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.
Let us begin with the heresy: Truth is a rhetorical artefact. Not a revelation. Not a metaphysical essence glimmering behind the veil. Just language — persuasive, repeatable, institutionally ratified language. In other words: branding.
Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.
This is not merely a postmodern tantrum thrown at the altar of Enlightenment rationalism. It is a sober, if impolite, reminder that nearly everything we call “knowledge” is stitched together with narrative glue and semantic spit. Psychology. Neuroscience. Ethics. Economics. Each presents itself as a science — or worse, a moral imperative — but their foundations are built atop a linguistic faultline. They are, at best, elegant approximations; at worst, dogma in drag.
Let’s take psychology. Here is a field that diagnoses your soul via consensus. A committee of credentialed clerics sits down and declares a cluster of behaviours to be a disorder, assigns it a code, and hands you a script. It is then canonised in the DSM, the Diagnostic Scripture Manual. Doubt its legitimacy and you are either naïve or ill — which is to say, you’ve just confirmed the diagnosis. It’s a theological trap dressed in the language of care.
Or neuroscience — the church of the glowing blob. An fMRI shows a region “lighting up” and we are meant to believe we’ve located the seat of love, the anchor of morality, or the birthplace of free will. Never mind that we’re interpreting blood-oxygen fluctuations in composite images smoothed by statistical witchcraft. It looks scientific, therefore it must be real. The map is not the territory, but in neuroscience, it’s often a mood board.
And then there is language itself, the medium through which all these illusions are transmitted. It is the stage, the scenery, and the unreliable narrator. My Language Insufficiency Hypothesis proposes that language is not simply a flawed tool — it is fundamentally unfit for the task it pretends to perform. It was forged in the furnace of survival, not truth. We are asking a fork to play the violin.
This insufficiency is not an error to be corrected by better definitions or clever metaphors. It is the architecture of the system. To speak is to abstract. To abstract is to exclude. To exclude is to falsify. Every time we speak of a thing, we lose the thing itself. Language functions best not as a window to the real but as a veil — translucent, patterned, and perpetually in the way.
So what, then, are our Truths™? They are narratives that have won. Stories that survived the epistemic hunger games. They are rendered authoritative not by accuracy, but by resonance — psychological, cultural, institutional. A “truth” is what is widely accepted, not because it is right, but because it is rhetorically unassailable — for now.
This is the dirty secret of epistemology: coherence masquerades as correspondence. If enough concepts link arms convincingly, we grant them status. Not because they touch reality, but because they echo each other convincingly in our linguistic theatre.
Libet’s experiment, Foucault’s genealogies, McGilchrist’s hemispheric metaphors — each peels back the curtain in its own way. Libet shows that agency might be a post-hoc illusion. Foucault reveals that disciplines don’t describe the subject; they produce it. McGilchrist laments that the Emissary now rules the Master, and the world is flatter for it.
But all of them — and all of us — are trapped in the same game: the tyranny of the signifier. We speak not to uncover truth, but to make truth-sounding noises. And the tragedy is, we often convince ourselves.
So no, we cannot escape the prison of language. But we can acknowledge its bars. And maybe, just maybe, we can rattle them loudly enough that others hear the clank.
Until then, we continue — philosophers, scientists, diagnosticians, rhetoricians — playing epistemology like a parlour game with rigged dice, congratulating each other on how well the rules make sense.
David Brooks and the Hollowing Out of Conservatism
David Brooks is the quintessential old-school Conservative—the kind who once upheld a semblance of ideological coherence. He belongs to the pre-Reagan-Thatcher vintage, a time when Conservatism at least had the decency to argue from principles rather than blind tribalism. We could debate these people in good faith. Those days are gone. The current incarnation of Conservatism contains only homoeopathic traces of its Classical™ predecessor—diluted beyond recognition.
The Degeneration of Conservatism
The rot set in with Reagan, who caught it from Thatcher. Greed and selfishness were laundered into virtues, repackaged as “individual responsibility,” and the party’s intellectual ballast began to erode. By the time Bush II’s administration rolled in, Neo-Conservatism had replaced any lingering Burkean ethos, and by Trump’s tenure, even the pretence of ideology was gone. Conservatism-in-Name-Only—whatever Trump’s brand of reactionary nihilism was—swallowed the party whole. Do they even call themselves Conservatives anymore, or has that ship sailed along with basic literacy?
