Reflections on the Emerging Integral Culture: Kissing Cousins in Sub-Cultures

Reflections on the Emerging Integral Culture:  Kissing Cousins in Sub-Cultures
 
By David M. Zeitler
 
Fifteen years ago I was an undergraduate neuroscience student struggling to make sense of the experiences that emerged as I sat in zazen meditation and the turtle neurons I was dissecting in order to learn about psychology. I knew that both of these approaches were saying something about psychology, but there was no way for me to hold them at the same time without feeling disturbed. That year, two events occurred that would fundamentally alter my path, and the paths of many others around the globe:  the University of Arizona began its biennial Towards a Science of Consciousness conferences, and Ken Wilber published his opus Sex, Ecology, Spirituality.
 
I was one of the many college students “praying in the closet” – in fact, when I revealed to my adviser that I was meditating, he ridiculed me, jokingly asking me if I was going to begin floating around his laboratory. I left feeling rejected, but a few months later I found myself representing the neuroscience program at the Towards a Science of Consciousness conference, where I noticed that the Transcendental Meditation folks were happy to discuss just that scenario. Thoroughly confused at that point, I realized that I was witnessing the other side of that scientistic pendulum, not only in the TM researchers, but also in the quantum physicists, mystics, philosophers and parapsychologists. In other words, not only was objective-reductionism well represented, so too was subjective-idealism.
 
While the consciousness conference and Wilber’s opus emerged at the same time, they do not reflect the same culture. Where the consciousness conference makes room for the tolerance of epistemologies, it represents an eclectic widening of a flattened circle, a green altitude embrace where cultures are given voice but not power. In many ways, the conference represented the waning of a green counter-culture, while Sex, Ecology, Spirituality represented the emergence of a teal trans-culture. It is exactly this hypothesis that I wanted to test when, fifteen years later, I was given the opportunity to do so as an associate organizer of the biennial Integral Theory Conference.
 
After getting his blessing, I began to adapt Dr. Imants Baruss’ Beliefs About Consciousness and Reality psychometric. This tool, normalized on professional academics who are in positions to research and write about consciousness, seemed like the ideal way to discover if the emerging “integral culture” is indeed different from the eclectic “science of consciousness” culture, and how they might be similar. In the time since Baruss published his findings in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, two other cultural pieces of note have emerged: Paul Ray’s work on what he calls Cultural Creatives (which focuses on market research), and Jennifer Garvey Berger’s work on Living Postmodernism (which focuses on authentic vs. assumed postmodern values).
 
Our goal is to publish two pieces: one for the emerging integral culture, the other for the consciousness research community. While both of these groups are aware of an interested in research that goes beyond objective-reductionism, they do so from decidedly different vantage points, reflected in the orienting generalizations that guide these cultures. In the consciousness research community, the orienting generalization is David Chalmer’s “Hard Problem of Consciousness.” The hard problem can be summarized as follows: why are we aware? In other words, there is no need for subjectivity in the view of objective-reductionism – it is not necessary for the big-bang, for natural selection, for selfish-genes, or for parasitic-memes.
 
The orienting generalization for the emerging integral culture, on the other hand, can be summarized as follows: every perspective is true-but-partial. In other words, if we can create abstract-maps and lived-territories that honor the partial truths of every perspective, the major human domains of art, morals, and science will fulfill their potential as the forces that, alternatively, bind and free us along the dialectic of evolution.
 
Where the consciousness research community tends to polarize around their orienting generalization, the emerging integral culture seems to take a pluralistic set of positions along the continua of “true-but-partial” in a context-dependent way. In fact, one of the goals we had when designing the recent Integral Theory Conference: Enacting an Integral Future was to explicitly widen the circle of public discourse to include dissent and polarization.
 
What did we find? The major similarity between the two cultures is that both believe that understanding the human brain is essential for understanding human consciousness, and that mental events can be explained in terms of physical processes. However, the emerging integral culture does not take the next step and reduce conscious experience to those processes, despite the fact that they take them as intrinsic for them. The biggest difference we found was that the emerging integral culture scored significantly higher on the overall scale of transcendentalism (i.e., lower on materialism) than the consciousness research community. Furthermore, less than half of participants in Baruss’ original study reported having a religious, spiritual, mystical experience (RSME) that changed their beliefs about consciousness and reality, while 90% of participants in the study on the emerging integral culture reported having an RSME that changed their beliefs about consciousness and reality.
 
I hope that this research can be used as a benchmark for the differences between the consciousness research community, cultural creatives, and authentic vs. assumed postmodernists. The full report will use Integral Theory to compare and contrast these four overlapping cultures. The value will be in defining who we are, but also in helping the emerging integral culture to communicate not only with other altitudes, but with the pluralism of cultures that is present at every altitude. If we are to survive and thrive in a world where tribal, traditional, modern, and postmodern values are vying for power and resources, we had better know how we are being heard.
 
I would like to end by thanking my two research associates. My research team consists of two students of mine who have the capacity and enthusiasm that cross-cultural research requires, and the three of us have found a nice balance of working from our strengths and challenging one another’s blind spots. Tim Cox has been researching the intersubjectivity of interpersonal relationships for several years, and brings a careful attention to intersubjective assumptions and claims, useful both for the design of the project and for the ethics of cultural self-reflexivity. Amanda Haboush has been steeped in measurement, design, and analysis for many years, and has been integrating qualitative and quantitative methods for her doctoral work, which will provide an exemplar for future integral researchers. Her attention to detail is unparalleled in the integral research community. I expect to hear more from them both as they pursue their integral paths, and want to thank them for all they have brought to the project.
 
-David M. Zeitler