My use of the term “Second Renaissance Hagiography” is in the spirit of metamodern “sincere irony”. It’s sarcastic. And it makes a serious point. This thread basically started as a list of books and authors. Different types of people write books for different reasons. These books are artifacts we may or may not find useful for our purposes. My purposes do not involve holding up the authors as moral exemplars for impressionable children, so what they did with their politics or sex lives or personal relations in general is not especially pertinent to the writings themselves. Biographical commentary on the authors is another discussion altogether.
- Hamartography: A warts-and-all depiction of a person, emphasizing their fatal flaws or negative qualities. A hamartographic biography would focus on the subject’s darkest secrets and poor decisions.
Isn’t this what our media are supposed to do? Hold their feet to the fire?
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Martin Luther’s abuse of women. Gautama Siddarta ‘s abandonment of his wife and child. Churchill’s alcoholism, racism and sociopathy. Obama’s corruption and ineffectiveness. Starmer’s war crimes. Winnie Mandela’s torture and murder of black rivals and “traitors”. Madonna’s abuse of Sean Penn.
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I’m glad that dead white males are not the only rotters on your list!
Allow me to circle back to something resembling first principles. We are building a movement/organization/network called “Second Renaissance”. The idea behind that is to address menacing threats such as the metacrisis. The original book list is a source of ideas standing behind Second Renaissance thinking. The list comes from one contributor. Other contributors have different opinions about those specific books and authors.
As I understand it, the impulse here is to flesh out the idea of “Second Renaissance” by identifying a substantial set of ideas that characterize what a “Second Renaissance” is. Looking at this from an instructor’s POV, if I got the chance to teach on “Second Renaissance”, what would be the reading list?
I’d like to suggest “what would be the reading list?” is the question that is most pertinent. Biographical caveats about the selected authors are certainly appropriate for teaching purposes. But what is really needed is the best set of books to convey what we are doing here and why we are doing it.
I find my self in two minds. Historically I would agree with you. But I think we are in novel territory; “thought leaders” celebrity professors, trends, memes and tribes are raging like wildfire through a society woefully lacking in critical thinking AND an environment of misinformation. People are not children but they are also not equipped for this onslaught, we are barely coping.
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On a certain level, people do need heroes to worship. So in a positive vein, who stands out?
Having just completed Brendan Graham Dempsey’s very capable summary of multiple developmental stage theories, I’m pretty aware that uncritical hero worship is for what Kegan calls second order consciousness - typical roughly of 10 year olds. That age needs firm rules and black and white examples. More mature development allows for more complex relationships to both people and ideas.
Second Renaissance strikes me as a Kegan fifth order sort of grouping. Such people are capable of taking multiple perspectives and problematizing even their own ideas. For fifth order thinking, authors can be both exemplary and problematic at the same time. If there is a constant bedrock for fifth order thinking, it’s more in the process than in the particulars.
Having taken the full measure of stage theory through Dempsey and others, I’ve arrived at my own interpretation - which may be entirely idiosyncratic - which is, in summary, that “nobody outgrows anything”. We all grow new things. But the old things are still in there. In that sense, there is a still a ten year old in all of us that really does need an unambiguous relationship to exemplary role models. On some level, we all need to pattern ourselves after someone.
So on the one hand, Second Renaissance, like any human grouping, needs its canonized list of founders and exemplars. On the other hand, Second Renaissance, being a fifth order sort of practice circle, is bound to problematize and qualify any such canonized list.
I would see this as a developmental question. I think you’ve implied that below.
Who is the Second Renaissance? Who holds the power, why, are there unseen hands? What is the worldview, what is tolerated, what is not tolerated.
Is there democracy, heterarchy, anarchy, panarchy? Who pays the bills, who profits, who and how are things moderated?
Is there a mission, who decides the mission, when, can the mission be changed, how?
Per the website: (The About tab specifically. For some reason Mighty Networks will not link to that one directly. )
In relation to the question of who holds the power, I’d say the main power here is the power of persuasion. No one is compelled to participate here (AFAIK).
Yes, there are specific Forum moderation rules and roles: About - Second Renaissance Forum
Thanks, I had not worked out the relationship between Life Itself and 2R, as I got invited at some point from Limicon, and then to the research group and didn’t go for much of a wander around.
