Taking some time from silence, to post about the JFK Conference in Integral Theory.  In the Bay Area, so I have no excuse!

I fully hope and expect to meet lots of my online pals, in person.

Thanks to Bill for the heads-up.

Over the last week, I've been dealing with media shallowness, but one comment I found interesting on the Rorty article:

It's all fine and good to be a skeptic in the Rortian vein or Stanley Fish-style and argue that metaphysics and foundationalism are bunk and that democracy doesn't need any sort of philosophical grounding.

The problem is that there is trickle-down of ideas: not directly from academia to the average citizen, but from philosophers to the media elite, who are mostly college-educated and whose views of reality and discourse are a kind of cartoon version of the dominant trends in academic thought.

You wonder then where the MSM gets this idea that empiricism doesn't matter, that reality is just a construct, that public life is nothing but a power-struggle in which the right thing to do is find out what the daddy-party wants, and just obey that?

Look no further than Rorty, Fish, and the two-bit latter-day deconstructionists.

Ideas have consequences, and so does the weak-tea thesis that ideas themselves are inconsequential. Without a strong commitment to truth, empiricism, and foundationalism in ideas, all you have left is tribalism on right, and triangulation on the left.

I've been making fun of the following Wilber quote:

"The single greatest problem was stated this way.  When green attacks orange, amber wins.  And believe me, amber is winning, just ask Karl Rove.  Despite a democratic victory here or there, the ranks of voters have downshifted towards amber, unmistakably and strongly.  All of this thanks to the likes of green Harvard, which has finally succeeded in deconstructing it's own deconstructionists"

I think I may have to take back my fun-making.  That quote above - coming from a completely different place than Wilber - essentially says the same thing.

Something to think about.

I came across this artice on Richard Rorty today, over at the Los Angeles Times.

Richard Rorty was, in many ways, the american postmodern.    He rejects epistemology early on, and situated "truth" as, in his famous expression - ""Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with saying."

You can't get more postmodern than that.

As the article points out though, he would review other philosophers works, and, to put it mildly, "misinterpret" what they have said:

These positions irritated many people. But what absolutely killed philosophy professors was Rorty's interpretation of the great figures of the Western tradition. The average philosophy professor may spend a decade or a career trying to elucidate the works of Martin Heidegger or W.V.O. Quine. Rorty lined up such figures in support of his own positions in a fundamentally careless way. He quoted them out of context and ignored everything he couldn't use.

This truly enraged people. The Dewey scholars hated him, as did the Wittgenstein scholars, the Davidson scholars, the Nietzsche scholars, the Derrida scholars and so on. Every one of them thought they could prove that Rorty was wrong about their particular boy, and that he'd have to listen and take back all the things he had said. In this, they didn't understand him at all.

Another example"

As Rorty spoke, Gadamer just shook his big, eminent, bereted head. When it was over, Gadamer said, in German-accented English: "But Dick, you've got me all wrong." Rorty gave the grin and the shrug and said: "Yes, Hans. But that's what you should have said."

Wilber, of course, is coming from a different worldview.  In his case, making room for transcendent truths, without negating the current truths of science and modernity.  A version of perennialism, although one based on perceptual spaces. 

Also interesting then, that so many Wilber scholars not associate with Wilber, share some of the concerns of misrepresentation of other scholars, that drove people crazy about Rorty.

Is now clearly on display.   More silly Paris Hilton obsessions. 

From Al Gore's book:

It is simply no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse. I know I'm not alone in feeling that something has gone fundamentally wrong. In 2001, I had hopes it was an aberration when polls showed that three-quarters of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for attacking us on September 11. More than five years later, however, nearly half the American people still believes that Saddam was connected to the attack.

At first I thought the exhaustive, nonstop coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial was just unfortunate excess --- an unwelcome departure from the normal good sense and judgment of our news media. Now we know that it was merely an early example of a new pattern of serial obsession that periodically take over the airwaves for weeks at a time.

Late in the summer of 2006, American news coverage was saturated with the bizarre false confession of a man who claimed to have been present at the death of JonBenet Ramsey --- the six-year-old beauty queen whose unsolved murder eleven years before was responsible for another long-running obsession. A few months prior to John Mark Karr's arrest in Bangkok, the disappearance of a high school senior in Aruba and the intensive search for her body and her presumed murderer consumed thousands of hours of television coverage. Both cases remain unsolved as of this writing, and neither had any appreciable impact on the fate of the Republic.

