text/Wilber-TheIntegralVision-OriginsAndApplications-Pt2.txt

I wanted to ask you about something that many contemporary philosophers and writers from social and cultural studies are at.  Some of them believe that individualism, war, reasons, dictatorship, destruction of ecology, and other contemporary problems  are related to the excessively masculine structure of society that needs urgent feminine perspective.  Right.  Do you believe that is right?  I remember that in a brief history of everything, you do mention something.  Yes.  An integral approach includes exactly those kinds of topics.  And it very much includes balancing masculine and feminine approaches.  And so in terms of the kind of hyper-masculine or excessive masculine approach,  that...  The modern Western Enlightenment brought is quite true.  There has been an excessive use of masculine agency and not enough use of feminine communion.  And according to the integral model, every sentient being has at least four major drives.  On its own present level, it has a drive to be its own wholeness,  its own self, its own autonomous individuality, and that's called agency.  And it also is part of a larger whole.  And so it has a drive to be related.  It has a drive to be a part of something larger.  And that's the drive of communion.  So there's agency and communion on every single level of development.  And there's also drives to move upward to a higher level.  And that's called eros or self-transcendence.  And then there's also a drive to embrace the lower levels that have already emerged.  So atoms to molecules to cells to organisms.  A cell has a drive both to its own agency, to maintain its own wholeness, its own autonomy,  to be a cell, but it also has a drive to be part of other cells, to be part of a community,  to be part of a related community.  To have a business and to have sort of care and responsibility.  Those are the two drives on its own level, agency and communion.  But a cell also has a drive to move upward to a higher order.  And that means a cell has a drive to be part of an organism and part of systems in organisms.  And that's eros or the cell's self-transcending to a higher level of organization.  And then biomechanics.  But also to embrace the previous levels.  A cell transcends and includes.  It embraces its previous levels.  So cells transcend and include molecules, which transcend and include atoms.  So each higher level is actually an increase in, to put it in human terms,  an increase in love and embracing and care.  And what the modern Western Enlightenment did is it emphasized the two masculinities,  the two feminine modes, which are agency and eros.  And it didn't give enough attention to the two feminine modes, which are communion and agape.  And so what we want to do is redress that imbalance.  And it doesn't mean denying what individuality and agency and eros.  It doesn't mean denying those truths.  Those truths brought representation.  It brought representative democracies.  And it brought human rights and universal rights of men and women.  All of that came from the masculine mode.  But the excessive use of that did indeed present the world as nothing but a billiard ball collection  of isolated individuals without communion and without agape.  And so what we want to do is simply introduce those.  We want to add those truths to the very good truths that the masculine mode has come up with.  So part of the problem with people that advocate the feminine mode is they want to deny or deconstruct  or even destroy what the masculine mode has accomplished.  And that would be a disaster.  But what we do want to do is complement it.  We want to bring in those modes of science, modes of living, modes of being in the world,  that include communion and agape.  And so that's part of the integral approach that has five or so major components  called quadrants, levels, lines, states, and types, which we can get into or not.  It's not that important, but I'm just naming them.  And those are the five.  And there are more, but those are at least the five aspects or components of any situation  that you want to include in order to be comprehensive.  Or as comprehensive as we can.  And types include masculine and feminine.  And there is definitely a disruption of that with the rise of a modern, disenchanted, detached,  agentic individuality.  And no way to actually get them together into a greater communion and a loving, caring agape.  So.  Do you think...  Do you think that the increase of a woman being in charge of different cultural and professional positions  does mean something related to this change or not?  Well, essentially and generically, the answer is yes.  But of course, it depends on the woman.  Some women have themselves an essentially masculine approach.  So it's not enough to simply say, you know, I'm going to be a woman.  It's not enough to simply say, put more women into positions.  But it is to say that since women have a much greater percentage of relational drives  and communion and agape, that making the positions of power include aspects of communion  and relationship and care and responsibility.  Okay.  Would then make...  So I'm not in favor of like a quota system where you have to have exactly 50% of every job is filled by females.  But I'm definitely in favor of changing awareness and ideas and consciousness such that it includes  these aspects in which women happen to specialize, if you will.  And so people applying for a job, more women would get the...  