Tag: books

Modernity: The Phase That Never Was

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6–8 minutes

We’re told we live in the Enlightenment, that Reason™ sits on the throne and superstition has been banished to the attic. Yet when I disguised a little survey as “metamodern,” almost none came out as fully Enlightened. Three managed to shed every trace of the premodern ghost, one Dutch wanderer bypassed Modernity entirely, and not a single soul emerged free of postmodern suspicion. So much for humanity’s great rational awakening. Perhaps Modernity wasn’t a phase we passed through at all, but a mirage we still genuflect before, a lifestyle brand draped over a naked emperor.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic

The Enlightenment as Marketing Campaign

The Enlightenment is sold to us as civilisation’s great coming-of-age: the dawn when the fog of superstition lifted and Reason took the throne. Kant framed it as “man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity” – an Enlightenment bumper sticker that academics still like to polish and reapply. But Kant wasn’t writing for peasants hauling mud or women without the vote; he was writing for his own coterie of powdered-wig mandarins, men convinced their own habits of rational debate were humanity’s new universal destiny.

Modernity, in this story, isn’t a historical stage we all inhabited. It’s an advertising campaign: Reason™ as lifestyle brand, equality as tagline, “progress” as the logo on the tote bag. Modernity, in the textbooks, is billed as a historical epoch, a kind of secular Pentecost in which the lights came on and we all finally started thinking for ourselves. In practice, it was more of a boutique fantasy, a handful of gentlemen mistaking their own rarefied intellectual posture for humanity’s destiny.

The Archetype That Nobody Lives In

At the core of the Enlightenment lies the archetype of Man™: rational, autonomous, unencumbered by superstition, guided by evidence, weighing pros and cons with the detachment of a celestial accountant. Economics repackaged him as homo economicus, forever optimising his utility function as if he were a spreadsheet in breeches.

But like all archetypes, this figure is a mirage. Our survey data, even when baited as a “metamodern survey”, never produced a “pure” Enlightenment subject.

  • 3 scored 0% Premodern (managing, perhaps, to kick the gods and ghosts to the kerb).
  • 1 scored 0% Modern (the Dutch outlier: 17% Premodern, 0% Modern, 83% Post, skipping the Enlightenment altogether, apparently by bike).
  • 0 scored 0% Postmodern. Every single participant carried at least some residue of suspicion, irony, or relativism.

The averages themselves were telling: roughly 18% Premodern, 45% Modern, 37% Postmodern. That’s not an age of Reason. That’s a muddle, a cocktail of priestly deference, rationalist daydreams, and ironic doubt.

Even the Greats Needed Their Crutches

If the masses never lived as Enlightenment subjects, what about the luminaries? Did they achieve the ideal? Hardly.

  • Descartes, desperate to secure the cogito, called in God as guarantor, dragging medieval metaphysics back on stage.
  • Kant built a cathedral of reason only to leave its foundations propped up by noumena: an unseeable, unknowable beyond.
  • Nietzsche, supposed undertaker of gods, smuggled in his own metaphysics of will to power and eternal recurrence.
  • William James, surveying the wreckage, declared that “truth” is simply “what works”, a sort of intellectual aspirin for the Enlightenment headache.

And economists, in a fit of professional humiliation, pared the rational subject down to a corpse on life support. Homo economicus became a creature who — at the very least, surely — wouldn’t choose to make himself worse off. But behavioural economics proved even that meagre hope to be a fantasy. People burn their wages on scratch tickets, sign up for exploitative loans, and vote themselves into oblivion because a meme told them to.

If even the “best specimens” never fully embodied the rational archetype, expecting Joe Everyman, who statistically struggles to parse a sixth-grade text and hasn’t cracked a book since puberty, to suddenly blossom into a mini-Kant is wishful thinking of the highest order.

The Dual Inertia

The real story isn’t progress through epochs; it’s the simultaneous drag of two kinds of inertia:

  • Premodern inertia: we still cling to sacred myths, national totems, and moral certainties.
  • Modern inertia: we still pretend the rational subject exists, because democracy, capitalism, and bureaucracy require him to.

The result isn’t a new epoch. It’s a cultural chimaera: half-superstitious, half-rationalist, shot through with irony. A mess, not a phase..

Arrow’s Mathematical Guillotine

Even if the Enlightenment dream of a rational demos were real, Kenneth Arrow proved it was doomed. His Impossibility Theorem shows that no voting system can turn individual rational preferences into a coherent “general will.” In other words, even a parliament of perfect Kants would deadlock when voting on dinner. The rational utopia is mathematically impossible.

So when we are told that democracy channels Reason, we should hear it as a polite modern incantation, no sturdier than a priest blessing crops.

