The modern world has changed faster than the people living inside it.

The Gap is a collection of essays and fiction about what it means to be an ancient species living in a modern world.

Human nature was shaped over hundreds of thousands of years. The technological environment surrounding us has changed almost beyond recognition in only a few generations. My work explores the distance between those two realities – and what it means for virtue, culture, trust, ritual, and civilisation.

I am interested in the behavioural technologies humanity developed long before machines: the customs, habits, stories and institutions that helped people govern themselves and cooperate with others. Some survived because they contained wisdom. Others became obsolete. Many are now disappearing before we fully understand what they were doing.

About Peter

I’m Peter Burnett. I live in the UK and work at the University of Oxford. I write essays about civilisation, human nature and modernity, alongside literary fiction exploring the same territory.

My first novel, Where a Hero Lies, follows four students given the opportunity to attempt the impossible: to reshape society itself. It explores what happens when a hero’s journey becomes a mass movement.