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as it seemed that, with his post-Wyatt Earp emphases on “integral spirituality” and “the fourth turning,” he had withdrawn his sharp insights into what his own model revealed about our political economy, thereby leaving the field of integral political analysis to the very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. 

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.