Re-reading The Worldview Artist, 2018–2022
Forty-seven posts. Seventy-some thousand words. Thirty-five of them arrived between April and September of 2018, which is what happens when a man who has been thinking in private for years is finally handed a door and told to open it. Then quiet, broken by seven posts around the 2020 election, one in 2021, and four in the autumn of 2022.
I read the whole thing straight through recently, start to finish, for the first time since I wrote it. It holds up better than I feared and worse than I hoped, which I gather is the standard verdict a writer returns on his younger self.
I’ve done this exercise before, as it happens. The third post I ever put on this blog was an inventory of the ways my previous blogs had disappointed or upset people, written in the weeks before I started this one. Eight years later, same exercise, new archive. Here’s what I want to keep, and here’s what I want to stop doing.
What I got right
I almost never started with myself. I started with somebody else’s sentence. A question posted in an Integral forum. A friend who had fallen hard for Nathan J. Robinson. A commenter named Paul who said that if spirituality requires a master’s degree it probably isn’t true. Even the philosophical pieces open in the middle of an argument already underway. Read in sequence, the blog isn’t a treatise at all — it’s a running correspondence, and my correspondents were usually skeptics. That’s not a format choice. It’s a discipline, and it’s the thing that keeps a worldview from drifting into a private language.
The method held. Handed a disagreement, I generally declined the question of who’s right and asked instead where each of us was standing when we looked. Opinions about opinions — going meta not to duck the question but to get more of the situation into view. Applied to religion it produced my most durable essays, the ones where spirituality isn’t a list of claims to accept or reject but a mode of reality talk, sitting alongside science and art, each with its own competence and its own characteristic ways of failing. Applied to a fight, it made me quote my opponents at length and at their strongest: Visser’s crux paragraphs in full, Lane’s entire comment, Paul’s whole complaint including the part where he calls my favorite book intellectual masturbation. That’s good from for an argument.
The ethic underneath the method was appreciation. Dick Bolles on the meanness abroad in the land. A whole piece on making cynicism obsolete. I was suspicious of the pleasure people take in being unimpressed, and I was right to be — that pleasure has become the house style of the age. Generosity is a higher-order skill, not naïveté. The reflex to debunk is usually a refusal to ask what a thing is for. Appreciation is near to the heart of the integrative way os being. Keep.
And underneath that, quieter, was the intuition I’d forgotten I had. I kept circling the suspicion that the Integral project’s besetting sin is its own cleverness. I asked whether Integral spirituality had grown too complex to be spirituality at all and went looking for a second simplicity. I proposed, in complete seriousness, that we borrow bug-tracking software from software developers and log the flaws in our own worldview. I ended my central philosophical essay insisting that growth isn’t only evolution toward complexity but also involution — simplification, embodiment, deepening — and that what we’re after isn’t wholeness later but wholeness-in-partiality now. If the archive has one organizing thread, an Integral intuition, that’s it: a sophisticated man’s persistent suspicion of sophistication, including his own.
I just didn’t act on it.
Where I got in my own way
I named a hornet’s nest and walked past it. Asked how an integrally intelligent person should speak to “lower spectrum cultures,” I paused, acknowledged the phrase was a mess, and wrote: another time. Another time never came. And across the archive the developmental vocabulary occasionally did exactly what I elsewhere warned it would do — it became a way of not having the argument. When my friend said Integral Politics was a privileged fantasy, I offered a hypothesis, and to my credit a genuine qualification: let’s say your politics are green; that doesn’t mean it’s your center of gravity. That distinction is real and I made it deliberately. Then I stated it once and rolled right over it. Green is hostile to higher levels, no doubt about it. Green shuns. The privilege language is training wheels. I meant to spare the man and speak only to the position. I doubt he experienced the difference as kindness. So I may be right or wrong, but I wasn’t always a kind sort of blogger, and I feel disappointed about that in retrospect.
Going forward: if I’m going to locate someone on a spiral, I’ll do the work in front of them, or I won’t do it at all. And if I have to choose between winning an argument or leaving another human being with the impression that I am speaking down to them from a mountaintop, I’d prefer silence.
