The Wages of Disembodied Theory • Part 1
Contemplative Writing in the Age of Ideology Evangelism
This is the first chapter of “The Wages of Disembodied Theory”, Part I of All We Are: Dispatches from the Ground Experience. This collection of writings explores the problem of ideological rigidity in social theories, the concept of "lived experience" (including my own), and the argument for using empowerment as a basis for education.
We are living in a time of cognitive overload. Text messages, emails, social media posts and comments, phone conversations, articles and manifestos from a wide variety of platforms, ideologies, belief systems, and identity groups are sprouting up everywhere, and it has become increasingly difficult for many people to sustain a sense of coherence in all this.
In this piece, I want to explore a little bit around the practice of what I call contemplative writing, which is one of the main practices I personally use to help me sort through the cognitive overload and hopefully rescue some coherence from the entanglement of taking in too much from too many.
It hasn’t been easy for me to keep up with this practice.
For a while now, I have been feeling supremely frustrated at being kept away from writing. There was simply too much I was responsible for over the past year, and the cognitive overload I was experiencing had gotten to the point where I was unable to bring forth any coherence into my personal writing projects. Outside of my responsibilities where I basically (and by the skin of my teeth) held it all together, when I sat down to try and write, nothing made any sense. It was all just jumbled chaos, and, in the end, I felt I had to keep in reserve any and all coherence that remained in my exhausted being so that I could attend to the needs of other people during an intense period of serious professional and family obligations.
Now, finally after so many months, I am able to sit here at this desk in this moment to contemplate my experiences, allowing the clickety clack of my fingers to help nurse my being back into the flow of harmony, simplicity, and the coherence I have been longing for.
And I couldn’t be happier (or more relieved) for this moment or filled with more gratitude that this moment has at long last arrived.
But, I am not out of the woods yet.
Writing: Contemplative, Self-Expressive, and Instrumental
A few days ago, I had the pleasure of reading a wonderful piece about how we can use our writing (and in particular, our social media output) as a meditative practice. It was written by Greg Lukianoff, the President and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). This piece is titled ‘Why Buddhism is True’ by Robert Wright wins this month’s Prestigious Ashurbanipal Book Award and covers the intricacies involved in practicing patience, non-reactivity, curiosity, and open-mindedness when confronting our instinctive inner and outer responses to posts and comments we consider unpleasant or outrageous.
The overall aim in practicing meditative social media communication is similar, at least in my mind, to the practice of contemplative writing, including writing that explores the darker aspects of individual and collective experiences, which I’ve explored throughout the Ground Experience newsletter.
Regarding the promises and perils of meditation practice (which includes contemplative writing), Lukianoff writes:
“When people are new to meditation they can often be blown away by how “loud” their minds are. It is often likened to a wild horse, but I think that image is not wild enough. To me it’s more like watching a hundred wild horses on amphetamines run around the inside of your skull with very loud music blaring and endless strobe light flashes of things your brain is worried about forgetting and embarrassing moments you have had in your life combined with a hyper-awareness that your shoulder really hurts and your calves really itch while wondering, “Am I just bad at this?”
This has been my experience, especially in recent times. There were a great many angles from which I was considering approaching different topics and themes in my writing over these past few months, but I was unable to make sense of any of it, as my mind was experiencing itself as oversaturated with information and stories—a pack of wild horses that fortunately I was able to temporarily tame in those rare moments when I had a breather from work and family responsibilities.
During some of those rare moments, all I could do was allow the experience of the tsunami to wash over me, commit to staying with the panic-laden thoughts and sense of urgency that accompanied the tsunami, and go to bed late at night stoically setting aside all the worries and thoughts for a later time so that the next morning I could wake up with the resolve to remain focused on the tasks that lie ahead.
Fortunately, I am now on summer break from teaching, and on a temporary leave from a few family emergency situations that have been worked out at least for the time. Now that the waters have calmed after a full week into downtime and gentle rejuvenation, the worrying thoughts and incoherence I was experiencing have subsided, and I am slowly relaxing back into the flow of simplicity, able to regard my thoughts as what Lukianoff calls “a little bit more like weather" (rather than as a big storm) and able to “decide more carefully which [thoughts] to follow and which ones to let fizzle”.
