Part II: Integral Politics

Intro Prologue Part I Part II Part III

     Lesa looked up, thought for a moment, and said, "I have a set of notes I am using to prepare a talk on integral politics . It bears directly on this topic. Should I just read from the notes, and maybe you all could help out?"

     "Why does integral politics relate to the issue of the various responses to the terrorist attack?" Morin asked.

     "Because so much of the discussion about the attack--what it means, why it happened, and most of all, who is actually to blame for it--is sunk in political terms and political affiliations, virtually of all which are considerably less-than-integral. Both the conservative and the liberal responses are fractured, fragmented, alienated and alienating. But this can only be clearly seen in contrast to a more integral political framework. Make sense?"

     "Sure, sure" replied Morin. "Read the lecture and we'll give some feedback. Once you do that, we need come back to the responses to the terrorist attack that might be expected from the higher, transpersonal, spiritual waves of consciousness, yes?"

Why Do Humans Suffer?: The Liberal and Conservative Answers

     "Okay, this is a rough draft, so bear with me. In the talk I am using the tragedy of the WTC to illustrate a few points. I then say,"--Lesa began reading--"To make matters worse, we really do not have an integral political theory that can be used to more adequately analyze this situation from a second-tier perspective. All we have right now, to put it bluntly, are conservative Realpolitik posturings--of the sort, 'You terrorists say that you are upset because America has so much wealth and power and crushes everybody else. Well, we have the wealth and the power because we earned it; if you want some wealth, go earn it yourself, and otherwise fuck off. Try to take or destroy our wealth and we'll bomb you back into the stone age.'" Lesa laughed. "Sort of a silly threat, in that they are already at the stone age. But this conservative blue-meme interpretation fails to take into account any sort of AQAL ['all-quadrant, all-level'] analysis that might disclose distributive power and distributive economic structures that genealogically came into existence under the influence of factors that even the blue meme itself would consider UNFAIR; and thus the claim that 'We earned our wealth' is not altogether true, in that these unfair infrastructures are in fact earning part of your wealth for you. This option is rarely considered by conservative analysts. They are...." She looked up, grinned, and said: "They're born on third base and spend their entire lives thinking they hit a triple.

      "Alas, the liberal interpretation is just as badly skewed, this time in the opposite direction. We all the know the very general difference between the typical conservative and liberal approaches--it's not that one is past-oriented and the other future-oriented, one is reactionary and one progressive, one aristocratic and one egalitarian--although all of those play a part. But the fundamental difference was first spelled out by one of our IC members in Up from Eden . What is the real difference between liberal and conservative? Well, if you ask the simple question-- Why do human beings suffer? --you will get two different, basic answers. The conservatives will say, You suffer because of yourself ; the liberals will say, You suffer because of someone else .

      "For example, why are some people poor? The conservative will say: 'Because they are lazy, they don't work hard enough, they have an entitlement mindset, they are indolent: I worked hard for my money, let them work for theirs!' The liberal will say: 'You are poor because you are oppressed, you have not been given a fair chance, you are downtrodden, you are a victim--it is not your fault, it is society's.' The conservative generally places blame within; the liberal, without.

      "Thus, gun control--conservative: raise children who have family values and will not use guns irresponsibly; liberal: take away all the guns. Economic wellbeing--conservative: instill values of personal industry and free-market capitalism, and those deserving will prosper; liberal: redistribute the wealth. Abortion--liberal: abortion on demand; conservative: practice responsible sex and abstinence and you won't need abortions in the first place. Homeless--liberal: make housing available to those who are disenfranchised; conservative: teach the values of self-responsibility and industry and you will have far fewer indigent. World hunger--liberal: feed the hungry; conservative: teach them to feed themselves.

     "In each case, the conservative mostly recommends interior changes, the liberal, exterior changes. Likewise, when it comes to social change, the conservative recommends interior development (character education, family values, industriousness, self-responsibility); the liberal recommends exterior development (material improvement, economic redistribution, universal health care, welfare statism). Of course, there are exceptions. But more often than not, that is a genuinely basic difference in socio-political orientation between conservatives and liberals.

     "We do have a bit of a terminology problem, however, in that 'liberal' and 'conservative' have been used in many different ways. So let me point out that there are two different issues here: one is the actual scale of causality for human ills: is it interior or exterior? And two, we are dealing with the names of political orientations (liberal, conservative, socialist, libertarian, etc.), each of which is a mixture of the interior-exterior scale that we are talking about plus several other important scales, such as the average level or levels of development that the political party mostly supports (e.g., blue, orange, green, etc.); the emphasis put on individual versus collective values; the nature of political change advocated (gradual, revolutionary, traditionalist), and so on. An integral or AQAL politics takes all of those scales into account in order to fashion a more comprehensive view of human political possibilities--and a more comprehensive, balanced, effective form of political inquiry and action. Several of our colleagues are already working on this (see Gregory Wilpert, 'Integral Politics: A Spiritual Third Way, Tikkun, 16, 4, Jul/Aug 2001; see also A Theory of Everything and its endnotes; and the works of Drexel Sprecher, Thomas Jordan, Don Beck, Maureen Silos, Jack Crittenden, Sean Hargens, Paul van Schaik, Mike McDermott, Lawrence Chickering, Mark Gerzon, Tyler Norris, Kees Breed, Ray Harris, Mark Palmer, Karin Swan, Michael Ostrolenk, and other IC members).