Like JonBenet Ramsey, O.J. has recently been back at the center of another fit of obsessive-compulsive news, when his hypothetical confession wasn't published and his interviews on television wasn't aired. This particular explosion of "news" was truncated only when a former television sitcom star used racist insults in a night club. And before that we focus on the "Runaway Bride" in Georgia. And before that there was the Michael Jackson trial and the Robert Blake trial, the Laci Peterson tragedy and the Chandra Levy tragedy. And of course we can't forget Britney and KFed, and Lindsay and Paris and Nicole, Tom Cruise jumped on Oprah's couch and married Katie Holmes, who gave birth to Suri. And Russell Crowe apparently threw a phone at a hotel concierge.

In early 2007, the wall-to-wall coverage of Anna Nicole Smith's death, embalming, and funeral plans and the legal wrangling over the paternity and custody of her child and disposition of her estate, served as yet another particularly bizarre example of the new priorities in America's news coverage.

And while American television watchers were collectively devoting a hundred million hours of their lives each week to these and other similar stories, our nation was in the process of more quietly making what future historians will certainly describe as a series of catastrophically mistaken decisions on issues of war and peace, the global climate and human survival, freedom and barbarity, justice and fairness.

But of course, Al Gore is somehow a green post-modernist, empowering Karl Rove,being a Harvard grad, and all that.

Now clearly, I'm making fun.  I understand KW has a lot on his plate - he isn't an expert in a lot of fields. 

But his Integral Politics is clearly deeply deficient - so are there other integal analyses that are worthwhile, of the media situation?   The banality and obsessiveness of the 24/7 news networks, really isn't a left/right issue - it comes in for mutual condemnation. 

But what is the integral analysis?

So I biked into work today.  At around 8 AM, went into the gym to shower, prepare for work, and noticed that on the cable news channels, reporting about Paris Hilton.

And just now, 3 hours later, I go into a corner store to get a snack - I look up at the TV, and what is being reported on?

Paris Hilton.

3 hours later.

(Oh, by the way, Paris Hilton is out of jail, in case you haven't heard.  I didn't know she was in jail, but apparently she was, and now she is out.)

Which brings up, of course, the clear emptiness of current news reporting.  Entertainment, rather than worthwhile news. What entertains, rather than what informs.

It would be interesting to see an integral analysis of this.  The financial and economic analysis is straightforward - the news companies are focused on ratings, there is a ratings bump from entertainment related news, so the editors at the news channels allow 24/7 insipid coverage, dominated by corporate interests on substantial issues, and fluff the rest of the time.  Whatever gets the ratings up, within reason.

The real question then, is where straight economic analysis is placed within the integral context? 

Economic analysis focuses, interestingly enough, focuses on most everything BUT the I-dimension.   Mainly this type of analysis is IT and ITS focused, with a bit of WE analysis thrown in, for cultural dimensions. 

My one sentence analysis of the shallowness of news is mainly an "externalist" rendering of the situation, with rational actors in the news divisions acting in a behavioristic fashion, in pursuit of those ratings bumps.  With the product then produced by that process being shallow tripe.

It would be great to see a bit more of this in integral-land, with a focus on the reciprocity between the individual and cultural factors, that move in interdependence with the IT economic "hard" factors (actual resources),  and ITS legal and economic structures that are in place.

It seems to me that Wilber talks about the external factors, only to abandon them in "inner" cultural and personal factors, when push comes to shove.

"The single greatest problem was stated this way.  When green attacks orange, amber wins.  And believe me, amber is winning, just ask Karl Rove.  Despite a democratic victory here or there, the ranks of voters have downshifted towards amber, unmistakably and strongly.  All of this thanks to the likes of green Harvard, which has finally succeeded in deconstructing it's own deconstructionists"

I would say that the hollowing out of news reporting, does downshift power towards amber.  The prizing of vapid fame over important issues means, that in the main news world, important information doesn't get reported until it bites "the people" in the rear-end.  Too late to do anything about it.

But how is that "green attacking orange?"  The externalist factors I describe above - the search for ratings - account for the dumbing down of the news.    That isn't green, correct?

This is why Wilber's analysis fails so badly - so incredibly, awfully badly - on this point.   "Green" because a magic talisman of sorts, the boogieman, to not actually engage what is happening in the "real world".

