• home
• about
• new
• essays
• AI
• book

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).

The Cherry-Picking Charge

A Defense of Focused Critique

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

Among Ken Wilber's devoted followers, one criticism reliably surfaces whenever his work comes under sustained scrutiny: “You're just cherry-picking and nit-picking.” It's a phrase designed to discredit the critic before their arguments can even be heard, implying that the problem lies not with Wilber's claims, but with the critic's methods.

It's worth unpacking this recurring complaint, because it says more about the psychology of “True Believers” than it does about the nature of the critique.

Cherry-Picking or Targeted Analysis?

The charge of cherry-picking assumes that a fair critique must engage equally with all of Wilber's writings—the whole sprawling corpus of books, interviews, online posts, and conference talks. This is an impossible standard. No one demands that a biologist read everything a creationist has ever written before responding to their misuse of evolutionary theory.

In reality, focused critique involves zeroing in on those statements and arguments that are:

• Central to the author's thesis,
• Empirically testable or logically evaluable, and
• Representative of a recurring pattern.

When Wilber claims, for example, that evolution cannot be explained without invoking “Spirit-in-action,” this is not a stray remark. It appears in multiple books, interviews, and online essays across decades. Highlighting it is not cherry-picking—it's addressing a defining feature of his worldview.

Nit-Picking or Pattern Recognition?

Nit-picking implies fussing over irrelevant minutiae—correcting a misplaced comma while ignoring the substance of an argument. But many so-called “minor” points in Wilber's work turn out to have structural significance.

For instance, when Wilber casually misstates a basic point of evolutionary biology, True Believers might dismiss it as a trivial slip. Yet such slips accumulate, revealing an underlying lack of engagement with the science he claims to integrate. What looks like nit-picking in isolation becomes pattern recognition when examined over time.

Why the Accusation Persists

The cherry-picking/nit-picking charge functions as a defensive reflex. It protects the believer from cognitive dissonance by:

• Shifting the focus from the content of the critique to the motives or methods of the critic.
• Creating an impossible standard (“Unless you address the entire oeuvre, your critique is invalid”).
• Framing the critic as unfair, thereby preserving the image of Wilber as unassailable.

For the committed follower, Wilber's work is not a set of claims to be evaluated individually—it's an interconnected worldview. Attack one part and you are perceived to be attacking the whole identity structure that rests on it.

Why Focus on Evolutionary Science?

Some defenders object that my primary focus—Wilber's handling of evolutionary science—is not even his “core business.” They see his evolutionary remarks as peripheral to his real achievements in philosophy and psychology, and therefore unworthy of sustained critique.

This misses the point. Evolution is a litmus test for how seriously Wilber takes the scientific side of his self-proclaimed “integration” of science and spirituality. By choosing evolution—one of the most robust, well-supported, and deeply studied areas of modern science—we can clearly see how his method operates when confronted with a discipline that resists mystical augmentation.

If Wilber's integration cannot handle evolutionary biology without misrepresentation or metaphysical inflation, then what confidence should we have that his integration works better in less empirically secure domains? Evolution is not a random target; it is the perfect case study for stress-testing the “all quadrants, all levels” approach under real scientific pressure.

Furthermore, Wilber himself has chosen to speak about evolution repeatedly and forcefully—even claiming that naturalistic science cannot account for it without invoking a cosmic Eros. Once he makes such claims publicly, they are fair game for examination. The fact that evolutionary theory is not his “specialty” only heightens the need to scrutinize his authority when he presents himself as a reliable interpreter of it.

The “Just Orange” Dismissal

Another favorite move among True Believers is to say my critique is “just” an Orange critique—meaning it supposedly comes only from the modernist, rational-empirical stage of development, and therefore cannot appreciate the “higher ways of knowing” Wilber champions at Green, Teal, Turquoise, and beyond.

This sounds sophisticated, but it is little more than a color-coded ad hominem. It shifts the debate from whether the claims are true to whether the critic is spiritually evolved enough to see their truth. It also assumes—without proof—that so-called “higher” stages automatically grant better insight into empirical matters like evolutionary biology.

The irony is that higher-stage knowing, if it exists, should be able to include and transcend Orange, not bypass or belittle it. In other words: if your lofty vision of Spirit-in-action can't withstand a fact-check from the most basic, consensus-level science, that's not a failing of Orange—it's a failing of your integration.

Framing disagreement as a developmental deficiency also conveniently spares the believer from having to engage with the specific counter-evidence. The critic's alleged “lower altitude” becomes the reason the critique can be ignored. It's a spiritually flavored version of “you just don't get it.”

In practice, this move undermines the very inclusivity Wilber's model claims to honor. A genuinely integral approach would not rank epistemologies in a way that makes empirical falsifiability optional. It would see scientific rigor as a foundation, not a disposable rung on the ladder to higher consciousness.

The Real Work of Critique

A serious critic does not need to be an encyclopedic commentator. They need to identify where the claims are wrong, unsupported, or incoherent—especially where those claims are central to the author's project. This is the work of intellectual hygiene, not malice.

In Wilber's case, the repeated highlighting of certain flawed arguments is not because they are the only arguments he makes, but because they are the weak points on which the larger edifice depends. If these points fail, the structure above them wobbles.

Conclusion

The cherry-picking complaint is a rhetorical smokescreen. It mistakes selectivity—an inevitable feature of all focused analysis—for bias or dishonesty. A critique that returns to the same examples year after year is not nit-picking. It is simply insisting that unanswered questions and uncorrected errors remain on the table, no matter how much the faithful might wish them away.

In the end, a critic's job is not to present a “balanced” bouquet of an author's strengths and weaknesses, but to examine the thorns where the stems are weakest. If that feels like cherry-picking to True Believers, it may be because the cherries in question are rotting.