On Enchanted Flatland: Iain McGilchrist & the Problem of Romantic Liberalism

A follow-up to my contribution to Rosy Cross: Question of Right & Truth of Christianity

May 03, 2026

The Matter With Things, Iain McGilchrist — David Fuller & Iain McGilchrist - Rebel Wisdom 2021

Abstract

Serving as a prolonged reflection and sequel to my contribution to the Philosophy Portal Books anthology Rosy Cross: Question of Right and Truth of Christianity (April 2026), this essay extends a specific critical methodology to the study of romantic liberalism. While my earlier work in Rosy Cross mapped the intellectual lineage from Michael Brooks to Cadell Last —probing the tensions between Žižekian-Hegelian thought and right-wing cultural critiques—the present analysis pivots to examine the philosophical infrastructure of the so called “meaning crisis”. I focus on the work of Iain McGilchrist, identifying his contributions as the primary intellectual pillar for the contemporary liminal web and/or meaning-making web.

The trajectory of this argument begins with Galen Watts’s sociological diagnosis of romantic liberalism as the spiritual-religious framework of the educated liberal class. It then incorporates Daniel Tutt’s recovery of Lukácsian critique and applies the analytical framework of IACT (Integral Awareness and Commitment Training). This critical path leads toward a constructive horizon shaped by the work of Jürgen Habermas, Georg Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, and Fred Dallmayr. This constructive turn is further developed through Stephen Maher’s Corporate Capitalism and the Integral State and held in conversation with Michel Bauwens’s Breaking the Third Information Barrier, which complements my own contribution in the Rosy Cross collection.

Intended as a companion to the anthology, this work articulates a new form of integral humanism—post-secular, integral-pluralist, in service of human flourishing—that functions as a fourth political theory. While this project mirrors Aleksandr Dugin’s recognition that twentieth-century ideologies—traditionalism, conservatism, liberalism, communism, and fascism—are obsolete, it derives its legitimacy from divergent sources. Unlike Dugin’s reliance on ethnic identity and traditionalist metaphysics, my new articulation of integral humanism synthesizes the work of Maritain, Dallmayr, and Habermas with Canadian speculative philosophy and contextual behavioral science. It affirms religious and spiritual inquiry as valid domains without collapsing them into ethnic identity or civilizational geopolitics. Ultimately, this essay advocates for a post-metaphysical approach to democratic life that recognizes how political-economic infrastructures determine the cultural availability of philosophical ideas.

Tags: Iain McGilchrist, Hemispheric Hypothesis, Raymond Tallis, Enchanted Flatland, Romantic Liberalism, Galen Watts, Robert Bellah, Lifestyle Enclaves, Jeremy Carrette, Richard King, Meaning Crisis, Liminal Web, Meaning-Making Web, Perspectiva, Jonathan Rowson, Tomas Björkman, Rebel Wisdom, David Fuller, Alexander Beiner, CIIS, Matt Segall, Integral Life, Ken Wilber, John Vervaeke, Brendan Graham Dempsey, Jordan Peterson, Jonathan Pageau, Daily Wire, Symbolic World, Charles Taylor, Instrumental Reason, Sean McGrath, Georg Lukács, Indirect Apologetics, Daniel Tutt, Emancipations, Psychoanalytic Marxism, Worldview Criticism, Antonio Gramsci, Traditional and Organic Intellectuals, Integral State, Stephen Maher, Corporate Capitalism, Institutional Marxism, Jürgen Habermas, Post-Metaphysical Philosophy, Communicative Rationality, Fred Dallmayr, Integral Pluralism, Richard Bernstein, Engaged Fallibilistic Pluralism, Jacques Maritain, Integral Humanism, Michel Bauwens, P2P Foundation, Commons-Based Peer Production, Karatani, Mode D, Michael Brooks, Matthew McManus, Postmodern Conservatism, Cadell Last, Philosophy Portal, Aleksandr Dugin, Fourth Political Theory, Michael Millerman, Guénon, Evola, Traditionalism, Steven Hayes, ACT, Hexaflex, IACT, Psychological Flexibility, Jonathan Haidt, Moral Foundations Theory, Integral Facticity, Enactive Fallibilism, Charles Sanders Peirce, Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, Merlin Donald, Recovery, Addiction, Guy Du Plessis, William White, Recovery Science, Charles Davis, Marc Lalonde, Michel Despland, George Grant, John Ralston Saul, Canadian Speculative Philosophy, New Integral Humanism, Metapattern Institute

Introduction

The present essay offers a deep and rigorous engagement with the work of Iain McGilchrist—specifically the hemispheric hypothesis introduced in The Master and His Emissary (2009), the metaphysical expansion of The Matter With Things (2021), and the supportive institutional network that has established him as a central philosophical pillar of the so-called liminal web and meaning-making web. This critique is born of genuine respect; as the most ambitious voice in the contemporary meaning-crisis discourse, McGilchrist’s project warrants a careful, thorough response. My approach is structural and political, aiming to reveal the inherent blind spots within his synthesis rather than ascribing ill intent or devaluing his contributions.

The diagnostic framework is summarized by the title. I originally coined the term enchanted flatland in “On God, Absolute Freedom, & the Post-Metaphysical Turn” (February 2026). It identifies the outcome of attempting re-enchantment without undergoing the rigorous post-metaphysical “crucible”. Such frameworks claim to reject left-hemispheric flatness, yet ultimately replicate it through different registers—whether transcendent naturalism, panentheism, process-philosophy, object-oriented ontology, dialectical materialism, etc. Though adorned with language of holism and depth, these systems remain structurally incapable of providing a grounded method for adjudicating truth claims within a pluralistic public sphere.

In his Literary Review assessment of The Matter With Things, Raymond Tallis identified a fundamental structural defect, characterizing the work as a “reductionist critique of reductionism.” This observation gets to the heart of “enchanted flatland”: an attempt to dismantle left-hemispheric reductionism using a method that inadvertently mimics the very characteristics it aims to transcend. By subordinating empirical science to broad metaphysical claims, it employs a subtle form of reductionism to bypass scientific limits. McGilchrist’s synthesis represents the most consequential and ambitious instance of this pattern in contemporary discourse. This maneuver sits structurally inside the irrationalist genealogy that Georg Lukács traced in The Destruction of Reason (1954), where the absolute elevation of intuition and the living whole against analytical-rational modes creates an intellectual climate available for political reaction. By reaching for re-enchantment through naturalist or panentheist registers without passing through the post-metaphysical crucible, such systems remain incapable of providing a grounded method for adjudicating truth claims within a pluralistic public sphere. Consequently, McGilchrist’s work functions as a form of indirect apologetics, producing the regressive resources required by the post-2016 right-wing cultural and political wave while lacking the disciplined epistemological architecture to protect first-person subjective and intersubjective depth from collapsing into an enchanted flatland or subtle form of reductive materialism.

I. Coming to McGilchrist

I first read The Master and His Emissary in 2010, a period coinciding with the conclusion of my studies at Concordia. The intellectual formation that informed my reading of McGilchrist’s work is documented at length elsewhere in my writing. For a fuller account, I direct readers to “Philosophy & Religion after Habermas“ (March 2026), the memorial essay I wrote the week Habermas died, and to “Between Facticity & Grace: On Habermas, Modernity, & Public Theology“ (April 2025), where I traced the convergence of Wilber and Habermas through my studies under Marc Lalonde and Michel Despland, and through the Browning-Fiorenza anthology that served as the central text on that convergence during that period. To summarize that trajectory: my father introduced me to Ken Wilber in 1998, and Wilber’s integral framework had been my primary interpretive lens for over a decade by the time I arrived at Concordia. Lalonde—whose 1999 Critical Theology and the Challenge of Jürgen Habermas: Toward a Critical Theory of Religious Insight emerged from his PhD under Charles Davis (1995)—was the figure who put Habermas’s post-metaphysical critique in front of me as the most serious challenge integral theory had to answer. The Wilber-Habermas dialogue opened at Concordia in those years has formed the substrate of my intellectual work ever since. Integral Facticity, conceived and named in 2017 during a self-directed return to Habermas alongside Bernstein and Dallmayr, is the synthesis I have been working out to hold both.

Reading McGilchrist in 2010 happened inside that dialogue, and the questions I was actively working on—Wilber and Habermas, Davis and Dallmayr, the post-metaphysical challenge to integral theory—sat at a different level than the cognitive-science argument The Master and His Emissary was making. Two figures shaped how McGilchrist’s book registered for me at the time.

Robert Bellah was the first of these figures. His work offered a sophisticated developmental analysis of religion as a historical and public phenomenon, viewing it as the fundamental mechanism through which human communities—moving from the axial age into the modern world—have structured their orientation toward ultimate concern rather than just a matter of private belief. During this period, The Robert Bellah Reader was an essential resource, and his 1964 essay on religious evolution, along with Beyond Belief, served as vital texts. Bellah’s study of the Tokugawa era opened a focus on Japan that later bridged into the Kyoto School and a renewed engagement with German Idealism. His work on modernization theory pressed a question that the rest of his thought kept returning to: modernization is not a neutral or progressive framework but is bound up with what secular modernity has inherited from religious traditions and what it systematically fails to recognize about that very inheritance. Bellah’s Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (2011) appeared the year after I finished reading McGilchrist for the first time. It is the book that retroactively supplied the structural framework I had been missing: a developmental-cognitive account of how the religious capacities Bellah had spent decades writing about sit upon a substrate of cognitive evolution running from primate episodic cognition through what Merlin Donald, in Origins of the Modern Mind (1993), names as the mimetic, mythic, and theoretic stages of human cognition. Bellah builds on Donald explicitly, and the Donald-Bellah architecture provides exactly what a hemispheric account needs to distinguish trans-rational contemplative depth from pre-rational immediacy in a developmentally disciplined way. That the McGilchrist framework fails to do this work—opting instead for a flattened binary of “good” right-hemisphere and “bad” left-hemisphere—is a load-bearing absence this essay addresses in Section VI. Bellah’s civic-sociological work runs alongside his developmental-evolutionary work and matters equally for the diagnostic this essay deploys: Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (1985), with Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, and Tipton, names the lifestyle enclave as the social form that the romantic-liberal moral imaginary produces under conditions of expressive individualism—a community organized around shared private leisure consumption, internally cohesive but politically disengaged. The first application of that framework within my published work appeared in “The Limits of Lifestyle Enclaves: A Critique of Integral Life“ (December 2024), critiquing the American integral community organized around the Integral Life platform, and initiating the analytical trajectory the present inquiry now extends to the broader liminal web and meaning-making digital ecosystem.

The second figure was George Grant, a religious-studies scholar at McMaster whose Lament for a Nation—the subject of my own essay by that title (”Lament for a Nation,” February 2025)—gave me the philosophical apparatus to read what was happening around me in real time. The 2008 financial crisis was still working through its devastating civic consequences. The 2012 Quebec student protests were two years off. The continental absorption Grant had diagnosed in 1965 was visibly accelerating, hollowing out the material base of Canadian sovereignty. This long historical arc—from Walter Gordon’s 1963 budget through the 1988 Free Trade Election and NAFTA to the Trump tariff war and annexation rhetoric of 2025–2026—is one I have worked through at length elsewhere, most recently in “Revisiting Lukács’s Destruction of Reason: On Trumpism & the Future of Canadian Sovereignty“ (March 2026), drawing on John Ralston Saul’s March 2026 Toronto address. Readers seeking the full historical analysis should turn there. McGilchrist’s hemispheric account, in 2010, was philosophically interesting on its own terms, but Habermas, Bellah, and Grant were the texts I was thinking from. They provided the civic, historical, and structural gravity that a purely cognitive or neuro-philosophical account lacked.

