Ken Wilber on the Four Quadrants and the Coming Revolution
Think about how parts nest inside larger parts. Whole atoms sit inside whole molecules. Those molecules sit inside cells, the cells inside organisms, and the chain keeps going upward. To examine any single thing, then, is really to examine the countless ways it connects with the environments and networks it belongs to. The number of those connections runs close to infinite.
The real split in how people approach all this comes down to one question. Do you treat those networks as plain facts that objective science can uncover, or do you treat them as interpretations that depend on the backgrounds of the networks themselves? Put it a few different ways: facts against values, givens against meanings, positivism against interpretation. At the widest level, it is systems theory on one side and hermeneutics on the other.
Neither camp is small. Both have passionate defenders and loud detractors. On the hermeneutic side you find figures like Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, Gadamer, and George Herbert Mead. On the more empirical side sit the sociologies and psychologies built around dynamic systems theory, family systems theory, complexity and chaos theories, component systems, and the rest of that family.
Here is where they agree and where they part. Both insist that the whole is what is primarily real, and that the individual is just an abstraction pulled out of that reality. They diverge on how the whole should be known. One side wants to know it from the inside, subjectively, from within. The other wants it from the outside, objectively, from without. Integral meta-theory refuses to pick: it holds that both are equally real, equally necessary, equally worth having.
That is a quick pass across all four quadrants. A psychology built for the future would weave all four into one coherent framework. And something stranger is happening on top of that. A genuine upheaval is underway in every one of the four quadrants at the same time, which has arguably never occurred together at any earlier point in history.
Take the lower right quadrant first. It covers collective exterior material systems, which includes technology and the techno-economic base of a given society. Technology is barreling toward what some call a singularity, a moment when machine intelligence catches up to the combined intelligence of humanity and then shoots far past it into a super-intelligence that people won't be able to follow.
Suppose that happens. Roughly 90 percent of experts in the area expect something of this kind by the end of the century, and about half expect it by mid-century. If they are right, the social consequences become nearly impossible to tally in advance. Picture a super-abundant economy in which everyone's basic needs are simply covered, leaving people with open-ended free time. Pair that with advances in molecular biology that could stretch human lifespans into the hundreds of years, and the free time starts to look astronomical.
The psychological side, the upper left, would have to grow new disciplines from scratch to cope with the questions all this forces on people. That almost certainly means a far deeper grasp of states of consciousness, the territory of enlightenment and awakening, if only to keep the raw boredom of such an existence from swallowing people whole.