ArchiveNovember 2020

A Look at “Sacred Economics” by Charles Eisenstein

(Photo: Ben White on Unsplash)

An economics based on Integral Theory is distant, says Christian Arnsperger in “Integral Economics: A Manifesto” (2007), neither being resonant with the materialistic dogma of unlimited economic growth nor sounding sufficiently like “science”, which to economists is a thoroughly positivistic and reductionistic affair. If modern economics is stripped of the interiors within individual and cultural whole/parts (holons), the rising of a more Integral economics instead would put humanity back into the economic discipline.

By including such interiority, Arnsperger theorizes, economics would be populated with people who are real subjects with desires, fears, states of consciousness, stages of consciousness, irrational drives, shadows, etc. Economics could include disciplines like psychoanalysis and social history … even existentialism and critical theory. What Christian is envisioning is a science with living subjects and literary modes and meaningful facts in all major perspectives (quadrants) and all levels of consciousness.

To get closer to this ideal, Integral thinkers need to start by taking seriously economic data and interpretations that have been widely overlooked by positivist economists. This includes the realm of spirituality. In this regard, it is worth quoting Arnsperger at length:

Today’s real capitalist agents—as opposed to the abstract, disincarnated homo economicus of evolutionary game theory and of complex-systems modeling—have deep-seated fears, desires, instincts, cultural preconceptions, and so on, which account both for the high performance and for the awful effects of global capitalism. On the normative side, work on a Buddhist economics, on a Christian economics, or on an “Enlightenment” economics would be extremely helpful to delineate paradigmatic ideals of economic organization and economic agency towards which conscious evolution might be geared in a liberation-oriented economy. These would be ‘paradigmatic’ in Wilber’s extended sense, i.e., they would be based on actual evidence that being a Buddhist, Christian or generally enlightened agent is possible, and that building a caring, compassionate economy is feasible, because such things has happened in actual fact and because there are accounts of such individuals and systems throughout human history. It’s about time we reached for such paradigms in order to consciously evolve toward our highest potentials.

Arnsperger’s vision is an example of a more evolved style of economics, one that can pave the way towards an economics of the Global-Mind (turquoise). Global-Mind, i.e., mature Integral consciousness, has the potential to attend to all aspects of life and work for individuals, neighborhoods, nations, and global holons. It would know the human being as having a holistic spiritual intelligence — an understanding of human nature that is truly beyond the selfish egos of modern economics and the tribalistic collectives of postmodern economics.

Reconnecting Money to Spirit and Matter

It is from something very close to Christian’s integral economics manifesto that I think we need to appreciate and critique Charles Eisenstein’s important book Sacred Economics (2011). Eisenstein is an author, speaker, and “de-growth activist” who has written an illuminative, sustained, and thoughtful attempt to apply postmodern (green) wisdom and approaches to baffling and critical problems in the world. Unfortunately, it leaves the Integral reader sometimes frustrated and concerned with regard to its potential use in the real world.

“Postmodernism” in my usage today is basically a worldview which emerged in the late modern era in opposition to many of modernity’s disasters: its crony capitalism, its coarse materialism, its cultural imperialism, its exploitation of the environment, and so on. Eisenstein’s postmodernism includes many of postmodernism’s most prominent dignities: a high level of responsiveness to human needs, an affiliative sensibility based on organizing a new gift economy, and a somewhat relativistic approach to values (situational and pragmatic, not absolutistic).

More problematically, Charles’s philosophy also features an openness to Romantic ideals such as a thoroughly optimistic view of human nature and an unrealistic idealization of indigenous spirituality based on caricatures. By inappropriately idealizing his sources of inspiration, he runs the risk of offering unrealistic solutions in his own right.

Sacred Economics contains a multi-faceted program defined in reflections on not paying debt, a critique of usury, wealth redistribution, economic “de-growth”, plus smart critiques of both socialism and New Age notions of “money as energy”. The task ahead for humankind may be best summed up in Eisenstein’s formula for describing the new money system he wants to create:

Sharing instead of greed, equality instead of polarization, enrichment of the commons instead of its stripping, and sustainability instead of growth. As well, this new kind of money system will embody an even deeper shift that we see happening today, a shift in human identity toward a connected self, bound to all being in the circle of the gift.

From an Integral perspective, Eisenstein is basically describing the evolution of money from a modern (orange) perspective to a postmodern (green) perspective. He pictures a critical mass of the population growing up in consciousness from a modern to postmodern self-sense, replacing the Cartesian-defined self with a “connected self” common at more developed stages.

