interview

ANDREW COHEN: We're living in an extraordinary time, at the beginning of the twenty-first century. There seems to be an unprecedented potential for conscious evolution these days, and yet our collective future has never seemed more precarious. So much hangs in the balance, and I think the issue of transformation has never been more important. But after sixteen years of teaching a spiritual path that calls for radical transformation, I can say unequivocally that the simple truth is that everybody wants to get enlightened but nobody wants to change. Actual transformation is something that the ego, or the separate self-sense, inherently resists in the unenlightened state. In fact, the ego lives in profound fear of the kind of insecurity that change creates, and is constantly endeavoring to create the illusion of permanence in a world where everything's changing all the time, and these days, faster than ever! But there's no doubt, as we agreed in our last dialogue, that enlightenment for the twenty-first century demands that we not only cease to resist the fact of perpetual change but actually embrace it through a dynamic surrendered engagement with the life-process. That's what I call Evolutionary Enlightenment, and it's incredibly thrilling and consistently inspiring.

Now, as you express passionately in your recent book Boomeritis, the fact is that unless we are able and willing to evolve—and at this point, evolve quickly—we're probably not going to be able to prevent a very disastrous phase in human history. You also shed much-needed light on the state of our contemporary culture, and identify a postmodern cultural disease called "boomeritis" as the major obstacle to our next evolutionary step. Can you explain briefly what boomeritis is?

KEN WILBER: In order to understand boomeritis, it might help to have a general understanding of the historical context. Many sociologists have identified three general phases of cultural development: a traditional culture, a modern culture, and a postmodern culture. And those correspond in some sense to three types or levels or waves of consciousness.

The traditional culture has a kind of mythic-literal religious orientation, a very fundamentalist orientation, such as a belief that the Bible or the Qu'ran is literally true, and so on. It is marked by a belief in an absolute and unyielding truth—for example, nobody can achieve salvation without believing in Jesus or Allah. Such cultures are usually nationalistic, ethnocentric, patriarchal, with an emphasis on family values and good ol' time religion.

The modern culture has a more rational, scientific, business type of orientation. It classically started with the Western Enlightenment and is the dominant mode of governance of most industrialized democracies. It believes that there are scientific truths and they are universal, but they have to be established by research and empirical studies.

The third major phase is the postmodern culture. In distinction to the traditional mythic orientation and the modern rational mode, the postmodern orientation maintains that there actually is a plurality of worldviews—there's a relativistic series of cultural beliefs, and you can't really say one of them is right and one of them is wrong because so much of what we call truth is really an interpretation. So the whole notion of postmodernism is that reality is not merely given—it's constructed and interpreted.

Now there are elements of truth, so to speak, in each of these orientations, although most developmentalists, including myself, see each successive wave as being a higher, wider, or more complex level of development. So general development tends to move from traditional to modern to postmodern. And a lot of us believe there are even higher levels or waves of consciousness, but these are the three that are present on a widespread scale among adults in today's world. And, of course, in any given society, you find a mixture of these cultures and individuals.

In this country, for example, sociologist Paul Ray [author of The Cultural Creatives] estimates that about 20 percent of the people are at the traditional mythic level, about 50 percent are at the modern, universal, rational level, and about 25 percent are at postmodern pluralistic, which includes the cultural creatives. And frankly, most of the people who would be listening to what we have to say come out of that postmodern, pluralistic, cultural-creative context. And that's both good news and bad news. The good news is that it is indeed a higher, deeper wave of consciousness development than what came before, and therefore it's open to higher, deeper, and wider truths, including certain spiritual realities. The bad news is that each of these great waves of development has a pathology, or shadow side, or downside, and the pluralistic wave is no different. Its downside is, "Since all views are equally correct, nobody is right and nobody is wrong. My truth is true for me and you cannot say that my truth isn't true."

AC: Boy, that sounds familiar!


THE DOWNSIDE OF PLURALISM

AC: As you make clear in Boomeritis, this pluralistic-postmodern level of development you've been describing, which in the system of Spiral Dynamics is also called the "green meme," is a position that tends to be inherently anti-evolutionary and anti-transformational.

