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.

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. 

The Trumpet Shall Sound

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 Corinthians 15:52

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 “Integral Trump, or the Center Cannot Hold” 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?

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 close look 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.

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.

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 types—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. 

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.

The Fake News Head Fake

We 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. 

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. 

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. 

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.

Transcend and Exclude: the Postmodern U-Turn

Ken 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 previously, 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.

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.

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.

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 rejects 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.

Integral Trump, or, the Center Cannot Hold

"But I have no power to make other men see the truth . . .”—Albus Dumbledore, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

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.

I originally sketched out the contours of the Trimemetic War ten years ago in a series of essays entitled “Three Blind Memes,” where I wrote:

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.

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.

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.

Reaping the Whirlwind

Some 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.

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.

I wrote about these dynamics in this blog nine years ago after the violent “protests” erupted in various corners of Dar al-Islam (the Muslim world) when the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten dared to publish satirical cartoons 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.

(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.) 

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.

It is a product of Wilber’s last great original insight laid out in his work on integral post-metaphysics 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.

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 century old, is still all over the place. Since the Integral Model posits that each emerging wave transcends and includes 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.

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.

Le massacre Charlie Hebdo: a Second Tier Perspective

I 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 “Three Blind Memes.”)

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.

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.

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 Charlie Hebdo massacre implies, amber and green find common purpose in boxing in orange.

Global 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.

“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.”

      —Rupert Durwall, The Age of Global Warming


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. 

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.

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.

The Boomer Banality of Barack Obama

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. 

According to an article by Mark Landler published in the New York Times,

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.”

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.”

“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.”

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.  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.

Integral Politics: A Primer

[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 dialogue with Layman Pascal on the Integral Life 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.]

In his extended interview with Tami Simon on Kosmic Consciousness, Ken Wilber makes the distinction between integral consciousness and being “integrally informed.”

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.

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.

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.

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.


First Step: One's Own Perspective

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.

More Boulderdash

That which we call Boomeritis by any other name would still reek of narcissism.


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 “The Daily Evolver,” during which he works hard to offer an integral look at daily events.

The problem is how to arrive at a common understanding of “integral,” something I’ve written extensively about.  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 integral wanna-be.  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.

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.

In his most recent broadcast, 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.

But his lack of rigor renders the balance of his presentation ineffectual (when not downright hilarious).

The "Integral" Case for President Obama

Integral Life contributor Terry Patten recently published a plea for “integralists” to support Barack Obama’s reelection entitled "The Integral Case for President Obama."  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.

That said, I am happy to oblige.

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.

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.

Let’s see if we can’t bring some clarity and specificity to the matter.


The Meaning of “Integral”

Wilber first began using the word “integral” in Up from Eden, 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 Sex, Ecology, and Spirituality and The Marriage of Sense and Soul, he introduced “integral” to the AQAL model, referring primarily to the first levels of consciousness in the transpersonal bands.  In A Theory of Everything, 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 pluralism to integralism” [italics in original] (p. 12).

Trimemetic Turbulence

The 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.

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.

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.

Walter Russell Mead, perspicacious as always, noted last week that

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.

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.

Occupy AQAL

I am not alone in my dismay at the muddled “thought” that substitutes for the commitment to rigorous spiritual principles among the trendy spiritual gurus of mass American culture.

Deepak Chopra, Jean Houston, Marianne Williamson, and Neal Donald Walsch, and others of these media gurus have enunciated truths that contain relatively accurate insights from the perennial wisdom.  I have learned much from each of them.  In particular I have great fondness for Jean Houston, whose Mystery School program made such a contribution to my father. But something trips all of them up whenever they stray into real world politics.  Without exception, demonstrating not the slightest absorption of the spiritual truths they present, they come across as New Age liberals without a scintilla of integral insight.

They simply haven't studied the integral model at all.

Thus their glamorizing the Occupiers and misreading of their influence is telling but not surprising to anyone who has followed their work.  Not only does it spring from their ongoing falling for the pre/trans fallacy, it is also an expression of the very real confusion among Greens about the actual structure of the transpersonal realm.

As Wilber has often pointed out, Boomeritis Greens are particularly susceptible to the pre/trans fallacy because of their vehement rejection of reason.  Thus they are apt to label anything nonrational as transrational, thus falling time and again for the communitarian bling of the left's rejection of  individual freedom in favor of group rights.  Their embrace of the Occupiers is just the latest demonstration of the problem.

