So I’ve been listening to the views of many opposing sides. I’ve been immersing myself into the arguments of the ideological right and the ideological left. And I’ve found a lot of learn and a lot to like on both side. I find a lot of information, data, reasons, and behind all these much larger overarching narratives which structure and inform the interpretation of all these facts and arguments. The narrative is a bit like a personality in which these disparate elements become meaningful and take on a definite shape. They’re the body that the bits are used to construct. And there is a difinite sort of personality to that construct. It’s a kind of god, an exaggerated guiding logos that emerges out of the personality: the purposes, the abilities, the interpretations, the insights, the blind spots, the weaknesses, the prejudices, the attitudes, the approaches that make it up. It is the spirit of that people.

Unfortunately, listening to the two try to talk to one another in a debate has been one of the most profoundly depressing and upsetting experiences of my life. Both sides have their extremes. And unfortunately this extremes have grown to swallow much of the meaningful discourse. The extremes still retain some of the power and wisdom of the position, but in such exaggeration and isolation that they have become grotesque, half-blind parodies of themselves. Like a body builder whose enroided muscles have grown so enormous that he can no longer move properly and appears unnatural and impotent, whose strength and development is so great that it undermines the very purposes of capability of motion and health and potency.

Listening to these two sides debate one another is such an excess of unreason that it’s hard to even describe. Both sides become almost indistinguishable when viewed from a neutral point. Both commit the same sins and fallacies against one another in turn and see no hypocrisy. They blithely complain about the hegemony and oppression of the other side, then smoothly justify their own hegemony and oppression in the same words and terms that were used against them in the past, marshaling the exact same arguments and being completely oblivious about it. Our taxes shouldn’t be used to support such filth. Everyone knows that’s all fake. We don’t have to listen to things we know are wrong. Your words are an attack on the safety and survival of our people. You deserve to be thrown out and ostracized. It’s the job of decent people to resist and fight radicals like you. I just heard two liberals make those exact arguments against conservatives without a hint of irony. And their justification, like everyone ever, was “Well, it’s ok for us to do that and say that because we’re right”. It’s ok for us to violate your free speech because these are all settled questions of which there is and cannot be any question.

I’m not siding with the conservatives in this case, only pointing out how the wheel of time turns, and how no one is really any different from anyone else as humans, however their ideologies might differ. We all have the same tendencies and tactics and justifications. There is nothing inherent in our nature by birth to make us better or different. We only lack the opportunity to become the same as those we revile. The only true differentiator is our choices and our behavior when we find ourselves in either camp. To embrace the mistakes all humanity tends toward in those positions, or to rise above them.

The rebels of today become the hegemony of tomorrow. And we become an oppressive hegemony especially by the degree to which we still regard ourselves as rebels, able to justify our tactics by our plight. We become terrorists, desperate to survive, fighting for our lives and existence, willing to do anything because the strength and threat of the enemy is so great that extremism in our response is not only justified, but necessary. Yes, we may technically commit injustices ourselves, but they are worth it because they serve to balance a cosmic scale of justice that is unfairly weighted against us.

Like the Jews under the threat of Haman, we take to ourselves the right to destroy any who threaten us with even greater violence. But unlike them, we do not take it only for the space of a day, or see our enemy only in one special circumstance we must defend ourselves in. We see the enemy everywhere, and we grant ourselves ever greater rights to seek them out in their homes to cut off their threat. We become Haman. And the more each of us becomes Haman, the more the other side is justified in their response and assessment of the threat, and the more they become Haman in turn.

I’ve heard this kind of reponse praised as a virtue by both liberals and conservatives, and even from established and respected institutions, and from both liberal and conservative churches. And both sides hear the call of the other and react with horror and increased escalation and shouts that their warnings have been validated and their denunciations justified.

The worst part is, they’re not entirely wrong. There is a reasonable version of each position that has good points to make. There is a version of their narrative that hasn’t grown to become a grotesque exaggeration, a version of their spirit that can teach instead of just grow and engulf and reduce all to purity and simplicity and hegemony. And the solution to hegemony and simplification and exaggeration and conflict isn’t anarchy or relativism or isolationism. It’s collaboration. It’s mutual submission to an objective standard for cooperation, negotiation, and conflict resolution.

There does have to be some basic common ground. Some shared structure to our view of the universe. That is why our gods have to be kept humble. If graven images, something limited made in our own likeness, becomes the object of our sole worship, the limit of the universe, it will inevitably lead to conflict and abuse. Possibly yoy can create a system where such conflict can be negotiated and find a system of mutual balance, but such a system is still dependent on existing within some overarching supersystem of common ground that allows that kind of negotiation and arbitration to take place.

So there are a few important questions that still need to be answered about what kind of situation we’re in. First, is there a genuine conflict between the worldviews that have developed in our culture, or do they still share enough common ground to function in cooperation? Second, why is it that the isolated extremes seem to be so favored and advantaged in our current environment? Why have they thrived so much?

Of course, there aren’t any quick and easy answers to these questions. But I’m going to try to give them anyway. In all seriousness, I’m just going to hazard a couple guesses about the possibilities.

As to why the extremes seem specially positioned to rise to the top, I believe it’s because of structural changes in our society and media. We live in a world where a few things have happened. Traditional barriers to exposure have been greatly reduced. You are no longer limited in how you can be heard by where you live or who you are.

