As I was preparing another essay – an essay on the rhetoric of evil – I had a thought about the relative intersubjectivity of subjectivity.
If one takes subjectivity seriously – not the Hollywood version with self-made heroes, but the real creature stitched together from language, history, and whatever emotional debris it stepped in on the way to adulthood – then one ends up somewhere awkward: the relative intersubjectivity of subjectivity.
Video: Two red figures walking (no sound)
Which is to say, we’re all standing on conceptual scaffolding built by other people, insisting it’s solid marble. A charming fiction, until we apply it to anything with moral voltage. ‘Evil’, for instance, collapses the moment you remove the demonological life-support and notice it’s little more than a child’s intensifier strapped to a cultural power tool.
More on that later. For now, just sit with the discomfort that the ‘self’ making moral judgments is already a negotiated artefact – relational, compromised, and never as autonomous as it pretends.
My philosophical critique, not of the book Why Democrats Are Dangerous, but of the two warring factions in United States politics – mind you, partisanship not limited to the US – sparked the ire of defenders of their respective turf. ‘You’ve got it wrong. Those other people are either addleheaded or abject evil’ is a consolidation of responses from both sides of the aisle. I’ve crafted a response.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast on this topic.
It’s perfectly true that I occupy a perspective. Everyone does. This isn’t a confession; it’s a structural feature of being human. Consciousness is perspectival by design. We don’t get to hover above the world like disembodied CCTV cameras. We look from somewhere.
But acknowledging one’s perspective is not the same thing as being trapped in a rut. A rut implies unexamined repetition, reflex, and dogma. A perspective implies angle, interpretation, intellectual stance. The accusation I’m hearing – ‘you’re in a rut too’ – is not actually an argument. It’s an attempt to delegitimise the analysis without engaging with it.
It says nothing about whether my observation is true, coherent, or well-reasoned; it merely notes that I, like every other speaking organism on the planet, occupy a position. And from this banal fact it attempts to smuggle in a conclusion: that my critique is thereby invalid. It’s a sleight of hand, and a clumsy one.
If someone believes I’m wrong, they are welcome – encouraged, even – to demonstrate:
where the logic fails
where the evidence contradicts me
where the symmetry is mischaracterised
where the interpretation distorts rather than illuminates
That is argumentation.
What they are offering instead is a sort of epistemic shrug: ‘You’re in a perspective, therefore you have no authority’. This is an ad hominem in a trench coat, pretending to be profundity.
The irony, of course, is that the people making this charge never seem to apply it to themselves. Their own viewpoint, naturally, is not a rut but a ‘stance’, ‘framework’, ‘tradition’, ‘bedrock’, or ‘fact’. Only the critic has perspective; they merely have truth.
But here’s the critical distinction:
Having a perspective does not invalidate an analysis, and pretending not to have one does.
The entire Anti-Enlightenment project rests on this recognition: that all human positions are mediated, situated, incomplete – and yet still capable of meaningful observation. You don’t escape your perspective by denying it; you escape dogma by interrogating it.
If someone wishes to rebut what I’ve written, they should do so directly, with evidence, reasoning, or counterexamples. If all they offer is ‘well, you’re biased too’, then they’ve conceded the argument by refusing to enter it.
A perspective is not a rut. A rut is what happens when you can’t tell the difference.
My colleague of several decades recently published a book titled Why Democrats Are Dangerous. Drew and I have long held opposing but genuinely respectful views on the political economy, a fact that once felt like a quaint relic of an earlier civic age. As we are both authors, he proposed that we exchange titles and review each other’s work. I demurred. One can often discern the contents of a book from its cover, and this one announced itself with all the subtlety of a campaign leaflet left in the rain. I am not allergic to polemic – heaven knows I have written my share – but some energies telegraph their intentions too cleanly. This one did.
Having now read the book, my hesitation appears justified. The project is less an argument than a catechism, less analysis than incantation. It is earnest, certainly; it is also tightly scripted by a worldview that permits only one conclusion, however much data must be dragged across broken glass to reach it.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast on this topic.
Rather than provide a review in the conventional sense – line-by-line rebuttal, forensic counter-examples, polite throat-clearing – I have chosen a different approach. I intend to reconstruct, or more precisely dis-integrate, the book through several strands of my own work. Not because my work is above reproach, but because it offers a conceptual toolkit for understanding how such texts arise, how they persuade, and how they hold themselves together despite their internal tension. This also has the ancillary benefit of allowing me to abridge my commentary: where a full exegesis would sprawl, I can gesture toward an existing essay or argument. I’ll dispense with addressing Drew by name, preferring to remain more neutral going forward.
A Note on My Position (So No One Misreads My Motives)
Before proceeding, a brief clarification. I do not belong to either of America’s warring political tribes, nor do I subscribe to their underlying ideological architectures. My critique is not an act of partisan reprisal; it is not a defence of Democrats, nor a veiled endorsement of Republicans. The Red–Blue cosmology bores me senseless. It is a quarrel between two anachronistic Enlightenment-era faith traditions, each convinced of its moral superiority and each engaged in the same ritualised dance of blame, projection, and existential theatre.
My vantage point, such as it is, sits outside that binary. This affords me a certain privilege – not superiority, merely distance. I do not have a factional identity to defend, no emotional investment in preserving the moral innocence of one side or the other. I am therefore free to examine the structure of my colleague’s argument without the usual tribal pressures to retaliate in kind.
This criticism is not a counter-polemic. It is an analysis of a worldview, not a combatant in its quarrel. If my tone occasionally cuts, it cuts from the outside, not across partisan lines. The book is not wrong because it is Republican; it is wrong because its epistemology is brittle, its categories incoherent, and its confidence unearned. The same critique would apply – indeed does apply – to the Democratic mirrors of this worldview.
My loyalty is not to a party but to a method: Dis-Integration, analysis, and the slow, patient unravelling of certainty.
The Architecture of Certainty
What strikes one first in Why Democrats Are Dangerous is not the argument but the architecture – an edifice built on the most cherished Enlightenment fantasy of all: that one’s own position is not a perspective but the Truth. Everything else cascades from this initial presumption. Once a worldview grants itself the status of a natural law, dissent becomes pathology, disagreement becomes malice, and the opposition becomes a civilisation-threatening contagion.
My colleague’s book is a textbook case of this structure. It is not an analysis of political actors within a shared world; it is a morality play in which one faction is composed entirely of vices, and the other entirely of virtues. The Democrats are ‘Ignorant, Unrealistic, Deceitful, Ruthless, Unaccountable, Strategic‘, a hexagon of sin so geometrically perfect it would make Aquinas blush. Republicans, by contrast, drift serenely through the text untouched by human flaw, except insofar as they suffer nobly under the weight of their opponents’ manipulations.
This is not political argumentation. This is cosmogony.
This, of course, is where my Anti-Enlightenment work becomes diagnostic. The Enlightenment promised universality and rational clarity, yet modern political identities behave more like hermetic cults, generating self-sealing narratives immune to external correction. A worldview built upon presumed objectivity must resolve any contradiction by externalising it onto the Other. Thus, the opposition becomes omnipotent when things go wrong (‘They control the media, the schools, the scientists, the public imagination‘) and simultaneously infantile when the narrative requires ridicule.
