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Very good to see Jeff Meyerhoff's predictably excellent Dismissal vs. Debate response to kw now online at Integral World.
The central problem here is that [Wilber is] not reading from my work. If it's intentional then he's despicable and if it's unintentional then he's grossly irresponsible. This audio was posted at least a month after my "Six Criticisms" appeared and yet neither he, nor Hargens, nor any of the other careful scholars at the Integral Institute had the conscientiousness to check whether what he was quoting were my words.... The hypocrisy is heightened when we remember Wilber's extreme overreaction to Jim Chamberlain's minor mistake of wrongly asserting that Wilber inserted the word "clearly" into a quote. Here he says he's reading from my work but is attributing to me words I've never said and views I don't hold.
Alas, 'tis simply par for the course at Wilber Abbey.
Wilber complains that "Meyerhoff won't give an alternative and say this is what development is really like." But my postmodern position is that development is not "really like" anything. That's the point! This comment reveals Wilber's essentialism: the non-postmodern idea that things are one way or another metaphysically, that they have a persisting essence. Supposedly he's transcended that belief with his new postmodern, post-metaphysical Integral Methodological Pluralism (IMP), but he still makes simplistic statements like this. Mr. I've-integrated-all-the valid-points-of-postmodernism can't understand the simple distinction between saying, "development is a value-laden model we use to organize phenomena," and saying, "development is the process by which the real world works."
You see now why I have long been "banging my lonely little drum" about kw not even really being all that bright in any practical sense, much less "brilliant," right?
The evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin, a source Wilber says puts Wilber's own idiosyncratic [I would have said "idiotic"] understanding of evolutionary biology "in accord with the most recent mainstream thought in biological evolution," explicitly defines his position against the mainstream of biological evolution.
Fantastic. "Folks"—as kw would say—you can't make up stuff like that! All you can do is marvel at how the Integral Master of Bullshit ever managed to graduate from any accredited institute of studies ... much less to keep a straight face or any claim to integrity as he fertilizes through his teeth.
It [i.e., kw's consistent, provable misrepresentation of others' ideas] gives the impression that Wilber will just say anything that gives the appearance of justifying what he wants to be true.
Heh. Bingo. It is only a testament to people's gullibility and need to believe in the most ridiculous claims (without bothering to do even the most basic research themselves) that kw is still seen by the Stuart Davis's of the world as being anything more than an untrustworthy quack, hardly worth responding to; much less as being a "brilliant scholar" who cannot get the simplest thing right. He either can't, or won't, "play fair," in even minimal academic competence and honesty. (And I've just seen, in my inbox, that I-I is starting a pledge drive, to raise money for their "noble goals." Well, they're poster-children for something, that's for sure.)
The lengths [Wilber will] go to avoid criticism are astonishing. If I took this statement [about not being allowed to quote from kw's recorded dialogs on the Integral Naked website] seriously then I couldn't use anything he said in his audio about me as his actual views and I couldn't quote him to demonstrate to the reader that what I said were his views were his views. If I accuse him of hyperbole or simplification he's covered. In effect, this statement suggests I can't reply because he can legitimately disavow everything he said simply because it is a taped conversation. What a bizarre defensive act; it actually amounts to his dismissing, not criticism such as mine, but his own stated views posted at his own website. There's a near-paranoic insularity in a move like that....
Well, the whole thing is a sorry performance, more representative of a disturbed adolescent than the "Einstein of Consciousness".... Wilber is a bizarre mix of imaginative theoretical chutzpah, an astonishingly broad range of intellectual interests and knowledge, mystical insight, audacious and embarrassing self-promotion, inflated self-regard, and a deep insecurity and defensiveness which leads to the cruel acting out which we've seen yet another example of in his audio reply to me.
Of course, we are still left wondering who the (presumed) "scholar" is who regards Meyerhoff's Bald Ambition as being merely a "turkey" of a manuscript, since the author of that particularly moronic evaluation prefers to remain anonymous. (Don't those self-interested, pathetic "New Age cowards" just piss you off?) Someone highly placed in the whackadoodle consciousness-studies field, no doubt, for him to have been "worth approaching" for comments on the mss. Someone who has likely published mild criticisms of kw, but who doesn't want to risk spoiling their professional relationship—or perhaps even their close friendship?—or losing the respect he enjoys from his peers in "leprechaun studies" while nestled securely in the Wilberian "circle of trust." Someone still in that circle as of this past summer, in order for him to have been cc'd in advance with Wilber's rant, as one of the "Chosen Two Hundred" in the Integral Ark. Someone who has read—or taught?—deeply enough in psychology to have had an opinion "worth sharing" about the psychological chapter in BA....
