We Don’t Refute Postmodernism, We Exceed It By Flexing The Systemic-Mind
Integral Theorists, Green is Not a Disease to be Cured by Teal
Ed. Note: This article uses the terms “green” and “teal” in a way that is familiar to Integral thinkers. If you need a primer, see IntegralLife.com.
Green may have its weaknesses, but Green isn’t a disease to be cured by Teal. Postmodern philosophers can be wrong about this or that point, but postmodernism is not a philosophy that can be refuted by a really great post-postmodern debating point. Nor, so far as I can tell, is Green merely a line of scrimmage with no perspectives or content of its own. What sort of model of consciousness are people working with to lead them to such odd conclusions?
Well, I have a suspicion (“First Tier / Orange, cough, cough, just kidding, it’s all good”). I suppose the people who believe these things are struggling with a difficult conceptual challenge that took me years to unwind (at least to my own satisfaction). Let’s try this again.
Individual and collective consciousness undergoes a massive shift from First Tier to Second Tier that has begun, is happening now, and is continuing. Its essence is the emergence of a scientific conception of Evolution in many aspects of life — psychological, cultural, social, spiritual — culminating in a radical change in just about everything. Eventually, about one-third of the way through the Second Tier, at the Teal/Turquoise transition, the principle of Evolution is attracted to a spiritualized concept of Eros (or holistic creativity) with which it is merged for a while.
But before evolutionary processes really become an ingrained part of the identity of selves or groups, the self and society must first become somewhat reconstituted. What emerges is something new — a social self — which is aware of itself from the society’s point of view as well as its own, and so it now sees itself in all its group belongingness and marginalness, and it now becomes more aware of imbalances or lack of equitability in terms of social and ethos structures. THE EMERGENCE OF THE SOCIAL SELF IS NOT A PATHOLOGY. IT IS HOW EVOLUTION IS WAKING UP, LESS DIVIDED THAN AT THE FIRST TIER.
What’s another way of talking about this new, social self? Think of it as the locus of the 4th-person-perspective. It begins nascent and unaware and gradually begins to mature into coming alive as a face of Eros itself.
Early on (Green), it is self-focused and begins to apply systemic techniques (i.e., psychology) to the self, thus gaining tendencies to a saturnine or solipsistic outlook because the 4th-person-view sees mainly the self and has lost a wider connectedness and sense of fulfillment that it used to have;
later on (Green/Teal), it is shadow-focused and ethos-focused and has the potential for trenchant social systemic-level criticism sometimes based on deconstruction or Goddess-energy-awareness (some forms of feminism), and now the 4th is mainly seeing the society, but the personal is in a blind spot, leading to a neglect of the spiritual and soulful aspects of life;
finally (Teal), the individual and collective faces coalesce into forms that can take on more embodied practices, politically enactive practices, and enlightenment-oriented practices including integral spirituality, meta-systemic philosophy, developmental cosmologies and theologies, visionary art and movies, and so on. We haven’t seen a lot of Teal yet, but it’s definitely emergent.
So no, I’ve thought about it and have to say that no one can wish Green away with theoretical mumbo jumbo as a mistaken philosophical argument or a single moment of angst, quickly past and forgotten, like one night’s hangover. Those beliefs are very likely to be a First Tier holdover from a self that hasn’t yet fully matured into a more social self-structure. The least I can say is that it doesn’t have the power to convince me. The social self is a quasi-permanent, enduring feature of self-awareness from this point forward until we get to the Third Tier (which is a topic for another day).
Going forward, I want to start using the terms Green and Teal less and less. People who are genuinely Green or Teal won’t make enemies out of each other, but will see that we’re playing on the same team and need each other to collaborate to accomplish our aims. The term “Systemic-Mind” fits the entire spectrum from the start of 4th-person to the birth of the 5th-person POV, and that’s what I will usually prefer to use.