Andrew Sullivan sums up his argument with the Social Gospel variety of Christianity — which he equates with a cooptation of Christianity by socialism and redistributionism, a position towards which Obama leans, he claims – in this way:

[I]t isn’t about encouraging charity; it is about the enforcement of “charity” by the strong hand of the state. And in so far as it forcibly takes people’s property from them, it also diminishes their capacity for real charity.

Now, saints are very rare.

And the kind of voluntary communism of which Merton speaks likely only in monasteries and religious orders. In the world as it is, there should be some mandatory public provision for the poor, the sick and the indigent. But it should be a safety-net to avoid specific social evils, not a system of redistribution to construct some notion of “social justice” (see Chapter 6 in “The Conservative Soul”). In the end, the social Gospel can make Christianity less, rather than more, likely. The state cannot experience faith; and it cannot express charity. Only individuals can. One by one. (emphasis mine)

Is it really so self-evident that only individuals, and not collective entities, are capable of “experiencing faith” or “expressing charity”? And that Christianity is essentially a religion concerned only with the individual soul, the I-Thou relationship between One Supreme God and The Individual Soul? Andrew Sullivan, like many Christians, thinks so. But this assumption has been fundamentally questioned by many Christian theologians at least since the late 19th century (including the early but not the later Reinhold Niebuhr), and is explicitly disavowed by liberation theology, arguably the most significant paradigm shift in theology in the past 40 years. Today, many Christians believe that groups as well as individuals embody the Spirit and have a role in salvation (Matthew 18: “For where two or three are gathered together in My name, I am there in the midst of them.”)

It may be literally true that a collective cannot “experience faith” or “express charity”, but can’t a collective embody greater or lesser degrees of cohesion, integration, and self-awareness? In fact, social scientists since Jean Gebser have argued that societies progress from archaic to magical to mythical to mental to integral stages of consciousness. Political structures, too, seem to range from those which enfold low to high degrees of consciousness (anarchic to tribal to authoritarian to democratic to social-democratic). One needn’t be an orthodox Hegelian–believing in the inevitable triumph of Absolute Spirit–to observe that some societies appear to experience and express greater complexity, harmony, and humanity than others. When a liberation theologian says that God is the force of expanding freedom and goodness in history, or when an integral theologian says that some social arrangements “enfold” more consciousness than others, they recognize God (or consciousness) as present in the empowering group, the virtuous neighborhood, the charitable organization, and–yes–the good state.

Christian Individualists will never look for God anywhere other than an individual’s own “personal” soul, and so they will never see God’s presence in and beyond individuals. More transpersonal thinkers–shifting from instrumental reasoning (orange) to vision-logic reasoning (green to turquoise)–know that God is neither strictly individual nor collective. We see that salvation is irreducibly relational and therefore Christian virtue expresses itself necessarily in individuals and groups. Government is, therefore, not an enemy of the soul, but a partner in the arising of the Christian vision of a “shining city on a hill” and “new heavens and new earth”.

Andrew Sullivan’s version of Christian Individualism says that the virtue of groups is likely in monasteries and religious orders, not civic institutions, and certainly not the dreaded federal government! His greatest fear, it seems, is Christianism–the ideology of wielding the Christian religion as a political force, conflating church and state. His criticism really only stings when it’s applied to pre-rational (amber or lower) ideologies: the Christian right, or Islamism, for example. Andrew thinks his critique of Christianism is damning also for the political left–Social Gospel Christians, Barack Obama, and so forth–but this misses the importance of the distinction between prerational and transrational religion. In its transrational forms, religion grasps the necessity to separate church and state by assuring an individual’s freedom of religion. But the spiritual left also sees that individual rights are best protected when they are legitimized and grounded in a theology of a liberating God (or a philosophy of evolving consciousness/Spirit). The spiritual left doesn’t want to impose its religion on everyone else. It respects religious freedom because it sees the arising of individual liberty itself as a reflection of the divine.

Christian Individualists will have none of that. They malign efforts to create a more virtuous government or a just society as somehow getting in the way. If government makes health care affordable, this is bad because it denies good people the ability to cultivate their individual virtue by giving charity to the less fortunate. If government does anything to address the “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” nature of human existence, then this is bad because it makes faith in an otherworldly God and an otherworldly salvation less pressing. As Andrew says, “in the end”, Christianity becomes “less likely”. Or something like that.

