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.

Comments on Steve McIntosh's Paper on Modernizing Islam

The Institute for Cultural Evolution (ICE) and its co-founder Steve McIntosh have just released a new white paper entitled “Fostering Evolution in Islamic Culture,” and have requested comments.

The purpose of the paper is to propose a method for Western societies to address the challenge the “difficult and dire problem” of “the ongoing rise of radical Islamism” we have been witnessing since the end of the Cold War.  The underlying assumption of the paper derives from ICE’s “aim to create significant forward movement in the evolution of the American political landscape, and apply this new ‘evolutionary’ perspective to the developmental challenges of a complex, globalizing world.”  ICE believes that it is possible to “positively influence the evolution of American culture in realistic and measurable ways” by “applying groundbreaking insights taken from Integral philosophy, developmental psychology, evolutionary theory, and the social sciences to help create significant forward movement in the evolution of the American cultural and political landscape.”

Now, apparently, not content with this demanding undertaking, we are invited to apply this same thinking to “Muslim culture” as the beginning of a remedy to the problem of radical Islamism.

I truly love and appreciate these efforts to uncover what, if anything, can be done to consciously expand consciousness on a mass basis.  Having studied this for some time, my own conclusion is “not at this time,” but what do I know?

Still, I find many flaws in the ICE proposition and its analyses, and this particular paper has its share.  Perhaps its author might be willing to consider them. 

Where to begin?

The paper makes regular reference to “traditional Islamic culture” as if that is a uniform system encompassing the 1.6 billion Muslims around the world.  But this is, at best, a misnomer, for many distinct cultures with their own peculiar history, political economy, and customs embrace Islam, from Arabic, Turkish, Egyptian, and Persian to Kazakh, Afghani, Punjabi, Indonesian, and many others.  While they all have Islam in common, they also are all centered in amber consciousness, which, as I will point out, is the actual issue.

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.