Intro Prologue Part I Part II Part III

[Before reading this, please read "Introduction to 'The Deconstruction of the World Trade Center'," posted on this site, or much of what follows won't make sense. Thanks, KW.]

      Two weeks after the awakening in Club Passim, terrorists associated with Usama bin Laden hijacked four American commercial airliners and suicidally crashed them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing thousands of civilians and shocking the world. Because of modern, global communication capacities and the alarming severity of the act, never in history had an event triggered a collective worldwide consciousness of such magnitude. From Manhattan to Mozambique, from Indonesia to Istanbul, from Lisbon to Lebanon, from Kenya to Kiev, some 4 billion people were united, if not in their actual opinions of the act, then in their absolute shock. "Unbelievable, unbelievable, unbelievable!" stammered a rattled Yassar Arafat, speaking for the world.

     In mysterious ways I could not explain, I was instantly in the presence of my teachers at Integral Center, as they were having dinner several days after the event. Mark, Charles, Lesa, Carla, Derek, Margaret, and dearest Joan.

     I had just turned twenty-one; the repercussions of the strange events in Club Passim were still echoing through a shattered soul that could not even remember its own name, the dates and destinies of everyday reality escaped my awareness altogether, as time and space lost their density and tended to evaporate if I wasn't paying careful attention. And yet here inexplicably I was, with people who had watched over my death and miraculously brought me back to a life that was beyond both life and death. This twentysomething owed those fiftysomethings more than can ever be conveyed; meaningful words slip out of my grasp and float into the cosmic void, home of a darkness that was to be a revelation calling.

Part I: A Spectrum of Consciousness

      "A few moments of silence, if we could," Charles Morin said. The air was still with a fullness not of this world.

      "The question has naturally come up: should Integral Center make some sort of statement in the wake of this horrid tragedy?," Morin finally queried after several minutes of infinite quiet. "I have to say I'm of two minds on this. One the one hand, the response seems simple: this is wickedness on display. On the other hand, as you all know, it is much, much more complex than that. So while a statement seems mandatory, I'm very hesitant to do so."

      "I have been surprised," Margaret Carlton said, "at the extent to which the world--more-or-less literally the entire world--has responded to this tragedy. I must say, it is so very, very touching. First, of course, your prayers go to those killed, and your heart weeps for their families and friends. Oh! the sadness, the inexpressible sadness." Transparent, fragile, porcelain Margaret Carlton looked, at that moment, like one of those beautiful Blessed Mary figurines, or maybe one of Kwan Yin. Lesa gazed at her with a tenderness that words--my words anyway--can't convey.

      "But I do tend to agree with Charles," she continued. "The actual situation is so utterly complex that a short statement would be superfluous. Most statements that I have seen"--Carlton's resoluteness replaced a certain softness--"are, shall we say, of a one-meme sentiment. Hard to know how to go with this without offending everybody."

      "Yes, part of the difficulty is this," Derek Van Cleef spoke up, and you could already feel his intense edge searing into the situation. Van Cleef was like a court jester on PCP: he always saw the shadow, but always expressed it through his own anger. "The people in this country who are getting so emotional about the event are not really worked up over the loss of human life, or even American life. After all, 50,000 Americans are killed each year in automobile accidents, and I don't see any of these people standing on street corners with placards saying 'Stop the Carnage!' Or even worse: the same number of people--50,000 of them, mostly children-- die each day around the world from starvation, and where are the weepy protesters? It's not human life they are worried about; no, they are reacting because their particular set of values was attacked and deeply threatened, and their response depends on the value set they are most attached to: red sees one thing, blue sees another, orange another, green another still. But when those planes tore into the side of the WTC, they were really tearing into these different sets of beliefs and values: the terrorists threatened not just human life, but the value-meme that you most identify with."

      "Well, Derek, that's putting it very coldly--and who would have thought that of you?" quipped Jefferson. Everybody laughed, more or less affectionately, at Van Cleef's natural lack of, well, warmth; I was about to say 'blood.'

     "But, yes, in the main, I would agree with that," Jefferson continued. "So why don't you elaborate a bit? Why don't you give us a quick rundown of how each level of consciousness, or each meme, would generally respond to the terrorist attack?"

Red: Rage and Revenge

      Van Cleef put down his fork and spoke deliberately. "Okay, right now I'm just going to summarize the different types of responses to the attack--I am NOT talking about the various causes of the attack, how blame should be decided and apportioned, and so on. Without implying that any of these responses are right or wrong, the point is that each meme, stage, or wave of consciousness reacts very differently to being attacked in such a fashion.

     "Start with red, the easiest to understand. Here's a mock dialogue--" Van Cleef began chuckling.

     Reporter: Mr. Red, I was wondering what you thought of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon?

     Red: Outa the way, Shorty, I'm about to suck some lunch. Gimme eat.

     Reporter: It needn't take long.

     Red: Huh, gurgle.

     Reporter: The attack. On the World Trade Center.

     Red: Kill 'em, I say.

     Reporter: Kill 'em? Care to elaborate on that, sir?

     Red: Yup. Kill 'em a lot.

     Reporter: Kill them a lot? Right, right. Tell me, why do you suppose they did it? The terrorists?

     Red: Huh, what?

     Reporter: Why you think they did it?

