The Daily Evolver

Ken Wilber is my hero. I mean that quite literally because Ken rescued me – from a life of confusion, fear and frustration as I tried to make sense of our crazy, mixed up world. Ken’s insights, set forth in his nearly thirty books and hundreds of talks and teachings, has organized life on Planet Earth from a disjointed mess into an elegant and meaningful whole. He has created a “theory of everything” that is worthy of the name, and which is helping countless people around the world to lead more intelligent, effective and loving lives.

Through his work Ken has revealed deeper dimensions of the prime force that powers the cosmos, evolution, by showing that evolution does not just explain the exterior forms of life, such as cells becoming sponges then fish then reptiles then mammals and ultimately human beings, but that evolution also powers the interior dimensions of the cosmos, and is behind the astonishing development of human consciousness and human culture.

To bring this down to everyday terms, Ken has shown me something that I attempt to show in my blog posts and podcasts: that we are evolving creatures in an evolving world. And further that there is a teleology, a directionality, to our evolution such that we human beings are indeed developing into higher dimensions of goodness, truth and beauty.

I realize that it doesn’t always look that way as we tune into the day’s news and see that for so many people (and creatures of all kinds), life is anything but good, true and beautiful. But this points to a deeper, paradoxical truth about evolution in general: while in its grand historical sweep evolution is beautiful, in daily application it is often not at all pretty. This realization is powerful, and calls all who realize it to enlist in the project of creating a more good, true and beautiful world. This is perhaps Ken’s greatest teaching to me: that in the final analysis we ourselves are evolution in action.

As he as done for four decades now, Ken Wilber continues to illuminate the path forward. So I thought it fitting, as I mark my first hundred episodes of the Daily Evolver, to invite the great man himself onto the podcast.

Last week we got together on the phone to take a look at the world as it is turning today, and to see if we can make some little bit of sense of it. We range through politics, religion and culture, from ISIS and Muslim extremism, to the situation in Russia and Ukraine, to political polarization and the future of government, to technology and trans-humanism, to the coming integral tipping point.

I’ve had the amazing good fortune to work with Ken over the past ten years and I know him to be not only the smartest person I have ever met, but also one of the wisest and wittiest. He is still the best and most sparkling vehicle for his own teachings, as I think this conversation demonstrates. I hope you enjoy it.

Here are some highlights from Ken to whet your appetite:

“There’s a race going on now between disaster and enormous breakthroughs. Human beings are transcending and including, transcending and including, which means that as our own history gets thicker and thicker and thicker, there are more and more levels to us. There are also therefore more and more things that can break down, more and more things that can go wrong.”

“Virtually all world conflict today is one ethnocentric group versus another ethnocentric group.”

“My sense is that in twenty years we’re going to hit a second tier tipping point. It will be slow but as people start paying attention to interior degrees of development, they’ll see that it explains a whole lot of world circumstances that didn’t make sense before.”

“At some point we are going to have brain-computer linkages. It may even get to the point where we can tell from brain-scanning what a person’s mindspace is. So we will be able to certifiably say that ‘this person is orange, this person is green, this person is turquoise.’ It would come with a certain amount of authority and people would trust it. We’ve had a century of looking at our educational system as producing higher levels of consciousness, and I think it will take a century for people to get used to that. But once that happens it’s just second nature that people will take into account the developmental altitude of another human being.”

“In order for this moment to come into being, it has to feel the previous moment. In order for any creativity to happen at all it has to add a bit of novelty. I think that happens in all four quadrants.”

“Wherever there is an ‘other’ there is fear – that’s the individual self. If you’re identified with the larger whole, pain still happens but suffering is lessened as you’re not identified with it.”

“Democracy in its present form, one body/one vote, will be seen to future generations as primitive. Right now, Mother Teresa and Jack the Ripper would get the same say. What would happen if we stopped giving physical bodies a vote, but instead give a vote for each conscious perspective a person could take?”

1:50 EVOLUTION’S LATEST: TWEE…

I start this week’s call by noting an article in last Sunday’s New York Times style section entitled: The Millennials are Generation Nice, a psychographic snapshot of the 50 million Americans between the ages of 18 and 29. This latest generation of adults, likely mirrored by those in other developed countries, are characterized by a declining interest in materialism and an increased dedication to social purpose, vegetarianism and optimism.

The article concludes, “Taken together these habits and tastes look less like narcissism than communalism. And its highest value isn’t self-promotion, but its opposite, empathy — and open-minded and -hearted connection to others.”

This view supports the thesis of a book I’ve been reading, Twee, The Gentle Revolution in Music, Books, Television, Fashion and Film, by Mark Spitz. Using the sometimes derogatory word “twee”, which means “excessively sweet or sentimental,” Spitz writes that “Twee can be similarly liberating from the pressure to be cool, swaggering, aggressively macho, and old at heart.”

James Parker, in the Atlantic, describes it as “The strangely persistent modern sensibility that fructifies in the props departments of Wes Anderson movies, tapers into the waxed mustache-ends of young Brooklynites on bicycles, and detonates in a yeasty whiff every time someone pops open a microbrewed beer.”

Spitz identifies several markers of the Twee aesthetic:

To me these orientations suggest a consciousness that is differentiating itself from the cynicism, irony and malaise of the post-modern altitude of development. Are we seeing the first signs of a new integral aesthetic? I think so, especially in the emphasis on basic goodness, as well as the impulse to create a personal project that contributes to the world.

12:45 A GOOD WEEK FOR THE OBAMA DOCTRINE

Despite pundits left and right decrying Obama’s handling of ISIS extremists in Iraq, we have seen an enormously positive development in the situation as a direct result of what Obama has done and not done. I’m talking about the peaceful and legal replacement of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki by the new Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi.

Maliki did not go easily and for a few days it looked as if he may even resort to attempting a military coup to maintain power. But in the end he acquiesced and even stood by the new Prime Minister in a demonstration of a constitutional passing of power that is remarkable in that part of the world.

In his disastrous last years in office Maliki presided over a Shiite domination of the country, precipitating a ratcheting down of Iraq from a fledgling modern altitude to a neo-tribal one, and creating rifts that enabled ISIS to gain a foothold in the Sunni sectors of the country.  Obama was criticized for “letting this happen”, criticism he pushed back on in his recent interview with Thomas Friedman:

The reason that we did not just start taking a bunch of airstrikes all across Iraq as soon as ISIL came in was because that would have taken the pressure off of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. That only would have encouraged, he said, Maliki and other Shiites to think: “We don’t actually have to make compromises. We don’t have to make any decisions. We don’t have to go through the difficult process of figuring out what we’ve done wrong in the past. All we have to do is let the Americans bail us out again. And we can go about business as usual.”