Equality and the Emperor’s Wardrobe

The refrain comes like a hymn: “All men are created equal.” But the history is less inspiring. “Men” once meant property-owning Europeans; later it was generously expanded to mean all adult citizens who’d managed to stay alive until eighteen. Pass that biological milestone, and voilà — you are now certified Rational, qualified to determine the fate of nations.

And when you dare to question this threadbare arrangement, the chorus rises: “If you don’t like democracy, capitalism, or private property, just leave.” As if you could step outside the world like a theatre where the play displeases you. Heidegger’s Geworfenheit makes the joke bitter: we are thrown into this world without choice, and then instructed to exit if we find the wallpaper distasteful. Leave? To where, precisely? The void? Mars?

The Pre-Modern lord said: Obey, or be exiled. The Modern democrat says: Vote, or leave. And the Post-Enlightenment sceptic mutters: Leave? To where, exactly? Gravity? History? The species? There is no “outside” to exit into. The system is not a hotel; it’s the weather.

Here the ghost of Baudrillard hovers in the wings, pointing out that we are no longer defending Reason, but the simulacrum of Reason. The Emperor’s New Clothes parable once mocked cowardice: everyone saw the nudity but stayed silent. Our situation is worse. We don’t even see that the Emperor is naked. We genuinely believe in the fineries, the Democracy™, the Rational Man™, the sacred textile of Progress. And those who point out the obvious are ridiculed: How dare you mock such fineries, you cad!

Conclusion: The Comfort of a Ghost

So here we are, defending the ghost of a phase we never truly lived. We cling to Modernity as if it were a sturdy foundation, when in truth it was always an archetype – a phantom rational subject, a Platonic ideal projected onto a species of apes with smartphones. We mistook it for bedrock, built our institutions upon it, and now expend colossal energy propping up the papier-mâché ruins. The unfit defend it out of faith in their own “voice,” the elites defend it to preserve their privilege, and the rest of us muddle along pragmatically, dosing ourselves with Jamesian aspirin and pretending it’s progress.

Metamodernism, with its marketed oscillation between sincerity and irony, is less a “new stage” than a glossy rebranding of the same old admixture: a bit of myth, a bit of reason, a dash of scepticism. And pragmatism –James’s weary “truth is what works” – is the hangover cure that keeps us muddling through.

Modernity promised emancipation from immaturity. What we got was a new set of chains: reason as dogma, democracy as ritual, capitalism as destiny. And when we protest, the system replies with its favourite Enlightenment lullaby: If you don’t like it, just leave.

But you can’t leave. You were thrown here. What we call “Enlightenment” is not a stage in history but a zombie-simulation of an ideal that never drew breath. And yet, like villagers in Andersen’s tale, we not only guard the Emperor’s empty wardrobe – we see the garments as real. The Enlightenment subject is not naked. He is spectral, and we are the ones haunting him.

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Butler versus Butler (on a bed of Beauvoir)

Posted in agency, fiction, identity, language, modernism, perception, podcast, politics, psychology, sexuality, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment
2–3 minutes

I’ve been reading Octavia Butler’s Dawn and find myself restless. The book is often lauded as a classic of feminist science fiction, but I struggle with it. My problem isn’t with aliens, or even with science fiction tropes; it’s with the form itself, the Modernist project embedded in the genre, which insists on posing questions and then supplying answers, like a catechism for progress. Sci-Fi rarely leaves ambiguity alone; it instructs.

Find the companion piece on my Ridley Park blog.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast summarising this topic.

Beauvoir’s Ground

Simone de Beauvoir understood “woman” as the Other – defined in relation to men, consigned to roles of reproduction, care, and passivity. Her point was not that these roles were natural, but that they were imposed, and that liberation required stripping them away.

Octavia Butler’s Lilith

Lilith Iyapo, the protagonist of Dawn, should be radical. She is the first human awakened after Earth’s destruction, a Black woman given the impossible role of mediating between humans and aliens. Yet she is not allowed to resist her role so much as to embody it. She becomes the dutiful mother, the reluctant carer, the compliant negotiator. Butler’s narration frequently tells us what Lilith thinks and feels, as though to pre-empt the reader’s interpretation. She is less a character than an archetype: the “reasonable woman,” performing the script of liberal Western femininity circa the 1980s.

Judith Butler’s Lens

Judith Butler would have a field day with this. For her, gender is performative: not an essence but a repetition of norms. Agency, in her view, is never sovereign; it emerges, if at all, in the slippages of those repetitions. Read through this lens, Octavia Butler’s Lilith is not destabilising gender; she is repeating it almost too faithfully. The novel makes her into an allegory, a vessel for explaining and reassuring. She performs the role assigned and is praised for her compliance – which is precisely how power inscribes itself.