In the old days, in order to get people to listen to you, you usually had to prove yourself in life and in your family and city in some way. You had to gain a platform in a mixed environment whose makeup you weren’t in control of. You had to achieve a certain amount of success and stability in your life. Even to have the luxury of time and the resources to support doing such a thing, you had to get your act together quite a bit. As a member of your family, as a member of the community, as a member of the economy. Your reach was very limited by the constraints of life in general. They acted as a strong selective pressure.

But modern technology has circumvented a lot of that. We’ve created a new kind of environment where we can interact with minimal consequences (the anonymity of the internet), and where our platform is much less dependent on our individual circumstances than it is upon our individual identity. We can let the algorithm do the selection for us and bring us our ideal audience. We can make selection work in our favor now, instead of against us.

Extremes that might be fairly unworkable in a mixed environment like a city or even a neighborhood or family, are reinforced instead by our freedom and ability to cluster together through media and find specifically the people we want to find who will affirm and confirm us and make us more ourselves, more settled in our identity. And the barrier to create a platform is just practically much lower. If you know how to provoke attention, you can be an influencer, or even a major politician if that’s what you like. Just make a splash on Twitter or Instagram.

So there are way more players in the game, because the barrier to entry is lower. But that also means there are way more parties competing for the same audience. The hyper-competitive, hyper-specialized environment of online media that has destabilized and replaced common audience media (people have their choice now, and a plethora of choices specifically tailored to their tastes and personality), means it’s a desperate competition between media outlets to get your loyalty and attention. And there are two very easy roads to that loyalty.

First, provocation. Content that is as viral and provocative and compelling as possible, that at a glance of a headline compels you to read. And the best way to achieve that isn’t through mild, considerate, balanced discussion. You want to play to the strongest emotions and most irresistible psychological mechanisms. Fear, resentment, outrage, the pleasure of secret knowledge, arousal, excitement, validation. Feeding the story of your individual god. That’s why we get these crazy headlines that often don’t even accurately reflect the content of the articles. The headlines were designed around a program that determines how viral the headline is, how likely it is to provoke someone to click on it. In no way does it measure accuracy, only efficacy. And yes, this isn’t even just something people do, it is a literal, actual program you can use.

And because of the way media works, this works for people in general. People who are provocative, who know how to pull attention and be viral and draw attention to themselves will get coverage and draw the public interest. Its not enough to be an expert or competent or even experienced. You need to be an entertainer, a provocateur. You need to know who go viral, for any reason, good or bad. You need to be a media figure. If you’re just a boring old normal, competent person, you’re not going anywhere. That’s what the audience demands, and because the media is there to sell the people what they want, the media demands it too. They need provocateurs to help make the headlines that sell.

Another thing the media can do to retain your attention and loyalty is to herd people. Keep them them on your platform, make it expansive enough that it can cover everything and fill up their whole lives, so they can get everything there without needing to go anywhere else or hear from anywhere else. You can basically climb into a specially constructed ideological niche and never leave it. All you want and all you want to know can be brought to your niche and filtered and interpreted to fit within it. We can make your god, your story, your ideological personality, the lens through which all things pass, so it becomes your whole world. Whatever it is you want, come here to get it; we will give you everything. You never need to leave.

There are two places I can think of that are far enough from ordinary life that you can operate in this kind of strange, constructed environment. One is the internet. And the other is the university. Both allow you a certain amount of distance from the real world and real consequences and compromises that tend to define ordinary existence. Both allow for a very special kind of ideological clustering and siloing.

Maybe at one point the university didn’t operate this way. But the necessary bureaucratic separation of different fields into separate departments, with their own concerns and cultures that have become more and more specialized over time and more and more invested in their own system for validation and criticism, means the university is now in the business of creating very limited, clique-based specialists in an environment fundamentally divorced from the realities of life, a world (the internet is helping to shrink) where our neighbors, friends, and the people we meet in our daily life are quite likely not going to share the same temperaments, degrees, background, and interests as ourselves.

The need to secure funding and lauds within your field (as well as the need to defend its legitimacy and mystique against challenges by and comparisons to other fields), pushes many disciplines toward a certain amount of conformity and isolation within their cloistered, specialized tower. And we can see this happening all over in many fields (and indeed, chasing the fashion of ideas has long been the pursuit of the academy, going back to the times of ancient Greeks). Just as a matter of professional advancement and legitimacy, a lot of academic work is very much about pleasing the ideological establishment and gaining reputation within it, and most academic fields are becoming progressively more and more ideologically uniform. It is a very strange environment for figuring out the great, interconnected truths about the world, and a very strange testing ground for ideas.

And if you stay in the university, you can go for broke on this model of sequestration and imagine that that’s the way of the whole world, because it is your world. And modern life makes it much easier for all of us to live like cloistered academics. The internet has made the ordinary world more like the university, and the university in turn has made the internet more like itself, a collection of ideological and psychological and professional silos. It trains young people to a certain approach to life and the world and through the internet allows it to be perpetuated. It addicts people to the safety and reassurance and comprehensiveness (we view and approach all life through this lens) of living inside their academic discipline and prepares them, not for the world outside it, but to fear and hate the very idea, to become reliant on it, and to seek to make their world and the whole world more like it.