So the Iraqi people and their representatives chose a different course, and a new leader who is far more equipped to create a pluralistic society that can protect itself from the impulses of its least civilized populations. Here’s how Ali Khedery, who served for seven years as advisor to the American ambassadors in Iraq, describes the new prime minister in last Sunday’s New York Times:

If anyone has the potential to unite Iraq and hold it together in the face of ISIS terrorism and Arabian meddling, it is Mr. Abadi. In a society where name and upbringing count for a lot, he comes from a respected Baghdad family and was raised in an upscale neighborhood. He studied at one of the capital’s best high schools, earned a degree from one of its top universities and later received a doctorate in engineering in Britain.

While Mr. Maliki [the deposed Prime Minister] spent his years in exile in Iran and Syria and earned degrees and Islamic studies and Arabic literature, Mr. Abadi, a fluent English speaker, worked his own way through his long and costly studies abroad. In meetings over the past decade, Mr. Abadi always impressed me and other American diplomats with his self-effacing humor, humility, willingness to listen and ability to compromise — extremely rare traits among the Iraqi political elite and precisely the characteristics that are needed to help heal the wounds Iraqis sustained under Saddam Hussein and Mr. Maliki.

Indeed, for the first time since 2003, Iraq’s top three leaders, the Shiite Mr. Abadi, the Kurdish president, Mr. Masum, and the Parliament’s Sunni speaker, Mr. Jubouri, have all emerged from Iraq’s Parliament, where they cooperated over the past decade to pass legislation and defuse numerous crises.

Societies (and individuals) need to solve their problems themselves. When America is there to exert our military force people begin to rely on it. They may resent us for it but they can also become comfortable with it, never getting to experience that “oh shit” moment where they realize, “okay, we really have to do this ourselves.”

27:28 FRACTURES IN FERGUSON

The last story I address on the call is the civil strife that has been arising in the town of Ferguson, Missouri in the wake of the shooting of a young 18-year-old, unarmed black man by white police officers.

Despite the predictable emphasis by the left-leaning media on the racial and civil aspects of the tragedy, and the right-leading media’s emphasis on the law and order aspects, I notice three signs of a new, more integrated awareness arising in our cultural mind. I expand on them on the call.

1. America’s police are over-militarized. And their consciousness is not keeping up with the hardware, as we saw in the Ferguson police department’s disproportionate response to the initial protests. There is something that is deeply repulsive to the modern psyche about facing a lineup of masked and helmeted shock troops arrayed on top of an armed personnel carrier. Humanity has spent too many bloody centuries overcoming the tyranny of the king’s men and the dictator’s secret police. Yet we also want to use the latest technologies to keep people — including police people — safe.  One of the great evolutionary challenges of our time is to deal with the problem of modern weaponry in the hands of a pre-modern wielder.

2. There is still a heartbreaking and increasingly intolerable divide between large portions of the African-American population and mainstream society. We can be encouraged by the substantial strides African-Americans have made into mainstream society, including the rise of a large black middle class as well as the double election of an African-American president.  But fifty years after the civil rights act and despite decades of various wars on poverty we are still a long way off from true racial equality. This is a four quadrant affair that requires a four quadrant solution.

3. The struggle in Ferguson was not just racial but developmental. Yes, the igniting events, the shooting of Michael Brown and the subsequent demonstrations, exposed deep tensions between a white police structure and the majority black population. But it grew into a struggle that was more fundamental: between people at or above the traditionalist altitude of development (amber altitude) and those below (red altitude). One key difference between these two structures of development is that people above amber are law-abiding citizens and those below are not. In the days after the initial demonstrations in Ferguson many people flooded into the area to protest legally and peacefully, but some from both within and outside the community came just for the mayhem. Citizens of both races supported the former and called out the latter. One of my favorite scenes was of African-American people, organized by community churches, helping to clean up stores (owned by white people) that were damaged by looters the previous night’s riots.

I suspect that we will learn a lot from the Ferguson drama that will motivate and inform a more rich, intelligent, loving and effective response to the stubborn problems of racial inequality in America.

40:25 QUESTIONS FROM LISTENERS

For the last twenty minutes we talk about all kinds of stuff. Have a listen. Till next week, keep it integral!

Szandra and Jeff met a few months ago in Budapest when she shared her research with the Integral European Conference. Szandra is an “ecological economist”, and to create a pathway towards the economy to come she uses a method called backcasting. With backcasting the researchers begin with a vision of what they want to exist in say, fifty years, and then they work backwards to see what would have to happen to create it.

Szandra conducted her research using two groups of test subjects: one older and steeped in modern values, and a younger group with postmodern sensibilities. The big surprise was how similar the results were between them, as if the vision was there to be discovered regardless of one’s current values.

“With regards to the future,” Szandra says, “the information is there, it’s available to us, to know where we should be going.”

Both groups agreed on several central premises: 1) that the definition of work would be expanded to include self development and taking care of the larger community, 2) that economies would become more local but with a global awareness, and 3) that the difference between non-profits and for-profits would narrow, with each taking cues from the other.

They also saw that education and politics are too intertwined with our economy to keep separate, and that these must be fully integrated in the vision of a future economy.

We hope you enjoy the conversation. Here are the main topics that Szandra and Jeff explore  (with time codes):

01:25 WHAT IS BACKCASTING?

Backcasting is a powerful tool used in future studies. Instead of forecasting, which begins in the current, existing mindset (presumably the one that created the problem), backcasting begins in the future with a vision of what could be and works backwards to see what would be necessary to achieve it. The technique is often used in transition management and especially for sustainability issues.

09:21 THE REDEFINITION OF WORK

The modern mindset sees work as a necessary utility to earn money to consume. Economists think of it this way too. But what if the idea of work was expanded to include self-development, taking care of a loved one, or doing good for the larger community? Any of these things may or may not be monetized, which brings up the issue of a guaranteed basic income.

