Metamodernism

Iain McGilchrist doesn’t address Metamodernism anywhere in his books. This is the proposed name of a paradigm that has emerged after Postmodernism. Perhaps it was still too much of a novel idea while he was writing. However it’s been steadily gaining greater attention. Recent Akomolafe mused "Perhaps the posthumanist needs the humanist to think well about the world." And while there are differing descriptions of exactly what this paradigm might be, some do comport very well with the hemisphere hypothesis, and thus provide us with an entry point into a wider discussion. Etymologically, the term metataxis translates as “between, beyond”. Plato's metaxy denotes a movement between (meta) opposite poles as well as beyond (meta) them. In their essay Notes on Metamodernism, Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker write:

"Ontologically, metamodernism oscillates between the modern and the postmodern. It oscillates between a modern enthusiasm and a postmodern irony, between hope and melancholy, between naïveté and knowingness, empathy and apathy, unity and plurality, totality and fragmentation, purity and ambiguity. Indeed, by oscillating to and fro or back and forth, the metamodern negotiates between the modern and the postmodern."

Basically, the modern and the postmodern are both incomplete, both subject to error. And by navigating between them we are in a better position to avoid the pitfalls of either. In a sense, it is an answer to the "no free lunch" theorem. Those familiar with what Jonathan Rowson described as the McGilchrist Manoeuvre will note the similarity here. During a conversation with Michael Garfield, Zak Stein described Metamodernism succinctly:

“The Modern view of science is that science is truth. Period. It's very definite. The Postmodern view of science is that science is one view, and that there's actually many sciences. The Metamodern view essentially tries to say that both of those are true, within a specific context. Science works and actually discovers things. But the problem is that it's overstepped its context, and so it takes for example an experiment that was done under very closed conditions, in a laboratory, and pretends that what's discovered there applies to radically open systems outside the laboratory. The Metamodernist says "We have to pay attention to the 'moment of truth' in the Modern, and then contextualize it with the Postmodern alternative." The combination of the Modern and the Postmodern in a Metamodern reconvergence provides the very distinct possibility of a new historical epoch, a nonreductionistic, complex systems science. Many people on the fringes know this. Building institutions, building medical practice, and building educational practice around that "new paradigm" is what the Metamodern attempts to do." And again: “One of the things that characterizes the move beyond Postmodernism is a reemergence of objectivity, but not the simplistic Modern objectivity. It's an objectivity that has to do with the refraction of different perspectives, a new synthesis, a global Renaissance, that's more than a Modern view.”

Why would we need to advocate for a reconvergence in the first place? Consider some of the obstacles that are preventing this. One of these may be what's been called the “cynical genius illusion,” concerning which several research articles have been written. The Postmodern critique, particularly those forms that tend to view social interactions solely in terms of power and control, is sympathetic to a “negativity bias.” And according to Jamil Zaki, this can easily take us along the slippery slope from skepticism, to mistrust, to cynicism. Stein noted that philosophers like Roy Bhaskar have observed a sort of "crypto-normativism" that Postmodernism gives rise to. As Stein puts it, "the Postmodern critique is always implying that there is a better way, but is unwilling to state what the better way might be, because if you state the better way you now open yourself up to critique. Bhaskar wanted to actively counteract the overtly pessimistic and nihilist kind of critiques of the Postmodernist." We have seen a similar dynamic playing out in politics, where some individuals might advance specific policy platforms, while others seem only eager to criticize and deconstruct these, without articulating any substantial alternative of their own.

