Cosmopolitan Socialism and Now-Time

Reflections on Michael Brooks, meta-theory and the politics of transformation

This will be the first article in an ongoing, open-ended series on what my friend, the late and great Michael Brooks (The Michael Brooks Show, Majority Report) called “cosmopolitan socialism.”

Michael had first written about it in his 2020 book, Against the Web: A Cosmopolitan Answer to the New Right. He passed away later that year — in July of 2020, and so the project remained (until recently) a nascent one.

“What we need is a cosmopolitan socialism premised on real material needs that expresses itself in criticism, art, movement-building, and anything else that drives politics. Again, following Gramsci, we need an integral approach that fuses universal desires, aspirations, and material concerns with a recognition that we do in fact live in a globalized, interconnected, and neoliberal world still defined by grotesque inequality, ecological crisis, and right-wing authoritarianism.”

The preceeding quote from Against the Web is a succinct and helpful definition of cosmopolitan socialism. What I think many of his listeners and peers found so appealing in the idea was a particular attitude that is sadly lacking, not only on the left, but broadly in our contemporary culture. Call it an ‘integrative’ attitude.

Michael affirmed the possibility of big-picture thinking when it came to visionary movement building and a sense of deeply rooted universal values. These twofold aspects, I believe, informed not only his thinking and analysis—which was often quite brilliant—but the passionate care and empathy he expressed towards humanity.

In order for reach people, in order to build a movement, you need the heart and the head working together: you need the grounded material analysis, but you also need a genuine connection with those broader, and deeper spiritual aspirations that every human society and individual encounters in their own way. This was the ‘integral approach’ Michael referred to.

“As the economist Amartya Sen emphasizes, if freedom and equality and solidarity and the rest are genuinely universal human values—and like Sen, I believe they are—we should be able to root them in a multiplicity of cultural traditions… It means building a truly global intellectual or political culture with roots in a diversity of societies.”

Michael, although often careful about how he talked about it publicly as a political journalist, was nonetheless open about being a very spiritual person. He advocated for meditation practices and often challenged his audience not to dismiss spirituality, or even mythology, lest it be co-opted entirely by reactionary conservative thinkers (as it was through folks like Jordan Peterson and other figures in the “Intellectual Dark Web”).

Michael and I shared countercultural roots as fellow spiritual practitioners, but like me, he gravitated towards an ‘intellectual’ spirituality. We both appreciated the writings of historian and founder of the Lindisfarne Association, William Irwin Thompson, as well as the work of meta-theorist Ken Wilber (Wilber, Michael cautioned, didn’t have particularly progressive politics, especially in his later writings and interviews, which seem to be courting the IDW audience).

Michael recognized the daunting civilizational crisis we face today — known as the “meta-crisis” by some or the “polycrisis” by others — has so many interrelated dimensions that it needed equally complex forms of thinking in order to effectively strategize and movement build.

I remember feeling both surprised and emboldened to see him, during one of his livestreams, openly applying Integral Theory to his political analysis.

I should note here that while Michael frequently referred to Ken Wilber’s “AQAL” model, he rarely, if ever, talked about Integral Theory’s developmental schema (i.e., the ‘stages’ of cultural development). You might imagine why. Pragmatically, a ‘meta’ map that elegantly and intuitively lays out the interconnected relationships between diverse fields of thought—that kind of map would be much more useful for someone trying to ‘hold’ more complexity in their analysis (it also didn’t help that Wilber’s own stage-centric analysis of the left as a “lower” stage of cultural development was a painful caricature).

To the occasional confoundment of fellow leftists, Michael didn’t outright dismiss or ridicule Jordan Peterson’s mass appeal (don’t get me wrong, though, Peterson was often the butt of many hilarious jokes). Rather, he used it as an opportunity to redirect his audience towards better alternatives.

“Though Peterson’s approach is lacking, the themes he’s dealing with should not be dismissed but should be addressed in more integrated and sound ways,” Michael wrote. “The work of anthropologist Scott Atran and depth psychologist James Hillman provide potent contrasts to Peterson’s mythology-enhanced market fundamentailism.”

Michael and I would frequently discuss Hillman’s work. He especially liked We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy—and the World is Getting Worse (1992) because it challenged the hyper-individualism of traditional therapy, reconnecting it with a broader, sociological context. “I feel comfortable with Hillman’s arguments about mythology, archetypes, dreams, and spirituality,” Michael wrote, “because his analysis of these subjects is connected to a seriously grounded materialist understanding of how social and group practices form and influence psychological health.”