24:21 GLOBALIZATION AND LOCALIZATION, OR GLOCALIZATION

In the vision of a future economy the motto is to think globally and act locally.  Eco-localization refers to local production and consumption imbued with an awareness of how one’s actions may impact other communities. This includes global trade between local economies (hence the word “glocalization”), which means you don’t import things that can be made locally but you may still share culture and “perhaps even have bananas in Hungary,” Szandra says.

32:26 CORPORATE AND POLITICAL GOVERNANCE

The study participants saw the for-profit and non-profit sectors merge ideologically. For-profit corporations will not just consider profit but also their social obligations, while non-profits will become more efficient and responsive to the market. Hence the “social economy” will be a new synthesis. Jeff offers the example of the electric car company Tesla who recently released their patents to the world.

42:06 A DIFFERENT KIND OF DEMOCRACY

The two groups involved in Szandra’s study both included the role of politics in the new economy, specifically the idea that the decisions should be made by the stakeholders most directly affected by the policies. This begs the question: should deliberative democracy replace the representative model?

47:54 CHANGES IN EDUCATION

We can’t transform work without transforming education. An alternative pedagogy with a focus on the personal capabilities of students is necessary in this new economy, so that our children can discover what they’re good at and how to develop their own special gifts.

Alexandra Köves graduated from Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh with an MA in International Business and the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna with an MPhil in International Studies. She has been working with social development for 15 years. Currently she is a doctoral candidate at the Corvinus University doing research on sustainable employment in the field of ecological economics. She also works as a freelance consultant on development policy and employment policy issues both in Hungary and internationally.

3:00 DO FISH HAVE RIGHTS?

I started this week’s call with an update on a fish story I told a few weeks ago about the lone koi fish I had in my garden pond, the sole survivor of a holocaust perpetrated earlier in the spring by migrating blue herons. He was hiding under a rock, traumatized I assumed, and not eating long past the end of his winter dormancy.

I considered leaving him to his own devices. “Eat or don’t eat,” I thought, absolving myself of responsibility. “If he dies,” I reminded myself, “the pond will be a lot easier to take care of.”

But instead I decided to go to the fish store and buy five new koi. When I introduced them to the pond my original fish immediately (I’m talking within three seconds) swam out from under his rock and began schooling with them. Today, six weeks later, they are a happy fish family, swimming, eating, mating, playing in the waterfall and in general living the koi dream.

How God kills fish.

What spurred my decision to add new fish was research I had posted a few days earlier by fish biologist Culum Brown revealing how fish are intelligent, social, emotional beings on par with many mammals.

Fast forward to this week, when two of my favorite bloggers, Andrew Sullivan of the Daily Dish and Ezra Klein of VOX, published an extended interview with Professor Brown. In it he talked about the reality of commercial fishing in our oceans, and the suffering it causes the fish…

Every major commercial agricultural system has some ethical laws, except for fish. Nobody’s ever asked the questions: “What does a fish want? What does a fish need?”

I think, ultimately, the revolution will come. But it’ll be slow, because the implications are huge. For example, I can’t think of a way to possibly catch fish from the open ocean in a massive commercial way to meet demand that would be anyway near our standards for ethics if we think of them like other animals. Currently, you go out, you catch a bunch of fish, you crush most of them to death in a net, you trawl them up from the bottom of the sea – which causes barotrauma for most of them – you dump them on a deck, half suffocate to death, the ones you don’t want get thrown overboard and die anyway, and the ones you keep go on ice, just to preserve the flesh for market reasons.

How do you do that in a way that has the fish’s interests involved to any degree? You can’t. So it’s not surprising that there is some fierce opposition to this idea. It would mean a massive change in the way we do things.

It also means a massive change in my (and perhaps your) delusion that if we’re eating fish we’re contributing less to the suffering of our animal brethren.

8:50 DEMOCRACY AND DEVELOPMENT

Hungary’s Viktor Orban (left) has signed an agreement with Vladimir Putin.

For my main story this week I note a new meme arising among political thinkers: the idea of the modern yet non-liberal state. Two of my favorite columnists, Fareed Zakaria of the Washington Post, and David Brooks of the New York Times, both wrote on this topic this week. Both were spurred by a remarkable speech given by the president of Hungary, Viktor Orban, who as he begins his second term in office gives voice to the idea of a non-Western, non-liberal yet modernized country.

As David Brooks wrote in his Monday column “The Battle of Regimes”:

On July 26 … Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary gave a morbidly fascinating speech in which he argued that liberal capitalism’s day is done. The 2008 financial crisis revealed that decentralized liberal democracy leads to inequality, oligarchy, corruption and moral decline. When individuals are given maximum freedom, the strong end up stepping on the weak.

The future, he continued, belongs to illiberal regimes like China’s and Singapore’s — autocratic systems that put the interests of the community ahead of individual freedom; regimes that are organized for broad growth, not inequality.

Orban’s speech comes at a time when democracy is suffering a crisis of morale. Only 31 percent of Americans are “very satisfied” with their country’s direction, according to a 2013 Pew survey. Autocratic regimes — which feature populist economics, traditional social values, concentrated authority and hyped-up nationalism — are feeling confident and on the rise. Eighty-five percent of Chinese are very satisfied with their country’s course, according to the Pew survey.

Fareed Zakaria commented on Orban’s speech in his column titled “The Rise of Putinism”:

The crucial elements of Putinism are nationalism, religion, social conservatism, state capitalism and government domination of the media. They are all, in some way or another, different from and hostile to, modern Western values of individual rights, tolerance, cosmopolitanism and internationalism. It would be a mistake to believe that Putin’s ideology created his popularity — he was popular before — but it sustains his popularity.

Orban has followed in Putin’s footsteps, eroding judicial independence, limiting individual rights, speaking in nationalist terms about ethnic Hungarians and muzzling the press.

So Putinism is pre-modern in its interior quadrants, stressing conformity over freedom and collective identity over individual rights. But note that nobody is advocating going back to a world that is pre-modern in the exterior quadrants. The new autocrats are not agrarian Luddites. On the contrary, their goal is to create organized, industrialized, information-rich, modern economies. Viktor Orban makes this clear in his speech:

…While breaking with the dogmas and ideologies that have been adopted by the West and keeping ourselves independent from them, we are trying to find the form of community organisation, the new Hungarian state, which is capable of making our community competitive in the great global race for decades to come.