Stein suggests the possibility of a new "historical epoch," so one could certainly interpret Metamodernism within a sort of "grand cosmological Hegelian theory of history." I have little interest in the actual terminology. But what does interest me is the use of the  "Metamodern" term to help 1) reveal the limitations of any "-modernism" through opposition, and 2) suggest that complementarity, rather than elimination or a simple synthesis, may be a more preferable response. The Metamodern reconvergence has attracted diverse writers. In his book More Deaths than One (2014), the New Zealand writer and singer-songwriter Gary Jeshel Forrester wrote that "It's okay to search for values and meaning, even as we continue to be skeptical." And in Metamodernity: Meaning and Hope in a Complex World (2019) Lene Rachel Anderson claims "Metamodernity provides us with a framework for understanding ourselves and our societies in a much more complex way. It contains both indigenous, premodern, modern, and postmodern cultural elements and thus provides social norms and a moral fabric for intimacy, spirituality, religion, science, and self-exploration, all at the same time." Jonathan Rowson wrote: 

"The point of invoking metamodernity is not to insist on this name for a chronological phase of time, but to resolve to characterise a cultural epoch with a Kairological quality of time... to feel into what it means to be in a time between worlds, where meta-crises relating to meaning and perception abound and we struggle to perceive clearly who we are and what we might do... To be metamodern is to be caught up in the co-arising of hope and despair..."

Metamodern education

Zak Stein: “The modern innovation of schooling is a result of the separation of church and state. (Note: There was progress in that move. The 30 Years War, for example, was bad. That was religion.) But today there's an incoherence of how we make meaning, of our identity in life, death, and tragedy. They're basically not telling you “what it all means.” You just go in, up, and out, and don't really question “Why am I doing this?” But the smartest ones will want an answer to that question.

If no one actually answers that, or if all the answers are obviously not enough, then there's built-up tension. So sometimes I think we misunderstand as attention-deficit what is really the tension produced by the absence of an answer. There's a pent-up desire for this. When there's a sense of why, and when my motivation and the motivation of what I'm doing aligns, it all feels right and I can do it.

There's a basic problem when we can't say good, true, and beautiful things about the nature of the situation we're putting the youth in. And they know it. So of course they’re not paying attention. Oh, they're paying a lot of attention to other things, just not to you, and not to school. This is part of the dynamic of the educational crisis. It is part of the larger “legitimacy crisis,” the absence or inability to secure political legitimacy or investment in the project of cooperation, which is society. That's one of those things education has to do, or the center falls apart.”

On the Metamodernism and the post-tragic: "How do we have conversations about topics of 'existential risk' and 'catastrophic risk'? We had to experience fearing having those conversations with the youth as Covid began. The fear of having to have the conversation about 'when billions watch millions die' and there's nothing they can do about it. I talk about the need for the future of education to be ‘post-tragic’ in terms of its orientation in psychology. Basically it means there are different ways to relate to tragedy. Tragedy is inevitable. If you believe tragedy is not inevitable then you're in the 'pre-tragic' state of consciousness. How do you move from the denial of tragedy, to stepping into tragedy (without getting stuck in it), and then to the post-tragic? It's not a new denial of tragedy. It's being in the tragedy still, but having also found a way to manage and transcend the tragedy, phenomenologically, psychologically, emotionally.

During the tragedy it's very hard to laugh and love. In the post-tragic there's laughter and love again, but it's different from the pre-tragic laughter and love. That's a simple characterization. But as educators thinking about this dynamic of intergenerational transmission, do we lie to our kids and give them a pre-tragic view? Do we traumatize them by getting them stuck in the tragic, and telling them there's no way out? Or do we have some way to actually become post-tragic? How do we tell stories about our own history that are not just simply tragedies?" 

Metamodern politics

Trump is an oligarch who openly admires other greedy, power hungry people. In a sense, he really walks the talk. And if we happen to agree with his ethos, that can seem very compelling. But greed sees no use for higher values like social equity. And what many Americans want, though they cannot easily find, is a politician who holds higher values, and has a record of putting those above their self interest.

Politicians across the political spectrum have forgotten values for the most part and are still dealing with the cultural legacy of postmodern cynicism. So, on one side we have self-aggrandizing greed, and the other side is a confused vacuum. What we need is a strong sense of values to confront greed, but all we can muster is, as Jonathan Rowson put it, “an avalanche of cliches and platitudes, cheered on by an unthinking crowd desperate to believe in something.” That isn't enough. So we get the greedy monster instead.

