Re-Reading Virtually Normal

Note: These remarks are intended for an audience familiar with integral philosophy such as that embodied by the work of philosopher Ken Wilber. Readers seeking more information about integral political theory are recommended to begin reading Ken Wilber’s A Theory of Everything. For a brief introduction of the SDi integral model including the use of colors as used in this article, see SDi.

Re-Reading Andrew Sullivan’s Virtually Normal, Nine Years Later

I once had a college professor (David Tracy at The University of Chicago) who said that there were several books that he re-reads every ten years. Why? Not to find out if the arguments in the book have changed. But to see how much he’s changed. Well, it’s not quite been ten years yet since the publication of Andrew Sullivan’s Virtually Normal... the nine-year anniversary is in September... yet I had the impulse today to take a fresh look at this enormously influential and classic work. Perhaps, I thought, I could see how much I have changed in nine years.

Reading Virtually Normal Nine Years Ago

Virtually Normal achieved wide notice as having articulated a vision for gay politics sharply at odds with virtually everyone else’s, upsetting the orthodox among both the religious right and the mainstream progressive gay civil rights organizations, among others. Sullivan famously defined four major types of arguments related to homosexuality (called the prohibitionists, liberationists, conservatives, and liberals), demolished their shortcomings, and then articulated a new “politics of homosexuality” that marries the best parts of all the others while avoiding their weaknesses.

When I first read this book, I was twenty-three years old, a recent graduate of Harvard and a dropout from The Divinity School at The University of Chicago. I found myself strongly identifying with the arguments from virtually all sides, especially the liberationists and the liberals. Sullivan’s critiques of these positions struck me as probable, and truly problematic. I found them difficult to counter persuasively, even though I was not quite satisfied by Sullivan’s proposed alternative, which I found to be a sort of “wimpy” libertarianism (not an entirely accurate reading, I must admit). Sullivan argues that the liberationist viewpoint (which views homosexuality as a social construct and the goal of politics as liberation from all traditionally defined social constructs) really lacks a political program, and when it does enter the political sphere, it is typically authoritarian. He also argues that the liberal viewpoint (which views homosexuals as an oppressed minority and demands laws to criminalize discrimination against gays by private individuals) tends to create a victim mentality, subtly reinforcing a self-identity that is disempowering. These arguments stung me (ouch! they had more than a ring of truth), even as I resisted buying into every detail of Sullivan’s alternative (particularly his objection to laws to prohibit private discrimination against gays in areas such as housing and employment).

Nevertheless, despite failing to fully sign on to Sullivan’s program, I had the sense that the book was a work of genius. Unlike virtually every other writer out there, Sullivan had managed to actually identify the different voices in the cacophony of argument on a highly emotional and controversial issue, honor the essential truths in their perspectives, and incorporate them into a broader, more expansive vision that was both conservative and liberal at the same time. I believed then, and continue to believe today, that Sullivan’s characterization of the four broad voices in the fray are fair, and most of his arguments marshaled against their weaknesses are convincing.

You might call Sullivan’s perspective post-conservative and post-liberal. With conservatives, it brings in arguments to persuade people that appeal to important traditional values and a sense of the common good. For example, against those who claim that homosexuality destroys families, it observes that homosexuals are parts of families; we are your brothers and sisters, sons and daughters. With liberals, it brings in respect for the law and its ability to uphold the rights of individuals against those who would seek to impose a parochial vision on all citizens. It demands an end to public discrimination against homosexuals, for example in sodomy laws, the military, and equal access to the institution of marriage.

I was a die-hard liberal who had been infected by a healthy amount of live virus in the form of postmodern queer studies, just enough to innoculate me against any view that doesn't acknowledge that reality tends to be far more complex and pluralistic than naive realists make it out to be. After reading Virtually Normal, I may not have become a psuedo-libertarian (which is how I misinterpreted Sullivan’s argument), but I could never again be convinced that all truth about homosexuality and politics was to be identified with any one philosophy or political party. There was plenty of truth to go around, and not everyone’s viewpoint was equally true. If something like Sullivan’s proposal were valid, then it should be possible to reconcile the apparent conflicts and opposites in political discourse, and identify a set of principles that could effect real change.

