Robb Smith

Congratulations, President Obama

I have posted this as a community editorial at Integral Life.

Lifelong Republican, Voting for Obama

With two weeks left until the Presidential election, I have remained up until now an undecided voter.  I have been a lifelong republican (for reasons I’ll allude to below), but am a now a true independent with a particularly integral view of the world.  This election I will be voting for Barack Obama.

First, before I summarize why I’ve chosen to vote for Obama, let me add a few points of preface.  First, our form of democracy was established such that change occurs very slowly, regardless of who is in office or congress.  This characteristic, thus far, has worked well by ensuring that competing forces and a moderating structural system has kept the country largely on a plodding but improving course through history.  All of this to say that the rhetoric about this being the most important election in a generation is not a statement of fact but a statement of passion.  I think all elections are of some importance, but none are of particularly great importance.  This is actually the deep brilliance of our system of government.  So I don’t believe that an Obama administration or a McCain administration will be a final and grand deciding factor of our fate in the 21st century.  Also, I think this view enables a more rational, less emotional, less biased, and more integral capability of evaluating the candidates given the current conditions we face.

Second, both candidates and platforms are flawed in ways that a transpartisan voter will find conspicuous.  To the extent that both candidates are political products from our two major political parties - who by definition have enacted the values of their respective socio-political movements, with all their attendant historical baggage and political IOUs - both bring deep limitations to an integral voter seeking a transpartisan approach that can transcend and include the valid but partial strengths of both traditional conservatism and traditional liberalism.  And it is obvious to the integral voter that who we will choose to vote for is the person who best reflects back to us our most strongly-identified part of ourselves - much like the choices we make in fashion or autos or jobs or houses is one where we see some idealized version of ourselves identified with and reflected back at us in those products and lifestyles choices.  So awareness of how we strongly identify, and conversely disassociate, with the different reflections we see is a critical capability of the integral voter.  And a state practice where we begin to build a transpersonal view of self will serve to make us better voters as it diminishes the influence of political rhetoric and lessens the passions born of fear as we react to the partiality of any candidate.  If America at large were capable of voting this way, we’d see political discourse become smarter, deeper, more evolved, and more significant.

What follows is a summary of how I made my decision to vote for Obama.

Because he is black.  I disagree with several of Obama’s policies and philosophical presuppositions, but I am not a party voter nor a single issue voter.  In this election we have been given an opportunity to symbolically and in the most potent gesture available to a body politic heal a wound that has existed since this country’s birth.  If America is a young adult, then real and perceived racial bias is our first and final major developmental pathology, and this opportunity to heal it is in the grand scope of America’s life story a benefit that by orders of magnitude outweighs all other policy and party differences.  This is not a political vote, it is a vote to heal the human race.

Because capitalism will have to be forced to grow up.  Capitalism (along with religion, art and education, in my view) is the most powerful force for change for good in the world.  It is also just a system, values-free and brainless. It produces what it is told to produce, which is dictated by the values of the people who operate within the system (values which aren’t changing fast enough).  Capitalism is not capable of accounting for the externalities (hidden costs) of natural environment degradation and climate change, nor, as a blind system, does it have any real incentive to do so.  Solutions to environmental degradation are the most pressing and legacy-defining issue of our time (another degree or two of increase in average temperature on earth and we probably reach a self-propagating tipping point of accelerating heat-capture), and I believe that Obama understands the complexity of what’s at stake and has the political backing in the liberal movement to effect the changes that will only come through political force domestically and, globally, exemplary leadership on behalf of the world’s largest economic superpower.

Obama evidences a later-stage of human development than McCain.  It is fairly clear that in general McCain tends toward absolutistic language and caters more to security and self-esteem needs.  Obama tends to more nuanced, more contextually-sensitive, more cognitively complex (all of which he has been criticized for), and tends to evoke themes of self-actualization.  Incidentally, I think this is why Obama attracts younger voters.  (Though the downside of the self-actualizing levels is narcissism, I believe this level is the leading-edge from which our culture is conditioning our youth’s view of themselves.) Now, I admit to not knowing whether later-stage development is better in our President at this stage in history.  I believe that it is.  But I think George W. Bush might be the best thing to have happened to this country in a long-time.  At least in my lifetime I cannot recall the country being so introspective about our role in the world, our values, and our relationship to the constitution on which we were founded.  In a larger time-scale view, great growth is always preceded by great suffering, and it is hard to know which leader will be more pivotal to our long-term development.  But as I haven’t seen any data to inform this decision otherwise, I’ll bet on Obama’s integral capabilities as immensely important to the successful navigation of the Iran problem, climate change, human rights and moral leadership, better global governance and others.

McCain’s judgment in Sarah Palin is problematic.  I think McCain made a choice that was smart in the short-term and fatal in the long-term.  I made this prediction in these pages two months ago and it has played out as I expected.  She energized the base and put the Democrats back for about a month as they tried to figure out how to respond to her choice without sounding marginalizing.  And they did the smart thing: by ignoring her they allowed her lack of credentials to become her undoing.  But this also bespeaks too much about McCain: he is impulsive and ultimately by choosing Palin evidences a traditional worldview that is problematic and underqualified for the complexity and progressivity of America’s badly-needed global leadership at this juncture.

In fairness, here is where Obama worries me.

Philosophy of culture.  I worry about Obama’s capability to understand the philosophical problem inherent in the financial meltdown and our responses thereto.  The meltdown has not been a problem of deregulation or capitalism gone bad.  Those are mere symptoms of a culture that has been conditioned to believe that consumerism is what will fill the existential void that accompanies rejection of the interior life.   The financial meltdown was stupid and avoidable, but also warranted.  I am disappointed in both Obama and McCain for voting for the bailout.  We needed to learn that choices have consequence and that populist solutions that just seek to protect American citizens from the values-growth they inevitably have to undergo is only postponing this growth.  This whole episode and the attendant bailout may have retarded the values-growth of our citizenry for another generation by teaching them that instead of saving money, living within their means, and seeking the deeper compensation of the inner life, that instead government is where we look when we need protection.  Obama might really believe in the liberalism that holds that broader social policy is a cure for this disease, but it is obvious that it does nothing but address the symptom and pass it on for another generation to solve.  Of course, McCain didn’t vote against the bailout, so he failed, too.

Tax and fiscal policy.  McCain is right to look to incentivize saving (i.e., prudence and delayed gratification) by lowering the capital gains rate.  Instead of replying that this benefits the rich, we should be asking how do we encourage everyone to live in such a way that over time they too develop wealth.  Higher savings would also help us to lower our trade deficit, strengthen our currency, and keep interest rates manageable.  So I think Obama’s just wrong on the capital gains rate increase (though he has made it more populist by only imposing on those with more than $250,000 in annual income).  But, among the many other reasons Obama is getting my vote is that right now there is no true fiscally-conservative party in the U.S. Republicans of the past ten years don’t even recognize their own party - we talk about teaching creationism in school and we spend like our children don’t count - so I’m part of the missing middle that is hoping that Obama will demonstrate constraint and fight his own party’s deeply entrenched interests to spend our way through this downturn (though evidence suggests otherwise, like the hundreds of billions of pork that was tacked on to the bailout).

Economic ethnocentrism.  If the republican party has the corner on social bias/discrimination in the U.S., from positions on homosexuality, to traditional values to gender roles, the democratic party has the corner on economic bias/discrimination, from support of ethnocentric unions, ethnocentric protectionist trade policies, and judgmental marginalization of people because of their income or wealth.  I think about what the planet needs over what just Americans need, and I don’t believe that policies that unfairly preserve American capitalistic interests at the cost to African farmers (or others) is the type of economic discrimination we should accept, and I hope that over time the democratic party begins to find a worldcentric sensibility in its economic policies (which won’t happen anytime soon given its union base).  Globalization is a tremendous force for good if we can balance our needs with others’ while also accounting for environmental impacts.

So my vote is for Obama.  Even as I write that I am surprised of just how much of a mess the republicans have made of their own party.

