Metamodernism Critique Part 4: The Dangerous Ladder
Linear hierarchy is an Achilles Heel
This is the fourth in a series of critical ponderings on Metamodernism. As mentioned in the first instalment there will be a podcast interview with Brendan Graham Dempsey on his Metamodern Spirituality podcast afterwards to chat through some of these criticisms. Previous instalments: Intro, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Metamodern Meaning Podcast.
Following up on the last couple of critiques I want to articulate why I feel a discomfort with stage models in general whether that’s Hegel’s Zeitgeists, Marx’s relations of production, Wilber’s developmental hierarchising or the manifold varieties of this among the Metamodernists.
Truth is, I was once rather taken with stage models (to put it mildly). As I discussed in the intro to the series, reading Ken Wilber’s A Theory of Everything (and later Sex Ecology Spirituality) was a transformative experience for me in the not-too-distant past. I was bewitched by the Spiral Dynamics model. I was taken in by the lure of being “second-tier” (everyone pre-Integral stage being first-tier chumps; second-tier thinkers were world-changers). It seemed so intuitively true and enabled such a useful way of talking about world history and of personal and social development.
As time has worn on however I have sobered up from this stagial narrative of history and what once rang like glorious truth to me now sounds like hollow truthiness. I can’t pinpoint exactly why. Perhaps it’s more death by a thousand cuts than any single blow.
One key encounter however was a post-mortem of Ken Wilber’s Integral theory on Rebel Wisdom a few years back. But first, for those who haven’t heard of Wilber or Integral (or for those late to the game like myself), it’s hard to overstate how big a deal it was at the turn of the millennium. One professor, Jack Crittenden (Beyond Individualism) wrote that
“The twenty-first century literally has three choices: Aristotle, Nietzsche, or Ken Wilber.”
As of 2014, Wilber was the most widely translated academic writer [if such he could be considered] in America with 25 books translated into 30 languages.
Integral was even beginning to hit the mainstream. Alanis Morrissette was (and still is as far as I know) a big fan of Integral. Even the American president at the time Bill Clinton was in on it saying:
“If ordinary people don't perceive that our grand ideas are working in their lives then they can't develop the higher level of consciousness, to use a term that American philosopher Ken Wilber wrote a whole book about. He said, you know, the problem is the world needs to be more integrated, but it requires a consciousness that's way up here, and an ability to see beyond the differences among us.”
Wilber was proclaimed the “Einstein of consciousness”. But Integral’s prophesied devouring of the culture never materialised. Wilber got sick and more or less disappeared off the map and Integral faded away (amidst a small scandal storm).
In the Rebel Wisdom post-mortem, Jamie Wheal (Stealing Fire, Recapture the Rapture) gives a great account of what went wrong: hierarchy. Surprise surprise when you create a linear hierarchy of worldviews in which each stage is more awakened and complex than the previous, people want to be on top. Wheal attributes the unravelling of the Integral movement to this hierarchisation. Instead of going out there and doing something (anything) the Integral movement became a dick-measuring competition for who was the most advanced.
In his post-mortem of Integral, Mark Manson (The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F**k, Everything is F*cked: A Book About Hope) reiterates this critique as he talks about the failure of the Integral subculture to productively wrestle with the global problems at the start of the 21st century:
“Major global and social issues were often only referred to in passing as descriptors for a certain level of consciousness development with the overarching implication being that “they” are not as highly developed as “we” are.
We’re “second-tier” thinkers. We’re going to change the world… as soon as we’re done talking about how awesome and “second-tier” we are.”
My fear is that Metamodernism is falling into the same trap as Integral and for the same reasons. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the cultural periodisation of Vermeulen and van den Akker, the developmental psychological model of Freinacht or the “decentration” of cultural logics in Dempsey, they are all creating a linear hierarchy for humanity. If you’re Metamodern you’re more advanced than the Woke and hippie postmoderns and the atheistic, scientism of the Moderns. You are more complex, more psychologically developed and rarer than them. You are at the cutting edge of human evolution. You, by virtue of the thoughts in your skull, are special. And if they don’t recognise it, it’s because they aren’t complex enough to see how special you are.
My fear is that Metamodernism is falling into the same trap as Integral and for the same reasons.