To be fair, this didn’t go unnoticed. Plenty of old-school Republicans recoiled in horror when Trump became their figurehead. Before the 2016 election, conservative pundits could barely contain their disdain for his incompetence, lack of moral compass, and general buffoonery. And yet, once they realised he was the party’s golden goose, they clambered aboard the Trump Train with the enthusiasm of lottery winners at a payday loan office. His staunchest critics became his most obsequious apologists. What does this tell us about their value system? Spoiler: nothing good.
Brooks’ Lament
Which brings us back to Brooks, who now bemoans the death of Conservative values. On this, we agree. Where we part ways is on whether those values were worth saving. Say you’re boarding a train from New York to Los Angeles. Conservatism might argue that a Miami-bound train is still a train, so what’s the problem? It’s the same vehicle, just going somewhere else. Except, of course, Conservatism has always insisted on the slow train over the fast train—because urgency is unseemly, and progress must be rationed.
If I’m an affluent middle-classer, I might prefer Conservatism’s careful incrementalism—it keeps my apple cart stable. Admirable, if you enjoy tunnel vision. Progressives, by contrast, recognise that some people don’t even have apple carts. Some are starving while others hoard orchards. To the Conservative, the poor just aren’t trying hard enough. To the Progressive, the system is broken, and the playing field needs a serious re-levelling. Even when Conservatives acknowledge inequality, their instinct is to tiptoe toward justice rather than risk disrupting their own affluence.
The Fallacy of Objective Reality
Leaving politics for philosophy, Brooks predictably rails against Postmodernism, decrying relativism in favour of good old-fashioned Modernist “reality.” He’s horrified by subjectivism, as though personal interpretation weren’t the foundation of all human experience. Like Jordan Peterson, he believes his subjective truth is the objective truth. And like Peterson, he takes umbrage at anyone pointing out otherwise. It feels so absolute to them that they mistake their own convictions for universal constants.
As a subjectivist, I accept that reality is socially mediated. We interpret truth claims based on cognitive biases, cultural conditioning, and personal experience. Even when we strive for objectivity, we do so through subjective lenses. Brooks’ Modernist nostalgia is touching but delusional—akin to demanding we all agree on a single flavour of ice cream.
The Existential Problem
And so, I find myself in partial agreement with Brooks. Yes, there is an existential crisis. The patient has a broken leg. But our prescriptions differ wildly. I won’t offer a metaphor for that—consider it your homework as a reader.
Brooks is likely a better writer than a public speaker, but you may still find yourself nodding along with some of his arguments. If you’re a “true” Christian Conservative—if you still believe in something beyond crass self-interest—he may well be preaching to the choir. But let’s be honest: how many in that choir are still listening?
The genesis of the Modernity Worldview Survey was Metamodernism. Is this still a thing? In recent years, metamodernism has emerged as a supposed successor to postmodernism, claiming to transcend the seemingly irreconcilable tensions between modernist sincerity and postmodern irony. Yet, upon closer examination, this framework reveals itself not as a genuine paradigm shift but rather as a modernist invention that fails to escape the very critiques it attempts to address.
Despite its claims of oscillation between poles, metamodernism betrays its modernist underpinnings through its implicit teleology and notion of progress. The very framing of “meta” as beyond or transcending suggests a linear progression that is fundamentally at odds with the postmodern rejection of grand narratives. Metamodernism positions itself as forward-moving whilst attempting to recapture elements of premodernity, revealing an anxiety about being perceived as regressive or naive.
Podcast: Audio version of this content
This desire to have it both ways—to acknowledge the constructed nature of meaning whilst still pursuing transcendent meaning—doesn’t represent a resolution so much as a psychological coping mechanism. The cognitive dissonance created by attempting to simultaneously hold contradictory positions is assuaged through a clever rhetorical move: claiming that oscillation itself is the point.
A Rebranding Exercise
What metamodernism presents as novel is ultimately a recombination of elements from premodern, modern, and postmodern frameworks without resolving their fundamental contradictions. Rather than being mutually exclusive from these earlier paradigms, it cherry-picks aspects of each whilst maintaining the basic ontological framework of modernism.
The notion that one can meaningfully “oscillate” between accepting objective and subjective realities is particularly problematic. Either reality has objective features, or it doesn’t—pretending otherwise doesn’t create a new philosophical paradigm but rather a convenient means of avoiding the implications of either position.