Why Sci-Fi Leaves Me Cold

This helps me understand why science fiction so often fails to resonate with me. The problem isn’t the speculative element; I like the idea of estrangement, of encountering the alien. The problem is the Modernist scaffolding that underwrites so much of the genre: the drive to solve problems, to instruct the reader, to present archetypes as universal stand-ins. I don’t identify with that project. I prefer literature that unsettles rather than reassures, that leaves questions open rather than connecting the dots.

So, Butler versus Butler on the bedrock of Beauvoir: one Butler scripting a woman into an archetype, another Butler reminding us that archetypes are scripts. And me, somewhere between them, realising that my discomfort with Dawn is not just with the book but with a genre that still carries the DNA of the very Modernism it sometimes claims to resist.

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Keeping Ourselves in the Dark: Depressive Realism and the Fiction of Agency

Posted in agency, language, modernism, morality, perception, philosophy, podcast, politics, postmodernism, power, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Philosopher Muse brought Colin Feltham to my attention, so I read his Keeping Ourselves in the Dark. It’s in limited supply, so I found an online copy.

So much of modern life rests on promises of improvement. Governments promise progress, religions promise redemption, therapists promise healing. Feltham’s Keeping Ourselves in the Dark (2015) takes a blunt axe to this edifice. In a series of sharp, aphoristic fragments, he suggests that most of these promises are self-deceptions. They keep us busy and comforted, but they do not correspond to the reality of our condition. For Feltham, reality is not an upward arc but a fog – a place of incoherence, accident, and suffering, which we disguise with stories of hope.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast summarising this post.

It is a book that situates itself in a lineage of pessimism. Like Schopenhauer, Feltham thinks life is saturated with dissatisfaction. Like Emil Cioran, he delights in puncturing illusions. Like Peter Wessel Zapffe, he worries that consciousness is an overdeveloped faculty, a tragic gift that leaves us exposed to too much meaninglessness.

Depressive Realism – Lucidity or Illusion?

One of Feltham’s recurring themes is the psychological idea of “depressive realism.” Researchers such as Lauren Alloy and Lyn Abramson suggested that depressed individuals may judge reality more accurately than their non-depressed peers, particularly when it comes to their own lack of control. Where the “healthy” mind is buoyed by optimism bias, the depressed mind may be sober.

Feltham uses this as a pivot: if the depressed see things more clearly, then much of what we call mental health is simply a shared delusion, a refusal to see the world’s bleakness. He is not romanticising depression, but he is deliberately destabilising the assumption that cheerfulness equals clarity.

Here I find myself diverging. Depression is not simply lucidity; it is also, inescapably, a condition of suffering. To say “the depressed see the truth” risks sanctifying what is, for those who live it, a heavy and painful distortion. Following Foucault, I would rather say that “mental illness” is itself a category of social control – but that does not mean the suffering it names is any less real.

Video: Depressive Realism by Philosopher Muse, the impetus for this blog article

Agency Under the Same Shadow

Feltham’s suspicion of optimism resonates with other critiques of human self-concepts. Octavia Butler, in her fiction and theory, often frames “agency” as a structural mirage: we think we choose, but our choices are already scripted by language and power. Jean-Paul Sartre, on the other hand, insists on the opposite extremity: that we are “condemned to be free,” responsible even for our refusal to act. Howard Zinn echoes this in his famous warning that “you can’t be neutral on a moving train.”

My own work, the Language Insufficiency Hypothesis, takes a fourth line. Like Feltham, I doubt that our central myths – agency, freedom, progress – correspond to any stable reality. But unlike him, I do not think stripping them away forces us into depressive despair. The feeling of depression is itself another state, another configuration of affect and narrative. To call it “realistic” is to smuggle in a judgment, as though truth must wound.

Agency, Optimism, and Their Kin

Feltham’s bleak realism has interesting affinities with other figures who unpick human self-mythology:

  • Octavia Butler presents “agency” itself as a kind of structural illusion. From the Oankali’s alien vantage in Dawn, humanity looks like a single destructive will, not a set of sovereign choosers.
  • Sartre, by contrast, radicalises agency: even passivity is a choice; we are condemned to be free.
  • Howard Zinn universalises responsibility in a similar register: “You can’t be neutral on a moving train.”
  • Cioran and Zapffe, like Feltham, treat human self-consciousness as a trap, a source of suffering that no optimistic narrative can finally dissolve.

Across these positions, the common thread is suspicion of the Enlightenment story in which rational agency and progress are guarantors of meaning. Some embrace the myth, some invert it, some discard it.

Dis-integration Rather Than Despair

Where pessimists like Feltham (or Cioran, or Zapffe) tend to narrate our condition as tragic, my “dis-integrationist” view is more Zen: the collapse of our stories is not a disaster but a fact. Consciousness spins myths of control and meaning; when those myths fail, we may feel disoriented, but that disorientation is simply another mode of being. There is no imperative to replace one illusion with another – whether it is progress, will, or “depressive clarity.”