     Red: Friggin jerkoffs, commie scum bastards. Kill 'em real hard. Mess with us, we'll rip their friggin towel heads right off, put 'em on stakes, that's what we'll do. Now gimme eat.

     Reporter: Actually, sir, they're religious fanatics, not communists. Surely you knew that?

     Red (grabs reporter by the collar, lifts him off the ground): What was that? Maybe I should put yer head in a vice grip and squoze yer eyeballs right outa their sockets. Whaddya say about that, Mr. Smarty-ass reporter?

     Reporter: Commie scum bastards, kill 'em real hard, that's what I say!

     Everybody was smiling with Van Cleef. "I am, of course, exaggerating. The fact is, healthy red is the engine of so much change. It is the obstacle buster par excellence; it refuses boundaries, smashes obstacles. It's just that if red is a fantastic servant, it's a horrible master. It's one thing to have red in your service, another thing to have only red as your center of gravity. It's also another thing to have red as a hidden underbelly--as does boomeritis, for example--driving your automobile without your knowing it, deconstructing every conventional boundary in sight, hijacking your philosophy to support its egocentric ways.

     "But the basic red response is indeed rage and revenge. The terrorist attack is viewed, consciously or unconsciously, as an attack--NOT on humanity, not on civilization, not on my country or on God, but an attack on ME--and I will respond by smashing your skull in. More or less." Van Cleef kept chuckling, this time in what appeared a genuinely good-natured way.

Blue: Good versus Evil

     "As we move to blue, a more cognitively complex structure begins to give considered reasons for its actions; but, unable to access the nuances of multiple perspectives, settles into authoritarian and dogmatic absolutes: I have good on my side, and therefore the attack is a case of evil, pure and simple. Generally speaking, this wave maintains that we Americans are good, decent, freedom-loving, God-fearing, fairness-loving people, and the terrorists are fundamentally satanic, demonic, subhuman, evil. We are right, they are wrong, and that is that. This is a straightforward case of good versus evil. Therefore, you are for us or you are against us in this crusade to rid the world of darkness. We must bond together under the one true way to see this--united we stand, divided we fall--joined by our belief that America is the greatest country on earth and we are God's children, and we will therefore hunt down those responsible and kill them, er, I mean bring them to justice." Van Cleef looked up and gently smiled, "Thus endeth the scripture reading for the day." He winked, but in a still-kindly sort of way. "Well, you know what I mean. Common blue-meme responses include those of William Bennett, Billy Graham, most exoteric religious leaders, here and abroad, and many conservatives and Republicans. The Pope held an unprecedented papal audience, telling Americans that 'evil will not have the last word.' God, you see, is on our side, not theirs."

      Hazelton looked mildly irritated--she always did around Van Cleef--and spoke up. "Everything you say is true, Derek, but I must tell you, dear souls, how surprised I was to find a good deal of blue resonating in me." Joan smiled gently. "I just got all choked up watching Americans love Americans. Then I really got choked up reading the condolences from around the world. One week ago, America was sole Bad Guy in the entire world: we were either McCulture ruining local values everywhere, or we were the Great Satan, or we were insipid Global Capitalism crushing freedom everywhere--we were supposed to be racists, imperialists, domineering swine." She began laughing. "I'm not saying there isn't some truth in those charges, but only that, from now on, it will be impossible to think that America is simply, merely, solely The Bad Guy. Yassar Arafat, for heaven's sake, donated his own blood to show 'solidarity with America.' European commissioner Romano Prodi declared, 'In the darkest hours of European history, America stood close with us. Today, we stand by America.'"

     Tears abruptly came to Joan's eyes. She smiled, brushed them away. "See what I mean? But it just goes on and on. France, no screaming friend of ours, put French pilots into Mirage jets, ready to support us; the French Prime Minister said, 'In light of what happened, we feel like an orphan'--that is, even France feels like an orphan without America. Russia turned over its intelligence network to help. Britain had a day of mourning, with people singing the American anthem; white lilies were tied to the fence around the American embassy in Grosvenor Square. Did you know that the Queen--the Queen, for heaven's sake--Ms. Warmth--actually, for the first time in history, sang the national anthem of another country in public, and she even got teary-eyed! In Kiev people laid flowers outside our embassy; one message read, 'No terrorism in the name of all Kiev.' Flags flew at half-mast in countries all around the world. A Canadian editorial written several years ago was brought out, dusted off, and widely circulated: 'This Canadian thinks it is time to speak up for the Americans as the most generous and possibly the least appreciated people on all the earth. I can name 5000 times when the Americans raced to the help of other people in trouble. Can you name me even one time when someone else raced to the Americans in trouble? Our American neighbors have faced it alone, and I'm one Canadian who is damned tired of hearing them get kicked around. Stand proud, America!'" She looked up, still teary-eyed. "I mean, doesn't that get to you?"

     "Of course, dear, of course," Lesa said. Heads nodded in sympathy. I looked at Van Cleef, whose expression, on the other hand, seemed to say, "Oh, suck it up, you wimp," but that was probably just my imagination.

     "Look," Van Cleef finally said, "the whole point is that, if you're lucky enough to have some sort of second--not to mention third--tier awareness, you can and should resonate with all these value chords, blue included. The question is, do you exclusively identify with a single first-tier meme and its response, or do you span the spectrum? And Joan, I know you. You're turquoise to the bone. Hell, Lesa thinks you're coral, or maybe some color we haven't even invented yet."

