June / July 2005

REVIEWS

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A THEORY OF EVERYTHING: An Integral Vision for Business, Politics, Science, and Spirituality
BY KEN WILBER
Shambhala, 2001, 189 pp., $13.95,
ISBN: 1570628556.
Reviewed by Daryl Paulson

A Theory of Everything is Wilber’s attempt to bring an integral view to essentially all human pursuits. Many theorists who claim to be integral—inclusive—in their approach are not. Wilber is the “real deal” and has, nearly singlehandedly, brought integral thought to fruition.

Wilber’s integral view is an allquadrant, all-level view, known as AQAL. He tries to repair the fragmentation of views found in the contemporary world. The science-based view argues that only the objective view is true. Another view, that of cultural relativity, views what is real as merely a social construction of reality. Cultural members share meaning, language, values, rituals, and ways of doing things. Yet another view sees reality as one’s own subjective view—an existential view of values, goals, meaning, likes, and dislikes. This assemblage of views is often termed objectivity, intersubjectivity, and subjectivity, and these are the basic domains that Wilber integrates. Each of these domains is hierarchical in structure.

The objective world, for example, through evolution and ecosystem development, has seen the progression of ever more complex life forms building on pre-existing structure, but transcending it. Cultures, too, have developed more complex worldviews over time, and humans, in their maturation process, proceed developmentally from stage to stage, at least in their cognitive skills and morals. This phenomenon is represented in Wilber’s AQAL model, a model consisting of holons—parts in one view and wholes in another. Generally, Wilber defines an individual human as a part, and the world-at-large as the collective (whole).

With this said, let us look specifically at the book, which comprises seven chapters, a note to the reader, and notes on six of the chapters.

The Amazing Spiral (chapter 1) incorporates theories of Donald Beck and Chris Cowen, presented in their book Spiral Dynamics (see Don Beck’s cover story). The spiral presents a color-coded developmental model of personal and cultural worldviews. Wilber has chosen this model both because he believes it is true and because it is easy for readers to comprehend. In this system, humans are at various levels of cognitive and moral development at various times in their lives, some developing more than others.

All levels of the spiral are needed, Wilber states, but problems arise when those at one level evaluate all other levels in terms of the view from that level—for example, fundamentalists viewing those outside their camp as heathens. Wilber discusses each level and argues that our cultural level is stuck at the “green level” of overemphasis on deep ecology, pluralism, human values, and human rights. Wilber clearly applauds this stance, but he also adds that it prevents this leading edge from proceeding up the developmental scale to a second-level tier, one of a truly integrative worldview. He calls this phenomenon boomeritis and its central tenants boomers.

Boomeritis (chapter 2) is a critique of the green worldview, which, according to Wilber, is so excessively preoccupied with its own self-importance, abilities, and personal meaning as to create a narcissistic backlash. The green worldview tends not to view the world as hierarchically constructed. This is a major problem for Wilber, as his intention is to convince readers that development is hierarchical. For example, Wilber presents the works of Carol Gilligan, in which female development proceeds in stages from selfish to caring and then to universal caring. Wilber condemns domination hierarchies, something the green worldview also abhors, by substituting them with hierarchical structures of development in morality, cognition, selfstructure, and other attributes.

Please recognize that Wilber does give considerable value to boomeritis—the green view—but he wants to transcend its pluralistic view to achieve a truly integral one.

In An Integral Vision (chapter 3), Wilber lays out what integral is. The introduction of the AQAL view is the basis of this chapter. He also presents the complex idea that no human is at one level of development, but rather is at a number of levels in different attribute domains (e.g., morality, cognition, relational, talents, emotions, spirituality). This view is more complex than that of most other theorists and more accurate.

Science and Religion (chapter 4) presents a lively discussion on where science (the objective) and religion (the subjective) fit into Wilber’s integral view. Readers will find that these differing views can be integrated convincingly using the AQAL model.

In The Real World (chapter 5), Wilber brings to the table those who are applying some form of an integral model in their life work. He begins with integral politics and his work with Drexel Sprecher, Lawrence Chickering, Don Beck, and Jack Crittendon. Wilber describes the need to value both the liberal and conservative views, but also to transcend them for a more integral view. Wilber next discusses integral business and, in part, my own work in integral business (see Competitive Business, Caring Business, Paraview Press, 2002). He also discusses briefly the works of JMJ Associates, John Forman, Leo Burke, and others. Finally, Wilber discusses, in brief, concepts of integral education, integral ecology, and the “Terror of Tomorrow” (before 9/11, I might add), which provides insight into the current clashes of cultures.

