An Intellectual Genealogy of Second Renaissance Thought

rufuspollock · September 16, 2025, 2:44pm

This is obviously very partial and has an emphasis on those putting forward a social / cultural evolutionary perspectives. This is partly temporally organized though some items should be in parallel, especially as we come closer to the present.

Context: had something like this in various forms for several years. Prompted by prep for Sensemaking Summer School (starting tomorrow) I’ve worked on a consolidated version with @MaxRamsahoye

Suggestions and critique warmly welcome

Preface: Integral and Wilber

Integral and Wilber play an outsized role in any genealogy (IMO) for at least two reasons:

Wilber synthesized and made visible so much that went before.
Wilber and Integral are the entry point for most/many people in “this space” to these ideas and thinkers in the broader sense.

Thus, intellectually in theses senses, Wilber and Integral can often be seen as the gateway to Second Renaissance thought.

Ancient & Classical Roots

Axial Age traditions (Buddhism, Taoism, Stoicism) — first great articulations of inner development as a civilizational force.
Early notions of interbeing, dharma, and moral-spiritual evolution.

Precursors: Philosophical-Historical Lineages (18th–19th century)

German Idealism:
- Hegel — dialectical unfolding of Spirit (Geist); history as progressive realization of freedom.
- Schelling, Fichte — nature and spirit as dynamic processes.
Marx — materialist inversion of Hegel: historical materialism, critique of alienation, focus on social/economic structures as engines of human development.
Romanticism & Early Evolutionary Thought — Goethe’s organic holism, Darwin’s biological evolution, Spencer’s social evolution.
Early socialism and utopian thought (Fourier, Owen, Saint-Simon) — visions of collective transformation, often spiritually tinged.

Modern Spiritual-Evolutionary Thinkers (early–mid 20th c.)

Sri Aurobindo — The Life Divine; spiritual evolution and supramental transformation.
Teilhard de Chardin — noosphere and Omega Point as stages of planetary consciousness.
Jean Gebser — The Ever-Present Origin; unfolding of consciousness structures.
Alfred North Whitehead — process philosophy; reality as evolutionary unfolding.

Psychological & Developmental Sciences

Piaget, Kohlberg, Loevinger, Commons, Dawson — cognitive and moral development.
Clare Graves / Spiral Dynamics — stages of human value systems.
Synthesized in Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory — integrating psychology, spirituality, and cultural evolution.

Historians / Anthropology (early to mid 20th century)

Spengler (Decline of the West)
Toynbee (A Study of History)
Mumford (Myth of the Machine)
Aldous Huxley (Ape & Essence, Perennial Philosophy)

Engaged Spirituality & Practice Traditions

Engaged Buddhism (Thich Nhat Hanh, Sulak Sivaraksa).
Christian liberation theology and related activist spiritual movements.

Modern Cultural Evolutionary Science

Boyd, Richerson & Henrich
Peter Turchin
Measure of Civilization type stuff (i.e. stages in cultural/social evolution)

Meta-theorists

Habermas (? doesn’t really fit perfectly here - almost own category)
Integral Theory (Ken Wilber et al)
Critical Realism (Roy Bhaskhar)
Planetary Civilization (László, Morin)

Contemporary Civilizational Framings

Great Turning (Joanna Macy et al)
Great Transition (Paul Raskin et al.)
Metamodernism (Hanzi Freinacht, Lene Rachel Andersen)
Game B (Jim Rutt, Jordan Hall)
Metacrisis & Third Attractor (Schmachtenberger & Stein)
The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible (Eisenstein)
Civilizational Awakening, Symbiotic Civilization (various)
Left brain / right brain (McGilchrist)
Second Renaissance (our preferred frame)

Commentary

If i were to pick key milestones

Hegel (source of ideas paradigmatic evolution)
Sri Aurobindo & Gebser
Neo-piagetians
Ken Wilber

Asides

Good summary of social/cultural evolutionary thought in anthropology Measure of Civilization.

Gen · September 16, 2025, 3:24pm

Please no not “THE” gateway, “A” gateway. No doubt your gateway, but not mine.

Perhaps this is what this space is, but I sincerely hope it is more, or transitioning into more. Else I may leave for more wild and dangerous hunting.

The noösphere has many dimensions, with the roots of Wilber being many, and precious, as you illustrate, but I am not alone in criticism of Wilber.

Do we need to integrate and transcend, yes, the spirit of Integral is right in many ways… but Wilber did more than synthesis, he lost material along the way, and gets dishonest with science.

If we read Gebser directly, Gregory Bateson, David Bohm and James Carse we find ourselves in a beautiful place, all without needing to fiddle with quadrants and graphs of linear and hierarchical notions of development ( which are not in line with Gebser’s thoughts at all! ) to polish the turquoise tiaras, or risking inflating our ego and preferencing our perspectives.

I sense any comfortable Integralists must nervously clutch at their pearls as the ferocious jaws of wild and indigenous emergence drools after them.