     "Well, this bone is a bit blue right now!" she laughed.

     "So, Derek, why don't you continue with your memetic rundown."

     "Right, right. Well, blue--the dear blue in the red-white-and-blue, is ethnocentric bonding, and no, there's nothing wrong with that. It's wonderful, as long as it is only one chord in a full-spectrum symphony, yes?

Orange: An Attack on Civilization

     "So let's look briefly at orange, or what we might call the Ayn Rand response: this wave of consciousness views the assault, not as an attack on a particular people, nation, or deity--those are all ethnocentric--but rather as a worldcentric attack on freedom, liberty, and justice. Not to mention an attack on free-market capitalism, the one positive force in the world today! Orange would be quick to point out that the terrorists did not attack a church or even Congress: they chose the Wall Street area and the World Trade Center. In other words, this would be viewed by orange, not merely as an attack on America, but as an attack on civilization itself, irrespective of particular countries or deities.

     "Notice that the orange response, due to yet another increase in cognitive complexity and sophistication, has already gone from ethnocentric (or mythic-membership) to worldcentric (or universal formal), in the sense that it does not appeal to a particular people, nation, race, group, or culture. It is instead postconventional in this sense: the attack is viewed as an attack on values that people everywhere could embrace, regardless of religion, race, sex, or creed. Not everybody can be an American; but everybody can make money, be a capitalist, yearn for that type of freedom, value that type of liberty--and therefore this was an attack, not on America, but on civilization. Again, I'm not saying that any of this is right or wrong; I'm simply describing some common ways that the different waves of consciousness view this terrorist attack.

     "David Kelley, executive director of the Objectivist Center, gives a classic and very literate orange-meme response. 'With rare unity, Americans have grasped that this was an assault on their values, and it was. But the values are not uniquely American, or even uniquely Western. They are the values of civilized life anywhere. This was an assault on civilization as such.' But by 'civilized values,' Kelley basically means orange-meme values, since he gives the following as examples: individualism; individual liberty and freedom; capitalism as a system of trade, production, innovation, and progress; secularism; reason; free market; world commerce. Those, of course, are not red values, not blue values, not green values, not turquoise values, and so on: they are orange values. And so an attack on the WTC was an attack on those values, which Kelley then identifies with civilization per se. He thus ends with the fervent call: 'We are not dealing with civilized people. We must declare war on the terrorists and use whatever force it takes to render them incapable of posing any further threat. We urge President Bush and Congress to undertake a similar campaign against every nest of terrorists who have declared themselves, by the death and destruction they have wrought, to be enemies of mankind. In doing so, we will be acting in our own self-defense, with the moral authority of those who have been attacked. But we should also understand and declare to the world that we are acting to preserve a world order on which civilized values depend, and civilized people everywhere must join in this cause.'"

     "You know what I love most about God?" Margaret Carlton abruptly interrupted Derek's narrative, then looked at everybody with a dreamy smile that suggested she was... elsewhere.

     "What, dear?" Lesa replied.

     "Spirit manifests itself in this extraordinary spectrum of consciousness, yes? This amazing spiral of development, spanning every conceivable range and color and band and wavelength, reaching all the way from dust to Deity, from dirt to Divinity. And every single color has its place, doesn't it? Every meme, every wave, every swirl and whirl and twist and twirl--they all have something important to say, don't they? Don't they?"

     Everybody nodded, apparently not sure where this was going, but touched by Carlton's frail grace and gratitude. "That's all. I just wanted to say that. I know that blue and orange and green and all of them can get really sick and really twisted and really stupid, but in their healthy forms they are all parts of this beautiful, beautiful, beautiful spectrum of consciousness, aren't they? Aren't they?"

     "You're beautiful, dear," Lesa said, squeezing her hand.

     "Right, right, real swell, Margaret," Van Cleef cut and clipped. "So, anybody else want to weigh in on the wonders of God? No? Okay." Then he actually smiled a genuine 'I'm-just-kidding' smile.

     Carla Fuentes looked at him. "Derek, you are the sweetest man in the world, under all that... well, under all that you."

Green: A Transvaluation of Values

     "Very funny, Carla, very funny. Watch me laugh. Ha, ha. Okay, moving on, moving on.... Where was I? Red, blue, orange, oh yes....

     "Green's response is the most difficult to catalog, because it is by far the most conflicted. On the one hand, the majority of green-meme attitudes around the world, at this time , are infected with the mean green meme and boomeritis, and this severely complicates the matter, because it makes it hard to spot healthy green and the wonderful types of kindness that it always brings to the situation. Much of green--and certainly the MGM (mean green meme) in its postmodern guise--wants to blame America for virtually all of the Third World's problems, and often all the world's problems, period.

     "Moreover, for the last several decades, the various Third World groups, factions, insurrectionists, and even terrorists have actually adopted the postmodernist lingo coming out of American universities in order to justify their actions. Green pluralism maintains, in its extreme--and most common--forms, that culturally there is no good or bad, no better or worse: there are no universal standards by which we may judge one culture to be better or worse than another. In fact, we cannot say anything about an Other that the Other would not say about itself. Period. To attempt to speak of the Other in terms other than those of the Other is to commit a horrible crime known as a 'metanarrative.' Rather, all cultural values are essentially equal--this is called 'an irreducible plurality of ultimates'--and a pure egalitarianism is the only possible response in the face of the Other.

