distinctions only matter when the difference recognized makes a difference. Chomsky has described this in saying that a fact worth discussing must be both true *and* important. an unimportant truth needn’t be engaged.

so what’s the difference? what makes a distinction important?

Chomsky again provides the model, in explaining why awareness of the failings of one’s own country is more important than awareness the failings of someone else’s, both failings being equally true. In short, the failings of one’s own country are, politically speaking, within one’s realm of influence. Here, if we borrow from Stephen Covey, we might formulate a general rule: important facts (i.e. distinctions) are those that lie within one’s realm of influence, as a distinct subset of one’s encompassing realm of concern.

All relevant distinctions are thus a product of this more fundamental distinction between influence and concern. Making this distinction is the first step to being something other than an underling, both personally and politically. It is, in fact, a recurrent principle. As progress on all levels occurs in steps, the distinctions that matter are exactly those that pertain to the step you are facing.

so, for example, the distinction between Confucious and Buddha is true in any case, but only matters – is, in other words, only a distinction worth making – to those who might be, for example, in the position to use one or the other of them as an exemplar. otherwise, the point is entirely academic. to put it generally: fruitful distinctions are driven by some basic need. hence THEY say “need facilitates fulfillment,” because need creates the foundation for making important distinctions, and important distinctions fuel the step by step process which alone fulfills.

one of the principal interests driving me in the discussion of Wilber was the prospect of distinguishing Wilber’s thinking from Wilber’s interpersonal style. had the discussion survived this process, i was aiming on bringing in the so-called Cube of Cognitive quality, which i’ve been tinkering with in the background. it’s an idea – the Cube – that came to me in a dream, and has since recurred. It is personally numinous, and of course (by its mere geometric aspect) to some extent archetypal.

the three axes bear many labels, though in terms of cognitive quality i describe them as Beauty, Goodness and Truth. Goodness is perhaps the easiest for me to describe right now, as my sense of it has just clarified in editing my parting response to Ben. Goodness is humanity, or humane-ity. A person’s goodness -as a person- is a measure of how well they serve the common good of humanity. the summum bonum. The poles of the Good axis might be labeled Selfless and Selfish.

we might recall here Lao Tzu’s description of the Tao being a merging of those two poles, whereby the Selfless rejuvenates the selfish while being revived by it. this is easy to appreciate – because we don’t morally judge biological systems – in terms of the Selfish gene, that by its perfect ruthlessness of self-replication enables the collective systems of biology to function and evolve. thus the axis of Goodness does not run from good to absence of good, in an ultimate sense. rather True Goodness (as opposed to the idealistic moral fantasies of spurious conscience) is the axis itself, and the two faces of that goodness are its poles.

which gets to a blindness typical of reformed people who feel great shame over their former selves. wanting to redeem themselves, they become advocates of Good over Evil, which is a partial truth that can never recapture the understanding of Tao – the Tao awareness that is the source of moral systems. This Tao Awareness forms the ‘vertical’, or Truth, axis of the Cube, and runs between ‘formal’ and ‘essential’. This axis is the one spoken of by Wilber and the Spiral Dynamics folks. Formal truth is reality articulated in Law. Essential truth is the Presence that understands law as an awareness, a Presence. The higher up the ladder of Presence, the more unified and abstract is the Truth. At the bottom the ladder Truth is bifurcated into a subject/object relationship.

Like the axis of Goodness, Truth is not at one end of the axis or the other. Truth is the Axis, even though one side is in a sense greater and the other less. Just as Collective systems need Selfish Genes, to Essential Truth needs formalized expressions… and vice-versa. The Way integrates and harmonizes the opposites, thereby healing division rather than resolving it by eliminating one side. Trans, versus Pre solutions. Solution by evolution rather than regression to a fundamentalist fantasy.

The third Axis is Beauty and this is the one i understand least. If we consider it in terms of, say, Wilber, i’d identify it with the charasmatic style of his writing. Feel free to fill in the blanks here…

While I jump ahead to get back to the beginning, to the Cube, and say these three axes form a phase space of what i’ve been calling ‘cognitive quality’. After we distinguish these different qualities – so as to escape the blindness whereby a moral judgment is construed as an intellectual one – we might put them back together. Without distinguishing these axes, we tend to judge people along a line, whereby the evil are the untrue, or the unattractive, or both. The Cube presents a differentiated space, in which we might witness patterns of motion (attractors), representing the complex interactions of Beauty, Goodness and Truth. Or False Conscience (Beauty lies for Beauty’s own sake), Spurious Consience and True Conscience. Or inversely: Truth, Justice and the American Way.