Will solving America’s health care crisis really make Christianity less likely? Will making our taxation progressive? Will regulating carbon emissions? Will protecting children from toxins and overseeing food safety? Will enacting Barack Obama’s progressive agenda? I guess if any of these things will actually make Christianity less likely (and I see no real evidence), then that’s a price this Christian is willing to pay. Because in the end, a Christianity that is rendered unnecessary by an evolving social consciousness is no form of the religion worth keeping around.

Technorati Tags: Andrew Sullivan, Christianity, integral, liberation theology, Obama, politics, religious right, social evolution, Social Gospel, social justice, spiritual left

Reading from Joe Perez’s Soulfully Gay:

Wednesday, Dec. 31

Did Jesus really rise from the dead? For the first time in many years, my answer to this question is Yes, I do believe. What changed? Part of the answer involves a story of a riddle from my past: a troubling breakdown and spiritual experience at age 30, confinement in a psychiatric ward for a time, visions in a hospital room, and an unexpected sight outside my room. I told this story in my journal (see entries on June 8 and June 15), and I’ll have a bit more to say about it. And part of the answer involves a topic I’ve written about: my encounter with the integral philosophy. But for now, here’s how the story ends: my mind accepts the reality of the resurrection….

Technorati Tags: Christ, Christianity, integral, Jesus, Joe Perez, resurrection, Soulfully Gay

Since it’s Independence Day weekend, I guess it’s time for the obligatory post on patriotism. I’ll keep it short, though (still blogging by Internet cafe). I’m inclined to strongly disagree with both Peter Beinart of Time and Matthew Yglesias of The Atlantic on the nature of patriotism in the United States. The former, Beinart, writes:

If conservatives tend to see patriotism as an inheritance from a glorious past, liberals often see it as the promise of a future that redeems the past. Consider Obama’s original answer about the flag pin: “I won’t wear that pin on my chest,” he said last fall. “Instead, I’m going to try to tell the American people what I believe will make this country great, and hopefully that will be a testimony to my patriotism.” Will make this country great? It wasn’t great in the past? It’s not great as it is?

The liberal answer is, Not great enough. For liberals, America is less a common culture than a set of ideals about democracy, equality and the rule of law. American history is a chronicle of the distance between those ideals and reality. And American patriotism is the struggle to narrow the gap. Thus, patriotism isn’t about honoring and replicating the past; it’s about surpassing it.

But the latter, Yeglesias, disagrees. He says:

As a July 5 observation on patriotism, it’s become increasingly common to think that there’s a liberal form of patriotism and a conservative form, and that the liberal form has something to do with a self-critical spirit whereas conservatives take on a more of a “my country right or wrong” attitude. You can see Peter Beinart for some well-done thoughts along these lines.

Increasingly, though, I think this is wrong and would instead describe the liberal attitude toward patriotism as a special case of the kind of thing Richard Rorty deals with in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Up on a terrace yesterday with a bunch of somewhat buzzed people watching fireworks and shouting taunts against England and Canada and extolling the virtues of America as seen in explosions, loud noises, old TV theme songs, and grilled meats it seemed to me that the liberal experience of patriotism is really just the same as the conservative one….

All of which is to say the liberal doesn’t, as a political matter, confuse the emotions of patriotism with a description of objective reality or anticipate that the citizens of Iraq or Russia or China or wherever will drop their own patriotisms and come to see things our way. Patriotism is a sentiment about your particular country but it’s also a sentiment that’s much more widespread than any particular country, and if you can’t understand the full implications of that then you’re going to go badly wrong.

My thoughts are closer to those of Bill Harryman of, er, the Integral Options Cafe, who–like all Integral thinkers–takes psycho-cultural development seriously. He writes:

McCain, as near as I can tell, is highly nationalistic, somewhat ethnocentric, and largely neo-conservative in his fiscal and social views. On the other hand, Obama has a stong faith in a mythic religion, is very comfortable with relativistic social views, seems to desire a more compassionate government, and is apparently capable of thinking in terms of systems within a complex and chaotic world (beyond black, white, or gray).