It is the oldest structural paradox in the political mind: the Other is both incompetent and dangerously powerful. This book embodies that paradox without blinking.
The Invention of the Enemy
One must admire, in a bleak sort of way, the structural efficiency of designating half the electorate as a monolithic existential threat. It creates an elegant moral shortcut: no need to consider policies, contexts, or material conditions when the adversary is already pre-condemned as treacherous by nature. Cicero, Trotsky, Hitler, and Franklin are all conscripted in this text to warn us about the insidious Democrats lurking in the marrow of the Republic. (Trotsky, one suspects, would be moderately surprised to find himself enlisted in a Republican devotional.)
This enemy-construction is not unique to this author. It is the rhetorical engine of American factionalism, and it is recursive: each side claims the other is rewriting history, weaponising institutions, manipulating education, promoting propaganda, dismantling norms, silencing dissent, and indoctrinating children. Both factions accuse the other of abandoning civility whilst abandoning civility in the act of accusation.
To put it bluntly: every single charge in this book is mirrored in Republican behaviour, sometimes identically, often more flamboyantly. But this symmetry is invisible from inside a moralised epistemology. Identity precedes evidence, so evidence is always retrofitted to identity.
This is why the polemic feels airtight: it evaluates Democrats not as agents within a system but as an essence. There is no theory of politics here – only demonology.
The Recursive Machine: When a Worldview Becomes Its Own Evidence
One of the most revealing features of Why Democrats Are Dangerous is its recursive structure. It operates exactly like the political systems it condemns: it constructs a closed epistemic loop, then mistakes that loop for a window onto reality.
The book does not discover Democratic perfidy; it presupposes it. Every subsequent claim merely elaborates upon the initial axiom. Schools, entertainment, academia, immigration, science, journalism, unions, and the weather – each is absorbed into a single explanatory schema. Once the premise is fixed (‘Democrats are dangerous‘), the world obligingly reshapes itself to confirm the conclusion, as long as one ignores anything that does not.
This is the dynamic I describe as the ‘Republic of Recursive Prophecy‘: someone begins with The Answer, and reality is forced to comply. If the facts fail to align, the facts are treacherous. If evidence contradicts the narrative, then evidence has been corrupted.
It is a worldview that behaves not like political analysis but like physics in a collapsing star: everything, no matter how diffuse, is pulled into the gravity well of a single, preordained truth.
The Projection Engine
If the book has a leitmotif, it is projection – unconscious, unexamined, and relentless. It is astonishing how thoroughly the author attributes to Democrats every pathology that characterises contemporary Republican strategy.
Propagandistic messaging; emotional manipulation; selective framing; redefinition of language; strategic use of fear; demonisation of opponents; declaring media sources illegitimate; claiming institutional persecution; insisting the other party rigs elections; portraying one’s own supporters as the ‘real victims’ of history – each of these is performed daily in Republican media ecosystems with operatic flourish. Yet the book can only see these behaviours ‘over there’, because its epistemic frame cannot accommodate the possibility that political identity – its own included – is capable of self-interest, distortion, or error.
This is the Enlightenment inheritance at its worst: the belief that one’s own faction merely ‘perceives the truth’, whilst the other faction ‘manufactures narratives’. What the author calls ‘truth’ is simply the preferred filter for sorting complexity into moral certainty. Once the filter is treated as reality itself, all behaviour from one’s own side becomes necessity, principle, or justice – whilst identical behaviour from the opposing faction becomes malevolence.
The Neutral Observer Who Isn’t
What the book never acknowledges – because it cannot – is that it speaks from a position, not from an Archimedean vantage point. The author stands in a thickly mediated environment of conservative talk radio, Republican think-tank literature, right-leaning commentary, and decades of ideological reinforcement. His acknowledgements read less like a bibliography than like an apprenticeship in a particular canon.
This does not make him wrong by default. It simply means he is positioned. And politics is always positional.
The Enlightenment fiction of the ‘view from nowhere‘ collapses once one notices that claims of objectivity always align with the claimant’s own tribe. If Republicans declare their view neutral and Democrats ideological, it is never because a metaphysical referee has blown a whistle confirming the call. It is because each faction treats its own frames as unmediated reality.
In truth, the book reveals far more about the epistemology of modern conservatism than about Democrats themselves.
The Fictional Symmetry Problem
One of the major deficiencies in the book – and in most modern political commentary – is the inability to perceive symmetry. The behaviours the author attributes exclusively to Democrats are, in every meaningful sense, bipartisan human defaults. Both factions manipulate language; curate narratives; cherry-pick evidence; denounce the other’s missteps as civilisational sabotage; outsource blame; elevate victimhood when convenient; and perform certainty whilst drowning in uncertainty.
The book pretends these behaviours describe a pathological left-wing mind, rather than the political mind as such.
This is not a Democratic problem; it is a deeply human one. But Enlightenment-styled partisan thinking requires the illusion of asymmetry. Without it, the argument collapses instantly. If Republicans admit that they exhibit the same cognitive patterns they condemn in Democrats, the entire dramatic arc falls flat. The villain must be uniquely wicked. The hero must be uniquely virtuous. The stage requires a clean antagonism, or the story becomes unstageable.
Narrative Weaponry
Perhaps the most revealing feature of this book is its reliance on anecdotes as foundational evidence. One school incident here, one speech clip there, one news headline in passing – and suddenly these isolated fragments become proof of a sweeping, coordinated ideological conspiracy across all levels of society.
We no longer use stories to illustrate positions; we use them to manufacture reality. One viral video becomes a trend; one rogue teacher, an educational takeover; one questionable policy rollout, the death of democracy.
Stories become ontological weapons: they shape what exists simply by being repeated with enough moral pressure. Political tribes treat them as talismans, small narrative objects with outsized metaphysical weight.
MEOW (the Mediated Encounter Ontology of the World) was designed in part to resist this temptation. It reminds us that events are not symptoms of a singular will but the turbulent output of innumerable interacting mediations. The worldview on display in this book requires villains, where a relational ontology recognises only networks.
The Missing Category: Structural Analysis
Perhaps the most conspicuous absence in the book is any substantive socio-economic analysis. Everything is attributed to malice, not structure. Democratic failures become signs of moral rot, never the predictable outcome of late-stage capitalism, globalisation’s uneven effects, austerity cycles, demographic shifts, institutional brittleness, bureaucratic inertia, political economy incentives, or the informational fragmentation of the digital age.
None of these appear anywhere in the text. Not once.
Because the book is not analysing policy; it’s diagnosing sin. It treats political outcomes as evidence of coordinated malevolence, never as the emergent result of complex systems that no faction fully understands, let alone controls.
This is where Dis-Integration is useful: the world does not malfunction because some cabal introduced impurity; it malfunctions because it was never integrated in the first place. My colleague is still hunting for the traitor inside the castle. The more sobering truth is that the castle is an architectural hallucination.
Where He Is Not Wrong
Lest this devolve into pure vivisection, it is worth acknowledging that my colleague does brush against legitimate concerns. There are structural issues in American education. There are ideological currents in universities, some of which drift into intellectual monoculture. There are media ecosystems that reinforce themselves through feedback loops. There are public-health missteps that deserve scrutiny. There are institutional actors who prefer narratives to nuance.
