The Integral Liberal: A Sketch
If an enlightenment liberal is one who seeks freedom and truth, an integral liberal does so in ways that take a fuller account of her inner life, our human interdependence, and emergent complexity.
For new visitors to Underthrow, please don’t be confused by the term liberal. Our sense comes from libertas perfundet omnia luce, which means freedom floods all things with light. In this article, I explore how those dedicated to human freedom can upgrade their sensibilities and engage more in conscious and continuous practice—ways of seeing and being. The consequence of doing so will be a broad-based project to counter authoritarian trends.
Yesterday, I met a young man named Joseph who also happens also to be an Underthrow reader. In our brief conversation, he said something important, which I will paraphrase so as not to misquote him. He said he loved thinking about systems, but he wanted to help others long to be free again.
For too many, the submission instinct is strong. Others seek security in unreflective tribal affiliation. But most people are comfortable in their apathy, perhaps vaguely aware of the occasional promise of goodies or something they overheard an ‘expert’ say on TV. Otherwise, herd humans just want to assimilate numbly into the least-costly patterns of life that will shuttle them to their graves.
To hell with that.
In what follows, I won’t make the case for why people should want more freedom. Brother Joseph is on that beat. Instead, I want to offer a sketch of the integral liberal, the kind of person who radiates and models her doctrine, which requires practice in seeing and being and is best equipped to deliver messages of freedom.
The Six Spheres Return
The integral liberal adopts six spheres of practice which we have set out in detail here and here. To summarize:
Nonviolence is the practice of abstaining from harm in thought, word, and deed. In our formulation, it extends to both persons and their property. Such can include nonviolent resistance against harmful institutions and individuals who would harm.
Integrity is the practice of truthfulness and fidelity to one's word. Being a person of your word means that others can count on you. Your reliability and truth-tracking mien is infectious.
Pluralism is the practice not just of tolerating differences among people, but of actively seeking to understand and synthesize multiple perspectives to maintain peace and glimpse a greater truth.
Compassion is the practice of being concerned for others' suffering and, when appropriate, actively and directly seeking to mitigate their suffering or improve their well-being. (Direct implies that politics is not compassion.)
Stewardship is the practice of taking care of things, whether resources or property, while actively seeking to improve that which is in your care, leaving circumstances better than when you found them.
Rationality is the practice of applying our evolved cognitive abilities to make reasoned justifications, both to achieve our ends and to track the truth. Where postmodernism sought to dismantle and deconstruct, we want to learn and build again.
Practice can overtake pathology. Practice forms new pathways in the mind. Practitioners of the six spheres can thus become radiant, like peaceful warriors.
Recall that liberalism was born, more or less, in the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment's major exponents were enamored of reason, and so are we. But reason is not enough. If you go too far in stripping your doctrine of what it means to be human, to feel human, people will not readily adopt it.
None of this is to argue that integral liberalism should be fantastic or irrational, nor should it be about simply sharing your feelings from one moment to the next. Taking on a pre-birth ‘perspective’ or applying a game-theoretical algorithm can be useful, to a point. But using reason shouldn't be so bloodless. Practice requires more than just adopting an abstract political philosophy; it requires embodied wisdom, attention to feedback, and being attuned to one’s inner life.
Because people live in a society, their philosophy must be more than a legal doctrine. It must also be a life philosophy. In other words, it's not enough to hope that some enlightened legislators will make our laws. We have to live our liberalism. In this way, it takes discipline to practice our values.
Unrestrained passion pushes us into making poor decisions and causes us not to see other perspectives. But the integral liberal must think, feel and practice. In taking on other perspectives, they can think what others are thinking, and feel what they are feeling—even if we see that they live in darkness. To persuade others, we must better understand them. Reason and empathy can operate in tandem by weaving together multiple, partial truths into a greater transcendent truth. Such requires mastery.
Therefore, integral liberals practice liberalism in ways similar to how one practices a religion.
That is, integral liberalism is more than a political philosophy. It’s an active moral and psychological way of seeing and being, which requires staying open to the perspectives of others. One remains attuned to opportunities to synthesize rather than contradict. At the highest levels of mastery, one can recommend a way forward based on a synthesized truth. The rarest integral liberal will be able to communicate or construct something upon her insights to make them useful to others.
Synthesis can be 'meta,' but not always. Unfortunately, smart people can be more meta than thou. That's not to say that we shouldn't all try to click out our minds another order of magnitude, from time to time. It's healthy to take a different perspective or even multiple perspectives. So thinking 'meta' can be healthy, too. But it is unhelpful when only a few, or one alone, can appreciate some insight. In this, one only achieves self-satisfaction. Perhaps smug solipsism. The integral liberal has to watch out for lapsing into immoderate meta-ness. The point of synthesizing perspectives is to discover a deeper truth and share it with people at different development stages.
Realizing the irony here, we must take a step back from our own meta-ness. We should ask what rules, guides, or heuristics can help ordinary people along the path to change. Most of us just aren't that smart or spiritually developed, which is another reason we need practice. To lead, one has not only to speak with humility and restraint. One must also convey one's ideas in a way that lets others understand and integrate change. If one’s cognitive scaffolding is so far above the ground that everyone looks like ants, though, no one down below will be able to hear her.
The integral liberal will build fewer towers of intellectual solipsism, and her thinking will still be advanced and nonlinear. Otherwise, at her best, she will speak clearly. She will fashion new tools and write new rules that reconcile multiple perspectives. And most importantly, she will live by example—engaging her practice, always moving towards mastery.
Of course, not all integral liberals will achieve mastery in all six spheres. Few will. We must hope there will be enough. We must hope, at the very least, people embrace nonviolence. As my mentor, entrepreneur Chris Rufer says, our greatest security comes when more people adopt the social values of peace.
Finally, the integral liberal is neither a collectivist nor an individualist. Collectivism subordinates the individual to the group—especially the power structures of groups. Individualism puts the proper emphasis on autonomy, but some variants deemphasize interdependence and chosen community. The integral liberal sees no contradiction in integrating concern for self and concern for the whole, so long as respect for the sovereign person is primary.
The individual and the collective cohere in balance.