Maps of the Kosmos (chapter 6) presents an overview of world views, past and present. In this chapter, Wilbur discusses the works of three influential analysts—Frances Fukuyama, Samuel P. Huntington, and Thomas L. Friedman. It is an extremely insightful presentation that predicts some of the problems we now face and suggests how we got into a post 9/11 world.

In One Taste (chapter 7), Wilber brings into the mix the importance of a personal integral practice for individuals, including body, emotions, mind, and spirit.

This book is exceptionally well written; it is Wilber, the theorist, at his best. Instead of remaining in theory, however, he also has focused on practice. Unfortunately, much of Wilber’s work is probably several decades beyond the central tendencies of business, of science and religion, and maybe even more so of politics. Yet, his message is clear: transcend but include. This is a “must read” book for humanistic, existential, transpersonal, and integral thinkers.

DARYL S. PAULSON, Ph.D., is a scholar-at-large in transpersonal and integral studies. He is President/CEO of BioScience Laboratories, and has taught transpersonal psychology, psychosynthesis, and Integral Psychology. He was a member of Wilber’s Integral Institute, serving on the core Integral Business Group. He is the author of six books, including Caring Business, Competitive Business: An Integral Approach for the 21st Century, and Walking the Point: Male Initiation and the Vietnam Experience. He is a decorated U.S. Marine veteran who served as a Vietnamese language interpreter.

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THE ERNEST BECKER READER
EDITED BY DANIEL LIECHTY
University of Washington Press,
2005, 248 pp., $19.95, ISBN:
0295984708.
Reviewed by Ed Mendelowitz

INTIMATIONS OF GENIUS

I do not think there are any books (excepting, perhaps, the novels of Kafka) that I have read more times than Ernest Becker’s Denial of Death, a Pulitzer Prize-winning tour de force originally published in 1974. This sadly was the year of the author’s untimely death. Becker had been on the planet not quite fifty years before cancer returned him to the cosmic mystery that had inspired, even underwritten, so much of his life’s work.

Becker was an astonishingly brilliant interdisciplinary thinker and writer. With a background in social anthropology, Becker roamed freely through seeming libraries of works in sociology, anthropology, political science, ethology, psychoanalysis, psychology, and religion. There are also, particularly in Becker’s later writing, penetrating, if fleeting, references to important works in film and literature, too. There is even somewhere a lovely essay on Kafka and the Oedipal project (a process of outgrowing entanglements of family, parochialism, and even culture at large), one that discloses an artist’s insight into things that Freud himself notably lacked. Becker understood, like William James and Otto Rank before him, that the fundamental problems in life are existential rather than instinctive. Human beings are conflicted not so much because of sexual and aggressive drives but because we know too much. We have evolved into creatures who think, a simultaneously devastating and exhilarating occurrence when we consider the implications of what it means to be briefly alive on a planet that spins on the periphery of a single galaxy within galaxies of the Infinite. We are, in a sense, effete animals who strive in so many ways to limit overexposure.

The Ernest Becker Reader is a superb compilation of Becker’s writing from 1960 through 1974, the duration of Becker’s turbulently inspired academic career. The introduction by Becker scholar Daniel Liechty is excellent. Here we find carefully chosen and edited selections that provide an overview of the broad sweep of Becker’s surpassing mind and achievement: Becker on human science, Becker on anthropology, Becker on Freud, Becker on genius, Becker on psychology, Becker on proper education, Becker on cultural heroics, Becker on the spiritual, Becker on death.

What is remarkable is that Becker writes with furious intensity from the start. The thoughts are stunningly articulated and argued, the words stirring and erudite. There is everywhere in evidence the uncommon, even solitary, quest to get to the heart of things. In American psychology, perhaps only William James and Rollo May are comparable. It is interesting that May, the master psychotherapist and philosopher, wrote with a certain reassuring remove from his subject matter: like Virgil in Dante’s company, he would lead us gently by the hand. James and Becker (along with their spiritual compatriot R. D. Laing in Great Britain), with a need to reassure neither public nor clientele, write, in Nietzsche’s words, “with blood,” such that the timid may feel oftentimes tugged down paths they are reluctant to traverse. There is, in each of these men, an almost desperate yearning for truth that culminates at last in a staggering contribution to psychology and humanism.

