Why Do Left Environmentalists Hate Gaia So?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Integral Model Is Not Dialectical

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

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

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

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

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

Stage Emergence is Sloppy and Violent

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

Some Remarks on Wilber's Podcast on Epistemology

In his most recent dialogue with Integral Life director Corey deVos entitled “Marx, Mysticism, and Mathematics: Navigating Our Epistemic Collapse,” Wilber concludes the series 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?  

I urge those interested in what Wilber has to say to watch the whole thing.

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.

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.

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.

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.”  

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.

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.

Truth and a Post-Trump World

It was never about President Trump.  It was always about us.

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.

When Ken Wilber undertook this task with publication of his essay “Trump and a Post-Truth World” 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.  

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. 

In his essay, Wilber ruthlessly laid out how this happened as Boomeritis collapsed into a barren combination of nihilism and narcissism.  

[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. 

. . . Nihilism and narcissism are not traits that any leading-edge can actually operate with.  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]

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.  

Mistaken Identity

Ever 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.

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.

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.

This is in large part because the Integral Model, by the very terms enunciated by Wilber in Sex, Ecology, and Spirituality and the unpublished follow-up insights in the so-called Kosmic Karma 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.

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 No Boundary, 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.

Green’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.

In his recently published “Trump and a Post-Truth World,” 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.

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.

What virtually all of the above [Trump] voters had in common was ressentiment—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).

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.


Diagnosing the Postmodernist Madness

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 Sex, Ecology, and Spirituality, and emphatically in the 1997 release of The Eye of Spirit: An Integral Vision for a World Gone Slightly Mad.