Welcome to Peak Fragmentation

The end of Postmodernism and the promise of Theosis

The air is thick with it. Like the static before a storm, it presses in toward an inevitable conclusion. In an era of social and political fragmentation, a collective desire for unity is crackling through the cultural body.

The scattered fragments of post-modernity are trying to adhere into a jagged coherence, and how it forms might be the defining question of our time.

We are living through Peak Fragmentation. Across the Western world, there is a resurgence of traditionalism and authoritarianism in response. A ‘quiet revival’ of Christianity is getting louder every day. Others are looking to new horizons, building AI religions or retreating to ‘conscious communities’ to try and sow the seeds of a new society.

It’s a time of chaos. A time between worlds.

One way to understand the desire to find unity by moving back into the past or out toward the future is as a response to the death of a cultural aesthetic that has been growing in dominance for the last sixty years: postmodernism.

More a collection of ideas than a coherent worldview, it is the idea that there is no fundamental truth or fundamental story that defines us. A philosophy that dovetailed perfectly with the fragmented landscape of the internet, where identity is fluid and self-created, cut into ever-smaller pieces and never finding purchase.

Postmodernity can be seen as a celebration of fragmentation, and a terror of essentialism; the idea that some things are inherent and unchanging. Now that postmodernism has run its course, the pull toward essentialism in the collective unconscious is potent and alluring.

It’s also inevitable. As sociologist Aaron Antonovsky argued, humans need a ‘sense of coherence’ in order to thrive, and it is correlated with better mental health and resilience. As Larson et al. have shown, people also tend to be more prosocial and conscientious when they’re embedded in a coherent social network. Despite the illusion cast by postmodernity and the fragmented realm of the internet, research suggests that the majority of people feel there is such a thing as truth in the world. This has been shown in multiple domains, including studies into theory of mind in children and Jonathan Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory.

Postmodern theorists are right to point out that who gets to decide what is true matters, and that the power to narrate reality is often unevenly distributed. However, they threw the baby out with the bathwater by assuming that truth is always something made up by humans. As psychologist Philip Tetlock has argued, people’s commitment to values like love, honour and justice is often viewed as independent of culture. Even if economic pressures often force people to trade those ‘sacred values’ in what he calls ‘taboo trade-offs,’ we generally have a sense that some things, like the sacredness of human life, go deeper than us.

One result of the cultural exhaustion with fragmentation is a deep desire to reconnect to these authentic values. But how we do that is more important than doing it. We could revert to a more authoritarian, closed-minded traditionalism, or beat the dead horse of progressive politics hoping it’ll turn into a unicorn. Neither is likely to take us to new and beautiful shores.

Instead, we have an opportunity to re-craft culture in a way that takes the best of postmodernism and combines it with traditionalism to create something new. To explore how that could look and feel, I’m going to give postmodernism its due and weave together overlapping narratives, including Integral Philosophy, Christian mysticism, metaphysics, and neuroscience, to imagine a new cultural aesthetic.

Unity

Sure, it’s cute now, but just wait until it’s in a gang of turtles led by a rat and beating people with nunchucks.

Men in Indonesia help a giant turtle return to the sea. A comedian riffs on the Epstein files. A man groans and gyrates in an ecstatic dance.

That’s thirty seconds of my Instagram feed, and as I scroll, millions upon millions of other people scroll on their own and see different stories. Millions of realities nested in other realities and no sense of what matters.

The otherworld of the internet really can make it seem as though there is no fundamental truth, no fundamental story that connects humanity. That who we are is relative, and our abstract theories about the world are more real than what we can touch and mould with our hands. The author Seth Godin has a brilliant seven-word definition of culture: “People like us do things like this.” So who are we collectively, and what do we do? No one, and everyone. Nothing, and everything.

As Douglas Rushkoff puts it in Leviathan, if you spend a long enough time on the internet you go mad. It’s no surprise that one of the most recent mental health diagnoses is AI-Induced Psychosis.

By rejecting the idea that there is a deeper truth underlying this chaos, postmodernity has led us to a meaningless, anti-human void. Not just because it lacks a coherent sense of what really matters, but because it negates the possibility of meaning to begin with.

But this was always going to be a temporary game, a brief moment in history where the rules of reality were twisted and warped. You can’t live in the carnival forever. Soon the sun comes up and reveals the reality beneath the masks.

Exhaustion

After years of being told that all claims to truth are suspicious, facing reality can be a hard thing for a culture to do.

When I’ve spoken to people about the state of the world recently, I’ve noticed two distinct emotions arising between us. The first is exhaustion. We’re all knackered. Exhausted with post-truth media, with AI, with the endless repetition of movie franchises. Exhausted trying to figure out what it actually means to be progressive, or conservative. Political homelessness is on the rise, and we’re huddling over the burning remains of legacy media, glancing at our phones and eyeing each other suspiciously.

I’ve also felt a hopeful yearning. A sense of possibility, a shared feeling that a space has opened, and that now is the time to create a new cultural reality.

Ours is an era defined by anxiety and yearning.

