A Sunny Second Coming

In response to H.B. Augustine's
“Integral Politics: A Brief Outline of and
Introduction to the Integral Era”

Daniel Gustav Anderson

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming!
--W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”

Introduction

H.B. Augustine's introductory essay on Integral Politics, "Integral Politics: A Brief Outline of and Introduction to the Integral Era", published at Integral World, is symptomatic of many of the explicitly political problems with the integral theory of Ken Wilber and his followers I diagnose in a recent essay, "Sweet Science." In a spirit of public debate, my purpose here is to summarize these general problems through Augustine's work, which crystallizes them in a convenient way; it is not to attack Augustine or his earnest convictions personally. Here, I intend to put some unconvincing and potentially harmful ideas to rest, and draw forward some ideas that may be more productive of future inquiry and future good for all beings without exception or compromise, rather than the accumulation of capital (spiritual, emotional, or social capital, or capital as such) for a spiritually-authorized and trademarked Authority.

Augustine's proposal begins without a definition of politics, and seems entirely innocent of traditional and contemporary political theory. Is politics the study of that which is the public concern; the study of power, relations of power, and techniques and technologies of power; an endeavor to understand the totality of social relations in a normative or determinative way, with an eye toward revolutionizing or democratizing those relations? Hm: here, integral politics seems not a methodical study of any particular object, but instead a series of theological speculations on world history and times to come that bear little relation to material conditions prevailing in the world, and have in themselves a specifically divisive (totalitarian) and therefore counter-integral, counter-democratic political use.

1. Augustine's Determinism (by means of Wilber and German Idealists)

Augustine proposes (without attribution) a summary of the Hegelian theory of right familiar to readers of Sex, Ecology, and Spirituality, in which History as it is lived by mere mortals is determined by Spirit expressing itself through worldviews, mind-stuff, which manifest as successive, homogeneous historical epochs. Spirit achieves greater self-consciousness with each epochal step by this model. For Augustine (still silently summarizing Wilber's summary of German Idealist historiography) these epochs can be notated and distinguished from each other by differentiating the worldviews from which they are said to arise and to which they are supposed to correspond; our world passes through X Era, which can be satisfactorily understood in its entirety in a few sentences describing the X worldview, while also gesturing indistinctly to material events such as the rupture of the Berlin Wall or the mental lives of Great Men (Augustine cites Kant in this context). These epochs are discrete; they begin and they end and that is that; their causality is strictly one-way, such that worldviews determine forms of consciousness, which determine the forms of social and material being and practice, and not the reverse, and not a dialectical relation between or among them. The intellectual production of a Great Mind, in short, makes an epoch what it is, and represents the continuing evolution of the World-Spirit's consciousness of itself. And these epochs are world-homogeneous, meaning that this one-way causality determines the consciousness of the totality of human subjects as one, at once, as Augustine explains: "the Holistic will allow the Integral to shower all its Goodness, Beauty, and Truth upon this planet as an entirety." This is an interesting theological position, as interesting as any other. As historiography, it is reductive, simplistic, problematic; as political theory, it is productive of nothing else so much as troubling consequences, as I will show.

2. The Trouble with One-Way Causality

I wish anyone who would attempt to demonstrate or support the claim that historical events are in the last analysis manifestations of Spirit's evolving self-consciousness through worldviews, consciousness, and finally process, form, being (everyday life) in a material way, which is to say, scientifically or even by appeal to deductive reason alone, the best of luck. Augustine does not do so; he takes this idealistic determinism for granted as a theological verity and moves on. One affirming such a position (Wilber in S.E.S., for instance) is left to rely not on verifiable evidence (what evidence?) but on the testimony of a canon of writers who themselves took this position as authoritative (Hegel, Schelling, Dilthey, Aurobindo in different variations), constructing them and perhaps oneself as a trustworthy philosopher-sage and casting those who find this strategy preposterous as dangerous “Descenders” who hate the West, hate Spirit, hate Patriarchy, or whatever straw man suffices in the moment. This rhetorical strategy strongly characterizes S.E.S., a comically shrill and petulant book that wants to be taken as righteously “angry” (in this sense it is a late blossoming of the political right's culture-war rhetoric of the 1980s).

Even if one takes this unproven and suspicious argument in favor of idealistic determinism on these lines for granted as true, one still has to account for the obvious argument against it: material conditions such as scarcity and biological need demonstrably determine forms of life and sociality, and that from those forms of production and subsistence, forms of consciousness and worldviews arise. At present there are millions of women in the global south wandering on foot, spending their daylight hours seeking out and gathering potable water for their families to use. Is this a postmodern or post-post-modern arch-holistic Era? Is their consciousness determined in the first instance by the cries of their babies and the hunger in their bellies or by an offer for a free introductory membership to Integral Life, exposure to which will induce a less linear and more holistic purview, and therefore change their means of subsistence, their form of life? I invite the reader to continue this thought experiment into the different sites of labor and living that prevail in this world, and consider the bare implausibility of the determinism Augustine (following Wilber, who follows the others) is taking for granted.