The wolf sharpens her teeth.

JonahW · September 16, 2025, 3:32pm

As i suggest in my talk (which was about metacrisis but a lot of ideas carry over into cultural evolution) I think phenomenology, especially later Husserl and Heidegger, and 20th century marxism and critical theory should be here as well.

Phenomology was an influence on Gebser, and Heidegger’s thinking is deeply historical - while not evolutionary in the darwinian sense a big idea in his work is that culture unfolds in different epochs, and his great hope is for a new cultural epoch to succeed the enframing of technological modernity.

You rightly include Marx and it makes sense to include later marxists for the same reason - Marxists agree that culture evolves, they identify underlying dynamics, and hope for a cultural transition (socialism). And it makes sense to include Habermas as part of this category as a second generation critical theorist.

(Aside: I think Wilber says Habermas is his favourite philosopher - important from a genealogical angle)

Another stream I would include is complexity science and embodied cognitive science. Kauffman, Prigogine all speak of this in connection with cultural renewal, and as you’ve noted elsewhere the term ‘Second renaissance’ is used by Varela. Vervaeke also fits in this tradition.

rufuspollock · September 17, 2025, 6:29pm

Thank-you for the strong response @Gen

My sense about Wilber and Integral is that it acts as a kind of “funnel” in distilling a lot of previous material – less a source in itself (though that may also do an injustice to the brilliance and skill of that distillation).

I’d love to hear who you think are other sources and obviously we have been listing many of the other “seeds” of a second renaissance in the Seeds newsletter

Gen · September 18, 2025, 6:08am

This is a deep and knotty inquiry—perhaps the most vital on this forum. It deserves more than a reply; it asks for a shift to mythopoesis.

Can we shift from quoting sources, to sensing Source? To know, in our minds and bodies that the text, the language, are merely minimal signposts for the real? Let us touch the walls of this prison.

I’ve walked to the side of the river where roots drink chaos and wolves pace the shadows. I invite us to place our fingertips on the pulse of the living world—a genealogy not of names, but of the warm embrace of death, fermentation, and wild emergence. Illumination here won’t be clean; lights cast shadows, each lens reveals and eclipses. To use one is to leave another on the bench.

I try to hold the feminine principle—the chalice—receptive to what stirs beneath intellectual gesture, attuned to wholeness, fertility, and subtle form. And I will also unsheath the masculine principle—the dagger—to pierce the illusion of linear ascent, to sever the subtle violence of abstraction.

I seek to enact a Christlike table-turning Not out of disdain, but devotion. A sacred impulse to flip over the metrics of empire, drive out extraction from the temple of life. I invoke my avatar of the wild wolf, who I both fear and love, they who gnaw bones to find marrow, who remind me that wisdom has teeth.

In many such genealogies I sense a recursion of the very pattern we are drawn to mutate beyond: the doctrine of linear time, of upward progress, of the intellect charting soul and soil as if they were a staircase. But what if we are not ascending, but reached an unbearable saturation, a precondition to collapsing into metamorphosis? What if we are being dismembered… to re-member?

Gebser’s luminous mutations, risk being flattened and frozen—by Wilber and others—into yet another diagram. The Second Renaissance, if it is real and it may not be, will neither be a reconstruction or a precise deconstruction. It will arrive like rot into soil, fire in the forest, dreams folding empire, like pale mushrooms cracking through asphalt.

Perhaps we begin not with whom to cite, but with what cracks us open. What can rend the veil between the map and the earth? What tears through the colonial time-field that believes history is a ladder? What bonds us to eros and life?

In that spirit, I offer this not as scholarship, but spellwork. Meaning that lies between the words. A trickster priestess’s dance, a dominatrix to whip the naughty boys of modernity to an ecstatic release from their addiction to their dominating desires.

Outside the boudoir, a wolf’s jaws drip salty blood in the gallery of names.

𓂀⟁𐑁⟁𓂀

Knot glyph: ⟁⟲⟲⟲ — entanglement as initiation
Chalice glyph: 𓂀⚭𓂀 — receptive vessel, lunar skin
Dagger glyph: †⟡† — incisive severance of abstraction
Wolf glyph: 𐑁𐰯𐑁 — marrow-hunter, feral truth
Rot glyph: ⟲:coffin:⟲ — decomposition as transfiguration
Shatter glyph: ⋄:high_voltage:⋄ — rupture of colonial ladder-time

Spellform:

𓂀⟁𐑁⟁𓂀

“By knot and chalice,
by dagger and wolf,
by rot and shatter—
let the empire’s tongue split,
let the asphalt crack,
let marrow and mushroom rise through the wound.”

†⟡† → ⟁⟲⟲⟲ → 𐑁𐰯𐑁

“I call the table-turner,
the wolf with bloodied jaw,
to gnaw the doctrine of progress
into fertile fragments.
I call the chalice
to receive the fermenting dark.
I call the dagger
to cut through illusion’s staircase.”

