saturn return to sender

I twitter-linked to this Salon.com interview with Ken Wilber. Then I made the mistake of reading some of the letters in response. Whew.

Call me a Wilber apologist if you want, but frankly a lot of people seem to get so offended by the man that they fail to even begin to grapple with his ideas. In particular, they sense an I’m-better-than-thou vibe and immediately dismiss everything else.

The whole “you can’t explain a higher state to a lower person” is a patronizing cop-out, as other readers have observed. Very convenient, too. “It’s not that I’m wrong, it’s just that you don’t understand me because you’re not as smart.”

No! It’s exactly not about being “smart!” It’s more like being an athlete. Is it a patronizing cop-out that an pro basketball player can’t explain to you how they hit so many three-pointers? Do you dismiss basketball games as the epiphenomenal result of adrenaline receptors and electromagnetic particle exchange? And so, that means you’re qualified to advise a pro basketball player on how to play the game?

Awareness training is a practice, not an intellectual belief! Why is this so hard to get?

Then people seem to get offended by the idea that science and religion aren’t in fact at odds. Here’s my take: if you treat either science or religion as simply belief systems, they contradict each other horribly and you post nasty puerile things on the internet.* If you treat them both as methodologies, they are actually in perfect harmony and there’s little point in squabbling over beliefs because the source of truth in each case is the practice, and if there’s disagreement about something then it’s just a matter of needing more practice, more evidence, more work.

The methodology of science gives us progress in the physical world, but says nothing about values and morals. The methodology of religion gives us progress in the inner world, but can’t make us microwave ovens. Don’t try to make one do the other’s work and there’s no problem.

What’s more, if every major religion has at its core an injunction against being a asshole (ie, the golden rule), as Karen Armstrong so eloquently
explains, and if every religious follower paid attention to that practice instead of the petty differences in belief, the world might be a considerably less violent, stupid place.

Now, what about these ideas is so threatening to people? I don’t get it.

I have friends who have worked with/for Wilber. I briefly did a little work for the Integral Institute a few years ago, but never met the man. Perhaps I’m lucky because I’ve heard he’s an asshole but have not personally experienced his asshole-ness. So, I may have the luxury of saying, who the fuck cares if he’s an asshole? He has a spectacularly compelling and constructive world-view, and his writing has done a lot for me, personally. Call me a Wilber apologist if you want.

Michael Pollan TED-Talks about plants and animals and humans. And Polyface Farm and closed-loop agriculture that generates fertility instead of depleting it.

There is an essential incompatibility between the Polyface philosophy and industrial agriculture. Pollan suggests it has something to do with the modern person/corporation’s anthropocentric insistence that we’re other than animals, and separate from nature. I tend to agree. The ecosystem is not a resource on which the economy runs. The economy runs inside the ecosystem. Duh. On the other hand, we can’t have Polyface farms in downtown Manhattan. Or can we?

I’m really loving The Omnivore’s Dilemma and there is some lengthy blog post coming out of it sometime soon. I’m in fact flying to New York tonight on a red-eye, will probably not be able to sleep, etc, so maybe then …