Stuck in the Cul-De-Sac

Renaissance Humans, #57

I struggled to decide what to write about this week. Driving in circles in my own personal cul-de-sac.

Usually essay topics, like story ideas, float into my mind through some mysterious process, an attunement, the call of a numinous voice. I capture them on walks, runs, while driving.

I’m not sure why this week it wasn’t so easy for the current to flow. I did read an absolutely brilliant essay by Mary Harrington where she asserts we are stuck in the “cul-de-sac of Modernity.”

Image Credit: Ian Lockwood

In one of my PhD classes this semester, we’re tracing a long line of political and scientific thinking— from Aristotle to Aquinas to Bacon to Rousseau and onward. I also finally finished Awakening From the Meaning Crisis by John Vervaeke, which is the companion book for his epic fifty-video YouTube series.

There’s a point Vervaeke makes toward the end of the book, where he asserts none of the key figures of the enlightenment purposefully developed concepts and explored ideas with an eye for destroying tradition and faith in the divine; it just kind of happened as an emergent result of various strands of thinking.

Following these thinkers, the postmodernists (Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard, Beauvoir, and Lyotard) responded to technological advancements and the dominant paradigms of the day. They rightly critiqued what came before (suspicion of grand narratives, power relations, inequality, etc), but did little to help the west find its way out of the cul-de-sac.

To do that, we need to be able to think in a more collective, holistic fashion— even as technology delivers wonders while fragmenting and alienating us.

We struggle to see the ground, as Marshall McLuhan would point out¹, or the context, as Alicia Juarerro discusses in her recent book Context Changes Everything: How Constraints Create Coherence. Juarrero argues human behavior, meaning, and causality are deeply context-dependent and can't be fully explained by linear, mechanistic models. She draws deeply from complexity science, philosophy, and neuroscience as she explores how actions emerge from dynamic systems—where past events, present situations, and future goals all interact.

Sometimes things are context independent. These are simple and linear things. But most things are not, especially when humans are involved. Juarrero argues context is not just a backdrop to behavior or events—it actively shapes and constrains what can happen. In complex systems, constraints are not limitations, but enablers: they narrow the field of possible actions and make coherent behavior emerge. The importance of context makes rigid cause-and-effect thinking inadequate for understanding real-world complexity, especially for human systems like ethics, decision-making, and social behavior.

As particular parts and components aggregate and ascend in levels— like atoms into molecules, water molecules into a vortex², cells into bodily organs, sand into a sandpile, neurons into minds, or humans into a group. And this next level of aggregation can influence things in a downward direction, i.e. the mob can influence individual humans, the sand pile influences the grains of sand.

Once you understand Iain McGilchrist’s hemispheric theory, it’s hard not to see it everywhere. It’s not the simple urban legend of “left brain math, right brain art”— although his work is constantly equated to that. It’s mainly about how each brain hemisphere attends to the world. The left seeks to apprehend (capture) and exploit, while the right desires to comprehend (understand) and explore.

Per McGilchrist and his well-sourced work, the left hemisphere is more analytical, linear, the explicit, and focused on details. It excels at categorization, language, and logical reasoning. The left hemisphere breaks down the world into smaller parts, allowing for a more focused and specific understanding of individual elements. It sees the tree, and maybe only part of the tree— it sees the fruit it wants to pick.

On the other hand brain, the right hemisphere is characterized by holistic thinking, creativity, intuition, the implicit, and an awareness of the interconnectedness of things. It focuses on the "bigger picture" and processes information in a more intuitive and simultaneous manner. The right hemisphere is associated with the appreciation of art, music, and spiritual experiences. It sees the forest in its entirety, vigilant for predators and other environmental dangers.

Bottom line— we have too much left hemisphere going on today in our WEIRD world, and not enough right hemisphere. This is not to say the left hemisphere is bad— it is responsible for many, if not most of the advancements of the modern world. But it must be employed in proper relation to the right.

McGilchrist and Juarrero are highlighting problems with our contemporary view of reality.

This is what I keep thinking when I read Bacon, Montesquieu, Descarte—the legacy of reductionism, mechanized thinking, empiricism, positivism. These are all powerful tools of science humans have used to banish superstition, darkness, disease, accidents, and general foolishness.

But they came with a price.

We disenchanted the world. I don’t mean that literally—I think the world has always been full of enchantment, and I don’t think we can wave a scientific wand and disenchant it, the way I might with a Magic:The Gathering card or a Mage’s spell in a table-top role-playing game. But we banished, divorced, amputated a part of ourselves when we took up the scientific worldview.

Juarrero jokes that the Parmenidian worldview won back in the day, over the Heraclitan one. I think McGilchrist would agree, as they roughly map to Left (Parmenides) and Right (Heraclitus) brain hemispheres.

Image Credit: Chris Paparone

We need more Alfred North Whitehead in our lives. Whitehead’s process philosophy sees reality as constantly changing and evolving. Instead of thinking of the world as made up of fixed, unchanging things, Whitehead believed everything is made up of events or moments of experience that are always in the process of becoming. These events are connected to each other, shaped by the past and influencing the future. In this view, the universe is not made of static objects, but is instead a flowing process of relationships and change.

None of what I’m saying is new or innovative. It’s just what’s coming up for me right now as I think about the current age.

We get caught in the top down (fix institutions, the market, the laws) vs. bottom up (inner development work) arguments—frozen by argument, paralyzed by indecision.

But we can’t just do one or the other. We have to do both.

Get ourselves sorted, and also grow/renew the structures that enable us to get out of the cul-de-sac. Can we strive for transpartisanship? To see the value of different political views and working to incorporate the best of them. Maybe we’ll be stuck here for awhile.

I don’t know.

But that doesn’t mean to stop trying.

Things seem bad, and maybe they’ll get much worse in the next few years—All the more reason to make ourselves and our families resilient, adaptable, curious, and above all, humble.

Let’s get post-tragic, because the only way out is through.

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Currere Certamen Tuum — Run Your Race

1. Marshall McLuhan’s figure/ground distinction describes how we perceive the world by focusing on a central element (the figure) against a broader, usually unnoticed context (the ground). The figure is what draws our attention, while the ground is the environment or medium shaping how that figure is experienced. McLuhan emphasized that media often work as grounds—subtly shaping our perceptions and behaviors without us being consciously aware of their influence.

2. She references Ilya Prigogine’s work on dissipative systems, for which he won a Nobel Prize in 1977.