2022 Reading Challenge: A Brief History of Everything
The last book I read in 2022 was Ken Wilber’s A Brief History of Everything. I’d like to review this one first, while it is still fresh in my mind, because I think I have a lot to say about it. I like Ken Wilber a lot. This is the fourth book of his that I’ve read, although one, checking in at 87 pages, is more of an extended essay than a book. (I highly recommend it, especially if you are interested in American politics. I found it in PDF form online for free, but that was many years ago.)
Wilber has a kind of “theory of everything,” commonly referred to as “integral theory,” and in each book of his that I’ve read, he sort of lays this framework out, and then applies it to some specific problem at hand. In this book, the problem at hand is the divide between what we might call modernism and post-modernism, and the singular shortfall that plagues them both. Of course, his solution to this problem is also presented in the context of his framework.
I need to start with a brief review of integral theory to really get anywhere in this essay. In each book, he presents it from a bit of a different angle, and focuses on some features more than others. For instance, in his book A Theory of Everything, he lays everything out in a spiral. In A Brief History of Everything, the spiral is not included, and a strong focus is put on his system of four quadrants. I will restrict my review of integral theory here to the presentation provided in the book I am reviewing.
Integral Theory
There are two major components to Wilber’s “everything model”: holons and quadrants. Let’s look at holons first.
Holons
Wilber describes holons in a collection of twenty tenets, which he provides as an appendix. He discusses a handful of these tenets in detail as he lays out his model in the first part of his book. The first tenet gives the basic idea of what a holon is:
Reality as a whole is not composed of things or processes, but of holons (wholes that are parts of other wholes; e.g., whole atoms are parts of whole molecules, which are parts of whole cells, which are parts of whole organisms, and so on).
This is a bit of a critique of the scientific tendency to try to locate the smallest building block of nature, of which everything else is built from. Instead, Wilber invites us to shift to a focus of how each level is itself whole, and also becomes a building block for the next level. Multiple levels of holons form themselves into a holarchy, in which every level is composed of wholes which are also parts.
These holarchies can be found in all sorts of domains, and not just the physical sciences. For instance, in the evolution of the life, simple organisms begin with loose connections of sensors, such as light receptors, and control systems that do things like getting the organism to swim towards the light. These develop into fish brains, which develop into lizard brains. The mammalian brain grows up and around the lizard brain, including the simpler structure within itself. Similarly, the human brain grows up and around the mammalian brain. So the lizard brain becomes a part of the mammalian brain becomes a part of the human brain.
Another example of holarchy appears in the development of human culture. We pass through stages such as foraging, horticulture, agriculture, and industrial, each new stage growing up out of the previous one. Similarly, in human development, we go through stages that he labels in chapter headings as follows:
Fulcrum-1: The Hatching of the Physical Self
Fulcrum-2: The Birth of the Emotional Self
Fulcrum-3: The Birth of the Conceptual Self
Fulcrum-4: The Birth of the Role Self
Fulcrum-5: The Worldcentric or Mature Ego
Fulcrum-6: The Bodymind Integration of the Centaur
Fulcrum-7: The Psychic
Fulcrum-8: The Subtle
Fulcrum-9: The Causal
Each step up the ladder is supposed to be a three-step process that he describes like this (page 131):
So every fulcrum has a 1-2-3 structure. One, the self evolves or develops or steps up to a new level of awareness, and it identifies with that level, it is “one with” that level. Two, it then begins to move beyond that level, to differentiate from it, or dis-identify with it, or transcend it. And three, it identifies with the new and higher level and centers itself there. The new rung is actually resting on the previous rungs, so they must be included and integrated in the overall expansion, and that integration or inclusion is the third and final subphase of the particular fulcrum.
It’s important to note that each level of the holarchy emerges from elements of the previous level. Each new level transcends the previous as well: It provides something new that we haven’t seen before.
Of course, Wilber goes into much greater depth into his theory than would be possible in a brief summary, and this summary does feel a bit childish to me. I also have a somewhat tentative grasp on all of this, so I may have gotten some parts wrong, or perhaps placed emphasis in the wrong places. It should give you a flavor, but to get the full picture, you’ll really need to go into it more deeply on your own. There are many great books on the subject, both by Wilber himself, and by others.
