JOSEPH GELFER

I’m not one for reposting articles about masculinity, largely because it’s rare to find one worth reposting. However, a recent article in the Daily Mail (!) by Tom Mitchelson is an exception, My (very) weird weekend with the naked woodland warriors who travel to remote England to ‘reclaim their masculinity’. Mitchelson goes undercover at the Mankind Project, on one of their Warrior Training Weekends, the like of which I’ve critiqued in the past. Now you could be forgiven for not taking an article seriously by a young author photographed like this:

However, some of the highlights from the article include the following quotes:

• It’s all rather bizarre, as they begin a strange game where I am asked to walk up to a man who stares at me, with black camouflage paint on his face. The process is repeated again, and again.
• They seem to have a paranoid fear of anything getting out. This, I suppose, should have set even more alarm bells ringing.
• I seem to have wondered into a Marx Brothers film, but without the laughs.
• He tells us how to be a man. It’s hard to take from a man wearing face paint, carrying a feathered stick.
• We are asked to describe how we fail to stand up to women. ‘They’re always getting at you to put the seat down on the loo,’ one of the staff men explains by way of example.
• Some of the staff are very skilled at reading visual signs of hidden emotion. At times, three inquisitors demand the answers to questions that eventually leave a man weeping and apparently broken.
• If these staff men have any professional training, I am unaware of it.
• They talk of regressing me. I don’t know if these amateur psychiatrists could achieve that or not, but they opt for getting me to wrench the guilt from my stomach by wrestling a rope up through my legs being held by four men.
• The cult-like intensity with which some of my fellow warriors converted to the brotherhood astonished me.
• This was an organisation that aimed to tell me how to be a man. Yet not once during that weird and frightening weekend did I ever hear it acknowledged that we men share a world. With women.

Mitchelson’s tragicomic tone in this article is an insightful reflection of this type of men’s movement.

Further to the previous post about Perez’s article: when I originally wrote Numen, Old Men I included a few thoughts about Perez’s book Soulfully Gay, but they didn’t make the final draft. I really wanted to like Perez’s book, because of the importance of bringing gay (i.e. counterhegemonic) voices to the integral table, but I found it rather limited in perspective. Here’s the outtake, which originally followed my discussion of David Deida:

Perez contains none of the misogynistic flavour of Deida, although he does rate The Way of the Superior Man as “one of my favourites” whose writing he sees as allowing for “complex permutations of gender and sexual preference” and focuses on Deida’s presentation of masculine and feminine essences. Also, following Jungian analyst Mitch Walker, Perez suggests that underlining gayness is a mythic archetype, “that straights are drawn to connect to the divine through otherness, and gays through sameness”. Clearly, this appeal to archetypal (prototypal) reality as well as its polarity (straight/gay, otherness/sameness) is problematic within integral thought, as outlined above. It is also another example of how mythopoetic themes again bubble to the surface of integral thought in relation to masculinity, heterosexual or otherwise. It comes, then, as little surprise to find Perez discussing Robert Bly’s approach to the spiritual journey. Perez also pays special attention to the “men’s gatherings” he has attending via the ManKind Project, one of the more widely-known mythopoetic organisations responsible for running the “New Warrior Training Adventure” course. Perez also admires Toby Johnson, acclaimed gay spiritual writer and advocate of Joseph Campbell’s archetypal perspective who will be discussed in some detail in the next chapter about gay spirituality. But during his integral journey Perez has read Wilber’s critique of Campbell and decided that contemplating archetypes is insufficient for spiritual development.

Why archetypes remain in the background of integral discussions remains unanswered: one would think such Jungian hangovers would have been transcended and included. Perez provides a clear example of how integral thought cannot shake free of polar/mythic reasoning, seeking to honour “the value both of dualistic thinking (yin and yang, male and female) and the principle of unity”. But this equation is itself a manifestation of dualistic thinking (duality versus unity). A more valuable equation (assuming one desires to continue the realities of yin and yang, male and female) is to honour “the value both of dualistic thinking and the principle of multiplicity”. The Deleuzean concept of the multiple in regard to gender is one of the key themes of chapter 7. Clearly the multiple exists in integral thought, which is perhaps even based upon it, but the fact that it is transcended and included with a directional impetus towards “orienting generalizations” gives an impression that the integral seeks less to honour the multiple, rather to erase it in “the principle of unity”. Perez seems aware of these dangers, but that he must be ready to move beyond such concerns: ‘I must be even more willing to be perceived by others as mean, intolerant, elitist, arrogant, or worse. I must be willing to be called names by hypersensitive folks … “too Western” or “too white” or “too androcentric”’. Indeed he must.

Much of Perez’s presentation of the integral consists of little more than commenting on how very clever Wilber is, and relaying his various core theories. His most original contribution, however, locates what he describes as “homophilia” at the heart of his own take on masculine and feminine principles. Perez suggests notions of self-transcendence and self-immanence can be equated with the terms “heterophilia” and “homophilia”:

In self-transcendence, all holons transform through an interplay of masculine and feminine principles. Self-transcendence is the root drive underlying heterosexuality in all species. And in self-immanence, all holons transform through an interplay of masculine and masculine or feminine and feminine (that is, the holon turns inward on itself). Self-immanence is the root drive underlying homosexuality in all species.

On one level this is a welcome addition to the integral model, locating same-sex orientation on a par with heterosexuality. However, it is stuck in the old pattern of polarity, and it is noteworthy that same-sex orientation equates with a downward momentum, while heterosexuality equates with transcendence, the ultimate direction of the integral. We have already seen how Wilber privileges transcendence, so even here homophilia suffers relegation. Perez’s model, while seeking to be integral, does not seem able to escape heteronormativity, which itself is a masculine assertion.

I’ve been charting the connection between integral spirituality and the mythopoetic men’s movement for a while now. In short, integral spirituality, for all its desire to transcend and include, does little more than include the men’s movement, with all its problems.

Another recent example of this is Joe Perez’s article, ILP and Men’s Shadow Work: A Powerful Combination, in which he puts the integral framework in dialogue with Robert Bly, Robert Moore, Douglas Gillette, The ManKind Project, and their use of myth and archetypes. I don’t know why integral types continue along this path, as it is a clear example of Wilber’s own elegantly-formulated pre/trans fallacy. Even if one buys into the whole notion of the integral, there is nothing integral here: even Wilber states, “Jungian archetypes…are for the most part … magico-mythic motifs”; i.e. pre-rational. To talk about “men’s work” in these terms is to fall foul of elevationism in the pre/trans fallacy. I talk about this at some length in Numen, Old Men, for those interested in finding out more.

As time goes by I believe it is becoming clear that large areas of integral thought fall foul of the pre/trans fallacy. Aside from gender, which I have written about, I would also include the integral presentation of politics and economics: I write about this in a new article, Lohas and the Indigo Dollar: Growing the Spiritual Economy, forthcoming in New Proposals: Journal of Marxism and Interdisciplinary Inquiry. It wouldn’t surprise me at all to discover there were other areas of integral thought which are far from trans-rational in disciplines in which I have no experience.

Such blind spots in integral thought make its viability increasingly problematic. The Integral Emperor has been wearing no clothes for some time now: I feel for his followers as this becomes evident to all.