From this perspective, life is not rescued by optimism, nor is it condemned by realism. It is simply flux, dissonance, and transient pattern. The task is not to shore up agency but to notice its absence without rushing to fill the void with either hope or despair.

Four Ways to Mistake Agency

I’ve long wrestled with the metaphysical aura that clings to “agency.” I don’t buy it. Philosophers – even those I’d have thought would know better – keep smuggling it back into their systems, as though “will” or “choice” were some indispensable essence rather than a narrative convenience.

Take the famous mid-century split: Sartre insisted we are “condemned to be free,” and so must spend that freedom in political action; Camus shrugged at the same premise and redirected it toward art, creation in the face of absurdity. Different prescriptions, same underlying assumption – that agency is real, universal, and cannot be escaped.

What if that’s the problem? What if “agency” is not a fact of human being but a Modernist fable, a device designed to sustain certain worldviews – freedom, responsibility, retribution – that collapse without it?

Sartre and Zinn: Agency as Compulsion

Sartre insists: “There are no innocent victims. Even inaction is a choice.” Zinn echoes: “You can’t be neutral on a moving train.” Both rhetorics collapse hesitation, fatigue, or constraint into an all-encompassing voluntarism. The train is rolling, and you are guilty for sitting still.

Feltham’s Depressive Realism

Colin Feltham’s Keeping Ourselves in the Dark extends the thesis: our optimism and “progress” are delusions. He leans into “depressive realism,” suggesting that the depressive gaze is clearer, less self-deceived. Here, too, agency is unmasked as myth – but the myth is replaced with another story, one of lucidity through despair.

A Fourth Position: Dis-integration

Where I diverge is here: why smuggle in judgment at all? Butler, Sartre, Zinn, Feltham each turn absence into a moral. They inflate or invert “agency” so it remains indispensable. My sense is more Zen: perhaps agency is not necessary. Not as fact, not as fiction, not even as a tragic lack.

Life continues without it. Stabilisers cling to the cart, Tippers tip, Egoists recline, Sycophants ride the wake, Survivors endure. These are dispositions, not decisions. The train moves whether or not anyone is at the controls. To say “you chose” is to mistake drift for will, inertia for responsibility.

From this angle, nihilism doesn’t require despair. It is simply the atmosphere we breathe. Meaning and will are constructs that serve Modernist institutions – law, nation, punishment. Remove them, and nothing essential is lost, except the illusion that we were ever driving.

Octavia E Butler’s Alien Verdict

Not Judith Buthler. In the opening of Dawn, the Oankali tell Lilith: “You committed mass suicide.” The charge erases distinctions between perpetrators, victims, resisters, and bystanders. From their vantage, humanity is one agent, one will. A neat explanation – but a flattening nonetheless.

👉 Full essay: On Agency, Suicide, and the Moving Train

Why Feltham Matters

Even if one resists his alignment of depression with truth, Feltham’s work is valuable as a counterweight to the cult of positivity. It reminds us that much of what we call “mental health” or “progress” depends on not seeing too clearly the futility, fragility, and cruelty that structure our world.

Where he sees darkness as revelation, I see it as atmosphere: the medium in which we always already move. To keep ourselves in the dark is not just to lie to ourselves, but to continue walking the tracks of a train whose destination we do not control. Feltham’s bleak realism, like Butler’s alien rebuke or Sartre’s burden of freedom, presses us to recognise that what we call “agency” may itself be part of the dream.

On Agency, Suicide, and the Moving Train

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I’ve been working through the opening chapters of Octavia Butler’s Dawn. At one point, the alien Jdahya tells Lilith, “We watched you commit mass suicide.”*

The line unsettles not because of the apocalypse itself, but because of what it presumes: that “humanity” acted as one, as if billions of disparate lives could be collapsed into a single decision. A few pulled triggers, a few applauded, some resisted despite the odds, and most simply endured. From the alien vantage, nuance vanishes. A species is judged by its outcome, not by the uneven distribution of responsibility that produced it.

This is hardly foreign to us. Nationalism thrives on the same flattening. We won the war. We lost the match. A handful act; the many claim the glory or swallow the shame by association. Sartre takes it further with his “no excuses” dictum, even to do nothing is to choose. Howard Zinn’s “You can’t remain neutral on a moving train” makes the same move, cloaked in the borrowed authority of physics. Yet relativity undermines it: on the train, you are still; on the ground, you are moving. Whether neutrality is possible depends entirely on your frame of reference.

What all these formulations share is a kind of metaphysical inflation. “Agency” is treated as a universal essence, something evenly spread across the human condition. But in practice, it is anything but. Most people are not shaping history; they are being dragged along by it.