Quadrants
Wilber has all kinds of beautiful diagrams in his book, including this one that lays out the four quadrants:
The upper and lower are singular and plural, respectively, and the left and right are interior and exterior. So, touchy-feely stuff on the left, and sciency stuff on the right. Collective exterior stuff encompasses relatively new branches of science such as systems theory. The difference between the “I” and the “we”, that is, individual experience and culture, seems to be more significant, at least to people thinking about these kinds of things today, than the difference between the study of things (in the terminology of science, subjects) and systems, so Wilber often collapses the right-hand side into a single category, ending up with what he calls “the Big Three,” which he lays out very helpfully in this little table:
These three are validated by appearing in the works of earlier philosophers, including Plato (the Good (we), the True (it), and the Beautiful (I)), Karl Popper’s three worlds (objective, subjective, and cultural), and Kant’s trilogy (The Critique of Pure Reason (it), The Critique of Practical Reason (we), and The Critique of Judgement (I)).
Every holon can be viewed from all three (or four) perspectives. This is shown in the following chart, where you can see how the items labelled with the same number in all of the four quadrants correspond to each other:
It’s important to note that where we are culturally does not always align with where individuals in that culture are. As individuals, we grow through these different stages. We advance through many of them as children. As adults, some of us get comfortable where we are, and others continue to grow. So we will be at different stages at different points of our lives. And the culture aligns with, roughly, the most dominant stage expressing through our individual selves. So, for example, we currently live in a predominantly post-modern culture, and perhaps the majority of people have a post-modern mindset, but many others have a modern mindset, and still others are at earlier stages of development, such as mythic or magic. Some small minority of us have already advanced beyond the post-modern mindset, and as more and more of us do so, we will gain momentum, and help humanity to advance culturally beyond post-modernity.
Wilber lays out his framework of holons and quadrants in Part One of his book. In Part Two, he goes into more depth, describing the development of human consciousness and culture through these stages, all the way through the ancient past, and on to places that most of us haven’t really gotten to yet. In Part Three, he tells his story in the context of this framework. The shorthand name he provides for this story is “flatland.”
Flatland
I must admit that I have somewhat of a tenuous grasp on the things that Wilber is talking about in this book, so you will have to take my summary and interpretation with a grain of salt. It’s really complicated stuff, and Wilber’s discourse can be difficult to follow. His flatland story is quite interesting, but I’ll keep my summary brief, as you will be better off reading the book for yourself if it piques your interest.
In short, the first time humanity was actually able to fully differentiate between the four quadrants was during what we call the Age of Reason. Before this, we weren’t very good at separating out I, we and it. We start to do so in what he calls Fulcrum-5, the stage of formal operational awareness. (I believe this is Piaget’s term.) But perhaps something goes wrong in this process:
Consciousness, morals, and science had indeed been freed from their magic and their mythic indissociation; each domain was set loose with its own power and its own truth and its own approach to the Kosmos, each of which had something equally important to say.
But by the end of the eighteenth century, the rapid, indeed extraordinary development of science began to throw the whole system off balance. The advances in the it-domain began to eclipse, and then actually deny, the values and truths of the I and the we domains. The Big Three began to collapse into the Big One: empirical science, and science alone, could pronounce on ultimate reality. Science, as we say, became scientism, which means it didn’t just pursue its own truths, it aggressively denied that there were any other truths at all!
Of course, we are all familiar with the way “science” ends up treating matters of consciousness or culture: as something to be studied as an “it”, as if everything in the world could be an object to their empirical methods. The results, needless to say, are not good. I’ll spare you the gory details. The next major stage discussed is Romanticism, which can be seen as a reaction against this kind of scientism, where nature is elevated, as opposed to being exploited. Wilber somewhat confusingly calls these camps “the Ego and the Eco.” The scientist types (which I seem to have been calling modernists above) glorify the subject (I) over all of nature (it). The nature Romantics (which I seem to have been calling post-modernists above) react by glorifying nature. However, in both cases, the Big Three remain dissociated.
Wilber’s answer, perhaps predictably, is to get to the next stage of human development, which he calls Fulcrum-6, which is really good at integrating stuff.
Honestly, it’s a really interesting story. It’s an interesting presentation as well. But my impression is that Wilber is not that good at getting his point across in a way that makes the ideas stick. He flips between different terminologies and different aspects of both the story and the framework with a lightness and ease that makes it easy to move your eyes across the page, but hard (for me at least) to come away with a concrete story one can relay. Every time I want to go back to his ideas, for instance to write this essay, or to try to figure out how these ideas relate to something else I am working out, I end up flipping through the book interminably, connecting little bits from distant chapters to try to recreate actual associations from vague memories. For instance, are modernists the same as, or roughly equivalent, to the Ego? Are post-modernists roughly equivalent to the Eco? Are they both part of Fulcrum-5? My impression is that the answer to all these questions is yes, but he never explicitly connects these different things, and I’m left hoping that I got it right.