     "So let me say that in this discussion we are focusing particularly on the interior-exterior scale , and you can then apply this understanding to the various political parties, here or abroad, and see where they fall on that scale (and how they might move to a more integral or balanced view). As it turns out, in America, the traditional conservative and liberal parties happen to align themselves almost perfectly along that one scale: the conservatives believe almost entirely in the interior causation of human woes, and the liberals believe almost entirely in the exterior causation of human suffering. As you all know, this simply means that the conservative emphasizes the importance of the Left-Hand quadrants, while liberals emphasize the Right-Hand quadrants. (Don't let 'Left' and 'Right' confuse you here--the political Left emphasizes the Right-Hand quadrants, the political Right, the LH quadrants). In order to make the world a better place, the conservative mostly wants to tinker with the interior (Left-Hand) quadrants, the liberal wants to engineer the exterior (Right-Hand) quadrants.

     "Accordingly, when you ask a conservative what could possibly cause the terrorists themselves to engage in such desperate acts, the conservative will not hesitate to ascribe virtually all blame to the terrorists themselves: they are evil, they are subhuman, they lack any sort of values, they lack character, they lack the true God, they lack something or other, and it's their fault , period. It's an interior problem. And the typical liberal will go to the other extreme and blame the exteriors: of course the terrorists are responsible for these acts, but something horrible in their environment made them do it. And in this case, that something horrible is a four-letter word: the West.

      "Both of those views have a degree of truth to them (simply because all occasions have both Left- and Right-Hand quadrants!). The conservative position correctly recognizes the necessity for interior development if any sort of genuine values, culture, and consciousness are to take root. In other words, they are correctly emphasizing the importance and necessity of development in the Left-Hand quadrants. Of course, most conservatives only recognize Left-Hand waves and values up to blue-orange; therefore, by 'instilling values' they often mean ethnocentric values: nationalism, family values, militarism, patriotism, patriarchalism, good ole Biblical injunctions and command morality--hence their strong emphasis on interior 'character' over exterior 'capacity' in a President. But the general truth in all of that is the definite need for interior development, because without it, purple and red rule: fenced barbarity is the most a culture can hope for. The downside, of course, is that there are values higher than blue-orange, which the conservatives usually deny and fight, on those occasions they can see them.

      "So the conservatives are correct in that Left-Hand development is absolutely necessary for any sort of civilization; wrong in that blue values are the highest values in the Kosmos.

      "But that sort of traditional, conservative political theory--grounded in mythic-membership and the blue meme--was the dominant view of governance for most of humanity's civilized history, East and West, from the axial period up to the Enlightenment in the West, where a radically new type of political philosophy was born: liberalism. Liberalism was many things at once: a move from ethnocentric tunnel-vision to worldcentric perspectives; from aristocracy to democracy; from slavery to equality; from society informed by myth to one informed by science; from a role-identity to an ego-identity; from duty and honor to dignity and recognition; from ethnocentric values to universal values (especially freedom, equality, solidarity).

     "In short, it was a move from blue to orange, from ethnocentric to worldcentric, from conventional to postconventional. It was the birth of liberalism in the modern Enlightenment.

     "But, of course, it was many other things as well, not all of them healthy. And few of the values I mentioned above arrived in a fully healthy form. Remember the dialectic of progress--the mixed blessing--of modernity: the good news was that the Big Three (of I, we, and it; or art, morals, and science) were finally differentiated and allowed to pursue their own truths in their own ways, which resulted in a spectacular freedom and progress in each; the downside was that the Big Three did not just differentiate, they eventually dissociated, and this allowed an aggressive and imperialistic science to colonize the other values spheres, catastrophically reducing art and morals--the Beautiful and the Good--to unnecessary intrusions on the path of instrumental rationality. Put bluntly, the interior dimensions of I and We--the Left-Hand quadrants--were all reduced to epiphenomena of the Right-Hand world of sensorimotor Its and exteriors: scientific materialism was born.

     "And liberalism was born with it. Liberalism grew up in the same flatland atmosphere, the atmosphere that recognized only exteriors--which is precisely why, to this day, most liberals can only comfortably think about what needs to be fixed in the exteriors in order to make society a better place. To think about fixing interiors would imply that some interiors are inferior to others, and liberals usually recoil at the implication--thus inadvertently paralyzing any effective interior development and focusing almost exclusively on exterior engineering of social systems.

     "But there is also a positive reason for the liberal reluctance to discuss interior development, and it needs to be carefully honored, namely: the separation of church and state. The previous political philosophy (which eventually morphed into conservatism), stemming from the mythic-membership wave (red-blue), was essentially a church-state fusion philosophy: the Pharaoh, Caesar, Czar, or King was either God or God's representative, a one-party command-and-control political system plugged straight into an ethnocentric religion. Liberalism wished to go beyond this ethnocentric governance to worldcentric, universal governance based not on specific religious values or conventional family values, but on postconventional freedoms extended to as many as possible. Therefore, the general liberal stance is that the State should not overtly promote any specific or favored version of God or of the Good Life--which is often summarized as the separation of church and state. Liberalism recommends a procedural republic (where right precedes the good), not a substantive republic (where the good precedes right); it generally defends negative freedoms (don't harm others), not positive freedoms (you should value this). The liberal stance therefore theoretically advocates a type of equality and even egalitarianism: all personal or interior values are a private choice, not generally open to public adjudication; there is no hierarchy of personal values with any sort of cross-individual applicability.

     "But here is the difficulty with such traditional liberalism: the very capacity to protect and promote universal equality is the product of at least five stages of interior hierarchical growth (beige to purple to red to blue to orange). The liberal stance that says all people are equal and no values are intrinsically better than others is itself an elite value reached by only a minority of the population at this time. Liberalism is the product of five hierarchical stages of growth that then turns around and denies the importance of hierarchical stages of growth.

