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

1. p. 254/55: "But from the very high developmental stance of the green wave of postformal pluralism... the death and dismantling of the allegedly evil force."

     Lesa Powell continued (from Kim's notes):

     "And so it came about that--just as preconventional anything was celebrated as postconventional freedom--so, too, almost anything postmodern fell in love with almost anything premodern. In doing so, these theorists once again proceeded on the basis of a double confusion: they robbed modernity of any of its liberating contributions, and they invented for premodernity various glories it did not possess. The totalizing critique of modernity (as with the totalizing critique of autonomy and rationality--see note 12 for lecture 6) was carried to absurd, bizarre, and self-contradictory extremes, thus sucking from modernity its many undeniable honors, such as the rise of representative democracies, feminism, ecological sciences, medical breakthroughs, and an increase in lifespan of an astonishing three decades. And although many premodern societies were cultures of beauty and sophistication--and extraordinary sources of spiritual wisdom--none of them possessed the widespread characteristics of postformal pluralism ascribed to them by the haters of modernity.

      "Almost all forms of cultural studies--from boomeritis feminism to boomeritis ecology--commit variations of this pre/post confusion. Most of them claim, for example, that at some time in the historical past, there existed some sort of pluralistic Eden not corrupted by oppression and fragmentation. For deep ecologists, it was the foraging era. For ecofeminists, it was the horticultural era. For philosophers of the flesh, it was anything prior to Descartes. But all of those 'Edens' were preformal, not postformal. And the freedoms that they possessed were idiosyncratic (confined to their own systems), not pluralistic (or honoring the views of all other systems), which is precisely why everything from feminism to the abolition of slavery to the ecological sciences arose only in formal-to-postformal times. Not a single case has been demonstrated of widespread, intersystemic, postformal pluralism in foraging, horticultural, or agrarian times.

      "Hence, the curious internal tension of the retro-Romantic stance that colors so much of boomeritis: postformal pluralism existed nowhere in history to any large degree, but since the assumption is that where pluralism is not, oppression must be, then boomeritis is forced to see the inequality that is inherent in preformal conditions as being the oppression of a postformality that actually was nowhere to be found, let alone oppressed. This forces boomeritis to advocate the recapture of precisely those preformal items that would in fact destroy postformal pluralism. Under those conditions, the salvation offered by boomeritis is in fact deeply reactionary. It is a course of action that, it seems, is pulled back into preconventional modes precisely by the narcissism lying therein."

2. p. 259: "'Human sacrifice was practiced by the Aztecs of Mexico... two pregnant women and several children.'"

     Kim's margin notes: "Keith Windschuttle, The Killing of History, p. 61."

3. p. 260: "'The killings,' reports Clendinnen, '... allies and enemies alike, were routinely present.'"

     Kim's margin notes: "Inga Clendinnen, Aztecs, p. 92."

4. p. 260: "'The victim walked or was dragged... the parts were cooked and eaten.'"

     Kim's margin notes: " The Killing of History, p. 64."

5. p. 260: "'A priest would... continue the ceremony.'"

     Kim's margin notes: " The Killing of History, p. 64."

6. p. 261: "'Then,' reports Clendinnen, '... one thigh was reserved to be fashioned into a face-mask for the man impersonating Centeotl, Young Lord Maize Cob, the son of Toci.'"

     Kim's margin notes: " Aztecs, p. 201."

7. p. 261: "It served various important functions for that meme... starting perhaps as early as 10,000 B.C.E."

     Van Cleef added (from Kim notes): "See Up from Eden. Cases of human sacrifice have been reported in foraging societies, but it does not seem to have been a widespread practice. Planting (horticulture) and the need to take magical steps to insure the crops seems to have been an important ingredient, which is why sacrifice is quite common in Great Mother societies. See René Girard, Violence and the Sacred; Patrick Tierney, The Highest Altar."

8. p. 261: "'Not all of those executed were outsiders... The children, who knew their fate, also wept.'"

     Kim's margin notes: " The Killing of History, p. 64."

9. p. 266: "'The deciphering of Mayan glyphs... revolved around the obsessive need for sacrificial victims.'"

     Kim's margin notes: "Patrick Tierney, The Highest Altar, p. 12."

10. p. 266: "Maya were peace-loving, deeply spiritual... (... as a typical account put it)."

     Carla Fuentes added, "See Calvin Martin, The Way of Being Human, which is a boomeritis account of the indigenous mind, and is a good summary of this approach."

11. p. 266: "As a recent scholar noted, with some astonishment, 'This... was accepted.'"

     Kim's margin notes: "Schele and Miller, The Blood of Kings, p. 19."

12. p. 267: "'First of all,' concludes Michael Coe of Yale University, "... they certainly never inflicted upon their victims the degree of torture and mutilation that were characteristic of Maya sacrifice.'"

     Kim's margin notes: " The Blood of Kings, p. 4."