McGilchrist did not return to my reading until much later, and the path back was indirect. After Concordia I opted out of graduate school. The academy looked like a wasteland to me, and I chose to keep doing my own research independently rather than enter a graduate or doctoral track that would have constrained it. I enrolled in several online graduate-level health studies courses at Athabasca and founded the Canadian Institute for Human Services (CIHS) as an attempt to bring some threads of my research and interests together institutionally. To pay the bills, I founded Metapattern as a small managed-services provider, falling back on my professional IT skills; the IT work supported the independent research as it continued on its own track. From 2016 onward, the research took a substantive recovery turn through my correspondence with Guy Du Plessis and William White on integral approaches to addiction treatment and recovery — a domain in which Du Plessis's Integral Recovery and White's foundational recovery-science scholarship had opened the conceptual ground CIHS was attempting to develop institutionally, before financial conditions rendered that attempt untenable. It was during this period of independent work that the 2017 Bernstein/Dallmayr Turn took shape: a self-directed reading through which I worked out Integral Facticity and Enactive Fallibilism as the two synthesis concepts that would eventually structure the public archive after the Metapattern Institute's launch in November 2024.

Through all of this, McGilchrist sat exactly where I had left him in 2010. What brought him back was the wider cultural formation that began to acquire institutional shape after 2016—the discourse that adopted a rotating set of names over the years that followed: the intellectual dark web (IDW), the meaning crisis, the sensemaking web, the liminal web. I came to that formation first through Rebel Wisdom and David Fuller’s documentary engagement with the Peterson phenomenon, and then, tracing the threads backward, through Jonathan Rowson and Perspectiva. Perspectiva is the British infrastructure carrying McGilchrist’s philosophical project forward most seriously, and the publisher of The Matter With Things in 2021. The full institutional history of those formations—Rebel Wisdom, Perspectiva, their British anchor cluster, and the wider liminal web—is taken up in the body of this essay. The crucial point here is that what Watts’s Spiritual Turn names is the philosophical centre of gravity these formations distribute. Romantic Liberalism is what McGilchrist’s work ultimately serves.

The apparatus this essay deploys comes to me through two books that operate in the same diagnostic register Bellah named decades earlier. The deeper formative work is Jeremy Carrette and Richard King’s Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion (2005). Selling Spirituality is a sustained critique of the privatization, individualization, and corporate capture of religion through the discourse of “spirituality” in late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century neoliberal capitalism. It is a politically engaged critical-religious-studies work tracing how historical religious traditions have been reorganized into privatized, market-friendly cultural products, rendered instrumentally useful to corporate, educational, healthcare, and managerial regimes. For me, the book sat in conversation with the Bellah formation Despland had provided, and its account of this silent takeover runs directly into the political-theoretical formation I would come to inhabit through Michael Brooks and Matt McManus a decade later.

Expanding upon the groundwork laid by Carrette and King seventeen years prior, Galen Watts’s The Spiritual Turn: The Religion of the Heart and the Making of Romantic Liberal Modernity (2022) provides a deeper ethnographic and theoretical evolution of the maps first drawn in Selling Spirituality. Utilizing the frameworks of Bellah, Charles Taylor, and Émile Durkheim, Watts delineates the philosophical anthropology of a cultural shift originating in the post-1960s West—a move toward a deinstitutionalized, individualized, and experientially-centered spirituality. This paradigm has since crystallized into the primary moral imaginary for the educated liberal classes throughout the Anglophone sphere. Watts demonstrates, through rigorous ethnographic data, that this is a structurally coherent moral and metaphysical stance, possessing its own unique anthropology and inherent blind spots. I explored these themes with Watts during Episode 13 of the Integral [+] Facticity Podcast on Oct 15, 2022. The concept of Romantic Liberalism featured in this essay’s subtitle is a category defined by Watts, and it remains an exceptionally precise descriptor.

The structural dilemma is identified by Tallis, yet the political stakes inherent in this problem are articulated through a specific lineage of political theory that informed my diagnostic approach from 2018 onward — a lineage I came to through the recovery work that had also brought Peterson’s early material to my attention, and that led from Peterson outward to Michael Brooks and Matthew McManus. Engaging their work, I adopted an analytical framework rooted in three core diagnoses: McManus’s exploration of postmodern conservatism as a political byproduct of an era that has discarded rational adjudication; Brooks’s critique in Against the Web, which characterized the Intellectual Dark Web as a structured ideological endeavor rather than a mere disparate group of individuals; and a constructive vision for cosmopolitan socialism that addresses integral developmental concerns often ignored by the academic left. The development of this project was tragically interrupted by Brooks’s passing in July 2020, and my subsequent work has been dedicated to furthering the vision he initiated. This intellectual history is detailed in three of my previous essays: “A Lament for a Missing Element of Flowers for Marx: Michael Brooks’s Integral Vision,” “Towards a New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere,” and “A Rosy Cross of a Book.” The present inquiry into McGilchrist serves as a primary example of how the romantic-liberalism of the liminal and meaning-making web becomes manifest.

The release of the anthology Rosy Cross: Question of Right and Truth of Christianity (2026), edited by Cadell Last and O.G. Rose, serves as the occasion for this inquiry. Building upon the themes established in A Rosy Cross of a Book, this essay functions as a culminating extension of that previous analysis. While the earlier work examined the friction between Žižekian-Hegelian thought and the cultural right, I am now utilizing that same diagnostic apparatus to scrutinize the romantic-liberalism that serves as the anchor for the liminal and meaning-making web. Operating as a capstone, this essay is intended to be read alongside the anthology, where my own contribution appears as Interlude 1 between the volume’s two halves. The first half is opened by Michel Bauwens’s Breaking the Third Information Barrier; the substantive dialogue between Bauwens’s P2P work and the constructive horizon developed here is explored in detail within Section VII. Having previously traced the lineage from Michael Brooks to Cadell Last and identified the tensions between the Žižekian framework and the cultural right, I am now positioned to address what this apparatus reveals when applied to romantic-liberalism. For readers seeking the full scope of this conversation—including Cadell’s Real Speculations, the wider speculative-philosophical contributions, and the diverse theological registers of the second half—I encourage purchasing the book. The public debut of the anthology provides the context for this reflection, as I look back across the history traced in this introduction to ask what the McGilchrist case reveals within this broader conversation.

Philosophy Portal

Rosy Cross: Question of Right and Truth of Christianity

Philosophy Portal has been committed to released a body of written work that is connected to our course and conference processes. Today I am excited to announce the release of our fifth anthology: Rosy Cross: Question of Right and Truth of Christianity…

19 days ago · 17 likes · 1 comment · Cadell Last

II. Iain McGilchrist and the Hemispheric Hypothesis

Iain McGilchrist was born in 1953 and educated as a scholarship boy at Winchester College and then at New College, Oxford, where he read English, won the Chancellor’s Prize and the Charles Oldham Shakespeare Prize, and was elected a Fellow of All Souls—a fellowship he would hold three times across his career. He taught literature at Oxford for several years before retraining in medicine and qualifying as a psychiatrist. He served as a consultant and Clinical Director at the Bethlem Royal and Maudsley Hospital in south London, the most demanding clinical post in British psychiatry, and worked as a Research Fellow in neuroimaging at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. This biographical detail matters because almost no one in the contemporary discourse around the meaning crisis possesses comparable depth in both literary-humanistic and clinical-scientific formation. McGilchrist trained in poetry before he trained in psychiatry; the hemispheric hypothesis emerges from twenty years of clinical work alongside two decades of reading in philosophy, literature, and the history of art. The Master and His Emissary (2009) carried over six hundred dense pages of argument supported by five thousand citations, and it was reviewed seriously by major figures in neuroscience, philosophy, and cultural criticism. Mary Midgley wrote about it admiringly in The Guardian; Adam Zeman called it ambitious and absorbing in Standpoint; W. F. Bynum in the Times Literary Supplement described its analysis of brain function as a tour de force. The book has sold over two hundred thousand copies and continues to circulate as a serious intellectual touchstone across a wide ideological range.

I want to register clearly, before everything that follows, that McGilchrist is a joy to read. His prose possesses a literary intelligence and a fineness of attention that almost no contemporary academic writer can match. The aesthetic pull of his writing is, in fact, central to its cultural power. He moves across cognitive neuroscience, ancient Greek philosophy, Renaissance art, late Romantic poetry, and contemporary phenomenology with an ease born of genuine learning rather than performed erudition. He is generous to his interlocutors, attentive to detail, and visibly serious about the matters he investigates. For a modern reader alienated by the sterile mechanics of contemporary bureaucratic life, reading McGilchrist feels like a profound exhalation—a validation of the persistent intuition that the world is richer, deeper, and more intensely alive than instrumental reason permits. When I returned to him—coming back through Rebel Wisdom, Perspectiva, and the wider conversation that grew up around him after 2016—I read him with the profound pleasure that accompanies watching a careful mind at work. The Matter With Things (2021) is even more ambitious: a two-volume work running close to fifteen hundred pages, drawing on more than five thousand cited papers, attempting nothing less than a comprehensive philosophical case for the priority of attention, relation, and value in the structure of reality. It is the most ambitious work of philosophical synthesis the wider Liminal-Meaning web has produced, and its commitments are sufficiently rigorous to be engaged on their own terms. The present essay does exactly that. The diagnosis I press is structural and political; it does not depend on diminishing what McGilchrist has built.

The hemispheric hypothesis itself, as McGilchrist articulated it in 2009, is far more careful than popular reductions suggest. McGilchrist is explicit that the older pop-psychology of left-brain-versus-right-brain—analytical man versus creative woman, logic versus feeling—has been thoroughly discredited and that nothing in his argument depends on those caricatures. His claim is not that the two hemispheres do different things, but that they do the same things in fundamentally different ways: each hemisphere brings a different kind of attention to the world, and those two kinds of attention give rise to two different ways the world shows up. The right hemisphere attends broadly, contextually, to the unique and the embodied, to what is implicit, metaphorical, and present; the left hemisphere attends narrowly, abstractly, to the categorized and the manipulable, to what is explicit, propositional, and re-presented. Both hemispheres are involved in everything we do; the asymmetry lies not in the possession of capacities but in the style with which capacities are exercised. From this, McGilchrist builds his thesis: healthy cognition requires the right hemisphere to be the master and the left hemisphere to be its emissary, with the right’s broad contextual seeing in charge and the left’s narrow analytical work in service to it. He argues that Western civilization since Plato has progressively reversed this relation, and that the contemporary world—bureaucratic, mechanistic, alienated, abstracted from embodied reality—is the result of the emissary having usurped the master. The book closes with the warning that we may be witnessing the final triumph of the left hemisphere at the expense of us all.