But these are not partisan phenomena; they are structural ones. They are not symptoms of Democratic corruption; they are symptoms of the modern polity. When the author grasps these truths, he does so only long enough to weaponise them – not to understand them.
The Danger of Certainty
What lingers after reading Why Democrats Are Dangerous is not outrage – though one suspects that was the intended emotional temperature – but a kind of intellectual melancholy. The book is not the product of a malevolent mind; it is the product of a sealed one. A worldview so thoroughly fortified by decades of ideological reinforcement that no countervailing fact, no structural nuance, no complexity of human motivation can penetrate its perimeter.
The author believes he is diagnosing a civilisation in decline; what he has actually documented is the failure of a particular Enlightenment inheritance: the belief that one’s own view is unmediated, unfiltered, unshaped by social, linguistic, and cognitive forces. The belief that Reason – capital R – is a neutral instrument one simply points at the world, like a laser level, to determine what is ‘really happening’.
The Enlightenment imagined that clarity was accessible, that moral alignment was obvious, that rational actors behaved rationally, that categories reflected reality, and that the world could be divided into the virtuous and the dissolute. This book is the direct descendant of that fantasy.
It takes an entire half of the population and casts them as an essence. It arranges anecdotes into inevitability. It pathologises disagreement. It treats institutions as coherent conspiratorial actors. It transforms political opponents into ontological threats. And it performs all of this with the serene confidence of someone who believes he is simply ‘telling it like it is’.
The irony is almost tender.
Because the danger here is not Democrats. Nor Republicans. Nor necessarily even the political class as a whole. The real danger is certainty without introspection: the comfort of moral binaries; the seduction of explanatory simplicity; the refusal to acknowledge one’s own mediation; the urge to reduce a complex, multi-layered, semi-chaotic polity into a single morality narrative.
My friend did not discover the truth about Democrats. He discovered the architecture of his own worldview – and mistook the one for the other.
If we must be afraid of something, let it be worldviews that cannot see themselves.
Read next:The Republic of Recursive Prophecy – an earlier piece that charts how political worldviews become self-reinforcing myth-machines.
Several countries set aside holidays to celebrate thanks-giving. This is a fine tradition, if not hypocritical, given the behaviours manifest on the other days, which isn’t to say that the day itself isn’t without consistency challenges.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast on this topic.
In the United States, today is the day of thanks – Thanksgiving™ – the last Thursday of the month of November. This problem isn’t the day or the name; it’s the accompanying tradition that has to go.
Video: “Pilgrim” riding a 4-legged turkey – Damned Midjourney. (No sound).
This day is supposed to represent a day of unity, where the Pilgrims™ shared thanks with the indigenous peoples, without whom they would have likely perished. Without Romanticising, this might have been a better outcome.
As history is penned by the survivors, the Pilgrims and their ilk repaid their thanks with genocide and systematic oppression. The country – renamed as America, and then the United States of… (a misnomer if there ever was one) – summarily renamed these inhabitants as Native Americans. Somehow, Proto Americans feels more apt.
To make a long story longer, we need to jettison this performative connexion to these indigenous peoples and focus on just being thankful for the sake of being thankful – at least by metaphor. This isn’t out of respect for the indigenous cultures, but at least reflects less revisionist history.
They almost got rid of Columbus Day, if not for the uprising of white Christian nationalists. They should extricate the religious aspects of Christmas, an even more hypocritical holiday.
Or maybe I just don’t like holidays.
More accurately, I don’t trust a civilisation that sets aside one day to perform gratitude, then spends the remaining 364 as a Black Friday pre-game warmup. We gorge on narratives the way we gorge on turkey: carving up the past, seasoning it with national mythology, and swallowing without chewing. The Pilgrims™ didn’t break bread so much as break treaties; they didn’t share so much as seize. But here we are, centuries later, performing thanks like a national yoga pose. Stretch, breathe, pretend everything is fine.
What if, instead of reanimating a historical fan-fiction about harmony and pie, we admitted the truth? That the country owes its existence to conquest, and its conscience to annual amnesia? Strip Thanksgiving of its sanctimony and keep the gratitude if you must, but at least stop embossing colonialism with little cartoon turkeys in buckled hats.
Be thankful for the food, for the people you’ve not yet alienated, for the brief respite from wage-slavery. But realise the holiday itself is a museum of revision. A diorama of innocence that never existed. A Norman Rockwell oil painting slapped over a crime scene.
So enjoy your meal. Be warm, be fed, be kind – even if only for a day. Just don’t confuse the performance of gratitude with the reality it obscures.
A NotebookLM Cautionary Tale for the Philosophically Curious
Apologies in advance for the didactic nature of this post.
Every so often, the universe gives you a gift. Not the good kind, like an unexpected bottle of Shiraz, but the other kind – the ‘teachable moment’ wrapped in a small tragedy. In this case, a perfectly innocent run of MEOW GPT (my Mediated Encounter Ontology engine) was fed into NotebookLM to generate a pseudo-podcast. And NotebookLM, bless its little algorithmic heart, proceeded to demonstrate every classic mistake people make when confronting a relational ontology.
Audio: The misinterpretation of MEOW GPT: On Progress by NotebookLM that spawned this post.
It’s perfect. I couldn’t have scripted a better example of How Not To Read MEOW GPT if I’d hired a team of Enlightenment rationalists on retainer.
So consider this your public service announcement – and a guide for anyone experimenting with MEOW GPT at home, preferably while sitting down and not holding onto any cherished metaphysical delusions.
Video: Surreal Light through a Prism Clip for no particular reason (No sound)
Mistake 1: Treating a Thick Concept as a Single Glorious Thing
NotebookLM began, earnestly, by trying to uncover the ‘inner architecture of honour’, as if it were a cathedral with blueprints lying around.
This is the central error:
Honour is not a thing. There is no inner architecture.
There are only patterns – drifting, contested, historically mangled patterns – that happen to share a word. If you start with ‘What is honour?’, you’ve already fallen down the stairs.
Mistake 2: Rebuilding Essence From the T0–T3 Layers
MEOW GPT gives you biological (T0), cognitive (T1), linguistic (T2), and institutional/technical (T3) mediation because that’s how constraints emerge. NotebookLM, meanwhile, reconstructed these as ‘layers’ of the same virtue – like honour was a three-storey moral townhouse with a loft conversion.
No. The tiers are co-emergent constraints, not components of a moral particle. If your conclusion looks like a metaphysical onion, you’ve misread the recipe.
Mistake 3: Sneaking Virtue Ethics in Through the Fire Exit
NotebookLM kept returning to:
an ‘internal compass’
a ‘core record of the self’
a ‘lifelong ledger’
a ‘deep personal architecture’
At this point we might as well carve Aristotle’s name into the hull.
MEOW’s stance is simple: the self is not a marble statue – it’s an ongoing social, cognitive, and technical scandal. Treating honour as a personality trait is just the old moral ontology with a new hairstyle.