Cross-posted to my Integral Life blog.

Great new politics piece on Integral Life

Check it out, it's free to the world, and serves as a great introduction to an integral approach to politics and an analysis of McCain's and Obama's acceptance speeches from an integral view.

Go here.

And if you dig this presentation, please Digg it here.

Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo From Maslow

I had dinner tonight with Chip Conley, CEO of Joie de Vivre hotel group and author of Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow. Chip is a really interesting guy and clearly self-actualizing in terms of his own needs-line.  He is a closet writing junky in addition to CEO of a very large, 3,500 employee organization and is asked to speak all over the country on how Maslow's hierarchy can inform corporate performance.  It's a great book and brings a developmental hierarchy to relevant ground for leading employees, suppliers and investors.  He is single-handedly spawning a movement and resurgence of Maslow.  Wonderful, and it reminds me that we need a similar treatise on a broader scale for integral.  (If no one has written it in 5 years than I will.) 

We also discussed the wonderful and irresolvable dialectic of pursuing multiple goals - personal, artistic, and creative versus organizational, leadership-like and professional - simultaneously.  I think this is the nature of an integral life, holding the paradoxical dimensions of multiple lines of intelligence and energy at the same time and accepting that balance on the micro-level is a myth. 

But it also strikes me that in the dynamic tension between peace and passion - which are my terms, respectively, for the state of resting in our innate transcendent everpresent perfection (peace) and the ever-ongoing striving to transcend our current forms and limitations and fulfill a unique life mission (passion) - in this constant tension between these ever-present dualities that something gives way in the creative process and they merge.  That is, in the clarity of the egoless peak creative state, we are both completely and timelessly present while also deeply engaged in the passionate expression of an evolutionary impulse.  Our peace and passion merge at the height of the creative state, and we become a channel for things that afterwards we can barely even recognize as our own.  (And barely even are they.)

Nevada Ventures Business Plan Template

Many people on Slideshare have asked me to share this presentation that I posted a few years ago, so here it is: Download nevada_ventures_presentation_template.ppt

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Ken Wilber Family Guy Spoof

Fitness update: Back to bulking

Heading back into a bulking cycle after having tried a Cyclic Ketogenic Diet for 2 months, which worked: I lost 5 lbs. (composed of 90% bodyfat) and my lift weight went up by about 5% across the board.  Impressive diet, I'll use it again on my next cutting cycle.  But afterwards I went off the rails with travel for a month and busted ass to get back to a regular 4-day gym routine.  My last big bulking cycle gained 20 lbs. and too much fat, so this time I'm cutting out Cytogainer as my meal replacement (it claims it's made of complex carbs, but it's not: maltodextrin has a GI north of 100 (some say 137, almost pure table sugar)), so I've moved to 40 grams of protein powder with 1 cup of dried thick-rolled oatmeal blended in water (2-3x/day) plus 3 whole food meals (complex carbs 40%, lean proteins 40%, good fats 20%).  This will cut out the sugars and lower the insulin spike while jacking total caloric intake about 500/day.  If all goes well I should gain about 1 lb. of lean body mass/week.

Enlightenext Web Conference

Enlightenext, the publisher of What is enlightenment? magazine, is doing a very cool web marathon tomorrow afternoon with Ken Wilber, Deepak Chopra, Andrew Cohen and others.  I'll be on the call at about 2PM MST.  You can find more information here.

"Science is Good, Religion is Evil"

The provocative title to this post is a direct quote from one of the 30 participants at the Aspen Institute  symposium on Religion and Science, which I'm attending this week in Aspen, Colorado.  It is a pointed summary of the extremes to which a discussion of this sort often devolves but it reflects an important truth in the 21st century about the relationship of these two pillars of knowing (as well as diverse constellations of institutions): the conversation is fragmented and often polemical. 

On re-reading this post I have to admit that it is dry and may be boring to some, but I felt that I needed to give a quick meta-level summary of how the perspectives in the room here are being negotiated.  So rather than focus this post on the actual contents of religion and science and their relationship, per se, instead I was interested in this question: What can I learn about the very process of debate when a potentially-charged discussion occurs at multiple altitudes?  Is the possibility real and significant that some higher synthesis, some integration, can occur through a dialectic of rational people?

The symposium is moderated by Charles Harper, the Chief Visionary for the Templeton Foundation, the leading global organization funding cross-paradigmatic research at the intersection of science and faith, and Laurence Krauss, a particle physicist from Case Western and the author of many books on science.

I will try to summarize several days of discussion with the following brief executive summary of the event thus far:

1. Predictably, participants' understandings/views of religion and science are diverse and tend to be couched in the vernacular of the modern press/culture wars, including much energy around the political manifestations of the apparent divide, such as the teaching of creationism in public schools.  (40% of Americans believe the Earth is 6,000 years old and, scary, fully 1/3 of Americans believe that only creationism should be taught in school science classes and another third believe that evolution and creationism should be taught side-by-side.)
2. There seems to be only sporadic appreciation (and less understanding) of key distinctions that define a critically-minded discussion of this sort: the mind-body problem, substance dualism, emergence, and physicalism in general; that religion and science are multi-faceted affairs that have behavioral, phenomenological, cultural and systemic impacts and these co-arise; that there is a sequence of psychological development in cognitive and faith-oriented knowing and it directly impacts the knowledge claims of both traditions; that epistemology and limit questions help craft the contours of immanent versus transcendent truth claims; that the progress of philosophy since Kant includes our graduation from metaphysics (to epistemology) and a recognition of our cultural embeddedness in how we each enact a personal reality-frame in a discussion of this type.  (Harper seemed aware of all of this except developmentalism; it wasn't clear whether Krauss was familiar with some of the philosophical technicalities here.)
3. On the other hand, what has been highlighted and useful here is the way that science can inform faith for traditionally-minded believers (i.e., by updating their cosmological viewpoint), and how fundamentalists tend to reject this conformation; that the latest cosmological view of the universe (it's flat, its 400 billion galaxies are composed of 70% dark energy, 29% dark matter and 1% normal  matter and energy and light, it may be part of a multi-verse, and it is scientifically confirmed that it will end in the future); that religion is a powerful carrier of culture and meaning for much of the world; that there is an evolutionary explanation of religion and faith as promoting survival and cooperative fitness; that there are unintended consequences that arise from modernity's imposition of rationality on pre-rational cultures, such as recent aid interventions in sub-saharan Africa ($300 million, the largest grant of its kind in history, was spent to educate and promote condom-usage amongst villagers, and AIDS rates went UP, prompting the funders to seize the researchers' hard drives and deep-six the results from public view).
4. There has been conspicuously little discussion of spirituality, religious orthodoxy, orthopraxy, or comparisons of religious orientation.  Therefore no higher synthesis of a rational or even postmodern religious orientation was even possible; most of the discussion was held at a formal operational cognitive level (more below) as it analyzed a sort of generic version of "traditional religion" (with features so lacking distinction that we could be discussing 12th century Scholasticism or 21st century Wahhabism).
5. Finally, on this last point, Harper pointed out on several occasions something that didn't seem to stick: it is difficult to discuss generic versions of religion or science as they, too, are evolutionary traditions, and we have to be very specific about the frame of context that underlies our semantic relationship to the terms we discuss.  And if we are going to generalize, we have to do so at a very high level of abstraction that allows for this evolution.  So I argued that religion, in general, is a means by which humans relate to transcendent questions and that science tends to be how we relate to immanent features of reality.  And of course methodologies, behaviors, practices, philosophical underpinnings, cultural and political processes, they all change over time etc.  But for most of the participants the discussion kept coming back to very specific instances of religion or science being generalized to support a very generic view of the whole.  There was no evolutionary frame of context being discussed to handle these gross approximations and so meaningful progressive discourse was fairly rare.  Harper and Krauss both did an excellent job of skillfully navigating these waters, but it was tough going at times.

