The Debate Over Idealistic Piracy in Metamodernity
(Photo Credit: theodor38/BigStock.com)
Today I saw an excerpt from a book by a contemporary metamodernist philosopher who writes:
I owe more to [Ken] Wilber than I perhaps give him credit for in this book. However, being a metamodern thinker who believes more in ideas under development than in individuals, I do not feel I owe anything to any of my inspirations. As I have said, metamodernism is idealistic piracy.
(I won’t cite the source just now, for multiple reasons including a sense of irony, but it won’t be hard for anyone to figure it out from context with a bit of research if it’s not obvious to them.)
Let’s talk a bit about giving credit to a movement visionary versus idealistic piracy. It probably won’t surprise you that I think there’s an alternative — a higher center — between slavish recitation of lineage and idea piracy.
We are all cultural appropriators. All writers and artists and philosophers are all borrowing or thieving or taking from those who came before. The notion that writers are idea pirates is not a particularly original notion. Steve Jobs said, “Good artists copy; great artists steal.” (He might have got that from Pablo Picasso.)
But cultural artifacts — the work of artists, scientists, writers, painters, and even high-tech industrialists — can be misappropriated. There are skillful and less skillful ways to appropriate. There are ethical and less ethical ways to appropriate. Much depends on context including legal realities, professional mores both written and unwritten, good manners, and ethics of right relationship v. exploitation.
So I find myself a bit suspicious when someone who leans very heavily on one source in particular seeks to obscure that relationship from the public eye, making it more difficult for those who come after him to trace the similarities and differences. At the same time, I would acknowledge that there are times when it’s not necessary to give credit and even times when it can be useful to put a mask over one’s influences in order to reach out to an audience that isn’t ready to absorb the information at that level of detail.
Let’s put the topic in a wider context. The philosopher who I quoted seems to be writing a bit as a disembodied thinker, perhaps secluded high in the mountains somewhere, one can imagine. But integralism isn’t, or shouldn’t be, the creation of intellectual artifacts of isolated individuals. It’s a movement that requires a collective sense of responsibility and accountability for acting in ways that support each other to the extent possible. We ought to have a coast guard ethic (maintaining a well-regulated organizational culture), not a pirate ethic (projecting community as a sum of competing individual ambitions).
What do I mean by “the Integral movement”? I would say that it’s a set of loosely affiliated or unaffiliated persons who perceive a great shift in our time towards the need for systemic, complex, developmentally-aware, and globally-reaching collaborations in order to address our individual evolution and collective growth in service to a loving and compassionate response to all sentient beings.
Therefore, I would avoid any blanket proclamations about Integral thought or metamodernism or evolutionary spirituality as being essentially about idea piracy. We are real people here, almost to a one of us, not sock puppets or avatars. Our creative output is an expression of real “blood, sweat, and tears”, just as the creative output of our forerunners and lineage holders was also an intensely invested experience. We need to be careful in how we appropriate others, so as not to misappropriate; in turn, we deserve the same.
Ideally, it’s about having the wisdom and discernment in a myriad of contexts to cite credit appropriately where due but not when it isn’t appropriate. Maturity of “Integral” judgment is often simply a matter of claiming the capacity to do the appropriate thing in the appropriate way in order to produce a quality outcome.
Here’s a meme to help you remember my last point. Feel free to pass it along, naturally.
A Critique of Bonnitta Roy’s Memorable Critique of Ken Wilber
Insofar as both the so-called “green” and “teal” altitudes of consciousness are one with a station of life in which Evolution is becoming increasingly self-aware, rising up from the dawn of the Second Tier to an eventual identification with Eros (holistic creativity) itself, it makes sense to wonder: What does this Second-Tier Mind consider to be “integral” or “whole” or even “being-in-Being”?
Well, the way I see it, there is a three-phase shift happening in the Month of the Green Forest, my mythopoetic term for the first third of the Second Tier. You don’t have to know anything about the Green Forest, but it’s valuable to know that it is associated with the letters S and Sh, so you can enjoy the following word-play.
In the first phase, or yang movement, the 𝌡⚎ or Svaadhiʃθaana (which we can think of as Spirit-in-embryo, or the base of the self), comes to glimpse Everything as a system in itself and partially identifies it with the evolutionary impulse itself. This movement is tremendously stimulating to the intellect, leading in next stage at 𝌢⚍ to the beginning of the Satva or Subtle realm, the work of the Scholar, and the awakening of both the idea of Suchness and the Sahasrara (Crown Chakra). The Kalendar paints us a glorious picture of a “day in the sun”, a time when the scale of time is tipped away from sadness in favor of success.
Weakened by its toil in the early subtle realms, the Self is nevertheless strengthened and ready to enter the second phase of the Green Forest: its identification of a system filled with new riddles, often taking the shape of a shy and painfully distressed (or shamed) phase in which Everything appears to be merely an illusion; the individual sense is now more so a collective ethos.
There is no consciousness of wholeness here, not even in the overly intellectualized sense of Everything-questing which initially motivated the Mind at Second-Tier. At this phase, midway between the gay hanky-codes of Green (hustler) and Teal (cock & ball torturer), one is preoccupied with the Shiva energy (deconstruction and creative shunting) or with Shadow-eating, which eventually may lead to Shunyata-awareness or some lesser Education in wisdom. Wholeness is now in eclipse; it is seen now as nothingness in drag.