     "Until the Other bombs the bloody fuck out of your country in the most heinous way imaginable." Van Cleef looked at everybody present, an entrenched grimness etching his face. "This generally threw green into an internal paroxysm and wrenching value spasm. Surely, it seemed to green, that brutal attack was, well, pretty bad, except that there isn't supposed to be any bad. And now all of a sudden, Western culture is viciously assaulted by something that looks suspiciously BAD. But there is only supposed to be 'a plurality of authentic ultimates,' with none of them inherently superior (except all the ones that are non-Western, since they are superior in every way--except that postmodern pluralism and multiculturalism arises only in Western culture--oops; so maybe I can say that postmodern pluralism is really just reestablishing the primal harmony present in all premodern tribes--except a premodern tribe just deconstructed the World Trade Center and that can't be good, can it?--except that I got my tenure by writing 2 books and 15 articles on the Crime of the Enlightenment and its hegemonic, patriarchal, capitalistic, colonialistic, imperialistic imposition on the paradisical, nondissociated, freedom-loving peoples of the premodern world, so I can't very well publicly change my mind , can I?--except that...).

     "Well, you get the point. I'm being flippant here, and I shouldn't be, because this was a truly agonizing interior tension for many greens. Nietzsche used to speak of a 'transvaluation of values,' where that which was once thought to be bad is seen to be good, and that which appeared good now appears bad. Well, when those airplanes slammed into the WTC, many green memes suffered a wrenching transvaluation of values: Western civilization was seen as something approaching a victim, and the nonwestern values, and even the tribal mentality--which was supposed to harbor everything that is good, from the noble savage to the Other of repressive civilization--was suddenly seen as something goddam close to bad. This is called Excedrin headache number 7."

     Smiling, Jefferson added, "Yes, in general I think you are right. And you're definitely right about the academic justifications for terrorist acts--er, I mean, for 'rhizomatic resistance to the power structures of repressive civilization': for the last three decades, insurrectionism and 'deconstructive terrorism' around the world have adopted the postmodern lingo coming out of American universities in order to justify their actions. It used to be that insurrectionists mouthed the Marxist lingo, or the anti-capitalist lingo, or sometimes they used a contorted religious lingo--and they still use all of those on occasion. But the most eloquent--the Michel de Certeaus and Edward Saids and Slavoj Zizeks of this world--now rely heavily on the language of postmodern poststructuralism, the language of pluralistic relativism--the language, that is, of boomeritis.

     "This is very like the Berkeley student protests of the sixties that Carla talks about in her lectures, where a set of truly postconventional ideals were hijacked by bands of preconventional, egocentric terrorists in order to aggressively deconstruct anything conventional. It's the pre/post fallacy on a worldwide scale--and yes, it is boomeritis to the core."

     Jefferson looked around the table. "Here is the sad truth of our time: Boomeritis has become the language of terrorism ." He paused, shook his head. "Add that language to the language of religious fanaticism , and you have an explosive mixture unequalled in all of history.

     "This has always been particularly painful to me as an African-American. We all know the genesis of postmodern pluralism--it's many strengths, it's many weaknesses. But when the green meme, pluralistic relativism, postmodern poststructuralism--call them what you will--moved into academia and began to dominate the humanities, it was just a matter of time before these 'tenured radicals' would--sometimes innocently and inadvertently, sometimes openly and intentionally--be forging the language that would be used to justify terrorist 'insurrection' and 'rhizomatic power resistance' and 'deconstructive destabilization' everywhere. When that academic justification for those acts--a justification stemming from the green meme (and boomeritis) in America--was added to the actual red-meme terrorists acting in the world, the result was an atmosphere in which the West's cultural elite could not decisively condemn any sort of deconstructive insurrections, an ideological opening not lost on the insurrectionists and terrorists themselves, who have always equated so-called 'sensitivity' with weakness. All they needed in their own minds to set off the powder keg was an equally deluded reason to attack and deconstruct, which was supplied by a twisted blue meme: religious fanaticism in this case.

     "There's a psychosocial structural linkage here as well," Jefferson continued. Kim said Jefferson's IQ is 160; it always felt like that was the speed of his intellect racing down the highway. I always got dizzy watching his ebony skin housing that brain going down the road at that unnerving speed. I wish Kim were here to explain it to me.

     "Psychologically, boomeritis is the green meme infected with a reactivation of red narcissism. Thus, green's inherently subjectivistic tendencies--Graves sometimes referred to green as 'relativistic, pluralistic, subjectivistic,' simply because its warrants for truth are basically subjective, relative, multiple: in other words, postmodern--anyway, green's subjectivistic tendencies become a magnet, a home, a harbor for a reactivation of red, egocentric, narcissistic impulses. Pluralism becomes a supermagnet for narcissism--and that combination of highly evolved green mixed with rather low red is the explosive mixture known as boomeritis, because in my own psyche, green ideals become the mouthpiece for red terrorism.