13. p. 267: "Schele and Miller describe one scene... In contrast, the quick deliberate heart excision practiced by the Aztecs can be regarded as a merciful act.'"

     Kim's margin notes: " The Blood of Kings, p. 217."

14. p. 268: "... the Druids seemed to prefer a 'disproportionate number of children'..."

     Kim's margin notes: " The Highest Altar, p. 14."

15. p. 269: "'The popular assumption... European intellectuals adopted the Inca Empire as a model of sorts for their own visions of enlightened socialism.'"

     Kim's margin notes: " The Highest Altar, p. 29."

16. p. 269: "'Scholars now believe human sacrifice played a crucial role... from Ecuador to Chile.'"

     Kim's margin notes: " The Highest Altar, p. 29."

17. p. 269: "'Once unacceptable sacrifices were weeded out... The Incas used many methods of sacrifice, including... tearing out the heart, and burying alive.'"

     Kim's margin notes: " The Highest Altar, p. 28."

18. p. 269: "'Scholars are just beginning to realize how widespread and varied human sacrifice was in the Andes... in case of good omens, in case of bad omens.'"

     Kim's margin notes: " The Highest Altar, p. 45."

19. p. 270: "In North America, human sacrifice was practiced by the Heron and Pawnee tribes..."

     Kim's margin notes: " The Killing of History, p. 60."

20. p. 270: "'The Anasazi... were believed to be profoundly spiritual, and to live in harmony with nature.'"

     Kim's margin notes: "Douglas Preston, 'Cannibals of the Canyon,' New Yorker, Nov. 30, 1998."

21. p. 270/71: "'The Anasazi captured the fancy of people... seeking a spirituality outside Western civilization.'"

     Kim's margin notes: "Douglas Preston, 'Cannibals of the Canyon,' New Yorker, Nov. 30, 1998."

22. p. 272: "The so-called American Paradise (North, Central, and South) was... precisely like all other foraging and horticultural societies the world over."

     Kim's margin notes: "See Up from Eden and Lenski, Nolan, and Lenski, Human Societies."

23. p. 272: "I will present an overview of the wisdom in a handout."

     Carla Fuentes handed out this leaflet:

      The model of cultural development that is presented in Up from Eden, written by one of our IC colleagues, has (at least) two major strands for any culture at any given time: the average mode and the most advanced mode. In the main lecture I am discussing the average mode. What many people have a hard time appreciating is that societies whose average mode included such shocking (to us) practices as human sacrifice, could also have a few highly evolved practices and accomplishments (just like today's capitalistic society can have a few Zen masters). This particularly includes spiritual realizations of the elite (such as various shamans, yogis, saints, and sages). There is suggestive evidence, for example, that a few of the Maya understood and practiced a preliminary form of kundalini yoga. Mayan shamans (often through bloodletting, fasting, vision quest, and other practices) apparently could arouse to some degree the kundalini power and use the resultant visions as a bridge to the spiritual domain. Many of these types of practices are explained in Up from Eden. Thus, it is absolutely not the case that we here at IC deny genuine spiritual insights to the magic and mythic cultures; only that their attainment was relatively rare--they belonged to the most advanced mode of that culture, not to the average mode. These most-advanced spiritual insights are still a source of wisdom for the modern and postmodern world. In this present lecture I am trying to draw a more accurate and balanced portrait of their cultures at large, whose average mode most definitely included the gruesome practices outlined in the main lecture. See Up from Eden for an account of both average and advanced waves in each major epoch; see the Introductions to volumes 2 and 3 of the Collective Works for a discussion of advanced-shamanic waves appearing during average-magic times; and see Integral Psychology for an explanation of why contacting higher altered states does NOT involve skipping stages."

24. p. 272: "I have written similar accounts of horticultural societies around the world, many of which practiced human sacrifice and slash-and-burn ecology."

     Kim's margin notes: "See Carla Fuentes, The Myth of Primitive Paradise: Human Sacrifice and the Building of Civilization: A Post-Postmodern Feel of the Evidence (New York: Pretence-Hall, 2002)."

25. p. 272: "Many of my IC colleagues have written on the topic as well."

     Kim's margin notes: "See Up from Eden; Sex, Ecology, Spirituality; A Brief History of Everything." Another note cryptically says, "See Boomeritis."

26. p. 273: "I am claiming, rather, a multi-cultural equality in barbarity."

     Carla Fuentes added (from Kim's notes): "And not even barbarity: these types of human sacrifices were normal, healthy behavior for that meme, at that time. Why? As one of my colleagues explained in Up from Eden, a book that summarizes a great deal of theory and research on this topic, the magic-to-mythic worldview (the purple-to-red meme) sees animal sacrifice--human and otherwise--as an intrinsic part of nature's economy, a barter system of life and blood where, if your life is to continue, somebody's else blood must be spilled. Human sacrifice was particularly common in planting, matrifocal, horticultural societies, because the Great Mother demands blood to magically bring forth new crops. The pre-Colombian American horticultural societies were somewhat unique in that human sacrifice was also to a sun god or mountain god. But the magically divine powers--whether of the earth or of heaven--demand blood for life and prosperity, and if you want either, you must pay with blood--and if you don't want the blood to be yours, it must be somebody else's, hence the ritual sacrifice."

