Integral Politics

[Dialectic]

For those interested, I thought I'd post this image to get y'all thinking about the approach we'd take here.

I'll write (or most likely, transcribe) a bit on this topic when I get back from Chicago. Suffice it to say for now that Wilber and the guys he cites are not talking out of their asses: he's worked with political advisors to the White House, former heads of state, and sociopolitical theorists who've had a lot of practical experience.

http://www.thefighting44s.com/images/stratdemo.jpg

[Dialectic]

This is an excellent introduction to how we would take an integral approach to politics:

http://www.integralnaked.org/media/kw/IntegralPolitics.mp3

(Originally mentioned on the KW blog here:
http://www.kenwilber.com/blog/post/89?page=12)

My intention in this thread was to copy sections from KW's introduction to Volume 8 of the Collected Works where he discusses an integral political approach; he's worked with quite a few people, including, as mentioned earlier, prominent political analysts and advisors, and they all agree on the fundamentals. I may not have time to do this, so I'll start a little of the discussion here. I'll see if I can do some typing/copying at a later date.

Essentially, the AQAL approach functions as a sophisticated and inclusive index of worldviews, from the spiritual to the political.

AQAL stands for All Quadrants, Levels, Lines, States, and Types (you'll have to read elsewhere for an introduction).

There are four quadrants, divided by two axes: subjective-objective (interior-exterior) and individual-collective (I-We). We also know that individuals and groups can be at different levels of development (cognitive and moral being the most relevant here), have different levels of development along different lines (cognitive, moral, spiritual, sexual, mathematical, artistic, etc.), can experience states lower and higher than their average level of development (aggressive tribal, protective nationalistic, spiritual oneness, etc.), and have different types of ways to navigate the world (individualistic, communal, introverted, extroverted, etc.).

AQAL can therefore generate every political stance we have seen in the last couple thousand years.

A simple example: just considering the quadrants and leaving out everything else, we see that you can have four broad types of positions. You can emphasize the individual or society, you can emphasize interior or exterior causation. If you believed the rights of the individual were paramount, that government should be as small as possible, that it's up to the individual to make personal and economic choices and live with those decisions with minimal outside interference, you'd be a Free-market economic libertarian (emphasis on the Individual-Subjective quadrant, or politically, the "Free Right."). If you were a social activist, say a feminist or racial advocate, who believes in politically correct ideology, and you wish for the state to use its authority to enforce your version of equality, you'd be placing emphasis on the Collective-Objective quadrant, or politically, the "Order Left."

We must also track the progression of the political Left and Right through time, and this is where Levels comes in. For example, the values conservatives champion now were liberal values, say, 100 years ago. As liberal values at any given point become ingrained in the socio-political landscape, they slowly become conservative values.

An integral approach, then, is one which recognizes the truths offered by all worldviews at all levels, and works to promote "the greatest depth for the greatest span." That is, it would make sure every level of the developmental spectrum is healthy and every level has the opportunity to grow. It would support conservatism insofar as it would work to "conserve" those healthy aspects of earlier development on which later development rests, and it would strive to increase the depth of the population and the political discourse along all developmental lines.

I realize this is fairly abstract; this entire field is only just getting started, and politicians are trying to figure out what this "Third Way" would look like in practical terms as I write this.

[Dialectic]

An excerpt from the proposed second book of the Kosmos Trilogy (SES being the first).

It relates theories, paradigms, and briefly discusses how Western democracies came into being.

http://wilber.shambhala.com/html/books/kosmos/excerptB/intro.cfm/

Put simply, a theory is a map of a territory, while a paradigm is a practice that brings forth a territory in the first place. The paradigm or social practice itself is called an "exemplar" or "injunction," and the theory is called, well, the theory. The point is that knowledge revolutions are generally combinations of new paradigm-practices that bring forth a new phenomenological territory plus new theories and maps that attempt to offer some sort of abstract or contoured guidance to the new territories thus disclosed and brought forth. But a new theory without a new practice is simply a new map with no real territory, or what is generally called "ideology."

