https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=FFx7kpenTxc
Are we recording now? Yeah. All right. So welcome to Voices with Raveki. My guest today is Brent Cooper. Brent and I have had some email exchanges and we’ve had already one extended Zoom conversation. And I found Brent very thought provoking. I think his voice should be heard more in this community. And so I’m hoping we can start something together here today and get his voice into Voices with Raveki and into the community in general. So welcome, Brent. It’s a pleasure to have you here. Thank you. Likewise. I think our work has a lot of intersections and yeah, I’m excited to explore that. Right. Well, that’s great. Maybe say a little bit about yourself and how, you know, even a bit of biographical history, but how you’re vectoring into all of this, whatever this is. Part of what we’re going to discuss is what all of this is. I’m just using vague hand gestures right now. Yeah, so if you can, yeah, like, how did you come into this and what do you see your role to be? What would you like your role to be, etc.? Sure. I’ll use a phrase that I used with layman the other day because it’s it’s actually from a book about about think tanks, but relegated autonomous sociologist. I’m a kind of para academic and go against the grain. You know, very, very critical from the radical tradition. I studied political sociology and international relations and political sociology is about actually the relationship between knowledge and power and elites and masses. So that that’s, you know, international relations opened my eyes and then political sociology helped give me laser vision to sort of focus in on, you know, that this these particular issues. It’s really, you know, that took me to the cusp of postmodernism and discourse and all these things and paradigm shift and where we’re going. So I’ve been on that path for about 10 years and interested in metamodernism and then connected with Meta Moderna in 2016. And and it’s been a it’s been a real treat, but also a lot of frustration to to be to have a community to be involved with and to see what that’s like and experience the different ideas and frictions and hierarchies and you know how we how we mitigate that. And so a lot of my critique is has taken me, you know, in some ways back to postmodernism necessarily. And my my side view article actually goes into that. Yeah. But yeah, it’s kind of kept me on the liminal edge, you know, of critiquing those that I admire and care about and including people I work with, including the intellectual dark web, which we’ll talk about. Yes. And back to metamodernism, you know, what is this project and where are we going and how can we, I mean, it’s a process. So we’re not going to get there, so to speak. But how can we recursively iterate the process? So that I mean, maybe there’s a good segue that I mean, I have talked to layman Pascal. That’s the layman he was referring to. And, and I’ve talked to him about this question and and Christmas of the actual and I are writing an article for anthology that layman is hoping to supervise and I believe Brent is also contributing to that as well. And we’ve also done some things that spread mentioned on the online journal the side view. But what this long preamble is to say I have some sense and I have a book that recommended it’s arrived. I haven’t started reading it. But since we have Brent here, what’s what’s your take on this notion of metamodernism? What what what what do you hear when you hear that word? What does it mean to you? And what’s happening in it right now? Yeah. When I first came across it, it was, you know, roughly the time I was at grad school in London, 10 years ago when Vermeulen and Vanden Acker were were doing their work. And I really had a sense of it myself, but I couldn’t, you know, I was so far from articulating it. It was just such a big, big idea. But I was in going in going around the sociology department saying we need a meta turn. Nobody knew what I was talking about. And there was also like a like a complexity kind of think tank at at the London School of Economics. And I think it had been like shut down or defunded or something. And at the same time, the Arab Spring was happening and and and Occupy. And at the same time, also within this year, the director of LSE kind of resigned in shame because he had taken money from Gaddafi to let his son study there. And so just where I was at, you know, politically and intellectually, all these things intersected. And I did my dissertation on the on the zeitgeist movement. And so that, you know, that brought up this concept of conspirituality, which was also of the time and kind of the merging of New Age and conspiracy. And so, you know, I saw this convergence and it and you know, I was on the edge of, you know, things like Zizek and Foucault and and and discourse and, you know, just again, wondering wondering where it was all going to go. And and how we could, you know, translate it because a lot of the language, you know, postmodern gibberish is the kind of expression. Right. So academic language can be very alienating. So you want to, you know, you ask the question like, what is this really about? How can we get to the point? And so, you know, more and more language was just nested within academic subfields. And it didn’t really do anything right. It was impotent. And so in some ways, a lot of this anticipates what happened, you know, with with the intellectual dark web and anti postmodernism. Where was I going with all this? What was your question again? My question was, what does metamodern mean? Oh, yeah, yeah, right. Yeah. So so so just to kind of fast forward, you know, I kept developing my own ideas. And from 2010 to 2015, you could Google search and you would not find a lot about this term. Right. Right. Right. Really, very little. And so so there was no discourse to sink your teeth into. And then I discovered Metamoderna, right. This kind of think tank. And they they hadn’t yet published their book, but but they were publishing articles. And so I thought that was fantastic. You know, I think Hansi does a great job of abstracting what this paradigm is. And there’s some heuristic shortcuts taken, but I was OK with all of it. You know, I’m on board the whole the whole modern postmodern metamodern thing. It’s not entirely arbitrary, but it’s a little bit slippery. Right. There’s other ways to frame this, you know, because there’s there’s other terms. There’s these concepts are nested. They’re fractal. I think Hansi gets all this, but he simplifies it for the sake of this system building. Right. So so I got involved with them. Just so you know, Brent is referring to a book called The Listening Society. Right. By Hansi Freinach. And he’s got two books out now and it’s part of a long term vision and series. And I think it’s it’s going well. And so, you know, they took inspiration from what Vermeulen and Vanden Acker were writing about culture. And so did I with my film, The Abstract, in terms of, you know, metafiction and sincere irony and all these things. So so the discourse was was working, but it was still very nascent. Right. Very, very young. And so, you know, getting involved with that community was interesting because different people had different ideas or lack of ideas. And Hansi kind of just, you know, kept it kept it free and open. You know, it wasn’t like you have to follow my theory, but that is kind of the implication as well, which is a good thing. And, you know, so I did two things. I tried to track the discourse and help develop a more formal theory of what metamodernism is. And my side view article is kind of the latest installment or culmination of that synthesis. I thought it was good, by the way. You know, thanks. Because I have a spreadsheet of like 270 sources now and there’s there’s more sources coming out, of course, but it’s hard to keep keep track of. But that was, you know, aggregate the discourse so everyone can see what’s being said everywhere. You know, I think that’s just an important research function that no other think tanks or scholars were doing. But then the other thing was, you know, developing it implicitly through my own work. So, you know, I’ve got I’ve got the film and then all which is about abstraction and then all my research about abstraction and then the kind of like adjacent research interests that I have, like evolutionary globalization and systemic conspiracy, which are kind of two sides of the same coin. And what each of those do is kind of like looks at the latest wave of scholarship on those topics. And it’s very synthetic and syncretic tries to integrate them. So I try to develop a kind of metamodern sociology implicitly through those. And there’s some other fields I’m interested in that I’ve that are less developed. But abstraction and metamodernism are also to have written about quite a bit, whether it’s kind of a cultural commentary or, you know, art commentary or the the more the more high theory stuff. So lately that has really crystallized into a convergence theory, into my hopes and intentions for consensus building, which I’ve been really on about for a long time, but finally wrote about. And then most recently anti-intellectualism, which which ties a lot of this stuff together because there’s as the this think tank book that I referenced and as many other sources suggest, there’s a kind of subtle anti-intellectualism that takes place in the That takes place between us, between intellectuals. And so, you know, we, you know, just we commit all sorts of fallacies, even if we’re aware of them. But perhaps one of the ones that stuck out to me the most is the Steve Fuller, this scholar of social epistemology describing heuristics as anti-intellectual. You know, the availability bias in particular is anti-intellectual. And that really that really struck me because that’s along the lines of, you know, my critiques of integral people like Ken Wilbur, people, of course, like Jordan Hall, who talk in a lot of these kind of neologisms or simplicities and things like the Blue Church and red religion, which I’ve criticized for just being lifted from a Trump thread. And these are, you know, so when you think in those terms, you’re collapsing into the availability bias and you’re using somebody else’s words to do your thinking for you. And and so Steve Fuller identifies that as a as a kind of anti-intellectual bias. And I think getting into the subtlety of this has been really interesting for me because, you