KW: It does tend to be that way. But it gets tricky, because what the green meme, or the pluralistic-postmodern wave of development, likes to talk about is transformation. And there's a grain of truth to the fact that the green meme really does want to transform, even if it badly fumbles the ball on occasion. But remember that this particular pluralistic wave really is a very high level of development. That needs to be kept in mind, even though we're talking about the pathological version. This wave didn't become really widespread until the sixties, and the boomers were the first generation in history where a significant percentage was in fact at this fairly high pluralistic level of development. The previous level or wave, which is still prevalent, the universal rational wave, became widespread with the Western Enlightenment and is itself only around three hundred years old. But the green meme, the pluralistic wave, came into widespread existence only about thirty years ago. So, all of the great positive aspects of the sixties, including environmental protection, feminism, health care reforms, and, most importantly, the civil rights movement, were products of healthy pluralism and healthy postmodernism. Those were the positive gains of the cultural creatives, the green meme, the pluralistic wave. So in that sense, it was a transformative event because transformation means any vertical move in the developmental scale. And the boomers, the cultural creatives, were a transformation from modern to postmodern, or from rational to pluralistic, from orange to green—whatever terms one prefers.

But once they settled in there, boy, they settled in! And you're not going to get them to move now because the downside is that once you're there, you are not allowed to make judgments, because "Everybody's expressive truth is the same." So you can't challenge somebody and say, "Look, you have to grow. You're being self-contracted. There's a higher spiritual reality." They'll say, "How do you know it's higher? How dare you judge me!"

So when boomers engage in a spiritual path, their fundamental desire is not to transcend the ego but to confirm it, to express it, to be told that "What I'm doing is wonderful and divine, just like I am." They are there to celebrate the self-contraction, to embrace the self-contraction and to feel it really hard and call that god or goddess or spirit. And you can't talk them out of it because then you're being judgmental.

Under the guise of pluralism—which holds that no truth is better than another—not just higher realities but also all of my petty, shallow, narcissistic tendencies can find a happy home. The higher significance of pluralism gets swamped with lower impulses, contracted tendencies, and egocentric expression—all now parading under the banner of pluralism.

To put it simply: boomeritis is pluralism infected with narcissism. It's the very high truths of pluralism completely corrupted and derailed by an ego that uses them to entrench itself firmly in a place where it can never be challenged because there is no objective truth that can get rid of it.

AC: This is the same kind of resistance that I've been endeavoring to penetrate for the whole sixteen years I've been teaching.

KW: Alas, it's a green swamp.

AC: With a vengeance! When I read Boomeritis, it was a revelation to me because it helped me to understand in a broader context why so many people have been deeply resistant in the face of my call for change. Ever since I began teaching, I have been consistently challenging people to evolve, to transform—to move from a lower to a higher level of development. Very specifically, I have been asking them to make the noble effort to move beyond inertia, beyond resistance, beyond ego. Initially, when someone is inspired and wants to become a student, it's as if they have fallen in love. "Oh, this is wonderful," they say. "This is fantastic. This is everything I've ever dreamed of." But sooner or later the inevitable occurs: I ask them to change and they turn on me in a rage—a narcissistic rage.

KW: Yes, that's boomeritis to the core. Everything is wonderful until you make a judgment, then narcissistic rage comes front and center, and now you, the teacher, and not the student's ego, are supposedly the problem.


"THOU SHALT NOT JUDGE"

AC: As long as the seeker after higher truths is firmly entrenched in the green meme, it renders the teacher-student relationship virtually dysfunctional. One comes to a teacher of liberation to evolve spiritually. But this particular entrenched position will often undermine the teacher's ability to help the person who came to them to evolve, because the teacher-student relationship, when authentic, is going to demand transformation—not just horizontal affirmation but vertical transformation.

KW: And the student has to accept a "judgment" that they are at a lesser stance of consciousness, at least in this particular regard.

