Guest Blog: Is Howard Gardner a Line Lumper? (by Ivo Banaco)
July 24, 2007 09:00

it does my heart good to see ivo, again, sincerely expressing himself. i may be four decades older, but i've felt a great affinity with him, going back to some brief messages we exchanged with each other at the ISC forums last summer. this, incidentally, is his second blog posted at kw.com.

by coincidence, i just began reading 'five minds for the future' yesterday. my take on it is somewhat different from ivo's, although i think i understand pretty well where he's coming from: it's disheartening to learn that someone like howard gardner, who has contributed greatly to present day psychology, simply hasn't been able to get what ken wilber is saying and doing.

i agree with ivo's assessment that this is evidently due to a green c.o.g. his altitude, his cognitive awareness, is, of course, higher, more expansive, but as we say, it's all quadrants, and his lower ones have, it seems, not allowed his self to move beyond 1st tier.

i haven't yet finished the book, not being able to read anywhere near as quickly as KW, so i can offer only a preliminary perspective. i'm actually encouraged by the openness in HG's remarks about KW. i think he would like to know more, but hasn't yet found a way to go about it. in a previous book--i forget the title--he considered adding a spiritual line to the others he's already posited, but balked. i actually think this is a good sign: he's being truly honest about this and he's not going to accept any spirituality that is not authentic, for instance, new age. it sounds to me like, as KW has put it, he may be ready to pop: life may confront him with some surprise that instantly opens him to spirit and/or integral.

about his being a line lumper, i agree. because he's looking at lines from a green, aqalless pov, alot of things are getting squished together, or, more accurately, they seem to be fused in his world view: he hasn't yet differentiated them. because he is operating largely from a green pov, he does not differentiate between transformation and translation, for example, and in his discussion of synthesis and creation, these get mushed together.

i'd better leave it at that until i've read the entire book. good to hear from you again, ivo,

ralph

---

justinrev

Joined on Sat, Sep 16 2006
Canada
Posts 47
Points 865

from the IN forums:

I'll reply to ralphweidner's discussion here because I haven't bitten the bullet to get access to his original post.

I think the book was Intelligence Reframed and HG seemed to be at least open to the idea of an "existential" intelligence. He wouldn't go so far as "spiritual" intelligence because of confusion about Santa Clause and other existents not being in Q2, so to speak. But his description of what existential intelligence might be, if I recall, allowed for most of the bases to be covered - when you think of it in terms of Wilber's Q1 empiricism per William James etc.
-------
What happens when all this raging-orange-mean-green-ego-mania-coca-cola-pococurante-blew-meme-bullshit goes up in smoke? Poof.


thanks, justin. your memory is probably better than mine, and it jives with my impression of the latest book. i feel that existentialism is generally a healthy green form of spirituality.

i've known since i signed up with i-i that there are different levels and choices of membership, but i've never paid much attention to the implications. the main restriction on my access to i-i services is not what i pay but the computer, an old apple ibook, i generally use. fortunately, this is all going to change with the new system they're working on.

ralph

---

one sign of green is HG's full support for political correctness, in spite of questions about its abuse in recent years. he relates that he already had become opposed to the lawrence summers' presidency at harvard before the latter's ill-fated remarks about women and science.

from pp. 144,5 from the chapter on the ethical mind:

I supported Lawrence Summers when he first became president of Harvard in July 2001. I admired his achievements, liked him personally, and respected the office that he held. In the next few years, however, I saw multiple instances in which he disrespected individuals and harmed the institution that i valued [respect is the fourth mind for the future, and HG distinguishes it from the fifth mind, ethics, as being more concrete, with ethics being more abstract]. At first, like many others, I sought to give Summers advice that might help him to be a more effective president, but for whatever reason, that advice did not take. Early in 2005, I made the personally painful decision to oppose him publicly and to advise him privately to resign. In making this decision, I had to mute my own personal feelings for Summers and my respect for the office that he currently held. Instead, I asked myself an ethical question: as a longtime citizen of the Harvard community, what is the right thing for me to do? At the cost of some friendships and much personal anguish, I elected to follow what appeared to me to be the ethical path--in the phrase of Albert O. Hirschman, to "let voice trump loyalty".

