Ken Wilber on the Coming Integral Age in Psychology
Specialization has its place, and we clearly need it. The trouble starts when a specialized view gets mistaken for a whole worldview, one that notices only bits, pieces, fragments, and slices. Once that habit sets in, we begin to read life itself, our own lives included, as a string of isolated and broken moments.
So the world now gets tugged in two contrary directions at once. On one side, technology drives globalization and a kind of unifying pull. On the other, our theories keep splintering: fragmentation, balkanization, fracturing into ever-smaller camps.
The only way through, as I see it, is to openly and deliberately take in all of these domains, each one valuable in its own right. Doing that is how we actually find out what we are capable of, and it is how we start to confront the genuinely wicked problems that now threaten to swallow the world. If psychology intends to be useful against a problem of that scale, it will have to grow steadily more integral.
Here is what I feel sure of. We cannot keep running the same partial, broken, fragmented methods we have leaned on all along, hope they somehow begin to work, and expect any real answer to either side of this. The methods failed before. They will not suddenly succeed. That holds both for reaching our enormous potential and for meeting our most serious dangers.
One of the larger forces shaping a psychology of the future, I believe, will be a strong pressure to stop this fragmentation and reach instead for unity, for harmony, for wholeness. Not only inside academic and professional fields like psychology, but inside our everyday lives. The aim is a growing sense of unity alongside diversity, harmony alongside multiplicity.
I think this will be fed from two springs. One is the arrival of stronger and stronger integral theories across nearly every discipline. The other is the continuing growth of humanity itself, as more people begin moving into the integral, second-tier stages of their own development.
As that happens, a powerful appetite for all things integral will keep surfacing, and along with it a demand for goods, products, and services that are truly holistic, whole, complete, and satisfying. Things that help people build lives that feel more whole and more fulfilled.
Our serious problems are all still with us. Even so, we are only now stepping into an unusual and abundant integral age, and psychology, I do believe, will be part of it. Thank you all very much.