Writing as Spiritual Practice
For me, writing is a spiritual practice. When I say spiritual, I am not necessarily speaking about metaphysical “spirit” or some kind of cosmic divine energy that flows inside, outside, and beyond the ego mind. I mean spiritual in the sense of “breath” (the word “spirit” comes from spiritus, which is Latin for breath)—the allowing of all experience, thoughts, fears, hopes, concerns, confusions, and moments of clarity to breathe through me, onto the page.
In those moments when I have finally completed a thought after months and sometimes years of reading, viewing, and listening to other people (articles, interviews, personal conversations, and videos), I feel a sense of spaciousness, clarity, and relief. And I often experience a non-forced, natural sense of presence and the delightful desire to be nowhere else in the world but here in the present, in this place, with you, with myself, with the immediate environment—with just what is.
But, while the completion of my writing process during a specific writing project might serve my own well being, clarity, and sometimes, my own sanity and peace of mind, I have to acknowledge that in general I am far more motivated to produce writing that is instrumental (of use to others) than I am in producing writing that is simply an exercise in self-expression and the sharing of my emotional journeys, personal revelations, confessions, gifts, joys, regrets, and flaws as a kind of catharsis. I want to spend time creating something of practical value for readers, which is why I am more often motivated to write about something “out there” that is experienced by—and therefore matters more to—other people rather than writing about something that’s just “in here”, my own inner world and its relation to my own outer experiences.
This could perhaps be due to my having inherited the Puritan work ethic that is so prevalent in New Englanders—the nose to the grindstone, ever-industrious workhorse who is constantly on the make for something to produce that can at the very least offer some small benefit to a few individuals or at best bring forth useful and genuinely helpful information that has not yet been introduced into a larger community or subculture.
At the same time, I can’t deny that an audience for any piece of writing often wants to find at least some personal connection with the writer, not just the information or narratives that the writer wants to share. And I can’t deny that there is a healing component in sharing some of what I have experienced, even the experiences that are embarrassing or frightening. But, in the end, I am still far more drawn towards writing projects that are instrumental towards a practical end. If I were asked to consider spending time on writing projects that were ultimately just for me or about me, then I wouldn’t bother. It would feel like a waste of time, an indulgence that nobody should be lured into participating in or guilted into caring about.
This is not to disrespect those whose writings are more revelatory of their inner lives or those that have an interior, more confessional tone. There is very much a place for those writers and their writings, and I appreciate so much those writers who usually write nonfiction and who then choose to share about themselves in later life —the Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung did this beautifully in Chapter 6 of “Confrontation with the Unconscious” in the semi-autobiography, “Memories, Dreams, and Reflections”, which was compiled by his longtime student and colleague in analytical psychology, Aniela Jarré.
It should be noted that Jung was initially reluctant to share his own inner development or personal experiences in this book. Well into his 80’s when Jarré began to interview him for the book, he did not see the value of sharing his outer experiences and personal history until they got deeper into the process some months later.
As Jarre states in the introduction,
“All of us were well aware that the task would by no means be an easy one. Jung's distaste for exposing his personal life to the public eye was well known, Indeed, he gave his consent only after a long period of doubt and hesitation.”
Jarré explains in the book’s introduction that after a period of time, Jung was able to appreciate the connections between his spiritual outlook, theories of analytical psychology, and his inner life and self development throughout his decades on Earth, and was able to acquiesce to Jarré’s requests that he share some of his personal experiences.
This is something I can relate to.
So far on the Ground Experience pages, I have mostly remained academic in tone and kept my focus on non-personal elements of the ideas I am exploring, sharing only experiences related to the aftermath of the tragic loss of a close loved one. This was a choice I consciously made due to the intimate connection between that event and my work as an educator and the conversations about related issues now taking place among people throughout the English-speaking world.