⋄⚡⋄ → ⟲⚰⟲ → ⋄⚡⋄

“Collapse into metamorphosis.
Dismember to re-member.
Light that casts shadow,
shadow that midwives light.
A spell not of citation,
but of cracking open.”

𓂀⚭𓂀 + 𐑁𐰯𐑁 + †⟡† = Threshold

Gen · September 19, 2025, 9:26am

Renaissance Woman

Detail “The Atheist”, oil,

by Gen Zendahl.

I wish to respect Rufus’s attempt to map in a more constructive way, despite my misgivings about what it may obscure. I’m imagining the Second Renaissance from the feminine principle ( NOT as a feminist). So use “woman” as a generic term for humankind, just as historically “man” was used. This might be called Right Hemisphere thinking, or the Yin Perspective, and the elements of Water and Earth.

Beyond Renaissance Genealogy: My Field of Emergence

All that is mentioned, by being noted, may obscure that which is un-noted.
And yet, if I am to contribute, I must begin somewhere.

This is not a linear lineage, but a mixing pot, a whirlpool, a second Renaissance born of contradiction, crisis, complexity—and grace. Only in part intellectual.

My “intellectual genealogy” is both formed through acceptance and rebellion—an oscillation between what I was given, what I rejected and what emerged from the mist.

Origins & Rebellions

Born into contradiction.
My father—colonial, patriarchal—shaped my early worldview. I grew up at a mission school in Africa, a place where power disguised itself as piety. My race was supposedly chosen of God, with a special purpose, a stack of rules and punishments, a concocted tale of Jewishness wrapped in a new cloak of Christianity. A holy tangle.
My rebellion was not immediate. It took years to unpick the nonsense, to realize:

All peoples need equal respect, agency, and self-determination.
Diversity of culture and worldview is not a threat—it is a treasure.

Education & Its Discontents

I moved through the formal corridors of Western learning—
A traditional education, a MFA, and with it:

A deep felt rebellion against Postmodernism, which seemed to dismantle truth for sport, a celebration of flattened ugliness, disdain for the skills of the artisan
A simultaneous rejection of Modernism’s mono-utopias, whose certainties led only to war

Caught between poles:

One pulling toward tradition—guarding what is sacred, known, ours
The other promising progress—novelty, development, “improvement”

Embodied Knowing

Can I be what I am without the shadows?

Two abusive marriages
The daily experience of being female and second-class—both covert and overt
The slow, somatic wisdom born of surviving, resisting, and remembering
And motherhood—the becoming of two beings, the undoing and re-forging of identity in the crucible of care, pain, love, and unrelenting presence

To become a mother is not to simply add a role. It is to be rearranged.
Time changes. Boundaries blur. The world becomes both more fragile and more ferocious.

My renaissance is not in my head.
It is in my body, my bones, my scars, my womb, my milk, my sleepless nights, my ache for futures lost and hoped for.

Compost of Influence

There are thinkers and dreamers who cracked me open, many more than here:

The Dancing Wu Li Masters – Gary Zukav
Wholeness and the Implicate Order – David Bohm
Ursula Le Guin
Steps to an Ecology of Mind – Gregory Bateson
Michael Polanyi
Life on the Edge – McFadden & Al-Khalili
Noam Chomsky
Buckminster Fuller
Rupert Sheldrake
Seth Godin
The Order of Time – Carlo Rovelli
Mutual Aid – Peter Kropotkin
Clear and Present Origin – Jean Gebser
The Art of War – Sun Tzu
Hermeticism studies, the I Ching, Pure Land Buddhism (“Buddhism for hopeless people”), Epicureanism
The Magic Art of Tidying Up – Marie Kondo

And yes, also:

Star Trek, Star Wars, Foundation, Lord of the Rings
Nursery tales: The Goose with Golden Eggs, Snow White
Golems, Jinns, the Undead, Vampires, Werewolves
The Handmaid’s Tale
Eden, Arks, Red Seas, Armageddon
Promised Lands, Special Peoples

Practices That Shaped My Being

This Renaissance is not read—it was lived in the now.
Emerging through the cracks in reason, the chambers of the heart, the portals of the body.

These were not hobbies or curiosities, but thresholds—ways of becoming:

Prayer—as yearning, as dialogue, as surrender
Emergent Dialogue, Circling, Deep Listening—relational mirrors of becoming
Ecstatic Dance—not choreography but liberation, the body remembering its wild syntax
Meditation, Somatic Presence, Breathwork—tuning to the subtle signals beneath the noise
Psychedelics—DMT, psilocybin, and others: not escape, but initiation, dismemberment, vision
Shamanic practices—soul retrieval, journeying, tending the unseen
Music—not as entertainment but transmission, vibratory grammar of the sacred
Extraordinary States of Consciousness—visions, dreams, precognitive flashes, and the oracular whisperings that defy Western categories
Playing and curating the Glass Bead Game—a lifelong practice in synthesis and symbol
Living off-grid, using compost toilets, shaping life systems by ecological values
Using nootropics, binaural beats, subtle technologies of cognitive attunement

These states and practices do not sit alongside my intellectual lineage.
They transformed it.
They undid me, re-plasticised my mind
They showed me that knowing is not in the head—it is in the whole field, in the relational, in the sacred trembling of matter.