One might sketch the orientations toward the collective “apple cart” like this:

  • Tippers with a vision: the revolutionaries, ideologues, or would-be prophets who claim to know how the cart should be overturned.
  • Sycophants: clinging to the side, riding the momentum of others’ power, hoping for crumbs.
  • Egoists: indifferent to the cart’s fate, focused on personal comfort, advantage, or escape.
  • Stabilisers: most people, clinging to the cart as it wobbles, preferring continuity to upheaval.
  • Survivors: those who endure, waiting out storms, not out of “agency” but necessity.

The Stabilisers and Survivors blur into the same crowd, the former still half-convinced their vote between arsenic and cyanide matters, the latter no longer believing the story at all. They resemble Seligman’s shocked dogs, conditioned to sit through pain because movement feels futile.

And so “humanity” never truly acts as one. Agency is uneven, fragile, and often absent. Yet whether in Sartre’s philosophy, Zinn’s slogans, or Jdahya’s extraterrestrial indictment, the temptation is always to collapse plurality into a single will; you chose this, all of you. It is neat, rhetorically satisfying, and yet wrong.

Perhaps Butler’s aliens, clinical in their judgment, are simply holding up a mirror to the fictions we already tell about ourselves.

As an aside, this version of the book cover is risible. Not to devolve into identity politics, but Lilith is a dark-skinned woman, not a pale ginger. I can only assume that some target science fiction readers have a propensity to prefer white, sapphic adjacent characters.

I won’t even comment further on the faux 3D title treatment, relic of 1980s marketing.

* Spoiler Alert: As this statement about mass suicide is a Chapter 2 event, I am not inclined to consider it a spoiler. False alarm.

Sustenance Novella free on Kindle

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On 7–8 September 2025, the Kindle version of my Ridley Park novella Sustenance will be available free to everyone on Amazon. (It’s always free if you’re a KindleUnlimited member, but these two days open it up to all readers.)

👉 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F9PTK9N2

So what is Sustenance?

It’s a novella that begins with the dust and grit of rural Iowa – soybean fields, rusted trucks, a small town where everyone knows your name (and your secrets). At first glance, it reads like plainspoken realism, narrated by a local mechanic who insists he’s just a “regular guy.” But then the ground literally shifts. A crash. Figures glimpsed by firelight in the woods. Naked, violet-skinned beings who don’t laugh, don’t sleep, don’t even breathe.

What follows is not your usual alien-invasion story. It’s quieter, stranger, and more unsettling. The encounters with the visitors aren’t about lasers or spaceships – they’re about language, culture, and the limits of human understanding. What happens when concepts like property, law, or even woman and man don’t translate? What does it mean when intimacy itself becomes a site of misunderstanding?

Sustenance is for readers who:

  • Gravitate toward literary fiction with a speculative edge rather than straight genre beats
  • Appreciate the mix of the banal and the uncanny – the smell of corn dust giving way to the shock of alien otherness
  • Are interested in themes of language, power, misunderstanding, and human self-deception
  • Enjoy writers like Jeff VanderMeer, Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, or Denis Johnson – voices that blur realism, philosophy, and estrangement

This isn’t a story that offers tidy answers. It lingers, provokes, and resists easy moral closure. Think of it less as a sci-fi romp and more as a philosophical fable wrapped in small-town dust and cicada-song.

This version of the book is available in these Kindle storefronts:
United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, Japan, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Australia, and India

For more details, visit the Sustenance page.

📚 Grab your free Kindle copy on 7–8 September 2025

Why a Free Copy of Sustenance?

I made this Kindle version available for free to get some reviews. This promotion is all or nothing, so take advantage of the opportunity. If you want to leave a review, please do.

The Enlightenment: A Postmortem

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Or: How the Brightest Ideas in Europe Got Us into This Bloody Mess

Disclaimer: This output is entirely ChatGPT 4o from a conversation on the failure and anachronism of Enlightenment promises. I’m trying to finish editing my next novel, so I can’t justify taking much more time to share what are ultimately my thoughts as expounded upon by generative AI. I may comment personally in future. Until then, this is what I have to share.

AI Haters, leave now or perish ye all hope.

The Enlightenment promised us emancipation from superstition, authority, and ignorance. What we got instead was bureaucracy, colonialism, and TED Talks. We replaced divine right with data dashboards and called it progress. And like any good inheritance, the will was contested, and most of us ended up with bugger-all.

Below, I take each Enlightenment virtue, pair it with its contemporary vice, and offer a detractor who saw through the Enlightenment’s powder-wigged charade. Because if we’re going down with this ship, we might as well point out the dry rot in the hull.

1. Rationalism

The Ideal: Reason shall lead us out of darkness.
The Reality: Reason led us straight into the gas chambers—with bureaucratic precision.