27. p. 276: "There are two major views... the recaptured goodness model, and the growth to goodness model."

     Powell added, "See One Taste, December 10 entry, for a discussion of both the growth-to-goodness and recaptured-goodness models."

28. p. 277: "A substantial amount of psychological research has concluded that both of those views are, as it were, partially right."

     Powell added, "See Integral Psychology for a summary of the research bearing on this issue."

29. p. 277: "Thus therapy, in these cases, involves... the lost potentials of childhood, which are not postconventional, but preconventional."

     Lesa Powell (from Kim's notes): "As for the possible existence of childhood spirituality, see Integral Psychology, chapter 11, 'Is There a Childhood Spirituality?' See Sidebar D for a summary of this debate ('Do infants and children have access to any sort of genuine spirituality?') and an integral model that incorporates the essentials of both sides of the argument."

30. p. 278: "In fact, he actually made fun of it... with a series of very witty remarks."

     Kim's margin notes: "For further discussion of Foucault's retraction, see note 12 for lecture 6."

31. p. 278: "Powell once again launched into a scathing intellectual fury of analysis, virtually none of which I understood."

     Lesa Powell continued (from Kim's notes):

     "Dr. Morin previously emphasized that cultural studies committed a double sin: it robbed modern rationality of credit for any of its emancipatory accomplishments (from abolition to feminism to ecological sciences), and it gave to prerationality a liberating force it does not, and never did, possess. French historians Gauchet and Swain, in carefully going over Foucault's early work, strongly concluded that it suffers 'a twofold illusion'--an illusion about modernity (denying something that it actually accomplished), and an illusion about premodernity (giving it something that it did not possess)--precisely the double confusion Morin suggested. Their carefully researched examples:

      "With regard to mental illness, Foucault had eulogized premodern societies because madmen were tolerated and allowed to roam free; they were not locked up or incarcerated. But this rests on 'an illusion about preclassical societies. If the madman was tolerated by traditional societies, it was not because those societies were "better," more tolerant, or, if you wish, less "metaphysical." On the contrary, it was because these societies were fundamentally inegalitarian and hierarchical'--dominator hierarchies, not actualization hierarchies--and thus 'the madman was indeed tolerated, but the toleration was based on the implicit affirmation of his absolute difference from the rest of humanity.... So children were allowed to chase madmen through the streets, throw rocks at them, and make fun of them.'"

      Powell's voice rose to an impassioned pitch. "That cruel treatment of the so-called Other of rationality is exactly what modernity in fact halted. In denying this, Foucault was guilty of 'an illusion about modern societies. If madness began to be a problem with the rise of democratic, egalitarian modernity, it was not because the madman was the Other but because... he had to be thought of as the same, as another man'--another human being, and not subhuman chattel. Thus, in these important areas, modernity begins the cure of exactly what it is misguidedly accused of causing."

32. p. 278: "' Modern history is a history of integration, not exclusion.'"

     Kim's notes: "These quotes, on Gauchet and Swain, are Ferry and Renaut's summary of their research, all from chapter 3 of French Philosophy of the Sixties. Also, see the 'Other of myth' notes: notes 1 and 4 for lecture 6, and note 9 for lecture 4."

33. p. 279: "... In the other direction, in a growth-to-goodness into postconventional, second-tier, integral goodness."

     Lesa Powell continued (from Kim's notes):

      "The true part of the recaptured-goodness model is that at any of the stages of growth--purple to red to blue to orange to green to integral--the potentials of those stages can be repressed, oppressed, alienated, fragmented. 'Therapia' then involves a recontacting, a releasing, a liberating of the repressed potentials--a regression in service of further growth. The main 'problem' with the Enlightenment was not the emergence of rationality (orange)--that, in fact, was one of its extraordinary accomplishments--but a rationality that was captured by empiricism and positivism and thus reduced to instrumental rationality (monological, not dialogical): what we at IC call 'flatland.' The other potentials of reason (dialogical, communicative, moral, practical) were thus buried, became atrophied and withered. The 'therapia' for this is not regression to red or purple--recommended by Romantics and eco-primitivists--but recontacting the lost potentials of reason and carrying them forward into second-tier integral embrace. See The Marriage of Sense and Soul and Sex, Ecology, Spirituality.

      "Are there any aspects of purple and red cultures that were spiritual? Certainly. See note 23 above. As for the forms of childhood spirituality, see Integral Psychology, chapter 11, 'Is There a Childhood Spirituality?' See also Sidebar D: 'Childhood Spirituality,' for a summary of all the relevant points about this important issue."

