibility, and initiative. In other words, it would have to de-Islamify itself.<br />
<br />
McIntosh observes that “moderate Muslim thought leaders have so far been unable to effectively reform Islamic culture’s interpretation of the religion of Islam. And this inability to reform Islamic religion has resulted in a corresponding failure to reform Islamic culture.” But I suggest that “Islamic culture’s interpretation of Islam” cannot be reformed because of the centrality of the <i>ummah</i> in the Muslim worldview. <i>Of course</i> attempts to reform both religious interpretation and culture have failed; they are one and the same thing. <br />
<br />
McIntosh goes on to say that the “key to defeating militant Islamism involves making traditional Islamic culture more successful on its own terms.” Yet to assert this means that we must have a sophisticated understanding of that culture (which, as I have already pointed out, does not actually exist as such).<br />
<br />
Such an understanding would include consideration of yet another feature of Muslim history: its cyclical bouts of repurification, of <i>fitna</i> and <i>dawla</i>. Throughout all of Islamic Arab, Persian, and Turkish history, as Lewis and Churchill point out, there have been regular movements to return the culture to its foundational roots. As history unfolded, events would inevitably conspire to change the original nature of the <i>ummah</i>: the need to deal with enemies, with success, with <i>kafirs</i>, and with every other contingency of life invariably leads to change. As the distance from the original piety became more and more disconcerting, movements of <i>jihad</i> arose to find ways to return the society to its ideal structure. Very often this entailed a reinstatement of sharia as the best method for enforcing proper behaviors.<br />
<br />
The rise of the modern societies of the West and imperial incursions into previously secure Muslim nations sparked yet another reconsideration of the spiritual health of the <i>ummah</i>. Thus we consider the impact of such figures as the 18th century Arabic reformer Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the 19th century Shiite political activist Jamāl ad-Dīn al-Afghānī, whom McIntosh cites, and 20th century reformers such as Hassan al-Banna, Sayyid Qutb, or Ruhollah Khomeini not as promoters of terrorism but as arising out of the reformist traditions of Middle Eastern history.<br />
<br />
This is not to romanticize the more sordid and nasty activities of some of their adherents, but to point out that it would be a mistake to characterize <i>al-Qaeda</i>, ISIL, or the Iranian Revolutionary Guards as mere anarchists or deluded Muslim Don Quixotes intent on returning the Middle East to the glory days of Harun al-Rashid.<br />
<br />
McIntosh argues that “theological reformation must be a central component of any viable strategy to defeat militant Islamism.” But from the perspective of Islamic history militant Islamism—at least on its own terms—<i>is</i> reformation. However, as I have pointed out, the cyclical reformations of Muslim societies, particularly in the Middle East, have not been nor are they now “theological.” Islam is not a doctrinal religion, and its basic tenets have not been disputed since the days of Muhammad. This misunderstanding undermines much of the argument in the paper.<br />
<br />
“If Islam were stronger and more confident in its encounter with modernity,” McIntosh writes, “it could better resist the regressive currents within itself that seek to drag Islam back into its medieval past. And by becoming more successful at the traditional level, Islamic culture can also function as a foundation for the further evolution of Islam as a spiritual line of development that can evolve through the modernist level and beyond.”<br />
<br />
Well, no. The Salafist, Wahhabi, Boko Haram, and Iranian revolutionary movements are all aimed at making Islam “stronger and more confident in its encounter with modernity.” Where ICE sees regression many Muslims see reform, even as the extremist measures of the Taliban, Boko Haram, and ISIL undermine their claims to the reformist mantle. The history of Islam, again particularly in the Middle East, has been a series of waves of purity and decay, with purity being restored by necessary <i>jihad</i> to bring the <i>ummah</i> back to conformity with God’s will.<br />
<br />
And the invariant in this dynamic has been the sincere desire to discern God’s will in any current situation. Since the struggle involves the entire <i>ummah</i>, modern notions of individual dignity, the four quadrants, separation of religion and society, open markets, and democratic governance simply have neither meaning nor application. This is demonstrated by the simple truth that, outside of Turkey with its peculiar Kemalist circumstances and Pakistan with its priority of defending against India, no party promoting secularizing the culture has won a democratic election throughout the region. (Even in Turkey and Pakistan, Islamist parties have been regaining strength.)<br />
<br />
I suggest that the centrality of the <i>ummah</i> as the expression of Allah’s will is the major obstacle to Western longings for “reform.” Not being a religion of doctrine but of praxis, reforms in Muslim societies have always been practical in nature. Sharia, so repugnant to Western sensibilities, is a time-honored and effective tool that the <i>ummah</i> has used for fourteen centuries to keep itself in submission to Allah. <br />
<br />
But McIntosh doesn’t quite understand this. “Islamic reformers,” he asserts, “have so far been unable to effectively change or reinterpret Islam’s spiritual teachings because many Muslims understand the Quran to be a Divine revelation that is final and unchangeable.”<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Yet Islamic history itself shows that this doctrine of the immutability of the Quran has not been followed in practice. The teachings of Islam have been interpreted in a wide variety of ways over the last fourteen hundred years. Indeed, during Islam’s golden age the Quran was interpreted to support reason, science, and tolerance for other religions. . . . the forces of religious fundamentalism eventually triumphed and effectively extinguished the reason-friendly version of Islam that prevailed during its golden age.</blockquote>
I would invite Steve to study more deeply the period of the Abbasid caliphate and the “Golden Age of Islam.” The caliphate was “reason-friendly” not because it applied a particular version of Islam but because it was a growing and powerful empire rich enough to patronize science, the arts, and literature. It ceased its patronage not because “the forces of religious fundamentalism eventually triumphed” but because other imperial structures evolved and began encroaching on its territories—and they all were devastated by the Mongol invasions.<br />
<br />
Of course, Muslim nations have no choice but to deal with the modern world with its attractions and downsides, and there is one country that has a track record in this regard that we can examine. In the detritus of the collapsed Ottoman Empire after World War I Kemal Atatürk led a significant experiment with how that might be accomplished—although the chief goal of his campaign of de-Islamification was to solidify Turkish nationalist identity by eradicating Arabic influences. His reforms, while popular enough to have taken root in Turkish culture, have nonetheless attracted institutional political resistance by significant elements of the dominant Justice and Development Party (JDP) of its President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, with its far friendlier attitude toward Islam and its place in Turkish history and culture. <br />
<br />
But the Kemalist approach was <i>not</i> to "modernize" Islam but to, in effect, ignore it. Secular Turks are much like American Catholics: they pay lip service to the tradition but practice—if at all—only those aspects of the religion that they like. But as the resurgence of the JDP illustrates, the culture's deep roots in Islam can be neither extirpated nor shoved aside.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b><i>Contributions of Islam to Human Evolution</i></b><br />
<br />
Even the case of Turkey demonstrates that the enduring power of Islam is its cultural flexibility. It makes room for <i>falsifah</i> and Sufism, for imperial might and illiterate backwardness, for the sophistication of Umayyad Cordova and the poverty of Sana.<br />
<br />
Ken Wilber has been concentrating on “integral spirituality” in the recent period so I have no doubt that “Fostering Evolution in Islamic Culture” is in some ways an outgrowth of that inquiry. Integral spirituality’s key method is applying transpersonal interpretations of long-standing religious beliefs and scriptures as a means of identifying core truths in each tradition and analyzing their place in an integral perspective. Islam presents a serious challenge to this endeavor because, as I stated earlier, it alone of the world’s religions self-consciously belongs to a particular wave of development, the premodern, amber, mythic/membership wave. Its contribution was to bring a universal and practical method of promoting peaceful relationships among the members of each tribe and among the tribes themselves.<br />
<br />
“Therefore,” McIntosh concludes, “by clearly understanding and honoring the vital role that Islamic culture will play in the twenty-first century and beyond, we can effectively disempower extremist ideologies by demonstrating to the larger Muslim community that they don’t need to support violence as a means of securing their place within our globalizing world.”<br />
<br />
But, again, what is that “vital role that Islamic culture [as already pointed out, a misnomer] will play” in our time?<br />
<br />
Certainly our modern world could find much to admire in Islam’s commitment to the <i>ummah</i>; our oft-cited challenges of alienation and isolation could find relief in a society that universally embraces standards of behavior and piety that promote social well-being and commitment. The focus on the <i>ummah</i> as the instrument of God’s plan for humanity is Islam’s unique contribution to human history. The question to be confronted is whether its presumptions and prescriptions can be carried forward into a modern culture with its commitment to individual liberty and sovereignty.<br />
<br />
The conundrum of Islam is of a piece with the larger trimemetic war that has been underway for the last five hundred years. McIntosh notes this by discussing the ways the premodern, the modern, and the postmodern all clash in Western dealings with the Middle East. Humanity itself is convulsed by this war, which will not find its Appomattox soon. The ICE endeavor is honorable for a number of reasons, but its impact would be greater if its understanding of the matters it’s addressing were far more sophisticated and accurate.<br />
<br />
A final quibble: McIntosh makes a passing reference to “orientalism” as “the West’s condescending attitude of superiority toward Islamic culture.” This is unfortunately an erroneous description of the term, no doubt adopted from Edward Said’s 1979 book <i>Orientalism</i> which indeed and falsely asserted that the study of the cultures of the East by first Europeans and then other Westerners was a conscious tool of European imperialism. McIntosh would do well to read Robert Irwin’s <i>Dangerous Knowledge</i>, a devastating critique of Said’s book, coming as it does from the Boomeritis green, postmodern belief in the overweening evils of modernity. The choice to regurgitate unidentified left wing talking points does not bode well for an essay proposing an integral analysis.<br />
<br />
But I’ve criticized ICE for this failing <a href="http://aqalblog.blogspot.com/2014/10/global-warming-and-cross-currents-of.html">before</a>.<br />
<br />
<br />Marty Kellerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11592136716581562644noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3401106149239386272.post-6867606639417048302015-01-18T21:49:00.000-08:002015-01-18T21:53:31.144-08:00Le massacre Charlie Hebdo: a Second Tier PerspectiveI am working with the hypothesis that humanity as a whole has been in a state of civil war since the emergence of the orange wave of consciousness as a mass meme five hundred years or so ago. (For a survey of this period and how the emergence first of orange and then of green has contributed to today’s intermemetic turbulence, see my essay <a href="http://aqalblog.blogspot.com/2009/08/three-blind-memes.html">“Three Blind Memes.”</a>)<br />
<br />
The key is Wilber’s insight that first tier waves presume that their perspective is the absolute truth; by definition they are not capable of embracing other perspectives. Therefore these other perspectives, regardless of their actual interrelationship, are at best sources of suspicion and at worst causes of warfare. Evolution is neither smooth nor linear. New waves emerge from earlier stages as discontinuities, doing seeming violence to the established order of those older memes. These disturbances are “built in” to the fabric of evolution, so that what most humans romantically long for as peace—a state of nonviolent equanimity—never seems to materialize.<br />
<br />
History records how emergence is never simple, peaceful, or swift. At least in the first tier the novel features characterizing a new wave make it radically different from that which gave birth to it; thus to the older wave it appears foreign and threatening. The two co-exist in the same Kosmic space but remain suspicious of each other. The principle of “transcend and include” means that the newer wave cannot attack the previous wave without doing damage to itself, but the reverse is not true. Thus while orange has struggled to find its Kosmic groove since its emergence as a mass meme 500 years ago, amber has had the stability from which to oppose orange’s trajectory.<br />
<br />
Similarly green faces the twin hostility of both amber and orange, although amber barely notices green, for neutralizing orange will automatically neutralize green. Orange is the only of the Big Three first tier waves required to fight a two-front war: defending amber’s resistance while attacking green’s drive to transcendence. Indeed, as the <i>Charlie Hebdo</i> massacre implies, amber and green find common purpose in boxing in orange.<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a>This may be the result in part of the relative newness of green, which has had neither the time nor the density to produce a dependable probability wave. By rejecting reason its majoritarian Boomeritis variant does not include yet orange; until it does it has a very unstable foundation from which to find its Kosmic furrow.<br />
<br />
Boomeritis green’s dismissal of reason makes it susceptible of being used by amber in its fight with orange. Think of America’s youth and retirees ganging up on the working age population to extract financial resources for themselves and you have an idea of the dynamic. The oldsters, although they were young themselves once, have little experiential memory of that state, while the youth have no clue about the perspective of their grandparents. But still they see the early and middle-aged adults as a source of means to support them.<br />
<br />
Wilber presaged this dynamic with his discovery of the pre/trans fallacy. To the rational (<i>i.e</i>., orange) mind the pre- and transrational both appear non-rational. Orange may be the predominant level in today’s world, but its position is neither settled nor hegemonic. Orange predominates because it has created much greater <i>depth</i> than amber, and thus despite its lesser span (20% of the global population) it represents the center of gravity of human evolution. It pulls amber up to it and interferes with green’s emergence. Green has the potential to supplant orange’s pre-eminence because it creates even greater depth, but its immaturity impedes this dynamic at the moment.<br />
<br />
<br />
<i><b>Self-Sabotage on a Global Stage</b></i><br />
<br />
Thus from a second tier perspective—one that embraces all of the first tier waves because it <i>includes</i> them all—the cauldron of current history can be seen as a series of births of new stages which, because they are first tier, are continuously struggling against one another. The peace we think we long for can only show up once we regard the violence that characterizes emergence in the first tier with equanimity, for peace is not the absence of violence and struggle but the radical acceptance of them.<br />
<br />
So the fearsome eruptions of physical violence in our societies, whether at the offices of <i>Charlie Hebdo</i> in Paris, in the village of Baga in Nigeria, or on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, are RH quadrant manifestations of the psychospiritual violence in the LH quadrants. The amber stage in both the upper and lower quadrants seeks and defends the stability of the mythic tribal cocoon, while orange promotion of individuation and personal perspectives requires liberation from the tribe. Amber has an ambiguous relationship with orange. On the one hand, it sees it as a threat to its own assumptions; on the other, orange’s novelty and (relative) freedom are enticing and alluring. <br />
<br />
We can easily understand this by analyzing our own maturation. From birth through infancy, to childhood and adolescence, into adulthood with all its stages, we notice that each new level of awareness, transcending and including the earlier levels, creates unease as well as excitement. Any unhealed or malformed energies in earlier stages remain to impact the way emergence occurs in the later stages, most often in the form of shadow material/dynamics. Psychospiritual “problems” are generally the results of these dysfunctions. Because they are hidden from our conscious minds, they wreak havoc with our development ranging in degrees from neurosis all the way to psychosis.<br />
<br />
Because the Kosmos is tetradimensional, these dysfunctions have analogues in all four quadrants. We experience them in our individuality because that is all our development permits. But they are also present in the lower quadrants, where their impact is vastly underappreciated but the damage they do is considerable.<br />
<br />
As green emerges from its immature Boomeritis form, its “sensitive self” innovation will increasingly permit apprehension of the pain and struggle present in the collective shadow, widening the draw into second tier with its identity in the transpersonal. As more of us experience this momentous leap, the contours of the shadow elements of the LH will begin to become accessible and the integration work can thus commence consciously.<br />
<br />
Hence as integralists we begin to understand acts of terrorism in the political realm as RH analogs of the subconscious drive to self-sabotage in the LH. All unhealed or, better, non-matured, lines of development rebel against the emergences that they feel leave them behind. Like abandoned children, they suffer the pain of exile which calls forth rage and other forms of violence. And like children, in their limited awareness they usually turn this violence against themselves, incapable of apprehending the larger scope of evolution and the dynamics that promote transcendence. (Alice Miller has done a good job mapping out these dynamics.)<br />
<br />
The Boko Haram gangs and the team that led the assault on <i>Charlie Hebdo</i>, of course, were (all but certainly) unaware of these subconscious dynamics in themselves, much less in humanity as a unity. Most of us act out of this hidden and suppressed ache, doing violence to ourselves and others in the futile attempt to find peace and the surcease of psychospiritual pain. Given the huge role of projection—the transference to others of our own unbearable character defects and soul deformities—it is inevitable that RH turbulence is inextricably linked to conforming turmoil in the LH. Tetradimensionality offers us a method by which to trace back to the LH a general idea of these dynamics based on how they appear in the RH.<br />
<br />
Of course shadow material shows up differently in amber than in orange. If Kosmic evolution as we view it from our little tiny pebble in the universe has launched this individuation project as a means for the One to create Self-awareness (or for other mysterious purposes), then we are in the middle of the unfolding of this particular phase. Amber is necessary for birthing orange, but the differentiations thereby created affect the structures of orange and succeeding waves. <br />
<br />
In amber, individuals are of course aware of ourselves as individuals but our perspective and resulting self-perception are of the tribe. Thus the shadow we experience is that of the tribe. In orange, the shadow is of our individual self, even as that individual self transcends and includes our amber stages.<br />
<br />
Yet in the RH, our shadow-driven behavior is still violent and reactionary. We see in the external world the fears and hatreds about ourselves we’ve repressed in our internal world, and act accordingly. Transcendence requires shadow work and projection withdrawal, something barely on the radar screen of all but the most spiritually advanced doing our work on the islands of the integral archipelago. <br />
<br />
<br />
<i><b>Healthy Green: Still the Goal</b></i><br />
<br />
I offer these observations as a suggestion for further exploration. If the Integral Model is valid, then all holons arise and exist with four quadrants. Since at least the beginning of recorded history, we humans have engaged in exploration, description, and measurement of the RH, while being aware of the impulses pushing us from the LH. Religious traditions, mostly amber and mythical, established the traditional paradigms for exploring the LH. As Western science turned its eye toward the mind, the disciplines of psychology offered new means for exploring the LH. Now the Integral Model suggests that a far more disciplined and useful exploration of especially the LL is possible and, I further argue, necessary for paving the way to second tier consciousness.<br />
<br />
A major dynamic to explore is whatever guilt may be present in the subconscious of the individual who has abandoned the tribe. The exhilaration of becoming one’s own person is at the expense of this desertion. Is there in all of us at orange a repressed guilt to go along with the sadness? It is left to green to pick up these pieces, using its sensitivity to promote reconnection of the individual to the tribe.<br />
<br />
But until it reaches a much more mature stage than it is manifesting presently, it will perforce use its insights to manipulate things its way. The lovely emotion that is “liberal guilt”—now become a tool of oppression via the heinous cudgel of “white privilege”—is put in service of the Left’s agenda of “social justice” and other features of Hegelian statist supremacy. Thus we are to be sensitive to oppressed minorities and create “inclusion” via multiculturalism. <br />
<br />
Europe’s increasing social turbulence resulting from imposing the EU’s theory of multicultural inclusion is evidenced in the ghettoization of immigrant Arabs and other Muslim immigrants. The poor Arabs clustered in Paris’ 19th arrondissement, home to the Kouachi brothers, are no longer Algerians, Moroccans, or members of other cultures, but neither are they French. But their rights to be there, to preserve a separate cultural and religious identity, to remain outside the host culture, are all championed by the same worldview that delighted the editors of <i>Charlie Hebdo</i>—proud leftists all—in their slandering the Prophet Muhammad on the covers of its magazine.<br />
<br />
The Boomeritis green insistence that all amber and orange expressions are backward and ridiculous lives uneasily with its championing those living from those perspectives as oppressed victims of Western capitalist greed and indifference. This is especially perplexing from an orange perspective, until we recognize that Boomeritis green has swallowed whole the postmodern rejection of reason, and what we are dealing with is an emotional state and not a reasoned set of principles.<br />
<br />
From a second tier perspective, these are all elements of the civil war characterizing human evolution. The challenge remains, as it has since the Summer of Love, to restore reason to green’s maturing so that its great gifts will lift us up toward our higher potential and provide even greater depth so that sooner than later a critical mass of us will indeed make the momentous leap into teal. In the meantime let us continue to use our personal development as the school in which to learn about the dynamics of our subconscious, within which the amber are earlier worlds of our own evolution are alive and well. We will have a handle on the human civil war when we start addressing our own.Marty Kellerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11592136716581562644noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3401106149239386272.post-29070065509917070812014-10-12T13:47:00.001-07:002014-11-20T10:39:48.364-08:00Global Warming and the Cross Currents of Evolution“No one knows what the Earth’s climate will be at the end of the century. Based on history, it is possible to hazard a prediction of a different kind. Before the end of the century, the Western mind will conceive another environmental crisis necessitating the ending of the modern industrial economy, the only form of economic arrangements that has lifted mankind to undreamt of prosperity.<br />
<br />
“The big question is whether the Western mind will be sovereign at the century’s end and the West remain the core of the world economy or relegated to its periphery—something only the passing of the present century can answer.”<br />
<br />
—Rupert Durwall, <i>The Age of Global Warming</i><br />
<br />
<br />
It is a curiosity of current evolution that the determination to “fix” the problem of climate change is so thoroughly the property of a single political faction, whose “solutions” are so universally resisted by another. <br />
<br />
The trained integralist sees at once the first tier food fight that this has, inevitably, become. But since there are actually very few well-trained integralists, it is a worthy exercise to look into the actual dynamics and how they so lawfully reflect evolutionary structures.<br />
