Metacrisis & Metamodernism Primer

Summary: Metacrisis is an umbrella term for the wicked, interlocking collection of crises facing humanity in the 2020s. Metamodernism is defined by various thinkers as an emerging aesthetic movement, a cultural phase, a developmental stage, a philosophical paradigm, and/or a political ideology. Such a wide lens is very much on brand with its “yes, and” outlook. Exactly what it will grow into is still unclear. The framework of metamodernism represents an attempt to synthesize the useful bits from the thesis/progress of modernism and the antithesis/critiques of postmodernism, in order to address the looming metacrisis in a holistic manner. I wrote this essay mainly to gather my thoughts together regarding everything I’ve been reading, listening to, and watching.

Introduction—Why should you care?

Human groupings throughout history have steadily weathered challenges, tolerated imperfections, and battled through contradictions. Our short allotment of stage time to strut and fret about the planet has always been full of complexity and chaos. Why is this moment different? Two main reasons.

First, the tempo of change is increasing as complexity grows, and is outrunning our collective cognitive capacity to adapt to it in a timely manner. Humans, both individually and as group, have limits on just how quickly they can metabolize change. This fact is what Joseph Tainter points to in his seminal work on societal collapse. Rebecca Costa also highlights the problem in The Watchman’s Rattle.

Second, the width and depth of interconnectedness between humans across the globe enabled by technology is a completely novel, systems-level sea change. We’re linking ourselves together as one large consciousness – something we’ve never done before as a species. The challenges of the present moment are best summed up by the following EO Wilson quote:

“The real problem of humanity is we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.” 

Metamodernism represents a good faith effort to engage with the complexity of the world as we find it today. It is a search for a way to level up our individual selves and our collective actions and posture toward reality. The following essay is an effort to gather some of the diverse strands of thought together on these issues. It is exploratory in nature – an intellectual smorgasbord to spur further investigation. In addition, it is incomplete – I will no doubt omit important contributions from those whose work I have not yet come across. Let’s “feel into” things below as we take a survey of the current predicament.

The Metacrisis

The dictionary defines “Meta” as “playfully self-referential” or “an abstract, high-level analysis or commentary.” Jonathan Rowson defines it in the following way:

“Meta means many things. At its simplest, it means after. But it’s sometimes used to mean between. Sometimes it is used to mean within. It seems to change its meaning slightly, depending on what it’s describing. It has a chameleon quality in that way. So, the first thing about meta is to realize it means many things.”

When we use the term “Meta” as a prefix in this context, we attempt to get upstream to find the headwaters of our current class V rapids predicament. It is a system-thinking style effort to zoom out and look at the gestalt, or holistic nature, of the challenges facing humanity. Activist and author and Terry Patten has a concise summary in a talk at Google here.

Here is how Zak Stein, an educator and cofounder of The Consilience Project, puts it: “There are a large number of crises drawing increasing amounts of public attention, such as the ecological, economic, immigration, geopolitical, and energy crises. But there is also an invisible crisis unfolding within our own minds and cultures that is getting much less attention. This is the metacrisis, which has to do with how humans understand themselves and the world. It is a generalized educational crisis involving a set of related psychological dynamics; systems and societies are in trouble, but it is the psyche—the human dimension—that is in the direst of straits.” He breaks the metacrisis down into four general areas in an essay for Perspectiva, a group focused on both systems and spiritual-level problems in mankind:

Sense-making crisis (what is the case?): Confusion at the level of understanding the nature of the world. Everyday people and experts are struggling to say things that are true, unable to comprehend increasing complexity.

Capability crisis (how can it be done?): Incapacity at the level of operating on the world intelligently. In all social positions and domains of work, individuals are increasingly unable to engage in problem-solving to the degree needed for continued social integration.

Legitimacy crisis (who should do it?): Incoherence at the level of cultural agreements. Political and bureaucratic forms of power are failing to provide sufficiently convincing rationale and justification for trust in their continued authority.

Meaning crisis (why do it?): Inauthenticity at the level of personal experience. Individuals from all walks of life are questioning the purpose of their existence, the goodness of the world, and the value of ethics, beauty, and truth.

In 2018, Peter Limberg and Conor Barnes published “The Memetic Tribes of Culture War 2.0.” In it, they articulate a fractured and segmented polity of 33 subgroups, warring incessantly in a WWE “Royal Rumble” contest in the digital and physical realms. They frame six different overarching crises:

·      Secularization and the Meaning Crisis: Weakening our collective understanding of what ought to be.

·      Fragmentation and the Reality Crisis: Fracturing our collective understanding of what is.

·      Atomization and the Belonging Crisis: Loss of genuine feeling of community.

·      Globalization and the Proximity Crisis: Removal of distance from conflicting views.

·      Stimulation and the Sobriety Crisis: Reduction of individual agency and attentional hijacking.

·      Weaponization and the Warfare Crisis: Transforming our minds into battlefields in an information war. 

Full Send into the Metacrisis

Daniel Schmachtenberger and Tristan Harris are both broad thinkers, zooming out to take in the totality of the problems humanity is facing. This is a clip from Joe Rogan with the two of them discussing social media risk.