[updated for clarity in a few places... bracketed elements within quotes are my additions]

Jones- I find ur ideas interesting and will continue 2 read ur blog, but our correspondance is no longer working for me, so i think this will be my last post.

fair enough. feel free to return at any point, should you like.

…i think the biggest thing we could do to improve political abuses is to come up with a sort of ‘common methodology for asserting the rights of the less powerful.’ a big part of building that will have to be the kind of ‘political pandit’ work u show special talent for.

glad you find it useful. you come back to this topic at the end, so i’ll have more to say there.

here’s my biggest sticking point in corresponding with u: i don’t feel like i can count on u to take ownership for the emotional content of the conversation, up to and including emotional attacks.

yeah, ditto. more on this below.

for instance, when i suggest that wilber displays poor use of logic (emotionally neutral), u recharacterize my suggestion as calling wilber ’stupid’, adding a negative emotional charge.

you’ve rewritten yourself here in a way that removes the emotional charge from your original statement. what you actually wrote was: “wilber’s ability to process information logically is exceptionally poor.” if i said that about you, what sort of emotional charge would you experience? would you feel i was calling you stupid? my guess is you would. in fact, in order to argue the neutrality of your expression, you edit it after the fact to diminish the emotional content, and then project the inclusion of that content onto me.

when i point out wilber’s specious arguments (emotionally neutral), u recharacterize my description as “your sense that [wilber] is a bad person.”

more misrepresentation. here’s a sample of what you actually wrote, in response to my question about what in particular you objected to in Wilber’s system:

it seems to me that wilber’s inner circle are confused kids in their early 20s who he takes advantage of by convincing them he’s the philosopher equivilent of a cult guru.

so my objection to wilber is not primary [primarily] with any individual claim, but the overall rationalization of a masked one-way transaction which excludes empathy, justifying whatever he wants it to.

in short, you identify him as an abusive cult leader, and say that your primary objection to him is not any specious argument or aspect of his articulated system, but this behavioral pattern. there’s no stretch at all to call such a figure a ‘bad person’ (especially if we understand personhood in the Confucian sense, as a being involved in social relationships productive of the common good… a similar understanding of human personhood is expressed by the Reverend Mother Mohiam in the opening chapter of DUNE), or to say that you regard him as such. your focus from the very beginning has not been on analyzing Wilber’s arguments, but on characterizing his behavior as that of “a cult guru.” it has from the beginning been a moral critique of his person.

elsewhere, you describe him as “yicky” and yet elsewhere write:

…wilber generally advances his claims via implication with an air of certainty (which seems slippery and dishonest to me)

clearly emotionally loaded terms of judgment.

thus, again, you’re misrepresenting yourself and projecting the disowned emotional content of your approach onto me.

or when i alluded to ur principal giving u a ‘harsh reprimand’ with the word ‘frustration,’ u suggest that my word choice inaccurately claimed emotional displeasure (frustration) because the word harsh indicates only an emotionally-neutral matter of degree (”a harsh reprimand as opposed to a mild reprimand”). but the word harsh isn’t emotionally neutral (like for instance “a strong reprimand”); it specifically indicates a negative emotional reaction (aka frustration) on the part of the speaker.

that’s an interesting distinction, but i think it’s off. a mild reprimand would have been a disapproving word. a strong reprimand would have been a stern lecture. so what should i call a man screaming and banging his desk? ‘harsh’ seems reasonable to me.

it seems to me that in this example you’re applying an unreasonable standard according to which i must ‘own’ whatever emotional content you infer. note also that you simply dropped the other half of the above example (which didn’t fit with the narrative you’re constructing), in which i demonstrated how your inference of my ‘confusion’ (another inferred state) was based on your own misunderstanding.

gates/jobs…

so u wrote: “my sense, for what it’s worth, is that you’re attempting to deprecate Wilber entirely – to render him as a complete charlatan [i.e. an abusive cult guru]… i think that picture is deeply influenced by your emotional drive here.” that accusation is not against any specific act(s) on my part, and so is an attack against me personally. however camoflaged, that’s an unfair emotional attack in the form of (roundabout) name-calling.

you’ve edited your jobs/gates story in such a way that it is critically not representative of what occurred between us. try this:

mr. jobs: i think two cents is insufficient pay, and that your policy is inhumane.

mr gates: i think you’re a hypocrite.