When Eisenstein’s book was first published (2011), there was more optimism in America for believing in a progress out of materialistic modern capitalism to a gift-based postmodern communitarian vision. Alas, Donald Trump’s presidency brought a devolution or “evolutionary self-correction” (as Wilber puts it). Therefore, we must remember that evolutionary progress is not guaranteed, it is only a possibility to be obtained through striving and destiny.

The Prophet and the Systems Integrator

Normative, spiritual ideas based on postmodern mysticism are not the usual fodder for economics, but there’s a place for them as part of an Integral synthesis. Sacred Economics doesn’t really provide complete answers or even roadmaps for getting to the promised land, but its ideas can help to model experimental, non-totalizing prototypes for revisioning a wide variety of aspects of our economic life, bringing our materialistic desires and spiritual ideals into greater harmony.

However, it is difficult to see many of these ideas actually getting off the page and into real life. One important reason for this is that as a postmodernist, Eisenstein is talking largely to others who share postmodernism’s values and he doesn’t offer a compelling way to persuade readers at other value memes (e.g., traditionalist and modernist) to climb on board the train.

For example, Charles wants to see “equality rather than polarization” in the new order, but is this equality of opportunity or equality of results? Does prioritizing the value of equality mean rejecting ideas of merit or bulldozing value hierarchies? Traditionalists, modernists, and many others would probably have many reasons to balk at the economic program.

The progressive postmodernist’s values are not everybody else’s values. Perhaps there is a way to for thought leaders to harmonize notions of equality enough across value memes so that they could be useful for shared economic programs among traditionalists, modernists, postmodernists, and others, but Charles does not seem interested in that, except to lift the spirituality of premodern religions out of context for appropriation.

Eisenstein is best seen as a prophet of systemic doom of the old economic systems (and the fires are indeed burning!), not as a meta-systemic integrator of new economic and spiritual dimensions. Generally speaking, postmodernists think systemically; Integral thinkers think meta-systemically. Integralists can’t just say “To hell with capitalism!” and demand that all systems in existence need to be shut down, they have to attempt to show how multiple intertwined socio-economic and cultural systems can interoperate and segue.

Like elite I.T. systems integrators, Integralists must concern themselves with the health of many different systems running on many different operating systems, and somehow get them all to talk to each other because the older systems must continue to be viable and operable for many decades to come. All have to be operating in good working order for the whole system to function (at least until finally, much longer than anyone ever anticipated, the legacy mainframes can finally be retired).

Note that because Integralists see the value of preserving a whole tier of co-existing systems, postmodernists often paint them as “conservatives” on this account. Though the greens would say it as a smear against the teals and the turquoises, such conservation is nothing to be ashamed of. All the value memes across the whole spectrum of consciousness have dignities of their own which must be respected and defended.

Conclusion

Even if Eisenstein’s economic program could be tested, I’m afraid that the key ideas would be doomed in execution. Postmodernism fails to understand the depth of the grip of other value memes on human civilization, especially aggressive self-interested economic activity, the sort known as Warrior Culture (red). Its failure stems also from a conception of human nature without sufficient regard for evil or sinfulness.

A question: Wouldn’t an economy based on sharing be defeated militarily by an alternative empire based on Warrior/Pirate values that sought to exploit its peaceful nature? Don’t look to Eisenstein for an answer to this simple question; it doesn’t seem to concern him.

Like others who bring postmodern values to the forefront of economics, he hasn’t fully grappled with the propensity of human beings to value self-interest over communal values until they have already reached a relatively high level of ethical development. What is the beautiful gift economy with its glorious economic commons to do when it is overrun by freeloaders, grifters, trolls, vandals, and unethical hackers? Surrender, apparently.

Postmodern thinkers usually insist on anti-capitalism and some sort of collectivism. This gets some things right and other things wrong. There are elements of postmodern economics that can be lifted up and incorporated into an Integral economics that is methodologically plural, one that allows roles for all sorts of actors (local, national, global) at all levels (orange capitalists, green communitarians, etc.) while we work, sometimes seemingly at cross-purposes, for new systems to emerge beyond the old models (teal/turquoise).

Integral economics not as anti-capitalism or anti-socialism, but as post-capitalism and post-socialism.

At the end of the day, there is no conveyor belt to such a higher-level consciousness contained in Sacred Economics, only a mélange of well-intended ideas that may offer a mirage rather than an exit from our most vexing problems. Latching onto Eisenstein’s new economic ethos of “de-growth” is no complete remedy for our maladies. Not because it is too extreme a measure, but because it may be too weak a response to the complexities of our current situation.