34. p. 280: "'Behind the walls of the asylum... power is bad... what power is exercised over is good, fine, rich': exactly the hurrahs of the recaptured goodness fever."

     Kim's margin notes: "Quoted in French Philosophy of the Sixties, p. 71."

35. p. 281/82: "'Those who worry that the industrial system... is actually "out there" and not simply a "construction" of imperial egos.'"

     Kim's margin notes: " The Twilight of Common Dreams, p. 214."

36. p. 282: "Likewise, 'The most passionate critic of "male" science believes that she should step out of the way of an oncoming bus, whether or not she believes in the Cartesian mind-body split.'"

     Kim's margin notes: " The Twilight of Common Dreams, p. 202."

37. p. 282: "That these components - objective and interpretive - can never be separated does not mean that all facts are merely interpretations."

     Jefferson continued (from Kim's notes):

      "This view is technically called 'all-quadrant,' which maintains that all occasions actually have (at least) four aspects or dimensions: intentional, cultural, behavioral, and social. The interior dimensions are generally interpretive, and the exterior dimensions are generally objective/empirical. For simplicity, we call the former 'interpretations' and the latter 'facts'--the point is that facts and interpretations can never be separated in reality, and all occasions have factual/objective aspects (Right Hand) and interior/interpretive aspects (Left Hand). Positivism attempts to have facts without interpretations, and postmodernism attempts to have interpretations without facts: both are broken. See The Marriage of Sense and Soul and A Brief History of Everything. For integral interpretation--the specific ways and tools for interpreting texts, history, symbolic meaning, art, linguistics, and so on, according to an 'all-quadrants, all-levels, all-lines, all-states' approach (what we call an 'integral semiotics')--see The Eye of Spirit, chapters 4 and 5, especially endnotes."

38. p. 284: "'I have always put it to my undergraduate students... that any history they make will be fiction - not fantasy, fiction, something sculpted to its expressive purpose.'"

     Kim's margin notes: "Quoted in The Killing of History, p. 74."

39. p. 286: "But precisely 'because of this dissociation of facts... that no norms need be imposed institutionally on the play of desire, for example, was gradually developing.'"

     Kim's margin notes: " French Philosophy of the Sixties, p. 62."

40. p. 286: "That is... 'Nobody tells me what to do!'"

     Kim's notes: "See lecture 9 for a discussion of Nagel and McGuinn."

41.p. 288: "As Ferry and Renaut point out, 'From the disintegration of norms to the rise of neonihilism... demonstrates one of the reasons for the decomposition we saw in May '68.'"

     Kim's margin notes: " French Philosophy of the Sixties, p. 62."

42. p. 288: "'It must seem paradoxical... for postmodernism acquires the strange appearance of a regression.'"

     Kim's margin notes: " French Philosophy of the Sixties, p. 227."

43. p. 288: "Had this lopsided view not been made to order for boomeritis, it would never have taken hold in such a widespread fashion, so palpably false it is."

     Mark Jefferson's entire statement on this issue (from Kim's notes):

      "On the intellectual front, this slide into word magic with no reference to facts was sustained by a single illusion: extreme postmodernism imagined that the verbal dimension of humans is the only dimension we have. (Hence word magic rules, since verbal interpretations alone would constitute reality). The claim was constantly made that there are no extra-linguistic realities available to men and women (no realities outside of language). Jacques Derrida's famous announcement that 'there is nothing outside the text' was taken to mean that there is no objective reality, only our linguistic interpretations. The common battlecry was 'Discourse all the way down'--that is, there are only linguistic interpretations all the way down, and we never run into facts at all. Moreover, these discourses, it was stoutly believed, always represented a particular interest, prejudice, or veiled form of power (except for the discourses of these postmodernists, which are clean and pure and power-free). Yet, in actuality, since every knowing contains both interpretations and facts, then nothing but discourse all the way down really means nothing but pathology all the way down.

      "Had this lopsided view not been made to order for boomeritis, it would never have taken hold in such a widespread fashion. Not only are there preverbal realities, there are transverbal ones as well, and the fact that verbal interpretation inescapably touches them all does not mean it creates them all.

      "An 18-month-old child has an elaborate conception of object permanence; her behavior indicates that she recognizes separate objects existing in space and enduring in time; she grasps numerous sensorimotor objects and actual occasions--but she has no linguistic or verbal structures at all! And she certainly has not learned the horrid Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm. Rather, the archaic-beige worldview, with its sensorimotor realities, is largely preverbal, and we continue to have access to that basic set of sensorimotor perceptions all the time (as do most other animals; even a camera will photograph sensorimotor objects--a rock, tree, an oncoming bus--and a camera can't interpret anything: it's a little short on discourse). Moreover, in certain advanced states of meditation, the verbal mind becomes still and quiet, and we are ushered into states of transverbal awareness. That both preverbal and transverbal realities are intimately intertwined with our verbal interpretations of them, does not mean those realities are not there!"