Maybe a few jots? I’m on an uncomfortable fence here. There’s tension between the character and work of a thinker. Their thought and research must surely have something of reciprocal relationship? Can Heidegger’s Nazi views be fully separated from his work? Perhaps we can manually ( ie use tools of criticality) separate, make sure we have some protective filters in place, some understanding. What does that even look like? ( Yes… we will discuss this)
And yet, how can the field not be poisoned, even just by juxtaposition, or misunderstood? We’re not talking minor deviations of opinion, a mere difference, some of this is world-destroying stuff.
Yes. For one thing, his most important work, Sein und Zeit, dates from 1927, prior to the rise of Hitler. Heidegger later affiliated with the Nazis as a condition of keeping his university position. Just like anyone who was anyone in Soviet Russia needed formal affiliation with the Communist Party. A similar process is currently visible in the US in corporate kowtowing to Trump.
One can stay aloof from that sort of moral compromise by retreating from the world. Anyone in the thick of things will have a messier set of connections. In any case, what Heidegger says about topics like aletheia stands quite apart from the pragmatic politics of the 1930s.
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I’m with @RobertBunge here. To me it is essential to split the person and her or his work / insights. None of us is perfect, we all have our failings, and I absolutely do not want to start imposing what could only look like arbitrary boundaries on what is acceptable in a private life and what not. Unless you actually have personal knowledge of someone, and therapeutic level knowledge, how can we judge, even for ourselves? Seems to me that most of the judging that goes on is not even personal, but crowd / mob based.
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What a terrible article for a scholar to share. You’d think an intellectual would have more concern for references, yet all the links point to right-wing news articles. But it doesn’t matter because it’s all an excuse to point the finger and blame the other. Conservative complaints are always full of projection. Who’s the real cult? Those wearing red hats and believing the lies of their leader? Or those with in-group knowledge to show moral aptitude? Every article like this could be flipped from left to right and it would make sense. The larger issue here is fracturing between left and right. Where the two once worked together to find compromise, now it is all backlash and attacks. Charlie Kirk epitomized this with his winning debate style. He wasn’t seeking truth or common ground, he wanted to make college kids look dumb. The amount of dissonance in this hero worship is making my head spin. Another figure lost to the culture war. My bookshelf is becoming shameful.
And here we land at our edge, the tension that we must face. Where do our boundaries lie, and how do we implement them?
Nasa’s space program led by von Braun. Kropotkin failing to denounce terrorism. The Western bloc failing to intervene in Gaza, and Myanmar. My use of an Apple phone which has mineral components mined by slave children.
Can we become pure at heart and treat ALL of humanity with respect and compassion, AND at the same time be absolutely zero tolerance for that which leads to destruction?
Are Trump, and Charlie Kirk, Putin, Netanyahu and all their like, just lost boys, pumped with unacknowledged fear, ego bolstering, and projection? We should not despise, but pity, although that should not mean we tolerate, but refuse to platform, or promote or appear to promote the irresponsible, and declare the beautiful and the true, without fear?
Good sentiments here. I’m not sure what zero tolerance would mean in practice, for situations over which we have no direct control. But if you say “condone” instead of “tolerate”, then that makes a lot of sense to me. Is that enough said, or would it be helpful to explain further?
I cannot agree, in fact the behaviour of a “thought leader” cannot be divorced from their work, and we have to ask what signal we send if we declare ourselves “a fan”. Please let’s think of the consequences.
I can’t ignore that Heidegger became an active Nazi after writing his greatest work. That fact carries weight: brilliance does not protect us from political capture—it can even disguise it. We risk repeating the same mistake when we elevate contemporary thought leaders without reckoning with their shadows. Shadows contain information.
Extractive capitalism is a death cult on a planetary scale. If we continue to laud those who, in varying degrees, bow to Moloch—Wilber, McGilchrist, Jordan Hall, Peterson, Eisenstein—we risk diverting the passion of people who might have made a real difference. Tell me I’m wrong; I would love to be.
I’m not talking about perfection, or of becoming a monolith, but having some basic boundaries on what we accept.
There is unspoken power in this forum. Respected founders and thinkers are here—and many others with less critical capacity or nuance will take your enthusiasm for McGilchrist, for example, as an endorsement, then head to his feeds and encounter what is often appalling right-wing apologia.
