Andrew Sullivan is indeed one of the most integrally-conscious of our mainstream media commentators. His blog is an evolutionary’s joy!
Andrew, if you should ever see this, please check out integral theory. Like many of us, you are working your way to a territory of consciousness that has been beautifully, if provisionally, mapped.
Here he is on Tuesday, reflecting on the worldwide progress of one of his great causes: gay marriage:
“Sometimes I think the whole world is really a version of America’s red and blue – but with the red much redder elsewhere (think Pakistan) and much bluer too (think Paris or Barcelona). Globally, we are witnessing an evolutionary shift about sex and marriage, men and women, gays and straights, blacks and whites and all the nuances in between. In the past, such shifts occurred gradually, as tradition reinvented itself in coherent societies. Today, with new media and a global economy, the conflicts and shifts that might be resolved gradually and peacefully in various societies at various stages of evolution, are unmissable and graphic everywhere at once. So you have both Victorian homophobia in Africa alongside the emergence of a gay rights movement in that continent. You have the web uniting the teens of Iran and Tunisia – but polarizing their own societies into modernists and fundamentalists (where the fundamentalists have the majority).
“In some ways, this last election settled the red-blue issue in America, by rendering it a bluer shade of purple in several states. Here, we now know the fundamentalists, even when allied with others, are, in fact, a minority. And so the next phase of integration can begin. Elsewhere? The wars will rage on – prematurely on the ground, and far too late on the web. It’s this aspect of the web that is often over-looked; it can break societal mores very easily; but it does not yet have the resources or reach in more traditional areas to rebuild them.”
His full blogpost here:
