The Opportunity in Trimemetic Chaos

Self-described “atheistic libertarian” Brendan O’Neill, editor of the British e-magazine Spiked Online, has written an important article entitled “The Crisis of Character,” which looks at the progress of the postmodernist campaign to hollow out the advances in human evolution achieved by Western civilization.  The attack on modernity has many fathers going back to the rages of François-Noël “Gracchus” Babeuf during the French Revolution, but this particular viciousness was created and promoted by the embittered clerisy at the Frankfurt School and its promulgation of “critical theory.”

The signal contribution of the orange modern stage of Kosmic evolution is the liberation of the individual from the tribe.  The critical importance of this to the spectrum of consciousness seems to elude many integralites.  Only the individual, confident in his self-identity as such, can prepare the way for transcendence into the transpersonal, second tier stages where identity shifts to a much more comprehensive collective such as humanity as a whole.  This development can only occur when the individual is free to release his self-identity, and this can only occur once we fully occupy our discrete autonomous self.

I have written elsewhere about how underdeveloped the structure of this stage of evolution remains in both LH quadrants.  As Ken Wilber has noted, integral postmetaphysics suggests that the stages of consciousness behave as probability waves of interiority; the more we occupy and work them, the higher the likelihood that they will conform to predictable patterns.  All the prepersonal stages up to orange have been around for millennia and therefore present relatively stable structures.

Orange, Wilber’s “rational/egoic” stage, is only five hundred years old as a mass phenomenon of development.  Further, it is the center of gravity of consciousness for only 20% of humanity.  Even among the 20% the evidence strongly suggests that we still have quite a way to go before orange displays the same stability as the prepersonal stages.

The Evergreen Sustainability of Utopia

If the evidence of the origin and nature of the Great Enrichment is so compelling—indeed, we in the Advanced Sector enjoy its historically unprecedented benefits every day—why then does its antithesis, socialism, continue to compel such widespread allegiance that many of us seek to dismantle the American system that is its highest expression?
 

I asked this of the eminent author and economist Deirdre McCloskey at a recent public forum in London, and somewhat to my surprise she admitted she could not answer the question.

And yet McCloskey is perhaps better prepared to do so than any living economist that I’ve encountered, now that Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek are no longer with us.

She prominently established the foundation for a satisfactory answer to this important question in the first two books of her soon-to-be-completed Bourgeois Era trilogy.  Particularly in the second book, Bourgeois Dignity, she demolishes every theory of the right and the left about the factors that created this massive shift in the trajectory of human political economy, and points out that it occurred because of a singular change in the collective inner consciousness of human beings in Holland and England during the seventeenth century.

Now, McCloskey doesn’t actually say “singular shift in the collective inner consciousness”; what she does assert is that there was a discernible and decisive shift in the rhetoric of social value. 

. . . three centuries ago in places like Holland and England the talk and thought about the middle class began to alter.  Ordinary conversation about innovation and markets became more approving.  The high theorists were emboldened to rethink their prejudice against the bourgeoisie, a prejudice by then millennia old.  . . . The North Sea talk at length radically altered the local economy and politics and rhetoric.  In northwestern Europe around 1700 the general opinion shifted in favor of the bourgeoisie, and especially in favor of its marketing and innovating.  The shift was sudden as these things go.  In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a great shift occurred in what Alexis de Tocqueville called “habits of the mind”—or more exactly, habits of the lip.  People stopped sneering at market innovativeness and other bourgeois virtues exercised far from the traditional places of honor in the Basilica of St. Peter or the Palace of Versailles or the gory ground of the First Battle of Breitenfeld.[1]

It’s a shame that, in the very beginning of her insightful argument, she pulls back from examining the habits of the mind whose transformation resulted in those “habits of the lip.”  Rhetoric, after all, is a product of inner consciousness and perspective.  Talk is the crystallization of thought seeking social viability.  That people “stopped sneering” happened for a reason, and McCloskey’s argument would be more deeply served by examining and applying that reason.

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.