Our most fundamental problem isn’t that there is too much wealth being created through industry; it is the lack of an operational Global-Mind (turquoise) with institutional authority and a market-based and regulation-tempered program for alleviating the quagmires posed by unchecked economic development. Perhaps this is a distant pipe-dream, or perhaps the next great and indispensable step towards its realization is as near as your next act of surrender, acceptance, and synergistic way of being in the world.

We stand in need of a new Integral economics which brings the interiors of individuals and collectives, including sacred matters, into the analysis of social goods. Our hope ought to lie not merely in shifting a Cartesian self into a “connected self” but in the rising up of the Global-Mind, a mature post-postmodern consciousness, one that has learned to apply its evolutionary awareness and holistic spiritual intelligence to the solving of urgent global problems through collective action.

Plenty Integral (That Is, If We’re Not Talking About Stages), and Here’s Why

(Photo: Official 2013 White House photo by David Lienemann)

Joe Biden is not a scholar or a deep philosophical thinker. He is not the son of scientists or doctors or executives. He is a father and grandfather from humble blue-collar roots who has survived tragic losses. He is a professional politician with a natural talent for relationship-building that has served him well doing Senate negotiations, international relations, and retail politics on the street.

He would neither recognize the term “Integralist” nor use it for himself (he is a devout Roman Catholic). But an Integralist might reasonably ask: how do we look at the U.S. president-elect from an Integral level of consciousness? and: How “Integral” is Joe Biden?

By “Integral”, I am speaking of a certain way of looking at and being in the world that is developmentally-aware. And when developmentalists look at the sphere of American politics, they tell us that there are certain undeniable patterns that emerge, worldviews, or basic units of culture that inform our values and political orientations.

In Developmental Politics, Steve McIntosh distinguishes between several different major worldviews in American culture: the traditional worldview with “Heritage Values” such as patriotism and religious faith; the fiscally conservative modern worldview with “Liberty Values” such as individual rights and limited government; the liberal modern worldview with “Fairness Values” such as protecting minority rights and an activist government; and the progressive worldview with “Caring Values” such as protecting the environment, championing multiculturalism, and expanding social justice.

McIntosh explains that conflicts among these four major worldviews are the basis of the “culture wars” that have played such a large role in American politics in recent decades. He also holds that the culture wars are not interminable because they can be resolved by a higher consciousness:

Unlike the standard modernist approach of making tactical compromises to try to get most of what our side wants, developmental [Integral] politics seeks to include the values of each camp into the mix from the beginning because it actually affirms these values and wants to see them forwarded. At the level of conventional political issues we’re often faced with a win-lose proposition. But at the level of bedrock values it becomes possible to discover something closer to a win-win solution, even if such a solution does not completely satisfy all parties. Simply put, a developmental approach to politics seeks to accommodate the concerns of all sides, not just to get its way, but to make authentic progress for all sides by creating new value agreements.

In McIntosh’s conception, which I think is a valid and important approach to an Integral Politics, the work of forging compromises between differing political factions can be an expression of a transformation in values from one level of development to another. This value transformation is key to what we might call an “Integral method” of doing politics, or simply, the creation of “Integral dignities”.

Three Bidenesque Integral Dignities

Even though Joe Biden has probably never studied interdisciplinary metatheory or any similar esoteric intellectual domain, he nevertheless walks in the world in a manner that is rich with Integral dignities. In other words, his basic approach to politics is that of one who reconciles conflicting value systems through the hard work of getting agreement on tough issues, forging a new level of coherence.

I will flesh out this understanding of Biden’s politics in a moment by talking about three specific Integral dignities, but even if I convince you that Biden practices one sort of Integral Politics, it’s important to stress that this isn’t the only valid and important way of walking in the world with an Integral Politics.

There are fluid positions for Integral politicians on the right, center, left, and other stations (but there should be no rigid, ideologically-fixed identities). There are persons with an “Integral consciousness” who may identify predominantly with one or more of McIntosh’s key values: Heritage Values, Liberty Values, Fairness Values, or Caring Values.

And there are Integral people working within every political party and trans-partisan endeavors. As for me, I’m an Integral Democrat (but I would happily vote outside my party if there’s a viable candidate who is a better fit for the role).

The Evolver-in-Chief: The First Integral Dignity

Some of you Integralists reading this are possibly having coughing fits at the notion of Biden as an Integral politician. You might be thinking: how could he be? He has never quoted an Integral thinker or used an evolutionary theoretical framework in his speeches?

I think this is a big confusion when looking at development, the idea that one must trace one’s biography in a philosophically coherent framework for development to be real. The truth is that on at least one hugely important developmental line – emotional intelligence – Biden’s life story has given him a constantly expansive and evolving capacity for worldcentric love and care.