The third phase of The Green Forest, mature Teal as it were, begins with a new emphasis on emptiness in both the increasingly coalescing individual and collective dimensions as well as empathy, embodiment, and the pleasureful dimensions of human life. Now that individual and collective senses are coming together, the system is increasingly aware of its manifold origami-like shapes which can be consciously manipulated through elegant design and enactive (constructive) political action.
Shadow, once eaten, can be defecated. The shit can be used as fertilizer (and please don’t ask me to explain the brown handkerchief in the gay hanky code). The intellect is no longer disowned as it was for a time while difficult shunting processes were underway. It is now increasingly enlightened, more than ever before. And hence, the apex of the “hero’s journey” for The Green Forest: The Throne of Treasuring which glimpses eternity in a new way, followed by the anti-climax of The Throne of Eros. What has happened is essentially that the system has begun to identify with Essence itself, and therefore with the root of the life-force, the sexual and primal creative drive.
So you see, “integral” or “whole” or “being-in-Being” looks different at different points in The Green Forest. As the Second Tier rises like an acorn into an oak tree, it spawns many branches with foliage.
If it sounds like you’ve heard something like this story before, it may be because you read one or both of Ken Wilber’s books, A Brief History of Everything and A Theory of Everything. In these works written for a well-educated yet popular audience not already familiar with the nuances of Integral Theory, Ken articulates a theoretical framework capable of allowing the Mind to situate itself within the story of Evolution itself.
Not since Hegel and the other German idealists, not even in the human scientific works of Clare Graves or Jean Gebser, had anyone explained how the evolutionary impulse can rise up within a single human being and allow her or him to grasp itself as a distinct-but-not-separate face of an evolving Spirit-in-action. Through erudition and wit, biting but not cruel humor, and dogged clarity of prose on extraordinarily complex topics, Ken developed a following and therefore created a sturdy cantilever bridge to the Second Tier for a world ready for the crossing.
Among the many talented scholars to comment on Wilber’s so-called Theory of Everything is Bonnitta Roy, who counts among her many credentials the role of co-editor of Integral Review. About eleven years ago, Roy wrote a memorable critique of Wilber’s project as “hyper-intellectual”, reducing it to mere “abstract theorizing” (without actually naming him personally, using only the “Theory of Everything” reference for her peg). It begins like so:
It seems to me rather unfortunate that the term integral has been associated with the notion of “A Theory of Everything.” In a recent dialogue hosted by Integral Review, a revision to “A Theory for Everything” was proposed—but even that seems to me to be problematic. While I consider the term “integral” to refer primarily to noetic enterprising, the notion of theorizing about everything seems somewhat at cross purposes to the integral embrace of body, mind and spirit. I believe that what is integral about integral is the capacity for integrating thinking, doing (including communicative acts) and being.
While an important critical component of integral is the articulation of distinctions, too much abstract theorizing results in the stratification of existence into a dizzying complexity of parts, and the hyper-intellectualization of the person at a loss for the whole being-in-Being. The product of this kind of hyper-intellectualization is the belief that reality is really composed of the discrete parts that we continue to identify. This puts us in the unfortunate position of having to create complex frameworks to explain how the parts fit together to retrieve a really whole reality.
Humpty Dumpty fell off a wall … all the king’s horses and all the king’s men…
Without going into a long-winded review of her entire editorial, which contained many interesting and informative points and on the whole was an entirely reasonable piece of writing, let me just say that she seems to have fallen into the trap of not appreciating the brilliant strategic fittingness of Wilber’s project for its time and place (which is still ongoing). Wilber needed to awaken the radiance of the Zohaar and the exuberant Shakti in the world by stimulating it to imagine itself as the spirit of evolution itself, Spirit waking up as the evolutionary impulse. And to do so, this required a systematization of thought on an order that few intellectuals have ever endeavored.
In short, there is no need for Ken Wilber to apologize for being “hyper-intellectual” or to feel guilt for “abstract theorizing”. His theories of everything, which have formed the basis of Integral Theory for so many of us, have shaped some incredibly significant “Kosmic grooves”. But maybe if Bonitta Roy has a better idea, one that avoids such hyper-intellectualism and abstract theorizing, she would share it with us? It turns out, she just did, in 2007, in Integral Review, and it took less than 800 words. In less than 800 words, she develops an alternative version of the Integral project as not being one of theory-making, but rather one of embodying “degrees of freedom”, similar to the way that a “fitness landscape” in biological evolutionary theory creates useful distinctions without needing to first construct a complex edifice to encompass the entire playfield.
But what is “freedom”? How is it defined, and at what levels of meaning-making? How does it fit in with the agentic drive for freedom and does it not give agency (yang) too great a role, shortchanging both communion’s (yin’s) drive for love/agape and the balanced (yung) drive for reconciliation and unity? And how does it suit the incredible complexity of the human philosophical and spiritual enterprise which has been the subject of mental labor since before the time of Socrates to reduce it to a graphic chart of red dots and black dots on an early 21st-century biologist’s “fitness landscape” spreadsheet?
