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Ken Wilber Critique, Part 8
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7
What Color Is Your Soul?
Sorry to keep hammering this Ken Wilber stuff. It’s just that once I get into the “zone” it’s hard to stop. I’m almost finished with it though. I just feel like his work is having such a wide influence in the world today (or at least the portion of the world I concern myself with) that it’s really worth it for me to get a handle on it. Anyway, my latest realization on what bugs me about Wilber and how to explain it comes as a result of a comment left by “Albion” on my piece about Ken Wilber’s march towards an Integral One World Government.
oh yeah i can see it…UN troops forcing everyone to wear color-coded clothing, in accordance with their capacity to ‘integrate’
Now, before you start calling me a conspiracy theorist (which I am, and proud of), let’s look at what’s really being said here, and which Albion merely extrapolated to one of many possible conclusions. At it’s core, the Spiral Dynamics aspect of Wilber’s philosophy is a system of observing & categorizing people. We can all agree on that characterization, correct?
Okay, so it’s pretty much unavoidable to label people, right? It’s just a natural thing we do with language & conceptual thinking. Does that mean though we ought to base an entire philosophy off of labelling people? I certainly don’t think so, no matter how “useful” it may be for systems of governance, etc.
But anyway, back to what Albion said above: maybe UN troops won’t go around handing out different colored shirts based on Spiral Dynamics. But there’s a very real potential to classify people according to this system in an official way. And it’s a very simple method. All you’d have to do is administer a questionnaire and maybe a short interview. Based on that, a trained “integral practitioner” would be able to put together a profile based on your attitudes, value systems, and behavioral components. And before you know it, your license or public record has a little tiny swatch of color indicating very quickly to marketers, educators, law enforcement personnel, and whoever else a corresponding system and method of interaction to which you would most likely respond.
The other thing that’s a bit sneaky about all this is that Wilber says again and again how integral philosophy basically allows people to “be what they are”, without unnecessarily forcing them to move to another level. Their specific “wave” of development is “honored” at the same time as it color-coded, systematized and stagnated. Would we have to retake the integral personality test once every six months to make sure that we didn’t move up to the next level by accident? Wilber also spends a ton of time trying to dismantle liberalism, postmodernism and egalitarianism. Why? It seems like together they form the major threat to his “hierarchies of value”, which he claims are built right into nature, but which the nasty “Green Memers” don’t want to acknowledge. People at this “wave” would very likely not accept a system where everybody is allowed or encouraged to stay as long as they want at their particular stage of development.
You’re a racist? Don’t worry - that’s totally normal behavior for your meme! Red meme, eh? You like war and explosions? Well, we’ve got a great job for you operating a machine gun nest in Baghdad! Ooh, an orange memer, eh? Well, here’s your scholarship to State Technical College.
It seems like it has very creepy potential for being a modern day intellectualized caste system. But maybe that’s just me. Maybe I’m just a victim of the “Mean Green Meme”…
UPDATE!
I just realized what this is a New Age version of. It’s Plato’s “Noble Lie” from the Republic:
The Rulers, Plato said, must tell the people of the city “The Noble Lie“–that the categories of Rules, Auxiliaries, Farmers, etc. was not due to circumstances within the people’s control, upbringing, or education, but because of God’s intervention. God, the Lie went, had put gold, silver, and iron into each person’s soul, and those metals determined where a person’s station was in life was.
The Rulers told the people of the city that if their own children were found with bronze or iron in their soul, the child would drop down the ranks accordingly. And if a farmer’s child was born with gold in his soul, he would rise up to the Guardian level. The Rulers also said, people had different metals in their bloodstream, and therefore could not intermarry.
The Lie is necessary, Plato argues, in order to keep a stable social structure. In Plato’s mind, The Noble Lie is a religious lie that’s fed to the masses to keep them under control and happy with their situation in life.
Ahh… The more things change, the more they stay the same.
July 25th, 2005 at 3:01 pm
but doesn’t the fact that he calls the green meme ‘mean’ contradict his statements to the effect that the ‘levels’ are nonjudgemental?
i can think of an exact parallel that’s been around from time immemorial. it’s a system of classification based on nonjudgemental categories of human interaction with the whole. it’s “integral,” and can be applied to everything from health to politics (and has been, for quite some time). it’s got a color code. it’s even something based on ‘nature,’ on observation of patterns within the natural world.
it’s called astrology.
i honestly can’t for the life of me see how wilber’s theories are anything other than neoastrology. astrologers have been saying the same thing since they were a bunch of chaldeans.