I was looking briefly at this article in Time today - The Last Temptation of Al Gore - and then referring back to the Integral Politics in Brief tract I linked to earlier today.

Here's a quote from the Time article:

The Assault on Reason will be hailed and condemned as Gore's return to political combat. But at heart, it is a patient, meticulous examination of how the participatory democracy envisioned by our founders has gone awry—how the American marketplace of ideas has gradually devolved into a home-shopping network of 30-second ads and mall-tested phrases, a huckster's paradise that sells simulated participation to a public that has all but lost the ability to engage. Gore builds his argument from deep drafts of political and social history and trenchant bits of information theory, media criticism, computer science and neurobiology, and reading him is by turns exhausting and exhilarating. One moment he is lecturing you about something you think you know pretty well, and the next moment he's making a connection you had never considered. The associative leaps are dazzling, but what will stoke the Democratic faithful are his successive chapters on the Iraq war, each one strafing the Administration for a different set of misdeeds: exploiting the politics of fear, misusing the politics of faith, misleading the American people, throwing out the checks and balances at the heart of our democracy, undermining the national security and degrading the nation's image in the world. For anyone who stepped into the Oval Office now and tried to end the war, he says, "it would be like grabbing the wheel of a car that's in mid-skid. You're just trying to work the wheel to see what pulls you out of it." But the mess we're in can't be blamed solely on the President or the Vice President or the post-9/11 distortion field that muzzled the media, immobilized Congress and magnified Executive power. "I think this started before 9/11, and I think it's continued long after the penumbra of 9/11 became less dominant," he says. "I think it is part of a larger shift driven by powerful forces"—print giving way to television as our dominant medium for examining ideas, television acting on our brains in ways that scientists are just beginning to unlock. As such, it's not the sort of problem that legislation is going to fix. Gore hopes that the Internet, which is so good at inviting people back into the conversation, will be the key to restoring American democracy. "It's going to take time," he says. "After all, we've been veering off course for a while."

Now first off, I'm going to buy the new Gore book, An assault on reason - but take the paragraph above DESCRIBING Gore's book, and compare it to the shallow analysis given by Wilber above. (And again, I'll have more on this later.)

Which sounds deeper, more true, more resonant, more attendant to the facts as they are happening, not generalizations that fit a theory?

Ken Wilber has been publishing stuff on Integral Politics.  This is recent on the subject.

I've read through page 25. 

I must say, I'm underwhelmed.   Three points -

a.  Ken can't seem to write "lingo" very well.  Very stilted, cardboard, and silly, all of the people, and all of the dialogue between people.
b.  The bringing in of integral theory, seems to be acting as a sort of deus ex machina.  The concepts and explanations are brought in, but aren't actually hooked up with any real time practicalities. 
c.  Left and right are reduced to generalities that are basically content free.  This is then expanded into the typical integral rap - levels and lines, etc.  But nothing really to sink one's teeth into, outside of the integral concepts.


For example, there is exactly ONE reference to power, almost as an aside, when referencing Nietzsche. 

Probably the only reference to any current situation (and I'm skimming now) is this quote:  "The single greatest problem was stated this way.  When green attacks orange, amber wins.  And believe me, amber is winning, just ask Karl Rove.  Despite a democratic victory here or there, the ranks of voters have downshifted towards amber, unmistakably and strongly.  All of this thanks to the likes of green Harvard, which has finally succeeded in deconstructing it's own deconstructionists."

Umm...Harvard?  That's the problem?  That caused Karl Rove?


There's quite a lot of undisciplined thinking in this piece, that I've read so far.  Really, you get better analysis at the smarter liberal and conservative blogs, frankly.

I hate to say it, but this type of piece is nothing so much as...silly.  I don't even find much to be outraged about, as the piece is so clearly lacking in any substantive content, it could have been written by a particularly bright, 1st year political science student, exploring integral concepts.

I'm again skimming (this is realtime, I'm reading then writing), and it looks to get a little better towards the end.  A few more distinctions brought in, that are useful.  What do other people think of this piece?

Last year, when all the crazy-ness around Ken Wilber's Wyatt Earpy posts began, I had been looking for the criteria checklist for "cultish" behavior.  I had found one checklist, and blogged on that, but I knew there was one out there that was more comprehensive.  (It's clear that ANY checklist would have some points, as organizations have analogous interests, such as a cause, or getting new members, etc.  Where is gets dangerous is if nearly every item on the checklist test, is "yes". )

Today, quite by accident, I ran into it the checklist.  So I thought it would be interesting to go through each check box, one at a time:

1, The group displays excessively zealous and unquestioning commitment to its leader and (whether he is alive or dead) regards his belief system, ideology, and practices as the Truth, as law.

