New Laske interview

Continuing this post, some excerpts from his May '18 interview in Integral Leadership Review:

Laske: "And where there seems to be such support [for transcending purely logical thinking], as in the integral movement, what you encounter is very flat, purely contextual thinking. [...] I follow Roy Baskhar, whom the integral movement claims to have integrated, and that is certainly a false claim that would probably insult him."

"Kegan’s theory and the whole social-emotional universe does not really provide us with any tools to develop people, not to speak of ‘transforming’ them. That splendid theory is a strictly diagnostic tool, and unfortunately also a way to build an entire ideology from. And the unfortunate thing, in my view, is that the social-emotional thinking of 'developmentally trained' consultants has by now suppressed the cognitive training that people urgently need, both individually and in organizations, and so I have come to speak of the whole integral movement as being on a 'social emotional triumphalism train', to follow what Bhaskar said about logical and idealistic thinking."

The interviewer responds: "My critique has been this statement that it takes five years to go from one developmental stage to another as if there’s some kind of holy grail that you are aiming at. I call it altitude sickness when you get to the integral or the second tier and suddenly you’ve 'made it'. It’s a triumphal arrival of the enlightened."

Laske later reiterates:

"The term ‘integral’ has been misapplied and is exhausted. This shows in the conception of consciousness now adhered to which either lacks a cognitive dimension or is reduced to it. The term ‘integral’ has sanctioned one-sided approaches that proclaim to be holistic and systemic but in their thought form structure show none of the features of complex thinking; they are pre-hegelian if not pre-kantian. The truly cognitive, dialectical dimension has been overwhelmed by the psychological, the social-emotional, and the so-called spiritual. The integral movement is still on what I call a 'social-emotional triumphalism train' rooted in Kegan’s work, with almost total neglect of the dialectical thinking Roy Bhaskar has renewed in work that the integral movement claims to have integrated."