In this way, the 2020s have parallels to the 1920s, when the horrors of the First World War forced artists and philosophers to question the underlying narratives: nationalism, gender roles, religion. Arguably the most influential artistic and philosophical movement to come out of that was Modernism. Modernist artists questioned underlying assumptions, both celebrating and lamenting a loss of ‘grand narratives’ about the world. Psychotherapy, surrealism, and sexual experimentation all flourished in an attempt to make sense of this strange new imaginary.

Whatever’s going on here, it’s not my place to judge

Modernism was also defined by a combination of anxiety and possibility. There was a sense that something profound had been lost, even as poets like Ezra Pound called on people to ‘make it new!’ and return to tradition to find new realities hidden within.

While many modernist artists had mixed feelings about the loss of certainty, after the Second World War the aesthetic evolved. Maybe the loss of grand narratives about the world wasn’t such a bad thing after all. A strange kind of nihilism developed; maybe nothing really matters, because there is no underlying essence to your identity, or to the world. There are only overlapping narratives and power games.

This is central to postmodern thinking. It might seem bleak and empty now, but after the Second World War, for many artists and philosophers it was appealing. If no single narrative can make a claim to truth, then you can’t have fascism. You can’t have people appealing to fantasies of the past, or inciting racial violence by claiming one group is better than another.

After 1945, the US and its allies were creating a new power structure: a ‘global village’ defined by safe humanistic values that would serve global capital and American interests abroad, while also preventing the rise of fascism and combatting communism. Postmodernism thrived in this global order, in part because it taught that human beings are constructed by many overlapping narratives and have no essential identity. As such, their identity as ‘global citizens’ was just as valid, if not more so, than any claim to place or ancestry.

According to this worldview, you can control reality by controlling the stories people tell about it. This is why the woke Left spent so much time policing language, and why Trump’s Whitehouse censors language as much as its enemies. While it is partly true that reality is created by language, it is also a deeply narcissistic perspective that places humans at the centre of reality.

It works for a while, until the embodied realities of biology, economics, human nature, and place inevitably prove to be more real. This is what’s been happening over the last decade.

The End of an Era

The age of postmodernism is coming to an end. What comes next is anyone’s guess. What seems inevitable is a return to different forms of essentialism, most of it happening unconsciously within the cultural body. The ‘quiet revival’ of Christianity in the US and UK and the centrality of immigration as the most important political issue in many developed nations are examples of this.

The immigration debate is complex, and as well as economic concerns it is driven by a deeper cultural anxiety around the loss of status of ethnic white identity. Most voters feel deeply uncomfortable with the idea that they will be in the ethnic minority of their own countries, but many also feel deeply uncomfortable about voicing it. They will likely do so in the anonymity of the voting booth, and it might be why the UK’s Reform party, which campaigns on a strong anti-immigration platform, has at the time of writing the highest odds to win the next UK election.

There is nothing wrong with a desire for more cultural homogeneity and a more coherent social contract. However, these desires can very easily slip into regressive dominator hierarchies.

That is exactly what some people want. A Pew study from 2024 showed that a median of 31% of people in middle- and high-income countries support the idea of authoritarian regimes, with the number higher in middle-income countries. Many political scientists believe that openness to authoritarianism is rising in developed nations.

When things fall apart, the promise of control hits like a drug. But what if there’s a better high?

Theosis

The pendulum swing in cultural values we’re living through might be part of a deeper trend in the Western psyche. In his recent session on Sensemaking 102, cognitive scientist John Vervaeke argued that Western culture pendulums so wildly because of an inability to reconcile two aspects of human agency rooted in the Christian worldview: Autonomy and Heteronomy.

Autonomy is the position that our actions affect the world and change it. Heteronomy is the stance that our actions are governed by external forces. If we see these two aspects of our agency as mutually exclusive, we swing between nihilism (I have no control) and narcissism (I am the source of control).

As Vervaeke pointed out, there is another concept in Christian theology that can reconcile these: Theosis. Theosis is a complex theological concept, but involves an active participation with the divine, one that combines both autonomy and heteronomy. It is the idea that human beings can become like God through grace.

You can sign up for the ‘Content Only’ version of Sensemaking 102 to find Vervaeke’s recent session along with 8 weeks of sessions and self-guided exercises

The essence of this idea isn’t just found in Christianity. It’s also found in the Hindu concept of Tat Tvam Asi, or “thou art that” which teaches that Self (Atman) is not separate from ultimate reality (Brahman). Threads of this non-dual awareness are also found in Integral Theory, Nora Bateson’s Warm Data, Trish Blain’s Four Forces, Iain McGilchrist’s work, and countless other people we’ve had on Kainos recently.

If you really adopt at non-dual perspective you also realise that ‘thou art bat’, but for some reason they get far less attention than they deserve

Many of these perspectives see reality as made up not of distinct things, but of relationships. In a relational view on reality, truth can’t be boiled down to a single polarity or story. Instead, all things, all paradoxes, all truths and contradictions are contained in a whole which is neither part nor whole. If this is how reality works, then postmodernism is half right. Reality really is made up of multiple overlapping stories. But what it got wrong was that there’s nothing deeper binding these stories.