Postmodern Irony in Motion
Perhaps the most intriguing interpretation of metamodernism is not as a sincere attempt to move beyond postmodernism but as postmodernism performing its own critique. Viewed through this lens, metamodernism becomes postmodern irony in motion—a knowing wink at the impossibility of escaping construction whilst performatively engaging with the desire to do so.
The irony deepens when we consider that “postmodernism” itself is essentially an externally imposed label rather than a self-identification. Most thinkers characterised as postmodernists reject the label, which functions primarily as a modernist attempt to categorise and contain ideas that fundamentally challenge its frameworks.
Art vs. Philosophy
Where metamodernism succeeds is as a descriptive label for certain artistic and cultural productions that deliberately play in the space between irony and sincerity. Works like David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest,” the television series “BoJack Horseman,” and Wes Anderson’s films effectively combine postmodern techniques with sincere emotional engagement.
However, what works as an artistic sensibility fails as a comprehensive philosophical framework or moral compass. The oscillation that enriches art becomes paralysing when applied to ethics or ontology. A moral framework requires some stable reference points; constantly shifting between believing in objective moral truths and viewing morality as entirely constructed provides no reliable guide for actual decision-making.
Insider vs. Outsider Perspectives
Like religious frameworks that balance literal and metaphorical interpretations, metamodernism may function as a lived experience for those who embrace it, even if it doesn’t hold up to external philosophical scrutiny. The cognitive manoeuvres that appear as tricks or inconsistencies to outsiders often feel like natural, intuitive ways of navigating complexity to those within the system.
This insider/outsider divide recalls Thomas Nagel’s famous “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” (PDF) thought experiment—there may be experiential aspects of inhabiting a metamodern worldview that aren’t fully comprehensible from the outside. Yet this doesn’t invalidate external critique; inconsistencies and contradictions still matter philosophically.
Conclusion: Beyond Labels
Perhaps the most postmodern insight is recognising that we cannot escape having an ideology—even a position of having no ideology is itself an ideology. What distinguishes various approaches isn’t whether they have ideologies but how explicitly they acknowledge them, how consistently they apply them, and how willing they are to subject them to revision.
Metamodernism, for all its aspirations to transcend earlier frameworks, ultimately reveals more about our contemporary psychological condition than it offers as a coherent philosophical position. It captures our desire to maintain meaning in a world where we’ve recognised its contingency—a desire that may be fundamentally human, even if philosophically untenable.
Rather than seeking yet another “-ism” to resolve our existential and philosophical tensions, perhaps we might more honestly confront the limitations and partialities of all our frameworks, recognising that the search for a perfect synthesis may itself be a modernist fantasy.
I’ve finally had time to create some video content for the Modernity Worldview Survey. This content is a cursory overview and serves as an introduction to deeper content planned for the future.
This video is short of seven minutes, so briefly, it outlines the worldviews and the questions. I opted not to produce a single comprehensive video so the material could arrive sooner. The content is bookmarked, though this is likely overkill for such a short video.
A permanent page about the survey is always available on this blog.
I’m still accumulating responses, but the survey is available here if you haven’t taken it. Apologies in advance for the fact that it renders best on a larger monitor or tablet rather than a mobile phone. It doesn’t render at all on a landline, so there’s that.
This post explains how to interpret the ternary plot chart’s visualisation. The ternary chart on the survey results page will render something like this. This is an admin page with additional functionality, but it’s similar enough. The blue dot represents the average of all responses. The star represents where I guessed the average would land–mostly modern with some residual premodernity and a touch of postmodernity.
Under the title in the header is a textual assessment of the visualisation. In this case, the response illustrates someone moderately modern with postmodern influences. Although this person also has some premodern tendencies, they are relatively insignificant to the context.
The three possible worldviews are at the vertices (the corners) of the triangle. Each side is a scale progressing from 0% to 100%—100% coincident with the label. For example, the bottom side runs from 0 on the left to 100 on the right, which would indicate a score of 100 per cent Premodern, which the output deems Pure Premodern.
Notice that each vertex has green and yellow shading that serves as visual aids representing the strength of the relationship to the corner. Green is strong, and yellow is moderate. The white section outlined by an interior triangle with a red border is decidedly mixed, showing no strong inclination to any of the extremes.
In the example above, the red plot point illustrates a response (as shown below the chart) that is 20.7% Premodern, 52.1% Modern, and 27.2% Postmodern. These numbers should always sum to 100, though there will be some drift due to rounding. The star represents where I thought the average response would be. Follow the tickmarks on each side, and you’ll notice they correspond with the plot point as a 3-tuple (20, 70, 10).