Mistake 4: Treating Polysemy as Noise, Not Evidence
NotebookLM acknowledged the differing uses of ‘honour’, but always with the implication that beneath the variations lies one pure moral essence. This is backwards. The ambiguity is the point. The polysemy isn’t messy data; it’s the signature of conceptual drift.
If you treat ambiguity as a problem to be ironed out, you’ve missed half the LIH and all of the MEOW.
Mistake 5: Turning MEOW Into a TED Talk
The podcast tried to wrap things up by contrasting honour’s “deep internal permanence” with the ephemerality of digital rating systems.
It’s cute, but it’s still modernist comfort-food. MEOW does not mourn for the ‘permanent self’. It doesn’t recognise such a creature. And digital honour doesn’t ‘replace’ the old patterns; it aggressively rewrites the honour-economy into algorithmic form. If your conclusion sounds like ‘ancient virtue meets modern technology’, that’s TED, not MEOW.
So How Should You Interpret MEOW GPT?
A short cheat-sheet for anyone experimenting at home:
There is no essence. Concepts like honour, truth, integrity, and justice are drift-patterns, not objects.
The tiers describe mediation, not ingredients. They’re co-emergent pressures, not building blocks.
Thick terms lie to you. Their apparent unity is linguistic camouflage.
Ambiguity is structural. If the term looks fuzzy, that’s because the world is fuzzy there.
If a concept feels granite-solid, you’re standing on conceptual quicksand. (Sorry.)
A Friendly Warning Label
Warning: If you believe thick moral concepts have single, universal meanings, MEOW GPT may cause temporary metaphysical discomfort. Consult your ontological physician if symptoms persist.
Where our projects nod politely, then go their separate ways
(For the constructive exposition of Perspectival Realism—its three layers of mediation, its commitments, and its ontology without footnotes—see the main article. This piece deals with the differences by Michela Massimi’s and my versions.)
I suppose it was inevitable. You spend years muttering into your notebook about mediation, realism without bombast, the irretrievability of universality, and the peculiar way science manages to stumble forward with partial, parochial tools… and then, inevitably, you discover that someone else—Michela Massimi, in this case—has been busy constructing her own edifice a few hills over.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast summary and discussion of this topic
I arrived late to her party. Fine. But now that I’m here, let’s pour a drink and compare architecture.
Because while our buildings look similar from a distance—both labelled Perspectival Realism—they’re made from different bricks and aimed at different skylines.
1. A Courteous Bow: We Are Not Strangers in the Same Wilderness
Massimi and I share several foundational intuitions:
No God’s-eye view. She rejects the fantasy of disembodied objectivity. So do I. Reality is not a neutral theatre awaiting the Enlightenment spectator.
Knowledge is situated. Her emphasis on historically embedded scientific communities echoes my own insistence that sense, cognition, and culture structure every act of knowing.
Plural perspectives, not universal sovereignty. No single inferential vantage point dominates; multiple perspectives can be fruitfully interlaced. That’s strikingly consonant with my claim that mediation is a condition, not a defect.
Anti-relativist without universalist delusion. Neither of us has patience for the “all maps are equal” caricature peddled by people who wouldn’t know a real relativist if they tripped over one in a library.
From this angle, we’re intellectual cousins—two people independently refusing Enlightenment triumphalism while refusing to surrender realism to the absolutists.
2. The Parting of the Ways: Our Projects Are Not the Same Creature
But similarities disguise deeper divergences. Here are the important ones:
a) She’s doing epistemology; I’m doing ontology.
Massimi reconstructs realism from the inside out by examining scientific practice—models, inferences, historically evolving toolkits.
My project is more structural. Sense mediation (icons), cognitive mediation (instrumentation), and linguistic-cultural mediation (conceptual carving) are not methodological observations; they are conditions of access to reality. They’re deeper than scientific practice—they underlie it.
b) She salvages realism; I happily burn universality and build realism back from the ashes.
Massimi is rehabilitating realism’s good name. I’m less sentimental. Realism, as a doctrine, has been caught lying too many times. I want the realism of resistance, not the realism of representation.
c) Her anchor is “modal robustness”; mine is “structured resistance through mediation.”
Massimi’s realism rests on the idea that phenomena are robust across models and contexts—they persist modally.
I agree that robustness is useful. But robustness is filtered through linguistic concepts, cognitive priors, and sensorimotor limitations. It’s a second-order indicator, not a metaphysical foothold.
Resistance—the world’s refusal to bend to belief—is deeper. It’s what enables robustness to manifest.
d) Her perspectives are model-based; mine are existential.
Massimi focuses on scientific perspectives—frameworks articulated through inferential blueprints.
Massimi gives us a realism of models. A realism that emerges from the community of scientific practice, negotiated through historically situated inferential perspectives.
I’m after a realism of resistance. A realism that remains intact even when models break, when languages fail, when cognitive categories run aground. Not the realism of what we say, but the realism of what pushes back.
Our projects are not incompatible, but they are differently motivated.
She is concerned with scientific rationality’s legitimacy. I am concerned with the conditions of access to reality in the first place.
She patches the Enlightenment’s ship. I point out that the ship’s hull is three layers of mediation thick, and pretend that universality is the hole in the floor.
4. A Clean Acknowledgement: She Was Here First (Sort Of)
Yes—Massimi coined the term in this specific form, and she developed a sophisticated, rigorous scientific perspectivism that deserves respect.
But my Perspectival Realism emerged from a different genealogy:
the insufficiency of language,
the inescapability of conceptual carving,
the recursive inadequacy of cognitive tools,
the quiet, stubborn existence of a world we only ever meet askance.
Different animals. Same habitat.
So no, I’m not competing with Massimi. And no, I’m not rebranding her work.
What I’m doing—and what this piece makes explicit—is placing my ontology in dialogue with hers. Two parallel rejections of universality. Two parallel refusals of relativism. Two parallel attempts to articulate realism without pretending we’ve escaped the conditions of being human.
If I arrived late to her race, so be it. I’m not running for her finish line anyway.
DISCLAIMER: This article was written or output by ChatGPT 5.1. It started as a conversation with Claude Sonnet 4.5, where I had input days of output for evaluation. One of these outputs was the post about Erasmus and the Emissary Who Forgot to Bow. A group chat ensued between me, Claude and ChatGPT.
What started as a discussion about the merits of my position, expressed in the Erasmus-influenced essay, drifted to one about Perspectival Realism. That discussion deepened on ChatGPT, as I further discussed my recent thoughts on the latter topic. I had rendered a Magic: The Gathering parody trading card as I contemplated the subject. It’s how my brain works.
All of this led me to ask ChatGPT to summarise the conversation, and, upon further discussion, I asked it to draft this article – the second of five.
Perspectival Realism: The First Ontology Without an Asterisk This article discusses what Perspectival Realism means to me and how I got to this position.
Arriving Late to Massimi’s Party: Perspectival Realism in Parallel 👈 I spent another half-hour following Google search results as I wanted to see if anyone else had already been using the term, Perspectival Realism. I ended up on the Oxford publishing site. I found a 2022 book with this name, authored by Michela Massimi. They allowed me to download the book, so I asked ChatGPT to summarise our positions, specifically where we agreed and differed.