And all this makes sense. It’s a much easier, more reassuring, more pleasurable idea of the world. One without compromise, without complexity, without any claims on us or barrier before us bigger than ourselves and the limits we decree. It makes our gods the gods of the whole world. And it lessen the need for us to turn to ourselves and work on ourselves and turns the moral and practical challenges of the world into something external we can confront and oppose directly. Our gods are complete and unchallengeable, the threat to our world, the cause of all problems in it, is the existence of the gods of other groups. If we can merely cast them down, the whole world will be in harmony. If we can just take away their power and silence their voices, we will have peace and paradise at last. Our righteousness is contained in our identity, and their sinfulness is contained in theirs.

This shift to responsibility based on group identity, rather than individual behavior, is massively comforting, and massively problematic. It returns us to the state of the necessary conflict between our gods, between our conflicting narrative views of the world, that are defined by and define our insights, strengths, abilities, desire, proclivities, weaknesses, blind spots, dislikes, and insufficiencies. In short, our personalities. So our real conflict is personal. It’s about you vs me. My idol against yours. And our two very different narratives can’t both claim to represent and contain the whole world. Their claims compete, and one must overcome the other by force, because they both recognize no space or measure above them to which they submit where both could be judged.

Nevertheless, I still say it’s a psychologically comforting place to be. Because it’s simple about what it’s most comforting to be simplistic about. It makes the security of our position a necessary inheritance, a part of who we are. We become unquestionable within the safe space of our specially constructed narrative world. All we need to do is belong to that group. And it makes the position of others very reassuringly clear too. They’re the enemy that must be stopped and confronted. They have nothing to share, nothing to contribute, no claims on us. They’re just wrong. We know it because they’re part of that group. Good and evil become easy to spot and figure out. Doing right consists in taking away the power and the voice of the bad people and raising up the power and voices of our party.

Unfortunately, this is a massive shift backward in social moral theory, away from individual responsibility to a more primitive idea of group identity morality. Virtue becomes something you do to resist and correct other people, not something you do to resist and correct yourself. Measuring it becomes all about identifying markers. How many markers do you have that give you positive value, that make you one of the good guys, and how many do they have that lower their rating and make them the bad guys? All other questions become secondary. Your value as a contributor to a culture, your value as an employee, the value of what you say, your moral value of either guilt or being deserving, all of those become overlapping functions of identity calculation. I know who I am and how to think of myself. I know who others are and how to think of them. I know what good and evil are, and I know what I need to do to further them. Self-identify, call out others, promote, and resist.

The best moralities of the past (best as in most successful and sophisticated), however, recognized the individual as the fundamental building block of all social structures , as well as the most fundamental container of value. They had claim to the greatest rights because they also had claim to the greatest responsibilities. American law in its infancy was terribly concerned not to deliver too much power to the state or to groups, and ensured this space for autonomy with the bill of rights, because it was believed that the responsibility for supporting and safeguarding and guiding society laid primarily in the hands of those very individuals.

These rights weren’t given because because individuals had little to do or little power, but because they were the very seat of power and responsibility. They had the most to do, the most agency, the most responsibility, the most culpability. There was the most to be protected and there was the most to be expected. And those moralities of individual responsibility were designed principally for you to use against yourself, to judge and correct yourself, to wisely rule yourself, and denied you the safe space of a moral value based in your group identity.

The shift from polytheism to monotheism is, psychologically, the shift from the veneration of your particular personality or approach or the viewpoint of your city or family or culture to a universal viewpoint that belong to no one. An overarching concept of order that transcends individual viewpoints and be pursued individually from different relative positions because it itself, in its deepest nature, is objective and unitary and intelligible. And it is this idea, shared by both Greeks and Jews and Christians (in their philosophies if not all individual practices) that is the spirit of Western Civilization. It’s a spirit that makes ideas such as the scientific method not only reasonable, but likely to arise. The world is objectively testable, objectively intelligible and consistent, objectively accessible. It has those qualities which would make science possible.

And this brings us to our final question. Is there such a conflict between the ideologies that have now emerged that they cannot work together or collaborate or be reconciled? And my off the cuff answer would have to be, as they are currently, no. They are not compatible. They are so radically different that they do not share enough basic components to make mutual intelligibility and negotiation possible. They would each take civilization down such drastically different paths that it would not possible to put them both into practice simultaneously.

But, and this is a big but, if they could become more moderated versions of themselves; it might be possible. We’re living currently in the post-modern world, but that world contains several different viewpoints within it. The post-moderns, the moderns, and the pre-moderns. Post-modernism is best exemplified by current liberal politics and the ideology prevailing among the social sciences and liberal arts.

Modernism still lingers around in the form of secular humanists, many (most?) members of the hard sciences and applied sciences, secular conservatives, and other folks whose work is very focused around practical constraints and limitations (including a good amount of business people).

The pre-moderns are those who hold the philosophies that led to modernism but never embraced its final forms, like Platonists, certain types of Christians, Aristotelians, and other classically-minded relics.

In fact Christians, as a group, are curious because they’re spread fairly widely across all three major divisions. There are so many different schisms among Christians (and among Jews as well). Some Christians (and especially Jews) have stuck to the old, now resurgent, idea of group identity as being primary. You can be born a Jew, and you’re a Jew whether you practice the religion or not. Many Christians gained this idea through cultural pollution of their beliefs, then many lost it again following the Reformation, then gained and lost it again, so that now most Christians in America don’t consider religion a heritable trait any more.

Many Christians have also embraced post-modernism, often without really even realizing it, as a form of cultural accommodation to what everybody knows and believes is true nowadays. Many Christians have also embraced or retained modernism, as the expression of or fulfillment of their own theological concepts. And some small number have retained their pre-modern roots and don’t quite fit easily into either group but both come from and lead to them.