More women would get the position than males.  But it's a matter of expanding our opportunities and not necessarily using kind of a quota system.  Ken, do you think that this more masculine perspective of modern world,  and that maybe we saw very clearly in the 20th century,  may reflect the failure of political structures such as communism,  and things like that, that tried to help in a utopical way,  I mean, individuality to go to communion.  But was it from the same structure of individuality?  I mean, was it too masculine to achieve it?  Well, yes.  And I think what happens here is that we have to bring in another dimension,  namely the vertical dimension of growth.  And that's the general stages that I've been talking about is archaic, magic, mythic,  membership, mythic conformist, and then rational, rationally egoic, individualistic,  and then green, pluralistic, postmodern, and also has an emphasis on communal organization.  And part of what Marxism did was attempted...  to introduce this pluralistic, communal way of living.  But since each of those stages of consciousness tend to go  with a particular techno-economic mode of production,  so that archaic, magic, mythic, rational, and pluralistic  correspond to foraging, horticultural, agrarian,  industrial, and informational.  And the difficulty was that some of these communal modes of knowing,  coming from the pluralistic stage, and supported by an informational infrastructure,  which really was not present at the time that Karl Marx conceived of a communalistic way of living.  Mm-hmm.  So those, the ideas were introduced into societies that were at an agricultural,  an agrarian stage of techno-economic behavior.  And that has a mythic, membership, fundamentalistic orientation.  And so there was a great problem in that the ideas were about two stages ahead  of where the techno-economic...  the economic base could support it.  So again, it's not just looking at masculine and feminine approaches.  There was an attempt here to rebalance masculine and feminine,  but not using modern and postmodern techno-economic bases,  but rather very primitive agrarian structures.  And so it was really rather doomed to fail for those reasons alone.  And it was turned into, Marxism became a fundamentalistic religion,  and was believed in as an absolutistic mode of knowing.  And those are all variations on the mythic stage of development.  The mythic, dogmatic, fundamentalistic approach to reality  was called absolutistic by Claire Graves.  And Marxism became an absolutistic system.  It was believed that it had absolute certainty,  that it had a scientific approach to the stages of human development,  economic development,  and that it had the key to the next form of revolution or transformation.  And all of those had some type of validity,  according to the pluralistic stage.  But the countries and the nations that it was introduced in  were not at the pluralistic stage at all.  But were at the fundamentalistic stage.  And so Marxism became philosophically an absolutistic system.  No different than if somebody is a fundamentalist Christian,  or a fundamentalist Muslim.  And it was believed in with that kind of absolute certainty.  And that's one of the main reasons that Marxism essentially failed.  The whole postmodern attack  on previous forms of thinking  certainly included an attack on Marxism.  And that was in part the reason for it.  Ken, if we look back to what you just mentioned about Marxism  and other clashes of freedom and equality,  do you believe we can go from individuality to community  with consciousness of our own individuality?  That's a very good question.  And I think the answer involves primarily  having the leading edge right now  in Western thought,  whether it's political thought or sociological thought  or philosophical thinking,  is essentially the pluralistic postmodern edge.  And that is a stage of development  that also becomes very relativistic.  And so it denies universals and denies common patterns  and focuses basically on each individual  and each individual culture having its own truths.  So that makes it very, very hard  to come up with any kind of commonality  across people and across cultures.  So at the same time,  there's an extreme emphasis on the collective.  The social structure actually creates reality.  So that so-called social construction of all knowledge.  And for integral thinking,  that's another kind of absolutism.  We call it a quadrant absolutism.  The quadrants are one of those five major aspects  of the integral framework.  And they simply refer to  the dimensions or perspectives  that all human beings have.  And it's the inside and the outside  of the individual and the collective.  And that gives us four dimensions,  including the inside of the individual,  which is described in I language.  And the inside of the collective  are common values and cultures,  common meanings and common linguistic and semantic forms.  And that's often described with a pronoun we.  And then on the right hand or exterior quadrants  is the exterior of the individual  and the exterior of the collective.  The exterior of the individual  is the individual looked at in an objective fashion.  And so it includes atoms,  molecule cells,  liver,  neuronal tissues,  skeletal,  muscular systems.  And that was the view of the medical model  that I was talking about,  the scientific materialist model.  And that's described not in I language,  but in it language,  third person approaches.  