American democracy has been a light unto the world for several hundred years.  And when we look at many Third World countries, oppressed by dictators or torn apart by wars or devastated by disease and poverty, we Americans have good reason to count ourselves lucky.  However, when we look at many of the more advanced nations of Europe, who manage to achieve a greater quality of life for their people with far fewer resources, we Americans have good reason to hang our heads in shame.

Here in the richest nation in the world, millions upon millions suffer from discrimination and poverty, poor education and lack of health care.  Meanwhile, we divert our resources to military attacks on other countries, and we are contributing more to global warming than most other nations combined.  We identify these problems year after year, decade after decade, but make almost no progress because of a political system that is so deeply divided it cannot respond to the needs of the people it is supposed to serve. 

If we set this problem into a spiritual context, we immediately see that the failure of our political system is a direct reflection of who we are as a people.  After all, we are a people whose spiritual ‘center of gravity’ hovers on the spiral of development between Stage Two fundamentalism and Stage Three materialism.  (See Spiritual Stages.) 

Contrast this with European societies which have had more time to mature and grow.  Countries such as Sweden and France and England now operate solidly from Stage Three, with a great deal of influence from Stage Four idealism, which allows their governments to extend what seems to us extraordinary protections and benefits to their citizens. 

Here in U.S., our lower spiritual center of gravity creates a politics that doesn’t serve our best interests, primarily because we have no idea what our best interests really are. The majority of us live by Stage Two priorities established by the ego and its considerable list of desires and fears and insecurities. 

Michael Nagler, co-founder of the Peace and Conflict Studies program at UC Berkley, compares our current situation to that of a snake unable to shed its skin.  After awhile, a snake that cannot grow from the overtight skin will not only suffer pain, but will get sick and perhaps even die.  “A spiritual crisis,” Nagler continues, “occurs when a culture finds itself trapped in an outmoded, suffocating network of values and conceptions in a worldview, a ‘creed outworn,’ that has become too small to allow the people to get on with their cultural evolution.”

Our spiritual center of gravity, dominated by Stage Two, has our society caught in a chokehold that literally threatens to end life as we know it.  However, it is vital to note that this doesn’t mean Stage Two thinking is “bad,” as many liberal voices accuse. 

Sam Harris, in his popular book, The End of Faith, famously advocated the end of all religions, Christianity in particular.  Because the Christian Right is so open about its goal of taking over the government, and beyond that, taking over the world, Harris and others argue that Christianity and other religions are too dangerous to let stand. They believe that because so many dualists use their religion as an excuse for violence and repression and exploitation of the environment, if we get rid of the religion, we will get rid of the problem.  They are mistaken.

Politics and the spiral

Fundamentalism is an inevitable expression of Stage Two thinking.  It is not created by Christianity, or Islam or any other faith -- and taking away the dogmatic structure of religion will not make the fundamentalist drive to lash out and conquer go away.  People in Stage Two, with their high need for authority and order and “being right,” would simply attach themselves to some other militant doctrine -- a doctrine that might not be balanced by Christianity’s emphasis on love and forgiveness.

Harris naturally wishes that everyone would just hurry up and grow into the Stage Three materialism from which he preaches his atheistic gospel.  But since being able to move through Stage Two is the only way to get there, if he wants more Stage Three thinking, he should not be trying to destroy Stage Two structures, or giving Stage Two believers a reason to cling more tightly to those structures.   

Furthermore, if we cut off access to Stage Two beliefs, then we give people thrashing around in Stage One chaos and egocentrism nowhere to go.   

The problem we face is not too much Christianity. The problem is not even fundamentalism, because fundamentalist is an inevitable expression of Stage Two and Stage Three levels of spiritual development. The problem is that we don’t have a “common knowledge” of spiritual stages, and too many of us are hanging out in one particular stage for entire lifetimes instead of growing into our potential.  And this stagnated spiritual growth is directly responsible for our stagnated politics.

The evidence plays out daily all around us -- in our media and halls of government, in corporate boardrooms and factory break rooms, even in our own living rooms.  Each stage has become hemmed in by a hard wall of defensiveness. Each stage loudly declares it is the only “right” one and fiercely engages in a “culture war” to stamp the others out.  And each stage is especially hard on those who dare to mature to the next level.  Stage Two religious-types banish and demonize their perceived deserters who grow into materialism.  Stage Three materialists, in turn, mock and marginalize those who grow into idealism. 

Meanwhile, Stage Four idealists refuse on principle to recognize anything as undemocratic as a hierarchy of stages, and insist we all stay on the same pluralistic, egalitarian level.  Instead of continuing to evolve, idealists get absorbed in their own little journeys, and many actually regress backwards toward egocentrism.  Rather than helping along the collective flow toward higher stages that are more inclusive and compassionate, Stage Four idealists often form an apathetic dead end that effectively stops the flow.

Clearly, the only way we are going to be able to develop a politics which actually serves the best interests of all people is to raise our nation’s spiritual center of gravity.  We are going to have to help move more of the population through higher stages of spiritual growth.  This means, first of all, that we must make sure the knowledge of spiritual stages becomes common knowledge in the culture.  I will say it again and again, this key knowledge has more potential to transform society than any idea since the Enlightenment first put forth the revolutionary idea that “all men are created equal."

