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Ken Wilber Critique, Part 6
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5
Science & Liberalism
Now that I’m about 90 pages into Ken Wilber’s A Theory of Everything, I’m starting to see more why people like it. My understanding was really helped along a bit by my brother last night who mentioned he’d read the book after seeing it in my room. He said something about how for people coming from a background of science as their defining worldview, it’s a good bridge into other more subtle spiritual matters. I hadn’t really been looking at it before. I tend often to assume that everybody is approaching things the same way I am, with the same background and attitudes. And this just couldn’t be further from the truth. Anyway, once Wilber stops trying to force-feed you jargon, and actually gets into his real ideas, some of them are pretty decent. Personally, I find all the maps, models and vocabulary completely unnecessary to the good points that he does make, but I suppose I could see their efficacy for other people approaching the work from other perspectives.
One of the things I like is Wilber’s definition of “Good Science” starting around 73. He basically boils down the essence of good science to three stages:
- It begins with a practical injunction - a needlessly complex way of say maybe an experiment or a set thing you do which could be repeated by others
- An experience of what happens during and as a result of that action - (data collection)
- Community checking - this means that other people can take the same steps you took in part 1, and receive either a similar or different experience of part 2.
It’s a very simple way of explaining the scientific method, and it’s great because he then turns around and suggests that this is also at the core of “deep” religious practice as well. All in all, I think this may be a good explanation too of what Thelemites are talking about when they say their “method is science” and their “aim is religion.” After this, Wilber has some detrimental stuff to say about religious practice that doesn’t follow this model, but I’ll come back to that at some point, rather than veer off course here.
Wilber further makes the distinction that we cannot define science
[…] by saying that it bases all of its knowledge on the sensorimotor world, because even narrow science (e.g. physics) uses a massive number of tools that are not empirical or sensorimotor, such as mathematics and logic. Mathematics and logic are interior realities (nobody has seen the square root of negative one running around out there in the empirical world)
Thus even the “hard” sciences (or “narrow” in his terminology) necessarily consist of interior and exterior states and information, though this is rarely regarded as such. More typically, people believe that science is exclusively based on sensorimotor, exterior, empirical data. This positivist attitude, he says, was championed by the Western Enlightenment, from which modern political Liberalism sprang. From page 80-1:
The classic Western Enlightenment - with its philosophy of liberalism - came into existence, in large measure, as an anti-religion movement. The liberal philosophers and political theorists of the Enlightenment sought, among other things, to liberate individuals from the dictates of state religion and herd mentality […]
Freedom from the dictates of a state-sponsored religion and value-systems combined with the exterior-driven emerging sciences. The result, Wilber contends, is that Liberalism came to adopt a policy that in terms of interior states, “no stance is better than another” - ie, moral relativism, which is the number one critique of Liberalism by Conservatives today. This denial of judgements about interior states also lead to another important distinction between Liberalism & Conservatism. On page 84, Wilber explains:
[…] when it comes to the cause of human suffering, liberals tend to believe in exterior causes, whereas conservatives tend to believe in interior causes. That is, if an individual is suffering, the typical liberal tends to blame external social institutions (if you are poor it is because you are oppressed by society), whereas the typical conservative tends to blame internal factors (you are poor because you are lazy).
Liberal political solutions thus tend to seek change to institutions, while conservative solutions tend to focus on interior “values”. According to Wilber’s system of waves of development, he claims that conservativism is a healthy version of a lower-level of thinking. Whereas liberalism is a “sick” version of a higher level of thinking. As much as I hate his whole system of waves and development hierarchies, this is a very interesting argument. Quite possibly the best “proof” of it is the increasing clamor among liberals to integrate spirituality into their politics. This seems to essentially be Wilber’s solution as well - to use the gains of freedom won by liberalism, and ally it to a deep spiritual practice and grounding, and thus move the whole culture forward.
- Ken Wilber Critique, Part 5
- Ken Wilber Critique, Part 7
- Ken Wilber Critique, Part 4
- Ken Wilber Critique, Part 8
- Moral Relativism
- Prev: Raising Consciousness
- Next: Moral Relativism
July 22nd, 2005 at 9:49 pm
what would it mean to you then to have a healthy way of operating higher level of thinking?