—your narrative ends here, but the story itself continues—

mr jobs: why?

mr gates: for accusing me of something you do yourself.

see the difference? just because i didn’t put the specific, refutable, item first, doesn’t mean i didn’t present it. i’ve presented it at length. in fact, we were just involved in discussing it. by leaving that part out of your example you edit your representation in such a way that proves your point but distorts reality. it’s a tactic simiar to ‘proof by animation’ whereby a critically non-representative model is substituted for reality and referred to as if it were accurate.

you have repeatedly represented my assertion characterizing your approach to Wilber as mere name-calling, made without reference to any specific behaviors. this is simply untrue.

the other thing i’m having some trouble with is our debates about information hygene, or the degree of conclusiveness of claims. yeah, i generalize about trolls from my personal anecdotal experience – that’s perfectly legal. it would be specious if i were to misrepresent that generalization as something more conclusive, but i don’t – how much more clearly could i indicate that i’m talking about what i’ve personally seen than to use the words “[generalized rule] that i’ve seen…”? it’s frustrating for me to have to work thru arguments about what is/is not legal in debate that u could easily pick up in a single class on logic or rhetoric (i think that stuff can only be learned from a human teacher, not a book).

[sigh] ok, you’ve simply ignored my question about what the point would be of mentioning your experience if you didn’t feel your generalization was a fair approximation of reality, i.e. significant. once again, you’ve edited the narrative, so that the story ends where you ask how much more clear you could have been than saying ‘i have seen.’ i’ll tell you: clarify the extent and nature of your experience so that i have some clue as to how to evaluate both the substance of your perspective and your intention in presenting it. (Chomsky is scrupulous about doing so in his talks. watch him.)

as it is, to say “everyone i have seen” in a tone of authority, without specifying the limits of your experience, is to claim significance implicitly, but in an unaccountable way. sound familiar?

i feel like we get derailed by tedious and irrelevant semantic arguments – it’s not so important to my point how u or i or blog owners define troll in regards to emotional attacks, etc. – the issue is i’m experiencing a lack of regard for my feelings and a lack of ownership for emotional messaging when we disagree, and it’s my impression that i’m not the first person to have that experience with u.

type of logical fallacy: anonymous authorities

beyond that, given your own history, what makes you so sure that this is an instance in my history and not yours?

i’ve said before i see value in just sorting one’s ideas out via blogging. but i don’t think the tao ends with merely sorting out one’s convictions. rather, those convictions only become valuable (and realisitic) as they’re translated into action. i think part of the tao is going beyond talking to become the change one wants to see in the world, and i think u believe that too.

we have no disagreement there. you’ve ignored the point, though, that it is entirely inappropriate of you to pass judgment on the general state of my life and self-realization. this whole bit is just absurdly out of bounds:

i think i have the same right 2 criticize u for complaining so heatedly about dkos, yet not be willing to step up & be the change u want to see in the world. i hear that starting a blog would take a lot of work – what *would* u be willing 2 do to put ur money where ur mouth is?

and that’s the (supposedly) emotionally neutral version, the walk back from ‘impotent complaining.’ beyond being emotionally loaded (’complaining’ is clearly a term of depreciation, ’step up’ implies a failure of responsibility, ‘money where mouth’ implies hypocrisy) and presumptuous, it’s factually in error on multiple levels. as you’ve ceased posting, i’m not going to bother going into them. for now, that you actually believe you have the right (not to mention the ability) to make blanket criticisms of my life, that such is the “same right” as my expressing specific, refutable, critiques of your approach within specific contexts of discussion, sums up for me where we part company.

it reminds me of a phrase perhaps you’ve heard:

shawbag, you know what you need is to join the army…

anyway, i entirely agree that it is appropriate that this discussion end. i would have preferred to talk about the prospect of an intertemporal map of revolutionary principles, and some other sort of site. as i’ve said, i’m totally open to the idea… i just don’t see yet what it entails.

As that comment thread has gotten a bit thick, i’m going to break up back to the main line to answer a few of open questions.

