The Daily Evolver

By Jeff Salzman From the earliest clans to today’s multicultural societies, we can see the circle of moral consideration that human beings and cultures have granted to others has increased, stage by stage. Traditional societies (amber altitude) are built on racial and religious identity and enforce overt and often brutal hierarchies. Modern societies (orange altitude) in turn seek to grant legal r...

In his classic book, Adventures of Ideas, Alfred North Whitehead describes the eros of the beautiful, the true, and the good. And to this list of intrinsic values he adds the idea of adventure, without which, he observes, “civilization is in full decay.” In this episode, Jeff Salzman’s guest Steve McIntosh explores Whitehead’s theme of adventure as it relates to the realm of spiritual experience....

In less than three months, Pete Buttigieg, the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend Indiana, (population 102,000), has gone from political anonymity to the top tier of candidates in the Democratic race for president of the United States. What accounts for Mayor Pete’s blast out of the political gate? His resume certainly ticks the boxes: Harvard graduate, Rhodes scholar, McKinsey consultant, and Afghan...

First of all, let me say that “intellectual dark web“ is the worst name I can imagine for a movement that seeks to illuminate our cultural moment. But, okay, nobody asked me and it appears they’re doing quite well anyway: the intellectual dark web (IDW) has coalesced into a vibrant group of intellectuals, most prominently Jordan Peterson, who are sparking a new international counter-culture known...

Nature is, as poet Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote, “red in tooth and claw.” Human nature is too, so far at least, but a counter-trend is emerging: as evolution progresses, conflict overall becomes less violent and more complex. Complexity arises out of the evolutionary process of differentiating (conflictual) and integrating (fun!). In this episode of The Shrink and the Pundit, integral psychotherapis...

This week I take a look at a recent issue of New York Times’ Sunday Review (2/24), where seven of eighteen articles focus on the real-time evolution of sex and gender relations. The Sunday Review is a quality barometer of the cultural weather in America and is must reading for me each week. In this podcast I endeavor to bring some integral perspective to the following selection of articles: Stop C...

Today my guest is Vince Horn, integrally-informed Dharma teacher and co-founder of the popular podcast, Buddhist Geeks, who discusses how the Buddhist Dharma (teaching) and Sangha (community) are being reimagined for contemporary life. How does a lineage founded on traditional concepts of renunciation, surrender and obedience to a teacher get transmitted into a modern and postmodern culture &#8212...

Every stage of human development creates radical new ways to organize work. The holy grail for today’s companies is to function so that everybody has a real chance to contribute their gifts. Instead of operating top-down, more power must be distributed throughout the organization, giving individuals and teams freedom to self-manage, while staying aligned to the organization’s purpose. Achieving th...

I invited Brooke McNamara to the Daily Evolver to talk about a project she is launching that I think represents a new way of building creative we-spaces. It’s a 6-week virtual course that provides inspiration, community and an opportunity for creative self-expression to a select group of people who are living in a unique crucible: mothers. Brooke developed the course, Write to the Heart of Motherh...

Is there intelligent life beyond Earth? Have alien beings contacted us? What do we make of the thousands of testimonials of human-alien contact, including from scientists, diplomats and astronauts? Yet … where’s the proof? And if there is proof, why is alien contact not the biggest story of the millennia? “It is arguably the most intellectually credible topic on the planet with the most cultural t...

It has been a hundred years since humanity spun into the chaos of the First World War. Peter Jackson’s acclaimed new documentary, “They Shall Not Grow Old,” brings vivid new life to the experience of British soldiers fighting on the western front. Using newly released footage from the Imperial War Museum, Jackson and his team worked four years to digitally restore, smooth, colorize and convert the...

For Valentine’s Day, integral couples therapist Tom Habib returns to share his insights into what he calls the “couples’ line of development.” In previous episodes he laid out the trajectory most couples take — from initial attraction, to role-partnering, to mutual respect, to what he calls first love, where intimacy begins to blossom into an exciting new we-space that transcends (while incl...