     "Under these circumstances, green ideals of contextualism, constructivism, and pluralism--which at their best insist that all perspectives be treated fairly and impartially, without unduly marginalizing any--quickly degenerate into rancid, even pathological pluralism: all views are to be treated fairly, not because they all deserve a fair hearing, but because no view is better than another, period . Narcissism and its eternal demand that 'Nobody tells me what to do!' thus finds a happy home in the postmodern pluralistic flatland. Because no views are better or worse than any others, my narcissistic inclinations can run free and wild, here in the safe haven provided by pathological pluralism. In my own psyche , green is hijacked by terrorist red. In my own psyche, postconventional ideals become the lingo of preconventional impulses. In my own psyche, the World Trade Center of my higher drives is deconstructed by my own lowest and barbaric inclinations.

     "This is boomeritis postmodernism--a secret love affair between green and red--and it has been played out on the world historical stage in a specific way: postmodern green academics, reactivating and harboring inflamed, premodern red impulses in their in own psyches, fell in love with premodern cultures everywhere: in the past--the great Paradises of Eden horribly contaminated by patriarchal Western oppression--and in the present--in all the Others of the Enlightenment struggling to be free from the repressive blanket of civilization. Much of the seminar series we just finished was devoted to an extensive examination of just this topic. And I am certainly not saying that the Enlightenment was without its own severe problems. I am saying that green academics were predisposed to eulogize red cultures in the most exaggerated and unrealistic of fashions, simply because they were fixated to, and mesmerized with, the unintegrated red impulses in their own being. The vaunted narcissism of the Boomers returned in the most distressing of ways, leaving a trail of green/red boomeritis roadkill all over the halls of academia.

     "And that is why, quite simply, boomeritis became the language of deconstruction, of tearing down, of terrorism everywhere. It could not provide a convincing distinction between tearing down that was progressive, and tearing down that was merely regressive--and in that sad and listless indecision lay one of the many roads to September 11."

     The table was very quiet for several minutes. "Yes, unfortunately, unfortunately," Carla Fuentes softly noted. "From that particular angle, you are quite right: boomeritis was deeply complicit in the deconstruction of the World Trade Center." Fuentes looked at each of us, one by one. Her wrenching words were delivered in a somber, non-angry, almost tender voice.

     "Didn't even Foucault call Derrida a terrorist? When the net result of your academic musing comes down to: there are no universal standards by which any culture may be judged inferior to another; the West under sway of the Enlightenment is merely a hegemonic imperial imposition of universal absolutist standards on the innocent world; therefore anything Western is bad, anything non-Western is good; therefore deconstructing the West and the Enlightenment is the noble thing to do--well, when your thought is shot through with pre/post fallacies of such magnitude, when it thus provides an intellectual atmosphere in which deconstructive terrorism anywhere is implicitly applauded; when a famous postmodern pluralist screams, 'If you are nonwhite, get as far away from any Western culture as possible!'--I wonder if Afghanistan is far enough away for this gentleman?--well, of course that entire academic atmosphere is deeply complicit in such terrorist acts. The extreme postmodernists are not the actual cause of any of this crime, but they are complicit, they are deeply complicit." Carla Fuentes shook her head.

     Van Cleef's spiky edge cut into the air; he looked more than usually furious. "The list of those complicit is endless--that is, the list of boomeritis scholars with philosophical blood on their hands is truly endless: starting with Heidegger--and shall we note his now infamous, unrepentant complicity with the Nazis?--and his philosophical comrades, early Foucault, most of Derrida, late Wittgenstein, the spin-offs and wannabes--Michel de Certeau, Richard Rorty, Edward Said, Francois Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Slavoj Zizek, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, the French gallery and their tepid, less talented mouthpieces in America--Stanley Fish, Susan Sontag, Stanley Aronowitz, all the way to the alternative movements, from JTP's 'New Birth in Freedom' to Revisioning TP Psych to boomeritis spirituality and the MGM in all its glory, to anti-ranking hypocrisies filling the air with the stench self-congratulatory smugness, to the latest avant-garde wannabe philosophers all mouthing cardboard pluralistic slogans." Van Cleef spat the words out in a breathless torrent; his colleagues, though not disagreeing, all looked uncomfortable, especially Joan.

     "I am more than glad to repeat," he said, "that in most of those cases there are very important truths galore--we often use many of them here at IC--and in most of those cases the intentions were so warm, so genuine, so nobly intended. But we all know what road to where is paved with good intentions. In the karmic book-keeping of the Kosmos, the rain of responsibility will thoroughly dampen those academic heads."

     "Put warmly and gently, as usual," smiled Fuentes. "But I generally agree. Everybody else?" Heads around the table nodded.

     "The real problem, as I see it, is that their sentiments, dressed as philosophy, have gotten out into the world in a major fashion, as even they proudly announce. The essential point here is that boomeritis has gutted the intellectuals' capacity to formulate a coherent condemnation of any such attack, apart from the lame retort that nobody has the right to physically attack somebody else--apparently their response is that blowing the fuck out of somebody is not being kind and sensitive." Fuentes laughed in her wickedly warm fashion. "But apart from that, as for why the Other should not retaliate in the face of the repressive barbarism that is the Western-Enlightenment culture: well now, boomeritis and the MGM are strangely silent , no? The only thing that short-circuited their philosophical silence was the massively over-the-top brutality of this particular act."