Ben writes:

r.u. agreeing with my earlier characterization of wilber as a ‘poet of the transcendant’, or r u making an argument that a worldview which does not emphasize logic can rely on specious arguments yet still somehow be ‘true’ in some objective sense?

there are a number of important issues compressed here. i’ll take them in the order they appear:

1. i wouldn’t label Wilber a poet of the transcendent. i’d used that label for Rumi, and Wilber is not of the same species as Rumi. i’d label Wilber in the manner he labels himself, as a pandit. the pandit systematizes what the poet intuits. Wilber’s aim is to reconcile the understandings of physical science, psychology (and religion), political theory and and social criticism. The point of his theory, summarized in the AQAL model is to provide a framework in which each of the profound modes of human understanding is given a place to exist, so that its form of truth is recognized and allowed for. This is well, and succinctly, explained in the wikipedia article on Wilber.

it seems to me that you either have never understood his point (the aim and its expression in AQAL), or else don’t believe that any such thing can be done. or, you believe such a thing can be done, but Wilber hasn’t done it. my sense is that it’s probably some combination of all three attitudes.

this gets to the second question you ask above. the form of that question suggests to me that you haven’t quite consciously grasped this fundamental point of Wilber’s work. Wilber’s proposition is that in order to evolve beyond the dissociation of religion from science from social justice and understanding we need to accord each of these spheres – the Quadrants of the AQAL model – their own validity by recognizing the manner in which validity is obtained within these domains.

the point i was making was that if Wilber misunderstands evolution (and i’m happy to suppose he does) i’d attribute that to his worldview, which is dominated by this project of reconciling disparate domains, rather than to some form of stupidity. i suspect all worldviews have blindspots, and it seems to me that construing these blindspots as stupidity is exactly the sort of failure in empathy that you object to in Wilber in his behavior relative to the ‘mean green meme.’ the difference, as i see it, is principally that Wilber has a name for his deprecated worldview. he’s gone through the trouble of analyzing and representing the mindset.

i’m not saying that mindset makes the untrue true, but that i think equating instances of ‘mindset blindness’ (misunderstandings introduced by the imperfect nature of the representational mindsets we use to conceive of ourselves and our world) with stupidity (e.g. extraordinarily poor logical ability) suggests a failure of empathy, and, i think, understanding. To posit mindset blindness before jumping to stupidity is in my view both more reasonable and more just.

even if i’m correct in this, i have no intention of expressing that you are doing anything ‘inappropriate’ or shameful. as i see it, it’s one instance of mindset blindness commenting on another. who knows? maybe this is just my mindset blindness… and you’re free to explain as such if it seems so to you.

sorry for the delay. i’ve been consumed by work and real life details… on the plus side, it’s given me time to get clearer on what seems to me the substance of our debate. but first, the long-outstanding question about Sylar:

i’d not responded to this question because i have no particular idea of what to do with Sylar. i still don’t, in part because what happens with Sylar is dependent on what happens with the other characters and story as a whole, and in part because i’m not engaged with either the characters or the story to that level.

i have, though, had a new level of appreciation for the dilemma of Sylar’s incarnation, you might say, in the form of Nathen Petrelli. it’s similar to the ghola situation in DUNE, in which the conscious personality regards the submerged root personality with profound ambivalence. it is on the one hand magnetically attractive and on the other entirely terrifying, as recovery of the root personality involves a sort of death of the conscious personality. In actuality, with gholas who recover their root identity, the conscious personality and the root personality are merged (or in Wilber’s terms, the conscious personality is transcended and included). The death the conscious personality fears is as partial as is the conscious personality itself. What perishes is what you might call the conscious personality’s illusion of absolute existence.

in Sylar/Petrelli there’s an additional tension, as the submerged root personality is guilty of so many murders. for Petrelli to recall his life as Sylar is to open himself to a tremendous guilt… though this tension is lessened somewhat by the, you might say, absurdly ambivalent character of Nathen Petrelli. whereas Sylar killed personally, Nathen was willing (in season one) to go along with mass murder (the destruction of NYC), and then (last season) was instrumental in the systematic abduction and apparently permanent incarceration of everyone with powers. his appetite for power and willingness to violate others in order to achieve it is hardly less than Sylar’s. he’s just of a different class, and so rather than the outcast loner he operates within and by means of institutions of power.

