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Frank Visser, graduated as a psychologist of culture and religion, founded IntegralWorld in 1997. He worked as production manager for various publishing houses and as service manager for various internet companies and lives in Amsterdam. Books: Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (SUNY, 2003), and The Corona Conspiracy: Combatting Disinformation about the Coronavirus (Kindle, 2020).

Ken Wilber and the 'Age of Unreason'

A Critical Review

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

A familiar diagnosis in a new political landscape

Ken Wilber's diagnosis of contemporary Western culture has become remarkably consistent. Modernity brought rationality, universalism and scientific thinking; postmodernity then challenged these achievements by emphasizing perspective, context, identity and cultural difference; and the result, in Wilber's telling, is an increasingly fragmented “Age of Unreason.” The way forward is not a return to premodern myth or a rejection of postmodern insights, but a developmental move into the Integral stage, where reason, pluralism and spirituality can supposedly be integrated.

There is something genuinely valuable in this narrative. Wilber is right that contemporary societies contain competing epistemic styles, moral sensibilities and political worldviews. He is also right that pluralism can become excessive: skepticism can turn into cynicism, sensitivity into hypersensitivity, and identity politics into a politics in which disagreement itself becomes morally suspect.

But the problem begins when this useful observation is transformed into a grand developmental explanation of contemporary politics. Wilber repeatedly interprets political disagreement through his stage model, and the model then appears to confirm itself. People who disagree with Integral conclusions are assigned to lower stages, pathological versions of stages, or “Mean Green Meme.” The theory thereby risks becoming less an empirical explanation of political reality than a vocabulary for classifying people according to whether they agree with Wilber's diagnosis.

The “Age of Unreason” is too convenient a story

The most questionable element is Wilber's tendency to portray postmodernism as the great culprit behind contemporary irrationality.

Postmodernism certainly contains strands that question universal claims, objective knowledge and Enlightenment assumptions. But that does not mean that postmodern thought is equivalent to the proposition that there is no truth whatsoever.

This is where Wilber's familiar “performative contradiction” argument comes in: if somebody says that there are no universal truths, they have supposedly made a universal truth claim and contradicted themselves. The problem is that this attacks an unusually crude version of relativism. A sophisticated postmodern position can instead say that human knowledge is historically situated, perspectival and fallible without denying that some claims are better supported than others.

Indeed, science itself operates this way. Scientific knowledge is not “anything goes.” Nor does science require access to an absolute, perspective-free God's-eye view. It requires evidence, methodological criticism, replication, explanatory power and openness to revision.

Wilber's binary—modern rationality versus postmodern relativism—therefore misses a large middle ground: fallibilist rationalism.

That middle ground is important because it undermines one of Wilber's favourite rhetorical moves. One need not choose between naive Enlightenment certainty and postmodern relativism. One can simply say: we have imperfect knowledge, but some claims are much better justified than others.

The strange reduction of politics to developmental stages

Wilber's political analysis becomes particularly problematic when he interprets contemporary America primarily through the Green/Integral distinction.

His account of the Trump phenomenon has repeatedly emphasized the backlash against what he calls “Mean Green.” The argument has some plausibility: sections of the American electorate clearly did experience progressive cultural politics as alienating, condescending or hostile to their values.

But explaining Trump's rise primarily as a reaction against pathological Green is dramatically incomplete.

What about economic inequality? Deindustrialization? Rural decline? Race? Christian nationalism? Immigration? The structure of the American electoral system? Gerrymandering? Media fragmentation? Social media? The Republican Party's decades-long transformation? The enormous political influence of billionaires and interest groups? Trump's own personality and political entrepreneurship?

These factors cannot simply be placed inside coloured developmental boxes.

This is the central weakness of developmental reductionism: once a developmental model becomes the dominant explanatory framework, almost everything starts looking like evidence for the model.

The asymmetry of Wilber's criticism

There is also a striking asymmetry in Wilber's treatment of political pathologies.

