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. 

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.

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.

What Is "Integral"?

Over the course of the past two years I have begun paddling to more islands in the integral archipelago.  It started with conversations with Jeff Salzman at the Integral Institute’s Daily Evolver, 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.

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.  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.  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.

One source of discord might be a disagreement on exactly what “integral” is.  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.  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.

The main sources of divergence seem to be from various Wilberians and Gravesians seeking to interpret Wilber's and Graves' work.  It’s too bad Wilber went whole hog into Spiral Dynamics and then abruptly pulled back and recast the color scheme.  Further complicating the picture was Don Beck’s development of Spiral Dynamics Integral and the break with Christopher Cowan.  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.

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.  From Sex, Ecology, Spirituality through Integral Psychology, Wilber has offered slightly differing versions of the stages of the spectrum of consciousness, aka the Spiral.  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.

Indeed, he originally adopted the term “integral” from Jean Gebser’s classifications of the waves of collective consciousness extensively chronicled in The Ever Present Origin.  Gebser called the inchoate transrational emergence he detected back in the 1930s the “integral/aperspectival” wave.  By that he meant that, contra 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 perspective-taking as an activity of being was now arising among humans.

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.

Towards an Authentic Integral Politics

There will be no authentic integral politics until a critical mass of humanity makes the momentous leap into second tier consciousness.

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.  

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.

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 versus what we think that might be from here in the first. Green is not integral regardless of our capacity to think about it.

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.

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.

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).