The Integral Review is an offshoot of the integrative movement, mostly from the Wilber version, but they have become largely autonomous and are open to many voices, unlike mainstream neoconservative Wilberism.
Their last issue is of a very high quality and deals specifically with the theme of Integral Politics
In her introductory editorial, chief editor Sara Ross writes:
“Our stated aim for this special issue was to make a “politically significant contribution to public knowledge and discourse, to illuminate a comprehensive range of considerations that need to be integrated into effective approaches to today’s—and the future’s—political behaviors and complex political issues, policies, and systems.”
What can adding integral to politics possibly mean though?
Here is an example from an interview of Jan Inglis, conducted by Russ Volckman:
“Jan Inglis focuses primarily on local communities and the use of an intervention designed, tested and implemented in the US and in Sweden by Sara Nora Ross and others. She describes how this process (TIP: The Integral Process for Working on Complex Issues) works (see here for a workshop overview or here for articles). Fundamentally, hers is a think globally, act locally strategy.
Inglis’ work has been primarily with individuals and communities, particularly from her small community base in British Columbia, Canada. She is focused on how change occurs and how individuals evolve into healthier ways of being. Thus, her attention has been on individual and cultural change. Her interests have led her into peace movements over the years, as well as engagement in local community politics. She has engaged in bringing many different fields of study and action to inform one another and find ways of creating an integrative approach to social change. She founded the Integrative Learning Institute and its curriculum for social change agents, the Cultural Coaches Training Program.”
(Jan’s interview is here)
The interview material leads Russ to conclude there are two ways of looking integrally at politics:
“To address the world of integral politics we can look through at least two lenses, which can be expanded through a metatheoretical approach into many more lenses.
The first is integral as it represents a “theory of everything,” that is, it can produce models and maps in which we can integrate widely diverse ways of knowing and researching political dynamics and systems on the individual and collective levels, include “meta-collectives” which move our attention from community and nation to the global perspective of politics. It can include lenses related to governance, agency and communion and many others. The point is that to gain an integral perspective involves the application of transdisciplinary approaches through the use of multiple lenses.
A second is to understand politics from a stage of development perspective. Here we would consider what politics might look like in a social stage where the focus in on family and tribes, as well as other stages of phases of human and cultural development in which politics is played out through institutions to enforce rules and correct behavior, to one that seeks to integrate diversity through transcending and including all those individuals and cultures at various stages of development. In these interviews we can glimpse both these perspectives, albeit they have not been made explicit. I trust that these interviews are in service of our development and learning in this process.”
Another essay discusses the Swiss experience of the group Integrale Politik:
“ This article tells the story of the Swiss NGO “Integrale Politik (ip)” founded by about 20 people in November 2007 with the aim of becoming a regular political party at a later stage (www.integrale-politik.ch). We wish to make ip’s concepts and approaches known to a wider public. Inspired by integral thinkers such as Jean Gebser and Ken Wilber, ip develops its own ideas and interpretations of integral in view of the concrete challenges of Swiss and European politics.”
Recommended essays in this issue:
• Integral Politics as Process, Tom Atlee. Integral Review, Vol. 6, No. 1
In this essay, Tom Atlee offers a specific definition of Integral Politics:
“Here I find the concept of “integral” especially useful for naming the successful integration of inclusion and coherence. To the extent we embrace all the relevant elements—including emergent dissonances—in a coherent way, we have an integral system or dynamic. The fact that in real life new factors are always emerging to disrupt coherent systems suggests that an integral system evolves through successive coherences. The family system gets disrupted by the birth of a child. One’s prejudices are disrupted by a compassionate or unexpected act from a person in the disrespected category. One’s pet idea is critiqued with devastating effect. Each instance raises in us the need to find some new coherence to depend on.
With that as grounding, I propose a definition of integral politics, followed by what integral politics “does” if we follow that definition. I offer these for exploration, introducing my initial forays into ramifications of viewing integral politics this way.
Integral politics would be politics that were especially competent at including diverse elements in evolving coherence that served the ongoing vitality of a community, nation, or other human system.
What integral politics does:
? Integral politics embraces any and all interactive process through which the evolving diversity of a community or society engages in consciously co-creating its collective life.
? Integral politics emerges from other forms of politics to the extent that we attend to the dynamic relationship between “the parts” and “the whole” (the members of a community and the whole community; conflicted political positions and the whole field of opinion around an issue; our many facets as individual human beings and our essential wholeness; and so on). “
• A Proposal for Integral Macropolitics . Daniel GustavAnderson. Integral Review, Vol. 6, No. 1
“ This treatise proposes the practice of becoming-responsible as a basis for integral micropolitics, defined as taking active responsibility for the well-being of the totality of living beings without exception, for the sake of that well-being alone. After reviewing two extant integral models for political action and interaction, demonstrating some of the limitations inherent in them, some ways are outlined in which the characteristic features of becoming-responsible—including critical clarity, compassion, competence, and consciousness—can be expressed in the realm of public concern; first, theoretically, drawing on a model proposed by poet and artist William Blake, and second, also historically, reflecting on an experiment in radical democracy in Chile (1970-1973), such that both examples critique and advance the claims and methods of mainstream integral theory as well as the alternative approach elaborated in this essay.”
