Note: This abridged version of the original essay excludes my commentary on the infamous series of Ken Wilber blog posts—beginning with the “What We Are, That We See” post of of June 8, 2006—in which Wilber viciously attacks his critics and then claims to have been only testing his readers, fans, and any curious passers-by. If you don’t know what I am talking about, click here for the June 8, 2006 Wilber post that started it all. If that link doesn’t work, click here.

The life and career of Ken Wilber is nothing if not interesting. But a google search will reveal that beginning a few years ago, Wilber began losing former fans, readers, followers, and promoters. Why? Ken Wilber is a scholar, critic, teacher, observer, and prolific writer who has written extensively and critically about science, psychology, religion, and philosophy—eastern as well as western. But he is not himself a peer of those whose writings and work he reports and critiques. Not that you have to be an expert, on the cutting edge of a given line of research, to write about that field, but Wilber makes claims and gives critiques that only experts working in a given field are qualified or equipped to make.

Wilber’s pretensions to “expertise” mislead those new to his writings into attributing more importance and legitimacy to his models and ideas than they can sustain. Once a reader realizes—often only after years of study—that Wilber’s work has not been nor is it ever likely to be rigorously tried and tested through experiment and the anonymous, pre-publication peer-review process through which respected experimental results are made public, that reader will likely join the growing number of former fans and followers.

Wilber’s defacto role since the publication of The Spectrum of Consciousness and No Boundary in the late 1970s has been to introduce and popularize various important areas of thought and research in psychology, philosophy, the history of science, and comparative religion. There is a place and a need for someone who can do for philosophy, evolutionary biology, comparative religion, brain research, and consciousness studies what Isaac Asimov did for the subjects he took up: encyclopedic overviews of nearly every major field of science and mathematics, a historical guide to the Bible, annotated editions of Byron, Milton, Swift, and Gilbert and Sullivan, and classic long, short, and multivolume works of science fiction. Instead of the Einstein of consciousness—as he has been occasionally called—Ken Wilber might justifiably be considered its Asimov. Except Wilber would probably feel insulted to be so labeled. Too bad.

If Wilber acts quickly to reassess realistically what he has so far accomplished (he is now in his late 50s) and stop pretending to expertise in the subjects he chooses to write about, there might still be enough time for him to become the next Isaac Asimov: The Asimov of Consciousness, The Asimov of Eastern and Western Philosophy, The Asimov of World Religions, The Asimov of Psychology, The Asimov of Politics, The Asimov of Evolutionary Biology, The Asimov of Education, and so on: The Isaac Asimov of and for whatever subject he may in the future feel inspired to summarize, comment upon, and incorporate into his AQAL theory/map of everthing that is, has been, or will be, yesterday, today, tomorrow, and forever. Amen.

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