As I mentioned above, I believe that the predominant means of discourse in the room operated cognitively at the "Orange"/rational/formal operational level, which researchers Commons and Richards describe thus (italics mine):

At the systematic order [participants] discriminate the frameworks for relationships between variables within an integrated system of tendencies and relationships. The objects of the systematic actions are formal-operational relationships between variables. The actions include determining possible multivariate causes--outcomes that may be determined by many causes; the building of matrix representations of information in the form of tables or matrices; the multidimensional ordering of possibilities, including the acts of preference and prioritization. The actions generate systems. Views of systems generated have a single "true" unifying structure. Other systems of explanation or even other sets of data collected by adherents of other explanatory systems tend to be rejected. Most standard science operates at this order. At this order, science is seen as an interlocking set of relationships, with the truth of each relationship in interaction with embedded, testable relationships.

The core observation I'd make about the discussion as it occurred the past few days is that the very conceptual objects "science" and "religion" were things to be examined as objective, pre-given terms subject to analysis and therefore whose compatibility or not was open to solving.  We were obviously seeking a "single true unifying structure."  What was missing from the room, generally, in addition to important prerequisite knowledge about philosophy of mind/science, was the ability to take a higher order perspective on the transaction of this search by bearing witness to the ever-present objectification that was occurring in the room.  So when someone spoke up about what religion or science is - asserting a stance about its function, its values, its methodologies, its politics - they were stating less an objective account of religion as it really exists "out there" and more an account of their own subjective experience, personal history and semantic relationship.  And this capacity to see one's own narrative and that of other participants is immensely critical in a discussion of this polarity: without being able to self-reflect on one's own mental stance, or be able to see that the primary reality being discussed in the room is not some integration of science and religion as it exists "out there," but rather that what is being discussed is a transaction of worldview enactments in this very room - "in here" - then no integration will ever be even remotely possible.   Regardless of all of the other technical alignings, agreement can under these circumstances only occur by developmental altitude, and even then at conventional altitudes only when their is a certain agreement on philosophical pre-suppositions.  The other doesn't stand a chance in a real world of great diversity.  I may be naive but I think this explains a whole lot of mankind's struggles.

Charles Harper, who was one of the true stable integral selves in the room, pointed this out in a truly brilliant summary of the problem: he cautioned everyone upfront that the current mode of discourse around these types of issues is one of identity manipulation.  Even the brochure for the symposium suggests a clash of the titans-like spectacle that subtly reinforces the notion that we prepare our identity in advance, getting ready for a serious-minded discussion where our identity as a religious-this or scientific-that can cut through the room like a sharp sword.  "We are here to dispel religious ignorance, because this is who we are..." Or vice versa.  So the story goes with so much of what passes for serious discussion in this culture, immediately presupposing that these polarities not only exist and are interminable but that there is obviously no other option than to be for this and against that.  For Obama, against McCain.  Pro-life, against abortion.  Pro-science, against fundamentalists.  Etc. etc. And we're all guilty of this and its natural and on one level it's predictable and normal.  But on another level it is obviously the surest way to perpetuate the discord and the fragmentation.  (We're seeing a classic example of this mind-numbing process play out for us, right now, as most intelligent commentators have no idea how to find a higher synthesis in Obama's exceptional speech on the status of a perceived racial divide in the U.S.)  As someone once said, "you do not convert a man by silencing him."

And one more interesting point to note is that this experience contrasts significantly with the progress of my Conscious Capitalism Club visit from a few days ago.  At the beginning of that meeting I introduced an integral view as a potential guiding framework for 3C development.  Most participants agreed that an integral view offered them a very clear understanding of how to process the differential stances that arise when one considers core capitalism issues: stakeholder representation, culture and social structures, leadership, governance etc.  They also admitted that this was the most productive of 3 meetings that they've held and a long-awaited club inauguration was finally consummated.  Now obviously integral doesn't take credit for any of that, but there is no question that some ordering structure by which differential views can be navigated amongst social participants is critical to basic social progress.  (And with culture wars what they are, it's easy to yearn for some new way out of the fragmentation.)

So although I may add more tomorrow I come away again convinced that altitudes are real, one cannot fake an integral view of the world, and that the faster we collectively become aware of the fragmentation, that is, an integral view, the sooner we will be able to heal the deep and painful divisions that lie at the root of so much of humanity's most pressing problems.  And given that the universe will, without a doubt, end at some point, that would give all human beings more time to enjoy a life of integrated richness, freedom and fullness before we all implode in some awesome cataclysm of space-time catastrophe ...

Notable quotes ...

Lawrence Krauss: "I hope everyone at sometime in their career finds a fundamentally-held absolute truth to be 100% false.  Only science can do this."

"Theologians should care about what we have to say about science, but scientists don't give a hill of beans about what theologians have to say.  It's just not relevant to the practice of science."

"We should respect religious sensibilities except when they're wrong."

"Most scientists cannot spell logical positivism."

"Most people don't realize that science can prove nothing to be true, only that something is false."

"Most of the best ideas I've ever had have been wrong. It's a pity that nature didn't use them."

"[On a cosmic scale] we are totally insignificant, all the stars, galaxies, planets, light, us, everything that can be seen is less than 1% of the universe, it is totally insignificant, but because of that it informs how unbelievably precious we are at the same time."

"Most science popularizers take a very serious responsibility to present what we know and don't know and is in most respectable cases only a presentation of the science and largely ignores theological questions."

Charles Harper:  "There is no such thing as religion in general."

"The habits of mind in science and religion are fundamentally different and the practice of science will tend to erode traditional theism over time. Science's habit of mind goes against a herd mentality and cultural trends."

"Identity-oriented manipulation is a major business in our culture wars."

"Truth is polyphonic and dialogical."

"It is ludicrous to be censorious towards teaching kids the scientific, rational process and the creation story gives us this tool with children who were raised fundamentally ... [As one of the world's foremost experts on the age of the Earth] I have used this approach in religious schools when I have spoken with them ...

... I haven't been invited back."

"Education liberates us from the slavery of marginalization and identity."

"There is a partisanization of the pop culture conflict between science and religion and this culture of pop conflict creates academic bigotry behind the scenes against religious-minded scholars.  A higher standard of serious dialog is called for ... Everyone loses with low standards."

Finally! Integral Websites Imminent (But Not Transcendent...)

Just a quick update that we are finally(!) nearing the launch point of a new website for Integral Institute and the global beta launch of Integral Life.  Beta is a latin term developed by the software industry that means "please don't flood our phone lines if something doesn't work."  Indeed, the technical infrastructure we inherited and had to clean up (and still do) is so complicated that it has stumped many bright technical people we've worked with in trying to do so.  But at long last IL.com will be launching beta by the end of April.  (Even so we will be spending another 6 months cleaning up back end issues on "multiplex" infrastructure.)

SPECIAL NOTE FOR EXISTING MEMBERS:  The retail price for the premium content membership in IntegralLife.com will about $15/month.  Community access is free.  On the day of launch, all of our current members (IN, ISC, etc.) at any price will be grandfathered in at their current rate.  So anyone spending $10/month at IN will get both IN and IL for $10/month.  Effectively, all valid members on the day of IL.com's launch will get IL.com for free, indefinitely (unless they cancel their membership, of course).  So our existing members get a real benefit and can decide at their preference where they want to engage integral content and community, either at IN or at IL.  (ISC will be moved over to IL entirely within the next 90 days.)

Also, the new Integral Institute website will also be launched within the next 30 days.  (We've been busy.)  It will introduce a completely new look and feel for the Institute and will have an easy-to-use navigation structure and clearly spell out how Integral Institute intends to lead the global emergence of integral in the nonprofit sector by being an active hub for new partnerships, programs, donors and scholarly endeavors throughout the integral community.  (Much of this is already underway and has only been discussed in a limited way here on my blog.)  Integral Institute will, along with Integral Life, practice a multiple-stakeholder model in service to the broader global integral ecosystem.  How we will do so will be themes of several Institute white papers anticipated to be published this year.