There is an intelligence to this thinking. The simple fact is that the great majority of people worldwide are pre-modern in their interiors, in their thinking and ways of relating. They are prone to romantic myths of ethnic superiority, strong-man saviors and great battles against an evil “other”. They are confused by pluralism, repelled by sexual liberation and turned off by the counter-culture aesthetic that inevitably arises with modernity and postmodernity. This is true of traditionalist people in every country; yet some countries have higher proportions of people with pre-modern interiors (Russia and China versus the countries of Western Europe, for instance) and thus their developmental centers of gravity are lower.

Leaders who can harness pre-modern impulses are very powerful and popular in their own societies. Today Vladimir Putin’s approval rating, at 80%, is double that of Barack Obama’s. When conditions are favorable, as they have been in both Russia and China for the last twenty years, and huge swaths of population are moving out of poverty into decent modern conditions (in housing, employment, education, medicine, and if not full human rights then at least a relaxation of the police state), then people are content and able to experience interior development at a healthy, sustainable rate.

When conditions are unfavorable, however, the new autocrats will ratchet down to appeal to the more ethnocentric and xenophobic impulses of the population’s premodern worldview, which is organized around finding and defeating an enemy, whether it is the enemy abroad (the West is plotting against us) or the enemy among us (homosexuals are corrupting our youth with degenerate values).

The evolutionary question is can the new autocrats contain and metabolize these pre-modern impulses – within their people and within themselves – in a way that moves their countries forward to a mature interior modernity, without falling into the bad old grooves of isolationism and militarism. Russia under Putin is flirting with the latter with his misadventures in Ukraine. And China, though more rooted in economic internationalism, also shows some signs of the same with its military buildup and territorial assertions over islands in the South China sea.

One thing is clear: the more a culture develops in its interiors the more open, prosperous and peaceful it becomes. What is less clear is how liberalism and democracy play into that process. We used to think democracy led to development, but one of the great lessons of the 21st century so far is that democracy can come too soon: witness the Maliki government in Iraq and Hamas in Gaza, both democratically elected. Now we realize that the trajectory is probably the other way around: development leads to democracy. The ground in-between is the territory being charted by our unlovable new breed of autocrats.

Due to a technical glitch the first two minutes of the podcast are low quality, then it gets better. 

5:20  BOYHOOD

I start this week’s call with a brief review of a new movie that I would nominate as an integral masterwork: Boyhood, by Richard Linklater.

Shot over a period of 12 years, Boyhood traces the life of Mason, an ordinary Texas boy in his development from first grade through high school graduation. The actors, featuring Patricia Arquette, Ethan Hawke and the lead character played by Ellar Coltrane, grow and age through the movie. The story and dialogue were written over time as well, sometimes shortly before a scene was filmed, and are designed to bring forth the essence of the actors themselves, especially the young leading man.

Though much happens in the movie none of it is extraordinary. And Mason himself isn’t particularly interesting — which allows him to be interesting in every particular. He has his problems to be sure, with his sister, friends, parents, stepparents and a girl, but the movie is not about that. It’s about growth itself, which alone turns out to be a potent narrative driver. We literally get to watch Mason grow. We see the shape of Mason’s face change in real time, along with his voice, his mannerisms and his thinking, creating an emerging, essential Mason-ness that is unique in all of time and space. In this way Boyhood reveals the most astonishing secret of all: everybody is fascinating. Every life is worth penetrating and appreciating.

Also of interest to evolutionaries, the movie revolves around the fourth dimension: time. Virtually all stories have a trajectory that unfolds over time. But with Boyhood, the passing of time is the theme, and it invites us to feel into the power of emergence in our own lives. I just hope Richard Linklater, the wise, sweet genius behind this movie is busy on the sequel, Adulthood.

11:25 THE CHALLENGE OF SUFFERING

I think one of the main challenges we face as we enter integral consciousness is that we become aware of two realities that are often unseen and irreconcilable at first tier.

The first reality is that from the larger perspective of history the human condition has gotten better, in all four quadrants, steadily and dramatically. Today, those of us living in the developed world are blessed with lives of astonishing ease and plenty relative to virtually any time, place or people.

On the other hand children are being blown up by bombs. The 24/7 footage from Gaza is just the most immediate example of the ugliness of the second reality: that for millions of people in pockets around the world life is as desperate and abject as the worst of anything we have seen in history. Good thing we can take multiple perspectives.

In the podcast I address the challenge of suffering more as an inquiry than as a commentary, and invite listeners to share their thoughts. The topic was stimulated last week when I received this message from a long-time listener, Peggy Babcock:

I was glad to hear that you’d be talking about both Ukraine and Gaza yesterday. And I confess to a certain level of disappointment in what felt like a deliberate choice to speak about it in a detached, clinical sort of way. I know Integral has been criticized for doing that, but given the very real global angst of the last week, it felt pretty pronounced.

For one, I’ve read Steven Pinker’s book [The Better Angels of our Nature, which makes the case that violence has decreased in history] myself and, while I agree with his conclusion, there is no way we can turn away from the grief of war, loss, fear, death itself. It seems to me that a truly integral approach would be to both hold the larger view AND include the deep pain that people are experiencing…whether Jewish, Muslim, as parents, as Americans, etc. at whatever level of development.

It would help if you could name this innate deeply felt desire to protect ourselves (and your listeners) from emotional distress. But the way beyond our current state is not to avoid, but to go through our experience. How we are each navigating that would help all of us to gain clarity…even if it means understanding that it’s all too complex for us to wrap up in one neat and tidy package! How do we, as integralists, hold the paradox of knowing many details and still NOT knowing what the solution should be?

Peggy also shared this gem from Tibetan Buddhist teacher, Pema Chodron:

As human beings, not only do we seek resolution, but we also feel that we deserve resolution. However, not only do we not deserve resolution, we suffer from resolution. We don’t deserve resolution; we deserve something better than that. We deserve our birthright, which is the middle way, an open state of mind that can relax with paradox and ambiguity. To the degree that we’ve been avoiding uncertainty, we’re naturally going to have withdrawal symptoms—withdrawal from always thinking that there’s a problem and that someone, somewhere, needs to fix it.

I was also happy to hear from noted developmental psychologist Susanne Cook-Greuter, who was on the call. In a message to me yesterday she makes a fascinating point about the expanding capabilities of integral consciousness to hold suffering:

Could it be that the much greater amount of resources later stages have available makes it easier to deal with the many more hurts one registers? At least that is how I have explained it to my students in the past. While we pick up much subtler forms of suffering, we also have become more resilient as well as skillful (metta meditation, tonglen, breathing techniques, tolerance for ambiguity and helplessness etc.) and aware that suffering and joy are two sides of the same coin.