To find that deeper essence, we have to avoid getting trapped in simple explanations like ‘truth exists’ or ‘there is no truth.’ To quote Iain McGilchrist:

“We need the union of union and division, not the division of union and division. We need not either both/and or either/or, but both both/and and either/or.”

Pre/Trans Fallacies

This is the level of thinking that is necessary for cultural evolution, but almost entirely absent from mainstream political and cultural discourse today. Postmodern fragmentation has created a universal allergy. It has made progressives allergic to any person or organisation making truth claims, and conservatives allergic to anyone making a claim that truth is relative. If we stop arguing on the internet for a few moments and pay attention to reality, we notice that both positions are true.

This perspective, which is old news to wisdom traditions and the ‘liminal web’, is now gaining more cultural traction as people try to escape the exhaustion of Peak Fragmentation. Most recently I’ve seen it expressed in the ‘Bell Curve’ or ‘Midwit’ meme.

I’ve seen many versions of this recently (the example above comes courtesy of

Daniel Kazandjian

). Every time I see one I feel hopeful, because it points to one of the most useful heuristics for moving us out of polarised thinking: Ken Wilber’s theory of the Pre/Trans fallacy. According to Wilber, the Pre/Trans fallacy is one of the central confusions in Western psychology and culture, and a significant factor in political polarisation.

The fallacy has three parts. From left to right in the meme above, it includes the pre-rational position (the Simpleton in the meme), the rational position (Midwit), and the trans-rational position (Jedi). You could also replace ‘rational’ with ‘conventional.’ Remember Seth Godin’s definition of culture? “People like us do things like this.” That is convention. Move beyond that, and you’re leaving the Overton Window behind and no longer holding a conventional perspective. Often society will try to force you back into the box; it’s why Terence McKenna quipped ‘culture is not your friend.’

However, what kind of unconventional perspective we hold makes all the difference. This is where the fallacy part of the pre/trans fallacy comes in. Both the pre-conventional and the post-conventional position seem similar. If you’re interdependent, you’re also dependent. But you aren’t only dependent. You’re also independent. This isn’t a case of two things being true at the same time, it’s the case of a position transcending and including two truths.

To take a modern example, we can look at the rise of ‘populism’ as a reversion to a pre-rational ‘might is right’ kind of thinking. From that perspective, immigration should be curbed because ‘this is my land, so get out.’ The conventional perspective was, until quite recently (and still is in many progressive circles), that all multiculturalism is right and good. The post-conventional perspective is by definition more complex and nuanced. It might acknowledge colonial history and the complexity of identity, while also recognising that white identity matters, though not at the exclusion of other identities. It recognises essentialism while still holding relativism. However, if you ask a pre-conventional and trans-conventional person whether immigration should be capped, they would both answer yes in this scenario.

Versions of Yes

The fundamental insight of the Pre/Trans fallacy is that not all ‘yes’ answers are the same. But the idea that a ‘yes’ can be both universal and relative at the same time (the post-conventional position) is anathema to many of our institutions, and particularly the legacy media. Bureaucracies select for simple narratives that can reduce reality to quantities that can be calculated.

There is still a lot of signal to the rational or conventional perspective on any topic; this isn’t a case of either or, but of yes and. The rational position moves beyond the knee-jerk emotionality and domination of the pre-rational response of ‘immigration bad because I’m better than you are’.

We all move toward pre-rational positions when we feel scared or threatened. This is as true in an argument with your partner as it is on the political stage. However, the rational position tends to have an allergy to any emotion, and can’t distinguish between transcendence and regression. Instead, it denigrates both the pre- and trans-rational positions, and limits cultural evolution in the process. New Atheism is a good example of this.

We move toward a post-rational view and out of double-binds when, as Nora Bateson has pointed out, we add context to a situation. Culturally, we can do this by sitting down with someone and speaking with them about what they actually think. It doesn’t happen on our social feeds, and it doesn’t happen in imagined conversations in our heads with our political opponents.

It happens in simple moments of connection and insight. Eating together, working together, singing together. It is birthed from embodiment, presence, and curiosity. It points us toward a unity that includes pluralism, but doesn’t fall into a relativistic mush. We can combat pre-rational forces of authoritarianism by growing a culture that embraces multiculturalism, but doesn’t shy away from celebrating white identity and history. Education that recognises everyone learns differently, but doesn’t do away with rote learning and discipline when it’s required. Sexual politics that recognise the unfair power dynamics at play around gender identity, without shying away from biological reality in the process.

Embedding trans-rational perspectives into mainstream culture is one route toward the cultural aesthetic that comes after postmodernism, and it’s one of the most exciting paths ahead of us. It isn’t a thing we do, but a stance we adopt in relation to reality. It’s both complex and simple. At its heart it’s about starting to ask people we disagree with the right questions, and listening. Most of the time, the complexity of feeling and reasoning in the other starts to unfold, and in the process we widen our own frame about what’s true and possible. What arises is a unity that embraces fragmentation, and a fragmentation that embraces unity.