Integral Left

Contextual Quote

On the Need for Recapturing the Full Moral Spectrum

1.

"Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundations theory shows that progressive-liberal movements tend to activate only the channels of Care and Fairness, while traditionalists activate the entire spectrum, including Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity. When secular progressives restrict their moral vocabulary to Care and Fairness while abandoning Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity, they create a dangerous spiritual and civic vacuum. Human beings possess an innate, evolutionary hunger for sacred order and communal belonging; when the cultural left refuses to speak this language, they cede these powerful moral foundations to reactionary, exclusionary movements."

- Erik Haines [1]

2.

"The path forward for left-wing thought does not lie in a defensive retreat into hyper-deconstruction, an uncritical embrace of techno-scientific reductionism, or a reflexively hostile secularism. Rather, as the exchanges at Portalpalooza demonstrated, the Left must evolve a post-post-metaphysical, epistemologically pluralistic framework—one that actively collaborates with religious traditions, takes spiritual awakening and divine revelation seriously, and reclaims the foundational horizons of existential meaning, and virtue ethics."

- Erik Haines, [2]

History

Erik Haines:

"Given this rightward drift, it was a profound shift when I encountered the work of the late Michael Brooks through Jeremy D Johnson , the integral and Gebserian thinker behind the Mutations podcast. My introduction to Brooks via his 2019 interview with Johnson on The Michael Brooks Show shattered the assumption that this developmental toolkit was inherently conservative. Brooks represented a striking anomaly: he was perhaps the only figure in that landscape to take the same developmental architecture—typically bent toward reaction and hierarchy—and repurpose it toward what he called “cosmopolitan socialism.” Brooks articulated a rare, anti-imperialist internationalism—one that embraced developmental complexity and evolutionary depth without retreating from concrete political engagement. The discovery that these vertical developmental frameworks could undergird a horizontal politics of solidarity, rather than merely validating a reactionary politics of order, became the critical tension that drew me into his work and continues to inspire and challenge my own thinking.

Coming from a French Canadian background, my own political and cultural formation was rooted in the legacy of the Quiet Revolution—a rapid, systemic upheaval characterized by the swift secularization of society and the sudden, dramatic dismantling of the Catholic Church’s hegemony over Quebec’s civic institutions. This historical trajectory was vastly different from the Anglo-American democratic-socialist tradition that Michael Brooks inhabited, which was shaped instead by labor coalitions, the civil rights movement, and a distinct lineage of secular Marxist critique. Because of this divergence, I did not approach Brooks as a fellow political traveler or an activist sharing a similar struggle. Rather, I was drawn to him purely through the integral tradition. I was fascinated by how he managed to liberate a vertical developmental framework from its conservative, hierarchy-justifying biases, purposely applying its diagnostic power to advocate for systemic and international cooperation.

By early 2020, a distinct progressive-integral milieu was already beginning to coalesce in the digital margins. On March 28, 2020, a small constellation of thinkers—including Jeremy Johnson, Ryan Nakade, and Matt Hudkins—launched Growing Down: A Progressive Integral Podcast. This project represented a deliberate attempt to cross-pollinate the tactical, structural concerns of progressive politics with the conceptual depth of integral theory and the emergent grammar of metamodernism. They sought to synthesize horizontal political struggles with vertical developmental awareness, hoping to offer a more psychologically literate alternative to the often flat, moralizing discourse of mainstream progressivism.

When Michael Brooks died suddenly in July of that same year at the age of thirty-six, the shockwave of his passing acted as a tragic catalyst. The collective grief galvanized this loose, digital network of thinkers into a self-aware, public-facing community. A memorial roundtable organized in his wake gathered key voices of this nascent scene—including Matthew David Segall, Layman Pascal , Brent Cooper, Brad Kershner, and Ryan Nakade—effectively mapping the coordinates of an “integral left” for the first time. Yet even as the scene briefly solidified, a deep irony persisted: while the broader public remembered Brooks for his sharp, quick-witted media critique on The Majority Report or his polemical book Against the Web, the sophisticated developmental architecture that quietly organized his political worldview remained almost entirely unacknowledged by his political allies.