     "Liberalism thus denies the very path that produced liberalism. And one of the major reasons that it does so, I am suggesting, is that an integral historiography discloses that liberalism was born in the climate of flatland, of scientific materialism, of economic reductionism, which maintained that all the truly important realities are exterior/sensorimotor occasions. Even the psychological systems that grew up with liberalism--empiricism, behaviorism, positivism--maintained that the interior world is nothing but a series of pictures of the exterior world, which is the real world (again: liberal science maintains there are only facts, no interpretations: that is, only exteriors, no real interiors).

     "From the beginning, liberalism therefore misunderstood the genesis of its own stance . It failed to grasp the fact that liberal values arise only through a series of hierarchical stages of growth--and they are fairly late-emerging values at that (beige to purple to red to blue to orange...). Therefore liberalism--because it was in fact a postconventional, worldcentric, universal wave of fairness, justice, and tolerance--immediately extended to all other stances the status of equal value: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.' Well, all men might be created equal, but very soon they reach different developmental waves, only the higher of which start producing liberal values. Whereupon liberal values, still captured by flatland, begin vigorously denying interior hierarchies and thus effectively dissolve their own genesis and work very hard to destroy the path that produced them.

     "In place of interior development, merely exterior development is then recommended by the flatland liberal. Material improvement and economic reshuffling become the major aims of governance--(re)distribute the material wealth, provide physical healthcare for everybody, provide physical shelter for everybody, provide physical food for everybody, provide physical wellbeing for everybody. This leaves all values, all interiors, all meaning, all depth, and all divinity to the conservatives, who represent a lower wave of development but who at least haven't forgotten the interiors!

     "Interior talk --values talk, religion talk, character talk, meaning talk--is thus left largely in the hands of the conservatives. The liberal then looks at the typical blue-meme conservative values--which are often ethnocentric and which are adaptive (and unavoidable) at that wave, but which can easily slide into homophobia and gay bashing, sexism and misogyny, militarism and imperialism--and says, 'If those are what we mean by "instilling values," then I'm staying out of the values game altogether!'--failing to see that its own worldcentric fairness is simply the next wave of hierarchically unfolding values. It thus attempts to escape ethnocentric values, not by transparently championing its own higher worldcentric values, but by claiming to be value neutral and egalitarian, whereas in fact it is championing the next wave of value structures, the next wave of interiors, failing to see which it then succumbs to flatland floundering. Instead of pioneering a new wave of interior talk--higher values talk, higher religion talk, higher character talk, higher meaning talk--it talks only of tepid egalitarianism, a plurality of authentic ultimates, tractionless multiculturalism, no interior is better than another, yada yada yada.... Whereupon every interior, no matter how lowly, is accorded not just equal respect but equal value, period--and the regressive nightmare is about to begin. Liberalism is much nobler than that, much higher than that....

     "Incidentally, it has often been noted that 'conservative' and 'liberal' have in some important ways switched their positions since the Enlightenment. What liberalism originally represented--individualism over collectivism, freedom from state intervention, and free market policies--have now been taken over by a branch of conservatism, while many liberals have started recommending policies that look suspiciously like the old conservatism (state intervention, collectivism, interference with the market, suspension of individual rights, emphasis on communalism).

     "There are many AQAL reasons for this major shift, but the simplest is: because the conservative impulse is just that-- conservative, or conserving the past--it tends to champion only those practices that have historically demonstrated that they work. They are not progressive or revolutionary--looking to the future for some sort of change and salvation--they are traditional, even reactionary: looking to the past for stable, proven anchors.

     "Now, at the time of the Enlightenment, to be conservative meant to be blue, since that is what had worked for a thousand years; the orange Enlightenment, on the other hand, was wildly new and revolutionary (and hence liberal or progressive). In place of blue collectivism and mythic-membership, it brought orange individualism and freedom of choice (through revolutionary means if necessary).

     "Even now, if you look in the dictionary, the major difference between conservative and liberal is given as: the conservative is traditional, the liberal is progressive. And there is much truth to that. But the truth is sliding....

     "That is, so well did liberalism work (even in its flatland form)--in economics, in science, in technical steering problems, in free-market wealth production--that by the time that 300 years had passed, these orange practices had slowly become... conservative. The new leading-edge wave was then, of course, green, and therefore to be liberal or progressive now meant to be green-meme in your values--and this meant in many ways that if you were a good liberal then you began to fight the previous orange values. Thus the very values that a few centuries ago were the leading-edge (and literally revolutionary) liberal values had now become the values of many conservatives, who in effect began embracing and defending Enlightenment values of individualism and free-market practices--exactly the values that they fought so desperately three centuries ago! Of course, the other most influential subgroup of conservatives stayed closer to the 'old-fashioned' conservative blue values, which is why conservatism today is a strange mixture of blue and orange, just as liberalism today is a strange mixture of orange and green.

     "This was a huge switch, with conservatives moving into orange and liberals moving on to green. Because all of a sudden the liberals who had gone from orange to green were no longer recommending individual freedom but collectivism; not freedom from the state but state intervention; not academic freedom but politically correct group-think. And these green-meme collectivist liberals--pomo liberals--were now attacked in the name of individual freedom by orange-meme conservatives who site Enlightenment values (the same values they despised at the time)! And green pomo liberals began attacking the Enlightenment and Western modernity with a fury--attacking their own parents! Weirder still, green liberals and blue conservatives would therefore often find themselves in the embarrassing situation of joining forces to encourage government control of individual choice: liberal feminists and rabid conservatives both insisting on state prohibition of pornographic material, for example.

     "All of this makes sense if you remember that conservatives ride the waves of yesterday, liberals ride the avant-garde waves. But neither of them, to date, have been able to ride the entire Spiral. And that, exactly, is the problem. Both the conservative and liberal positions are partial, fragmented, alienated and alienating.