We consider comments from a number of other listeners as well, working our way to a better understanding of how we can not only relate to suffering, but actually be helpful. I hope you are stimulated by the podcast and moved to share your thoughts as this important and ongoing discussion continues.

03:35 HOLACRACY IS A HIT!

I start this week’s call with a pat on the back to my old friend Brian Robertson, who is getting big mainstream attention for holacracy, the organizational governance system he has developed.

Inspired by integral theory, holacracy attempts to replicate in business organizations the holonic structure of the cosmos, where independent entities integrate to create more complex entities (for example atoms create molecules, which create cells, which create organisms).

Holacracy replaces a typical business hierarchy with a series of interlocking circles of people, each responsible for a task, from planning the company picnic to managing its finances. It’s particularly popular in the tech world where creativity and responsiveness are paramount, and hundreds of companies have adopted holacracy, including Zappos, the online shoe company owned by Amazon.

Here’s a terrific article from Ezra Klein’s cool new website,Vox, which explains holacracy’s basic principles and showcases its success. On the call I also share my personal experience with holacracy when in 2007 the Integral Institute served as a laboratory for its development.

12:05 PLANE DOWN IN UKRAINE

This tragedy of the Malaysian airliner being shot down over Ukraine serves to illustrate how much harder it is these days to oppress another country. In the bad old days, the Soviet Union could just roll in the tanks (Czechoslovakia, 1968) or starve a rebel population to death (Stalin’s forced starvation of over five million Ukrainian “separatists” in 1932-33).

But today Vladimir Putin has to act in Ukraine through Russian proxies that range in competence from professional to ragtag to, apparently, drunk. The downing of the civilian jetliner appears to be a mistake perpetrated by one of the less disciplined of the Russian militias. In addition to the human tragedy, it is bad news for Putin as it has riveted the world’s attention on his stealth campaign to destabilize his neighbor.

The question I explore in the call is what is the appropriate response from the West — and who is responsible to carry it out? My conclusion is that this is a case for European leadership. America is slowly resigning its position as the world’s police. This causes all sorts of anxiety on all sides, of course, but it is an inevitable and intelligent move for our country, and one for which I believe President Obama will be admired by history.

Is it because America is war weary? No, though the Afghanistan and Iraq wars have been long and grueling, they are relatively minor compared to the cost of other US wars in terms of lives and treasure. Americans aren’t war weary as much as we are orange and green (the modern and post-modern stages of development), which means we are war weary on behalf of all of humanity. As modernity comes more fully online in the interiors and exteriors of a culture we are entering the post-war world.

So Europe, what will it be? Greater sanctions for Russia, which will in turn hurt your own economies? This is a fascinating question for Americans because much of Europe, most importantly Germany, is at least a half a stage higher in development than we are. They may very well decide that it’s not worth it to punish Putin by adding significant suffering to their own people. But is this just appeasement that delays the inevitable day where Putin will have to be stopped militarily? The story will continue to unfold…

LISTENER POLL: Should America offer “lethal aid” (guns, tanks, missiles) to the Ukrainians? Result: Yes 7%; No 93%

34:50 ROCKETS FLY IN GAZA

It feels like deja vu with this latest conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians, but the damage and suffering are concrete, immediate and heartbreaking.

What the Israel/Gaza situation has in common with the Russia/Ukraine situation is that each conflict is being fueled by the pre-modern strata of their respective populations. There are plenty of people in all of these countries who are flying at modern and postmodern (and integral!) altitudes as well, and like developed people everywhere they want to stop fighting and be part of the world community. Each country has these two populations in different proportions, however, giving them different developmental centers of gravity.

The center of gravity of the Palestinians is traditionalism (amber altitude) and the center of gravity of the Israelis is modern (orange altitude). On the call I examine the asymmetry that these differences create in warfare.

LISTENER POLL: Who is more responsible for the violence in Gaza: the Israelis or the Palestinians? Result: Israelis 77%; Palestinians 23%.

I think the result of this poll represent a key principle of evolution in the lower left quadrant (the collective interiors of culture and relationship): the person or group at the higher stage of consciousness is more responsible for the health of the relationship than is the person or group at the lower stage.

INTEGRAL PRACTICE: TWO BEAUTIFUL SONGS EVOKE TWO WORLDSPACES

A key feature of integral consciousness is the heightened ability to see through the eyes of people who experience the world differently than we do. Art is a great vehicle for this practice, and in the call I share two of my favorite songs that transmit some radical differences between pre-modern and modern-plus worldviews.

1) The Exodus Song represents the pre-modern worldview, which is ethnocentric and nationalistic and where one’s identity derives from one’s land and people. (We can’t resist linking to a YouTube version here which features the iconic soundtrack sung by Andy Williams overlaid by a post-modern video illustrating the inevitable violence which a pre-modern worldview provokes. To experience it un-ironically simply close your eyes.)

2) Anthem represents a thoroughly post-modern worldview, where borders matter less and one’s country is to be found anywhere one’s own mind, heart and soul are free to roam.

THE EXODUS SONG (from the movie Exodus)

This land is mine, God gave this land to me,

So take my hand and walk this land with me,

I’ll make this land our home,

ANTHEM (from the musical Chess)

No man, no madness

She is eternal

And you ask me why I love her

How can I leave her?

The struggle between the Muslim and Western worlds is not only a clash of civilizations, but also a clash of development. I had a good conversation on this subject with Dr. Aftab Omer, a sociologist, psychologist and integralist who was raised in Pakistan, India and Turkey, and who has lived in the US for much of his life.

Aftab is president of Meridian University in Petaluma, California, and has written on topics including cultural leadership, transformational learning and the power of imagination.

Here’s some of what we talk about in this podcast…

4:13 The intrinsic developmental effect of living in multiple cultures and speaking multiple languages.

6:45 The unique histories and soul-spaces of Muslims in South Asia and the Middle East.

16:00 Accommodating the shamanic legacy that underlies traditional religions, and the need for spiritual anchors, initiation and embodiment.

21:00 The developmental adolescence of militant groups like ISIS who lack the consciousness required to lead and govern a complex state.

32:00 Colonization: the special problems of cultures that are conquered by more developmentally advanced cultures.

42:40 From Cairo to Mosul: what are the successes and failures of the new Obama Doctrine of restraint?

