Flatland
Flatland
Wilber's View
Flatland is Wilber's name for the reduced, one-dimensional worldview he thinks scientific materialism actually settled into — even in its more "holistic" guises. His diagnosis has two stages. First, gross reductionism narrows everything down to the Upper-Right quadrant of exterior individual matter (atoms, particles). Second, and more insidiously, even thinkers who explicitly reject gross reductionism and champion "holism," "the web of life," or systems theory (see systems-theory) commit subtle reductionism: they don't reduce everything to atoms, but they do reduce every interior dimension — meaning, value, consciousness, the [[four-quadrants|Left-Hand quadrants]] — to its exterior, Right-Hand correlate. The result looks holistic (it insists "everything is interconnected") but has quietly discarded depth, interiority, and the very idea that anything could be qualitatively higher or lower, better or worse — only bigger or smaller, more or less complex. Wilber calls this collapse of the Kosmos into the mere cosmos: a "flat and faded landscape" of interlocking empirical surfaces with no vertical dimension left in it at all.
He treats flatland as the deep structural cause of most of the confusions he spends the book untangling: it's why systems theory, for all its real virtues, can't by itself account for consciousness; why the pre/trans fallacy is so easy to fall into (flatland can't distinguish infrarational from suprarational, since it can't see interiors at all); and why ecological "holism" so often ends up championing a regressive, undifferentiated state rather than genuine integration.
In Sex, Ecology, Spirituality
The second part of the book therefore looks at that which prevents us from seeing the holistic Kosmos. It looks at what I call flatland.
— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, Preface to the Second Edition
What these systems and "holistic" theorists don't seem to understand is that while they have indeed avoided gross reductionism—and for that are to be highly praised—they are nonetheless (and apparently unknown to them) the exemplars of subtle reductionism. They don't reduce everything to atoms; they reduce everything in the Left-Hand to a Right-Hand description in the "system." They reduce a four-quadrant holism (or Kosmic holism) to merely a Right-Hand holism, a flatland holism. And they are so understandably proud that they are holists, they overlook the flatland part.
— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 4, "A View from Within"
All of that can still be heartily embraced by the subtle reductionist; it's just that all holarchies of quality have been lost entirely in holarchies of quantity, and all gradations of interior depth have been replaced by gradations of meaningless exteriors (compassion is better than murder, but quarks are not better than photons, and thus to explain the entire Kosmos in terms of exterior surfaces and empirical forms is to find only a cosmos with no value whatsoever: guaranteed).
— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 4, "A View from Within"
Similarly, personal integrity and intentions (UL) are reduced to healthy brain functioning (UR), to the now rampant model of biological psychiatry (one is depressed, not if one's life becomes meaningless or lacks values, but if one's neurotransmitters lack serotonin)… Not "Where am I situated in the Kosmos?" but "How can I function better in the cosmos?" Not "What does my existence mean?" but "How can I get it to work better?"
— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 4, "A View from Within"
It is from this flat and faded landscape, armed with good intentions and a weakest–noodle science, that they cry out to us as our saviors.
— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 4, "A View from Within"
See Also
- kosmos-vs-cosmos — the terminology Wilber uses to name exactly this collapse
- four-quadrants — the Left/Right distinction subtle reductionism erases
- systems-theory — the science flatland co-opts while discarding its holistic promise
- pre-trans-fallacy — a confusion flatland's blindness to interiors makes especially easy
