while our emotions and heuristics were perhaps suitable for dealing with the African savanna in the Stone Age, they are woefully inadequate for dealing with the urban jungle of the silicon age.

...

Postcolonial and feminist thinkers challenged it as a chauvinistic Western fantasy, glorifying the autonomy and power of white men.

Having these in the same paragraph leaves me so confused. Is the author pleading for progress towards Homo economicus? Is he saying its ethnocentric to presume that's the modern ideal, and to presume we should all aspire for the impossible in order to be properly, legitimately modern, unlike those barbaric jungle-dwellers?

Which reminds me of this. As far back as 1916, young TS Eliot wrote (it was originally a school paper)

The Absolute responds only to an imaginary demand of feeling. Pretending to be something which makes finite centres cohere, it turns out to be merely the assertion that they do. And this assertion is only true so far as we here and now find it to be so.

...

The question can always be asked of the closest-woven theory: is this the reality of my world of appearance? And if I do not recognise the identity, then it is not. For a metaphysic to be accepted, good-will is essential. Two men must intend the same object, and both men must admit that the object intended is the same.

In other words, some of us knew how little we know, and how fragile and continent and fictitious these 'knowledge' are. It's just that the positivists won the cultural war, over-confidence became the cultural norm, and Eliot's papers were left to rot in archives.

I wish Eliot were here to read and respond to this. I really think he was ahead of his time. /end of gushing