• 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 Problem of Integral Developmentalism

A Response to Steve McIntosh on Islam

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

Introduction

In his recent essay “Fostering Evolution in Islamic Societies”[1], Steve McIntosh once again applies his familiar framework of “evolution in consciousness” to a global religious and political question. His basic thesis is that the Islamic world, still largely operating from a “traditional” or “premodern” worldview, can only overcome its present crises by evolving toward a “post-postmodern” or “integrative” stage of development.

This is, in many ways, the Integral diagnosis in miniature: history as a series of expanding worldviews, each transcending and including the previous one. Yet when this schema is applied to Islam—or to any living civilization—its limitations become painfully clear. McIntosh's noble moral intention ends up reproducing the very hierarchy it claims to transcend.

The Developmental Template

McIntosh's model assumes that cultures evolve through recognizable stages:

• Traditional—mythic, communal, religious;
• Modern—rational, scientific, individualistic;
• Postmodern—pluralistic, egalitarian, relativistic;
• Post-postmodern—integrative, developmental, spiritually renewed.

Islam, in his view, remains stuck in the first phase. The Western world has, at least partially, moved through the second and third. What is needed, he argues, is an integral synthesis that honors Islam's virtues while helping it to “catch up” developmentally.

This sounds reasonable at first, but it carries a hidden presupposition: that the Western historical trajectory provides the universal yardstick for measuring all cultures. The idea that “traditional ? modern ? postmodern ? integral” is a global law of consciousness is simply an updated form of Hegelian Eurocentrism, baptized in spiritual language.

The Problem of Civilizational Essentialism

McIntosh treats “Islam” as if it were a single entity—a civilization that can be placed at a definite point on the developmental ladder. Yet Islam is not a monolith. It encompasses mystical Sufism, philosophical rationalism, scriptural literalism, modernist reformism, secular humanism, and everything in between. To call “Islam” premodern is like calling “the West” postmodern—both are generalizations so broad they obscure more than they reveal.

There are modern and postmodern Muslims, just as there are premodern and anti-modern Westerners. The developmental map dissolves once we acknowledge this internal diversity.

The Mirage of Linear Evolution

Integral developmentalism borrows its authority from the metaphor of personal growth—the idea that individuals move from child to adult, from egocentric to worldcentric. McIntosh extends this to cultures. But historical change does not follow a neat sequence of stages. It is not linear but dialectical, recursive, and often chaotic. Cultures hybridize, regress, and mutate, rather than simply “mature.”

Moreover, when the metaphor of psychological growth is applied to civilizations, it smuggles in a subtle hierarchy: some cultures are “more evolved” than others. This logic of spiritual progress is indistinguishable from the old colonial trope of “civilizing the natives”—except that the missionary has been replaced by the integralist.

Missing the Material Dimension

McIntosh locates Islam's problems primarily in consciousness—in the persistence of mythic belief and the lack of pluralistic values. But the turmoil in the Islamic world cannot be understood apart from colonial history, Western intervention, economic dependency, and geopolitical exploitation. Reducing these structural factors to a “worldview lag” is a form of spiritual idealism that moralizes suffering instead of explaining it.

Cultural transformation is inseparable from political and material conditions. Consciousness may shape history, but history also shapes consciousness—and usually the latter does most of the work.

Ignoring Islam's Internal Pluralism

A serious engagement with Islam must begin with its own interpretive traditions. The Qur'an, the schools of jurisprudence, and the Sufi metaphysics of Ibn Arabi or Rumi all contain resources for reinterpreting revelation in more universal and humane terms. McIntosh's essay never mentions them. Islam is treated as an object of Western spiritual management, not as a self-renewing tradition capable of internal evolution.

If integral philosophy truly believes in the universality of Spirit, it should expect that Spirit to speak in Islamic idioms too—not only through postmodern Western theorists.

The Paternalism of Integral Universalism

McIntosh's tone is benevolent, even compassionate, yet unmistakably paternalistic. The developmental narrative assigns to integral thinkers the role of global tutors. They occupy the “leading edge” of evolution and must help others ascend. But this self-conception replicates the very hierarchy of consciousness that it claims to transcend. The Integral vision of “evolution in consciousness” easily becomes a spiritualized ideology of Western superiority.

Integral Theory's Persistent Blind Spot

This essay exemplifies a broader tendency in post-Wilberian thought: the inflation of consciousness as the master variable of history. Once everything is framed as a question of developmental stages, concrete political, economic, and historical realities disappear behind a metaphysical curtain.

The result is a strangely bloodless moralism—confident about the direction of evolution, but helpless before the messiness of the real world.

What Can Be Salvaged

To be fair, McIntosh is right about one thing: modernity and postmodernity have not solved the problem of meaning, and religious traditions continue to provide vital moral orientation. His insistence that spirituality must evolve rather than be discarded is both wise and necessary.

But spiritual evolution cannot be charted on a single map. It must be understood as a plural and context-bound process, emerging within each tradition according to its own logic. To impose a developmental hierarchy on this diversity is to mistake a Western self-narrative for a universal law.

Conclusion

Steve McIntosh's essay is animated by genuine goodwill—a desire to overcome the clash of civilizations through consciousness evolution. Yet his developmental approach repeats the very error it hopes to correct: it projects Western categories onto the rest of humanity, assuming that the ladder of spiritual progress has the same rungs for everyone.

Islam does not need to “evolve” into integral consciousness; it needs to find within itself the resources for renewal, justice, and pluralism. The task for Integral philosophy is not to lecture other civilizations, but to deconstruct its own myth of higher development.

Only then can we move from the hubris of hierarchy to the humility of dialogue.

NOTES

[1] Steve McIntosh, "Fostering Evolution in Islamic Societies: A Strategy to Defeat Radical Islamism", Substack, November 4, 2025.