My Critique of Integral Theory
I find Wilber’s writing to be extremely insightful, and a pleasure to read. His integral theory strikes me as a very powerful tool. He’s taken on a heroic task in trying to come up with a framework that encompasses so much of human reality, including physics, the evolution of life, the development of culture, stages of human development, as well as all varieties of human spirituality. I think there are some problems, though, which often have to do with attempting to fit disparate things into the same category.
For instance, he names many examples of holons and holarchies, including atoms to molecules to cells, as well as epochs of human development, from foraging to horticultural to agrarian to industrial to informational. I can see how, in each of these two examples of holarchies, each next level “emerges from” the previous level. But they do so in distinctly different ways. The molecule is composed of multiple atoms, so this is a compositional, or one-to-many, relationship. However, agrarian societies are not composed of horticultural societies. Agrarian societies grow out of horticultural societies. This is a one-to-one relationship. There is one conceptual agrarian culture, and it evolved out of a single conceptual horticultural society.
Perhaps Wilber differentiates between these two different kinds of holarchies elsewhere, or perhaps it is in the text I just read somewhere and I somehow missed it, but this is a fundamental difference of kind that should not be glossed over.
There are more problems. Wilber says atoms combine together into molecules, and molecules combine together into cells. This is naively true, but under closer examination, it simply doesn’t hold up. The next level up in the holarchy from molecules is not cells, but solar systems! After all, stars and planets were around long before there were ever cells. After solar systems come galaxies, and after galaxies come galactic clusters. Cells are somewhere in between molecules and solar systems.
You can sort of tell that science is not Wilber’s primary concern, because anyone deeply interested in science can tell you that there are a massive number of layers of complexity between molecules and cells. In fact, we have tremendous levels of complexity within the space of molecules alone! There are simple molecules like nitrogren (N2) or water (H2O) or ammonia (NH3). And there are other molecules such as proteins that can be many thousand times the size and complexity of these simple molecules. And it’s the simpler molecules that solar systems are composed of, not the complex ones.
So from simple molecules, we probably have multiple levels of complexity within the molecular space alone. From here, we have many, many layers to go until we get to a cell. In the least, there are molecular complexes, or multiple molecules that come together to serve a single function, and there are organelles, which are the major sub-structures within a cell. And what about viruses? Once again, these are collections of molecules that are vastly smaller and less complex than even the simplest cell.
One really important aspect to all of this life on Earth stuff that I think should be accounted for in any theory of everything is that fact that this life comes up in the in-between of the two pre-existent layers of holarchy: the simple molecule and the solar system. There is something very fractal about this, and in contradiction to Wilber’s apparent vision of a linear (or spiral) progression of stages growing out of previous stages.
This in-between kind of growth tends to be more of the one-to-one kind of growth, coming up in between the many-to-one layers. But there are many-to-one layers in life as well. One obvious example is single-cell life to multicellular life. It’s as if the individual cell becomes a stable enough platform that compositions can form on top of it, but interestingly, still inside the space between molecule and planet. It’s like a fractal drawn on a page, where the dimensionality expands beyond the two dimensions of the piece of paper.
It is often said that with such a vast number of planets and solar systems out there, the magic of life on Earth is bound to be repeated on other planets in the universe. I think we can take this a step further. The same way that complex life grew up on the surface of the Earth, feeding off of the energies of the Earth and the Sun, we should also expect this kind of complexity to take place at other levels of the holarchy. We should expect complexity to arise, for instance, on the surface of an electron spinning about the nucleus of an atom. We should not be surprised if this is happening in an atom in our body right now, given the vast number of atoms we are composed of. We might also expect to find complexity growing up on the surface of a star, feeding from the energy of the galactic center.
Why I Read This Book in 2022
The reason why I read this book recently is that I was hoping to use these ideas to back up a very simple idea of mine that helps support the importance of myth and religion. This simple idea is that the development of modern ways of thinking out of mythical, and other pre-rational, ways of thinking, happens in an incremental way, like how the mammalian brain grows up and around the lizard brain. It’s not like we can discard our lizard brains! We still need them. I’ve managed to make this argument once or twice in the stuff I wrote last year, but each time in a superficial enough manner that I did not end up referring to Wilber explicitly.
All told, I really loved this book. Wilber is wrestling with some big ideas, which I like. Like many books and authors, he doesn’t get everything right, but the ideas he presents, while imperfect, provide deep and genuine insight. I wish the book was better written. And I wish I found it easier to work with. He’s just a bit too deep, or maybe too all-over-the-place, for me to incorporate his ideas directly. Instead, they become part of the background picture in the things I am writing about.