Originally published at: https://integrallife.com/a-view-from-somewhere-an-introduction-to-metatheory/
Bruce Alderman and Mark Edwards explore how integrative metatheory can illuminate and address the interconnected crises of our time. Through themes such as navigating hyperobjects, the role of storytelling in fostering collaboration, and the challenges posed by algorithmic fragmentation, they advocate for integrative thinking that balances big-picture reflection with grounded, actionable practice.
Mark and Bruce,
Many thanks for your rich, edifying, and fascinating dialogue. The development and proliferation of the podcast format and its cousins (like Integral Life media), offer many opportunities to super charge growth and offset the negative effect of algorithmic undertow provided, of course, one wisely self-mediates one’s screen time.
There were so many highlights, it was hard to keep up. Suffice to say I think your dialectic has provided vocabulary and tools and a map for all of us to navigate our way through the overwhelming complexity of our post-post-modern world while providing the framework for diagnosing our problems and prescribing interventions in all four quadrants, the latter being a particularly valuable set of injunctions. Mark’s concept of the night sky being humanity’s first screen is a powerful image, and his emphasis on stories to illuminate our current human condition is spot on.
One of the tasks I’d like to perform is to translate some of the academic jargon used here to language more easily accessible to a general audience. While terms like “stratified alienation,” “developmental gap,” “homeomorphic equivalences,” “relevance realization,” “epistemic bubble,” “dialectic of presence and absence,” “algorithmic undertow,” “demi-reality,” “digital reality tunnel,” and the like convey deep meaning to the initiated, they generally cause most eyes to glaze over.
For example, “epistemic bubble” makes me think of farting in a bathtub. And here’s the thing: As the passed gas rises through the water and breaks the surface, we notice the smell. Likewise, as the sudden realization of our own epistemic bubble breaks the surface of our awareness, we notice the aroma. Some say the BBC bubble smells way better than the Fox News bubble, some the reverse. But/and here’s another thing, and it might help us laugh at ourselves and so not take ourselves so seriously: both are farts. And the really weird thing is, the more all of our epistemic bubbles come to the surface and pop into our consciousness, and the more we take deep, deep breaths, the better off we will be.
Before proceeding further, and for the record, I would like to explicitly acknowledge my priors (as you did Bruce): I declare myself an unrepentant conservative and member of Jonah Goldberg’s Remnant.
As a quick introduction that may help further situate my current place in whatever serves as the Kosmic Address White Pages, I am a 66 year-old semi-retired (I substitute teach) resident of Eastern Washington; half my working life was spent as a blue collar man (cue the Styx song of that title); the other half of my employment was teaching at the middle and high school level; in no particular order: twelve years in two different Yupik villages in Southwest Alaska, ten years teaching English at Barrow High School in Utqiagvik, Alaska, and three and half years in Chicago Public Schools and a suburban district.
Half a lifetime ago, while living for a time in Denver while my life continued its slow motion derailment, a therapist and men’s group leader gave me his beat up hardcover copy of Ken Wilber’s Up From Eden, a book that ultimately transformed my life. (Shorty after devouring it, I scrapped together enough money to buy, from Tattered Cover Union Station , a first edition Sex, Ecology, and Spirituality signed by the author.) It has taken me three decades of recovery, healing, and growth to get me to where I am now, and I’m not going to stop walking that path until I take my last breath.
I regularly listen to Witt and Wisdom, The Ken Show, and various other offerings from Integral Life; The Remnant podcast, Commentary Magazine Podcast, and The Dispatch Podcast, among others. I also subscribe to the online publications The New York Times, The Dispatch, National Review, and Commentary Magazine, and regularly consume NBC News and Yahoo News.
All this to establish my bona fides for a brief critique of Mark’s praise of Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Bernie Sanders, as well as his micturating, from a great height, on conservatives. I trust, Mark, that you will take this, as I am doing my best to do, in the spirit of your excellent essay “On Being Critical.”
Your praise of Biden, Harris, and Sanders puzzles me in a forum like this, as I think assuming a more or less politically neutral position would have been more appropriate. Being so overtly partisan invites criticism and narrows the audience of people who might otherwise be willing to listen to you.