I’ve described the groups, but what exactly are the spirits of these groups that make them different and either complimentary or incompatible? What are the narratives that they describe, what kind of gods do they preach, what story about us and about the world do they give us to make sense of things? I’ve already described the pre-moderns to some degree. Theirs is a philosophy of unity, intelligibility, and objectivity, of a transcendent reality that can be tested and better or worse answers and better or worse practices discovered. Their world is a world haunted by purpose and order, a teleological universe of purpose, and a moral universe of individual responsibility and social complexity. There is a diversity of perspectives, but there’s only one world. It’s the position you arrive at by emerging out of psychological polytheism (a simple morality and truth founded in identity, the gods of your city or state or household in competition with the gods of everyone else’s) to psychological monotheism (a complex and complicated morality and truth that belongs to no one but is equally accessible and testable and negotiable between everyone). And it’s the position that lays the ground for modernism. It’s the position you leave behind as when you emerge out of monotheism into secular humanism and scientism.

Modernism drops a lot of the teleological haunting of the universe and wants to get more practical. Let’s talk about mechanisms and consequences and technique and what to do, now that we’ve got things figured out, not waste time on scholastic quibbles. Modernism is less concerned with the many perspectives there are on the world and more concerned with nailing down the right one. Modernism was, perhaps, a bit drunk on the practical power that it gained from its scientific advancement. There was a confidence to it, and maybe a little bit of reductiveness. Having found a universal reality and distilled it down to a single element (math, science, biology, scientific politics, economics, modernist philosophy, physics, materialism, depending on who you’re talking to), they set about dispelling all the ghosts and reducing all other dimensions of life to that one level of truly objective reality.

This gave rise to many different cultural movements, not all of which were great. The attempt to solve the problem of life through philosophical, scientific, and political means led to things like genocide and war and the gulags and millions of deaths under Hitler and millions more under Stalin and Mao. As cultural prophets like Neitzsche had predicted, we hadn’t quite learned how to wield all the godlike power we had suddenly assumed. And even the more positive applications of modernism to solving human life left people more comfortable but somehow still not fulfilled, still lacking in meaning. We fancied that we had unlocked the keys to the universe but somehow found godhood, or rather humanity, more problematic than we expected.

Modernism today still lingers on in an altered form. I think politically conservative Christianity is a kind of alliance with modernism that has turned it into a vassal state of political ideology. Its faith used to be something larger and more diverse and complex than a mere political theory or set of political ways and means, “earthly” ends to power and change that were eschewed by Christ and the early Christians and many later saints and reformers. But modernist Christianity lost a lot of its confidence, much as philosophy did at the same time, and both felt the need to tie themselves more closely to the earthly powers that had yielded such amazing success for the scientists and given them mastery over the physical world and influence over the social and psychological worlds. They saw the need to become more like those masters of the modern age, crafting the world through their technique and influence.

The seeds of postmodernism were already nascent within modernism, especially Marxism. Not so much as ideas, as much as attitudes. If modernism was a courageous attempt to discard the past and all the messy, conflicting complexity of human life and boil it all down an explicable, consistent formula that humans could unlock and manipulate, postmodernism is the reaction to modernism’s failure, or at least it’s unworkability.

At some point modernism couldn’t really pull it all together in a way that actually worked for human life. It failed to give us the world in a way that really meant something to us, in a manner that met our psychological needs and really connected with us and made us happy and gave our lives meaning. Having lost our narrative complexity and our teleology, it all just seemed like a cold machine, inhuman. And the fruit of this concern was existentialism.

Having lost faith, both intellectually and because of the practical historical results (for example, the world wars), in our ability to create a perfect system and reality based on pure, unquestionable reason, a perfect castle of scientific society and human life built by us from the ground up, thinkers turned to existentialism. And they wondered if, in fact, there was really no sense or meaning or intelligibility to life at all. And some folks, such as Bertrand Russell, even tried to wed modernism and existentialism and build a kind of aggressively ebullient existential materialism. We’ve figured out the world, and it is hollow, and you are nothing, and the universe is northing. You’re born, you live, you die, and so it is with all things, even existence itself. But that’s everything. So deal with it. Build your life off what the world is, not what you wish it were, and let that be enough. And this position is still popular today in some circles.

But for many people this seemed like a very unacceptable approach to life. It left the world feeling very small and limited. And they had a lot of concerns and criticisms about where modernism had led and what it had achieved. They were still living in the world that modernism had built, and they were trying to figure out how to live in the world existentialism had disposed of. And the result was a new kind of skeptical philosophy.

The postmodern outlook can be basically understood in a couple ways. One is as an attitude. We’ve disproved everything, but we’re going to act as if we didn’t. Humans need their stories to live inside, but none of them is actually truer than any other; so live your story, just don’t make any claims about objective reality or big “T” Truth or transcendent value structures. It’s a kind of ideological Marxism, socialized truth, socialized reality.

There is a kind of hopefulness to this position, the hope of living out your own individual truth, however you define it, and that it will make you happy and won’t get in the way of anyone else’s happiness. And that’s all there is. That’s as much as you can hope for. In a way, it’s not far off from what certain existentialist recommended. Embrace the absurdity of life, and just forget about it. Live within your own necessary delusion to be happy, because that’s all there is. Just don’t get in the way of me doing my thing, and don’t presume to claim that there’s anything else out there.