To summarize, I think the appeal of meta-theory was its capacity to intuitively hold complexity a) as a powerful tool for analysis and b) because complex thinkers often take spiritual themes and concerns seriously in a root-oriented form of universalism. The latter insight helps us get out of the head, exclusively, and enter the heart. I was especially touched by Michel’s conversation with Dr. Cornel West).

“[Cornel West] is an influence on me… one of the major reasons… is because of that synthesis, and ability to hold multiple truths.”

I encourage my readers to watch this whole segment. It’s simultaneously inspiring and heart-rending, four years on after his passing, to consider his contributions and to wonder, aloud, about what may-have-been had Michael been able to continue building his project. In the last months before his death, we were in frequent conversation, talking about a strategic turn in his show to bring in more complexity thinkers, more integral and meta-theory, and more spiritual conversations. He talked about getting “back to spirit,” because he felt that it was more important and more urgent than ever.

I think I’m writing this series not only to reflect on these things, but at some level, to continue our conversation. What comes to mind in this moment is a passage of writing from Croation philosopher Srećko Horvat (incidentally, it was Michael who introduced me to Horvat’s writing through their interview).

Drawing from the philosophy of Walter Benjamin, Horvat argues in Poetry from the Future (2019) that we need nothing short of a new consciousness of time in order to transform our world. This would involve overcoming “the purely linear and chronological vision” of time and history. We need to shatter the clocks of Chronos and leap into time as Kairos: time as open and unfinished.

You can hear distinct echoes of Gebser’s description of “integral-aperspectival” time, although Horvat, to my knowledge is not aware of Gebser’s writing.

Horvat hits a personal note here, which I feel compelled to share at length for my readers. “When a movement shatters or a comrade dies,” Horvat writes, “nothing is lost so long as the struggle continues.”

“Even if they are not physically among us any more, to carry the spark of conviction and resistance into the future entails a chance of resurrection. The point is not to remember, but to live as if the comrades and their struggles are here, in the now-time [Jetztzeit], to debate with them here and now, to quarrel if needed, to think and rethink, to have fun, to laugh and play and dream together, by deconstructing time itself and the prevailing notion that what has passed has passed for ever. We have to understand the temporality of struggle as something which is not kronos, a mere succession of events… but another space, another time, another reality which is not past but is here and now. The potentials of the past can only be reactivated by changing the present. And it is in this newly shaped present that the future can be created.”

It’s in this spirit that I write, then.

To go on living as if the conversations with my friend continue, and in the process hopefully connect with and interview many others who share the endeavor to transform our world and transform our time (and if you are one of those folks, please reach out to me and we’ll arrange a call).

In that spirit, I’ve been appreciating Matthew McManus’ recent book, A How To Guide to Cosmopolitan Socialism: A Tribute to Michael Brooks. In the conclusion, Matt quotes a statement from Michael. That quote was really what urged me on to begin writing, here, and now.

“The left has empathy but doesn’t provide spiritual nourishment. Reclaiming time is a way of enacting a different reality.”

I was struck. Michael often quoted and cited his friends and peers, and seeing the phrase, “reclaiming time,” I immediately knew he was likely drawing from some of our final conversations. In the spring of 2020 I was pitching Fragments of an Integral Future to him during a phone call. Michael had recently read my first book, Seeing Through the World (2019) about the integral philosopher Jean Gebser.

We were, as William Irwin Thompson called it, “mind-jazzing” about meta-theory, spiritual counter-cultures and our respective creative projects.

Michael was graciously offering feedback on my new book pitch, and I was thinking out loud with him about the new directions he wanted to take the show. “Reclaiming time” was the phrase I often used to describe a process of overthrowing colonized “clock time,” (the time in Gebser’s ‘mental’ structure of consciousness) and reclaiming time, soul, and the present in a radical, spiritual way that would also translate into the material transformation of our world.

We were both aligned with this notion: that the transformation of consciousness was inextricably and powerfully linked with how we’d learn to overcome cultural fragmentation and alienation and ultimately reshape our world.

I don’t know what comes next, only that continuing the conversation on these themes, in some form, is what feels like an intrinsically good thing to carry on doing.

We live in jetztzeit, ‘now-time.’ It is here where, and when, we might perceive “the temporality of struggle.” The present, and nowhere else, is where we learn to enact a “different reality,” and so Michael’s project remains unfinished, yes, but it also remains creatively open for those of us who feel compelled to pick it up.

In the spirit of spirituality and compassion for our world, a radical-but-pragmatic adoption of meta-theory as a tool for social transformation, in a cautious but deep advocacy for a root-oriented (as in ‘radical’, as the word is etymologically related to) universality and planetary solidarity—in the spirit of all this, the work continues.

And I invite you, dear readers, into this conversation.

More to come.