Michel,
I like much of what you’ve posted, but believe a key distinction has been overlooked about two fundamentally different kinds of politics.
Michael Oakeshott, as noted in Wikipedia (below), identifies them as follows –
>>Oakeshott suggested that there had been two major schools of political thought. In the first, which he called ‘enterprise’ association, the state was understood as imposing some universal purpose (profit, salvation, progress, racial domination) on its subjects in which they were forced to participate. ‘Civil’ association however was primarily a legal relationship, in which laws imposed obligatory conditions of action but did not require choosing one action rather than another.
>>…Oakeshott describes the ‘enterprise’ and the ‘civil’ association in different terms. An ‘enterprise’ association is seen as based in a fundamental faith in the ability of the human to ascertain and grasp some universal “good” (i.e. the Politics of Faith), and the ‘civil’ association is seen as based in a fundamental skepticism about the human ability to either ascertain or achieve this universal “good” (i.e. the Politics of Skepticism).
>>Oakeshott saw power (especially technological power) as a necessary prerequisite for the Politics of Faith, because a) it allowed people to believe that they could achieve something great (e.g. something universally good), and b) it allowed them to implement the policies necessary to achieve this goal. The Politics of Skepticism, on the other hand, rests on the idea that government should concern itself with preventing bad things from happening rather than enabling ambiguously good events.
>>Oakeshott used the analogy of the adverb to describe the kind of restraint law involves. For example, the law against murder is not a law against killing as such, but only a law against killing ‘murderously’. Or, a more trivial example, the law does not dictate that I have a car, but if I do, I have to drive it on the same side of the road as everybody else. This contrasted with the rules of enterprise association in which those actions required by the directing purpose were made compulsory for all. (source: Wikipedia article on Michael Oakeshott)
I believe that politics in the sense of civil association among formal equals (horizontal vs hierarchical relationships) belong at the heart of emerging integral, P2P polities.
Best,
Mark Frazier
Openworld.com
“Awakening assets for good”
@openworld (twitter)
Hi Mark,
thanks for this interesting distinction, which makes sense, and that I wasn’t aware of. My question is the following: aren’t those polarities rather than totally different approaches.
let’s take the example of greece, where the neoliberal state is taking away 20-40% of social wealth, therefore also making it very difficult to have a civil life; can one, in those circumstances, follow a purely ‘civil’ approach, ignoring the organized attack against civil society?
so it seems to me that while in ‘normal’ circumstances (but when are circumstances ever truly ‘normal’?), one can achieve civil associations and ignore the faith of the state, this will rarely be actually the case. This is why I’m advocating the concept of a partner state, which ‘enables and empowers social production to occur’, but this is not the same as a corporate welfare state, which bails out financial predators but guts civil society in order to do so. In this context, you cannot ignore the present faith of the state, and be agnostic on it, but rather it also requires a political stance, apart and next to civil association. Once achieved however, then this new partner state should not substitute itself from civil society but do what is necessary, in creating the right conditions, so that civil association becomes optimally possible,
Your comments on this would be very welcome,
Michel
Michel,
Thanks for the thoughtful reply – and sorry for the delay in responding.
I agree on the idea of polarities. There is a continuum between the enterprise association-based state at one end, and the civil association-based state on the other. Once a state puts systems in place to tax a substantial portion of wealth, I believe it in effect incentivizes power struggles, in which groups vie to capture power and secure resources to advance their enterprise association agendas. Such struggles tend to be less intense in low-tax, lightly regulated jurisdictions (e.g. Hong Kong) where there are fewer gains (and losses) to be reaped from political victories relative to voluntary exchanges. Alvin Rabushka’s early work (in the 1970s) on Asian freeports and free zones found that ethnic rivalries tended to fade as civil association-based reforms rewarded shifts from zero-sum group political competition to voluntary business and social ventures.
In my view, a “partner state” for a P2P society is one that ensures a rule of law, in which no peaceful and honest ventures can be subordinated via discriminatory tax or regulatory measures to the substantive ends of any other. That said, I’m all in favor of contractual associations (e.g. neighborhood associations and cooperatives) of residents experimenting with various codes of conduct that they deem suitable, so long as these are transparent, subject to state-established uniform due process rules, and binding only upon expressly-consenting individuals. These conditions, I think, create conditions for P2P-based polities to learn, adapt, and thrive from the social and cultural innovations of free people within them.
What do you think?
Best,
Mark
@openworld