48:00 Integralists can help by demonstrating developmental compassion, personal humility and the ability to live in multiple worldspaces.

56:40 Integral sectarianism: how we can use the lessons of geopolitics to help solve the problems of the integral movement, and make the next stage of human development more healthy and vibrant.

Urge and urge and urge,

Sure as the most certain sure, plumb in the uprights, well entretied, braced in the beams,

– Walt Whitman

THE EVOLUTION OF SEX

Creativity is the essence of the kosmos. The Big Bang itself was an act of mind-stopping fecundity that has continued to complexify, in material and mind, for the past 13.8 billion years.

The latest emergent appeared last week on Big Brother, the CBS reality show, where a straight man and a gay man began snuggling with each other. Even I am shocked and moved to ask: what’s going on here? What is Eros bringing on now, and is there no rest for the weary?

Every stage of development expresses sex in its own way, including animals and bacteria. In fact sex itself is a relatively late emergent in the evolution of the universe. Life started out asexually. We had 2 billion years of single cells simply dividing, passing 100% of their genes on to the next generation.

But the kosmos, which is known for its big surprises (such as the advent of life itself) eventually presented a new means of reproduction that exponentially multiplied creativity: sexual union with other individuals. This is the point where life makes the deal that if each individual gives up 50% of his genes, the resulting variety of the offspring will more than make up for it. This brought forth a splendid new display of life into the kosmos and today virtually all plants and animals reproduce sexually.

PART CHIMP/PART BONOBO

We get our first glimpse of early human sexuality by looking at the animal kingdom from whence we’ve evolved. One of the most interesting lessons can be found in the difference in sex and gender behaviors between chimpanzees and their close cousins the bonobos. Chimps are aggressive and brutal, and the males dominate the females who are often isolated from each other. Over in bonobo land, on the other hand, it’s all “make love not war” and “love the one you’re with.” Bonobos have an inordinate amount of sex with themselves and with whoever is handy of either sex.

The difference? Chimps live in trees and hunt, which favors the physical prowess of the male. Bonobos forage for food on the ground, which is something  the female can do in full partnership with the male. As a result the females affiliate with each other which creates a counter-force to male domination. This emergence of female power changes the entire system.

So are humans more chimp or bonobo? Theories differ as to the earliest human, and I have no problem imagining that dawning cultures could be both brutal and loving as life conditions varied. But one thing is clear: by the time we reached the red, warrior stage of development we were channeling our inner chimp.  And since then we’ve been working our way toward bonobohood.

In fact, one of the great culture wars of our time is going on between pre-traditional cultures — where women are shrouded and girls’ schools are burned down — against a society where women have full partnership. Female empowerment is indeed lethal to the patriarchy.

One of the developmental themes of human sexual and gender relations as we develop is that women become more and more powerful as new cultural structures arise.

WHAT’S NEXT IN SEX?

So what is integral sex? Well for starters it’s an integration of the best of what all the previous structures have to offer.

As integral sexual practitioners we want to feel into the earliest strata of our being, where we experience the obvious: we are biological creatures who are carriers of the procreant urge of the Big Bang itself, which wants to be expressed in biological union with one another. This, folks, is known as animal sex, and it is ideally a key part of the integral sexual repertoire.

We also want to be conscious of the role of sex in the miracle of procreation. A woman friend once told me that the best sex she ever had was when and her husband stopped trying to avoid pregnancy. So for the times of life when the window of procreation may be open, let’s notice and enjoy it, and take part in the deep fulfillment of what it is to bring forth a new life.

As integralists, we also want the sex with God. Sex has always been imbued with sacredness, from the fertility statues of the earliest humans, through the insatiable horniness of the power gods and goddesses, to the tantric traditions, which intentionally incorporate deity energies into the sexual act.

This sacredness survives well into the amber “traditionalist” altitude, where today’s social conservatives live.

And life is good there apparently; conservatives report more satisfying sex lives than liberals. It turns out that there’s a special kind of heat that can be generated in the crucible of lifetime committed monogamy, where our sexual union with our mate is experienced as being blessed by God and furthering His purpose.

As we enter modernity, however, people tend to lose their religion and one of the unfortunate consequences of this developmental move is a disenchantment of sex. The sexual revolution sparked in modernity may increase the span of our sexual lives but rarely the depth. Bringing a fully felt spirituality back to our sex lives is one of the challenges of progressive practitioners.

One of the astonishing new human emergents to come online as we enter the green, post-modern culture is that for the first time in history it is okay for adults to be single yet sexually active. Think about it: don’t you wince a little when you hear of a seventeen or eighteen-year-old getting married? Yet this was standard for most of human history. A new phase of life has emerged in just the last generation, a stage of transitional adult singlehood that lasts through the twenties. Plus divorce is no longer taboo, giving many of us single periods throughout our lives. One way to see the evolution of culture and consciousness is as a process of ever increasing choice. In today’s green cultures there is a enormous proliferation of options for expressing our sexual and gender creativity.

Smartphone apps are the new singles bars (above).

In this week’s episode of the Daily Evolver I talk about all this and more. I also did a live call on this topic where I asked my listeners to rates themselves on a one to five scale as to their level of sexual intelligence.  I used a wonderful definition of highly developed sexuality developed by sexual therapist Marty Klein in his new book, Sexual Intelligence:

We are born sensuous; we become erotic. To cultivate the erotic is also to engage with sexuality as a quality of aliveness and vitality that extend beyond a mere repertoire of sexual techniques. We learn to play, be curious, engage with our imagination, anticipate. Erotic intelligence is our ability to bring novelty to the enduring, mystery to the familiar, and surprise to the known.

The results of the survey? Turns out we’re not doing too badly, at least by our own lights: nearly 70% of the listeners rated themselves a four or above. Another reason integral is so hot!

WHERE HAVE YOU GONE, JOE DIMAGGIO? A NATION LIFTS ITS LONELY EYES TO YOU…

The USA lost the battle — to Belgium in the World Cup — but soccer won the war. America is now officially smitten. More of us watched the USA’s final match in the World Cup than watched last year’s World Series, the championship of the great, all-American sport of baseball.

Soccer integrates the red altitude impulse to fight and win, civilized by amber rules, produced by orange business and expressing a green world-cultural identity. It is helping Americans become better world citizens (and not all conservatives like it). Yet soccer presents a challenge for Americans because it is so, well, foreign. The arcane ranking system, the low scores, the theatrics (as Rachel Maddow points out, the only arena where Americans feign injury in order to manipulate the game is politics) — all these require us to take new perspectives, which of course is an engine of evolution.