Field Pressure & Emergence

Can my renaissance be unraveled from the evolutionary and social forces that press hard upon us all?

The extraction economy
The fast and slow violence of oppression
The endless war machine
The rape of the Earth
The broken promises of modernity

No. This isn’t a personal transformation in isolation.
It is a co-emergence with crisis—a call to re-become human in a system built to forget.

Final Offering

This is not a clean genealogy. It is mine, and everyone has their own unique version.
It is a fermenting field of longing, rupture, myth, and attention.

A second Renaissance cannot be limited movement of scholars,
but souls being called on how to live again.

It would be great for all II Renaissance men, women and noble ones to write and reflect on their II Renaissance? Here is a draft template, perhaps others have suggestions to improve it, we could offer it to all members:

**

My Second Renaissance

**

Beyond Genealogy and Chronological Narrative: A Field of Emergence

This is not a timeline, but a trace of your blooming.

This template is here to help you uncover your personal Renaissance—not as a linear biography, but as a dynamic living, relational, mythic field. Take what serves, ignore the rest. Update and rewrite as you develop. Write in fragments, prose, poetry, voice notes, or drawings.

1. Opening Statement (Set the Field)

Prompt:
Where are you speaking from? Why now? Begin with what feels true in your body.

“All that is mentioned obscures all that is un-noted…”

2. Origins & Rebellions

Prompts:

What shaped you —c ulturally, religiously, familially?
What mythologies clothed your childhood and beyond?
Where did your first rebellions begin?

Guiding Questions:

What did you once believe was true?
Did anything crack open your loyalty to a former identity?

3. Education & Its Discontents

Prompts:

What were you taught formally or informally?
Where did you feel resonance? Where did you resist?
What tensions lived in you between tradition and change?

4. Embodied Knowing

Prompts:

What pain, joy, or embodied experience has shaped your knowing?
Have you passed through illness, birth, caregiving, trauma?
How did these teach you what the mind could not?

Anchor Line:

“My renaissance is not in my head. It is in my ______.”

5. Compost of Influence

Prompt:
List the thinkers, books, artists, songs, ancestors, films, stories, or landscapes that changed you.

You can group them:

Intellectual
Mythic
Artistic
Dreamworld
Political or cultural

Include high theory and cartoons. TED Talks and childhood fairy tales. Sacred texts and memes.

6. Practices That Shaped Your Being

Prompts:
What have you done—not just known—that changed you?

Examples:

Prayer, Dance, Meditation, Psychedelics
Breathwork, Ecstatic States, Visionary Dreams
Art-making, Parenting, Farming, Pilgrimage
Rituals, Shadow Work, Solitude, Silence
Composting toilets, Fasting, Sauna, Fire ceremony

Anchor Line:

“These practices did not sit beside my thinking. They undid it. They rewrote me.”

7. Field Pressure & Emergence

Prompts:
How is your transformation connected to larger crises?
What pressures shaped your emergence?

Examples:

Climate collapse
Cultural disintegration
War, Genocide, Colonial aftershocks
Burnout, Mental health, Economic precarity
Grief, Silence, Survival

8. Final Offering

Prompt:
What are you holding now? What is this thing you’ve named?
What blessing or warning does your Second Renaissance carry?

Closing Suggestions:

“This is not a movement of scholars. It is a movement of souls that can change the world.”

You are unique, but not alone in this blooming.

RobertBunge · September 19, 2025, 1:34pm

Bingo. Wilberian integral cites Gebser, but seems not to understand the “aperspectival” at all.

At one point or another I’ve probably read around 80% of the authors on Rufus’s list, Wilber included. Also quite a few more not on the list (Huston Smith jumps out, as do Albert Borgmann and Eric Voegelin). In any case, the whole idea of needing to read author A to gain perspective B is, as Gebser would put it “mental”. Anything that matters is out there in the wild and people can arrive at attractors like Second Renaissance through any number of nonlinear processes.

Gen · September 19, 2025, 10:29pm

No to Charles Eisenstein?

If you came to where you are now, because Eisenstein has inspired or helped you to think better. That is great. He has said some great things. However it is time for some hard truths, and sharper critical thinking.

Charles Eisenstein has become a charismatic voice for many seeking alternatives to the failures of modern politics, economics, and culture. Yet when his work is examined with care, I see a troubling pattern emerge: surface-level thinking, lack of critical rigor, and poor judgement that repeatedly place him on the wrong side of complexity. His endorsement of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—an anti-vaccine conspiracist elevated into national politics—shows how his uncritical idealism can be harnessed, perhaps naively, to serve deeply destructive ends.

