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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.
Price: $58.00
Pages: 450
Publisher: Ibidem Press
Imprint: Ibidem Press
Publication Date:
28 July 2026
Trim Size: 8.27 X 5.83 in
ISBN: 9783838217666
Format: Paperback
BISACs:
cott Gibbs has written a masterful manifesto on the contemporary history of extremism. He capsulizes the arc of his book in one eloquent line: “We struggle still in the blast wave of 9/11—itself the crescendo of decades of repetitive drama.” Toward the Turning is a passionate yet brilliant and methodical meditation on the dizziness of modernity, the clash of cultures, and the repeated and too often unwitting reductions of those cultures to dangerous stereotypes and simplistic victim-perpetrator cycles. As Gibbs makes plain, echoing Nietzsche, at the heart of the modern dilemma is nihilism, and, ironically, nihilism—or the lack of faith in anything—perpetuates authoritarianism to compensate—an authoritarianism, by the way, that is in some ways more excessive and varied than those of the past. I feel deeply heartened that this book is out there, as it is a massive successor to my own work and that of many others who called out the primal terrors of our age and their resulting calamities; and yet Toward the Turning is a profound treatise in its own right, inspiring fresh insights and compelling recommendations for a world gone awry.
— Kirk J. Schneider, adjunct faculty at Teachers College, Columbia University; and author/editor of 14 books and over 200 articles and contributions
— Kirk J. Schneider, adjunct faculty at Teachers College, Columbia University; and author/editor of 14 books and over 200 articles and contributions
Scott Gibbs is a California-licensed psychotherapist in private practice. A board member of the Existential-Humanistic Institute, he draws on clinical experience and longstanding independent scholarship to inform his writing on the roots of conflict in everyday relationships, in intimate partnerships, and across groups. His peer-reviewed work has appeared in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology. He holds degrees from Princeton University and Northwestern University.