know, there’s so much to unpack about what the intellectual tradition actually is. What the radical tradition is because, you know, we we we tend to forget historically some of the more important thinkers or political actors, right? They get whitewashed and erased. And, you know, there’s there’s statues of all these Confederate, you know, heroes or whatever. And they’re being they’re being torn down now. And that’s not to erase history. That’s actually to remember history properly. Right. It’s kind of historical revisionism. So, so there was a lot in there. So let me pick up a couple threads. So one thread that I thought, because I’m still sort of what I want to prove you more about their modernism. Right. Right. Seem to come up. What seemed to come up as towards the end is something that I work in, which is, I think why you mentioned it. I do work on, you know, rationality and things like the availability heuristic and the relationship between heuristic and bias and rationality. And then there was a lot in your there also, at least I think directly implied and implicit in that sense about, you know, the importance of dealing with self deception, whether or not it’s individual or collective. Yeah, those are things I talk a lot about and something I’m very interested in. So one of the ways I’ve heard people talk about these three categories, and I grant you they’re they’re they’re on a continuum and they’re slippery. But we need to talk. We need to have some points of reference for our discussion. Right. One way I’ve heard people talk about modernism, postmodernism and metamodernism. And I had a good discussion on letter wiki with David Chapman about this is especially in their conception of rationality, the conception of what rationality is. And that seemed to be part of what layman was saying when I was asking. So is that is that a fair way of trying to get, you know, a doorway into this, but thinking about how those three conceive of rationality. And part of my point, I just if I can just make one more point part part of my critique of what has typically been called modernity and what I think was implied in postmodernism, especially in aspects of some aspects of Derrida. But we can put that aside for now is that I’m thinking of his his criticism of logo centrism, for example, is that modernity had a very truncated and strangulated. Notion of rationality and postmodernism basically critique that. And then what I heard layman saying to me was, well, and this really saying to me because this is part of my work, right. It’s no, no, we need we need to bring back a more encompassing notion of rationality in which ideas about overcoming self deception and more recognition of bias in our thought plays a much more fundamental role than sort of formal logical consistency. And so that has been something that I’ve been I’m offering that as a point of connection for so that I can better understand between my work and and and metamodernism. Is that is that a useful thing to just to to try and explore? Yeah, I think so. Yeah, I got derailed there with my definition of metamodernism. I think that’s part of the story. And I think, you know, the term trans rational comes to mind. Right. And so there’s maybe a kind of progression from rational to post rational to trans rational. Sure. And and and yeah. And, you know, we don’t we never want to be reductionist. Right. That’s the tendency with thinking about these things. And so that’s what I saw in people in the integral community when they would try to, you know, download metamodernism or even integral, you know, and and again with the heuristics to rely on the kind of integral heuristics in this in the stage theories. So can we slow down here? Yeah, I’m interested in that too, because again, this is something that I’ve only had passing connection with. I’ve never spoken with Wilbur. Okay. I’ve yet to read any of his work in depth. I bought his book on the recommendation of those in called The Religion of Tomorrow, because I’m trying to read books that are trying to talk about the future of religion. So what can you can you can you slow that down and unpack it a little bit? Because maybe that will also help me understand better. You know what you mean by trans rational your criticism of integral. Like what is the what is the what’s your is it is it a kind of oversimplification that you’re putting your finger on or what is it you want to expand on that? Yeah, I just wanted to mention the term. I don’t I don’t know how deep I can go into it just off off the top of my head because I wanted to kind of box you in if you don’t want to. I just want to find a place where I can I want I want to I want to get an example where I can see your thinking like doing its critical work and that was something that I had rationality. And then I have like I said, I’m not invested in integral. I’m trying to understand it. I know layman has had a history with it and he’s had. Yeah, I’m trying to get a sense there. So I was trying to find a point of contact for us. Yeah, and and I don’t want to be too reductionist to with integral because there’s sort of non Wilbur forms. There’s people have criticized Wilbur. So a lot of this has taken place within that community before. And that’s part of for me the the ironic frustration and of seeing it reemerge in its kind of crude forms because I wrote about a two part article about the relationship between the two. The article about the relationship between integral metamodernism and the intellectual dark web. Oh, well, that’s great. Can we can is that close enough in your memory could we could unpack that a bit. That’s what I’m feeling. Yeah, yeah, I can try because it emerged. Basically, you know, because there’s so many integral people in Hansi’s community, and they would say like integral slash mm like they’re the metamodernism like they’re the kind of the same thing and I was, I had to do a lot of work to kind of try to appeal that for people because I was saying, well, there’s, you know, there’s Romulan and Vanden Acker and they don’t mention integral at all. Like, it’s a different tradition. Right. And so just people tend to get hung up on that integral term because there’s a community. books, they’ve invested so much energy into it. And, and maybe just to tie that off, what we can we can go into it. But but the thing that comes to mind first is in those articles, I reference a book from 2015, which zack Stein is involved in actually, yeah, called Meta Theory for the 21st century. Right. And the whole point of that book, there’s a table I take from the book, it basically tries to triangulate and synthesize three major paradigms, which is integral theory, critical realism, and complex thought. And the table kind of juxtaposes. So that tells you right there that you can’t just have integral theory. Right. There’s these other things that are well developed. And it’s interesting because the general critique of integral and the takeaway is that it was kind of negligent of social justice, right, it’s like progressive in name, but a little bit like conscious capitalism. Instead, and so that that kind of divide in our thinking exists today, you know, people lack the language to, to, you know, de complexify capitalism and socialism, you know, actually make these things operational. So the way the intellectual dark web fits into that is, you know, at that point, Ken Wilbur had put out some videos, like, that were kind of his commentary on the on the IDW. And it was like, Jordan Peterson and stuff like that. Is that what you mean? Okay, keep going. Yeah, Wilbur had Wilbur had a short like a six part series. Right, you know, and, and so, you know, at that point, other integral people, like the names Mark Foreman and Rob Smith come to mind and Corey DeVos, to some extent, like they’d already been critical of the IDW. And there wasn’t even that kind of collective thinking that it had like trickled up to Wilbur. So I found his position just really, really weak, really diluted, like, oh, yeah, all these thinkers are second tier, like, that’s just so irresponsible and a little bit incoherent, I think, because this is a kind of metaphorical system. And so, so there’s all those intersections, you know, and then like, Eric Weinstein had tweeted out like, Oh, what Ken Wilbur knows who I am. That’s interesting. But, you know, Weinstein wasn’t necessarily like endorsing integral or anything. And, you know, rebel wisdom, like a big part of their branding for a while was like, is the intellectual dark web integral? Like, is Jordan Peterson integral? I just think it was totally the wrong question, you know. Okay, so in what way, so you took time to, like, to pull apart, and it sounds like it was a bit of a challenge, pull apart metamodernism from integral, because people were just treating them as synonyms, and you thought that was a kind of deep conceptual mistake. One of the things that, again, I’m very hesitant, like I said, I’m pronouncing, I’m announcing, I’m ignorant of the interval, I only know of it. I’ve read some secondary stuff. So please take that into account. But, and I’ve met people have talked about it. And I don’t see the concern with self deception and rationality. And maybe that relates to your critique about the not addressing issues of social justice, socio economic status. Yeah. Oh, sorry. If I can clarify that point quickly, because what I wanted to add was, like, there’s, there is sort of an integral left tradition, if you will, and also kind of activity now, right. And, you know, Zach, as I said, Zach was the leader of the movement, and he was the leader of the movement. And so, you know, I sort of work with Jeremy Johnson, a little bit, and he’s like a left activist and integral thinker, and he draws from a different from different sources. But I think there is some competitive Just to brief overview of integral, I guess it’s like a long term kind of, you know, synthetic thinking, right. So you have like mystics involved, right. And then, you know, like, someone I promote a lot is Michael Brooks, who also has an integral background, right. But he but he shares my critiques and that he kind of grew out of the Ken Wilbur version of integral. And so, I think that’s kind of the, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the So all of us now we try to bring it back to politics and make it grounded. Yes, I just wanted to add that qualifier. Well, no, fair enough. And I do want to be fair. I mean, you probably know from my work that I try to