<br />
The leading edge of consciousness evolution resides in the impulse to what I call “high green”—that structure of green striving, without much success so far, to emerge from the immature form that is “Boomeritis.” Green is the first stage of consciousness to become aware of the fundamental and universal equality of all humans, which inspires its desires to create a world that honors and protects that equality. The orange stage which it transcends was, in its turn, the first to create and sanctify individual identity as it emerged from its tribal wave. At orange we explore with abandon our newly found individual identity; at green we explore the universality of this structure.<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a>Green’s emergence as a mass meme in the 1960s was, for better or worse, impregnated by the concomitant rise of postmodernist critiques, starting with literary studies and quickly swarming outward to invade first all fields of study and then all parts of society and culture. Postmodernism’s greatest weakness is its rejection of Reason as a universal method of analysis; without discovering and employing a dialectic that transcends and <i>includes</i> Reason, it has only Emotion to offer in its stead. This supplanting of Reason with Emotion has had all kinds of disastrous consequences, one of which has been to stultify the maturing of green and, in the political realm, regress back to the amber days of might makes right.<br />
<br />
As it has permeated political consciousness, those in whom Boomeritis first emerged tended to congregate in the New Left, whose war on the Old (orange) Left resulted in the takeover of the American Democratic Party in the period 1968-76. Previous to this transformation, both political parties were centered in orange consciousness, with its right hand structures in nation states and industrial economies. The Democrats had diverged from the Republicans with their formal adoption of a progressive philosophy during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, which they turned into a governing majority when FDR used it to fashion a reasonable response to the exigencies of the Depression.<br />
<br />
The Republicans, on the other hand, emerged from the Civil War and the leadership of Abraham Lincoln as the party of modernity that championed individual liberty and the economics that most supported and benefited from it. In 1912, the “progressive” Bull Moose experiment of Teddy Roosevelt provided a “softer” version of state intervention into the economy than the New Deal would, but later on its currents in the GOP couldn’t survive the demands put upon them by the Great Society, and so rather quickly the “liberal Republican” disappeared.<br />
<br />
The presidency of Ronald Reagan represented the apotheosis of the political economic outlook of Lincoln, but the rapidly emerging Information Age and the end of the Cold War laid bare new challenges to which neither party has yet to respond effectively and inspirationally.<br />
<br />
Thus since the election of that avatar of Boomeritis Bill Clinton in 1992 we have been a 50-50 nation; neither the establishment orange policy assumptions nor postmodern Boomeritis prescriptions have caught the public’s imagination. To many it appears our politics have degenerated into a name-calling, money-drenched, left-right deadlock, with nothing but fear and loathing of the other side to offer.<br />
<br />
In the case of the politicization of climate change, we have been barraged with emotional warnings of imminent catastrophe from all the major domos of the pomo left, but almost no rational and thoughtful dialogue which alone would help humanity discern the best response to the currents of our dynamic climate.<br />
<br />
<br />
<i><b>Leftist Climate Policy’s Unspoken Assumptions </b></i><br />
<br />
When one attempts to understand the world that the majority of global warming alarmists see when they agitate for enormous compulsory reductions of CO₂, CH4, and other greenhouse gases created in increasing quantities from the fossil fuels used to power the world economy, one notices five fundamental assumptions underscoring their policy prescriptions. (I am referring here to those pushing the particular policy of dramatic and compulsory greenhouse gas emissions reductions, not to those conducting scientific research on the climate.)<br />
<br />
First and foremost, as exemplars of the new emerging “green” consciousness they assume a stance of caring for the well-being of humanity and the planet. They are indeed able to see a bigger picture of how things work together and are interdependent. They can see a disproportionality in the global social order which they believe can and must be set right. <br />
<br />
Thus they seek to protect the earth and humanity from the depredations of “the 1%” who, they assert, refuse to take the responsibility that they, the alarmists, do to be stewards of the planet, its environment, and its people. Only the "progressives," they believe, are capable of assuming a global consciousness; everyone else is trapped in his own narcissism and ignorance.<br />
<br />
Secondly, they assume that the current physical environment of the planet, poisoned though it may already be by human carelessness and ignorance, must be permitted to deteriorate no further. Somehow the status quo represents a fixed position that must be defended and returned to at all costs.<br />
<br />
All the concern about melting polar ice and rising sea levels, for instance, presumes that the current levels are correct and/or optimum for human civilization. All the anxiety about longer summers and shorter winters presumes that the current ranges are correct and/or appropriate for human survival.<br />
<br />
Thirdly, they assume that the environmental degradation produced by the technologies of the Industrial Age is the result of conscious decisions by morally culpable people who by and large chose personal advantage over community sustainability. The treachery of these people against humanity should sentence them to the ninth level of Dante’s Inferno.<br />
<br />
Thus even as the two billion-plus populations of China and India have finally reached the threshold of exponential increases in per capita wealth via industrialization of their economies, our friends on the Left say they must now choose between bettering their own standard of living or deferring this indefinitely to stave off global disaster. They also would like the Advanced Sector to liquidate a vast amount of its wealth to compensate for the impact of the Indian/Chinese economic pause they prefer. Since, they reason, this wealth came at the expense of the global environment, those who have benefited have the responsibility to pay for those depredations. (Exactly how the Indians and Chinese can use this wealth in a carbon-free economy is not discussed.)<br />
<br />
The fourth assumption is that human activity somehow is alien from the earth and its history, as if, rather than being an intrinsic and leading element of evolution, we were mysteriously dropped here from an entirely different place in the universe. This is reflected in the standard practice of applying the words “nature” and “natural” to anything non-human, and to isolate identifiable human influences as “artificial” and thus in some way outside of “nature.”<br />
<br />
Somehow, in this view, something about humans divorces us from our source in Mother Earth. Although birthed by the on-going evolutionary imperative of the cosmos, we did something at some point that stripped us of the condition of being embedded in that imperative. We now stand alienated from our environment, both physically and temporally, banished from Eden for eating the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Industrial Growth. The postmodern god of the communitarian imperative has expelled us from Paradise for the resultant sin of blasphemy.<br />
<br />
The fifth involves a fascinating irony: the conviction that “green technology” will be able to generate sufficient energy throughput to safely and cost-neutrally replace fossil fuels. Ironic because this faith puts humanity back into the picture just after the previous assumption dumped us out.<br />
<br />
So, as far as I can assess it, these are the foundational assumptions of the majority of the global warming "alarmists" (<i>aka</i> the Left or the “progressive”/rent-seeker axis): the physical structure and condition of Planet Earth must change no further (unless of course we could restore it to the condition is was in at the dawn of the nineteenth century); only non-human terrestrial dynamics are natural and therefore valuable; in spite of that artificial “green technologies” are not only acceptable but game changing; and any impacts we make on the planet that degrade the status quo are the result of greed and obtuseness at best, and of evil at worst, while they have only the best interests of humanity at heart.<br />
<br />
That these are foundational for these people offers us some insight into humanity as a whole as we all engage in the endless struggle of existence. After all, that significant numbers of us operate from this perspective at least raises the question its origin and place in our evolutionary psychological structure. Rather than reject or argue with it, it offers us a deeper insight into what’s really going on at the very depth of our existence.<br />
<br />
<i><b><br />Historical Antecedents of the Warmists’ Assumptions</b></i><br />
<br />
Before going there, let’s note a few things in response to these assumptions of our friends on the Left.<br />
<br />
First, there is nothing new whatsoever in them. <br />
<br />
Thomas Malthus warned his fellow Englishman 215 years ago at the beginning of the Industrial Age that we were running out of the resources necessary to sustain life. The conviction that present reality is the only sustainable reality is ancient, and it is tied both to our fundamental requirement for physical security—the first level of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs—and to our underdeveloped capacity to see, understand, and align with long-term evolutionary trends.<br />
<br />
Indeed, since Malthus’ day a significant amount of global political strife has been about the presumed need to defend the status quo against the destructive forces of capitalist innovation. A feature of this strife is the not-surprising fact that the champions of the status quo are usually allied with those most invested in it. <br />
<br />
The recognition of the impact of the toxic by-products, waste, and carelessness characteristic of the first two centuries of the Industrial Era is a much more recent emergence. We trace its earliest political response only to the middle of the nineteenth century when the British Parliament passed the Alkali Act to curb HCl emissions in London. Various reactions to particularly air pollution caused by unfiltered venting of industrial gasses and smoke from factories across Europe and the United States continued thereafter, along with the creation of wildlife and nature conservancies. But addressing the systemic cause of pollution had to wait until the 1970s when masses of people agitated for mitigation and clean-up.<br />
<br />
Until that time, however, the need to deal with these problems was taken in stride and not converted to a spiritual problem. The Left had not yet taken up environmental concerns in its platform, so the application of its particular political method had to await the social upheavals of the 60s. Indeed, the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s muckraking <i>Silent Spring </i>marked the beginning of a mass awareness that certain products and processes might contain toxins that can degrade the physical and social environment.<br />
<br />
It was the link between the political Left with its enmeshment in socialist and postmodern categorical thinking and the emergence of environmental awareness that created the crucial association of human industrial and commercial activity with moral culpability. Thus from the start those who owned and benefited from the technologies that produced pollution and other toxic materials as a by-product were now to be associated with the oppressor bourgeoisie class of Marx’s invention.<br />
<br />
This compulsion to assign blame and culpability to others is also the ancient and still firmly innate human tendency to project upon The Other our own shadow self-beliefs. That the Left developed its own symbology and nomenclature is merely the latest twist on an ageless element of human psychology.<br />
<br />
The truly spectacular innovation was contributed by the postmodernists with their obsession for deconstruction and dethroning Reason from human discourse and social organization. This generated their campaign to denaturalize humanity, to take the blame game an extraordinary step further and erase humanity itself from its role at the leading edge of Kosmic evolution. In quick order it has become commonplace on the Left to assume that somehow “humans” and “nature” are entirely at odds with one another; nature, in their minds, has become yet another ideological victim in the greedy and selfish human drive for hegemony at any cost.<br />
<br />
You can immediately discern the problem with this set of assumptions. If defending the terrestrial climate status quo is the imperative, then the development of a definitive and demonstrably effective policy to ensure that is essential. But since human greed is in the way, then implementation of such a policy—even if sufficient political consensus about its viability can be achieved—will require unprecedented amounts of force to make opposition yield and take its medicine. And since there is nowhere near an actual global agreement to undertake this unprecedented social and economic engineering challenge, those “in the know” must organize politically sufficient strength to subdue the opposition; the application of force is a key weapon in this war against ourselves.<br />
<br />
It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that such a war would make the bloody violence of the 20th century seem a mere skirmish. The suppression of the natural (there’s that word) human desire for an ever-greater standard of living among the billions in Asia who have such an outcome now in their collective sights is probably impossible, even if the Advanced Sector had the unanimous will to attempt it.<br />
<br />
Arriving at this conclusion is not particularly difficult; regardless of one’s political orientation one can easily see the impossibility for the success of this course. Yet the climate activists continue to push for global action to maintain the climate status quo <i>as if this were actually achievable</i>. After their abrupt comeuppance at Copenhagen by China and its developing sector allies they, like the Bourbons of post-Napoleonic France, have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.<br />
<br />
The fig leaf employed to disguise this unsettling truth is the faith that “sustainable” energy-generating technologies can easily and painlessly replace the fossil fuel regime. Even though no studies exist to verify this, and even though the current “green technology” sector in both the U. S. and Europe is rife with rent-seeking via massive taxpayer subsidies, one cannot in good faith dismiss the possibility out of hand. This potential, on the other hand, is the only factor that the Left offers to counter the charge that their policy is otherwise an emerging nations suppression strategy. If their faith proves to be chimerical, then the only possible result of their policy recommendation is exactly that which they proclaim doing nothing will result in: massive devolution of human civilization.<br />
<br />
It is ironic that these people blast their opponents for our faith that technology will be part of the ameliorative adaptation policies that will permit humanity to deal with the impacts of climate change while they themselves have a similar faith in their own technological approach. The difference, of course, lies in the fundamentals of the recommendations.<br />
<br />
What drives the Left’s puzzling policy prescription—since they are currently unwilling to entertain the possibility of mass adaptation to global warming—is their certainty that refusal to do so can only result in human devolution. This leads to a very uncomfortable conundrum, which so far has been absent from the public debate: if the policy the Left proposes is not viable, but if at the same time they insist that their policy is the only one we can pursue, then are they not asking us, in essence, to choose our method of committing mass suicide? Hemlock or firing squad: are we not damned if we do—unprecedented world war to enforce sufficient suppression of greenhouse gas emissions—or damned if we don’t—ignoring the alarmists’ uncompromising suppression policy and taking our chances with Mother Nature?<br />
<br />
Surely, you ask, our friends on the activist Left aren’t so stupid as to be unaware of what they are demanding. Surely they must be uneasy about betting the farm on their hopes for cheap and viable “green technology.”<br />
<br />
That is indeed a good question, one to which we are inexorably led in the light of their continuing and unyielding insistence that humanity must, in essence, tear itself apart via an unprecedentedly bloody world war. Must we destroy the globe in order to save it?<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Eros <i>v.</i> Thanatos</b><br />
<br />
Perhaps this logical absurdity is a reflection of a profound paradox resting not only in the hearts of humankind but in the very nature of the Kosmos. So let us take a seeming detour from our study of the "warmist" perspective to look at human nature and the way it has been shaped by evolution. We will see that the tendency to what looks like self-sabotage is a feature of the universe, although not in the way we apply it to ourselves, and that it plays a role in the dialectics of transformation that we can embrace.<br />
<br />
Certainly we can see in the physiosphere the interplay of the forces of creation and of destruction. The universe itself (according to our best theory) was born when the perfect symmetry of Nonexistence was violently and suddenly destroyed by Existence. As this anomalous incubus expanded out of and into Nonexistence, matter and energy began a constant dance of transformation, exchanging form and content nanosecond by nanosecond, energy cooling into matter and matter exploding back into energy endlessly. <br />
<br />
Even now, quantum physicists describe the subatomic world as a plasma of virtual reality, where the precise “existence” of anything particular appears with a ghostly mien, perhaps taking on form, but then again perhaps not. The best we can say for certain is that the physical realm is <i>extremely</i> and <i>permanently</i> dynamic. The firm ground we think we stand on is an illusion.<br />
<br />
From the perspective of the physical universe this must appear “natural,” <i>i.e.</i>, it is the very order of things. From +0<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><sup>n </sup></i>seconds from the moment of the Big Bang, expansion and transformation has been a signal constant, and although the current configuration of the universe appears vastly different from what it was at the beginning, in fact we could say that, since nothing has been added or subtracted in the interim, it’s just the current version of the original pattern.<br />
<br />
However, until the emergence of humanity in the form of <i>Homo sapiens</i> some 100,000 years ago, the universe was conscious of none of this. Self-awareness only emerged with the differentiation of the human species from the rest of the world; and even this has undergone various stages of expansion and transformation. Like the universe that gave birth to it, consciousness necessarily is one with the laws of universal nature established at the Big Bang.<br />
<br />
In our evolution we can discern a handful of distinct stages, and we can further observe that the emergence of new stages seems to be accelerating. From the beginning we survived with a level of consciousness conducive to the maintenance of our hunter-gatherer social ecology. After humans survived the last Great Ice Age we developed agriculture in earnest, and a new structure of consciousness emerged to support this social innovation. This was around 12,000 years ago; it was tribal in identity, oral in communication, imperial in social structure, linear in economic structure, and mythical in spiritual and intellectual matters.<br />
<br />
Although here and there, apparently starting in the last half of the first millennium BC, individuality in the modern sense began to arise, it wasn’t until the Renaissance had given birth to the Protestant Reformation in Europe that an entirely new level of consciousness began to supplant the tribal. This was individual in identity, literary in communication, egalitarian in social structure, nonlinear in economic structure, and rational in spiritual and intellectual matters. This stage of consciousness accompanied and supported the rise of modern science and of the Industrial Age.<br />
<br />
Even as the Modern era expanded outward from Europe, first to America and then to the rest of the globe, the seeds of the next stage of consciousness did not take long to sprout. By the middle of the nineteenth century, well before the zenith of the industrial mode, what would become postmodern consciousness began to arise. This was best symbolized by the discoveries of relativity by Einstein and of quantum physics by Bohr, Mach, Heisenberg, and the rest in the early twentieth century. (We could also point to its presence in the arts via geniuses like Picasso in painting, Schonberg in music, and Proust in literature.)<br />
<br />
As a mass phenomenon this postmodern stage began to emergence only 50 years ago. Its relative youth means that it hasn’t settled into a stable structure yet, so our characterization of it is still tentative: it is transpersonal in identity, video-based in communication, leveling in social structure, democratic in economic structure, and emotional in spiritual and intellectual matters. This stage of consciousness supports the rise of the Information Age.<br />
<br />
Even as each stage of awareness features topographies that are uniquely different and expansive compared to earlier stages, they have several things in common. (For a comprehensive review of these stages of consciousness and their role in Kosmic evolution, see Ken Wilber’s great <i>Sex, Ecology, and Spirituality</i>.) First, they are extremely partial in their understanding of the great questions of humanity: life, death, purpose. Second, they are extremely time-bound; their capacity to see and identify with the vast scope of the world and its evolution is limited. Thirdly, each is utterly convinced that its worldview is the only valid one. Fourthly, they have no capacity to live with and embrace either paradox or ambiguity. We pursue certainty under the assumption that it is a necessary element of security and stability—in spite of history’s evidence that while neither security nor stability exist in any sustainable way, nonetheless we have figured out a way to host and provide for more and more humans with an ever-increasing standard of living.<br />
<br />
The evolution of human consciousness is characterized by ever greater degrees of freedom for the human being. As Maslow so skillfully demonstrated with his Hierarchy of Needs, our growth starts with freedom from the need to survive, proceeding to freedom from the need for security, then from the need for belonging and validation, and so on. As we move up the hierarchy, we experience exponentially greater degrees of freedom.<br />
<br />
But, as his use of the pyramid to illustrate this progression implies, the farther up the hierarchy we travel, the fewer people we meet who have experienced the same degree of transcendence. <br />
<br />
Thus all of these features result for almost of all us in a sense of constant conflict. "Life is difficult," the famous opening line of Scott Peck's <i>The Road Less Traveled</i>, is universally apt. Many of us still struggle even for basic survival. Even when we master that struggle we next fight for safety and stability, and so on up the pyramid. Further, we soon learn at each stage that there is no “right way,” no guaranteed method by which we can secure our needs. We are subject to not only everyone else’s opinions and advice, but to our own inner voices that criticize and undermine our every decision.<br />
<br />
All of it, all of these conflicts, simply reflect the universal structures set in motion 13.7 billion years ago. They are our own version of the constant dance of transformation. Everything in our world—indeed everything within each of us—is relentlessly changing. <i>Yet our consciousness has not yet evolved so as to be at peace with this fact.</i> And so at our deepest levels we fear the worst: that all of this struggle is for nothing, and that at the end death and oblivion are all we can expect.<br />
<br />
Plato identified deep currents underlying the world as <i>Eros</i> (love) and <i>Thanatos</i> (death). From the beginning, <i>Eros</i> was seen in every combination that created something new, while <i>Thanatos</i> was found in every collapse and dissolution. New forms continuously come into (<i>Eros</i>) and out of (<i>Thanatos</i>) existence. From the perspective of the evolution of consciousness, <i>Eros </i>calls us to greater and deeper awareness and identity, while <i>Thanatos </i>seduces us into stasis and reaction.<br />
<br />
Humanity, in whom consciousness is such a young and tender thing relative to the history of the universe, is naturally subject to the whiplash of <i>Eros</i> and <i>Thanato</i>s. We can see it in our own history, as we have struggled to develop ever greater capacities to live and to live well, resisted by our fears that innovations will either prove fleeting or destructive. <br />
<br />
