Boomeritis

A Novel That Will Set You Free

Year: 2002 · Format: Book

Description

Wilber's one novel: a satire of postmodern academic and New Age culture (his term "Boomeritis" names a narcissistic strain of Baby Boomer postmodernism), following a young protagonist through a series of encounters that also function as an extended self-commentary and appendix on integral theory.

In-Depth Overview

Wilber's only novel follows a young protagonist through UC Berkeley-adjacent academic postmodernism, campus politics, cults, and internet culture — episodic enough that it reads at times like a satirical tour of early-2000s culture-war territory. Its more distinctive feature structurally is that the fiction is interleaved with, and frequently interrupted by, long footnoted sidebars and appendices in which Wilber argues the nonfiction case directly — making the book roughly half novel, half continuation of the theoretical project from A Brief History of Everything, with the plot serving as illustration for the argument rather than the other way around.

The title term, "Boomeritis," names what Wilber diagnoses as a narcissistic strain within Baby Boomer-generation postmodern pluralism: a "green meme" worldview genuinely correct about the value of inclusion and the limits of rigid hierarchy, which curdles into self-contradiction when it denies that any developmental hierarchy exists at all — including the hierarchy that would rank its own perspective as more developed than the ones it's reacting against. Reception has been mixed: praised by some readers as an inventive way to make dense theory more approachable, criticized by others (including readers otherwise sympathetic to Wilber) as clunky and didactic as a novel in its own right. It remains the clearest single statement of the "boomeritis"/green-meme critique that recurs, more soberly, in his later political writing.

Notes

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