Anyway, finally some public-facing changes to match the very active private changes we've been implementing.  Stay tuned, and bring a big bag of forgiveness for anything that may be slightly tweaked those first weeks. Much love ...

Conscious Capitalism Club Launch

I spent the weekend at John Mackey's ranch in Austin, Texas discussing the launch of the Conscious Capitalism Club.  As the founder, Chairman and CEO of Whole Foods Markets, John has been one of the leading pioneers of capitalism's ability, when deployed correctly, to be a force for positive change throughout an entire industry's ecosystem.  Taken to its logical limit, conscious capitalism has the potential to serve all of humanity through the awakened practices inherent to the culture and business practices of one of these players.  Conscious capitalism is a particularly integral view of commerce, which is why I participated and why Integral Institute will be doing much more in this area over the next year.  It has two guiding tenets: 1. conscious capitalists are driven by a deep purpose that transcends (but very importantly includes) the profit-maximization motive of classical economics and 2. conscious capitalistic companies attempt to build and perpetuate a multiple stakeholder model in their business models, core values, and employee, supplier, customer and investor relationships.

Out of this weekend several exciting outcomes are in the works ... a conference is being planned for later this year and through our partnership with C3 we will be helping to craft what it means to be an integral leader, an integral entrepreneur, and how embodiment of these principles form the basis for right livelihood with integral life practice as a foundation.

Is Integral Life right for me?

I describe below how an average integrally-aware person might think about their life and some of the “big questions.” These issues can often be huge sticking points in people’s lives, and I address an integral view in plain language. If you can relate to these perspectives or want to develop more of these capabilities in your own life, then Integral Life may be the right place to do so. You'll notice that each of these lends itself to better communication, more compassion, more peace, more acceptance of human differences, and more self-awareness. Integrally-aware people tend to be:

1. Aware of different subjective realities: Different people live in different worlds, literally. That is, we each "enact" a different worldspace in which we operate. Human beings are not delusional, but we do have fundamentally different answers to really big questions upon which our lives are based: What is real? What is good? What is true? What is beautiful? Integrally-aware people respect that human beings are acculturated in very different ways and therefore hold completely different answers to these questions, and this in turn creates different fundamental realities in which they live. (And different political views, moral views, spiritual views, etc.)

2. Capable of fluid perspective-taking: Real peace of mind calls for mental freedom, which only comes from the capacity to take different, and varied, perspectives. Fluid perspective-taking is a capacity that yields true compassion, love and ultimately inner and outer peace. Integrally-aware people tend to accept and honor other people's view of reality while also helping to open them up to broader perspective-taking capabilities themselves.

3. Integrated (and not fragmented) in their lives: Integrally-aware people view the fragmentation that pervades all levels of life - personal, familial, religious, political, media, etc. - as the inability to hold different perspectives in order to work through different realities. Integrally-aware people tend to have a comprehensive way to integrate these different domains rather than engage in the typical "culture wars."

4. Generally, slow to take offense: Integrally-aware people hold their ego identifications lightly, easily finding humor in the attachments around which many people can become insulted.

5. Respectful of metaphorical wisdom: Religious mythologies provide wisdom and guidance for billions of people throughout the world as they seek to navigate a changing world. Integrally-aware people understand that a literal interpretation of religious myth eventually evolves to a metaphorical understanding of religious orthodoxy and this wisdom can be honored without being shunned or marginalized.  Profound respect for the mystery of existence and the journey of self-fulfillment incumbent within it is one of the bedrocks of the integral spiritual life.

6. Oriented to data and scientific evidence: Integrally-aware people deeply respect science and the empirical process to provide objective and interobjective truth while also recognizing that there remain limits to the areas in which science can fully arbitrate disagreement. Science itself is a constantly-evolving endeavor that serves as a fundamental bedrock of what we know to be true and yet it cannot be expected to answer fundamental questions of ultimate concern or questions of beauty and goodness: Why are we here? How should we behave towards each other? How can we enact deeper and broader forms of love, compassion and meaning?

7. Aware of partial but valid truths: Integrally-aware people believe there is, literally, meaning in everything, holding that all human experience has some valid, but partial, truth to teach us. Because there is some truth in everything, nothing is excluded totally or repressed in an integral life. This awareness eliminates the either/or polarities that typically arise in fragmented modern living. Everything is included, but because each truth is partial it is added just in the right place and right measure.

8. Balanced in their life activities: Many people want to spend time each week exercising their multiple intelligences through, for example, exercise or yoga (body development), meditation or prayer (contemplative development), learning or reading (cognitive development), self-awareness practice (shadow and emotional development), gardening or photography (artistic development) etc. All human beings feel good exercising a balanced approach to development. But integrally-aware people make this a habit, not only understanding what their own lines of intelligence are and what is calling for attention in every moment, but actually finding new and interesting ways to evolve their innate capacities.

TED: On what do you set your heart?

Karen Armstrong is a well-known religious scholar who was a TED 2008 prize winner and talked on the understanding and role of religious faith, not as a noun as most contemporary people understand it but as a verb, not as something we possess but something we do: an active process through which we assemble meaning and reaffirm our fundamental normative stance. She ended her talk by requesting a TED wish - every TED prize winner gets one - and her wish was that by this time next year the TED community help her assemble a statement of universal religious compassion (I hope I've got that right) that would be signed by all the world's major religious leaders. (Though I haven't seen exactly what she has in mind, I have pledged to help how we can, which we should be able to do with many of the world's leading contemplative lineage holders attending our annual Integral Spirituality Center.)

Armstrong's view is not new. This topic was treated in James Fowler's excellent book Stages of Faith, when he writes that the central question of faith is "on what or whom do you set your heart? To what vision of right-relatedness between humans, nature and the transcendent are you loyal?" Following comparative religionist Wilfred Cantwell Smith's observation that faith is not, especially for modern humanity, merely a religious term, rather it is misunderstood as an act of belief, Fowler reiterates that it is an orientation towards the universal and transcendent. It is a verb, and in this view faith carries a broader meaning and can account even for the atheistic orientation of some scientists. By this view scientists of the physicalist sort are living a form of faith in their quest for the ultimate truths of a purely falsifiable worldspace.

Next week I'll be back at Aspen Institute attending a symposium on Religion and Science, and in preparation I've thought about why my own faith has such heavy leanings toward a living inquiry of what we can know rationally, versus those limit questions to which, in the final analysis, we are called to surrender. My answer a few years ago would have been that my own faith involves a deep desire to not want to be horribly wrong, to not wake one day years hence and find that beyond an experience of maya I've also paired an experience of cognitive delusion because I was not rigorous enough to push the bounds of my understanding to their natural limits. (And yes, I get the contradiction here.) This also breeds humility: while my faith carries the danger of a presupposed arrogance, it is in the continual renewal of understanding and overturning of presuppositions that the soil is churned in which an arrogant root would otherwise easily grow. I think any pursuers of truth might sympathize, admitting that their faith is lived vis-a-vis truth-finding (e.g., science) and that it reflects deep down a yearning to be fully modern/rational, reflecting an inner fear of being duped, an insistence to awaken from the religious adolescence of pre-modern thinking.

Now, however, I think my answer would be simpler. I just have a broad responsibility as a developing leader to enact a worldspace within myself that is fully open to that of others and their needs in that moment. And that requires that I have a fluid perspective-taking capability rooted in the deeply known transience of all mind-oriented propositional states. Fowler describes my orientation as conjunctive faith, the fifth stage of faith growth. Conjunctive faith "sees both sides of an issue simultaneously" and is characterized by "dialogical knowing," where

the known is invited to speak its own word in its own language. In dialogical knowing the multiplex structure of the world is invited to disclose itself ... The knower seeks to accommodate her or his knowing to the structure of that which is being known before imposing her or his categories on it ... Epistemologically, there must be sufficient self-certainty to grant the known the initiative ... to let reality speak its word.

