Book
Toward the Turning
Rethinking the meaning of 9/11, the clash of civilizations, and a postmodern world
The ultimate source of group inhumanity is an apparition, spectacularly unrecognized and ignored. While we scapegoat tribalism and fanaticism, those impulses are merely derivatives of a deeper engine of recruitment: our unwitting loyalty to inherited identities.
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About the book
Toward the Turning
The ultimate source of group inhumanity is an apparition, spectacularly unrecognized and ignored. While we scapegoat tribalism and fanaticism, those impulses are merely derivatives of a deeper engine of recruitment: our unwitting loyalty to inherited identities.
TOWARD THE TURNING exposes this engine, revealing how it fractures and inflames human relations. Using 9/11 and the "War on Terror" collision of Islamic, Zionist, and Western identities as its touchstone, the book reframes global division not as good versus evil, but as a theater of the absurd defined by "deadly dances" fueled by identity-in-difference.
These identity systems function as tacit, communal compacts through which we navigate existential groundlessness. They constitute us, but they also destroy us. At their core lies an ontological misapprehension: we see the self as a discrete "thing" and the world as an external, given backdrop, blind to their contingency and co-constituting processes. This error underwrites the naturalization of identity, making it susceptible to the tribal fanaticism that haunts history.
TOWARD THE TURNING culminates in its titular vision-not toward a new ideology, but a corrective understanding that can move us beyond violent, reactive patterns. When groundlessness becomes habitable, the grip of identity loosens, difference becomes negotiable, and the compulsion to control subsides.
Reviews
KIRK J. SCHNEIDER, PHD
Past president of APA's Society for Humanistic Psychology
TOWARD THE TURNING is a passionate, brilliant, and methodical meditation on the dizziness of modernity, the clash of cultures, and the repeated and too often unwitting reductions of those cultures to dangerous stereotypes and simplistic victim-perpetrator cycles. As Gibbs makes plain, echoing Nietzsche, at the heart of the modern dilemma is nihilism, and, ironically, nihilism —or the lack of faith in anything—perpetuates authoritarianism to compensate... TOWARD THE TURNING is a profound treatise, inspiring fresh insights and compelling recommendations for a world gone awry.