In short, extolling a combination of “freedom” and “fitness” as a replacement for a Theory of Everything is mighty peculiar. Roy offers no ideas on how to reconcile potential conflicts between these two ideals/values, nor does she suggest how we are to weigh the competing demands of freedom v. love or fitness v. compassion. What are we to make of the extreme philosophies which absolute freedom or evolutionary fitness, and how can we critique them if we have made these values into the essence of the Integral project?
I suspect in 5 years or 10 years those spreadsheets that she loves so much will be obsolete. These are questions that would need to be answered in far more detail than 800 words before Roy can hope to win this fight. Her column packed quite a punch — good for her to have put it out there and advanced the game some yards down the field — but when it comes to tackling A Theory of Everything, she was simply out-thought. Humpty Dumpty, etc.
I like to say that if Wilber hadn’t created his Theory of Everything, then someone else would have had to do it, for better or for worse. The quest for wholeness of vision is an innate part of the human condition. Some people can escape it some of the time by looking the other way, or (as Roy counsels us) by exchanging a comprehensive vision for a postcard-size set of slogans like “freedom” and “fitness”. But nobody’s fooled, nor for very long.
At the birth of the Systemic-Mind, home of the Element of Air in my Nine Elements artwork, the intellect and its processes for theorization need to be celebrated and owned. There’s room for flexibility and intellectual dissent, including a multiplicity of theories and constant improvements. But no matter how far along we get in our “growing up” as integralists or evolutionaries or whatever-label-comes-next, we ought not forget that the path of Spirit is one through the Mind, not dodging it in a swerve.
I know I’m going to get asked this eventually, so let me address the topic explicitly. What’s a guy who wrote Soulfully Gay, the memoir of his integral spiritual development, doing talking about being bisexual or homoflexible? Gay is not bisexual. Isn’t that a contradiction in terms?
Yes and no. If you read the book and not just the title, you would have heard how I came out of the closet first as bisexual and only later identified as gay. In fact, as a Harvard senior, I had the opportunity to enroll in the world’s first-ever college course devoted to bisexuality (Robin Ochs taught it at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1991). If you’ve only been paying attention to the labels I have worn like a garment and not stripped them off, then you’ve only been looking at half of me.
Truthfully, from age 20 to age 23, I identified as bisexual, not gay. But I was open about my preference: I was not a “Kinsey 3”, exactly half-way between homosexual and heterosexual. Few self-identified bisexuals are, in fact. My preference was on the gay side of the street, and anyone who asked about my preference as opposed to my orientation knew this. I didn’t think of my homosexuality as a rigid orientation which I could not shake off so much as it was the side of the sexuality street I was more inclined naturally to be comfortable playing on. Make sense?
I only stopped identifying as bisexual after testing HIV positive (at age 24) and realizing that my life’s choices were probably going to be drawn from a shorter menu than I had previously contemplated. I wanted to find a partner, preferably one who was also HIV+. Basically, I looked at two exigencies: first, by looking for another partner who was also HIV+ there were many more gay men than straight or bi women who were HIV+; second, biphobia among gay men meant that if I refused to also identify as gay I would likely be seen negatively. And who wants to be thought of as a “sexual orientation traitor”? (Yes, someone actually called me that when I came out as bi and didn’t always see the same way as the “politically correct” party line.)
Once I grew comfortable identifying as gay and no longer actively sought out female partners, everything got a little bit easier for me socially as an HIV+ man. I think that’s what postmodern theorists call “monophilic privilege”.
There’s actually at least one term for what I was back then: a gay-identified bisexual. It is more or less what it sounds like. It’s someone who has bisexual feelings and attractions, but calls himself gay for whatever reason. This is not to say that I ever “chose” to be gay, only that given the many different curve balls that life threw at me from prenatal hormones to genes to socio-cultural ideologies, I really had very little choice other than deciding to be myself or live a miserable life of denial, lies, and distortions.
Now many of you are probably saying “who cares”, and I applaud your tolerance. Many people keep such topics private, but as an author I have something of a professional responsibility to deal with the public dimension of the topics that I choose to write about. I won’t labor the point.
What changed that I am now calling myself bisexual? Sometime in 2011, I was separated from my then-boyfriend and started thinking about what it meant to be single again. I realized that I didn’t care anymore about whether my next potential mate was a boyfriend or a girlfriend, and so I started practicing a bit of homoflexibility before I even knew there was a term for it. Shortly after this time, my boyfriend and I got back together and we stuck out a monogamous partnership for another five or six years. So I went back to being gay, which is basically where I landed.
I’m not going to call Shambhala and tell them to change the title of my memoir to Soulfully Bisexual. It’s fine just the way it is. I’ve lived the vast majority of my entire adult life as a gay man and that’s unlikely to change. But times have changed, both in terms of my views and the cultural views. The younger generation is increasingly rejecting rigid sexual orientation labels for themselves, and that’s a bit of cultural evolution at work.