It is interesting to note that the cross-currents of epistemology (i.e., how we know) and a willingness to surrender - both of which show up in my former stage - are likely necessary ingredients to a new stage of faith that allows reality to come forth unhindered by fear, ego-self, or knee-jerk conceptualizations. (At least, on my good days.)

In any case, "do you believe in God?" is a question that pre-modernity would not understand because God was a given. Modernity uses the question as a litmus test for faith. It is really a litmus test for belief, and reflects the modern trend, which in Fowler's summary of Smith's observation of this trend:

Termed variously as secularization, religious disenchantment or modernism, this movement has given rise to essentially a new form of consciousness. It has construed knowledge as empirically-demonstrable facts; it has subordinated ethics and aesthetics to what works or is workable; it has reduced intimacy to sexuality and inflated sexuality to a fetishism. It has come to see faith as belief or a belief system and, in what passes for tolerance or "understanding," maintains a dogmatic attitude of relativism regarding the truth or appropriateness of all such "systems of belief."

In other words, all valid knowledge once again is reduced to purely exterior correlates of vivid interior findings (aesthetics, intimacy) and a sort of condescending head-patting takes place with all acts of faith, ignoring that faith is a process of living commitment. Everything has been reduced to a relative and subjective belief system, and in the process we've lost our own capacity to clearly understand that faith undergirds even sophisticated contemporary normative stances. Faith is our living, breathing answer to the ongoing question of how we navigate our deepest inquiries.

Integral Recovery: House bill mandates coverage

John DuPuy and I are working on assembling a new company around Integral Recovery, which is an integral treatment program for drug and alcohol addiction.  As a $200 billion problem annually (U.S. alone), it's an enormous and devastating social problem that impacts almost every family in the U.S.  John has published his approach in the Journal for Integral Theory and Practice and we are raising $250K to launch the company this year.  This news could blow the top off of the plan:

Link: House bill mandates mental health coverage.

The House of Representatives passed a bill Wednesday that would require health insurers to cover treatments for addiction and mental conditions the same way they provide for physical illnesses.

TED: Is beauty truth? A beautiful theory of everything ..

As soon as I saw the question "Is beauty truth?" I thought to myself, "well, that's sort of a category error."  Beauty is in the eye of the subjective beholder.  As I like to requote, "beauty lets the psyche rest."  It's a subjective phenomenon, not an objective one.  So I immediately thought to myself that once again TED was engaging in ether confused inquiry or confused reductionism, or both.  No harm done, except no one pointed that out on stage, which would have been a really great opportunity to do so.  Or am I wrong?

I like to remember the notion that when you're a hammer everything looks like a nail.  In other words, perhaps the simple integral criticism I provided above is not the whole story.  For instance, who we think of as beautiful has been demonstrated to be on some levels an evolutionary adaptation to best chances for gene survival. Great looking, great genes, great chance of survival, or so one story goes.  If true, it would demonstrate that beauty is an affair of both subjective and objective dimensions, and again that might not be that surprising.  Clearly all beauty starts with a beholding of an object (or another subject), but in any case an "other."  So I think that the intention behind the question, after hearing the talks on it, really was to find a sort of absolutism in the answer: this is where we find beauty, and it is Truth.  In my view, this is confused.

I was reminiscing on all of this when physicist Garrett Lisi presented a compelling new theory of everything in particle physics. His theory is elegant because it is parsimonious: one geometric figure accounts for the behavior of all sub-atomic particles.  Known as E8, it is reported to be one of the most elegant geometries in all of math, with 248 symmetries.  Sort of like Lite-Brite, it was really cool when Lisi plugged the different color known particles into each vertice of E8 and then visually shifted the symmetries on-screen.  Imagine a multi-color snowflake transforming into a fractal into a geometric depiction of a revolver's ammo chambers and you have something of the picture.

Of course, when I say his theory is parsimonious, I'm thinking it's better than the 11+ dimensions of M-theory, but what do I know?  I don't know whether each symmetry of E8 is a dimension, in which case it's sort of a grand unified theory of a very complex geometry.

If true, it is a beautiful outcome in the search for a TOE.  Most mortals will never understand what it means, but at least we can tell our children that our best known description of very-small objective reality is kind of like a [insert favorite visual metaphor here].  Beats the hell out of trying to explain to them what a brane and bulk and string symmetry is.  And is reality holonic at that level?  If true, is E8 a beautiful whole of a bunch of parts that we can identify mathematically (and some of which we can "see" by smashing high-energy particles together, to use the old adage: telling time by smashing the watch on floor and looking at the pieces), but are really just wholes of smaller constituent parts?  I seem to recall it was Sagan who guessed that it was turtles all the way down.  Of course, so did Koestler, who termed holons to begin with.

Unfortunately any theory of everything runs into limit questions like these.  As Nagarjuna argued in his dialectic, all is found to be relative, so the absolute is uncharacterizable. Or Kant: we cannot know things in themselves.  And at this level of abstraction, that's sort of an understatement. 

So I think it would be beautiful, if true, and perhaps even beautiful if not.  It's beautiful that we are a self-aware species who has the "unreasonable" audacity to dream that we can explore every area of the Kosmos, all depth of our own awareness, every contour of an ultimately mysterious existence. Is beauty truth? I don't think so, but then again it doesn't need to be, for life is a far richer experience when beauty and truth can stand as two co-arising and interdependent domains of experience, sensation, knowing, feeling, being ...

TED 2008: Notable Quotables

[Cross-posted from the TED blog, these are some quotable highlights.]

Imagine Martin Luther King saying, ‘I have a dream ... But I don’t know if the others will buy it.’” - Boston Philharmonic Conductor Ben Zander, on the importance of persuasive leadership

"Human progress depends on unreasonable people. Reasonable people accept the world as they meet it; unreasonable people persist in trying to change it. Well, I’m Bob and I’m an unreasonable person. And if TED is anything, it is the olympics of unreasonable people." - Musician and activist Bob Geldof

“Why are we ignoring the oceans? Why does NASA spend in one year what NOAA will spend in 1600 years? Why are we looking up? Why are we afraid of the ocean?” - Ocean explorer Robert Ballard

"I  think it's the Dopamine." - Anthropologist Helen Fisher, explaining to Chris Anderson why she's still optimisitic about love, despite understanding its chemical and biological basis

"Relative to the universe, it's just up the road." - Physicist Brian Cox, after referring to Chicago as 'just up the road' from Monterey, CA

“If you think half of America votes badly because they are stupid or religious, you are trapped in a matrix ... Take the red pill, learn some moral psychology and step outside the moral matrix.” - Jonathan Haidt, author of The Happiness Hypothesis

“If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between ‘for’ and ‘against’ is the mind’s worst disease.” - Jonathan Haidt, quoting Sent-ts’an, from 700CE China

[Jonathan was one of the clearly integral thinkers in the room; I'll contact him about joining the Integral Institute.]

“It's important to eave the security of who we are, and go to the place of who we are becoming. I encourage you to let yourself out of any prison you might find yourself in. Because we have to do something now. We have to change now.” - Environmental advocate John Francis, who went 17 years without speaking

"The job of the C is to make the B sad." - Boston Philharmonic Conductor Ben Zander, deconstructing a piece by Chopin

“How do we give credible hope to the billion poorest people in the world? It requires compassion to get ourselves started, and enlightened self-interest to get serious... If economic divergence continues, combined with global integration, it will build a nightmare for our children.” - Paul Collier, author of The Bottom Billion

“In order to solve the climate crisis, we need to solve the democracy crisis.” - Al Gore, urging citizen involvement not only on a personal level, but also on a political level

[Al Gore also said: "what we really need is an increase in the level of consciousness of the world." He said it twice, and we can help the TED community understand and articulate what that means.]