As a group, these media spiritual gurus lambaste our market economy, insisting that we must put “human values” before “economic values,” as Williamson demands in her speech to the Los Angeles Occupiers.  Indeed, our friends offer spiritual cover for the political demand for something they call “economic justice,” a very vague program centered on more vigorous redistributionist policies.

A Boomer Reflects on Boomeritis

Walter Russell Mead (born 1952), James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, is one of my favorite commentators on the world political economy.

Although I have never heard him mention Ken Wilber, his writing is certainly integrally informed.  He understands and writes about the impact of cultural dynamics on historical, political, and economic trends globally.  He acknowledges the role that our human foibles play in the way we make and carry out public policy.  He looks for and analyzes the interplay of events and impulses, both personal and collective.

He recently posted a useful polemic on the impact of Boomeritis on our generation—although he doesn’t use that term.  In “Listen Up, Boomers: the Backlash Has Begun,” Professor Mead takes us Boomers to task for what he sees as a generational failure whose seeds were sown from the very beginning.

He, like Wilber, certainly acknowledges the many contributions we have made to the material advancement of humanity.  But these pale in comparison to our disappointments.

But at the level of public policy and moral leadership, as a generation we have largely failed.  The Boomer Progressive Establishment in particular has been a huge disappointment to itself and to the country.  The political class slumbered as the entitlement and pension crisis grew to ominous dimensions. Boomer financial leadership was selfish and shortsighted, by and large.  Boomer CEOs accelerated the trend toward unlimited greed among corporate elites, and Boomer members of corporate boards sit by and let it happen.  Boomer academics created a profoundly dysfunctional system that systemically shovels resources upward from students and adjuncts to overpaid administrators and professors who by and large have not, to say the least, done an outstanding job of transmitting the cultural heritage of the past to future generations.  Boomer Hollywood execs created an amoral morass of sludge — and maybe I’m missing something, but nobody spends a lot of time talking about the towering cultural accomplishments of the world historical art geniuses of the Boomer years.  Boomer greens enthusiastically bet their movement on the truly idiotic drive for a global carbon treaty; they are now grieving over their failure to make any measurable progress after decades spent and hundreds of millions of dollars thrown away.  On the Boomer watch the American family and the American middle class entered major crises; by the time the Boomers have finished with it the health system will be an unaffordable and dysfunctional tangle — perhaps the most complicated, expensive and poorly designed such system in the history of the world.

And, he points out—channeling Wilber’s indictment of Boomeritis—“all of this was done by a generation that never lost its confidence that it was smarter, better educated and more idealistic than its Depression-surviving, World War-winning, segregation-ending, prosperity-building parents.”

The Immediate Challenge: Healthy Green

Andrew Cohen, in the summer 2006 issue of What Is Enlightenment? magazine, wrote that

[t]o consciously evolve is to surrender unconditionally to the truth that there is no other and at the same time to accept responsibility for what that means in an evolving universe—a cosmos that is slowly but surely becoming aware of itself through you and me. one without a second is simultaneously awakening to itself as it develops, as it evolves, and it is that one, as you and me, alone, that can now begin to take responsibility for endeavoring to consciously create its own future.

At the leading edge of this consciousness evolution, which is basically at the Green mature rational egoic wave, what is necessary for us to assume responsibility for how this evolution occurs? I assert that what we must focus on is consolidation of healthy Green, for that will lead almost immediately into the transpersonal waves and the integral embrace.

We face this developmental challenge even as Green must deal with assaults from its two junior stages. As I wrote in the “Three Blind Memes” series below, the world is enjoying an unprecedented collision of three powerful First Tier memes: Amber premodern (which can also be understood as the preconventional, traditional, mythic/membership, rule/role stage), Orange modern (conventional, rational/egoic, scientific), and Green postmodern (postconventional. vision/logic, sensitive self).

Amber, as the oldest member of this triad, arose as part of the shift in the human social and economic structures from hunter/gatherer to agriculture, some 13,000 years ago.

Orange first appeared as an identifiable feature during the so-called Axial Age around 600 BCE, but did not manifest in significant numbers until after the Italian Renaissance in the fourteenth century CE.

Green first appeared around the turn of the nineteenth century, but showed up in sufficient numbers only in the 1960s.

One of the characteristics of this evolutionary trend is the accelerating rate of new memetic emergence. It took Amber around 40,000 years to emerge from the previous Red magic wave, but it took Orange less that 13,000 years to arise from Amber. And Green required less than half a millennium to appear.