Well, certainly SOME people feel this way about Ken Wilber.  But in my estimation, not many. Since this a on/off judgment call, I'm going with "no".

2. Questioning, doubt, and dissent are discouraged or even punished.

This one isn't even close - definite "no".

3. Mind-altering practices (such as meditation, chanting, speaking in tongues, denunciation sessions, and debilitating work routines) are used in excess and serve to suppress doubts about the group and its leader(s).

While meditation is encouraged, as is the ILP, this is still a definite no.

4. The leadership dictates, sometimes in great detail, how members should think, act, and feel (for example, members must get permission to date, change jobs, marry—or leaders prescribe what types of clothes to wear, where to live, whether or not to have children, how to discipline children, and so forth).

Umm...nope. 

5. The group is elitist, claiming a special, exalted status for itself, its leader(s) and members (for example, the leader is considered the Messiah, a special being, an avatar—or the group and/or the leader is on a special mission to save humanity).

There is definitely this going on, because, you know, integral is the highest form of being!  .  Given the terms of this checklist, I'll give this a "yes".  Although, it must be said, most groups consider themselves on a "special mission".

6. The group has a polarized us-versus-them mentality, which may cause conflict with the wider society.

If the "us" is the 2nd tier, versus 1st tier, then yes.  While I think, most of the time, in practice, people aren't evaluated as "1st tier" or "2nd Tier", the philosophy as such, DOES easily lead to an "us" versus "them" mentality.  I'm going to go with "yes", but with caveats.  Still counts as a yes though, for these purposes.

7. The leader is not accountable to any authorities (unlike, for example, teachers, military commanders or ministers, priests, monks, and rabbis of mainstream religious denominations).

This is true.  While there is a new CEO, and a board, as was seen last year, Ken isn't really accountable to anyone - the power structure rests with him solely.  It must be said, for any founder of a company, this is usually the case.  It is the case for Anthony Robbins, or Chopra, or any single proprietor with employees.  But still, this would be "yes", on the checklist.

8. The group teaches or implies that its supposedly exalted ends justify whatever means it deems necessary. This may result in members' participating in behaviors or activities they would have considered reprehensible or unethical before joining the group (for example, lying to family or friends, or collecting money for bogus charities).

No.

9. The leadership induces feelings of shame and/or guilt in order to influence and/or control members. Often, this is done through peer pressure and subtle forms of persuasion.

You have a little bit of this, in the 1st tier/2nd tier distinction, but not enough for a "yes".  No on the checklist.

10. Subservience to the leader or group requires members to cut ties with family and friends, and radically alter the personal goals and activities they had before joining the group.

No, clearly not.

11. The group is preoccupied with bringing in new members.

Isn't nearly EVERY group preoccupied with bringing in new members, from the democratic party, to the local rotary club?  Not much evidence, but the checklist would be yes.  Doesn't really prove anything though. "yes".

12. The group is preoccupied with making money.

Again, most groups are preoccupied with making enough money to function.  In terms of an 'extraordinary' desire to make money - ponzi schemes or multi-level marketing, working on your friends - that would be a "no".

13.Members are expected to devote inordinate amounts of time to the group and group-related activities.

Nope.


14. Members are encouraged or required to live and/or socialize only with other group members.

Nope.

15. The most loyal members (the “true believers”) feel there can be no life outside the context of the group. They believe there is no other way to be, and often fear reprisals to themselves or others if they leave (or even consider leaving) the group.

No.

So - what's the total?

11 No's
4 Yes's.

Given the fact that at least 2 of the Yes's in question have caveats to them, I think we can clearly, unequivocally, and authoritatively say that, Integral Institute is in no shape, way or form, a cult.  Just an organization, with an enthusiastic mission to spread one philosopher's views.


Now, as an alternative, if this same checklist were to be utilized for Andrew Cohen the Guru - my, my my, how quickly we get more yes's!    Very quickly you find out that yes, Cohen as Guru groups are, organizationally, a cult.

If you haven't see what Joe is doing recently, make sure to go over and have a look.