Another way to understand postmodernism is as a set of fundamental claims about the story of human life. The first is skepticism. There is no true map of reality, other than that there is no map, all stories are subjective, they’re just our personal stories. They have no validity other than what we grant them. Nothing has an objective or universal claim over anyone. We’re all just figuring our way through things, and there is no “right” answer. All stories (maps of the universe) are fundamentally equal, therefore all paths through it are fundamentally equal. Therefore it doesn’t really matter what you do, and there are no real differences that matter.

That being known, all outcomes have equal value, and there shouldn’t really be any difference in outcomes, because there is no right or better or objectively or universally truer map or path. So if there is a difference in outcomes, it’s because of some sort of structural manipulation, because someone is keeping other people down and forcibly denying them their rightful due that their equally valid and valuable worldview and ethic (their map and roadmap) should be giving them. All outcomes that are not equal are a fundamentally honest signal of structural inequity, prejudice, manipulation, arbitrary discrimination (because all discrimination is arbitrary in a world where there are no real differences or objective standards), and theft.

So, skepticism leading to a theory of ideological egalitarianism. There is no objective measure, therefore the value of all gods, all stories, all cultures, all practices, all peoples, all behaviors, is equal. A more pessimistic existentialist would say that that’s because their value is all zero, so who cares whether you honor and value or despise and destroy the others; it makes no difference. But postmodernism is more agreeable (except to any position that doesn’t agree with its own positions) than that and embraces the beauty of the value of zero as the only value we ever really had, what we’ve always had.

The way to perfect our world and perfect that value, the solution to all our historical problems and suffering, which proceeded from our delusions and struggle to prove and assert that our gods had some real, non-zero value, is to recognize the inherent absurdity of all such claims and to flatten all outcomes. To tear down any of the heretical claimants to objectivity, to root out all the places where the forces of prejudice, disenfranchisement, theft, and inequality have distorted the outcomes and tear down those structures. When all prejudice is removed, all outcomes will naturally be equal, as would be expected under a system where skepticism and resulting equality are the only universal truths.

There’s one more, slightly odd, assumption that tends to be packed in with postmodernism that’s part of what separates it from the less agreeable forms of skepticism and existentialism. And that’s what I can only think to call an assumption of agreeability. The assumption that everyone, except those who disagree with postmodernism, is fundamentally nice and good and agreeable, and we all want the same things in the same way and that all apparent conflicts are really just illusory and would all disappear if we just stopped claiming that there was any real right or wrong or better and worse.

Rather than embracing the idea of a world of despair and chaos and nature red in tooth and claw, the struggle of my life against yours, competing for space and resources; they see the world in more rosy tones. It’s a world of kindness and tolerance and individualized meaning and happiness, and if the bad people just stopped being unfair and manipulating the outcomes we would all live in equal success and harmony.

There’s a strong tendency toward optimism and utopianism, the idea that if you just removed the artificial structural barriers, then the utopia that is the birthright of every human would dawn. If you see anywhere that it isn’t dawning, that’s because someone is stealing it or preventing it. We all have a right to that utopia, a valid expectation that it should be happening to all of us in whatever way we desire, that we can all be anything we want to be because we’re all the authors of our own stories.

It’s a very welcoming system. So long as you can accept their two fundamental truths of skepticism and ideological egalitarianism, and as long as you play nice and are agreeable and don’t abuse the system by hurting other people, then there’s room for everybody. There’s room for everything. Everyone gets what they want, everyone is happy, everyone gets equal outcomes, all maps have equal value, all paths have equal value, no one needs to feel bad about themselves, no one needs to blame themselves for anything, no one needs to blame some unchangeable nature of the world for anything. Our world and our happiness are what we make it. You live your truth. We’re all finite, all our truths and ethics are subjective. Our truths, our identity, are our own creations. We are the artists and gods of our worlds, crafting our selfhood and our meaning as we see fit.

Now, I’ve taken some extra time to talk about the postmodern viewpoint, which perhaps isn’t very fair, to assume that people have a clear idea of modernism or premodernism (or even psychological polytheism), when postmodernism is the water most people swim in now, the viewpoint our culture takes for granted. In fact, all of these different viewpoints exist simultaneously in our culture, and are often found mixed even within a single person. Much as in academia, a person may have retained a more modernist viewpoint when it comes to their work, their business and science, while taking a more postmodern view of social matters.

And these four frameworks are constantly evolving into one another as they go through their process. Separate gods and perspectives, encountering one another, lead to an attempt at unity under an overarching monotheism/unified theory of universal being, leading next to a demystified, simplified, secularized modernism, then descend into a skeptical existentialism that fractures the unity back into separate gods and perspectives again. And the next likely stage is for skeptical polytheism to evolve right back into real psychological polytheism.

It isn’t a big step to jump from embracing the many gods as a tactic to simply believing in them again. All it needs is the proper trigger. One of those triggers is just time. Give people enough time and they’ll basically go back to the old ways and more and more forget the unified vision of modernism they rejected. People change. People forget. Cultures revert.

A second potential trigger is crisis. Skepticism is, to a certain degree, a psychological luxury. It’s easy to imagine that all maps and paths are the same when you have such technological and economic power and comfort that, in practice, that seems to be the case. We’ve got all these wonderful things we’ve built, all this safety, all this ease and pleasure. It’s easy to imagine that anyone can be or do anything, that there are no limits, that we and the world are whatever we want them to be. We have the power to make the world whatever we want, without constraint. We are like gods; we live like gods. That’s the power of wealth and technology, they let us be whatever we want to be and do whatever we want to do.

