Ahoy Rikard,

Firstly: I really appreciate your writing and the depth of your consideration and insight. It is indeed refreshing to come across a well-reasoned critical review of The Listening Society (and this coming from someone who left a glowing/gushing review).

In the spirit of getting dialectic, and in response to your welcome for discussion, I have a few different interpretations to share.

Firstly: the supposed pinnacle

“Thus the book doesn’t only give you a pass to put yourself on the pinnacle, it is also in itself a litmus test that says that if you get it, you’re good, and the critics still have some way to go. The book is self-referential, since it describes human development, so that any opinion you have on it also reflects your development stage, and thus your understanding of the book.”

My read of the book is that the author(s) are precisely not describing a singular pinnacle to reach. This is in direct contrast to the popular Spiral Dynamics model, which does have a singular pinnacle with ‘spiral wizards’, and where “all you need to do in order to be a super-duper person is to believe in everything that Don Beck says and try to use his model to explain pretty much everything”. The Listening Society, on the other hand, at least presents 4 domains—complexity, code, state & depth—and it is highly unlikely that someone is peak in all four. And even if there were such a person, the combination of factors would very likely not create the type of person who would put themselves on a pedestal, and they would have the wit to know that there is no singular point of truth (nor any singular pinnacle to arrive at).

Personally, I was left feeling like I had significant work to do to further develop myself across these domains. And even if I flatter myself with a delusion of reasonably complex thinking—there is still the inherent acknowledgement that even this falls within a hierarchy. There are levels above which we can only hope to aspire to. It is, therefore, wondrously humbling.

An almost mythical might be valid belief in patterns

To be fair, I think the patterns here might be valid. The reasoning is pretty solid, but far from waterproof.

I’m not sure it would be possible to have any waterproof commentary on the meta-patterns of something as complex as the development of human societies through history. And if one were to create a comprehensive waterproof commentary that is somehow free of subjective bias (both impossible)… it would make for impossibly long and dry reading.

This is what I like about writers like ‘Hanzi’ — their subjective perspective and use of persuasive devices is utterly evident. They are flawed and impure and have a thesis to present—which makes them more real. The more popular alternative is to attempt to mask one’s thesis as though one is ‘innocently’ speaking from the perspective pure objectivity. This, as you know, masks a whole heap of covert subjective bias and flawed/limited perspective. Better to have subjectivity out in the open, I say, so that we are more prompted to think for ourselves.

Which brings us to…

The problem of Hanzi

…the author(s) are playing with some sort of hyperreality, creating an image of Hanzi that is just as real to the reader as reality could ever be. I can see the point. I can see how it would make you question the authority of other scholars that you may rely blindly. (How often do you follow the sources in your non-fiction literature, read the original papers, look up biographies?) But even so, it mostly seems dishonest to me.

This may just be a matter of taste. Having worked and lectured at three universities, I am rather tired of the bland, tepid, politically correct and supposedly innocent/objective/neutral writing purported by many researchers and scholars.

But I fucking love the character that is Hanzi. The brazen, brash and charmingly obnoxious (and sometimes quite poignant) writing is evidently voiced through a fictitious character.° And yet it allows for the author(s) to get away with so much more. And, as they say: the fiction makes the book come alive. “We take Hanzi’s role as an intellectual less seriously—and we take the necessarily fictional part of reality more seriously.”
° Although admittedly: I didn’t realise this until after reading the book, and searching for more on Hanzi Freinacht.

A blessed lack of actionability

The main point of criticism of postmodernism in the book is its ineptitude, its inability to give any real solutions to the problems of modernism.

I think the authors did well to reign back from prescribing actions—the reader thinks for themselves, rather than being told what to do. I appreciate this, but I understand how this could be frustrating for some.

Part of the trouble with practical actionability is that it is so domain dependent. ‘Integrating yoga into schools’ may make sense to enhance many factors—but as soon as this is presented as a prescription, it collapses hypercomplexity into a singular mundane thing. And then that thing will never be enough. There will always be reasons why it won’t work. Instead, the author(s) provide enough for the reader to take the initiative and proceed with informed naïveté.

This I found refreshing, but again it may be a matter of taste. I’m in an industry that is filled with ‘motivational speakers’ who get on stage share their (flattened, simple, popular) ‘truth’ and then tell people what they need to do (the secrets/rules) in order to be successful. It reeks of hubris, and I am personally highly allergic this brand of naïve arrogance. And so, to be offered provocation and left to protosynthesise the pieces—as with The Listening Society—is much more appreciated.

Finally: the development of code

But good luck having the general population agreeing, the population to which all postmodernists sound like new-age, animistic, astrological-precariat thinkers who have completely missed, not surpassed, modernism and postfaustianism. And to some extent, they are right. There are many postmodernists who don’t have a damn clue what they’re doing, but they have a “flattened” view of the postmodern code, as Hanzi would put it. If this was math, then they can perform calculations, but they don’t know the proofs, but they think they do and come off sounding silly. So how do we develop everyone? That is a question that remains unanswered.

I daresay progress will be a lot messier than this. Amidst the multitude of perspective, there will never be full agreement. But as ‘Hanzi’ says: “I develop if you develop. Even if we don’t agree, we come closer to the truth if we create better dialogues and raise the standards of how we treat one another.” With this in mind, my interpretation of the development of cultural code seems different to yours. I don’t think the author(s) suggest someone could leap from a pre-modern to a postmodern code. My understanding is that they would need to progress through the stages of cultural development first. That is: they would understand the workings of science before being able to then critique it and then later synthesise it. But of course, this is limited by their development and ability to think at higher levels of complexity. Inevitably we will have many folk operating with ‘flattened’ perspectives of code (I am probably one such). But this is the inherent nature of our broken reality. It is thus through both co-development and dialect that we can arrive to a shared understanding (a deeper ‘truth’)—but this only works if people (we, I) listen. And even then, it’s always messy, context bound and problematic.

But what’s the alternative? To wait for the perfect waterproof solution? Or to proceed with fluidity amidst the messiness?

…

I’ve only commented on the criticisms thus far—I daresay we agree on much more. I personally (tentatively) hold The Listening Society as the most perfectly significant book of our times—but I’m quite aware I may be missing something. And as the first person to review the book on Amazon, I have been worried since that all of the reviews have been likewise gushing thus far. In the spirit of antifragility, a bit of criticism makes the whole thing stronger. It’s been fun to write here (an opportunity to process some of my own thinking). Thank you for the invitation!