I believe in wearing labels around sexuality lightly; it’s not the social identity that penetrates to the soul or spirit level, it’s the intermixing of homophilia and heterophilia (and homo-Eros and hetero-Eros) in the subtle and spiritual realms (for more, see Soulfully Gay). Nor does having a sexual identity have to be a preoccupation: I’m also okay with not being with anyone else romantically or sexually at the moment. But if I choose to date again, it’s just another aspect of being amorously human.
A Culture Warrior Who Says Not to Acknowledge Truth if a Conservative Says It
My friend Emilio (not his real name) says he’s having a love affair with the writing of Nathan J. Robinson, and — being the jealous author sort of guy that I am (not really) — I’ve decided to throw some cold water on the romance. Nathan is the editor of Current Affairs; he has penned an argument to soothe the leftist’s soul.
As Emilio puts it:
I’m discovering what seems to be a love affair with Nathan J Robinson’s writing. This article should be read far and wide. Anything to reduce the disturbing “tendency of people who are nominally “on the left” to make arguments based on conservative premises.” Stoppit.
My initial comment was simply:
Isn’t adopting conservative premises a good thing, if they’re correct? That’s basically what Integral politics is all about, finding the truth wherever it leads.
Ah, but that was not satisfying to my friend, so I promised a longer reply. But still it’s going to be pretty short because Robinson’s article isn’t bad, really. He makes sane points about the overuse of the term “neoliberalism” and some fairly clear cut examples of ways that a couple of liberal writers (Kevin Carey of Washington Monthly and Mike Rose of UCLA) fell down in responding to bad conservative arguments. If Robinson’s presentation of these various arguments is correct, then I think he’s right to feel let down by the liberals.
But that doesn’t mean that Robinson’s thesis is correct when he criticizes the tendency of “people who are nominally ‘on the left’ to make arguments based on conservative premises.” The problem isn’t that the liberal writer is making arguments that take into consideration the conservative premises; it’s simply that they’re not *also* making arguments that re-frame the discussion in ways that are wider and more expansive than the premises offered by the target of their criticism.
If Robinson were a good integralist, he would know better than to suggest that arguing “from the left” and “from the right” are mutually exclusive options. The argument “from the right” ideally captures the conservative’s attention, lets them know they’ve been heard, and then refutes the flaws in their argument. The argument “from the left”, added on top of what came before, then may very well fail to appeal to the conservative. But it would appeal to open-minded independents and liberals who need the wider perspective. By combining both points of view, a stronger case is made overall for a wider audience, plain and simple.
Why does something so plain and simple not occur to Robinson? Probably because like many people still caught in flatland culture wars he is operating under a sort of implicit “intellectual scarcity” model. He seems to think that if you give an inch to the enemy they will take a mile, so you have to refuse to acknowledge the truth of what they say whether it’s valid or not. That’s not Integral, and it’s not what is going to get progressive causes through the culture wars with progress made.
I only have one more thing to say about Robinson’s article. Remember, the topic of his article wasn’t strictly about using conservative frames, it was about the term “neoliberalism”. And his main point is to introduce an odd contrast between liberalism and leftism:
I gave a similar example recently of the difference between the way a neoliberal framework looks at things versus the way a leftist does. Goldman Sachs produced a report suggesting to biotech companies that curing diseases might not actually be profitable, because people stop being customers once they are cured and no more money can be extracted from them. The liberal response to this would be an empirical argument: “Here’s why it is actually profitable to cure diseases.” The leftist response would be: “We need to have a value system that goes beyond profit maximization.”
How peculiar, indeed! I have never heard liberalism in any form, classical or contemporary, defined to virtually reduce the liberal mind to that of a parrot with no capacity for flexibility of thought or originality; nor have I ever seen the leftist mind described as a purveyor of Confucius-like wisdom regarding “value systems” (aren’t leftists usually ontological materialists who reduce value systems to epiphenomena?).
Although on the face of it Robinson’s point is not sound, it probably somehow helped him to express a glimmer of a more integrative, transpartisan impulse. He may be implicitly recognizing a growth hierarchy/holarchy (this is good! this is a notion from cultural evolutionary theory!), one with at least two levels: liberals on the bottom acting like a yo-yo to conservatives and leftists acting as the voice of mature, expansive vision. By integrating the two levels of the value hierarchy, the left can thereby integrate both conservative and progressive values, and then we can get on with the serious business of change. I’m not saying that Robinson’s growth hierarchy (if there indeed is one) is particularly well-conceived, but it’s a start.
We don’t need more polarization in our discourse with people who seek progress refusing to see the truth when it’s spoken by their political opponent. Such separation is not only political malpractice, it’s also a sort of lie against our highest nature as interconnected, indivisible people. In short, we need people who can see beyond the illusion of separation to a higher unity… and we need debaters who can perform a skillful jiu jitsu of values and policies, responding flexibly to block weak arguments while setting up a powerful strike in the direction of our best and wisest values.
Integral Theorists, Green is Not a Disease to be Cured by Teal
Ed. Note: This article uses the terms “green” and “teal” in a way that is familiar to Integral thinkers. If you need a primer, see IntegralLife.com.
