Something Has Made the Sci-Fi Kid Mad

Damien Walter uses “modernity” in a very particular, almost dramaturgical way. He’s not just talking about “the modern era” in a historical sense; he’s talking about a civilizational operating system—a worldview that shapes how people imagine themselves, their agency, their stories, and their futures.

Modernity is a story about the self. For Walter, modernity is fundamentally a narrative regime. It tells people: You are an individual. You are rational.  You can choose your own story. Progress is linear and inevitable. He often frames this as the “modern myth of the heroic individual,” which he believes is both empowering and deeply limiting. It’s the story that underwrites everything from self-help culture to superhero movies.

Modernity is a break from tradition. Walter sees modernity as the moment when Western societies fractured the image and disenchanted the world. It replaced myth with science. It replaced tradition with choice. It replaced communal identity with personal identity. He often echoes Charles Taylor and Max Weber here, though in a more narrative, writerly register. It also echoes a stage in civilization when customs no longer suffice and one must make choices between alternatives. Modernity, in his usage, is the age of the self-authoring individual.

Modernity is in a crisis of meaning. Walter frequently argues that modernity contains the seeds of its own breakdown. The individual becomes isolated. The heroic self becomes unsustainable. Consumer capitalism exploits the modern self (Adam Curtis). The loss of shared myth leaves people unmoored. This is where he overlaps with my Spenglerian and Toynbeean sensibilities: modernity is a late-civilizational condition, a story that has run out of story.

Modernity is a genre problem. Because Walter is a fiction critic, he often frames modernity as a genre shift. Pre-modernity = mythic stories.  Modernity = realist stories. Postmodernity = stories about stories. Metamodernity = oscillation between sincerity and irony. He sees modernity as the era when realism became the default mode of consciousness—when people believed the world could be fully mapped, explained, and controlled.

Modernity is a limited interface. One of his recurring themes is that modernity is not wrong, but incomplete. It’s a powerful interface for navigating the world, but it flattens human experience, excludes the mythic and symbolic, overvalues rationality, 𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘃𝗮𝗹𝘂𝗲𝘀 𝗶𝗺𝗮𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻. This is why he’s so interested in science fiction, fantasy, and myth: they reveal the parts of human experience that modernity suppresses.

Modernity is a transitional phase. Walter often suggests that modernity is not the end of history but a bridge...from mythic consciousness through rational consciousness toward a new integrative mode. He sometimes calls this “metamodern,” sometimes “post-postmodern,” sometimes “the return of myth,” depending on the context.

When Damien Walter says “modernity,” he means a civilizational story about rational, self-authoring individuals that has shaped the last few centuries—and is now breaking down, revealing the need for new mythic frameworks. Which, I have to say, harmonizes with my own mythic rites of reconstitution. Walter is diagnosing the same rupture I'm experiencing, but in a different idiom — and this is where my civilizational instincts cut deeper than Walter’s own framing. His philosophy can be read as a personal, writerly, psychological reaction to the plateauing of the modern S‑curve. In fact, once you see it that way, his whole project snaps into focus with almost embarrassing clarity.

Modernity is now a plateaued S‑curve. Borrowing from Perez, Turchin, et al., the pattern is unmistakable. Early modernity = rapid expansion, new frontiers, rising returns. High modernity = institutionalization, rationalization, heroic individualism. Late modernity = diminishing returns, stagnation, meaning-crisis. Beginning with Napoleon's defeat in 1815 to the debacle of 1914, followed by the partial reconstitution from FDR to Jimmy Carter, Walter’s philosophy lives squarely in this third phase. He is diagnosing the felt experience of a civilization whose expansionary logic has run out of runway. He’s not wrong — he’s just describing it from the inside.

Walter’s thought tracks the plateau. Walter is a narrative theorist. He experiences civilizational change as a shift in story-forms. When the S‑curve flattens, the heroic individual stops feeling heroic, progress stops feeling progressive, rationality stops feeling sufficient, realism stops feeling real, and the self stops feeling stable. Walter interprets these as a crisis of narrative, but they’re also the psychological symptoms of a system hitting diminishing returns.

His “return of myth” is, in this reading, a reaction to stalled technological dynamism, stalled economic mobility, stalled cultural innovation, and stalled political legitimacy. He’s sensing the Time of Troubles, the Epochal Crisis, but he translates it into the language of story. Walter’s work is also deeply autobiographical, though he rarely says this outright.

When the civilizational S‑curve plateaus, the writer’s imagination becomes the battleground, the self becomes unstable, the old stories no longer work, and the new stories haven’t arrived yet. Walter’s philosophy is, in many ways, the inner phenomenology of a late-modern intellectual trying to metabolize civilizational stagnation. He feels the plateau as a collapse of meaning, a collapse of narrative coherence, a collapse of the modern self. His philosophy is a personal reaction to the plateauing S‑curve. But it’s also a representative reaction. He’s articulating what millions feel but can’t name.