Thoreau, writing in his journals, once reflected on the liabilities of science devoid of “elements of mystery.” (“If we knew all things thus mechanically merely, should we know anything really?”) Becker, too, is chagrined by the limitations of materialist science, calling at last for a closing in of psychology on religion. A genuinely human science cannot divorce itself from values or ultimate concerns, must acknowledge from the start that the scientist, too, is immersed in a transcendent Unknown. For students of existential-humanistic psychology (including its quintessential transpersonal dimensions), of human nature generally, Becker is indispensable.

I have never understood discomfiture with Becker’s ideas on grounds of their avowedly tragic perspective. Can we imagine disallowing Beethoven or Mahler, van Gogh or Hopper, Rilke or Dickinson, Antonioni or Bergman, Dostoyevsky or Chekhov for their stark insights into existence and humankind? Even Shakespeare and Fellini, ebullient as they are, are deeply tragic in the end. A cursory surveillance of our current professional scene or national politics reminds us at once of an even deeper tragedy: the compounding of suffering and violence, even madness, where melancholy and paradox are eclipsed. “The reality of the world cannot be evaded,” Karl Jaspers once wrote; “there is truth after all.” It is more than a little shameful that psychology trails so sheepishly here behind its sister humanities. There is quite a lot not to feel good about.

Becker’s work, it seems to me, is profoundly humanistic and in the richest sense of this word. Throughout his foreshortened life, Becker was ethically attuned, preoccupied with a feeling for what is possible. I am not sure to what extent our understanding of this man’s extraordinary accomplishment is enhanced by phrases such as “Theory of Generative Death Anxiety,” or what he himself would make of quantitative studies into “Terror Management.” I do not recall that Becker was given to fashionable packaging and imagine that he envisioned something quite different for his “house of science.” I remember writing some years ago to Neil Elgee, President of the Ernest Becker Foundation (the group out of Mercer Island, Washington, responsible for the present publication) on similar themes. The original work, after all, speaks so compellingly for itself. Still, Elgee and his organization deserve praise for keeping it all within the public domain. With the publication of the present book, we are all in their debt.

In his deathbed interview with Sam Keen (originally published in Psychology Today and included in the present volume), Becker manifests moving dignity and grace as he reflects on evil as a “denial of creatureliness” and America’s inability “to express [higher] heroics,” even as he counterposes legions of “cheerful robots” with an ethos that sees in truth an “ultimate value” and in false hope “a great snare.” No stranger to the loneliness of individuation, he contemplates the ultimate encounter between the unencumbered individual and “an absent God,” taking final solace in the notion of “communities of the abandoned”—a heartrending idea borrowed from the sociologist Max Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School. With great modesty, Becker described his life’s work as a kind of “intellectual house-cleaning” to make room for “the higher virtues.” To the extent that this is so, we do well to recall that this has been the work of great spirits and cabalists throughout time: the uncovering of husks to get at the mysterious light embedded within, pointing in this manner a way for lesser souls. Is this not higher virtue in itself? Today, with our startlingly reductive professional codes and increasingly ominous world-historical situation, Becker’s writing is uncannily relevant and poignantly prescient. Even darker truths can set us free.

ED MENDOLOWITZ, Ph.D., is in private practice and on the faculty of the Film & Psychology Series at the Boston Institute of Psychotherapy. He is contributing author to the books Psychology of Existence and The Handbook of Humanistic Psychology and on the Board of Editors of the Journal of Humanistic Psychology. His recent manuscript, Ethics and Lao-Tzu, is a meditation on character.

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THE RESILIENCY ADVANTAGE:
Master Change, Thrive Under Pressure, and Bounce Back from Setbacks
BY AL SIEBERT
Berrett-Koheler, 2005, 225 pp.,
$14.95, ISBN: 1576753298.
Reviewed by Stephan Tobin

Al Siebert describes his excellent new book, The Resiliency Advantage, as an “owner’s manual” for essentially normal people who wish to “access and benefit from inborn abilities to become better and better at handling turbulent change, nonstop pressure, and life-disrupting setbacks.” I found it to be an interesting, well-written book that I think would guarantee the increase of resiliency in anyone who is willing to read it carefully and do the many well thought-out exercises described in each chapter. I am already recommending it to clients.

The book has many positive features. First, Siebert quite rightly in my opinion defines resiliency as a process—something one does—rather than as a content, something one has. Thus, he makes it clear that one can learn to be more resilient only by doing rather than merely by reading about it or by listening to someone talk about it. To help people determine their degree of resilience, he provides a useful quiz in chapter 2.