     Morin jumped in. "Yes, I think Carla's right. If any band of terrorists had chosen a smaller target, hit only military or governmental officials, and followed up with a statement about the freedom and equality of all cultures being trammeled by the heartless Capitalist Machine, the majority of green memes in this country would quickly agree--or, at the least, would refuse, absolutely refuse, to judge those terrorists as being WRONG. But the utter severity and savagery of the World Trade Center attack shoved these ideas down their throats in a way that is almost impossible to disguise and excuse with pluralistic platitudes." Morin shook his head.

     "It's definitely an issue shot through with deep confusion," mused Jefferson. "Very similar to when the Unabomber maimed and killed dozens of innocent people in the name of ecology versus civilization --another completely false dichotomy--and Kirkpatrick Sale--under the same pre/post fallacy and the same boomeritis--was immediately online defending the Unabomber's philosophy, while insisting, rather unconvincingly, that this did not mean he advocated the same action."

     Margaret Carlton, frail frame held up by conviction, noted, "Yes, yes, yes, but for at least a decade, responsible scholars have been pointing out that extreme pluralism really just allows, even encourages, a glorification of virtually any culture Other than Western--blue Others, red Others, purple Others, beige Others. This boomeritis attitude has certainly revitalized the old noble-savage impulse--Boomers put Romanticism on steroids!" she laughed sweetly.

     "As only one of numerous examples... I have it here somewhere...." Van Cleef shuffled through his brief case. Okay, Keith Windschuttle: 'Cultural relativism began as an intellectual critique of Western thought but has now become an influential justification for one of the contemporary era's most potent political forces. This is the revival of tribalism in thinking and politics. The demand by representatives of tribal cultures to have the sole governance of their affairs is probably the biggest single cause of bloodshed in the world today. It has produced the charnel house politics of Northern Ireland, Sri Lanka, the Sudan, Central Africa, the Middle East, and the Balkans. Postmodernism and cultural relativism are complicit in this--both in their insistence on the integrity of all tribal cultures, no matter what practices or values they perpetuate, and in their denunciation of all' Western civilization. 'Rather than an advance in political conceptualization, however, the politics of relativism should be recognized as simply a mirror image of the racist ideologies that accompanied and justified Western imperialism in the colonial era.' Quite right: they are both ethnocentric to the core--they both extol ethnocentric pluralism instead of universal pluralism--or pathological pluralism instead of genealogical pluralism--all inflamed by a boomeritis eager to rule."

     Van Cleef took a deep breath and turned up the volume. "A glorification of the preconventional tribal mentality: green's favorite romantic passion, the purple and red tribes. The Taliban is a tribal herd in northern Afghanistan, living close the land, with tribal elders and a tribal council, wonderfully free of Enlightenment values and totally free of the horrid Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm: noble savages, each and all, red waves flourishing freely in the wind.

     "Well," he roared, "a red wave slammed smack into the World Trade Center, and green got to actually see the real contours of that which it has been eulogizing ever since the original Romantics. Noble savages deconstructed civilization: pretty sight, isn't it?" and he crashed his fist down on the table, making a disturbingly sharp "whack!"

     "Okay, Derek, okay. That's a bit over the top," Morin said.

     "No, it isn't." Van Cleef's intensity singed the atmosphere. "If we are going to 'make no distinction between the terrorists and those who harbor them,' then philosophically we can make no such distinctions either."

     "He's got a point," Jefferson concurred. "But it's a point we already made. There is no question but that these scholars are complicit in supporting a philosophical atmosphere that was hesitant to judge any Others negatively and equally hesitant to say anything positive about Western culture. Let them answer to their own actions, let them be responsible for their own words. Nothing we can do will change this."

Healthy Green: Now More than Ever

     "All right, we are way off the subject!" Lesa Powell intervened. "We are supposed to be discussing the reactions to the attack, not the causes of the attack or who is blame for it."

     "Right, right; sorry, we got a bit of testosterone poisoning." Jefferson laughed.

     "Yup," Van Cleef nodded. "Look, I am not blaming the extreme postmodernists for this attack, only pointing out the difficulties that it threw into their value system. I am saying that their responses to the attack--and the general green-meme response itself--suffered a transvaluation of values, because the cultural Other--which was supposed to be GOOD--now appeared really totally friggin BAD, and the Western culture of the Enlightenment--which was supposed to be BAD--now appeared a VICTIM. And by the language of boomeritis, all victims are noble, innocent, and good. Suddenly, the West itself had secured the coveted status of victim , and this wrenched the MGM value system so badly that their responses are still dazed, confused, rambling, almost incoherent.

     "Well, they generally end up with something like, 'Yes, the terrorists did a bad thing. But we should not retaliate; instead we should use this occasion to reflect on how we are all terrorists when we are unkind to others; we should use this as a time of healing, and caring, and feeling into our pain. We should reflect on the common brotherhood and sisterhood of humankind, and practice love with each other daily. Turn off the TV every now and then and tell each other how much you care. Send healing light and love to all the victims everywhere, not just here, but around the world."

     "Healthy green is a decent and noble response," Joan added. "I hope you're not making fun of that attitude, Derek. Boomeritis, remember, is pathological green, not healthy green. I hope I can find a great deal of healthy green in myself, because now if ever is when we need it."