Apathy, false equivalence, the “bothsidesism” that tries to justify cynical disengagement from politics, all played a role. Sure, Trump is bad, they say, but the other side is more of the same “business as usual,” the same corporate criminals and war hawks, that got us to this point to begin with. To a significant extent that is true. When you are empty and stand for nothing behind the words, anti-value is what you get. It seizes the opportunity. Rowson again, “Those who lament Trump’s victory should also lament the absence of a powerful story of the present and vision of the future - that is an even bigger problem than Trump’s victory, and part of its basis.” George Lakoff and Gil Duran wrote: 

“All politics are moral politics. Trump won because he has tapped into something deep in the American psyche: Strict Father morality. This is a hierarchical view of the world, rooted in the metaphor of a family with a dictator-like patriarch whose word is law. Millions of American brains are wired to accept this moral system, and this is why none of the facts about Trump (his impeachments, his convictions, his lies) mattered. Moving forward, Democrats must stop ignoring the metaphorical and moral frameworks underlying our politics… Unfortunately, Trump reflects the values of many Americans – even those whose “self-interest” is clearly threatened by his policies… They identify with his projection of dominance and strength, and it matters more than their own gender or racial identity.” 

There’s nothing inherently wrong with a hierarchical view of the world (often associated with Modernism), indeed hierarchies are everywhere and very few things would function or make sense without them. But, and this is a very big “but”, we need to understand them correctly and not have a delusional view on them. Trump’s authoritarianism is a delusional, completely inverted moral hierarchy. Not only is this ethically illegitimate, it’s built on a foundation of lies. And the only reason it has attracted as much support as it has is that Democrats have apparently given up that game (under the influence of Postmodernism). They aren’t advancing much of a moral hierarchy of their own to confront the inverted one Trump presents us with, and connect it to the evidence needed to back it up. Where there are no convictions there is no courage to act. As David Brin wryly noted, "there are reasons why the all out assault on all fact-professions is the core agenda" underlying Trump's rise to power. Despite some significant disagreements I have with Robert Ellis' review of TMWT (we've looked at these before), one of his observations is astute: 

"McGilchrist is, I believe, something like a theoretical Burkean conservative – a position that, in theory, I have much sympathy for, because it prioritises a recognition of complexity in socio-political relationships, and discourages quick and simplistic solutions to problems. However, one of the major problems in current political discourse is the appropriation of such conservative ideas by corrupt political Conservatives – who have very little understanding of complex systems, and are mainly interested in defending the interests of a privileged class through any manipulative means that are available. ...the heirs to Burkean conservatism in modern UK politics (parallel to many other countries) are much more the Green Party, which prioritize the conservation of the complex relationships both between humans and the environment and within human society, rather than the asset-stripping ‘Conservative’ Party. Without making this explicit, the immensely destructive corrupt right will simply appropriate books like this for their own rhetorical purposes."

Those with an overly simplistic understanding of McGilchrist, whether on the Far Right or Far Left, are just as lost in identity politics. What makes the difference has more to do with their hidden ontological commitments. The Right is more sympathetic to the ideals of modernism, while the Left is much more aligned with post-modernism. The problems with post-modernism are many, including relativism and general hostility to hierarchy and asymmetry (very similar concepts). Clearly, the transcendent, sacred, or divine is closely associated with hierarchy as traditionally understood. And asymmetry is associated with inequality. These are lightning rods for the Far Left. But on the whole, the challenges on both sides of the aisle are extensive. How might we sum this up? The Far Right sees in McGilchrist a very superficial sort of agreement with their beliefs, and has used it to justify their form of identity politics (for example, "left hemisphere = political left"). Meanwhile, the Far Left sees in McGilchrist a very superficial disagreement with their beliefs, and this has been used to justify a dismissal of his work (for example, "inequality in the brain = inequality in society"). If both sides understood the deeper nuance of the hemisphere hypothesis, all this could be avoided. The takeaway from all this is that a superficial understanding of inequality can and does favor the ideology of the Far Right, and so we might say that they have a slight rhetorical advantage. There are ways one might mitigate this however, Bradbrook shines here. 