Green receives enormous attention as a source of narcissism, relativism, identity politics, political correctness and hypersensitivity. But comparable attention is rarely given to pathological expressions of Orange, Blue or Red.

Yet these are hardly hypothetical possibilities.

Pathological Orange can mean ruthless economic instrumentalism, extreme individualism and treating nature and people as resources. Pathological Blue can mean religious authoritarianism, fundamentalism and unquestionable moral certainty. Pathological Red can mean domination, violence and charismatic authoritarianism.

These are not obscure theoretical possibilities. They are major forces in contemporary politics.

Consequently, a theory that claims to transcend and include Green should be particularly interested in preserving Green's genuine achievements while criticizing its pathologies. Instead, Wilber often sounds as though Green itself has become the principal obstacle to further development.

That is precisely the irony of his own concept of the “Green allergy.”

As Wilber himself wrote in The Religion of Tomorrow, a common pathology at the second tier is becoming so exhausted by Green that one dissociates from one's remaining Green qualities and begins seeing “Mean Green” everywhere.

The uncomfortable question is therefore unavoidable:

Could Wilber himself be exhibiting the pathology he describes?

The Green allergy becomes self-confirming

This is where Wilber's developmental theory encounters a serious methodological problem.

Suppose someone criticizes Wilber from a progressive perspective. Wilber can interpret the criticism as evidence of Green pathology.

Suppose someone criticizes Green from a conservative perspective. That person can be interpreted as Orange or Blue.

Suppose someone agrees with Wilber's critique of Green and also accepts Integral theory. That person can be interpreted as moving toward second tier.

The model thus possesses considerable interpretive flexibility but little capacity for being falsified.

A scientific theory should ideally expose itself to the possibility of being wrong. Wilber's developmental framework frequently does the opposite: disagreement can be interpreted as evidence of developmental limitation.

This is especially problematic when the theory is used to diagnose entire populations.

Where is the empirical evidence?

This brings us to a deeper problem that goes beyond politics.

Wilber frequently speaks about percentages of people occupying developmental stages and about societies moving from one stage to another. Similar claims appear in interviews and presentations—for example, claims about the proportion of Americans at pluralistic, rational, mythic and Integral stages.

But what exactly is being measured?

What independent instrument establishes that someone is “Green”?

How do we distinguish developmental stage from education, ideology, personality, class, age or political affiliation?

Can independent researchers reproduce the classifications?

Can someone move between categories depending upon the issue?

And, most importantly, can the theory make predictions that could turn out to be wrong?

Without convincing answers, the developmental map remains primarily a philosophical interpretive framework, not an established scientific model of human development.

That does not make it worthless. But it does mean that Wilber should be much more cautious about presenting it as an empirically established description of the evolution of consciousness.

The paradox of “Integral” politics

There is an even deeper irony here.

Wilber's great contribution was supposed to be the ability to hold multiple perspectives simultaneously. Integral theory famously insists that reality cannot be understood from a single quadrant, level, line, state or perspective.

Yet when Wilber discusses contemporary politics, the analysis can become surprisingly one-dimensional.

The complexity of American politics gets compressed into Green versus everyone reacting against Green.

The complexity of the Middle East becomes “they all need therapy.”

The complexity of geopolitical conflicts is subordinated to psychological and developmental categories.

The complexity of political institutions receives less attention than the developmental level of the actors involved.

That is almost the opposite of what an Integral political theory ought to accomplish.

A genuinely integral political analysis would have to take economics, institutions, history, ideology, psychology, culture, technology, geopolitics and individual agency seriously at the same time.

The danger is that the Integral model becomes another reductionism—only now a reductionism in the name of transcending reductionism.

Wilber's strongest point

A fair review should nevertheless acknowledge what Wilber gets right.

There really are important pathological forms of progressive politics. There really is a danger when moral sensitivity becomes moral absolutism. There really are forms of identity politics that fragment rather than integrate. There really are situations in which relativism undermines shared standards of evidence and truth.

