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Description
This monograph explores how inherited identities drive conflict, using 9/11 and the "War on Terror" as key examples.
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.
Scott Gibbs is a California-licensed psychotherapist, a board member of the Existential-Humanistic Institute, and an independent scholar whose work has appeared in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology. He holds degrees from Princeton University and Northwestern University.
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.
-Kirk J. Schneider, PhD. Schneider, is a licensed psychologist; past president of APA's Society for Humanistic Psychology (Div. 32); former editor of the Journal of Humanistic Psychology (2005-2012); adjunct faculty at Teachers College, Columbia University; and author/editor of 14 books and over 200 articles and contributions.