A scholar such as McGilchrist, who can marshal the full force of science to validate religious belief, can be very appealing. It is those features of religion that are consequences of built in asymmetries and inequalities that the post-modern political left is (understandably) very skeptical of, and tends to take exception to, and which therefore explain the differential reception to McGilchrist that we observe. For example, to the extent that religion is stripped of traditional hierarchical concepts it tends to become more palatable to the post-modern aesthetic. We can point to "Buddhist modernism" as an example of this, which has sanitized "ethnic Buddhism" of many (if not most) of its offensive inequalities, but in the process of doing so rendered it almost unrecognizable. By necessity we all begin with a shallow understanding of any topic, and the hemisphere hypothesis is no exception, but if we are going to reduce our vulnerability to manipulation, and check if our conclusions are sound, then we will eventually need to arrive at a deeper understanding of "the asymmetry of the coincidentia oppositorum." Maybe this won't be possible (or even desirable) for each of us individually, but as a culture it is critical. 

A language of conviction and value

From a recent conversation:

Henry Soinnunmaa: “Some people are like “Whoa, what are you talking about when you refer to values such as truth and beauty and good as being something that's not invented by humans?” There's so much cynicism nowadays about them that to imply they would exist as anything besides a social construct is seen as very provocative. And many of the people who might be triggered by you referring to those being something besides social constructs probably don't view themselves as postmodernists. 

Zak Stein: That’s because social constructivism is the cultural given. Which is why I bring it up. Many of the people who are social constructivists and relativists have simply not been educated otherwise. If you move through college and graduate school in the United States or Europe you will get postmodernism. You won't get anything else. You'll get postmodernism, and you'll be brought into the belief that truth and ethics are basically a function of power, and therefore the things that we valorize as beautiful, good, and true are the result of systematic power over many generations and all kinds of performative contradictions and other things built into that worldview. What's interesting to me about it is that this is anomalous. The majority of human belief systems throughout history held that we participate in something bigger than us. They did not believe that the universe is meaningless. That’s the anomalous view. From the perspective of all other humans that have lived we are quite unusual in that view. 

Soinnunmaa: Yet we do need postmodern criticism. That makes us pay attention to how power affects things in the world. So the question then is how to integrate that, without throwing away the understanding that there are values that are important and there are things to aspire towards. John Vervaeke uses the term transjective, meaning not entirely objective or entirely subjective but something else. David Chapman also writes in his Meaningness blog about how meaning is not created entirely subjectively or objectively, but it's something that we come into contact with when we are together with the world, and together with other people.

Stein: That's exactly it. Value evolves. That's what’s so remarkable about it. It evolves in these relationships between different centers within the flux of of evolution. The postmodern critique is not incorrect, it just kind of ends up pulling the punch. It doesn't complete its own circle. You know, my view of education is very much a postmodern critical theory argument. But I come from a stance of critical theory, the Frankfurt School, which basically says you can only do criticism if you can articulate something you stand for.

So there's this term, crypto-normativism, which is what most of postmodernism is. They’re critiquing this, and they're critiquing that, and they're critiquing the other. And all of those critiques are correct. But what remains unsaid is the thing that they are standing on to do the critiquing. If you are critical of something then you must stand for something. Can you move from the language of complaint and criticism to the language of conviction and value?  That would be what the postmodernist needs to do, that turn, which is the turn that Habermas did, which is to turn postmodernism from a deconstructive into a reconstructive project. You totally deconstruct and then you rebuild, because you wouldn't have taken it apart if you didn't stand for something that was valuable. Why is power over other people bad? If everything's a social construction then who cares? So there's this sense in which the postmodernist has to go that turn towards the reconstruction.

