Evil, Wisdom, and Western Civilization
On refusing to cede Western Civilization to evil people who insist their map is the territory.
As you can tell from the ambitious title, this little essay is going to hit some big topics. But they're sort of the "why" of this newsletter's existence. The lens of practical comparative metaphysics—the map versus territory compass of reality—demystifies them in a new, clearer, and forever changed way.
As I've said before, I'm aware the label "metaphysics" scares folks away. But it is what it is, and there's nothing esoteric or mystical here. It's just everyday know-how that's too often gatekept and made unnecessarily intimidating. Truly, it's a basic conceptual pocket tool that everyone deserves to carry with them.
I'll take a recent, forceful column by political journalist Osita Nwanevu as a jumping off point to show how powerfully useful it can be. (Nwanevu is also the author of The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding (2025), which I just ordered and look forward to reading.)
Osita Nwanevu
While I had some quibbles I won't get into here, I do recommend reading the piece in full. Nwanevu riffs on the Texas A&M professor whose course materials from Plato's Symposium (!!!) were banned as part of the fascist wave of censorship, in this case against any ideologically non-compliant discussion of gender. Nwanevu writes that the Plato materials touched on "universal aspects of the human experience philosophers have examined in the service of understanding what it means to be a human being ... The efforts to answer or speak to that question are the highest and best accomplishments of what we've come to call 'western civilization'" (not to say that equivalent efforts aren't accomplishments of other societies as well). One answer in American history, Nwanevu notes, has been "the idea that human beings are equal, possessed of a universal dignity that entitles us to basic rights and a chance to flourish and prosper, whoever we may be." But the likes of Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, and their bootlicking followers don't just oppose that answer; they reject the question, and thus the striving of human civilization itself.
"Against the demands and best aspirations of civilization – western or any kind – they tell us the human being is a creature that yearns for nothing more than blood and soil, which is, of course, just mud. The lust for mud has taken up many guises in our history and has been many given names of late – neo-reaction, post-liberalism, fascism. But the name familiar to most is evil."
Blatant ethnic cleansing? Unambiguously evil. Unconstitutionally kidnapping and trafficking innocent people to concentration camps? Unambiguously evil. Using a five year old kid as bait to entrap an asylum-seeking dad? Unambiguously evil. Campaigning to justify the murder of a peaceful, queer mom and a Veterans' Administration nurse for trying to defend their neighbors from fascist chuds? Unambiguously evil. Privileging pedophiles and rapists? Killing hundreds of thousands of people or more, many children, by blowing up USAID? Destroying the planetary bases of life itself for the sake of profit and patriarchy? Constantly, shamelessly lying, equating reality and truth with identity and power? Yep. They're the baddies. The list of evils goes on almost endlessly, here and abroad, and keeps growing. For all that MAGAts whinge and yawp about "Western Civilization," you might also call what they're doing downright uncivilized.
Crucially, it's all the same general evil across all of its particular forms and motivations. It's the same fractally repeating and compounding pattern being done across time and at scales from the individual to the global. That evil is rejecting the deep interdependence, systems embeddedness, uncontrollable complexity, indeterminate openness, and profound diversity that universally characterize our human experience (how woke!), in favor of short-sighted illusions of singular view-from-above perspective, neat separation, idealized abstraction, identity essentialism, absolute certainty, natural hierarchies and rightful domination. That evil is seeing zero-sum power-over as the only true order to the world, taking sadistic satisfaction in the suffering and humiliation of those deemed fundamentally inferior, and suppressing civilized positive-sum power-with and power-to as invalid and unreal. That evil is assigning others a status of sub-human while taking a stance that is anti-human, often even as to themselves. That evil is feeling entitled to hoard power and resources without regard to need and degenerating the natural and social systems upon which everyone and everything ultimately depends. That evil is unraveling the world's intricately unfolding relationality by trying to collapse it into a simple enough map that dominators can see and control it all.