Green may have its weaknesses, but Green isn’t a disease to be cured by Teal. Postmodern philosophers can be wrong about this or that point, but postmodernism is not a philosophy that can be refuted by a really great post-postmodern debating point. Nor, so far as I can tell, is Green merely a line of scrimmage with no perspectives or content of its own. What sort of model of consciousness are people working with to lead them to such odd conclusions?
Well, I have a suspicion (“First Tier / Orange, cough, cough, just kidding, it’s all good”). I suppose the people who believe these things are struggling with a difficult conceptual challenge that took me years to unwind (at least to my own satisfaction). Let’s try this again.
Individual and collective consciousness undergoes a massive shift from First Tier to Second Tier that has begun, is happening now, and is continuing. Its essence is the emergence of a scientific conception of Evolution in many aspects of life — psychological, cultural, social, spiritual — culminating in a radical change in just about everything. Eventually, about one-third of the way through the Second Tier, at the Teal/Turquoise transition, the principle of Evolution is attracted to a spiritualized concept of Eros (or holistic creativity) with which it is merged for a while.
But before evolutionary processes really become an ingrained part of the identity of selves or groups, the self and society must first become somewhat reconstituted. What emerges is something new — a social self — which is aware of itself from the society’s point of view as well as its own, and so it now sees itself in all its group belongingness and marginalness, and it now becomes more aware of imbalances or lack of equitability in terms of social and ethos structures. THE EMERGENCE OF THE SOCIAL SELF IS NOT A PATHOLOGY. IT IS HOW EVOLUTION IS WAKING UP, LESS DIVIDED THAN AT THE FIRST TIER.
What’s another way of talking about this new, social self? Think of it as the locus of the 4th-person-perspective. It begins nascent and unaware and gradually begins to mature into coming alive as a face of Eros itself.
Early on (Green), it is self-focused and begins to apply systemic techniques (i.e., psychology) to the self, thus gaining tendencies to a saturnine or solipsistic outlook because the 4th-person-view sees mainly the self and has lost a wider connectedness and sense of fulfillment that it used to have;
later on (Green/Teal), it is shadow-focused and ethos-focused and has the potential for trenchant social systemic-level criticism sometimes based on deconstruction or Goddess-energy-awareness (some forms of feminism), and now the 4th is mainly seeing the society, but the personal is in a blind spot, leading to a neglect of the spiritual and soulful aspects of life;
finally (Teal), the individual and collective faces coalesce into forms that can take on more embodied practices, politically enactive practices, and enlightenment-oriented practices including integral spirituality, meta-systemic philosophy, developmental cosmologies and theologies, visionary art and movies, and so on. We haven’t seen a lot of Teal yet, but it’s definitely emergent.
So no, I’ve thought about it and have to say that no one can wish Green away with theoretical mumbo jumbo as a mistaken philosophical argument or a single moment of angst, quickly past and forgotten, like one night’s hangover. Those beliefs are very likely to be a First Tier holdover from a self that hasn’t yet fully matured into a more social self-structure. The least I can say is that it doesn’t have the power to convince me. The social self is a quasi-permanent, enduring feature of self-awareness from this point forward until we get to the Third Tier (which is a topic for another day).
Going forward, I want to start using the terms Green and Teal less and less. People who are genuinely Green or Teal won’t make enemies out of each other, but will see that we’re playing on the same team and need each other to collaborate to accomplish our aims. The term “Systemic-Mind” fits the entire spectrum from the start of 4th-person to the birth of the 5th-person POV, and that’s what I will usually prefer to use.
Andrew Sullivan, the pundit with a “conservative soul”, convincingly zen-slaps Ross Douthat, the New York Times columnist who thinks Pope Francis is an existential threat to Roman Catholicism because he wants to consider flexibility on the question of whether divorced Catholics ought to be given the sacrament of Holy Communion. After summarizing Ross’s argument and spelling out its deficiencies, Andrew adds:
This stringency [Douthat’s] on sexual morality — combined with flexibility on so much else — is part of what has rendered the church toxic for so many, especially given its own recent, horrifying sexual standards. When you barely bat an eye at the rape of children and come down hard on someone who left a toxic marriage, you run the risk, to say the least, of seeming somewhat lacking in moral integrity. And what this worldview unwittingly does is draw attention away from the broader, far more central tenets of the faith: the truly foundational commandments to love one another, to forgive one another, to defend human dignity, to advance the Kingdom. In the broader context of secularizing modernity, of the widening vista of loneliness and despair, of the attenuation of community and charity, of environmental vandalism, of the false idols of celebrity and money, of the throwaway culture that treats unborn human life as so much industrial waste, of the cruelty and heartlessness of late-stage capitalism … is it really worth creating a schism over a pastoral attempt to include those beached by a bad or toxic marriage?
That’s just about as good a short list of ways that traditionalist Christians have retreated into a myopic, sometimes bordering on pathologically ossified, vision of their faith that I’ve seen. Ross’s values are the priorities of the Synthetic-Mind (Amber), clinging tightly to formalities of ritual and purity (excluding the sinners) in order to avoid a mortal threat to the self, and Andrew’s stated values are considerably more evolved (speaking beautifully to values up and down the spectrum of Mind in a way that is probably Strategic Mind (Teal) if it were necessary to categorize).
