At a time when our identities are increasingly reduced to caricatures and simplistic cycles of polarizing tit-for-tat, EHI board member Scott Gibbs offers a formidable challenge to the way we understand our fractured world. Scott typically authors EHI’s monthly Existential Moment, but this month I am stepping in as a guest contributor to review his passionate, brilliant, and methodical new book, Toward the Turning: Rethinking the meaning of 9/11, the clash of civilizations, and a postmodern world.
At the heart of the book’s inquiry, echoing Nietzsche, is the specter of nihilism, not simply disbelief, but the erosion of sufficiently sustaining values and meanings. For Gibbs, the groundless ground of this vacuum leaves us susceptible to a slide toward rigid identities, authoritarian certainties, and polarized camps that promise refuge from the vertigo of existence.
Against this existential backdrop, one of Gibbs’s notable contributions is his recasting of conflict not as a clash between fixed enemies but as a “deadly dance” in which identity, fear, grievance, and retaliation continually call forth one another. The construct asks us to see how responses that appear justified in isolation can perpetuate, even worsen, the larger cycle of action and reaction and how oblivious we can be to our own role in sustaining these cycles. By shifting attention from isolated perpetrators and victims to the relational processes in which they—indeed we—participate, Gibbs opens a demanding path toward accountability, understanding, and transformation.
The scope of this undertaking is striking. Gibbs examines traditional religious traditions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) and modern, secular identities (e.g., American, Zionist) to better grasp the relational context and enduring reverberations of 9/11. He searches beneath these disparate systems for the shared dynamics and lands on the groundlessness that fuels polarization and hardens into absolutism and demonic fervor.
At its deepest level, Gibbs’s “turning” begins with recognizing a fundamental misapprehension: we mistake process for substance, emergence and unfolding for fixed reality. We take the fluid, relational process of selfhood for a stable “thing” and the worlds we inhabit for self-evident realities. The turning asks us to acknowledge this folly, face the groundlessness it conceals, and accept rather than flee or fix it. This movement from reification toward accepting groundlessness makes Toward the Turning a profound treatise, rich with fresh insights and compelling recommendations for a world gone awry.
~Kirk Schneider, PhD, EHI Co Founder and President
About Our Guest Contributor: Kirk Schneider, PhD, is a psychologist in private practice, an author of numerous books and publications, and adjunct faculty at Saybrook University and Teachers College, Columbia University. Kirk Schneider’s latest books are The Vibrant Center: A New Consciousness for Our Broken Age and Life-Enhancing Anxiety: Key to a Sane World.
Related Workshop:
Scott will be facilitating an online EHNW Lunch-n-Learn on September 11th where he will be discussing the topic of this book. Hosted by our friends at Existential-Humanistic NorthWest in Portland. More Info & Registration
Scott’s New Book:
Find out more about Toward the Turning on Scott’s website.
Related Blog Posts:
Explore all the Existential Moment series posts on EHI’s blog.
Existential Moment Author: Scott Gibbs, LMFT, EHI Board Member-at-Large | Website: www.mscottgibbs.com | Twitter: @Novum_Organum
