Crasses et Voluptés

In this regressive atmosphere, as David Berreby puts it, writing in The Sciences, “Americans have a standard playbook for creating a political-cultural identity. You start with the conviction that being a member of your group is a distinct experience, separating you from people who are not in it (even close friends and relatives) and uniting you with other members of the group (even if you have never met them). Second, you assume that your own personal struggles and humiliations and triumphs in wrestling with your trait are a version of the struggles of the group in society. The personal is political. Third, you maintain that your group has interests that are being neglected or acted against, and so it must take action—changing how the group is seen by those outside it, for instance.” 

It’s not that such action is bad. It’s just that, taken in and by itself, it is alienating and fragmenting, a type of pathological pluralism that astonishingly believes that acceptance of my group can be accomplished by aggressively blaming and condemning exactly the group from which I seek the acceptance. 

True pluralism, on the other hand, is always universal pluralism (or integral-aperspectival): you start with the commonalities and deep structures that unite human beings—we all suffer and triumph, laugh and cry, feel pleasure and pain, wonder and remorse; we all have the capacity to form images, symbols, concepts, and rules; we all have 208 bones, two kidneys, and one heart; we are all open to a Divine Ground, by whatever name. And then you add all the wonderful differences, surface structures, culturally constructed variants, and so on, that make various groups—and various individuals—all different, special, and unique. But if you start with the differences and the pluralism, and never make it to the universal, then you have only the aperspectival, not also the integral—you have, that is, pathological pluralism, aperspectival madness, ethnocentric revivals, regressive catastrophes. 

Of course it is fine to highlight any group that you feel is important. But it’s becoming impossible to define that group as “oppressed,” because now every group claims to be oppressed, and none admit they are oppressors. White males used to be the bad guys, but now even they have caught the fever. White males are no longer a single group that can be blamed for oppression, because most of them now claim to belong to an oppressed or marginalized group themselves: they are drug addicts, physically handicapped, alcoholics, were sexually abused as a child, victims of an absent father, abducted by aliens, or turned into “success objects” by women. They can’t oppress anybody because they are too busy being oppressed themselves

Ken Wilber

One Taste