Walter stops at “we need new myths.” He’s the phenomenologist of the plateau.

Before he got doppelganged, the psychohistorian Jiang Xueqin underscored the importance of the creative imagination. The resonance between Walter and Jiang becomes striking once you see that both are responding to the same civilizational pressure, but from opposite ends of the cultural spectrum. Both diagnose a collapse of the modern imagination. Damien Walter frames it as the exhaustion of the heroic individual, the failure of realism, and the breakdown of modernity’s narrative operating system.

Jiang Xueqin frames it as the exhaustion of the exam‑driven, bureaucratic, hyper-rationalized “anti‑civilization” (his word for Toynbee's Universal Empire); the collapse of meaning in a system optimized for compliance; and the inability of young people to imagine futures beyond credentialism. Different vocabularies, same wound. Both are saying: the modern world has lost the capacity to imagine alternatives.

Both see imagination as the missing developmental capacity.

Walter:  

Imagination is the faculty that lets individuals author new stories when the old ones fail.

Jiang:  

Imagination is the faculty that lets societies regenerate cultural vitality instead of ossifying into anti‑civilization.

Walter is speaking to individuals (writers, creators). 

 

Jiang is speaking to societies (China, but also modernity at large).

But the function is identical:  

Imagination is the organ of renewal.

Both are reacting to the plateauing S‑curve. When a civilization hits diminishing returns:

- institutions become rigid  

- narratives become stale  

- education becomes mechanical  

- elites become defensive  

- individuals feel trapped  

- creativity collapses into repetition  

Walter feels this as a narrative crisis.  

Jiang feels it as an educational and cultural crisis.  

But both are describing the phenomenology of a system that can no longer expand along its old trajectory.

Their call for imagination is a call for a new curve. Both reject “anti‑imagination” systems. 

Walter critiques:

- algorithmic culture  

- corporate storytelling  

- the flattening of myth into content  

- the tyranny of realism  

Jiang critiques:

- exam culture  

- bureaucratic rationalism  

- the suppression of curiosity  

- the reduction of learning to obedience  

Both are fighting the same enemy:  systems that treat imagination as a threat. Both are trying to reopen the mythic channel. This is where they converge.

Walter wants:

- mythic consciousness  

- archetypal storytelling  

- a return of the symbolic imagination  

Jiang wants:

- cultural self-renewal  

- moral imagination  

- the recovery of civilizational vitality  

They are both trying to re‑enchant a disenchanted world — one through literature, the other through education and cultural critique. Both are prescribing reconstitution through imagination.

Jiang’s critique of “anti‑civilization” is ultimately a critique of lovelessness. When Jiang talks about anti-civilization, he is describing a world where love has been systematically engineered out. Rome was built on nothing but force and sadism.

Jiang doesn't mean romantic love — but the broader, civilizational sense of care, attention, devotion, loyalty, and compassion, the willingness to see another person as fully human. His “anti‑civilization” is, at bottom, a system that has lost the capacity to love.

This is why creators like Homer and Dante matter to him. Homer and Dante are not just literary references for Jiang. They are moral exemplars of what a civilization looks like when love is the binding force.

In Homer's epic, Achilles learns compassion through suffering.  Priam and Achilles share a moment of mutual recognition.  The Iliad ends not with victory but with pity. Homer’s world is violent, but it is not loveless. It is held together by bonds — familial, civic, divine.

Dante's entire Commedia is a journey from confusion to clarity through love as the ordering principle of the cosmos. “L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle” — love moves the sun and the other stars.  For Dante, love is not a feeling. It is the structure of reality.

Jiang invokes these figures because they represent civilizations where love is the organizing force, not efficiency, not compliance, not fear. Jiang’s educational philosophy is a philosophy of love. When he talks about teachers who care, students who flourish, communities that nurture, and cultures that renew themselves, he is describing a world where love is the generative engine. He never uses the word sentimentally.  He uses it structurally. Love, for Jiang, is the capacity to see potential in another, the willingness to cultivate it, the courage to resist systems that crush it. He was preparing his students. This is why he admires Homeric and Dantescan worlds: they dramatize love as the force that restores order.

Jiang’s call for imagination is a call for love. This is where he and Damien Walter converge. Imagination, for both of them, is not escapism.  It is the ability to see the world as it could be. And that ability is inseparable from love. To imagine a better world is to love the world enough to believe it can be better. To imagine a better student is to love the student enough to see their unrealized self. To imagine a better civilization is to love civilization enough to refuse its decline into anti‑civilization.

Imagination is love in motion.

Jiang’s ultimate moral is: Civilization survives only where love is strong enough to resist the machinery of anti‑civilization.

Damien Walter’s scorn for Star Trek isn’t a casual dislike — it’s a principled rejection rooted in his entire theory of modernity, imagination, and the limits of the heroic‑individual myth. It has become one of the most revealing pressure points in his worldview.