give as much credit and recognition as possible to people’s work. And I, you know, I know, Zach, and I really appreciate his work. I just got a book today, by the way, an education between two worlds. But there was something that came up. So see, my connection to integral is I know it through transpersonal psychology. And I know, I know, or gave Ferrer’s critique of standard transpersonal psychology as being tied to a perennialist kind of epistemology. And therefore, not really philosophically or cognitive scientifically up to date in terms of its epistemology and its thoughts about cognition and meaning making. And I, I want to meet for it. I had never had. I never have. But he was one of the influences on my idea participatory knowing because he argues that much more participatory epistemology is needed than that with the one that’s presupposed by standard, especially Wilbur’s form, purely structural kind of, well, seems fairly structural kind of transpersonal psychology. So I get that. And that’s how the mystic is supposed to be taken in. But it seems to me that one of the things that postmodernism does is wake people up to implicit epistemologies and get them to stand back and take a more critical eye on them. And this is a kind of the deep addressing of self deception that you and I think we’ll share. And so it seems to me, therefore, that because is it fair to say that one of the distinctions between so it’s a question, not a statement. Is it is it the one of the distinction between metamonetism and integral and the IDW is that metamonetism takes postmodernism very seriously and says that there’s lots of good work and good argumentation there. The IDW one of my critiques of it, and I think this explicit is that I don’t think it has the reliance, for example, on Hicks’s presentation of modernism. I think, you know, just is just bad. It’s just bad, bad philosophy, bad work. Right. And so I think the IDW Did not take postmodernism seriously. Yeah. Intellectually, it took it seriously in terms of an emotional reaction to it, but not intellectually. Now it sounds to me. So this is more again very much more hesitant, but it sounds to me like integral also isn’t properly reading or understanding if for errors critique is good and it seems to be good. That suggests to me it implies to me that integral did not take the postmodern revelation of implicit epistemologies and the critique of it. The integral hasn’t also has not taken that seriously enough in general, at least the the the the the the Wilbur version. Would you, what do you think of that? I’m making. Oh yeah, no, no, no. I’m making an argument. Yeah, that’s, that’s absolutely on point. That’s, that’s sort of a point I make in my, in my IDW case. In my IDW critiques and it’s yeah, especially if you’re drawn to metamodernism. It seems very obvious, like how do people not realize this, but but for 30 years there’s been a kind of culture war over postmodernism. Right, like a lot of this is rehashed stuff from the 90s, because the, you know, you know, we don’t, it’s a kind of systemic thing. We don’t need to point fingers too much, but it’s like the, you know, postmodernism in the 90s was was waning and declining and there was critiques and and it, it, it, you know, it, it, it, like, first of all, it’s irreducible. Right. That’s the point I make in my side view. So so a side view article. There’s more than just strengths there. Like it’s a whole era. It’s a whole, you know, multiple discourses. But, but that that that fractionation and fragmenting, you know, is part of the problem with our, our ever expanding culture. Right. It’s just Right. It’s just an increasingly relativist. Right. So, so I think people noticed and you know, in the 2000s, you have these other discourses like post postmodernism, right. That’s actually a term. Which is funny. It’s like, well, is that the best you could come up with? Why didn’t we just jump to metamodernism? Right. But I, I, and this is another thing with my research is I’d actually found sources on metamodernism from the 90s that, you know, they’re very good sources. They’re not huge. They’re not like, they’re, they’re, they’re very strong arguments, but they’re not well developed beyond that. And so it’s sort of a missed opportunity. And then there’s all these other discourses, hypermodernism, transmodernism. So I’m interested in all these things, but metamodernism has the most generative potential and the communities around them. Right. So that is that is really the the main, the main attractor. And so, so I tried to map out as much of that as I could in my side view article. And, but just to, to, to bring it home, like your, your point is absolutely correct. They just, they, the IDW dismisses and rejects postmodernism wholesale. And integral did go through a phase where they were critical of it, you know, and Wilbur calls it the mean green, mean green meme. And so, you know, it was processed in a way, but I, but it wasn’t, it wasn’t, it wasn’t healthy. It wasn’t conclusive, because there’s just so much there. And so, you know, it’s really a mental feat to, to whether implicitly or explicitly try to be synthesizing the modern ideas and postmodern ideas. Yeah. And I think you do it a bit in your, in your side view article, like, like your side view article is incredibly dense, incredibly, incredibly wordy to do in fact, there’s some words I actually had to look up, which, which I have no problem admitting. But it’s, but it’s also not that common, you know, I like to know my words, but, but, but it’s incredibly dense in that, in that capacity, which is great because you’re, you know, there’s a, just, just a compression of the argument that you’re making. Right. Yeah. And I, there’s some definitely some metamodern qualities, like you’re, you’re, you’re, you’re doing a very syncretic things, right. Yeah. Consolidating a lot of ideas into these, into these concepts, like, and then you list them out, like, neo-anosticism, pseudo-religious ideologies, ersatz mythologies. Yeah. Well, thank you for saying that, Brent. That means a lot to me. So I want to pick up on this then, because I think this feels like it’s really getting legs. That’s what we’re doing here. First of all, I mean, I agree with you and you’ve mentioned it a couple of times and I just want to pause and expand it for people. It’s, it’s actually, I mean, you know, conversation has to take place at different levels and that’s fine and that’s fair and that’s part of how it functions. But you shouldn’t treat postmodernism as if it’s a homogenous single thing. Like, so I can’t claim to have read all of these thinkers. I mean, there’s, I’ve read three, I’ve read Derrida deeply studied in. Foucault, not as deeply, but I’m working on it. And then Rorty, right? And, and, and even their backgrounds are very different, you know. Derrida is very dependent on Saussure in a way that Foucault is not. And Rorty comes out of, you know, pragmatism. He’s mostly influenced, you know, by James and Pierce and Dewey, right? And so, like, trying to, to, to put that all together as it’s a single thing. I recommend instead this strategy. I recommend that what we should do, because these people, I mean, it’s a mistake to say they should be immune from criticism. I dislike that also. I also dislike the deification of postmodernism as if, no, I mean, for example, I think Han in his book, The Agony of Eros, has a powerful critique of Foucault. That people should read, right? But what I’m saying is you should look at individual arguments by individual thinkers and respond to them with individual counter arguments or counter proposals rather than a pastiche. And I think that’s a very dangerous, maybe that’s what you’re meaning, Brent, when you’re talking about sort of giving into the availability heuristic and an oversimplification strategy. So, for example, I think Derrida’s, like, I can make this argument extensively and I have made it elsewhere. So I’m just gesturing you. And so I’m not, I’m not asking for your agreement. I’m just giving you an example. Right. But I think Derrida’s notion of deference can be compared very insightfully to this notion I’ve been working at from cognitive science of relevance realization. And I think there’s a lot of deep similarities there. And even his take on it having kind of neoplatonic religious significance, his connections with negative theology are there to read. Right. And so, but that also gives me a way of saying, but because I can connect it to cog side, I can bring aspects into deference that perhaps Derrida is overlooking. You know, the whole stock about embodied, extended, embedded cognition isn’t well developed in Derrida. And so I think, and this is something I’ve been trying to promote in general, if you take a specific argument and then have a specific bridging, you know, counter proposal to it, then you can actually enter into useful dialogue with the postmodernist. And so now, sorry, this is the long preamble, but I take that and it feels to correct me, but I take that as an example of what I see the metamonitors trying to do. Like I see them entering, okay, they, here’s a postmodern thing. Here’s, you know, something I can link it to and then put them into dialogue and see if I can move beyond it, but not in a dismissive fashion, but in a dialogical fashion. So you’re nodding. So maybe I am saying something that resonates with you. Yeah, everything you said there makes sense. And there’s a couple things I wanted to anchor into. What should I go first with? I mean, as you said, postmodernism is not homogenous. And when you engage the texts of all these thinkers and or debates, you know, it becomes less clear who is a postmodernist and who’s not, you know, this idea of a label of a postmodernist is kind of counterproductive to some extent. However, you’ll always come back into these kinds of expressions because within different subfields, there are kind of trends like, you know, English literature, whatever, right? It’s like they’re well defined. And so you don’t know until you actually dive into the literature. And that speaks to something you mentioned that, you know, some authors you haven’t read, right? Like this is true for all of us. And it made me think of a kind of generational gap too, because I think older scholars have read more than people like me. However, you know, for younger people, you know, you have the internet now and we have access to more sources than ever. And there’s more coming out than ever every day. So there’s no