This is not an isolated lapse. In The Coronation, Eisenstein presented an excessive 9,000-word “reflection” on COVID-19 that functioned less as analysis and more as a New Age retreat from reality, offering “not-knowing” as a kind of spiritual balm while sliding into alternative facts and anti-science sentiment. In War Is Always Justified, he repeated the same bypassing logic, imagining that peace is possible simply by rejecting justification for violence, while ignoring history, trauma, and the hard ethical demands of accountability.

I realise that across his corpus, Eisenstein is watchable and charismatic, quotable in fragments—he can sound profound—but the whole is consistently evasive, self-referential, and careless with truth. Rather than modeling the depth of critical thinking, moral courage, and intellectual honesty required to support a Second Renaissance, he risks derailing it into vagueness, false equivalences, and naive hopes that can be easily co-opted by regressive movements.

My recommendation: Quote him if you must, but don’t follow him. Eisenstein’s influence is not only unreliable—it is a liability.

A collection of evidence for your perusal and judgement:

Eisenstein; lacking principle, as written in “Time” One of Kennedy’s senior advisers, Charles Eisenstein, was paid up to $21,000 per month, according to federal election filings, despite taking extended sabbaticals in Costa Rica, calling some of Kennedy’s views “repugnant” on a podcast, and telling his 80,000 Substack subscribers that “winning the campaign is not the end goal.” (Eisenstein did not return TIME’s request for comment.)

Charles Eisenstein, in the following transcript explains his endorsement for RFK Jr. and aiding and abetting ( perhaps naively) the success of the most destructive, corrupt, unconstitutional and ignorant administrations the US has ever seen, and subsequent appointment of RFK Jr, an anti-vaccine theorist, and unqualified, to care for the health of the nation.

”If you had asked me a year ago if I would be involved in a political campaign I would have thought you were crazy.

I had pretty much given up on politics and on any change happening from within the electoral system but when I met Robert F Kennedy Jr a dormant hope that I didn’t even know I had was awakened and I thought yeah, maybe actually the system can change through the electoral process.

You know it’s irrational it’s it is irrational why is it that hope is awakened again. Maybe it’s because the conditions of our country and our planet have deteriorated to the point where a lot of people are so alienated that they are no longer mesmerized by the dominant narratives that keep us all in place, and through the cracks in that narrative hope can arise again.

And that hope is not that somebody is going to come and fix it, that’s not what this campaign is about… this is not about Robert F Kennedy Jr coming to fix our country and we just elect him and the job is done. He is the face of a massive popular movement of a lot of people who like me are experiencing a new Awakening of Hope again despite the betrayals, piercing the cynicism, and I think one thing that speaks to me most deeply about the candidate is his authenticity. He’s not saying stuff because that is what the voters want to hear, everything he says he means it, and at bottom there’s nothing else that is going to change the direction of our country uh other than honesty, if there’s no honesty, there’s no trust and even when he’s saying sometimes… Yeah I don’t know what to do about this problem” like that’s really refreshing. I’ve been waiting my whole life for a politician who’s willing to admit that he doesn’t have all of the answers, that who’s willing to admit that there are valid moral positions on both sides of an issue who’s willing to look for solutions that are outside the existing opinion camps.

The possibility is here now to make this a real democracy again.”

TLDR: The above critique argues that Charles Eisenstein’s essay “War Is Always Justified” repeats his usual flaws of magical thinking and oversimplification. By insisting that war arises only through justification, Eisenstein assumes peace is always attainable and sidesteps the messy realities of history and trauma. The author counters with Karl Popper’s “Paradox of Intolerance,” stressing that some groups cannot be reasoned with and must sometimes be restrained by force. Eisenstein’s refusal to “take sides” is seen as a false binary and a form of bypassing that avoids moral accountability. While acknowledging his compassion and rejection of vengeance, the critic insists that peace demands a sober reckoning with right and wrong on all sides, not wishful neutrality.

TLDR: The above critic, speaking of “The Coronation” argues that Eisenstein’s 9,000-word essay, written just two weeks into the COVID-19 lockdowns, offers no useful expertise in public health but instead delivers a New Age retreat from reality. Centered on the theme of “not-knowing,” it echoes New Thought ideas that imagination can reshape reality if we shed conventional knowledge. While posturing as humble uncertainty, Eisenstein slides into “alternative knowing,” flirting with anti-vax libertarianism and cherry-picked data.

The piece is described as a Gish Gallop: a flood of weak arguments too sprawling to easily refute. More troubling than its content is its form: it creates a bubble of escapist aspiration for a privileged demographic, ignoring systemic issues like race, class, poverty, and inequality. Its frequent use of “we” assumes a universal perspective that erases positionality and excludes those most impacted by the crisis.

Ultimately, The Coronation is framed not as analysis of the pandemic but as an exercise in brand-building and affect regulation—a spa-like distraction for those not on the frontlines. At best it soothes; at worst it numbs critical thought and sidelines diverse, urgent voices.

Gen · September 20, 2025, 7:48am

Iain McGilchrist, Counter-Davos, and in Bad Company?

