Jam Sessions of the Mind: Democratic Conversations
Tok Group featuring John Vervaeke—in the far left middle panel directly above me
In jazz lore, after the regular gigs for musicians were done, late-night, after-hour jam sessions became a laboratory for experimentation and improvisational excellence. The play was serious fun for the musicians and audiences, where the principle of antagonistic cooperation insured that bandstand challenges prompted the soloists to bring it or go home.
The dialogue series that began last week at The Stoa, Body and Soul: The Mind of Culture, is like a jam session of the mind. To check out the first jam, featuring physicist Stephon Alexander, evolutionary biologist Brandon Ogbunu, psychologist Gregg Henriques, and culturalist Greg Thomas, click here.
Gregg and I continue swingin’ this afternoon from 5:30-7:00 pm ET with renowned cognitive scientist John Vervaeke and the innovative Integral philosopher Steve McIntosh; both were featured in the final blog post of last year, “A Short Reflection on 2020 and Beyond.”
We’re excited to bring McIntosh and Vervaeke together for the very first time because their thought and body of work range from the philosophical to the scientific, and the political to the spiritual. Another reason is that the topic, “Values as Energetic Transcendence,” expands upon the themes Jewel wrote about in her excellent blog post from last November, “The Energy of Values.”
Hyper-Polarization: Political or Cultural Problem?
Steve McIntosh
As such, the conversation will span many themes, but one key convergence point will be the state of our democracy. In a work published in 2020, Developmental Politics: How America Can Grow Into a Better Version of Itself, McIntosh argues that the political polarization ripping the nation’s fabric isn’t primarily a political issue. Rather, the issue is cultural. McIntosh proposes cultural intelligence as a way to first, understand the true nature of the problem, followed by an integration of value polarities.
Integral consciousness provides a new way of seeing—an expanded epistemology—that can recognize how two seemingly conflicting propositions can work together as a system of development. This way of seeing . . . [is] a method of understanding that requires an intuitive sympathy achieved only by entering into the alternative perspectives that generate the opposing values.
—Steve McIntosh
In Part One of Developmental Politics, the major issue is differing values systems, which he frames as worldviews: “a coherent set of values and ideals that persist across multiple generations.” McIntosh presents three major worldviews in America: traditional, modern, and post-modern, each with different moral emphases. In simple terms, traditionalists value religion, modernists science and business, and post-modernists social justice, each worldview highly critical of the other. In reality, however, modernism is built upon the foundation of the traditional, and postmodernism derives from modernity. He estimates that about 30% of Americans are at a traditional center of gravity, 50% at modern, and 20% post-modern.
In the left-right spectrum, these show up as follows:
Thus far, the analysis isn’t groundbreaking. But McIntosh swings at higher octaves of insight in the chapter titled, “Reaching Political Agreement Through Values Integration.” As each worldview contains positive as well as shadow sides, understanding such value sets is a foundation of what McIntosh now calls a “post-progressive political perspective.”
The following charts begin to display the power of McIntosh’s cultural intelligence, as applied to politics:
Perhaps if the mainstream media were truly interested in resolving America’s political dilemmas, rather than profiting from the polarization, clarifying charts such as these above would be widely discussed among the chatterati on television and print media.
When positive political goals and values such as seen above are in conflict, what Gregg Henriques calls “wisdom energy” can be brought to bear to manage and integrate them. McIntosh makes clear that such integration will not occur by striving for a common ground based on centrism, but rather through higher ground based on ultimate values gravitating toward the good, the true, the beautiful. That’s why In part Two of the book, he advances a felicitous political philosophy of purpose grounded in transcendent values. One example focuses attention on the way “self-interest” and “greater-than-self-interest” function as polarities which depend on each other in a dynamic equilibrium of creative adaptation and organic embrace.
Such interdependent value polarities, McIntosh argues, hold significance as virtuous engines of the evolutionary maturity of consciousness and culture. Expanding on his concerto of philosophical themes, McIntosh also reanimates the practice of virtues as magnetic means to ameliorate America’s political problems.
Vervaeke’s Dialogos and Democracy
John Vervaeke
Last November, John Vervaeke was an online guest of Gregg Henriques’ ToK group, of which I’m a member. I asked John about his idea of “dialogos,” which he describes below. Here’s the exchange:
Greg Thomas: When I hear you talk about dialogos, it reminds me of what I call the higher frequencies of democratic discourse. When you look at the very process of democracy as democratic conversation, as what Danielle Allen, a political philosopher at Harvard, in her book on the Declaration of Independence, Our Declaration, talks about as the writing of the Declaration as a group writing process. That was a process of dialogos, both directly in dialogue verbally, but also in writing. There’s something there to do with the very democratic process that I think it’s important for us to explore.
John Vervaeke: I think that’s right, deeply right, and I like the metaphor. It actually jibes with a paper that Chris [Mastropietro] and I are trying to get published right now: we talk about how behind whatever we speak, there’s much more that we convey. And when we try to speak what we convey we just open up the deeper levels of conveyance.
We talk about how you have everyday discussion, but when the conveyance starts to break down, we move to debate. If the shared normativity required for debate breaks down, we move to this higher level of dialogos, in which we’re trying to re-engineer cultural communing, so we can get back to a shared conformity. Then we can drop back down to resolvable debate and drop back down from there to living our lives in social cooperation.
I’m deeply influenced by [John] Dewey on one hand, and by [Jurgen] Habermas on the other. And you can see the universal pragmatics in what I just said. But putting the two together, the idea that what democracy is supposed to be is something very analogous to living things. It’s supposed to be a fundamentally self-correcting process that uses opponent processing. We’ve lost that; it’s been broken down into adversarial zero-sum. But if we could get back to people committing to the shared project of self-correction, the higher frequencies that you talk about, that could . . . I think all the attempts—sorry, this is going to be bold everyone—I think all of the attempts to restore democracy at the political level are pretty much doomed to fail.
We have so eroded the communicative machinery and the shared normativity that’s needed that I don’t think the answer is going to come there. I think we have to do is get back to what Aristotle thought: that politics is ultimately about living the good life, and about meaning-making, and about creating culture. But we have to get into the machinery, the non-propositional machinery where most of that heavy-lifting is done. I don’t think political ideology is going to do it, at all.
So, you have two choices when you’re facing burgeoning complexity: you can look for the single answer that’s the final story for all time, or you can get into a process that can adaptively evolve because it’s dynamically self-correcting. The choice of democracy is the latter, the choice of authoritarianism is the former.
Notice the distinction between McIntosh’s and Vervaeke’s view: Steve heroically strives to address the meaning crisis as appears in the political realm via a developmental approach to values and virtues; John on the other hand casts doubt on the political realm as locus of what Albert Murray in The Hero and the Blues called the “Great Good Place.”
These nodes of subtle divergence should add a delicious element of creative tension today.
That’s why I expect the conversation beginning at 5:30 ET this afternoon to be chockful of insights and revelations. My desire is for this dialogos jam session to be as memorable as the jam sessions at Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem that democratically birthed a new jazz style called bebop. So why not join the conversation?