Integral Rising; The Emergence of Decentralized Intersubjective Sensemaking

I think I can say, with confidence, that I was not alone in my dismay when I learned the result of the US presidential election on the morning of November 9, 2016. At first, my anger and reactivity were blinding. Like so many on the left, I reflexively jumped to conclusions about what Trump’s election meant. I confidently inferred widespread malicious motives and political illiteracy. With time, reaction faded to reflection. I began to wonder how it could be that the “gold standard” sense making tools I depended on—the “experts”—could have gone overnight from confidently dismissive, even smug, to deranged with outrage and flailing in their efforts to achieve coherence. A nagging question formulated itself. Could it be that my perspective, and the lenses I was using to make sense of the world, were unreliable—broken, even? I watched as many on the left doubled down on their certainty and outrage. I shared many of their putative concerns. But, the whole conversation began to sound an awful lot like the raucous echo chamber I found so repugnant on the right. I was effectively dislodged from my confident niche and ejected into liminal space.

If nothing else, I am now painfully aware of the need to hold conclusions lightly. I have woven together many threads and assembled a toolkit of new lenses for myself, but I certainly have no more than a dim and partial view. What I’d like to share here is one of the more powerful lenses I have stumbled across, a theoretical structure with remarkable explanatory power, and one that may even point the way to a more hopeful future.

In 1977 Ken Wilber, an intellectual prodigy still in his 20s, shot to prominence with the publication of his first book, The Spectrum of Consciousness. In the decades that followed, Wilber undertook the eye wateringly ambitious task of synthesizing all of the major areas of human knowledge, including the intellectual and spiritual, objective and subjective, into a remarkable “theory of everything” that came to be called Integral Theory. In his cross disciplinary review of the literature on human development, Wilber was struck by the consistency with which a predictable series of developmental stages emerged, stages that not only mapped onto individuals, but onto the development of human civilization itself. Human cultures are, in effect, direct reflections of the stage(s) of development of a critical mass of the individuals who make up those cultures. Wilber’s crucial insight is the fact that three of these developmental stages predominate in the contemporary West:

1. Amber: Online about 5000 years; Mythic literal, i.e., tends to literally believe mythical texts with roots in the axial age; Ethnocentric, i.e., concerned with the welfare of a limited in-group (not world-centric); absolutistic; conventional; traditional.
2. Orange: Online about 300 years; Roots in the Western Enlightenment; Rational; Modern; World-centric; Scientific; Concerned with equality, defined as universal individual rights, individual liberty and freedom of opportunity.
3. Green: Online about 150 years; Pluralistic; Relativistic; Post-Modern; World-centric; Concerned with equality, defined as equity and equality of outcome.

Each of these three stages, and all of the preceding stages—collectively called 1st tier—generate radically different worldviews. From the inside, each of these 1st tier worldviews appears substantially irreconcilable with the alternatives. Just as the native speaker is unaware that he is following a complex set of grammar rules in his native tongue, a cognitive construct that Wilber points out is undetectable by introspection, the amber, orange or green stage thinker is unaware of the “grammar” of his thought. The fish cannot detect the water in which it swims.

Beyond 1st tier lies 2nd tier, or Integral, characterized by a meta awareness of the 1st tier stages. Integral is world-centric, views each of the 1st tier developmental stages as providing vital but partial insight, and seeks to integrate them. Integral thinkers see systems of systems, navigate a complex dialectical dynamic between the 1st tier stages, and are continually inclined to look for what is missing.

Wilber outlines how postmodern “green” initially delivered important gains. These included the civil rights movement and a range of other rights and inclusivity victories that built on the foundation laid by orange, which had precipitated the end of slavery and the broad adoption of universal human rights. Green also articulated crucial partial truths about the dialectical and conditional/perspectival nature of truth claims, and the dangers inherent in canonical interpretations and absolutistic grand narratives.

Unfortunately, in Wilber’s reading, the leading edge of contemporary green has regressed into extremism and absolutism: authoritarian language policing in the name of egalitarianism, and absurd performative contradictions, such as the claim that there are no universal truths while insisting on the universal truth of this claim. The leading edge of green is now synonymous with what Maajid Nawaz often refers to as the “regressive left”: it is predominantly anti-liberal, anti-freedom, and quite willing to curtail free speech, or even compel speech, in the name of furthering social justice ends.

Antagonized by the gains of green, and now seeing opportunity in its absurd excesses, amber—naturally absolutistic and ethnocentric—has been powerfully reconstituted. In the US, amber is predominantly comprised of religious fundamentalists—believers in the mythic literal—with a hard right fringe of white ethno-nationalists and white supremacists.

Squeezed in the middle are the traditional liberal Enlightenment values of orange—like universal rights, freedom of speech, equality of opportunity, and adherence to the scientific method—now under attack by both green (who reject these ideas as Eurocentric, oppressive, patriarchal constructs) and amber (for whom the values of orange have always threatened to undermine its ethnocentric inclinations and mythic grand narratives).

The consequence of this 1st tier culture war has been the disintegration of the old right/left dichotomy. The old Republican party was largely constituted from amber (ethnocentric, authoritarian, adherents to the mythic literal); the old Democrat party primarily of orange (free speech, equal opportunity, universal rights, science). The emerging new dynamic has completely reshuffled the deck. Old school 1960s style liberals—believers in classic orange values like free speech, universal rights and equal opportunity, generally supportive of the civil rights and inclusivity gains of green—have now been joined by more progressive former conservatives, now manifesting as orange, who are stepping up to defend free speech and equality of opportunity. This dynamic is particularly well illustrated by old school liberals like Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying—clearly located on the left of the political spectrum by any traditional measure—who find themselves unexpectedly attacked from the “left” in the now famous moral panic at Evergreen State College.

There can be little doubt that the downside risks of the current situation are enormous—just consider the mayhem promised by memetic tribes and the Red Religion. The glimmer of hope I perceive is that, by upending legacy sense-making institutions (the Blue Church) the Trump election may inadvertently have catalyzed the dawn of Integral as the true leading cultural edge. Wilber’s analysis suggests that 2nd tier Integral thinkers are now emerging from the embattled middle ground between amber and green, and coalescing into a powerful, loosely affiliated network online—an emergent, intersubjective sensemaking collective.

I have been following this development with great interest for about two years now, and remember distinctly the moment on Sam Harris’ podcast in January 2018 when Eric Weinstein coined the term “Intellectual Dark Web” to refer to what is arguably the most prominent group of these thinkers. Wilber argues that critical mass for any developmental stage—the point at which that stage becomes the leading cultural force—occurs when it extends to 10% of the population, and concludes that, “Part of what we’re seeing right now is the emergence of that Integral or 2nd tier stage, really for the first time in history.” Surely such an evolutionary leap in thought can’t come a moment too soon.