McGilchrist’s hemispheric hypothesis makes a specific philosophical move with a clear precedent in the Canadian intellectual tradition I came up in: the parallel I want to draw is with Charles Taylor. Taylor’s career as a philosopher began with his 1964 thesis at Oxford, The Explanation of Behaviour, which remains one of the most sustained philosophical critiques of behaviourist psychology written in the twentieth century. The argument Taylor made there, refined across his career and brought to its fullest articulation in Sources of the Self (1989) and A Secular Age (2007), is that reductive accounts of human behaviour—accounts treating human beings as systems of stimulus and response, or as input-output mechanisms describable in third-person scientific terms without remainder—fail to capture what is essential about human life. Human beings are self-interpreting animals who exist within frameworks of meaning, oriented by qualitative distinctions about what is good and worth caring about. We live within what Taylor calls moral sources and social imaginaries that situate us in relation to something larger than instrumental utility. The proper method for understanding human life, Taylor argued, is hermeneutic rather than naturalistic: it requires interpretation of meaning rather than the discovery of causal regularities.

The cultural diagnosis Taylor builds on this foundation is that modernity has progressively closed the cosmos into what Taylor calls the immanent frame, evacuating the qualitative horizons within which human action used to be intelligible and leaving us with a thinned-out picture of ourselves as preference-satisfying agents in a value-neutral universe. This is precisely what Taylor detailed in The Malaise of Modernity (1991): the loss of meaning, the eclipse of ends in the face of instrumental reason, and the resulting loss of freedom to the “soft despotism” of a hyper-managed, technocratic society. Instrumental reason—the kind of rationality that calculates the most economical application of means to a given end without judging the value of the end itself—is the core pathology Taylor diagnoses. The result is not the loss of any particular belief, but the loss of the framework within which beliefs about what matters can be intelligibly held.

Read against Taylor, McGilchrist is recognizably making the exact same kind of move, merely translating the philosophical diagnosis into neuroanatomy. McGilchrist’s main target in The Master and His Emissary is scientific materialism—the picture of the world as inert matter mechanically interacting, with consciousness treated as either epiphenomenon or illusion. The hemispheric hypothesis, on McGilchrist’s account, is what gives that materialism its grip: scientific materialism is the world as the left hemisphere alone presents it when the right’s contextual seeing has been suppressed. What Taylor calls instrumental reason, McGilchrist calls the left hemisphere’s manipulative grasp. The cure, in both frameworks, is not to abandon science but to restore a prior, more comprehensive orientation—to recover the kind of attention that sees the world as alive, related, value-laden, and continuous with the embodied perceiver. The argument mirrors Taylor’s structure flawlessly. Both writers critique reductive scientism by appealing to a more capacious account of the human and a richer account of the world the human inhabits. Taylor does it through hermeneutics and the recovery of the moral sources of selfhood; McGilchrist does it through neuroscience and the recovery of the right hemisphere’s mode of attention. Both make a philosophical-anthropological argument by way of a critique of method: Taylor asserts that the hermeneutic method is irreducible to the naturalistic; McGilchrist asserts that right-hemispheric attention is irreducible to left-hemispheric. Both are reaching, through that argument, for a re-enchanted account of reality—Taylor through the recovery of strong evaluations and constitutive goods, McGilchrist through the recovery of what he eventually articulates in The Matter With Things as a panentheist metaphysics in which value, consciousness, and relation are intrinsic to what reality is.

This parallel is why I have been able to use both Taylor and McGilchrist in my own work, and why the specific framework I have been developing—Integral Awareness and Commitment Training (IACT)—draws on both of them substantively. It is also why the diagnostic move the rest of this essay performs against McGilchrist applies, with appropriate modifications, to Taylor as well. Both writers, on the analysis I will press, fail to pass through the post-metaphysical crucible that Habermas put before integral theory through my teacher Marc Lalonde. Both writers reach for re-enchantment without adopting the disciplined epistemological architecture that would allow re-enchantment to be defended against the systematic confusions the integral apparatus and the Lukácsian apparatus are designed to detect. Taylor’s Catholic-philosophical version of the move is gentler, more historically mediated, and far more attentive to the ways modern identity has its own unique integrity rather than being merely a catastrophic falling-away from premodern wholeness. McGilchrist’s neuroscientific-philosophical version, by contrast, is more ambitious, more sweeping, and consequently vastly more available to the political downstream that Section V will diagnose. But both belong, ultimately, to the same structural category. I raise Taylor here because the parallel matters for what follows: the romantic-liberal formation Watts diagnoses, and the Lukácsian irrationalism Section V will press, run through Taylor as much as through McGilchrist—even though the Canadian intellectual tradition I belong to has historically held Taylor in a register of respectful regard that has insulated him from the kind of structural-political diagnosis his work also requires.

Prior to advancing the diagnostic critique, it is necessary to delineate the framework guiding my analysis, as the conceptual tools I will utilize against McGilchrist are rooted in it. IACT represents the structural framework I have refined through recent writings and within the short theoretical essay Bridging Minds & Souls: Towards an Integral Humanism Approach to Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) & Recovery (2024). This framework is detailed extensively there and serves as the essential architecture for the following investigation. In condensed form: IACT integrates Steven Hayes’s Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)—the most empirically supported third-wave behavioural therapy of the past three decades—with Ken Wilber’s integral theory (AQAL), Jürgen Habermas’s concept of facticity, and the contemplative traditions that Hayes’s behavioural framework necessarily reaches toward but cannot fully articulate from within its own resources. Hayes’s ACT operationalizes a six-process model of psychological flexibility—defusion, acceptance, contact with the present moment, self-as-context, values, and committed action—known as the Hexaflex. Psychological flexibility, on Hayes’s account, is the human capacity to remain in contact with present-moment experience, to hold thoughts and feelings as mental events rather than literal truths, to make room for difficult experiences without struggle, to access the witnessing perspective from which experience is observed, to articulate chosen values, and to act in service of those values even amidst difficulty. The framework is empirically rigorous, clinically effective, and developmentally flexible across cultural and religious contexts. While ACT provides a robust clinical methodology, it lacks an internal account of which kind of attention is doing the work across its various processes. To address this, the integral tradition supplies the deep philosophical and epistemological architecture required to ground the framework.

Wilber’s AQAL (All Quadrants, All Levels) names the structure that holds the four irreducible perspectives from which any human phenomenon can be approached: the individual interior (Upper Left, the first-person phenomenological domain), the individual exterior (Upper Right, the third-person biological-behavioural domain), the collective interior (Lower Left, the intersubjective cultural-hermeneutic domain), and the collective exterior (Lower Right, the systems-and-structures domain). Wilber’s later articulation of integral practice through Wake Up, Grow Up, Clean Up, Show Up names four developmental movements that constitute the work and praxis: Waking Up through state development and the recovery of nondual awareness; Growing Up through stage development across cognitive, moral, and interpersonal lines; Cleaning Up through shadow integration and the recovery of disowned aspects of self; Showing Up through embodied engagement and the translation of insight into committed action. What I add to Wilber, drawing on Habermas, is the concept of Facticity: the recognition that all this developmental work happens within the irreducible givenness of conditions—the body one has, the history one carries, the situation one inhabits—rather than in transcendence of them. Awakening, on the account I have been developing, is not escape from facticity but the cessation of struggle against it. The 4 I’s that organize IACT (I of Body, I of Mind, I of Soul, I of Spirit) map the Hexaflex processes onto the AQAL quadrants and the developmental movements such that each functional ACT process is held within an integral-developmental container.

This framework is testable. Enactive Fallibilism—the methodology I have been articulating in parallel, drawing on Charles Sanders Peirce’s pragmatism and Evan Thompson’s form of enactivism—treats the lived body as the empirical probe testing whether systems are sustainable. When a framework is working, it shows up in embodied experience: in cognitive clarity, in the capacity to remain in contact with present experience, in the ability to act from chosen values, and in stable access to the witnessing perspective. When a framework is not working, the body reports that too: in cognitive collapse, in fusion with verbal content, in the inability to access the observer self, in compulsive reactive behaviour. Since late January 2026, I have been conducting systematic auto-ethnographic documentation of my own experience across the IACT Hexaflex dimensions—daily capacity scores, somatic markers, sleep architecture, relational facticity—precisely because Enactive Fallibilism requires that frameworks be tested against the resistance of the lived body, not merely asserted from within a theoretical frame. This auto-ethnographic methodology makes the framework a falsifiable practice rather than a mere theoretical proposal. It is also what gives me a basis from which to assess where competing frameworks systematically obscure what they should be making visible.

This is the apparatus the rest of the essay deploys. The hemispheric hypothesis, taken on its own terms in The Master and His Emissary (2009), is a serious contribution to thinking about how attention, embodiment, and relation structure’s cognition. The Hexaflex’s six processes map productively onto the hemispheric work, with right-hemispheric attention bearing family resemblance to present-moment contact, self-as-context, and cognitive defusion. The cultural-historical extension of that hypothesis across Western intellectual history is fascinating and deserves the careful response it has received. The metaphysical extension in The Matter With Things (2021)—into a comprehensive philosophical synthesis claiming that consciousness is prior to matter and that reality is fundamentally relational and value-laden—is where the structural problem this essay diagnoses becomes legible. The IACT apparatus and the Lukácsian apparatus that follows can hold both moves. The first move (the 2009 book) survives the apparatus mostly intact. The second move (the 2021 expansion) does not.

III. Rebel Wisdom, Perspectiva, CIIS, and the Digital Public Sphere

Two years before The Matter With Things was published by Perspectiva Press in 2021, the institutional architecture that would carry it forward had already taken shape. The following history outlines the institutional context within which McGilchrist’s later work has been read, promoted, and culturally positioned. It matters deeply because the romantic-liberal formation Watts diagnoses operates through these institutions as the philosophical centre of gravity named in Section II. The institutional substrate is not incidental to the philosophical work; it is the physical and digital medium through which the philosophical work has been translated and delivered to its actual readership. It is the means by which a 1,500-page dense, neuro-philosophical tome is distilled into consumable sensemaking podcasts, ensuring a particular, highly functional reading of McGilchrist becomes dominant.

Perspectiva—Perspectives on Systems, Souls and Society—was conceptualized in late 2015 and formally co-founded in late 2016 in London by Jonathan Rowson and Tomas Björkman as a registered charity. Rowson is a British applied philosopher with degrees from Oxford, Harvard, and Bristol who served as British Chess Champion from 2004 to 2006 before transitioning to policy work at the Royal Society of Arts (RSA), where he directed the Social Brain Centre and authored the influential 2014 report Spiritualise: Revitalising Spirituality to Address 21st Century Challenges. Björkman is a Swedish entrepreneur who founded Investment Banking Partners AB and chaired EFG Investmentbank AB before turning to philanthropic-philosophical work through the Ekskäret Foundation, an initiative aimed at sustainable individual and societal development based on retreats hosted on Oak Island in the Stockholm archipelago. The institutional purpose Rowson and Björkman articulated for Perspectiva was to bridge a perceived gap between contemporary social-change organizations—which they argued were strong on systemic analysis but weak on the existential and developmental dimensions of human life—and the long traditions of contemplative practice, philosophical anthropology, and integral theory that policy work was failing to integrate. Perspectiva organizes its work through four thematic strands (Realisation, Insight, Praxis, and Emergence) and operates a publishing arm, Perspectiva Press, which produces what Rowson calls “soul food for expert generalists” in the form of short, intellectually dense books designed as durable cultural artifacts.