Reading Virtually Normal Today

Today, I remain convinced of the enduring value of Sullivan’s proposal, and note with amazement how much has changed in our country over the past nine years. Gays have won the right to marry in Massachusetts, and the right to everything-but-the-name-of-marriage in Vermont. Sullivan’s argument that marriage should be the centerpiece of gay political agenda has been vindicated. Moreover, Sullivan himself deserves a healthy amount of credit for having contributed to the intellectual climate in which this momentous change in social milieu could have occurred. For that, Sullivan and many other activists and intellectuals who got behind the equal marriage rights bandwagon have my deep gratitude, and should have every gay activist’s respect. They have contributed to making the seemingly impossible gains possible, though it needs to be acknowledged that there is much more work ahead to bring equal marriage rights for all in our society.

I’ve been changing my mind about many things, particularly in the last six months or so since beginning and deepening my explorations of integral philosophy, including its applications to political theory. So it seems appropriate to ask: to what extent is Sullivan’s philosophy in Virtually Normal truly integral? And how does it fall short? It is certainly “integral” in two senses. First, it is an application of critical thinking skills that draws heavily upon the vision-logic or aperspectival mode of consciousness. Second, it is an effort at synthesis that recognizes a plurality of “memes of discourse” (not a word Sullivan then used), and attempts to find a way to bridge the gaps by honoring the essential wisdom contained in each. It is a truly post-conservative and post-liberal approach to homosexuality, as any authentically integral politics should be.

The limitation of Virtually Normal, as I see it today, is that it is very, very flatland. As students of the integral philosophy will instantly recognize, there is no understanding of the existence of a “spectrum of consciousness,” nor an attempt to recognize the complex psychological and cultural conditions of consciousness that underlie the supposedly rational arguments. The book is essentially written from a standpoint of a sort of positivistic rationalism, one that assumes the heart of politics should be to confront others with views or arguments, and then ask what they mean, what evidence and considerations support them, what speaks against them, and so forth. An implicit assumption is that something will come of this effort at disembodied reason. Although the book is written with more than a nod to vision-logic, it unfortunately remains bound to a more formal/functional mode of rationality.

Sullivan’s approach illustrates the usual sort of intellectual arrogance of picking a position and defending it against all rivals, gathering the evidence and contrasting it favorably to its opponents. A more fully vision-logic (or integral) approach would be more like Hegel’s style of philosophy. As Robert C. Solomon wrote in In the Spirit of Hegel, “Hegel would simply ride the wave of all the great philosophers before him, from the pre-Socratic and Plato up to Kant and the neo-Kantians. He would flow with the conflicting but ultimately unidirectional currents of their efforts and be carried to the end, for a final summation... In this way, [Hegel] never actually opposed anyone: in a sense, all he did was go along for the ride.” A more truly integral approach would not have been one of attacking and defending a position, but one of “going along for the ride.”

Or, in the terms of contemporary integral theory, Sullivan’s approach falls short by failing to grasp the embodied and evolutionary nature of consciousness itself, and therefore doesn’t persuade in the way Sullivan probably thought it should. At various stages of the spectrum of consciousness, people may talk, but understanding is limited; all meaning is re-interpreted by each listener according to its own particular memes, structures, and forms.

The integral model of SDi explains the essential limit with Sullivan’s quadratic typology of homosexual politics. Whereas Sullivan assumes that liberationists, conservatives, prohibitionists, and liberals are capable of fruitful dialogue and coming to agreement, the reality is less encouraging. Each of these four types are embodied in particular modes of consciousness and social structures; the modes of consciousness they embodied are only capable of listening to Sullivan’s arguments on their own terms, and not in the mode that he favors. Prohibitionists are embodied in the BLUE (mythic) and ORANGE (rational) memes of consciousness; liberationists in the GREEN (pluralistic) meme; conservatives are BLUE and ORANGE, while liberals are ORANGE and GREEN. And Sullivan’s own argument is one, I am suggesting, properly characterized as something like an ORANGE-YELLOWish color (a hybrid that might be called integral-positivism or integral-rationalism).