One of his main theses is that the person with an internal locus of control tends to be resilient in dealing with adversity, the person with an external locus of control, unresilient and crushed by disastrous events. He includes in chapter 3 a quiz that shows the reader the differences between internal and external feelings of control. Much of the rest of the book involves describing various levels of resiliency and exercises for helping people develop, step by step, greater resilience at these levels.

The levels are divided into five categories: developing physical health; developing good problemsolving skills, particularly the ability to deal with adversity in a positive, creative fashion; developing strong inner gatekeepers (good self-esteem, a positive self-concept, and self-confidence); developing highlevel resiliency skills (which involves synergistically dealing with other people in a way that creates harmony in group functioning); and being able to notice and take advantage of fortunate opportunities that come one’s way (what he refers to as serendipity).

He gives examples of disaster events that would have ruined the lives of more unresilient people. These people, however, were able to turn their misfortunes into triumphs. Just one example is the water-skiing accident to an athletic young man who was permanently paralyzed. After a long recuperation, he became a champion wheelchair athlete and founded a company that makes specialized workout equipment.

Along with other stories of accidents, Siebert movingly describes the resilient actions of victims of downsizing, people who were fired, a 9/11 survivor, a woman who was shot and left for dead by plane hijackers, people who contracted life-threatening illnesses, and an unemployed woman with no marketable skills whose husband divorced her and left her with children to raise. All of these people resiliently picked themselves up, learned from their experiences or “failures,” and went on to create new, often even better, lives than they had before. Something I would like to know, as a clinician, is what in the backgrounds of these people shaped them to handle extreme adversity in such positive ways. But that information was, of course, beyond the scope of Siebert’s book.

A second strength of the book is that he makes it clear that people who are resilient are those whose identities consist of the identification with and recognition of internal traits and abilities, rather than with externally defined roles such as one’s profession, marital status, or job, which, in these tumultuous times, can be subject to change at any time.

Third, he bases his ideas upon some well-established theories and research, e.g., David McClelland’s studies on differentiating between those who are motivated toward experiencing success vs. those who are motivated by avoiding failure. Another body of important research he references is that by Carol Dweck and her colleagues on the difference between those people for whom every difficult task is a potentially negative reflection of their worth as human beings, and those who see such tasks as interesting puzzles from which they can learn.

Fourth, he stresses that being resilient does not mean being Pollyanaishly optimistic, but requires being “pessimistic” as well as optimistic. I actually see these people as being basically optimistic, and, rather than also being pessimistic, able to realistically anticipate possible negative barriers while, at the same time, devising ways around these barriers toward the goals they wish to reach. Siebert also makes it clear that becoming a resilient person can have its disadvantages. For example, some other people may prefer to be around those who are docile and obedient, not more independent!

One minor criticism I have is that Siebert gives numerous examples of people being the victims of downsizing or unfairly fired and rather willingly accepting their lot. I thought to myself, wouldn’t these people fall into the good-boy or good-girl categories that Siebert describes as essentially unresilient? To be sure, all of the people he discusses managed to use their negative experiences to create better careers than those they lost. However, my political activist soul would have liked to read a story about someone who resiliently initiated collective action which, instead of just benefiting themselves, helped many people. For example, someone who fought against downsizing or the exportation of jobs overseas. Native Americans, whom Siebert discusses, have achieved results through collective action, and they must have mastered the synergistic abilities Siebert describes in Level 4 of his resiliency schema.

As a professional psychologist who likes to read theory and philosophy, I was intrigued by the last chapter of his book, in which he relates modern scientifi c concepts, such as Heisenberg’s Principles of Uncertainty, to the subject of resiliency. This chapter, however, seemed different in tone to the rest of the book and I doubt would be of interest to the layperson who is only using the book to learn about and increase their own resiliency.

These are minor criticisms. Siebert is dealing with an important subject: helping to create a science of resiliency and aiding people to develop and maximize their strengths. We need more of an emphasis in psychology in increasing people’s level of functioning. Siebert’s book falls squarely in the humanistic psychological tradition.

STEPHAN A. TOBIN, Ph.D., a long-time member of AHP, practiced and taught in Los Angeles for many years. He now resides in the Portland, Oregon, area, where he practices, and teaches as an adjunct faculty member for Saybrook Graduate School and for Ryokan College. stephtobin@comcast.net www.doctortobin.com.