Arguing over semantics is usually the sign that a friendly debate has deteriorated into a lame exchange of opinions. To avoid getting offensive, the parties agree that, at the end of the day, they just have different ways of saying the same thing… precisely because they aren’t saying the same thing at all.

The liberal mind has a pathological aversion to conflict. Liberalism has always been a tradition of compromise, aiming to politely represent the interests of the oppressed without ever letting the word “oppression” slip out. Urban intellectuals, bohemians, latter-day hipsters and the rest of our ilk have for the most part inherited this allergy. We run in circles where, in practice, offending someone at a dinner party boils down to a worse injustice than the corporate sanction of child slavery, the mention of which so rudely sidetracked the chat about the virtues of the iPad.

So it’s with some hesitation that I want to talk semantics here. But there’s a word that keeps cropping up that I think needs some scrutiny. That word is “evolution.”

It’s a word that’s used in different ways. There’s its obvious application in science to mean the development of species through natural selection. There’s its use to connote any organic development from the simple to the complex. There is also “evolution of consciousness” in the sense of the growth of ideas through time, and the phrase “conscious evolution,” which is used in the consciousness movement for what I perceive to be the exact opposite of evolution in the usual sense. My concern isn’t with these applications but with the use of this word, evolution, to give certain metaphysical theories a scientific lacquer which not only cheapens them, but actually makes them dangerous.

It occurred to me to write about this as I read Ken Wilber’s Up from Eden: A Transpersonal View of Human Evolution. (I should state from the outset that I’m not a fan of Ken Wilber, or of any other writer who has every possible human experience neatly pegged in a totalizing system.) In these pages, Wilber pushes a notion of evolution that unites the formation of the physical universe, natural selection and historical progress in a single process. Those who deny that consciousness is subject to this process he dismisses as “retro-Romantics,” far behind the times:

The retro-Romantics and neopagans fully agreed that evolution operated in the rest of the universe but not in humans; in fact, the Romantics added, in the case of humans, evolution started running backward! In the general Romantic view, humans, both phylogenetically and ontogenetically, started out in a type or primal Eden, a great paradise, an original heaven on earth, and then things promptly started going downhill from there. The massive forces operating in the Kosmos for billions and billions of years — forces that produced ants from atoms and apes from amoebas, colossal forces that propelled galaxies and quasars into planetary configurations, and from there into cells with sensations, and organisms with perceptions, and animals that could see and feel and think — all of those forces, once humans were produced, simply came to an abrupt and crashing halt — they simply stopped working! — and for no other apparent reason than that they didn’t fit with the retro-Romantics’ idea of the way the world should run. (Forward to the 1996 edition, p. 296 in vol. 2 of the Collected Works)

The “colossal forces” that Wilber’s talking about have nothing to do with evolution: they are the laws of physics. Unless we’re speaking in metaphors, plasma doesn’t evolve by becoming a star any more than a rock evolves by rolling down a hill. Moreover, if physical forces produce order and form in the universe, they also produce disorder and chaos. The forces that set the stage for our leap from apes to people are the same that could very well slam a giant asteroid into the earth and do away with us altogether. To equate them with human evolution, let alone moral progress, is a category mistake. Though indirectly, Wilber is here presupposing a moral dimension in nature. His version of evolution has nothing to do with The Origin of Species or the actual formation of stars; it has everything to do with the doctrine of historical progress set in a sharply pantheist key.

For Wilber and most other neo-gnostic thinkers, evolution is the name given to the idea that the world is “intended,” whereas for scientists, evolution proves that the cosmos has no intrinsic moral order, no intentionality. As the philosopher John Gray puts it, “A truly naturalist worldview leaves no room for secular hope.” Scientifically speaking, you can’t use Darwinism to develop a theory of progress anymore than you can use the assembly instructions of a computer to perform brain surgery. Of course, the cultural appropriation of the idea of evolution—its conflation with the idea of progress—goes back to Darwin’s earliest disciples. It’s built right into the Victorian vision of “higher” and “lower” life forms and their racial analogues in the human species. If social Darwinism gets such a beating from Wilber in his book, it’s mainly because Wilber himself is trying to wrest Darwinism from conservatives like Herbert Spencer. He wants to hammer out a fresher, friendlier, more liberal form of social Darwinism under the flag of integral theory.

And so Wilber writes that there exist clearly definable stages which a person must go through in the evolutionary process. A person’s color-coded stage determines how she thinks and feels about the world. Thus there are Beige people, Purple people and Red people, and onward to Yellow (Wilber’s own “integral” stage) and the enigmatic Turquoise, which no one knows much about because it’s still only emerging. For those who are put off by the apparent hierarchical nature of this system, Wilber points out that the stages aren’t stacked one atop the other (that would be very Red of him) but arranged in a circle, where each stage “integrates” and “transcends” the ones preceding it. If claiming that my stage is only higher in the sense that it includes and transcends yours isn’t the epitome of egotism (which, incidentally, is an attribute of the least integral stages in the rainbow wheel), I don’t know what is.