Thus, when I re-read Virtually Normal today, I am no less impressed with its genius, yet I am now aware of its failure to reach an integral mode: as a flatland vision, it recommends flatland solutions. In other words, it’s a case of “so close... and yet so far.” Although Sullivan wouldn’t have used these words, essentially his book recommends an implicit agenda: “everybody smarten up now, why don’t ya?” The book does more than any other book I know on the subject of homosexuality to bridge the gaps between people of different worldviews and modes of existence, and yet ultimately it reduces their differences to matters of argument of an operational/functional mode of rationalism. If Sullivan were a doctor, he might have said: “I know what ails you, and it’s that you’re not reasoning well enough..."

I want to emphasize here that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with making this sort of argument; in fact, it is quite useful as a wonderful and positive expression of the ORANGE-YELLOWish meme that it is. I don’t mean to take anything away from the book’s many achievements. However, I am simply observing that the book’s agenda runs into a huge limitation when reviewers come along and they don’t buy it and most are not persuaded to actually change their minds (naturally, since they are each reviewing the book from within their own values/memes). Moreover, the book's limitation is implicit, or unconscious, as Hegel would say, and therefore presents an obstacle to its own overcoming. By the way, it is worth noting that Virtually Normal certainly cannot be criticized convincingly for having been unfamiliar with integral philosophy; the most prominent single work of integral philosophy was not published until 1995, the same year as Virtually Normal.

What Does a Truly Integral Vision of Gay Politics Look Like?

What does a truly YELLOW (integral and vision-logic) perspective offer the debate concerning a politics of homosexuality? My initial answer is: I don’t know. There hasn’t yet been a truly YELLOW analysis of all the issues involved, nor research done to determine the best course of action to recommend. However, I can suggest an outline for the emerging framework, and note that the “integral revolution” is quite young, and will continue to involve the work of many people over many years to come. Any thoughts expressed at this time are quite tentative, and should be taken lightly.

YELLOW is the first of the Second-Tier levels of consciousness to emerge, and it is distinguished from all the previous levels (including BLUE, ORANGE, and GREEN) in that all the previous memes thought their perspective was the only correct one, and everyone else is wrong. At YELLOW, each of the previous waves of the spiral of consciousness are recognized as normal, often quite healthy, and have an essential place in the structure and order of society. In other words, the prohibitionists, conservatives, liberationists, and liberals are all seen to have a piece of the truth—they have essentially accurate and healthy views of homosexuality as it appears from a given level of consciousness. (This is true even in the case of the prohibitionists, whose perspective Sullivan rightly notes should not be dismissed as bigotry. Theirs is the primitive and not-yet-adequate concept of homosexuality as contrary to nature, which is understood to include heterosexuality not only as normal, but normative. As disconcerting as it may seem to some to be saying so, this vision of normative heterosexuality represented a healthy stage of the formation of consciousness when it became influential in history in cultures of both East and West approximately 2,500 years ago. Note that in the healthy expressions, prohibitionism is not coupled with overt animosity, fear, or hatred towards homosexuals; only in its pathological forms does it become overtly homophobic.) In contrast to all First-Tier memes, the politics of YELLOW is governed by an impulse to protect and defend the health not of any one level of values, but the health of the spiral of consciousness as a whole.

From this viewpoint, the entire sense of a politics of homosexuality changes, even as the actual policy recommendations may (or may not) end up appearing quite a bit like the program of Virtually Normal. At the integral stage of consciousness, there is not an attempt to articulate the politics of homosexuality and defend it using operational/functional logic; instead, there is an acknowledgement and embrace of a plurality of politics of homosexuality (actually, of views of homosexuality embodied at a wide spectrum of levels of consciousness). And there is an awareness of the vital role that each color in the rainbow plays: BLUE is vital for the maintenance of law, order, social structures, discipline, etc.; ORANGE is vital for the recognition of individual rights and liberties, economic self-interest, egalitarian values, instrumental/formal/positivisitic rationality, etc.; and GREEN is vital for recognizing the role of the emotional life, sensitivity, multicultural diversity, and an authentic pluralism of values. And at YELLOW, there is finally an abandonment of the agenda to prove that one's own values are the only correct set; instead, there is an attempt to weave visions that integrate the core truths of each level of consciousness into a whole, and articulate strategies for engagement that respect the differences and legitimate interests of each of the memes of the spiral. In other words, at YELLOW there is finally a political philosophy that can let BLUE be BLUE, ORANGE be ORANGE, and GREEN be GREEN, while positively encouraging growth in consciousness in ways that are consistent with ORANGE (that is, ways that do not impose its set of values on a pluralistic society as a whole).

