How do people in the 2020s think?

“Uh… correctly?” might be the unspoken answer. It’s the assumption in every age.

A Medieval European might say the same thing… on her way to a witch burning. Enlightenment thinkers assumed their way of thinking would usher in a better, more peaceful world…before the most enlightened thrust us into the bloodiest century in human history.

Never considering how you evaluate truth is to let the spirit of the age pull you downstream without your agreement or even your recognition.

My goal in this post is to give you fins.

Now, my guess is that you have little interest in philosophy (alas, a trapping of our current age).

But as I look back on my own attempts to understand the world, the most important discovery was the most obvious: we are not the first people to try to make sense of life. So let me bring you into one of my favorite muses - the history of how humans in the west have thought.

“BORING. What’s in it for me?” you might rightly ask.

To be frank, without this basic history, it is impossible to understand the present state of western culture- the discussions and the arguments that will shape our future. Secondly, without an understanding of the different ways that people approach truth, the danger is that you yourself are co-opted into the bubble of someone else’s way of thinking without even knowing it.

That brings us back to our original question: how are we thinking in 2023?

The way I see it, we are in the middle of a winner-take-all cagematch between three very different epistemologies.

A New Word

Epistemology: a too-fancy philosophy term that simply means "how you know what you know".

So a toddler who knows what’s true about the world because mom said so has a "mommy epistemology". Your neighbor who reads his horoscope to know if he should start that business (or just curl up in the fetal position) could be said to have an "astrological epistemology".

Your epistemology is not a catalog of your beliefs - your epistemology is how you came to those beliefs. It is the rubric by which we know something is true or false.

This is a little meta, sure- but important. Despite the infinite expressions of human thought since the dawn of western civilization, in terms of how those beliefs arose, there have been three epistemological power players - and we are in the middle of their fight.

To understand them, go back with me for a second.

Mapping the Zeitgeist

The (Really) Old Days

Before farming, there wasn’t much time to think. We were too busy chasing berries, hunting buffalo, and otherwise reaping the curse of the ground. The “big thoughts” we did think were typically religious and spiritual in nature.

Farming brought food surplus. Food surplus gave us the time to do all the other things that we now know as “civilization” - including thinking like we had never thought before.

From one such civilization (Ancient Greece), there arose men who elevated logic and clear thinking to unprecedented heights. While most Greeks simply hoped the gods would be good and went on with their life, these “philosophers” asked big questions and tried to carefully reason their way to the answers.

Techniques and entire schools of thought cropped up around this systematic way of thinking, eventually trickling down (as philosophy does) from the philosophers to the culture.

For the first time, a rationalist epistemology was emerging,

Rationalism would survive the fall of Greece- but when its conquerors, the Romans fell, rationalism would (incredibly) go the way of the dodo for over a thousand years.

Before Rome fell, though, something incredible happened in the history of human thought. Constantine (the emperor of Rome) became a Christian - and Rationalism had a new rival.

The Age of Faith

Humans have always looked to spirituality and religion for answers to life’s big questions. But when Rome “Christianized” at the height of its power and (and then-height of western philosophy), religious thinking was levelled-up and infused into the culture with unprecedented thoroughness. Christian thought and Greek philosophy mingled, sparred, and more or less lived alongside each other. Until, somewhere along the way, the rationalism bestowed on us by the Greeks, was, essentially… lost. For over a millenia, we understood the world through the lens of church and bible (and sometimes superstition).

Origins, purpose, meaning - the church provided the answers. But more fundamentally, it provided a way of knowing.

Where did we come from? See what the bible says. How do I live a healthy, fulfilling life? See what the pope says. Where is the earth in relation to the universe? See what the church says.

To be a Medieval Christian wasn’t simply to believe the truths of religion- it was to know what was true by testing it against the stance of religious authority

For over a thousand years, the west had a religious epistemology.

Until the enlightenment turned that upside down forever.

The Age of Reason

If the Renaissance was Europe reacquiring its taste for Greek Rationalism, then the Enlightenment was the west getting drunk on the old 1000-year-vintage logic.

What was the enlightenmetn? Well, the characters are myriad and the effects incalculable (think everything from America to the iPhone). For our purposes, let’s simply zoom in on a short, French bachelor named Rene Descartes.

Perceiving a growing pressure from enlightenment thinkers, Descartes set out with a simple goal: to defend his beloved Catholic church against the assault of pure reason. His idea? To show that the truths of the Christian religion could be arrived at by reason alone - with no revelation required (Bible, pope, or otherwise).

In his Meditations he arrived at the same old biblical truths (the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, etc.), but in “showing his work”, he explicitly avoided using the bible as his standard of truth. Logic alone was enough.

Descartes wouldn’t understand the impact of his work until it was too late.

After being condemned by the church he was trying to save, copycats would soon follow - thinkers who loved how he thought (using reason alone) but who generally disagreed with his conclusions.

Modern philosophy was born.

The rational epistemology that had lain dormant since the days of Aristotle, was back - and this time on steroids. Science and Reason were in and the Bible was on the way out among the thinking class. But was Reason alone sufficient to guide us?

