This caught my ear in a recent dialog between New York Times columnist David Brooks and PBS’s Charlie Rose. Brooks was on the Charlie Rose show promoting his new book, The Social Animal.
Brooks is about as integral as people in the mainstream media can get, which is the 1st integral level, referred to as teal in Wilber’s developmental scheme (yellow in Spiral Dynamics). He’s tethered to science, but seeks to see the largest possible scope of reality that science will allow, including the insights of psychology and social sciences.
Here’s an interesting excerpt in their conversation where they speak of what I consider to be integral qualities in Obama.
Brooks: One of the things the research shows us is that we don’t just have one self, we have mulitple selves, aroused by different contexts. The President has even more core selves than the rest of us.
Rose: He is many people.
Brooks: He is many people aroused by different contexts. And I think his strength is that he always has the ability to look at his other selves — and they’re all authentic, I’m not saying the’s fake — and sort of judge. I [also] think that it does make it harder for him to commit than somebody who may have less self-observation.
Rose: Like a Ronald Reagan or George W.
Brooks: Yes