As I’ve stated elsewhere, I hope to find the time and heart-space to examine that tragedy in more detail in later chapters in which I plan to argue that the experience of this event does not in anyway grant me access to special wisdom or insights into the nature of reality, human psychology, or political solutions, nor does it grant me the right to have my voice heard above others on the social and political issues related to the event.
This writing, if I am fortunate enough to have the opportunity to attempt it, will be a clear and unambiguous argument against the over-application and totalizing influence of the doctrine of lived experience—the idea that suffering or oppression automatically grants a higher level of knowledge to those who have lived through the experience of this suffering or oppression—and how this doctrine when held tightly—can interfere with the integrity of process and healthy relationships between groups of people that are needed to craft effective public policy. The chief framework that informs the idea that those with lived experience have more wisdom on the issues related to the lived experience is called standpoint theory, which is something I would like to explore in the future, feeling quite confident that illuminating the drawbacks of this theory will be helpful for readers who want to find ways to neutralize the power of this very popular idea.
So, that writing will be largely instrumental in the sense that even while I will be offering descriptions and narratives that are personal in nature, the overall aim will be for the writing to be of practical use to the audience I am seeking to reach.
Writing for the Audience I Want
Given all that I’ve just said… who, then, is my audience?
And why would they have any interest in reading what I have to say?
To address these questions, I would like to introduce the readers to Peter N. Limberg, a Stoic philosopher who writes a newsletter called “The Stoa” and conducts podcasts related to living in accordance with the principles of Stoic philosophy. In a remarkable piece called “Write for the Audience You Want, Not the Audience You Have”, Peter has this to say about who a writer is writing for and the need to stay true:
“Writing for an audience one aspires to have will engender a different mode of writing than what occurs when one writes to their current audience. Embodying this principle is necessary for those afraid of being ‘audience captured,’ the phenomenon where neediness for audience approval compromises a creator’s integrity.”
He goes on to explore in this piece the essential task for writers to make room for a certain amount of attrition (the falling away) of some members of their audience as long as the writers remain authentic to their unfolding experiences, evolving views, and new understandings. Some audience members might choose to drop off because they may have outgrown the writer’s outlook or because they have lost interest in the themes the writer has explored, already having investigated the themes long enough to let go of them.
Still, others might have chosen to move on to other pastures because the writer appears to have turned towards a direction that no longer interests the audience member or has begun to travel down new rabbit holes that the audience member finds objectionable or to not in be alignment with the values that originally attracted the audience member to the writer’s output.
Limberg also covers the question of just who our audience currently is and who we hope to attract to our writing. Towards the end of this short piece Limberg confidently shares the values and even character of his own readers—the target audience he has and the one he wants.
Here is a short passage excerpted from his description:
My audience consists of [people who] are intellectually humble yet bold at the same time. Unafraid to offer explicit critiques on foolish propositions, they lovingly criticize one’s character, while being senseful of the sociopaths lurking in digital corners ready to evilly prey on any sign of weakness. They possess power literacy and thick skin and are not easily triggered because they lack the political daddy or mommy issues prevalent among the Culture War Left and Right. With transperspectival capacities and wholesome vibes, they are interested in holistic development.
This description speaks to me.
From what I’ve seen so far, I think the audience I began with and the audience that has recently come around (albeit in small numbers) consists of people who generally lean liberal in the sense that they are open to dialogue and new ideas, and have an abiding interest in seeing a healthy, just, and free society in which oppression and injustice is greatly reduced and in which freedom of thought, inquiry, expression, and speech is consistently summoned in the service of that vision.
Epistemic Humility
I would also add that it is my hope that the audience I currently have and the one I am writing for are interested in further developing in themselves what some call epistemic humility—a relationship to understanding that can be considered a foundation for what Limberg is calling intellectual humility.
As I understand it, the word epistemic (as the adjective for the word epistemology) is related to the way we see, experience, and understand the world—how we come to know what we know. By remaining humble about what we think we know about the world and how we arrive at this knowing, we stand the best chance of engaging others who have a different epistemic sense of the world from the one that we have—something that factors quite large in the development of worldviews and ideologies and the extent to which different people are attracted to their respective ideologies.
