Where Green Goes Astray

I've been thinking a lot lately about why postmodern green somehow encourages magical thinking like The Secret. After some deliberation, I think I've spotted it.

Wilber points out that each stage of growth transcends and includes the previous -- it includes the capabilities of the previous stage, and adds some new capabilities too. Inclusion in this new larger pool of abilities recontextualizes and repurposes the abilities gained in previous stages. Ideally, this is what happens. When it does, the result is a healthy and more adequate mode of thinking about and interacting with the world. What sometimes happens, though, is that the abilities of the previous stage are rejected instead of recontextualized.

This seems particularly relevant to the baby boomers, the green meme, and growth past orange...

[More below] Postmodernism pointed out that different observers may see the same events differently, and that what they see depends very much on the context they see something in. Even if both observers proceed logically from their observations, they may end up with very different conclusions. In green circles, I've often noticed a very appropriate response to contextualism: an emphasis on sharing experience. If I hear what experiences led someone to a particular viewpoint, that viewpoint often starts to make a lot more sense. Given what that person observed, their conclusion may be entirely logical. This is a healthy green, one that transcends and includes orange, that realizes that while there may not be an ultimate non-contextual truth to be found, we can still apply observation and reason within contexts of our choosing.

Some people, however, took relativism and contextualism as an excuse to give up on observation and logic altogether. Theirs is an unhealthy green at best, with the potential to become thoroughly regressive. It can't discriminate between internally consistent perspectives and fragmented, self-contradictory perspectives. It can't tell the difference between perspectives based on experience and perspectives based on imagination and psychological necessity. This green can't tell the difference between science and magic, between physics and mysticism. This is the green that abuses quantum physics to justify theories of matter, mind, and spirit that don't so much verge on as plow right into magical territory.

Much time has been spent talking about how green's permissiveness may encourage the expression of repressed red desires for social power. Far less attention has been paid to the ways that unhealthy green's abandonment of observation and reason encourages a resurgence of belief in purple and blue metaphysics. I believe the latter to be as dangerous, and perhaps more dangerous, than the former.