War and Peace

WIE: How does integral politics view peace, pacifism, and the use of military force?

McINTOSH: Integralists are much less willing to engage in war than any of the previous stages, except perhaps postmodernism, but they aren’t satisfied with passivity either. They’re not peaceniks. Integralists recognize that there are things in the world that are worth fighting for, things that have to be battled against. So rather than simply resign themselves to living at a time in history when there are wars, integralists recognize that we want to end war once and for all. The only way to do that is the only way it’s ever been done, and that is to replace violence with law, with an agreement or social contract that actually monopolizes violence in a way that’s sustainable, that is moral, legal, democratic. In the United States, for example, the states no longer fight one another because the rule of law has replaced the state of nature in which violence flourishes. Indeed, what makes the rule of law effective in this way is that it monopolizes violence.

WIE: You’re saying that the only way to prevent violence is to monopolize it within the context of a legal structure?

McINTOSH: You can also monopolize it within a dictatorship or some kind of autocratic authority, but that’s not sustainable. Freedom will break that mold. If it’s not moral, if it doesn’t preserve freedom, if people don’t agree with it at a deep level, if they have to be coerced into that monopoly on violence, then it’s not a monopoly that can be sustained.

So integralism takes an important value of postmodernism, which is the rejection of war, and says that we want to end war once and for all. It turns this admonition against war into something that’s practical, something that we can actually implement. The only way to prevent war worldwide is to replace it with law, and the only way to do that is some kind of democratic world federation.

Radical Islam

WIE: One of the biggest problems today is Islamic radicalism. Of course, it’s not just Islam that has produced a violent form of fundamentalism, but it has been the most virulent over the recent decades. How would an integral perspective respond to the dynamics around this clash between the West and Islamic radicalism?

McINTOSH: It doesn’t take integral consciousness to see that the answer to radical Islam is healthy forms of traditional Islam. Postmodern or modern solutions are not going to apply. We need to help strengthen Islam, making it more successful as a traditional form of civilization and helping to empower the moderate voices. Currently, the moderate voices in the Islamic world are mostly silent. And even those who can be heard are not addressing the core problems that are causing the radicalism in the first place, which is that many of the people in Islam feel disgraced, deeply wounded, and ashamed that they find themselves in what’s unmistakably a backward stage of history and civilization. They have a great sense of pride about the fact that Islam was once the leading culture in the world. It was once great and they know that it could be great again.

So the forces that are creating radicalism are this feeling of being stuck, this feeling of having failed, this feeling of disgrace. And these feelings of disgrace are particularly destabilizing to the Islamic civilization because it is such a proud civilization. This pride is seen in a variety of ways; it’s seen, for example, in the status of women. All forms of traditional consciousness, East and West, are chauvinistic. Women are second-class citizens in all of them, but currently Islam is probably the worst on this account. So this machismo, this male superiority is part of the sense of dignity and the need for respect that are the values of warrior consciousness. The warrior needs respect.

The reason that Islam fails in many ways is because—this is controversial, but I’ll say it—it lacks certain degrees of truth. In other words, the quality of the religion as a whole has certain truth blind spots. We see this in the way these warrior values have been carried forward and embodied in the traditional stage. There hasn’t been enough of a separation between warrior consciousness and traditional consciousness—they’re too close. You can see this in the pride. So when colonialism comes along and conquers Islam, the moral authority of the traditional consciousness is sacked. It can no longer serve in the way that it must in order to make people behave well and be civil actors in the society. It’s been shamed and disgraced. And this is in part because of the excessive pride. The traditional consciousness wasn’t far enough away from warrior consciousness in the first place.

WIE: Is that the sense in which you mean that it doesn’t have enough truth? It hasn’t separated itself enough from warrior consciousness?

McINTOSH: Yes. Christianity had many of the same problems. It had regressed around the time of the Renaissance; the Catholic Church had become corrupt. If you read, for example, the account of the Renaissance popes, they were having orgies in the Vatican. Warrior consciousness had clearly infected and destroyed the moral authority of traditional consciousness. This situation was rejected by Luther, who declared that a more moral form of Christianity was necessary. This led to the Reformation, which purged the warrior elements from Christianity, creating the Protestant structure that then became an effective platform for the Enlightenment. The Reformation was a prerequisite for the Enlightenment. It purified the religion and made it more moral. It made it more good, more true . . . maybe not more beautiful, but nevertheless! So again, it’s not just integralists who are calling for a reformation of Islam. That’s the next step in its history. That’s what is going to be required prior to functional forms of sustainable modernism emerging within Islamic civilization.