     "Very true," Jefferson concurred. "Very true. Healthy green is the last of the first-tier memes because it acts to sensitize the entire Spiral, infecting it with compassion, you might say, and thus preparing the leap into second tier. I'm with Joan; now if ever is when green is needed."

     Jefferson rubbed his eyes. "Still, the one thing that worries me is that when green slips into its more, shall we say, platitudinous side--"

     "Like a duck-billed platitude?" Fuentes grinned.

     "Oh, I see, humor. No, Carla, the hyper-sensitive, over-the-top caring side, a response that is already circulating Martin Luther King's statement: 'The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. In fact, violence merely increases hate. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.'

     "But, you see," Jefferson continued, "that statement is wrong on almost every count. As a black man raised outside of Harlem, I don't have to tell you that the Reverend King was my salvation as a boy. Well, him and Charlie Parker, but that's another story. Anyway, in this case, I believe his heart was clouding his head. Real violence is almost always ended by stronger violence in saner hands. When you meet a Hitler in this world, the correct, noble, ethical, spiritual response is: get a gun and blow his brains out. We ended Auschwitz, not with love, caring dialogue, sensitivity training, and sweet thoughts, but with superior fire power, period. So it is with real violence in the real world--much of it stems from red, and red can only be forcefully contained until it develops its own internal blue constraints. Civilization, for the most part, does not produce barbarism, but curbs it.

     "Green's basic problem is that the injunction to not have violence in your heart is confused with not using violence in the real world--at which point green begins to contribute to the problem, not the solution. This is yet another variation on the sad fact that green--and without doubt the MGM and boomeritis--have been complicit in the rise of insurrectionist violence around the world. Of course we should not harbor hate in our hearts; and of course , when you meet Nazis--to borrow Van Cleef's line--you should kill them real hard." A laugh emerged through the deep concern in Jefferson's face.

     "If green wants a spiritual sanction for this, then try reading the Bhagavad Gita . The warrior Arjuna is about to go into battle; concerned with killing, he invokes the Lord Krishna to help him decide what to do. Krishna, who is so post-green it's wild, tells him two things: you must do your duty in the real world, and therefore, you must fight and possibly kill, because that is the way of the world at this time; but when doing your duty, keep your mind in Spirit, not as a way to justify the killing, but as a way to rise above it. 'Remember me, and fight,' is what Krishna tells Arjuna. He does not tell him to avoid fighting (typical green), NOR does he tell him to fight in the name of the Lord (typical blue). He tells him to fight and remember the Lord, for there alone is your salvation in the real world of unavoidable karma.

     "Of course, there are a few situations--a very few situations--in which nonviolence will work: namely, in any culture that has Western Enlightenment values (such as America or Britain--the only two cultures where nonviolence has actually worked as a strategy). In any other culture, possessed of pre-orange, premodern, pre-Enlightenment values, if you lie down in the front of the approaching troops, why thank you! Much easier to stomp your ass and it saves us a ton of bullets. Try nonviolence with the Nazis, the KKK, the Sargons and Ramses and Pol Pots of this world, and see where it gets you. Dead, of course, is where it gets you. And in letting a greater evil thereby flourish, your death doesn't even buy you good karma, but the karma of the coward: listen instead to Krishna and do your duty, which takes much more courage than fleeing your duty in a green-meme self-congratulatory stance.

     "You see, with pre-orange memes, violence (or the threat of violence) is almost the only way you can end violence. At orange, physical war shifts to economic war, and the battle field switches to the board room--same war, different means. But only at green do people stop wanting to fight, and only at yellow do they begin to use violence to strategically end violence. But the pre-orange memes only use violence, and that's the problem. Turning the other cheek is exactly what you don't want to do with pre-orange memes. Again, in your heart, no violence; in the world, do your duty."

     "True, Mark, true," Joan interjected, "but I want to add again: the healthy green stance is an imperative part of any second-tier response. Transcend and include!"

     "Agreed. We want to include green. But also transcend it. So don't confuse having no violence in your heart with having no violence in the real world, if required. Your duty may or may not include violence, but let us not forget that there are indeed occasions where violence ends violence--or, I should say, reflecting the messiness and microscopically incremental nature of Eros: there are occasions where violence replaces a grosser violence with a subtler violence, a lesser devil on the way to a vaguely greater good.

     "The Zen-inspired code of the Samurai warrior is still as good a guide as any: the best fight is not to fight; the real sword is no sword--but if you think that means a Samurai warrior never used his sword, you are tad naive, I fear."

Yellow: To Balance the Whole

      "Let's move on to yellow's response to the terrorist attacks--the response of the first truly second-tier wave," Morin suggested. "Derek?"

     "Well," Van Cleef responded, "we really can't talk about yellow's response without talking about what a truly integral approach to terrorism would be. Lesa, that's your specialty...."

     "Let's see," Powell replied, "summarizing yellow and turquoise responses is a tall order, because whether they articulate their responses in the theoretical terms that we use, their responses are indeed integral: they tend to see the big picture (at least as big as today's world makes possible), and they respond, in some sense, to the Whole as it fluidly unfolds and evolves. What we try to do at IC is articulate that unfolding Whole, and that takes a few minutes!" She laughed.

