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Growing Up Amid Conflict
Toward the Turning blends philosophy, religious studies, psychology, and political analysis, arguing that conflict grows from our often-unconscious attachment to identity systems. Why was this an important book for you to write?
For as long as I can remember, conflict has felt dangerous to me because of how quickly it can spiral and leave people hurt. Growing up amid conflict at home and in a city (Flint, MI) marked by poverty and racial tension taught me early that conflict cannot be understood apart from the conditions in which it arises. I also found that I could see competing perspectives and help people navigate differences more constructively. Shortly after 9/11, writing this book began to feel like something I was supposed to do. Ambition was part of it early on, but gradually receded. The mission became less about producing a successful book than about faithfully developing its argument, getting it right, and bringing it into the world for greater human harmony. Over time, the work itself mattered far more than any recognition attached to it.
Why did this subject require such an interdisciplinary approach?
I began with a simple question: Why did 9/11 happen? Each answer only deepened the question. Because conflict is relational, the inquiry moved across the interacting worlds of the West and Islam. It also moved downward, from historical events, rhetoric, and grievances—the immediate causes and stated reasons for the conflict—to their psychological and identity-based roots. Seeking the ground beneath those forces, it finally reached the most basic structures of human existence and the domain of the philosophical. The interdisciplinary approach was necessary, then, to connect the particular forces that converged in 9/11 with the deeper conditions that made this kind of conflict possible.
You argue that modernity creates both freedom and anxiety. Why do you think those two outcomes are so closely connected?
Modernity frees us from inherited authorities and limits (e.g., religious institutions and dogma, kings and tradition) and empowers us through reason, science, and individual agency to understand and reshape the world. But removing the foundations those authorities provided leaves us without ultimate authorities and abandons us to judge, choose, and bear the consequences alone, without certainty. In this sense, then, freedom and anxiety therefore walk together. The further irony is that modernity’s instruments of liberation—control, individuality, and progress—have become new masters.
Has writing this book changed the way you approach conflict in your own life?
My work as a couples counselor and writing this book have deeply informed each other regarding conflict. Together, they led me to see it less as fixed perpetrators and victims and more as a system and iterative process, with each action answering what came before and shaping what follows. I watch for closed-mindedness and rigidity, and try to meet them with openness and flexibility. In communication, I watch for blame, defensiveness, and contempt, especially in myself, and try to meet them with owning my own experience, curiosity, and respect. I listen for what each person is saying, consciously and implicitly, what feels threatened, and what they are protecting and seeking. Skeptical of adversarial debate and wary of repetitive drama, I pursue dialogue, seeking collaboration rather than competition. I try to understand what problem we are solving, what my response is likely to evoke next, and which differences must be negotiated rather than eliminated. I still get caught, which keeps me in my place about how difficult this is.
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Toward the Turning: Rethinking the Meaning of 9/11, the Clash of Civilizations, and a Post-Modern World
Scott Gibbs’s Toward the Turning is an ambitious work of philosophy, religious studies, psychology, and political analysis centered on a difficult question: why do groups keep repeating destructive cycles of blame and violence? Gibbs argues that conflict grows from our often-unconscious attachment to identity systems, which he calls spiritual and secular “faiths.” He examines two families of identity: the traditional religious (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) and the modern secular (including several strands of American identity and Zionism), the latter rooted in modernity itself. All identity systems, including these, give people the social worlds they inhabit, anchoring and orienting them within those worlds, but they can also harden into rigid worldviews that divide humanity into righteous insiders and threatening outsiders. Gibbs presents conflict as a “deadly dance” in which identities, fears, grievances, and reactions continually shape one another.
The book’s range is impressive. Gibbs spends substantial time examining the beliefs, promises, demands, values, and historical experiences that shape major religious and political traditions. He’s especially interested in the ways people respond to vulnerability, uncertainty, humiliation, mortality, and social change. His treatment of modernity is central because he sees scientific progress, individualism, capitalism, nationalism, and globalization as liberating forces that also disrupt traditional structures, take competing institutional forms, and create new sources of anxiety. The chapters on American identity show how Christianity, exceptionalism, and the pursuit of success combine into national worldviews across both the political right and left that can inspire reform while also encouraging self-righteousness and domination. His discussions of Islam, Judaism, Zionism, and Western power then bring these ideas into the charged territory of 9/11 and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where competing claims to justice, security, dignity, and historical innocence feed each other.
Gibbs’s greatest strength is his determination to look for common structures beneath sharply different ideologies. He refuses the comfort of assigning all responsibility to one religion, nation, or political camp. Instead, he shows how fundamentalism can develop on the left or right and in religious or secular settings when fear turns identity into something absolute. That approach produces moments of real insight, as when he describes public conflict as an unspoken conversation about vulnerability, worth, and safety. The writing is intellectually serious and extensively researched, though it can be demanding. Gibbs frequently builds long chains of philosophical concepts, revisits earlier claims, and uses specialized language drawn from existentialism, theology, and psychology. Readers who stay with his framework will find that the repetition gradually creates coherence, but the book rewards patience and close attention.
The “turning” of the title is a change in how we understand both ourselves and the worlds we inhabit. Gibbs asks readers to see identity as a living, contingent process. He believes greater self-awareness can loosen rigid identification, help people tolerate uncertainty, and make room for mutuality, accountability, and genuine problem-solving. The book closes with a hopeful but measured vision of transformation, one that begins through patient recognition and can spread outward from individual lives into larger communities. I’d recommend Toward the Turning most strongly to readers interested in existential philosophy, comparative religion, political psychology, conflict studies, and the intellectual roots of contemporary polarization. It’ll also appeal to patient readers who enjoy big, synthesis-driven books that try to connect private anxiety with public history.
Pages: 450 | ISBN : 978-3838217666