Until the widespread growth of Reason with the rise of the Modern in Europe after the sixteenth century, premodern cultures were organized to address little beyond Maslow’s first two levels of needs. Things progressed so slowly as to be invisible to all but the most visionary. The impulse of<i> Eros</i> was difficult to see beyond the local level (at best), and so we projected it onto the various deities that our different cultures invented. It was said that the one God of Judeo-Christian mythology loves us unconditionally, but we will experience that fully only once we affirmatively accept His love and only after we slough off this mortal coil. The Christian myth explicitly incorporates the love <i>v</i>. death theme with the centrality of its crucifixion-resurrection story.<br />
<br />
The innovation of Reason permitted us a strange new metric by which to apprehend evolution, and the invention of the natural sciences unbridled by the claims of religion and orthodoxy spurred an exponential number of discoveries about ourselves and our world. For the first time in Kosmic history, tools to analyze the world around us became available, and humans applied them with relish.<br />
<br />
Ultimately we attempted to apply to the study of the world within our hearts and minds the same scientific principles we discovered in the study of the physical realm. And although this will ultimately be inadequate—the inner realm has different metrics—we nonetheless have learned a lot about psychology and the evolution of the inner life of the individual. <br />
<br />
Throughout all of it, the fundamental dynamics of creation and destruction, of form and energy, of love and death remain visible and available to experience. But for most of us these are distant, almost imperceptible forces, surviving in a neo-mythical realm of archetypes and fundamental dynamics that seem to have little impact on our daily lives. Even at the leading edge of the evolution of consciousness—high green—we still see the world in formal and egocentric terms. We do not yet identify with the universals; we still experience ourselves as drops of water separate from the ocean.<br />
<br />
It is the hope of many integralists that we are living on the threshold of the mass emergence of second tier consciousness, something for which the evidence speculative at best. In the meantime, it’s a thoroughly first tier world convulsed by <a href="http://aqalblog.blogspot.com/2009/08/three-blind-memes.html">the Trimemetic War</a>, of which the great climate change debate is a thoroughly quintessential artifact. <br />
<br />
<br />
<i><b>Integral Approaches to the Climate Change “Debate”</b></i><br />
<br />
Integral theory derives from the insight that “everyone is partially right.” Whatever our particular worldview, as long as it is in the first tier we assume that it is absolutely valid and therefore superior to others. This is the dynamic that characterizes the Trimemetic War, in which we each battle furiously to defeat what the other stages of consciousness champion. This “win-lose” dynamic is how the <i>Eros/Thanatos</i> duality expresses in first tier terms.<br />
<br />
So thoroughly embedded are we in first tier that it is a significant challenge to find methods by which we can become aware of how its dynamics influence our thinking and then find equanimity with everyone else’s mystification about this strange and weird new perspective. <br />
<br />
An example of the difficulty of this can be seen in philanthropist Steve McIntosh’s initial steps toward an integral view of the global warming debate in his founding of the <a href="http://www.culturalevolution.org/">Institute for Cultural Evolution</a>. McIntosh and his collaborators have set for themselves “the goal of applying groundbreaking insights taken from Integral philosophy, developmental psychology, evolutionary theory, and the social sciences to help create significant forward movement in the evolution of the American cultural and political landscape.” They have faith in the possibility of both a “transpartisan synthesis,” and the forthright ability “to positively influence the evolution of American culture in realistic and measurable ways.”<br />
<br />
A mighty big goal, yes? The question of the viability of conscious evolution is certainly a tantalizing one; why waste all the wisdom generated by humanity over the millennia if we could focus it consciously to improve the lot of not only ourselves but the Prime Directive itself? And to McIntosh’s credit, there’s nothing like just doing it to discover what, if anything, works in this noble endeavor.<br />
<br />
The challenge will be, however, to develop rigorous means of transcending and including our first tier experiences and structures, all of which rebel against the “momentous leap” into the second tier. (To be clear, Spirit itself generates both each wave of consciousness and the drive toward transcendence of and by each wave.)<br />
<br />
Thus the ICE appropriately uses climate change as a useful exemplar of how we might develop a “transpartisan” approach. <br />
<br />
In <a href="http://new.livestream.com/integralcenter/events/3039696?utm_campaign=973f376813-Invitation_Daily_Evolver_Live9_26_2012&utm_medium=email&utm_source=The+Daily+Evolver&utm_term=0_9e57d4efed-973f376813-87091849">a wide-ranging interview</a> with Integral Institute co-founder and “Daily Evolver” host Jeff Salzman, McIntosh and collaborator Carter Phipps (alumnus of Andrew Cohen’s <i>EnlightenNext </i>project) appropriately acknowledge their own leftist bias and perspective—owning our own perspectives is a critical element in any integral analysis. <br />
<br />
Stating one’s own viewpoint, however, is just the first step to an integral perspective. One must subsequently be able at least formally to describe the other perspectives involved, and this is where it can become tricky, since one has to be able to be aware of how one’s own biases can color the understanding of these other biases.<br />
<br />
McIntosh and Phipps authored an essay, <a href="http://www.culturalevolution.org/docs/ICE-Depolarizing-American-Mind.pdf">“Depolarizing the American Mind,”</a> that proposes a methodology to encourage the transpartisan synthesis. It starts out well by asserting that the leading edge of evolution bears the greater responsibility for dealing with the junior waves by virtue of its greater depth. Thus they assert, albeit grudgingly, that “the responsibility for overcoming the gridlock [<i>i.e</i>., in Washington] rests mainly with progressives and liberals.” <br />
<br />
In the practical world of politics, however, this is making the unsupportable assumption that “progressive” and “liberal” = “green wave” consciousness; from the very start of their analysis they reveal first tier blind spots that greatly weaken their case.<br />
<br />
It is not my intention to examine in detail the flaws of the approach laid out in “Depolarizing”; that will be the topic of another post. Suffice it to say that even the most adventurous Boulder-based attempts to fashion second tier analyses suffer from the Boomeritis origins of their perspectives. It is necessary to constantly point out that <a href="http://aqalblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/green-is-not-integral.html">green is not integral</a>; good intentions are simply irrelevant to transcendence. <br />
<br />
Given that <a href="http://www.recoveringbureaucrat.com/2012/10/clashing-narratives.html">the New Left and its “progressive”/rent-seeker axis</a> have solely generated agitation for globally-imposed “solutions” to the global warming “problem,” necessarily integral approaches to climate change policy must start by looking unsentimentally at both the content and context of these recommendations. McIntosh and Phipps, being embedded in the Left, take for granted the superiority of their perspective and so do not subject it to rigorous analysis. That is one of the limits of first tier memes. Thus they do not see how the leftist prescription has its historical roots in amber’s reaction to orange. They fail to appreciate the reactionary roots of socialism as a political movement, and thus simply misconstrue orange and non-Boomeritis green suspicions of the motives of the climate activists. For sure, they point out that these people have failed in their mission to get the globe to exchange its wealth for drastic greenhouse gas reductions through their adherence to postmodern deindustrialization and dismantling of capitalism.<br />
<br />
But a serious flaw is their uncritical acceptance of the leftist analysis of the issues of climate change as a “wicked problem,” even though they recognize that it is “too multidimensional to be simply ‘solved.’” Even as they attempt to envision an integral approach to the issue, they reject those who disagree with their major premise as duped by “a consortium of think tanks associated with the Tea Party movement [which] have indeed achieved <i>astonishing</i> success in decreasing concern for global warming” [italics in the original].<br />
<br />
But they see none of the five unspoken assumptions I examined at the beginning of this essay. By assuming as given the policy thrust generated by these very important beliefs, they unconsciously block the possibility of an actually integral—or more precisely—an integrally informed approach. (This is doubly ironic because one of the gifts of the Postmodern is the rejection of "givens" in understanding Kosmic evolution.)<br />
<br />
The closest they can come is “to seek to use and include all the valid perspectives” of the three environmental “policy camps” on the left which they have distinguished.<br />
<br />
At the same time, they also recognize that resistance to these group’s insistence on the dire nature of the threat is in large part culturally determined, <i>i.e</i>., in the Lower Left. Thus they realistically recognize that imposing “warmist” solutions will not occur until and unless they can persuade a sustainable majority to support both their position and their assumptions.<br />
<br />
This, at least, is a legitimate attempt at four-quadrant analysis. If they could get the stages correct, they might actually approximate an integral analysis. <br />
<br />
All this is <i>not</i> to say that their long-term determination to initiate an inquiry into the possibility of conscious evolution is a waste of time; far from it. But if they are to use successfully the climate issue as the vehicle of this inquiry, they have a lot more work to do.<br />
<br />
<br />
<i><b>The Integral Imperative</b></i><br />
<br />
From my perspective, the imperative remains, as the case of McIntosh and ICE demonstrates, the de-Boomerization of green. Our political polarities have been colonized by Boomeritis; the New Left has adopted the environment as the wedge issue to achieve its original goals of undermining orange with its commitment to individual autonomy, industrial economy, and Reason. The “community” it champions is just amber tribalism all gussied up with pomo rhetoric. The right, on the other hand, has by and large abandoned its championing of the spiritual and material advances of the modern world and fallen back on amber/orange traditionalism a defense against the postmodern assault on the achievements of orange. In its confusion it has developed an unhealthy Stockholm syndrome that the Tea Party was founded to challenge.<br />
<br />
It is highly ironic that both these factions do not acknowledge their common amber ancestry, although we should probably be very grateful that they do not.<br />
<br />
It would be of greater value if the Institute for Cultural Evolution and the other Boulder-based organizations would focus on the imperative to encourage healthy green; second tier’s emergence is probably being delayed by green’s occupation by its Boomeritis variant. Perhaps ICE has started this with its critique of leftist approaches to climate activism.<br />
<br />
At the same time, integral analysis notes that the dynamics in play are yet another version of the endless dance of <i>Eros </i>and <i>Thanatos</i> in the unfolding Kosmic drama. As the American mystic Thomas Merton wrote in his classic <i>New Seeds of Contemplation</i>,<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
For the world and time are the dance of the Lord in emptiness. The silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast. The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life, the more we analyze them out into strange finalities and complex purposes of our own, the more we involve ourselves in sadness, absurdity and despair. But it does not matter much, because no despair of our can alter the reality of things, or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there. Indeed, we are in the midst of it, and it is in the midst of us, for it beats in our very blood, whether we want it to or not.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Yet the fact remains that we are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds and join in the general dance.</blockquote>
If the Left is correct in its assessment of the dangers facing humanity because of the way the climate is changing, then it does indeed bear the responsibility to devise generally acceptable policies to responsibly deal with it. But as long as it remains bound in the first tier, it must fail spectacularly at the challenge. Perhaps the crisis is presenting humanity with the impetus for discovering transcendence, for only by recognizing its own limits and blind spots can the Left actually become willing to cut a deal that rationally prepares us to accommodate both the changing climate and the accelerating drive in India and China (and shortly thereafter in Africa and the rest of Asia) for a modern standard of living.<br />
<br />
Our own perspectives are subject to the <i>Sturm und Drang</i> of <i>Eros</i> and <i>Thanatos</i>. This is, in fact, a source of optimism and joy as Spirit expresses Itself in its evolution.Marty Kellerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11592136716581562644noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3401106149239386272.post-33273727854963293652014-09-01T17:53:00.001-07:002015-08-29T19:32:54.543-07:00Towards an Authentic Integral Politics<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"></span></span><br />
<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<o:OfficeDocumentSettings>
<o:AllowPNG/>
</o:OfficeDocumentSettings>
</xml><![endif]-->
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">There will be no authentic
integral politics until a critical mass of humanity makes the momentous leap
into second tier consciousness.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Until then it might be
valuable to strengthen our cognitive hypothesis about the nature and contours
of a potential integral politics, because the practice of seeking to take and
embrace multiple perspectives could very well contribute to the necessary transcendence.
</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Some, including a number in
the Boulder orbit, have made the noble attempt to step into a hypothetical
integral politics, but never quite develop a perspective that satisfies the demands of the Integral Model. While we will take note of
some of these deficiencies for the purposes of looking more deeply into the
matter, we do this collegially and affectionately.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The biggest challenge,
illustrated by the various Boulder efforts that miss the mark, is to note the
distinction between what will arise politically in the second tier <i>versus</i>
what we think that might be from here in the first. Green is not integral regardless of our capacity to think about it.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Ken Wilber illustrates the dynamics of this structural disparity when he
noted that the Constitution of the United States offered a “stage 5” method of
governance in a “stage 3” society. By that he meant that the founding
principles of the nation set forth in both that document and the Declaration of
Independence reflected the possibilities of self-governance developed out of
the centuries-old English tradition of limited government as improved by the
insights of the Scottish Enlightenment with its commitment to individual
liberty and sovereignty. These were principles for a nation whose
citizens had developed to the moral understanding of the stage 5,
postconventional worldcentric perspective.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">But the United States did
not become a stage 5 society on June 21, 1788, the day the Constitution was
formally ratified. Indeed, even after the Civil War and adoption of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments eradicating
slavery and guaranteeing the political rights of all citizens, the U. S. continued
its evolution toward the orange rational/industrial stage 5 nation it finally
became after World War II. It wasn’t until the beginning of the 20th
century that the majority of the citizenry made it to stage 4, and it was only
in the 1960s that the possibility of mass stage 5 consciousness emerged.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<a name='more'></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Thus we may surmise that it
is similarly true that promulgation of any integral governance scheme would
have little immediate impact on the actual level of consciousness of the
society that adopted it. So the value of these exercises lies more in how
they help us wrestle with the concepts and the experiences behind them. Remember, t</span><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">here will be no <i>authentic</i>
integral politics until a critical mass of humanity makes the momentous leap
into second tier consciousness.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">This exploration comes at a moment of
accelerating change in global society, a change very difficult to analyze
without the aid of the Integral Model. The green millenialists have been
predicting that human culture is about to make the momentous leap into second
tier consciousness, but I remain highly skeptical of its likelihood.
(Ironically these same people also predict a climate Armageddon if we fail
to convert to their faith.) We can certainly survey the history of first
tier evolution to derive generalizations about its structure and dynamics, but
we have no collective experience beyond it. Thus to presume that the laws
governing first tier unfolding will also govern the next are highly speculative
at best. It may just as likely be that humanity is about to hit a wall as
it is to bust through it.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In either case, <i>grace</i>
appears to be the guiding light of evolution, so nothing we do or refrain from
doing will of itself accelerate or clarify our trajectory.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Steve McIntosh, Carter
Phipps, and Jeff Salzman have created the <a href="http://www.culturalevolution.org/">Institute for Cultural Evolution</a> </span><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">“organized around the goal of applying groundbreaking insights
taken from Integral philosophy, developmental psychology, evolutionary theory,
and the social sciences to help create significant forward movement in the
evolution of the American cultural and political landscape.” This is a laudable
attempt to explore the contours of an integral politics, but its very mission
to “create significant forward movement in . . . evolution” will not be
fulfilled under its own terms because <i>no one actually knows how to do this</i>. We do know that movement occurs by its Right Hand manifestation; we know next to nothing about the actual mechanics (if that's even the right concept) of emergence because of our inchoate mastery of Left Hand disclosures, especially in the Lower Left.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">However, what really
matters is the attempt. ICE’s experiences, like other Boulder-inspired efforts, will offer a place from which
to apply integral political analysis and for that we are grateful.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The Institute’s principals
are all self-proclaimed green leftists who make only formal attempts to take
other perspectives. Naturally they are invested in <s>global warming</s>
climate change activism; that’s the leftist cause <i>du jour</i>. But
nowhere do they give any evidence of a willingness to examine their own
presumptions; these are taken as a given. This lack of self-curiosity
alone disqualifies their work from being integral and eviscerates their
mission. They take the leftist presumptions about the climate change
political debate as given, forgoing a rich opportunity to engage in an integral
examination of beliefs. (See <a href="http://aqalblog.blogspot.com/2013/08/integral-politics-primer.html">"Integral Politics: a Primer"</a><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="color: #0563c1;"> </span></span></span><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">for a suggestion of how to
conduct integral political analysis.) </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">As I note below, this lack
of curiosity is emblematic of the missing discipline to examine the Left Hand
quadrants scientifically, as Wilber lays out in <i>Marriage of Sense and Soul.</i></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The trick to this work is
to take and embrace multiple perspectives without necessarily abandoning our
own, but accepting the challenge to examine ours from that integral
aperspectival lens. We have the yoga to develop this capacity, but it is
in an embryonic stage and available to too few.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Until an effective integral
yoga is adopted by a significant enough number of people, we will have to make
do with a “fake it until we make it” method. </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Reviving the Discipline of
Political Economy</span></i></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">A useful approach to
developing such a discussion of integral politics would be to revive the
earlier discipline of political economy, which understood that economic
activity was not separate from political relationships. This holistic
insight was the original way scholars and moral philosophers looked at the
development of national economies. Its assumptions were shared by
analysts as disparate as David Ricardo, Adam Smith, and Karl Marx.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">This early development was one of the many powerful results of the differentations of the Four Quadrants, which did not escape the temptations of flatland, as we shall see. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">One way this field of political economy degenerated into a flatland version was a result of the progressive movement's unshakeable
confidence in the value to the body politic of the independent “expert.”
Progressivism lamented the tendency of the republic’s chaotic politics to
prevent or water down what it determined were the appropriate solutions to the
nation’s problems. Its answer was to remove as many decisions from
political mechanics and turn them over to “nonpartisan” and “independent”
regulatory bodies who could be counted on to render the best and most effective
decision.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">This move resulted in part
from the spectacular results that applied science was providing to the
modernizing, industrializing nations, particularly Great Britain and the United
States. If experts in the physical sciences could provide principles that
led to productivity and wealth increases in every sphere of human economic
activity, the thinking went, why could they not provide similar advances in the
social realm? But as Wilber examines at length in <i>Sex, Spirituality, and Ecology, </i>even the physical sciences eventually suffered from an excess of empiricism.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Thus we saw the splitting
up of the discipline of political economy into “political science” and “economics,”
both riddled with the progressive faith in the superiority of science as the
source of right outcomes for all of us over the nasty and counterproductive
squabbling of the political process. The key figure here was the British
socialist Alfred Marshall, whose 1890 book <i>Principles of Economics</i> set
the stage for treating economics as a precise science; thus he became the
father of modern economics.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">At the same time, the
influence of Hegel as the godfather of the German Empire with its reliance on
the state as the guarantor of rights and incomes led to the establishment of
the study of “political science” as a separate sphere. This also coincided with the rise of a hard nationalism in Europe after the revolutions of 1848. The American
authors of this approach were progressives such as Woodrow Wilson, Charles
Beard, and Albert Bushnell Hart. </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Thus by the implementation
of the New Deal under Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s, the discipline of
political economy had been largely abandoned in favor the newer, shinier modes
of study. And once the New Left took over American and European academia
after 1968, the official enshrinement of the “disciplines” of economics and
political science were given the leftist, Boomeritis victimology gloss.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">All of which we must
account for in integral analysis, and all of which is missing in any such analyses
I have come across. </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The economic historian
Deirdre McCloskey has made a powerful start in reviving political economy—and
providing integral analysis a great tool—in her projected three-volume series on <a href="http://www.deirdremccloskey.com/academics/"><i>The Bourgeois Era</i></a>, whose very title she expects will set the leftists’ teeth on edge.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Her thesis is
straightforward and emphatic, as she writes in the Preface to the second
volume, <i>Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World</i>:</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">A big
change in the common opinion about markets and innovation . . . caused the
Industrial Revolution, and then the modern world. The change occurred
during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in northwestern Europe.