way you can keep up with it. You know, and it’s like you have to kind of find a way to grok it without reading it. However, you know, to qualify that statement, you do have to read. You do have to read as much as you can. You know, so there’s a real paradox there. And so, I mean, I realized this a long time ago that I was never going to catch up. I was never going to go for a PhD because PhDs are about specializing. Actually, I consciously decided I was going to be a generalist, which is a very difficult path. And it’s very rare. Not a lot of people do it. And some people try to do both. Right. But, you know, so part of that is, you know, I wanted to pick up on this idea just because what you said triggered it. I think one thing, Brett, don’t lose your, don’t lose your thread of thought. I just wanted to point out something that Brent said that I want to highlight and how it’s bringing out kind of a new bias, a new form of self-deception, which is, and Sloman talks about this, the knowledge illusion. People regularly and reliably confuse access to knowledge with the possession of knowledge. So a standard example of this experimentally is, do you know how a bicycle works? Oh, yes, of course I do. Well, here, draw a diagram and show me how a bicycle works. And then people can’t do it. Now, why did I bring that up? Because the point that Brent just made about, you know, access to the internet actually magnifies that bias tremendously. People think because they have access to all this information, that’s the same thing as it being in possession of that. I just wanted to, I just, sorry for interrupting, but I thought it was an important point to flag for people that, you know, we think about this. Oh, this access is so empowering. Well, no denying that. But you also have to understand ways in which it’s triggering and amplifying powerful forms of self-deception. So I just wanted to put that in there, Brent. Yeah, thanks. That’s helpful. And I think that’s true for me to some extent too, because I do get like overconfident with my knowledge. However, the flip side of that is like, I’m constantly collecting and downloading more books and articles that I can read, right? But I’m keeping conscious of the library that I’m building, you know, and it makes me aware of what I might know and what I definitely don’t know. So it keeps me humble at the same time, right? Good. Yeah, that’s very good. I think that’s a virtue towards which I aspire. Yeah. I try to do it by some very explicit and repeated habits of action, because I think it’s very important. Yeah. So to finish the point I was making before, like, you know, as a student, you know, when we’re students, we’re all taught to read primary sources, right? Like, read play-doh, like, you know, do the work. And because that is what you have to do as a student. It’s an exercise, right? So I remember back to a class in 2008, right? And it was like a third year level class in political theory. And they’re just all they can do because they’re teaching students is kind of give you the tools and teach you how to work with them, right? And contrary to public opinion with what the IDW tells you, they don’t just indoctrinate you, you know, at least where I went to school. They teach you how to think very critically. But, you know, they would teach you theories about international relations like, oh, here’s idealism. Here’s realism. Here’s Marxism. Here’s the thinkers. And then they actually tell you like, oh, like they use the phrases like, oh, the idealist would say, well, the realist would say, you know, and that’s useful as a student. You’ve got to go through that. But then, of course, that’s a kind of a gross simplification of how these things work. And so you don’t want to reify those theories too much. And the point I wanted to make before is like, you know, by all means, like read, read Plato, read, read Nietzsche, whoever, read, read Zizek, whatever you want. But this idea of primary sources, like primary sources are essential, but also they can be wrong. And so a kind of metamodern move, maybe postmodern a bit too, is like you want to value secondary sources too. So like with Marx, take Marx, for example, right? Marx is prolific. I’ve read some, I’ve read a lot more Marx than Peterson has, but I also really trust certain secondary sources, right? When you’re reading scholars writing about Marx, you have to, you know, this is, I guess, a postmodern thing, first and foremost, but you have to think about like, well, who are they? What era and what place are they writing in? How does this situate in the lineage and the actual kind of evolution of Marxist thought, right? And so it really defies simplification. And so, so going back to that point about, you know, not being able to read everything and keep up with it all. This is where it gets metamodern, right? And I talk about this idea of auto critique in my anti-intellectualism article, which is like a self critique and like a hyper critique of society, the society that you’re in, what are we doing with war and imperialism, very meta questions. And so I apply that to my own work, like, because nobody’s going to be as critical as me, you know, I don’t have a dissertation advisor anymore. You know, I don’t have an editor. So that’s it. I mean, I think sorry for interrupting, but I think that’s, I want to flag this. I mean, this is what I, this is what I think is at the core of this metamodern notion of rationality is like when one of my students asked me for like, what’s a, what’s a criterion, not a definition, but what’s a criterion, but you know, how can I pick out people that are more rational? I say, look for people who are committed to self correction. Look for people who are committed to self correction rather than, you know, just a formal tightness in a monologue. And so I’ve sort of brought that to two people who are interested in self correction and are interested in genuine good faith dialogue and trying to specify what that means is I’ve been doing a lot of work on that. But I just wanted to flag that because I think that’s another point that I think really sings for me. The fact that I heard you a couple times in this discourse point to areas in which you have been and continue to be self corrective. I try to do the same thing. And so, you know, I’m not claiming any expertise and that or anything like that. I’m just marking that out as exemplification of how this other kind of rationality is more properly enacted. I just wanted to say that. Yeah, I think it’s important to flag it. That’s great. I like you pausing and, you know, reiterating what’s going on here. It’s helpful. And so to if I can quickly tie it back to like metamodernism and what I’ve tracked with the different schools of thought, you know, I like what Hansi is doing. I like what Thomas Bjorkman is doing. Oh yeah, Thomas is doing excellent work. I love it. Yeah, yeah. You know, it’s been it’s been it’s taken me a while to get up the nerve to talk about these things. But but I like hearing other people talk about it when they know what they’re talking about. And I and you know, because I’m because I’m versed in it. So so that’s been really helpful. But what they’re trying to do and I’m part of that project right is they’re systematizing and they’re they’re simplifying this kind of paradigm shift. And then so so in my side view article identify, you know, the kind of the Dutch school the Dutch school. Yeah, they emerged first. And just just to clarify for everybody. I only call it the Dutch school as a joke, because the primary authors are from the Netherlands and they, you know, they work in London, they work with an international community of scholars. And it’s and it’s just a joke. And as I say, in my review of their book, which is a great book, I say their their theory fits the social sciences like a pair of clogs, which is to say like kind of awkwardly and you know, wouldn’t. But it’s got a ton of potential, right. And so so when you read Vermeulen and van den Acker’s book, they’re referencing, you know, Frederick James and Raymond Williams. And those are really important sources for the background of all this stuff, right. And I, and going back to what we’re saying about about reading, like I’ve I’ve skimmed those books, you know, I’ve got a gestalt impression. And I’ve read, you know, this is the thing with sec with secondary sources. So I trust them. I trust their reading, but it’s a kind of tentative trust. Yeah, because I’m also critical of Vermeulen and Dan Dacker for what I identify as what they miss, right. So, you know, a lot of my work wouldn’t be possible without them. But I’m trying to I’m trying to recursively and auto critically feedback into that system. Right. Right. And so, so that’s sort of where our the contemporary use is popularized in kind of, you know, describing trends in art and culture. And and then and then Hansi makes a makes a formal move and does exactly the same thing I’m advocating is saying, well, we need a meta turn in sociology and politics. And, and they do that. Is he part of the second because you said there’s two groups for metamodernism or is he still I’m just trying to keep the taxonomy clear. Yeah, so the Is he part of the Dutch group or is he part of the other group of metamodernism. The other so I’m saying Hansi and Hansi is what I call the Nordic school. Right, right, right, because they’re based in in Scandinavia, but the the fictional author Hansi is actually based in Switzerland. But, but the Swiss school just didn’t sound right, because I’m trying to talk about reality here too. So Thomas Bjorkman wants to kind of separate himself from that. But they’re, they’re, they’re kind of in the same sphere, but I’m in my article I make a distinction. I say the Nordic school is just Hansi because they’re actually formalizing it and trying to build a community. And it’s just a very, I think, cogent and powerful system. And so, you know that doing that allows me to to distance myself from it and have a meta perspective of the two schools and the interplay. And as I said to you at the beginning, like I’ve been developing my alternative view the whole time, but it comes into clearer focus as time goes on. So let’s let’s just say that’s the abstract school because I point to thinkers like Benjamin Bratton. Who invoke a ton of abstraction in their work explicitly and I and I track abstraction everywhere it goes right so Daniel Schmoktenberger uses it a lot Jordan Peterson uses it a lot. And there’s some there’s