Like the best of Sullivan’s Virtually Normal, YELLOW is post-prohibitionist, post-conservative, post-liberal, and post-liberationist. It is the first of the Second-Tier levels, and as such is different in one fundamental way from each of the First-Tier levels (which are, of course, necessary and vital). At YELLOW, there is finally an acknowledgement that the only way (developmentally, for individuals and collectives) to get to YELLOW and subsequent waves of the spiral is to begin at BEIGE and work your way up to PURPLE, RED, BLUE, ORANGE, and then GREEN. There are no developmental shortcuts; every wave must be included and transcended at all levels for genuine transformation of individuals and collectives to occur. With BLUE, there is an acceptance of the need to argue for advances that are in the interest of the common good and traditional social structures such as the family. (There is also the demand to limit pathological BLUE expressions from inflicting ethnocentric and parochial conceptions of the common good on a diverse, pluralistic society.) And certainly, with ORANGE, there must be a high priority on the need to address discrimination against homosexuality in the public sphere that denies our dignity, distinctiveness, and common humanity. And with GREEN, there must also be a willingness to allow localities the ability to enshrine values of sensitivity and inclusion for homosexuals into law, so long as those measures don’t erode fundamental individual rights. Indeed, to the extent that the substantive dimensions of Sullivan's political program will need to be modified to become more integral, I suspect that they will need to incorporate more of the healthy, positive aspects of GREEN--the meme of pluralistic multiculturalism. None of the memes can be skipped over in development without adverse consequences, and to the extent that Virtually Normal is an ORANGE vision stretching towards YELLOW, it will need to first move to incorporate more GREEN.

An integral perspective is summed up as a philosophy of unitas multiplex, or unity in diversity—a politics that acknowledges both the goodness of the distinctiveness of gay and queer identities as well as our common humanity. An integral perspective may not offer recommendations that are totally original; however, it has a unique vantage point for bringing greater harmony and peacefulness to the discourse on homosexuality and politics. I believe the integral vision of unitas multiplex is the cutting edge of consciousness regarding homosexuality and politics. History may well remember Sullivan’s Virtually Normal as the earliest and most important attempt to date to articulate an integral approach to the difficult political issues surrounding homosexuality in our time.

Comments

[Torin Drake]

This is an Ad Home remark

I am disappointed with Andrew Sullivan because he is another preachy conservative “do as say, not as do type”. I read his blog for a year then I find out, while he preaches that homosexual life style is too promiscuous and pointing figures at loose moral queers, he was caught looking for a “Bare Back” sexual encounter through a personal add. SHAME.

[Joe Perez]

It's interesting that so many gays and queers say Andrew Sullivan is a "conservative." He's a former editor of the liberal publication, The New Republic, in favor of full inclusion of gays in the military, equal marriage rights for gays, an end to sodomy laws and other discrimination by the government against gay people, adheres to a classical liberal political philosophy, and vocally criticizes and pisses off the religious right constantly. Certainly "conservative" describes some aspects of Sullivan's philosophy, and is probably not a label that he would entirely refuse. Those who call Sullivan conservative and refuse to see the way he integrates liberal and progressive positions into his writing strike me as half-blind. It's much easier to throw a label on someone so you can disregard their point of view, rather than seek to understand and be challenged by it.

As for the "preachy" label on Sullivan, oh, I don't know. I don't see it that bad. There are many other writers like Signorile and Avarosis that I would much sooner call "preachy." Preachy may be an eye of the beholder thing. I'm sure some people would call me preachy, so whatever. :)

[Vince]

Hi Joe,

Your article is real eye-opener for me, when it comes to an "Integral Vision for Gay Politics." I found your criticism (both good and bad) of Sullivan to be very insightful. You are the first voice I've come across in the blogosphere that is using the integral framework to examine what it means to be a homosexual in today's world. Awesome stuff!