Beinart’s view that left and right have different views of patriotism is certainly closer to the truth than Yglesias, but both miss the crux of the difference. Bottom line: Obama and McCain have fundamentally different outlooks on patriotism because the political values of each are shaped by different levels of consciousness. With McCain, with a more ethnocentric (and therefore less evolved) perspective, it’s always America-first. Obama, with a somewhat more worldcentric (and therefore more evolved) perspective, it’s America-in-progress, America as one leading nation of the world, and America-the-many.

The more ethnocentric your worldview, the more you are to hold strongly to a patriotic attitude towards your country. (There’s an interesting argument to be made that patriotism can’t meaningfully be compared to ethnocentrism, but I’ll tackle that issue another day.) The more worldcentric your worldview, the more your patriotism gives way to a wider, more universalistic perspective. In the discourse in American politics, you’re likely to find little of this basic truth, because it implies that the more ethnocentric party (usually Republicans) are more patriotic than the more worldcentric party (usually Democrats). That’s poison to Democratic candidates who must appeal to voters across a spectrum of levels of consciousness from egocentric to ethnocentric to worldcentric and beyond. That’s why Democrats are so defensive, and Republicans so eager to exploit their advantage.

Funny how you have to look outside the mainstream media (e.g., Time and The Atlantic) for a simple dose of truth on patriotism, while the MSM prides themselves over their fairness and balance in presenting all sides of the issues. I don’t want to hype these differences too much, but when virtually all of the intelligensia (exemplified here by Beinart and Yglesias) totally ignore the importance of psycho-cultural development, it’s worth stressing.

Technorati Tags: Beinart, Harryman, integral, patriotism, Yglesias

Is Barack Obama’s thought process an enigma, at least to some conservatives? It seems so, if Ross Douthat, has it right:

It’s true that Obama’s policy positions have been no more fungible than McCain’s (though no less fungible as well, as evidenced by his recent maneuverings), and in many respects they’ve been considerably more detailed. But there remains, I think, a striking opacity to Obama - the deep structures that inform his thinking aren’t out in the open for anyone to see, the way they are with McCain, and in certain ways I feel like I know less about Obama the man than I did when he had just started running for President. This has been reflected across his life and political career: I don’t agree with the entire Steve Sailer take on Obama, but Sailer is on to something when he writes that the Democratic nominee seems to have “spent his life trying on different personalities,” while his core has remained something of a mystery - perhaps even to himself.

Which somehow reminds me of Perez’s Law #13: The integrated mind is always misunderstood by persons whose psychic structures are less integrated. The less integrated, the more mysterious its inner workings will inevitably seem.

Feel free to discuss.

Technorati Tags: consciousness, integral, Obama, Perez's law

Dan Savage’s “cheating can be okay” message is fairly well-known. For the record, Savage doesn’t condone lying to one’s partner or carelessly disregarding one’s obligations. His position is more nuanced:

Getting married—or civilly united or shacking up—is like buying a cow. You know going in that you’re going to have to milk the thing. But unlike an unmilked cow, a spouse—male or female—won’t just stand there in a field and suffer. A spouse is a cow with a credit card, a job, and a car. If you don’t milk the cow you married, your cow has the means to go out and find someone who will. If you’re fine with that, for God’s sake tell your cow. If you lose interest in sex but want to stay married for the kids, friendship, or financial security, apologize to your cow and tell ‘em you’ll do them the courtesy of turning a blind eye if they’ll do you the courtesy of being milked discreetly elsewhere.

Savage’s defense of cheating seems to be seeping into the culture. In a post on the Blowfish blog, Greta Christina opines that she has recently had a change of heart about whether or not it’s okay to cheat in monogamous relationships. She writes:

I wish with all my heart that more couples would spell this stuff out: talk about it openly, negotiate agreements they can both live with . . . both early on in their relationships, and as things shift and change. It bugs me that so many people make unthinking default assumptions about the most important decisions in their lives.

But the reality is that people do make default assumptions about relationships. Monogamy is one; continued sex is another.

