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Postmodern vs. Integral A brief description of postmodernism and its relation to the Integral worldview will be helpful in clarifying and understanding an analysis of a human world that has been dominated, academically at least, by both functional and dysfunctional postmodern perspectives for the last quarter century. Postmodernism is not a school of thought or a particular philosophy. It is a different mode of perception, a different worldview, as applied to a number of fields, from literary criticism to art, and from cultural anthropology to philosophy. Much of what passes for or is labeled as postmodern is really a failure to fully integrate different perspectives into a coherent whole. In contrast, a fully integrated multi-perspective worldview is an Integral World. The contributions of postmodern thought have been enormous when they have been Integral, but have been quite damaging and distracting when they have remained dysfunctional and failed to present and integrated view of reality. Writing at mid-century, before the rise of what is usually called postmodernism, sociologist Paul Sorokin presciently described what he felt would happen to our modern worldview as the century progressed. "Where before there was a mental and moral order-a reflection of the order of the systems of sensate values and meanings, shortly a mental and moral chaos will arise. The distinction between true and false, right and wrong, beautiful and ugly, positive and negative value will be more and more obliterated… Mental and moral atomism will grow and with it, mental and moral anarchy."(i) A better description of extreme or dysfunctional postmodernism's effect on Western society would be hard to write even sixty years later. The essence of the postmodern worldview is the attainment of multiple perspectives, or the elimination of any one single privileged perspective. While at first blush this seems like an Integral worldview, the dysfunctional postmodern perspective tends to disdain both hierarchy and context, creating from a multifaceted world of many depths, what Wilber refers to as a "flatland." In attempting to see from a number of perspectives, the extreme postmodern worldview gives each viewpoint equal weight. Thus as Glenn Ward writes in his introduction to postmodernism, "There is, for example, no self-evident reason why Bach should be seen as better than Bacharach. This is not to say that they are the same, just that they are equal."(ii) More specifically he concludes, "…critics and theorists need to stop thinking of culture as a building with two stories. Culture is in a sense flat rather than hierarchical: it is a horizontal field in which different areas of interest mix, converse, cross over and sometimes fight with each other. It is not a vertical edifice in which influences and/or disagreements travel up and down between the top (art and literature) and bottom (mass or popular culture) floors."(iii) This is a worldview that sees no difference in value between Francisco Goya's painting The Third of May and the urinal that Marcel Duchamp placed in his exhibit and called art. They can both be seen as art, but to say that both are of equal value because of this is not to be holding multiple perspectives, but to have lost all perspective entirely.(iv) Without contexts, multiple perspectives tend to lose all meaning. This then leads to a dismantling of reality in a fashion that places everything on equal footing. As Huston Smith noted, "…postmoderns think that more disconnections, more dismantling and difference (and the increased fragmentation, distractions, and dispersion these produce) is what we need."(v) Wilber expands upon this when he describes the dysfunctional postmodern project as declaring that, "…truth itself is culturally relative and arbitrary, grounded in nothing but shifting historical tastes, or power and prejudice and ideology. Since truth is context-dependent, the argument goes, then it is completely relative to changing contexts. All truth is therefore culturally constructed-the social construction of gender, the social construction of the body, the social construction of pretty much everything-and because all truth is culturally constructed, there are and can be no universal truths." As Wilber goes on to illustrate, this viewpoint falls apart under it's own assumptions. "This view thus claims that there is no universal truth at all-except for its own, which is universal and superior in a world where nothing is supposed to be universal or superior at all."(vi) In attempting to find truth through multiple perspectives, which is an admirable goal, the dysfunctional postmodern worldview equalizes in value the contexts and depths that establish meaning, thus making meaning meaningless. But as Wilber so rightly points out, contexualism "… means neither arbitrary or relativistic. It means determined by contexts that constrain the meaning. In other words, 'context' means 'constraints,' not chaos." In this way he concludes "… meaning is indeed context-dependent (there are only holons!), but this means neither arbitrary nor relative, but firmly anchored in various contexts that constrain the meaning."(vii) More explicitly, meaning and truth are found not simply from cultural contexts, but from social, psychological, and physical contexts at every depth of being. All of the aspects of being at every depth, (Wilber's four quadrants), need to be brought to bear in the search for truth. This is the Integral perspective. The Integral worldview is one in which the postmodern penchant for perspectives is not allowed to run amok creating a morass of multiple views held all in equal importance. An Integral worldview seeks to weave from a mass of multiple perspectives a coherent vision of their interrelatedness, including their hierarchical relationship to each other. Dysfunctional postmodern worldviews tend to disdain or disregard hierarchy, generally feeling that it places one view, one person, or one thing in a superior position over others. Hierarchy is quite natural and some views are more complete than others. As the Great Chain of Being and the notion of holons makes clear, the whole of the universe is a hierarchy, or a holarchy, if you will. The problem is not hierarchy itself, but dysfunctional hierarchy that places things, people and ideas in an inappropriate context to one another. For example, in regards to views on art and literature, we all have our opinions, but some opinions are more informed than others. The opinion that Shakespeare is a less than talented writer is perfectly valid, and one that has been held by a number of prominent critics since his day. However, the view of someone who has never read Shakespeare is less valid than someone who has read King Lear, which is again less valid than someone who had read all of Shakespeare, which is also less valid than someone who has studied, acted, and directed all of Shakespeare's works. A dysfunctional postmodern worldview would consider each of these views to be equally valid. An Integral worldview, by contrast, sees that while each view has value, the more encompassing worldview, the one with the greatest depth, is more valid.(viii) This can
be a difficult idea to get one's head around as we usually tend to assume
that our view of the world is either inherently correct, or at least
of equal value as the next person's. Just as it is hard for a person
with a Traditional or Modern worldview to accept that the perceptions
of a person with an Integral worldview might encompass more truth, and
thus have more value, it may also be difficult for someone with an Integral
worldview to accept that there are perspectives deeper than their own.
These deeper worldviews are the transpersonal, or Spiritual, perspectives
that are available to each of us. Each successive worldview acknowledges
truths that the previous stage is oblivious to. This is contrary to
the dysfunctional postmodern perspective that believes all viewpoints
are of equal value. In contrast, the Integral perspective, and more
so the Spiritual perspective, attempts to see the value of each viewpoint
in relationship to all viewpoints and the world that they view. Footnotes i) Pitirim
A. Sorokin, The Crisis of Our Age: The Social and Cultural Outlook,
p.304.
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