Yes, I too resonate with McGilchrist’s hemispheric framing, and Wilber’s quadrants are a clever tool—but both lack political will and praxis. They risk abstracting systemic violence into polite philosophy. Even in the regenerative movements I live and work in—at Lammas Eco Village, where I’m part of the directorship—I see the same shadows: colonial residues, patriarchal reflexes, and resistance to critical self-reflection. Justice keeps being sidelined.
As Kramer & Alstad argue in The Guru Papers: Masks of Authoritarian Power, domination often hides behind masks of wisdom, spirituality, or higher truth. I see these masks at play in our movements too. If we don’t call them out, they quietly steer us back into the very patterns we claim to resist.
Mapping isn’t enough. We must feel the wounds and act. Care for Earth must be inseparable from justice for people, especially the most marginalized. And please—don’t silence those who rock the boat. Sometimes rocking it is the only way to keep it from shattering on the rocks.
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I’d like to respond to this point by point, as I see your perspective, @Gen and it makes good sense. While I’m wondering how you would respond to my last comment, let me dive in and contribute the nuance that is necessary to understand my position.
I do not declare myself to be a “fan” of Iain’s. I appreciate much of his work (as you do) but do not endorse his more recent positions in particular. I see Iain as a person, not a “thought leader” (ugh!), but I do see his insights as very useful steps forward towards a fuller and richer understanding of the kind of issues that we talk about in the 2R space.
Indeed, I am in agreement. What is the content and the implication of the information contained in those shadows?
I don’t “laud” any of these people as people. We are all worthy of respect; we all make mistakes and errors of judgement. There is always something to disagree with people about. This is why I don’t have any mortal as a “guru”. But, do they really “bow to Moloch”? Do you know them well enough to see behind any specific words that you read, to understand the nuance of how they really think? (This is the basis of my maxim: don’t argue with people you don’t know.)
As for the risk … I’d say this is very difficult ground here. I’m inclined to say that anything we say carries the risk of being misinterpreted; the risk of misleading people — because no limited form of words (and especially written words without the extra bandwidth of face-to-face communication) expresses the whole of one’s meaning.
What I would like would be a culture – and especially an intellectual culture amongst us – that is curious and questioning. Like, for example: “you say you appreciate the work of McGilchrist — does that mean you also approve of what he says here […]” — reply: “not at all, I appreciate his work on […] but I’m not in line with this piece […]”. Clarificatory nuance.
If we can’t have that kind of nuanced conversation, then I see us being in “cancel culture” territory, where we are disowned for saying the wrong thing or appreciating the wrong thing, in a black and white way with no subtlety, no empathy, no care, no love.
Well, yes, we may all have our own reasonable boundaries, but … … first, do those boundaries need to be the same? And second, when boundaries are written down in words, they look like rigid definitions, and surely we are all aware of the dangers of rigid definitions?
So I’m absolutely not saying that “anything goes” or “free speech”! This is again something that needs nuance, that needs conversation, that needs listening and appreciation. We all need our boundaries, but I would add that to be a good community, those boundaries need to be somewhat flexible and adaptable to the particular collective in which we hold meaningful conversations. If we have differences in boundaries, I would like to understand yours, and you understand mine. Quite possibly these differences stem from our different respective childhood experiences. I don’t want to downplay the importance of these, but how about trying to understand them? And yes, not all boundaries are flexible. Sometimes we need to distance ourselves from those who continue overstepping our boundaries. That’s not the end of the world, just a divorce, while often being regrettable and a pity, is not the end of the world.
But again, I would say there is no formula for avoiding this risk, apart from respectful curiosity and conversation aimed at deeper understanding of our own personal nuances. What I find oppressive is someone else telling me that I need always to state the fact that I don’t endorse Iain as some kind of saint, every time I appreciate some of his thinking. That’s just the kind of thinking that leads to an obnoxious cancel culture.
So I advocate for any programme, any developmental initiative, which helps people develop “critical capacity or nuance”.
I read your word “risk” many times. I would like to understand your narrative that goes along with these risks, and the narratives and beliefs about how you think we should avoid these risks — and then look at the up and down sides of those strategies.
