Democracy and Dictatorship in Sub-Saharan Africa

WIE: I’d like to hear your thoughts about the situation in sub-Saharan Africa, and particularly in Rwanda. Of course, your heart goes out to the people there and the horror that unfolded, and the ethnic tensions that continue to this day. At the same time, there is a great deal of hope in Rwanda. The president, Paul Kagame, has established some kind of order. Aid is starting to come back. It’s one of the more hopeful cases in Africa, despite the fact that the genocide happened so recently. So I’m curious what you feel integral politics might have to say about a situation like Rwanda.

McINTOSH: I’d like to talk about sub-Saharan Africa in general, and Rwanda as a special case with the recent genocide. From an integral perspective we can see—and I’m generalizing here—that there are people in sub-Saharan Africa who have achieved modern and postmodern levels of consciousness. There is also plenty of traditional consciousness. But it seems, and I don’t claim to be an expert, that the majority of the individuals in this region have a center of gravity that is still centered in tribal or warrior consciousness. So what the integral worldview would prescribe in sub-Saharan Africa for recalcitrant forms of tribal and warrior consciousness is healthy doses of traditional consciousness. And that’s not only for sub-Saharan Africa as a whole; it’s the next step for Rwanda, in particular. Any form of traditional consciousness that would be acceptable to both Tutsi and Hutu would be the most ideal form—whether it’s Christian or Islamic or Buddhist. Any will do, as long as it’s healthy and can be accepted by both ethnic groups. So then it makes sense that traditional consciousness, especially in the form of Anglican Protestant Christianity, is proving extremely successful. It’s being adopted and seeming to have a positive effect—despite all the negatives we associate with evangelical Christianity here in the developed world. Healthy forms of traditional consciousness can join the two racial groups into one ethnic identity. That would be an important next step for them, so they can develop a healthy sense of public virtue that can eventually generate its own form of native modernism, as we’ve seen in some successful situations around the world.

So with Rwanda, we can see hope; we can see them recovering from this outrageous holocaust. But from a cultural and psychological perspective, this is a deep and gaping wound that’s going to go on setting them back for generations. There have recently been quite a few magazine articles about a process of cultural and psychological healing that was developed by German psychologist Bert Hellinger. The Hellinger Work, as it’s called, has been extremely effective with holocaust survivors. Some kind of ongoing work like that on a national basis in Rwanda would be important to help heal those wounds, which are carried on for generations. We need this kind of work, not only as a stopgap to prevent further genocide but as an important crutch to help these levels of traditional consciousness take hold so that they don’t continually collapse back into warrior levels. When you have an understanding of the internal universe from an integral perspective, you can see how important such measures would be.

WIE: What about democracy? Integral politics would seem to suggest that democracy is hardly a one-size-fits-all cure for a dysfunctional political culture.

McINTOSH: You can’t thrust democracy on a population that hasn’t achieved a corresponding level of cultural evolution if you want that democracy to be functional. Rwanda is pretraditional to a large extent. So the next stage for them is unlikely to be a democratically elected government. I would like to see it, and if they can pull it off, great. I hope they prove me wrong. But when we recognize that these stages of consciousness go with certain types of political organization, we can see that a dictatorship, hopefully a benign one, or some kind of predemocratic rule is probably inevitable, if not appropriate.

But the way to make sure that it’s appropriate in cases like this would be if we had some kind of international authority that could say, “We understand that you’re not ready for democracy, but the dictator is still subject to international global law and could be arrested if there are human rights violations or if the money of the country is stolen or if there is genocide or ethnic cleansing.” It would help to allow these earlier stages to exist as they must, but in moderated forms, so the worst abuses that have characterized these levels of consciousness are not repeated.

The Future of Russia

WIE: I wanted to ask you about the current situation in Russia. There is a lot of concern in the West about the lack of true democracy in Russia today. After the collapse of the Soviet system, there was an effort to create a modernist economy in Russia, one that failed quite badly. The country seemed to be slipping into an almost tribalistic governing structure with these oligarchs becoming more and more powerful. There is a lot of legitimate frustration with Putin right now, but there is also more internal stability. So what does integral consciousness have to say about the future of Russia?

McINTOSH: First of all, we can’t hold Russia to the standards of a postmodern democracy when they’re not there from a historical point of view. I think what we can do is respect them and give them space, because if any people have demonstrated an ability to resist any outside imposition, it’s certainly the Russians! We want to help Russia in ways that are appropriate and respectful of its national autonomy. One of the ways we can do that is to recognize that the reason Russia is struggling to develop a functional modernism is because it is still lacking an appropriately functional form of traditional consciousness. We have the Russian Orthodox Church, but the society never became fully traditional, although the Church was once the functioning traditional structure. Communism then completely swept that away and became a replacement form of traditional culture. Now communism has been swept away, and all the loyalties and all the higher purpose of the workers’ paradise are gone, leaving hardly any structures of traditional consciousness in place at all. So the inevitable collapse back into warrior consciousness was predictable.

