Maybe it’s because he dissed my man Sam Harris. Or it might be I’m just subconsciously jealous of his relative fame and success. Shit, maybe I’m just cranky because I haven’t had a day off from work lately. Who knows, but for whatever reason Stuart Davis has managed to get under my skin. I used to love this guy’s irreverent, no-holds-barred commentary on everything under the sun, but lately he sounds more and more like a lackey for Ken Wilber and Integral Institute. Stu’s blog, like that of his mentor, has become little more than a hub of shameless self-promotion. In his latest infomercial for Wilber Incorporated entitled Open letter to rational pundits, Davis bellows (yet again) that he is fed up with so-called flatlanders. This time it’s Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris who get bitch-slapped, as Davis gets his panties all bunched up railing against the futility of rationalism and the supposed refusal of rationalists to acknowledge the reality of human development.
Davis begins with this tired and absurd claim that the likes of Dawkins and Harris cannot “simply recognize” that “PEOPLE DEVELOP,” then he condescendingly chastises these two “rationalists” for attempting to reason with the vast majority of humanity who, according to Davis, lacks the developmental depth of consciousness to understand a word of the argument. Of course, Stu then tries to convince us first-tier boneheads to embrace his own pet theory, i.e. the brainchild of uberman Wilber, using nothing but rational arguments, doing precisely what he says he cannot stomach from Dawkins and Harris.
Gimme a break Stu. You had your chance to take Harris to task when you interviewed him for Integral Naked, but I seriously doubt you raised your empty objections then. I can’t say for sure, because long ago I stopped listening to those Integral Institute advertisements and mutual masturbation sessions you call “dialogues.” Had you raised your little “it’s development, stupid” argument to Harris, he undoubtedly would have disabused you long before you could spit your spiel about “all quadrants, all levels, all lines, all states, all types, and all other stuff.”
Furthermore, you’re just flat, flat, flat-out full of shit when you parrot Wilber’s smoke and mirrors “solution” to the world’s problems, which amounts to little more than beseeching people to translate everything into the terms of his dubious “theory of everything.” You rag on rational dialogue and offer in its place a rational monologue about how we “simply” need to acknowledge the obvious fact of development and then… and then what, Stu? Ask how people develop? Ask how five year-olds move from one worldview to another? Ask how twenty-seven year-olds who act like five year-olds move from lower to higher worldviews? Seriously dude, should we “simply” wait until George Bush and Osama Bin Laden evolve to “second tier consciousness,” the whole notion of which is highly dubious and at best scantily supported by empirical evidence? Should we convince them to buy Integral Institute’s latest multi-media package? Get ‘em into weightlifting? Ask ‘em to talk to “big mind?” Are you meaning to imply that you, Stuart Davis, are more highly developed than Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins?
No, you will not convert them with your transpersonal blather. They cannot hear you. You will not persuade or convince them. And not because you’re at some higher altitude, but because your rational argument is “simply” not compelling enough. So nyaah.
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