Love and Integral Evolution

Integral Evolution: An Interview with David Loye

By Russ Volckmann

David Loye is one of those people that the longer you get to know them the more you begin to discover a bit of their depth and breadth of perspective and creativity in the world. His publications speak for themselves. His network with leading scientists and thinkers around the world is equally impressive.

Actually, my first contact was with David’s wife, Riane Eisler, author of the Chalice and the Blade (among other books written with and without David). Despite the fact that they live over the hill from me, I did not meet her face to face right away. Rather, I interviewed her over the telephone for the Integral Leadership Review, which I publish and edit. When I first approached her about doing the interview she suggested that I should interview David, but I did not know David Loye’s work at all. In that interview I discovered more about Riane’s work and the extent of their partnership. In fact, they are prime movers of a partnership approach to leadership that they promote through a nonprofit center and in a Master’s program at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco.

My conversation with Riane piqued my curiosity about David’s work and I bought one of his books, Darwin’s Lost Theory of Love. Here I found evidence of the extraordinary scope and depth of David’s work that made him a natural candidate for an interview. The only question was would I use it in Integral Leadership Review or in Integral Review: such is the quality of his interests and intellect.

Read the Entire Interview: Here

DAVID LOYE is a psychologist, evolutionary systems scientist, World War II veteran and the author of many books on Darwin, moral evolution, evolution theory, history, poetry, love and social action. David is also co-founder of the multinational General Evolution Research Group and World Futures: The Journal of General Evolution.

WorldChanging Team

From WorldChanging Team:

Crackdown against 'environmental criminals' follows Greenpeace report

Slaughtering the Amazon from Greenpeace UK on Vimeo.

Some of the world's top footwear brands, including Clarks, Adidas, Nike and Timberland, have demanded an immediate moratorium on destruction of the Amazon rainforest from their leather suppliers in Brazil.

The move is the first major development since the Guardian revealed a three-year undercover investigation by Greenpeace in June. The investigation said leading Brazilian suppliers of leather and beef for products sold in Britain had obtained cattle from farms involved in illegal deforestation.

Intersubjectivity and Interobjectivity in the Kosmos

The Ways We Are in This Together: Intersubjectivity and Interobjectivity in the Holonic Kosmos

by Ken Wilber

In "An Integral Age at the Leading Edge", we summarized the evidence suggesting that a cultural elite, representing less that 2% of the adult population, was entering psychosocial waves of development that could best be described as integral, and that this 2% might very well be the harbinger of integral waves of consciousness to follow in the culture at large. It is a paradoxical situation, in a sense, in that this "elite" is the first to actually embrace a radical inclusiveness, an inclusive not shared by the other 98% of the population at this time (although they, too, might develop into this inclusive and integral orientation). But the integral waves of consciousness, however conceived, have at least one thing in common: an understanding that "Everybody is right."

This means that the chief activity of integral cognition is not looking at all of the available theories--whether premodern, modern, or postmodern--and then asking, "Which one of those is the most accurate or acceptable?," but rather consists in asking, "How can all of those be right?" The fact is, all of the various theories, practices, and established paradigms--in the sciences, arts, and humanities--are already being practiced: they are already arising in a Kosmos that clearly allows them to arise, and the question is not, which of those is the correct one, but what is the structure of the Kosmos such that it allows all of those to arise in the first place? What is the architecture of a universe that includes so many wonderful rooms?

One such suggested architecture of the Kosmos is called AQAL (pronounced "ah-qwil," short for "all quadrants, all levels, all lines, all states, all types..."). The pragmatic correlate of AQAL metatheory is a set of practices (or meta-paradigms) referred to as Integral Methodological Pluralism, which attempts to honor and include the many important modes of human inquiry already arising in this spacious Kosmos.

We particularly focused on the quadratic aspects of this methodological pluralism, where "quadratic" refers to four of the most basic dimensions of being-in-the-world, dimensions that are so fundamental they have become embedded in natural languages as variations on first-, second-, and third-person pronouns (which can be summarized as "I," "we," "it," and "its"). As we saw, these represent the inside and outside of the singular and the plural: hence, the four quadrants ( subjective or "I," objective or "it," intersubjective or "we," and interobjective or "its"). A few aspects of these four dimensions are indicated in figure 1.

We also saw that human beings, over the decades and sometimes centuries, have developed time-honored methods of inquiry that enact, bring forth, and illumine these basic dimensions of being-in-the-world. For example, phenomenology and introspection enact, bring forth, and illumine the first-person singular dimensions of being-in-the-world ("I" or subjectivity, the UL quadrant); hermeneutics and collaborative inquiry enact, bring forth, and illumine the first- and second-person plural dimensions of being-in-the-world ("thou/we" or intersubjectivity, the LL quadrant); empiricism and behaviorism enact, bring forth, and illumine the third-person singular dimensions of being-in-the-world ("it" or objectivity, the UR quadrant); and ecology, functionalism, and systems theory enact, bring forth, and illumine the third-person plural dimensions of being-in-the-world ("its" or interobjectivity, the LR quadrant). Of course, there are many other important modes of inquiry, but those are a few of the historically most significant, and certainly ones that any integral methodological pluralism would want to address.

Read More: Here

NOTE: This is Excerpt C of draft material Wilber released a number of years ago. For more such excerpts go to Wilber's Shambala website.

Toward an Integral Media Criticism

Toward an Integral Media Criticism

by Rebecca Bailin

When did I walk away from away from that doctoral program? 1981? I was three courses and a dissertation away from a UCLA PhD in Theory, History and Criticism of film and TV. A doctoral dissertation away, however, can not be considered close. A friend likened writing a dissertation to having a low grade fever for several years. You’re never really sick enough to just lie in bed but you don’t feel very good, either.