Taking a well-balanced Integral view as I strive to do, it isn’t necessary to remain impartial to, neutral towards, or “float above” cultural conflicts like this one. What is essential about Ross’s perspective — the holiness of rituals to express one’s philosophical and foundational principles, the value of communities of memory and preservation, and even the sanctity of marriage are all upheld by both of these pundits. That fact alone separates Andrew’s criticism from the typical sort of “progressive Christian” (a.k.a. Green) critique of fundamentalists and traditionalists (wherein the progressive would usually reject the faith itself, or belittle the core values of Ross’s that are important).
Basically, Andrew has already integrated Ross’s core values just as any good integralist would; but the “conservative soul” guy just didn’t let those values steep so long in egocentric and ethnocentric bathwater that they became shriveled and nearly useless. He integrates Ross’s core values, but the opposite is not true.
Who Wins the Smackdown Between These Metamodernist Thinkers?
(Above: “Hanzi Freinacht”)
At Metamoderna, Hanzi Freinacht goes head-to-head-to-head with Camille Paglia and Jordan Peterson. He concludes:
The core failure of the intellectual projects of Peterson and Paglia comes from a lack of understanding of developmental sociology. They have both failed to see the simple and fundamental progression: from traditional, to modern, to postmodern, to metamodern.
The context:
And that, my friend, closes this marathon of harrowing academic incompetence. All in all, these were 47 points Of critique, a handful of which would have shot dead an academic discussion of normal standards. (13 + 37 points, but three were interludes with due credits).
Forty-seven points of severe, fundamental faults. That’s either incompetence, dishonesty or the tunnel vision of the fanatic. You decide which one, or which combination of the three.
If you’re one of the many people who have been unable to see through the thin veneer, unable to see these people for what they are – standard conservatives, misogynists, hysterical anti-feminists – this means that your critical thinking has also been curtailed.
So do the right thing and say a painful goodbye to your YouTube father figure, Jordan Peterson. He told you to speak the truth. But he doesn’t tell you the truth, not even close. And neither does Paglia.
Regardless of what one thinks of Freinacht’s opponents, it’s hard to argue that Paglia and Peterson totally represent a stance in keeping with the spirit of the best of the Integral/ evolutionary/metamodernism movement, broadly conceived. They’re smart enough, complex enough in their capacity to hold a multiplicity of perspectives without relativism or aperspectival paralysis, but there’s something about the contraction of their spirit that comes across poorly.
Freinacht pretty much nails the alternative to Peterson’s monological conservatism and Paglia’s idiosyncratic iconoclasm: take what’s good and valuable with feminism, subtract its excesses and defects, add in what’s good and valuable in masculinism, subtract its problems likewise, and then take a both-and perspective.
All three of these thinkers — Freinacht, Peterson, and Paglia — have passionate defenders in the Integral community. One prominent integralist that I know has even called Camille Paglia the “godmother of Integral”. It’s pretty evenly matched and by no means a knock-out fight, despite Freinacht’s rhetorical heat (which gets over-the-top). Paglia is certainly not “misogynist” or “hysterical”, and it detracts from Hanzi’s argument to suggest otherwise.
While I’m sympathetic to the argument that it’s not fair for Hanzi to scrutinize an unscripted video filled with off-the-cuff remarks of Jordan and Camille, I think it’s fair enough. If Paglia or Peterson feel they’ve been unfairly represented by Freinacht, then I’m pretty sure that a round two can be arranged.
Overall, I believe that Paglia and Peterson come across as old school culture warriors whereas Freinacht demonstrates the capacity to bring their level of culture-watching acuity but with greater rigor and a broader, more appealing vision of the world. I score this bout as solidly a win by Hanzi.