Against the Vat: Why Perspectival Realism Survives Every Sceptical Hypothesis At 0500, I returned to bed, but I woke up again at 0700, thinking about how one might differentiate between Putnam’s brain in a vat from Perspectival Realism. ChatGPT asked if I wanted that output in long-form.
The Constraint Interface: Toward a Nexal Ontology Being uncomfortable with the dichotomy between Realism and Idealism, I chatted to come up with terminology that disrupts what I consider a false dichotomy, focusing on the nexus rather than privileging one or the other. Consider this similar to the debate on sex and gender binaries.
As I mentioned at the end of the first series, I may return to this series and publish a coherent expository version more in line with my usual style. Meantime, this allows me to share my ideas unvarnished and unpolished at the same time, granting me more time to focus on other matters. Apologies to those who may disagree with the outline format. Honestly, it annoys me, but I am choosing function over form at the moment.
In the great hall of the palace, at the centre of a circle of polished stone, stood what the kingdom called the Last Unicorn.
No one had ever seen it. No one was permitted to try.
The Founders had decreed that direct observation would profane the creature’s ‘purity’. To see it was to diminish it; to touch it was to collapse its ‘essential nature’ into some accidental form. Thus, the unicorn could be approached only through instruments – never through hands, eyes, or unmediated judgement.
It was the Last not because others had died, but because it remained the final remnant of an age that still believed truths stood on stone.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast summary of this topic.
The Instruments
To preserve the unicorn’s nature, the Keepers constructed an evolving array of devices.
The Spiral Gauge, oldest and most revered, hung from silk threads above the empty circle. It detected one possible configuration of the horn’s curvature – never the horn itself.
The Echo Clock measured hoofbeats. The hall was silent, yet the wires vibrated all the same, yielding intervals that corresponded (according to the ledgers) to modes of unicornic motion: walking, standing, contemplative stillness.
The Mane Spectrometer mapped disturbances in candlelight to infer the density of a mane that existed only in theory.
The Temperament Dial synthesised these readings into a single number – currently 1.618: serene alertness.
The instruments never disagreed; they could not disagree, because each was calibrated against the others.
‘Truth is coherence’, the Master Keeper taught.
The Scaffolding Expands
Over centuries, ledgers multiplied into an archive wing. Scholars journeyed from distant kingdoms to admire the rigour of the data.
A visiting philosopher once said, ‘Your measurements form the most complete record of unicornic behaviour ever assembled’.
The apprentices beamed. No one asked why no other kingdom kept such records.
Schools taught the unicorn’s anatomy. Artists painted its likeness. The quarterly update of the Temperament Dial was read aloud in public squares. Children traced the golden spiral, believed to mirror the creature’s horn.
When dissidents questioned the absence of hoofprints, they were told what everyone knew:
‘The Last Unicorn is beyond crude contact. Only refined instruments can reveal its truth’.
Consensus deepened. With it grew the need for further instruments.
A Quiet Realisation
Sometimes, on night watch, a Keeper would stand above the empty stone. The Spiral Gauge quivered. The Echo Clock murmured. The Proportion Engine hummed, harmonising the system.
And in that stillness, the Keeper would feel a thought rise and evaporate instantly:
that the instruments described one another more faithfully than anything else.
That their perfect coherence reflected the architecture of the scaffolding, not any creature the scaffolding purported to measure.
Such thoughts were structural, not heretical – and no less dangerous.
The Last Unicorn
The Minister liked to call it the Last Unicorn. He never explained why it was last or what fate had befallen the others. He did not need to. The title served its purpose:
If it is the Last, no comparison is possible. No contradiction can emerge. No counterexample can survive.
Its uniqueness proved its necessity.
What else could unify a kingdom but a creature no one could touch, see, or disbelieve?
The Closing Line
And so the unicorn remained – in measurements, in ratios, in ledgers, in rhetoric.
A fiction made coherent by instruments, maintained by tradition, sanctified by those who needed it to be real.
The Last Unicorn was not the final creature of its kind. It was the last foundation still standing. And in that sense – it was more real than anything that had ever lived.
(For the constructive exposition of Perspectival Realism—its three layers of mediation, its commitments, and its ontology without footnotes—see the main article. This piece deals with the predictable objection.)
The moment you say “our access to reality is mediated,” someone inevitably performs their civic duty as Defender of Enlightenment Orthodoxy and announces, as if discovering fire, “So you’re a relativist, then?”
It’s a comforting little reflex. If a position denies universality, it must be relativism. If it rejects the view from nowhere, it must reject the very idea of truth. If it acknowledges cultural scaffolding, it must be one critique away from saying flat-earthers and astrophysicists are peers.
This objection misunderstands both relativism and Perspectival Realism.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast summarising this topic.
Let’s begin with the essential distinction—think of this as the tattoo at the base of the spine:
Relativism says: all maps are equally valid. Perspectival Realism says: all maps are partial, and some are better.
Better at predicting.
Better at surviving.
Better at cohering with everything else we know.
Better at not getting you killed.
This is the spine of the position. Everything else is elaboration.
Relativism’s Self-Destruct Button
Relativism denies that reality has enough structure to constrain belief. According to its logic, perspectives are sovereign. The world bends to interpretation.
If that were true:
Gravity would turn itself off for anyone sufficiently committed to optimism.
Viruses would consult your cosmology before infecting you.
The Müller–Lyer illusion wouldn’t vary between populations because there’d be no stable perceptual machinery for it to fool.
Relativism collapses because the world does not permit it.
Perspectival Realism begins from the opposite premise:
There is one reality.
It resists us.
Perspectives rise or fall by how well they handle that resistance.
You can’t get further from relativism than that.
Why Perspective ≠ Prison
Another familiar confusion: “If access is perspectival, aren’t we trapped in our own little worlds?”
No. Mediation isn’t isolation. It’s a shared condition.
You and I may wear sunglasses of different tint, but we still walk the same street. Your glasses may darken the building I call “red,” so you call it “dark red.” That’s not incommensurability—that’s disagreement within a shared world. We argue, we adjust, we converge.
Perspectival Realism doesn’t say “worlds are sealed off.” It says we are situated—embodied, encultured, cognitively structured. Our lenses differ. The street does not.
The Crucial Point: The World Pushes Back
Relativism has no mechanism for adjudication. Perspectival Realism has the best one available: reality’s structured resistance.
If your perspective predicts, explains, and survives contact with the world, it’s better. If it collapses upon use, it’s worse. If it transfers across contexts, it’s better. If it leaves you dead, it’s worse.
This is not metaphysics. It’s survival.
And it is very explicitly not relativism.
Logic: Form Universal, Application Situated
A predictable objection:
Objection: “Isn’t logic universal? Doesn’t that kill perspectivalism?”
Response: Basic inferential forms—modus ponens, contradiction—are indeed widespread. That’s Layer 2 architecture: the cognitive machinery we all share.
But what counts as a valid premise, which inferences feel compelling, and which conclusions are considered exhaustive vary across cultures (Layer 3). Logic’s form is stable; its deployment is contextual.
Perspectival Realism doesn’t deny logic. It denies the fantasy that logic operates in a cultural vacuum.