This momentary coalescence, however, proved fragile. Growing Down ceased production within a year, and the scene rapidly dispersed back into its respective niches. Its participants were geographically and institutionally far-flung, operating more as a loose network of independent thinkers than a disciplined political movement. What had briefly bound them together during that season of loss was not a rigid doctrine, but a shared intuition: they saw that the developmental and evolutionary frameworks of the integral tradition carried profound political consequences that the mainstream, action-oriented left was too quick to dismiss as bourgeois navel-gazing. Conversely, they recognized that the mainstream integral community had grown too comfortable in its apolitical quietism, retreating from the harsh material realities of political economy into the sanitized realm of private spiritual development. To bridge this divide, they insisted that a true progressivism required both a psychological depth capable of self-examination and a structural commitment to transforming material conditions. Bringing these two dimensions together meant laying the groundwork for a genuine integral political praxis—a task that remains as unfinished as it is urgent.

It was precisely in the shadow of this unfinished project, and against the rapid quietism of the post-roundtable period, that I launched my own podcast, Integral [+] Facticity, in the spring of 2022. I did so out of a distinct sense of urgency; the transient window of 2020 had slammed shut, and Brooks’s vital synthesis of developmental psychology and cosmopolitan socialism was already slipping back into the digital margins. The inaugural episodes of the show set out to reconstruct this very lineage, debuting with an interview with Matt McManus. In surveying the remaining landscape, I found only a small handful of thinkers who still held the memory of Brooks’s deeper, structural engagement with the integral framework. Among them were Josh Summers and Jeremy Johnson—both of whom I was fortunate enough to host for long-form dialogues. I had not been a participant in the brief, intense season of 2020; rather, I arrived as a chronicler of its aftermath, driven by a quiet determination to prevent its diagnostic breakthroughs from fading into historical obscurity.

Michel also came to this scene late, though through the same hub. Johnson interviewed him on Mutations in November 2020, in a conversation on the commons and cultural evolution, and that is where Michel first registered for me. Here was a European, French-speaking, Catholic-raised thinker who was at the same time deeply conversant with the American integral movement — with Wilber, the Integral Institute, and the whole architecture that grew up around them. That combination is uncommon, and it sat close enough to my own coordinates to command my attention. What eventually brought us into direct contact was the Rosy Cross anthology this past spring, the volume edited by Cadell Last and O.G. Rose out of Last’s Philosophy Portal — the online community that has become, for me, the living continuation of the very milieu this history describes. Where the Growing Down scene scattered, the Portal is where a good deal of that same energy has reconstituted itself, and where several of these figures still turn up. My own contribution to that anthology, A Rosy Cross of a Book, provides a more detailed account of that trajectory from Brooks to Cadell. For present purposes, what matters is that contributing to the anthology alongside Michel gave me the occasion to move from reading his work to writing to him directly, and we have been in semi-regular correspondence since late May.

As part of that exchange he shared a long autobiographical interview tracing his intellectual evolution, and reading it clarified why our paths converge as they do. He begins in a Marxist-revolutionary period, moves through the radical body-mind therapies of the 60s-70s, and passes into an extended engagement with Eastern spiritual traditions and then with the Western esoteric inheritance of Rosicrucianism, and the Hermetic line, before arriving at the work on commons-based peer production and the P2P Foundation for which he is now best known. Threaded through the middle of it is a serious, years-long immersion in Wilber and the Integral Institute. Having discovered Wilber in the early 1980s, he immersed himself in his writings for nearly ten years. He vividly traces the trajectory of falling under the spell of an all-encompassing system of thought and adopting a temporary ideological stance, until the very criticisms he had long brushed aside finally began to hit home. It is this lineage that leads him to frame his own peer-to-peer project as a left-integral offshoot.