Seeing you brought the subject up, I feel obliged to say, as a conservative and/but Never-Trumper (from the beginning: https://www.nationalreview.com/2015/06/witless-ape-rides-escalator-kevin-d-williamson/), and as a human being, I consider the presidency of Joe Biden to have been, overall, a failure. There are many reasons for this I won’t get into here, but consider one easily measurable metric: Joe Biden’s (and his progressive Democratic Party’s) most important job, and you may even agree with me, was to prevent the election of Donald Trump to a second term – and how did that turn out? How and why that happened is certainly debatable, but it is an unpleasant reality that in my opinion won’t be explained by claiming that Trump’s plurality is the sole, or even main, result of stories Trump voters told themselves that were “false but still real.” To the extent that they did tell themselves just so stories because they got their (dis- or mis-)information from foul epistemic bubbles, it is my view that the progressive voter did too. No side has a monopoly of virtue here.
I’d be more inclined give Democratic and progressive folks more of a hearing if they were to start examining their own priors and roles (Ezra Klein is beginning to do so) in my country’s failure to stop Trump’s ascent to a second term.
There is an institution that polices its own side, often savagely, and it’s a conservative online publication called The Dispatch, founded by Jonah Goldberg and Steve Hayes after they both quit Fox News following the latest Tucker Carlson outrage (The propaganda film Patriot Purge.). Five years later, The Dispatch is going strong and growing, and it is my opinion that the best conservative thought can be found there; some of it is 2nd tier.
In closing, it is my self appointed task to introduce AQAL and Ken Wilber to the wider audience of Dispatch subscribers by commenting on the forum following most articles, and by writing emails and open letters to several of their writers.
I invite you both to give this online publication a try, and I look forward to seeing your subsequent presentations.
Cordially,
Dave Horwath
PS. Bruce: Are you going to name names regarding the “people in the integral community who have fundamentally different interpretations of events and figures in very very profound ways that are sometimes baffling to (you)?” Inquiring minds want to know.
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Nomali nailed it at about 1:48 when she asked Bruce and Mark about making this stuff relevant. I renewed my subscription just to access the entire (brutal) talk, in order to confirm my bias that it would likely be full of charts and graphs, and arcane language only spoken by what I imagine to be an ever-shrinking Integral cadre that keeps doubling down on their convictions of importance. I’d highly recommend leaving the charts and graphs at home, and work at deleting a few syllables here and there.
“Secular” gurus get stuck in their science-based “flatland” and tend to ignore the deeper source, Spirituality. I did hear Nomali mention “spirit” once, and I think Mark did as well, but it seems the BIG component in all this existential handwringing still sits on the bench.
There is no reason that humanity has to continue, but we seem to be stuck with the notion that it must. I think that when vigilance and care, combined with compassion (I didn’t hear “compassion” mentioned at all), and waking up to “Source” come into play, then those “trauma-producing problems” that first present as “bigger than our worlds,” will serve as transformative catalysts. As they say, “there are no atheists in foxholes.”
I find myself at a crossroads with the concept of climate change. While I recognize its prominence in post-modern discussions, I struggle to align with the urgency and consensus that surrounds it in many circles. My skepticism isn’t rooted in denial but rather in a need for a deeper, more personal understanding that transcends what I perceive as social cues or collective agreement.
I’m aware that many integral thinkers, who I respect for their ability to synthesize complex information across disciplines, see climate change as a critical issue. This makes me question whether my current perspective might be underdeveloped or perhaps missing some crucial insights that are evident to those with a broader, more integrated view of the world.
I’m eager to learn more and understand if there’s a layer of comprehension I’m not yet accessing. Could it be that my skepticism is a reflection of where I am in my developmental journey, rather than a flaw in the argument for climate change? I’m open to exploring this further, perhaps through engaging with different metatheoretical perspectives or diving deeper into the evidence and narratives that shape this global conversation.
I invite those who see climate change through the lens of integral theory or other metatheoretical frameworks to share their insights, not to convince but to help broaden my horizon. How have you reconciled or integrated this knowledge into your worldview? What made the reality of climate change undeniable to you beyond social consensus?"