More or less suddenly the Dutch and the British and then the Americans
and the French began talking about the middle class, high or low—the
“bourgeoisie”—as though it were dignified and free. The result was modern
economic growth.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">That is,
ideas, or “rhetoric,” enriched us. The cause, in other words, was
language, that most human of our accomplishments. The cause was not in
the first instance an economic/material change—not the rise of this or that
class, or the flourishing of this or that trade, or the exploitation of this or
that group. </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">. . . In
other words, I argue that depending exclusively on materialism to explain the
modern world, whether right-wing economics or left-wing historical materialism,
is mistaken. </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">At last, a political
economic argument that looks at the Left Hand quadrants and not just the Right!
Her books provide welcome illumination of the orange interiors, something
that has been missing from our political discourse for too long. </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Transcending Flatland:
Integrating the Left Hand Quadrants</span></i></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Integral analysis is
incomplete without a four-quadrant inquiry in its stage trajectory.
Wilber takes a shot at this in the chapter “Brave New World” in <i>Sex,
Ecology, and Spirituality, </i>but from 40,000 feet and in the context of the
evolution of consciousness. McCloskey gets right down into it, and if she
completes the projected three volumes, it will be spread over some 1,500 pages.
While of course lacking the tools for a verifiable examination of the interiority of humanity as we
evolved into the modern era, she demonstrates how the unique shift in the conversation starting in Holland at the beginning of the 17th century reflects an interior shift--exactly what Wilber has presented in his observations about the shift from amber to orange.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">As I have argued elsewhere,
and as Wilber has discussed at length, getting at the Left Hand quadrants is no
easy task. Interiority by its very nature is not susceptible of objective
analysis. Further, in our intellectually impoverished Western culture,
mind has been subordinated to emotion, the authentication of which has been
declared taboo by everyone except the emoter. Ours is a world of
ever-splintering deconstruction, depriving us of any consensual framework from
which to explore our world.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Wilber, as always, states
the problem succinctly in <a href="http://www.enlightenment.com/media/bookrevs/wilbersci.html"><i>Marriage of Sense and Soul</i></a> (perhaps his most
important and ignored book):</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The
modern and postmodern world is still living in the grips of flatland, of
surfaces, of exteriors devoid of interior anything: “no within, no deep.”
The only large-scale alternatives are an exuberant embrace of shallowness
(as with extreme postmodernism), or a <i>regression</i> to the <i>interiors </i>of
<i>premodern</i> modes, from mythic religion to tribal magic to narcissistic
new age. A modern and postmodern spirituality has continued to elude us,
primarily because the <i>irreversible</i> differentiations of modernity have
place difficult but unavoidable demands on the sought-after integration:
spirituality must be able to stand up to scientific authority, not by aping the
monological madness but by announcing its own means and modes, data and
evidence, validities and verifications. [Italics in the original]</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The muddy and slippery
field of postmodern political discourse is a messy collage of privileged
emotionalism and pseudoscientific incantations, as the leftist approach to
climate change perfectly demonstrates. This mélange is a cavalier mix of
the postmodernist “exuberant embrace of shallowness” with the regression to the
worldview of “tribal magic and narcissistic new age”—a recipe for political stagnation
and gridlock if there ever was one.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Yet an integral politics
must embrace even this toxic mess, for it has to account for the dynamics of
development: every person, every nation, and the human race as a whole is in
exactly the right place in our evolution, and can be in no other. At the
same time, embracing it does not require becoming enmeshed with it. In
order to arrive at this place of equinanimous embrace we will have to have
developed access to the Left Hand quadrants that originated in a disciplined
approach to our own individual interiors, expressly including our shadow
material. The capacity to withdraw projections is the <i>sine qua non</i>
of the momentous leap into second tier consciousness, for when we are capable
of accepting all of our own individual interiors with serenity we become capable of
accepting the interiors of all of us similarly.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Until that happy time,
however, we will still need to develop a more disciplined approach to assessing
the impact of the Left Hand quadrants on the political economy.
McCloskey’s approach is to examine exhaustively the Right Hand analogs of
the growth of the Advanced Sector over the past four hundred years and
eliminate all factors that are not peculiar to that particular period.
Remember, her thesis is that the exponential economic growth that began
in Holland and England in the 17th century resulted from a shift in
consciousness signified by an entirely new conversation. <i>What</i> we
said is found in the Right Hand quadrants ("rhetoric," as McCloskey notes), <i>why</i>
we said it in the Left ("ideas").</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">A simple reflection on our
current political “discourse” should reveal the critical necessity of
integrating these two. Rare is the political figure willing to say
exactly what he wants—and he is enabled by an electorate that regularly
supports contradictory things. Yet everything people say reveals, even if
opaquely, what we want. That we fool ourselves into believing otherwise
is nonetheless evidence of our wanting to be fooled. What needs to be dug
out is the <i>why</i> we want this.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In the next post I will
look more closely at this phenomenon as it shows up in our political economy.
If the Integral Model is accurate, then national self-governance must
necessarily accurately reflect the state of our own individual self-governance.
Mastering this, I think, is the key to an authentic integral politics.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<w:WordDocument>
<w:View>Normal</w:View>
<w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom>
<w:TrackMoves/>
<w:TrackFormatting/>
<w:PunctuationKerning/>
<w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/>
<w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>
<w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent>
<w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>
<w:DoNotPromoteQF/>
<w:LidThemeOther>EN-US</w:LidThemeOther>
<w:LidThemeAsian>X-NONE</w:LidThemeAsian>
<w:LidThemeComplexScript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript>
<w:Compatibility>
<w:BreakWrappedTables/>
<w:SnapToGridInCell/>
<w:WrapTextWithPunct/>
<w:UseAsianBreakRules/>
<w:DontGrowAutofit/>
<w:SplitPgBreakAndParaMark/>
<w:EnableOpenTypeKerning/>
<w:DontFlipMirrorIndents/>
<w:OverrideTableStyleHps/>
</w:Compatibility>
<m:mathPr>
<m:mathFont m:val="Cambria Math"/>
<m:brkBin m:val="before"/>
<m:brkBinSub m:val="--"/>
<m:smallFrac m:val="off"/>
<m:dispDef/>
<m:lMargin m:val="0"/>
<m:rMargin m:val="0"/>
<m:defJc m:val="centerGroup"/>
<m:wrapIndent m:val="1440"/>
<m:intLim m:val="subSup"/>
<m:naryLim m:val="undOvr"/>
</m:mathPr></w:WordDocument>
</xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<w:LatentStyles DefLockedState="false" DefUnhideWhenUsed="false"
DefSemiHidden="false" DefQFormat="false" DefPriority="99"
LatentStyleCount="371">
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="0" QFormat="true" Name="Normal"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" QFormat="true" Name="heading 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" QFormat="true" Name="heading 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" QFormat="true" Name="heading 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" QFormat="true" Name="heading 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" QFormat="true" Name="heading 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" QFormat="true" Name="heading 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" QFormat="true" Name="heading 7"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" QFormat="true" Name="heading 8"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" QFormat="true" Name="heading 9"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="index 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="index 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="index 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="index 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="index 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="index 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="index 7"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="index 8"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="index 9"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="toc 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="toc 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="toc 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="toc 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="toc 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="toc 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="toc 7"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="toc 8"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="toc 9"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Normal Indent"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="footnote text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="annotation text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="header"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="footer"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="index heading"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="35" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" QFormat="true" Name="caption"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="table of figures"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="envelope address"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="envelope return"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="footnote reference"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="annotation reference"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="line number"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="page number"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="endnote reference"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="endnote text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="table of authorities"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="macro"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="toa heading"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Bullet"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Number"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Bullet 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Bullet 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Bullet 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Bullet 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Number 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Number 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Number 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Number 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="10" QFormat="true" Name="Title"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Closing"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Signature"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="1" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="Default Paragraph Font"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text Indent"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Continue"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Continue 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Continue 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Continue 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Continue 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Message Header"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="11" QFormat="true" Name="Subtitle"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Salutation"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Date"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text First Indent"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text First Indent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Note Heading"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text Indent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text Indent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Block Text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Hyperlink"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="FollowedHyperlink"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="22" QFormat="true" Name="Strong"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="20" QFormat="true" Name="Emphasis"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Document Map"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Plain Text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="E-mail Signature"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Top of Form"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Bottom of Form"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Normal (Web)"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Acronym"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Address"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Cite"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Code"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Definition"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Keyboard"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Preformatted"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Sample"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Typewriter"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Variable"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Normal Table"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="annotation subject"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="No List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Outline List 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Outline List 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Outline List 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Simple 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Simple 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Simple 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Classic 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Classic 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Classic 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Classic 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Colorful 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Colorful 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Colorful 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Columns 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Columns 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Columns 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Columns 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Columns 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 7"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 8"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 7"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 8"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table 3D effects 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table 3D effects 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table 3D effects 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Contemporary"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Elegant"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Professional"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Subtle 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Subtle 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Web 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Web 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Web 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Balloon Text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="Table Grid"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Theme"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" Name="Placeholder Text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="1" QFormat="true" Name="No Spacing"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" Name="Revision"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="34" QFormat="true"
Name="List Paragraph"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="29" QFormat="true" Name="Quote"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="30" QFormat="true"
Name="Intense Quote"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="19" QFormat="true"
Name="Subtle Emphasis"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="21" QFormat="true"
Name="Intense Emphasis"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="31" QFormat="true"
Name="Subtle Reference"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="32" QFormat="true"
Name="Intense Reference"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="33" QFormat="true" Name="Book Title"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="37" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="Bibliography"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" QFormat="true" Name="TOC Heading"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="41" Name="Plain Table 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="42" Name="Plain Table 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="43" Name="Plain Table 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="44" Name="Plain Table 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="45" Name="Plain Table 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="40" Name="Grid Table Light"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46" Name="Grid Table 1 Light"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51" Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52" Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46" Name="List Table 1 Light"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="List Table 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="List Table 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="List Table 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="List Table 5 Dark"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51" Name="List Table 6 Colorful"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52" Name="List Table 7 Colorful"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="List Table 1 Light Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="List Table 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="List Table 3 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="List Table 4 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="List Table 5 Dark Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="List Table 6 Colorful Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="List Table 7 Colorful Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="List Table 1 Light Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="List Table 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="List Table 3 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="List Table 4 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="List Table 5 Dark Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="List Table 6 Colorful Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="List Table 7 Colorful Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="List Table 1 Light Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="List Table 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="List Table 3 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="List Table 4 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="List Table 5 Dark Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="List Table 6 Colorful Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="List Table 7 Colorful Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="List Table 1 Light Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="List Table 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="List Table 3 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="List Table 4 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="List Table 5 Dark Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="List Table 6 Colorful Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="List Table 7 Colorful Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="List Table 1 Light Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="List Table 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="List Table 3 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="List Table 4 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="List Table 5 Dark Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="List Table 6 Colorful Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="List Table 7 Colorful Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="List Table 1 Light Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="List Table 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="List Table 3 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="List Table 4 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="List Table 5 Dark Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="List Table 6 Colorful Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="List Table 7 Colorful Accent 6"/>
</w:LatentStyles>
</xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 10]>
<style>
/* Style Definitions */
table.MsoNormalTable
{mso-style-name:"Table Normal";
mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;
mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;
mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-style-priority:99;
mso-style-parent:"";
mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt;
mso-para-margin:0in;
mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:11.0pt;
font-family:"Verdana","sans-serif";}
</style>
<![endif]-->Marty Kellerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11592136716581562644noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3401106149239386272.post-10694819429080438942014-06-15T22:28:00.003-07:002014-06-16T10:02:55.335-07:00The Boomer Banality of Barack Obama<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<o:OfficeDocumentSettings>
<o:AllowPNG/>
</o:OfficeDocumentSettings>
</xml><![endif]--><br />
<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<w:WordDocument>
<w:View>Normal</w:View>
<w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom>
<w:TrackMoves/>
<w:TrackFormatting/>
<w:PunctuationKerning/>
<w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/>
<w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>
<w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent>
<w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>
<w:DoNotPromoteQF/>
<w:LidThemeOther>EN-US</w:LidThemeOther>
<w:LidThemeAsian>X-NONE</w:LidThemeAsian>
<w:LidThemeComplexScript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript>
<w:Compatibility>
<w:BreakWrappedTables/>
<w:SnapToGridInCell/>
<w:WrapTextWithPunct/>
<w:UseAsianBreakRules/>
<w:DontGrowAutofit/>
<w:SplitPgBreakAndParaMark/>
<w:EnableOpenTypeKerning/>
<w:DontFlipMirrorIndents/>
<w:OverrideTableStyleHps/>
</w:Compatibility>
<m:mathPr>
<m:mathFont m:val="Cambria Math"/>
<m:brkBin m:val="before"/>
<m:brkBinSub m:val="--"/>
<m:smallFrac m:val="off"/>
<m:dispDef/>
<m:lMargin m:val="0"/>
<m:rMargin m:val="0"/>
<m:defJc m:val="centerGroup"/>
<m:wrapIndent m:val="1440"/>
<m:intLim m:val="subSup"/>
<m:naryLim m:val="undOvr"/>
</m:mathPr></w:WordDocument>
</xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<w:LatentStyles DefLockedState="false" DefUnhideWhenUsed="false"
DefSemiHidden="false" DefQFormat="false" DefPriority="99"
LatentStyleCount="371">
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="0" QFormat="true" Name="Normal"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" QFormat="true" Name="heading 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" QFormat="true" Name="heading 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" QFormat="true" Name="heading 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" QFormat="true" Name="heading 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" QFormat="true" Name="heading 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" QFormat="true" Name="heading 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" QFormat="true" Name="heading 7"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" QFormat="true" Name="heading 8"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" QFormat="true" Name="heading 9"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="index 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="index 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="index 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="index 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="index 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="index 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="index 7"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="index 8"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="index 9"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="toc 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="toc 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="toc 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="toc 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="toc 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="toc 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="toc 7"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="toc 8"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="toc 9"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Normal Indent"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="footnote text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="annotation text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="header"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="footer"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="index heading"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="35" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" QFormat="true" Name="caption"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="table of figures"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="envelope address"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="envelope return"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="footnote reference"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="annotation reference"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="line number"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="page number"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="endnote reference"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="endnote text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="table of authorities"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="macro"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="toa heading"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Bullet"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Number"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Bullet 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Bullet 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Bullet 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Bullet 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Number 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Number 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Number 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Number 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="10" QFormat="true" Name="Title"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Closing"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Signature"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="1" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="Default Paragraph Font"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text Indent"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Continue"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Continue 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Continue 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Continue 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Continue 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Message Header"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="11" QFormat="true" Name="Subtitle"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Salutation"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Date"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text First Indent"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text First Indent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Note Heading"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text Indent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text Indent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Block Text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Hyperlink"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="FollowedHyperlink"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="22" QFormat="true" Name="Strong"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="20" QFormat="true" Name="Emphasis"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Document Map"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Plain Text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="E-mail Signature"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Top of Form"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Bottom of Form"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Normal (Web)"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Acronym"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Address"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Cite"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Code"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Definition"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Keyboard"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Preformatted"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Sample"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Typewriter"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Variable"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Normal Table"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="annotation subject"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="No List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Outline List 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Outline List 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Outline List 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Simple 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Simple 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Simple 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Classic 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Classic 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Classic 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Classic 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Colorful 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Colorful 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Colorful 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Columns 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Columns 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Columns 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Columns 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Columns 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 7"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 8"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 7"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 8"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table 3D effects 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table 3D effects 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table 3D effects 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Contemporary"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Elegant"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Professional"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Subtle 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Subtle 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Web 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Web 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Web 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Balloon Text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="Table Grid"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Theme"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" Name="Placeholder Text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="1" QFormat="true" Name="No Spacing"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" Name="Revision"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="34" QFormat="true"
Name="List Paragraph"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="29" QFormat="true" Name="Quote"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="30" QFormat="true"
Name="Intense Quote"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="19" QFormat="true"
Name="Subtle Emphasis"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="21" QFormat="true"
Name="Intense Emphasis"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="31" QFormat="true"
Name="Subtle Reference"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="32" QFormat="true"
Name="Intense Reference"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="33" QFormat="true" Name="Book Title"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="37" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="Bibliography"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" QFormat="true" Name="TOC Heading"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="41" Name="Plain Table 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="42" Name="Plain Table 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="43" Name="Plain Table 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="44" Name="Plain Table 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="45" Name="Plain Table 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="40" Name="Grid Table Light"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46" Name="Grid Table 1 Light"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51" Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52" Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46" Name="List Table 1 Light"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="List Table 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="List Table 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="List Table 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="List Table 5 Dark"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51" Name="List Table 6 Colorful"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52" Name="List Table 7 Colorful"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="List Table 1 Light Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="List Table 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="List Table 3 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="List Table 4 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="List Table 5 Dark Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="List Table 6 Colorful Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="List Table 7 Colorful Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="List Table 1 Light Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="List Table 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="List Table 3 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="List Table 4 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="List Table 5 Dark Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="List Table 6 Colorful Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="List Table 7 Colorful Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="List Table 1 Light Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="List Table 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="List Table 3 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="List Table 4 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="List Table 5 Dark Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="List Table 6 Colorful Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="List Table 7 Colorful Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="List Table 1 Light Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="List Table 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="List Table 3 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="List Table 4 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="List Table 5 Dark Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="List Table 6 Colorful Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="List Table 7 Colorful Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="List Table 1 Light Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="List Table 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="List Table 3 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="List Table 4 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="List Table 5 Dark Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="List Table 6 Colorful Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="List Table 7 Colorful Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="List Table 1 Light Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="List Table 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="List Table 3 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="List Table 4 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="List Table 5 Dark Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="List Table 6 Colorful Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="List Table 7 Colorful Accent 6"/>
</w:LatentStyles>
</xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 10]>
<style>
/* Style Definitions */
table.MsoNormalTable
{mso-style-name:"Table Normal";
mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;
mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;
mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-style-priority:99;
mso-style-parent:"";
mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt;
mso-para-margin:0in;
mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:11.0pt;
font-family:"Verdana","sans-serif";}
</style>
<![endif]--><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
During commencement remarks delivered yesterday at
University of California at Irvine, President Barack Obama demonstrated yet again how
thoroughly and banally ensnared in the Boomeritis wave he is.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
According to <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/15/us/obama-mocks-lawmakers-who-deny-climate-change.html?_r=0">an article</a> by Mark Landler published in the New
York <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Times</i>,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
Speaking in gleefully sarcastic
terms to a commencement ceremony at the University of California, Irvine, Mr.
Obama likened those who deny climate change to people who would have told John
F. Kennedy, at the dawn of the space program, that the moon “was made of
cheese.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
He saved his most scathing words
for lawmakers who say they are not qualified to judge the issue because they
are not scientists. These people, the president said, recognize the truth but
will not utter it for fear of being “run out of town by a radical fringe that
thinks climate science is a liberal plot.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
“I’m not a scientist either,” Mr.
