Developmental Politics with Steve McIntosh EXCERPTS

4:17AM Feb 28, 2022

Speakers:

Michael Maxsenti

Steven Bhaerman

Steve McIntosh

Keywords:

cultural

progressivism

political

cultural evolution

modernity

worldview

antithesis

perspective

called

polarity

emergence

polarization

world

pathologies

problem

people

politics

america

establishment

steve

Welcome to Front and Center, from political battlefields to cooperative playing fields. Hello, I'm Michael Maxsenti. And we have another very important conversation today to help us move through these evolutionary times towards a more beautiful world our hearts know as possible. Let me invite my partner Steve Behrman to make a more formal introduction of today's guests, Steve.

Thank you, Steve. And thank you, Michael. It's a pleasure to be with you today.

Thank you. Thank you. Our guest today is Steve McIntosh. He was leader in the integral philosophy movement and author of Developmental Politics, How America Can Grow Into a Better Version of Itself. He is president and co founder of the Institute for Cultural Evolution think tank, which focuses on the cultural roots of America's political problems. He is also co author with John Mackey and Carter Phipps of the book, Conscious Leadership, Elevating Humanity Through Business. He has authored three previous books on integral philosophy, The Presence of the Infinite, Evolution’s Purpose, and Integral Consciousness and the Future of Evolution. Welcome, Steve.

Okay, well, Michael, why don't you take the first question.

Hi Steve, what I'd like to do to start us off, is I want to quote, if you will, from your December 21 article, which really kind of summarizes from my perspective, and correct me when we're done with if I'm wrong, but your great work on Developmental Politics.

December 21, you wrote a column called Why Centrism Fails and How to Overcome Hyperpolarization. Now, I'm quoting here, the hyperpolarized condition of politics in the United States, where the growing intensity of America's cultural war now threatens the foundations of its democracy. American culture and politics remain starkly and bitterly divided. Hyper polarization is not a problem that can be solved under America's current cultural conditions. The only way to ameliorate this "wicked problem" is to effectively grow out of it by pointing to achievable next steps for America's cultural evolution. Integral philosophy accordingly offers a realistic remedy for America's political dysfunction. Steve M. Let's start here. Can you briefly elaborate explain that?

Many people point to social media, right, and how the business incentives of those structures encourage a division and divisiveness and hostility? Right, that's certainly a contributing problem. Others point to the campaign finance structure and how corrupt that is, right. Others points to the fact that it's in the interests of the political parties to sort people into opposing camps to build their their particular constituencies. The Founders envisioned a polity that would be naturally in political conflict, but that those political conflicts could be worked out through compromises, right compromising for the good of the country, right? A sense of, of civic nationalism or general patriotism, were important cultural agreements that kind of held the polity together, wherever you find a human political organization, you naturally find divisions. And so it's not as if the healthy polarization is something that I advocate we try to overcome. I think it's a matter of seeing that right now. We're in a kind of a stuck polarization. And this idea of growth, which I champion in the book, and which you mentioned, is, is I think the best way to go out of it grow out of it. And that is despite these contributing problems, the way we see it at the Institute for Cultural Evolution is that hyper polarization is resulting primarily from cultural evolution from cultural growth. And it's it's a cultural problem, primarily, despite these other political and economic exacerbating factors, that it's really the divisions are occurring upstream. from politics in Washington, DC, and for a long time, the idea was that, you know, the Americans just needed to come together, you know, because we're stuck together. And and there's just this sort of admonition that it's going to be better for everyone if we can meet in the middle and seek some kind of bipartisan compromise. Right. And so the the the political perspective on it is that so much of polarization is caused by politicians behaving badly. The joke about the drunk in the middle of the night, he's looking for his keys on the street corner under the spotlight. And the cop comes along and says, you know, Can I help you? What are you doing? He says, I'm looking for my keys. And so the the cops helping him look, and they after about five minutes, a cop says, Well, where did you last see your keys? He said, Well, I saw him in the park. They said, Well, why are we looking here? Well, that's where the light is! And this cultural understanding can act, not only as a supplement to other worthy efforts to try to overcome hyperpolarization. But ultimately, I think, the kind of perspectives that we're going to need if we're going to get out of this mess and avoid some kind of political regression, more than we've already seen.

Not to contradict what I just said about the limitations of social science at getting at the bedrock level of values where people's cultural identities lie. But the back in 2018, the the More in Common organization sponsored a small scale, sociological study, called The Hidden Tribes report, where they identified a variety of factions, five different factions, the middle of which were Americans who were disengaged from politics, didn't watch the news didn't vote. But they also identified a several factions that we might characterize as being on the right, several factions that might be characterized on the left. And then last year in 2021, a Pew poll, which had a larger sample size, sort of reproduced The Hidden Tribes report almost exactly. And so what we can see is that, at the very least, that the polarity that we're talking about is not just a polarity between the left and the right, or red states or blue states. There are actually multiple levels of polarity, right? So there's, we can identify a polarity on the left between what the media is now calling progressives and moderates, right. And so I would characterize that as I'm about to explain, the polarity, the natural dialectical difference between the modernist worldview and the progressive postmodern worldview.