July 25th, 2005 at 3:29 pm
Oh, but here’s the catch! Any level can have a “mean” version of it, or “pathogenic” as some sources call it. So it’s actually quite judgemental, but it’s a displacement of judgement. It’s removed from which level you’re in and instead focuses on whether or not you’re a good little robot according to that level, and whether you’re ready for a promotion.
Anyway, you and others are definitely right when you say that Wilber isn’t really saying anything new. It comes from astrology, Qabalah, chakras, psychology, etc. The point is NOT that it’s new, but for me it’s merely that it’s so popular, and that it’s gaining such wide traction among many types of thinkers. It kinda reminds me of how the Council of Nine went around to other groups of New Age channelers and tried to convince them that their channeled messages were really coming from the Nine as the ultimate source, regardless of whatever subsidiary spirits may be used. I’ll write about that some more when I can figure out how to phrase it better.
July 25th, 2005 at 3:43 pm
ye gods, i wonder if wilber is the culmination of the council of nine’s weird philosophies! tried looking for a connection, but google doesn’t turn anything up. of course, to get paranoid on purpose, if i was an ancient and mystical council of channeled extraterrestrials using a modern-day ‘integral’ guru to establish a new world order, i’d make sure there were no visible connections so as not to freak out the norms.
July 25th, 2005 at 3:54 pm
i haven’t been reading up on all of your fun time with Wilber ’cause I just can’t stomach it. but this last post and the one before it reminds me a lot of not just astrology but fucking database technology, which is basically a practical application of all of that jerk-off color shit that Wilber cries himself to sleep with every night .. is it not?
if thats the case, we are most certainly in the thick of it, from Nazi Hollerith machines all the way up to my “bonus” card at superfresh.
July 25th, 2005 at 6:09 pm
i don`t think kenny cries himself to sleep so much as laughs all the way to the bank. but i take your point, we are in the thick of something to do with worshipping material things, whereas we would like to be casting spells.
July 25th, 2005 at 6:19 pm
Well, again, all Wilber is really doing is taking a bunch of different “maps” that exist cross-culturally and across various disciplines, and trying to map them together to create a coherent picture. It’s blurry in places, but it’s about the best such map I’ve seen to date.
Anyway, I’d thought of the “Spiral Dynamics as Noble Lie” analogy awhile back when I was really into Allan Bloom and Leo Strauss (I wrote a large, and, IMHO, awful paper where I posed Neoconservatism vs. Integralism as being the 21st century’s political dilemma)… one of the things that an anti-Wilberian pointed out to me at the time was that Wilber himself might be a Neocon, his whole philosophy just a Platonic/Straussian lie with nihilism at it’s heart. I don’t think that’s the case, but it’s an interesting one to contemplate. Again though, the “colors” are just orienting generalizations, and the levels don’t have any actual existence… it’s all just a useful and convenient simplification of a group of very complex processes.
July 25th, 2005 at 6:37 pm
Yes, I agree. The point of this stuff is not that Wilber’s ideas are new. That’s almost irrelevant. What seems important to me is their popularity. I don’t especially agree that his ideas are the “most coherent”, although I’ve been thinking about that a lot and can’t come up with a solid definition of what “coherent” means (see this post). If you’ve got one that works, let me know.
Anyway, I personally think putting faith into one model or system or believing one to be coherent is dangerous. Coherency (whatever that means) comes from our lives, not from systems we immerse ourselves in. If we start believing one system is more coherent, we end up forgetting or forgiving the little cracks and flaws within it. We also begin to lose the ability to perceive things which flout this system, because we are so bent on labelling and categorizing things to fit it.
My personal approach is that certain systems are better for certain applications. Depending on your task, one is better than the next. What is it that Wilber’s is so good for? How do we decide that one system is better than another system? How can we make systems useful for us, rather than getting used by systems?
I’ve also written elsewhere something that’s useful for summarizing my thoughts here:
I understand religions as our attempt to give form to the divine, because we suck at contemplating raw infinity. Religions, in some sense, are nets which we cast in the hopes of catching god. But it’s like trying to catch the sea with a net. It’s much more likely that we’ll just get ourselves tangled up, and god will slip through. I think god wants us to follow and imitate him as he playfully escapes our nets and challenges us to reach new levels of understanding and love.
How do we make sure that we don’t get caught up in the nets? Why are some nets so seductive, especially to certain types of people?
Whether or not he’s a neocon, you said yourself its a “useful and convenient simplification of a group of very complex processes.”. It doesn’t have to be Platonic/Straussian to be a “Noble Lie” nor to be useful as a mechanism of social control. That said, pretty much anything can be used as a means of social control. What I’m most worried about is the seeming lack of critical reaction to not only his ideas, but to the methods with which he delivers them.