Postmodernists are not really taking themselves seriously enough. They're critiquing all of this stuff, and they're doing it from this really heartfelt position, often of anger and indignation, and that means that there's something inside of them that really stands for something. So to move out of the crypto-normative into the explicitly normative, to move from the deconstructive to the reconstructive, that's the postmodernism that we need. Postmodernism reveals the Shadow, but then says there's only Shadow. But if you're going to call out the Shadows you need to be able to claim your own position as light. It takes a kind of self referential humility to do that because now you're on the hook for something. Now you have to go build something better than this thing that you’re critiquing. Let's go do that. But who’s doing that? They're just critiquing. But at some point we have to go build something better than the thing we critiqued. 

It's quite easy to get a large group against something. But it’s very hard to get a large group standing for something, and then building, reconstructing. How do we move from deconstructing the old power structures to building structures that could be responsibly used, or is there no vision of what a better world could be? So yes, postmodernism was a critical moment, but it hasn't completed its work. It needs to turn reconstructive, and then we get into a different phase of philosophy.

Soinnunmaa: Like metamodernism, which is trying to integrate postmodernism with modernism and premodernism? 

Stein: Totally. We need to become people who have rich languages of intrinsic value, a shared sense of what is actually at stake, and what types of futures would be valuable. It’s not a homogenizing value set, but it is a planetary scale macro ethics that agrees upon the value of certain things, the most minimal of which would be the biosphere as we know it, for example. Without this even the most capacitated and intelligent technologists, politicians, and others will be in a difficult position. So we need to become a very different type of human and re-infuse our most important endeavors with a language that refers to intrinsic and real value. 

Metamodern movements

The counterculture of the 1960s was an anti-establishment cultural phenomenon and political movement that rebelled against dogma everywhere, experimenting with new relationships to religious ideas, the material economy, and social institutions. But it wasn't long before rigid thinking and greed returned, and as we've since seen, with renewed vengeance. Would the movement have achieved more lasting results had it a better understanding of the world around us, and how our brains function to reveal that world?

Alan Watts opens his book The Two Hands of God: The Myths of Polarity, with three quotes. One of which from the Zhuangzi is particularly challenging:

"Those who would have right without its correlative, wrong; or good government without its correlative, misrule,—they do not apprehend the great principles of the universe nor the conditions to which all creation is subject. One might as well talk of the existence of heaven without that of earth, or of the negative principle (yin) without the positive (yang), which is clearly absurd. Such people, if they do not yield to argument, must be either fools or knaves." Zhuangzi, xvii

Does this have anything to do with the Pareto principle (also known as the "80–20 law") which states that roughly 20% of all people receive 80% of all income (and 20% of the most affluent 20% receive 80% of that 80%, and so on). ...Could it be that the asymmetries of right and wrong, of good government and misrule, and of power and wealth, are in some sense immutable qualities of the world?

In the course of time, some of the goals of the 1960s have been realized, while others still remain out of reach. Perhaps the goals that were realized were those that did not traduce these asymmetries, and those that are still out of reach are precisely those that would've required their violation. And so, if we are to achieve these remaining goals sooner rather than later, perhaps we will have to find ways to reconcile them accordingly, or continue that work if it has already begun. 

Extinction Rebellion: A Metamodern Movement?

Gail Bradbrook is following an interesting path. She earned a doctorate in molecular biophysics, and in 2016 went on a "psychedelic retreat" to Costa Rica after which she and Hallam came up with Extinction Rebellion. She was engaged in many different movements prior to this. In a 2019 video she describes her approach to social movements in general, and the Extinction Rebellion in particular. It's wide ranging, and there's more than I've included here, so watch the video. I'm only paraphrasing some of it from the transcript (she talks fast):

"I want to talk about Extinction Rebellion's strategy and how we can see it in a really wide ecology of different theories of change, because it's important that we understand how strategy can be thought about from different perspectives. There are lots of perspectives in our movement. One of these perspectives is that of Gene Sharp, the father of civil resistance, who thought about how you look at a system and try to make a significant change to it, how you take out dictatorship and so on. We can also look at our movement through the lens of purpose, vision, and culture, through the lens of patriarchy and white supremacy, and underneath that, even through the lens of consciousness.