      "Accordingly, here is what we have today: the typical conservative position correctly recognizes the importance of interior development (or the Left-Hand quadrants), but only up to blue-orange; and it devalues the exteriors in general. In order to become integral, conservatism would therefore have to acknowledge that (1) exterior development and distribution (factors in the Right-Hand quadrants) are often uneven and unfair for various people and this is responsible for a good deal of their suffering; and (2) on the interior, there are higher levels of consciousness--and higher sets of values--than blue-orange, and the entire spectrum of consciousness and values must be acknowledged and addressed for any political governance system that wishes to be comprehensive and therefore adequate to the real world, both at home and abroad.

     "The typical liberal position, on the other hand, importantly moves from the ethnocentric (red-blue) to the beginning worldcentric waves of development (orange to green)--a truly higher evolutionary development--only to get trapped in flatland, thus gutting the importance of the interior hierarchy of growth that produced its own noble stance in the first place. Liberalism's values have always come from the postconventional waves (whether in the modern Enlightenment or the postmodern pluralist forms). But, caught in flatland, liberalism in all its forms failed to realize that liberalism is therefore NOT another version of egalitarianism, but elitism: the stance of liberalism itself demands the growth and development of consciousness and culture to the postconventional, worldcentric waves--which, so far in history, involve only a minority of people. That is, the liberal stance to treat all people equally is a stance embraced only by a minority of people around the world. This is not bad; far from it: it is a simple reminder that liberalism springs from the higher--and therefore relatively rare--postconventional waves of psychological and cultural evolution.

     "(Quite apart from the fact that, laboring under genealogical opaqueness and false-consciousness egalitarianism, liberalism then usually champions and even promotes the lower, preconventional waves, waves that all but sink authentic liberal consciousness while aggressively hijacking its liberal slogans. I am not going to discuss this pre/post confusion that haunts the halls of today's liberalism, important as that is; rather, I am focusing on the leading-edge liberal values themselves and the inherent difficulties that a higher wave of consciousness always confronts in the world at large).

     "Since liberalism itself springs from relatively high waves of development, many difficult problems follow in its wake. Precisely because liberalism historically represented the avant garde--the leading edge, the growing tip--of consciousness evolution (put differently: precisely because it is progressive)--liberalism has, so far, represented the highest developmental levels of psychological tolerance, cultural embrace, and political inclusion: not egocentric policies (what is right for me), not ethnocentric policies (what is right for my tribe), but worldcentric: what is right for all tribes, all peoples, all races. When the world was ethnocentric blue (demanding a rigid and dogmatic belief in an absolutist god, submission to one monarch, death to all heathens and infidels), liberalism arose as worldcentric orange (demanding the universal rights of humankind, regardless of race, sex, color, or creed). When the world itself, or rather its elite governing systems, then began explicitly moving into orange (embracing universal liberal values resulting in the abolition of slavery, the rise of feminism, the revolutionary introduction of the representative democracies around the world), then liberalism moved even further into green (demanding that those universal liberal values be truly and fully applied to all peoples without marginalizing or oppressing any).

     "In all of those instances, liberalism represented the next, great, highest wave of consciousness development and inclusion--and therefore liberalism itself was a driving force for each of those major expansions of political theory and practice, extending and pushing political tolerance and embrace from ethnocentric to truly worldcentric (thus riding the leading edge of consciousness and cultural evolution itself, which, we have often seen, tends to flow from egocentric to ethnocentric to worldcentric).

     "Thus, in every case of liberalism's noble history, it rode the leading edge of consciousness evolution--an ELITE leading edge, never amounting to more than perhaps 10% of the total population at the time--and yet it found generally benign ways to force its elitism on others . For example, the American Constitution is, for the most part, a moral-stage-5 document--an orange-meme statement, grounded in Enlightenment values. But when that document was written--and eventually implemented as the law of the land--less than 10% of America's population was at moral-stage 5. The brilliance of the Founding Fathers was that they found a way to take this rare, elite stance--demanding equality and freedom for all--and force it on an entire population as the backbone of a series of legal and behavioral codes that demanded that, even if individuals are not at moral-stage 5 in their own interiors, they must conform their exterior behavior to rules consistent with a moral-stage-5 act (e.g., you do not have to love me, but if you shoot me they will lock you up). Thus, at their best, the laws of America embodied an attempt to encode higher, postconventional, worldcentric responses--regardless of race, sex, color, or creed--implemented with the consent of the governed (the moral-stage-5 social contract), even if those laws were developmentally ahead of most of the governed. The legal, judicial, and political structures of the United States thus acted, in their best instances, as both a higher elitist stance imposed on the population at large and a magnet of psychological and cultural development for its peoples, who could grow into the worldcentric values of freedom and equality embedded in and informing the codes. In short, the Constitution was a pacer of transformation --it impressed a set of postconventional, worldcentric, liberal values into the land--but these were not hereditary values or aristocratic values or values given only to a select few and denied to all others: no, they were developmental values--that is, values into which all people could grow : it was an elitism, but an elitism to which all were invited.

     "Was liberalism justified in doing this? Certainly. Why? Because liberalism represented, at its core, a truly higher, wider, more expansive set of values stemming from that period's highest average expectable wave of consciousness (at first blue to orange, and then orange to green, and then perhaps... yet higher? Let's come back to that in a moment).

     "Now for the problems. They are as extensive as are those of conservatism, and for essentially the same reason: neither stance is integral. Both liberal and conservative stances represent very important stretches of the overall spectrum, but neither represents the spectrum itself--both are partial, fragmented, and ultimately oppressive.