There is a related concept called epistemic injustice, which has gained ground in recent years in social justice discourse. Epistemic injustice comes into play when the insights born from the lived experiences of people who belong to groups deemed marginalized (e.g. sexual and gender identity minorities, Black, neurodivergent, women, physically disabled, developmentally challenged, etc.) are not included in the development of society’s cultures, norms, laws, policies, and ongoing collective knowledge. Epistemic injustice is said to occur in all societies at some points in history and involves the centralization of the “dominant group” over other groups in what is allowed to be made visible, known, and valued; and what is to kept invisible, ignored, or actively silenced—the epistemic wisdom that is said to be born from the lived experience of groups that have been either passively set aside or actively pushed to the margins.
It is beyond the scope of this essay to go into the details of this ideological concept, but I want to mention it here because I want to make the point that when we apply concepts like this one in a totalizing way, we are not allowing other variables to be included that could very well have an important influence on our capacity to solve real world problems. For example, if we reject the accumulated knowledge around the mechanics of engine combustion and how carbon dioxide is released in favor of the indigenous ways of knowing (the epistemology of indigenous people) related solely to the environmental and psycho-spiritual impact on real world communities of engine combustion, we risk not finding scientifically sound ways to create alternative energy sources. We also risk falling into the moral and scientifically suspect area of group identity essentialism (see an earlier post about this here), which assigns intrinsic good and bad character traits and cognitive and perceptual capacities to entire demographic groups.
That is, by reducing the accumulated knowledge of engine combustion and other scientific concepts, for example, to “white” ways of knowing (white epistemology) and calling it “bad”, we risk losing the benefits of that knowledge while also reducing individuals of different groups to caricature, including indigenous people of color, who are then seen as cartoon characters of all-wise shamans, magical wood dwellers, and always peaceful (see this Aeon article on the “African Enlightenment”, which informs us that so-called “Western values” existed on the African continent long before the writings of European figures like Emmanuel Kant, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume, John Locke, and others). We also have to factor in the purported “Western” ways of knowing (like engineering) that had to have gone into the precision stone-cutting and organization of human and natural resources that built the Great Wall of China and the Egyptian pyramids and served the development of ancient Mesopotamian cuneiform writing, mathematics and other purportedly indigenous forms of knowledge to see how untenable the idea of different “ways of knowing” is when applied in a totalistic way to entire demographic groups.
With just a cursory glance at historical documents and inventions from around the world, we can easily dispense, too, with the idea that there is such a thing as so-called “White Supremacy Culture” (being on time, love of the written word, politeness, detail orientation), which is an example of applied group identity essentialism theory on steroids.
To put it all this in the simplest way…
When we apply oversimplified theories to a complex reality in a totalizing way—we are hypnotizing ourselves into becoming further disembodied from the world as it actually is—which has often led to breathtakingly negative outcomes throughout world history (and this assertion requires no hyperlinks).
This leads me to another description of the audience that Peter Limberg seeks to reach in his writings.
Embodied Theoreticians
In the second part of the description of his target audience, Limberg describes another aspect of the character of his readers with a phrase that deeply resonates with me and hopefully will resonate with the audience that I am writing for: “the role of embodied theoreticians”. These are people who are willing to give a respectful hearing to theoretical models, frameworks, ideas, concerns, policy proposals—even entire ideologies—while also maintaining a healthy respect for what Helen Pluckrose calls “evidence-based epistemology”, the willingness to investigate ideas and patterns through an empirical lens without relying on an ideology or theory as the sole mediator of what is true and what is not true (for more on this, the reader might be interested in the branch of philosophy called Radical Empiricism which was championed by the famed 19th century Harvard philosopher William James).
In other words, the most likely audience would likely include those who hold in high regard the practice of evidence over narrative and who might be willing to change their minds when confronted with previously unknown facts, allowing for personal growth and contributions to society that are more directly valuable for a greater number of people.