some real value there you know my first article about Peterson was was sort of positive in this regard. But that’s of course I have way more criticism for him than compliments. But so you know this this alternative is like, I’m actually trying to highlight some of the things the other schools put in the background. Right so I have a missing meta modernism series which highlights a novel philosophy of technology liberation theology. And black black men of modernism right so that’s the actual focus on the the subaltern the global south alter globalization black studies. And of course I think that’s all very relevant more than ever with all that’s happening in the world. So I just two questions came to mind while you were saying that. So one is just because I’m ignorant so I’m just it’s a factual question in your opinion like your studied opinion. Like do these two do these because I didn’t get a clear sense in the article. What’s the relationship between them. Is it friendly is it biological or are they sort of isolated from each other. Do they talk a lot and then secondly so you could answer that question first like this notion of abstraction. I mean it’s in the name of your think tank and that wonderful that that video you’ve done that wonderful video on it and that sort of you know playful irony you know really abstraction is that the key. And so maybe and maybe by answering the first it’ll give you a platform for expanding on what you mean by this process. So first of all like what is the relationship between the two groups and then story for the pun but maybe you want it. What did you abstract from that into your notion of abstraction. Yeah, I think I think there’s sort of a sort of a healthy separation in some ways but also unhealthy like like they don’t really talk that much. They don’t talk that much. Some of some of them talk like there’s been some crossover with Greg Denver for example he was in the side view article and and for for a couple years like we would just talk past each other. And I actually had to invoke a medic mediator to say Jason Snyder I said you know bring us together so we can figure this out. And so, you know, so what I call the Dutch school doesn’t even recognize Hansi, you know, and which is which is which is unfortunate and interesting. And I think that’s the same time because I think academically the Hansi books are are are are quite formidable, you know, it shouldn’t be written off you know Daniel is a PhD in sociology. I have advocated for us to to talk, but it’s never really happened so the two schools kind of remain distinct and of course the original school doesn’t really see itself as a school of thought they’re just they’re just they’re just academics but I have identified lots of contrasts like I say the former is more academic the latter is more para academic you know and there’s there’s a reason for that there’s a you know and it’s interesting so it gives metamonetism this this aliveness this tension. Right and you know and and and so you know in lieu of talking Hansi just makes a move you know I think he says in the book they kind of pirate the term from Bremulan and Vandanaaker it’s in a footnote. It’s almost just in passing and and so so there’s that and then also you know I’m trying to do something different if I can by you know trying to have a syncretic approach and look at them all and and and and particularly you know convert converge. Because I think there should be a kind of unified body of work you know not to say it’s homogenous it never will be but but you know so one of one of the things I lament in my side view article two is like year after year more articles will come out on postmodernism you know and it’ll just be some hot take or or new insight or whatever but it’s like you know I I’m bewildered how people can write about this and just completely ignore all of this. Completely ignore other things going on you know so like like like the the book I recommend to people for postmodernism is the postmodern turn in the social sciences and that came out in 2015 and in 2015 like you have you know years of kind of production of all these alternatives like metamodernism, digimodernism, transmodernism, hypermodernism but there’s no mention of any of those in the book. And and and the book is very you know encyclopedic and yet it’s still still misses these things and then those. It’s myopic in a sense though. In a sense it’s also fractal I mean it’s incredible I make a note in my article like there’s 1600 footnotes in the book like no books do that like it’s got all these endorsements from from big sociologists so you know it’s just it’s it’s very intimidating right in that sense. But but it gives you there’s all within it there’s a lot of simplifications like well here’s the five major turns in different fields that this you know this is what postmodernism is. So I mean right there just to highlight that point you know postmodernism is at least five things right and of course it’s much more than that but this is the mistake the IDW makes is just collapsing it into one thing like oh it’s relativism. Well relativism predates postmodernism. Right. It’s all. Yeah. Or even if you read like read Foucault. Like I’ll talk to people. It’s funny to broaden the critique. I’ll I’ll I’ll I’ll this will happen with it with people who sort of, you know, speak Foucault’s words, and I’ll say, but have you read the later Foucault, you know, with the care of the self, and he starts reading Pierre Hedot, and he gets deeply into it. And he gets deeply interested in ancient philosophy and the wisdom tradition. And that’s, and he saw that as, and I think rightly, by the way, he saw that as the culmination of what he’d been working on. And I said, there you go. Yeah, yeah. And, and, and, and Foucault, you know, died before his time. Yeah, and that that can be true for a lot of thinkers I mean how many thinkers have died without finishing their their magnum opus right. They all have unfinished manuscripts and it’s so tragic. And so that that is part of a big part of what metamodernism is for me is really trying to pick up their threads and finish their project. You know, because I remember in grad school 10 years ago is a kind of running joke that everybody was trying to publish their manifesto. And, and, and, and actually, you know, in 2011, Luke Turner published his metamodern manifesto, which was just eight points right is really short and that was a kind of tongue in cheek joke that like on a number of levels but you know in lieu of writing a big book it’s like this is this is it just eight points about oscillation and irony and whatnot. So, you know, I accepted that myself and I thought, you know, I want to write some books of course but not too many books, the thrust of my project is to is to try to, you know, participate in this long term historical process of knowledge creation and praxis. Right, because to, you know, to tie it to this idea of the meta crisis. You know, it’s like it’s this deep thing that you only get a salience of when you’ve really developed a complex perspective and you’ve taken in a lot and you, you channel your concern for whatever social issues that might be too singular, or even superficial like like veganism and I’m a vegan I advocate it, you know, or whatever or poverty it’s like okay that’s one thing, and the meta crisis is all these things are connected. Yes, and we reproduce it in almost everything we do. Right, that’s that’s the tragic irony of humanity is just how, how, how, how smart we can be and how like, like, transcendent Lee stupid we can be and and just disconnected from each other’s worlds and projects and the internet brings all that back together, right, this this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this crisis and its, its dynamical complexity as something that you think metamodernism should be addressing centrally. Is that, is that fair? Yeah, that’s, that’s, that’s bang on. And actually I have to mention, because it pops into my head, this is not an availability bias thing, kind of is, but in 2015, there’s an article titled, The Meta Crisis of Secular Capitalism. And so, you know, that’s not typically what we’re talking about when we talk about this term, but I like it. And that article in particular, highlights abstraction as part of the key, right? Financial abstraction. So capitalism abstracts. And that, that, that, that, that was a whole other conversation to unpack. But let me just start. Open up this term for, open up this term as you want it, as you intend to use it, abstraction. Yeah. Please. So, so I’ll try to just say something about that article. Because it’s basically about, you know, the, the, the falling rate of profit and, and, and there’s some implicitness about, you know, just the, you know, can’t have infinite growth kind of thing. So capitalism is in crisis, right? But, but so, so to bring it back to the beginning. So in all my studies, you know, and I think we all have this to some extent, abstraction has come up in your work, but I would, I would come across this term, you know, and you read about like the absolute, you know, in philosophy and abductive logic, you know, abduction. And actually you, you say in your article that you’re, you’re using inference to the best explanation. Yes. That is abduction. That is abductive logic. That’s what it’s called. And, and so this is actually not like, this is actually like, if I’m, if correct me if I’m wrong, but it’s not such a common approach. It’s more subtle than induction and deduction, right? Those are the main approaches people take. Yeah. Brent, my reason for not using the term abduction is just as people always misunderstand what it means. And, and I was very influenced by, especially by Lipton and others who are recap and sort of a little bit of a cottage industry around this inference to the best explanation. Yeah. And I found that to be the best interpretation of Darwin and et cetera. So yes. And the reason why that comes up, and this is how maybe I somewhat like you and being a generalist, because cognitive science, you, you’re not, you’re not doing, you’re not specializing with one of the home disciplines. You have to read deeply and study deeply in all of them, but you’re trying to get a synoptic integration, which requires this kind of abductive reasoning. And so is that part of what you’re pointing towards, that sort of abductive reasoning that you’re talking about? Yeah, yeah, for sure. For sure. Oh, that’s absolutely fascinating to me