And that, my friends, gets us to metaphysics. The separating, static, essentialist, and hierarchical insistence that questions of universal human experience and meaning, "and our sense of reality itself, must yield to the turfism of the primates with the biggest clubs" (in Nwanevu's words) is rooted in a metaphysical orientation that mistakes simplifying approximations and heuristics as ultimate reality. It starts with a narrow-focus mental mode predominant in the left brain hemisphere that isolates representations of things (in the broadest possible sense) from relational and temporal context, essentializes them against ideals, and seeks control. This mode has important uses, of course. Unfortunately, as a metaphysics it encloses itself and reifies the representational models this mental mode creates, treating them like they’re all that matters and not reintegrating them back into the larger whole. That’s why I call it map-metaphysics, in contrast to the right brain hemisphere’s more broadly-integrating process-relational thinking that points us in the direction of reality’s actual territory. Whether driven by malignant psychologies, selfishness, arrogance, fear, incuriosity, and/or lazy social conformity, a reality-view insisting one's maps are the territory isn’t synonymous with or sufficient for evil, but it’s pretty necessary.
I know it may sound ridiculous to accuse Donald Trump, that howling void of sundowning id overstuffed into a rotting orange-faced Jabba the Hutt meatsuit, of having a metaphysics. Or most of his fans and enablers for that matter. Maybe you didn't realize you have a metaphysics, either! But a metaphysics, in this basic sense, is a thing that it's impossible for anyone not to have or do. It's just usually subconscious and implicit. Nevertheless, it’s false map-metaphysics that structures MAGA’s most foundational lies. Without surfacing these foundational structures in others and ourselves, we're hamstrung in our ability to fight this evil.
Incidentally, it’s a little ironic for Plato to now be a victim of map-metaphysics-based censorship. While by no means an evil guy, he’s a key figure in how map-metaphysics became so prominent in Western Civilization in the first place. To grossly oversimplify, two and a half millennia ago, society around the Mediterranean was undergoing rapid change fueled by increased trade and greater exposure to different, destabilizing worldviews. Old certainties fell away. This helped fuel the rise of pre-Socratic philosophy attempting to put understanding of the world on solid ground again. Metaphysical paradigms were fleshed out and debated, including Heraclitus' process-relational "everything flows" view, as well as contrasting atomistic views emphasizing separation and stasis. In this context, the Athens School, founded by Plato and continued by his student Aristotle, largely coalesced around the side of idealized analytical abstractions being more real than Heraclitus’ messy, contradictory, process-relational world of lived experience. You can see this in Plato's Allegory of the Cave as well as Aristotle's vertical ordering of being. Those thinkers’ intellectual justifications of map-leaning metaphysics as more rational and real spread widely, including at the spear-tips of the imperial armies of Aristotle’s student Alexander the Great.
Since Plato's times, map-metaphysics in Western Civilization has taken many forms which have left residues on current thinking. Not all forms have been maximally dominating, patriarchal, and in-group supremacist, but the inherent temptations of certainty and hierarchical order have too often channeled them in that direction. Some of those most map-committed strands of Western thought have been reductively scientistic, some dogmatically religious, some just plain greedy or sadistic, some even communist. Wherever they’ve suppressed relations and feedbacks in service of terraforming the world into their hierarchically controlled maps, evil has followed.
Luckily, as Nwanevu emphasizes, these maximally dominance-oriented strands driving our current surging evil have never been close to the entirety of Western Civilization, or America for that matter. Indeed, as the emerging field of wisdom studies agrees, there's wide consensus here and worldwide, academically and popularly, that "[w]ise people have in common that they are not focused only on their own benefit, or on the benefit of those who are in some way like them." Instead, wisdom is seen as working across difference with others to advance the common good. Resisting the map-trap is Western Civilization too.
Those of us siding with reality, wisdom, and holistic regeneration should refuse to cede the past, present, or future definition our culture or country to the degenerate evil side of the struggle. It's hardly enlightened to agree with Stephen Miller that abolitionists and civil rights activists are less really American than those they've opposed. "This evil is anti-American" is neither a naïve nor a purely aspirational statement, but a historically true proposition that in some contexts is strategically worth emphasizing over its equally true and important negation that "this evil is thoroughly American." America, like Western or any other Civilization, is a dynamic and multitudinous process. It's not the entity of static and singular essence MAGAts want it to be. There's opportunity and responsibility in that.
Just as luckily, we can have total confidence that evil gets reality wrong, on the level of empirical fact more than mere opinion or even moral judgment; and we can use the universally applicable map-territory compass to keep ourselves aligned together towards the less-wrong direction. That tool is all the more vital as forces distort our information environment and push us to give up trusting our discernment of what’s real.