Relativism’s Moral Collapse
Why “anything goes” goes nowhere
Relativism becomes lethal the moment ethics enters the scene. If all perspectives are equally valid, you lose the ability to critique harmful practices. Torture, forced servility, institutionalised cruelty—all become “just different frameworks.”
Perspectival Realism rejects this.
You don’t need a metaphysical skyhook to condemn torture. You need:
Shared vulnerability – all humans are embodied beings capable of pain.
Empirical observation – societies that normalise cruelty become unstable and self-poisoning.
Pragmatic convergence – diverse cultures can agree that some practices destroy the conditions of flourishing.
Reality-tested norms – ethical systems survive because they work, not because they download from a Platonic server.
This is not relativism. It’s ethics under realism-without-universality.
You can condemn harmful practices without pretending to be the mouthpiece of timeless universal Reason. You can ground human rights in intersubjective evidence—not metaphysical fiat.
No view from nowhere required.
The Three-Way Contrast (The Only Chart You Need)
Naive Realism: There is one perfectly accurate map.
Relativism: All maps are equally good.
Perspectival Realism:
All maps are partial.
Some are atrocious.
Some work astonishingly well because they track deeper regularities of the terrain.
No map is complete.
No map is sovereign.
The terrain adjudicates between them.
You don’t need omniscience to compare maps. You need terrain. And we all share the same one.
Prediction: The Final Judge
If you want the single litmus test:
Does the perspective predict anything?
Does it do so consistently?
Does it correct itself when wrong?
Does it transfer beyond its original context?
If yes → closer to reality. If no → a charming story, but please don’t build bridges with it.
Relativism has no concept of “closer to.” Perspectival Realism depends on it.
Putting It All Together
Perspectival Realism maintains:
Realism: the world exists independently of our representations.
Anti-universalism: no representation escapes mediation.
Anti-relativism: some representations perform better because they align more closely with what the world actually does.
Humility: we navigate through partial perspectives, comparing, refining, and error-correcting.
No one gets to declare universal sovereignty. Everyone gets tested by the same reality.
Relativism says everything is equally true. Perspectival Realism says everything is equally mediated—but not equally successful.
Reality decides.
Perspectives compete.
And relativism loses on the first contact.
COMMENTARY: To be fair, the argument about relativism is a strawman argument against virtually no one who would hold or defend this position. For whatever reason, the training data indicated that this was a significant contender. I’ve heard similar weak strawmen in other disciplines, and I felt I should address the invisible elephant in the room. — Bry Willis
DISCLAIMER: This article was written or output by ChatGPT 5.1. It started as a conversation with Claude Sonnet 4.5, where I had input days of output for evaluation. One of these outputs was the post about Erasmus and the Emissary Who Forgot to Bow. A group chat ensued between me, Claude and ChatGPT.
What started as a discussion about the merits of my position, expressed in the Erasmus-influenced essay, drifted to one about Perspectival Realism. That discussion deepened on ChatGPT, as I further discussed my recent thoughts on the latter topic. I had rendered a Magic: The Gathering parody trading card as I contemplated the subject. It’s how my brain works.
All of this led me to ask ChatGPT to summarise the conversation, and, upon further discussion, I asked it to draft this article – the second of five.
Perspectival Realism: The First Ontology Without an Asterisk This article discusses what Perspectival Realism means to me and how I got to this position.
Why Perspectival Realism Is Not Relativism 👈 Further discussion prompted me to differentiate this ontology from other perspectives.
Arriving Late to Massimi’s Party: Perspectival Realism in Parallel I spent another half-hour following Google search results as I wanted to see if anyone else had already been using the term, Perspectival Realism. I ended up on the Oxford publishing site. I found a 2022 book with this name, authored by Michela Massimi. They allowed me to download the book, so I asked ChatGPT to summarise our positions, specifically where we agreed and differed.
Against the Vat: Why Perspectival Realism Survives Every Sceptical Hypothesis At 0500, I returned to bed, but I woke up again at 0700, thinking about how one might differentiate between Putnam’s brain in a vat from Perspectival Realism. ChatGPT asked if I wanted that output in long-form.
The Constraint Interface: Toward a Nexal Ontology Being uncomfortable with the dichotomy between Realism and Idealism, I chatted to come up with terminology that disrupts what I consider a false dichotomy, focusing on the nexus rather than privileging one or the other. Consider this similar to the debate on sex and gender binaries.
As I mentioned at the end of the first series, I may return to this series and publish a coherent expository version more in line with my usual style. Meantime, this allows me to share my ideas unvarnished and unpolished at the same time, granting me more time to focus on other matters. Apologies to those who may disagree with the outline format. Honestly, it annoys me, but I am choosing function over form at the moment.
I was having an inappropriate chat with ChatGPT and, per Feyerabend, I once again discovered that some of the best inspirations are unplanned. The conversation circled around to the conflicting narratives of Erasmus and Wells. Enter, Plato, McGilchrist, and the Enlightenment – all living rent-free in my head – and I end up with this.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
I. The Proverb and Its Presumption
Erasmus sits at his writing desk in 1500-something, cheerful as a man who has never once questioned the premises of his own eyesight, and pens what will become one of the West’s most durable little myths: ‘In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king’. It arrives packaged as folk wisdom, the sort of thing you’re meant to nod at sagely over a pint. And for centuries, we did. The proverb became shorthand for a comfortable fantasy: that advantage is advantage everywhere, that perception grants sovereignty, that a man with superior faculties will naturally ascend to his rightful place atop whatever heap he finds himself on.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king
– Erasmus
It’s an Enlightenment dream avant la lettre, really – this breezy confidence that reason, sight, knowledge, insight will simply work wherever they’re deployed. The one-eyed man doesn’t need to negotiate with the blind. He doesn’t need their endorsement, their customs, their consent. He arrives, he sees, he rules. The proverb presumes a kind of metaphysical meritocracy, where truth and capability are self-authenticating, where the world politely arranges itself around whoever happens to possess the sharper tools.
Image: Midjourney didn’t coöperate with my prompt for a one-eyed king. Trust that this king has only one.
It’s the intellectual equivalent of showing up in a foreign country with a briefcase full of sterling and expecting everyone to genuflect. And like most folk wisdom, it survives because it flatters us. It tells us that our advantages – our rationality, our education, our painstakingly cultivated discernment – are universally bankable. That we, the seeing, need only arrive for the blind to recognise our superiority.
Erasmus offers this with no apparent irony. He hands us a proverb that whispers: your clarity is your crown.
II. Wells Wanders In
Four centuries later, H.G. Wells picks up the proverb, turns it over in his hands like a curious stone, and proceeds to detonate it.
The Country of the Blind (1904) is many things – a fable, a thought experiment, a sly dismantling of Enlightenment presumption – but above all it is an act of literary vandalism against Erasmus and everything his proverb smuggles into our collective assumptions. Wells sends his protagonist, Nuñez, tumbling into an isolated Andean valley where a disease has rendered the entire population blind for generations. They’ve adapted. They’ve built a culture, a cosmology, a complete lifeworld organised around their particular sensorium. Sight isn’t absent from their world; it’s irrelevant. Worse: it’s nonsense. The seeing man’s reports of ‘light’ and ‘sky’ and ‘mountains’ sound like the ravings of a lunatic.
