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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 15, 2025

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What will come after post-modernity? From my perspective we are already seeing the postmodern lens break down a bit, as religion is getting a bit of a upswing, and many leading intellectuals are turning away from the post modern lens, or rather incorporating it into their thoughts. Examples here are John Vervaeke, Charles Taylor, Jordan Hall, David Chapman, and many others.

In addition, there seems to be a tacit admission amongst the secular humanist crowd that their worldview no longer has the appeal or swing it once did. Tyler Cowen and Steven Pinker, in a recent podcast discussion, went over how humanism seems to be somewhat dead and there aren’t many bright young humanists out there. Cowen also said the same thing about young liberal thinkers with another podcast guest recently, Cass Sunstein.

If you look at the death of the effective altruism movement, and the shift from rationalist to post rationalist, I believe there’s a similar trend.

To me the question becomes less “will old school meta-narratives” return, and more: what will be the ground of future exploration?

Will we adopt “metamodern” stances as they become useful and abandon them just as quickly, as Chapman suggests? Or instead will we rescue the transcendentals, and understand classical theism & morality through a more relational and dynamic lens, as Vervaeke and others are working on?

While the modern chaos can be exhausting at times, it’s also a moment of great opportunity. I’m interested to see what comes next.

as religion is getting a bit of a upswing

Not a thing, source 1 source 2 source 3. At most you could say that the decline has levelled off by some metrics, but statistics keep showing that the importance of religion in peoples' lives is slowly but monotonically going nowhere but down.

I'm not really sure what you mean by "postmodern" here other than as a vague gesture at a blob of liberalism-wokism-rationality etc. Perhaps the Right will come to dominate. Currently, the Right is dominated by conspiracists like Candace Owens, Just Asking Questions connoisseurs like Tucker Carlson, and shitposters like Catturd. As bad as it is right now, I have faith that it will eventually be replaced by something even worse.

The spike in religion-talk seems to be coming from the small subset of already-religious (in a very meticulous, autistic way) men talking more about it, plus aesthetic posturing about Based-ness. So, the talk is all talk.

Compare red-pill Islam- that's just peddling redpills to the existing Muslim online young men.

Yeah as far as I can tell based on statistics. The increasing popularity of religion online in certain spaces hasn't had much real world effect.