We all know MAGAts relish calling their opponents "evil" too. Whether they sincerely believe it or not, it's a prominent way they justify their campaign of purifying, hierarchical-order-restorative violence. Fewer people know that after millennia of investigation, we have increasingly many converging lines of evidence pointing us to the cold hard fact that MAGA is incorrect. The map-metaphysical foundations of MAGAts' ideals and hatreds have been proven to be wrong about how the world works, over and over again, by quantum physics, astrophysics, biology and Earth sciences at every scale, cognitive science, psychology, social sciences, superior albeit still heterodox economics, and beyond. We know map-metaphysics comes from a reification of incomplete, isolating mental models—often the most oversimplifying, control-oriented and fear-based ones. The layers built on top of that base map-territory mistake compound its errors. Politics is downstream of culture which is downstream of metaphysics which, at least at this basic directional level, is a knowable topic with wrong and less-wrong answers.
Here’s the demonstrable truth. For all their vast differences, the kinds of things that constitute the universe are all interdependent relational processes, not isolated entities determinately rankable along universal ideals. Nature-culture on Earth is one integrated process-system of complex, reciprocal, mutually shaping relationships among other process-systems. Goodness and evil describe things done within that reality. They're not objective absolutes, and they're also not purely relative to individual subjective perspectives because all perspectives are embedded relationally too; process-relational realism thus transcends both objectivity and relativism. Process-relational reality means that contributing to the overall resilience, diverse flourishing, and aliveness of our nature-culture process-system is valuable and good. Conversely, those who unravel the system of which they're a part into fragmented separateness and uniform hierarchy destroy overall value and contribute to their own doom. That makes their worldviews self-refuting on the level of reason as well as evil on the level of morality, because there's no sharp division between those levels of value.
Obviously writing about evil, wisdom, reality, and Western Civilization could go on just about forever, but I'll wrap up with some points about the tools Western Civilization has to self-correct. The West has its own deep traditions of wisdom, curiosity, care, systems awareness, democratic equality, and reciprocal relationality that it can leverage. It has its own long-enduring narratives warning against the degenerative effects of hubris and short-sighted selfishness. It has stories old and new (I hear Andor is good) identifying evil and prefiguring ways to defeat it. These can be bolstered by sciences, religions, and other sources of knowledge, meaning and narrative. These can be further educated by the abundant examples offered to us by Indigenous, African, and Eastern civilizations that have organized themselves around reciprocal relationality. Cultural tools abound.
Of course, the West also has destructive tools; but adding the map-territory axis to the toolbox allows us to select and use our tools better for more well-chosen, transformative goals.* With process-relational reality to align and guide us, we can overcome the lies that destructively flatten our world into black-and-white maps while resisting our own map-temptations. Better is possible. As is much worse.
Western Civilization isn't a static inheritance but a story we're writing from within. We have the knowledge and the agency to decide which way it will broadly go from here. Will degenerate evil dominate and cause collapse? Or will reality-based wisdom help us contain (if never eliminate) humanity's evil capacities and promote diverse and regenerative flourishing? Every choice shapes our intricately interwoven garment of destiny, whether unraveling the relations that define us or improving the quality of the weave. It all matters.
*I need to go on a little side-rant here: With all respect to the brilliant Audre Lorde, whose famous phrase has often been warped far away from her original meaning, sometimes what people label as "the master's tools" absolutely can dismantle the master's house. The screwdriver that went righty-tighty can, in good hands and toward good purpose, go lefty-loosey. What tools are "the master's" is as dynamically contextual as everything else in our process-relational world. The sadly widespread idea of being too pure to touch a tool of power (like, say, electoral politics or bureaucracy or religion or patriotism) because the oppressor captured and (ab)used that tool is a map-metaphysical mistake that guarantees failure of purported liberation efforts that adopt it. There's a lot to learn from observing the master's successes and repurposing some of the tools that achieved them, for opposite ends. We shouldn't cede helpful tools to evil to use against us unilaterally. Where's the wisdom or strategy in letting tools stay in the master's service rather than ours, if the evil isn't inherent in the tools' essence but emerges in how, why, and for whom they're used? What can't dismantle the master's house are superficial remodeling efforts that continue to serve the master's master plans. Practical comparative metaphysics can help distinguish between remodeling and dismantling and keep the latter project on track.