July 25th, 2005 at 6:58 pm
well my UN comment was in jest, but seriously, wilber is wack. like i said earlier i don’t read wilber so i’m not really qualified to go into it, but what little i’ve read is an incoherent combination of sweeping over-simplifications, combined with pedantic over-complications, dressed up with a bunch of inappropriate and poorly understood scraps of the history of ideas. i explained in my comment on wilber part 6 why i thought his analysis of the liberal/conservative dichotomy was nonsensical (and for a conspiracy theorist, that one’s pretty much a no-brainer). his explanation of the US constitution seems to me to be similarly muddled, though i’m really not much inclined to spend much time trying to sort the sense from the nonsense. basically from what i’ve read, i have no confidence that wilber is at all fluent in the history of ideas. his basic method seems to be to ignore basic distinctions, while making all sorts of superfluous ones, and call that ‘progress’. the problem isn’t that it’s complex, but that it’s needlessly complex. if anybody actually attempts to implement some sort of social policy based on wilber’s snake oil, how can the result be anything but disastrous?
July 25th, 2005 at 7:29 pm
Tim: Well, to me “coherent”, in this context, means that the map matches up with the territory. For instance, I’ve never found Leary and Wilson’s “eight circuits” model to be very coherent because I can’t seem to apply it in reality- it just doesn’t seem to work when the rubber meets the road, and there seems to be quite a few false attributions in it (not to mention that the books just feel horribly out of date these days). On the other hand, Wilber’s model has a great deal of explanatory power, especially in politics, worldview confrontations in daily life, etc. (and, on top of that, I used Wilber in over half of the research papers and seminar theses that I wrote in college- whereas, had I been even trying to use Wilson, I probably would have been laughed out of the room.)
As for “nets”, well, language is essentially the ultimate net, but it’s one that we’ve all agreed to straightjacket ourselves to in order to communicate (see Alfred Korzybski, or Neil Stephenson’s “Snow Crash”). Languages, philosophical models, etc. are all “nets”, but they have varying degrees of usefulness. Even Wilber admits that his model is still just a “box” for ideas- he just thinks it’s a much better, and bigger “box” than most, and that even his “box” has it’s limitations. Or, as Aleister Crowley points out, “all that mystics have written is nonsense”, because it is impossible to speak of an ineffable experience, but if you’re going to try to share that experience with anyone else, you have to try to use language, even if it is ultimately insufficient.
Similarly, methods of “social control”, like languages and philosophical systems, are systems that we tie ourselves to in order to exist in a civil society. And, similiarly, the better, more inclusive, and more life-promoting the model, the better- we can’t live without modes of social control, but we can try to develop better and better ones.
Albion: As one (friendly) critic of Wilber’s “Sex, Ecology, Spirituality” put it, “it’s hard to summarize this book, because it’s an 800 page summary!” Naturally, second-hand, summarized Wilber is going to be over-simplified, given the nature of the work. So I wouldn’t call Wilber “wack” without reading his work first. As for his analysis of the liberal/conservative dichotomy, I still haven’t seen a model that explains the reason that Democrats and Republicans can’t carry on an effective dialogue, or the differences between America and Europe, better than Wilber’s. (”Of Paradise and Power” by Robert Kagan is fairly effective in this regard, but still doesn’t do the job as well) Neither Wilber or I am a conspiracy theorist, however, so the analysis probably doesn’t fly for someone who is (I am something of a conspiracy theorist in some ways, but I think the nature of the conspiracy is quite different than most). He has a pretty good grasp on the history of ideas, all told, especially given how much of that history he is attempting to integrate- anyone human is going to fall at least *slightly* short. But if he falls less short than his predecessors, well, that’s progress.
July 25th, 2005 at 7:44 pm
i have: it’s called the ’strategy of tension’.
then again, i’m a conspiracy theorist. anyway, what bothers me about wilber is that in his zeal to ‘integrate’ he seems to pull his scraps of ideas rather indiscriminately from their sources. it’s painfully obvious even in the few exerpts i’ve read that he’s cherry-picking his examples to suit his preconceptions. so in that regard, yes, he’s a true neocon.
it’s not analysis, it’s polemic, and i think it’s garbage.