44. p. 288/89: "Dening's thesis that... history is not a process in which objective knowledge is discovered and accumulated."

     Kim's margin notes: " The Killing of History, p. 75."

45. p. 289/90: "To argue that Bligh was less violent, Dening does not put forward... his case is self-contradictory."

     Kim's margin notes: " The Killing of History, p. 76."

46. p. 290: "Second-tier integralism points out that both of these positions are important and in any event inescapable."

     Jefferson added (from Kim's notes):

      "There has been a concerted effort to find a middle way between facts and fiction, history and myth, positivism and constructivism, only facts and only interpretations. See, for example, P. Novick, That Noble Dream; J. Appleby, L. Hunt, and M. Jacob, Telling the Truth about History; J. Chandler et al., Questions of Evidence; L. Gossman, Between History and Literature; G. Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century. Most offer a reduced but workable objectivity and practical realism coupled with an understanding of the inevitability of historical and contextual situatedness. However, what all of those lack is an integral framework that can support their otherwise admirably balanced approaches. I recommend an 'all-quadrants, all-levels, all-lines, all-states, all-types' approach, which is summarized in Sidebar A: 'Integral Historiography.'"

47. p. 291: " All of that needs to be taken into account for more integral interpretations of history."

     Jefferson continued (from Kim's notes):

      "But even when we claim that humans are always culturally situated--and they are--we are making universal factual claims that are not open to interpretation. Likewise with the sensorimotor realm itself, which is the field of universal scientific facts (both Hindu water and Muslim water have two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom). But the green meme, in attacking scientific objectivism, positivism, and empiricism, has a hard time seeing that both empiricism and hermeneutics are important components of human knowledge: like all first-tier memes, it tends to think either/or, not both/and.

      "The major waves of existence (red, blue, green, etc.) by no means exhaust the interpretive repertoire. Within each wave of existence, with its own deep syntax of interpretive possibilities, there are different surface types of interpretive ploys. For example, many literary theorists, from ancient Greek to Renaissance to modern structuralist (Jakobson, Lévi-Strauss, Foucault), have maintained that tropes (figures of speech embedded in most languages--such as metaphor, metonym, synecdoche, and irony) are the linguistic structures that prefigure all forms of interpretation. This is an example of analyzing various translative (or 'horizontal') types or styles, and it is useful as long as one does not use the existence of styles to deny the existence of facts, which writers from Hayden White ( Metahistory) to early Foucault attempted to do (if there are no objectively true claims, then the claim that tropes create interpretation must also not be true, in which case we can ignore it). But in actuality, interpretive styles (horizontal) and interpretive levels (vertical) do not deny facts but merely situate them.

      "Great historians are masters of both facts and narrative story-telling. By contrast, empiricists are dullards, narrativists are liars; great historiography is sensorimotor facts combined with interpretive flair, which is why it is worth reading the great historians again and again, not for their facts but their flair--from Thucydides and Plutarch to the more recent: Thomas Macaulay, Jacob Burckhardt, Thomas Carlyle, Alexis de Tocqueville, Edward Gibbon, Arnold Toynbee....

      "My thesis is that in this delicate balance between fact and interpretation, boomeritis significantly tipped the scales in favor of over-emphasizing interpretation (because it is in the province of the ego) and under-emphasizing or even denying the reality of facts (which are in the province of the not ego and not controllable). Facts constrain egoic license, and thus the very existence of facts must be deconstructed, sometimes subtly, sometimes blatantly. But the net effect of boomeritis historicism is to put the historian's ego into the picture to a degree wholly unwarranted by good evidence or good interpretations. A blatant example is Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Regan, by Edmund Morris, where the author finds it impossible to keep is own ego out of the history of another person, and therefore literally inserts the character 'Edmund Morris' into the narrative in completely fictional ways, with the net effect being that you cannot believe a single sentence he writes (is he making it up or reporting it?). A subtler example is Dead Certainties, where Simon Schama presents what appears to be history and then confesses that he made some of it up (since, after all, there is not that much difference between fact and fiction anyway). The worst examples, however, are those many postmodern writers who have used the supposed fictionality of all history to claim that Holocaust never occurred. Since all history is myth, who can say otherwise?"

48. p. 292: "Morin, who had just finished a short lecture on 'The Tribal Hijacking of Reason,' which is in my notes... 'Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Joan Hazelton.'"

     In between Jefferson's and Hazelton's presentation, Morin spoke on "The Tribal Hijacking of Reason" (from Kim's notes):

      "It soon becomes apparent that most of the horrors that extreme postmodernists blame on the Enlightenment and on reason are actually the result of a misuse of a reason, a pathological form of reason, a reason held ransom by much lower and much uglier impulses. For the unpleasant reality is that, once humanity evolved to orange reason and the various types of technology that an incredibly powerful formal operational cognition could create, then any of the earlier memes--purple, red, or blue--could hijack that technology for their own ends. Put bluntly, the technological products of reason can be used by anybody, at any stage of development. And that explosive combination lies behind virtually every brutality and holocaust unleashed in the modern world.