Detractor: Max Horkheimer & Theodor Adorno

“Enlightenment is totalitarian.”
—Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944)

Horkheimer and Adorno saw what reason looks like when it slips off its leash. Instrumental rationality, they warned, doesn’t ask why—it only asks how efficiently. The result? A world where extermination is scheduled, costs are optimised, and ethics are politely filed under “subjective.”

2. Empiricism

The Ideal: Observation and experience will uncover truth.
The Reality: If it can’t be measured, it can’t be real. (Love? Not statistically significant.)

Detractor: Michel Foucault

“Truth isn’t outside power… truth is a thing of this world.”
—Power/Knowledge (1977)

Foucault dismantled the whole edifice. Knowledge isn’t neutral; it’s an instrument of power. Empiricism becomes just another way of disciplining the body—measuring skulls, classifying deviants, and diagnosing women with “hysteria” for having opinions.

3. Individualism

The Ideal: The sovereign subject, free and self-determining.
The Reality: The atomised consumer, trapped in a feedback loop of self-optimisation.

Detractor: Jean Baudrillard

“The individual is no longer an autonomous subject but a terminal of multiple networks.”
—Simulacra and Simulation (1981)

You wanted autonomy? You got algorithms. Baudrillard reminds us that the modern “individual” is a brand in search of market validation. You are free to be whoever you want, provided it fits within platform guidelines and doesn’t disrupt ad revenue.

4. Secularism

The Ideal: Liberation from superstition.
The Reality: We swapped saints for STEMlords and called it even.

Detractor: Charles Taylor

“We are now living in a spiritual wasteland.”
—A Secular Age (2007)

Taylor—perhaps the most polite Canadian apocalypse-whisperer—reminds us that secularism didn’t replace religion with reason; it replaced mystery with malaise. We’re no longer awed, just “motivated.” Everything is explainable, and yet somehow nothing means anything.

5. Progress

The Ideal: History is a forward march toward utopia.
The Reality: History is a meat grinder in a lab coat.

Detractor: Walter Benjamin

“The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned.”
—Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940)

Benjamin’s “angel of history” watches helplessly as the wreckage piles up—colonialism, genocide, climate collapse—all in the name of progress. Every step forward has a cost, but we keep marching, noses in the spreadsheet, ignoring the bodies behind us.

6. Universalism

The Ideal: One humanity, under Reason.
The Reality: Enlightenment values, brought to you by cannon fire and Christian missionaries.

Detractor: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

“White men are saving brown women from brown men.”
—Can the Subaltern Speak? (1988)

Universalism was always a bit… French, wasn’t it? Spivak unmasks it as imperialism in drag—exporting “rights” and “freedom” to people who never asked for them, while ignoring the structural violence built into the Enlightenment’s own Enlightened societies.

7. Tolerance

The Ideal: Let a thousand opinions bloom.
The Reality: Tolerance, but only for those who don’t threaten the status quo.

Detractor: Karl Popper

“Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance.”
—The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945)

Popper, bless him, thought tolerance needed a firewall. But in practice, “tolerance” has become a smug liberal virtue signalling its own superiority while deplatforming anyone who makes the dinner party uncomfortable. We tolerate all views—except the unseemly ones.

8. Scientific Method

The Ideal: Observe, hypothesise, repeat. Truth shall emerge.
The Reality: Publish or perish. Fund or flounder.

Detractor: Paul Feyerabend

“Science is not one thing, it is many things.”
—Against Method (1975)

Feyerabend called the whole thing a farce. There is no single “method,” just a bureaucratic orthodoxy masquerading as objectivity. Today, science bends to industry, cherry-picks for grants, and buries null results in the backyard. Peer review? More like peer pressure.

9. Anti-Authoritarianism

The Ideal: Smash the throne! Burn the mitre!
The Reality: Bow to the data analytics team.

Detractor: Herbert Marcuse

“Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.”
—One-Dimensional Man (1964)

Marcuse skewered the liberal illusion of choice. We may vote, but we do so within a system that already wrote the script. Authority didn’t vanish; it just became procedural, faceless, algorithmic. Bureaucracy is the new monarchy—only with more forms.

10. Education and Encyclopaedism

The Ideal: All knowledge, accessible to all minds.
The Reality: Behind a paywall. Written in impenetrable prose. Moderated by white men with tenure.

Detractor: Ivan Illich

“School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is.”
—Deschooling Society (1971)

Illich pulls the curtain: education isn’t emancipatory; it’s indoctrinatory. The modern university produces not thinkers but credentialed employees. Encyclopaedias are replaced by Wikipedia, curated by anonymous pedants and revision wars. Truth is editable.

Postscript: Picking through the Rubble

So—has the Enlightenment failed?

Not exactly. It succeeded too literally. It was taken at its word. Its principles, once radical, were rendered banal. It’s not that reason, progress, or rights are inherently doomed—it’s that they were never as pure as advertised. They were always products of their time: male, white, bourgeois, and utterly convinced of their own benevolence.