Rebel Wisdom was founded in late 2017 and launched in 2018 by David Fuller, a filmmaker and journalist with over a decade at Channel 4 News and the BBC, and Alexander Beiner, a writer and meditation teacher who co-founded Open Meditation in 2012. Fuller’s departure from mainstream British broadcasting was driven by a recognition that legacy journalism was institutionally incapable of treating the kinds of cultural-philosophical questions the post-2016 moment was making urgent. Rebel Wisdom built itself around a different model: high-production-value YouTube documentaries and conversations focused on what Fuller and Beiner called sensemaking—the work of interpreting accelerating cultural complexity through perspectives drawn simultaneously from cognitive science, contemplative practice, embodied somatic work, and heterodox political analysis. The platform’s early identity was inseparable from its coverage of Jordan Peterson, whose ascent to mass cultural visibility through 2017 and 2018 produced the discourse that would eventually be named the Intellectual Dark Web, the meaning crisis, the sensemaking web, and finally the liminal web. Rebel Wisdom’s coverage of Peterson was substantively engaged rather than reductively oppositional; Fuller and Beiner approached him as a serious cultural phenomenon worth understanding rather than as a culture-war target to be either defended or denounced.

The institutional convergence of Perspectiva and Rebel Wisdom was rapid. Rowson met Peterson in January 2018 at an RSA event, and his reading of the Peterson phenomenon—later articulated in his essay An Epistemic Thunderstorm: What We Learned and Failed to Learn from Jordan Peterson’s Rise to Fame—recognized in Peterson the symptom of a real cultural-developmental crisis to which the institutional left had no adequate response. During that same January 2018 period, Rowson chaired an RSA event with Peterson; shortly thereafter, Peterson recorded a half-hour conversation with Iain McGilchrist that was filmed and produced by Perspectiva—an exchange McGilchrist himself referred to as a “too-short exchange between two of the leading thinkers of our time.” The Perspectiva-Peterson-McGilchrist link was forged at that moment, and the subsequent eight years have elaborated rather than departed from it. McGilchrist appeared at the Rebel Wisdom Summit in May 2019 alongside Bret Weinstein, Heather Heying, and Jordan Greenhall, an event the Rebel Wisdom team explicitly framed as an experiment in immersive, participatory, and evolutionary conversation in the wake of the IDW’s first wave. The Matter With Things was published in November 2021 and was promoted through multi-part interview series on Rebel Wisdom in the months that followed. McGilchrist appeared as a featured guest on Jordan Peterson’s Daily Wire podcast in April 2024, in an episode titled What Your Left Brain Won’t Tell Your Right Brain. The conversation ran an hour and fifty-one minutes; the Daily Wire listing places it within the network’s content alongside the Ben Shapiro Show, Matt Walsh’s documentaries, and Michael Knowles’s commentary.

The American institutional cluster operates on a different infrastructure but elevates similar material. The California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) carries the Aurobindonian-integral lineage that began with the American Academy of Asian Studies in 1951 and the Cultural Integration Fellowship in the 1960s; CIIS’s Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program, founded by Richard Tarnas in 1994, has been the academic home of process-relational metaphysics in North America for three decades. Matthew David Segall, whose process-relational panexperientialism I engaged at length in On God, Absolute Freedom, and the Post-Metaphysical Turn, teaches in that program. CIIS’s institutional history runs through Esalen, Michael Murphy, Dick Price, Alan Watts, Frederic Spiegelberg, and Haridas Chaudhuri—a Pacific Coast lineage of speculative-cosmological thinking that has stayed alive in American intellectual life through decades when the broader academy made such ambitions professionally dangerous. Wilber’s Integral Life platform, the institutional center of the American integral movement, operates in the same orbit and shares much of the same readership. Together, these American institutions amplify a vision of consciousness evolution and cosmological re-enchantment that is genealogically related to but institutionally distinct from the British Perspectiva-Rebel-Wisdom cluster. The two cross over through shared figures such as McGilchrist, John Vervaeke, Brendan Graham Dempsey, and the broader meaning-crisis discourse.

The amplification mechanism across all three institutional clusters works the exact same way. McGilchrist’s hemispheric hypothesis, articulated in 2009 with all the careful neuroscientific qualification described in Section II, gets uncoupled from those qualifications and metabolized into a highly legible cultural narrative doing specific ideological work in a specific political moment. The narrative posits that contemporary modernity has been hijacked by a narrow analytical rationality that has lost contact with embodied, relational, value-laden reality; that the symptoms are bureaucratization, technocratic managerialism, alienated consumerism, secular materialism, and progressive ideological rigidity; and that the cure is the recovery of a richer, more contextual, more spiritually attuned mode of attention. This narrative’s core diagnostic insight is, in significant respects, correct. Modern Western life has indeed been impoverished by the dominance of instrumental rationality. The Frankfurt School diagnosed this in the 1940s; Charles Taylor diagnosed it in the 1980s; my own teachers Marc Lalonde and Charles Davis diagnosed it in the Canadian critical-theological tradition. The diagnostic is not new and is not wrong. What is happening in the McGilchrist-Perspectiva-Rebel-Wisdom-Daily-Wire amplification, however, is that the diagnostic has been uncoupled from the disciplined epistemological-methodological work that distinguishes a genuine post-metaphysical critique of instrumental reason from an irrationalist nostalgia for premodern wholeness. The amplification renders McGilchrist available as a resource for a particular cultural-political formation that the post-2016 right has been mobilizing. This mobilization is not what the 2009 book on its own terms licenses, but it is what the 2021 expansion, in conjunction with the institutional infrastructure carrying it, has made operationally and politically possible.

This cooptation is not a matter of explicit endorsement, and McGilchrist himself is not a partisan of the new right. In temperament and self-presentation, he is an introvert with a melancholic philosophical sensibility, more interested in poetry and contemplation than in political controversy, and his published work lacks the kind of explicit political claims that would lock him to any specific political program. What is happening, rather, is that the philosophical anthropology his work delivers—the picture of modernity as left-hemispheric usurpation, of contemporary ideological progressivism as the symptomatic cultural form of that usurpation, of re-enchantment as the cure—has been picked up by figures whose political projects do require an explicit political program. McGilchrist’s work has provided those projects with a philosophically respectable anchor.

Peterson’s appropriation of McGilchrist for the Daily Wire audience is the clearest case. Peterson’s project—after the controversies of 2016 and a subsequent decade of cultural production through 12 Rules for Life, Beyond Order, the Daily Wire podcast, and engagements with Russian state media, the Hungarian Viktor Orbán government, and the broader transatlantic right—has been the construction of a romantic-anti-progressive cultural formation. Drawing on Jung, Solzhenitsyn, selectively read religious traditions, and a specific reading of brain science, Peterson mounts a sustained critique of the post-1960s liberal-progressive consensus. McGilchrist’s hemispheric hypothesis, in Peterson’s hands, becomes the neuroscientific anchor for that critique, providing biological cover for a sociological agenda. The right hemisphere becomes the locus of the traditional masculine virtues Peterson valorizes—meaning, order, hierarchy, religious depth, embodied wisdom—and the left hemisphere becomes the locus of the progressive feminine pathologies Peterson opposes: abstraction, ideology, technocratic managerialism, cultural deconstruction. McGilchrist’s own framework does not require this reading, but the cultural-political wave Peterson is riding absolutely requires a foundation of this kind, and the McGilchrist framework permits it without resisting it.

The Pageau dialogue carries the symbolic-religious register on which Peterson’s reading of McGilchrist rests. Jonathan Pageau—the Eastern-Orthodox icon carver and Symbolic World founder who has been Peterson’s primary ongoing dialogue partner since 2017 on questions of symbol, narrative, religion, and meaning—supplies the theological content that Peterson’s reading of McGilchrist would otherwise lack. The right hemisphere as Peterson and Pageau jointly read it is not just a mode of attention; it is the locus of the symbolic patterns Pageau argues underlie all reality, and the McGilchrist framework provides the neuroscientific anchor for what Pageau articulates as a comprehensive Orthodox-Christian symbolic ontology. The 2022 Daily Wire+ conversation Deeper Yet Into The Weeds, the first three-way Pageau-Vervaeke-Peterson sit-down, made the convergence explicit. Pageau’s role in the formation matters deeply because the Symbolic World register is what licenses the move from McGilchrist’s careful neuroscientific qualifications to the comprehensive metaphysical-theological claims the formation makes available to its readership.

The Perspectiva and Rebel Wisdom institutional positioning is more complex and deserves careful understanding. Rowson, Beiner, and Fuller were not naive about the Peterson phenomenon, and by the late 2010s they were increasingly explicit about its hazards. Rowson’s Epistemic Thunderstorm essay diagnosed Petersonitis in real time, naming the audience-capture and ideological-rigidification dynamics that Peterson’s trajectory was exhibiting. Rebel Wisdom pivoted away from personality-driven IDW coverage in the early 2020s toward systems-theoretical and meaning-crisis material (Schmachtenberger, Vervaeke, Hall, the metacrisis discourse). In June 2022, Fuller and Beiner made the genuinely unusual decision to close Rebel Wisdom while it was still at its peak, explicitly to avoid the algorithmic and audience-capture dynamics they had diagnosed in others. The platform’s final event in November 2022 included Schmachtenberger and Vervaeke and was framed as a deliberate dissolution of the project before it could become what it had set out to critique. Perspectiva inherited the audience and institutional momentum, integrating it into its own four-strand architecture and continuing to publish and promote McGilchrist’s work alongside its broader meaning-crisis output. The institutional arc, taken as a whole, exhibits genuine self-awareness and significant epistemic agility; it is not the same kind of formation as the Daily Wire, and treating them as straightforwardly equivalent would be a mistake. What they share, however, is the centrality of McGilchrist as the philosophical anchor for the meaning-crisis diagnosis, and the complete absence of the disciplined post-metaphysical critique that would distinguish McGilchrist’s romantic re-enchantment—and the broader romantic-liberal formation Watts, Carrette, and King diagnose—from the irrationalist genealogy Section V will press.

The point of laying out this institutional history in detail is that the amplification structure is not a neutral conduit through which McGilchrist’s ideas reach a broader public. It is itself the institutional embodiment of the romantic-liberal formation Watts diagnoses. Perspectiva’s Realisation strand, organized around the Germanic concept of Bildung and culminating in the annual Realisation Festival hosted by the 12th Earl of Shaftesbury at his ancestral estate in Dorset, gathers the educated-liberal, spiritually curious, post-progressive readership that Watts identifies as the social bearer of the Romantic-Liberal moral imaginary. Rebel Wisdom’s audience, before its dissolution, was demographically and culturally continuous with that readership. CIIS’s location at the western edge of the post-1960s American counterculture, and Integral Life’s location within the post-1990s American integral movement, are continuous with the same broader cultural formation across the Anglophone world. The McGilchrist who reaches this readership is not the careful 2009 neuroscientist with three All Souls fellowships and a literary-philosophical formation in Oxford English; it is the 2021 metaphysician whose comprehensive philosophical synthesis underwrites the cultural diagnosis the readership desperately wants to receive. The institutions amplify the McGilchrist who serves the formation. That is the structural reality this section has established, paving the way for the wider liminal web ecosystem examination in Section IV before bringing the structural-political diagnosis to bear in Section V.