As I argued extensively in the book, in order to understand culture, we have to identify what I call the basic units of cultural analysis and understanding. And these are worldviews, large scale, Major, historically significant worldviews. And these worldviews in a sense track the evolution of human history over the last several 100 years, right. So, so a way of understanding this is that in the enlightenment, you know, between the late 17th century and throughout the 18th century, in Western Europe, there occurred an awakening an emergence, a new kind of cultural understanding, a new epistemology and new ontology it brought about science, it brought about democracy, it brought about a new way of thinking about society that transformed the world and invested the European nations that adopted this enlightened layman perspective, as well as the United States which was founded on this perspective. It gave them immense new power, which they used for good and for ill. In other words, colonialism, right? Environmental degradation, all of the results of the emergence of modernity, as it's sometimes called. Are showing that certainly modernism can't be the end of history, right? That it's not sustainable, environmentally, or even culturally. But it has brought tremendous gifts, and one of the gifts that, but understanding that modernity is not just the Industrial Revolution. It's not just the advent of science. What brings about the gifts of modernity is a new kind of consciousness, right? A new cultural agreement structure that coheres as a historically significant, multi generational worldview. And this modernist perspective, this modernists way of thinking is what generates the conditions required for democracy. It generates the conditions required for a robust, a healthy, modern economy right. With it, one of the things that's often overlooked when people think about modernism is tha, for the countries despite the inequality, right. Despite again, just bracketing the pathologies of modernity for a moment. One of the things that modernity has brought to the to the cultures and countries that is that have managed to adopt it as a as a sort of governing philosophy. And a cultural agreement is what's known as the Great Enrichment. Humility is a prerequisite to growth. So certainly when any form of culture or a person adopts a stance of arrogance, then they're affording their own ability to become better, right. So, so certainly, arrogance is something we can condemn. And we can see arrogance, of course, in almost every cultural structure and situation. But one of the one of the goals of the developmental philosophies understanding of cultural evolution that I'm arguing for, is it it gives us a sympathy and an appreciation of every step of human development That there's this natural tendency to condemn what came before or to vilify it. In other words, one way you could say is that, as the steps of worldly development unfold, the god of one becomes the devil of the next. So progress was, in a sense, the god of modernity. So, so speaking to the arrogance of modernity, certainly is something is, is a pathology of it, a blind spot of it, and the root of many of its pathologies. But we can also of course, point to the arrogance of of traditionalism. Of every they were arrogant notions, ethnocentric notions., in every one of the great religious civilizations, right. Some had the more strongly than others. We could go prior to the emergence of writing and the organization of religious civilization, to the tribal level, the pre literate level, and there's deep wisdom, Earth knowing, that has been lost. That we need to recover. So another way of understanding this is that we want to transcend the current situation. But the degree of our transcendence is partially measured by the scope of our inclusion. Not only we have to try to go beyond, we also have to try to better include what came before. And that certainly includes indigenous wisdom. There's a world historical fact, that is this cultural worldview, which is roiling American politics, its emergence is a real thing and our ability to see it and not just flinch from the fact that there may be parts of us that we don't like or parts that we don't want identify with. What I'm offering is a perspective that attempts to stack out higher ground, an outside and above perspective, that can see these worldviews not only from within, right from within our own political identity, but from without as well. So standing outside of the culture war as a whole. And seeing that it's not just a left right, a conflict. That there are actually these three major cultural structures, which are in this overarching struggle to be born and to transcend and the perspective that I represent, sometimes we call it post-progressive, because that this emergence of progressivism over the last 60 years, while powerful and important and necessary, if we are going to make a better world the values of progressivism are necessary, but progressivism is not the end of history. Something comes after this worldview. And the way of understanding that that I that I like the bestest is seeing this pattern of evolution, right. The pattern first identified by the idealist philosophers 200 years ago, of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. You can see this pattern of unfolding at every level. And so sort of fractally distributed in all forms of evolution and here in culture, we can see how the thesis of the old establishment right. As in the 60s when progressivism as a worldview is emerging and becoming democratized. The people tried to distinguish themselves from the establishment. Which is the sort of the cultural block of the truce between traditionalism and modernity that characterized American culture after World War Two and prior to the 60s. So progressivism emerges. And now it's it's signaling, emerges as an antithesis. Right? How do you how do you evolve beyond the world of you know, the early 60s? Well, you, you, you push off against the pathologies of that world. You reject the values of status and materialism. You reject the oppression. You reckon with a sins of history. All of the things that progressivism has come to stand for. Were the opportunities for evolution that it embraced. And it embraced those by staking out this position of antithesis to the establishment, right. The thesis of you know, America as it had been throughout the 20th century. A new thing emerged, the antithesis. And, that's done good and it still has much good left to do. But, as it now begins to gain its own establishment power, as it becomes a kind of new establishment in the media and in the universities and in many institutions in American society, for good and bad. That the fullness of the antithesis, signals the opportunity on the horizon of history, for the next step, the next worldview, the next significant emergence. Which is a synthesis, it includes, it does what progressivism can't, and it is able to better include the best of what's come before.