Against the Gurus
The Gurus are Not (Post)Modernity's Challengers but Its Symptom
Return of the Gurus
"We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely." - E.O. Wilson. Author of Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge[1]
We are inundated in our society with a constant stream of stimulation and positive claims being made to us. All of us are subscribers to a puzzle of the day, of the hour, of the minute club that dumps its pieces in our laps through the pushes and nudges of devices we keep attached to our hips, sit down in front of every night, and use to work and engage meaningfully in our current social reality. This is a function of living in an information age economy where the unit of analysis for ordering our world is increasingly the concept of “data”. These data we consume and generate are not direct observations or unmediated experiences of reality. They are abstractions that lack context and a grounding in our local reality, which makes their presented content or claims something we cannot verify in isolation.
Our economic and social system has responded to this by according status to those who claim to build cohesive systems of thought from these puzzle pieces, offering cognitive closure through coherence and holistic understanding. This has strengthened a public epistemology that is coherentist in nature. In this world increasingly based on reality dissociating trends, this demand for holistic understanding stems not just from a desire to make cohesive statements out of these data and respond to the implicit requests for action and attention they represent, but crucially, it stems from people’s intuitive awareness of the isolation and alternative systems problems of coherentism as a solution: coherentism doesn’t give us grounding to validate one logically coherent narrative or framework over another, and relatedly, has a lack of a connection to the external world of the kind needed for truth-conductivity.[2] We are all facing the resultant difficulty in deciding between seemingly coherent, increasingly complex narratives of an increasingly complex world, which a mere reliance on coherence doesn’t give us a decision path for.
This has created an ideal space for the guru to thrive. Gurus and mystics have always offered “holistic” understandings as a counter to the supposed rigidity of a modern “linear” logic and reason. However, what sets contemporary gurus apart is their existence in an age of public coherentism. The gurus of today cannot claim a counter-cultural transgression in their embrace of holisim and coherentism, as that is the ideology of a postmodern, data society. Instead of offering ways out then of (post)modernity, the gurus ultimately lean further into a rabbit hole of maximizing logical coherence, rather than introducing the constraint and self-building aspect of an objective or material reality. The result has been a curation of networks and audiences whose thinking is increasingly anxious, conspiratorial, and reliant on a perpetual symbiotic relationship with those gurus and networks that spin them complex, increasingly metaphysical structures for understanding their lives.
The gurus do not challenge the coherentist framework then, the technological or social trends inducing it, or the metaphysicalization of our politics. Rather than questioning the material causes leading to this state of affairs, challenging the narrative that we can’t control technology’s impact, or even just advocating for the public to withhold belief on topics they do not have foundational grounding in, the gurus endorse the irrational and the subjective, reject materialism, and stand firmly in line with a strand of Counter-Enlightenment thought they associate with Postmodernism, but is best thought of as an older strand of conservatism found new fertile ground in our postmodern condition, as critics of postmodernism warned would be the case. This is all done to patch the problems of a coherentist, network age rather than to challenge it.
How The Gurus “Solve” the Problems of Coherentism
That these gurus are offering something in response to the problems of coherentism is, as we will see, made explicit by them and seen in the solutions they offer. Namely, they make two moves.
More Coherence, More Better
One move is to endorse the possibility of a meta-theory that renders competing alternative narratives and frameworks as different ways of understanding or stating the same larger truth. This move essentially leans further into holism then. These different frameworks are simply different languages or ways of knowing for the same reality. Their apparent disagreement is just a problem of “appearance”. One can see this move in the gurus’ interest in metaphor, 70s New Age integral theory, consilience, Alasdair MacIntyre, Joseph Campbell, the “metacrisis”, Buddhist Modernism, etc.
Statements made by different beliefs systems or frameworks then can be translated across systems. Closure can be found by being ascended enough to view things from the meta-theory standpoint, where the squabbling between lower theories will seem quaint and beside the point. The movement and “geometry” of theories, not their independent truth claims, are what becomes interesting. The complexity and volume of purported explanation becomes a sign of a theory’s warrant – as it’s a sign of how meta a theory is - rather than traceability to truths grounded in a reality or that can be given a tangible explanation in isolation beyond the mathematical, metaphorical, metaphysical, or artistic level. “Models” instantiated by patterns of behavioral data and predictive of behavior - as defined by the model - are the frameworks for understanding, rather than theories derived analytically from independent facts of objective reality that make substantive, semantic claims beyond association. This pairs well then with an age of machine learning, LLMs, and “AI” systems that focus on syntactic and inductive reasoning.
