Toward the Turning: Rethinking the Meaning of 9/11, the Clash of Civilizations, and a Postmodern Wor

The ultimate source of group inhumanity is an apparition, spectacularly unrecognized and ignored. While we scapegoat tribalism and fanaticism, those impulses are merely derivatives of a deeper engine of recruitment: our unwitting loyalty to inherited identities. Toward the Turning exposes this engine, revealing how it fractures and inflames human relations. 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 defined by "deadly dances" fueled by identity-in-difference. 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 an ontological misapprehension: We see the self as a discrete "thing" and the world as an external, given backdrop, blind to their contingency and co-constituting processes. This error underwrites the naturalization of identity, making it susceptible to the tribal fanaticism that haunts history. Scott Gibbs' fascinating monograph culminates in a call for a "turning"--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.