IV. The Liminal-Meaning Digital Ecosystem and Failure of Romantic-Liberalism

Sections II and III built the analytical pieces that this section now assembles. We must widen the object of study so the McGilchrist case becomes legible as one node within a larger ecosystem, and so romantic-liberalism can be seen as the philosophical centre of gravity that the ecosystem distributes. Section V will then bring the structural-political diagnostic—Lukács’s Destruction of Reason, recovered for contemporary critical theory—to bear on this landscape.

The wider liminal web — and the closely overlapping Meaning-Making Web that crystallized around the meaning-crisis discourse — as it has stabilized since Joe Lightfoot named it in 2021, organizes itself across four overlapping clusters with distinct national and institutional bases. The British anchor cluster runs through Perspectiva, through Rebel Wisdom while it operated, through the Realisation Festival at St. Giles House, through the Wheal-Hall-Schmachtenberger meaning-crisis network and the Stoa platform Peter Limberg organized, and through the wider Bildung-and-metamodernism conversation around Brendan Graham Dempsey, Layman Pascal, and the Dispatches from a Time Between Worlds anthology Rowson and Pascal edited for Perspectiva Press.

The Canadian cluster operates in two distinct strands. One strand—Peterson and Vervaeke, joined since 2017 by Jonathan Pageau—operates at mass-cultural scale and is the loudest single voice in the contemporary meaning-crisis conversation. This strand is supported by the Daily Wire programming infrastructure, by Vervaeke’s massive YouTube reach through the Awakening from the Meaning Crisis lecture series, by Pageau’s Symbolic World podcast, courses, and Symbolic World Press, and by the broader Toronto-centric network of psychologists, philosophers, and public intellectuals who have positioned themselves around the meaning-crisis discourse. The other Canadian strand—the critical-theological and speculative-philosophical resources operating against the formation from within Canadian intellectual life (Grant, Taylor, Armour, Davis, Lalonde, Sweet, McGrath, Trott, Saul)—is the position from which I write, and the position this essay advances.

The American cluster runs through Wilber’s Integral Life, through CIIS and the process-relational tradition, through the older meaning-crisis figures (Vervaeke’s and Hall’s American audiences), and through the IDW infrastructure that originated in 2016–2017 and has since fragmented and reformed across multiple podcast and Substack platforms.

Finally, three genuinely distinct left-of-centre clusters operate outside the liminal web ecosystem proper, to the left of it, with their own digital media ecosystem. The continental-Marxist cluster—Cadell Last and the Philosophy Portal, David McKerracher’s Theory Underground, the broader Žižekian-Lacanian-Marxist current that carries forward post-Brooks—works in continental-philosophical idiom. The analytical-Marxist cluster—Ben Burgis’s Give Them An Argument show, the Burgis-McManus collaboration that has formed around their joint book and podcast work, and the wider analytical-Marxist network in the tradition of G.A. Cohen extending through Matt McManus’s writing on postmodern conservatism and liberal socialism—works in analytical-philosophical idiom. The psychoanalytic-Marxist cluster anchored on Daniel Tutt and his Emancipations podcast and study collective, the Torsion Groups study-group infrastructure he has built, and his collaborators including Gabriel Tupinambá, Conrad Hamilton, and C. Derick Varn (Varn Vlog) —works in a register distinct from both continental and analytical clusters: psychoanalytic theory and Marxism in dialogue at the level of philosophy of praxis, with sustained attention to worldview-criticism and the irrationalist genealogy Lukács named. Tutt’s recovery of The Destruction of Reason is precisely what Section V draws on for the diagnostic apparatus this essay deploys. The three clusters are genuinely distinct in method and lineage. All three inform the political-theoretical formation I came to inhabit through Brooks, McManus, and Tutt’s Lukács recovery, which is part of why this essay exists.

Beyond the liminal web ecosystem proper, but operating in continuous traffic with its right-leaning strands, sits the New Right intellectual lineage anchored in Aleksandr Dugin’s fourth political theory. Dugin’s project is the explicit articulation of what the Peterson-Pageau-Vervaeke convergence has been gesturing at without naming: that the existing political-theoretical positions—liberalism, communism, fascism—are exhausted, and that what is needed is a fourth theoretical articulation operating from different ground than the three twentieth-century positions. Dugin’s specific articulation goes through the Guénon-Evola Traditionalist-esoteric lineage that Habermas was already diagnosing in the 1980s and that Matthew McManus has tracked with increasing precision in his work on postmodern conservatism: ethnos as fundamental subject, civilizational geopolitics, traditionalist metaphysics, postliberal-illiberal political orientation. The figure who has carried Dugin’s project from Russian into Anglophone political philosophy with the most sustained intellectual seriousness is Michael Millerman , whose Heideggerian reading of Dugin emerged from his University of Toronto PhD dissertation on Heidegger and was published as Beginning with Heidegger: Strauss, Rorty, Derrida, Dugin and the Philosophical Constitution of the Political (Arktos Media), followed by Inside “Putin’s Brain”: The Political Philosophy of Alexander Dugin (2022). Millerman has translated seven of Dugin’s books into English—including The Fourth Political Theory (as co-translator), The Rise of the Fourth Political Theory, Political Platonism, Ethnos and Society, and Theory of a Multipolar World—and Benjamin Teitelbaum has called him “the leading English-language interpreter of Dugin’s thought.” His digital infrastructure—the Millerman School, the Substack, the YouTube channel with over 36,000 subscribers—does for the New Right cluster what Perspectiva and the Daily Wire podcast network do for romantic-liberalism and its right-pole convergence: it is the Anglophone institutional carrier through which the philosophical project travels into the educated readership the formation orients toward. That Millerman writes from Toronto, from the same Canadian academic infrastructure that produced Peterson and Vervaeke, registers something the Canadian intellectual situation Section II identified makes legible: the Canadian tradition contains both the Lament for a Nation lineage from which I write and the Heidegger-Dugin lineage Millerman channels, with no shared ground between them. The convergence with the Peterson-Pageau material runs through the symbolic-religious register, the appeal to traditional civilizational forms, and the rejection of liberal proceduralism as the final horizon of political life. The New Right cluster operates to the right of romantic-liberalism and names the political-theoretical destination toward which romantic-liberalism’s structural ambivalences keep pointing without ever explicitly arriving.

What Watts’s Spiritual Turn names, and what Selling Spirituality named seventeen years earlier, is the philosophical-anthropological formation running through all four clusters as their common centre of gravity. The formation is romantic-liberal in the precise technical sense Watts develops at length: it draws on the post-1960s spiritual turn toward deinstitutionalized, individualized, experientially grounded religiosity; it operates within the broader liberal political framework of the educated middle class across the Anglophone world; it valorizes authenticity, depth, expressive individualism, and self-actualization as the core human goods; and it treats the recovery of meaning, spirituality, and purpose as the central cultural task of late modernity. Watts is careful to distinguish romantic liberalism from progressive liberalism—they are politically and culturally distinct, often opposed—but he demonstrates they share the underlying liberal moral framework, and that the differences between them are inflections within a single broader formation rather than fundamental disagreements about what human life is for. This formation is genuinely culturally generative. It has produced the wellness industry, the contemplative-revival publishing arc, the integral-spiritual conference circuit, the meaning-crisis podcast economy, and a substantial portion of contemporary popular religion in its non-institutional forms. On Watts’s analysis, it is the single most influential moral-metaphysical position in the contemporary educated-Anglophone world. The philosophical-anthropological work of figures like McGilchrist, Vervaeke, Dempsey, and Segall serves as the highbrow articulation of what the formation believes about itself.

What Selling Spirituality had already named in 2005 was the political-economic substrate of the formation. Carrette and King traced with considerable empirical detail the way the discourse of spirituality had been progressively privatized, commodified, and metabolized by neoliberal capitalism—turned into a market product, instrumentalized for managerial and corporate ends, and severed from the socially transformative dimensions of the historical religious traditions it claimed to draw from. Under neoliberalism, right-hemispheric modalities like mindfulness and flow states are stripped of their ethical demands and repurposed as corporate productivity hacks, stress-reduction techniques for burnt-out managers, or personal-brand enhancers for the creative class. Carrette and King’s diagnosis is sharper than Watts’s precisely because it foregrounds this political-economic mechanism: the formation is not merely a moral-metaphysical position with systematic blind spots, but a culturally productive arrangement of religious and spiritual resources serving specific political and economic functions in late capitalism. It is spirituality defanged of its capacity to challenge structural economic realities. Watts adds the ethnographic and theoretical depth that Selling Spirituality did not have time to develop. Taken together, the two books constitute the empirical substrate from which this essay’s diagnostic proceeds. The formation has its political-economic substrate (Carrette and King), its philosophical-anthropological articulation (Watts), and its highbrow-philosophical apparatus (McGilchrist, Taylor, Segall, McGrath, Vervaeke, Dempsey). It has its institutional carriers (Perspectiva, Rebel Wisdom, CIIS, Integral Life, the Daily Wire in its meaning-crisis register, the Liminal-Meaning web more broadly). And it has—though few of its participants would recognize this—its political downstream: the post-2016 cultural-political wave mobilizing romantic-liberal philosophical resources for an explicit political project that romantic liberalism itself, as a moral-metaphysical position, would not endorse but cannot recognize itself as enabling.

The Limits of Lifestyle Enclaves (December 2024), written as the first sustained public deployment of the diagnostic this essay extends, took up Robert Bellah’s Habits of the Heart category of the lifestyle enclave and applied it specifically to the American integral community organized around Wilber’s Integral Life platform. The argument was that what began as an integral movement aspiring to civic, intellectual, and spiritual transformation had progressively become a lifestyle enclave in Bellah’s precise sense: a community organized around shared private leisure consumption, internally cohesive but politically disengaged, religiously serious in form but entirely unable to translate its commitments into the public-sphere institutions through which democratic life is actually sustained. A lifestyle enclave retreats from the friction of structural politics into the comfort of shared aesthetic and spiritual consumption. The present essay extends that diagnostic at scale. What was true of the American integral case is true, in different inflections, of the British Perspectiva-Rebel-Wisdom cluster, of the CIIS-process-relational tradition, of the Vervaeke-Peterson mass-cultural strand, and of the broader Liminal-Meaning web ecosystem taken as a whole. The institutional infrastructure across all four clusters produces lifestyle enclaves at increasing scale, anchored philosophically by the romantic-liberalism Watts diagnoses, served philosophical-anthropologically by figures like McGilchrist, and completely unable to recognize themselves as such because the categories of analysis available within the formation cannot reach the structural-political level at which the diagnostic operates. That diagnostic is what Section V now lays out.