Postmodern theory works much better in a world where some people are very successful and comfortable, and to a certain degree have inherited that position and have had no great demands placed upon them. The world is a playground, as is our university, a safe place where we can freely explore our ideas apart from the troubles and restrictions and demands of the ordinary world. You can hold your picture of the world and your road map quite loosely, because you don’t really need them, except as an exercise in self creation and the exploration and construction of your own personal happiness and meaning. They’re personal and, to some degree, arbitrary and unconstrained. They aren’t meant to be judged for the their accuracy against some eternal, universal standard they have to correctly map onto or risk being dangerously wrong or bad.

But when your world is suddenly in crisis, when suddenly you’re in a real fight for your life, it raises the stakes. You need to believe in your belief. You need it to be able to survive testing. Your polytheism stops being a philosophical indulgence and becomes a necessity for survival. And I think that’s probably where things are heading. Through skepticism and postmodernism back to polytheism. Back to the old ways and the old gods, back to magic, back to mysticism, back to the pantheon of many gods. Science will continue to linger for quite a while because of its adherents that still cling to modernism and the many practical powers and advantages it yields, but public confidence in its pronouncements, especially about anything to do with people, will continue to wane.

Society in general is already philosophically way beyond the point where science and modernism hold any validity. If it weren’t for the practical powers and luxuries and technology it provides, it would have already gone the way of the dodo. And one should expect more and more funding to be given and more legitimacy to be given to viewpoints and systems that are directly in contradiction to science. Little inroads have already been made here and there, which the busy scientists have largely ignored or been merely slightly annoyed by. But they should expect those cracks to widen and grow. They should expect their cache’ to erode quicker and quicker over the coming years. Because science itself is in opposition to the postmodern philosophy. It is itself a likely target for accusations of prejudice and abuse.

Science stands on the philosophical foundation of psychological monotheism. There is one world. There are many perspectives, but we can overcome them and grasp objective, universal truths through reason, because the world and its nature are unitary, and it is intelligible, consistent, and testable. And it is our intellectual and moral duty to test and discredit false theories to allow better ones to rise to prominence.

From the viewpoint of postmodernism, these fundamental claims are nothing but pride and prejudice and elitism and the domination of an abominable, unjust, oppressive hegemony. This is the height of discrimination, it is inequality at its worst. These claims are fundamentally in opposition to the essential claims of postmodernism, which are skeptical, subjective, and egalitarian. At the least, science had better stay in its safe spaces like physics and engineering and figuring out how to make things go and giving us all the products and conveniences we need and like. It had better not start making elitist claims about people or ethics. They had better toe the line.

This is why I think there is, in fact, a necessary conflict between the different viewpoints that have arisen in our society. As much as they exist all mixed together, almost all possible scenarios where they coexist in close quarters end in inevitable conflict. Modernism and postmodernism cannot effectively coexist for long. Their fundamental assumptions and aims are so radically different, so radically in conflict.

That’s why listening to people try to have a meaningful debate these days is so disheartening. It’s so clear that people are coming to the table with such radically different systems for how to even approach and interpret data that the idea of them actually learning anything or finding agreement is almost laughable. There’s so much foundational preparation, so much background work, that would need to be done for them to make any kind of sense to each other or find any kind of agreement. They have so many deep, unresolved differences that guide their whole approaches that it’s ridiculous to expect them to be able to meaningfully discuss secondary and tertiary issues that stand upon those conflicting foundations.

Premoderns have largely been choked out and converted to either modernists or postmodernists, or they’ve carved up their kingdom so they keep certain parts of their premodern/modern ideology intact and allow other parts of be influenced and determined by postmodernism. Which in itself is a complete betrayal of the idea of premodern and modernist thought. If you’re carving up your world, you’ve already given up on the whole idea of ontological and epistemological unity. You’re already knee deep in psychological polytheism and have set up different gods for different arenas.

Faithful postmodernists at least can admit to this kind of hypocrisy, for example retaining a more modernist approach to certain areas of life like science or business, and defend themselves by arguing that it’s perfectly consistent and within their rights to be inconsistent, if that’s what they want to do. There’s nothing saying they can’t be inconsistent, and no problem with it, so long as it doesn’t tilt them generally back into the delusion of modernism. The world isn’t fundamentally consistent, so why should they be?

And among them all, there’s a constant temptation to collapse back into psychological polytheism. My world is the world, my story is the story, there are others out there, and they are separate and unimportant or they are in competition with me. I don’t have to make sense of them in some larger objective world, I just have to either tolerate or be amused by or ignore or eradicate them. If postmodernism isn’t already a secular religion, it’s very close to becoming one, and a very old fashioned sort of religion indeed.

As I’ve already said, postmodernism is always perched on the cusp of evolving from skeptical, postmodern polytheism back into actual polytheism. And psychological monotheism is always on the verge of collapsing back into polytheism. It’s a very hard position to maintain, very demanding, and requires you to take yourself out of yourself. So in practice it’s a lot easier to claim monotheism and act like a polytheist, where your fundamental loyalty is to yourself and your own identity as determinant of truth and reality, to the gods of your household.