Underneath all of this is what we might call the sacred. I'm essentially talking about love and the consciousness we're running in our brains. There's lots of scientific evidence that there is a "oneness," a connection of energy between us, an actual purpose to life itself. Your life has an inherent purpose within a flow of life. A capitalist-consumerist society very much wants to disconnect us from that. What brain science suggests is that when we're more in our right hemisphere than our left hemisphere we have a deeper connection to the oneness there is. Look up Iain McGilchrist's work for example, and his book The Master and His Emissary. Also a beautiful video by Jill Bolte Taylor, and another by Wai Tsang. This is not something you have to sort of "believe in and be a hippie about." I'm suggesting be open to the idea that love is underneath what really matters to us.

I think the only way we're going to make the shift that's necessary is if it's a paradigm shift, a shift in consciousness. And I think this is all possible, but what we need to do is recognize that we're working on different strategic levels. I personally believe that science and spirituality are on their way to unification. And I'm interested in teleology, the idea that there may be inherent purpose in the universe. It shows up through things like morphic resonance, which is actually known about in the science I did, looking at crystallizing protein structures and so on.

Tim Gee's book Counter Power talks about the need to raise awareness of an issue, or consciousness about an issue, and coordinate across movements. That's the confrontation stage. The consolidation stage is the citizen's assembly. We want a people-powered decision-making process about what the change actually looks like. We know from Erica Chenoweth's work that we need around 3.4 percent of the population in active participation in the movement, and we need about 50% of the public to support the issue that we're dealing with. That's Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan's work. The grand strategy then focuses on the three pillars of the system, and that comes from Gene Sharp.

I'm also really in love Valerie Kaur's TED talk, "Three lessons of revolutionary love." She talks about the radical self-love that other movements didn't do. I think that is something that we really have to bring forward, and that will show up as self-care. I think it's part of the rising feminine; that's how she talks about it. It's the work that we do on decolonization, on anti-oppression and liberation. So these are things that are coming through from the regenerative culture team XR Together, and also there's the XR Internationalist solidarity network in the UK doing great work as well.

It's now the time for humanity to stop harming and start repairing, and do that together with more democracy. That's a vision that is universally known about. For the Jewish faith it is tikkun olam. In Africa it's talked about as ubuntu. We can bring that through in multiple languages and culturally relevant ways. Frederick Laloux's book Reinventing Organizations is about how businesses might make more of a profit when they get behind purpose, and he gives some great examples. Wouldn't it be amazing if the business world continues to move in that direction and actually holds this purpose that our culture needs to speak to, that we want to stop harm and start repairing, and help us get that done together?

I want to just speak very briefly to something controversial. I've been speaking about psychedelic medicines; they're not for everybody. They've been part of my path, and they very much speak to me in terms of access to these processes. But they need to be used in really safe and healthy ways. If anybody is using them there's lots of information out there. They are part of deep indigenous traditions and spiritual practices.

As things get worse, what are we doing in XR that is going to support us? Frankly, the work we're doing is prefigurative. It's anti-fascist, it's holding a vision, it's the people's assemblies work, it's working together, it's holding conflict, it's how we work on diversity, it's how we're bringing forward our vulnerability, it's how we address patriarchy and white supremacy. And goodness, I know we're not getting that right, but in tension let's keep doing our best and moving on that stuff. It's how we really notice that there's an evolutionary purpose here. So this is what you might call prefigurative. It's the piece that will help us to be together as things go pear-shaped. That's why it's so important. It's a very imperfect journey that we're on. I really love Adrienne Maree Brown's book Emergent Strategy. It shaped some of the thinking at Extinction Rebellion. She says: "Trust the people."