If there’s a path forward, it’s not to restore Enlightenment values, but to interrogate them—mercilessly, with irony and eyes open.

After all, the problem was never darkness. It was the people with torches who thought they’d found the only path.

From Thesaurus to Thoughtcrime: The Slippery Slope of Authorial Purity

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I had planned to write about Beauvoir’s Second Sex, but this has been on my mind lately.

There’s a certain breed of aspiring author, let’s call them the Sacred Scribes, who bristle at the notion of using AI to help with their writing. Not because it’s unhelpful. Not because it produces rubbish. But because it’s impure.

Like some Victorian schoolmarm clutching her pearls at the sight of a split infinitive, they cry: “If you let the machine help you fix a clumsy sentence, what’s next? The whole novel? Your diary? Your soul?”

The panic is always the same: one small compromise and you’re tumbling down the greased chute of creative ruin. It starts with a synonym suggestion and ends with a ghostwritten autobiography titled My Journey to Authenticity, dictated by chatbot, of course.

But let’s pause and look at the logic here. Or rather, the lack thereof.

By this standard, you must also renounce the thesaurus. Shun the spellchecker. Burn your dictionary. Forbid yourself from reading any book you might accidentally learn from. Heaven forbid you read a well-constructed sentence and think, “I could try that.” That’s theft, isn’t it?

And while we’re at it, no editors. No beta readers. No workshopping. No taking notes. Certainly no research. If your brain didn’t birth it in a vacuum, it’s suspect. It’s borrowed. It’s… contaminated.

Let’s call this what it is: purity fetishism in prose form.

But here’s the twist: it’s not new. Plato, bless him, was already clutching his tunic about this twenty-four centuries ago. In Phaedrus, he warned that writing itself would be the death of memory, of real understanding. Words on the page were a crutch. Lazy. A hollow imitation of wisdom. True knowledge lived in the mind, passed orally, and refined through dialogue. Writing, he said, would make us forgetful, outsource our thinking.

Sound familiar?

Fast forward a few millennia, and we’re hearing the same song, remixed for the AI age:
“If you let ChatGPT restructure your second paragraph, you’re no longer the author.”
Nonsense. You were never the sole author. Not even close.

Everything you write is a palimpsest, your favourite genres echoing beneath the surface, your heroes whispering in your turns of phrase. You’re just remixing the residue. And there’s no shame in that. Unless, of course, you believe that distilling your top five comfort reads into a Frankenstein narrative somehow makes you an oracle of literary genius.

Here’s the rub: You’ve always been collaborating.

With your past. With your influences. With your tools. With language itself, which you did not invent and barely control. Whether the suggestion comes from a friend, an editor, a margin note, or an algorithm, what matters is the choice you make with it. That’s authorship. Let’s not play the slippery slope game.

The slippery slope argument collapses under its own weight. No one accuses you of cheating when you use a pencil sharpener. Or caffeine. Or take a walk to clear your head. But involve a silicon co-author, and suddenly you’re the Antichrist of Art?

Let’s not confuse integrity with insecurity. Let’s not confuse control with fear.

Use the tool. Ignore the purists. They’ve been wrong since Plato, and they’ll still be wrong when your great-grandchildren are dictating novels to a neural implant while bathing in synthetic dopamine.

The future of writing is always collaborative. The only question is whether you’ll join the conversation or sit in the corner, scribbling manifestos by candlelight, declaring war on electricity.

Understanding Generative AI

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Ok. I admit this is an expansive claim, but I write about the limitations on generative artificial intelligence relative to writers. I wrote this after encountering several Reddit responses by writers who totally misunderstand how AI works. They won’t read this, but you might want to.

The AI Isn’t Coming for Your Manuscript, Karen
Click to visit the Ridley Park Blog for this article and podcast
Video: Cybernetic robot assisting a female writer (or stealing her work)

The Heuristic Self: On Persona, Identity, and Character

Posted in agency, consciousness, fiction, identity, language, morality, perception, philosophy, podcast, prostitution, psychology, sexuality, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”
— Oscar Wilde

Identity is an illusion—but a necessary one. It’s a shortcut. A heuristic, evolved not for truth but for coherence. We reduce ourselves and others to fixed traits to preserve continuity—psychological, social, narrative.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic. (Direct)
https://open.spotify.com/episode/0mMqpb8xblpQP6SK3qcJUD?si=CPv6HZGwToSiIO1JZtbEzw

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic. (Spotify)

But what if continuity is a lie?

In the latest post on RidleyPark.blog, we meet Sarah—a woman who survives by splintering. She has three names, three selves, three economies of interaction. Each persona—Sarah, Stacey, and Pink—fulfils a role. Each protects her in a system that punishes complexity.

