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 symptoms of a deeper engine of recruitment: our unwitting loyalty to inherited identities. Toward the Turning exposes this engine, revealing how it fractures and inflames. 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 in which groups are trapped in a self-reinforcing cycle, defining themselves against one another and confirming one another’s worst fears. 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 a misapprehension: we see the self as a fixed “thing” and the world as an external, given backdrop, blind to how each shapes the other and how fragile both are. This error underwrites the naturalization of identity, making any threat to it feel existential. 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.