What he’s actually rejecting Star Trek as the Last Great Myth of High Modernity. Walter sees Star Trek — especially TOS and TNG — as the purest expression of the modernist worldview, which is that rationality solves everything, institutions are benevolent, progress is linear, humanity is perfectible, exploration is destiny, and that the individual hero is a function of the system. To him, Star Trek is the cathedral of the Enlightenment imagination. And he believes that cathedral has collapsed.

Star Trek is a lie about power. Walter’s scorn sharpens around one idea: Star Trek pretends that power can be wielded rationally, ethically, and without corruption. He sees the Federation as a fantasy of technocratic virtue, managerial benevolence, frictionless multiculturalism, infinite resources, and infinite competence. In his view, this is not just unrealistic — it’s dangerous because it seduces people into believing that institutions can save them. Walter’s entire project is anti‑ institutional. Star Trek is institution‑worship.

Even worse, Walter believes modernity killed myth by replacing it with science, bureaucracy, rationalism, and procedural ethics. Star Trek is the apotheosis of that replacement. It is myth stripped of the mythic: gods replaced by captains, fate replaced by physics, ritual replaced by protocol, archetype replaced by archetype‑lite. To Walter, Star Trek is myth that has forgotten it is myth, and therefore spiritually inert.

When his scorn becomes almost elegiac, he sees Star Trek as the fantasy of a rising S‑curve, the dream of a civilization still expanding, and the optimism of a world with frontiers. But we live in a world of stagnation, diminishing returns, institutional decay, and narrative exhaustion. So Star Trek’s optimism feels, to him, like a relic — a museum piece of a civilization that no longer believes in itself.

James Blish, the first SF author to novelize Star Trek, was a Spenglerian who viewed science fiction itself as the "second religiousness" of Western culture in the late stage of its civilization. Spengler, for his part, used "civilization" to mean the husk of what formerly lived.  Walter’s deepest critique is that Star Trek blocks the emergence of new mythic forms.

Walter’s scorn is not hatred. It’s grief. Star Trek represents a future we can no longer have, a faith we can no longer sustain, and a civilization that no longer exists. Star Trek is the dream of a world that believed in progress. Walter lives in a world that no longer does. 

So he turns away from it — not because it is bad, but because it is obsolete.

The fascinating thing is that Insurrection and Picard deconstruct Star Trek, and in two very different ways, each targeting a different pillar of the franchise’s high‑modern myth. If you look at them through the macrohistorical lens — modernity plateauing, the collapse of institutional faith, the exhaustion of the heroic‑individual narrative — the pattern becomes unmistakable. Somebody in the franchise knows his or her psychohistory. Insurrection is a great dramatization of a Time of Troubles. Insurrection is the moment when the franchise first turns its critique inward. It’s subtle, almost embarrassed about it, but the themes are unmistakable. The movie attacks the Federation’s moral purity, the Prime Directive as a shield for imperial behavior, the assumption that technocratic elites always act ethically, the idea that progress is inherently good. The film’s central conflict — Picard vs. Starfleet Command — is a direct admission that the Federation can become the villain without being corrupted by an outside force.

That’s new.  

That’s dangerous.  

That’s self‑deconstruction.

Insurrection is the first time the franchise says: “Our institutions may not deserve our faith.”

It’s a crack in the cathedral of high modernity.  

A hairline fracture in the Federation myth.

It doesn’t go far enough — it still wants to be a TNG episode with a budget — but the deconstructive impulse is unmistakable.

So Picard finishes the job. Where Insurrection hesitates, Picard plunges the knife in. The series dismantles every pillar of the Star Trek worldview. The Federation is no longer benevolent. Instead it is fearful, bureaucratic, xenophobic, paralyzed, morally compromised. This is not a glitch. It is the system working as designed. It is on the path to anti-civilization. Ships don’t arrive. Orders are cowardly. Leadership is hollow. The institution is exhausted. Picard’s authority means nothing. His charisma means nothing. His moral clarity means nothing. He is an old man shouting at a machine that no longer hears him.

The utopia has stalled. The S‑curve has flattened. The dream has curdled. Rationality no longer saves the day. The problems are emotional,  political, traumatic, and worst of all, systemic.

The Enlightenment toolkit has failed. The myth collapses. Picard is the first Star Trek series that treats the Federation not as a beacon but as a fallen empire. I had heard a rumor about this. Imagine the Federation as a bloated, complacent Empire. Is it able to face a new challenge? This is not a critique from outside. It is Star Trek turning on itself.

Walter thinks this is happening because the world that produced Star Trek — the rising S‑curve of high modernity — no longer exists. I prefer to believe that the franchise is trying to metabolize the collapse of its own worldview. There's the need for a new mythic architecture beyond it.