Make Your Life a Sport of Psyche, Wife of Eros, Signifier of My Sutras and Suras
Kalen O’Tolán, the immortal prophet born at Delphi in the Bronze Age, offered an unusual prayer at the Summer Olympics of 2044 CE in the Age of the Blue Castle. As it is recorded in the diaries of Bonsai, the heir of Beionai, translated from the original Lingua-U…
Sportsmen and sportswomen: You are at the core of my all-body, Your life is the ‘liciousness at the core of my love-body. Make your life a sport of Psyche, wife of Eros, signifier of my sutras and suras. Listen at the knees of spirit at the Kai’ai, intestines of my sea-foam, protector of the knees of sport. Life is not a course to be cruised. It is eeking-bruising. Life is not a game to be gamed. It is an abolishment of abomination and an upholding of appreciation. Life is not a play to be pretended. It is purity of a good will. Life is not a football to be fumbled. It is finding your feet where they fall and humble. Life ought not be spoken of with makeshift sayings. They will make you shifty. Life ought not be spoken of with loose analogies. They will make you a lucky loser. Speak of life in the language of the Real. Listen at the knees of Spirit at the Kai’ai, the abode where I-yʊ dwelt ere my-yɪ descent to Delphi. Be a protector of the knees of sport at every Kai. Learn to talk of life in the language of the Real, not the stupidity of turpid sense. Life is located where there is fire to be lighted and unfiled. Ignite the light within the soul and the body-brightness and the spirit-sparkles will follow. Spirit inspires within and spirals and sprays and spins and spoons and spreads and spends and spokes and spans and spouts and sparks light to the ends of the earth, from Grecian Delphi at my atheist birth to Sofia Bulgaria at my nude denudement. Light up your spirit! There is no half-time. Fuel your life with abundant knowledge for navigation, pleasure for play, energy for endurance, and acceleration for actualizing the negative. Speak not of life as a sport. Such words dock Being of its spear-like, piercing awesomeness; sport is an oakish root. Listen at the knees of Spirit at the Kai’ai, protector of the knees of sport at every Kai. Learn to talk of sport in the language of the Real. Spirit and sport are both based at the knees of Psyche! Bend to pray. One bends to praise. Bend over at your knees to bow and make baleful tears. Bend fingers to hold a football. Bend your back to catch a baseball. Bend your flapping ass to protect the basketball. Bend at your knees to put your head where your core was. Think with your gut. Bend at your knees to put your eyes where your heart was. See with your feelings. Bend at your knees to put your shakti-yoke where your shoulder was. Do it with your invisible muscle. Kneel to pray, but not for sport, unless there is an important need to compete. Prayer takes you to the root of the knees of Psyche. There you take your shot before God: Śūnyatā, 0; God, 1. Give the ball to Him: He is nimble instead of kneeling in sport. Look: A Galaxy is shouting. What did you say? Sport takes you to the front of the knees of Psyche. Push them forward. Port sprightly onward in your sportsmanship. There you win or lose the risk-toil at the center of your roiling self-citta. Do not strive to win or lose a game. You have already won and lost the game. Look: the razor-tipped Stars are argent. What’s the point? Gain with every game at the thighs of Jaia’s Center if you would change the game’s eighth outing to an inning. I have just told you a secret; try to forget it. Forgive me. For many years have I dwelt in the high altitudes of Quetzaltenango; my wits are like a merry-go-round. I must extirpate now.
Bonsai records that the prayer ended so. He added these words:
Blessed be Kalen O’Tolán, keeper of the knees of spirit at the Kai’ai, protector of the sportsmen and sportswomen at every Kai. And blessed be God forever, God’s diadem of greatness forever shining in the light of the Great Spiral.
There’s a stack of philosophy and spirituality books in my office that offer a thousand different perspectives on the way to live a good life and make peace with the universe and fix the world’s problems, but I would be lying to you if I said that very many of them had the answers that I have sought.
But I keep them around. You never know when you might be called by some underappreciated piece of wisdom which suddenly takes on new significance years after you discarded it or thought you learned everything you need to know about it.
These books, like the public library and of course the Internet, form part of my mind – not extensions of my mind or resources for it – but actually they are part of my higher self. It’s like a computer network gives every terminal the ability to expand its computing power exponentially if the computing resources are disseminated across many different machines linked together through protocols which allow them to communicate and share information.
In the here and now, the world works through invisible means. The books in the stack are invisible to me except for their spines. The computers on the Internet are filled with files which serve up web pages which are invisible to me until the moment I go to open a page.
The laws which regulate society fill up warehouses of documents, some of which have never been read, and yet somehow they manage invisibly to coordinate the behavior of hundreds of millions of people. Seven billion people live in an international meshwork of laws and treaties to which their society adheres even if almost nobody knows explicitly what they are in detail.
And so with this in mind, let me tell you something that is not widely recognized or appreciated today: I believe that spirituality is fundamentally about our relationship to the unseen, the world of invisible and mysterious realities that do not appear to the naked eye. Tradition has bequeathed to us words like spirits and ghosts and angels and jinn for these entities. Their source and power, like the element of water in Chinese philosophy, is hidden even as the results of their functioning are apparent to all, even when it is interpreted non-metaphysically.
Unfortunately, most of the theology and philosophy books in my office don’t understand spirituality that way. Some of them think they are too sophisticated for any kind of belief system that wants to say something about the nature of the way things are. They may even use terms like “post-metaphysical” to signify that they are too smart to fall into the trap of talking about reality with the naiveté of religious people. They may think that this is the way you have to talk to be officially accepted in “Integral spirituality” circles.
Let me just say: in my view, they’re more wrong than right.
Not everyone who subscribes to “post-metaphysical” principles falls into these errors, of course. In Ken Wilber’s Integral Spirituality, for example, he acknowledges that even though he adroitly attempted to eliminate metaphysical presuppositions from the book, he couldn’t do so entirely. In the end, he had to speak of at least one (the notion that evolution itself has a telos of some kind, however imperfectly understood).
The way that I imagine it, once you admit that you have to admit some Big Picture of reality that is based on a sort of reasoning that can not be demonstrated to skeptics, then you have to have some humility and tolerance for people who have more than one tiny little assumption.
You see, the assumptions that we bring about reality are not context independent; they manifest in spiritual beliefs, those pesky things so many smart people have tried to rid themselves of. Metaphysical principles have practical purposes, and some of these lead to beliefs important for human welfare, happiness, peace of mind, liberation, and even the continued viability of the planet Earth.