July 22nd, 2005 at 10:12 pm
Nice site, and interesting critique of Wilber… I’m a huge Wilber scholar, and while I agree with much of his model (maybe 80-90%), I still have my own critiques.
My only real issue with your critique is that if this is your first time reading Wilber, you definitely chose the wrong book. “A Theory of Everything” is basically only a slight “update” to “Sex, Ecology, Spirituality”, which is the book I typically recommend that would-be readers of Wilber’s books start with (if they already have a background in the fields that Wilber delves into, anyway- a more accessible introduction is “The Marriage of Sense and Soul”, though it lacks some crucial areas covered in SES and does not include the extensive endnotes and bibliography).
In any event, as I’m an “interested party” where the issues that this blog deals with are concerned (not to mention a big fan of Robert Anton Wilson as well), I think I’ll poke my head in here from time to time. And, if you’re interested, I have a story or two of my own to relate…
July 22nd, 2005 at 10:12 pm
Well that’s the question that I see him posing here. I myself don’t have an answer for it
July 22nd, 2005 at 10:16 pm
Thanks for visiting Nicq - I’m gonna combine your two posts into one. Not sure how they got split in the middle!
To answer your comment, I didn’t really “choose” this book to start with. Somebody graciously sent me a copy. I’ve always been resistant to Wilber in the past, so I thought I would go through it and call it as I see it. My original opinion of it was much harsher than where I am with it right now. I’m starting to see what he’s getting at, but wish it was done in a more concise manner. But then, maybe it again goes back to the book choice!
Please feel free to relate whatever stories you like!
July 22nd, 2005 at 10:17 pm
It occurs to me that naive moral relativism is just like the idea that “technology is neutral” (which, as you saw the other day, I have a big issue with). In both cases, someone is trying to completely cut something off from evaluation. But what does “relative” really mean? It doesn’t mean meaningless or valueless — it means you determine the value by examining the relations. This is not the same as the radical relativist position that you can’t evaluate something because it’s all meaningless, and it’s not the same as the conservative position, that you can’t evaluate it because we already assigned it an absolute inherent value. We have the power/responsibility to evaluate every behavior, every idea, every tool on our own, by looking at its whole web of relations. This is like gnosticism or anarchism, in that it takes the power of judgment away from the authorities and gives it to everyone, but it only works if we use that power responsibly. (Of course I don’t see liberals or conservatives adopting this system any time soon. Liberals will just indulge people’s sheepliness by offering an alternative absolute morality.)
July 22nd, 2005 at 10:19 pm
I think that’s a really fantastic distinction. We should try and branch this off into it’s own discussion.
July 22nd, 2005 at 10:25 pm
[…] Q page!
Moral Relativism
Ran put together an excellent comment on my most recent Ken Wilber piece, about moral relati […]
July 22nd, 2005 at 11:22 pm
[…] Ken Wilber Critique, Part 7
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 It’s All Good, Baby! For those of you who are tired of al […]
July 23rd, 2005 at 1:28 am
well i don’t read wilber but i noticed a couple obvious errors.
it is incorrect that the suspension of judgment is inherent to liberalism. was sextus empiricus an enlightenment liberal? and for kant, a central figure of enlightenment liberalism, judgment is the primary cognitive faculty of the human mind.
nor do i believe that absolute or moral relativism are the necessary results of liberalism, in general i think that kind of stuff just lacks basic common sense.
wilber may have had a point with his oversimplification, but dragging a few mismatched scraps of philosophy into it it doesn’t exactly bolster his credibility for me.
July 23rd, 2005 at 1:04 pm
I like your points Albion and tend to agree. I want to dive into this more in depth, but I thought it was nice to be able to present what he’s saying without as much commentary from me for once. Plus I’ve been considering how to tackle this issue. I’m gonna write more about this later today, but a big part of Wilber’s critique seems to be a critique of liberalism and postmodernism dressed up as a big fancy theory that encompasses everything. But more often than not, he spends most of his time attacking those areas and flinging around buzzwords. I have a few suspicions as to why he’s doing this and the likely effects which I will put down later.
July 28th, 2006 at 6:03 pm
[…] Ken Wilber explains it like this: The classic Western Enlightenment - with its philosophy of liberalism - came into existence, in large measure, as an anti-religion movement. The liberal philosophers and political theorists of the Enlightenment sought, among other things, to liberate individuals from the dictates of state religion and herd mentality … […]