While we share a common ground in our Catholic upbringings and the mutual influence of the American integral movement, our professional trajectories diverge in ways that reflect our different approaches to the digital landscape. My own path has been shaped by over fifteen years in information technology, knowledge management, and financial services, which now informs my work as an independent researcher and the development of the Montreal-based Metapattern Institute. Sitting at the intersection of health informatics and integral human development, my research explores how digital tools and information systems shape human meaning-making, culminating in applied work like the Integral Awareness & Commitment Training (IACT) program—a project that synthesizes Canadian speculative philosophy, integral humanism, and contextual behavioral science. Michel’s trajectory, by contrast, was forged through Marxist political economy, leading to his pioneering efforts with the P2P Foundation and the design of decentralized digital commons. Yet, despite this divergence between my focus on health informatics and his work on peer-to-peer institutional architectures, we converged on the same speculative conviction: that the Western tradition harbors vital, neglected resources worth recovering, even if we traveled vastly different routes to find them."

(https://www.erikhaines.org/p/a-short-history-of-the-integral-left)

Discussion

Michel Bauwens and the Evolution of the Integral Left

Erik Haines:

"Another major highlight of Portalpalooza was the presentation by Michel Bauwens—the renowned Belgian cyber-philosopher, commons theorist, and founder of the P2P Foundation. Bauwens brings a unique historical depth to the integral scene; having been deeply immersed in Ken Wilber’s work throughout the 1980s and 1990s before pioneering peer-to-peer (P2P) economic theory, his intellectual trajectory represents a vital bridge between American integral metatheory, European political economy, and Catholic social thought.

My own engagement with Bauwens deepened significantly through a series of correspondence exchanges leading up to the conference, which I mapped in my July 2026 essay, A Short History of the Integral Left & Varieties of Integral Traditions Today. In those dialogues, we compared notes on how the micro-level psychological flexibility of contextual behavioral science (and Ostrom-based Prosocial models) intersects with macro-level commons governance and peer-to-peer resource management. Our exchanges also explored the neglected tradition of Catholic integral human development—from Jacques Maritain’s personalism to Catholic social doctrine—revealing how deeply the Western tradition harbors integrative, non-statist alternatives to both raw capitalism and bureaucratic collectivism.

In his conference address, titled around the “resurrection” of the Integral Left, Bauwens mapped a rich historical arc tracing how left-wing thought and commons-based peer production can interface with integral theory. Drawing on Marxist theorist Loren Goldner’s thesis on the Hermetic Renaissance (”cosmobiology”), Bauwens highlighted how the conviction that matter and spirit are co-arising was forced underground by Cartesian dualism, only to re-emerge in radical political economics and P2P resource management.

While Bauwens’ talk offered an extraordinary historical synthesis, I find myself making a subtle but crucial conceptual distinction regarding his title. Bauwens speaks of the resurrection of the Integral Left—a term that carries connotations of bringing back a static, past model (such as the brief 2020 Growing Down milieu formed around Michael Brooks’ passing or early Hermetic paradigms). In my view, what we are witnessing—and what we must actively cultivate—is not a resurrection, but an evolution of the Integral Left.

An evolutionary framework recognizes that the Left cannot simply restore past developmental models or rely on pre-critical spiritual syntheses. Instead, it must adapt dialectically to the realities of the present moment:

It must integrate Dylan Shaul’s post-post-metaphysics to reclaim ontological and existential grounding—specifically anchoring human action in divine revelation and the pursuit of the Good—without regressing to pre-modern dogmatism.

It must incorporate Downs and Nance’s Sci-Fi Marxism and Faultline Theory to confront algorithmic governance, AI, and technocapitalism (”Robo-Cthulhu”).

It must ground its macro-political vision of the P2P commons (Bauwens) and cosmopolitan socialism (Brooks) in Fred Dallmayr’s integral pluralism (”democracy to come”) using Integral Epistemological Pluralism (IEP) as its meta-theoretical architecture, alongside the enactive, post-metaphysical discipline of IACT praxis (i.e., Integral Political Praxis).

Where “resurrection” looks backward to restore a lost coherence, “evolution” moves forward, synthesizing new theoretical tools to build an adaptive, multi-dimensional Left capable of out-thinking and out-organizing the New Right."

(https://www.erikhaines.org/p/dylan-shaul-returns-to-the-portal)