And if you dance, you have to pay the piper. You lie in the bed that you make. Plus whatever other cliches you can think of about taking responsibility for your actions. If you make unspoken default assumptions about your relationship — such as the assumption of monogamy — you have no right to take umbrage if your partner also makes unspoken default assumptions . . . such as the continuation of sex.

I think that Savage, and those like Christina who follow his lead, would be better off not trying to disparage the traditional prohibition on cheating. Instead, they should encourage partners to making cheating wholly unncessary (for example, by encouraging partners unwilling to be monogamous to negotiate groundrules and parameters for non-exclusivity).

Unless a partner says something like, “I’m going to have sex outside of this relationship, and will live with the consequences whatever they may be”, then yes having sex with someone else is cheating. (With a warning, it’s still cheating. But at least it’s not dishonest. It’s a red flag to renegotiate the relationship contract.) And if the agreement is monogamy, then the partner’s choice needs to be discouraged and punished in order to maintain the sanctity of the relationship and enforce the relationship “contract”.

The principle at stake in my view is the notion that healthy, mature relationship ethics must be subject to a delicate balancing act of values inherent in a range of developmental levels. A great relationship will have partners with active, fulfilling sex lives (healthy red values); encourage virtuous upholding of the sacredness of the relationship bonds and the profanity of cheating (healthy amber values); uphold mutually agreed upon behavior agreements (healthy orange values); and, finally, allow for different but morally acceptable relationship arrangements for different members of a multicultural society (healthy green values). In short, as I see it, turquoise values offers an ethic of fidelity to monogamy for couples who choose monogamy; fidelity to negotiated relationship agreements for those who don’t.

Not all relationships are capable of the sort of flexibility and dynamic flow necessary to successfully achieve such a delicate balance of values. In fact, relationships capable of such responsivity are probably quite rare (fewer than 1 in 10, I would imagine). And in such relationships, the demands of morality are not confined to a simple list of prohibited behaviors. Morality demands reverence and respect for the embodiment of Eros and Agape recognized as the very presence of Spirit with the relationship.

Eros, the divine principle of expansive evolution, calls for us to find in sex a freedom from all earthly attachments; Agape, paradoxically, the divine principle of integrative involution, calls for us to find in sex an irreducible interconnectedness to all earthly bonds. Some of our relationships eroticize the other-in-otherness (heteroerotic polarity), and others eroticize the other-in-sameness (homoerotic infusion). The spiritual path of sex may diverge in transcendence or self-immanence, and yet ultimately it may reveal the nonduality of All Being. Or so, I imagine, the Integralist may hold as an inspiring ideal, and attempt humbly to work out in practice.

The trendy tendency to say “cheating can be okay” places a premium on red and green values (self-expression and pluralism) over those of amber and orange (sacredness and integrity). But a more integrated ethic doesn’t allow one set of values to dominate over the others. Instead, an integrated ethic encourages an understanding of relationship as a special place for an encounter with Spirit, and a reverence for sex as a mode of the unfolding of an entire evolutionary spectrum of values.

Technorati Tags: cheating, integral, monogamy, Sex and Gender

“Stop going and advising people without asking (that’s what the Bible says). Give only when asked. We cannot bend the world. When the world is not ready to receive your ideas, don’t force them.” — Swami Satchidananda

Technorati Tags: change, integral, Swami Satchidananda, yoga

How does consciousness change as it shifts from green to teal and turquoise and indigo altitudes? Consciousness researches often say that the mode of cognition becomes more oriented to “vision logic”. While searching online today, I found this 1999 e-mail by Thomas Jordan helpfully summarizing Ken Wilber’s thought like so:

In the Atman Project (ch 7), Wilber doesn’t use the word “vision-logic”, but talks quite extensively about “high fantasy” or “vision-image.” He talks about it as integration of the primary and the secondary processes (non-verbal imagination and verbal thinking). The authors he cites are a different set in relation to authors cited in later works. After Atman Project, Wilber seems to have oriented the concept “vision-logic” away from imagination and towards the perspectives developed in cognitive-developmental literature. This literature talks about postformal development in terms of dialectical and systematic reasoning (formal operations=rational thinking; postformal operations=beyond rational thinking)…

An example I’ve heard Ken Wilber use is Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous speech “I have a dream…” Simply put, King saw the world in a different way from most people. He saw possibilities, he inspired change, he visioned the arising tensions presaging future reconciliations in the world order. Vision logic is when a dream is not just a dream, but a profound grasping of the world as it truly is, a more harmonious and unified whole than meets the average person’s eye.