Most strains of Metamodernism (but it’s worth noting — not all! more on that in future instalments) believe in this advanced status of Metamodernism. And they believe that Metamodernism contains these previous worldviews within it. Whether that’s a developmental stage that they pass through or as a “decentration”, each new stage “transcends and includes” the previous stages (for more on this see the previous critique).
Even without the “transcend and include” bastardisation of Hegel’s aufhebung, the post-Marxist cultural theorist version of Metamodernism falls prey to the same problem. By setting up Metamodernism as that which is ahead, above and beyond of the Postmodern, Modern, Premodern, it still creates a linear hierarchy in which the Metamodernists are advanced and special. That is pragmatically dangerous.
Making Metamodernism a singular Zeitgeist sets it up for infighting and failure. It makes Metamodernism vulnerable to the same hypocritical and pathological dynamics you find in hippie circles where you find the doublespeak dick-measuring around the spiritual hierarchies of ego-lessness, compassion and Shadow-work. The Metamodernists are in danger of repeating the failure of Integral — getting caught in the snare of their own theory.
Once again, for anyone, for any Metamodernists (or other critical readers) reading, I’d love to hear your thoughts on any blindspots, oversights, errors, distortions or strawmen you see in this or any other piece in the series. As I said in the intro this isn’t some polished piece of art but a wrestling to articulate something I sense. If I’m mistaken I’d love to know; future pieces can benefit from that knowledge.
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This makes this Integral/Metamodern stuff seem like a dysfunctional version of Sufism. The Sufis also believe in developmental stages, in higher consciousness, yet, see this quote from Rumi:
"The one who sees the ray of divine power in the smallest things in the world is a person of high understanding and high aspirations. Such a person respects himself and others and does not disdain the smallest of tasks, for he sees them as manifestations of divine power."
Cuts through any sense of superiority someone may be developing, doesn't it?
To add some complexity:
1. Integrals don't position themselves at "top" of the stage hierarchy, but at the *penultimate* position. This leaves room for the guru to whom they prostate themselves, and leaves room above for them to eventually grow into a guru themselves. Integral's uncritical guru problem (Adi Da, Andrew Cohen, Marc Gafni, Wilber himself, etc) shows the power pathology very clearly.
2. You correctly identify the many, many motte and bailey formations in the rhetoric of Integral, or in metamoderns like Dempsey, but you can sharpen your view by seeing motte and bailey as the entire style, the embodied experience, the "cogntive shape" of the Wilberite ideology. There is no question or critique that Wilberites or Dempseys won't cheerfully embrace--thank you for your service! But watch in the next essay or forum thread how they fall back into the same simplistic color codings and slogans and catechisms, as if the critical exchange never occurred. The greatest irony of their pop Hegelianism is that the encounter with the opposing view never causes a mutation or fork or aufhebung, never EVOLVES. More strongly: for a Wilberite, the encounter with the genuinely critical Other DOESN"T LEAVE A TRACE.
3. What this demonstrates is that Integral / Metamodern is anti-dialogic. The encounter with the Other is scary because it risks fundamentally changing you. The Integral has to be completely protected against this risk pre-emptively, made safe from change, in order to risk it at all. This is the function of Spiral Dynamics: one knows in advance not just that one is superior, second tier, but that one has "transcended and included" the critic's perspective IN ADVANCE. One has already "worked through" the inferior stage and understands it from the inside. The Other is emptied of any possible contribution to the exchange in advance, and this is a CONDITION of permitting the encounter at all. Of course Integrals can play at imitations of dialogue - "Why thank you, Mr Atheist Orange, I've learned so much from this exchange!" but the condescension is obvious because the dialogic exclusion is foundational.
4. Put it another way: if I have "transcended and included" you, then I could carry on the dialogue between us without your presence. In the Wilberite encounter, I ERASE YOU ALTOGETHER, replacing you with the imago of your developmental type in order to serve my own narcissistic supply by an easy "win." You cannot contribute any new knowledge or capacity because I have already claimed ownership of it in advance. If I walk away with anything new from our encounter, it is only because your inferior presence allowed me to midwife it out of myself, where it already existed--though occulted--before we met. Afterward you can be discarded as a husk, like any disposable untermensch. This absolute erasure is the whole point of Wilberism and its derivatives. Calling it "We Space" or "co-creation" or "The Listening Society" is a greenwashing tactic.