July 25th, 2005 at 8:00 pm
albion: “Polemic” and “analysis” are in the eye of the beholder, and if you haven’t read the damn books, you really can’t make that judgement. Show me how it’s painfully obvious. I’ve read every book Ken Wilber has ever written multiple times, listened to his audio lecture series, had some exchanges with the man, and I really don’t know what you’re talking about, given that I haven’t seen it (and trust me, I’m not blind. I’ve had a fairly solid classical liberal arts education to date- BA in Government, Int’l Affairs, and Philosophy, currently working on an MA in Western Classics, and I plan to earn an MA in Eastern Classics and a PhD in Political Philosophy before I’m done, so I can assure you I’m not a lightweight in this regard. In other words, the burden is on you in this case, and you’re knocking a thinker that you don’t even have a tenuous grasp on.
July 25th, 2005 at 8:12 pm
Nicq, I’m going to respond to the basic thrust of your observations above elsewhere, but I had a couple things I wanted to respond to here:
I don’t remember ever agreeing to use language as a child, do you?
Yeah I agree that Wilson’s/Leary’s models suck - but then they arose out of and are mostly applied to psychedelics and consciousness expansion, not to social institutions. Their goal is basically to escape the games, not to figure out how to play them better on a social level.
People accepting a source doesn’t make that source good. Look at all the newspapers and TV channels which feed us erroneous data constantly - for starters.
July 25th, 2005 at 8:16 pm
So what? Just because Albion hasn’t read any of his work, doesn’t mean Albion’s opinions on the matter are without merit. If we wanted to be truly “integral”, we’d have to take all positive and negative criticisms from all levels, wouldn’t we? None of them are wrong, I thought that was part of Wilber’s whole point? If you’re at a higher level of thinking than Albion, then doesn’t that mean your thinking also includes the criticisms listed above?
July 25th, 2005 at 8:39 pm
“I don’t remember ever agreeing to use language as a child, do you?”
Ultimately we do have to agree to use language- otherwise we are treated as invalids. I have a cousin who, due to his autism, has never “agreed” to language- and hence, he will never have an education, a driver’s liscense, a job, a normal social life, and will probably eventually be institutionalized. Just because the “agreement” involves compulsion doesn’t mean we don’t have other options- we just don’t want the consequences of making those “choices”. It’s not unlike “choosing” not to pay our taxes.
“People accepting a source doesn’t make that source good. Look at all the newspapers and TV channels which feed us erroneous data constantly - for starters.”
It doesn’t automatically make it good, but being accepted by specialists in a field does lend it a greater degree of credibility than it would have otherwise. I’m an academic, and “peer review” is our procedure for checking the validity of data. It doesn’t make it true, but it makes it more likely that it is true if it is checked against the data of others first. And some sources simply have better reputations than others- for instance, it’s easier to trust the reporting of the Wall Street Journal (if not their opinion page) than Pravda. It doesn’t necessarily mean it’s correct- just more likely that it is.
“So what? Just because Albion hasn’t read any of his work, doesn’t mean Albion’s opinions on the matter are without merit. If we wanted to be truly “integral”, we’d have to take all positive and negative criticisms from all levels, wouldn’t we? None of them are wrong, I thought that was part of Wilber’s whole point? If you’re at a higher level of thinking than Albion, then doesn’t that mean your thinking also includes the criticisms listed above?”
His criticisms, however, are based on a lack of data. If he had read, say, SES, Integral Psychology, or Up from Eden and made the same criticisms, then there would be a point worth looking at. As it stands, though, his criticisms of Wilber make about as much sense as my criticisms of James Joyce- I can’t legitimately criticize Joyce, given that I haven’t even read his novels to begin with.
July 25th, 2005 at 8:40 pm
[…] because you’ve brought a lot of useful insight to this inquiry. But I wanted to use one of your quotes as a jumping off point: And, similiarly […]
July 25th, 2005 at 9:03 pm
nicq, the point is that unlike wilber i’m not pretending to be anything but polemical. wilber strikes me as intellectually dishonest. as a result i’m not interested in anything he has to say. pretty rough huh?
best of luck to you, and don’t mistake the map for the territory.
July 25th, 2005 at 9:26 pm
There is no such thing as intellectual honesty, Albion, and if you’ve bought into that myth, I’ve got a few more for you…
July 25th, 2005 at 9:36 pm
I think that’s what I’ve been trying to say. Intellectualism isn’t honest - it can’t be. It’s only part of the much bigger game.
July 25th, 2005 at 9:37 pm
yes i’m sure you do, nicq.
July 27th, 2005 at 10:16 pm
[…] at] few will be able to maintain control over their opinions.” I know I put down my Ken Wilber sword, but this whole thing about “remediating underdev […]