In the future, I expect to render a view that plots the average survey response as a reference.
Below this chart is an expository account of the response choices. You can render this content as a PDF for your personal archive.
Final Word
If you have any questions or suggestions related to this topic, please feel free to leave them in the comments below.
A Brief, Brutal Experiment in Categorising Your Worldview
This month, I’ve been tinkering with a little project—an elegant, six-question survey designed to assess where you land in the great intellectual mess that is modernity.
Audio: Podcast discussion about this post.
This isn’t some spur-of-the-moment quiz cooked up in a caffeine-fueled haze. No, this project has been simmering for years, and after much consideration (and occasional disdain), I’ve crafted a set of questions and response options that, I believe, encapsulate the prevailing worldviews of our time.
It all began with Metamodernism, a term that, at first, seemed promising—a bold synthesis of Modernism and Postmodernism, a grand dialectic of the ages. But as I mapped it out, it collapsed under scrutiny. A footnote in the margins of intellectual history, at best. I’ll expand on that in due course.
The Setup: A Simple, Slightly Sadistic Ternary Plot
For the visually inclined (or the masochistically curious), I initially imagined a timeline, then a branching decision tree, then a Cartesian plane before landing on a ternary plot—a three-way visual that captures ideological leanings in a way a boring old bar chart never could.
The survey itself is brief: six questions, each with five possible answers. Submit your responses, and voilà —you get a tidy little ternary chart plotting your intellectual essence, along with a breakdown of what your answers signify.
Methodology: Half-Rigorous, Half-Reckless
I am, after all, a (recovering) statistician, so I’ve tried to uphold proper methodology while also fast-tracking certain safeguards for the sake of efficiency. If there’s enough interest, I may expand the survey, adding more questions or increasing response flexibility (tick boxes instead of radio buttons—revolutionary, I know).
Privacy Concerns? Relax. I’m not harvesting your data for some nefarious scheme. No personally identifiable information is collected—just a timestamp, session ID, and your browser’s language setting. I did consider tracking IP addresses to analyze regional trends but ultimately scrapped that idea.
In the future, I may add an optional email feature for those who wish to save and track their responses over time (assuming anyone is unhinged enough to take this more than once).
The Rest of the Story: Your Feedback, My Amusement
Since this is a personal project crafted in splendid isolation, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Are the questions reasonable? Do the response options make sense? Does the summary feel accurate? Is the ternary chart decipherable, or have I constructed a glorified inkblot test?
As an academic, economist, and statistician, I had never encountered a ternary chart before embarking on this, and now I rather enjoy it. That said, I also find Nietzsche “intuitive,” so take that as you will.
If this gains traction, expect follow-up content—perhaps videos, podcasts, or further written explorations.
Your Move
Take the survey. It’s painless, requiring mere minutes of your life (which is, let’s be honest, already wasted online). And because I’m feeling generous, you can even generate a PDF to stick on your fridge, next to your collection of expired coupons and disappointing takeout menus.
Let’s see where you stand in the grand, chaotic landscape of modernity. Or at least, let’s have a laugh trying to make sense of it.
DISCLAIMER: The Modernity Worldview Survey is not scientific. It is designed as an experiment to provide directional insights. It is hosted on Google Cloud and subject to its availability and performance limitations.
I’ve written about this topic before. Metamodernism has been heralded as the great reconciler of Modernism and Postmodernism, a dialectical triumph that purports to synthesise these two oppositional paradigms. On the one hand, Modernism clings to its belief in objective truths, rationality, and universal principles. On the other, Postmodernism dismantles those certainties, exposing them as fragile constructs, rooted as much in ideology as in reason. The promise of metamodernism is to bridge this divide, to create a space where the objectivity of Modernism and the relativism of Postmodernism can coexist. But can it?
Audio: NotebookLM Podcast about this topic.
Spoiler alert: it cannot. In fact, metamodernism doesn’t even attempt to fulfil its stated goal. Instead, what it really does—intentionally or not—is meld Modernism’s objective framework with Pre-Enlightenment mysticism, offering a regressive concoction that romanticises the past while pretending to chart a bold new future. This isn’t synthesis; it’s nostalgia masquerading as innovation.