And then there's third person plural,  which is what individual organisms  in collectives look like.  And that's covered by systems theory  and approaches like that  that basically look at a holistic approach,  but only of exteriors.  Systems theory doesn't include anything  on interior values or meanings  or spiritual awakenings  or beauty or goodness or any of those,  which those are found only in I and we spaces.  So what we are looking at is  many approaches to reality  take just one quadrant  and absolutize it,  say it's the only real quadrant.  So there are approaches  that take the interior of the individual  as fundamentally real.  Everything from phenomenology  to Zen Buddhism  takes consciousness as ultimate.  And then there are  the scientific materialist approaches  that look at an individual  just from the exterior  in an objective fashion.  So that's the standard modern scientific approach,  which thinks that only objects are real.  And then what much of postmodernism did  is  is starting with looking at linguistic structures  which operated as systems of meaning  and could not be discovered by phenomenology,  but only by things like structuralism  and neo-structuralism  and found that or concluded that  reality itself,  what we call reality,  is a product  of how we conceptualize it  and often on a subconscious fashion  but this is called  the social construction of knowledge  and the postmodernists maintain  that even modern science,  even rational empirical science  is not reflecting universal realities  but is the product of social activities,  social practices.  And that's absolutizing the we quadrant.  The we creates all realities,  creates I and creates it  and creates its.  And so that's sort of  an over-extreme version  of what postmodernism does.  Now it's telling us a certain truth.  It's telling us that all cultures  parse reality,  divide reality  in different ways,  have different meaning systems  that we cannot easily claim  that our approach to reality,  that let's say somebody  doing social science in San Francisco,  that that understanding  works for all cultures.  And that was sort of the claim  that the Western Enlightenment made  and it went too far  in claiming that its studies  were applicable to all cultures.  And postmodernism discovered this  with a vengeance  and found all of the things  that were being left out  or marginalized  or excluded  in our approaches to reality.  And one of the first, of course,  is that it excluded the feminine.  It left that out.  But it also left out versions of reality  of peoples of color  and gays  and all sorts of marginalized awareness.  Modernity left out of the picture.  And that's why postmodernity  came along  in an attempt to correct that.  And there's a lot of, again,  partial truths  in what postmodernism tells us.  But in absolutizing itself,  it got into trouble  and it deconstructed everything,  including itself.  And which is why postmodernism,  as an approach to reality,  is now actually sort of at a dead end.  And everybody knows postmodernism is over.  And there are hundreds of books,  literally,  with titles like  Beyond Postmodernism  or What Comes Next?  or What's After Postmodernism?  And the thing is,  if you look at developmental studies,  what we find is that  one of the contributing factors  to traditionalism  and traditional values  and modernism  and modern values  and postmodernism  and postmodern values,  one of the main contributors  is the developmental level of consciousness  that individuals are at.  And so at the mythic conformist level,  individuals embrace absolutistic  traditionalist values,  fundamentalist values  that are taken to be absolutely true.  And then at the modern stage,  the rational stage,  the formal operational stage of development,  individuals are open to third-person views  and particularly scientific approaches to reality.  And so the extreme version of that  becomes scientific materialism.  And then as individuals develop further  into postformal or postmodern  or pluralistic modes of awareness,  then, of course,  the postmodern worldview starts to make sense.  And the worldview,  in general,  looks like a pluralistic collection  of socially constructed value spheres.  And that's why one has to be very careful  not to marginalize  these numerous other value spheres.  But by itself,  pluralism cannot see  how all of these different value systems  are related to each other.  The postformal,  postmodern level of development  doesn't have quite enough cognitive capacity  to see the common patterns  that unite these multicultural differences.  That's what develops with the next stage  that is variously termed autonomous  and integrated or integral  or self-actualizing  by various developmentalists.  So there actually is a stage  of real psychological development  beyond the postmodern stage.  And that's the integral stage  that is increasingly  starting to appear.  As I said,  it's gone from 2% to around 5%.  And we think it's headed towards around 10%  within a decade or so.  But right now,  the very leading edge  of thinking  is still pluralistic.  It's still postmodern.  And so that's a bit of a problem.  It has partial good truths,  but it's a dead end.  It has no way  to go beyond itself.  And so it ends  basically in nihilism and narcissism,  as has often been pointed out.  And that's part of the problem  we have right now  is that our leading edge thinkers  are at a dead end.