this difference in class adds a third tension between the conscious and the root personalities.

mashing Sylar and Petrelli reminds me suddenly of The Corporation, which diagnoses the behavior of corporations in terms of individual psychopathology.

we can, i think, draw a parallel between the fear/desire of the conscious personality relative to the root personality and the resistance of individuals to information as to the partiality of their worldview. i don’t have this language worked out well, but in short, worldview and the conscious personality are intimately connected. consider the class consciousness at issue in this video on Obama’s reaction to the Gates affair:

aside from general interest, i’m going on about this even though it doesn’t answer your question about what i’d do with the character (still have no inclination there) because it relates directly to the framework in which i’m going to answer your questions concerning what i see happening in your critique of Wilber. in short, i suspect that part of your criticism of Wilber is worldview based. that, in other words, you express an animosity that is typical of worldview conflict.

in particular i’m referring to your assertion that “wilber’s ability to process information logically is exceptionally poor”, based on his disagreement with neo-darwinian orthodoxy. as i see it, you’re interpreting a difference in worldview as a failure in cognitive capacity – a conflation that i take as a red flag of worldview conflict.

Wilber’s unorthodox view of evolution is, in my opinion, better described as an artifact of his worldview, which is not defined by the dictates of material science. It’s not because he can’t process information logically, but because he’s aiming to integrate disparate domains and so take into account different information than the strict neo-darwinian… who may be compartmentalized so as to beleive logically in evolution but emotionally in some moral divinity.

Again, the red-flag (as i see it) of worldview conflict is the interpretation of differences rooted in worldview as deficiencies in the capacities and/or character of the other. In short, it seems to me you’re doing in essence the same thing that Wilber (so i’ve heard) does in dismissing people on grounds of their Green perspectives. Except that Wilber’s conscious of it. He spells it out, whereas in the instance i’m speaking of the conflation occurs unconsciously as a conviction that anyone exposed to information X must, if they are intellectually competent, reach conclusion Y.

Again, the difference as i see it is not a result of intellectual incompetence, but of a will to integrate additional information – the information, in Wilber’s terms, of the monological, dialogical and translogical eyes (rather than the monological alone). He may very well fail in the attempt, and the attempt may be futile in general, but we might at least understand the nature of his perspective.

so, that said, to your other questions:

1. no
2. no
3. you can make the argument, though i thought we’d already agreed that his philosophy doesn’t in itself preclude empathy. though it is common for people to only empathize with others who share their worldview (or whom they assume to share their worldview) – members of their class, in other words – i believe true empathy transcends these distinctions. therefore, to articulate a philosophy that reckons distinctions does not preclude true empathy. as i see it, the failure to reckon class distinctions doesn’t liberate true empathy, but only makes the conditions in which empathy is withheld unconscious.
4. no.
5. my discussion of the issue of ‘clarity’ relates to what i took to be the general case you were building as to Wilber’s intellectual incapacity.
6. it seems to me you’re interpreting ‘clearly’ as ‘infallibly’. when i say he writes clearly i mean he constructs sentences well and spells out his ideas… clearly enough that they can be converted into diagrams. his associations may not hold water, may not be infallibly established, but i think he spells them out well, in clear sentences, with diagrams.

as i’ve written, i’ve read exactly one book by Wilber, and that a short one (The Marriage of Sense and Soul), and only the bits of criticism linked from this site. i’m not in any position to have an opinion about who expresses Wilber’s ideas best.

though, if his critics are capable of expressing the same ideas more clearly, the ideas must have been put forth clearly enough in the first place for them to get the idea, right? you’ve said you’ve a friend who reads Wilber to keep informed of other thinkers (another testimonial to his clarity, apparently). why not ask him or her why he or she reads him?

i’m curious, finally, about the claim that you’ve done over a dozen footnote searches that have led off into apparently infinite regresses. you’ll gather that i’m suspicious of it, first of all on purely practical grounds. Dr. Manhattan strikes again! there are a dozen versions of you still on those quests, right? but seriously, it’s impossible for me to understand what you mean to say. one footnote led to another footnote which led to another footnote which led… where? how about a few examples so i can get a sense of what … means?

Solar Hero wrote:

Well, the whole thing about the significance of the AQAL metatheory is: who has applied it for a greater good?

Even Jesus said you measure things by their fruits.