The World Cup is explicitly un-American, since it has the word ‘world’ in it and we have zero chance of winning. If I wanted to spend ninety minutes watching foreigners beating us up embarrassingly, I would just leaf very slowly through our students’ international math and science test results.

— Alexandra Petri in The Washington Post

Which brings me to our lovely host country, Brazil. Or is it a dystopia, I forget. What happened to all the stories about how bad Brazil had screwed things up, about the stadiums being unfinished, the transportation system broken down, rampant criminality, the people up in arms? In the weeks leading up to the games I would’ve thought that they were going to be called off, or played in the midst of rubble. Then suddenly the story of Brazilian apocalypse shifted to…let’s play ball!

This points to a polarity that host countries have to navigate. They fight hard to win the privilege of hosting a huge event like the World Cup or the Olympics. After all, it’s a chance to get the attention and respect of the world. The downside is that in our contemporary media environment the host country’s flaws get highlighted as much – if not more so – than their achievements.

We can blame the media — as long as we remember that the media is us.  

We tend to think that the media is conveying information, that it’s factual and logical. (We tend to think this about ourselves too.) But actually what reporters do best is tell stories, morality tales about good people and bad people, involved in some drama that stimulates our thinking and emotional systems. And like good storytellers of all times and places they spin the “facts” to make the story more vivid and meaningful.

For months, the story they/we have been telling of Brazil is of a country that has fundamentally entered the stage of modernity, with all its attendant goodies but without sufficient regard for their poor. Hundreds of thousands of people rose up in a series of large demonstrations, critics railed against the government, experts predicted failure.

And though the protests have dwindled since the games began (it seems that the disaffected have World Cup fever, too) the point has been made. Brazil and the rest of the world have all seen something that cannot be unseen. To see is to care, and to care is to act.

That’s why integral theory stresses the idea that the leading line of human development is the cognitive line, with cognition defined very simply: what are you able to see? In the case of Brazil are you able first of all to see the poor? Are you able to see the reasons why they’re poor that are not their fault? Are you able to see how their poverty is society’s responsibility? Your responsibility?

Can you see that their poverty is your poverty?

These are all stages of moral development, and what we’re seeing in Brazil is a dramatic, real-time process that Martin Luther King described when he said: “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.”

THE STRUGGLE IN UKRAINE’S SOUL

If healthy red is sports, unhealthy red is war. Half a world away from Brazil, in the Ukraine a struggle is on between the culture and consciousness of the East and that of the West. This struggle has on occasion broken into significant violence, and it threatens to escalate once again.

We’ve been following this story so here’s a quick update: Ukraine’s new president, Petro Poroshenko, has gone ahead and signed a comprehensive trade agreement with the European Union. This is the treaty rejected by the former president, the Russian-leaning Viktor Yanukovych, last February, which set off the dramatic protests in Kiev’s Independence Square and led to his ouster and exile in Russia. Poroshenko is also showing a willingness to use military force against the Russian rebels who are occupying some Ukrainian towns and buildings.

My guest on this call is Oleg Linetsky, a Ukrainian philosopher and writer with whom I spoke last week via skype from his home in Ukraine. I include in the podcast a five minute excerpt from our full conversation, which will be posted in its entirety soon.

Oleg sees the struggle with Ukraine and Russia as a battle in a bigger struggle between the East and the West.

He writes about some of the differences:

In the West, especially in the US, people meet challenges in terms of science and development. In the East they meet challenges in terms of soul and inner knowledge.

If we want to achieve peace and harmony in the world, these approaches have to be integrated. And this is my personal concern as we are here on the verge of the third world war.

As you know Ukraine is involved today in an undeclared war with Russia. Europe pulls Ukraine to the West; Russia pulls it to the East. From the outside it may look like aggression of imperious and irrational Vladimir Putin against the entire civilized western world. I am convinced that his methods are medieval and treacherous, indeed. However, from his point of view, it makes certain sense.

Oleg goes on to quote Puting as saying, “The West is not merely expanding its sphere of influence in the East, but also it attempts on the Russian soul…I’m convinced there is some higher moral principle, about which they forget in the West thinking only about success and prosperity.”

THE ESCALATOR OF CULTURE

Cultural identity, particularly our identity with family, actually precedes the formation of our individual identity. Every culture holds themselves as sacred, as each is an expression of the basic goodness of its people. Basic goodness is a teaching emphasized by Chogyam Trungpa, the Tibetan Buddhist master who founded Naropa and the Shambhala lineages in the West.

There’s a basic sacredness at the center of all cultural identity. It’s that special quality of feeling at home. 

~Jeff Salzman

Basic goodness holds that people are fundamentally wired to want to do the good and right thing. This holds the opposite pole from the Christian teaching of original sin. Of course both have a piece of the truth, but I’ve always appreciated the teaching on basic goodness because it helps balance out the reflexive Western view of sinfulness, as well as the negativity bias which is apparently built into the human brain.

Basic goodness helps us understand the deep connection we have for our tribe and clan. Every culture loves and nurtures its children. Every culture laughs and takes pleasure. Every culture creates art and ritual and celebration. Every culture connects to the ineffable, absolute reality. Barring aberrations, every child is born into a container of love and intelligence, and as we grow our roots extend even deeper into that particular soil.

But from these idyllic beginnings can grow some nasty fruit. A culture’s identity is challenged the second it meets another culture, and most of human history is the story of one people conquering another. However, as a culture moves into modernity (orange altitude) it begins to accommodate a whole new idea: pluralism, and is able to live with, work with, and create families with other cultures.

When we get to post-modern culture (green altitude) we don’t just accommodate differences, we celebrate them and defend them. This creates new set of problems, mainly around over-valuing culture as a determinant of identity.

In the last part of the call I share what I think is the move beyond a green vision of cultural identity to a more interesting and exciting integral vision. Hope you have a listen!

It’s good to be back for the 2014 Summer Series of the Daily Evolver weekly live calls! If you ever wish to join the calls in real time, you can register here. Thank you to my friends at Integral Life, the world’s leading online integral community, for hosting the calls each week.

