Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10

1. p. 391/92: "What are the realistic chances that any of them--Boomers, Xers, or Ys--will make it to an integral culture?"

     Morin gave an extended, highly technical discussion of the generational divide and what it might mean for any possible, future evolution into second-tier consciousness. From Kim's notes:

      "Now, of course, no generation is simply 'at' a level of development, just as no society is simply 'at' a level. When we say 'Boomers were the first green generation' or 'Millennials might be the first yellow generation,' these are extremely simplistic generalizations. In order to grasp the demographics more accurately, you need a 'phase-4' model of quadrants, levels, lines, states, and types. You can then analyze much more carefully the distribution of consciousness in each individual, culture, generation, society, species, and so on.

      "So, when we say 'Boomers were the first green generation,' we simply mean that, compared with the previous generations, a significantly larger percentage of Boomers--perhaps up to 30% or 40% of them-- reached the green wave as their general center of gravity. 'Center of gravity' for an individual means that the proximate self-sense is basically identified with that level (although many other developmental lines might be at other levels). Thus, for example, the stereotypical Boomer that we are discussing in this seminar has a cognitive line of development that is at yellow; a self-sense whose center of gravity is green; numerous subpersonalities at red and purple; and an internal recoil against, or repression of, one's own blue and orange (which means that the subpersonalities at blue and orange are internally alienated and therefore projected onto others where they are aggressively attacked). That psychograph is quite typical of boomeritis--a green alliance with red/purple in hatred of blue/orange, and all the interior grandiosity and outward rebellion that would ensue--as we have often discussed in this seminar series. (This does not rule out subsequent psychological dynamics: e.g., once boomeritis has alienated its own healthy blue, it often compensates by reactivating a morbidly rigid blue system--we saw this with the Green Inquisitors. But all of that is subsequent to the basic psychograph of the GREEN/red pathology.)

      "Now, the grandiosity of the Boomers had a specific effect on their children, and this grandiosity came in two waves, reflected in the Xers and Ys. Again, we are talking generalities, averages, and stereotypes here, so please remember that. But wave-1 of the Boomers (and boomeritis) was the retro-Romantic phase, the original Woodstock Nation, the celebration of 'original goodness' and the noble savage, the hedonic celebration of pre-conventional and pre-rational as if they were free and liberated (whereas pre-rational consciousness is simply a slave to purple and red impulses). The result of this first phase of boomeritis attitude in parenting produced Gen X--yes, the so-called slackers: letting little Johnny 'run free' actually let little Johnny rot. (Okay, you Gen Xers out there, don't get annoyed until you hear the whole story....)

     "When the Boomers realized that this Romantic approach to reproducing their egos in their kids was not working, they went in the opposite direction from 'original goodness' (let little Johnny alone so to not repress his so-called original goodness) and switched to 'growth to goodness': run little Johnny ragged by working him morning, noon, and night: send him to pre-school, enrichment programs, around-the-clock supervised empowerment programs, music lessons and soccer games, SAT study courses, you name it. The result of this wave-2 boomeritis produced, not Slackers but Blasters, produced the Millennials.

      "The first wave of Boomer children--Gen X--were those that grew up in the retro-Romantic wave of Boomers (and boomeritis)--let's call it wave-1 or boomeritis-1. Here, the idea was to let little Johnny do whatever he wanted, since as a child he was 'closer to pure nature'--a type of noble savage that we should let alone so as to not repress his 'original goodness.' This was the 'run free, run wild' phase of the Boomers (little Johnny was also left alone for another reason: he was a latchkey kid). The result, of course, was that little Johnny went to seed, and thus the result of 'let little Johnny alone' was the Slacker generation. Boomeritis in wave-1 celebrated its own grandiosity through its children by condemning the conventional waves and wallowing in the preconventional waves, which, as we said, let little Johnny rot--hence, slacker.

      "Now, of course, what little Johnny the so-called slacker actually did, under the onslaught of this retro-Romantic Boomer ego--this boomeritis-1--was to adapt to these wretched circumstances by developing a very sophisticated intelligence--skeptical, pragmatic, entrepreneurial, independent--and completely irreverent in the face of the false value system of boomeritis. Think David Spade or Janeane Garafolo, two of my all-time favorites. Gen X is a wonderful title for all this, but 'slacker' is misleading in that it doesn't give the underlying flavor of the brilliantly adaptive intelligence involved here: how better to confound boomeritis and its grandiosity than by developing a 'ho-hum' attitude in the face of all that self-proclaimed greatness?