The Unbridgeable Divide: Objective vs. Relative
To understand why metamodernism’s claimed synthesis is untenable, we need to examine the fundamental incompatibility of its supposed components. Modernism rests on the firm foundation of objectivity: truth is universal, reason is supreme, and progress is inevitable. Postmodernism, however, thrives in the cracks of that foundation, pointing out that these so-called universal truths are culturally and historically contingent, and that “progress” often serves as a euphemism for domination or erasure.
Reconciling these two positions is like trying to mix oil and water. Modernism’s faith in absolutes cannot coexist with Postmodernism’s celebration of ambiguity and multiplicity without reducing one to a mere aesthetic flourish for the other. The result is not a synthesis but a superficial oscillation, an endless back-and-forth that achieves neither clarity nor coherence.
The Real Agenda: A Fusion of Objectivities
What metamodernism actually achieves is something quite different. Instead of bridging the gap between Modernism and Postmodernism, it fuses Modernism’s objective certainties with the equally objective but pre-rational framework of Pre-Enlightenment mysticism. In doing so, it abandons the critical lens of Postmodernism altogether, retreating to a worldview that is comfortingly familiar but intellectually regressive.
Consider the resurgence of myth, spirituality, and transcendence in metamodernist discourse. These elements hark back to a time when objective truths were dictated by divine authority or cosmological narratives rather than scientific inquiry. By incorporating these pre-modern ideas into its framework, metamodernism sidesteps the hard questions posed by Postmodernism, offering a fusion that is plausible only because both Modernism and Pre-Enlightenment mysticism share a common belief in absolute truths.
Plausible but Retrograde
This melding of Modernist and Pre-Enlightenment frameworks might seem plausible because, in truth, many Moderns never fully abandoned their mystical roots. The Enlightenment’s project of replacing religious dogma with reason was always incomplete; its foundational assumptions about universality and objectivity often carried an unspoken theological residue. Metamodernism taps into this latent nostalgia, offering a vision of the world that feels grounded and comforting, but at the cost of intellectual progress.
The problem is that this vision is fundamentally retrograde. By retreating to the certainties of the past, metamodernism ignores the most valuable insight of Postmodernism: that all frameworks, whether Modern or mystical, are ultimately constructed and contingent. To move forward, we need to grapple with this contingency, not escape from it.
Conclusion: Nostalgia in Disguise
Far from being a dialectical synthesis, metamodernism is a retreat. It cloaks itself in the language of progress while recycling old patterns of thought. Its attempt to reconcile Modernism and Postmodernism collapses into a fusion of Modernist objectivity and Pre-Enlightenment mysticism, leaving the critical insights of Postmodernism by the wayside.
If we are to truly progress, we must resist the siren song of metamodernism’s nostalgia. Instead, we should embrace the challenge of living without absolutes, grappling with the ambiguity and multiplicity that define our postmodern condition. Anything less is not synthesis but surrender.
Of course, there are the self-proclaimed rebels who smugly declare they’ve rejected their parents’ politics. The ones who went left when Mum and Dad leaned right or discovered anarchism in the ruins of a conservative household. But let’s not be fooled by the patina of rebellion: they may have switched teams, but they’re still playing the same game. They’ve accepted the foundational myths of institutions and democracy—those hallowed, untouchable idols. Like religion, these constructs are not just defended but sanctified, preached as the best or only possible versions of salvation. Dissenters are heretics; non-believers are unthinkable.
By fall, I don’t mean autumn except perhaps metaphorically speaking. The accompanying image illustrates a progression from the pre-Enlightenment reformation and the factors leading to the Modern Condition and increases in schizophrenia in people, societies, and enterprises.
Podcast: Audio rendition of this page content.
This image is essentially composited from a later chapter in Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary. In it, he outlines a path that commences at the Reformation that led to Lutheranism and Protestantism and further to Calvinism (not separately depicted). Max Weber argued that Capitalism is inextricably linked to Calvinism and the workmanship ideal tradition.
McGilchrists argument is founded on the notion that Catholocism is a communally oriented belief system whilst Protestantism is focused on the individual and salvation through personal work. The essence of capitalism is the same.
Of course, history isn’t strictly linear. In fact, there are more elements than one could realistically account for, so we rely on a reduction. In concert with the Reformation but on a slight delay is the so-called Age of Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, which led not only to faith in science but then to the pathology of Scientism.