The Assault on Reason

For “rationalists” of the 19th century, the future couldn’t be brighter. Sure, there was a growing disparity between the different conclusions the philosophers were coming to, but with universally-accessible Reason and Science guiding the way (in contrast to faith-based claims), it was only a matter of time before Truth about everything from God to governance would emerge.

And yet…

Even in these halcyon days, cracks were already beginning to show. While Spinoza and Berkeley built their unassailable castles of rationality, Kierkegaard and Hume were loading enough dynamite into the cellar to blow the Rationalist project up forever.

While Hume’s problem of induction called into question the truth value of scientific claims, across the North Sea, Soren Kierkegaard was getting fed up with Hegel’s rational co-opting of the Christian faith. He questioned the very value of cold, reasoned Truth altogether. After all, what good is a Truth “out there” that has no bearing on our day-to-day lives anyways? Isn’t our lived experience more important?

Beyond Truth

Rationalism’s heyday would continue into the 1900s (with the positivists pushing rationalism to the breaking point). But by the time the last Nazis were cleared out of Europe and the blood had dried on a second gruesome world war, the consensus among philosophers wasn’t just that God was dead, but the very project of modern philosophy (the sufficiency of Reason in search of Universal Truth) - lay as dead as the men on the beaches of Normandy.

*My local library while I was in France, dedicated to Camus, a leading existentialist thinker)*

Before any remaining rationalists could pick up the philosophical pieces after World War II, it was Jean-Paul Sarte and the French existentialists that would set the tone for philosophy in the latter half of the twentieth century. If God was dead, then meaning was for us to create. Perhaps there was no grand narrative to figure out. And even if there was, hadn’t the last century shown us the impossibility of one person reasoning to it from their limited, singular vantage point?

Maybe our own experiences of the world, finding and living our own “truth” was the best we could hope for. Maybe Nietzsche had it when he said “might makes right”. What if Truth wasn’t something out there to find through reason and argumentation, but just a tool, defined and then used by those in power to dominate.

Post-modernism, along with post-modern epistemology was born. And as it always has, this view of the world, this definition of truth, did not stay in the dusty halls of academia. What was once an odd, minority view held by disillusioned Europeans has found its way to the main stage- our culture.

Today

Do you still think this foray abstract or esoteric? If you take one thing from this post, let it be this: The thoughts that philosophers think become the thoughts that everyone thinks (about 100 years later).

Open a newspaper, scroll through your Twitter feed, or simply look around.

In our day the gender and even the race of a person is not determined by an objective measure, say XY chromosome pairs or genetic ancestry. That’s where a rational or even a religious epistemology would push us to. In our culture, gender and race aren’t up for argument. After all, if the postmoderns are right, there is no objective truth - so why can’t gender and race and anything else be determined by how an individual experiences his or her or zirself.

While Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed a dream in which his four children could “live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character”, critical race theorists dream of a day when color, gender, and sexuality are the primary means by which we are to be judged.

And of course, in just two decades, we’ve gone from outrage over Bill Clinton’s big lie to the acceptance- and celebration of- our first fully post-truth president, living and proclaiming his own truth on all things big and small - from weather to his own re-election. Facts be damned.

Ideas have consequences. And right now we’re living through them.

These developments in western culture are not random. They are the outworking of a 70-year-old view of truth that has finally made its way from the lecture hall to the town hall.

Signs of the Times

Still not sure about all of this? Look at how thought leaders of today are aligning themselves.

On the American political left, Bill Maher, long the prime mocker of all things conservative, has found common cause with the American right. After all, in the old days he could at least argue over facts. He is not alone.

Whether it’s Jordan Peterson becoming the Canadian posterboy for reason or Joe Rogan becoming the number one podcast on planet Earth, these “old” liberals (with their rationalist epistemology) have taken up common cause over something far more concerning than priests talking about the bible (religious epistemology). More fundamentally, with post-modern thought, we are staring down the barrel of the end of truth itself.

Similar schisms exist on the right, with some Republicans merely agreeing with our former president’s policies… and others ready to jettison little details like ballot counts and evidence. From a post-modern viewpoint, truth is secondary and narrative is king- the real game is power.

The Real Battle

This article isn’t to push you to a certain epistemology (much less a particular belief). It's to give us better categories and narratives than the ones CNN and Fox are using to profit from our fear and anger. The key battle of our time isn’t between left and right, black and white, or rich and poor. It’s more fundamental than that. The battle that will determine our future is over what truth is and how we arrive at it.

Will reason guide us? Is evidence and rational argument the way to discover truth - or will power grabs and propaganda be required to create truth? Long the source of our ideas about morality, equality and truth itself, what role will religious understanding play in the minds of westerners in this century?

For all the helpful critique that postmodernism has given us about the limits of reason and the importance of experience, we need think carefully about this view of truth - and the role that this way of thinking should play in our future.

The last great epistemological battle was between priest and professor - and it was intense. People died, power shifted, and we all view the world differently because of it.

You are living through the next great battle. Think carefully.

In 1832, Hokusai painted his famous “Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji”. With each painting, he gave a fuller view of the mountain- and his own perspective. Here’s one of my “36 (or so) views of the world”. It’s an attempt to illuminate an aspect of the present by telling a story of the world through one lens. This essay covers one of my favorite (though admittedly abstract) lenses: epistemology.

Thinking in 2023