      "Well, Boomers are not total idiots, and when they realized that this 'noble savage' approach to reproducing their egos was not working--and that little Johnny left in his original goodness is a slacker (and they begin to realize this when little Johnny hit adolescence)--then the Boomers in droves began to switch from 'original goodness' to 'growth to goodness.' Now it so happens that the 'growth to goodness' model is the generally correct model; but when it became injected with the grandiosity of boomeritis, look out! Childhood was turned from a time of, well, childhood, into a time of around-the-clock preparation for adulthood and greatness: after all, how better to show that I am an amazingly great person and parent than to have kids that grow up to be amazingly, astonishingly successful. This, however, demands enormous work--starting when the kid is a fetus--and with this, boomeritis-2 went into full gear. Where Gen X was left alone to rot, Gen Y was molded from the moment of conception--both by the same boomeritis ego, but with a different method to the madness.

      "The Millennials are now hitting adolescence and early college years. Again, we are speaking generalities and stereotypes here, but unlike the Xers, the Millennials don't want to slack the system, but succeed in it. They don't particularly chafe against the rules, don't totally yawn in the face of their parents, appear more generally happy with society and are ready to accelerate in it, and tend to trust the system, more or less. The extreme stereotypes here are not David Spade and Janeane Garafolo but Britney and Mandy and N Sync. Whereas the Xers, following the original boomeritis phase, had a huge distrust of blue and orange, the Ys tend to embrace blue and orange easily, and are happy to move on from there--if they can....

      "Nonetheless, what both Xers and Ys are still struggling with is the legacy of boomeritis, in either wave 1 or 2, a legacy that has left them with a crippling allegiance to flatland. Whether that shows up in Xers as a slacker attitude or in Ys as intense ambition without a real goal, both show the ultimately directionless nature of flatland. We at Integral Center continue to believe that members of both of these generations have an extraordinary chance to move beyond green and into yellow, to become part of the first generation in history that MIGHT have a significant percentage of its members with their center of gravity at yellow (say, 10% or more). And, as we point out in the lecture today, these Xers and Ys might very well be joined by a significant number of aging Boomers who, in the second half of life, manage to move their own center of gravity from green to yellow (or higher). As we said, a fair number of 'geeks and geezers' might come to inhabit a second-tier consciousness, and that would indeed have a profound impact on society.

      "This is why, finally, it is not a matter of what generation you are, but of what waves of consciousness you can open yourself to. This is why it truly does not matter what age you are, or what generation you are, but whether you can find, in the openness of your own awareness, a second- and third-tier awakening to the deepest aspects of your very own being. And, my friends, in this venture, I wish you all the very best."

2. p. 398: "I quote [Fritz Perls]: 'It should be noted... The criticism which galls is that which he directs against himself.... especially if someone emotionally significant to him invites the projection by voicing similar criticism.'"

     Kim's margin notes: "This quote is from The Adjusted American, by the Putneys, who present a teaching that is based on Gestalt therapy principles."

3. p. 398/99: "I am simply suggesting that if it is boomeritis--flatland inhabited by a big ego--that is the major barrier to the emergence of integral consciousness, then boomeritis, of all things in the world, truly needs to be deconstructed."

     Van Cleef continued (from Kim's notes): "What does this integral project involve? In my opinion, it has two sides: something to do, and something to avoid. The positive injunction is to take the insights of pluralism and move them forward into integralism. This gesture of balance would unite the best of premodern, modern, and postmodern insights, and would deeply honor the entire spiral of development and the full spectrum of consciousness.

      "As we have seen, a good deal of the 'high end' of boomeritis is based on the wave of pluralistic relativism (the green meme), and thus its important--but partial--truths need to be taken up and preserved in any further growth. Aspects of pluralism, contextualism, and constructivism are universally true, and need to be carried forward in that light (as part of universal integralism). Put simply, there are some enormously important contributions that have been made by the green meme--and by postmodernism in general--and these are crucial components of any second-tier integral consciousness.

      "And, in fact, almost every sophisticated critic of green postmodernism--from Jürgen Habermas to Luc Ferry--has benefited enormously from its insights, as they themselves readily admit. As Ferry and Renaut put it, 'On the philosophical level it is impossible to return, after Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger, to the idea that man is the master and possessor of the totality of his actions and ideas'--impossible to return to an orange ego thought to be completely autonomous and self-mastering. 'Today we know'--that is, thanks to green we know--'the illusions and danger inherent in such a denial of the unconscious in its various forms'--the danger of denying the extensive contexts and relationships in which all subjects are embedded. 'Today it is a question of rethinking--after this [green] critique and not only against it--the question of the subject' ( French Philosophy of the Sixties, p. xvi). In other words, it is only because of green and after green--its is only post-green--that we can carry this project forward into more integral and balanced endeavors.

      "Now indeed is the time to go post-green, at least at the leading edge. But this does not mean that we will cease all green concerns. On the contrary, they are taken up, included and embraced, in the ongoing flow of integral consciousness. Moreover, for every person who graduates from green, three or four enter it: the great Spiral is unending in its flow.

