This post is mostly a rambling of my thoughts, not particularly coherent nor created for an audience, for now... But I want to get all of this out before I start creating more coherent posts about these issues.
First.
An observation:
That the post-Ken Wilberian "Integral theory" intellectual and organisational enterprise, (that I have noticed and/or been a part of, online, in the USA, and in Australia) is disproportionately White.
Second.
That unlike English language American Buddhist literature, post-Wilberian Integral Theory is also disproportionately not Jewish (which, from a normative perspective, says as much about English-American Buddhism's "Jewishness" as it says anything about the "goyim", non-Jewish hegemony of Integral theory).
I have been, in my spiritual and philosophical life, largely been influenced by both.
Third.
That through exposure to Ken Wilber's writings, along with meeting up with amazing folks at Sydney Integral, I was also exposed to the following, teleological theory-praxes of individual and collective adult development...
-> Don Beck and Chris Cowan's "Spiral Dynamics"
-> Susanne Cook-Greuter's "Leadership Development Framework"
-> Terri O' Fallon's independent work ... Terri is also one of the key staff in Pacific Integral, that runs the Generating Transformative Change (GTC) program that I have been a part of... (two of their alumni are based in Australia in New Zealand, so they formed South Pacific Integral to host the GTC in this region... I was part of the first cohort here).
-> Bill Tobert's "Action Inquiry"
and more...
Fourth.
Through my learnings and conversations, I have encountered that materialist theories of social justice begin to emerge at particular stages of the development of consciousness (of both individuals and collectives).
Fifth.
Through a few conversations with Terri O'Fallon, I have encountered the idea of Developmental Justice, which is the sense of justice which takes into account the "rights" of people to be "where they are at" developmentally... (i.e. strictly and dogmatically materialist conceptions of justice can themselves be theoretical and practical enactments of Developmental Injustice).
Sixth.
A consideration of the line... "We can measure the health of a nation by the way it treats its indigenous peoples."
(an additional consideration of how many Indigenous peoples (to my knowledge, of Canada, USA, Australia, and New Zealand, among many others for sure) hold the projections of the dominant national culture's hegemonic concerns around savagery, primitivism, "backwardness", and the associated pathologies of "early" cultural developmental levels... part of my interest in developmental justice, then, emerges from considering a few things:
1. These concepts of Indigenous people (as representations of "early" cultural developmental stages... e.g. hunter-gatherer, tribal, animistic, shamanic, etc.) are partially projections of dominant, modernist culture onto certain groups of people who claim Indigenous/Aboriginal heritage.
2. Some communities and individuals of Indigenous/Aboriginal heritage also introject these concepts, turning them into "self-concepts".
3. To the extent that there is, from a modernist perspective, a lived reality of "backwardness" among a disproportionately large number of people of Indigenous/Aboriginal heritage, then the health of a nation is partially contingent not only on how it socialises Indigenous/Aboriginal people (indeed, all people), into modernist ways of being/doing, but also on the extent to which it can graciously hold, the legitimacy of early developmental ways of being-in-the-world.
4. How well do we nurture national cultures which hold and support spaces in which people can manifest these "early developmental" stages in healthy forms...?
5. This is true not just for indigenous people, but also for people who are of colonial/migrant heritage.
My friend Tim wisely points out that the ways that some people engage these "early developmental" stuff, in modernist, consumerist pathos, is through encouraging magical ideas of Santa Claus, the tooth fairy, etc., but that these are unfortunately, in the context of modernity, encapsulated within a socialisation into consumerist culture
6. That Indigenous/Aboriginal folks are in a unique cultural/ancestral position to be curators of some of these early developmental stages as linked to Land...
i.e. not just in ways that are of or from early developmental perspectives, but as people who hold the unique struggle of integrating (and iterating) considerations of "early" development in "later" developmental considerations of developmental justice within a national and global culture, in the service of the health of the whole spiral [of human developmental potential] (to use language from Beck and Cowan).
Seventh.
This means, also, considering the ways that Integral Theory, in its hegemonic Whiteness (and straightness, and male-dominance, and upper classness, and American-ness, and so on), may re-inscribe some of the same materialist blindspots of modernist injustice, unwittingly.
(in my observation, tending toward exclamations which reveal privilege and ignorance, rather than outright, malicious oppressive intent)
Eighth.
This also means observing my own involvement in Integral, as the normative means through which I articulate or formulate theories and practices of enacting developmental justice.
Healthy skepticism.
Embracing, including, and integrating the baby AND the bathwater.
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