The desire and need to still judge sub-systems, lest these theorists be accused of a relativism that threatens their maintaining a scientific aesthetic and commitment to those material facts they do wish to endorse, is maintained by pointing to coherence as a means to judge between theories. However, theories are essentially equally valid so long as they are equally logically coherent, maintaining their coherentist nature.[3] These meta-theories then avoid moral, political, or substantive claims in favor of explaining how systems evolve, change, or “move”. These meta-theories often appeal to a kind of enlightened centrism, where the universal moral, political, and substantive commitments of lower-level theories are “Game A” thinking that will be seen as illusory once one reaches new stages of enlightenment. Appeals to evolution, “wellbeing”, and practical error abound here over appeals to values, justice, or non-naturlistic ethics or truth. This reliance on a supposedly non-ideological pragmatism obscures the ideological commitments and beliefs that are involved in the criterion these models use and their tendency to prize a kind of techno-libertarianism, the prizing of coherence and prediction over getting to the essence of what something is, and the blurring of category distinctions of domains of human life.
This move is made by many in the “liminal web” and meta-crisis spaces, including John Vervaeke, Jordan Hall, Daniel Schmachtenberger, Gregg Henriques, and Eric Weinstein. These individuals offer geometric theories of everything, “third attractors” that provide consilience and a third way between competing approaches to the world, language of “Game A” and a “Game B” mindsets, and “unified theories of knowledge” that purport to join metaphysics to physics. These theories are often explicit that their goal is “holism” and generating “islands of coherence”.
Solving Isolation with The Primitive
The second move used by sensemakers and gurus is to solve the isolation problem of coherentism by declaring certain beliefs as necessary and philosophically primitive. This move is the most in line with a traditional response in philosophy to the isolation problem of coherentism. “Primitive” here, in the philosophical sense, means something that is taken as the most basic, fundamental level of a phenomenon or level of analysis for something. To say something is “primitive” is to say we cannot go any deeper or further in terms of what the makeup of something is. Particle physics, for instance, can be thought of as a primitive of material reality.[4] In the context here of justification and knowledge, the coherentist must make the argument that there is simply some class of beliefs we must take for granted as primitives of our cognitive experience. What distinguishes this from the foundationalist view about the existence of self-evident beliefs is that these primitive beliefs are not treated as necessarily having any justification or positive epistemic status (and are not necessarily representational beliefs about external data from the outside world). It is this move that most borrows from an aesthetics of concern for “truth”, science, etc. All the gurus fall back to it at some point or another.
Gurus that make this move rely heavily on narratives about human cognition, drawing often on the controversial positions of ecological psychology and “4E”. The move made here is to state that the gestalt or the whole comes first in cognition, and that this gestalt or whole is not the result of inference (even inference done at the implicit level), but is the primitive of our perception. As one 4E paper puts it when describing how a telephone conversation is seen to work: “…when the phone rings, I hear John’s voice; I do not hear a set of electronic sounds and infer that John is the cause of these noises”[5] We will discuss the problems with this rejection of inference and the category collapse supporters make in using embodied cognition to support these stronger, ecological and enactive claims, but all that needs to be known for now is that the move made here is to treat perception as not a result of inference, but as beginning with holistic concepts that one then makes logical extensions from.
Crucially, these conceptual primitives are also inherently normative and social. They are “affordances”, meaning cues for action or accomplishment of certain purposes. They are not objective facts about the world that are then combined into wholes through inference, where social values or individual goals then supervene, but holistic concepts that come prepackaged with this ethical or social meaning. At times, the gurus draw on Jungian concepts of a collective unconscious or even genetic memory to justify how there could be these (non-inferential) primitives that nevertheless already have social and normative content. Other times, they reference mirror neurons (which has the problem of being “analogous to saying that no computation occurs when graphics rendering is performed by a GPU…instead of a CPU…because the GPU just ‘delivers’ the result to the CPU”).[6] Psychdelics and meditation play a key role as well, taking us out of a self-conscious rational framework so we can accesss the primitive, meaning-laden starting essences of this post-hoc created self - a self that is ultimately parasitic on these underlying drives.
The upshot of this approach is that meaning comes before truth for the gurus then, as a matter of human perception and cognition. This is what Jordan Peterson means when he says that “the Bible is the prerequisite for the manifestation of truth, which makes it far more true than just true…this is the only way to solve the problem of human perception” (emphasis added).[7] Narratives, a plan for action, or myth is what is primitive. Talk of an objective reality outside of these conceptual schemes “literally” cannot occur. There is no removal of the stone from the soup.
Why This Practically Matters
There are both political and philosophical upshots of the moves above.
For the first move, we have already sketched a few out. Politically, it engenders an obscuring of the political, social, and material factors for history beyond those that fit into the abstracted, “longtermism” frame of evolution and systems theory. Philosophically, it engages in a quietism on the claims of fact (natural or ethical) made by those Game A theories, prizing holism and coherence and a kind of crude pragmatism that isn’t grounded in independent truths.
For the second move, there is a lot more to tease out in its implications. This move is central to the sensemaking space due to the degree to which it has directly or indirectly influenced the gurus deploying the first move as well. When pressed to justify the grounding for their claims, sensemakers of all types have been seen to draw on this theory of cognition. It has pretty notable political and philosophical upshots.