Put differently, Augustine elides the practical matter of pedagogy one might expect in such a proposal, of how one can impose the correct theocracy as the right theocracy in any given state-form, because by the logic of his proposal (such as it is), makes this unnecessary: in a very strong determinism, this is just going to happen by the spiritual force of the Paradigm itself (of which more later).

3. Are Epochs Real, Discrete, and Homogeneous?

Augustine gives no reason to think so, but the fact remains the integral politics he proposes posits these epochs as real, as discrete in time (having specific and identifiable beginnings and endings), and homogeneous (meaning that all subjects [all sentient life?] is affected at once and in the same way by the movements of Spirit through the Weltanschauung of the epoch, as I have shown. For this to be true, it must first be true that any one epoch (say, the postmodern epoch) manifests in a consistent, even way by all: in my old neighborhood in sunny Portland, Oregon; by all in Hermosillo, Mexico; by all in Kathmandu, Nepal; by all in the illegal brothels and trafficking rings of the Golden Triangle; by all in places that have no names, flyover places, or places of transit. Is Spirit treating all these beings the same, as historical manifestations of the mind-stuff of Spirit itself, all at once? Maybe. One might argue that under conditions of globalization this may seem more plausible than before globalization (assuming anyone can agree when globalization as such began, or can refute the contrary evidence showing the manifest unevenness of development that characterizes the political economy globalization). Again, maybe. However, the burden of proof is on the one seeking to make such a claim, and Augustine declines to offer such proof, understandably, because who can claim to know the contours of the minds of all of humanity, to diagnose the spiritual capacities of so many others in a way that is not profoundly arrogant and consequently laughable? It seems less implausible and egomaniacal to propose instead that the diversity of forms-of-life prevailing in any one of the communities or spaces I cite above are specific, unique, and contingent on many different and likely conflicting kinds of causalities, some of which being amenable to scientific analysis. (For readers keeping score, I am indeed proposing Althusserian overdetermination as a more responsible methodology to the kinds of speculative make-believe that characterizes Augustine's modest proposal, and I would argue a more integral one in its account of the totality of all relations, a point of departure beyond the scope of this note.)

To review Augustine's precise on the causes of historical transformations: Spirit moves a sensitive, blessed soul to propose and promote the Correct Paradigm (Weltanschauung), which functions as the spirit of the age (Zeitgeist); when enough people buy in, Shazam! You get a totalitarian world government, very spiritual Authority, and a consequent blossoming of personal culture and private capital. This is totally going to happen. Such is the belief.

Conclusion

With respect, Augustine's historiography, predicated as it is on Wilber's doctrine of the evolution of consciousness, is simply untenable politically. It is certainly unsupported by reason or fact, and not any more or less plausible than the model of historical transformations presented in The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (one theological explanation is as good as any other in a spiritual marketplace and when none are held accountable to science). Further, it is potentially dangerous as a form of make-believe. Hegel designed this schema specifically to justify ideologically a totalitarian state, which is precisely where Augustine's speculations lead him (in the form of an unnamed and barely specified “Authority”): this assuming the "senior holon" in the pop-Hegelian total state's holarchy is indeed responsible enough to "organize the freedom" of its junior members, to evoke Wilber's terms in Sex, Ecology, and Spirituality. Is it (is He) so responsible, slouching toward Bethlehem? As this obvious analogy between the structure of Wilberian spirituality (hand responsibility to the holon above you, and the holon above you will hand down conditions of development to you, leave cash at the door or pay electronically, thanks) and the structure of holarchy's totalitarian political world suggests, if the guru is wrong, then all goes pathological. I will leave the reader to speculate on the value of Wilber's analyses of his successive gurus and "realizer" protégés, such as Adi Da or Andrew Cohen, and reflect on these as the explicit homology of the rough beast of totalitarian politics explicit in S.E.S. (as I show in “Sweet Science”) and implicit in Augustine's essay.

It follows from all this that intellectual work is a kind of political work, even whimsical metaphysical speculations on a coming New Age of Beauty and Truth. To make unqualified and uncritical theological claims of this nature is to offer an ideological justification for a particular political system, particular regime, or particular economic system, in this instance putting forward a spiritual justification for a sunny form of fascism. Further, positing X or Y claim about the spiritual world and its manifestations in time and space bring with them assumptions about the person making those claims (that he or she is capable of doing so, and doing so in good faith). Consequently, a critical approach to integral politics would demand that its own politics be explicitly marked and not left unexamined, be open to critique and analysis rather than standing at the ready to shout down any critique as a supposed form of anti-religious or anti-whatever-else bigotry, and be reflexive and self-critical in its means of making knowledge. Finally, when making claims about history, it seems appropriate to step away from the fetishized philosopher-sages of Europe and postcolonial, post-Theosophy South Asia, and examine the historical archive a bit: to take a serious look at the material artifacts history has produced (natural history and social history), to be properly scientific about it, rather than assuming that one's ideals and beliefs and the survey of the Great Men of intellectual history one may remember from a hazy undergraduate semester is causally productive of the world as a whole.