We are in a great global struggle between three major ideologies

As we continue our meditation on Ken Wilber’s Integral Politics, I would like to emphasize that I am simply seeking clarity and not agreement. This is something Dennis Prager always says, because in most debates you’re not really going to have any impact on the other side anyway. It's much easier to simply express one’s view as clearly as possible, and see how they stack up against the alternative. Then let the folks decide.

So the last thing I want to do is get into a food-fight with Wilber's disciples, who, after all, outnumber me by about a million to one. I don't want Al Gore getting pissed off and taking away my internet privileges. As a preface, I’ve been saying for the last year that we are in a great global struggle between three major ideologies, only one of which will emerge victorious, 1) radical Islam, 2) European style leftist socialism, and 3) American style classical liberalism.

In the opinion of many observers such as Mark Steyn, Western Europe has already lost due to the dysfunctional nature of its socialist paradigm, which produces a spiritually bereft, warped version of mankind that can not even rise to defend itself. Just yesterday, for example, I heard that England announced that it will no longer employ the term “war on terror” for fear of insulting Muslims! Can you even imagine the absurdity of such a thing in World War II? “We can’t call it a war on nazism, because Germans might be offended.”

This is a fine example of how the auto-castrated EUnuchs will simply lie down and show their throats to the Islamo-fascists. More worrisome is the fact that approximately fifty percent of the U.S. is more European than American, and in that fragile balance hangs the future of the world. If the left prevails and we go the way of Europe, then we are headed for a caliphate worse than death.If Wilber’s paradigm were to ever become a massive movement, then I suppose we would have to add a fourth ideology to the other three. But since “greens” are at the top of the heap in his model, it would seem that, in the final analysis, we are simply dealing with another version of leftism -- even the “elites” of the left. In fact, this is exactly what the character Charles tells us in the book:

“[I]f liberalism stated its own stance more accurately, it would say that liberalism is an elite developmental stance, often reached by a relative minority of people, but whose values insist on treating not just that elite but everybody equally -- an unheard of fairness and generosity. It is an egalitarianism held by an elite. But the typical liberal, not understanding both of those clauses, often arrives at the disaster of a conclusion that it is an egalitarianism held by everybody, or easily could be. Whereas, at this time in history, very few people share that value, and it’s losing ground, by the way -- more about that later.”

Let’s break down this paragraph. First, liberalism (by which he means leftism, not classical liberalism) is an “elite developmental stance.” ...Back to Integral Politics. At the press conference, the character Charles actually does a decent job of nailing the spiritual pathology of the left, noting that

“Instead of pioneering a new wave of interior talk -- higher values talk, higher spiritual talk, higher character talk, higher meaning talk -- it talks only of tepid egalitarianism, a supposed plurality of equal values, tractionless multiculturalism, and an endless yada yada yada of whateverland.... Whereupon every interior, no matter how vulgar and narcissistic and self-serving, is accorded not just equal respect but equal value, period -- and the regressive nightmare is about to begin.”

Exactly. Why then elevate these vulgar and regressive nightmarians of whateverland to such a lofty place in the developmental color scheme? Where’s the upside of this dubious ideology? posted by Gagdad Bob at 12/12/2006 07:39:00 AM 36 comments links to this post