Exposed! On Bill Harryman’s exposé on Marc Gafni’s personal relationships

I know people on the Integral blogs have been chatting a lot about sexual abuse allegations, and I’ve been watching the flow of discourse and contemplating when and how to best wade into the discussion. But I’d rather talk about a movie just now. Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion is the most compelling and intelligent film I’ve seen in years, unrivaled in the complexity and nuance with which it examines ethics in a time of worldwide crisis.

The character closest to the role of villain is Allen (Jude Law), a conspiracy theorist and blogger drunk on his own power. At his worst, Allen incites death-dealing public panic and engages in unethical and illegal profiteering as a result of his blogging. When at last Allen is arrested, a cop says to him, “If I could lock up your computer too, I would.”

Despite his corruption, Allen leaves the jail defiant and unremorseful, so convinced of his righteousness that he continues his past behavior without pause. He’s a white knight to many. He’s one to tell truth to power, they might say. He engages in “real journalism,” they might say.

Allen is close to a villain, but he seems to have a legitimate role to play. He exposes a questionable and possibly illegal communication between Dr. Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne), a high-up figure at the Centers for Disease Control, and his girlfriend. He promotes a homeopathic remedy whose impact on the MEV-1 virus might be beneficial. He applies pressure on the government to communicate more clearly and directly.

Allen is deeply immersed in a postmodern worldview, caught up in its suspicion towards those in power, quick to shine a spotlight on selfish motivations and power interests, and eager to deconstruct the narratives offered by establishment players. He uses his blog as a vehicle of performance art because it’s the only tool in his arsenal to combat the crisis all around him.

He never even notices that he is making matters worse (by inciting panic) or directing precious attention into diversionary sideshows (by revealing Dr. Cheever’s scandal). At a time when the world most needs clear-headed leadership, he creates doubt and division. At a time when the world needs to generate new systems more highly integrated than ever before, he gets people to think about personalities and peccadilloes instead of policies and programs.

The Dr. Marc Gafni sideshow

Recently Bill Harryman has pushed controversy about a spiritual teacher out of private conversations into the blogosphere, where he insisted that “Integral Leadership” must comment on his scandalous posts and Facebook updates or they’re chicken. The point of all this, he says:

My mission is to help prevent any other women from being victimized by Marc Gafni.

I don’t know Marc Gafni personally; however, I enjoyed his leadership of the ISE 2 event last year. By almost all accounts, he’s a flawed but enormously talented man with a great many gifts to offer the world. I’m not deeply familiar with his writings, but I respect the work he’s done in building more complex and post-conventional ways of thinking about a variety of subjects.

Gafni has also taken a fair amount of criticism of his behavior involving past teacher/student relationships. Most recently, he’s been accused of having polyamorous relationships with two women who consented both to the relationship and to keeping it secret. One of them wrote:

I am a fully empowered adult woman who has been working on behalf of what I want to bring into the world. In the natural course of doing so, I have stepped into many different roles and ways of relating, and done so in the most responsible way I know. One of these included for a time an intimate dynamic with Marc that expressed itself sexually. To suggest that this violated our student-teacher relationship, or that I was in any way victimized, is actually a degradation of the feminine, and of the masculine too.

Gafni’s paid a heavy price for the mistakes he’s made over the past five years, having been expelled from various spiritual groups. Most recently, he’s lost a publishing deal with Tami Simon (according to information published on Bill Harryman’s blog) and even Integral Life is severing its ties with Gafni and his organization, saying among other things, “we will keep fire starters away from our home.”

Firestarters and firefighters

Robb Smith, CEO of Integral Life, wrote a post on the controversy called “Where I Stand.” He clearly and concisely unpacked the Integral community’s ambivalent relationship with Marc, who he has called a friend, and acknowledges that his past defense of Marc may not have been the right call.

Robb focuses attention on changes that must be made (e.g., an ethics policy for IL contributors) so lessons are learned and mistakes not repeated. All in all, I’d characterize his approach as clarity within complexity, a forward-leaning orientation that isn’t afraid to acknowledge that there is messiness and ambiguity not easily tackled in a blog post.

Overall, when I read the responses of Diane Hamilton, Tami Simon, Marcy, and even Marc Gafni himself, I am proud of the caliber of intelligence and compassion and level-headedness displayed by all. Nowhere do I get the feeling that Integral Leadership is defending a fiefdom or angling to defend a lucrative niche or sweeping shadows under the carpet.

The major players in the drama exude sincerity and a strong desire to do what’s right, not fear or anger. Nowhere do I get the sense that anyone is acting merely to defend his/her own behavior instead of acting with genuine concern for bringing into the world a greater truth and goodness that is wanting to emerge.

Gafni’s own passionate defense of post-conventional relationships, polyamory, and post-postmodern analysis of power dynamics is a compelling read … even if one wishes that the author wasn’t such a highly interested party to the astute analysis. One isn’t quite sure whether Marc is a fire starter, or a man who mostly shows up at the scene of a burning bush.

When bloggers attack

Scandals among leadership occur in every organization, party, and movement … and the Integral movement is no exception. But without the activity of Bill Harryman’s “attack dog” blog posts, might the whole thing have played out differently? And if so, would it have been for better or for worse?

Here’s where I stand. I think Bill’s blog posts were fair game and conducted with well-intentioned desire to publish the truth, even if doing so put a great big target on Bill’s back. I’m glad he wrote on the topic and grateful he had the courage to bring up uncomfortable subjects. I think he had (and still has) a valuable role to play in the unfolding of the story.

But let’s not pretend that Bill’s posts were a great model of second-tier or integral consciousness at work. He certainly exploited a legitimate investigative journalistic opportunity in writing about the story he did, but his work is tainted by his avowed motivation: a crusade to prevent women from being “victimized” by Marc Gafni.

Bill insists that he’s motivated by concern for abused women, and I am not interested in questioning his motivations per se. But within what bigger context is his concern situated, and how is the concern variously constructed by different worldviews operating in our midst? Bill seems merely to buy into the usual understandings of victimhood in our culture. Where is the integral vision and how does it show up in his blogging? To be blunt, any semblance of an Integral approach is missing-in-action on Harryman’s “Integral Options Cafe.”

In Bill’s story, he’s the hero and Marc’s the villain. But maybe the truth is more complex than that. Maybe there are no heroes and villains. Bill’s attitude reminds me of the character of Allen in Soderberg’s Contagion, a man too caught up in his worldview to see it and too caught up in his story of victims and villains to see his own place.

Allen had a valuable role to play in exposing Dr. Cheever’s failings, leading to the scheduling of government hearings on the alleged ethical breach by a CDC leader. Nobody can deny that Allen got the truth out there. But it’s postmodernism that gives the most honor to such heroes as Allen, for its worldview of suspicion and its ethics of interrogation knows nothing better to value.

An Integral perspective values bloggers and journalists who break new investigative territory, for sure. But we also look at the context of the investigation, and whether that context is served better by non-interrogatory modalities. Instead of writing an exposé, we wonder if the situation is more skillfully handled in another way. We stand ready to expose when it’s the best thing to do, and we stand willing to give up a scoop for the benefit of a greater wholeness.