So how do we sponsor the development of healthy traditional consciousness within Russia? I’m not sure. It would be good to consult some experts on the Russian culture to give us more insight into this. Communism is not a desirable option. The Eastern Orthodox Church does seem to be functioning as a decent platform for modernism in places like Greece. Greece isn’t France, but it’s certainly got a modernist economy and a functional democracy. That is testimony to the fact that their form of traditional consciousness will sustain functional modernism, that it provides enough public virtue for it to not collapse back into a kind of kleptocracy, a corrupt structure.

So perhaps over time, the Eastern Orthodox Church in Russia can be nurtured and restored so that it does create good citizenship and a sense of ethnic solidarity among the people, and then it can begin to serve as a foundation for functional modernism. But the Eastern Orthodox Church was founded in Greece and has historical roots in Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire. It was more of a transplant in Russia and was never as strong there. An alternative might be a form of Russian patriotism. Nationalism and patriotism can shape forms of healthy traditional consciousness, although the morality brought with a religious form of traditional consciousness is often far more potent than one that is merely based on national solidarity.

The problem is not dissimilar to the problems with modernism in Latin America. We can see that the Catholic Church in Latin America is not creating a successful enough level of traditional consciousness to keep corruption from continually decimating the economy. Modernism keeps collapsing in these countries because of corruption—and not just because of the people who are taking the bribes, but the people who are tolerating the bribes, tolerating the system. It’s like, “Oh well, the guys are corrupt, but what can we do?” There’s corruption in modernist countries, too, but people won’t stand for it, at least not for long.

Healthy forms of traditional consciousness are generally not on the radar screen of the modernists and postmodernists who want to help the world get better, yet from an integral perspective, this is where we need to start. We need to go back down to those levels of culture and begin there. The pattern of evolution is so instructive; it’s like a road map for exactly what we need to do to make the world a better place. We need a vertical perspective because one size does not fit all when the world’s development is spread out across the last two thousand years of history.

Life in a Balkanized World

WIE: One of the issues we are confronting today is how to satisfy the many ethnic groups around the world and their desire for self-determination. As empires have fallen and colonialism has ended, there is a great desire for more autonomy on the part of different ethnic groups that have been subjugated for so long. It can cause a lot of instability in regard to existing national boundaries and political structures—whether it’s the Kurds in Turkey or the Basques in Spain or the Croats in the Balkans. So how does an integral worldview begin to deal with this difficult issue of self-determination?

McINTOSH: The integral worldview recognizes that the de facto nation-state structure of most of the world today has, in some places, been inappropriately imposed on populations. One of the things that makes the integral vision of a world federation different from the type that has been proposed before is the idea of simultaneously pushing power down and pushing power up. In other words, with an integral world government, we push power up by creating a supranational political organization. And then simultaneously we push power down where we need to by allowing the more naturally existing political groups to consolidate and rule themselves.

Pushing power down means that we would allow some countries to become Balkanized, if you will, allowing them to scale back in history to a time when they had all these different ethnic identities. It allows those ethnic groups to be empowered, to be a bunch of tiny little countries, miniature national identities, miniature linguistic identities. They can go back to the level at which they are stable, go back to the level at which they have authentic evolutionary development. It’s only when you force countries into forms of political organization that they haven’t grown up into naturally that these forms are unstable. So when we see instability in the world, what we need to do is push power down to the level at which it exists naturally—the level to which it has developed in terms of consciousness. Then we can let it stabilize at that level and gain some autonomy and political authority, but we do it within the larger context of a supranational legal structure that can help preserve human rights within these smaller structures. Then gradually they can grow up to the point where they can become a nation-state on their own. But trying to force fit these populations into forms of political organization that they haven’t yet evolved into is never going to work. We see this in Iraq and in other parts of the world. The Turks, for example, are afraid of the Kurds having power pushed down to them because then maybe Turkey will have to defend the integrity of its national border from a new Kurdistan. But if there were an overarching global political organization that would secure peace among the Kurds and Turks, the Turks would be less defensive about the Kurds.

WIE: So in order to grant more autonomy to these ethnic groups, we also need a larger meta-organization that can help oversee the process?

McINTOSH: Yes, you can’t push power down unless you have pushed enough power up. The example that I use is the European Union. The formation of the EU allowed power to be pushed down to Scotland, for example. England originally consolidated Scotland and Wales as a way of making it competitive with France and Spain. But recently Scotland has achieved more independence from England, and England didn’t have to hold onto it because with the EU it was no longer just a nation-state competing against other European states. Power had been pushed up, so it could then be pushed down. The same thing has happened with Spain and Catalonia. The EU has reduced the competitive pressures between the nation-states within the union in a way that’s allowed the substates that exist within them to be given more autonomy.

Part of what keeps nation-states clinging to every piece of territory that they’ve managed to accumulate through their history is that they don’t want to be competitively disadvantaged by having territorial disintegration. But a certain degree of territorial divestment can be healthy and appropriate, and that can occur when the competitive pressures are reduced by an overarching governing system that provides more security. That dynamic could happen at a global level if we had a functional world federation.