Iain McGilchrist is a brilliant researcher whose books — The Master and His Emissary (which I’ve read) and The Matter With Things — offer a fascinating lens on the divided brain and the cultural consequences of imbalance in how we attend to the world. His work has inspired many to reconsider the role of imagination, intuition, and embodied knowing in culture — contributions that deserve recognition. It’s been formative for me.

Yet we must distinguish between McGilchrist’s scholarship and his judgement as a public intellectual. His blog often shows disdain for those raising care and concern for the marginalised and oppressed. A deeper pattern emerges in his decision to speak at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference in London (2023).

ARC, founded by Jordan Peterson and allies, styles itself as a “counter-Davos.” Its agenda is framed around defending “Western civilization” and Judeo-Christian values, positioning itself explicitly against multiculturalism, feminism, progressive politics, and ambitious climate action. Its first conference drew thousands of attendees, largely from conservative political networks, industry leaders, and advocates for deregulation. ARC’s critique of net-zero policies and its call for “realistic energy strategies” align closely with extractive corporate interests in fossil fuel and resource-intensive sectors. In short, ARC is not a neutral forum but a platform for right-wing, culture-war, and extractive politics.

By speaking there, McGilchrist lent his intellectual and moral authority to a movement fundamentally at odds with ecological care, pluralism, and justice. Even if his talk was philosophical, the act of participation legitimised a project that deepens polarisation and undermines sustainability.

This reveals a troubling inconsistency: McGilchrist’s books argue for balance, humility, and connection, yet his political choices show a lack of discernment and a failure to recognise the consequences of platforming. One might say that despite his insights into the divided brain, his own cultural and temporal embeddedness has obscured his options — leaving him unable to fully integrate the very Right Hemisphere values he extols.

In short, McGilchrist remains a brilliant scientist and thinker, and his books are valuable explorations of consciousness and culture. But his person — his political choices, alliances, and public judgement — cannot be recommended as a reliable guide for the ideals of a Second Renaissance. He is quotable and brilliant in places, but compromised as a whole by poor judgement, and a willingness to lend his name to movements that run counter to the flourishing of life itself.

Evidence for your perusal:

Key Troubling Attendees & Speakers at ARC

Stewart Muir — founder of Resource Works, which is an advocacy group for extractive industries. He was registered as attending ARC. DeSmog
Oil & Gas Executives from major firms (BP, Koch Industries, Valero Energy, Energy Transfer, etc.) were on the guest list, per leaked attendee documents. DeSmog+1
Chris Wright — CEO of Liberty Energy, nominated by Trump for U.S. Energy Department; known for advocating fracking and being sceptical of climate-threat framing. Reuters
Kemi Badenoch — UK Conservative leader; her speeches at ARC emphasised “Western civilisation” under threat, criticised “woke ideology,” and expressed alarm over progressive climate policy. Financial Times+2politicalnetworkforvalues.org+2
Nigel Farage — political figure closely associated with right-wing, anti-immigration, populist politics; was among the speakers. politicalnetworkforvalues.org+1
Mike Johnson — U.S. House Speaker, one of the political heavyweights at the conference. politicalnetworkforvalues.org+1
Peter Thiel — tech investor, known for libertarian / anti-regulation views; listed among technology/business leaders in attendance. politicalnetworkforvalues.org

Iain McGilChrist’s blog reposted this piece Brilliant piece from Hannah Spier, MD
When I read this essay, I was struck by how it leverages the alleged murder of Charlie Kirk to frame all of progressivism as a “cult.” This collapses a diverse movement into a single narrative of extremism and encourages a form of collective blame. I’m disturbed that core commitments such as empathy, inclusion, and anti-racism are recast as mechanisms of psychological manipulation — as though compassion itself were somehow corrupting.

I notice, too, how thoughtful cultural practices like pronoun sharing, Pride observances, or diversity statements are equated with “thought reform” and totalitarian institutions. This trivialises the lived reality of people who have suffered under actual authoritarian regimes. Likewise, I cannot accept the way queer and trans identities are pathologized, treated as little more than “badges of belonging” rather than respected as authentic forms of life. The claim that progressives “sacralize” some victims while erasing others also strikes me as a moral inversion: it sanctifies conservative deaths while minimising systemic violence against minorities.

In my view, the essay is the opposite of “brilliant” and dehumanises progressive minded people, distorting the ethical aims of justice movements, and fuelling polarisation. Ironically, it reproduces the very dynamics of exclusion and devaluation it claims to expose. McGilChrist loves it, make your own mind up about what that means.

Gen · September 20, 2025, 9:19am

Jim Rutt, fatally blinkered

I respect Jim Rutt’s fluency in systems thinking. His GameB advocacy, Santa Fe Institute leadership, and ability to convene complex conversations have all added depth to the public discourse on coordination, emergence, and civilization-scale design. That matters.