5. This explains why Integrals, though they want to steal its prestige and mimic its rhetoric, can't help but reveal their venomous hatred of science if you let them talk long enough. (The hysterical claims of Dempsey et alia--maybe you too--that science and materialism have led to nihilism are the fundy shadow crying "Satan!" and "Sin!"). It's the IMAGE OF THE ENCOUNTER that triggers their hysteria. Science doesn't "transcend and include": that's the Wilberite image of a structure eating, digesting, and eliminating the Other with no change except onedimensional "growth," becoming a more bloated ideological version of itself. Science, by contrast, has to be changed by the encounter. When a scientific hypothesis encounters a fact it cannot absorb, the entire structure of the hypothesis must change to accommodate it. If a hypothesis encounters facts that wholly undermine its axioms, it doesn't "transcend and include"--the theory DIES. It's scrapped and a new hypothesis is constructed to connect the data. Needless to say, as an IMAGE OF ENCOUNTER, this prospect of dialogic ego-death is horrifying to a spiritual narcissist. Even the most corrupt, Lysenkoist scientific process cannot play motte and bailey forever. Hence the Wilberite need to declare "metarationality" as a higher woo stage which infallibly preserves one from risk and change, as well as from the most basic rigor and discipline of critical thought.
6. Why did Wilber stake his entire project on a nobody like Clare Graves? This one is easy. Unlike other developmentalists who posit a linear ladder (bad enough, in many ways), Graves posited a CHASM between first and second tier. Crossing from green to yellow is not simply the addition of one new perspective level, n+1, a la Kagan or Cook-Greuter: it is the full access to ALL the previous framings AND the natural intuition of how they relate to each other. In a single stage graduation, one goes from a single truncated perspective to the rainbow multiverse, from subhuman to fully human. Graves makes BINARY the division between the developmental haves and have nots: being "second tier" is a necessary condition for having any idea worth expressing whatsoever. Ideologically, Graves maximizes narcissistic claims of omniscience and non-reciprocity for the higher stages like no other developmental theorist.
This is the drug that Wilber could not resist, and this is the function of SD in Integral. One proves one's rhetorical authority not through argument and empirical evidence, but through the virtue-signalling demonstration of second tier status, as the ugly adolescent chaos of any Wilberite forum will amply demonstrate. Wilberism and Scientology are superb case studies in how effective, how psychologically regressive, and how socially poisonous the blackmail of 'developmental social comparison' up a designated stage ladder can be. Wilberite and Metamodern gurus prompt their acolytes to a stage rat-race up to their own OT3 level exactly as L Ron Hubbard did. The process is no less lobotomizing, and the arrival point is no less stupid than the story of Xenu.
Apparently you're pals with Dempsey now--haven't watched the video--but notice this overwhelmingly important motte and bailey: after appearing to concede the ideological problems of stage theory, he'll repeatedly slap up a color-coded WILBERITE image of SD to illustrate "stages." After giving himself plausible denial by admitting the "problems" with some stage models, he then repeatedly NORMALIZES Spiral Dynamics as the primary referent. Contact with critique does NOT CHANGE THEORETICAL/IDEOLOGICAL BEHAVIOR.
The most important little chart that Wilber ever made was the "conversion chart" lining up Kagan, Cook-Greuter and other developmentalists with Graves to show they all intuited "the same thing." Of course none of the others had the Gravesian "chasm" between tiers. The function of the chart is to CONVERT ALL OTHER DEVELOPMENTAL THEORIES BACK INTO SD, which provides the maximum anti-dialogic yield for ideological protection and colonization.
Epilog
(Dempsey is a Christian *priest,* in the unflattering Nietzschean sense. Reading your latest posts here I get a glimmer of hope you're moving beyond both. For all his wheezy "Greek" handwaving, Nietzsche is pathetically and poisonously Abrahamic in the end. "No Christ, no anti-Christ": that's my aphorism, the minimum condition to have any hope for a world with apocalyptic mentalities in charge.)