Ken Wilber on the Culture Wars and Stages of Human Development

People can halt their own growth at any level, which means any given culture ends up looking like a layer cake: different slices of the population resting at different points along the rainbow of developmental altitudes. Of all these stages, second-tier is the only major one so far that grants the other levels any legitimacy. It recognizes that they exist for a reason, that each one plays a real part in how humans grow, and it turns out that view is correct. Every stage is a necessary piece of our development. None of them can be skipped or erased, in the same way you cannot jump from atoms straight to cells without passing through molecules. Each stage earns its place, and second-tier is more or less alone in grasping this intuitively.

Reaching that higher, integral level of being and awareness is part of any durable answer to the problems that actually matter. Take Conscious Capitalism by Mackey and Sisodia. The authors openly recommend what they call "evolving to higher levels of consciousness in stages," and they cite examples like the work of Maslow, Colbert, Graves, and my own research. I keep returning to their book because it shows that even a famously hard-nosed field like business can account for these major AQAL elements. Any genuinely integral approach, in any domain, will include them, and that is precisely what Mackey and Sisodia set out to do.

Consider the three most recently evolved levels within first-tier. First-tier covers roughly 95% of the world's population, so this is most of humanity we're describing. The three newest first-tier levels are the mythic, religious, traditional values (amber), the modern, rational, scientific values (orange), and the postmodern, multicultural values (green). Those happen to be the exact three value sets locked in combat in the culture wars: traditional against modern against postmodern.

Each of these, being a first-tier stage, is convinced that its values alone are true and real. Green postmodernism regards orange rational science and amber mythic religion as mere social constructions, and therefore as ultimately unreal. Orange modern science dismisses mythic religion as infantile and treats postmodern sensitivity as woo-woo. Amber mythic religion, for its part, consigns both modern science and postmodern multiculturalism to eternal hellfire. So why bother with what any of them think?

And yet critics across the board agree that these same three sets, the mythic traditional, the modern scientific, and the postmodern multicultural, are the ones at war. They are still scrapping for dominance everywhere humans do anything: in classrooms, in politics, in foreign policy, in spiritual questions, in the larger goals a culture sets for itself. What almost nobody sees, inside those camps or anywhere else, is that every one of them is speaking from a well-documented stage of human development that is, by its nature, partial and limited.