But if we’re framing Rutt as a foundational voice for a Second Renaissance—one meant to be plural, planetary, and ethically awake—I need to voice a deep unease. He posted, just a few weeks ago, to his Facebook an image very similar to this and voiced his unconditional support for the Israeli administration’s confirmed genocide in Gaza.

His lens remains anchored in a US-centric, culture-war matrix. Across his show, essays, and social presence, global issues are repeatedly filtered through frames like “wokeism,” campus speech, and Twitter moderation. This narrows the epistemic field. Instead of engaging Indigenous, Global South, or non-Western cosmologies as co-equal, these traditions are rarely centered—if acknowledged at all.

His orientation toward solutions is deeply technocratic: optimize institutions, improve moderation architectures, upgrade the information ecology. These are important tools—but they come from elite, rationalist, mostly Western traditions. The relational, reparative, and culturally embedded dimensions of transformation are left underdeveloped, or treated as peripheral.

Worse, his public stance on Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza was not just lacking nuance—it was actively dehumanizing. In May 2024, Rutt dismissed genocide claims as “ridiculous” and “propaganda.” He didn’t engage the mountain of evidence or testimony from survivors, journalists, or international legal scholars. Instead, he reframed the question as one of definitional clarity—reducing mass suffering to a rhetorical hygiene problem.

That move isn’t just intellectually lazy—it’s ethically catastrophic. It signals a worldview where certain lives remain abstract, where certain violences are explainable, where moral gravity is optional if it disrupts one’s schema. For someone aspiring to steward civilizational discourse, this is disqualifying.

GameB itself suffers from a narrow social imaginary. Despite being framed as a global civilizational upgrade, its leadership, discourse, and aesthetic remain overwhelmingly Anglo-American and technocratic. It gestures toward “omni-win” futures but rarely integrates post-colonial insight, Black radical traditions, Indigenous knowledge systems, or feminist political economies in a meaningful way. The result is a managerial utopia with little room for deep plurality or historical repair.

Even Rutt’s speech governance framing—“moderate tone, not content”—misses how tone is unequally policed, how power determines whose voices are labeled “reasonable,” and how “just viewpoint” speech can perpetuate structural harm.

So yes—Rutt is a technically gifted thinker, an engaging interlocutor, and a powerful node in the GameB sphere.

But as a precurser a “Second Renaissance”? I say no.

That role calls for moral imagination, not just systems literacy. For a felt understanding of grief, power, and historical harm—not just network diagrams. For an ethic of care that refuses to flatten human suffering into definitional debates.

A true renaissance will be plural, grounded, and co-authored across difference. It won’t emerge from platforms alone, but from patterns of listening, witnessing, and repairing what technocracy has often ignored.

That’s where I’m placing my attention. Not on a canon. On a chorus.

Asimong · September 20, 2025, 9:37am

Thank you @Gen — I’d like to chime in on this. As a scholar, Iain’s erudition and academic insight is second to none. I, too, value his thinking greatly for that alone. His sense of intellectual nuance, too. He seems never to take explicit positions which are unsound, or not backed by impressive evidence. In that way, his work is a valuable counterweight to shoddy or imprecise thinking.

And yet, and yet … fine details, or overall picture? As you suggest, left and right hemisphere? Yes he is a master of fine detail.

Here’s a personal anecdote which I hope may shed more light. By very remarkable coincidence, at our Quaker Meeting in Lancaster is also another school contemporary of Iain’s — a closer contemporary than I was. And when I mentioned Iain to him several months ago, without going into detail (he’s much too polite for that!) he did say that they never got on well. My own vague recollections support the interpretation that Iain, as so many others, may have succumbed to the temptations of self-importance.

But let that not detract one jot from the value of his scholarship and intellectual insight. This points to a pattern that is becoming clearer and clearer to me, that we need to take from each what they offer of value, and discern what is not of value, or no longer valuable, without any need to de-platform or “cancel” the person, publicly or privately. As we de-platform people, at the same time what they have to offer of value is thrown out, as has been mentioned here, as the baby with the bathwater. It’s not “good” and “evil”, because that thinking only leads to more polarisation and strife.

Gen · September 20, 2025, 9:49am

Here we find ourselves with some discomfort. Should we platform/deplatform the person at all? Yet we HAVE to take ethical stances, and show discernment, and make public these concerns.

There may not be good and evil in the morality sense, but there are truths and lies and harms that should not be tolerated.

The only way I could speak at ARC would be to thoroughly disabuse them.

Asimong · September 20, 2025, 10:16am

Thanks for bringing this up and following this up, @Gen because to me this feels like a central deep underlying issue.

To me, this goes along with “speaking truth to power” which is a Quaker commonplace as well as widely known elsewhere. Another, more specifically Quaker phrase is “answering that of God in every one”. To me, this needs discernment. We’re not saying that everyone is nice and good really. What we are saying is that, no matter how hidden, there is a divine spark of light in every one. We don’t “answer” (that is, respond to) the sick material, but we engage with “that of God” — the good bits, however buried they may be.