      "Since boomeritis is getting stuck at pluralism infected with narcissism, the positive injunction is to move forward from pluralism to integralism, and the negative injunction is to scrub narcissism from the program as much as possible. The negative injunction is to examine, as honestly and as carefully as we can, the contributions of excessive egocentrism to our own agendas, and attempt as best we can to ameliorate them. This includes a type of historical scrubbing: looking over our past pronouncements and fervent beliefs and seeing to what extent any of them were either created by, or perhaps over-inflated by, a narcissistic investment."

4. p. 400: "But a level that has unfortunately gone rancid, sour, pathological."

     Mark Jefferson continued (from Kim's notes):

      "I have argued in this seminar that most of extreme postmodernism is supported, not so much by the healthy green meme, as by the mean green meme (MGM), or the pathological version of green that carries its insights to absurd extremes, and especially by boomeritis (green infected with purple/red). It is not surprising, then, that extreme postmodernism, politically correct ideology, and extravagant multiculturalism have been attacked by four different groups: the MGM has been attacked by healthy green, second tier, orange, and blue.

      "(1) The healthy green meme itself is quite critical of extreme green (and boomeritis). I have often tried to represent the healthy green claim against the mean green in this seminar. Many constructive postmodernists, as opposed to deconstructive postmodernists, have also argued against the extreme versions of pluralism and relativism. Political scholars such as Amy Gutmann have argued for a healthy multiculturalism within similar green-meme guidelines. Another fine example of healthy green's approach is Culture Wars, by James Davison Hunter.

      "(2) Second-tier integral theorists have vigorously criticized the mean green meme, as well as a fixation to even the healthy green meme. They are arguing from an integral orientation, which finds fault with any merely first-tier approach, healthy or otherwise (because no sustainable political solution can be found at first tier). At the same time, second tier transcends and includes green, and thus the essentials of healthy green are always honored and included in any truly integral approach, even when their partialness is sharply criticized. Jürgen Habermas takes this second-tier stance when he rebukes merely ethnocentric multiculturalism. John Searle takes this stance when he deconstructs deconstruction and when he decisively argues against the social construction of all reality. I have also tried to take this stance throughout this seminar. The problem with even the healthy green approach--which calls, as James Hunter does, for 'peaceable pluralism'--is that there is no such thing as peaceable pluralism. In order for the conflicting memes to be at peace, they must exist in a context that transcends all of them--that is, they must be held in a cultural space of integralism, not pluralism. All second-tier critiques of pluralism are conducted from this integral realization.

      "(3) Orange (Enlightenment) liberals have argued strenuously, and often successfully, against the extremes of green, because pathological green does not transcend and include the Enlightenment, but merely trashes it. Healthy green, on the other hand, builds upon the gains of the Enlightenment and extends its many benefits even further and more fairly. True multiculturalism is a natural, almost inevitable, outgrowth of Enlightenment thinking, and those green theorists who merely deconstruct the Enlightenment are demonstrating nothing but their own inability to integrate. Besides, the Enlightenment at its best--Kant, for example--reached solidly into second-tier integral constructions, deeply worldcentric, a thing of beauty and goodness, apart from whatever flaws it also certainly possessed. Fine examples of the orange Enlightenment's response to the mean green meme are Jonathan Rauch's Kindly Inquisitors--The New Attacks on Free Thought; Todd Gitlin's The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars; and Richard Bernstein's Dictatorship of Virtue: Multiculturalism and the Battle for America's Future.

      "(4) By far the most shrill and alarmist critiques of green have come from blue-conservatives, who have often gone absolutely apoplectic over green anything, let along extreme green. But they, too, have a series of important points, not the least of which is that a society that lets blue structure crumble is simply going to disintegrate, sooner or later, one way or another. The problem with blue, as with all first-tier memes, is that it thinks its values are the only real values, and so its agenda tends to be coercive, occasionally bordering on fascist. Oddly, it used to be that liberals stood for universal rights and conservatives for ethnocentric-patriotic nationalism, but the situation has recently reversed. As liberals have tended to abandon themes of universal anything (under pressure from multicultural green), blue conservatives have taken to arguing for the common good. But true multiculturalism is an Enlightenment universal, and by the 'common good' most blue-conservatives mean their traditional (ethnocentric) values. Nonetheless, Bill Bennett and The Book of Virtues are not without their relevant points.

      "In other words, I agree with all four critiques of the mean green meme, but for quite different reasons. Moreover, although all of them have spotted the mean green meme, few have spotted the real worm in the apple: boomeritis.

      "Finally, my liberal friends have been very uneasy with the notion of boomeritis, since it is directed almost entirely at the misuses of liberalism (especially green pluralism). In the culture wars, the most bitter acrimony has been between blue conservatives and green liberals (mostly in the form of the mean green meme. If the Berkeley protests were any example, up to 60% of green pluralists are actually harboring preconventional impulses). The question naturally comes up, which is more threatening, blue fundamentalists or the mean green meme (MGM)?