WIE: So what are the dynamics that would give rise to that?

McINTOSH: You need to strengthen those who would be voices of moderate Islam, give them a little integral technology, if you will. But again, they can’t be coming from a modernist or postmodernist perspective. They have to be at a traditional center of gravity themselves; they have to show those loyalties.

So the way to do that, for example, is to look at the Qur’an. That’s what we want to use to bolster the morality, just as Luther used the Bible. It’s all there in the Qur’an. So that means helping to sponsor individuals who can be positive voices, without making them puppets.

The other thing we could do is to recognize how important dignity is to the Islamic world and give them back some of that dignity. For example, we could pay for a memorial in downtown Tehran that memorializes our shame at the CIA’s political manipulation of the Iranian government. We can atone for those sins, help heal that little bit of history, and thereby become more moral ourselves.

WIE: I remember when Clinton went to Rwanda and apologized for not doing anything to stop the genocide. It had a tremendously positive effect.

McINTOSH: There could actually be an entire art movement in memorials of this type. I had an idea for a memorial in downtown Baghdad to help restore dignity after the initial invasion. It would be called “We all speak Arabic” and would be a memorial to Islamic civilization’s significant contributions to our international system of decimal numbers and to mathematics in general. The actual forms of our numbers, zero through ten, are taken directly from Arabic script. Think about how important ones and zeros are to the digital age. So this memorial would celebrate Arab achievements in mathematics, which were adopted by Europe several hundred years later and made a big difference in the development of capitalism. We could commemorate that and memorialize the accomplishments of the Islamic civilization in a way that could help restore some of the dignity that they lost by being conquered in three weeks.

But if we’re doing all of this in such a way that it’s obviously self-interested, if we’re doing it only for strategic reasons, then it’s not truly morally fragrant, and people at the traditional stage of consciousness can smell that a mile away.

Iraq

WIE: That brings up the question of the Iraq war, which is dominating the media in America. What does integral politics have to say about the war in Iraq?

McINTOSH: Part of the reason that we failed in Iraq, and why we’ll continue to fail when acting militarily and unilaterally as a nation-state, is because the battle is not so much on the ground as it is a battle for hearts and minds. And hearts and minds can’t be won if we’re acting from national self-interest with a history of exploitation and colonialism. They’re never going to believe us, even if we have genuinely good intentions, and for good reason. We’ve screwed it up at the modernist level, and until we heal that history, the moral fragrance, the spiritual fragrance that’s going to be required to win hearts and minds, will not be evident. We need the larger moral vision of integralism, which transcends but also includes postmodernism. And what postmodernism brings is a sincere worldcentrism, a multicultural solidarity, an environmental priority, and a spiritual sophistication, which are all prerequisites to making the approach to all of these problems more moral than it can be with modernism.

So in Iraq there were several missteps along the way. The first mistake was invading unilaterally, but even then it wasn’t completely hopeless. I was giving talks about global governance back in 2003 and advocating that at least now that we had invaded, we had to recognize that having this colonial artifice created by the British called the nation of Iraq is part of the problem. The Iraqi people have not gotten to the modernist level, which would allow a functional, healthy, multiethnic nation-state. What I advocated was dividing up the country—maybe not into separate countries, but at least significantly independent districts. And I felt that they were not ready for the separation of church and state, so they needed, for example, to put somebody like Shiite spiritual leader Sistani in charge of the Shiite faction. Then we have to help encourage the more moral aspects of the religion and work with them so that they don’t become too harsh in their application of sharia law. Then there would need to be some kind of a trust that holds the oil wealth and divides it equitably among the three districts.

So integralism would help us move forward in Iraq by recognizing that trying to get them to become a Jeffersonian democracy and function as a nation is hopeless at this stage in their development. The failures in Iraq are actually an evolutionarily potent life condition because they show how inadequate the nation-state structure is on ten different levels.

As soon as you begin looking through the lens of the spiral of development and you cast that lens on the situation in Iraq, everything comes into view. All of a sudden that lens turns and—boom—you’ve got clarity. That clarity doesn’t exist now, even among our most intellectual, well-intentioned leaders and pundits. And it’s also a showcase for why the United Nations is not adequate and why we need a functional world federation. A world federation is many years away, but when we recognize that this is the future of positive political evolution, we can begin to see where we’re heading and use this knowledge to make better strategic decisions in the present.