ITEM #1: FISH STORY

I start this call with an account of my personal discovery of the interior world of our finned friends. It began with a post I wrote on the Daily Evolver blog late last week linking to new research that shows that fish can think, feel, make friends and suffer. A report of the research out of Macquarie University in Sydney Australia, stated:

Fish have very good memories, live in complex social communities where they keep track of individuals and can learn from one another. This helps to develop stable cultural traditions. And there is mounting evidence that they can feel pain in a manner similar to humans.

My discovery ended two days later, when I Inadvertently brightened a little corner of my own back yard.

ITEM #2: QUICK REVIEW OF MALEFICENT

Next I share some thoughts about the new movie, Maleficent, which retells the classic fairy tale, Sleeping Beauty, and stars Angelina Jolie as the wicked godmother. Fairy tales have been told for centuries as a means of transmitting life lessons about good and evil, particularly to children. In the traditional telling of Sleeping Beauty the princess presented a role model that was beautiful and good, but essentially passive and powerless. The wicked godmother on the other hand was…well, wicked; she put a curse on the King’s newborn daughter because he had snubbed her at the christening.

In Maleficent, Angelina Jolie’s version of the wicked godmother is motivated by a far more justifiable anger. And that’s a key point. In our new, post-modern retellings of these tales, which in addition to Maleficent include Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, OZ the Great and Powerful, and even the current Disney mega hit Frozen, the protagonist isn’t just “good” and the antagonist just “evil”; they each contain some of both ends of the polarity. We see that while the evil character may do bad things, it is a result of being mistreated or misunderstood.

The new lesson is that good and evil reside in each of us. The word Maleficent is itself a mash-up of the words malevolent and magnificent. And as the narrator intones in the last line of the movie (spoiler alert) as the camera pans away from the image of a newly wiser, stronger, more mature Angelina Jolie, “And so the kingdom was brought together not by a hero or a villain, but by someone who was both hero and villain…”

ITEM #3: CAN INTEGRAL THINKING HELP US UNDERSTAND IRAQ?

I begin my comments on Iraq with a look inside the minds and hearts of the jihadis who have surprised the world with their sudden success in taking over the northeast, Sunni-dominated areas of the country.

This week we got a remarkable view into what motivates these young men, when they released a well produced twelve minute video on YouTube, in English, directed to the young Muslim men of the West. In the video a small group of fighters, later identified as having come from the UK and Australia, sit in a row in an outside setting and tell their stories. Entitled “There is No Life Without Jihad,” the video makes a passionate case for forsaking the comforts of western life to come fight for Allah. One speaker, a Brit named Abu Bara Al Hindi, says:

Oh my brothers living in the west, I know how you feel. In the heart you feel depressed. The cure for the depression is jihad. You feel that you have no honor. Oh Brothers come to jihad and feel the honor we are feeling, feel the happiness that we are feeling.

As you sit in your comfort, ask yourself if this is how you want to die. Or do you wish to be resurrected with the wounds and the sacrifices that you’ve made for Allah. Ask yourself as you sit and watch this video if this is what you have chosen while you know your brothers are out on the front line facing the bullets and the bombs and everything that the enemy has, while you were sitting in comfort, while you were sleeping, while you were going shopping, they are sleeping on the floor, they’re giving blood.

Another asks:

Are you willing to sacrifice the job you’ve got, the big car you’ve got, the family you have? Are you willing to sacrifice this, for the sake of Allah? Then if you sacrifice something for Allah, Allah will give you 700 times more than this. You are going to die anyway.

Coming from an integral view, we would identify these men as being developmentally at a center of gravity somewhere between the red and amber altitudes of development (Spiral Dynamics red/blue). Remember, red is the warrior altitude where the organization of the human psyche requires it to be in deep contention with other human beings. This is the stage where ego comes fully online and the subject needs to feel powerful and needs to be seen and dealt with in order to find out how strong he or she is. The amber altitude features a mythic religiosity, and calls for a devotion and subjugation to the one true God. Put them together and you have a holy warrior.

The red/amber altitude of the jihadis also features an abject brutality, where the enemy is seen as completely outside the circle of moral consideration, minions of the devil that must be eliminated. Thus we see the trail of cruelty left by ISIS: beheadings, dismemberment, and bodies hung from poles as a tool of mass communication.

The original video has been removed by YouTube, but here is a short report about it.

Yet for the warriors, the red/amber altitude is also home to a sense of intimacy and comradeship that is not available anywhere else. As war journalist Sebastian Junger writes:

The undeniable hellishness of war forces men to bond in ways that aren’t necessary — or even possible — in civilian society. Men in a platoon of combat infantry for the most part are prepared to die for each other. I think that kind of courage goes to the heart of what it means to be human, to affiliate with others in a kind of transcendent way.

The draw is apparently powerful; currently estimates are that 7,000 – 10,000 foreign jihadis are fighting in Syria and Iraq, with more flooding in every day.

ISIS’s five-year plan, according to NBC News.

The second question I address regarding Iraq is: what do we do now? What is the best response from the west, particularly America which has a responsibility to ameliorate the damage and suffering our intervention unleashed?

Of all of the thousands of words I’ve read and listen to on this issue, I think one man, Barack Obama, has put it just about right…

We’re not going to allow ourselves to be dragged back into a situation in which while we’re there we’re keeping a lid on things and, after enormous sacrifices by us, as soon as we’re not there, suddenly people end up acting in ways that are not conductive to the long-term stability and prosperity of the country.

You have a schism between Sunni and Shia throughout the region that is profound. Some of it is directed or abetted by states who are in contests for power there. You have failed states that are just dysfunctional, and various warlords and thugs and criminals are trying to gain leverage or a foothold so that they can control resources, populations, territory… And failed states, conflict, refugees, displacement—all that stuff has an impact on our long-term security. But how we approach those problems and the resources that we direct toward those problems is not going to be exactly the same as how we think about a transnational network of operatives who want to blow up the World Trade Center. We have to be able to distinguish between these problems analytically, so that we’re not using a pliers where we need a hammer, or we’re not using a battalion when what we should be doing is partnering with the local government to train their police force more effectively, improve their intelligence capacities.

People may disagree about the implementation of Obama’s policy, but at least he has the view right. That’s important, because the wrong view, such as the Bush/Cheney view that we can impose democracy (a modern, orange altitude innovation) on pre-modern cultures, and that “we will be greeted as liberators,” inevitably creates the wrong policy.

We end the call with a number of great questions from our listeners. Hope you enjoy it. Check back next week!