So? You mean, people are not perfect; there are no ideal communities? I would offer the question: what do you think we should do about that, practically? And, as you have probably guessed by now, insisting that we aim for perfection in all our writing seems, to me, a fundamentally impractical non-starter. Instead, I offer the positive vision of assuming good intent, steel-manning not straw-manning, and taking apparent conflict as an opportunity to seek deeper, more nuanced understanding of each other — an opportunity for what I call ontological commoning.
If you see justice being sidelined, then I would ask the other members of your community to give you space to be heard and understood. I don’t see it as OK to say to other people in a deliberately developmental space: “just lump it; you’re being oversensitive”. Respecting people’s perspectives and sensitive spots doesn’t mean needing to agree with them. To me, it means empathy. Empathy does not mean endorsement, it means trying honestly and wholeheartedly to see things from their perspective, as another valid perspective, not the only one.
I see this itself as a narrative based on fear. Justifiable, quite possibly. Is there an alternative approach?
I’m rather allergic to “we must” statements. And I’d like further conversation around what “rocking the boat” means in practice. I very much welcome the expression of different values and perspectives. What I don’t welcome is the assumption that the only way is my way. I see it as very positive if each of “our ways” is heard (or seen) and appreciated; not necessarily endorsed.
I’m sympathetic, rather, to “I” statements. “When I read this, I am upset because I imagine …” needs to be heard and taken seriously; but that doesn’t mean that one person’s upset needs to set rules for a community not to risk upsetting that person. That would risk denying people’s right to change their mind and grow.
Risk, risk, risk … is that the way we want to respond to life?
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I’ve been reflecting on our exchange, and I think I discern where the tension lies—and a seam worth tending.
Am I right to perceive that you are holding the thread of personal conversational integrity—ensuring people are understood as more than their positions? I honour and value that.
In this case, though, my attention is tuned to a different register: toward the collective field—how signals ripple through shared space. In transformative contexts like Life Itself and 2R, what we implicitly admire, cite, or leave unmarked will inevitably shape what feels alive, legitimate, or safe, especially for the majority still forming discernment.
I’m assuming (perhaps wrongly) that we—both you and I, and the collective 2R—share a sense that our species and planet are in the throes of interlinked collapse processes—the polycrisis—driven largely by extractive capitalism and enabled by maladapted ways of thinking, the underlying metacrisis. This is the ground I speak from. Please correct me if I am wrong.
Currently there seems little distinct attention here to the structural roots, and the human suffering of collapse—colonialism, genocide, poverty, authoritarianism, militarism, ecocide. The abstracted, and arguably disassociated, use of the term “polycrisis,” and the solutionism of countering the underlying “metacrisis” by inner development, may cause us to bypass the need to confront and correct these specifically and structurally.
When that absence combines with frequent reference to thinkers leaning libertarian or hierarchical, the field drifts. McGilchrist, for example, has recently circulated U.S. right-wing apologetics; Eisenstein has promoted RFK; Wilber’s stage theories carry shadows of hierarchy and exclusion. This isn’t about cancelling them, or judging their being, but about their effect. It’s about asking: how do we ensure appreciation doesn’t blur into endorsement, or citation drift into complicity? Silence here too is a signal.
So when I say “we must,” I don’t intend to command—I mean the imperative of collective responsibility and accountability. The forces of collapse don’t arrive named; they slip in through frameworks, aesthetics, omissions. The discernment I call for here is not exclusion but clarity: keeping the space open, but not undefended.
Ah…you don’t like the prophetess of doom. Yet I think we should. I love life, I’m protective of it. Best case scenario is already dire, worst, we might actually lose the atmosphere. I’m not alone in feeling called to repeatedly voice risks and warnings—not from fear, but from attention to consequence. I would say that the gravity of the threat, should invite us to give full attention to that discernment.
I’m not postmodern, all-views-have-equal-value, I’m metamodern, all-people-have-value, and some views are simply damaging and plain wrong. If we cannot come to some collective consensus, but instead sit on the fence, for me there’s no much point of 2R, it just a place to chew ideas and plan a bunker monastery ( and maybe that is the preferred path) I’m for more than that, for birthing a better wider world.
The collective “we” offers, for good or ill, a character and idea space that is 2R—and as we form it, it forms us.
So I ask: how might we listen for the signals in the undercurrent, and tend them together?
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Just to note that I appreciate this reply a lot, thank you, and as you have taken some time to respond, so shall I 
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Some times I worry that I’m adding to the saturation of words.
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