Evolution and Complexity: Ken Wilber Interview

Individual and cultural development, the 2024 elections and Satori moments

In a complex system, like your body or the Amazon rainforest, under the right conditions everything can change in an instant. This is know as a ‘critical transition’, a moment where new conditions lead to a dramatic and sudden shift in the state of the whole system. As we see record temperatures around the world, some scientists are wondering whether we’re fast approaching a critical transition in the biosphere. 

There is an old idea in some spiritual and systems change traditions that finding solutions to collective problems like climate change requires its own kind of tipping point; a shift in the way we view ourselves and the world around us. A critical transition in our shared sense of what’s real, who we are, and what really matters. A shift toward a new value system, one that is more complex, adaptive and inclusive of its previous states than anything that came before. 

The degree to which we can evolve as individuals, or as a species, has been on my mind a lot recently. A few weeks ago I met with philosopher Ken Wilber again, and recorded a fascinating conversation with him exploring the state of the world and human development, which is included below. I also spoke with Daniel Görtz about Metamodernism. Metamodernism is a movement that, like Wilber’s Integral philosophy, seeks to map out human development and introduce a new cultural aesthetic to meet the complexity of the times. Both these systems of thought, and others like them, focus on how we can evolve to ever-greater levels of psychological, social and spiritual complexity. 

At the same time, I’ve been developing a new course with Trish Blain, NonOrdinary Sensemaking, which starts on July 18th. The course focuses on the skills we need to step into the new, unknown territory that comes after those critical transitions, either in our own lives, on our perspective on the world, or in culture. How can we move to the edge of our own certainty and become skilled at navigating not just the new perspectives we find there, but the underlying desires and states of consciousness driving them? Trish and I recorded a film together exploring these topics and diving deeper into why we think these questions matter so much today.

As well as introducing cognitive and emotional practices to help you navigate new territory in your own life and the new realities that await us in the future, the course will take you on a shared journey of cultural sensemaking with people from around the world. We’ll be inquiring into what it really means to step into a new paradigm. As Jules Evans wrote in his piece ‘Dude Where’s My Paradigm Shift?’, the New Age has been harping on about this concept for years, but has failed pretty monumentally in ushering in whatever utopia its adherents promised. 

Likewise, systems-change communities like Game B ask a similar question - how can we move toward a paradigm that grows beyond the winner-take-all dynamics of late-stage capitalism? One of the key points we’ll explore in NonOrdinary Sensemaking is why the traditional idea of a paradigm shift is often flawed, because as Trish Blain argues, it focuses on ushering in a static worldview rather than a dynamic reality. Truly finding coherence together in a dynamic reality requires a completely different set of skills, including the ability to navigate the deep desires and often conflicting states of consciousness that make up human life and drive cultural evolution.

For those who might not be familiar with Ken Wilber, he is a philosopher most famous for his Integral philosophy, which seeks to create comprehensive map of human development, both individually and collectively, drawing on dozens of models to create a kind of ‘model of models’. Jamie Wheal says it’s one of the best philosophies to learn and then forget, and I think there’s something in that. It’s been hugely influential on my thinking, but ‘the map is not the territory’ and I’ve found it most powerful when held lightly alongside other models.

Integral was hugely influential in the early 2000’s, with fans like Al Gore and Alanis Morisette. Wilber fell ill in the 2000’s and while Integral’s influence declined, there are many people out there today (myself included) who were greatly influenced by it. Wilber has been prolific in the last decade, and wrote a short book called Trump and a Post Truth World which I found hugely useful for making sense of what was going on at the deeper levels underlying the huge cultural shifts we saw around the world in 2016, exploring shadows within progressivism I think are as unowned and damaging today as they were then. It was a special moment to visit him and give him a copy my book The Bigger Picture a few weeks ago, and take the chance to get his thoughts on the state of the world. 

Our conversation is available below for paid subscribers. This is the first time I’ve written a piece with Substack’s ‘teaser’ function, and I wanted to name that rather than just sliding it in. Conversations like this include a fair bit of travel and expenditure, so my hope is that if you appreciate my work and feel drawn toward this interview and others like it (including the growing number of resources and exclusive pieces behind the paywall), you’ll consider subscribing for the price of a fancy cup of coffee.