Disembodied Theoreticalism: a Central Theme
The main reason why the term embodied theoretician resonates with me is likely to be obvious to readers who have read a fair amount of my output over the past few years. I have grown quite skeptical over the years of what I have come to call disembodied theoreticalism, the habit of spinning theories out of theories to such an extent that the dehumanization of large swaths of people becomes entirely justified in the eyes of the theories’ true believers who have taken these theories on in their entirety.
Up to now, I have mostly used the term Critical Social Justice (CSJ) theory in these writings because it is a neutral descriptor term that is used by both CSJ followers and their critics to refer to the theories that are currently of most concern to me. But, I am beginning to warm up to the term “social justice fundamentalism”, which was recently used by Greg Lukianoff in a recent essay called “The mental health consequences of social justice fundamentalism” critiquing the abstract ideological fixations emerging out of extreme versions of intersectionality theory, and by Tim Urban in a Free Press podcast about the ways in which this form of fundamentalism has taken over colleges and universities.
This 2023 podcast is featured on the Free Press YouTube channel, “Honestly with Bari Weiss”. Weiss left the New York Times in 2021 because she felt at the time that the paper of record had been ideologically captured by what Tim Urban calls “social justice fundamentalism” and that she could no longer call this newsroom a safe home for open inquiry and honest investigative reporting1.
As many readers are by now well aware, the problem of social justice fundamentalism has been a main through-line in almost all of the writings in Ground Experience, and so it’s fair to say that the audience that occasionally checks back in will likely share some of this skepticism and hopefully appreciate some of the ideas I share from scholars and advocates who are working to roll back the polarizing impact of this form of fundamentalism. The main rollback strategy, of course, is the sharing of updated information and perspectives that haven’t made their way to people in the circles that have the most influence over society’s cultural norms, institutions, and (increasingly) official public policy.
In a way, disembodied theoreticalism can be said to be one of the most central themes of the Ground Experience newsletter. Though I haven’t used the term for this newsletter until now, I did begin using it in 2019 after a winter in which we witnessed the ease with which the public fell for the hoax hate crime that was perpetrated by Jussie Smollet, the gay Black actor who pretended to have been attacked by Trump supporters wearing MAGA hats in the middle of a frigid night in Chicago; the unfair canceling and public bullying against Nick Sandmann, a mild-mannered 16-year-old high school student who was falsely accused of harassing an elderly Native American man during a “March for Life” event organized by Sandmann’s school, Covington Catholic High School; and similar events in the United States and other countries. This was also the winter when Gillette initiated a new marketing campaign in which razor commercials stigmatized men and masculinity in alignment with the most extreme stereotypes forwarded by followers of ideology-based women’s empowerment movements.
It was the winter in which we were able to see how theory that is dislodged (disembodied) from the facts on the ground can find its full expression in the dehumanization of disfavored demographic groups; the instillment of fear and suspicion about people and events through the spread of ideology-induced disinformation; and the practical and sometimes devastating effects on actual people.
A winter in which social justice fundamentalism broke out into the mainstream public in the form of social justice evangelism, which left many victims in its wake.
It’s interesting to note that according to the search results of a new online Large Language Model (LLM) program called Perplexity (the popular term for LLMs is Artificial Intelligence or AI.), almost all of the questions posed about the content, tone, and themes of the Ground Experience newsletter yield similar results, many of which point to the central theme of how rigidly held ideologies and frameworks can cause us to see others as less human and deserving of mistreatment (i.e. what I have now introduced in this essay as disembodied theoreticalism). The most succinct summary of the Ground Experience newsletter can be found at this link of the Perplexity AI search results that one of my editors sent to me. For interested readers, other Perplexity search results about the content of Ground Experience can be found here, here, here, here, and here).