from pp.146,7:

The course of good work [that and community, according to HG, are the bases for ethics] is much more difficult to determine when the various parties are misaligned. Returning to my two examples [Summers and Abe Lincoln], the goals and means of President Summers--however well intentioned--were increasingly misaligned with those of large parts of the Harvard faculty, and so the ethical course for faculty members was difficult to discern. By the same token, Lincoln oscillated for years about the status of slaves in his country until he finally concluded the preservation of the union required the emancipation of the slaves [something HG earlier notes that Lincoln had always wanted]. Nowadays, almost all agree that Lincoln did the right thing: but he paid with his life, and reverberations from his decision echo till this day.

i googled summers, and looked at the article he wrote on milton friedman upon the latter's death. he wrote that he had come from a liberal family, had begun as a keynesian economist, but was gradually won over by many of friedman's arguments to a more nuanced position, imo, a more integral stance that values the best from both the liberal and conservative sides of economics.

again, the best, simple interpretation we can give to HG's remarks, imo, is, in a word, green. i'm particularly intrigued that in the comparison he makes, Lincoln is not equated with Summers but, apparently, with the harvard faculty. this reminds me of a confiding remark a fellow college teacher made to me: 'the students teach the teacher'. and the story of the class of students who decided to prove this by persistently looking to the right of the teacher. by the end of the class he was huddled over in the far right corner of the room. now the harvard faculty, albeit with some trepidation, has taught its president a thing or two.

this book, incidentally, is about leadership, or what i would interpret as green leadership. it will be interesting to see how harvard fares with their new president, drew gilpin faust. in an interview on the news hour with jim lehrer, at the time of her appointment, she said

To think about how disciplines are breaking down, and how we can reconfigure knowledge, and how an intellectual engagement means leading that kind of change, that was exciting, too.

discipline happens to be the first mind of the future. it is largely an orange mind, as i interpret it, but one HG feels is basic to our way of life and, consequently, one we would want to maintain into the future. as in this and other examples, i think HG is promoting a healthy green, one that transcends and includes previous levels. faust's remark suggests to me that she may not be as willing to include orange.

---

as much as it hurt me, too, to see HG bluntly criticizing KW, he's simply giving a green c.o.g. perspective on the integral vision. from that pov KW is indeed the ultimate 'lumper'. afterall, green is very pluralistic. it loves to differentiate, to diversify, to split, but without integrating what it differentiates, without lumping; without achieving any unity in that diversity, for that would require that one transcend, go beyond that diversity to something better, making all that went before worse. the irony is that HG himself has achieved in this book as well as elsewhere, in other books and other endeavors, it appears to me, a certain degree of integration, even if not recognized by himself because of his c.o.g. he himself has developed, it is clear, each of the five minds for the future, including both a synthesizing mind and a creating mind, which together (integrated) make for an integrating mind, as evidenced in the overall vision underlying this book. that he berates KW for being the ultimate integrator suggests to me that he might be projecting what his green self cannot accept.

---

Hi Ralph,

Thank you very much for your comments. My post was an instant reaction to the book. I was so mad because HG expose Ken's work so lightly, with poor knowledge of what integral theory is all about. You can disagree with the framework, you can reject AQAL approach but give me something better, give me the reasons for we at least can start the debate.

Unfortunately I don't have much time available nowadays to post with regularity in I-I forums. I'm working and studying hard. The only two things I wrote, one was directly from my drafts about applying the integral model to European Union evolution (my dissertation in my master degree in Economics) and the second was this "Is HG a line lumper?". I am very flattered to have the opportunity to have these two posts on Ken's blog. I'm over the moon!

Stay with my e-mail ibanaco@gmail.com, because unfortunately I don't come to I-I forum very often. It's just a world out here and I feel a little bit lost, so keep in touch by e-mail if you want.

btw..I also felt a great affinity with you in the last summer..I remember that at the time we were discussing Integral Spirituality chapter by chapter. I also read some posts from you everytime I came (very quickly) to I-I site like today. Very cool stuff...

All the best,

Ivo

---

Like a tear in all we know
Once dissolved we are free to grow
What is human, what is more?
I\'ll answer this when I get home

Eddie Vedder in "Severed Hand"