I have wondered the same thing here in these pages - interesting article. This comes from Frank Visser's Integral World. In my opinion, Ken is more than a little optimistic, or his definition of "integral" is a lot looser than mine.
Read the whole article.Integral People - Where?
Giorgio Piacenza
So where are we really going, collectively speaking?I'm worried that Ken Wilber's expectation that an influential percentage of the population (at least in the U.S. and Europe) is becoming Integral Stage will not materialize in the world at large. After the green baby boomers mature (and some, expectedly, become first stage Integral) how will the rest of the population evolve? Will new cohorts like the boomers arise under the circumstances materializing today?
As said by Ken and other thinkers the boomers' children seem to be more narcissistic than their already narcissistic fathers. I also say (along with psychologist Sergio Sinay, author of “La Sociedad Que No Quiere Crecer” which translates as “The Society Which Doesn't Want to Grow”) that a great influential percentage of kids born in the 1980's and after (even as children of baby boomers) do not share the depth of ideals of their parents and crave short term entertainment. They are the children of postmodernity, of internet, of instant gratification. they are light, they are videocrats and I think that the life style this first stage of post modernity imparts tends to be developmentally confused (within the minds of newly developing individuals) with Red Level quick gratification and rebelliousness implicit or explicit values, therefore holding back further psychological development into the stage that psychologist Robert Kegan says people need to develop in order to operate in the demands of today's world.
While Derrida and other post modern philosophers may have been Green at heart in an ethical way and their criticisms of modernity, the logos, structures, traditions and reason may have been well intended in order to generate horizontality, their generally convincing questioning of the logoic structures that held our world together may be misinterpreted and, for the most part, assist Red level individuals to remain red. It may even assist Amber level individuals to question modernity in an attempt to return to how things were in the not too distant past of the Middle Ages. In fact, postmodern thinking can be so much misunderstood…it is dangerous.
In some universities here in Perú there is a small but growing movement of Catholic religious, neo conservatives that question, humanism and the modern, scientific invasion of most spheres of life and they do it by using the tools of Deconstructionism to deconstruct the rational scientific premises of modernity in order to re establish as more valid the a religious-based way of life. This in essence is like the "Radical Orthodoxy" also proposed in the U.K. and other places.
While the Greens (which originated from a long and complex process in advanced Western Societies under unique intellectual and democratic circumstances) appeared in the political scene questioning traditionally rigid modern and mythic society after the Second World War, we must see that the time was ripe for them. But their utopian expectations soon gave way (in a majority of cases) to the task of making a living and becoming more realistically settled. They are hard working, still sufficiently idealistic to strive for a universal cause, but also individualistic…in a certain way they conform the last of a cohort that believed in Meta Narratives and the first of a way of being which is more Postmodern. They handed in the economic and technological basis for the next generation (some of them being their children) but -perhaps- their openness and more approachable educational style failed to transmit to the new generation some of the structures, limits and values they had dearly strove to live by. When their children grew in red and amber stages, they required authoritarian or at least structured Father and Mother figures that their Boomer parents could not represent or weren't willing to represent anymore. Moreover, also the mores of the culture they helped to change didn't either clearly transmit values of 'right' and 'wrong' in the stages when the new generation needed them the most.
~ Giorgio Piacenza is a sociologist student in the Certificate program leading to a Master's degree in Integral Theory at JFK University.
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