NEW BOOK, FUTURE SUBSTACK

A STATUS REPORT

Hello subscribers old and new. And there’ve been quite a few new subscribers lately. Old and new, your interest in my work, and somewhat meandering intellectual journey, has been appreciated. Long time readers, and even consistent short time ones, will know that a major purpose for creating this substack, on my part, was to develop my next book. (Links to past ones are offered below for those interested.) It provided both a repository of fleshed out ideas, where particular themes and analyses could be stored in a relatively organized way. But also, it provided the opportunity to figure out exactly what I thought was important to say in the next book, both through the motivation of producing content – with an eye to following the logic of prior posts’ implications – and with the benefit of the feedback in the comments section that so many of you have been generous enough to provide.

Well, I’m happy to report, I’ve got the next book planned out. Yes, I think I’ve got it. Thanks to all of you who have joined me on this intellectual journey. So the job now is to bring all this together, coherently, into a book that will help others – perhaps not so forgiving of my meandering thought process as those of you regular readers here have been – understand in a more concise way where exactly we are, how we got here, what’s at stake, and what opportunities still remain to soften the landing of the collapse that seems at this point almost inevitable.  

I’ve on occasion pointed readers here toward a video series I created a while back. And interestingly I find myself winding my way back around to the fundamental ideas in that series: emphasizing both a model of historical cycle – teased out of a synthesis of several thinkers operating decades apart and from within different disciplines, using different methodologies – and providing a biological grounding to such cycles, with a notion of phenotypic selection. As I wind back around to those original seminal ideas, though, I reapproach the topic with the vastly richer theoretical framework that I’ve been able to accrue while writing this substack, particularly over the last year. Back then I had little appreciation of the role of the managerial class, biopolitics, and the social engineering project of the administrative state in those processes, nor how Max Weber’s work connected the managerial class’s administrative state and the cyclic implications of bureaucratic rationality.

Nor had I read Jean-Claude Michéa and understood the left’s revisionist history that wrote right wing socialism (see here and here) out of the story of those resisting the (distinctly) French Enlightenment (see here and here) left’s agenda of undermining all the forms of organic community that protected people from the two-pronged assault of the Janus-faced symbionts: commodifying laissez-faire markets and the social engineering administrative state. At that time, I hadn’t read Robert Nisbet and sufficiently appreciated the intellectual genealogy of such a left-wing assault on organic community and its concrete institutions, the theoretical resources of resistance, and how concrete institutional manifestations, such as the Roman Law, had served to undermine the foundations of a pluralist society built upon the strength of the family.

Only since producing that video series have I been increasingly able to bring into the analysis the work of thinkers I’d been previously familiar with, but now took on an important new context: e.g., Carl Schmitt (see here and here), Paul Piccone, the Frankfurt School, Karl Polanyi, and Harold Innis. And perhaps most importantly, when I created that video series I was still blind to the historical potential of a pluralist, federal populism. Populism is the only organic North American popular resistance movement — dating back at least a century and a half now — to the left’s Janus-faced symbionts of markets/bureaucratem. In the North American context, a pluralist, federal populism constitutes the only organic Schmittian enemy of managerial liberalism, and likely is our best hope of generating the conditions for a soft (or at least softer) landing as we face the collapse phase of the cycle, with all the immiseration such prospects hold for so many people.

I was aware of none of that when I produced the original video series. And it is the need to flesh out the ideas of that video series with this richer theoretical framework which I’m taking on as the challenge of the next book. Of course, turning all those substack articles into a book will require putting the ideas together in a more coherent way than the spontaneous, gradual groping toward insight which has characterized this substack. So, a lot of work lies ahead in that regard.

What then does this decision mean for the current substack? I expect I’ll be posting less often – though who knows. However, I do not presume to have all the gaps in the argument of the book fully fleshed out. There are going to be areas into which I need to do deep dives, still. (Recent posts already have fallen into that category.) For instance, right now I’m into a more fine-toothed combing of the big five personality psychology literature and what it reveals about those I’ve characterized as temporals and spatials. And that’s just one of what I think will be important, provocative posts I anticipate in the weeks ahead. My plan, when such gap-filling dives have been fleshed out, is to publish them here.

Consequently, when the book is done, all the material that forms it (or almost all) will be somewhere available on this substack. But it also means that future posts will have more of a fragmented feel to them. In the past, posts had an organic development. The popular series on Solidarność clearly was an outgrowth of my critique of Parvini’s book on populism. The other recent big series, What’s Left of What’s Right, was obviously a response to my reading of Michéa (see here and here), among others. There’ll be less of an obvious developmental flow moving forward. But hopefully, when the book is finally pulled together, the connections will be made more obvious there than they might seem here.

So, that’s the current state of things. If you see a change in the frequency or apparent organicity of posts moving forward, that’s the explanation. And of course, when the book is ready, I’ll announce it here first. Indeed, if my boomer brain can figure out how to manage it, I’ll offer a modest (I’m a poor old pensioner) discount to subscribers to this podcast. All that, though, of course lays ahead.

In the meantime, for anyone interested, I have several other self-published books available on the evil Amazon. (Yes, I know, but they have made self-publishing amazingly easy and effective.) If you find yourself jonesing for more of my empirically informed irreverent takes on life and the world, you could always check out one of them. They’re all available on my Amazon author’s page.

In reverse order:

The Managerial Class on Trial. As the running gag on this substack would have it, my must read(!) book. It attempts to trace the roots of the rise of the managerial class, identify the nature of that class, it’s recent ascendance to hegemony, and speculates upon what might constitute an effective strategy against that class’s dominance considering those roots, identity, nature and history. 

Biological Realism: Applications and Foundations. Regular readers here will know that I’m an unreconstructed naturalist and believe that – whether one believes in a supreme being or not – all human nature and behavior must be explained at the foundational level of fitness. If you want to fill in the gaps in the biology with appeal to a God-given soul, that’s fine, but given my naturalism it’s a theoretical shortcut epistemologically unavailable to me. In this book I’ve attempted to lay out the biological foundations of such a realism as well as I’m currently able.

Darwinian Liberalism. Already in this book I was aware of the shortcomings, and internal inconsistencies of standard, received liberalism. Relying upon a biological realist framework, I explore whether it might be possible to resuscitate the best in liberalism, even if such a resuscitation requires also disposing of some of its most sacred cows. I’m undecided myself as to how successful the endeavor was. If you decide to read the book, I’d be curious to hear what you thought.

Not for the Common Good: Evolution and Human Communication. In recommending this book, I need in all honesty to start with two qualifications. First, it was published prior to (at least I knowing about) the existence of tools that have made self-publishing on Amazon way more effective. So, the formatting leaves something to be desired. Second, there are positions I take in it, particularly related to “group selection” which I now consider to have been perhaps naïve, perhaps insufficiently informed. However, as a PhD in Communications, this exploration of how to interpret theories of human communication (e.g., speech act theory and semiotics) in an evolutionary context is I believe a valuable contribution and the closest I’ve come to something like a work of technical expertise.

Hopefully, those resources will help ensure you don’t forget me while I’m off putting together the next book. Thanks again to everyone for their ongoing interest and support. Until later.