Obama told this young audience, “but we’ve got some good ones at NASA. I do know
the overwhelming majority of scientists who work on climate change, including
some who once disputed the data, have put the debate to rest.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
For Terry Patten, Jeff Salzman, and the other Obama acolytes
in the Integral Institute, this should put paid to the fantasy that the
President represents the possibility of an integral transcendence in the
Democratic Party.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Obama and all his yes
men have never evinced anything but the impoverished depradations of the
narcissism that has, so far, eviscerated green’s powerful potential.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<a name='more'></a>For any student of integral politics, all this has been
obvious from the beginning of Obama’s national career, especially when seen in
the context of the emergence of green with its majoritarian Boomeritis variant
over the past fifty years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This first found
its American expression, for better or worse, in the New Left, whose <a href="http://www.h-net.org/~hst306/documents/huron.html">“Port Huron Manifesto,”</a>
written mostly by Tom Hayden, was published by the SDS in 1962.<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Hayden channeled Jean-Jacques Rousseau with his insistence
that the innovations of the modern world, a product of the orange Enlightenment, had perverted human
society and stood in dire need of purification.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
Men have unrealized potential for
self-cultivation, self-direction, self-understanding, and creativity. It is
this potential that we regard as crucial and to which we appeal, not to the
human potentiality for violence, unreason, and submission to authority. The
goal of man and society should be human independence: a concern not with image
of popularity but with finding a meaning in life that is personally authentic:
a quality of mind not compulsively driven by a sense of powerlessness, nor one
which unthinkingly adopts status values, nor one which represses all threats to
its habits, but one which has full, spontaneous access to present and past
experiences, one which easily unites the fragmented parts of personal history,
one which openly faces problems which are troubling and unresolved: one with an
intuitive awareness of possibilities, an active sense of curiosity, an ability
and willingness to learn.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
This kind of independence does not
mean egoistic individualism—the object is not to have one's way so much as it
is to have a way that is one's own. Nor do we deify man—we merely have faith in
his potential.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
Human relationships should involve
fraternity and honesty. Human interdependence is contemporary fact; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">human brotherhood must be willed however, as
a condition of future survival and as the most appropriate form of social
relations</i>. Personal links between man and man are needed, especially to go
beyond the partial and fragmentary bonds of function that bind men only as
worker to worker, employer to employee, teacher to student, American to
Russian. (Italics added.)</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Hayden's ideas here certainly reflect the emerging green sensibility, while his insistence that "brotherhood must be willed" demonstrates the atavistic amber menace lurking in the green opening. We must see these ideas and the movement it inspired as part of the several centuries-old stream of that bizarre combination of reaction and utopian millenarianism that characterized political socialism. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
As I argue in “<a href="http://aqalblog.blogspot.com/2009/08/three-blind-memes-part-ii.html">Three
Blind Memes</a>,” this socialism of nineteenth century Europe was primarily an
amber reaction to the rise of the modern industrial nation state.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That it resulted in the enormous amber communist
empires of the twentieth century should be no surprise to the integral
student.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Amber has been contesting the
right-hand structures of orange from their very beginnings in the Italian Renaissance, and that memetic war
continues unabated to this day.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Bismarck and his progressive heirs sought a middle ground
upon which the worst disruptive features of the industrial age could be ameliorated
so that the enormous good it was producing in the macro sense could be
channeled to the greatest numbers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In
this sense, orange set out to accommodate amber.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Out of this willingness grew the
non-socialist left, whose greatest achievements were the New Deal in the United
States and the Scandinavian social democracies in Europe.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One of the most honorable contributions of the
American labor movement was its forthright resistance to communism both domestic and
international.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But the tribal, mythic impulse that characterizes amber,
true to its first tier nature, believes it alone has the truth and therefore
all other levels are false and must be resisted.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The amber dimension of socialism was not subdued by all these programs of the progressives. Amber is the origin of the “us <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">v.</i> them” identity, so of course it identified these with the capitalist "them."<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This the New Left set out to fix.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The emergence of green of which the New Left was a LR
exemplar has added a third dimension to this memetic war; in a way, it was born in the
five hundred years-old crossfire between the two earlier waves, and so was
influenced by that even as it was contributing something unique and novel.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As Wilber always reminds us, each new wave
transcends <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">and includes</i> the earlier
ones; this new and unique memetic dimensionality offers us a better look at how the unhealed pathologies of those earlier waves
impede the emergence of the newer ones.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The New Left passionately used the emerging green and postmodern perspectives unreflectively to push socialism's amber ambitions. It took over the national Democratic party with the McGovern nomination in 1972, and hasn't looked back since. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Barack Obama actually serves as a great example of this
evolutionary stream.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In his honorable if futile
attempt to make Obama teal, Terry Patten in his 2012 essay <a href="http://integrallife.com/integral-post/integral-case-president-obama">“The
Integral Case for President Obama”</a> asserts that</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
I believe we are much more likely
to get integral ideas included in a Democratic party platform than in a
Republican platform, which has now been ideologically purged and purified. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It makes no sense to empower a Republican
party that is currently incapable of hearing and including truly integral
ideas, and has thwarted constructive negotiations and compromise. The
Democratic party is at least conceivably capable of becoming more integral,
even if it is not there yet. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
. . . That’s why I’m supporting
Obama in this election.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If he wins, it
serves a double purpose. It potentially breaks the fever of the doctrinaire
right-wing regressive lurch that has seized the Republican party in the last
few years, and brings both parties closer to a pragmatic center. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span>That’s the hope.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Ah, has the euphoria of that hopium worn off yet?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Far from breaking “the fever of the
doctrinaire right-wing regressive lurch,” it led to the reelection of the
“doctrinaire” Republican majority in the House of Representatives and shrank Democratic control of the Senate, which in
turn produced even more of the dreaded deadlock in Washington.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It also ratified the Republican control of the majority of state legislatures. Patten’s hopes are based on his convincing
himself that “Obama has proven himself to be a pragmatic modernist centrist,
someone we can count on to lean toward constructive change, even if not
galvanizing progress at the pace we would have hoped.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Now here’s his man Obama, leaning toward constructive change
by sarcastically belittling his opponents and adopting a stance of superiority
toward them based on his non-scientific certainty that the debate on climate
change has, by a fallacious appeal to authority argument, “been put to rest.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As a tool for leadership, sarcasm is a tacit
admission of the poverty of the argument and betrays the fear that it may in
fact be wrong.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I am hoping that Terry has the integral <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">cojones</i> to be embarrassed by this juvenile display of ignorance
about the scientific method, one of orange’s majestic gifts to evolution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I hope he concedes that the President's continuous
assailing of his opponents as ignorant captives of an alleged “radical fringe”
is amber tribalism at its best.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When the greens see in the GOP a doctrinaire party, should he be surprised that they can't see their own rigid ideology, which might equally have played a role in the gridlock? (<a href="http://townhall.com/tipsheet/kevinglass/2014/06/12/the-three-liberal-myths-about-partisanship-busted-by-pews-new-poll-n1850762">Recent polling data suggest</a> that Democrats are both more extreme and more doctrinaire than Republicans, MSM myth-making notwithstanding.) Perhaps
he is willing to look back now on the past five and a half years and notice the
pattern of the President's rhetoric and behavior; neither are new or infrequent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In fact, it was there on display during the
first term, but somehow notice of it failed to make Terry’s essay.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Even colleagues at the Integral Institute are taking some
tentative steps away from the Obama-integral faith.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Steve McIntosh and Carter Phipps at the <a href="http://www.culturalevolution.org/">Institute for Cultural Evolution</a>
recognize the futility of what they call the “activist alarmist” approach to
addressing climate change, a criticism by inference of President Obama, whose righteous
rhetoric and policy approaches could have been written by Al Gore.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The hallmark of teal is its capacity to take different
perspectives with equanimity, for self identity has transcended the individual
and now rests in an all-embracing universal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Mr. Obama’s behavior demonstrates how critical the healing of Boomeritis
is, for only healthy green can be the threshold of the second tier.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Integral wannabes can contribute to this by our willingness
to constantly re-examine our own perspectives, engage in serious shadow work,
and release judgment of all "others," whether internal or external.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>From the perspective of the Prime Directive,
we recognize that Mr. Obama is perfectly justified to be where he in in his own
and the Boomeritis evolutionary trajectories.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> This is not about Mr. Obama; it's about the discipline of integral politics.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The challenge for the integrally informed is to be very
vigilant about misidentifying green with integral.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mr. Obama’s remarkable performance yesterday
offers a very powerful mirror into which we may look to examine our own
beliefs.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
Marty Kellerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11592136716581562644noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3401106149239386272.post-45020525733556176812013-09-29T11:44:00.001-07:002013-09-29T14:10:58.850-07:00Integral Political ImperativesThe discipline of integral politics requires that we stand aloof from the daily occurrences of first tier assumptions. From an integral perspective, we are always in the midst of a first tier political food fight. In America right now there is plenty of non-stop entertainment everywhere we look.<br />
<br />
Domestically, the Congress and the President are engaged in their routine denunciations of one another, with the House Republicans being labeled “crazy,” “lunatic,” “terrorists,” etc. The President admonishes them to “compromise” while refusing to do so himself. The Republicans, meantime, are engaged in a vertiginous civil war, with the establishmentarians led by the former “Straight Talk Express” guy Senator John McCain getting rolled by Tea Party favorites Senators Mike Lee and Ted Cruz. It’s all part of the pass-the-budget, raise-the-debt-ceiling slam dance that Beltway types do so well.<br />
<br />
Then there’s the Middle East, with Syria and Iran both now pretending to be good guys so the Advanced Sector can avert its eyes again from the really nasty things a-brewin’ there. Poor Binyamin Netanyahu is—publicly at least—being ignored so that the niceties will be preserved. Al-Shabab keeps reminding everyone that al-Qaeda did not die with Osama bin Laden. Vladimir Putin, fresh from his Syria intervention, continues his project to recreate the Third Russian Empire, bullying the Ukraine to abandon its strategic <i>Drang nach Westen</i> and remain docilely in the Russian sphere.<br />
<br />
Deeper in the background are the signs of serious economic slowdown in India and China, something that worries financial analysts as they read the bird entrails of the latest Federal Reserve meeting minutes regarding its “quantitative easing” policy.<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a>Angela Merkel’s CDU won a remarkable vote of confidence from German voters, while Australians dumped the liberal Labor Party and installed its conservative counterpart, the Liberals. <br />
<br />
Oh, and as if this were not all enough to be getting on with, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is squabbling about what to include in its latest report, with scientists, ideologues, and rent-seekers all looking to find a way around the stubborn fact that the IPCC’s computer models cannot account for the dramatic slowing of global temperature increase the past fifteen years.<br />
<br />
Reality offers an endless invitation to practice integral perspectives.<br />
<br />
<br />
<i><b>Whither Evolution Has Brought Us Today</b></i><br />
<br />
We in the Advanced Sector, mired in orange marbled by chaotic filaments of Boomeritis and (more rarely) high green, generally don’t know how to deal with a world that is still 70% living in amber consciousness. George W. Bush’s campaign to replace Saddam Hussein with a Western-style democracy was a spectacular failure, a sobering reminder of the folly of the attempt to impose modern social structures on premodern cultures. <br />
<br />
And, of course, the Advanced Sector is itself hardly homogenously centered in orange. Transcend-include-integrate means that even at high green we experience currents of all previous levels complicating our efforts to find patterns and propose innovations.<br />
<br />
All of this is made more complex by the current increase in political economic chaos due to the shift from the Industrial to the Information Age, whose impact is perforce global even if most of the people on the planet still live in pre-industrial societies.<br />
<br />
This shows up in the United States in the 50-50 “red-blue” split, which while a nifty shorthand for tedious political scorekeepers, masks a much more complicated reality.<br />
<br />
America is coming, in fits and starts, to the end of the “blue social model” based on classical liberalism 4.0. This was the product of progressive faith in the vehicle of government to protect civic freedom from the real and projected threats that industrial monopolies (the “trusts”) were making against average Americans. Starting with the piecemeal projects of Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson and realized by FDR in a permanently expansive federal government, the Boomer generation’s progressives did their predecessors one better. <br />
<br />
Even though the threat feared and organized against by the progressives never materialized (whether because of or in spite of their policies remains controversial), the progressives nonetheless followed the logic of their philosophical approach by imposing the Great Society, whose yet again expanded governmental reach became infused by New Left Boomeritis imperatives after 1972. <br />
<br />
Thus what we now call the blue social model began its inevitable decline. The New Left, even more than the original progressives, believed that the American system itself generated institutional oppression against its more economically marginal citizens. Naively ignoring the role and nature of government in producing this result, it sought to expand the regulatory reach of government into every area of Americans’ lives. It combined progressives’ ingenuous belief in the disinterestedness of experts with the radical Left’s willingness to use force to punish the perceived perpetrators of all things bad and ugly in American society.<br />
<br />
Postmodernist thought played a key role in infusing this movement with its destructive energy. The rejection of Reason and its presumed intellectual and cultural traditions aided the wholesale trashing of long-term institutions of social coherence like family, church, and schools. <br />
<br />
Not unexpectedly, significant reaction against this ideology set in. Starting with Barry Goldwater’s presidential candidacy in 1964 and reaching its high water mark in the administration of Ronald Reagan and the end of the Cold War shortly thereafter, the conservative counterattack succeeded in delaying but not derailing the blue social model. The rise of political talk radio in the 1990s provided conservatives with their own fireside around which to chat with their fellow citizens.<br />
<br />
But Reagan and his successors failed to offer a better solution to emerging post-Cold War problems than the prevailing liberal order. And although the events of 9/11/01 were not in themselves decisive, they served to emblemize the unexpected disintegration of the old reliable social structures. The failure of the conservatives to apply the Enlightenment’s founding principles of classical liberalism in a fresh and engaging way only served to make the public discourse increasingly tawdry and insipid.<br />
<br />
In the short run, the internet and its cheap hand-held access devices appear to be fueling this disintegration by amplifying the cacophony. The whole range of the unrestrained personal ego can express itself to billions of people simultaneously. Spend any time on any political web site and you can instantly experience the nasty, hateful, and narcissistic side-by-side with the thoughtful, compassionate, and earnest.<br />
<br />
Where’s the center in all of this? Where is the ground of dependable stability? What are the rules of the new game? <i> Who’s making things worse?</i><br />
<br />
The integrally informed student starts by looking for the truth in all those perspectives and seeks to discern the meta-pattern of evolution. <br />
<br />
<b><i><br />Fear and Breakthrough as Evolutionary Dynamics</i></b><br />
<br />
My thesis is simple. Kosmic evolution up the spectrum of consciousness led to the humanity project as a vessel of self awareness. The current telos of this project is the development of the mature, autonomous individual as the necessary condition for the next stage of self awareness. At the point that a sufficient density of such people is reached, the momentous leap into second tier, collective consciousness will become possible. This should, in theory, prepare the way for applying consciousness to evolution itself.<br />
<br />
The individuation project has been slowly unfolding at least since<i> Homo sapiens sapiens</i> evolved from earlier hominid species some 200,000 years ago. The primary tensile dynamic pushing the endeavor has been the appeal of both fear and breakthrough. (Wilber and others also see this dynamic in the Eros/Thanatos <i>Sturm und Drang</i>.)<br />
<br />
This has become a four-quadrant process, at least as a conceptual approach. Since the emergence of orange we have been able to see the evolutionary thrust tetradimensionally, which helps us appreciate truth more fully.<br />
<br />
Amber fears the dissolution of order and blames those with contempt for rules. Orange fears the collapse of progress and blames those with contempt for initiative and profit. Green fears the relapse to arbitrariness and autocracy and blames those clinging bitterly to their guns and religion.<br />
<br />
Once the Soviet communist empire collapsed in 1991, the structures of global political stability quickly disappeared. This more or less coincided with the rapid “informationalization” of the economies of the Advanced Sector. (A topic for future examination will be the role of Information Age technological advances in the undermining and downfall of the Soviet and Chinese amber empires.) The first major shift came in American and NATO re-evalution of their defense postures: how powerful did we need our armed forces to be with our enemy of forty years suddenly defanged?<br />
<br />
There was a concomitant freeing up of capital flows the world over, as nations—particularly China—sought to cash in on the unexpected peace by modernizing their economies. In the U. S., the Clinton administration persuaded the Congress to repeal the Glass-Steagal Act, a New Deal law that separated commercial and investment banking. This opened the doors for an entire new tranche of speculative financial investments, making possible a series of bubbles that resulted in the 2008 crash.<br />
<br />
In the meantime, passage and enforcement of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts in the mid-1960s contributed to a significant mass internal migration in the United States which saw millions move out of the Rust Belt and into the Sun Belt, thus redistributing both economic and political power. Generally speaking, the Sun Belt states (with the key exception of California) favored less government involvement in the private sector by keeping taxes low and regulations simple. Their right-to-work status kept union influence on the evolution of their public policy at a minimum.<br />
<br />
Information Age companies favored these states as locations expansion out of their California base. These states were the first experiment with post-industrial governance, while the older states of the Midwest and Northeast often dug in to defend their blue social model systems.<br />
<br />
Since the presidential election of 1992, the balance of national power has swung back and forth over a very narrow continuum. Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have been able to seize and keep both the White House and the Congress for long. The electorate has been concentrating more on our fears than on a push for breakthrough, and our politics fairly dependably reflect this.<br />
<br />
In the meantime, advancing technology especially in communications has produced a revolution in the way we speak and listen to one another; it will be a while before we can see clearly in what direction this is serving to lead us. But at the very least it has heightened the cacophony and the political rhetoric without contributing anything to deepen potential stability.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b><i>The Integral Imperative</i></b><br />
<br />
So that brings us back to the current Kabuki. It seems to me that we will be experiencing first tier dramatics for some time to come, because the ongoing breakdown of the blue social model institutions has yet to inspire the necessary structures for the post-industrial, Information Age world.<br />
<br />
Integrally informed political thinking should, I believe, always keep two essential currents in mind. First, a sober-eyed understanding of the trimemetic war underway, and second, an inquiry into what the individuation project requires in light of this war. <br />
<br />
A recent book by James C. Bennett and Michael J. Lotus called <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/sep/11/book-review-america-30/?page=all"><i>America 3.0</i></a> makes a heroic attempt at this second task. I will look into and analyze their recommendations in a coming post. I found their thesis compelling because they get that the United States is a project of the Scottish Enlightenment, and so they take on the meta-pattern of human evolution as it finds itself today. <br />
<br />
It certainly is valuable and necessary to inquire into how we might support greater numbers of us entering the next phase of the Enlightenment project, the exploration of second tier. But given the amber-orange-green configuration of humanity today, it remains imperative to regularly examine the current political economy for signs of both emergence and resistance, as well as to develop a disciplined integrally-informed analysis that sharpens our individual capacity to see truth in everyone’s perspectives.Marty Kellerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11592136716581562644noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3401106149239386272.post-71525790802815343072013-08-19T10:11:00.000-07:002013-08-19T18:36:32.493-07:00Integral Politics: A Primer<i>[This piece is an in-depth lesson on how to develop an integral analysis of political matters, written in part to provide background to a <a href="http://integrallife.com/node/257416">dialogue with Layman Pascal</a> on the </i>Integral Life<i> web site. The issue we are wrestling with concerns the nature of integral politics, which I contend must await the emergence of teal in a critical mass of people. Until then we can certainly work hard at being "integrally informed" on matters of politics and power relationships.]</i><br />