And Wilber is right about something more fundamental: political disagreement is not always merely disagreement about facts. People can inhabit different moral worlds, developmental perspectives and conceptions of what counts as a legitimate political concern.

That is an important insight.

But it does not follow that Wilber's particular developmental map is the correct explanation of these differences.

From useful typology to grand theory

This distinction is crucial.

Wilber's categories can be useful as heuristics. They can help us notice that a political conflict may involve different value priorities: order versus freedom, universalism versus particularism, individual rights versus group identity, stability versus transformation.

But a heuristic becomes problematic when it is mistaken for an empirically demonstrated ontology.

“Green,” “Orange,” “Blue” and “Integral” are useful shorthand only if we remember that real human beings are much messier than the boxes.

People can be highly rational in one domain and irrational in another. They can be progressive on economics and conservative on religion. They can reject identity politics while being strongly egalitarian. They can be scientifically sophisticated while holding bizarre political beliefs.

Development does not necessarily move in one direction.

And political maturity does not automatically correlate with a particular developmental stage.

The real Age of Unreason

There is therefore a delicious possibility that Wilber's title points in the wrong direction.

Perhaps the contemporary “Age of Unreason” is not primarily the product of postmodernism.

Perhaps it is the product of the collapse of common epistemic institutions under conditions of mass communication, algorithmic amplification, political polarization, economic inequality and declining trust.

In that case, irrationality is not the inevitable consequence of Green.

It is something produced by a much more complicated interaction between human psychology, technological systems, political institutions and economic incentives.

And that explanation has one major advantage over Wilber's: it does not require us to believe that humanity is currently trapped at one particular stage of consciousness.

Conclusion: Wilber needs more Green, not less

The irony of this interview is that Wilber's own Integral ideal contains the resources for a much better analysis than the one he actually gives.

If Integral means genuinely transcending and including, then Green should not be treated principally as an obstacle to overcome. Its achievements—pluralism, sensitivity to marginalized perspectives, cultural criticism, suspicion of unquestioned authority and awareness of one's own situatedness—need to be preserved and integrated.

At the same time, Green's excesses should certainly be criticized.

But the same standard must be applied to every developmental level.

That means criticizing pathological Blue, pathological Red, pathological Orange and pathological Green.

And it means resisting the temptation to interpret every political disagreement as evidence of somebody else's developmental deficiency.

The most troubling feature of Wilber's recent political commentary is therefore not that he criticizes postmodernism. Much of that criticism is legitimate. It is that his critique of Green has become so dominant that it threatens the very perspectival pluralism that Integral theory was designed to transcend and include.

The best version of Wilber's Integral politics would be considerably less interested in telling us who is “Green” and considerably more interested in explaining how real institutions, economic interests, historical forces, technologies and competing values interact.

That would be a genuinely Integral political theory.

And it would be much more interesting than another diagnosis of the Mean Green Meme.

Appendix: Debunking Wilber's Performative Contradiction Argument

The argument in a nutshell

One of Ken Wilber's favorite objections to postmodernism and relativism is the accusation of performative contradiction. The argument is roughly this: if someone says, “There is no absolute truth,” that person has made an absolute truth claim. If the statement is true, then it contradicts itself. Therefore, radical relativism is logically incoherent.

At first sight this looks devastating. But it only works against a very particular—and rather crude—version of relativism. Once the argument is formulated more carefully, its limitations become apparent.

The first problem is that the statement “There is no absolute truth” is ambiguous. It can mean the very strong proposition that nothing whatsoever is objectively true. But it can also mean something much more modest: that human beings do not possess an infallible, context-free method for establishing ultimate truth. The latter position is not self-contradictory at all. It is a familiar form of epistemic fallibilism.

The difference is crucial. Saying “we have no access to absolute truth” is not the same as saying “there are no truths.” Science, for example, does not need to claim that human knowledge is absolute in order to distinguish reliable knowledge from error.

Confusing truth with certainty

Wilber's argument tends to slide between two quite different concepts: truth and certainty.