I’ve been willing to say I was wrong in public when it actually cost me something. The Gafni statements are the record. I defended him for years, then read a document in which every sentence of one paragraph was false, leaked it at real risk to myself and my standing in the Integral world, and wrote that Tami Simon had exercised sound judgment about his honesty when I had not — after I’d been the one to publicly challenge her. Nobody made me publish that. This is the part of the archive I’m least embarrassed by, and it’s worth saying plainly because the caricature of an Integralist is a man who can absorb any objection without ever being touched by one.
I worried about complexity in print and then wrote “orangish-teal” and “greenish-teal” and “indigo Integralists” in the very next breath. Second simplicity was a topic I raised, never a practice I adopted. The concern was sincere and it never changed a single sentence. Of all the missteps this is the one I most want to fix, because it’s the one that yields to craft alone — no change of mind required, only a change of hand.
The politics posts held up better than I expected, with one exception. The 2022 election piece calls one party amoral and cowardly, which looks at first like partisanship in Integral costume. It isn’t: it spends more of its energy on the side I actually voted for — the overreach, the economic mistakes, the coddling of defund-the-police activists, the hugging of the loudest voices on immigration when the center was right there. I took Andrew Sullivan’s premise seriously and then explained why I was voting the other way anyway. That’s the method producing a conclusion rather than decorating one. My regret is craft again: the harshest line in the piece is the one thing I asserted instead of showed.
On writing for people already inside
Which brings me to the objection I can hear forming, because I’ve been forming it myself for a week: this was all written for people already inside.
Yes. It was. On purpose.
To paraphrase something Steve McIntosh said years ago, and which I quoted here in 2020: there’s no more important work for an Integralist than building the Integral worldview itself. You don’t build a worldview by describing it politely from a safe distance. You build it by applying it to actual arguments, defending it against its critics, and pushing it in the directions you believe it needs to go. That’s what these forty-seven posts were doing. It’s a workshop, it’s a rallying cry, and — let’s be honest about the genre — a fair amount of the time it’s a sermon.
Sermons are addressed to a congregation. That isn’t a flaw in a sermon; it’s what a sermon is. Plenty of people have no wish to be preached at, and they should close the tab with my blessing; there’s a great deal of writing in the world and not nearly enough hours. What I owe the ones who stay isn’t less conviction. It’s better craft. Fewer altitude labels doing work that argument ought to be doing. More claims shown rather than asserted. More occasions where a critic gets the better of me in print and I say so out loud.
Involution, not only evolution. Simpler, more grounded, more embodied. Not higher — more whole. I wrote that in 2020 as philosophy. Re-reading the archive now, I think it’s also the assignment: the same intuition, in plainer words, held by someone willing to be corrected by people he’d rather not agree with.
I’m still a worldview artist with a bold vision about the future of religion, politics, culture, and Spirit. I’m not retiring the vision. I’m sanding down the delivery.
On worldview artistry
I called this work worldview artistry, and the name fit. A worldview isn’t one subject among others. It sits underneath spirituality and politics and culture, at the root of how a person lives in the world at all — and once you can see that a worldview is made, that it’s constructed and relative and no more inevitable than any other made thing, you can walk into it and rebuild it from the inside. Cook-Greuter calls that vantage Construct-Aware. I treated it as a studio. That’s what thrilled me: not describing worldviews from a lectern but entering them and reworking them. And the colors were paint. Teal, turquoise, indigo — waves, lines, quadrants — those weren’t the technical apparatus of a philosopher to me, they were brushes and palette knives, and I laid down the ribbons of culture in color because that’s how I could see them and because seeing them that way was beautiful.
I wouldn’t take the name today, though not because I’ve decided it was wrong. I’m older, and in old age a man prunes. I keep cutting away the parts of my philosophy that turn out not to be load-bearing — the elaborations I once mistook for the structure — and I find I now prefer a cloud of unknowing to a full-spectrum rainbow. Which is nearly what I was saying in 2020 anyway, when I wrote that the upper reaches of every developmental line seem to point toward a cloud of knowing and unknowing, a vast Spirit or Emptiness. Perhaps the painter was aimed there the whole time. These days I come into a conversation about what matters assuming I’ve probably heard it before, and hoping to be proven wrong — listening for the thing that’s actually new, that makes me curious or hopeful or excited in spite of myself. That’s a quieter posture than a man with a full palette and a wall to cover. I think it suits me now.