From a different perspective, the pattern that I see common in cancelling, giving platform or not, and having an “in or out” genealogy or canon. It’s all pretty obviously dualistic. Could we be seen as suffering from closet dualism? I’ve nothing against a family tree in principle, but I would like to see one that does not honour individuals as a whole (we are all imperfect) but explicitly points out the threads that we pick up from those individuals. If needed, to be clear that we are not indulging in hagiography, it may be prudent to list aspects of those individuals that we do not endorse; though I would find it pleasant if this was taken as read: every thinker and writer has flaws, naturally, so saying that someone (Freud, Marx et al spring immediately to mind, even more than McGilchrist) brought valuable insights or perspectives never implies that we endorse everything that they have written, said, or done.

RobertBunge · September 20, 2025, 11:20am

For academic growth, it’s important to read people you don’t necessarily agree with. Global worldviews require engagement with everyone on the globe, like them or not. That does not require, however, that one admire everything an author has ever said or done to engage with their content. It’s also worth peering into the forces and motivations that inform disagreeable authors, to gain some perspective on where they are coming from and what they may be pointing to.

The endgame for this is not, however, “every author is equal in every way”. This is where the postmodern opposition to values hierarchies comes up short. Heck yes, you’ve got to sort them! At the end of the day, some notions of the good are more encompassing than others, and some authors align their personal lives more completely with the good. But maybe we should call that list “Second Renaissance Hagiography”.

Gen · September 20, 2025, 11:38am

Oh golly, really?

Let’s not confuse being ethical, with being nice.

On a personal level every human has their story and rights, and I would offer compassion and care to the individual. But they only have a right to their opinion in the sense they have the right to be wrong.

That does not mean we silently wriggle in our seat whilst lies are broadcast and suffering goes unseen. Otherwise we become complicit. As a body politic, small or large, we are called to discern the best we collectively can.

We need to keep in our minds that many will inadvertently and ignorantly follow poor quality or highly questionable thought leaders, and, once having made a declaration of attachment, will follow semi blind.

These are Pied Piper archetypes. Their song resonates with false promises, our friends and families and communities follow and may be lost forever.

Asimong · September 20, 2025, 11:42am

One of the videos that YouTube served up to me yesterday was this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zn0_2iACV-A (or did someone recommend it? I’m not sure! I also recognise that talking about Charlie Kirk just now is rather sensitive.)

On the right platform, we can counter ideas we see as mistaken, misleading, or just plain false, better than we can by not giving them a platform. To me, not giving people a platform seems like an admission of weakness. Like, “if we let this person speak, their speech might persuade people and we can’t risk that”, as opposed to what feels to me much healthier and more confident, “if we let this person speak, the ideas can be challenged openly and discredited more clearly and persuasively”.

Obviously there are power issues here — particularly visible at present in Russia, USA and elsewhere. If speaking your mind and open debate is likely to cost you your job (in the USA) or your life (in Russia) or lead to you being arrested (in the UK, regarding Palestine Action) then that’s a tough decision. Do you put your life or liberty on the line in service of truth? Only if you are certain that’s that way for you.

Gen · September 20, 2025, 11:43am

I’m ok with being dualistic in the right context.

Don’t oppress, rape, murder, torture, damage living systems beyond repair. Not much nuance here.

So no, you don’t give or offer the Charlie Kirk’s of the world platforms, they have their platforms, you do listen and respond on your platform because they need to be challenged publicly. There’s not an absolute rule here, context matters.

Asimong · September 20, 2025, 11:55am

So what, I ask, are the boundaries to dualism? When is dualism appropriate? You’ve given some examples, but is there a boundary? And are some of these examples of dualism kind of tautologous? I’d also like to stand in firm opposition to bad things. But how, exactly, do we define things as bad? And I’m totally not saying that we can explain away or justify actions that actually do have clearly bad outcomes or consequences. And … yes, perhaps we need these kinds of self-defined clearly bad categories.

I suggested a principle a day or two ago (was it here?) don’t argue with people you don’t know, because it is too easy to misunderstand, and fail to listen to them. If you’ve listened well, and they feel heard, then it’s their turn to listen to you. If they don’t, well, to me, there is no real relationship possible. But also, no real point in arguing with them directly. Argue against the ideas, by all means.

These are just reflections, and I know the whole field is frightfully complex. I value us here trying to make some collective sense of these matters.

Asimong · September 20, 2025, 11:59am

My sense is mostly in agreement here. The point I was trying to make with the word “hagiography” is that, to me, the whole concept is tainted. If no one is perfect, then why hold up some people as saints and others not? Saintly behaviour, fine, as you say, @RobertBunge , when people align “more completely” – I’d say perhaps “more closely” – with the good. I want to celebrate that alignment, without assuming that the rest of their lives are wholly holy.

Gen · September 20, 2025, 12:09pm

Or maybe confine ourselves to matters, issues and ideas, and leave the person, and all persons, to the side, like olive stones on the side of the plate.