because I think it’s the hallmark of science. I think it doesn’t work in terms, sorry, I’ll stop in a sec. I think it doesn’t work in terms of certainty. I think it works in terms of a different normativity, plausibility, which I’ve been trying to get clearer about. And the thing about it is for me as a cognitive scientist, that’s the form of reasoning that really, and this is a point I owe to Jerry Fodor, is really dependent on that whole process that I talked about with relevance realization, which I think is really, really key. So I just wanted to say that if that’s what you’re talking about, then there’s just a lot that I can, it’s an intensive intelligere. I can read into it. I can read into what you’re saying. Go ahead. That’s great. And that’s exactly why I mentioned your article and I’ve alluded to your other work on abstraction because there’s a good chance, like, well, I’m certain that in some of this regard, you’re more of a specialist of abstraction than I am. Right. And so is Benjamin Bratton. Right. And that this is why I defer to them. But just so to wind it back for the sake of kind of telling the story, what happened to me 10 years ago was, you know, abstraction kept coming up and also it means different things in like abstract art. And, you know, I always, it’s as interesting, I always thought abstract art was stupid. I’m like, like, why is this picture of a square worth so much money and stimulating so much thought and debate in people, you know, is making me angry. But then, you know, I developed a sort of deep appreciation for it and just abstraction in general. And so the term comes up in all these different sources in Korsybski, you know, in systems thinking in Marx, right, in Hegel. And, you know, Nietzsche, I mean, it’s everywhere and it’s nowhere at the same time, because I started to just develop a practice of aggregating these sources. I have hundreds and hundreds of sources. And like with metamodernism, it took me a while to kind of get the ball rolling there, because I just found it really elusive, really hard to track. And, you know, I bring up that Meta Crisis of Secular Capitalism article because it’s got abstraction right in the thesis. And also a book by Cernacek and Williams called Inventing the Future, right, by Verso Press, the leftist press. And they have a lot of abstraction in that book. And it’s like, I would find it in all these places and find it talked about really cogently and really brilliantly. These people know their work, but there was no meta theory behind it. There was nothing tying all the abstraction together. And this is perhaps an impossible project. But at minimum, I’m trying to, you know, chronicle and catalogue all the sources because I just keep finding more. And so, you know, this is I’ve written like, you know, 13, 14 articles on some abstract, some aspect of abstraction, financial abstraction, meditative abstraction. And art and all these things. And so this is why with my project, like it became artistic thing, became a became a film and it became a research project, a think tank. And so, you know, I’m still this is still in motion. I still have to, you know, read a lot more and process a lot more. But I know in aggregating that stuff, like it kind of puts me ahead of the curve in some ways just because it’s such a monumental task. You know, I’m trying to like, you know, and, you know, Zizek comes to mind because he’s, you know, every time someone mentions abstract in their speech, it, you know, I log it in my memory and I think about what they’re trying to say, what it means in the big picture. And Zizek’s written over 50 books, right? He’s prolific. And so, of course, you know, Peterson didn’t even bother cracking one to prepare for the debate. This is too much. And, you know, I’ve read a bit of Zizek and seen him talk a bunch of times. But, you know, it also just goes on and on. And so people get kind of tired of them and people have their critiques of Zizek. So but this theme of abstraction, you know, it’s the it’s the fact that it’s so subtle and then it gets buried in our research that is part of the reproduction of the Meta Crisis. And so there’s a book from 1973 called The Abstract Society. And that was really formative for me because it’s it’s not a huge book, but it’s very dense. And its thesis is basically, you know, society is getting more abstract. And he identifies these these trends like, you know, bureaucratization, of course, specialization. These are now like sub functions of abstraction. And they all they all add up. And, you know, we just have this increasingly complex world. And so to to bring it back before I forget with capital. Right. So because Marx talked about commodity abstraction. Right. And what they call real abstraction. And there’s a bunch of the kind of speculative realists that write about this, too, like Ray Brassier. Like this is like it’s the super dense writing, very hard to penetrate. Yeah. The only one of those guys that I’ve read in depth is Harmon. So I don’t. Right. Right. OK. The only connection I have with it. Yeah. I’ve got a sense of it, but that’s I’ve read a little bit of Morton. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So so to crystallize it, basically, a lot of these authors throughout history, in particular, some of these guys, they say there’s not just mental abstraction. Right. Because that’s because you, especially as a cognitive psychologist, that might be what you what preoccupies a lot of your interest. But they say there’s not just mental abstraction. There’s like abstraction in the world, like material abstraction. And it’s this is super interesting and really difficult. What does that mean? What does that mean? Yeah. That’s what I was trying to set up. That’s how difficult it is to explain. It means, you know, we abstract the world and the world abstracts us. This is just a process we’re locked into. It’s like the idea of like thinking, you know, ideas think you or ideas work through you rather than you think ideas. So can I just nail down the reference of the world? You know, you mean, you are sort of like the socio cultural world is is abstracting or do you actually mean the material world? So so I’ll get to this. So I’m identifying a lot of these authors say that there’s two major forms, which is the thinking and the kind of material that they call real abstraction. And I’ll unpack that. But just quickly, you know, I did an article called integral abstraction where I put it in the four quadrants. Right. So this is actually really useful because because I’m taking what most authors are saying, oh, there’s just two. There’s actually four. So so I say there’s mental abstraction. Oh, fuck. What is it? Mental abstraction, physical abstraction, social abstraction and then material abstraction. What’s the difference between material and physical? Yeah. So so material would be the upper right quadrant, which is like the the the individual as opposed to the collective. So material is on the collective level. OK, right. And so so, yeah, I mean, I’m going to try to just keep it in the in the in the binary frame because it’s a little bit easier to explain. But but but just I’m rushing you and I don’t mean to go ahead. Yeah. Social abstraction, which is not part of the binary. That’s that’s the lower left. That’s the ideas that we share. Right. So the idea of a nation is a social abstraction. And so there’s all these quadrants are connected. There’s an individual component to it all. But so the George Herbert Mead kind of idea, right. That kind of abstraction. I get that. OK. OK. Yeah. And and and so there’s no integration between these fields in the different scholar scholarly traditions. I mean, there might be implicitly there might be a little bit explicitly. But but what I was reading is most of them just for simple yet complex sake. They say that there’s mental abstraction and then and then material. And so Marx talks about commodity abstraction. And the point with that is that is that the abstraction becomes like rarefied. Right. It becomes it just it becomes its own acting agent that then that then, you know, creates the world that we live in. And so there’s there’s a dialectic process there. And Bratton takes it way deeper. He he talks about primordial abstraction. He goes and so does Peterson. They go way back in time to when we were just, you know, simple organisms. And so so animals abstract. Right. But only in the capacity of like sensing mapping, you know, for food friend or foe. So it’s very primitive type of abstraction. And what Peterson says is, you know, we kind of evolve in the sense that we’re not just a group of people. You know, we kind of evolve and we go up and we that that maps higher and higher to philosophy. Ultimately, like play. It’s a theory he gets. That’s from Aristotle. I mean, that’s OK. It’s a brilliant idea. Right. That’s pretty much a brilliant idea. Yeah. So go ahead. Go ahead. Yeah. So so again, just to kind of, you know, hedge my hedge my bets here. The material abstraction is really difficult to talk about. You know, the commodity form and all this. Yeah, I’m trying to get it. Is it is it? Well, I offer this as a as a possible bridging analogy because I’m trying to get it. I don’t get it. I’m trying to get it. So Aristotle talks about what I would call like a metaphysical kind of abstraction in that you have inanimate matter and it gets informed and it becomes animate matter. And that’s more abstract than that. Right. And then animate gets informed at another level of recursion and it becomes, you know, psychological and then ultimately rational and rational is a is an act is an abstract form of being that can can self abstract and self realize. And so that’s a metaphysical abstract and it’s not taking place in everybody’s mind. It’s the ontological structure of being. Yeah. Am I getting closer to what you’re talking about? Or is it something like that? Yeah, I think I think maybe that’s maybe that’s a better kind of heuristic even because you have a whole scale there. But what I’m talking about it is slightly different. I mean, it’s all it’s all connected. But let me try to bring it back to talking about commodities. But then that that that abstracts into a higher form of money. Right. And so with finance financial abstraction, right? We you know, you just have more and more complex forms of money and finance and that that is distance from the material world. Right. So there’s so much distance. And so I don’t know if you know about modern