A proposition can be true without anybody being absolutely certain that it is true. Conversely, somebody can be absolutely certain of something that is false.

Scientific knowledge is largely built around this distinction. We do not establish the laws of physics by achieving metaphysical certainty. We formulate hypotheses, gather evidence, compare explanations, test predictions and remain prepared to revise our conclusions.

The scientific attitude is therefore neither naïve absolutism nor radical relativism. It is fallibilism.

We can reasonably believe that Earth orbits the Sun, that humans evolved from common ancestors with other primates, or that infectious diseases can be caused by viruses without claiming that our present scientific understanding is infallible or complete.

Wilber's performative-contradiction argument becomes much less impressive once this middle position is recognized.

The real target: radical relativism

There is, however, a legitimate target hiding inside Wilber's argument.

If somebody literally claims:

“No proposition is objectively true.”

then the obvious question is: is that proposition objectively true?

If it is, the statement defeats itself. If it is not, there is no reason for anyone to accept it.

That is indeed a performative contradiction.

But the conclusion that follows is much narrower than Wilber sometimes suggests. Radical truth nihilism is problematic. It does not follow that every form of relativism, perspectivism, constructivism or postmodern philosophy is therefore incoherent.

This is a classic case of defeating a weaker opponent than the one actually under discussion.

Postmodern philosophers differ enormously among themselves. Some reject universal foundations; others emphasize historical situatedness; others distinguish between local and universal claims; still others retain forms of realism while criticizing naïve claims to objective knowledge.

To refute the sentence “there are no truths” is therefore not to refute postmodernism as a whole.

“All truth is perspectival” is not necessarily contradictory

Wilber sometimes approaches another version of the argument: if someone says that all truth is perspectival, they have supposedly made a perspective-independent statement about all truth and have therefore contradicted themselves.

Again, this depends upon what “perspectival” means.

Consider the proposition:

“Every human claim to knowledge is made from some perspective.”

That proposition does not claim to be a perspective-free description of reality. It is a claim about the conditions under which human beings make claims.

There is no contradiction in acknowledging that one's own statement is included within the domain it describes.

The situation is analogous to saying:

“Every map simplifies the territory.”

The map itself is necessarily a simplification. That does not make the statement self-refuting.

Likewise:

“Human knowledge is perspectival.”

can itself be a perspectivally situated but nevertheless well-supported claim.

The fact that a statement has a perspective does not automatically make the statement false.

Self-reference is not automatically contradiction

This is perhaps the most important logical point.

Wilber's argument exploits the intuition that self-reference produces contradiction. But self-reference by itself produces no contradiction whatsoever.

Consider:

“I am speaking English.”

The sentence refers, indirectly, to the circumstances in which it is uttered. It is self-referential in a loose sense, but not contradictory.

Or:

“All statements in this book are written in English.”

If the statement itself is written in English, it is perfectly consistent.

A genuine performative contradiction requires something stronger: the content of the proposition must conflict with the act of asserting it.

The classic example is:

“I am not making any assertion.”

If someone asserts this sentence, there is a genuine tension between what is said and what is being done.

But:

“I cannot establish an absolutely certain foundation for human knowledge”

contains no such contradiction.

The speaker is not claiming certainty. They are explicitly denying that certainty.

The epistemic modesty defense

There is an especially powerful way to expose the weakness of Wilber's argument.

Suppose I say:

“I could be wrong about this.”

Have I contradicted myself?

Obviously not.

In fact, this is a paradigmatic expression of intellectual humility.

Now consider:

“Human beings should remain open to the possibility that their beliefs are mistaken.”

Again, there is no contradiction. The statement recommends a method of inquiry rather than claiming infallible knowledge.

Much of what gets dismissed as “relativism” can be reconstructed in precisely this way.

The position is not:

“Everyone is equally right.”

It is:

“Our claims to knowledge are fallible, so they should remain open to criticism and evidence.”