The political upshot of this view of human cognition is its being very much in line with conservatism in the original sense of the word. If the normative gestalt comes first, prior to an observation or analysis of abstract or objective truths, then a primacy for tradition is better secured. Knowledge becomes a question of what “appears to be working”, as shown to us by those who came before. There is no need to find a starting justification, independent of Burkean prejudice, about why this way is the best way in an objective-realist sense, as it is not possible to do this analysis as a matter of human perception. We see here this view of cognition’s symbiotic relationship with the behaviorism and historical empiricism of the first move: what we can talk about are people’s actions in a system, that is, goal-oriented behaviors and predicting them. Questioning whether or not the goal-behavior-outcome associations we see are the result of the frame itself, or the model shaping people’s intuitions or choices in the world, is ignored in favor of assuming those social realities, hierarchies, intuitions, and histories (viewed from a long-term view) are the result of objective factors of evolution, systems theory, or pragmatism. This is preferable to the destabilization of a destructive individualistic rationalism that cannot analyze what comes before these affordances and myths, robs us of meaning in its quest to do so, and represents a kind of ego or naivete to believe one can rise above and think outside of these primitive structures for meaning or encoded affordances. Long before Jordan Peterson centered “know-how” before “know-what” in human cognition, Michael Oakeshott’s postmodern conservatism was complaining of a “rationalism” of liberal modernity that was dangerous to human flourishing in its belief in abstract, universal, and objective truths not centered in tradition or “know-how”.[8]
The philosophical upshots of this view is that the anti-representationalism of the self-proclaimed “postmodernist bourgeois liberal” and radical pragmatist Richard Rorty, and his goal of defeating epistemology, realist truth, and traditional “Philosophy”, can be secured at last with the imprint of scientific theory.[9] [10] Rorty’s postmodern “epistemological behaviorism” finds strength with this theory of perception. Representation is simply not how cognition really works and truth via literary ways of knowing and conversation finds support. Another philosophical upshot is how this view of cognition centers a concern over “telos” and an Aristotelian-Thomist virtue ethics. Supporters of 4E, for instance, have commented directly on this view of cognition’s relationship to Aristotelian ideas. These philosophical upshots we are sketching shallowly here and with error-filled simplification, but the important takeaway is that they identity for us a further political upshot. If the project of a knowledge, rationality, and truth outside of relative goals fails, then the philosophical underpinnings of universal human rights and liberalism also fails, as Alasdair McIntyre, Michael P. Lynch, and others have said.
Conclusion
This framework for categorizing the gurus is meant to highlight that what they offer does not challenge a reliance on coherentism, insteading seeking to either ground it as a matter of human perception or put forth the project of an ultimate holistic framework that makes coherent all claims. Neither of these moves put forward a closer connection to a mind-independent reality, but a further abstraction from it. This occurs, on one hand, from absolving the individual’s capacity (and thus responsibility) for creating their own meaning based on experience with an objective reality outside of pre-made conceptual schemes, and shaping reality in response. On the other hand, it occurs from asking us to take a higher level, meta view that is focused on the geometry of systems over possessing commitments in response to a reality that is not at this level of abstraction. The problems with these moves are why the gurus cannot lead us out of the problems of modernity, but ultimately worsen a turn to ideologies borne of a postmodern condition.
For our next article, we will be turning to the primitive cognition move to understand more deeply how the gurus abuse concepts of philosophy to lend intuitive credence to these moves. We will do this by looking at the most well-known of the gurus: Jordan Peterson. Peterson’s incoherent ideas on truth are most coherent when taking his understanding of human cognition into account. By taking a deep dive into Peterson’s concepts of truth, knowledge, and mind, we will see the problems typical of this move and the crude pragmatism it is used to justify.
[1] Remembrances of E.O. Wilson (1929 – 2021)—E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation. (2021, December 28). https://eowilsonfoundation.org/eow/remembrances-of-e-o-wilson-1929-2021/
[2] See Coherentism in Epistemology. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (n.d.). Retrieved December 5, 2024, from https://iep.utm.edu/coherentism-in-epistemology/ for a refresher.
[3] See Alasdair MacIntyre for this. Rationality is relative to the telos of a given framework, but we can adjudicate between frameworks by appealing to which are more coherent.
[4] Tahko, T. E. (2023). Fundamentality. In E. N. Zalta & U. Nodelman (Eds.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2023). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2023/entries/fundamentality/
[5] Embodiment, Enaction, and Culture: Investigating the Constitution of the Shared World. (2017). The MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/10799.001.0001
[6] Carney, J. (2020). Thinking avant la lettre: A Review of 4E Cognition. Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture, 4(1), 77–90. https://doi.org/10.26613/esic/4.1.172
[7] Jordan Peterson’s Realization About the Bible. JRE (Director). (2022, January 25). Joe Rogan Experience [Video recording]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vt9K6kmpx44
[8] Oakeshott, M. (1991). Rationalism in Politics and other essays (Expanded edition). Liberty Fund.
[9] Ramberg, B., & Dieleman, S. (2024). Richard Rorty. In E. N. Zalta & U. Nodelman (Eds.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2024). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2024/entries/rorty/
[10] Richard Rorty’s Platonists, Positivists, and Pragmatists. (n.d.). Retrieved December 24, 2024, from https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/rorty.htm