LET'S CALL THE WHOLE THING OFF
White nationalists attack riot police in central London.
by robert cobbold
One of the hallmarks of evolutionary thinking is the ability to see past seemingly intractable differences towards a higher-level integration. Hegel called this thesis, antithesis and synthesis and used it to describe what he called the dialectic of history. Ken Wilber calls it differentiation and integration, and points out that this repeating pattern occurs not just in human history, but in cosmological and biological evolution, right the way from the atom through to global civilisation.
The fertilised egg divides into two then four then eight then millions before integrating into a coherent multicellular organism. In human history tribes fought one another before integrating to form chieftainships which then differentiated into many competing chieftainships before integrating to form city states and so on. Even the evolution of human culture and consciousness follows a similar pattern. Differentiation and integration therefore form the basis of all healthy growth and evolutionary progress.
Differentiation and Integration has followed a self-similar pattern across all levels of evolution
But differentiation can go too far into disassociation: the cells in your body can forget that they are part of a coherent whole and become cancerous.
In the present moment of human history, we are at a point of extreme differentiation, to the point of disassociation, or even rupture. Our consciousness has become dissociated from nature to the point where we no longer recognise that we are part of it and it is part of us, as apples from a tree. Our ways of knowing have dissociated to the point where people feel forced into making a choice between science and religion. And our politics have differentiated to the point where we can no longer have a civil conversation with someone of the opposing political tribe.
If a world in which we have healed these schisms sounds idealistic or implausible then listen to this:
My girlfriend’s family are Spanish, and her great grandparents were all involved in the civil war. The paternal side fought for the Nationalists under Franco and were very religious. The maternal side fought for the Republicans, and were atheists.
Let’s step outside the abstraction of history and family trees for a moment, and into the immediacy of the extraordinary emotional achievement without which my girlfriend wouldn’t exist.
Her great grandmother, Joaquina, a deeply devout Catholic, became a widow when her husband was executed by the Republicans, along with nearly all the male members of her family. Her son then fell in love with a woman whose family were Republican atheists, and Joaquina had to find it in her heart, not only to forgive, but to give her son her blessing.
On both sides the decision was taken that because the young couple loved each other, they were now one family; there would be no arguments about the civil war. To their dying day, no one can remember there being any bad blood.
It’s hard to imagine this kind of integrity playing out in the toxic political arenas of today, whether it’s Leavers vs Remainers, or the radical left vs Trump supporters. I hope that the next time you find yourself in an emotional disagreement about politics you will remember this story.
Because right now the fabric of our democracy is unraveling fast, and it requires bravery and intellectual honesty not to be pulled one way or the other.
Bravery, because it’s much easier to fall prey to the reassuring certainty of simple political narratives with clearly marked enemies and simple solutions than to embrace the frightening uncertainty of complexity; and intellectual honesty, because deep inquiry into the problems we face and admitting our complicity in those problems is both difficult and uncomfortable.
Far easier to just throw our hat in with whatever political tribe we are surrounded by and form our views based on that. If you give me someone’s views about pulling down statues for example, I’m pretty sure I can predict their views on climate change, refugees and face masks too. What does that tell you?
It tells you, as David Foster Wallace wrote so presciently in 2001, that we’ve lost what he refers to as our “Democratic Spirit”:
“A Democratic Spirit is one that combines rigor and humility, i.e., passionate conviction plus sedulous respect for the convictions of others. As any American knows, this is a very difficult spirit to cultivate and maintain; particularly when it comes to issues you feel strongly about. Equally tough is a D.S.'s criterion of 100 percent intellectual integrity – you have to be willing to look honestly at yourself and your motives for believing what you believe, and to do it more or less continually.
This kind of stuff is advanced U.S. citizenship. A true Democratic Spirit is up there with religious faith and emotional maturity and all those other top-of-the-Maslow-Pyramid-type qualities people spend their whole lives working on. A Democratic Spirit's constituent rigor and humility and honesty are in fact so hard to maintain on certain issues that it's almost irresistibly tempting to fall in with some established dogmatic camp and to follow that camp's line on the issue and to let your position harden within the camp and become inflexible and to believe that any other camp is either evil or insane and to spend all your time and energy trying to shout over them.”
There’s a lot of this sort of thing going on these days.
As a collective expression of the trauma of racial oppression sweeps the Western world, police have stood by as protesters looted independent businesses and armed far right vigilante groups have used this as an excuse to begin using lethal force. Divisions are fomenting everywhere, and sane, intelligent people are being used as vectors for the spread of increasingly radical political memes. A recent podcast argued convincingly that the US is far closer to civil war than anyone imagines.
So how do we step back from the brink? How do we regain our “Democratic Spirit?” How do we grow out of political polarisation and towards some kind of healthy integration of right and left?
The first thing that both sides need to realise is that neither is going away. One side is not going to triumph decisively, while the other declares: “Actually, you were right all along.” The idea is obviously absurd and yet so much political debate takes place with the implicit underlying assumption such an outcome is both possible and desirable. It is neither.
Because underneath the political parties, the candidates and the issues are two sets of values. Progressivism, at its heart, is the impulse to change, iterate, move things on and push for progress. Conservatism (with a small ‘c’) is in essence the impulse to maintain and protect the gains that have been made in the past. Even in stating these definitions, the irony becomes clear: as political philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote, “The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.”
Moreover, both progressivism and conservativism have healthy and unhealthy expressions. Using all the correct gender pronouns does not automatically make you a good person; voting for Brexit does not automatically make you racist.
A society without healthy expressions of both progressivism and conservatism is a dystopia. Ceaseless change with no stability is chaos. Endless status quo with no progress is totalitarianism. Thus, neither set of values is “bad” or “wrong”. They are both useful and necessary. And yet both are clearly in tension.
A useful concept here is that of “positive polarities.” A positive polarity is when two values are both positive and yet in practice they can come into conflict. Examples of positive polarities include:
· Freedom and Equality
· Real and Ideal
· Mercy and Justice
· Competition and Cooperation
· Masculine and Feminine
Take freedom and equality for example. Most people will agree that both freedom and equality are good things. And yet when we put them into practice in economic policy for example, they come into conflict.
The attempt to mandate total economic equality in Communist countries past and present by definition necessitated curtailing the freedom to create wealth. As far as I know, in all cases this was followed by attacks on press freedoms, democratic freedoms and freedom of speech. In modern capitalist economies, decades of neoliberal economic policy has resulted in a situation where eight billionaires now own half the world’s wealth.
This is what happens when one side of a positive polarity collapses and can no longer constrain or challenge the other. You create an imbalance which eventually becomes so unstable that it collapses under its own weight. This is what happened in the Soviet Union, and it looks like Western civilisation is showing symptoms of something similar.
The strange irony is that both left and right need each other to survive. This is the view from complexity. What we’re after is not so much a middle ground between two extremes, but a higher-level integration in which both become part of a single healthy system.
As Steve McIntosh, author of the book Developmental Politics, says: “This does not mean we have to support the other party’s candidate, it simply means acknowledging the basic legitimacy of the other side’s bedrock values.”
If we can do this, if we can find a way to process the hurt of history, to own our individual and collective trauma, and see the legitimate values lurking behind even the most misguided political views, then we can stop democratic society from unraveling and begin to build a politics in which we leave behind the worst and integrate the best that left and right, progressivism and conservatism, have to offer.
If Joaquina can do it, so can you.