      "The worst damage a purple meme can inflict on its own is with a bow and arrow; the worst damage red can inflict on its own is with crossbows and catapults; but orange can discover nuclear power. Yet the real nightmare occurs when nuclear power falls into the hands of purple/red, which could never invent it on their own but which can easily and happily push the button: exactly the terrorism now facing the world at large, as red war loads hijack the products of orange science. No person who was actually at moral orange (postconventional, worldcentric) would ever use nuclear or biological weapons of mass destruction as a means to further their own drives at the expense of innocents. But red is more than happy to do so--and there's the rub, there is the source of the real holocausts that have plagued modernity from the start (holocausts that postmodernists have misguidedly blamed modernity itself for, whereas modernity provided only the means, not the motives).

      "Max Weber pointed out that there are at least three forms of reason: formal or mathematical, communicative or dialogical, and instrumental or rational-purposive. Most of the downsides of rationality come from a misuse of the latter, which is either overemphasized by certain monological philosophes or, worse, hijacked by lower memes. The Enlightenment did indeed tend to over-emphasize instrumental rationality, and that is problematic in itself. Orange instrumental rationality can be repressive, as earlier indicated, and that needs to be taken firmly into account. ( Sex, Ecology, Spirituality contains a strong criticism of the Enlightenment's over-emphasis on instrumental rationality and the monological gaze--see especially chaps. 4, 11, 12, and 13.)

      "Yet even then, the real problems in the modern world--from Gulag to Auschwitz--come not from orange instrumental rationality but the hijacking of that rationality by purple, red, or blue. And the cure, in any event, is not less Enlightenment but more. I side entirely with Habermas in that we must build on the positives of the Enlightenment and not merely deconstruct it. Constructive postmodernism, in my view, transcends but includes the many beneficial moments of the Enlightenment.

      "Todd Gitlin echoes a Habermasian conclusion, which I strongly share:

     Those postmodernists who propose to discard the Enlightenment as an excrescence of male, imperialist, racist, Western ideology are blind to their own situation. For all their insistence that ideas belong to particular historical moments, they take for granted the historical ground they walk on. They fail, or refuse, to recognize that their preoccupation with multiculturalism, identities, perspectives, incommensurable world views, and so forth would be unimaginable were it not for the widespread acceptance of Enlightenment principles: the worth of individuals, their right to dignity, and to a social order that satisfies it.... The most cogent defense of the politics of difference, that of...philosopher Charles Taylor, [points out that] 'the politics of difference grows organically out of the politics of universal dignity' [of the Enlightenment].

      Even the ideals of perspectivism and its political equivalent, self-determination, are the still uncompleted...unfolding of one of the Enlightenment's major potentials.... The Enlightenment is not to be discarded because Voltaire was anti-Semitic or Hume, Kant, Hegel, and Jefferson racist, but rather further enlightened--for it equips us with the tools with which to refute the anti-Semitism of Voltaire and the racism of the others [indeed, such racism is not the result of Enlightenment reason but of residual blue ethnocentrism]. The Enlightenment is self-correcting. The corrective to darkness is more light.... It is from the much-maligned Enlightenment that the idea emerges that we must all, in the philosopher Richard Rorty's words, 'lend an ear to the specialists in particularly.' But lending an ear does not mean turning one's face from the Enlightenment. The fact that Jefferson owned slaves and cavalierly presided over the refusal to enfranchise women does not justify any particular view that happened to be held by a slave or a woman....

      Today's identity theorists are properly skeptical toward imposed, imperial, arbitrary, unwarranted universalizations. They pursue what one feminist theorist, Lata Mani, calls the 'revolt of the particular against that masquerading as the general.' But where did they get their skepticism? How do they justify their revolt? Why does it seem legitimate to them? Not on Confucian or Islamic or Aztec grounds. The revolt rests precisely on the Enlightenment's taste for human equality and diversity, its ideal of self-determination, its objection to arbitrary power. The business of the Enlightenment was, indeed, to enlarge the scope of the differences that deserved respect.... To hate absolutism was also to hate the absolutist claims of one's own nation, tribe, family. For precisely that reason, the Enlightenment is not to be disposed of with a wave of the moment's identity cards. (The Twilight of Common Dreams, pp. 215-16)

      "All of that tends to be overlooked by typical assaults on the patriarchy and patriarchal rationality, assaults that are all too often driven by boomeritis. As Gitlin says, 'The most common form of this argument today is so-called standpoint feminism, the idea that so-called objectivity and so-called emancipation are nothing but the trappings of imperial masculine ego at work, consuming, obliterating, or paving over everything in its path. In this view, patriarchy's rage to rule is the inevitable consequence of the Cartesian illusion that the mind is separate from the body and hovers in free space, like God's eye, treating the world as an object. At the root of male supremacy and ecological disaster alike lies the false assumption that the world has not life of its own but exists for the pleasure and conquest of the (white, Western, heterosexist) male ego'" (Gitlin, p. 214).