Let us shed the illusion that we can ever be fully free of metaphysics. What is metaphysics really, but “reality talk”? I mean, if your perspective is post-dual (a.k.a. nondual spirituality) at least, situated as a constituent of the enlightened mind, the Armory of Atman, and not some mere speculation or abstraction, what else could it be?
I couldn’t care less whether someone says their spirituality is pre-metaphysical, metaphysical, or post-metaphysical. The very preoccupation with metaphysics of some spirituality writers, for or against, suggests to me that they are working to address certain concerns or solve problems that are closely related to modernity (Orange).
But the Diligent-Mind of modernity is only one of nine stations of the cosmology of Mind mapped by The Kalendar, part of my worldview artistry. In plain speech, if you are focused on being for or against metaphysics, you’re buying item of fashion that will eventually, inevitably go out of style.
Let me get back to the notion that spirituality is a form of “reality talk”. Not naive acceptance of folk wisdom. Not acceptance of the myth that the world is simply “given”. But we can’t stop thinking about and talking about and working with reality, I don’t think, or we end up going out of whack in our life path.
And the fact about the material components of Reality is that about 95% of it is completely invisible and undetectable to our senses and even our most sophisticated scientific instruments (according to NASA scientists). If someone doesn’t intuitively grasp that invisible realities are the ocean we are swimming in, not the silly superstitions of underdeveloped or stupid people, then they are the densest sort of fools.
And if supposedly smart spirituality cannot situate itself within mysterious realities, visible and invisible, to speak of God and angels and spirits as so many believers do, then it isn’t as smart as it presumes to be. Authentic spirituality is not going to believe it knows what it doesn’t know or claim certainty for notions that were only personally grasped after years of developmental trials, but it will not shy away from addressing the ineffable or perplexing.
Truly sophisticated spirituality may even humbly acknowledge that people who lived thousands of years ago who were much more aware of the invisible ocean of spirit than we are today might have something to teach us about it, so maybe we should listen to the heritage they have bequeathed to us.
Don’t read books by authors who have forgotten Who They Are or who are unwilling to speak with a poet’s heart. Instead, read the Book which resides at the Base of Being: Imbibe every Bible and open it to the page in which it is the Unmanifest Mind of God; Make the Dao Your Download; And when as the Zeitgeist is collapsed into Zlomylein (Dispirited) so that the Deity appears to disappear entirely, like the last day of the Season of Yang enfolding itself into the first day of the Season of Yin, await Spirit there at the Start of Sapience.
I don’t know you, but I suspect that you probably have a very busy life, full of activity and every sort of human dignity, just like me. We are quite possibly a lot alike, and I bet our differences are interesting as well. Are you at all like me?
Think about it. Maybe yes, maybe no.
We might find ourselves engrossed in sublime philosophical conversation mixed with playful joking around at a Starbucks, if your enjoyments are similar to my own. Or we could find ourselves bored or dismayed with each other, but let’s hope for the best and assume at least for rhetorical purposes that we like each other.
Liking each other is a good start if we’re going to have a platonic love affair. And when I say platonic, I mean intimate and cordial… but also like Plato’s conversation partners. Let’s put ourselves in the shoes of Socrates and Hermogenes at least once in a blue moon and explore together new holistic possibilities for being human, making sense of suffering, and practicing our Dharma.
When we’re not talking about virtue and the good life, let us support each other in finding and living out our life’s true vocation each with the other.
Perhaps you have asked me, “What do you do?”
Did I mention that for the past decade I have listened to hundreds of Seattleites from many different professions and walks of life talk about their careers and how to make their lives better? So I’m open to listening to your frustrations in between conversations about saving the world from doom and preparing the world for the next quantum leap forward.
And now, since it’s my blog and this is one of my first posts, let me tell you what really makes me tick. It’s not my day job. Caveat: I only promise to be up to 90% clear and direct with you. I’m shy, and I don’t know you that well yet! I won’t tell you everything right away, but I will step out of a walk-in closet with you.
I call myself a Worldview Artist because the title of World Teacher which I once tentatively grasped in the past eludes me. About a year ago, I even started a blog like this one but called World Teacher (kept it going for two weeks). I started it because I am passionately working on books which will reveal an original philosophical vision of global significance; I took it down because I just couldn’t get myself across in a way that felt real and productive. It didn’t help that I got mocked and attacked for it, either.
I’m a man who felt early in his life that I was meant for a special mission in life, one that I would have to discover for myself. Sometimes I understood this truth in ways that would sound to you narcissistic, delusional, or grandiose. Enough said (it’s a long, complex subject).
To discover the deepest and highest reaches of my own divinity, for many years I went in pursuit of a worldview that could make sense of the widest, most comprehensive number of perspectives possible, consistent with human health and well-being.
And I found far more and much less than I bargained for. My greatest accomplishment in life may very well be to have painted an Artwork of this worldview cleansed with soap borrowed from glimpses from an enlightened mind. It’s a Big Picture worldview that I can share with others from any station of life, any religion, any philosophy, and any personality type.
Thank you for coming along on my journey of getting more real, more whole, in a world that doesn’t make it easy. As they say in Arabic, Əs-Saaləm-mu-aa-leɪ-kum (Peace be with you.)