AC: Yes, exactly, this is the big problem. At a recent retreat that I gave, the issue of judgment became the topic of much heated discussion. I had to spend a great deal of time explaining that a big part of the evolutionary process has to do with the cultivation of the all-important capacity to discriminate—to see things more clearly. I had to bend over backward to help everyone understand that the manifest universe is made up of objects that are in relationship to each other, and that being able to see clearly what those relationships are doesn't necessarily imply a negative judgment, but is simply the expression of clear discrimination. If one aspires to have a liberated relationship to the human experience, then one has to be able to see things clearly in order to know how to make the right choices, how to respond in the most appropriate way in any given circumstance. And in order to do that, one is definitely going to have to be willing, God forbid, to make judgments!

I've noticed that especially for people who are engaged in the spiritual dimension of life, there is a tremendous fear, often to the point of becoming a superstition, of any conclusions about anything that could possibly be seen as being anything other than—

KW: —accepting of all stances.

AC: Yes, which of course is inherently an impossible position to take!

KW: Again, that's part of the real downside, the pathological version, of this wave of development. Of course, there are certain types of judgment that a liberal, advanced, caring person ought not to make. There are certain ways we should not be judgmental. We ought not to make judgments based on prejudice—based on skin color, sexual orientation, religious beliefs, and so on. But there are types of judgments and discriminating awareness that are positive and necessary—including, incidentally, the healthy part of the pluralistic stance. That is, the postmodern pluralistic stance is itself a huge judgment: that certain types of judgments ought not to be made. And there are other types of judgments, traditionally known as discriminating wisdom, that do have to be made. Those have to do with degrees of depth, not between human beings but within any human being. One can be, for example, prerational, rational, or transrational, and each of those is a progressively higher level of development. One's perspective can be egocentric, ethnocentric, or worldcentric—and each of those is a progressively higher level of development. A worldcentric person will correctly condemn an ethnocentric judgment. Hierarchies like that are very important because they represent degrees of truth and inclusiveness and compassion. But if you get stuck in the green meme, you're jammed. You can't make a choice. You can't make any more decisions because ALL judgments and ALL hierarchies are supposed to be bad. I call it aperspectival madness.

AC: And these hierarchies that you're describing represent actual structures that exist in reality, real developmental structures. They're not just subjective conceptual fabrications.

KW: Yes, the point is that there are these general waves of unfolding, and they represent what we call "nested hierarchies" or "holarchies" of development—such as that worldcentric is higher than ethnocentric, which is higher than egocentric. It is better to be worldcentric than ethnocentric, and hence you can be very judgmental about ethnocentric prejudice. The irony is that the green meme itself is involved in making hierarchical judgments all the time, even though it denies hierarchies.

AC: That's self-contradictory.

KW: Right. It's now pretty widely accepted by most philosophers that postmodernism is riddled with what's called a performative self-contradiction. It condemns in others exactly what it constantly does itself. It makes judgments constantly. For example, it has its own hierarchy that says "linking is better than ranking"—well, that's a hierarchy of value. So it hierarchically condemns hierarchies. Oops!

But the positive aspect, again, is that green is cleaning out bad hierarchies; the downside is that it's losing all the good hierarchies as well. And, as we were saying, that stance very quickly turns on itself and becomes self-contradictory. The green wave itself is the product of a hierarchical developmental unfolding from traditional to modern to postmodern, so when the green meme condemns all hierarchies, it's basically condemning the very process that produced its own higher position.

AC: That's what's so enlightening about this point—realizing that condemning all hierarchies inherently destroys the very ground one is standing on.

KW: When you're faced with this in students, what exactly do you do? How do you, on the one hand, appreciate the fact that they no longer want to make, let's say, ethnocentric judgments or homophobic judgments, but, on the other hand, help them understand that they do have to make other judgments? We all have to make judgments based on the degree of depth in our own consciousness, in our own awareness. And there are higher states and stages of consciousness that a spiritual aspirant has to orient him- or herself toward if there's going to be growth and evolution at all, and those higher states definitely pass judgments on the lower and lesser states, just as worldcentric correctly passes judgment on ethnocentric.

AC: Well, the answer to that question would be that a spiritual mentor, if he or she is authentic, should be able to demonstrate to the student that there is a living, breathing difference between their respective levels of consciousness that can be objectively recognized. And hopefully that's going to generate in the student a little humility and a lot of evolutionary tension, awakened inspiration, and real interest in meeting the mentor at his or her own level.