First of all, brilliant review @rufuspollock! I forked this thread, because there is a lot to what both you and Ken Wilber are saying here, so it felt like it needed some space to unfurl.
First of all, some basic agreement with the overall shape of Wilber’s argument here. “There is no truth” was never great philosophy and no one can organize a society that way. Trump is currently trashing the likes of Harvard and Columbia, but only because Harvard and Columbia previously trashed themselves.
Before we wax too nostalgic about “amber” however, it’s worth asking, why did amber not persist forever as the leading force? Why did modernity even emerge? Likewise, if amber + orange are enough on their own, and if green is so off the rails (I generally agree with Wilber that it is), why did green even happen in the first place? Were Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Lacan just wasting all our time for no good reason? What’s lacking in Wiber’s analysis (generally) is a plausible evolutionary mechanism. In the LR quadrant especially. Yes, growing up, waking up, cleaning up, etc. are hard to do, but why do at least some people bother with it, and why do many others not bother with it at all, or make false starts and head into developmental dead ends? For me, those are great 2R questions. Integral-informed, but beyond integral itself.
Mostly here, I’m just posing some questions. But I do believe in doing so there is an obligation to at least drop a hint or two about where the investigation might lead. Having done root cause analysis to the nth degree over the past few years, I generally see human nature as being cross-culturally consistent about the most basic drives and needs, and I see culture as a more independent variable in how those drives and needs get expressed. Moreover, both social structure and the bio-physical environment are constraints on how culturally-informed behavior plays out. (I’m using “constraint” in Snowden’s sense of possibly being an affordance as well as a limitation). Anyway. to sum up very briefly, for complex reasons early modern Europeans found that incipient capitalism put more food on the table than pure tradition did. So orange emerged from amber. The emergence of green from orange is a bit subtler. I won’t go all into it just now. But my personal childhood perspective from the US was of the 1960s starting off with one sort of culture (women in dresses, men in ties) and ending up with a very different sort of culture. There is a lot of story to tell about how that came about. There are also a lot of implications about that story for our current story.