To which this reply, moved up from the comments:

there’s a difference between theory and practice based on theory. A theory of developmental levels, like AQAL, is separate from particular practices intended to encourage or enable development along those levels. the theory merely says they exist; the practice verifies their existence.

this, i reckon though i have only skimmed the subject a bit, is why Wilber writes of the necessity of a ‘community of the adequate’ – to verify the levels described theoretically through applied practices.

so, returning to what you wrote: i’m having difficulty understanding how it is that the theory itself might have fruits, given that merely holding a theory as true is not sufficient to accomplish anything. except according to, for example, those Christians who believe in the ultimate efficacy of belief (otherwise known as wishful thinking). (now there’s a tree that we might judge by its bitter fruit.) from the little i know, i wouldn’t take Wilberites to hold such a view (i.e. a belief in the salvic power of merely believing in AQAL). therefore, the fruits of believing in AQAL are dependent upon practices.

my question, then, is how to separate the fruits of the theory from the fruits of the practices? if, for example, you are spurred by AQAL to take up daily meditative and martial practices (by the revelation that there are levels of perception), and if you actually follow through on those practices, then you might very well accomplish something for your own good (and hence the greater good of those in your sphere). but this is hardly a fruit of the specific theory, as the practice brought the results and the practice might have been motivated by some other theory with that same general developmental notion.

so i guess that’s where i’m not following your specific assertion: i don’t understand what sort of consequence AQAL itself might have. is it radical enough, or aberrant enough, to have any? my ignorance prevents me from answering. i’ve no idea.

thanks for the comment, though! i feel quite a bit closer now to having a framework for considering AQAL.

are you following this, Ben?

let me recap: i’m neither offended by nor enamored of Wilber’s originality or lack thereof; i regard reports of Wilber’s personal flaws as plausible, but not particularly interesting as i’m not interested in deifying him anyway; but if there were some radical aspect of his theory that were in itself consequential… that’d be interesting. some worldview feature like: God hates homosexuality therefore i’m going to try to pray away the gay. a radical belief that strongly suggests a particular course of abberant action.

are you aware of anything like that?

I came across this video today of a LaRouche campaign ad from 1980 (i subscribe to the LaRouche channel on YouTube), in which he dismisses environmentalists as people ‘against progress’. People who, had they been around way back when humanity lived side by side with dinosaurs (?), would have opposed even the invention of the wheel:

Oddly enough, i finally got around to watching Charlton Heston in The Omega Man tonight (i’ve a thing for zombie movies), and was surprised to find that the zombies aren’t really zombies at all, but zombified anti-progress hippies specifically against the “users of the wheel”:

LaRouche is the Omega Man!

my thoughts on Wilber aren’t very deep, but on the upside, they can be expressed briefly. my responses fall into two main categories: response to Wilber’s work and responses to Wilber’s personality. These aren’t, from one perspective at least, entirely separable (that perspective recognizing the way in which Wilber’s work provides a means for Wilber’s apparent personal flaws to be disguised), still they are distinct enough that whatever Wilber’s failures in interpersonal relationship these don’t disqualify his thinking.

my general response to Wilber’s thinking is as it has been for a while: i’m generally sympathetic to the project of ‘integrating’ different models of human development, and to the general outlines of Wilber’s system. These being the four quadrants, which are really just what he calls the Big Three (I, We, It); the existence of distinct aptitudes (lines of development) at different levels of development; and the Divine as Ground and Goal of all lines. I’m sympathetic to this system because it mirrors the lines of my own thinking. i can relate to what he’s been trying to do and to the general scheme he’s come to… but still, really, i don’t know enough to know where i’d disagree.

the personal complaints against Wilber sound plausible enough. of course i have no personal experience, though i can easily imagine a person surrounded by a fawning inner circle of devotees who feed the guru ego and carry away its waste products. i have always been very wary of such groups and in general unimpressed by people who think religiously in someone else’s structure of ideas.

it was either Wilber or i who has said that there are pros and cons to solution cults. perhaps it’s something like bubble economics. take the Internet for example. boatloads of money were dumped into it largely in response to a concoction of different flavors of deception. economically there was a great deal of fraud… but one consequence of that fraud was the rapid advancement and proliferation of this wonderful technology. it was an economic miracle… of course it was a crime.

