Text by Corey W. DeVos
We are here today to talk about the 8 critical zones of integral metatheory, and to apply them to the ongoing cultural conversation taking place around race, racism, and other kinds of bigotry that we continue to see in the world. This discussion is going to be a great opportunity to not only learn more about these 8 primordial perspectives that are available to us, but also to see how they can be applied to social and cultural challenges and “wicked problems” such as these.
The purpose of this conversation is not to say, “racism is a totally ubiquitous and growing problem, and in fact here are 8 new kinds of racism that you need to worry about.” I think the actual context here is more like “hey, we’ve actually already made the sorts of social transformations that gets us out of ethnocentrism and racism in the first place”. However, as Ken has written about extensively, and as we have discussed several times in the past on this show, these social transformations don’t happen overnight. Even after we achieve something truly remarkable, like eliminating discriminatory laws in the lower right quadrant as we have done over the last several decades, it can still take several generations or even lifetimes for the rest of our collective center of gravity to “catch up”. Yesterday’s forms of social self-organization can still have painful consequences for people’s lives today, and non-discriminatory laws can still be interpreted in discriminatory ways, which are just some of the zone-related issues we will discuss as we go.
So again, what we are talking about today are really the sorts of resistances, inertias, and karmas that remain and that we continue to face as we play “catch up” in our interiors, in our behaviors, and in our culture. As Ken says, “the knowledge quest proceeds funeral by funeral” — which is precisely why it can take so long for these social transformations to be properly fulfilled across an entire society.
I’ve been particularly turned on by Ken’s 8 zones of Integral Methodological Pluralism over the last several years, which Ken and I summarize in our previous episode together. These 8 zones are lighting me up the same way that the four quadrants originally did when I first got into integral philosophy over 25 years ago, and have greatly improved my own capacity to make sense of the incredible complexity of today’s world. To me, these 8 zones offer an incredibly high degree of granularity and explanatory power as we look at all of the most critical factors of social transformation, and how these transformations are then selected for (or not!) by the rest of culture and society. They also allow us to see how, when discussing matters such as race, ethnicity, and racism, we need to make room for many conflicting and partial perspectives, and attempt to pull them together into a more comprehensive analysis. Which to me has been one of the most difficult challenges in this discourse as we see it today — everyone is talking across each other, often using the same words but very different meanings and interpretations behind those words. So it’s an opportunity to create more shared reality between multiple conflicting or even contradictory views.
My hope is that this sort of analysis can ultimately help us innovate more skillful solutions and interventions that are more appropriate (and therefore more effective) for each of these eight primary perspectival zones of our being. Each of these zones reveal unique challenges and inertias that require zone-specific interventions in order to disrupt and overcome — and that each of these challenges themselves have driving factors that come from multiple other zones. The goal here isn’t to simply categorize all of our problems like a color-by-number painting. These zones are not categorical, they are enactive — that is, they are literally psychoactive, they are not describing some inert foreign territory “out there” somewhere, but are rather describing the living perspectives within you right now, which you can use to disclose more of your inner and outer realities. This is a perspectival yoga which, if done carefully and consciously, can help us quickly cut through the fog of confusion surrounding an increasingly fragmented culture war, and reduce the greatest amount of suffering for the greatest number of people.
All of this, I think, leads us toward something like a genuine “integral critical theory” that allows us to bring the greatest understanding, clarity, and compassion to some very emotionally charged issues, and prevents us from talking across each other as we so often do in our present cultural discourse. What’s more, this “integral critical theory” also allows us to appreciate and even celebrate the genuine progress that we HAVE made over the generations, even as we continue to deal with some of the nasty residues of yesterday’s world, and while also acknowledging the very real pain felt that is felt by many of these communities to this day. And I think it is fully aligned with something you wrote about 20 years or so ago, which I think continues to become more and more relevant as time goes by:
“The heart of integral philosophy, as I conceive it, is primarily mental activity of coordination, elucidating, and conceptually integrating all of the various modes of knowing and being, so that, even if integral philosophy itself does not deliver the higher modes, it fully acknowledges them, and then allows and invites philosophia to open itself to the practices and modes of contemplation. Integral philosophy is also, by virtue of its comprehensiveness, a powerful critical theory, critical of all less encompassing approaches – in philosophy, psychology, religion, social theory, and politics.” —Ken Wilber
https://integrallife.com/integral-critical-theory-the-8-zones-of-racism/
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Ken and Corey continue their discussion of the 8 critical zones of integral metatheory, and apply them to the ongoing cultural conversation taking place around race, racism, and other kinds of bigotry that we continue to see in the world. This discussion is a great opportunity to not only learn more…
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