Ken Wilber Responds: "I couldn't agree with Robb more..."

I couldn’t agree with Robb more.  In the midst of the worldwide crisis we are going through, seeing it in perspective is crucial.  Slavery is just one example, but a staggering one at that.

The modern techno-economic structure made it possible to dispense with slavery economically, and the modern emergence of worldcentric, postconventional morality made it an ethical imperative.  And thus, in a 100-year period, from roughly 1770 to 1870, slavery was outlawed in every rational-industrial nation on earth, something which had never happened anywhere in history before (even tribal societies had a 15% slavery rate).  This stunning increase in the moral center of gravity of society was accompanied by other post-conventional transformations as well, such as outlawing torture (being drawn and quartered, racked, submitted to the iron lady, etc.).  In many real ways, these were all examples of genuine progress, rare as that attitude is now.

But all individuals are born at square 1 and begin their development through the various structures of consciousness starting at the beginning (in Jean Gebser’s terms, archaic to magic to mythic to rational to pluralistic to integral), and thus slavery—which is particularly common at the mythic-agrarian stage of development—is still likely to occur, if world policing mechanisms are not put in place (which we obviously have not done, with 27 million slaves in existence, or where Nazis can seize control of entire nations).  The times when torture was socially sanctioned were so brutal in so many ways, we postmoderns have a tendency to easily forget just how good we have it today in so many ways.

So it often takes a crisis such the present one to help jar our memory, and remind us that, apart from numerous exceptions (due to the fact that everybody starts at square 1), we postmoderns live in a world that is essentially more moral and ethical than any in history.  The fact that our technology can outrun our morals—producing anything from Auschwitz to global warming—does not warrant a totalizing criticism of the modern and postmodern world, but rather a seeing of it in perspective.  This particularly means to avoid the twin evils of romanticizing everything in the past and condemning everything in the present.

Robb sets our present financial crisis in just such a more universally-balanced perspective, where we can more easily and accurately get a hold of it.  Much thanks for this important perspective and the freedom and fullness it engenders even amidst a felt-sense of crisis.

Read Robb Smith's original piece here.