V. The Lukácsian Diagnosis: Romantic Liberalism as Heir to the Irrationalist Genealogy

The diagnosis I advance here is that the romantic-liberal formation Watts names—and the broader cultural-philosophical wave McGilchrist’s work anchors—sits structurally inside the irrationalist genealogy that Georg Lukács traced in The Destruction of Reason (1954). The argument is not that McGilchrist, Taylor, or Segall are conscious irrationalists or anti-democratic theorists. The argument is structural. The argument is that frameworks reaching for re-enchantment without passing through the post-metaphysical crucible—the crucible Habermas put before integral theory, the crucible Bernstein and Dallmayr brought into the Canadian register I work in—operate, regardless of authorial intent, as what Lukács called indirect apologetics. They produce structural consequences participants would themselves reject if those consequences were explicitly named. The Canadian critical-theological tradition I was trained in possesses the resources to name them; it is the tradition Davis and Lalonde and the Concordia formation gave me, and it is the tradition I extend into the diagnostic work romantic-liberalism has not yet been adequately subjected to.

Lukács wrote The Destruction of Reason in the late 1940s and published it in 1954 as a sustained genealogical analysis of the irrationalist tradition in modern philosophy. He traced this tradition from Schelling’s late turn through Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Bergson, Dilthey, the early phenomenologists, the Lebensphilosophie tradition, Heidegger, and on to what Lukács saw as the ideological substrate of National Socialism and the broader European reactionary politics culminating in fascism. The book has had a complicated reception. Its core method—tracing the political consequences of philosophical positions through the way those positions structure intellectual and cultural possibilities, regardless of authorial intent—is what makes it indispensable. Its specific accusations—particularly the claim that the entire post-Hegelian European philosophical tradition runs in a relatively continuous line toward fascism—have been criticized, with justice, as too sweeping, too reliant on Stalinist political categories, and insufficiently attentive to the genuine philosophical achievements of the figures it groups under the irrationalist banner. The recovery of The Destruction of Reason for contemporary critical theory, which Daniel Tutt has carried out across his recent work and which I deployed at length in Revisiting Lukács’s Destruction of Reason (March 2026), proceeds by retaining the structural-diagnostic method while loosening the Stalinist-political conclusions. What the recovered Lukács provides is a way of reading the political downstream of philosophical frameworks whose surface commitments may be liberal, humanist, or even progressive, but whose architectural structure produces consequences continuous with the irrationalist tradition Lukács named. Aleksandr Dugin’s fourth political theory—drawing explicitly on Guénon and Evola, the Traditionalist-esoteric currents Habermas was already diagnosing in the 1980s and that Matthew McManus has tracked in his work on postmodern conservatism—is the contemporary right-pole case where the genealogy Lukács traced surfaces in active political articulation.

The structural feature Lukács identifies as constitutive of the irrationalist tradition is the absolute elevation of intuition, immediacy, life, experience, and the contextual whole against the analytical-rational mode of thought characteristic of Enlightenment science and post-Kantian critical philosophy. The irrationalist move, on Lukács’s account, is not the rejection of reason as such—almost no major figure in the tradition rejects reason in any straightforward sense—but the subordination of analytical reason to a more primary mode of knowing that operates through immediate apprehension of the living whole rather than through conceptual mediation.

Bergson is the paradigm case Lukács gives the most attention to. Bergson’s distinction between the analytical intelligence that breaks the world into discrete static units and the intuitive durée that grasps the world in its continuous lived flow; his argument that scientific knowledge is necessarily distorting, that it spatializes the temporal, mechanizes the organic, and abstracts what can only be lived; his elevation of intuition over intelligence as the higher cognitive faculty: all of this forms the structural template that Lukács argues runs through the entire irrationalist tradition. The diagnostic claim is that frameworks built on this template, regardless of their authors’ political commitments, deliver to political reaction the exact philosophical resources reaction needs: the dismissal of analytical-critical thought as the intrusion of an alien rationalism into the organic life of the people, the elevation of vitalist and holistic alternatives as the recovery of authentic experience against its distortions, and the production of an intellectual-cultural climate in which the diagnosis of social pathology is structurally available only at the level of philosophical-anthropological depth rather than at the level of political-economic analysis. Why is the durée or “unmediated life” so politically dangerous in Lukács’s reading? Because if you claim immediate, intuitive access to the “living whole,” your claims cannot be rationally contested. You bypass the slow, procedural, analytical requirements of democratic deliberation (which requires the very analytical mediation the irrationalist framework rejects). Intuitionism invariably breeds authoritarianism because it removes the criteria for public adjudication.

Read with this template in hand, McGilchrist’s hemispheric hypothesis is Bergson translated into neuroanatomy. The right hemisphere, as McGilchrist describes it across both The Master and His Emissary and The Matter With Things, has all the features of Bergson’s durée: it grasps the contextual whole; it attends to the living, the unique, the embodied; it is continuous with relation, value, and meaning; it cannot be captured in the abstract categories of left-hemispheric analysis; it is the master whose proper sovereignty must be restored. The left hemisphere has all the features of Bergson’s intelligence: it is analytical, abstracting, mechanizing, manipulative; it cuts the living into static categories; it produces the world of scientific materialism, bureaucratic managerialism, and ideological abstraction; it is the emissary who has usurped the master and whose dominance produces the pathologies of modernity. The hemispheric hypothesis, on this reading, is not merely like Bergson’s intuition-versus-intelligence distinction. It is the exact same distinction, recast in the vocabulary of contemporary neuroscience and given a more sophisticated empirical apparatus. The structural work the framework does—what gets elevated, what gets subordinated, what gets named as the disease and what as the cure—is identical. McGilchrist’s framework is the irrationalist genealogy reassembled for a twenty-first-century readership.

The same structural diagnosis applies, with appropriate qualifications, to Charles Taylor. Taylor’s critique of behaviourism in The Explanation of Behaviour (1964) and his broader hermeneutic critique of the social sciences developed across the early essays culminating in Sources of the Self (1989) constitute recognizably the same kind of move. The naturalist-reductive sciences, on Taylor’s account, fail to capture human life because human life is constituted by meaning, by self-interpretation, by orientation within frameworks of strong evaluation—and these constitutive features are accessible only through hermeneutic methods operating within the lifeworld rather than from a third-person scientific standpoint outside it. The diagnosis is structurally parallel to McGilchrist’s: a reductive method has flattened a richer reality, and the cure is the recovery of the richer mode of access. Taylor’s sources are different—Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Hegel, Aristotle, Catholic moral philosophy—and the political register he operates in is far more careful, far more historically mediated, and far more attentive to the integrity of modern selfhood than McGilchrist’s. A Secular Age (2007) is a vastly more nuanced book than The Matter With Things, and it does not produce the same political downstream that McGilchrist’s work has been pulled into. But the structural form of the move is the same. Both are romantic-liberal in Watts’s sense: both reach for the re-enchantment of a thinned-out modernity through the recovery of qualitative dimensions of human life that reductive method has excluded. Both have, in different registers, the same vulnerability to the diagnostic Lukács provides. Sean McGrath and Matt Segall, whom I engaged at length in recent essays, are working in adjacent registers and are subject to the same diagnostic. They differ in surface vocabulary, intellectual lineage, and political emphasis, but they share with Taylor and McGilchrist the structural form: re-enchantment without the post-metaphysical crucible.

Here is where the indirect apologetics concept becomes fully operational. Lukács’s term names the precise mechanism by which a framework can perform political work that its author neither intends nor would endorse. The framework operates indirectly: not by explicit advocacy for a political position, but by structurally producing the philosophical-anthropological conditions under which a political position becomes available, plausible, and culturally generative. An author may intend only to write a book on neuroanatomy or phenomenology, but the text generates affordances that reactionary politics inevitably seizes. McGilchrist’s framework, in conjunction with the Perspectiva-Rebel-Wisdom-Daily-Wire amplification structure, performs indirect apologetics for the post-2016 cultural-political wave that has variously been called the new right, the postmodern conservative formation, the meaning-crisis right, and the integral right. The framework provides the philosophical-anthropological resources that wave needs to anchor itself: a critique of progressive modernity as left-hemispheric usurpation; a valorization of right-hemispheric depth as the site of genuine cultural authority; a vocabulary of re-enchantment that can be fluidly translated across spiritual, religious, and traditional registers; a developmental story about the trajectory of Western civilization that licenses the recovery of premodern wholeness against modern alienation. None of this is what McGilchrist himself is actively doing; all of it is what his framework makes available. And it is precisely what the institutional architecture of Perspectiva, Rebel Wisdom, the Daily Wire podcast network, Integral Life, CIIS, and the broader Anglophone meaning-crisis discourse has been amplifying for the past eight years.

The diagnostic capable of recognizing this is not available from within the framework itself. Internal critique of McGilchrist on his own terms can identify particular factual errors, quibble about whether the hemispheric science as he describes it is fully consistent with current neuroscience, or ask whether the cultural-historical extension is well-evidenced. None of these critiques reach the structural problem. The structural problem is that the framework cannot recognize itself as a node in the irrationalist genealogy because the irrationalist genealogy is precisely what the framework’s vocabulary makes invisible. It inverts Lukács’s diagnostic, treating the analytical-rational mode as the disease and the intuitive-vitalist mode as the cure, and so cannot diagnose itself by Lukács’s method. The integral apparatus (IACT, AQAL, the Hexaflex, Integral Facticity) acts as a partial corrective by forcing the question of which kind of attention is doing the work and refusing to collapse the four quadrants into one. But the integral apparatus on its own can be assimilated by romantic-liberal frameworks as one more set of categories within the broader project of re-enchantment, as the American integral movement around Wilber and Integral Life has frequently demonstrated. What is needed is an integral critique of the framework on its own terms—which Section VI takes up—combined with the constructive horizon Habermas, Lukács, Gramsci, and Dallmayr collectively open onto in Section VII. None of those tools individually does the work; together, in dialogue with Bauwens’s P2P work, they allow the diagnostic move I am pressing to recognize the romantic-liberal formation as what it structurally is, regardless of what its authors and audiences understand themselves to be doing.

VI. The Integral Critique of McGilchrist

Section V brought the Lukácsian diagnostic to the romantic-liberal formation as a whole. This section turns that work toward McGilchrist’s specific framework through the integral apparatus laid out in Section II. What follows is the integral critique of McGilchrist—the deconstructive moves the IACT apparatus makes available—set down briefly and concretely before the constructive horizon Section VII opens.