<br />
In his extended interview with Tami Simon on <a href="http://consciousnessreviews.blogspot.com/2005/09/kosmic-consciousness-ken-wilber.html"><i>Kosmic Consciousness</i></a>, Ken Wilber makes the distinction between integral consciousness and being “integrally informed.” <br />
<br />
The latter is the threshold of the former. Being “integrally informed” is using one’s cognitive capacity to apply the AQAL model to any given situation. Integral consciousness is the first transpersonal band of awareness, incorporating enough lines of development to constitute a center of gravity in the second tier. Wilber’s observation that the cognitive is almost always the first line of development to expand into the next wave applies quite aptly here.<br />
<br />
I have yet to find a discussion of integral politics that isn’t actually an attempt at integrally informed analysis rather than politics from an integral perspective. Wilber’s discussion with Simon about an actual integral politics is not only highly speculative but suffers from the usual translation challenge that a second tier perspective has in communicating to first tier. My own sense is that an actual integral politics awaits the day when there are enough people with a second tier center of gravity to take it on and invent it. We’re not there now, especially with people running around proclaiming that Barack Obama operates from teal.<br />
<br />
But it is quite useful, in the cheerful spirit of AA’s “fake it till you make it” injunction, to practice an integrally informed look at particular political situations. This way we can begin to familiarize ourselves with the AQAL method and intuit, if not directly observe, where an actual second tier perspective might be reaching out to us.<br />
<br />
So let’s take the example of Abraham Lincoln’s extraordinary achievement in guiding the United States through the Civil War and, applying AQAL analysis, see what it might suggest in the way of an eventual integral politics.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b><i>First Step: One's Own Perspective</i></b><br />
<br />
Effective AQAL analysis begins with an awareness of our own perspectives, since we will be starting by an “objective” look at the historical period in question as it appears to us as an LR expression. How this subject looks at and interprets that object is a necessary prerequisite to practicing Integral Model investigation.<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a>I am a green (but not the Boomeritis variant) classical liberal (not “progressive”) with a well-developing integral cognitive capacity. I am a practitioner of accountability yoga, a method of identifying and withdrawing projections and seeking to live with authentic intimacy with the people in my life. In the LL, I live in Sacramento, California, a town whose political consciousness is driven on the surface by Boomeritis beliefs, but that is floating on a longstanding amber/orange consciousness informed by the agricultural economy of the Central Valley. The Boomeritis perspective derives from the unionized civil service base of the state government, dominated as it is by the Democratic Party, which in California leans farther left than in other states.<br />
<br />
In the UR I am sixty-one years old, in reasonably good health physically and mentally; in the LR I live in the 26th largest metropolitan area in the U. S. The political economy here has, as mentioned above, long been dominated by agriculture, although the city fathers keep looking for ways to transcend that base, including aspirations to make Sacramento a center for the “green economy,” whatever that means. The major employer is the state government; we also have several second-tier universities and the usual network of community colleges and technical schools.<br />
<br />
When I describe myself as a classical liberal, I am referring to the distinct Anglo-American tradition that was the product first of two hundred years of struggle in England between monarchy and popular government, culminating in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and then radically reinvented a hundred years later as “a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” in the American Revolution (1774-1789). As Professor Walter Russell Mead <a href="http://www.the-american-interest.com/article.cfm?piece=1183">explains it</a>,<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
A liberal is someone who seeks ordered liberty through politics—namely, the reconciliation of humanity’s need for governance with its drive for freedom in such a way as to give us all the order we need (but no more) with as much liberty as possible. In this sense, liberty isn’t divided or divisible into freedoms of speech, religion, economic activity or personal conduct: Genuine liberals care about all of the above and seek a society in which individuals enjoy increasing liberty in each of these dimensions while continuing to cultivate the virtues and the institutions that give us the order without which there can be no freedom. </blockquote>
So we’ve begun our AQAL analysis with four of the five elements of the Model: quadrants, lines, levels, and types. As for the state of consciousness, I am in gross body waking consciousness, although as I write I lapse from time to time into a daydreaming state in which thoughts, impressions, and connections free flow in service to composition.<br />
<br />
<br />
<i><b>The Case of Abraham Lincoln</b></i><br />
<br />
So with the initial perspective established, we move now to the object of our study: Abraham Lincoln’s presidency.<br />
<br />
First, some AQAL background.<br />
<br />
The United States in 1860, the year he was elected, was the exemplar of a developing nation. Its amber agricultural base was rapidly incorporating an orange industrial realm, starting in New England and spreading rapidly westward. The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 gave impetus to this new world; the burgeoning wealth of the British Empire provided capital to fund American industrial infrastructure as a railroad-building explosion ensued. Northern and western farmers were eager to apply new technologies to cultivation; mechanization of agriculture freed up labor for more sophisticated activities.<br />
<br />
The resulting political economic transformations passed the agrarian South by in large part because, after the invention of the cotton gin in 1795, it had tied itself to slave labor-intensive cotton cultivation as the primary mode of wealth creation. A significant portion of its economic and intellectual energy was diverted into finding creative ways to justify an outdated amber institution that the founding principles of the nation condemned. <br />
<br />
The Declaration of Independence and the U. S. Constitution had established individual equal sovereignty as the universal principle upon which American governance was to be managed. The political power of the slave-holding states forced an awkward compromise in which the commitment to universal principles was ignored in the case of the African slaves in order to create the political unity necessary to establish and maintain independence in the face of European hostility. <br />
<br />
But the practical results of the application of the principles of liberty in the northern states, exponentially expanding per capita wealth and opportunity, increasingly exposed the national moral debasement that tolerating a slave economy within the political and spiritual borders of the U. S. revealed.<br />
<br />
Over the course of the first six decades of the nineteenth century, the two sections of the country moved rapidly apart in terms of their economic imperatives, putting increasing strain on the unity that the slavery compromise had been designed to reinforce. The north increasingly needed educated, skilled labor to man its machines, railroads, and ships; the south needed more slaves to feed its cotton gins. In response to the outlawing of the international slave trade in 1807, plantation owners had begun to develop an internal slave market, augmenting the central role of slave labor in the southern economy.<br />
<br />
The American victory in the aggressively expansionist Mexican War (1846-47) resulted in the cession of millions of acres to the U. S. Half of this territory lay south of the Missouri Compromise line of 36°30′; the southern states saw these lands—including most of California—as territories into which to expand slavery. They began fierce agitation to repeal that agreement to permit the legal expansion of slavery.<br />
<br />
The Compromise of 1850 did just that, but four years later the Kansas-Nebraska Act potentially opened all territorial lands to slavery. The resulting firestorm, further fueled by the <i>Dred Scott</i> decision in 1857, intensified the “irrepressible conflict.” The two main parties, the Whigs and the Democrats, inheritors (more or less) of the divergence between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson in the early days of the nation, began to disintegrate. By 1856 the Whigs were supplanted by the newly-formed Republican Party, and by 1860 the Democrats were irretrievably split in two, its southern wing shortly to lead the secession of eleven slave states.<br />
<br />
An integrally informed analysis sees that the ever-strengthening orange political economy of the north was dramatically pulling away from the static amber quasi-imperial south. The founding principles of the country were being reified by the vibrancy and growth of the north, thus from their perspective making slavery more and more incompatible with the progress of the nation. The amber south saw the north as a grasping, greedy, impersonal machine whose dynamics were undermining the American founding principles of individual sovereignty protected by the rights of each state to govern itself unmolested by the federal government.<br />
<br />
Still uniting the nation was its amber conviction of white superiority; very few in north were willing to see blacks as political, much less social, equals. Visionaries on both sides of the Ohio River recognized that the one would necessarily lead to the other, but the majority of voters were unwilling or unable to think that far ahead.<br />
<br />
Abraham Lincoln came to office because of two historically unique factors. First, the five-year old Republican Party, comprising many diverse political factions, had to settle on a presidential nominee acceptable to the majority. Lincoln arrived at the GOP convention everyone’s favorite second choice. Second, the split in the Democratic Party allowed a united north to elect Lincoln with less than 40% of the popular vote nationwide.<br />
<br />
Lincoln brought unique skills and qualifications to the presidency. As a lifelong Whig in Democratic Illinois, he had nonetheless been elected to the state legislature four times and to the U. S. Congress once, and had come five votes short in the legislature of defeating Stephen A. Douglas for reelection as United States Senator. He grew up dirt poor on farms in Kentucky and Indiana, and was essentially a self-taught man. As a young man he had several careers before settling on becoming a lawyer—a highly unusual choice in the sparsely populated Prairie State dominated by agriculture.<br />
<br />
In many ways he was the embodiment of Benjamin Franklin’s advice in <a href="http://itech.fgcu.edu/faculty/wohlpart/alra/franklin.htm"><i>The Way to Wealth</i></a> with its emphasis on hard work and delaying gratification. He had an internal drive toward self-actualization; as such he was the quintessential exemplar of the orange rational/egoic structure. He believed in the superiority of self direction and responsibility, and applied himself to it assiduously and unsparingly. Yet he was no loner. He particularly appreciated frontier society’s “pitch-in” ethic, where people lived their lives as they pleased for the most part and pitched in to help their neighbors when asked. It led him to value the Founders’ vision of a minimalist but powerful national government which could “pitch in” to help develop the economic infrastructure that no one town or even state could manage on its own.<br />
<br />
This is the reason he was drawn to the Whigs rather than the Democrats. The Whigs tended to represent the burgeoning orange urban, scientific, industrial, and entrepreneurial emergence; the Democrats tended to represent the amber rural, nativist, communitarian status quo. Lincoln looked to Henry Clay as his model; Democrats looked to Andrew Jackson.<br />
<br />
His epic series of debates with Stephen A. Douglas in their 1858 campaign for Douglas’ U. S. Senate seat laid out the distinction between the two approaches quite unmistakably. Lincoln’s orange moral line of development showed up in his insistence on two critical issues: first, that slavery was morally wrong; second, that the Constitution and its rule of law must be defended against utilitarian assaults. These convictions required him to walk a narrow tightrope. One the one hand, slavery was abhorrent to the nation’s founding principle that “all men are created equal”; on the other hand, abolition required constitutional amendment, since that document reserved the authority to permit or refuse slavery to the states. Since the arithmetic showed that ¾ of the states would not agree to amend the Constitution to outlaw slavery, Lincoln was stuck with advocating a gradualist approach to ending slavery.<br />
<br />
Douglas based his counterargument on the widespread amber moral prejudice of whites against blacks. The Declaration was intended only for whites, he maintained; Lincoln’s position would inevitably lead to racial mixing and diluting the superior condition of the white man. The south was not alone in its legal suppression of the human rights of its black residents; the north too had its share of Jim Crow laws designed to harass if not entirely exclude free blacks from peaceable pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness as they saw fit. (Only ten years earlier, Illinoisans had voted to amend their constitution to outlaw black immigration.)<br />
<br />
In spite of his defeat, Lincoln’s campaign catapulted him to national prominence, setting the stage for his nomination and election as president. <br />
<br />
<br />
<i><b>Lincoln Through the Integral Lens</b></i><br />
<br />
So, looking through the lens that I’ve identified as mine, I have hypothesized the following:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
1. In the LR, the United States in 1860 was a developing country, rapidly industrializing especially in the northeast. European immigrants were steadily arriving to take advantage of all the new opportunities this expansion was creating. Its politics were boisterous, with Whigs pushing for federal subsidies for infrastructure development financed by high tariffs to protect American manufactures from cheaper British imports.<br />
<br />
The south remained untouched by these currents; its slave-based agrarian economy was growing because industrializing England was hungry for its cotton. Its social structure was classical amber: a small stratum of wealthy landowners presiding over a mass population base of poor whites and black slaves.<br />
<br />
Although the south was a drag on overall American development, the U. S. was nonetheless the only nation of its kind in the world. Other than the republican governments of northern Europe (mostly still led by monarchs and aristocracies), the world was a vast array of amber empires large and small. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
2. In the LL, the political economic divergence between the two sectors of the country was reflected in a concomitant cultural divergence. Although whites in both sectors were embedded in amber assumptions of racial and ethnic superiority, the northern industrialization was impelling a rapid expansion of literacy, education, and self-improvement. This was supported by a growing commitment to science and its application to both agriculture and manufacturing. Horace Mann led the movement to provide taxpayer-funded primary grade public education as literacy rates expanded rapidly. Newspaper circulation grew exponentially. These are all indicators of a shift in internal consciousness toward orange individuation.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
3. In the UR we find Abraham Lincoln, 51 years old, six feet, four inches tall, weighing roughly 180 pounds. He was muscular and in decent general health.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
4. In the UL we can only infer Lincoln’s center of gravity. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that, in at least several lines of development, he had reached an integral perspective. Cognitively he consistently evinced the capacity not only to take multiple perspectives, but to honor them as valid in themselves. Morally his commitment both to founding principles and right action to align the nation more perfectly with them indicates at least a green altitude. His remarkably nonjudgmental capacity for self criticism and course correction reflect at least a green if not teal level of individuation. On the other hand, his personal relationship line of development appears to be less mature; his relationship with his wife was stormy, in part because he appears incapable of effectively communicating empathy to his family and friends.<br />
<br />
5. A quick word about types, which appear to be most applicable to the UL than anywhere else: Lincoln certainly had introvert tendencies, although as a politician he was in the company of all sorts of people all the time. On the masculine/feminine continuum, his consistent inclination to action implies a masculine orientation. On the conservative/liberal axis, he was a self-proclaimed conservative; even his promulgation of the radical Emancipation Proclamation derived from an eminently conservative leaning.</blockquote>
Lincoln’s signal achievement was, having determined to preserve the union against the slaveholders’ rebellion, to coax the loyal citizenry into doing it such a way that the outcome was a nation more in alignment with founding principles than it was before he took office.<br />
<br />
His determination to preserve and perfect the union stemmed from his belief that the American experiment in self-government was a necessary step in the progress of humanity. “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master,” he once said. “This expresses my idea of democracy.” In <a href="http://ia700800.us.archive.org/31/items/abrahamlincolns0linc/abrahamlincolns0linc_djvu.txt">his famous speech at Peoria</a>, the first of his many debates with Douglas, Lincoln succinctly stated his understanding of the uniqueness and importance of America as the vessel of humanity’s next transformation:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Our Republican robe is soiled and trailed in the dust. Let us purify it. Let us turn and wash it white in the spirit if not the blood of the Revolution. Let us turn slavery from its claims of moral right, back upon its existing legal rights and its arguments of necessity. Let us return it to the position our fathers gave it, and there let it rest in peace. Let us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it the practices and policy which harmonize with it. Let North and South, let all Americans, let all lovers of liberty everywhere, join in the great and good work. If we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union, but we shall have so saved it as to make and to keep it for ever worthy of the saving.</blockquote>
His strategy for suppressing secession and restoring the union was informed by his highly advanced assessment that the entire nation, and not just the south, was responsible for slavery and its morally debilitating effects. His refusal to apply extraconstitutional means of permanently abolishing slavery was grounded in his profound understanding of the radical advance that was the American experiment in self-government. The rule of law supported by a majority whose power was constitutionally restricted from tyrannical application was the <i>sine qua non</i> of successful popular government.<br />
<br />
When he took the oath of presidential office on March 4, 1861, seven slave states had seceded, and the other six were teetering on the edge. From this day until he died a little over four years later, Lincoln had to balance an ever-changing swirl of attitudes, events, and capabilities in his single-minded drive to restore lawful government to the states in rebellion.<br />
<br />
He was keenly aware of the power of the LL in his management of the war. More than almost any other political figure in American history, he tuned into the collective consciousness in order to determine his strategic moves. We see this in his leadership on emancipation.<br />
<br />
Pressured from the left to unilaterally declare freedom for all the slaves, and pressured from the right to leave the institution alone, Lincoln had no choice but to move carefully. He early on recognized that, as slavery was the cause of the war and the foundation of the Confederate political economy, it must be destroyed if the north was to win the war and reunite the country upon its founding principles. But in that conviction he was far out in front of public opinion. Given the fragility of the new Republican coalition, comprising as it did abolitionists like Charles Sumner and Owen Lovejoy on the one hand and traditionalists like Francis Blair and Edward Bates on the other, Lincoln determined that his tactics required keeping the team as united as possible.<br />
<br />
He spent his first year seeking reunification by appealing to the loyal slave states to undertake compensated emancipation. If Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware were to voluntarily end slavery in return for payment, Lincoln believed this would undermine the slaveholding aristocracy in the Confederate states by offering their Unionist citizens a way out of armed revolt.<br />
<br />
But when none of those states took him up on his proposal, he shifted to approaching emancipation as a military measure. His preliminary proclamation, issued in the aftermath of his Army of the Potomac’s repelling of Robert E. Lee’s first raid of the north at Antietam Creek, offered a carrot and a stick. He gave the states in rebellion one hundred days to give up the struggle and seek a deal with the north. Failing that, on January 1, 1863, all slaves in those territories would be declared free. <br />
<br />
Of course, the Confederates denounced his move and ignored his offer, and so despite setbacks in the November elections in large part because of his commitment to southern emancipation, Lincoln signed the formal proclamation. <br />
<br />
He thereby killed several birds with one stone. He took a formal stand for freeing of the slaves, but his measure did not cover the slave states that remained loyal to the Union. He signaled to the several million slaves remaining under Confederate control that if they could flee their plantations and make their way into federal lines, they would be free. This would seriously disrupt the southern economy and its capacity to support the war. He formally tied reunion to emancipation. Finally, he prepared northern public opinion to support total freedom for the slaves by ratifying a constitutional amendment outlawing slavery once and for all.<br />
<br />
Over the course of the next two years, Lincoln moved public opinion firmly in that direction. His principle instrument was the enlisting of African Americans in the United States armed services. This bold move remained controversial in many quarters throughout the war, and Copperheads and other peace Democrats would campaign against Lincoln with a promise to negotiate a return of the seceded states to the Union in return for preserving slavery. Lincoln would have none of it. To a group of visiting Wisconsin politicians in the summer of 1864, Lincoln exclaimed, “There have been men who have proposed to me to return to slavery the black warriors of Port Hudson and Olustee [battles in which black soldiers distinguished themselves] to their masters to conciliate the South. I should be damned in time and eternity for so doing. The world shall know that I will keep my faith to friends and enemies, come what will.”<br />
<br />
By this time Lincoln’s policy, fully ratified in the 1864 Republican platform, was reunion <i>and</i> emancipation. It was upon this rock-solid commitment that he was enthusiastically re-elected that November. Union soldiers in particular agreed; Lincoln won 78% of their votes.<br />
<br />
<br />
<i><b>Lincoln’s Second Tier Capacities</b></i><br />
<br />
Although in the fullness of history (and of AQAL) we can get a solid picture of Lincoln’s task and how well he completed it, contemporaries were also aware that they were working with an extraordinary leader. Ignatius Donnelly, a Republican congressman from Missouri addressing his colleagues on the floor of the House, <a href="http://archive.org/stream/congressionalglo7388unit#page/2038/mode/1up">captured Lincoln’s achievements</a> in the run-up to his re-election in 1864:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
He will stand out in future ages in the history of these crowded and confused times with wonderful distinctness. He has carried a vast and discordant population safely and peacefully through the greatest of political revolutions with such consummate sagacity and skill that while he led he appeared to follow; while he innovated beyond all precedents he has been denounced as tardy; while he struck the shackles from the limbs of three million slaves has been hailed as a conservative! If to adapt, persistently and continuously, just and righteous principles to all the perplexed windings and changes of human events, and to secure in the end the complete triumph of those principles, be statesmanship, then Abraham Lincoln is the first of statesmen.</blockquote>
As the President turned his attention to reconstruction of the nation once his armies had vanquished the Confederate resistance, he brought a particularly teal perspective to the challenge. Long had Lincoln insisted that the entire nation bore equal responsibility for the institution of slavery, refusing to play an amber game of “blame the South.” To his mind, greater forces than he could clearly see were at work in the evolution of the United States as a force for human liberty and popular government.<br />
<br />
In the summer of 1864, Lincoln wrote to a Quaker leader, “The purposes of the Almighty are perfect, and shall prevail, though we erring mortals may fail to accurately perceive them in advance.” In a memo to himself written at the same time, he noted that “[t]he will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong. God cannot be for, and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party—and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect His purpose.”<br />
<br />
