Ken Wilber - Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution, Second Edition

Sex, Ecology, Spirituality

The Spirit of Evolution

SECOND EDITION, REVISED

Ken Wilber

SHAMBHALA

Boston & London

2011

SHAMBHALA PUBLICATIONS, INC.

Horticultural Hall

300 Massachusetts Avenue

Boston, Massachusetts 02115

www.shambhala.com

1995, 2000 by Ken Wilber

Cover art: Group ix, series uw The Dove, nr 2 (Lnr 174) by Hilma af Klint. Courtesy of the Hilma af Klint Foundation, Stockholm, Sweden

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wilber, Ken.

Sex, ecology, spirituality: the spirit of evolution / Ken Wilber.2nd ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

eISBN 978-0-8348-2108-8

ISBN 1-57062-744-4 (alk. paper)

1. Cosmology. 2. Consciousness. 3. EvolutionPhilosophy. 4. Whole and parts (Philosophy) 5. God. I. Title.

BD511.W54 2000

110dc21

00-044003

THE GENESIS OF SEX, ECOLOGY, SPIRITUALITY

S EX, ECOLOGY, SPIRITUALITY was the first theoretical book I had written in almost ten years, following the events described in Grace and Grit. The previous book, Transformations of Consciousness (with Jack Engler and Daniel P. Brown), was completed in 1984; I wrote Grace and Grit in 1991; and then I settled down to finally write a textbook of psychology that I had been planning on doing for several years. I was calling that textbook System, Self, and Structure, but somehow it never seemed to get written. Determined to complete it, I sat down and began transcribing the two-volume work, whereupon I realized, with a shock, that four of the words I used in the very first paragraph were no longer allowed in academic discourse (development, hierarchy, transcendental, universal). This, needless to say, put a considerable cramp in my attempt to write this book, and poor System, Self, and Structure was, yet again, shelved. (I recently brought out an abridged version of it with the title Integral Psychology.)

What had happened in my ten-year writing hiatus, and to which I had paid insufficient attention, is that extreme postmodernism had rather completely invaded academia in general and cultural studies in particulareven the alternative colleges and institutes were speaking postmodernese with an authoritarian thunder. The politically correct were policing the types of serious discourse that could, and could not, be uttered in academe. Pluralistic relativism was the only acceptable worldview. It claimed that all truth is culturally situated (except its own truth, which is true for all cultures); it claimed there are no transcendental truths (except its own pronouncements, which transcend specific contexts); it claimed that all hierarchies or value rankings are oppressive and marginalizing (except its own value ranking, which is superior to the alternatives); it claimed that there are no universal truths (except its own pluralism, which is universally true for all peoples).

The downsides of extreme postmodernism and pluralistic relativism are now well known and widely acknowledged, but at the time I was trying to write System, Self, and Structure, they were thought to be gospel and were as religiously embraced, making any sort of developmental and transcendental studies anathema. I therefore set System, Self, and Structure aside and began to ponder the best way to proceed, feeling rather like a salmon who had first to swim upstream in order to have any fun at all.

But I have been dwelling merely on the downsides of postmodernism and pluralistic relativism. Their positive benefits are equally numerous and far-reaching, and deserve a hearing as well. As I have tried to suggest in several places (e.g., The Marriage of Sense and Soul, Integral Psychology, and A Theory of Everything), pluralistic relativism is actually a very high developmental achievement, stemming from the postformal levels of consciousness, which disclose a series of very important truths. (Postformal means the cognitive stages lying immediately beyond linear rationality or formal operational thinking. Thus, cognitive development proceeds from sensorimotor to preoperational to concrete operational to formal operational to postformal cognition, to possibly higher modes [see below]. I also refer to postformal cognition as network-logic or vision-logicGebser called it integral-aperspectivaland it is vision-logic that drives the best of postmodernism.)

As I suggested in those publications, the truths of postmodernism include constructivism (the world is not just a perception but an interpretation); contextualism (all truths are context-dependent, and contexts are boundless); and integral-aperspectivism (no context is finally privileged, so an integral view should include multiple perspectives; pluralism; multi-culturalism). All of those important truths can be derived from the beginning stages of postformal vision-logic, and postmodernism at its best is an elucidation of their profound importance.

In particular, the previous stages of concrete operational (which supports a worldview called mythic-membership) and formal operational (which supports a worldview called universal formalism) have inherent limitations and weaknesses in them, and these limitations, when pressed into social action, produce various types of rigid social hierarchies, mechanistic worldviews that ignore local color, and universalistic pronouncements about human beings that violate the rich differences between cultures, peoples, and places. But once consciousness evolves from formal to postformaland thus evolves from universal formalism to pluralistic relativismthese multiple contexts and pluralistic tapestries come jumping to the fore, and postmodernism has spent much of the last two decades attempting to deconstruct the rigid hierarchies, formalisms, and oppressive schemes that are inherent in the preformal-to-formal stages of consciousness evolution.

But pluralistic relativism is not itself the highest wave of development, as numerous studies have consistently shown (see Integral Psychology). When vision-logic matures into its middle and late phases, pluralistic relativism increasingly gives way to more holistic modes of awareness, which begin to weave the pluralistic voices together into beautiful tapestries of integral intent. Pluralistic relativism gives way to universal integralism. Where pluralism frees the many different voices and multiple contexts, universal integralism begins to bring them together into a harmonized chorus. (Universal integralism thus stands on the brink of even higher developments, which directly disclose the transpersonal and spiritual realmsdevelopments wherein the postformal mental gives way to the postmental or supramental altogether.)

But this leaves pluralistic relativism in a difficult position. Having heroically developed beyond a rigid universal formalism, it became suspicious of any universals at all, and thus it tended to fight the emergence of universal integralism with the same ferocity that it deconstructed all previous systems. It turned its critical guns not just on pre-pluralistic stages (which was appropriate), but also on post-pluralistic stages (which was disastrous). Deconstructive postmodernism thus began to actively fight any higher stages of growth, often turning academia into a charnel ground of deconstructive fury. Little new was created; past glories were simply torn down. Little novel was constructed; previous constructions were merely deconstructed. Few new buildings were erected; old ones were simply blown up. Postmodernism often degenerated into the nihilism and narcissism for which it is now so well known, and the vacant, haunted, hollow eyes of professional academia, peering through the smoking ruins, told the tale most sadly.