point being, Wilber provides a bunch of people with a way of conceiving of their lives in an integrated fashion. clearly there’s a great need for such a thing. if Wilber has turned into the person he used to warn people about, i’m not surprised. round about 1965, according to John Lennon, the Beatles were the world’s biggest assholes… because everyone wanted a piece of their success. no doubt Wilber is surrounded by similar, if different, energy.

i don’t mean to be an apologist for him. rather, i’m not disappointed because i’m generally mistrustful toward teachers and prone to doing my own thinking. i’ve kind of gone through my cycles of outrage and disillusionment. and even if Wilber has, as his followers believe, achieved one of the most significant conceptual breakthroughs in 3,000 years of historical thought (in short, the AQAL metatheory), it’s not really of any use outside of an actually integrating person – the old formula of teaching, awakening student and proper circumstance.

what i’m trying to get at here is that i feel as if i could only really critique Wilber from the perspective of a person sufficiently engaged in a similar process. i feel a bit too much like a dabbler at this point to offer much substantial. i think that’s the simple truth.

[from the comments... illustrations to follow]

it seems to me we’re disagreeing on less than you think. i’m not doubting your personal experience of virtue, or claiming that virtue can be defined exactly by some ethical system. that covers three of the four items you mention in paragraph one, above… which leaves only the matter of virtue within different spheres of activity.

as i’m not sure that you actually are hearing me on that, i’ll repeat that i’m not saying that virtue itself is not the same, but that manifestations of virtue look different depending upon role and circumstance. that is, the specific qualities that make for, say, a good mother are not the same as the specific qualities that make for a good governor. this, i’ve been saying, is what ultimately makes virtue so hard to define, as it transcends but includes all of the specific instances – that is, the qualities appropriate to specific roles. hence, again, what Campbell calls the great Bronze Age myth, which defines virtue as (in essence) a faithfulness to the requirements of the responsibilities of one’s role.

this, i think, is the perspective that Socrates considers himself in terms of – in, for example, explaining his activity before the court of Athens as an act of submission to the will of the god Apollo. when Socrates explains virtue as “a gift given by God to the virtuous” he is espousing a position that we find later expressed in the basic formula of Islam, which is nothing other than the Great Bronze Age Myth (GBAM) restated. that being: by submitting to one’s station (islam) one becomes open to the proper feeling (iman, or faith, the heart’s tug, or as Augustine put it, ordo amor) which is the state in which one might develop true excellence (ishan, or virtue in the sense of excellence).

so to restate Socrates: virtue (excellence) is a gift given by God to the virtuous (those who submit).

in your case, by submitting to social relationships (islam) you might hear the voice of your heart (iman) and so act well (ishan). i’ve never been trying to dissuade you from or deprecate your personal process. i’m just articulating the matter in a way that speaks to me.

—

re Wilber: i don’t know much at all of his system or the disputes he’s responding to in that long blog post. mostly i find that post clearly written, plausible and somewhat funny, though there is at least one moment where his arrogance made me cringe (where he talks about being at the “center of the vanguard” of the most important development in history). i can see how it would offend a bunch of people, though i’m not among the offended.

i think you’re definitely onto something in wondering about your own knee-jerk rejection. not that i’m suggesting you suppress it, but rather that as useful as it can be it can also be an impediment.

there’s a long tradition of speculation that runs parallel to speculations about the nature of viture, concerning the behavior typical to the transformed – that is to say, the excellent or virtuous. for example, Arjuna asks Krishna in the Gita:

“How can one identify a man who is firmly established and absorbed in Brahman? In what manner does an illumined soul speak? How does he sit? How does he walk?”

Sunni Islam is founded in essence as an answer to this question, the name of which comes from Sunnah, meaning the words and actions or example of the Prophet Mohammed (and his companions).

so the question you’re asking, it seems to me, is in effect, does Wilber act how a man firmly established in Brahman ought to act? i don’t know. the truth probably is that i don’t revere him enough to expect anything like that from him… so i’m not disappointed or shocked. i look at it from the perspective of a blogger, not a potential devotee… if you follow the sense of that distinction.

“Which is the better: a good friend, a good heart, a good eye, a good neighbor, a good wife, or the understanding of consequences? It is none of these. A warm and sensitive soul which knows the worth of fellowship and the price of the individual dignity – this is best.”