He would flesh these thoughts out publicly in what is probably the most second tier speech ever given by an American statesman in his <a href="http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/lincoln2.asp">Second Inaugural Address</a>. From his perspective, embracing with equanimity as he did all the perspectives of his fellow citizens, he nonetheless called the country forth to a deeper and more profound understanding of its founding and its bloody struggles to preserve “the last, best hope of mankind.”<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether." </blockquote>
Lincoln was here calling upon his fellow countrymen to relinquish their personal and sectional perspectives, and open themselves to an integral point of view by which to see the country as a single, indivisible entity. Both North and South, “by whom the offense [of slavery] came,” were suffering through a war more “fundamental and astounding” than either expected. Suggesting that God’s perspective might be so radically broader than their own, he invited his brother citizens to steel themselves to the completion of this higher task that the true and righteous judgments of the Lord may be requiring of them. <br />
<br />
Given that each citizen’s perspective is inevitably limited, and recognizing that most would not or could not stretch themselves to take on an integral view, what should the country do with Lincoln’s startling directive?<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.</blockquote>
Notice that, while he fully recognized the partiality of people’s perspectives (“as God gives us to see the right”), he nonetheless urged Americans to “strive on the finish the work we are in,” the completion of which “may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”<br />
<br />
And so we see Lincoln, five weeks before his murder, reaching a level of spiritual maturity that few political leaders have ever attained. He guided the nation through a significant battle of the five hundred years' war between amber and orange by transcending the limitations of the first tier. He saw the world historic nature of the American experiment with popular government based on its founding principles and determined to preserve it at all costs. His vision transcended and included those of his countrymen while inviting them all, north and south, black and white, native and immigrant, to identify enthusiastically with the evolutionary possibilities that the country's very success promised all humanity.<br />
<br />
<br />
<i><b>Conclusions</b></i><br />
<br />
We will end our AQAL analysis here. We set out to offer an example of an integrally informed look at a political situation, so that when we take on the work of an authentic integral politics (someday), we will have become adept in the cognitive line at a minimum at taking an integral perspective of the patterns and impacts of political activity.<br />
<br />
An actual integral politics will flow from participants whose center of gravity has evolved into the second tier. When politicians—which emphatically includes a critical mass of the citizenry—embrace, like Lincoln did, the fact that the perspectives of their fellow citizens are valid for them and thus worthy of respect but not necessarily agreement, we will step tentatively into power arrangements that integrate all the entire first tier into the work of the second. <br />
<br />
Lincoln’s presidency gives us a good look at the challenges, for although he conducted himself from what at times appears to be a teal altitude, he was unable to inspire a working plurality of the country to join him there. When he succumbed to John Wilkes Booth’s bullet, the potential for a reconstruction policy that might have integrated the entire nation into an orange perspective died with him. That would take the nation another hundred years and the emergence of green to achieve.<br />
<br />
Thus for us Americans today, who span the spectrum from amber to green, the initiation of an integral politics requires us to concentrate on inviting each other first, to healthy individuation, and immediately afterwards, into healthy green. When a critical mass of us reach that stage, the momentous leap into the second tier will become a reality, and actual integral work of all kinds will start revealing its contours and delivering its promise.Marty Kellerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11592136716581562644noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3401106149239386272.post-49383578128672944232013-07-22T11:33:00.001-07:002013-07-23T14:14:41.997-07:00More Boulderdash<i>That which we call Boomeritis by any other name would still reek of narcissism.</i><br />
<br />
<br />
Jeff Salzman, who calls himself “an integralist, an evolutionary, and now a public commentator who, swimming against the current of prevailing culture, is heartened by the state and future of things,” offers a weekly broadcast called “<a href="http://www.dailyevolver.com/">The Daily Evolver</a>,” during which he works hard to offer an integral look at daily events.<br />
<br />
The problem is how to arrive at a common understanding of “integral,” something <a href="http://aqalblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/immediate-challenge-healthy-green.html">I’ve written extensively about</a>. I am sure that Mr. Salzman is a fine person and really does consider himself an integralist, but the actual content of his talks reveals him to be more of an <a href="http://aqalblog.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-integral-case-for-president-obama.html">integral wanna-be</a>. He tends to be so uncritical of the Boomeritis assumptions that permeate his network in Boulder that he presumes much that is not actually in evidence. Like so much of what comes out of the “integral” networks around Ken Wilber, the rigor necessary for achieving escape velocity from the first tier is sadly lacking. <br />
<br />
This detracts not one iota from the honor we should give to Mr. Wilber and his circle for their willingness to tackle the evolutionary opportunity that Spirit, visible via the cognitive line at teal, appears to be calling forth. Our capacity to witness the elements of the Integral Model and to explore how to assess today’s experiences thereby is a truly remarkable gift, and we acknowledge the courage it takes to be willing to be commanded by its insights. <br />
<br />
In his <a href="http://www.dailyevolver.com/2013/07/the-george-zimmerman-trial-pulling-us-forward-in-race-relations-live-tuesday-call-8/">most recent broadcast</a>, Mr. Salzman spends time attempting an integral analysis of the George Zimmerman trial and its aftermath. For the most part, he is on solid but very conventional ground when he begins by noting that the “Big Three” levels of first tier consciousness that prevail in the United States—amber, orange, and green—each have a different way of seeing and interpreting the matter.<br />
<br />
But his lack of rigor renders the balance of his presentation ineffectual (when not downright hilarious). <br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a>His mistaking levels of consciousness for political stances is a serious flaw. He carelessly equates amber with traditionalists, conservatives, and Republicans, as if those were all synonymous; he is equally sloppy when he conflates green with liberals, progressives and Democrats. <br />
<br />
This category error is so egregious that it makes any meaningful integral discussion impossible, and thereby he fritters away the robust opportunity for actual and rigorous integral analysis. <br />
<br />
(On more than one occasion Mr. Salzman has revealed his falling short of the integral mark when, upon observing how present-day reality doesn’t conform to his moral code, he says “I blame God.” This demonstrates an appalling misunderstanding of the Integral Model, which starts with the hypothesis that the Kosmos is One—or, more rigorously, Not-Two. It thus both gives rise to and contains <i>everything</i>, including Mr. Salzman and the things he dislikes. The Integral Model presumes that, from God’s point of view, nothing is wrong and mistakes are impossible. Further, by “blaming God,” he is placing himself above God, a classic Boomeritis blasphemy that originates in the narcissism that is its central unhealed flaw.<br />
<br />
<br />
<i><b>Mistaking Levels and Types</b></i><br />
<br />
Mr. Wilber <a href="http://www.kenwilber.com/writings/read_pdf/59">has suggested that “liberal” and “conservative” are examples of types</a>, not of levels or waves. Making them features of levels is a horrible blunder for several reasons. First, the waves are generalized features of the evolutionary spectrum; for them to have any validity they must be universal in their application. Mr. Wilber expends a lot of ink (including exhaustive footnotes) demonstrating the cross-cultural legitimacy of his description of these elements of the model. Slapping American political labels on them negates their universality.<br />
<br />
Secondly, as Mr. Wilber has demonstrated in his examination of <a href="http://integrallife.com/tags/integral-post-metaphysics">integral post-metaphysics</a>, the levels or waves are structures of consciousness with probabilistic characteristics based on their longevity and depth. They are interpretive frameworks through which <i>all</i> reality—that which arises tetradimensionally—are construed. Politics—the arrangement of power relationships—is but one of dozens of phenomena that we take in and interpret according to the evolution of our various lines of development. As frameworks, levels/waves <i>cannot</i> function as political philosophies; rather, they assign certain meanings to political philosophies based on the mechanics of their structural features.<br />
<br />
So Mr. Salzman begins his analysis with a deeply flawed and erroneous assignment of points of view to the “Big Three.” Further (not surprising given his Boulder environment) he has almost no clue about actual conservatism in America. In his careless categorization, “conservative,” “traditionalist,” and “Republican” are all the same thing. (In this, of course, he is joined by millions of sloppy thinkers, aided and abetted by the MSM. This is no excuse, for, as he asserts later in the broadcast, a signal feature of “integral” is perspective-taking; yet he show no curiosity at all about this particular perspective, or even any awareness that it is a distinctive perspective.)<br />
<br />
Citing Arnold Kling’s thesis in <a href="http://patterico.com/2013/06/04/kling-on-the-three-languages-of-politics-or-how-to-talk-to-progressives/"><i>The Three Languages of Politics</i></a>, he asserts that conservatism has its meta-narrative in “the struggle between the forces of civilization and the forces of barbarism”; this is the lens through which amber (<i>aka</i> conservatism) views the world. This gross oversimplification is specious nonsense and further evidence of the dangers of the wave conflation he cavalierly engages in.<br />
<br />
Modern political conservatism, dating back to the observations of Edmund Burke (1729-97), seeks to conserve the best that humans have created in the constant evolution of self-governing institutions. It is a friend to innovation because the creative genius is among the greatest of human capacities. It supports markets because they have demonstrated themselves time and again to be the best mechanism to promote the overall growth of wealth.<br />
<br />
The amber elements of American conservatism are best seen in social issues, where traditionalists seek to conserve the best of the rules for healthy social organization, which includes treating sexuality with great caution because of its capacity to wreak havoc upon social stability. Orange conservatism seeks to conserve the optimization of the market economy to promote the greatest wealth for the greatest number at the least aggregate cost. Green conservatism, while very new, seeks to conserve the commitment for egalitarianism from Boomeritis contamination.<br />
<br />
Mr. Salzman’s cluelessness about conservatism is reprised by an equally shoddy understanding of liberalism and progressivism. He blithely conflates these with political Democrats, as if there are no Democrats with traditionalist or modernist views. Further, I personally know a number of <i>soi-disant</i> progressives who turn their noses up at the Democrats, considering them hypocrites and incrementalists.<br />
<br />
Modern political liberalism dates back to the Scottish Enlightenment and its greatest practitioners, the American Founding Fathers. Liberalism seeks to expand freedom for the individual and to reduce tyrannical structures that obstruct it. Liberalism commits to establish political legitimacy in self-governance and not in self-appointed or power-grabbing oligarchies or dictatorships. It is a friend to the rule of law because it prevents the tyranny of self-interest or emotional excess from imperiling individual liberty. (Professor Walter Russell Mead has done <a href="http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2010/12/15/can-the-l-word-be-saved/">the best recent work</a> on the evolution of modern liberalism.)<br />
<br />
Amber liberalism seeks to ensure that all members of the tribe or group benefit from its society. Orange liberalism fights to ensure the sustainment of individual political sovereignty and economic opportunity. Green liberalism struggles to overcome both overt and hidden or unselfconscious tendencies to denial of liberty; further, it extends its scrutiny to systems that may have developed tyrannical tendencies in spite of their original intentions.<br />
<br />
So, with all these erroneous assumptions, it comes as no surprise that Mr. Salzman’s evaluation of the case of Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman is both muddleheaded and minimally informative from an integral perspective.<br />
<br />
He is at his best in describing the meta-narratives that Americans at amber and orange might apply in discussing what happened and drawing out lessons. He demonstrates this by starting with a relatively neutral recitation of the facts of the matter. “As we go from here with the story, we can see that the facts that fill in the story begin to line up pretty clearly with the ideology of the person telling the story; they’re very different stories, representative of different development altitudes.”<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>Amber with its commitment to rule/role, mythic/membership assumptions applies the lens of “us and them,” which we do regardless of our race.</li>
<li>Orange with its commitment to individual egoism and reason applies the lens of “did the system work?”</li>
<li>Because he conflates healthy green and Boomeritis—the primary flaw of Boulderdash—his green analysis is less persuasive. The primary polarity that charges up green liberalism, he says, is “identifying the oppressor and the oppressed, where people become sensitized to the pain of those who have been marginalized and left behind by the previous stages of development; green seeks to rectify that, to bring them into the fold as full participants.” This is a solid description of classic green. But he can’t leave it there; he has to Boomerize it by accusing Republicans of still trying to “continue the Jim Crow regime, in homeopathic doses” [through voter ID laws]. “The cool thing is that it appears to have backfired because, in the last election, blacks voted in higher percentages than whites, so nyah, nyah, na-nyah nyah on that.”</li>
</ul>
<i><b><br />That Famous Skin Galvanic Response Line of Development</b></i><br />
<br />
This having been noted, there are some real howlers in his narrative. His casual assumption of Mr. Kling’s characterizations leads him to say some really stupid things. For instance, “for amber [<i>aka</i> traditionalists and conservatives], they’re just a little closer to red in the stages of development. They tend to live a little more hardscrabble lives in smaller towns; liberals tend to live in safer enclaves. Crime’s a real danger for these people. They don’t really trust the police in the state in the same way that we liberals do. They remember when the police were a brutal tool of the dictator or king—that’s a karmic memory that is a little more vivid for amber than it is for orange or green. They see themselves as free sovereign agents responsible to protect themselves and their families. That’s so important for them to have the right to bear arms, to have guns, which are repulsive to green. By the time you get to green the idea of having your own weapon is, ‘really?’”<br />
<br />
Not content to stop digging here, he then proceeds to assert that conservatives’ bodies are different from liberals’: “Traditionalists are more physically attuned to danger and chaos. There’s study after study that shows that conservatives basically have a stronger startle response than do liberals; they’re more skin-galvanically-responsewise attuned to danger, because they are literally closer to the stages of barbarism.”<br />
<br />
Conservatives live “more hardscrabble lives” than liberals? Liberals love the police more? Conservatives see their environments as more threatened by crime? No liberal owns a gun? And just where are all those studies that show “that conservatives basically have stronger a stronger startle response than do liberals”? And what exactly does that mean?<br />
<br />
Really, you can’t make this stuff up (which is another sign that we are dealing with Boomeritis integral wanna-bes).<br />
<br />
What do you call the belief that all people in a given category share the same characteristics<i> by virtue of belonging to that category</i>? Isn’t this tendency to stereotype people because of their race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or level of consciousness development supposedly what’s at the heart of the Martin killing?<br />
<br />
As a conservative I am happy to know that, skin-galvanically-responsewise I am more attuned to danger than Mr. Salzman. Perhaps if I rise above my hardscrabble existence, I can learn from my liberal friends (say, like <a href="http://aqalblog.blogspot.com/2011/12/occupy-aqal.html">the Occupiers</a>) to love the police.<br />
<br />
Sorry, Jeff; I call bullshit.<br />
<br />
The rest of this session of the "Daily Evolver" meanders aimlessly through more stereotypes, slapdash assumptions, and arrogant assertions. I have no doubt that Mr. Salzman is in earnest; still it is shocking to see yet another Wilber acolyte so intellectually and morally lazy.<br />
<br />
The sad thing is we never get anything close to a cogent integral discussion of the country’s reaction to the Martin killing. That's likely the only way to produce the genuine "conversation" that many liberals insist we need. But we do at least get yet another look at how far we are, gaseous Boulderdash notwithstanding, from making the momentous leap into the second tier.<br />
<br />
And that’s OK: Spirit always already has it well in hand.<br />
<br />Marty Kellerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11592136716581562644noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3401106149239386272.post-87092981254770928692012-09-16T20:24:00.000-07:002012-09-27T09:14:30.262-07:00The "Integral" Case for President Obama<i>Integral Life</i> contributor Terry Patten recently published a plea for “integralists” to support Barack Obama’s reelection entitled "<a href="http://integrallife.com/integral-post/integral-case-president-obama">The Integral Case for President Obama</a>." I acknowledge that Mr. Patten’s call is a noble attempt to get his arms around the challenges of the current breakdown of the global order from as advanced a perspective as he could muster. He deserves credit for being courageous enough to raise the matter of evolution of consciousness in the very real context of our actual political economy, and for being willing to expose his stand to analysis and criticism.<br />
<br />
That said, I am happy to oblige.<br />
<br />
It’s been a serious concern to me for some time now that people associated with Ken Wilber, the Integral Institute, and its various offshoots keep using the terms “integral movement” and “integral community” so casually, because I have no idea what those words mean.<br />
<br />
The lack of specificity about the common understanding of “integral” in these labels is a symptom of the general intellectual sloppiness that postmodernism and Boomeritis have injected into our public discourse. It is unfortunate that Wilber and many associated with the Integral Institute both tolerate and often perpetuate this.<br />
<br />
Let’s see if we can’t bring some clarity and specificity to the matter.<br />
<br />
<br />
<i><b>The Meaning of “Integral”</b></i><br />
<br />
Wilber first began using the word “integral” in <i>Up from Eden</i>, where he referred to Jean Gebser’s application of it to the integral/aperspectival wave of consciousness that succeeded the mental/rational [Orange] wave. Then, in <i>Sex, Ecology, and Spirituality</i> and <i>The Marriage of Sense and Soul</i>, he introduced “integral” to the AQAL model, referring primarily to the first levels of consciousness in the transpersonal bands. In <i>A Theory of Everything</i>, Wilber presented the idea of First and Second Tier from Spiral Dynamics, with the First Tier comprising the prepersonal and personal waves, and the Second the transpersonal. “Second-tier thinking . . . is instrumental is moving from relativism to holism, or from <i>pluralism</i> to <i>integralism</i>” [italics in original] (p. 12).<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a>Landing in the Second Tier requires the “momentous leap” into an awareness <i>completely different and new</i> from the level of mature Green, the highest First Tier wave. “Integral” in this sense therefore refers to both this higher, transpersonal wave <i>and </i>to its structures.<br />
<br />
Despite claims to the contrary, I see no evidence that this new wave—Teal in Wilber’s spectrum model—is breaking out in any significant numbers anywhere on the planet, Boulder included. Terry’s essay is certainly evidence that in the cognitive line of development people can begin to intentionally take multiple perspectives, but as Wilber has patiently pointed out, cognitive only leads the way; it is not the wave itself. <br />
<br />
I suggest that when one’s center of gravity of consciousness actually ascends into the Second Tier, the shift in perspective is so radical that it is impossible to report back to those of us in First Tier with any effectiveness what it’s like. In the transpersonal realms our center of gravity moves out of the Upper Left into the Lower Left because our identity ceases to be with our individual ego and broadens to something much larger. We have disidentified with our personal self-concept, and are now seeing ourselves as something transcendent. <br />
<br />
Wilber used to call this first transpersonal wave the Psychic, with its identity in nature mysticism. <i>The Atman Project</i> and <i>Sex, Ecology, and Spirituality</i> offer extensive reports about the structures of this wave. With the publication of <i>Integral Psychology</i>, Ken begins to relax insistence on this, and to speak of the Second Tier more generally.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
In the archeology of the Self, deep within the personal lies the transpersonal, which takes you far beyond the personal: always within and beyond. Experienced previously only in peak experiences, or as a background intuition of immortality, wonder, and grace, the soul begins now to emerge more permanently in consciousness. Not yet infinite and all-embracing, no longer merely personal and mortal, the soul is the great intermediate conveyor between pure Spirit and individual self. The soul can embrace the gross realm in nature mysticism, or it can plumb its own depths in deity mysticism. It can confer a postmortem meaning on all of life, and deliver grace to every corner of the psyche. It offers the beginning of an unshakable witnessing and equanimity in the midst of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and breathes a tender mercy on all that it encounters. It is reached by a simple technique: turn left at mind, and go within. (p. 106)</blockquote>
While this is a fairly good description of that realm, it has very limited value because until we make the leap ourselves we can only interpret these reports from a First Tier perspective. To awaken each morning identifying as something more comprehensive, holistic, and beyond our individual self-sense is an experience almost no human being living has had with any consistency and persistence. We just ain’t there yet.<br />
<br />
The fact that some of us can see that “there” is exciting, but again the map is not the territory. <br />
<br />
If the evidence suggests that the actual number of individuals living in the transpersonal is miniscule, what then could possible constitute the “integral community” and the “integral movement”?<br />
<br />
<i><b><br />So What Is the “Integral Community”?</b></i><br />
<br />
(Let us note in passing the vapidity of the word “community” in this context. It is part of the postmodern assault on language and reason to water down meaning so as to render signifiers all but devoid of specificity. Pomos have made this word, for instance, mean “any collection of individuals with even a single feature in common,” rather than an organic and comprehensive group of individuals with a common culture and purpose.)<br />
<br />
So let’s go to the website of the Integral Institute to discover what the Wilberites might mean when they use the word “integral.”<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Integral theory is an all-inclusive framework that draws on the key insights of the world’s greatest knowledge traditions. The awareness gained from drawing on all truths and perspectives allows the Integral thinker to bring new depth, clarity and compassion to every level of human endeavor — from unlocking individual potential to finding new approaches to global-scale problems. </blockquote>
At the <i>Integral Life</i> web site, we learn that<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Something amazing is happening right now.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
All around the world, a new culture is beginning to emerge.<br />
<br />
It's a culture of people like you—people who are bringing more beauty into the world, more love to our human family, and more wholeness to lives. People who understand that we are all still evolving, and that growth and self-discovery is a life-long journey.<br />
<br />
It's a culture of people who are creating an entirely new vision of who we are and where we are going—a positive, inspiring, radically hopeful vision of the future.</blockquote>
The site also features a <a href="http://integrallife.com/video/brief-history-integral">video by Ken Wilber</a> giving a 20-minute overview of this general integral catch-all idea. <br />
<br />
It appears, then, that when Wilber and his colleagues use the term “integral” they don’t really mean the first transpersonal waves of consciousness <i>per se</i> but rather the <i>concepts</i> that adopting an integral perspective offers. It seems to be about the cognitive line of development by which those with a center of gravity in Green are capable of adopting—at least temporarily—multiple perspectives, and working toward a perspective that embraces them all. So we can conclude that the “integral community” comprises those individuals aspiring or consciously intending to move their center of gravity into the Second Tier—whether that has actually occurred or not.<br />
