Self-reflexive Challenges of Integrative Futures

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Self-reflexive Challenges of Integrative Futures
Ken Wilber
David Lorimer
Universal metaphor
A question of style?
Integrative implications and the hidden dynamics of denial
A pattern language for design of appropriate complexity?
Conclusion
References -- Controversy | Doubt vs Certainty | --

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Augmented version of an earlier document (Wilber, Lorimer, Varela and Everything, 2003) in response to the critique in the special issue of Futures: the journal of policy, planning and futures studies (40, 2, March 2008) on "integral futures". It appears under the revised title in a different format in that journal (2008) with other responses. Abridged version published in: Futures, 42, 2, March 2010, pp. 154-161 doi

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Introduction

Abstract: Contrasts the approach to "futures" characteristic of Ken Wilber, and Integral Futures, with the approach taken by David Lorimer, and the Scientific and Medical Network. The differences between these approaches, for any integrative understanding of futures, are presented as arising from stylistic preferences and biases which are usefully highlighted with a range of metaphors. These however highlight the challenge of any more integrative understanding, especially in the light of hidden dynamics of exclusion in a questionable effort to demonstrate that one approach is "better" than another in a complex human endeavour -- especially when the future is sensed strategically through other metaphors than "vision". Consideration is given to the possible use of a pattern language to address such issues, especially given questions regarding the adequacy of text on a conventional surface to hold complex significance and interrelationships. It is concluded that integrative futures is then the strange quest for how cognitively to embody the extremes represented by Wilber and Lorimer in the present -- to evoke the greater harmony through engaging creatively with the dissonant pattern of imperfections.

This exploration is about "everything" as exemplified by the initiatives of Ken Wilber and David Lorimer. More precisely it is about how such reflections affect me and enhance or inhibit my own integrative understanding.

Part of the fascination in endeavouring to craft a comment on the special edition on "integral futures" (Futures: the journal of policy, planning and futures studies, 40, 2, 2008), as edited by Richard Slaughter, lies outside the technicalities of academic discourse through which positions are presented, criticized and debated. The question for me, and I assume for others, is how a coherent understanding is enabled in the face of a spray of "points" and "lines" of argument -- to say nothing of the very "volume" of such discourse which somehow makes up the "body" of available knowledge at this time. At the same time one knows full well that pre-logical biases and preferences swing into play in filtering, weighting or dismissing content considered (highly) significant by others. One may also be aware that the body of knowledge, like any planet, has "curvature" -- giving rise to "horizon effects" that ensure that some knowledge will not be available to me and that some I prefer will be cast into shadow when those others are appropriately enlightened.

It is for such reasons that it is valuable to consider the challenge for anyone coming to integrative questions for the first time and struggling to work out what are the integrative relationships between positions that seem to be at odds with each other -- especially when those differences and dynamics are not integrated into what are put forward as integrative frameworks. My own early attempt to honour those who took integrative matters seriously was the profiling in 1976 of 421 "Integrative, Unitary and Transdisciplinary Concepts" within the context of the Yearbook of World Problems and Human Potential with a bibliography of relevant studies. That exercise also endeavoured to associate those understandings with the separate extant set of understandings of "human development" and of "human values" as described in Futures at that time (World Problems and Human Potential: a data interlinkage and display process, Futures: the journal of forecasting and planning, 7, 3, 1975, pp. 209-220). However one of the obvious challenges was whether the degree of integration of any integrative endeavour got beyond the binding of the book in which the various approaches were presented (delightfully named as Buchbindersynthese in German).

There is also something subtle to be questioned in any "confrontation" between one's own "integrative" efforts over the years and those of any other -- however wise, experienced or honourable. This is the context for considering here the work of Ken Wilber (and "integral futures"), in contrast with that of David Lorimer (notably as director and principal bibliographer of the Scientific and Medical Network and its Network Review.

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