Today I also stumbled upon a fantastic example of vision logic insight. In “Brazil: The Black President Before Obama” , Jose Murilo Junior describes the uncanny visions of a 1928 Brazilian science-fiction writer. Here are a few of the stunning visions …

The sweeping Obama phenomenon has caught Brazil, and it comes as no surprise in the country with the world’s largest population of African descendants. Blogs are commenting on all things Obama, from his stand on ethanol to the ‘rumors‘ of his appraisal of Brazil’s free software policies. An especially notable thread is the one reporting on the resurgence of a weirdly interesting 1928 Brazilian sci-fi novel — ‘The Black President’ — that predicted a US election matching a black, a feminist, and a conservative candidate in the then remote year of 2228….

‘The Black President’ is a scary book. Frightening in many ways. Firstly, by the prescient character of the piece. In 1926, Lobato forecasts the invention of a kind of data radio transmission that would make it possible for human beings to accomplish their tasks from their home, without having to relocate to work. He also anticipates the disappearance of the printing press, for the news will be “radiated” directly to the houses of the individuals and will appear in bright letters on a screen — exactly how it is happening with whoever is reading this very text. [It is] in one modern word — the Internet. But the premonitions don’t stop there. By the time he was moving to the US as commercial attaché at the Brazilian embassy, Monteiro Lobato foresaw the election of a black president in the US. The specific political moment in the year of 2228 that bore such a situation would be due to the split that occurred in the white race, between a candidate from the Masculine Party (Kerlog) and a candidate from the Feminine Party (Evelyn Astor). The neo-feminist Evelyn Astor has the victory almost guaranteed, but then the black leader Jim Roy surges and ends up being elected President. The Black President. A Scary Book - Acerto de Contas

Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan.

Technorati Tags: Brazil, cognition, consciousness, indigo, integral, Ken Wilber, Obama, politics, prophecy, sci-fi, teal, turquoise, vision-logic

One of the most intriguing — and palatable, if I may speak freely — conservative thinkers writing today is The Atlantic’s Ross Douthat. Recently, he attempted his own definition of conservatism:

I don’t think of conservatism as a philosophy…. It’s a practical principle, yes, but I think a better way of putting it would be to call it an approach to political and social controversies, under which the fact that a given piece of furniture (i.e. a policy or institution) has suited in the past - and the fact that it is your piece of furniture, which belonged to your father and grandfather as well - gives the case for keeping it greater weight that it might enjoy if you simply tallied the chair or sofa’s good qualities and compared them to the really fabulous, amazing, but still-hypothetical qualities of the fancy new one that might replace it. Now certain political philosophies may be effectively conservative in certain times and places, because they function as defenses of the existing furniture - thus Lockean liberalism is an effectively conservative philosophy in contemporary America in a way that it wasn’t in the 17th century, and thus many contemporary American conservatives consider the Enlightenment, at least in its the Scottish and English manifestations, to be the patrimony that they’re charged with defending. But conservatism itself (again, under my admittedly idiosyncratic definition) is not a philosophy or an ideology; it’s an approach, a bias, or a political style.

The notion that conservatism is actually a style rather than an ideology hadn’t occurred to me, nor had I seriously imagined that a leading conservative writer would actually hold such conservatism isn’t a political philosophy. But, novelty aside, the idea is growing on me. Conservatism as a style overcomes a number of problems, especially the tricky issue that conservatives can’t agree on what it is that they all believe or have in common.

Ken Wilber, as many of my readers certainly know, argues that the political right is distinguished from the political left by virtue of its doctrine that the source of human suffering is in the interiors of individuals. Put simply, people suffer because human nature is selfish, lazy, and mean. If people suffer, it’s because they deserve it.

But if Douthat is correct, then Wilber’s view of the supposedly core conservative doctrine is really just one more way of intellectually justifying a much more fundamental disposition towards life. That is, I would summarize, the disposition that the case for keeping a tradition is given greater weight simply because it’s your tradition.