Bradbrook has clearly fully internalized the hemisphere hypothesis and perhaps even expanded upon the implications, it appears to be very substantially embedded into the DNA of XR, which explains why McGilchrist has spoken at several XR events. How could he not? Bradbrook is really getting his ideas out there, she invariably cites him in almost every recorded presentation she's given, including a more recent 2023 talk she gave (note that this is after TMWT is published, whereas the other was before it was published):

"How did we get here? As psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist articulated based on reviews of thousands of scientific papers, human beings like other animals have two very distinct hemispheres in our brain with very distinct roles. To cultivate the collective "good mind" we have to have practices baked into our culture. In our diseased culture these get baked out. So given that we live within a pathologized system of systems, we need to understand more about how systems work. We need social movements that are very mindful of the "wetiko pathology." Ones that see the anti-life systems of destruction and both forcefully and mindfully separate from them. I see it in me, but I'm choosing something else. Each one of us has that choice in the moment, and as groups. It's time to unite within a collaborative framework for change that leaves space for doing things that is location and culture specific.

We are part of a more enduring system than that of capitalist-colonialist modernity. It is our birthright to root ourselves into aliveness, reclaiming our role as keystone species and serving life's purpose, which includes composting and adding to the complexity and beauty of life. We can intend to create the conditions for life to thrive by learning from life. Life thrives because it collaborates and learns. Through purpose, collaboration, and learning unexpected things emerge. Let's work across different organizations and networks, seeing our shared concerns and these root causes, and then develop some kind of framework together around how we see the change." 

So given this additional context, it may be that Roger Hallam's recent article is a reaction to what Bradbrook has been saying, perhaps since the inception of the Extinction Rebellion, than to anything McGilchrist is saying. And given her good work here, I'm a bit dismayed that he hasn't been listening to her more closely! It would be interesting to compare Hallam's writing in The Ecologist to Bradbrook. 

The UK activist scene is quite the network. I'm trying to sort it all out. So Bradbrook and Hallam (with others) began XR in 2018. Bradbrook cites McGilchrist in 2019 as a core influence in their movement strategy. She's almost certainly familiar with him before that time. McGilchrist appears at several XR events. Shaun Chamberlain joins Extinction Rebellion early, then moves to Local Futures with Helena Norberg-Hodge, which was founded in 1978. McGilchrist appears in many recorded conversations with Norber-Hodge and speaks at the "Planet Local Summit" in 2023 in several presentations (alongside Bayo Akomolafe). Chamberlain later interviews McGilchrist as part of his "Surviving the Future" program in 2024. The Local Futures' directors also form the editorial board of The Ecologist magazine, where Hallam (among others) regularly contributes articles. McGilchrist also widely collaborates with many other activists in the UK, not least of which being Rupert Read, Dougald Hine, and many others. One could go on.

All that being said, McGilchrist also gets equal air time from conservative media platforms, even though some of these are critical of the goals and strategies of the above activists and organizations (many of these appearances have been highlighted here before). His ability to engage with people on both sides of the aisle is somewhat uncommon today. How does he do that? I think there are many reasons for this, including what I'd characterize as a metamodern approach. Jonathan Rowson's series of conversations at Perspectiva were in this same line of thinking. But McGilchrist's recent success courting conservative platforms may have come at the cost of curtailing enthusiasm among the activist community, who still need to hear the sort of message he's putting out there. It's a challenging balance. So hearing people like Dougald Hine, but especially Gail Bradbrook, deeply integrate the hemisphere hypothesis into their work is really inspiring. Like Elizabeth Oldfield, Bradbrook has a praxis, a way of engaging her audience, that is aware of, responsive to, and fluent with the conceptual world of contemporary alternative subculture(s) that are looking for a connection with the sacred and a path to meaningful engagement.