Post-Enlightenment Horizons of Cultural, Social, and Educational Change

How can we navigate competing visions of change in a post-Enlightenment world?

Many of today’s systemic crises stem from the unintended legacies of Enlightenment modernity — the pursuit of rational control, universal truths, and hierarchical knowledge systems. Yet, attempts to challenge these legacies often reproduce new forms of exclusion, fragmentation, or domination, especially when change efforts are narrowly scoped or idealistically framed.

This model does not offer a single ideal alternative, but rather a typological framework to help changemakers map, evaluate, and navigate the multidimensional horizons of cultural, institutional, and educational transformation.

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🧭 A Multi-Matrix Typology

The framework consists of three interrelated matrices — each illuminating key dimensions and tensions that shape the landscape of possible futures:

Cutural Change Matrix

Social Change Matrix

Educational Change Matrix

These are not prescriptive models, but descriptive tools designed to reveal the strengths, trade-offs, and unintended consequences of various change strategies. Their purpose is not to declare which approach is "right," but to help changemakers choose strategies that align with their context and positionality.

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🌐 Strategic Use: Navigation, Not Prescription

These matrices are maps, not mandates. They support changemakers — educators, policymakers, community leaders — in:

• Locating their approaches within broader cultural and systemic logics

• Anticipating secondary effects and unintended consequences

• Identifying tensions and blind spots in emerging paradigms

• Avoiding binary thinking (e.g., modernization vs. tradition, decolonization vs. reason, freedom vs. structure) & invitation to see beyond the dichotomies in the typologies

• Recognizing their positionality within complex change ecosystems

• Designing hybrid strategies that span multiple quadrants

• Choosing trade-offs consciously, rather than reactively

• Facilitating cross-paradigm dialogue among actors with divergent change visions

Possible secondary effects of C3's social change approach through S1 (Similar dynamics may be observable in the conflicts surrounding "wokeism")

Possible secondary effects of restricting C1's social change approach to S2 (Similar dynamics may be observable in platform capitalism & the capitalism-populism convergences)

💥See this framework in action with this AI-simulated debate:

(Produced as my personal pre-meeting exercise for the 2025/26 Inaugural TIAL fellowship)

Read more

📚[in Japanese] The Dominance of Modern Knowledge and Horizons of Change: A Synthetic Anthropological Analysis

📝[in Japanese] "Exploring Integral Knowledge" Workshop 1: The Dominance of Modern Knowledge and Horizons of Change

See also

• Academia as Distributed Knowledge-Ecosystems for Collective Transformation

• From "Incommunicability" to "Response-able Awareness

• East Asian Philosophies of Science

• Controllability Dependence

• Redefining "Metaverse"