“How dare we be pessimistic? Maybe the future is better than it used to be.” - Peter Schwartz, co-founder of the Global Business Network

Leonardo Da Vinci, a Mystery, and Museums Today

One of the most fun short talks at TED was an answer to the longstanding mystery surrounding Leonardo Da Vinci and what he really looked like.  Absolutely fascinating, through computer and portrait topography of his works, and then cross matching it with a Donatello statue, we finally have the real face of Da Vinci.  Another version of the search is here.

Also, Thomas Krens, former Director of the Guggenheim Foundation, talked about the worldwide expansion of the Guggenheim and the $120 billion investment that Abu Dhabi is making to create the cultural capital of the planet. He made the observation that the modern museum is an 18th century idea (basically a physical encyclopedia for art) in a 19th century box finally fulfilling its goal in the 20th century.  Oops, the world has changed: "Museums today represent the unsustainable conceit of  North Atlantic predominance."

He also wryly noted: "All the talks aren't all good but the bad ones aren't that long."

Reminder: Answers.com

I just wanted to remind readers that I don't explain a lot of terms I use in my blog because I have answers.com installed.  All you have to do is double-click any word on my blog and you'll get an instant pop-up definition of that term.

TED 2008: Warning, scary shit ahead.

Who are we?
Warning, scary shit ahead.  Craig Venter, who decoded the human genome, is digitizing biology by designing (on a computer program) and synthesizing new life.  The process designs the new life on an auto-CAD like program and gets added to existing genetic material to knock out certain pieces of the old life's DNA in order to create new forms of life with more parsimonious DNA.  As he describes it, by inputting new DNA (software) into existing life forms (hardware), "the software builds it own hardware."  The life form literally changes in the lab in front of their eyes.  This is bad Hollywood sci-fi writ large.  Venter wants to create synthetic life to solve many of humanity's pressing problems (carbon explosion, health crises, etc.)  He did go through a bio-ethics review at MIT prior to doing this new work and now receives $100 million annually from public and private sources for his Venter Institute.

Paul Rothemund is a Caltech scientist who folds DNA to demonstrate that humans are "computer-generated artifacts," by which he means that the primary definition of life is the computational process required to assemble life.  So he sees a world where we can "design life at a computer like you would a cell phone." 

At this point in the conference I was so depressed I thought of committing sepuku.  We should assemble a credo on integral bioethics.  Many of the problems that these scientists are trying to rectify derive from a sole reliance on artifact development (i.e., technology) to solve previous problems, a reiterative process that doesn't solve itself.  Our technology development since the Enlightenment has far outstripped our ethical development.  Most of the presenters at TED and the TED staff are continuing to look in the wrong places for comprehensive solutions to the questions they are posing, which is why the answers are partial, not integral, and in the most dangerous sense of the world: more purely right-hand empirical development will not change the game, only perpetuate it. 

Instead, increasing complexity calls for more modesty.  As TED presenter and scholar of randomness Nassim Nicholas Taleb argued on Thursday, black swan events are catastrophic and completely unpredictable events whose only predictability is that we will have them in the future.  (Think 9/11, Black Friday, World War I, etc.)  Because heightened systemic complexity is far greater than humans can currently comprehend, he argues that we should just stop messing with complex systems as if we walk God-like over reality.  Another way to put it, in integral terms, is that ontological complexity in all 4 quadrants is far greater than that describable by Teal or Turquoise levels of development, and with our leadership tending to Green ethics (this is my judgment after having worked with world leaders from every sphere), we are still under-equipped to make the right ethical judgments.  My own solution, when I realized this 3 years ago was to embark on building a global community devoted to vertical development so that we could bring the interior development up to par with the ontological complexity and the technological compulsion. Integral Life is the result of that impulse.

MEMEs: An addition/revision of the integral model?
The third presenter was researcher and author Susan Blackmore. She argued very persuasively that MEMEs, despite being much maligned, are misunderstood, are real, and have profound implications for our future development.  She cautions that in order for MEMEs to work we stick to a strict definition: "information which is imitated."  She summarized Darwin's 3 main points from Origin of Species: 1. variation in biological traits occurs, 2. selection for survival-promulgating traits occurs, and 3. heredity occurs. These three basic features, which I'll call VSH, are the only three dynamical aspects required for design/evolution to occur (presumably variation also accounts for mutation).  These hold true for information MEMEs and are the basis of culture.

Take a simple example: earrings.  We didn't invent earrings, rather they were among a variation of cultural adornments that each successive generation selected as having some positive effect on life condition.  And so on with all cultural refinements since the dawn of man, with each successive mutation or adaptation having a four-quadrant instantiation at a given level of our development: socially, culturally, behaviorally, or phenomenologically.  We like the iPod because it is a better adaptation than what came before, especially as we operate in a techno-economic that is information-based, we are mobile, we like the state-experience of new music, new music is easily accessed with the device, etc.  And now everyone's wearing one, with a several billion dollar market having been generated and a redistribution of the resources in the music business.  A rampant, unruly MEME on the loose.

Now here's where Susan really opened my eyes: The first level of dynamical systems to obey Darwin's VSH rules were genes, as we all know.  The result got us through 4 million years of evolution roughly up to the dawn of language.  But roughly with the dawn of language, MEMEs took over genes as the primary influences on development. With the birth of language and the development of culture, representing an inter-subjective space for the early hominids, MEMEs (working together with genes) impelled brain growth to accommodate memetic evolution.  So MEMEs put genes in their service in order to advance their own parasitic role on humankind (and eventually evolving to enjoy religion, art, etc.).  A gene machine became a MEME machine. 

Susan argues we are now at the cusp of a third epoch of VSH-compliant dynamical-system emergence: Temes, or technological memes. Temes obey all the VSH rules.  The argument that technological development is self-generative (driven by cultural memetics), that we select those adaptations best suited for our collective version of the good life, and that those are passed on, seems self-evident to me.  Importantly, each stage of VSH emergence implies immense danger to the host system (that would be us).  Because each emergence sucks up resources blind to their own sustainability, emergents can very easily kill off the host.  What she argues is that, especially in light of presentations like Craig Venter's, temes will soon get to the point that they either self-replicate (yes, self-generative artifacts) or they survive on like parasites on their human hosts.  When paired with Chris Jordan's talk on unconscious collective behavior and Nassim Taleb's talk on black swan complexity, Blackmore's argument is fully plausible to me.  It's all around us, all you have to do is look at how cell phones and iPods emerged and look at emerging genetic therapy and it's not hard to project where this could go.  Scary shit, indeed ...

TED 2008: Our place in the universe

Day 1 of TED concluded with "What is our place in the universe?" Particle physicist Patricia Burchat, who works at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, described the composition of the universe as 73% dark energy, an as yet undiscovered thing that accounts for most of the mass of the universe (we know from the gravitational lensing effect that it must be there; for an at-home experiment, break off the bottom of your wine glass and place it over a black dot on a piece of paper.  The dot will appear as a circle, just as distant galaxies do when we view and the view is obstructed by large gravitational obstacles that don't have enough mass to account for the effect.) She also pointed out that galaxies are not moving away from each other through space, as many think when they hear about an inflationary universe, but space itself is expanding (and the expansion is getting faster over time).

University of Washington paleotontologist Peter Ward, comedian John Hodgman (who plays the "PC guy" in the Apple commercials), and spiritual teacher Sri Sri Ravi Shankar finished the session.  (You can find a detailed report on the entire TED experience at Ethan Zuckerman's blog, he did a better job of keeping up with the pace of material.)  Ravi Shankar's shared a story about his spiritual teacher getting shot in the head, and when he awoke from his medical recovery he was in a state of enlightenment; equally incredible to Jill Bolte's and further testament to the biological basis of a enlightenment state experience.  His message: "Dispel the negativity because our emotional pollution radiates outward."

My net takeaway that every answer to the question "What is our place in the universe?"except Ravi Shankar's came from a literal interpretation of placement.  Here is our place.  I was looking for more of our Place.  What's interesting is that after the full four days TED became one of the greatest experiences of my life, but it was because of the entire mosaic of experience despite the often fragmented approach to these questions of ultimate concern.  It's obvious to the philosophical observer that TED is badly in need of some philosophical help if it is going to embark into these areas and an orienting framework would help them make sense of what they are presenting.