Second of all, those of us stuck in flat, Stage Four idealism need to unblock the spiral and take steps to move ourselves to the more profound and active idealism of Stage Five (See What Next?)   Yet we also have to help Stage One get to Stage Two, and Stage Two get to Stage Three, and so forth. 

We do this as progressives always have, by addressing the economic and social issues that keep so many trapped in the earlier stages.  But also by protecting the conceptual frameworks for each stage so people have the ideological space to grow.  We need to defend religion from the attacks of materialism, we need to defend materialism from the attacks of religion, and we most definitely need to defend New Age idealism from the attacks of both.  The health and vitality of each stage is essential to the health of the entire spiral. 

The “culture wars” and the attacks on other stages, says Wilber, are one of our greatest “threats” to the future.  So rather than taking adversarial positions that only entrench and harden each other into our own political views, we need to start understanding the world through each other’s eyes.  We need to start taking an integral perspective that understands that the political views of those in earlier stages are not necessarily “wrong.” 

The integral approach

In the two-party system that divides American politics today, we see an often bitter difference of opinion on the cause of our social ills. The conservative Republican opinion, based largely in Stage Two with its moral order based on rules and discipline and obedience to authority, sees the individual as entirely responsible for his or her own suffering.  All the problems of society are understood as the failures of individuals.  That is why most conservative solutions focus on scolding or controlling individuals rather than the funding of social programs.

Meanwhile, the Democratic and Green Party point of view, which includes Stage Three moderates and Stage Four liberals with their empathy-based morality, says that it is the failures of society which are entirely responsible for the suffering of individuals. That is why the most liberal solutions focus on developing social programs rather than encouraging individual responsibility.

As we have already seen, each side argues so adamantly for its own point of view, and gets so caught up in power struggles over which approach to take, that our politics are now all but incapacitated.  It‘s unfortunate, because seen from a Stage Five integral view, both sides are right.  We are failing both as individuals and as a society, and our solutions must therefore integrate both approaches.  We must insist on individual responsibility at the same time we accept collective responsibility.

An integrated politics, if embraced, is our best hope of breaking political deadlock by giving both sides what they want --  by giving the individual and the community equal weight.  Even as we enhance opportunities in the community, we insist on increased responsibilities for the individual.   We pay for child care for parents who are working and paying taxes; we pay for college in exchange for public service commitments; we pay for welfare in exchange for college or job training enrollment.  Rather than handing out entitlements without asking anything in return, we insist on a return for our investment.              

Unlike our current polarizing approach which leaves so many people stuck in their life circumstances and likewise stuck in their level of spiritual growth, a more integrated approach would improve life circumstances and create movement up the spiral of development.  This would create a positive feedback loop:  As more people advanced through spiritual stages, the more enlightened our public policies would become, and the more people would advance through spiritual stages.  Individual and society would increasingly benefit each other.

But how could we put this to work in the actual world, starting from where we are today?  How do we encourage the Left and the Right to integrate?  Are we supposed to politically sit in the center?  Vote for whoever is the most moderate candidate, regardless of whether he or she is Democrat or Republican?  Are we supposed to join a third party?  What?

While it is impossible to answer that in general, I think it is possible to better judge each circumstance in particular.  I know that in spite of the fact that I am idealistically most compatible with the Green Party, I do not vote Green because it is so far to the left of the spiritual “center of gravity” that it does not seem to me a good integral choice.  I am all for visionary perspectives, and believe we very much need the empowering perspective represented by the Green Party, but I also believe in the necessity of dealing with reality.  

Those who righteously insist on pushing hard left only tear themselves away from the mainstream and leave it to sink to the right, as happened with Ralph Nader and the 2000 general election.  So rather than trying to lure Democrats away to be Green, I think the Greens could be far more effective if they joined the Democratic Party and helped widen and enlarge its vision. 

To say such a thing is heresy to the Left -- which deplores the two-party monopoly on politics.  But it seems to me that life chooses a yin/yang, dialectic balancing act on its own, and we make ourselves crazy trying to make it happen otherwise.  And perhaps if we stay and work within the system, we might then be better able to institute reforms like Instant Run-Off voting which would make a multiple party system more viable.  

We cannot, of course, force change in others.  We can only change ourselves.  We can examine our own assumptions, and step back from our own extremes.  We can make sure our contributions to the political process are not divisive and blaming, but inclusive and respectful.  We can try to look at the world through the eyes of the other and make sure their needs are met, from whatever spiritual stage they see the world, as well as our own. 

But whether or not we can immediately get our politics moving in an integral direction, we cannot delay on getting down to serious work on the social issues that hinder spiritual growth.  Wilber points out that the truly necessary revolution is “not a glorious collective move” into Stage Four and Five, but creating the conditions for the oppressed and starving peoples to grow from Stage One to Stage Two and beyond.   In other words, we have to feed the hungry, house the homeless, end poverty, end religious persecution and repression and war. 

Getting involved with politics is the only way to make this necessary effort a common goal of government and society.  But we also have to make sure this necessary effort is our own personal goal.  “Saving civilization is not a spectator sport,“ writes Lester Brown in “Plan B: Mobilizing to Save Civilization."  “Each of us has a leading role to play.“

We have to take it on ourselves to work for the benefit of others, with or without government help.  Or as Gandhi so memorably said, we have to become the change we wish to see.

Go to Becoming the Change.