The Dialectic of Progress

Wilber's View

The "dialectic of progress" is Habermas's term, which Wilber adopts because it independently confirms a claim central to his own developmental account: every evolutionary advance solves the defining problems of the stage before it while generating a new category of problem specific to itself — never in Wilber's reading a frictionless net gain, but never a straightforward net loss either. He uses it as his main weapon against what he elsewhere calls the retro-Romantic move: comparing only the achievements of an earlier, "simpler" stage against only the pathologies of the current one, a comparison he calls "perverse in the extreme" because it's methodologically rigged from the start. Habermas's own worked example, which Wilber quotes at length, is a phylogenetic needs-hierarchy running from the family/magic stage (the problem of demarcating society from nature; power over nature as the new scarce resource) through the mythic-imperial state (self-regulation of the social system; legal security as scarce resource) to industrial capitalism (self-regulated exchange with external nature; value as scarce resource) to a postmodern, vision-logic stage he speculates about (self-regulated exchange with internal nature; motivation and meaning as scarce resource). Wilber notes, and clearly finds significant, that this lines up closely with Maslow's and Loevinger's independently-derived individual needs hierarchies — see waves-and-streams for the general apparatus this is meant to confirm.

The argument does real work against naive progress-narratives and naive decline-narratives alike, which is its strength: it structurally rules out both "things just keep getting better" and "we've fallen from a golden age," since every stage carries both a genuine achievement and a genuine new burden. What it doesn't obviously license is the further, more contestable move Wilber makes elsewhere in the book — using this pattern to rank stages as objectively higher or lower rather than merely different-with-different-tradeoffs. A dialectic in which each stage both solves and creates problems is compatible with reading history as net progress, net treadmill, or genuinely incommensurable across epochs; Wilber consistently reads it as the first, and the "dialectic of progress" framing itself doesn't settle which reading is correct — that argument has to come from elsewhere in his developmental scheme.

In Sex, Ecology, Spirituality

Recall that one of the defining aspects of evolution is that it brings new and emergent possibilities and therefore new and potential pathologies. Habermas, working from a different angle, arrives at the same conclusion, and he refers to it as the "dialectic of progress".

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 5

Evolutionarily important innovations mean not only a new level of learning but a new problem situation as well, that is, a new category of burdens that accompany the new social formation. The dialectic of progress can be seen in the fact that with the acquisition of problem-solving abilities new problem situations come to consciousness.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 5 (Wilber quoting Habermas)

Habermas's critique of Romantic regression is along the same lines as mine: of course there are new problems and new pathologies at each stage of development, but to take only the pathologies of the higher stage and compare them with only the achievements of the previous stage is perverse in the extreme.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 5

With the transition to the sociocultural form of life… there arose the problem of demarcating [beginning to differentiate] society from external nature… Power over nature came into consciousness as a scarce resource…

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 5 (Wilber quoting Habermas)

The emergence of a new level solves or "defuses" some of the central problems and limitations of the previous stage (or else it wouldn't emerge), but it also introduces its own new problems and new scarce resources.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 5

But any way we slice the evolutionary pie, there is where we stand today: on the verge of a planetary transformation, struggling to be secured by rationality and completed by vision-logic, and embedded in global-planetary social institutions.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 5

See Also

• Jürgen Habermas — the source of this argument, which Wilber treats as independent confirmation of his own developmental scheme
• waves-and-streams — the general levels-of-development apparatus this dialectic is meant to support
• Multiculturalism and Transnationalism — two contemporary phenomena Wilber reads through this same stage-transition lens
• dominator-vs-growth-hierarchy — a related argument that hierarchy itself isn't the problem, only its pathological, dominating form
• pre-trans-fallacy — the companion confusion this dialectic is meant to guard against from the opposite direction (mistaking earlier stages for simpler-and-better)