Nuñez arrives expecting Erasmus’s kingdom. He gets a psychiatric evaluation instead.
The brilliance of Wells’s story isn’t simply that the one-eyed man fails to become king – it’s how he fails. Nuñez doesn’t lack effort or eloquence. He tries reason, demonstration, patient explanation. He attempts to prove the utility of sight by predicting sunrise, by describing distant objects, by leveraging his supposed advantage. None of it matters. The blind don’t need his reports. They navigate their world perfectly well without them. His sight isn’t superior; it’s alien. And in a culture that has no use for it, no linguistic scaffolding to accommodate it, no social structure that values it, his one eye might as well be a vestigial tail.
The valley’s elders eventually diagnose Nuñez’s problem: his eyes are diseased organs that fill his brain with hallucinations. The cure? Surgical removal.
Wells lets this hang in the air, brutal and comic. The one-eyed man isn’t king. He’s a patient. And if he wants to stay, if he wants to belong, if he wants to marry the girl he’s fallen for and build a life in this place, he’ll need to surrender the very faculty he imagined made him superior. He’ll need to let them fix him.
The story ends ambiguously – Nuñez flees at the last moment, stumbling back toward the world of the sighted, though whether he survives is left unclear. But the damage is done. Erasmus’s proverb lies in ruins. Wells has exposed its central presumption: that advantage is advantage everywhere. That perception grants authority. That reason, clarity, and superior faculties are self-evidently sovereign.
They’re not. They’re only sovereign where the culture already endorses them.
III. Plato’s Ghost in the Valley
If Wells dismantles Erasmus, Plato hovers over the whole scene like a weary ghost, half scolding, half despairing, muttering that he told us this would happen.
The Allegory of the Cave, after all, is the original version of this story. The philosopher escapes the cave, sees the sun, comprehends the Forms, and returns to liberate his fellow prisoners with reports of a luminous reality beyond the shadows. They don’t thank him. They don’t listen. They think he’s mad, or dangerous, or both. And if he persists – if he tries to drag them toward the exit, toward the light they can’t yet see – they’ll kill him for it.
Video: Plato’s Cave
Plato’s parable is usually read as a tragedy of ignorance: the prisoners are too stupid, too comfortable, too corrupted by their chains to recognise truth when it’s offered. But read it alongside Wells and the emphasis shifts. The cave-dwellers aren’t wrong, exactly. They’re coherent. They’ve built an entire epistemology around shadows. They have experts in shadow interpretation, a whole language for describing shadow behaviour, social hierarchies based on shadow-predicting prowess. The philosopher returns with reports of a three-dimensional world and they hear gibberish. Not because they’re defective, but because his truth has no purchase in their lifeworld.
Plato despairs over this. He wants the prisoners to want liberation. He wants truth to be self-authenticating, wants knowledge to compel assent simply by virtue of being knowledge. But the cave doesn’t work that way. The prisoners don’t want truth; they want comfort shaped like reality. They want coherence within the system they already inhabit. The philosopher’s sun is as alien to them as Nuñez’s sight is to the blind valley.
And here’s the kicker: Plato knows this. That’s why the allegory is tragic rather than triumphant. The philosopher does see the sun. He does apprehend the Forms. But his knowledge is useless in the cave. Worse than useless – it makes him a pariah, a madman, a threat. His enlightenment doesn’t grant him sovereignty; it exile him from the only community he has.
The one-eyed man isn’t king. He’s the lunatic they’ll string up if he doesn’t learn to shut up about the sky.
IV. The Enlightenment’s Magnificent Blunder
Once you’ve got Erasmus, Wells, and Plato in the same room, the Enlightenment’s central fantasy collapses like wet cardboard.
Humanity’s great Enlightenment wheeze – that baroque fantasy of Reason marching triumphantly through history like a powdered dragoon – has always struck me as the intellectual equivalent of selling snake oil in a crystal decanter. We were promised lucidity, emancipation, and the taming of ignorance; what we got was a fetish for procedural cleverness, a bureaucratisation of truth, and the ghastly belief that if you shine a bright enough torch into the void, the void will politely disclose its contents.
The Enlightenment presumed universality. It imagined that rationality, properly deployed, would work everywhere – that its methods were culture-neutral, that its conclusions were binding on all reasonable minds, that the shadows in Plato’s cave and the blindness in Wells’s valley could be cured by the application of sufficient light and logic. It treated reason as a kind of metaphysical bulldozer, capable of flattening any terrain it encountered and paving the way for Progress, Truth, and Universal Human Flourishing.
This was, to put it mildly, optimistic.
What the Enlightenment missed – what Erasmus’s proverb cheerfully ignores and what Wells’s story ruthlessly exposes – is that rationality is parochial. It’s not a universal solvent. It’s a local dialect, a set of practices that evolved within particular cultures, buttressed by particular institutions, serving particular ends. The Enlightenment’s rationality is Western rationality, Enlightenment rationality, rationality as understood by a specific cadre of 18th-century European men who happened to have the printing press, the political clout, and the colonial apparatus to export their epistemology at gunpoint.
They mistook their own seeing for sight itself. They mistook their own lifeworld for the world. And they built an entire civilisational project on the presumption that everyone else was just a less-developed version of them – prisoners in a cave, blind villagers, savages waiting to be enlightened.
The one-eyed man imagined himself king. He was actually the emissary who forgot to bow.
V. McGilchrist’s Neuroscientific Millinery
Iain McGilchrist sits in the same intellectual gravity well as Plato and Wells, only he dresses his thesis up in neuroscientific millinery so contemporary readers don’t bolt for the door. The Master and His Emissary is essentially a 500-page retelling of the same ancient drama: the emissary – our little Enlightenment mascot – becomes so enamoured of his own procedures, abstractions, and tidy schemas that he forgets the Master’s deeper, embodied, culturally embedded sense-making.
McGilchrist’s parable is neurological rather than allegorical, but the structure is identical. The left hemisphere (the emissary) excels at narrow focus, manipulation, abstraction – the sort of thing you need to count coins or parse grammar or build bureaucracies. The right hemisphere (the Master) handles context, pattern recognition, relational understanding – the sort of thing you need to navigate an actual lifeworld where meaning is messy, embodied, and irreducible to procedures.
The emissary is supposed to serve the Master. Left-brain proceduralism is supposed to be a tool deployed within the broader, contextual sense-making of the right brain. But somewhere along the way – roughly around the Enlightenment, McGilchrist suggests – the emissary convinced itself it could run the show. Left-brain rationality declared independence from right-brain contextuality, built an empire of abstraction, and wondered why the world suddenly felt thin, schizophrenic, oddly two-dimensional.
It’s Erasmus all over again: the presumption that the emissary with one eye should be king. The same tragic misunderstanding of how worlds cohere.
McGilchrist’s diagnosis is clinical, but his conclusion is damning. Western modernity, he argues, has become pathologically left-hemisphere dominant. We’ve let analytic thought pretend it’s sovereign. We’ve mistaken our schemas for reality, our maps for territory, our procedures for wisdom. We’ve built cultures that privilege manipulation over meaning, extraction over relationship, clarity over truth. And we’re baffled when these cultures feel alienating, when they produce populations that are anxious, depressed, disenchanted, starved for something they can’t quite name.