That is not an attack on reason. It is one of the foundations of modern scientific reasoning.

Wilber's own position creates a problem

There is also an interesting symmetry here.

Wilber frequently presents his own Integral framework as an attempt to see beyond partial perspectives. But Integral theory itself is offered through particular concepts, distinctions, developmental models and interpretive frameworks.

If Wilber argues that postmodernists cannot make truth claims because all claims are situated within perspectives, he risks creating a problem for himself.

His answer is usually that Integral theory can transcend and include perspectives.

But this raises the obvious question: what establishes that Integral theory actually occupies this privileged meta-perspective?

If the answer is that Integral theory recognizes more perspectives than competing theories, that establishes breadth, not truth.

A map containing more territory is not automatically a more accurate map.

If the answer is that higher developmental stages can see truths that lower stages cannot, the argument becomes circular unless there is an independent method for establishing that someone really has reached the supposedly higher stage and that their perceptions are therefore more reliable.

This is particularly important when Integral theory is used to classify critics themselves. If criticism of Integral theory can be explained as the expression of a lower developmental stage, the theory has acquired a convenient immunity to criticism.

The deeper category mistake

Wilber's performative contradiction argument ultimately rests on a category mistake: confusing the existence of objective reality with our ability to describe it without perspective.

These are different questions.

There may well be a reality that exists independently of human minds. A scientific realist can happily accept that.

But it does not follow that any particular human description of that reality is complete, final or perspective-free.

One can therefore consistently affirm all three propositions:

Reality exists independently of us.

Our knowledge of reality is mediated by human conceptual and perceptual frameworks.

Some interpretations of reality are much better supported than others.

There is nothing relativistic or contradictory about this position.

Indeed, it is close to the practical epistemology of science.

From “no absolute truth” to “no absolute authority”

There is another ambiguity worth exposing. When critics of “absolute truth” speak about relativism, they may not be denying objective reality at all. They may instead be rejecting claims to absolute authority.

That distinction is particularly important in politics and religion.

Saying:

“No human institution should be regarded as possessing infallible access to truth”

does not mean:

“Anything anyone believes is equally true.”

The first proposition is compatible with rational inquiry, evidence and objective reality. It simply denies that a particular person, church, ideology or philosophical system possesses an unquestionable epistemic privilege.

Ironically, this is precisely the kind of intellectual humility that Integral theory ought to encourage.

What the argument actually proves

At its strongest, Wilber's performative contradiction argument establishes something quite modest:

A universal assertion that there are no universally true assertions is self-defeating.

That is true.

But it does not establish that:

postmodernism is irrational;

perspectivism is incoherent;

epistemic relativism is impossible;

all truth is absolute;

Integral theory has privileged access to truth;

or developmental-stage theory provides a reliable hierarchy of epistemic authority.

Those conclusions require separate arguments.

And that is where Wilber's case becomes considerably less secure.

A better formulation

The position Wilber attacks can therefore be reformulated in a way that avoids the alleged contradiction:

There may be objective truths, but human beings do not possess an infallible, perspective-free method for identifying them. Consequently, all human knowledge remains provisional, corrigible and open to criticism.

There is nothing self-contradictory about this statement.

Indeed, it describes the basic intellectual posture of science rather well.

The irony is that Wilber's own Integral project would benefit from adopting exactly this degree of epistemic modesty. Integral theory could then be presented as a powerful interpretive framework—one that organizes insights from psychology, philosophy, spirituality and the social sciences—without claiming that disagreement with it is evidence of developmental inferiority.

The performative contradiction argument is therefore not the knockdown refutation of relativism that Wilber sometimes presents it as. It successfully exposes one extreme position—absolute truth nihilism—but it leaves the much more defensible territory of fallibilism, perspectivism and critical realism largely untouched.

And that is precisely where the serious philosophical debate begins.

SEE ALSO

Frank Visser, "An Allergy to Green Goes a Really Long Way, Layman Pascal's Interview with Ken Wilber", www.integralworld.net, December 2024.