     "Liberalism demands that all people be treated legally and politically equal--which is certainly correct at this unfolding point--but that does not mean, and cannot coherently mean, treating all people as having equal cognitive, moral, or spiritual capacity, which they demonstrably do not. Liberalism fully knows this, but it constantly forgets it and thus tends to slide from the exalted, altogether noble stance that 'all values must be treated fairly and not prejudged according to one's race, sex, belief, or creed'--into the insipid, self-contradictory notion that 'all values are therefore the same, period.'

     "Most liberals know this, but when they put 'freedom, equality, and democratic egalitarianism' front and center, as if that really were the whole of liberal values, they foster a flatland worldview that fails to notice that worldcentric values are better than ethnocentric values which are better than egocentric values--and thus, in effect, they deny the growth hierarchy that produced their own stance--and thus they subtly discourage interior growth and holarchical progress--an agenda that, if ever really carried out, would destroy the actual source of all liberal values--namely, the postconventional waves of development.

     "Both orange-Enlightenment liberalism and green-postmodern liberalism severely gut the interiors, savage the Left-Hand quadrants, and then put almost total emphasis on fixing the exteriors (material and economic) as the sole means of alleviating human suffering, failing to realize that without a corresponding interior growth of consciousness and culture (Upper Left and Lower Left), there will be nothing to hold the exterior developments in place. Green liberalism especially claims that no value stances are better or worse than others, and that leads, of course, straight to the mean green meme and the horrors of boomeritis, all courtesy of a massive pathology at the leading-edge. And believe me, at the leading edge is least where you want to see pathology.

     "In order for liberalism to become integral, it would therefore have to redress its glaring deficiencies (just as would conservatism): both of them would then be racing to find the first truly integral politics in history. We already saw the two major moves required of conservatism (acknowledge the exteriors in general, and acknowledge interior levels higher than blue-orange). The corresponding steps for liberalism would be: (1) acknowledge the interiors in general; that is, recognize the interior waves of growth--the growth holarchy--that produced its own noble, expanded, worldcentric stance, and work toward ways to foster that interior growth (not force it, but foster it, making the conditions for this growth freely available to all--one of the original purposes of a truly liberal education). Typical liberalism has forgotten one of Kant's central points: 'freedom' does not mean being able to do anything I want; it means following one's own highest dictates. Repeat: 'freedom' does not mean being able to do anything I want (and therefore personal or political freedom does not mean behavioral anarchy); freedom means following one's own highest dictates (and therefore personal and political freedom demands interior development). An egocentric person is not free, but is bound to his impulses; an ethnocentric person is not free, but is bound to his prejudices; only a worldcentric person begins to the breath the atmosphere of a freedom and equality extended to all.

     "In short, you are not born free, you are everywhere born in chains. But you can become free, growing beyond your narrow perspectives to eventually embrace--and be released into the freedom and fullness of--a worldcentric, global, nonmarginalizing awareness.

     "Put in our terms, one is not free by merely possessing all the material comforts imaginable, because somebody at red is a slave to his urges, somebody at blue is a slave to the herd mentality, somebody at orange is a slave to his profit drives, somebody at green is a slave to his subjectivity. Only at second tier does a person begin to transcend those lesser impulses, drives, and dictates, and rise instead to a vision of the fluid, flowing Whole that allows one to begin to be both truly Free and truly Full in an integral embrace that makes room for all.

     "Thus, the second step for liberalism to become integral is.... Well, if step (1) is a recognition of the need for interior growth as well as exterior growth, step (2) involves the necessity to recognize yet higher interior waves beyond orange and green.... Just as traditional conservatism needs to recognize waves higher than blue-orange, today's postmodern liberalism needs to recognize waves higher than orange-green. But beyond green is... second tier. And friends, that would change everything."

Integral: A Union of Conservative and Liberal

     Powell looked up. "Okay so far?"

     "Doing fine, dear," Margaret said.

     "Perhaps the major defining characteristic of second tier is that it can grasp the entire spectrum of consciousness and the full spiral of development (at least up to the day's leading edge, which is now turquoise). This means that the NEW liberalism, as culture's leading edge today --that is, a liberalism that moved from green into yellow/turquoise--would do something that no political philosophy in history has ever succeeded in doing: recognizing, harmonizing, meshing, and integrating the entire spiral of developmental waves (up to turquoise)--NOT by using a flatland pluralism (green's attempt at integral) but a holarchical pluralism (i.e., a nested hierarchy of growth representing an increasing expansion of care and consciousness). Each meme, level, stage, and wave still has a crucial role to play and is still an invaluable part of the entire Spiral, not only because each junior wave is a necessary ingredient of the senior waves (no atoms, no molecules), but also because each holon, junior or senior, has a vital role to play at its own level. Nothing is ever lost; all is included, as this amazing Spiral makes it way from atoms to Infinity.

     "A truly integral politics would therefore function to integrate all waves and memes across at least two major dimensions: since each wave is important in its own right, and since many individuals will spend their adult lives at a particular wave (high or low or in between), then ideally a culture would offer ways to integrate the four quadrants at each and every wave. This horizontal integration would allow anybody to integrate self, culture, and nature (I, we, and it) at whatever level they are at. Beyond that, a truly second-tier, integral politics would allow a meshing of the different value structures across the entire spectrum of consciousness and spiral of development--a vertical integration . No longer would one set of values be viewed at the only set of values that should inform governance systems. The entire spiral of developmental possibilities would be taken into account in any integral decision-making process. Technical steering problems could still be handled by Right-Hand systems science, but governing policies, norms, and ideals would reflect the entire spectrum of human values as they exist in culture at any given time, and as they unfold and develop in the society being thus self-governed. It is the Spiral acting in and through integral political leaders that would govern, not this or that partial meme. Is this managerial elitism? Yes, indeedy, exactly as the liberal leading-edge has always done. But again, it is an elitism to which all are invited .