Although much of my critique around the over-application of ideology has been focused on the left side of the political spectrum due to this side being my home base (which means therefore that the left has a more immediate an impact on my real world experiences in many different settings), I think it’s important to acknowledge that disembodied theoreticalism has historically been responsible for some of the worst abuses and human rights violations perpetrated by individuals, groups, movements, and governments that can reasonably be labeled extreme “right wing” or "conservative” in their outlook.
I will be exploring ideologies from the right side of the political spectrum in a future piece about the entitlement mindset of the “Rightful King”, a concept I borrowed from Dr. Erec S. Smith in his book “Critique of Antiracism in Rhetoric and Composition”. One need only look to the atrocities committed in the name of Christianity, white superiority, and the racial theories of the Nazis to see how far away from humanity disembodied theoreticalism can take us no matter where we are on the political spectrum.
And that brings me to the purpose of my taking the time to write this essay about the writing process itself; the reason why I started this Ground Experience Substack page; and why I believe long form essays can be helpful in contributing to rolling back bad ideas and therefore to building a more just and benevolent society.
Long-form Essays in a World of Short-term Memes
Now, at the final stretch of this essay on the way to part 2, I want to talk briefly about what I hope is useful about a piece of writing of this length (maybe not this one necessarily, but you get the idea!).
I once read that “it’s all ab-stract, until there is an ab-stract”, which I take to mean that we need to write our ideas down in a thoughtful, organized and methodical way, so that we can thoroughly, systematically, and accurately describe problem scenarios with an eye on finding and implementing practical solutions that are based on a more complete analysis rather than just a simple gloss-over of the basic facts at best and childish sloganeering at worst.
For me, long form essays are a necessary ingredient in building understandings (and sometimes entire movements!) that seek to reduce polarization and enhance our ability to search for, discover, and appreciate the many nuances that are present in societal problems. Like the “abstract” or summary descriptions of important findings we read in major academic papers, research studies, dissertations and governmental reports, the long form essay format can help people sort out the details of what is troubling them and begin to formulate ideas that can bring things to a resolution.
One of the main benefits of long form essay writing is that it provides an opportunity to carefully unpack slogans, headlines, names of movements, and other seemingly simple culturally influential artifacts that often spread like viruses throughout society.
And these viral artifacts have a name: memes.
Most people who have read this far know all about memes, so I will ask them to bear with me as I do the ‘teacher’ thing and summarize the meaning just so we’re all on the same page.
Here goes.
The original meaning of the word meme is not to be confused with the square images with text that we find on social media or the popular figures we find in these images such as the alt right Pepe the Frog icon, which was originally drawn as an innocent non-political character designed by comic artist Matt Furie (see this documentary “Feels Good Man” for the fascinating history of this meme and why its creator sought to distance himself from it).
When it comes to culture, social movements, and even policy-making, memes are so much more. They are simple ideas (the moon landing was staged, Jews are shifty, America is a Christian nation, all white people are racist) that are transferred from one mind to another and sometimes from millions of minds to millions of other minds.
The word “meme” was coined by British evolutionary biologist, zoologist, and author, Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. In a 2013 Wired article, a meme (or what some call a mind virus) is described in the following way:
The word -- which is ascribed to an idea, behaviour or style that spreads from person to person within a culture -- has since been reappropriated by the internet, with Grumpy Cat, Socially-Awkward Penguin and Overly-Attached Girlfriend spreading virally, leaping from IP address to IP address (and brain to brain) via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.
Eventually, with the advent of social media, the average travel time involved in the memetic journey of an idea from one mind to another vastly accelerated as the distance traveled now happens through instantaneous news and commentary, hyperlinked posts, user comments, and images sent out into the world via YouTube, Tik Tok, Rumble, Instagram, Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), and many other online platforms, resulting in large numbers of people sharing the same belief and information about people and events (whether accurate or not) in almost no time.
And the consequences for societal cohesion could not be overstated.
According to Peter Limberg (mentioned above), the rapid spread of memes has contributed to massive cultural shifts and tribal rifts, which he outlines in another remarkable piece he co-authored with Conor Barnes in 2018 called The Memetic Tribes of Culture War 2.0. This white paper examines the power of the viral (memetic) ideas that began emerging in the 2010’s from major culture-wide events and how these ideas contributed to the further balkanization of political, social, and cultural “memetic tribes.”
