Ken Wilber Critique, Part 4

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Ken Wilber Critique, Part 5

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expresed itself in terms of peace love and social justice were a lot of people who were mostly interested in turning society upside down and raising hell for it’s own sake

So what’s wrong with that? If it’s truly a more “primitive” drive, then that must mean it’s closer to nature, because it takes less development to get there. And thus it’s more powerful, more useful, more energetic. The point was change

incidentally, to the best of my knowledge there’s nothing in wilber about burning witches, or imposing systems thinking inappropriately, or denigrating or supressing a value system of any kind. to the best of my knowledge all he’s ever done was try to build bridges of understanding, and incorporating as much understanding into his personal framework as possible.

but anyway. bed time

I do agree with Ran though - if the Berkeley protests had good effects, then what’s the point of retroactively analyzing and categorizing people’s motivations?

1) he’s creating a framework that will incorporate the understandings of as many traditions, religions, worldviews, cultures and developmental levels as possible, because of 2) the long long long history of people apparently ‘misunderstanding’ each other. so that 3) people who might not otherwise be able to understand where someone else is coming from or what experiences they are describing, can use a shared framework and a common terminology that is as neutral as possible and honors as much diversity as possible, to communicate effectively.

he’s not trying to substitute his ideas for anything. he’s adding a translation mechanism on top of as much as he can fit underneath it.

Also, even if you were to grant everything he’s saying, it’s still the case that the Berkeley protests had political effects that I really like, so who cares about the motivations? “By their fruits ye shall know them.”

I’m trying my damnedest to find something in his work that is useful to me. That’s why I’m actually reading through it rather than just dismissing it out of hand, which I was admittedly doing before this. So far I haven’t found anything I personally can use in his work. Or rather, maybe this is it. Maybe me sharpening my knife against his ideas is the thing that’s useful to me. Who knows, maybe he’s right and I’m just acting out my egalitarian “green meme” fantasies against him who’s on some other magnificent spiritual plane of development. I’m willing to admit that as a possibility, even if I don’t feel it’s particularly likely.

PS. Why does everybody always back down from defending Wilber’s ideas? Seems to happen again and again and it makes me highly suspicious.

I think it’s easy to walk into a body of work with preconceived notions and find lots of faults in it, regardless of who wrote it. I could find plenty of faults in wilber if i felt like it, but i’d preffer to find the usefull stuff and leave the rest.

What kind of suprises me is the genral tone of resitance to qualitative assesments of moral/ethical development. true, no one wants to be on the short end of that stick, but the fact is we make those distinctions all the time.

we all make calls on how honest, compassionate, openminded, or loving somone seems to be. it’s easy to see how egotistical, self centered, or arrogant someone is.

the sheer fact that everyone seems comfortable labeling wilber as an egocentric narcissist with delusions of granduer, only shows that those people are perfectly willing to rank people’s motivations or personal presentation in exactly the way wilber is accused of doing.

his hierarchies are based mostly on a consensus of developmental researchers like jane lovenger, or robert keegan which at least aspire to objectivity. ‘Our’s’ are based on whatever biases, peer group moods, or personal prejudices we feel alright laying claim to.

no one here hesitates to rank ‘egocentric’ or ‘ranking’ behavior as inferior to ‘humble’ or ‘non ranking’ behavior. it’s implicit in the critique. in order to critique you have to make some kind of qualitative judgement. everyone does it, so why is it a scandal when someone tries to draw a consensus around research into interior development?

I still sort of disagree that there is any evidence to support pre/post-conventionality. It just doesn’t seem to me to be something that can be backed up by what might be classified as “scientific” evidence (which I know I’ve lambasted elswhere).

I definitely agree that whenever you move into realms like this, you inadvertently introduce the burden of labelling one person as superior to another. You can either choose to cast aside the framework before or when that happens, or you can cling to the framework at all costs. I feel that Wilber’s work seems to do the latter much more often.

More importantly though, I still don’t quite see why we would necessarily *need* “A Holistic Model for Assessment of Spiritual Maturity”. What advantage does this give us to judge whether or not somebody fits into a model of spiritual maturity? What business do we even have of guaging somebody’s spiritual maturity in the first place? This seems to tread on the same thin ice that a lot of Christians get into when they are trying to intervene on the state of your soul.

If your theory is based on evidence, then show me evidence that will stand up to the slightest bit of scrutiny. And if it’s not based on evidence, then stop suggesting that it is.

I think you’re partly right here, partly a little unfair. I’d say that Wilber is addressing “those in the know” in the scientific fields of psychology, sociology, neuroscience, even psychodynamics (if allowed), etc. The evidence in those fields is massive and it does support his main thesis on pre- and post-conventional morality.

I find useful the 4 stages formulation of M. Scott Peck (”The Different Drum”) via James W. Fowler (”Stages of Faith : The Psychology of Human Development”), which are:

* Stage I: Chaotic, antisocial (=pre-conventional)
* Stage II: Formal, institutional (=conventional)
* Stage III: Skeptic, individual (=post-conventional)
* Stage IV: Mystic, communal (beyond frameworks)

See, for example: A Holistic Model for Assessment of Spiritual Maturity

I find it useful to use this framework but then discard it, so to speak. As you know, I like to see individuals as containing all those stages within them with their energies being at different levels on different issues. I also see great value in returning to Stage I, again and again, essentially the “child within”. There is always a sense in which person A is “superior” (on a higher stage) than person B and vice versa. However, when taking it all into account (something that only God can do), person A is actually no higher or lower than person B. Well, I’m not being God taking it all into account here, lol. I’m just saying that this should be treated as the case because none of us is in a position to clearly judge otherwise.

And I guess this is pretty close to what you’re trying to say yourself. (Not to mention Jesus according to John 8:7.)