And yet, this isn’t fiction. It’s reality intensified.

Identity Is Compression

Cognitive science suggests that we don’t possess a self—we perform one. Our so-called identity is assembled post-hoc from memory, context, and social cues. It’s recursive. It’s inferred.

We are not indivisible atoms of identity. We are bundled routines, personae adapted to setting and audience.

This is not pathology. It’s strategy.

From Performance to Survival

In Needle’s Edge, Sarah doesn’t use aliases to deceive. She uses them to survive contradictions:

  • Stacey is desirable, stable, and profitable—so long as she appears clean and composed.
  • Pink is a consumer, invisible, stripped of glamour but allowed access to the block.
  • Sarah is the residue, the name used by those who once knew her—or still believe they do.

Each persona comes with scripts, limitations, and permissions. Sarah isn’t being dishonest. She’s practicing domain-specific identity. This is no different from how professionals code-switch at work, or how people self-edit on social media.

It’s just more raw. More urgent. Less optional.

The Literary Echo

In character development, we often demand “depth,” by which we mean contradiction. We want to see a character laugh and break. Love and lie. But Sarah shows us that contradiction isn’t depth—it’s baseline reality. Any singular identity would be a narrative failure.

Characters like Sarah expose the poverty of reduction. They resist archetype. They remind us that fiction succeeds when it reflects the multiple, the shifting, the incompatible—which is to say, the real.

What Else Might We Say?

  • That authenticity is a myth: “Just be yourself” presumes you know which self to be.
  • That moral judgment often stems from a failure to see multiple selves in others.
  • That trauma survivors often fracture not because they’re broken, but because fracturing is adaptive.
  • That in a capitalist framework, the ability to fragment and role-play becomes a survival advantage.
  • That fiction is one of the few spaces where we can explore multiple selves without collapse.

The Missing Link

For a concrete, narrative reflection of these ideas, this post on RidleyPark.blog explores how one woman carries three selves to survive three worlds—and what it costs her.

Jordan Peterson: Derivative, Disingenuous, and (Hopefully) Done

Posted in morality, perception, philosophy, podcast, postmodernism, power, psychology, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

I don’t like most of Jordan Peterson’s positions. There – I’ve said it. The man, once ubiquitous, seems to have faded into the woodwork, though no doubt his disciples still cling to his every word as if he were a modern-day oracle. But recently, I caught a clip of him online, and it dredged up the same bad taste, like stumbling upon an old, forgotten sandwich at the back of the fridge.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic

Let’s be clear. My distaste for Peterson isn’t rooted in petty animosity. It’s because his material is, in my view, derivative and wrong. And by wrong, I mean I disagree with him – a subtle distinction, but an important one. There’s nothing inherently shameful about being derivative. We all are, to some extent. No thinker sprouts fully-formed from the head of Zeus. The issue is when you’re derivative and act as if you’ve just split the atom of human insight.

Peterson tips his hat to Nietzsche – fair enough – but buries his far greater debt to Jung under layers of self-mythologising. He parades his ideas before audiences, many of whom lack the background to spot the patchwork, and gaslights them into believing they’re witnessing originality. They’re not. They’re witnessing a remixed greatest-hits album, passed off as a debut.

Image: Gratuitous, mean-spirited meme.

Now, I get it. My ideas, too, are derivative. Sometimes it’s coincidence – great minds and all that – but when I trace the thread back to its source, I acknowledge it. Nietzsche? Subjectivity of morality. Foucault? Power dynamics. Wittgenstein? The insufficiency of language. I owe debts to many more: Galen Strawson, Richard Rorty, Raymond Geuss – the list goes on, and I’d gladly share my ledger. But Peterson? The man behaves as though he invented introspection.

And when I say I disagree, let’s not confuse that with some claim to divine epistemic certainty. I don’t mean he’s objectively wrong (whatever that means in the grand circus of philosophy). I mean, I disagree. If I did, well, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, would we? That’s the tragicomedy of epistemology: so many positions, so little consensus.

But here’s where my patience truly snaps: Peterson’s prescriptivism. His eagerness to spew what I see as bad ideology dressed up as universal truth. Take his stance on moral objectivism—possibly his most egregious sin. He peddles this as if morality were some Platonic form, gleaming and immutable, rather than what it is: a human construct, riddled with contingency and contradiction.

And let’s not even get started on his historical and philosophical cherry-picking. His commentary on postmodern thought alone is a masterclass in either wilful misreading or, more likely, not reading at all. Straw men abound. Bogeymen are conjured, propped up, and ritually slaughtered to rapturous applause. It’s intellectually lazy and, frankly, beneath someone of his ostensible stature.

I can only hope we’ve seen the last of this man in the public sphere. And if not? Well, may he at least reform his ways—though I shan’t be holding my breath.