     "Let me sum up this section: to date, neither conservatism nor liberalism has been integral--neither of them is 'all quadrant, all level.' The typical conservative champions the blue-to-orange waves, and ignores or devalues the Right-Hand quadrants. The typical liberal champions the orange-to-green waves, and ignores or devalues the Left-Hand quadrants. In order to become integral, both would have to correct their imbalances by addressing the ignored quadrants and levels: conservatives, by explicitly including the Right-Hand quadrants and levels higher than orange; and liberals, by explicitly including the Left-hand quadrants and levels higher than green. We discussed each of those items above.

     "But such an integral politics would no longer be conservative or liberal, not as we have recognized them up to today. Even liberalism, which otherwise might be able to carry the banner of integral politics--simply because, as the leading edge of cultural evolution, it would be the first to punch into second tier--but even so, it would then become a type of liberalism that nobody, absolutely nobody, has ever seen before: a liberalism that does NOT claim, when it comes to conservatism, that 'We're Right and They're Wrong,' as a quaint title from a lovable, leading, liberal loudmouth put it (i.e., James Carville), but rather, 'We're Both Right, So Now What the Heck Do We Do?'

     As the laughter subsided, Lesa Powell smiled and continued reading from her notes. "So we call this new integral politics by both the terms postconservative and postliberal, although frankly we believe that the leading edge will probably come from highly developed liberals who have broken through to second tier and thus (1) realize that all of the previous memes, values, stages, and waves need to be honored in a holarchical pluralism; (2) which means that not only the entire Spiral of development needs to be integrated (vertical integration), but (3) both the Right Hand and Left Hand, or the interior and exterior, need to be integrated (horizontal integration); so that (4) 'progressive' would cease to mean merely progress in material-economic conditions but also would include, and must include, growth and development in consciousness; which would be a radically progressive stance that would also be (5) profoundly conservative in that all of yesterday's memes would be honored, preserved, and taken up in the ongoing unfolding of consciousness and culture."

     Lesa paused after this long recitation; she had been reading for almost an hour. "Well, that's as far as I've gotten in the lecture. I need to finish it up with an outline of the integral political position itself. As well as recommendations for responses--individual and collective. I thought you all might help me with that." She looked around the table.

     Carla Fuentes was the first to speak up. "Hot damn! What a ride. I know we are going to move on to the transpersonal and spiritual responses to the terrorist attack, but while you were reading that, I couldn't help but think of the WTC and the various political commentaries on it. And sadly, sadly, ain't it the truth--neither conservative nor liberal in any existing form is integral; neither addresses all the quadrants in all their levels and lines. An AQAL approach would take the best of both and jettison their crippling limitations and partialities. A Theory of Everything briefly summarizes this approach, but that book itself states that we are awaiting a detailed application of this integral approach to various issues. Besides, that author just keeps repeating himself, don't you think?

     "Anyway, right now we have only lopsided conservative or liberal ideological interpretations. All we have are very intelligent people like Samuel Huntington giving us a conservative blue-meme reading of the clash of ethnocentric culture blocks; or a wonderful orange-meme theorist like Thomas Friedman reading the world situation in terms of market globalization; or green liberals like Laclau and Mouffe reducing everything to discourse as a new way to rail at the brutality of the West. Apart from their partial truths, all of those blue and orange and green analyses are crippled to the core, in that they latch onto one set of value interpretations, see the facts through those lenses, and then unconsciously distort the remaining facts in a way that they themselves are blind to. Each of them has an incredibly important piece of the puzzle; none of them sees the whole elephant."

     Carla Fuentes shook her head, took a long breath. "It does no good to have an exterior-only liberal screaming that U.S. intervention in other cultures has killed some 6 million people around the world. Through an AQAL analysis you would have to show what the cost would have been had the U.S. not intervened but some other, possibly worse devil had the upper hand. Moreover, you have to show what the actual, realistic alternatives were, based on genealogical research and not based on flatland liberal psychology and politics.

     "Of course American power is in some ways a bad guy in this particular regard; globalization--meaning in this case an orange-meme capitalistic expansionism--is partly to blame for the causes of terrorism. I'll tell you more of what I think about that mess in a moment! But what I would like to see is how any other country--France, Japan, Iran, Germany, Indonesia, Rwanda, Peru, Iraq--would handle the same amount of power on a world scale. Would they do better, or worse, or much worse? Get the picture? As far as I can tell, no country can or could handle that amount of power well--with the possible exception of Holland, perhaps the only sane country on the face of the planet, but they're too busy having a life to get that obsessed with power. But it's highly likely that everybody else would be worse than America, some by staggering orders of magnitude--the same countries that scream the loudest about what criminals Americans are. What pathetic hypocrisy, these vulgar critics. Still, bad is bad, and America is bad enough in this regard. Goes to show, if you want to prevent terrorism, get to the root causes of terrorism, yes? But you can only see the real root causes if you are looking through an integral lens."

     Carla took another long breath, then hurriedly continued. "One of the reasons we keep 'picking on green' is that it is the highest expectable level found in large numbers of the cultural elite. It dominates academia, liberal politics, social services, education. And therefore its shenanigans cause problems that quickly multiply and cascade throughout the social system, a type of trickle-down pathology. Boomeritis, to use a current phase, is a force multiplier. And therefore, although problems with red, blue, and orange are catastrophic, we reserve a particular, shall we say, nastiness for the mean green meme. Green responds: 'I'm very concerned with that insensitive tone, aren't you?'

