Fifteenth Global Studies Conference

Abstract

Philosopher John Vervaeke has said that our age is dominated by a “meaning-crisis,” an idea first expressed by Friedrich Nietzsche’s proclamation that “God is dead.” The postmodern era has been cast as the death of “meta-narratives,” and over the last few years in the West we have idea of the collapse of a shared sense of reality escape the ivory tower and rear its head in the public square. From the QAnon shaman storming the US capitol to vaccine conspiracies to post-truth politics, the shipwreck of the meaning crisis has led many to cling to the nearest driftwood in our new ocean of noise; cultural detritus mashed up and repackaged by algorithms designed to capture and monetize attention. Meaning–a coherent, reliable, durable, resilient, motivating grasp on the world–has become a scarce commodity. In this presentation, I present a potential antidote to the meaning crisis in the form of Ken Wilber’s integral theory. Building on Viktor Frankl’s concept of the “will to meaning” and drawing on research from developmental psychology, integral theory posits that human beings’ meaning-making has unfolded through a series of stages, and that the differences between these stages drive the many crises our world faces. By better understanding the process of meaning-making itself, we can untie the knots that lock us in the labyrinth. I analyze the contours of the meaning-crisis, introduce the key concepts of integral theory, and explain how it can help us make sense of the political gridlock around a particular issue: climate change.