In the video of a talk at the Integral Institute, one of Wilber’s disciples addresses Thomas Keating and David Steindl-Rast, both Roman Catholic monks, as follows: “This might be a politically incorrect question, but are either of you aware of anybody in the college of cardinals who has a centre of gravity that could lead the church into orange and green?”

In plain English, he’s asking if there are any progressive cardinals in Rome who could make the Church more inclusive, more accepting of difference, more tolerant—i.e., more liberal. A great idea no doubt, but you see the implication. The question conceals a belief that people with a progressive worldview are not only right, they’re actually more evolved. The superiority of liberalism stems not from the power of its arguments but from nature itself. The cardinals in Rome never consciously chose their worldview; they just haven’t yet been “led” to the evolutionary stage where they will see the light. Perhaps all we need to do is mail the pope a copy of Wilber’s Brief History of Everything, or at the very least the latest book by the arguably Yellow-stage Deepak Chopra, to get the evolutionary machine grinding in Vatican City and turn the Roman Catholic Church into the Esalen Institute.

The fact that the questioner started off by confessing his political incorrectness is interesting, since political incorrectness is often synonymous with saying the thing that’s on everyone’s mind but that no one dares to say. There’s a tacit agreement in educated circles that the root cause of the bigotry of conservatives, rural hicks, neocons and Tea Party members is their incapacity to perceive reality because their consciousness isn’t evolved enough to do so.

That’s my beef with all this talk about the evolution of consciousness. It’s one thing to believe in ethical development and the virtues of tolerance, which I think are as important now as it ever was. It’s quite another to attribute these things to unstoppable forces of nature which have the peculiar tendency to favour white educated liberals. And it’s another thing again to think that history can be reduced to a linear ascension from primordial jelly to celestial being.

Wilber himself says that evolution is irreversible. Sure enough, it’s impossible to imagine a particular Homo sapiens turning back the clock to physically return to the Homo erectus stage. On the other hand, we can all too easily imagine a confirmed Yellow turning into a raging Red under the right circumstance—say, poverty or starvation or physical threat.  In other words, while the genome changes through a verifiable chain of cause and effect, every step forward in moral development is completely contingent. Maybe there’s wisdom to the Buddhist doctrine that in order to start on the path to enlightenment, one’s basic needs for food, shelter and health have to be covered. Moral excellence isn’t a right but a privilege.

The point is that biological evolution and spiritual progress are simply not the same thing. In fact they could be said to be at odds with each other. From a strictly naturalist viewpoint, we’d have to say that the most “evolved” people in the current sociopolitical system—the ones who will most successfully pass on their genes—are those who can best adapt to it and manipulate it to their advantage. These aren’t the people calling for change but those who profit from the status quo. There’s no place for the “wretched of the earth,” for heroes, saints, mystics and poets, in a purely evolutionary framework. Spiritual progress depends precisely on overcoming the tyranny of reflex and unconscious instinct. Getting back to semantics, perhaps what we need isn’t evolution at all but anti-evolution, counter-evolution, or just a plain revolution in the way we live with one another.

In my view, Terrence Malick gets to the heart of it in Tree of Life with his dichotomy of nature and grace. Evolution is nature’s game. But there’s another power at work in the universe, namely grace, which doesn’t evolve. It was there from the start, waiting perhaps for the emergence of a mind capable of entering into it. Through grace, the mind transcends itself and, in so doing, transfigures nature by revealing its terrible beauty. Humans have this unique capacity to get beyond the blind mechanics of nature through acts of creative love, what the Greeks called agape. This capacity didn’t evolve; it emerged from the mystery of consciousness, itself a gift that came to us from God knows where.

Agape isn’t the privilege of this or that social class, this or that tribe, this or that creed or colour-coded meme. We don’t become heroic by joining the clique that already claims to be enlightened. We become heroic by doing the right thing, by giving ourselves over to something that exceeds the biological imperative. This can’t happen in a group—it can only happen in individuals. The natural response to all of this, of course, is despair, because how could we expect everyone to individually choose to do what’s most difficult at the critical moment? As I see it, we have no option but to believe in the possibility, however remote, of an event—an apocalypse, literally a “lifting of the veil”—that will offer each of us the opportunity to make the leap. Given what’s going on in the world, it’s getting harder and harder for the skeptics to laugh off the predictions about 2012. The hour’s getting late. It may be possible that the Event is upon us, and that enough of us will heed its call to change the world through love.