In that piece, Limberg and Barnes posit the necessity for individuals in society to become “memetic mediators”, where each of us undertakes the responsibility to travel between different political, social, and cultural tribes to learn the language, norms, and values of each tribe in the hope that we can translate the deepest held concerns and possible overlaps of those concerns between the different tribes—thus mediating the conflicts and bringing each side closer to the lived experience, reality, and perception of those on “the other side.” For more on this concept, there is another piece I put out in 2021 called "The Freedom to Err • Mediating Reality Across Tribal Perceptions," which encourages readers to adopt an approach to mediating tribal conflicts by contemplating or “getting into the bones” of the experience of those we feel are different from us.
Jonathan Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory offers practical tools for this kind of mediation. For instance, if a memetic mediator is working to bridge the gap between a tribe that prioritizes the moral foundation of liberty vs. oppression and another that values sanctity vs. degradation, they can craft messages that address both concerns. That is, if we as memetic mediators can learn to understand the values that are prioritized by various tribes, we can discover integrative solutions that can appeal to a broader audience, thereby fostering a more cohesive and less polarized society.
And, above all, we can learn to translate our newly found understanding into practical action.
Contemplative Writing and Instrumental Action
At last, I’ve just about reached the end of Part 1.
I originally hoped to write something shorter as a friendly hand wave to Ground Experience readers to say “hey, people, I am still alive and I swear I’ve been working hard on the research and writing I am planning to put out for this newsletter!” But, as luck would have it, I was moved to say much more about why I feel the need to write these kinds of essays and how the contemplative approach to looking into societal issues helps me personally and professionally and how long form essays in general can inform the instrumental actions people take when they choose to make contributions in the real world.
Sometimes, I can get too far ahead of myself and go down rabbit holes I had not originally intended. But, in the end, I have to accept the fact that this approach is a means for me to sort through not only what is on my mind in terms of problems in society but also the need to find some coherence in my thought process around the competing ideas, ideologies, and seemingly contradictory values that I have been influenced by due to my immersion in many different memetic tribes.
And I recognize that this can all be a bit much, too (for myself and for the reader!).
Limberg, once again, offers a warning about the tendency to get lost in ideas in a way that is disembodied, indulgent, and separate from concrete reality in a recent Substack piece appropriately titled, “The Mind: A Dangerous Neighbourhood.” It’s something that I am on the lookout for, and I want to share the following passage because I think it sums up this pattern succinctly and accurately:
Many people’s minds are borrowed minds—a muddled mess of premises from various incompatible traditions and schools of thought, what David Chapman calls a “thought soup.” Other people's minds are true labyrinths, making them prisoners of their fear-inspired thoughts. Some of these mind prisoners manage to make their labyrinths coherent enough to seduce others into getting lost and locked in. These are the so-called “galaxy brains” who have developed various TOEs (theories of everything), secretly motivated by a desire to trap other minds, making the world feel less lonely for themselves.
But, while this warning is something I and many others who spend a good amount of time online should seriously take into consideration, I continue to believe that there is a place for exploring ideas and theories (including theories of everything!).
This is because I believe that contemplative writing, if produced from a place of sincerity, rigor, and humility can help provide a moral foundation for instrumental action.
In a global society in which ideological frameworks that claim to have the end-all-be-all final “truth” about all of reality have been rapidly spreading, it has become necessary to offer up expanded frameworks that transcend and include those ideologies, or at least to offer up comprehensive arguments that can best counter the ones that have taken hold of millions of minds. And we have to ensure that the arguments we offer up are fair, sophisticated, and persuasive enough to neutralize the stranglehold that dangerous and divisive ideologies have on our society’s discourse so that we can help to ward off the disastrous consequences that surely await us in the absence of cooler, less disembodied heads prevailing.