It's very "integral-meta", but also a new way at looking at integral writing, and what the writing is "about".  Taking a perspective on your perspectives, and words, and such, and labeling various writing - whether contemplation, statements about moral views, etc - with a color code. 

One of the reasons I personally like this, is because it really breaks up the view that a person is OF a certain color, in the simplistic Spiral Dynamics view.  This becomes very obvious in Joe's painstaking analysis and color-coding of the State of the Union address by President George Bush. 

Within one speech - one speech! - you find nearly all the different values as reflected in the spiral dynamic specrum, while at the same time, getting a visual take of the largest "percentage" of where the speech is coming from.   

For myself, it's quite useful, like seeing a spreadsheet chart graphed or grouped, on miscellaneous data, for the first time.  So much better than a simplistic take, showing that Bush "differentiates across the spectrum of values, while remaining pretty firmly centered in conformity values.

I highly recommend to go take a look at the work Joe has done, in advancing out of a simple view of Spiral Dynamics.

Since I have a comment by a reader, in a previous post, I will go ahead and point to a new article up at What Enlightenment, by a major contributor (millions of dollars) to Andrew Cohen's work. 

She details out, from her perspective, the process that Cohen went through to secure a 2 million dollar donation from her. 

Now, individual posts like this, you have to be cautious of - but given that, in this post, she details some of her own personal issues honestly, as well as gets some corroboration from other NAMED individuals in the comments, the post is worth paying attention to.

I'm not sure what it will take for Integral Institute and Ken Wilber, to STOP giving any oxygen to this guy, but hopefully it will happen soon.  After a year of exposure, from various sources, it can't come soon enough.  (I vote, with my Sponsor Plus membership in Integral Institute, to drop this guy).  When will Ken wake up about this particular issue?  Anyone at I-I ever do a Q&A with Ken on this particular issue?

(Note - don't do a Q&A NOW - Ken's had a marvelous and inspiring recovery, as detailed in this blogpost, but at some point maybe someone can find out Ken's stance.)

Check out Zaadz, collecting posts BY Zaadsters, that then tag their post with Ken Wilber.

You will see a few familiar bloggers, but also some people you don't normally see.  But make sure to scroll down.

Some good thoughts.

NOTE:  In case you were unaware, Gary has created the largest grassroots integral community (of course, you knew that, right?)

Read it here.

Just saw this, been busy - but it is a full and comprehensive update, so if you haven't read it, go now.

The news from Nomali, is that Ken is in ICU, and has been unconscious, and has been for nearly a day.

More information in these places -

This thread on Zaadz.

This thread on Integral Multiplex.

Update:  I haven't seen something "official" on this, which is surprising.  I've been looking - will keep you posted.

More over at Vince's blog.

In the previous post, I was investigating ethics - and I came across the Wikipedia article on Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral development.

What struck me, as regarding Wilber theory, was the following Further Stages entry:

In his empirical studies of persons across their life-span, Kohlberg came to notice that some people evidently had undergone moral stage regression. He was faced with the option of either conceding that moral regression could occur, or revise his theory. Kohlberg chose the latter, postulating the existence of sub-stages wherein the emerging stage has not yet been adequately integrated into the personality.^[8] In particular Kohlberg noted of a stage 4½ or 4+, which is a transition from stage four to stage five, sharing characteristics of both.^[8] In this stage the individual has become disaffected with the arbitrary nature of law and order reasoning. Culpability is frequently turned from being defined by society to having society itself be culpable. This stage is often mistaken for the moral relativism of stage two as the individual considers society's conflicting interests with their own choices relatively and morally wrong.^[8] Kohlberg noted that this was often seen in students entering college.<sup>[8][11]

The question I have is this - if "regression" can happen, what does this do to Wilber's understanding that "you can't go backward" in terms of development?" 

Kohlberg seems to see this as "sub-stages", before "full" integration into the next stage.  I suppose that fits with the Wilber claim, but it also leaves one adrift in analyzing any PARTICULAR person - which again, seem to me to show that using stages to analyze an individual person is a non-starter.

Also, if you look at the bottom of this article, the See Also section, notice that there is a list of other theorists of development - cognitive, faith, ego, and psychosocial. 

This, for me, throws into clear relief how much "integral" theory is in alignment with, and dependent on, developmental theories.  So should integral theory be considered, in the main, a meta-developmental theory?</sup>

This is pure "gossip talk", and I really shouldn't be indulging in it - but Vince has a good question on Ken Wilber's recent CEO Search announcement.