Looking back through an integral lens, it is precisely the “flatlandedness” of my classically postmodern education that did me in. If I had to write one more paper about a film or TV show that may have looked fun/happy/liberating/progressive on the surface but was really repressive de-sublimation that erased capitalist and patriarchal hegemony, I was going to puke. Buddhists are accused of not being much of a party crowd, but try postmodernists.

Postmodernist film criticism includes some real grostequeries: those French could write without irony about Jerry Lewis as a transgressive and liberating figure. And one school of “feminist” analysis was organized around Jacques Lacan’s Freudian work on “presence and absence” or penis vs. not-penis. I would come to my graduate seminars and whine, “are we going to do weenie-ology again today? Apologies to all the Freudians out there and shout-outs and props to our dawg Sig for his groundbreaking genius, but Freudian feminism still seems to me a little like a civil rights march led by Strom Thurmond.

What postmodernism did give us, of course, was an appreciation of the power and subtleties of the Lower Left; that culture and language and signs and meanings – our intersubjectivity – pervades our consciousness. We learned that we must consciously intend to make this pervasive ideology (and this was my favorite concept from postmodernism) “opaque.” Social meaning making is so complete that it is transparent – we don’t even perceive it unless we make an effort to make it opaque. Our Lower Left frames the questions we ask and thus shapes the answers that seem possible.

Read More: Here

Integral Ecology and Forest Innovation in British Columbia

Humanity, Forest Ecology, and the Future in a British Columbia Valley: A Case Study

by Stephan Martineau.

“One of the most important and challenging issues facing humanity in the 21st century is the increasingly complex human-ecology interface”, says Stephan Martineau.

In this article, Stephan suggests the potential that integral mediation and integral ecology hold in addressing this interface. Stephan distinguishes two categories of ecological challenges, removed and local tangible, and indicates that they require adapting methodologies to address them. Using a local tangible challenge—a 35-year old conflict over land use issues in the Slocan Valley, British Columbia, Canada—as an example, Stephan outlines an integral mediation approach.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE: HERE / OR AT: THE INTEGRAL REVIEW

Evolution's Third Replicator

From New Scientist:

Evolution's Third Replicator: Genes, Memes, and Now What?

by Susan Blackmore

WE HUMANS have let loose something extraordinary on our planet - a third replicator - the consequences of which are unpredictable and possibly dangerous.

What do I mean by "third replicator"? The first replicator was the gene - the basis of biological evolution. The second was memes - the basis of cultural evolution. I believe that what we are now seeing, in a vast technological explosion, is the birth of a third evolutionary process. We are Earth's Pandoran species, yet we are blissfully oblivious to what we have let out of the box.

This might sound apocalyptic, but it is how the world looks when we realise that Darwin's principle of evolution by natural selection need not apply just to biology. Given some kind of copying machinery that makes lots of slightly different copies of the same information, and given that only a few of those copies survive to be copied again, an evolutionary process must occur and design will appear out of destruction. You might call it "design by death" since clever designs thrive because of the many failures that don't.

The information that is copied, varied and selected is called the replicator, and the process is well understood when applied to biology. Genes are copied, mutated and selected over and over again. Assemblages of genes are used to build vehicles that carry them around, protect them and propagate them. These vehicles - the lumbering robots, as Richard Dawkins calls them - are animals and plants, the prolific and exquisitely designed products of the first replicator.

About 4 billion years after the appearance of the first replicator, something extraordinary happened. Members of one species of lumbering robot began to imitate one another. Imitation is a kind of copying, and so a new evolutionary process was born. Instead of cellular chemistry copying the order of bases on DNA, a sociable species of bipedal ape began to use its big brain to copy gestures, sounds and other behaviours. This copying might not have been very accurate, but it was enough to start a new evolutionary process. Dawkins called the new replicators "memes". A living creature, once just a vehicle of the first replicator, was now the copying machinery for the next.

Read More: Here

Meaning, Technology and the Brain

Below information designer Tom Wujec talks for just over six minutes about three areas of the brain that help us understand words, images, feelings, connections. Wujec asks: How can we best engage our brains to help us better understand big ideas?

God, Strings, Emergence and the Future

God, Strings, Emergence, and the Future of the World

By Nicola Hoggard Creegan

This paper is a part of a larger project in which I argue that a reconnection with nature, and a reconceptualization of nature, are necessary accompaniments to a well developed sensus divinitatis. Schleiermacher talks about faith being neither a knowing nor a doing but a kind of feeling, a sense of absolute dependence, and a consequent understanding of all things in and through the infinite. Calvin mentions the sensus divinitatis directly, and also the connection between this sense and the natural world. Like any capacity, however, it may remain undeveloped or under-developed. The sensus divinitatis may be awakened by connection with, and participation in the natural world—as centuries of mystics testify—although this connection is then explained by and made meaningful in sacred narratives.

The twentieth century has not been an easy time for a theology of nature. This was the century of Karl Barth and a turn away from nature in the interests of affirming the otherness and holiness of God. At the same time, neo-Darwinians taught us to look at all order as only design-like (spandrels). The indeterminacy of the quantum level, combined with the random nature of biological mutation, made any sense of divine presence in nature much more difficult to discern.

The resulting mix of positions in science and theology tended to gravitate either towards a deism, like that espoused by the 2006 recipient of the Templeton Prize, John Barrow, or to the process-like position of many others, like Ian Barbour. Even with the latter, however, there is little sense that God is revealed in nature; in a process theology of nature there is only the presence and influence of God understood as a continuous but perhaps indiscernible lure.

Read More: Here