To be effective in this endeavor, we need to become more meta-ideologically informed (contemplative) as well as more willing to engage people on the seemingly opposite side of our political, cultural, and social world views (instrumental). This requires us to go down various rabbit holes and to contemplate the complexities of different world views long enough for us to develop the ability to appreciate the overlaps that exist between different systems of thought (this is often called commensurability in formal philosophy) so that when we do engage with others, there is a chance for that engagement to be productive.
Meta-ideology is a term coined by dialogue and depolarization coach, Ryan Nakade, the founder of Ruminant Resolutions, an organization that “works with governments, non-profits, and civic leaders to bridge divides and make communities more resilient to conflict” using the approach of meta-ideology. He is also the co-founder of the podcast Meta-Ideological Politics and conducts diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) workshops where he employs complexity theory and deradicalization techniques to help communities work towards depolarization, sometimes helping individuals in a variety of movements to walk back from the ledge of violent extremism. Nakade has much to offer in the conversation around depolarization, and I hope readers will have a chance to investigate his work. As a primer, I recommend two podcast episodes, Meta-Ideological Politics to Confront Extremism and The Antidote to Extremism: Meta-Ideological Politics.
Concluding Thoughts
This essay, part one of a series, has been about the process of contemplative writing and its potential impact on instrumental action in the world of human relationships and policy-making on the scale of small communities and on potentially much larger scales, including international communities. For the most part, I’ve been examining things from an abstract level with an eye on instrumental action, which is something I had to work out for myself to gain some clarity and coherence about how I see the world and what I believe I should be doing in the world.
Over the next several parts of The Wages of Disembodied Theory, I will examine these ideas further from the meta-ideological angle and from a more concrete angle, zeroing in on my work as a reading and writing instructor and member of several committees in a small technical college that serves more than 76 per cent students of color. One of the areas of the teaching life I will be exploring is the question of how I can best contribute to a community that is situated within a geographical region in which adjacent communities, government agencies, political leaders, and architects of public policies are heavily influenced by Critical Social Justice (CSJ) theory and practice.
Out of the need to protect confidentiality in accordance with my contract and out of respect for my colleagues, I will only be sharing ideas and challenges faced by K-12 schools and higher education in general and publicly available knowledge about the college’s change initiatives in the same way I did in the February 2023 piece I posted about why we should be investing in Minority Serving Institutions.
Part of my experience in discovering the most appropriate instrumental actions in a world in which the values of disembodied theories are considered foundational can best be summed up in Ryan Nakade’s insightful advice. He recommends that when we are engaged in depolarization work with people from any side along the political spectrum who are radicalized to a high degree, we have to commit ourselves to learning how to “look for openings in their ideology to plant seeds of deradicalization.”
Usually the opening is that they genuinely care about people they feel they are protecting, which is always a good place to start in seeking common ground, because wherever we are on the political, cultural, or social spectrum, we too genuinely care about the people we are protecting.
For the most part, I can only report that so far I have done my best towards this end and that I will continue to do my best. But going forward, self-care and the commitment to honoring my limitations will need to play a larger role in my life and work, because, as we will see, walking between the raindrops in a world in which strong ideological currents reign supreme can carry a great cost for those who have chosen to walk that path.
There are wages.
NEXT: The Wages of Disembodied Theory • Part 2 • Challenging the Belief in a Pervasive Malevolent Force
FOOTNOTES
Fortunately, the New York Times is beginning to come back to the sensible middle as evidenced by this recent interview with executive editor Joe Kahn who has indicated that since 2020, the paper has gone “too far” in its partisan advocacy and strayed away from the original journalistic ethics that guided the paper.
Couple this development with the recent Washington Post editorial that argues against forced DEI statements and Bill Maher’s defense on the television show “The View” of the reasons other than “bigotry” that Trump voters have for supporting his candidacy (namely the extreme practices and policies that the fundamentalist social justice left has introduced into the everyday curriculum of students and the Federal agencies’ adoption of positive discrimination under the name of racial and gender equity), there is cause for hope that a more mature and nuanced approach to discourse will eventually win the day