Depth psychologists understand that one of the biggest movers of human consciousness from one level to another is the capacity to overcome grief. Mourning breaks down certainties and symbols of coherence into new capacities for meaning-making. In Biden’s life, he has overcome losses in his personal life without losing his open-heartedness and has expanded that concern to members of his political tribe, to his country, and even to the world.

At a time of a global pandemic with all the suffering it entails, Americans have selected a “healer in chief” as our president-elect partly because we rightly sense that he is the man for the occasion. Biden can be the emotional physician for healing a sick nation—and Integralists understand that this is so because of his advanced emotional intelligence, one that has expanded the scope of its empathy beyond egocentric concerns until it embraced the whole world (and beyond into the spiritual realm).

The Scientific Spiritualist: The Second Integral Dignity

Biden campaigned for president as a spiritual person (notably, by attending Mass on election day) and as a man with reverence for science (notably, by wearing masks to comply with scientific public health recommendations). So, it is worth noting that the ability to do both of these things is one of the hallmarks of the Integral worldview.

McIntosh defines “cultural transcendence”, a key concept of Integral consciousness, as

a new collective higher purpose for American society that finds its truth in the intersection of science and spirituality.

He says that cultural transcendence, or values transformation, is a sort of “technology of agreement”.

So far as Integral “super-powers” go, “cultural transcendence” is basically the ability to depolarize a polarized country. The superhero rescues a nation bitterly divided into warring factions by getting them to see beyond their cultural prejudices, even those in his own party and ideology.

It makes sense that Joe stands a good chance at reconciling the conflicts abounding between the modern scientific worldview and the traditional religious worldview because these worldviews are reconciled in himself. He can draw on his personal journey of self-integration when he works on issues involving human rights, religious freedom, the role of science in government, and so on.

In short, Biden is more likely than other politicians to see ways of reconciling apparent polarities in modern and traditional worldviews because the same opposing forces have become complementary energies within himself like yin and yang.

The Pragmatic Uniter: The Third Integral Dignity

Another Integral dignity relates to the ability to reconcile pragmatism with idealism. Like Barack Obama before him who spoke of “No Red States and Blue States”, and walking in the footsteps of George W. Bush who said he was a “Uniter, Not a Divider”, Joe Biden delivered an acceptance address tonight which was a message of unity. His message was a response to a political climate that is widely acknowledged as extremely polarized and toxic, filled with demonization and hostility.

Now, in certain times and places, a political message of unity would not be appropriate. Some historical conditions call for a radical or revolutionary spirit (i.e., the spirit of Eros) and others call for a radical conservative spirit (i.e., the spirit of Agape). But the wise Integralist understands that political theory needs to be flexible enough to adapt to the moment, conserving what needs to be conserved and reforming what needs to be reformed, or even supporting extreme measures in extreme situations.

Biden’s pragmatic spirit is obvious, but couldn’t this be seen not as a dignity but as a disaster, an unprincipled accommodation to a corrupt political system? Indeed, it could, if the pragmatism becomes divorced from the idealism. Likewise, if idealism becomes unmoored from pragmatism, it becomes a disaster in its own right, or “the perfect becoming the enemy of the good” as we say.

Conclusion

I have suggested that the question of Joe Biden’s “Integral-ness” ought to be framed as a matter of the extent to which he seems to embody characteristic norms of an Integral philosophy of life—namely, an evolutionary orientation, emotional intelligence, scientific spirit, spirituality, idealistic pragmatism, and a unifying orientation. There are many other qualities or norms of an Integral nature that we could talk about.

Obviously, not everyone who has some of these dignities would consider themselves an Integralist. And certainly not all Integralists have these dignities. But most Integralists will recognize these dignities as present in their own value systems. They will welcome these qualities in Biden because they have them in themselves.

You might be thinking: “There’s no way that Joe Biden is Integral. He’s boring!”

But I would say: “Don’t demand that Integral Politics always be exciting! That would be very immature of you. There’s a face of Integral Politics that is integrative rather than revolutionary, empathetic rather than lively, effective rather than astonishing, useful rather than avant garde. Biden’s face is not the only face worn by Integral Politics, but you’ve got to appreciate the authentic Integral dignities that he has or you’re leaving a lot out of the picture.”

In my view, Joe Biden’s election is a new day for America, one made all the more hopeful by virtue of his Integral dignities. These dignities endow him with the potential capacity for “cultural transcendence” necessary for solving our national polarization crisis, and he deserves the support of Integralists in his efforts to do so.