The day finished with a performance from Kaki King, who Rolling Stone magazine said might just be the next guitar god. I had to pick my jaw up off the floor.

TED 2008

(ATTENTION: please pause the Sonific widget to the left prior to playing this video.  The music from Sonific is set to auto-play.) The producers of this video were at TED this year.  The consensus is that it is changing the conversation nationally and may have already sealed Obama's coming victory (it's been viewed 7 million times already).

TED 2008: Who are we? Neti neti

Jill Bolte Taylor is a Harvard-trained neuroanatomist at Indiana University and was the final presentation on “Who are we?” The wait was worth it. Jill’s research examines the “biology that connects our dreams to reality” (or what might be characterized integrally as the intermediation process between the upper-left quadrant and upper-right quadrant). She summarized (with a real human brain in hand, milky white spinal cord trailing …) the basic physiology and processing functions of the brain: the right hemisphere acts as a parallel processor (in computer science terms) that is responsible for sensory perception and phenomenologically is completely absorbed in the present moment. In Jill’s terms the right hemisphere is “melded with the energy all around us.” Completely physically separated from the right hemisphere – she proved it by pulling them apart, demonstrating these gloriously separate but interdependent two brains – the left hemisphere is a serial-like processor responsible for analytical and rational reasoning. It sorts through the details of life, lives in the past and future, projects possibilities, thinks in language, and basically creates from all these rich details the “I am” ego of the differentiated self.

Now here’s where her story gets really fascinating. Jill suffered a stroke in 1996, and amazingly for a brain scientist, she had a “ringside seat to her own brain processes” as her brain progressively shut down its functions during the first 4 hours of the stroke. Jill vividly described the first-hand experience as her left hemisphere shut down. Her report shocked me. As her right hemisphere took over her own cognitive processes, Jill described an immediate move into what we would recognize as non-dual awareness. Her awareness completely dissolved into “a unified awareness of all energy of the universe” as she no longer recognized a differentiated self, or any differentiated objects. All of her emotional chatter, stress, and emotional baggage were gone in the “euphoric perfection of the present moment” connected with all things in a non-dual embrace. Jill had dissolved into unio mystico.

She ended the talk by standing on the edge of the stage, eyes closed with tears streaming down her face, arms spread wide in front of some of the most powerful people in the world, pronouncing “I’ve found Nirvana” and asking that we all engage in this, our innate birth right, the one, only and final chance we have to express the love necessary to humanity’s long-term survival.

A really nice way to end an inquiry that ultimately, desperately called for someone to express mankind's unique access to its own divine sense, our ability to just joyfully be, evidence of Eros's 14 billion years of progressively intelligent, increasingly significant development, final testament of a dignified hope equal to the fragile nobility of a complex creature at the edge of its own awareness. Not this, not that …

Here's the video:

TED 2008: Who are we? Part 3

I was expecting artist Chris Jordan’s take on “Who are we?” to be, well, artistic. It was, and sadly so. He does clever art, doing massive visual compilations of tiny objects like cigarette cases, barbie dolls and other artifacts representing human vice and pain. (The Barbie dolls represent the breast augmentation craze amongst young women in the U.S., now the leading high school graduation gift.) Jordan’s art focuses on “unconscious collective behavior,” reflecting the downside of the human condition while focusing on the psychopathological shadow and existential angst of the modern malaise. He rails that “we are not feeling enough as a culture, not enough anger, not enough grief” (for example, at the 1,000 daily deaths daily of Americans from cigarettes). He is begging for recognition of an interior-space and yet passed up an awesome opportunity to answer a deeply existential question in a way that vivifies interiors. And while his art is poignant, his provocative display of human’s weaknesses does nothing to reflect the amazing dignity of who we are as humans, the multicolor spectrum of the human experience, the just-this-ness of our consciousness, the majesty of hope in the face of daunting odds, the deep love and care and compassion we are capable of at our best. Each answer to the question so far is, not surprisingly for integrally-aware observers, demonstrating the worldspace that each respondent enacts as they go about their own life and work. And while no answer is altogether wrong, they are seriously partial and thus far from being integral (and satisfactory). They do not thus far offer a vision that gives permission to be fully human while providing a way for inclusion of all aspects of our complex awareness, including everything that we are but only in the right place and right measure for each unique human life.

TED 2008: Stephen Hawking on Extraterrestrial Life

Physicist Stephen Hawking patched into TED from Cambridge. When asked whether life exists on other planets, he presented an interesting view, summarized as follows. There are two alternatives. No: because in the course of 15 billion years of evolution, if there was advanced life in other galaxies then we should have detected any life that was within 100 light years of our radio telescopes (at least no life within 100 light years).  Yes: but if advanced civilizations tend to kill themselves off when measured over long time periods, we might happen to be measuring during a time period when prior advanced civilizations have already gone extinct and those that still exist are not yet advanced enough to generate radio signals.

TED 2008: Who are we? Part 2

To follow my previous post on Day 1, Louise Leakey is a paleoanthropologist and a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, attempting to answer the question “Who are we?” Her answer was narrow and deeply partial: we are “big apes.” Well, I think it’s a bit more complicated than that, but she did offer a really robust answer to a different question: How have we have evolved in the physiosphere for the past 4 million years? She answers from a counter-anthropocentrism, rightly asserting (in my view) that there is no pre-ordained specialness to human kind as the evolutionary hominid survivors. But she also doesn’t acknowledge any sacredness to humankind as the most advanced evidence of holonic development in the known universe. And not exactly optimistic: “We are now a polluting, aggressive species … and need to control our numbers [population].”

There still has not been a deep, comprehensive, spiritually-satisfying answer to the question "Who are we?" coming from TED 2008, but stay tuned it does get (slightly) better ...
 

TED 2008: Will Evil Prevail? Part 1

Philip Zambardo of Stanford University, famous for his Stanford Prison Experiment and author of the book The Lucifer Effect, addressed the question “Will evil prevail?” Zambardo states that “evil is the exercise of power to cause harm or pain.” As an example he addressed the Abu Ghraib scandal, a trial for which he was an expert witness, and his hypothesis was that the soldiers were not intrinsically bad but placed in a bad setting where authority was given to them to carry out intimidation and pressure tactics to extract information in a war setting.  He describes the lucifer effect as an evil transformation due to three dimensions: a transformation within people – a dispositional, or “bad apples” explanation; the cultural characteristics of the situation itself – a situational, or “bad barrel” explanation; and the system that gives rise to the political, legal and economic context of evil transformations – a systemic explanation, or “bad barrel-makers” explanation. Integral readers will recognize these as the I, We and It/Its dimensions of the four quadrants, and Zambrado nicely situates a co-arising responsibility in each dimension for its role in contributing to evil transformations in human beings. 

TED Aspen 2008 - Day 1

It's late so I'm going to make this a brief update.  First of all, the weather in Aspen is gorgeous, we really lucked out with a beautiful sunny day, and the Doerr-Hosier building at the Aspen Institute is a very special place to hold an event like this.  TED knows how to throw an event - this is easily the fattest event I've ever been to.  They full understand what it means to cater to a fast-paced, information driven group of business and social leaders.  It shows up in the little things: every staff member is impeccable about service and excellent attitude; there are lots of very high-tech spaces (like a bloggers lounge) for satisfying different moods throughout the day; dress is casual and low-key, encouraging a very congenial atmosphere for networking; presentations are all very plain language and down to earth (no obfuscation or erudition); great use of staging and setting, including lots of reclining chairs, couches, killer lighting, great sound, ubiquitous plasma screens, and very fresh, energetic house beats throughout; no introductions of speakers to give a very fast pace of material, and confined to 18 minute segments.  All-in-all, these people know what they're doing in hosting an event, just an exceptional job on getting the experiential details nailed.  (And the gift bag is embarrassing it's so generous.)