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I appreciate the humility that you have brought to your query. To answer your questions directly, three factors contribute to my view that climate change is real: first, personal observation of changing weather patterns in locales where I have lived longer than a decade; secondly, the majority of scientist in the world tell us it is so and present clear evidence, including that most of the change is due to human activity; and finally, I think it is best summed up by a Biblical phrase:" speak to the Earth and it will teach thee and the fishes of the sea shall declare unto thee." Speaking to the Earth can be done in various ways, in the shamanic vein for instance, shamanism having arisen during the magical stage of cultural development. While it is certainly not necessary to embrace such talk in order to recognize climate change, neither does it hurt. An aside: there is a general inclination to think of waking up as going straight to a non-dual realization, but one can also wake up to the psychic self and the subtle self and subtle Energies which are helpful in speaking to the Earth. So it is definitely the rational/ scientific as well as a spiritual perspective and experiences that account for my view of the legitimacy of climate change. Certainly the green stage of development/ postmodernist people speak of climate change as they are environmentally attuned, but scientists at the rational stage also speak of it, as do integral folks who are including all perspectives. You referred to yourself as being skeptical, neither believing nor denying. There is a website called skeptical science that you might want to check out. And as you probably know , both the US government and the UN have climate change information at their sites . As to your other question, I am reconciled to the fact that perhaps as many as 70% of the world’s population are at pre-rational levels of development, which accounts for some but not all of the lackadaisical attitudes and lethargy in addressing climate on a larger scale; as the saying goes , hurts more and bothers me less . I am also aware that all forms change and die, disappear from ordinary vision, from frogs to forests to folks. It’s the way of things, as is the emergence of new forms. Creation, sustainment, dissolution, creation, sustainment, dissolution… on and on and on, perhaps. This all sounds so clinical , so let me end with a few lines from a Yoko Ono song I used to sing all the time: I love you Earth, you are beautiful, I Love The Way You Are. I love your mountains, I love your valleys, in fact I love you everyday. I love you, I love you, I love you Earth. I love you, I love you, I love you Earth. 
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Greetings LaWanna, and thanks for the Skeptical Science link. Sadly, evidence supports such massive archives of hard data can’t find a foothold when it comes to the below:
“… our brain is hard-wired to protect you – which can lead to reinforcing your opinions and beliefs, even when they’re misguided. Winning a debate or an argument triggers a flood of hormones, including dopamine and adrenaline. In your brain, they contribute to the feeling of pleasure you get during sex, eating, roller-coaster rides – and yes, winning an argument. That rush makes you feel good, maybe even invulnerable. It’s a feeling many people want to have more often…” - from Cognitive Biases and Brain Biology Help Explain Why Facts Don’t Change Minds - UConn Today
I’d like to get the Skeptical Science folks together with the brain biology folks of this article.
Keeps coming back to UL as the main player here, but we’re not ready for that, apparently.
Here we are!
After over 50 years of ongoing ecological collapses in various bioregions!
After over 40 years of economic resources shifting from the 90% in the 1950s to the 10% in the 2010s in supposedly democratic nations!
After many centuries of supposedly powerful agencies failing in their social responsibilities to generate caring flourishing communities for everybody with everybody in which all people participate in various duties of care across all generations of all living beings.
Hey Sidra, how are you? Yes, the lack of an interdiscipinary approach is too common in far too many fields–not to mention trans- and arch-disciplinary approaches (as spoken of by Robb Smith in the Big Picture Mind recent piece). We have a long ways to go. However, per the quote you provided, while the hard-wired brain in its protective facility can lead to the reinforcing of opinions, and in general probably often does, it doesn’t have to and doesn"t always, I don’t believe. Our UL consciousness can observe that our opinions are being reinforced, and our responses to that, including physiological and psychological ones, and we can choose a more neutral or objective or open stance to opinions different from those we hold. Granted, this is probably rare for most people, but it’s possible. My post was in response to @David_McLeod who presented as unopinionated about climate change, and if that’s so, then maybe there’s something there useful to him.
On the ecological front, i wonder why the “not Right Wing” go all in on climate change as the thing they want to scientifically prove - and fail.
Climate changes. The planet goes through hot and cold periods naturally. To try and prove change is human created rather is problematic. First we would need to have a mathematical model of all prior periods explained, which we dont have. Only when we can mathmatically model all prior cycles can we the claim to “prove” the current trend is a deviation.
As an anti-industrialist, I have to concede the Right’s point that human generated climate change is not, actually “proven” and it is unscientific to claim so
Meanwhile here is a sampling of proven and immediate health concerns created by industries.
- plastics in the food chain
- heavy metals in the food chain
- pesticides in humans - which cause health problems
- hormones in food - which cause health issues like obesity and man boobs
- the great garbage island in the pacific
- air quality causing increased asthma in children
- “downwinder” cancers caysed by nuclear testing
- The hidden depression epidemic created by the modern lifestyle which in turn perpetuates drug addiction, obesity and all the related health effects
- acidic rain requiring more chemicals to grow food
- destruction of the earths topsoil caused by industrial farming which turns fertile farmland into watelands
- impotence and infertility directly caused by the unhealthy modern lifestyle
My suggestion is that the Left likes to hang its cross on unwinnable positions rather than actually change their “comfotable” consumption based lifestyle. Climate change is vague enough that it allows tbe Left to keep its righteous indignation while actually accomplishing nothing