     "Okay, you've got two minutes," grinned Morin.

     "Swell." Lesa smiled, rolled her eyes. "Okay, start by looking at the possible causes of this terrorism, because a second-tier response is not divorced from an intuitive grasp of the dynamically patterned and fluctuating Whole--which means that your response and your grasp of the causes are all of a piece. So let's start there.

     "We all know that, just as when anybody tries to do historiography [for an overview of integral historiography , see Sidebar A: 'Who Ate Captain Cook?--Integral Historiography in a Postmodern Age'], we realize that there simply is no ONE CORRECT WAY to see things, apart from various sensorimotor facts. But even those facts--such as, in this case: on September 11, 2001, two airplanes hijacked by non-Americans crashed into the World Trade Center in Manhattan, completely destroying the structure and killing over 5,000 people; while another hijacked airplane smashed into the Pentagon, killings several hundred--those basic facts are uncontested, but those facts cannot be understood, as opposed to described, without an extensive system of background cultural values (because all holons have a LL quadrant). So far, this sounds like a typical postmodern pluralist account, except that we move beyond pluralistic relativism--which denies that any of these cultural interpretations are intrinsically superior to the others--by advocating genealogical pluralism, or developmental unfolding, which suggests that, based on extensive research, some of these values are higher, better, and more inclusive than others: worldcentric is better than ethnocentric which is better than egocentric. Each may be appropriate in certain circumstances, but there is no question as to the hierarchical ranking of increasing capacity for consciousness, care, and compassion.

     [For an overview of developmental or genealogical pluralism contrasted with relativistic pluralism--as the way out of pathological pluralism in general--see Sidebar A .

     "But my point: Each of the value memes, or general waves of development, has something important to tell us about how we can and should interpret the question of causes and blame in this particular event. Even if each higher, more inclusive meme has a more adequate view of the situation and is therefore more accurate (without ever being totally accurate: there is no such thing), nonetheless each meme tells us something about how others--and the Other--might see the world in terms of whom to blame. This is the general second-tier response: intuitively feeling what all of the various responses have to tell us about the whole of reality and all human beings in it. But the second-tier response also understands that the weight that should be given to each of these responses and interpretations is better adjudicated by turquoise, since that is the highest average expectable wave of consciousness that has taken on significant form in all four quadrants to date; and, I hasten to add, for turquoise to be genuinely adequate, it must be informed by third-tier insight (at least as a state, if not a stage)."

     "Lesa, could you expand on that at all? It's too dense," Hazelton said.

     "I'll try, in a minute, Joan. But let me first begin to run up the spectrum on actual causes of the terrorist act, suggested by an all-meme analysis. First and foremost, the lion's share of the blame lies with the terrorists, pure and simple. They are not even representing red values, but pathological red values, or extremist red values. Even 'healthy' terrorists, if I can put it that way, immediately condemned their acts. Yassar Arafat: 'Unbelievable! Unbelievable! Unbelievable!' That part is a no-brainer. Whether you want to say that it was an attack on good by evil, or an attack on civilization by barbarism, or an attack on human bonding by really insensitive people, it doesn't matter. On the top of the list of whom to blame, by a wide margin, are the terrorists themselves--their leaders, their cohorts, their accomplices." Lesa looked up and smiled, "They are like way totally bad," and everybody laughed--an IC inside joke.

     "What would motivate such acts? Remember, virtually all memes, red to turquoise, agree that these acts were, by whatever name, sick (no matter what mitigating circumstances may have been present, which we will discuss later). So we are justified in asking, what kind of sickness or malformation, exactly? What are its actual contours? An 'all-quadrants, all-levels, all-lines' analysis (an integral psychograph) would have to be done--and I don't have nearly enough information to do that adequately--but some simple aspects suggest themselves: in the LR quadrant, there was, and is, severe economic distress (which may or may not be fairly ascribed to globalization and western corporate capitalism: that is a separate issue to be decided on its own merits--more about this later); in the LL quadrant, there seems to be something of a cultural rigidification in the face of modernity; this appears to be a pathological blue, or mythic-membership distorted into defining one's myth almost solely by the destruction of an Other: the Other in this case being the West (again, whether the West shares guilt is a separate issue; the fact right now is: phenomenologically, this seems to be the essential LL in these terrorists); in the UR, dopamine up, serotonin down (or whatnot); in the UL, a red-meme pathology fed by a distorted blue superego-formation; more specifically: cognitive line at orange; ego line at red, with pathological dissociation and a fulcrum-3/subphase-b malformation; super-ego in the tripartite ego is harsh, internalized, deformed blue-meme ideology. "

     Lesa paused. "Well, did I give enough metanarratives to drive the average MGM totally nuts?" Everybody smiled, nodded. "Oh, let me add: it was a tactically brilliant attack, absolutely brilliant, executed with fierce courage. But we're focusing on the sick side right now....

     "In short, it seems reasonable to assume that the terrorists were pathological red inflamed by distorted blue ideology--an explosive combination, to be sure. No healthy value system in any culture that we are aware of condones these acts. However, the question then arises, to what extent can these pathologies in the four quadrants be ascribed to others, such as global western capitalism? Here the situation, as you can imagine, gets a bit trickier."

Intro Prologue Part I Part II Part III