     "That's part of the problem. The green meme looks at the present political situations here and abroad, and with its unconscious fixation to flatland, whenever it sees a hierarchical imbalance, it is forced to assume that said imbalance is due to--not any interior factors (since flatland recognizes no interiors)--but merely exterior factors imposed on the situation by an imperial, oppressive, malevolent force--usually, the West--and thus it is blind to any interior factors that may be contributing to the situation (such as the fact that the West is the only culture that has legally institutionalized postconventional values, however imperfectly executed). The West becomes the devil, and anything non-Western, like that nice Taliban, must be innocent victims. The liberal critic sees the West's complicity; the conservative critic sees the Taliban's guilt; neither sees the whole. The West is much less to blame than green-meme liberals believe, and much more to blame than conservatives can see."

     Margaret Carlton nodded. "I was particularly struck by the fact that postmodern liberalism--well, as you know, postmodern poststructuralism actually attacks traditional liberalism very aggressively, so the postmodernists would claim that they are not liberals at all. But as you suggest, Lesa, this is simply an attack by green liberals on orange liberals. The same evolutionary shift that produced two major subschools of conservatism--namely, traditional blue (whose premodern values tend to fight those of the modern Enlightenment) and free-market orange (which has evolved into embracing most of the Enlightenment values)--has similarly produced two major subschools of liberalism--namely, orange liberals (representing the original Enlightenment values of individual freedom and equality) and green liberals (who have vehemently attacked the modern Enlightenment and replaced its values of individual freedom with group rights; as we all know, most green expressions at this time in history are riddled with boomeritis and the MGM, so green liberals have yet to find their healthy expression. And likewise, many strong, exterior-causation, orange Leftists--e.g., Chomsky, Albert, Callinicos, Harvey--aggressively attack the pomo Left--e.g., Zizek, Rorty, Laclau--which shows that what divides them--the value-levels of consciousness--are as important as what unites them--exterior causation. Still, any conservative would see all of them as being, well, nonconservative).

     "That is, orange liberals and green liberals are both liberals as we are using the term: they place most blame for human suffering on exterior circumstances (if you are suffering, it is NOT your fault); they therefore suggest progressive social improvements based mostly on exterior, material, and economic redistribution (Right-Hand changes) and, in the case of green, extensive social control of offensive speech behavior; they both ignore--indeed, attack the notion of--the interior (Left-Hand) growth hierarchies that produced their own noble stance, and hence they are clueless as to how to reproduce their insights in others (fortunately evolution does not depend on them!); they both are, whether acknowledged or not, actually representing the leading edge of evolution (though they both have an intense flatland philosophy that would deny it); and they both are therefore correctly agitating for progressive political change to increase the circle of embrace and tolerance (egocentric to ethnocentric to worldcentric)."

     "Quick question," interrupted Derek. "Granted that liberals generally define most causes of human suffering as being exterior. But the green or pomo leftists talk about subjectivity and feelings and interpretation and interiors all the time--simply because green talks about interiors all the time. Isn't that interior causation?"

      "It's interior talk, but not interior causation. The green-postmodern Left indeed talks about interiors, sensitivity, caring, possessing a nonmarginalizing attitude, and so on. But when it comes to the causes of your suffering, all of those are exterior. That is, you are not suffering because you have failed to develop your own consciousness; you are suffering because somebody else (namely, the Western Enlightenment) is oppressing you, being insensitive to you, marginalizing you, and so on. If you are suffering, it is because you are a victim, not a responsible causal agent in your own state. When it comes to your values, they cannot be judged inferior because they cannot be judged at all, which removes interior causation from the scene."

      "Got it."

     "Anyway, as I started to say, it is indeed sad that green postmodern liberalism has so vocally championed value egalitarianism and thus ceased being progressive in any consistent fashion. Lacking a coherent view of how and why society should be improved based on normative, developmental, evolutionary, and progressive values, they revert to a program of social improvement based on nothing but material and economic redistribution and behavioral totalitarianism, never a great idea. But this is why, as critics from Habermas to Taylor have pointed out, the postmodernists so often end up being reactionaries. The real curse of postmodernism: it is deeply reactionary because, lost in flatland pluralism, it can get no traction in order to establish normative, progressive development to a better state of affairs (apart from its standard claim that things would be much better if everybody simply agreed with them and universally embraced the idea that there are no universals worth embracing). Instead of realizing that the values of nonmarginalizing equality arise only from higher waves, they extend notions of equality to people who will not return the compliment , and they can't figure out why this doesn't work! Society thus ends up going nowhere, or sliding backward--especially from worldcentric rights into merely ethnocentric rights--and thus the postmodern pluralists end up being deeply reactionary and exclusionary, as witness the PC thought-police." Carlton took a long breath and laughed. "Well, jeepers creepers."

      "Jeepers creepers? Right. I find the main problem with trying to argue the facts with both conservatives and liberals is that, for the most part, their facts are correct," Charles Morin offered. "I think you mentioned this, Lesa. It's not that, for example, America didn't have a hand in millions of deaths around the world, as the liberal says. The problem is that those facts are a selection from among millions of other facts in the case, and typical liberals, looking through an orange or green lens, simply will not see, and cannot see, what other facts might be equally relevant. They will therefore not report those facts. Their overall interpretations will thus be badly skewed. Liberals, as Lesa said, especially put a very strong emphasis on the Right-Hand or exterior factors, and thus they almost never report the Left-Hand or interior factors that are as important--and usually more important--in deciding affairs than are exterior facts. But their exterior facts are generally correct, if highly selective, and in arguing only those facts they are therefore convinced that they are absolutely right in their analysis--or, anyway, more correct than the alternative interpretations."

     "Oh, they are often more correct than alternatives, because the alternatives are even more fucked!" Fuentes interjected.