<br />
This is a crucial distinction, because in fact authentic integral consciousness includes the majority of the lines of development, and not merely the cognitive. That I can take other perspectives for moments on end does not necessarily mean that I can experience their interiority, or that I can empathize with their assumptions, or that I can feel equanimity toward them all. It does not mean that I have access to my own Shadow material, or that I have embraced and withdrawn all my projections, or that I have established genuine accountability for all my thoughts, feelings, instincts, and intuitions.<br />
<br />
And until I have made the “momentous leap” in a majority of my lines of development, I remain, integral cognitive capability notwithstanding, in the First Tier.<br />
<br />
So I think a more accurate designation of this collection of people that Wilber and the Integral Institute folks want to speak for and reach out to is the “integral wannabe community.”<br />
<br />
Since integral wannabes are still ensconced in the First Tier, we can expect the kind of conventional political thinking that characterizes Mr. Patten’s essay. This includes some very questionable assertions about Mr. Obama and his Democratic Party, as well as some very First Tier assumptions about the relationship of our political economy to the evolution of consciousness.<br />
<br />
So let us now turn our attention to these.<br />
<br />
<br />
<i><b>Obama and First Tier Consciousness</b></i><br />
<br />
The questionable assertions start early. “I think it’s safe to say,” Patten writes, “that a majority of people with integral and evolutionary values eagerly supported then-Senator Obama in 2008.” We’re back to the kind of fallacy of composition made so memorable by <a href="http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/02/27/the-actual-pauline-kael-quote%E2%80%94not-as-bad-and-worse/">Pauline Kael in her remarks about Richard Nixon’s re-election</a> in 1972. “I live in a rather special world,” she said. “I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.”<br />
<br />
Mr. Patten similarly lives in a special world. Given the complete absence of a census of people living at Teal and of integral wannabes, how in the world could anyone know the percentage of them who “eagerly supported” Obama the first time around? Perhaps Mr. Patten knows one person who voted for McCain. If not, I will be happy to introduce myself.<br />
<br />
The same fallacy applies to the assumptions laden in the words “integral and evolutionary values.” What are these, and when did we vote on them?<br />
<br />
After asserting his disappointment with Mr. Obama with a variety of his actions (or inactions), Mr. Patten then says, <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
At the same time, I believe a large majority of us agree with many of his cultural values (for example, on gay marriage, women’s health, and the environment), appreciate his efforts and accomplishments in an incredibly hostile political environment, and believe that he is still the best hope we have for more integral policies and politics. Moreover, we look at the alternative—which is not just the elusive candidate, Mitt Romney, but a Republican party that has become increasingly dogmatic, oppositional, and rigid—and we realize that Obama is still the far better choice.</blockquote>
Wow. The values he cites are actually Boomeritis values stemming from the postmodern deification of multiculturalism, which Wilber has on more than one occasion skewered. The integral embrace can certainly appreciate why Boomeritis has adopted these values, and can acknowledge that they are certainly true for those who espouse them. But it can simultaneously point out that they do not necessarily have anything to do with the drive toward “more integral policies and politics”—and in fact I will argue that just the reverse is true.<br />
<br />
It is also a decidedly First Tier assertion that the “Republican party . . . has become increasingly dogmatic, oppositional, and rigid.” In fact, it is a decidedly <i>Democratic party</i> assertion, because from the Republican point of view it is in fact the Democrats who have become “increasingly dogmatic, oppositional, and rigid,” and their point of view is, from an integral perspective, equally true for them. These charges and countercharges are just features of the First Tier food fight, and don’t really offer much evidence of an evolutionary impulse; they’re just translative activity.<br />
<br />
Mr. Patten then goes on to call the presidency of George W. Bush a “disastrous mistake,” without any evidence to demonstrate this; more Kaelism. He asserts that President Obama “has proven himself to be a pragmatic modernist centrist.” Proven himself to whom? I can build a much more powerful case that the President is a postmodernist leftist, intent on forcing the round peg of his theory of community organizing into the square hole of a nation based upon the sovereignty of individual citizens.<br />
<br />
This “pragmatic modernist centrist” is “someone we can count on to lean toward constructive change.” Again, what is “constructive change”? More policies based upon the pomo assault on reason and Western values? Isn’t that really “destructive change”? <br />
<br />
“We have a duty to help culture evolve, in part by electing a modernist President whose center of gravity is more postmodern than traditional—and more open to and capable of an integral view. That makes our support of him a truly integral move.” With this statement I wholeheartedly agree. The problem for me is that this person is not the incumbent seeking re-election.<br />
<br />
You see, everyone at Orange and beyond is “capable of an integral view.” But capacity is a mere potential, and even if a significant number of these are “open to” it, it requires a lot more than capacity and openness to get there.<br />
<br />
Mr. Patten and the wannabe integralists would be well served to study the presidency of Abraham Lincoln, the last president to truly inspire a transformative shift in the American polity toward the prime directive.<br />
<br />
<br />
<i><b>Authentic Transformative Leadership</b></i><br />
<br />
Mr. Lincoln was a thoroughly Orange worldcentric leader who understood the global significance and necessity of the American experiment in self government based upon universal values of individual dignity and sovereignty. He recognized the dramatic encumbrance that slavery was upon the full realization of those values, while acknowledging the Amber tinge of most of the nation’s electorate. His remarkable achievement lay in guiding the nation through the Civil War toward not only constitutional emancipation, but indeed toward a national agenda of full industrialization, setting the framework for the emergence of an Orange, middle-class nation bursting with the wealth and optimism that this wave makes possible.<br />
<br />
What made Mr. Lincoln the real deal was his conscious embrace of his world historic mission, his skillful oratory to prepare the nation for the coming transformation, and his sure-footed tactical manipulation of politicians, general, and public opinion. Now <i>here</i> was a “pragmatic modernist centrist” who didn’t just “lean into constructive change,” he grabbed hold of it by the neck and dragged it kicking and screaming across the finish line. And he was able to do this only because the finish line lay in the direction of transformation and transcendence.<br />
<br />
Of course, there are those who choose to believe that the communitarian impulses that animate most of the left in the U. S. are also in the direction of transformation and transcendence, and in theory they are correct. But in practice they are usually clueless and often counterproductive. And this includes Mr. Obama and his national Democratic party, which since its capture by the New Left in 1972 has increasingly abandoned the nation’s founding principles for some highly suspect alternatives.<br />
<br />
One has only to look to Detroit or to California to see what the country would look like if we ever truly abandoned ourselves to this postmodernist Boomeritis utopian insistence.<br />
<br />
Mr. Patten says that “[i]n the long-term, I believe we must create a truly integral evolutionary moment, including an integral political party.” Well, yes, and in the long-term we must establish world peace and double life expectancy. <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
But in the immediate term, there is no real integral option—at least not in the US. When we look at our realistic options, I believe we have a better chance of integralizing the Democratic party than the Republican party, at least at this point. That’s why I’m supporting Obama in this election. If he wins, it serves a double purpose. It potentially breaks the fever of the doctrinaire right-wing regressive lurch that has seized the Republican party in the last few years, and brings both parties closer to a pragmatic center. That’s the hope.</blockquote>
Well, in the spirit of integral fraternity, I certainly wish Mr. Patten good luck with that integralizing of the Democratic party, a thoroughly Boomeritis institution in denial about the financial, physical, and psychic indebtedness it has, in collusion with the Republicans, promoted since the Great Society fiasco.<br />
<br />
But I heartily disagree with his assertion that “there is no real integral option.” This is the final evidence that we are dealing with a First Tier perspective. For in the Second Tier, the prime directive itself becomes our guide, and from <i>that</i> perspective everything is always possible—once we have accepted responsibility for what comes next.<br />
<br />
And please note that I choose the word “we” deliberately, for at Teal and higher we identify no longer with our personal self-sense but with a wider and deeper embrace. We are equally as conscious of us as we are of our individual entity, and our perspective is no longer limited by perceptions of what that individual entity can accomplish on its own.<br />
<br />
The great political economic project we can undertake is the denarcissification of Green—the healing of Boomeritis. Evolution will be much more efficiently served once the Red boulder stuck in our Green soul is dissolved, and healthy Green can become the genuine gateway to the Second Tier.<br />
<br />
“I would argue,” Mr. Patten writes, “that our integral responsibility is to hold a difficult balance between preserving what works in our existing structures, while also pushing the edges and opening spaces for the new and higher and better that’s yearning to emerge.” Well, sure—to the extent that we’ve developed a yoga to do this.<br />
<br />
But I would argue that the development of that yoga is our priority, something that Wilber and others’ writings and videos on Integral Life Practice have been groping toward. This yoga ought, in my assessment, to include powerful Shadow and projection-withdrawing training, along with an authentic accountability practice. I can never genuinely embrace the perspectives of others until I recognize them within myself—good, bad, <i>and</i> ugly. <br />
<br />
Given the dismal impact Boomeritis has had on our civic lives, it seems foolish to invest a whole lot of psychic energy in conventional politics. Sure, vote, contribute, polemicize, organize. These are all honorable actions citizens can and should undertake. <br />
<br />
But let the integralists and intergralist wannabes hold very lightly to the results. Our awareness and insights about the future outworkings of the evolutionary impulse remain incredibly partial, if not mostly wrong. Who would have thought in 1900 that the coming century would both be the bloodiest, most violent, and financially disrupted century in human history, and would have at the same time generate so much wealth that life expectancy would double and the number of humans—the Kosmos’ agents of self-aware evolution—would sextuple?<br />
<br />
With the rate of change now accelerating, and with the world for the first time dominated by three distinct waves of First Tier consciousness, it would be foolish in the extreme to assume <i>anything</i> definitive about what comes next. But let us concentrate on the task of healing Green; it is something for which we bear total responsibility, whether we know in this moment exactly how that can be accomplished or not.<br />
<br />
In the meantime, of course, Spirit has it all in hand, friends; rest in this while fearlessly doing your thing.Marty Kellerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11592136716581562644noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3401106149239386272.post-30410063801223467252012-04-23T16:35:00.006-07:002012-09-27T09:10:18.837-07:00Trimemetic TurbulenceThe most recent US jobs report confirms the long-term lassitude in job formation that has characterized the now almost four-year economic downturn. While the official unemployment rate drifted down a tenth of a point to 8.2%, new job creation was a trifling 120,000 for March. (Economists generally assert that we would need to add jobs at a monthly rate of 300,000 to return employment to what it was at the beginning of the recession.) More alarming, the labor force participation rate—the percentage of adults in the market of employment—continues its slow decline; it stands at 63.8%, down from 65.7% in January of 2009.<br />
<br />
Additionally, the real unemployment rate, which accounts for people out of work plus those with part-time jobs who prefer to be in fulltime work, is 14.5%—down from its high point of 17.2% in October of 2009, but still a daunting number.<br />
<br />
Also in recent news, the Eurozone is on alert again after Spain’s latest bond offering yielded disappointing results. After the auction, the International Monetary Fund warned that Spain is facing “severe” challenges. Italy’s labor unions are challenging the technician government of Mario Monti’s determination to open up that country’s restrictive employment laws. And Greece’s technician prime minister called snap elections for May 6; polls show plunging support for the two main parties. Nickolas Sarkozy came in second in the first round of voting and is in danger of losing the French presidency to Socialist François Hollande in the May run-off.<br />
<br />
Walter Russell Mead, perspicacious as always, noted last week that <br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
for what it’s worth, the world economy is beginning to look a little shaky again. The two problems: Europe has papered over its euro difficulties but hasn’t solved anything, and China is reaching the limits of its old development model without having found a way to shift to something new.</blockquote>
Although we have no evidence that Professor Mead has read “Three Blind Memes,” he accurately identifies the unprecedented dynamics at play in the Right Hand Quadrants of today’s global political economy.<br />
<a name='more'></a><blockquote class="tr_bq">
The danger is greater because the US is in the middle of its transformation from a blue model, industrial economy to something postindustrial that we don’t yet understand. The interaction of Asian, European, Latin American and Anglosphere economies also confounds policy makers. We’ve never had anything quite like the global economy in view today, with its mix of huge surplus and titanic deficit economies, with its fiat money and globally integrated financial markets. The experts and pundits stroke their chins very convincingly on TV, but neither they nor anybody else really grasps either the big picture or all the moving parts that make up the world economy today.</blockquote>
When I wrote <a href="http://aqalblog.blogspot.com/2009/08/three-blind-memes.html">“Three Blind Memes”</a> back in 2004 (with an update in 2009), I was applying an AQAL analysis to the world situation. The salient issue, I asserted, was the unprecedented dominance of huge numbers of humans and societies by three distinctly different First Tier waves of consciousness. It had been difficult enough for the previous five hundred years when Amber and Orange were duking it out for dominance; the introduction of Green into the mix transformed the dynamics in ways we still have difficulty assessing.<br />
<br />
This is in part because of the relative immaturity of Green as a stable wave. Wilber’s great insights from his integral post-metaphysics that the levels of consciousness are structured as probability waves helps us understand the chaotic behavior of Green in this its first half-century of mass manifestation. Its current majoritarian variant, Boomeritis, is essentially the result of the extreme youth of this newly-emerging Kosmic habit. It simply hasn’t had enough time and usage to manifest predictable characteristics and worldviews as reliable as the earlier waves.<br />
<br />
Wilber explains his notions of the levels of consciousness as Kosmic habits in his 2002 on-line postings from <i><a href="http://wilber.shambhala.com/html/books/kosmos/index.cfm/">Kosmic Karma and Creativity</a></i>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
This means, for example, that all of the waves up to today's leading edge of evolution (which in humans roughly means, up to around the green wave) have been inherited as morphogenetic grooves and contextual fields. They originally emerged in part as creative novelty at evolution's leading edge, but then were laid down as Kosmic habits and thus form part of the building blocks of future occasions. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The older the meme, of course, the more fixed a Kosmic habit it has become. Thus, the basic features of beige, or the sensorimotor wave, are similar the world over: all humans, without exception, require food, water, warmth, shelter. Purple has been around for at least 30,000 years; red for at least 10,000 years; [amber], for around 3,000 years—so, relatively speaking, there is very little wiggle room left in their deep features: they have become morphogenetic groves of intense habitual patterns almost impossible to break (even though originally they emerged in part as creative freedom). Orange is only 300 years old, but most of its forms seem to have settled in. Green, on the other hand, is only around 30 years old (on any sort of collective scale), so green has a fair amount of wiggle room left in its structure; it is not yet a fully settled habit. The leading-edge today is around [turquoise], which means that any of you who are pioneering integral ideas and practices are actually creating the Kosmic habits that future generations will inherit, even as future generations continue to move beyond [turquoise].</blockquote>
It seems apparent to me that the “wiggle room” in Green is a problem unto its own self, because the narcissism embedded in Boomeritis enmeshes with that in Amber and Orange in such a way as to offer no hope of transcendence and healing. The seeming intractability of the “50-50” state of American politics is Exhibit A of this gridlock.<br />
<br />
While I give Wilber great credit for stepping out of his study to launch public institutions for framing the integral inquiry, it doesn’t seem likely that these “salons,” as he refers to them, will or even could actually birth an authentic Second Tier wave. Rather, we might look back at them, much as he looks back to the French and English salons of the eighteenth century, as places where the emerging integral structure started receiving names for and analysis of what was manifesting among any number of people.<br />
<br />
Let us simply acknowledge that those longing so passionately for the Second Tier to manifest—we can call them the “hope and change crowd”—are jolly eddies in the chaos that is in full roar at the present.<br />
<br />
Make no mistake about it: we are helplessly caught in world historic currents of such turbulence and energy that probably the best we can do for the time being is surrender to it while keeping alert for the eventual emergence of levees and islands of stability.<br />
<br />
At the same time we can prepare to encounter these banks and islands by conscious inquiry into the tetradimensional nature of reality as we find it here and now, and be willing to hold lightly our conclusions.<br />
<br />
I participated this past weekend in a conference call hosted by a group of people associated with the <a href="http://www.integralleadershipcollaborative.com/sq/6617-ilc-free-content">Integral Leadership Collaborative</a>, “the world’s first online learning community dedicated to the practice of Integral Leadership.” This call was the first of a series of dialogues to “bring the integral community together, and kick start the movement.”<br />
<br />
I found the call both entertaining and illuminating. The main host was <a href="http://integralthinkers.com/authors/brett-thomas/">Brett Thomas</a>, “an active leader in the integral movement.” He managed the digital switchboard, cuing speakers and moving participants into small group discussions. According to Thomas, at the height of the call there were 212 people from around the world. <br />
<br />
After about a half hour of introductory business, Ken Wilber came on the line and talked a bit about the purpose of the call and the invitation to join the “integral movement”—although I give Wilber credit for openly questioning whether the label “movement” is an appropriate signifier for the struggle of Second Tier waves to emerge as a mass phenomenon. <br />
<br />
Faithful readers know of my skepticism about claims made by Wilber and others about the dimension of this emergence. Surely I have seen no evidence of the claims of “2% of the world’s population” moving into the transpersonal; that would mean over 136 <i>million</i> people have the center of gravity of their consciousness at Turquoise. Or even if the claim is scaled back to the advanced sector, that would still comprise almost 22 million individuals. Or, just to focus on California, I should be able to meet some 750,000 fellow citizens living here out of Turquoise.<br />
<br />
Hmmm. I have been involved in many communities based on the intentions or desires to be open to the presence of Spirit or to Second Tier awareness, and I think I know a handful of people that seem to operate out of transegoic, Second Tier consciousness. Where are all those other people hiding?<br />
<br />
So, color me unconvinced about the imminence and the scale of Second Tier emergence.<br />
<br />
Still, there is no denying that <i>something</i> is happening, and that that something is happening at a time of trimetetic turbulence suggests the possibility of real transformation among larger and larger numbers of people. The global transformation we are experiencing is identifiably similar to that during which Orange emerged from Amber—a process that took several centuries to find a political economic home from which to keep it relatively secure and stable. The current transformation will probably take far less time to consolidate as a wave with similarly predictable probabilities—although it may be the emergence of Green rather than Turquoise that in the fullness of time will have been underway during this period. <br />
<br />
This makes sense because of Green’s relative youth as a wave. Boomeritis still pervades too many with this center of gravity. The tendency among those attracted to the integral work to conflate Green with Second Tier is an impediment to clarity about the ways Green (and beyond) could actually be working to attract the junior stages towards transcendence.<br />
<br />
I suggested in my breakout group that among the key action steps people drawn to exploring “integral” can take is to promote Shadow work at all levels. As I have argued in earlier posts, integrating Shadow material appears to be essential to permanent transcendence into the Second Tier. Without healing the pathologies that occurred in especially the prepersonal stages, those that disappeared into the Shadow, individuation remains incomplete. Complete transcendence of the ego—access to the transpersonal realms—cannot occur as long as the personal ego itself remains only partially developed.<br />
<br />
Wilber’s assertion that the central problem of the world today is the necessity for greater emergence and consolidation of healthy individual egos should probably be the starting point for all analysis and discussion of the contribution of the integrally-informed.<br />
<br />
The insertion of Green, even in its Boomeritis version, into the Amber-Orange conflict offers the possibility of greater compassion and embrace. People attracted to the promise of the integral expression need to wrestle with healing Boomeritis’ narcissism so that genuine and healthy Green can emerge in significant numbers. The sooner Green can settle down into its potential as a probability wave, the sooner its authentic sensitivity can call Orange forth toward it. <br />
<br />
At the same time, those of us at healthy Green find ourselves inexorably drawn toward the Great Leap into the Second Tier. But until we apply Green’s abundant compassion toward the tough work of Shadow integration, the transcendence will remain a tantalizing possibility.<br />
<br />
And all of this has to occur in a world roiling from the travails in the Right Hand quadrants as the leading edge of the global political economy moves deeper into the Information Age. So many of our challenges are a direct result of this shift, as many of us try to defend the old ways from collapse while others push the new economy with wild abandon. <br />
<br />
I think it’s difficult for us collectively to deal with what appears to be expanding chaos. We have no models from the future, as it were, upon which to depend for guidance. Instead we are cursed with only our past experience upon which to draw conclusions and from which to devise plans of action. Worse, even when we have powerful insights about new and better ways of dealing with the emerging world, we are immediately beset by doubts about their viability.<br />
<br />
This is why turning to small groups makes sense. In these groups—or salons, if you prefer—we can test out various theories, insights, and conclusions based on experience with others of like passion. We won’t do this to create a movement or to generate Second Tier consciousness; Spirit has that work well in hand.<br />
<br />
We’ll do it to accelerate our own awareness, for when we look into the highly polished mirror of our friends and colleagues with great curiosity and commitment to refrain from judgment, we will start to encounter our Shadows, and on the other side of that startling and scary activity we will come to know the gift we are each bringing to the work.<br />
<br />
And once we are conscious of these gifts in willing accountability for their being given to our chosen group, true acceleration becomes a real possibility.<br />
<br />
The trimetetic turbulence will be with us for a long time, but the good news is that we will never experience quadrimemetic wars, for the next wave of consciousness has no ax to grind with anything or anyone in the First Tier.Marty Kellerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11592136716581562644noreply@blogger.com0