I’d like to put Douthat’s definition into a frame of reference that he wouldn’t be comfortable with, but seems reasonable to me. Douthat seems to be arguing that the conservative approach is to privilege the maintenance of smaller circles of concern over greater circles of concern at all levels of consciousness. At the egocentric level, conservatism privileges the maintenance of egoic structures and family structures. At the ethnocentric level, conservatism privileges the maintenance of tribal or national structures. It stands to reason that at the worldcentric level, conservatism privileges the maintenance of global structures (as opposed to Kosmocentric structures), and so on.

Douthat’s definition of conservatism is worth stewing over. It may also invite another consideration: What if the definition of an integral approach to politics is that it’s “not a philosophy or an ideology; it’s an approach, a bias, or a political style.” What might that style look like? Integralists inclined towards “include and transcend” might be rather conservative in temperament, whereas those inclined towards “include and transcend” might be rather progressive. Indeed, I’m inclined to think that there is not one integral political style but at least two major styles, one emphasizing Eros (progressivism) and the other Agape (conservatism).

Technorati Tags: agape, conservatism, Douthat, eros, integral, politics, progressivism

In “The Wilber-Combs Lattice and the Pre/Trans Fallacy”, Bruce Alderman discusses developments in the more recent work of Ken Wilber on consciousness, and how it helps us to understand spiritual experience and development. Here’s Bruce’s conclusion:

As a stage of cognitive development or epistemology, the transrational involves the establishment of an abiding mode of interacting with the world, ordering experience, and acquiring or generating knowledge. As such, it should not be confused with discrete altered state experiences which, in themselves, are questionable in terms of their capacity to deliver propositional knowledge. Rather, it represents the evolution and integration of sophisticated human capacities for meaning-making, perspective-taking, and broad state access, with relevance to human well being functioning far beyond having access to transitory “mystical experiences.”

Most of Bruce’s discussion seems exactly right to me. Where I think it gets a little fast is in Bruce’s assumption, I think, that transrational stages of consciousness deliver an epistemology whereas states do not. Technically, epistemology refers to a branch of philosophy concerned with the theory of knowledge. In other words, its concern is how we know what we know, the nature of truth, and how beliefs are justified.

Bruce calls this “propositional knowledge”, whereas I don’t think I would say that transrational stages (like mystical states) deliver a theory of knowledge or propositional knowledge of any kind. What they deliver, I think, is a formal knowledge, not content of principles or propositions. Thus, if a person is at a transrational stage of development, they will have knowledge in a certain form, not of certain things. They will take, say, a 5th-person perspective on the existence of angels. But two persons each employing a genuine 5th-person perspective may come to different beliefs about whether or not angels exist.

Technorati Tags: beliefs, consciousness, integral, pre/trans fallacy

Originally posted August 10, 2007.

Talking yesterday with a friend in the 12-step universe, we were discussing (and disagreeing about) contrasting approaches to the recovery process. I’ve shared my basic orientation to the recovery universe in Soulfully Gay. So let me now paraphrase: Recovery, like all aspects of life, is an evolving process. It traverses phases that accompany us through the various phases and stages of our lives. To speak for a moment of recovery as it is most commonly understood, as a process of learning to recover from addictions to alcohol and other drugs, sex, overeating, gambling, etc., then it is fitting to speak of recovery as a dysfunction of the magenta (impulsive) and red (self-esteem) waves of development. (My preference is to speak of addiction as a pathology of the red stage of development; however, there are other ways of speaking about recovery that may be just as valid, or more valid, than the approach that I find most useful.)

For persons who are caught in this active pathology of the impulsive and self-esteem oriented developmental process, addiction can become a fixed (some would say permanent) feature of red, working to sabatoge healthy development in all subsequent waves of development and stations of life. It is sometimes the case that addicts will find themselves stuck in red as a fixed station of life. Recovery, therefore, is a process that is often encountered as an attempt to overcome aspects of personality that are stuck at unhealthy red. In amber recovery, abstinence and dependence on a Higher Power and a Higher Collective Order is the remedy. In orange recovery, building healthy ego strength in the service of rational decision-making to unmask the irrationality of addictive thoughts and behaviors is the prescription.

Technorati Tags: 12 steps, addiction, health, integral, recovery