      Morin looked up and smiled gently. "That view is mistaken on virtually every account. It's not just that standpoint feminism misunderstands the real nature and difficulties of the Cartesian dualism (see Sidebar E: 'Descartes'), or that it distorts the actual meaning of the mind-body problem (which is a four-quadrant problem in every way, and not merely a version of gender issues), or that it fails to understand the real genesis of ecological despoliation--which is caused, not by male values, but by male and female values at any of the first-tier memes, including the green-meme values of standpoint feminists. That is, the real problem is not the male, patriarchal, agentic, Cartesian ego--the real problem is the male AND female ego at any first-tier meme. The egocentric and ethnocentric female ego is just as partial, dissociative, limited, and despoiling as the egocentric and ethnocentric male ego. What is truly sad here is that the first-tier feminist ego feels that she has escaped this dissociative activity herself, whereas she merely exemplifies a first-tier consciousness in her own attacks on all the other first-tier values.

      "No wonder that Gitlin points out that, in addition to being historically confused, these critics are factually incorrect. 'Does it follow, as Richard Rorty writes, that "the vocabulary of Enlightenment rationalism, although it was essential to the beginnings of liberal democracy, has become an impediment to the preservation and progress of democratic societies"?... Rorty has claimed that, in the real world, people act in the name of their particular tribes; that when they have acted altruistically, for example to rescue Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe, they have "usually" given parochial reasons for doing so--that the Jew was "a fellow Milanese, or a fellow Jutlander, or a fellow member of the same union or profession, or a fellow bocce player, or a fellow parent of small children." But the political theorist Norman Geras examined some eighty accounts of Gentiles who saved Jews during the Holocaust. Only one failed to mention universal moral obligations. Even those who saved their friends cited universalist motives as well. The rescuers spoke of defending "human dignity," of helping "a persecuted human being," of helping "because a human being ought to help another," of "our human duty to open our home... and our hearts to anyone who suffers"' (p. 216-17). They all spoke, that is to say, in the words of the patriarchal, universal, postconventional, worldcentric, rational Enlightenment.

      "There are indeed downsides of the patriarchal Enlightenment, as mentioned (see, e.g., Sex, Ecology, Spirituality). But these are corrected by redressing the imbalances within rationality and then moving forward, not by eulogizing preformal, premodern modes and condemning en toto the Enlightenment.

      "The rational use of rational technology does not include ecological despoliation that is perfectly suicidal; it does not include biological warfare that can kill the entire human race; it does not include ethnic blood cleansing and mass homicide. No definition of rational includes any of those grotesqueries: those are all rational technologies used by prerational impulses--egocentric or ethnocentric, selfish instead of universal care, tribalism instead of genuine universalism--and whether that be teutonic tribalism or corporate tribalism matters not one wit.

      "Auschwitz is not the product of reason; Auschwitz is the product of reason hijacked by tribalism. Hijacked by the red and blue memes, by an ethnocentric blood-cleansing ideology intent on genocide, rife with prerational manias and premodern revivals, shot through with retro-Romantic feelings, laced with human sacrifice, horticultural mythology, blood soaked and horror drenched. The Nazis were not reasonable--they were just Aztecs with gas chambers. The Gulag archipelago, Pol Pot's mass homicides, the massacre at Wounded Knee: these are not the products of reason, but the products of purple and red and blue memes catastrophically using the powerful products of reason to further their brutal agendas.

      "To see poor postconventional, worldcentric reason--Gilligan's wave of universal care--blamed for these modern nightmares is a travesty indeed. And horrifyingly worse: once reason is blamed for these prerational catastrophes, then getting rid of reason is recommended as their cure, when the rejection of reason is actually their cause. Extreme postmodernism--boomeritis by any other name--thus appears to be an intrinsic part of the disease for which it claims to be the cure."

49. p. 294: "I put Kim's notes on all this in my journal."

     Hazelton's lecture (from Kim's notes):

      "To begin with, it is an uncontested fact that modern industrialization is the prime polluter of the planet. Industrialization is a product of orange rationality; but, as we just saw, using industrialization in a way that is perfectly suicidal is not a rational use of rationality--it is instead rationality hijacked by red power drives and blue imperialism. Ecological disaster is not postconventional reason in action, but reason commandeered by tribalism--corporate tribalism, ethnic tribalism, blue imperialism, red slash-and-burn motives, purple power and egocentric vanity drives--of which men and women are equally guilty.

