stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

542 STRIPPING THE GURUS
again readily recognize that where Bohm himself explicitly calls
something “white,” Wilber is claiming that Bohm has called it
“black,” and then deriding him for that, from no more than a
“straw man” perspective of Bohm’s work, which Wilber himself has
solely created.
If there is one overarching point which we can take from all
that, then, it would be that ideas which have been proved “wrong”
and “impossible” by seemingly watertight logical argument today
may well be shown to be not merely possible but unavoidable tomorrow.
Conversely, arguing so persuasively in favor of wrong or
grossly misrepresented ideas that they seem to be inarguably correct
can easily do more harm than good in the service of truth. In
such a case, merely “doing one’s best” to spread one’s preferred gospel,
whether integral or otherwise, is in no way “good enough.”
At any rate, a “late” answer to a critique is better than none at
all; and the interim absence of the same should never have been
confidently taken as a sign that the bold misrepresentations of
Bohm’s brilliant and precise work, on Wilber’s unapologetic and
inexcusably sloppy (“Mountain of Inattention”) part, were unanswerable.
As Robert Carroll (2003) has noted, Wilber’s half-baked arguments
against Darwinian evolution “dismiss one of the greatest
scientific ideas ever in a few paragraphs” of what can only charitably
be called gross misrepresentations. (Carroll himself uses much
stronger language. Good for him.) And having gotten away with
that sleight-of-mind, kw does exactly the same thing to another of
the truly “greatest scientific ideas” ever—in Bohm’s Nobel-caliber
reformulation of quantum mechanics—in a comparable number of
indefensibly ignorant paragraphs.
And that, in Wilber’s world, evidently qualifies as not merely
“professional competence” but as “facing the Truth, no matter what
the consequences.”
As Bugs Bunny would say, “Whadda maroon!”
Interestingly, Albert Einstein himself—a man not prone to endorsing
“epicycles” or “simplistic notions”—considered David Bohm
to be his “intellectual successor” and “intellectual son” (Peat, 1997):
It was Einstein who had said, referring to the need for a radical
new quantum theory, “if anyone can do it, then it will be
Bohm.”