monetary theory, but that’s the kind of catchphrase that is becoming more and more popular. And and I it’s something I wrote about for for Thomas Bjorkman. That’ll that’ll come out soon. But it’s day by day. There’s more coming out on it. And it’s basically the theory that, you know, states and the Federal Reserve, you know, have the kind of prerogative to just print money, right? Just add numbers to the ledger. And that is possible because of how advanced capitalism has become in terms of abstraction. Yeah, in terms of abstraction. Exactly. And it’s become so advanced that we can’t keep up with it. And we don’t even know what we’re doing. And so so modern monetary theory is already employed when there’s a stimulus package and it goes to, you know, corporations and and whatnot. And so that that is very capitalist because you actually want that money to go into the hands of people. Right. And so the debate about modern monetary theory is is how we add numbers to the ledger and what we spend it on. Right. And so bringing it back to politics and we’ll keep it on abstraction. But just to finish this money point, you know, we need to make money more available to people and you need to spend it on development, social infrastructure, not not bombs that just blow up that money. You know, and so this is what capitalism does, though, through its functions of abstraction and and particularly the advanced forms of finance and now cryptocurrencies. And so we need to reverse that trend in some ways. And we also get out in front of it and you know, it’s like, stop. I mean, sir, I mean, I’m not meaning this question positionally. I mean, seriously, given what you just said a moment ago about the fact that the complexification is dynamical, right. It’s the complexification. The complexification is complexified. Right. It’s going up in a nonlinear fashion. I mean, how do you mean this question seriously? How do we get out in front of that? It sounds like it’s got a runaway, you know, like, yeah, yeah, right. I’ve got the answer. That’s good. It’s not it’s not easy, but it’s the way you phrase the question sets me up because that’s that’s great to take it back to, you know, what do we do about it in the mental abstraction. So part of my work is trying to unpack the mistakes and the fallacies we’re making in our own mental abstraction. Yeah, you know, and so, you know, we need a mass education, universal education so that the average person has better mental abstraction faculties to engage with the world. And this is where your work sort of intersects with Zach’s work, I would imagine. Yeah, and yours, right, because you want people to have better relevance realization in all these sense. But I’m always bringing it back to the system because it’s not enough to like build out these these capacities in small groups. Right. You need to actually advocate for universal education. Right. Yeah. This is why I’m so passionate about Bernie Sanders because he had a pretty broad platform that included, you know, Green New Deal jobs guarantee and, you know, debt forgiveness and and and free college. You know, this stuff is really, really important. It has consequences. And so, so to frame it in terms of how we ideologically abstract and how we debated, not even debated, we just argued over the past four years about about, you know, who, who wore it well, or whatever, you know, we have the dumbest conversations about politics. And it’s a function of bad abstraction actually what I call what’s called vicious abstraction. So, you know, William James talked about vicious abstraction. Yes, yes, I was going to say, I was going to ask if James was an influence on you because I hear him in what you’re saying a lot. Yeah. And so that particular concept has a kind of twofold implications here. One is just the general bad abstraction out there. Like I’ve used, can use Jordan Peterson as an example because look at how he abstracts the concepts of things like Marxism or feminism. Right. He viciously literally viciously aggressively and kind of violently collapses it into singular meaning like all Marxism equals communism. Actually, you can’t get more anti intellectual than that on that topic because that’s like McCarthyism. And it’s just it’s foreclosing thought and discussion. Right. And so that’s a vicious abstraction. But the context in which I use this concept is actually an article about systemic racism. Because because it’s interesting, you know, there’s a there’s a Republican strategist named Lee Atwater in the in the active in the 60s and 70s. And he uses the words abstract. He’s like, you know, we used to use these slurs, but you can’t do that anymore. So what we’ve done is we abstracted the, you know, the the politics. And so, you know, this is part of this dumbing down of culture and anti intellectualism. And, you know, now, you know, the education secretary is Betsy DeVos. And she’s extremely anti intellectual. I can just see just anti education. Yeah, she’s a billionaire. She’s for these things called. What is it? The vouchers vote, you know, charter schools, charter schools. Yeah. Right. And it’s like, like, there’s so much going on there. And what we need is more universal access to quality education. Right. And, you know, a big lamentation for a lot of us is like, they don’t even teach critical thinking in high school. You know, like this is basic. But but part of the critique of education is, you know, just making people informed enough to work and to be compliant, kind of kind of populace. And we’re seeing that all break down. Right. The meaning crisis, the actual functional meta crisis, it’s all breaking down. It is we can’t afford such poor, weak, bad, vicious abstraction in our thinking. Sure. And isn’t there also I mean, I talked to Thomas about this based on his work, the world we create, because I thought part of his argument was there’s also been. It’s both an abstraction and a reduction. And those don’t have to be contradictions to each other. Of our normativity, because he and I got into a discussion about how all we used to have multiple sources of normativity. This is kind of a Habermas point, too. But, you know, his point is they’ve all been defeated. And we now have the de facto, you know, one normativity of the market. And this strikes me as convergent with Zach. Zach and I have talked about this, about, you know, how the market normativity has become the sole basis by which we’re evaluating educational success. And I hope you’re being charitable to me. I’m not saying that economic, we should there shouldn’t be economic criteria in education. Of course, there should be, because it’s a process of human being. But we used to, I mean, if you look, you know, classically, look in Plato’s The Academy, right? The normativity there is not the market. The normativity there is virtue. Or, you know, of course, there’s critiques of, you know, the normativity of the market. And so, you know, of course, there’s critiques of the Platonic vision. I’m just pointing out that there have been longstanding, you know, all through the Middle Ages. It’s a religious normativity rather than a market normativity, driving education. University was originally to make a person universal, the liberal arts, to liberate them, right? Right. High ideals there. Yes, very high ideals. But they weren’t ivory tower ideals. They actually constituted and regulated the educational project. And then we have basically put that all aside for this other normativity, which seems to be, I take this to be Zach’s critique. It seems to be, and maybe yours, it seems to be failing us in our ability to produce, well, if you’ll allow me, a really loaded term here, but I’m using it, you know, resonating with the classical traditions that I’ve invoked here. You know, making good persons. That used to be the project, the project, right? And then we tried, I think already a diminished version, but we tried making good citizens. And then we’ve diminished that to making good consumers, which I mean, and that has gotten us into a tremendous a lot of difficulties. So when I see my kids and their cohorts, the lack of depth and resiliency in their cognition that their education has afforded them, which I think is part of what you’re pointing to, too, I think we have done them a great disservice. I think we have done them a great disservice because I see the way a lot of them are responding to the COVID crisis and the way that’s exacerbating the meeting crisis, putting it on steroids and meth. And they just don’t have, you know, the self-complexifying resiliency and sophistication of cognition to deal with this. And that’s not a criticism of them as people. That’s a criticism of an educational system that has largely failed to prepare them for reality. Sorry, that was a bit of a rant. No, that’s great. Yeah. And it’s so something I continuously try to highlight is that it’s cut down in the most subtle ways. And that’s how it happens right under our noses. So neoliberalism in the 70s emerging, not by accident, right? But emerging, you know, was so, you know, so when laws and stuff are passed, like the Patriot Act was passed without even being read, you know, so there’s so much abstraction in these documents and people are just like, I don’t have time to deal with it. Right. So it’s like, how do you think neoliberalism happens? Right. It’s like there’s some great ideas in theory and principle, but there’s vicious abstraction there. And before I forget, I thought maybe you want to define that for people because we kind of just rushed over it. Well, I mean, part of what I understand James to mean is and Whitehead had a similar one, which is really interesting because in many ways are so different. The fallacy of misplaced concreteness, this idea that we can mistake our abstraction and we can attribute them to a reality. And I think the phenomenologists, I think Marla Ponty and the others were also trying to put their finger on this in their critique of what they call intellectualism. It’s not what you mean by intellectualism, but it’s the same thing that what James also used the same term. And again, not the way you’re using it right now, but this idea that we can get caught up in like the these abstractions and take them to have a kind of reality that we and we have we forget. We forget the processes by which they emerge and we are then cut off from the life world. We’re cut off from what I talk about being actually coupled to our body, to each other, into the world. And that’s what James was really, really, really critical of. And so the idea of pragmatism was that and I have lots of criticisms of James and how he uses this term. I think he was ultimately trying to talk about relevance, but that’s another that’s another thing, right, that we should be paying attention to the use that these concepts perform for us and and and and and and and and and and and We situate them back within how we how they are conditioned by and conditioning of our inactive interaction with each other in the world. Sorry, you asked for a definition. I don’t think a definition is quite what I gave you, but that’s a good characterization, I think. Yeah, yeah. And that’s that’s a great complex definition. Let me try to give a simple one of for for myself and for listeners, because what I part of what I put in my The article on racism and when you search the term this comes up is the idea of vicious abstraction as misquotation and and I really like that because you’re cutting off the context. Yeah, right. And there’s the The last the last of contextualization is James’s main point. Okay, I think that’s that’s what you’re saying there. So, yeah, because when you misquote you literally don’t pay attention to the context. Yeah, right. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And there’s different there’s different types of misquotation I go and I go into the details a little bit, but just, you know, I think the idea of misquotation. It’s so ubiquitous. You can once you frame it in those terms, you can see it everywhere right in discourse and in the framing of concepts and it’s just It’s just, it’s just that it’s you’re just you just you’re just cutting off part of the context that completely changes the meaning of the thing that you’re trying to say or convey. And this is just, you know, I love the word vicious. Because it implies a lot of a lot of violence and kind of malice even advice advice advice. Yeah, advice. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So virtuous abstraction would be would be the opposite. And that is not a well defined developed term in in in what I’ve Well, I’ve tried to do that. If you’ll allow me, let me allow me to because you you did make the connection between abstraction and abduction. And I’ve tried to go back to Plato’s notion of an agagio and reciprocal opening as a way of trying to get what virtuous abstraction looks like. And that’s where I get from the time is because for time to stick that up between the framework and then said, yes, but what’s my cognitive existential and ultimately spiritual relationship to that framework. And how can I use that right to abstract myself up to realize myself more and more. And so that’s that that’s part of what I’m trying to do with that notion and trying to bring that notion back is try to get up. But what’s the virtuous version of making use of this human capacity for self transcendence, because that’s what that’s what that’s what the abstraction is actually rooted in. But it’s, I mean, the device, I would argue comes from perverting that primary ability for a human self transcendence and and that means there shouldn’t virtues of self transcendence and And instead of maybe giving a definition, maybe trying to articulate the virtues of self transcendence would be the way of trying to articulate what virtuous abstraction is. And that’s a proposal I give you. Yeah, and I want to be careful here, you know, because what what comes to mind is the, you know, the the schism or the contrast between psychology and sociology and I’ve written about this a bit in different places. It’s a constant theme. I’m a sociological guy in a world of mostly psychological psychologists type people. And so with with virtue and with the wisdom tradition right and stoicism, it’s often framed in terms of the individual. And how could it not be right. So, I mean, sorry, I want to interject there because I mean, I, I have been developing and I think this is not a maverick in this sense. This is a key feature for you cognitive science. The, the centrality of discriminative cognition, the breaking out of the monolithic mind breaking out of monological thought into biological. I mean, this has been something that I think is properly being emphasized now and developed by a lot of people. So I think if you I would make an argument that there is a I’m not trying to push. I’m not trying to dismiss you, but I think I would say that there is a community of people within the psychological camp broadly construed or engaging in a very powerful form of self correction around exactly this issue. That’s great. Yeah. Yeah, and not not not to not to single you out in any way but but I wish that was, you know, I still have higher hopes I want to see more and you know, a psychologist that comes to mind right to defer it from from us completely is Steven Pinker right I made this point to to to Daniel Gertz yesterday is like, you know, the critique in Jacobin came out of Steven Pinker and, you know, I think that’s a really good point. The critique in Jacobin came out of Steven Pinker and, you know, the headline is is a bit rude. It’s like, it’s like, yeah, it’s proven Steven Pinker is full of shit. But the article is great. Right. And this is the point like, Steven Pinker can’t take critique right he gets into feuds with people like What’s his name? Phil, Phil Torres, and many, many other people right. But so there’s no there’s no auto critique there’s no reflexivity and you know Pinker really leans into the kind of brand of the optimist, right, it’s it’s it’s like almost a joke, you know, and so Yeah. You know, so to make sure to make the move to sociology, you know, is there’s much bigger implications for that and and this is why I titled my article like In the side view mapping metamodernism for collective intelligence right there wasn’t a lot of space to unpack that but it’s kind of a jab at what’s happening with this term collective intelligence and intelligence is the operative word there because it’s a lot of people instrumentalizing this, you know, of whether it’s in like, you know, Silicon Valley communities or whatever that reinforces that distinction from like the masses of people. Right. And what we want to foster is intellect distributed intellect and so literacy. I mean, there’s not even a basic literacy. Well, maybe I’m talking about something similar to this then because I talk a lot about because I’m, you know, I have an ambivalent attitude towards intelligence, I think, until that which makes us adaptive also makes us prone to self deception. Yeah, so I think I say the project should be about trying to maybe maybe you won’t like this but I think about the way I see individual wisdom is using intelligence to acquire a psychotechnology of self correction that affords rationality, the way we’ve talked about it. I’ve talked about that we should be trying to cultivate collective rationality, not just collective intelligence and I thought that to me is a central project right now. Yeah, yeah. And I think with with self correction, like, like, we can, we could keep, you know, anything with the self and self deception is very, is very subtle, like, because we all we all know geniuses that have some pathologies. And then it’s kind of a paradox of how do you challenge that person, right, it’s like they’re threatened by by your critique and then there’s implications for them and how much they’ve invested in that line of thought. So people underestimate the implications of self critique and of of metanoia, which is like a deeper spiritual and intellectual conversion. It is, it is. I think, yeah, I think there’s a spiritual aspect to this. Brent, I’m sorry, but I’m not a good place to wrap it up. Yeah, it’s a good. Well, that, that, that. Okay, but that, first of all, I would like to invite you to come back in August, and we do another one of these for Voices with Verbeke. And if if if you’re if you’re in agreement with it, I’d like it to zero in on that last very provocative point because I don’t want to just leave that sort of dangling the spirituality, which is something I’m very interested in. I don’t like that term, as you know, but it’s there’s no other term right now. The spirituality of all this because you sort of brought it out and you’ve alluded to it in a couple places and you invoked a term drawn from the heart of, you know, you know, neoplatonic Christianity, metanoia. So I’d like to bring out because this is also an area where I think what we would talk about with intersect with layman, right, the spirituality of metamonternism and what and your project. Yeah, that’s great. Okay, that’s perfect. That’s that’s that’s perfect because other people have been asking me about this and actually I’m going to talk to layman about it soon and just your full disclosure my my contribution to Jonathan Roussen’s metamontern book is about metanoia. But but it’s up in the air whether I’m going to still contribute that because I’m actually going to try to publish on metanoia on my blog as soon as possible because I just want to get get this content out there. And and then we can talk about it. So I’m really glad you picked up on that at the end. I look forward to that discussion. Oh, well, great. So maybe maybe what you could do and I will I will respect your complete intellectual property over it. But maybe you can send me the most recent draft. Oh, sure, sure, sure. Yeah. And then I could read it and that would give me a little bit of background that we could go into it because I mean this is a concept that’s very important to me to sure. Right. Brent, this has been really wonderful. It’s, I hope you feel that you were given like a welcoming space, because that was my genuine intent here. And I really enjoyed this. I mean, there’s there’s there’s points of difference, but I thought there was a genuine good faith dialogue, which is and I’ve said this before and and you’ve earned my trust because trust should be earned. If I get a sense that people, even if they differ from me in certain ways, are willing to enter into good faith dialogue, then I want to talk to them, especially if they’re bringing the kind of insight and the acumen that you are bringing to it. So thank you very much. Right on. Yeah. In insight porn is Peter Lindbergh would probably get really turned on about so. Yeah, I really appreciate the welcoming context here and it’s enabled me to have a good dialogue with you. So thank you. Okay, well thank you very much. And I guess I’ll stop recording at my end here.