This Protestant-Scientismic nexus brought us to Capitalism and into the Industrial Revolution, where humans were devivified or devitalised, trading their souls to be pawns to earn a few shekels to survive. Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution led to Marxism, through Marx’s critique of Capitalism, but Marxism has the same fatal flaw as Capitalism inasmuch as it doesn’t view people as humans. It does afford them a slightly higher function as workers, but this still leaves humanity as a second-tier aspect and even historicity is elevated above as a sort of meta-trend or undercurrent.
From there, we transition to Modernity, which yields the modern condition and schizophrenics in one fell swoop. This is no coincidence.
Although I end this journey at Modernism, McGilchrist is also leery of the effects of post-modernism as well as philosophy itself as overly reductionist in its attempts to categorise and systematise, valuing signs and symbols over lived experience. His main complaint with postmodernism is that it moves from the objective perspective of Modernity to the subjective perspective, and so there remains no base foundation, which is the shared experience. I’m not sure I agree with his critique, but I’m not going to contemplate it here and now.
In the end, this journey and illustration are gross simplifications, but I still feel it provides valuable perspective. The challenge is that one can’t readily put the genie back into the bottle, and the question is where do we go from here, if not Modernism or Postmodernism. I shouldn’t even mention Metamodernism because that seems like an unlikely synthesis, as well-intentioned as it might be. McGilchrist gives examples of reversals in the trend toward left-hemisphere bias, notably the Romantic period, but that too was reversed, recommencing the current trajectory. My feeling is that if we continue down this dark path, we’ll reach a point of no return.
It seems to be that it’s growing at an increasing rate, like a snowball careening down a slope. It not only drives the left-dominant types further left because an analytical person would reinforce the belief that if only s/he and the world were more analytical things would be so much better—even in a world where net happiness is trending downward—, but it also forces this worldview on other cultures, effectively destroying them and assimilating them into the dark side, if I can borrow a Star Wars reference.
Epilogue
I wasn’t planning to share this story—at least not now. In another forum, I responded to a statement, and I was admonished by Professor Stephen Hicks, author of the book of dubious scholarship, Explaining Postmodernism.
I responded to this query:
If you’re a single mother and have a son I’d suggest putting him in a sport or martial arts to add some masculine energy to his life. It’s not a replacement for the actual father but it can help instil structure and discipline into the core of his being.
— Julian Arsenio
“Perhaps this world needs less discipline and structure, not more,” was my response, to which Hicks replied.
The quotation is not about “the world.” It is about boys without fathers. Evaluate the quotation in its context.
— Stephen Hicks
“Disciplined boys create a disciplined world. Not a world I’d prefer to create or live in. We need more right-hemisphere people. Instead, we are being overwhelmed by left hemisphere types, leading to Capitalism and the denouement of humanity as it encroaches like cancer, devouring or corrupting all it touches.
“In the end, it is about the world, which from a left hemisphere perspective is a sum of its parts. Right-hemisphere thinkers know otherwise,” was my reply. He responded,
You seem to have difficulty focusing. From a quotation about fatherless boys you free associate to [sic] weird psychology and global apocalptic [sic] pessimism. Pointless.
— Stephen Hicks
“I’ll suggest that the opposite is true, and perhaps you need to focus less and appreciate the Gestalt. This was not free association. Rather, it is a logical connexion between the disposition of the people in the world and lived reality.
“Clearly, you are a left-hemisphere structured thinker. The world is literally littered with this cohort.
“I suggest broadening your worldview so as not to lose the woods for the trees. I recommend Dr Iain McGilchrist as an apt guide. Perhaps reading The Master and His Emissary and/or The Matter with Things would give you another perspective. #JustSaying”
And still, rather than addressing the issue of fatherless boys, you go off on tangents, this time psychologizing about people you’ve zero first-hand knowledge of.
— Stephen Hicks
Feel free to interpret this as you will. For me, his attempt to limit discussion to some notion he had in his head and his failure to see the woods for the trees, as I write, suggests that he is a left-brain thinker. Having watched some of his videos, whether lectures or interviews, this was already evident to me. This exchange is just another proof point.
I considered offering the perspective of Bruno Bettleheim’s importance of unstructured play, but as is evidenced above, he is not open to dialogue. His preference appears to be a monologue. This is the left hemisphere in action. This is an example of how insidious this convergent thinking is, and it makes me worry about what’s ahead in a world of people demanding more structure and discipline. Foucault’s Discipline and Surveillance comes to the forefront.
Philosophics 