On to speakers, and I will look at each through an admittedly integral view.  The first big question of the day was "Who are we?" and was addressed by anthropologist Wade Davis, paleoanthropologist Louise Leakey, artist Chris Jordan, and neuroanatomist Jill Taylor, with a brief cameo from physicist Stephen Hawking.  Generally the mood was pessimistic with a few notable exceptions; these are people generally lamenting the social and ecological impact of humanity and evidencing scant reason for hope on the horizon.  I'll cover Wade Davis's presentation tonight.

Davis advanced a classic retro-romantic view of the tribes he studies, tribes living through a pre-modern worldview in the midst of modern civilization.  Notably, he went out of his way to explicitly reject a human or cultural developmental model.  To wit: "these tribes represent a rich topography of the human spirit and are not failed attempts to be modern, rather they are 6,000 languages that answer the question of what it means to be human with different visions of life."  Davis is right that these pre-modern cultures are a rich topography of different answers to the question "who are we?," but in his retro-romanticism - e.g., Lascaux cave paintings represent "postcards of nostalgia" of a simpler time - he fails to admit (or recognize?) that these tribes have not yet differentiated their value spheres (i.e., art, morals, science).  In a classic postmodern confusion, Davis gets the evidence exactly backwards while committing a pre/trans fallacy, citing in the same sentence the rich myths and rituals that sustain these tribes in their mythic worldview while also stating the fact that tribal leaders call their modern counterparts their "little brothers" (while they are the "big brothers").  In Davis's language, "Victorian England is not the apex of progress."  Agreed, because a modern or postmodern contemporary culture is. 

I suspect also that it's conducive for a pre-modern tribe in today's world, surrounded as they are by modern civilization, to be less aggressive and martial than they were millennia ago.  I wonder if Davis is seeing cultures as they always have been, or perhaps they are enjoying unwitting benefits of modernity?  Sort of a safe haven insulated from the other warring tribes of ages gone by?  (I'm only speculating, but if violent partiarchal social practices are in part caused by the need to defend one's village, territory, people etc., what happens when the pre-modern threats from other tribes are replaced by broader modern ecological threats, such as deforestation, water pollution, encroaching urbanization etc?  I'm not downplaying the real risks to these important cultures, and I sympathise with Davis's obvious frustration, but it does seem likely that what looks currently like peaceful adherence with a natural worldview could really be a surrender to forces beyond their control.  The point would then be, seemingly, that cultural evolution is natural, warranted, and healthy, despite modern civilization's obvious responsibility to care and nurture the cultural, social and ecological environment in which they each are embedded.  As we know, modernity has a very mixed record on that score, a serious and fair criticism.)

Davis also discussed his project "Science of Mind," a movie about 2,500 years of Buddhism's exploration of human inner space.  I highly commend Davis for recognizing the notion that there is a science of spirituality (his term: "science of enlightenment")  and that meditation is an injunction within a scientific paradigm.  This is where Davis's romanticism is a virtue: he comes across all-in-all as a strong advocate for the role of the human heart and spirit in having a place at the table in the waste land of pure empiricism.  But he does so in a way that will appear quite partial, and in various ways just inaccurate, to the integral audience.

More over the next few days ...

Boulder, Colorado: Explains a Lot About the World

I have been living in the Boulder, Colorado area for approximately 6 months. In many ways this makes me unqualified to opine on the city, and in other ways more qualified. I am both less knowledgeable and less biased than those who have lived here a long time. But after I saw that Boulder was rated as America's smartest city, it explained a lot about why the world has the problems that it does. Human beings are bad at making sound judgments. If Boulder is the smartest city in America, God help us all.

I refer to these headlines as just smatterings of counter evidence pulled from the local newspaper the past 2 weeks:

Boulder City Council Wants to Impeach Bush

Boulder Wants to Shut Down Strip Club

Now that I see how the City Council spends its time and energy, the rest sort of makes sense: housing is so unaffordable that it should be nearly criminal for any CEO to build a company in Boulder; the drug problem in Boulder schools is, according to my colleagues with school age kids, rampant and worsening; the violence pouring from the UC Boulder campus into the city's living and shopping areas is uncontrolled (I've personally been threatened with assault twice since my arrival); the hypocrisy between the so-called progressive ideology of Boulder and the actual behavior of its government is so off-putting that I wouldn't be proud to call this home; the traffic and overall living density are very high, decreasing basic quality of life (from what I can tell); the homeless population on Boulder's main shopping artery is so high that I don't want to take my family there for the weekend; employees who live in Boulder have a very odd view of work (as in, work should not be "work"; I've confirmed my experience is not unique with the CEOs of companies employing thousands in Boulder), and so on ...

Now, I have friends who moved to Lake Tahoe 3 years ago, from Boulder, and then moved back to Boulder after a year. They missed it. So my view is partial and I can see from my own Boulder experience that there are some really great things about the city. But every one of them - the people, the mountains, the politics, the shopping - are seriously tarnished to the point of now being repulsive. Reno, where I come from, is far more liberal than Boulder. Lake Tahoe is in a different universe of natural beauty than Boulder. And smarts? Hmmm, the results speak for themselves.

A reasonable reply to this criticism is that I should leave Boulder to those who love it. Fair enough, I probably will. But it would be nice if Forbes and other rating agencies would do their homework before handing out these rankings, because if Boulder is the smartest city in America, the world has a long way to go before that really credibly means anything.

What are you optimistic about?

As I get ready to attend TED next week I have been reading a few of the books that are sent prior to the conference. The latest is called What are you optimistic about?, another secular humanist’s anthology from Edge.com founder John Brockman. Brockman’s usual suspects are on hand: Daniel Dennett, Stephen Pinker, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins et al. and while I was really looking forward to a stimulating read with the hope that this would reflect some of the world’s foremost thinking, what I came away with was anything but optimism. In short, it was another long list of physicalists decrying the looming threat of mythological religious worldviews. “Please won’t more of the world take our science seriously and see that the rational enterprise is our only hope forward for mankind! Please won’t God just hurry up and die!”

(Umm, yeah, don't worry, the Pew Forum predicts that God will be completely dead in America in 300 years. Actually, America may be dead in 300 years.)

If I were to reply to Brockman’s question, I’d say that I’m optimistic that more people will begin discussing ideas rather than things. Brockman’s group, not universally but in large part, is still stuck in the world of things. (I think Donald Hoffman's entry on his optimism that science will posit a theoretical reply to the mind-body problem is a notable, and wonderful, exception.) Once one accepts a critically realistic view of science and its discoveries, they remain fascinating but only so much so. If the leading edge of the world’s thinkers are for the most part strict physicalists then any acceptance of interiority is precluded from the very start. Values, meaning, subjectivity and intersubjectivity have been rationalized away. I’ve not read one of those thinkers provide a convincing answer to the mind-body problem that persuades me that they have not presupposed an arguable philosophical foundation to all their deliberations. And they continue to bully the younger kids at the school yard: of course a mythological view of God is no longer accepted seriously by the leading edge of culture. Seventy percent of the world is still in a mythological narrative, but it is a developmental narrative. Did no one tell them? Their battle lines are being drawn before an opponent that is epistemologically weak yet the battle moved past them about 3 decades ago with research in developmental psychology.

I understand the fear that serves as the cynical impulse behind the book respondents. Yes, technology is great and will on a per-capita real GDP basis eventually drive enough techno-economic progress to make milk free and work a distant memory for every human on the planet. But that’s a long time away and science is not winning the war of good ideas because good ideas don’t occur in the domain of science: good ideas drive differential behavior, and that requires that meaning and values and interiors get addressed. The religious absolutism that science will cure all ills and the secular life is the only valid path of meaning is just a fragmented view of human life. It is therefore not surprising, given how dreadful fragmentation feels to the human spirit, that there is not more optimism in this group. And I find the book to reflect this lack of inspiration, ending up just sort of predictably boring and partial.