Historically, religious monotheism has always been very hard to maintain and not have it get reduced in practice or confused in belief with the local cultural polytheism. Because of how close postmodernism is to becoming psychological polytheism, it makes it quite easy for many premoderns and monotheists to skip right over modernism and just drop right into postmodernism. It’s not that far from where they just came from; the undertow is already there. Give it a fancy new paint job that suits modern sensibilities and tastes and you’ve got polytheism for the modern age.

If you’re a more agreeable person especially, it will be more tempting to side with postmodernism than modernism, which comes off a bit harsh to contemporary minds burdened with the fears and guilt of history. And of course modernism is always at risk of failure at its ambitions, falling prey to its overconfidence or myopia, or succumbing to defensiveness in the face of personal opposition, and degenerating like the premoderns back into psychological polytheism. If you’re forced to defend your territory on a personal basis, under personal threat, you’re likely to take it personally and lose your philosophical perspective and your open intellectual process.

After all, if other people aren’t interested in playing by the rules you’ve submitted to as universally valid, such as logic and science, if your arguments are attacked as merely expressions of personal propaganda and your objective measures are derided merely as mechanisms for orchestrating your own advantage, then there’s not a lot you can do. You’ve no longer on your liberal neutral playing field. According to your accusers, it’s a home game, and it’s rigged in your favor, solely for your benefit, so the field itself is a threat and an injustice.

Already some modernists, particularly scientists in the harder sciences and a good number of atheists, are beginning to feel the heat. They’re starting to see the problem, and they’re starting to realize that postmodernism represents an existential threat to their ideology. And when you’re under personal, existential threat, when the other side sees all your arguments and positions and work and mechanisms as nothing but personal artifice that must be defeated, you’re likely going to respond personally, with conflict, with your god, your banner, your meta-narrative against theirs. And in this process, in this fight for life and liberty and sanity (from the perspective of the modernists) it’s easy to forget that your god doesn’t actually belong to you; it isn’t a personal possession. It isn’t on your side. But in a fight, you want it to be, you want a household god. So maybe it becomes one.

The various psychological, cultural, and philosophical stages of thought are always either coming out of one form and beginning to turn into the next, or rising out of one form and sinking gradually back into the sea of their precious common beliefs. And all are mixed together in our hearts and minds, struggling for ascendancy and relevance, dividing up our psyche and our approach to life. Consistency is a terribly difficult task for humans, and the nature of ourselves and nature of the world conspire to help make it so.

We are, after all, finite. We all are limited and experience life from a subjective point of view. But we also appear not be be gods, not able to fully determine our identity or the nature of the world. The world often pushes back against us, often challenges and refutes our expectations and wishes. We don’t get to choose so much about our existence, or the kind of world we find ourselves in, or the kind of world that emerges and changes around us. And it seems to have its own laws and consistency that impinge on all of us in similar, irresistible ways, whether we like it or not. We stand in a middle zone between god and animal, and can’t quite find our comfort by being fully in either world, neither able to shape the world and our lives as pleases us, nor bound to unconsciously follow our instinct and submit to the world and our place in it.

It is, perhaps, a cruel place to find ourselves in, a place of terrible burden. And it is no wonder we often wish and seek to escape into a world of either total freedom or total inevitability, where either choice is unrestricted by duty or duty is unquestioned by choice. Where either what we can do or what we must do is clear and straightforwardans uncluttered by a need to consider both questions simultaneously.

The real question is, how have we got by as well as we have this far? How are we not already in a far worse conflict, considering where our society has gone? Partly, I think we have benefited from the existence of powerful systems set in place by many wise and clever people who came before us. Systems of technology, social and political and legal systems, all of which protect us and promote peace and cooperation and mitigate dangers. They allow us to keep such disagreements largely academic and private, because we’re all relatively well provided for to some degree, enough to maintain the peace.

We don’t have to be too worried about what other people are thinking or doing because it doesn’t affect our baseline existence and security that much. The social and technological and political and legal structures we have in place do most of that work behind the scenes. So long as we don’t disrupt them too much, the system works well enough to make our different niches within it tolerably irrelevant.

Where things get dicey is if that peace and provision and those structures are ever genuinely in danger of failing. Either because the world has tested them beyond their capacity to protect and provide for us, or because some group within our society has gone so far with their own unique interests that it’s overtaxed the system started to impinge on and affect everyone else. In either case, the system has lost the capacity to absorb the burden of the differences in outcomes and consequences between different groups, causing them to spill over into the broader group, breaking down the insulation between them, increasing the likelihood of direct conflict. You can do what you like as long as I don’t have to suffer for your choices.

There’s a big conflict between how we wish the world was and how it actually is. And life is a continual struggle between the two. More agreeable people, and more agreeable philosophies, focus on how we wish the world was. More disagreeable people, and indeed philosophies, focus on how the world actually is. And they both seek to adapt and survive by means of the insight their perspective gives them. They each provide a way for understanding the world and a guide to what we should do in response.

Artists, dreamers, visionaries, the exceptionally kind and caring, people who want to just make other people happy, these are the sorts of people you find in the agreeable camp. They want to say yes, they want to believe you, they want to agree with you and feel with you and give you what you want. Perfectionists, technicians, prophets, problem solvers, surgeons, military leaders, highly conscientious people, these are the sorts of people you will find in the disagreeable camp. Their instinct is to question you, they feel the need to subject everything to criticism, they’re very guarded with their sympathies, and they’re much more concerned with what you need than what you want. At their extremes, they can get dangerously experimental and delusionally indulgent, or tyrannically harsh and myopically restrictive, respectively.