The idea of human progress has been widely discredited since the wars and genocides of the mid-20th-century. But what if the 20th century also featured the largest (and largest percentage) of people living in peace and prosperity, eclipsed only by the 21st century so far, which is dramatically even more peaceful and prosperous? This argument is made by Steve Pinker, author of “Enlightenment Now” a...

Integral practitioners talk a lot about creating a more spacious consciousness, one that includes more of reality. To that end we do things like place people and cultures on maps. We tease apart distinctions, we “transcend and include” and “differentiate and integrate” — all in an effort to increase the resolution of our worldview, as one would zoom into a google map to reveal more of what i...

The culture wars heated up last week with two new skirmishes. One was the release of the American Psychological Association’s new Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Boys and Men. The other is a new ad released by the Gillette razor company: The Best a Man Can Get. Both explicitly criticize traditional views of masculinity; as the APA Guidelines states, “traditional masculinity — marked by...

Donald Trump’s coarseness has proven to be more powerful than most people thought possible. In act two of his presidency he is being met with reciprocal incivility from his opposition, exemplified by newly-elected Congressperson Rashida Tlabid, who promised at a rally to “impeach the motherf*****”. In this episode I explore where and how this “new incivility” is arising, its evolutionary potency,...

According to Shane McDermott, my guest today, the biggest challenge of being human is living in a body. At every stage of development we are in conflict with how we look, feel or function. Shane approaches whole-person development through the portal of physicality. In our discussion he shares his methods for freeing up life force and releasing patterns that constrict us without our being fully awa...

On the Daily Evolver we often explore the downsides of various stages of human development, such as warrior violence, traditional fundamentalism, modern materialsm and postmodern relativism. But what are the blind and stuck spots characteristic of the post-postmodern stages of development? In this episode I am joined by development psychotherapist Kim Barta for a discussion of both the light and s...

Donald Trump at midterm is poised to be one of the most consequential presidents in modern history. Not necessarily for his policies, many of them odious (like his character), but for leading a frontal charge against the worldviews of modern globalism and postmodern multiculturalism. Drawing on the latest headlines, I examine Trump and the Trump phenomenon in the light of cultural evolution. Can a...

The morning after this week’s US midterm election I got a note from Dr. Keith Witt, my Shrink and the Pundit podcast partner, suggesting we do an episode on the voting results. “I’m a little let down by the election,” he confessed. “I’m uncharacteristically at a loss around understanding this situation culturally and politically, and have some questions I’d like to explore with you aro...

Today I’m joined by Corey DeVos, editor-in-chief of Integral Life. I invited him on because my job is highlighting the emergence of integral consciousness, and I have been really impressed with the stuff Corey and company are putting out these days. (Plus they host my live show twice a week, and I want them to know I love them!) In our conversation I asked Corey about three recent offerings that p...

Celebrity chef David Chang’s irreverent new series on Netflix, Ugly Delicious, illuminates the developmental arc of some of the world’s favorite foods. Each of eight episodes highlights one dish or concept, such as BBQ, fried rice or home cooking, and explores its roots in different regions and how it has evolved. Today I’m reviewing the first episode, which follows Chang and his gang as they seek...

by Jeff Salzman Today I’m joined by one of our most impressive young integral thinkers, Jeremy Johnson. Jeremy is a scholar of the 20th century poet/philosopher Jean Gebser, and is currently president of the international Jean Gebser Society. Gebser is a major (if eccentric) figure in the integral lineage, most famous for describing the structures of human consciousness as archaic, magic, mythic,...

Another week of cultural evolution at warp speed was brought on by a real-life daytime TV drama. It started on Tuesday, with NBC morning host Megyn Kelly defending blackface as a Halloween costume choice. She apologized and had her consciousness raised live on her Wednesday show, and was fired from the network on Friday. In this episode I use an integral lens to tease apart some of the cultural fo...

People often call me an optimist, a term I’ve never felt quite comfortable with. Is it optimistic to notice that humanity – and humans – fight our way forward? Is it optimistic to see that the catastrophes of history, while dwindling, are far from over? I prefer the term evolutionary, someone who sees how the upward draft of Eros creates beauty through means that are often not pretty, and th...