BAKRISH as a student to his guru
Frank Herbert, The Godmakers

i feel that we’re getting close to bringing more and better order to some of the basic subjects under consideration on this site since its inception. in particular, the subject of shame.

There’s a complex of related issues here that perhaps it’d be useful to map out. What seems to me insufficiently clear is the relationship between the supposedly natural inclination toward shame that is a feature of the virtue instinct, considered to be the most valuable of all human characteristics. It is ultimately this superior sense of conscience (that is, an ability to distinguish right from wrong) that makes us human (and brings with it a corresponding capacity for evil).

In part, Socrates was wisest of the Greeks not simply out of knowledge of his ignorance, but of the presence of his daimon, which served as a sort of divine conscience that would inform him when he was in danger of straying from the path that is not simply virtue, but divine will.

Now, is that daimon the same thing that makes people clam up out of fear of retaliation? Stated another way: is all fear the fear of God? Does it matter, in other words, what we feel ashamed about, or only if we obey what shame we feel?

Granted that all human concepts of moral responsibility, all maps of shame and praise, are approximations. Still, as in anything, not all approximations are created equal. One should not, as the I Ching says, persevere under galling limitations. Tyranny is not only unpleasant, but debilitating if endured. And, of course, illness is a sort of tyranny.

Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out.

- Vaclav Havel

But before this spins outward, let me try to bring it back: Virtue to Socrates was ultimately accordance with divine will. It was not the normative virtue understood by today’s therapist. Take the final scene in the jail, at the end of Phaedo, in which Socrates sends his weeping wife and children away so that their emotion doesn’t disturb his final moments of philosophical consideration with his friends. Within the context of our culture, our sense of a proper emotional ecology, it was a callous, hurtful, act. Yet it was not to him. So what was it in reality?

If we are to seek after an understanding of virtue, we must seek after something that might be cross-culturally valid. Or else we must apprentice ourselves, so to speak, to some Universal Culture in which human values have been fully embodied. Or, more simply, we might seek after an ultimately personal form: a Universal ethic that is both comprehensive and bounded ultimately by the individual.

That, i think, it was Socrates was after. And the answer in general terms is well known, if inscrutable and dangerous: virtue is accordance with the will of God. In DUNE, and increasingly in real life, virtue was articulated ecologically. To live in accordance with God was to maintain one’s honor, insure the survival of one’s kin, and participate in the ecological transformation that would bring about paradise. Ecology, thus, is at one and the same time a science of planetary biology and a science of the soul.

Understanding this, we can arrive at a definition of the nature of the soul: the soul is that sensitive complex that responds to a moral aesthetic. Soul, in other words, is the organ that perceives the moral universe, that knows (however correctly) right from wrong. Remember that this sensitivity to right and wrong is also a sensitivity to the divine will or Design.

Thus the soul has long been considered as a repository of moral shapes, the Ideas that Socrates spoke of (and the elements of ecological knowledge articulated by Parodt Kynes, the Imperial Planetary Ecologist of DUNE). What Socrates referred to as a memory of Heaven, the quality of which determined one’s proper station in incarnate life (spoiler alert: the highest station was held by philosophers).

This knowledge implicit in the soul is called by some Real knowledge. The trick is making this Real knowledge Conscious, so making your conscious knowledge real. This ties back to the previous point about a Universal Ethic that is at the same time Individual focused, in that the Real and the Conscious are resolved through the realization of Identity. As the Siddhi yogis say: God exists within you as you.

The problem with all this, as a theology, is that by leaving it up to the individual, you open the way to all sorts of makeshift assumptions based upon personal ignorance. It’s confusion that’s good for business (as in everyone’s left still hungry for identity because they’re dining on junk food, on debased and over-processed forms of truth) but bad for the common welfare.

One of the great ironies of Socrates, i think, is that he exists through writing though he regarded writing as an instrument for spreading ignorance – the appearance of knowledge but not the reality of it, which he thought could only be transferred person to person, soul to soul, by interaction.

Personally, to pull this all down from the heavens, i believe something like this is true, in a way that touches on your question, Ben. The experience of ownership and responsibility within emotional relationships is crucial. Thus Rumi advises people pay attention to which birdcage is brought close to their cage; Washington advises a courtesy to all people but a friendship reserved for few; and Herbert declares a proper feeling of friendship as the best of qualities.