I think these day in our culture it’s much easier for us to see the value of agreeability and harder for us to see the value of being disagreeable. We like ease, we like choice and freedom, we like people being nice to us and having what we want. We respect kindness and care and sympathy. We love all that stuff. So what’s the value of being disagreeable? Why should we still keep those people around? They’re unpleasant, unsympathetic, they don’t seem to care about us, they don’t care if they cause us pain. They’re dangerous. There might not be room for them in the modern world.

There’s a strong spirit and a strong justification to both instinctive approaches, a powerful superpersonality. And both are capable of being kind and of being reasonable and of being cruel and tyrannical, in their own way, for their own reasons. What each of them really provides is an almost irresistible narrative that makes facts, arguments, actions, and approaches so compelling (or repulsive and incomprehensible, if they’re coming from the side opposite your own preference).

If I see as set of facts or arguments as fitting in and appealing to my fundamental desire to be the good guy, which for me means being agreeable (or disagreeable), being nice by giving people what they want (or being nice by giving people what they need), then I’m going to be heavily prejudiced toward those facts and arguments. Our personal narrative not only affects what things we like to hear, but even affects what things were capable of hearing (because perception is not value-neutral; we filter the vast sea of information to select relevant data according to what our purposes and goals are, we look for our helpers according to our idea of what needs doing).

Moderism, if it were a person, would be fairly high in disagreeability. Postmodernism would be fairly high in agreeability. And that’s part of the problem why they have such a hard time hearing or understanding anything the other side has to say. They’re coming from inside different value structures for selecting, interpreting, and valuing information. They actually have similar goals at the deepest level (health and success and happiness, but maybe having pretty different ideas of what that means) but they have very different strategies for achieving them. As different as whether you should bend the world according to your will’s demands or bend your will according to the demands of the world.

In a way, it’s a bit like two parents fighting over how to raise a child. And they’re both accusing each other of being terrible parents, and both of their accusations against each other (you’re a tyrranical father, you’re an indulgent mother!) have some real teeth. They’re both valid, important strategies with some really palpable dangers and a very clear pathology.

Peter pan child wish fulfillment

Marxist attitude of egalitarianism, but Marxism is objectivism because it said history would prove it right, it’s not skeptical. Postmodernism combined the Marxist approach with the thought seed of deconstructionism, with the skeptical argument that all realities are social constructions. Put them together and you get skeptical egalitarianism. Then all you need to add is the (largument that it’s ok to actively seek power, seek to deprive others of power, and act in an unequal way of the goal is to undo and level existing unjustified power structures. In much the same way it was justified to cast down the bourgeois because their power over the proletariat is unjustified, it is acceptable to seek power and destroy the structures of others and to act with prejudice as long as you’re on the side of the oppressed and your target is the oppressors. Because no other forces of exist other than social construction to explain why one group finds themselves in a different position from another (because remember, there is no objective truth or reality, only constructed truths and realities), then the only explanation for any difference is outcomes must be prejudice, oppression, unfairness, bias, and theft on the part of those responsible for doing the constructing. Therefore any measure of unusual success a person achieves is the result of their advantage by belonging to oppressive, dominant groups that control the process of social construction (unfairly for their benefit), and any unusual failure a person experiences is the result of their belonging to groups unfairly targeted for exclusion from the benefits of the social construction. And morality, which has no genuine universal basis other than this nexus of skepticism and social constructor,

One big problem, of course, is that you can’t really argue against the philosophical underpinnings and conclusions of the postmodern approach without essentially stapling a scarlet letter to your forehead that reads “oppressor”. You can’t make the argument “I’m not sure you’re right in saying everything is racist” without immediately suffering the rejoinder “Oh, so you’re defending the racists now?” And this argument has some teeth. Because there are some racists, obviously. And it should also be fairly obvious that the crimes and failures and excesses and abuses of the past and present, including those of modernism, are quite real! People didn’t get freaked out and reactionary over absolutely nothing. They ran all the way to the other end of the earth to get away from things they had seen go really wrong and make real mistakes and cause real pain.

The reality is that the key to unlocking the pathology of each movement is held by the other side. Unfortunately, this means that the best arguments that could correct the abuses of one side are often going to be in the mouths of the people they least want to listen to and have the least sympathy with, and who are quite likely to see seen as dangerous abusers by them. The best arguments in favor of a policy will be those that the most extreme and unbalanced members of a movement will use (but in an excessive, distorted, unbalanced form).

So how do you sort out who is making good points and criticisms from the pathological extremists? That’s a much trickier question. The moment anyone puts forward any argument that has real critical power either for their side or against the other side, it will get jumped on and endorsed by the worst agents within their own movement. It will likely get taken over, get taken to insane excesses, and become a destructive, unchecked, monstrous version of itself.

Wisdom is, in my opinion, the point where the disparate perspectives and truths of the different facets of humanity meet and form a single, precious jewel that scatters light in all directions. The greatest and most precious bits of wisdom are many-faceted and complex, gathering light from many, many different points and scattering them in a vivid, life-giving rainbow in every direction. The more balanced, the more nuanced, the more complete, the more facets, the more unified, the better it receives and distributes the light. The closer it gets to being that from which the light proceeds, a little star in your hand. And The key to our own wisdom is often in the hands of our greatest rivals. Nature has its own way of forcing some of this wisdom on us, for our own good, but as exploring the nature of wisdom isn’t the objective of this piece, I won’t go into any detail here.