      "Take science, for example. Both blue fundamentalists and the MGM aggressively attack the validity of science. Blue claims that science disagrees with the Bible and is therefore wrong; 'creation science' (the earth and the entire fossil record were created in six days) should therefore be included in school curricula. The mean green meme also attacks science: it is allegedly marginalizing, oppressive, racist, sexist, patriarchal, and so on; more than that, it hurts some people's feelings.

      "Which is the more alarming attack?

      "Opinions vary. The green-meme theorists in general try to rally around the cause of pluralism, even if it goes to extremes. They thus paint the culture wars as being mostly an alarming attack by blue fundamentalists that threatens more open and caring values. James Hunter, in Culture Wars, takes this stance.

      "Orange liberals, on the other hand, perhaps sensing that blue fundamentalists are indeed alarming but their claims are so preposterous that they constitute no lasting threat, believe that the real damage is being inflicted by the mean green meme. Richard Bernstein takes this stance in The Dictatorship of Virtue. So does Jonathan Rauch in Kindly Inquisitors. Of the two attacks, the mean green meme, he says, 'is the more dangerous. We will pay a heavy price if the principle takes root in our ethical code that the offended, having been hurt [i.e., simply having hurt feelings], have the right to an apology and redress. It is crucial to understand that this...principle is deadly--inherently deadly, not incidentally so--to intellectual freedom and to the productive and peaceful pursuit of knowledge' (p. 27).

      "As an African-American, I am acutely aware of the threats that the blue fundamentalists pose; but I must generally side with Bernstein and Rauch: the MGM is much more menacing than blue. The ideal situation, of course, is that following the Prime Directive, the healthy and constructive modes of both blue and green can equally be honored as they make their own important contributions to the health of the overall Spiral. But until that time, the MGM, by virtue of its cognitive sophistication, appears the more dangerous threat."

5. p. 401: "An integration of liberal and conservative values... would allow a more judicious balance of human potentials and aspirations, don't you think?"

     "Boomeritis," Jefferson continued (from Kim's notes), "is a threat not only to standard conservative values; my major point is that boomeritis is even more of a threat to genuine liberal values, in both their Enlightenment orange and postmodern green versions. By celebrating preconventional egocentrism under the disguise of postconventional autonomy, boomeritis invites and indeed encourages precisely those factors that cripple blue, orange, green, and higher."

6. p. 419: "As more geeks and geezers move into yellow... we will increasingly see the rise of social movements, spiritual movements, political movements, educational movements, that will demand integral approaches."

     Jefferson added (from Kim's notes): "The fundamentalist blue conservative sings the praises of premodern, traditional values (mythic-membership, conventional morals, civic virtues, family values), and lashes out at the orange Enlightenment and its modern conceptions of self, morals, and ends (individualism, liberal morals, postconventional). The typical green liberal, wishing to be ever so sensitive, also lashes out at the orange Enlightenment, this time from a postmodern stance that froths at the mouth about the Others of rationality. What both stances miss is that, in the overall Spiral of development, premodern (purple, red, blue) and modern (orange) and postmodern (green onward) all have a crucially important role to play, in both individual development and social systems at large. Only by taking a truly integral stance can we combine the best of liberal and conservative and thus begin to move beyond the crippling limitations of each. This is the basic approach we try to take at IC."

7. p. 422: "Dubious as that might sound to some of you, it is nonetheless the rather strong conclusion of an enormous amount of sober, sophisticated, cross-cultural research."

     Hazelton added, "See Integral Psychology for the results of over one hundred researchers investigating these postformal and transpersonal waves of development."

8. p. 423: "Almost anybody, at any level of development, can have a temporary experience... of third tier."

     Hazelton added (from Kim's notes): "There is a difference between states, stages/levels, and realms. In this short introduction I am not going into those details, but they are crucial for understanding this phenomenon. 'Third tier' is just a general term we are using for any higher, transpersonal consciousness. As we are using this generalization, third tier is a general realm, which can be accessed via an altered state at almost any stage of development. But when a person develops from second tier to third tier, then those altered states have become permanent traits (or levels/stages), and thus third tier has become a permanent stage or wave of consciousness. At no point are real stages skipped. See Sidebar G: 'States and Stages,' for a summary of this important topic."

9. p. 424: "And since this spirituality is now post-green, it is a post-boomeritis spirituality."

     Hazelton added (from Kim's notes): "We call this an 'all-quadrants, all-levels, all-lines, all-states, all-types' model--or AQAL for short. See A Theory of Everything." And then, for some strange reason, she looked at me and winked, and that might very well be the last thing I remembered about that seminar series.