image by べンジャミン

Before we can understand where we’re going, we have to see where we are, so let’s start by talking a bit about modernism and postmodernism.

Modernism began with the Greeks, then disappeared until Europeans picked up the thread in the Renaissance, discovering that reason could improve their lives at least as much as the religions which had previously governed them. Pre-moderns looked to God for answers, but moderns began to look toward science.

It took a long time for people to disembed their religious beliefs from their identities and take up the new tools of rationality, but eventually modernism came to rule the world, and it still does today. In terms of population, more than half the world exists at the traditional, pre-modern stage. But moderns hold almost all of the world’s wealth, and more than half the people in the Western world have their center of gravity in modernism.

Modernism values science, technology, commerce, wealth, and individuality, and great good has come from it. It has brought us medicine, airplanes, education, and material wealth on a scale unprecedented in human history.

But, of course, modernism also has its problems. Because it values science and rationality in pursuit of learning and material wealth, anyone operating with different values is automatically seen as an inferior “savage,” which allows modern people to exploit them as desired. After all, what’s more important—the traditions of savages, or the grand goal of Progress?

In this way, moderns simultaneously built empires and destroyed cultures all over the world in the name of Progress and wealth, rolling over the planet like a great cotton gin, harvesting that which modernism values and discarding everything else. Sadly, this process is still happening throughout the developing world.

Of course this destruction had consequences, which gelled into the worldview of postmodernism. As postmodernism developed, it ran through the catalog of modernism’s achievements, pointing out deep currents of exclusion and validating all the people which modernism had marginalized: women, minorities, homosexuals, Third-World cultures.

The postmodern way of looking at things—appreciation for different cultures and non-wealth-based forms of value, and criticism of modernist governmental and corporate policies—came to full flower in the late 60s as students protested the Vietnam War and women came together to discover who they were outside of their traditional roles.

Today, postmodern values are held by about 25% of the developed world, and 5% of the entire world’s populations. Researcher Paul Ray uses the term “Cultural Creatives” to describe people at this level—they tend to congregate in cities and are at the forefront of ecological, organic, justice, and peace movements.

Like modernism, postmodernism has brought amazing things into the world: growing racial equality, feminism, and sensitivity to different points of view. Though oppression still exists, people are freer than ever to be who they are. Fifty years ago, only rich white men ran things, with extremely little input from people from different backgrounds. Now, we are about to have our first Black president. The times have definitely changed!

But, also like modernism, postmodernism has its problems. First off is a nihilistic point of view, such as the one I developed right after graduating school. If our racial, gender, and social conditioning completely determines who we are, and if progress is just an illusion written into history books by rich white men, then what opportunity or incentive is there to change and grow?

The irony, of course, is that without the material wealth created by modernism, postmodernism would never have arisen. As Don Beck says in Integral Consciousness and the Future of Evolution: “It’s like a person who climbs to the top of a house and then throws down the ladder that got him up there.”

Postmodernism’s derision for the previous levels of development is also a serious problem. We saw this most recently and explicitly in the presidential campaign, when many liberals spewed venom at Sarah Palin, a true representative of the pre-modern worldview, and John McCain, whose worldview falls more within modernism. This venomous response does no good, and in fact does great harm. We end up spinning our wheels in endless fights about ideologies when we could get a lot more done by showing each others’ ideas respect, and agreeing to work together on that which we share. In other words, postmodernism is bitterly fighting one side of the Culture War, and doesn’t seem likely to lay down arms any time soon.

So ... if the problems of modernism leave us with unsustainable and oppressive models, and the problems of postmodernism leave us unwilling and unable to change, where do we go next? What’s the next level, and how do we get there?

Emerging now is an integral worldview, which wants to harvest the genius of everything that came before it, retaining what’s useful and good, like science and technology and diversity and ecology, and discarding what doesn’t work, like racism, sexism, and nihilism.

We’ll talk more about integralism in the days to come, but a good understanding of it starts with understanding the developmental process we discussed Monday. Integralism seeks to objectify rather than identify with all the worldviews that came before, from tribal right up to postmodern.

In this way we can make rational instead of habit-driven decisions about how to use all the wisdom humans have amassed throughout history to solve our problems and create a new way of living.