The integral critique I press here has been pressed before, against a different target. In Can the Real Wilber Please Stand Up?, I argued that the epistemological structure supporting Whiteheadian panexperientialism is insufficient — that it has adopted the surface features of the post-metaphysical turn without fully internalizing its demands. The result was what I called enchanted flatland: richer and warmer than materialist metaphysics in denial, but still unable to protect first-person subjective depth or contemplative awareness as irreducibly its own. The same diagnostic carries directly to McGilchrist’s framework. Wilber’s own critique of Whitehead identified three structural failures of process philosophy: an excessive concreteness that reduces complex consciousness to atomic occasions of experience, missing the continuity and depth of conscious life; a missing hierarchical structure that focuses on process itself rather than the developmental stages through which consciousness unfolds; and a Pre/Trans Fallacy that conflates pre-rational with trans-rational engagement. McGilchrist commits the same three failures in a different idiom. The right hemisphere becomes the atomic occasion through which meaning is made and the world is encountered. The master-emissary narrative is a story of cultural-historical oscillation without a developmental hierarchy of consciousness: no archaic, magic, mythic, rational, pluralistic, or integral structuring of the trajectory it describes. And the framework’s celebration of right-hemispheric attention cannot tell the difference between regression and transcendence, between enchantment that expands consciousness and enchantment that collapses it. McGilchrist is to neuroscience what Whitehead was to physics: phenomenologically richer than the reductive picture he correctly diagnoses, but missing the post-metaphysical architecture that would protect what the right-hemispheric mode of attention actually discloses.

McGilchrist’s hemispheric framework, read through the AQAL apparatus, exhibits a structural absence of Cleaning Up. The framework articulates a developmental story—Western civilization moving through cultural-historical phases as the master-emissary relation oscillates and finally inverts—but it has no account of the shadow dimension of the right hemisphere, and no methodology for recognizing what right-hemispheric attention itself excludes, suppresses, or projects. The right hemisphere, as McGilchrist describes it, is uniformly elevated. The framework valorizes its mode of attention without any corresponding developmental work to integrate the shadow side of right-hemispheric capacities. What is the shadow of the right hemisphere? It is the tribal boundary, the in-group loyalty that overrides universal ethics, the submersion of the differentiated individual back into the undifferentiated mass, the susceptibility to charismatic fusion over rational deliberation. This matters deeply because the romantic-liberal formation that the framework anchors requires the very shadow integration the framework fails to provide. The formation’s own pathologies—the spiritual bypass, the political quietism, the consumerist absorption of contemplative traditions, the inability to translate spiritual commitment into public-sphere institutions—are precisely the right-hemispheric shadow material that the framework’s wholesale elevation of right-hemispheric attention cannot recognize. Without a mechanism for Cleaning Up, right-hemisphere “holism” quickly degenerates into communal fusion.

The framework also exhibits the categorical confusion between states and structures that the integral apparatus is designed to detect. McGilchrist treats the right hemisphere as if it carried both the pre-rational immediacy of pre-conceptual experience (which is a state) and the trans-rational depth of contemplative wisdom (which is a structural achievement of long-developed cognitive maturation). These are categorically different. Pre-rational right-hemispheric immediacy is what a small child accesses before the developmental work of cognitive structuring has occurred; trans-rational right-hemispheric wisdom is what a contemplative practitioner accesses after decades of developmental work has built and integrated the analytical-rational capacities the small child does not yet possess. Wilber’s pre-trans fallacy, articulated across the integral literature for forty years, is the specific diagnostic that catches this confusion. McGilchrist’s framework collapses the two: it treats right-hemispheric attention as such as the locus of authority, without distinguishing the pre-rational from the trans-rational forms it takes. We see the consequences of this vividly in the wider meaning-crisis discourse, where a romanticization of indigenous, ancient, or pre-modern cognitive states frequently occurs without acknowledging the structural-developmental scaffolding (Waking Up and Growing Up) required to hold trans-rational insights sustainably. The result is that the framework’s recommended cure for left-hemispheric usurpation—the recovery of right-hemispheric primacy—cannot distinguish a recovery of trans-rational contemplative depth from a regression to pre-rational immediacy. The amplification of the framework through the institutional infrastructure of Section III has, in many of its applications, made the regression far more available than the recovery.

Furthermore, the framework exhibits what AQAL calls the total absence of Lower-Right structural analysis. The cultural-historical narrative McGilchrist tells about Western civilization runs almost entirely in Upper-Left and Lower-Left registers: the interior of individual cognition and the interior of cultural meaning. Ideas drive history in his account. The political-economic infrastructure that actually structured the trajectory of Western modernity—the Lower-Right of capitalist development, brutal colonial expansion, industrial transformation, capital accumulation, financial capture, and the algorithmic manipulation of platform capitalism—appears only intermittently and is treated as entirely downstream of the cultural-cognitive shifts the hemispheric story foregrounds. The Habermasian-Gramscian work that Section VII takes up reverses this entirely: the political-economic infrastructure is not downstream of the cultural-cognitive shifts, but rather constitutive of the very material conditions under which particular cultural-cognitive formations become available, plausible, and reproducible. The integral apparatus on its own can name the absence of Lower-Right analysis; the integral apparatus combined with the Habermasian-Gramscian work in Section VII supplies what is missing.

Beneath the structural absences sits a deeper one: McGilchrist’s framework lacks the zone-differentiated epistemology that the post-metaphysical turn requires. The Master and His Emissary makes neurological claims (about hemispheric specialization), phenomenological claims (about how the world is encountered through different modes of attention), cultural-historical claims (about Western civilization’s trajectory), and ultimately metaphysical claims (about what reality fundamentally is). These are claims in genuinely different domains, with genuinely different testability conditions, requiring genuinely different methods of verification. Wilber’s 8 Zones architecture insists that every claim identify its domain and its testability conditions before it can do the work the framework asks of it. McGilchrist runs all four registers together: the neuroscience of hemispheric asymmetry slides into the phenomenology of attention, which slides into a cultural-historical narrative, which slides into a metaphysical position about the participatory nature of reality. None of this involves the post-metaphysical work of locating which kind of claim is being made where. The result is that local strengths in one register get used to authorize claims in registers where they have no purchase. The neuroscience cannot warrant the metaphysics; the phenomenology cannot warrant the cultural-historical narrative; the framework’s rhetorical architecture nonetheless allows each to lend gravity to the others. This is the same epistemological underhousing I identified in process philosophy. Without the zone-differentiated apparatus, the framework cannot locate itself, and therefore cannot tell when it is overreaching.

The structural critique can now be stated plainly. The framework cannot diagnose itself because the categories of analysis available to it are precisely those its position in the romantic-liberal formation produces and rewards. Gramsci’s distinction between traditional and organic intellectuals acts as the analytical instrument here: McGilchrist functions as a traditional intellectual in Gramsci’s precise sense. He does not understand himself as class-positioned, his work lacks explicit class-political claims, and the categories he operates with are presented as transcending any particular cultural-political formation. But the categories are exactly those that the romantic-liberal formation produces, and the work performs the cultural-hegemonic function the formation requires. The “Decoding the Gurus” tradition of secularist-skeptical critique cannot reach this level of diagnostic because it operates at the wrong level: it asks whether McGilchrist’s empirical claims are well-supported, whether his cultural-historical extensions are persuasive, whether his metaphysical conclusions are warranted. None of those questions touch the structural-political diagnosis.

The genuine Lacanian-Žižekian critique—the critique I engaged in A Rosy Cross of a Book and that runs through Cadell Last and the Philosophy Portal—names something real about the absence of Cleaning Up and the framework’s inability to integrate its own shadow material. However, it does not yet reach the structural-political diagnosis either, because the Lacanian-Žižekian apparatus is itself trapped at the level of philosophical-anthropological critique and lacks the Habermasian-Gramscian-Dallmayrian tools that make the political diagnosis fully operational. The work the integral critique cannot do alone—the structural-political diagnosis the framework cannot perform on itself—is precisely what Habermas, Lukács, Gramsci, and Dallmayr together make available, and is what Section VII turns to.

VII. The Constructive Horizon: Toward a New Speculative Left

With the integral critique established, the diagnostic work of this essay is complete. What remains is the harder work: not a better diagnosis, but a constructive horizon. The romantic-liberal formation’s structural problem is not a wrong metaphysical synthesis but the substitution of metaphysical synthesis for the political-philosophical and institutional work that genuine democratic public life requires. The path out is not a better synthesis. It is a radically different posture toward what philosophy is for in democratic life. This section identifies the resources I have been drawing on for that constructive work—Habermas, Lukács, Gramsci, and Dallmayr, in dialogue with Michel Bauwens’s P2P work—and points toward the new speculative direction for the left, these resources collectively open.

The synthesis I have been articulating in recent essays—most directly in Revisiting Lukács’s Destruction of Reason (March 2026), Towards a New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (August 2025), Philosophy & Religion after Habermas (March 2026), and A Rosy Cross of a Book (August 2025)—runs through four thinkers whose work supplies what the constructive horizon requires, but which no single one of them can supply alone. The four are Habermas, Lukács, Gramsci, and Dallmayr. This work is in progress; what follows is its working-register articulation.

Jürgen Habermas’s work enters in three registers. The 1962 Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere names what is at stake: the historical emergence of the bourgeois public sphere as the institutional space where private citizens come together to discuss matters of common concern through reasoned debate, and the subsequent transformation of that sphere through the rise of mass media, the commercialization of culture, and the structural shifts in twentieth-century capitalism that progressively eroded the conditions for genuine public-sphere discourse. The mid-period work—particularly the two-volume Theory of Communicative Action (1981) and the post-metaphysical writings of the 1980s and 1990s—names the philosophical-methodological discipline that any framework entering democratic public life must clear: the discipline of submitting all claims, including religious and spiritual ones, to the critical examination of intersubjective communicative reason, while simultaneously refusing to reduce all rationality to instrumental calculation. The post-metaphysical, post-secular threshold Habermas articulated through his late dialogue with Cardinal Ratzinger, and his subsequent work on religion in the public sphere, distinguishes a genuinely critical engagement with religious-spiritual resources from the romantic-liberal evasion of disciplined critique. Finally, the 2022 New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere names the contemporary form of the colonization: the digital structural transformation through which platform capitalism has restructured public discourse such that the conditions for the bourgeois public sphere as Habermas originally described them have been structurally undone. The algorithmic manipulation of attention by corporate platforms actively prevents the intersubjective reasoning Habermas champions. Habermas’s work in all three registers anchors the constructive horizon: it names what is at stake, what discipline any framework entering democratic life must clear, and what the contemporary digital substrate has done to the institutions through which democratic life is sustained.

The diagnostic utility of Lukács’s Destruction of Reason, which has been revitalized over the last ten years by Daniel Tutt and his contemporaries to transcend its initial Stalinist constraints, was applied in Section V to scrutinize the romantic-liberal paradigm in its entirety. This methodology remains vital because it uncovers the structural political consequences inherent in philosophical systems, irrespective of an author’s conscious objectives. As previously established, the romantic-liberal structure is fundamentally embedded within an irrationalist lineage. Utilizing a Lukácsian lens exposes a reality obscured from within the formation itself: when re-enchantment is pursued without the necessary post-metaphysical rigour, the prevailing institutional frameworks of modern discourse end up providing the very philosophical foundations essential for political reaction. This critique is not dependent on identifying reactionary motives in specific writers; rather, it relies solely on the structural investigation facilitated by Lukács’s approach.

Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, written in fascist Italian prison between 1929 and 1935, supplies the third element. Gramsci is the indispensable theorist of how irrationalist formations become institutionally reproduced through what he calls the integral state: the dense network of cultural, educational, religious, and intellectual institutions through which a class formation reproduces its own ideological substrate as common sense. The integral state is not the legislative-administrative state narrowly conceived; it is the wider network through which political society and civil society interpenetrate, such that the cultural-hegemonic work of reproducing a class formation’s worldview happens across an institutional ecology far broader than the formal apparatus of government. Gramsci’s distinction between traditional intellectuals (who present themselves as autonomous from class formations but whose categories of analysis are produced by their class) and organic intellectuals (who self-consciously articulate the perspective of a class formation) provides the analytical key. The romantic-liberal formation is reproduced, in Gramsci’s framework, by traditional intellectuals—figures like McGilchrist, Taylor, and the broader meaning-crisis discourse—who do not understand themselves as class-positioned but whose work performs the cultural-hegemonic function the educated-liberal class requires. Gramsci’s analytical resources let us see this clearly without requiring the conspiracy-theoretical move of attributing the reproduction to a single agent or institutional decision.

Stephen Maher’s Corporate Capitalism and the Integral State: General Electric and a Century of American Power (Palgrave, 2022) is the contemporary extension of Gramsci’s apparatus that does the work the present diagnostic requires. Maher’s institutional-Marxist framework develops the integral state as the wider network through which state power traverses and interpenetrates state bureaucracy, legislature, industrial policy apparatus, and corporate governance—the institutional networks through which, as Alfredo Saad-Filho puts it in the book’s reception, corporate power is transformed into class power. Maher’s archival case study of General Electric tracks the integral state across three periods—the finance-capital period (1880–1930), the managerial period (1930–1979), and the neoliberal-financialization period (1979–present)—showing the state as active organizer of the political power of the capitalist class rather than passive responder to interest-group pressure. What Maher’s account makes available, beyond the Gramscian framework on its own, is the contemporary institutional analysis the present moment requires: the integral state as it actually operates in advanced corporate capitalism, with the cultural-hegemonic infrastructure progressively absorbed into platform capitalism’s algorithmic substrate. The diagnostic extends across the Anglo-American transatlantic. Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom are all suffering from forms of the integral state Maher anatomizes—the structural transformation that the late Habermas was already diagnosing in the 2022 New Structural Transformation, the colonization of the public sphere that Saul has been tracking in the Canadian case for three decades, and the institutional capture that Brooks’s Against the Web and McManus’s work on postmodern conservatism document on the right-pole side of the formation. The Liminal Web, Perspectiva, the Daily Wire podcast network, the CIIS-Integral Life cluster, and the broader meaning-crisis ecosystem are all, in different inflections and from different political positions, attempts to respond to the integral state Maher anatomizes—attempts to find the cultural-philosophical resources for civic and spiritual renewal under conditions where the integral state has progressively colonized the institutional spaces through which democratic public life was historically sustained. The structural problem is that none of these responses passes through the post-metaphysical crucible Section IV established. Without that crucible, the responses are not exits from the integral state but reproductions of it under different cultural signatures. Re-enchantment without the post-metaphysical discipline is, structurally, a romantic-liberal supplement to the integral state, not a critique of it. The diagnostic this essay has pressed against McGilchrist applies, in different inflections, across the entire ecology of digital-network responses currently competing for the attention of the educated-liberal class.

Fred Dallmayr’s integral pluralism—articulated across his work from the 1980s through Integral Pluralism: Beyond Culture Wars (2010) and culminating in Democracy to Come (2017)—names what the integral architecture requires to enter democratic public life: a political-philosophical commitment to genuine encounter across civilizational, religious, and philosophical traditions before any synthesis or developmental hierarchy has decided what the encounter will yield. Dallmayr is the political philosopher who supplies this for what Maritain’s integral humanism and Wilber’s integral theory would otherwise lack. His integral pluralism is what prevents the integral architecture from becoming, in practice, one more framework that absorbs the contemplative traditions of other civilizations as material for a synthesis decided in advance—a danger the American integral movement around Wilber and Integral Life has frequently illustrated. I came to Dallmayr through the 2017 Bernstein/Dallmayr Turn—a self-directed reading alongside Richard Bernstein’s Engaged Fallibilistic Pluralism through which I worked out Integral Facticity and Enactive Fallibilism—and the Dallmayr-Bernstein synthesis is what the in-development Dallmayr essay on Democracy to Come will work out at length.

Michel Bauwens’s Breaking the Third Information Barrier in Rosy Cross—the same anthology to which I contributed—is the dialogue partner I want to name explicitly here. Bauwens, founder of the P2P Foundation, has been building since 2005 a substantial body of work on commons-based peer production drawing on Karatani’s Mode D—the regenerative networks that emerge as the ethical-axial response to civilisational extraction-regimes. His chapter in Rosy Cross is the most generative single piece of constructive thinking I have encountered in recent years on this terrain, and the convergence between his project and the new integral humanism I am articulating is one I expect to develop at length in future work. Bauwens works from the political-economic infrastructure side; the new integral humanism works from the philosophical-anthropological side. Both orient toward the same horizon: the genuine democratic encounter that Dallmayr names integral pluralism and that Maritain named integral humanism. Readers who want to follow this conversation should obtain the Rosy Cross anthology; Bauwens’s chapter and my own sit on either side of the question Cadell Last has posed for the volume.

Each of these resources is necessary; none is sufficient. Habermas alone is too procedural and lacks the structural-political analytic. Lukács alone is too sweeping and reproduces the Stalinist closures of the original. Gramsci alone lacks the post-metaphysical apparatus and the philosophical-genealogical depth. Dallmayr alone names the constructive horizon without providing the civic and institutional work that makes the horizon possible. Together, in dialogue with Bauwens’s P2P work, the four supply what no single tradition can: the constructive horizon this essay has been working toward.

What integral political praxis adds to the procedural-communicative architecture is a practical mechanism the procedural architecture cannot supply on its own: the psychological flexibility required to hold multiple irreducible moral configurations without fusing with any one of them. Habermas names the conditions under which validity claims can be redeemed in intersubjective discourse; he does not, on his own, supply the technology by which psychologically rigid participants—each fused with a partial moral configuration—learn to occupy other configurations long enough to recognize what they are seeing. That technology is what the Hayes-Haidt-Habermas synthesis I have been articulating provides. Haidt’s moral foundations theory documents how the political spectrum sorts at the level of pre-reflective moral intuition: the individualizing cluster (Care, Fairness, Liberty) and the binding cluster (Loyalty, Authority, Sanctity) configure differently across positions, and reasoned discourse without perspective-taking produces the rigidity Haidt’s research documents rather than the genuine encounter Habermas’s framework requires. The ACT Hexaflex—defusion, acceptance, present-moment contact, self-as-context, values, committed action—is the technology that makes perspective-taking practicable rather than aspirational. I call this synthesis IACT: Integral Awareness and Commitment Training, developed at length in Beyond the Master Signifier and Through and Beyond the Threshold (both February 2026). For the McGilchrist case, what the synthesis names is what romantic-liberalism’s framework cannot do: produce participants capable of holding the multiple moral configurations its own pluralist commitments require, because the framework lacks the psychological-flexibility architecture to translate those commitments into practicable cross-divide encounter.

The constructive horizon I want to close on is the one I have been articulating across the recent essay arc, finding its most direct expressions in A Rosy Cross of a Book and the in-development Dallmayr essay. The path out of the romantic-liberal formation is not a better comprehensive philosophical synthesis competing with McGilchrist’s. It is a different relation to the public sphere, to the institutions through which democratic life is sustained, and to the post-metaphysical, post-secular threshold that any framework entering democratic public life must clear. The path I have been working out is what I call the new integral humanism—post-secular, integral-pluralist, in service of human flourishing. It is, in its constitutive elements, the synthesis of Maritain’s integral humanism with Dallmayr’s integral pluralism, grounded in Habermasian post-metaphysical thinking, operating with Integral Facticity and Enactive Fallibilism as epistemological discipline, and held within the Canadian intellectual tradition that has carried these resources since the founding generation of Canadian universities through Watson, Armour, Sweet, Bradley, McGrath, Trott, Grant, Taylor, Saul, and the Catholic critical-theological tradition through Davis, Lalonde, Despland, and Baum.

The new integral humanism is integral in Maritain’s sense: it grounds political and social life in the irreducible dignity of the human person against both bourgeois individualism and totalitarian collectivism. It is integral in Wilber’s sense, meaning post-metaphysical: it draws on the developmental and methodological architecture of AQAL while submitting that architecture to the discipline of Habermasian post-metaphysical critique. It is pluralist in Dallmayr’s sense: it commits to the irreducibility of the other before any synthesis, hierarchy, or framework has decided what the encounter will yield. It is post-secular in the precise Habermasian sense: it neither privatizes religious-spiritual claims nor exempts them from disciplined critical examination, but holds them in their full substantive depth within the post-metaphysical conditions of intersubjective discourse. Finally, it is grounded in the lived-experience auto-ethnographic methodology IACT operationalizes: Enactive Fallibilism acts as the discipline that tests frameworks against the resistance of the lived body, treating the body’s feedback as data that falsifies unsustainable systems and ensuring the framework remains in-progress and revisable rather than claiming completeness.

The new integral humanism, at its core, is grounded in a lived-experience auto-ethnographic methodology operationalized through IACT. Within this framework, Enactive Fallibilism serves as a vital discipline, testing systems against the resistance of the lived body. By treating somatic feedback as empirical data that can falsify unsustainable frameworks, it ensures that the project remains a revisable, in-progress endeavor rather than a closed or complete system.

Positioned as a fourth political theory, this new integral humanism acknowledges Aleksandr Dugin’s diagnosis that twentieth-century ideologies have reached exhaustion. However, it establishes its legitimacy through a radically different grounding. Whereas Dugin’s project is anchored in ethnos, civilizational identity, and traditionalist metaphysics—effectively foreclosing the integral pluralism introduced in Dallmayr’s Democracy to Come—the new integral humanism commits itself to the post-secular, post-metaphysical threshold required for participation in democratic public life. While both projects inhabit the fourth-political-theory landscape and share certain diagnostic lenses, their fundamental groundings remain in substantive opposition.

Returning to the themes of the introduction, I revisited Iain McGilchrist because the digital public sphere has granted his work a visibility that was absent during my initial 2010 reading. I engage his project with both the pleasure of witnessing a meticulous mind and the analytical scrutiny made possible by the IACT framework, Lukácsian critique, and the combined work of Habermas, Gramsci, and Dallmayr. The structural and political diagnostic presented in this essay does not require devaluing McGilchrist’s significant contributions. Indeed, The Master and His Emissary (2009) largely survives this critique as a robust exploration of how cognition is structured by attention and embodiment. In contrast, The Matter With Things (2021)—alongside its supporting institutional infrastructure—fails the test. Its metaphysical extension provides the philosophical-anthropological fuel for the reproduction of romantic liberalism, a process that remains invisible to the framework itself. Raymond Tallis’s identification of a “reductionist critique of reductionism” offers the necessary entry point, while the resources developed in Sections V through VII provide the way through. Ultimately, the new integral humanism—in conversation with Michel Bauwens’s P2P research and the Žižekian-Hegelian insights gathered in Rosy Cross—points the way out, leaving the constructive labor for the work that follows.

Integral [+] Facticity

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