A scientific revolution is the result of new paradigms and new theories coming into accord with each other, both of which are anchored, not in abstractions but in social practices. These revolutions are embraced, at the start, by a handful of individuals at the leading edge, but, if validated, these new exemplar-worldviews (paradigms-and-theories) are accepted by the larger culture or knowledge community, becoming a new "normal" or "legitimated" science, which stabilizes and carries forward until the next set of pesky data arises that refuses to be humbled in the existing scheme of things, and new and heretofore undisclosed territories start to shimmer on the horizon of the possible.

A similar process is now at play, I believe, in the nascent integral salons spontaneously forming around the world. Before we discuss that possibility in more detail, here is another example of a knowledge revolution, this time in politics.

The rise of the modern, liberal, representative democracies in the West involved, among innumerable other things, a significant shift in values from traditional to modern, which particularly began in Europe around 1600 and accelerated to something of a crisis pitch by the mid-1770s. Traditional values (e.g., blue, mythic-membership, conventional) tended to be conformist, ethnocentric, hierarchical, mythic-religious, and based on individuals conforming strongly to the present order. Modern values, on the other hand, tend to be egalitarian (not hierarchical), individualistic (not conformist), scientific (not mythic-fundamentalist), and place a premium on equality (not slavery).

This shift from blue to orange, or from traditional values to modern values, was presaged in the salons or "small gatherings of moderns" (the word salon is French, but these gatherings were also occurring in England, Scotland, and Germany, among others), where the social practice of dialoging according to orange values was carefully exercised. That is, the practice of dialogue geared toward mutual understanding, reciprocal exchange, postconventional equality and freedom was practiced by small groups of leading-edge elites. This was a collective, communal, intersubjective, dialogical discourse at the orange wave of consciousness--a social practice, paradigm, or injunction of dialogical discourse within an elite subculture whose center of gravity was orange or higher.

This new exemplar or social practice gave rise to a set of novel experiences, insights, data, illuminations, and interpersonal understandings, which new political theories then sought to capture. Most of these new theories of liberal democracy shared the idea that the only way to integrate individual and social is to have the individual feel that he or she is participating in the laws that govern his or her behavior. In the States this was popularly summarized by the phrase, "No taxation without representation," and it essentially meant that a people have the right to be self-governing. This new practice of dialogical discourse and self-governance (generally called a "social contract") was conceptualized in different ways by leading-edge individuals ranging from John Locke to Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Paine to Thomas Jefferson, Immanuel Kant to James Madison.

This self-governance is not a felt requirement of blue (which will follow the law if it is part of tradition), and it is not felt requirement of red (which will follow the law if it issues from the power leader). Only at orange does interiority start to demand a hand in the laws that regulate its own behavior.

(Of course, there were several other social injunctions that were part of the orange tetra-worldspace, including an industrial base that was one of single largest factors in reducing the need for slavery, and which lessened the demand for physical strength in order to succeed in the public sphere, thus paving the way for, and actually allowing, the various liberation movements, including feminism and abolition. But we are here focusing on the subset of social practices or paradigms within the rising cultural elite that was forging a new and revolutionary form of governance that would tetra-mesh with new techno-economic base.)

In short, out of this new exemplar or social practice of orange dialogical discourse (which was enacting and bringing forth a new set of experiences, data, and illuminations) soon issued a new theory of political governance called the social contract, whose general form is: any legitimate governing system is a contract between the governors and those governed, such that the two are mutually governing. This usually involves the election of governors by those governed, such that sovereignty rests, in the final analysis, with the people being governed. All representative, liberal, industrial democracies are today some form of a social contract, which was first pioneered, in a micro-quadratic form, by a small cultural elite at the leading edge who were forging new types of social practice or paradigms embodying a higher, wider, deeper wave of consciousness unfolding.