What we seem to be witnessing in this moment, exemplified in different inflections by Trump and Peterson, is the final death of the modern, and the last clinging gasp of patriarchy (the origins of which can be traced much earlier than modernity) before the emergence into a novel relational mode. Two centuries ago, Hegel heralded the inception of this novel dispensation as “a birth-time and a period of transition to a new era.” This relational mode, I contend, seeks dialectically to reconcile modern modes of thought based largely on reductionist materialism and the differentiation of logical, rational capacities (roughly correlated with the Aristotelian material and efficient causation almost exclusively privileged in modern science) with affective, intuitive, and somatic epistemologies generally more highly developed in premodern and primal world views (often correlated with Aristotelian formal and final causation). As Alfred North Whitehead wrote in 1938, “the current philosophic doctrines, mostly derived from Hume, are defective by reason of their neglect of bodily reference,” specifically the felt reality of forms and purposes so pervasive in earlier eras, which have often been repressed and marginalized in the last several centuries in the West. These causal modes were recognized by Jung as deeply connected with the unconscious shadow, the body, and the archetypal “feminine.”

These are large, complex ideas, whose application can be extended beyond the vitally important issue of gender to address many of our most fundamental beliefs and modes of relation to the world and to one another. But for present purposes, it must suffice to say that the modern construction of masculinity has defined itself through opposition to the other–not only to women, but also to other ways of relating to gender and sexuality, to other cultures, and even to other epistemologies and modes of causation. Postmodernism and feminism have, in broad strokes, been largely constituted in the project of deconstructing and problematizing these privileging oppositions. This deconstruction is an essential project that has temporarily left most of us without a stable cultural narrative on which to base our identities, and that has produced an immensely disorienting moment of transition stretching across several generations. But this deconstruction also seems to have been the precondition for the emergence of a mode of thought that seeks to reconcile these oppositions by holding them in compassionate, though often tense relation, an incipient process that we currently seem to be witnessing in the #MeToo movement, which has emerged as a countervalent corrective to the regressive movement exemplified by Peterson and Trump.

The profound shadow of modernity is coming to light in these apparently opposite movements, which both ultimately seem to be manifestations of the same deeper impulse toward the healing of the wounds of modernity and patriarchy through the emergence into collective consciousness of the misogyny and bigotry that have formed the unconscious complement to the triumphant, archetypally “masculine” ascent of discovery, exploration, and conquest explicit in modernity’s heroic, egoic narrative. By collectively becoming aware of our shadow, we are effectively exorcizing our cultural demons, creating a precondition for the integration of profound oppositions that have resided at the heart of a schizophrenic modernity.