     "Yes, well, no argument there. But the conservative comes in--Huntington is a fine example--and says to the liberal (to put it in our terms), 'Hey, wait a minute, you liberals are arguing orange economics or green human rights, but most of the world--some 70% of it--is at red and blue. It's not about money or rights; its about culture and identities. And you liberals just can't see that the biggest threats in the world today come from a clash of cultures and values, not matter and money--come from red tribes and blue religious fanatics."

     "Right," said Jefferson. "You know, one of the great puzzles of modern sociology has been: why didn't religion go away? By 'religion,' of course, sociologists mean purple magic and red-blue myths. They thought that orange rationality would put an end to all that magic and myth--and when it decisively did not, they scratched their heads. But the most amazing thing about the spiral of development is that everybody, in every culture, is born at square 1, is born at beige, and must begin their development from there. So every time human beings anywhere have sex, the world is producing a fresh supply of red tribes and blue fundamentalists. Because everybody starts at beige and develops through those waves--again, and again, and again. And unless those red and blue factions grow up in an orange-or-higher culture, they will remain nothing but red or blue; their actions will not be contained in a culture that imposes postconventional behavioral codes on them (such as, e.g., you are not allowed to shoot somebody because they have a different religion from you). And thus, one way or another, those egocentric and ethnocentric cultures will declare war on all worldcentric cultures. Of course, the red and blue subcultures in orange-green societies will also declare war on worldcentric values, as the street gangs of any American city and the televangelists will attest. But sooner or later the worldcentric cultures will figure this out.

     "Figure out, in other words, that the real threats are not from other cultures per se, but from the lower levels of consciousness development in any culture , including your own--AND, those 'lower levels' are and always will be a crucial ingredient and foundation of any higher levels, so that you can't... well, you can't shoot them, gas them, oppress them, repress them, or marginalize them, because they are your own roots, literally--and therefore, a la the Prime Directive, it is your duty to protect and promote the health of the entire Spiral, and not any particular wave or meme, however 'lowly' it might appear.

     "The fascist move--the Auschwitz move--vaguely grasps the hierarchy of development but ignorantly, evilly, imagines that you can cut off the roots and the leaves will flourish all the more. The communist move--the Gulag move--also vaguely grasps the hierarchy of development but equally ignorantly, evilly, imagines you can help the egalitarian roots by hacking off the leaves. Fascism destroys what it perceives to be the lower in order to help the higher; communism does the reverse. Dumb shits, both of 'em. You can't cut the Spiral in half and expect the other half to live.

     "Well, to return to the point," Jefferson smiled. "Whatever course of action we take, we need--first and foremost--a much more integral analysis of the national and international situation, an AQAL analysis--all quadrants, all levels, all lines--an integral historiograph of the present states of affairs, in order to grasp a more adequate response. Otherwise, we cannot really say what an adequate response would be because nobody--and I mean nobody--has done the integral analysis first. I'm afraid we ourselves simply do not have all the necessary information, much of it classified, that would let us proceed with an AQAL overview. Another reason we desperately need integral leaders home and abroad."

     "That's why," Morin added, "we trust so few political commentators on the scene. As I was saying, there's no such thing as just reporting the facts, because all facts are a selection, and every selection is seen through a value lens. Facts are not created by values, but they are selected by them. The blue conservative will report on the activities of a heinous network of terrorists around the world. This is true. Blue will then say that this is a clear case of good versus evil and we are being innocently attacked. But green liberals will point out that many of those terrorists were in fact trained by America. This is also true. (Usama bin Laden was trained and recruited by the CIA in order to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan--some say in order to incite the Soviets to fight in the first place.) Green liberals will then say that we are obviously suffering at the hands of our own aggression and power drives, and until we change our ways, we have no right blaming somebody else. And so the battle of endlessly fragmented interpretations goes. Both sets of facts are true; but both interpretations are partial, warped, distorted, and distorting. Acting on either will lead to more problems than it solves."

      "What I constantly hear," said Powell, "is that America talks this great idealistic show, but it rarely, or never, lives up to it. 'We are protecting peace and freedom' are just American codes word for 'my freedom to culturally dominate and rape you.'

      "Of course America doesn't live up to its ideals," Carlton responded, "because we--like everybody else--have red and blue memes all the over the place, hijacking the higher structures for their own morally sluggish or even criminal use. Which is no reason to condemn the higher structures themselves, although, Lord knows, they're not perfect either. Again, you have to consider the realistic options, given the world's historiography, in order to assess credit and blame. Of course, it goes without saying that anytime you have country as big and powerful as America, it is going to step on toes everywhere, and the world has a right to resent that. But there has to be some sort of balance in the picture."

      "So the question is, What is the integral approach to the situation ?" said Morin. There was a long silence, and then everybody broke into uproarious laughter.

      "Yes, and what exactly is the answer to God, Life, the Universe, and Everything?"

      "You also didn't describe third tier's response to the attack," Margaret Carlton said as she gently touched Lesa's hand. Once again, I felt electricity in my body.

      "One miracle at a time," laughed Joan.

     "Let's try this," Morin suggested. "Let's discuss the general response of the transpersonal or spiritual waves to the terrorist attack, and then pause and reflect on an overall integral approach to the problem. How does that sound?"

      Everybody nodded. Jefferson looked around. "Okay, who wants to give the rundown on the third-tier response? How shall I delicately put this.... Who do we think best understands third tier?" After a few moments of silence, several voices said either "Joan" or "Lesa."

      "Joan, dear, you do it, would you?" Lesa asked. "I'm shot."

      For some reason Joan looked directly at me, the sky collided with the sky and gave way to a shining infinity, stars emerged in the synapses of my brain, crackling thunder replaced the pounding of a torn and tattered heart--all in a nanosecond. Joan: how would I ever repay her?

Intro Prologue Part I Part II Part III