The emissary has forgotten the Master entirely. And the Master, McGilchrist suggests, is too polite – or too injured – to stage a coup.
In McGilchrist’s frame, culture is the Master. Strategy, reason, Enlightenment rationality – these are the emissary’s tools. Useful, necessary even, but never meant to govern. The Enlightenment’s mistake was letting the emissary believe his tools were all there was. It’s the same delusion Nuñez carries into Wells’s valley: the belief that sight, reason, superior faculties are enough. That the world will rearrange itself around whoever shows up with the sharper implements.
It won’t. The valley doesn’t need your eyes. The cave doesn’t want your sun. And the Master doesn’t answer to the emissary’s paperwork.
VI. The Triumph of Context Over Cleverness
So here’s what these three – Erasmus, Wells, Plato – triangulate, and what McGilchrist confirms with his neuroscientific gloss: the Enlightenment dream was always a category error.
Reason doesn’t grant sovereignty. Perception doesn’t compel assent. Superior faculties don’t self-authenticate. These things only work – only mean anything, only confer any advantage – within cultures that already recognise and value them. Outside those contexts, they’re noise. Gibberish. Hallucinations requiring surgical intervention.
The one-eyed man arrives in the land of the blind expecting a kingdom. What he gets is a reminder that kingdoms aren’t built on faculties; they’re built on consensus. On shared stories, shared practices, shared ways of being-in-the-world. Culture is the bedrock. Reason is just a tool some cultures happen to valorise.
And here’s the uncomfortable corollary: if reason is parochial, if rationality is just another local dialect, then the Enlightenment’s grand project – its universalising ambitions, its colonial export of Western epistemology, its presumption that everyone, everywhere, should think like 18th-century European philosophes – was always a kind of imperialism. A metaphysical land-grab dressed up in the language of liberation.
The Enlightenment promised illumination but delivered a blinding glare that obscures more than it reveals. It told us the cave was a prison and the valley was backward and anyone who didn’t see the world our way was defective, uncivilised, in need of correction. It never occurred to the Enlightenment that maybe – just maybe – other cultures had their own Masters, their own forms of contextual sense-making, their own ways of navigating the world that didn’t require our light.
Wells understood this. Plato suspected it. McGilchrist diagnoses it. And Erasmus, bless him, never saw it coming.
VII. The Enlightenment’s Paper Crown
The Enlightenment liked to imagine itself as the adult entering the room, flicking on the light-switch, and announcing that, at long last, the shadows could stop confusing the furniture for metaphysics. This is the kind of confidence you only get when your culture hasn’t yet learned the words for its own blind spots. It built an entire worldview on the hopeful presumption that its preferred modes of knowing weren’t just one way of slicing experience, but the gold standard against which all other sense-making should be judged.
Call it what it is: a provincial dialect masquerading as the universal tongue. A parochial habit dressed in imperial robes. The Enlightenment always smelled faintly of a man who assumes everyone else at the dinner table will be impressed by his Latin quotations. And when they aren’t, he blames the table.
The deeper farce is that Enlightenment rationality actually believed its tools were transferrable. That clarity is clarity everywhere. That if you wheel enough syllogisms into a space, the locals will drop their incense and convert on sight. Wells disabuses us of this; Plato sighs that he tried; McGilchrist clinically confirms the diagnosis. The emissary, armed with maps and measuring sticks, struts into the valley expecting coronation and is shocked – genuinely shocked – to discover that nobody particularly cares for his diagrams.
The Enlightenment mistake wasn’t arrogance (though it had that in liberal supply). It was context-blindness. It thought procedures could substitute for culture. It thought method could replace meaning. It thought mastery was a matter of getting the right answer rather than belonging to the right world.
You can all but hear the emissary stamping his foot.
VIII. The Anti-Enlightenment Position (Such as It Is)
My own stance is drearily simple: I don’t buy the Enlightenment’s sales pitch. Never have. The promise of universal reason was always a conjuring trick designed to flatter its adherents into thinking that their habits were Nature’s preferences. Once you stop confusing methodological neatness with metaphysical authority, the entire apparatus looks less like a cathedral of light and more like a filing system that got ideas above its station.
The problem isn’t that reason is useless. The problem is that reason imagines itself sovereign. Reason is a brilliant servant, a competent emissary, and an atrocious king. Culture is the king; context is the kingdom. Without those, rationality is just an embarrassed bureaucrat looking for a desk to hide behind.
This is why I keep banging on about language insufficiency, parochial cognition, and the delightful way our concepts disintegrate once you wander too far from the lifeworlds that birthed them. The Enlightenment thought the human mind was a searchlight. It’s closer to a candle in a draughty hall. You can still get work done with a candle. You just shouldn’t be telling people it can illuminate the universe.
So the anti-Enlightenment move isn’t a call to smash the instruments. It’s a call to read the room. To stop pretending the emissary is the Master. To stop assuming sight is a passport to sovereignty. To stop wandering into other cultures – other caves, other valleys, other hemispheres – with a ruler and a smirk, convinced you’re about to be crowned.
Underneath these brittle idols lies the far messier truth that cognition is parochial, language insufficient, and ‘rationality’ a parlour trick we perform to impress ourselves. I’m not proposing a new catechism, nor am I pining for some prelapsarian alternative. I’m simply pointing out that the Enlightenment promised illumination but delivered a blinding glare that obscures more than it reveals.
The task, then, is to grow comfortable with the dimness. To navigate by flicker rather than floodlight. To admit that the world was never waiting to be made ‘clear’ in the first place.
This doesn’t mean abandoning reason. It means remembering that reason is the emissary, not the Master. It means recognising that our schemas are provisional, our maps incomplete, our procedures useful only within the cultures that endorse them. It means learning to bow – to culture, to context, to the irreducible messiness of lifeworlds we don’t fully understand and can’t procedurally master.
The one-eyed man never was king. At best, he was an enthusiastic tourist with a very noisy torch. The sooner he stops shining it into other people’s faces, the sooner we can get on with the far more interesting business of navigating a world that never promised to be legible.
Not a kingdom of sight. Just a world where the emissary remembers his place.
This video on accents was nice –a welcome diversion. In truth, it devoured the time I’d planned to spend writing something original, so I’m sharing it instead.
It’s by Dr Geoff Lindsey, a linguist whose work I rate highly. Using Gary Stevenson and Jimmy the Giant as case studies, he explores how accents quietly gatekeep credibility and upward mobility in Britain. The experiment is clever, the cultural archaeology even better.
Watching it as an American raised in New England, I found the whole exercise oddly revealing. I can distinguish the accents, but I don’t carry the surrounding freight, so I was pulled more by persuasion than by prejudice. The Eliza Doolittle caricature feels distant enough to resist belief; Gary and Jimmy’s ‘poshified’ voices do not.
And of course, we have our own mess. In the US, Southern accents are coded as low-status, no matter the speaker’s education, yet many outsiders find them charming. Each side of the Atlantic has its class machinery; the gears are simply cut differently.
Philosophics 