      "As for you ecofeminists out there who imagine that women are friendlier to nature, we will have a few sobering comments on that momentarily. For the fact is, first-tier female values are just as devastating to the biosphere as any first-tier male values. All of ecofeminism runs aground on this simple mistake. What is required is not an attitude that is more friendly to body, nature, relationships, and the feminine mode of knowing--because, after all, as Carol Gilligan pointed out, there are egocentric and ethnocentric stages of feminine knowing--but rather a development that puts more men and women into second-tier integral consciousness. Failing to do that, and merely emphasizing yin values over yang values, once again contributes to the lack of second-tier consciousness that is the single greatest threat to Gaia. And thus most forms of ecofeminism, like deep ecology, are inexorably contributing to Gaia's demise."

      Joan Hazelton shook her head, sighed, and continued. "To move to the topic at hand. The central confusion of boomeritis ecology is the equating of the biosphere with Spirit, a confusion that depends, first and foremost, upon a very slippery definition of the word 'biosphere.' On the one hand, I realize that, in some sense, Spirit is all-pervading and all-encompassing, so I must claim that the biosphere likewise is the great wholeness, the great holistic Web of Life, which embraces absolutely everything. So the biosphere, meaning the whole universe and its glorious Web of Life, is equated with Spirit, with God or the Goddess. In short, Gaia is God.

      "On the other hand, I must also claim that humanity--or at least the modern, instrumental-rational, western patriarchy--is destroying the biosphere. But if the patriarchy is part of the biosphere--if it is part of the great Web of Life, like everything else--that would mean that the patriarchy is something that the biosphere itself is doing. And that can't be right, because the patriarchy sucks. So I must introduce a split, an ontological dualism, between the great Web of Life and the patriarchy, so that I can claim the latter is destroying the former.

      "So my 'biosphere' is not so all-embracing after all, since apparently it does not wish to include and embrace Newton, Descartes, Bacon, Galileo, and all the other criminals responsible for the death of the Goddess. So I must select a slice of manifestation, and identify Spirit with the particular slice that I like, and identify the enemies of Spirit as those who do not agree with my version of the slice. Generally speaking, this means that the 'biosphere' is identified with the empirical, sensory, bodily world: the world you can see with your senses. And anything that is human-made--from houses to boats to villages to airplanes--is not as directly part of the biosphere, which is why humans can hurt the biosphere.

      "With this narrow definition of Spirit, this slice-and-dice notion of the Goddess, numerous ecophilosophers have written treatise after treatise explaining that almost every human activity is basically anti-ecological--and therefore anti-spiritual. As soon as the first human picked up a club and hit a bear with it, the assault on the biosphere had begun, the brutal assault on Spirit was afoot. As soon as the first human scraped the earth with a hoe and planted the first seed, the rape of nature had begun. As soon as the first mill ground the first wheat, the murder of the Goddess was upon us.

      "By thus restricting Spirit, reducing Spirit, to the preconventional realm of sensory experience, eco-boomeritis could scream 'Murder!' when any conventional display began to emerge. By narrowing Spirit to the sensory world, boomeritis could hold on to its own preconventional sentiments, while claiming it was holding on to nothing less than God.

      "By reducing God/dess to the sensory realm, boomeritis had at last found a Spirit that spoke its own language: immediate feelings and impulses, preconventional and preformal, loudly claiming to be divine, the wonder of my own sensations. And this sensate version of salvation is the only salvation allowed. This is yet another rendition of the boomeritis slogan: 'Lose your mind and come to your senses,' which, although the recipe for a terrific fraternity house party, is not exactly a philosophy of life.

      "In announcing that it had 'The Way' (as a typical eco-boomeritis book was titled), which will subvert the Spirit-destroying forces now amongst us, eco-boomeritis claimed that it was going to save Gaia, save God, save the Goddess, and it was going to do so by recapturing the preformal paradise that formality (modernity, patriarchy, rationality) had destroyed. Of course, most eco-Romantics avoid the issue of whether the original foraging tribes of half a million years ago (whose example we are supposed to follow in order to save the planet) did little damage to the biosphere because of the presence of wisdom or simply the lack of means. In fact, as Dr. Fuentes explained, many tribes practiced slash and burn and left trails of eco-despoliation wherever they went. Moreover, in their legal and cultural structures, the original foragers clearly did not possess inter-systemic, postformal modes of intersubjectivity, so they clearly are not models of how to proceed in reconciling noosphere and biosphere. It is, in fact, the tribal mentality--me and my clan, my tribe, my nation--that most prevents the widespread emergence of postconventional, worldcentric awareness, which alone can recognize and protect the global commons. Once again, the retro-Romantics are recommending a reactionary course of action that effectively prevents their own goals.

      "In this Regress Express"--to use Lesa's wonderful phrase--"still looking for the beach beneath the pavement, many of the standard tools of boomeritis were brought into play: the social construction of reality, contextualism, Foucauldian genealogy, deconstruction, pluralistic relativism, the retro-Romantic crusade. Many good truths, many sad distortions.... Boomeritis on parade...." Hazelton shook her head, smiled to herself, walked back to the podium.