Harris is the vision behind “The Social Dilemma” documentary and the “Your Undivided Attention” podcast. He has been an important voice in calling “attention” (sorry not sorry for the dad joke) to the impact of social media on fracturing our focus, splintering our attention span, damaging childhood development, and the perverse “race to the bottom of the brain stem” business model of the social media giants.  

Schmachtenberger (one of the key individuals behind The Consilience Project along with Zak Stein and several others) recently articulated his current thinking in a two-part Rebel Wisdom YouTube series titled “In Search of the Third Attractor.” In a complex system, “attractor points” invariably arise – places of relative stability where the behavior of the system settles, given the constraints and resources. Schmachtenberger argues that the accumulation of existential risk (his description of the metacrisis is a similar formulation to Stein, Limberg, and Rowson’s) is creating rivalrous dynamics, tragedy of the commons issues, environmental degradation, decentralization of catastrophic weaponry, and the power of digital media to damage social relations and heighten political polarization and gridlock. This is driving a global trajectory towards either chaotic disorder or tyrannic order attractor points. A search for the third attractor is an effort to avoid those two scenarios through solving the global coordination problems, improving education, empowered civic virtue, cultural enlightenment, and figuring out a solution to a post-AI economy. Rebel Wisdom is led by David Fuller and Alexander Beiner, and their work has connected many of the metacrisis/metamodernism dots through essays on their substack or videos on their YouTube channel.  

Nate Hagens is a prominent voice in the ecology space, sounding the alarm about our collective energy blindness. He highlights the dangers of an exponential growth economic model coupled with a planet that has finite resources and carrying capacity. His animated video on YouTube, “The Great Simplification,” is eye-opening from an energy resourcing perspective (His book is even better — available as a PDF here.). In addition, he has a wonderful “Reality 101” series targeted at preparing college freshman for the complexities of the world. It does much of the Bildung work that Lene Rachel Anderson and Zak Stein espouse in their writings and discussed below. The series covers everything from human biology, evolutionary psychology, cognitive science, sociology, and then scales up to economics, energy, climate, and systems thinking.

 Author and philosopher Bonnitta Roy is also a prominent contributor to both understanding the metacrisis and in developing the skills of humans to deal with it. I have not yet engaged with her work greatly, but what I have seen is interesting and relevant.

Live shot of the 2020s

 Jim Rutt is another active figure trying to make sense of our current situation. A former chairman of the Santa Fe Institute and business executive, he is a proponent of a concept called “Game B.” Where “Game A” is rivalrous zero-sum competition driven by scarcity, Game B is an attempt to find a more cooperative, positive sum collaboration between humans.

In the anthology chapter “Tasting the Pickle: Ten flavors of metacrisis and the appetite for a new civilization,” Jonathan Rowson, Chess Master and Director of Perspectiva, articulates the following framework:

The Ten Flavors of the Meta-Crisis

·      Cosmopolitics: We don’t have a viable We.

·      World System Dynamics: We’re not good at joining the dots.

·      Historiography: Modernity and postmodernity struggle to procreate.

·      Education: We are failing to learn how to learn.

·      Ideology: Our underlying mechanisms subvert their own logics.

·      Epistemology: The territory is full of maps.

·      Design: We have a suicidal generator function.

·      Consciousness: We are increasingly disabled by dissonance.

·      Arts & Humanities: The imagination is limited by the imaginary.

·      Cosmovision: A weakness for 1 of 2 kinds of spiritual bypassing.

Rowson explains his ideas in a video here. The chart from the essay provides a thought-provoking framework below. A few quick definitions:

Entelechy: the actualization of form-giving cause as contrasted with potential existence. My sense is it is used here to define a term that embodies the category it is describing.

Paidea: Greek word meaning roughly educational paradigm—the totality of a society’s ideas, institutions, and practices concerning intergener­ational transmission of knowledge and wisdom.

Metanoia: A transformative change of heart; a spiritual conversion.

Bildung: Education, self-formation, character development. German word, used by the Scandinavians to great effect in their societies, as related by Lene Rachel Anderson in The Nordic Secret and Bildung.

Rowson, Tasting the Pickle 

Cognitive scientist from the University of Toronto Jon Vervaeke is a critical voice in this space. His “Awakening From The Meaning Crisis” is a survey of humanities’ attempts to understand itself and what is important. This short article by Gregg Henriques does a great job of explaining his four ways of knowing. In short, Vervaeke finds that “Relevance Realization” is the way that humans figure where to put their attention, and that with the decline of organized religion and community, humans have lost access to ways of knowing that are essential to our proper development and flourishing as beings. This is driving feelings of alienation, anomie, and fueling the mental health crisis.

Framing What Came Before Metamodernism

The history of humanity can be divided in many ways, depending on the perspective or frame. For our purposes, we will use Indigenous, Premodern/Traditional, Modern, and Postmodern to describe the main eras. The actual beginning and ending of these eras are “squishy” as the terms are imprecise. The art of an age will generally be a leading indicator prior to philosophical articulation in society.

Indigenous

The original human grouping. With roots in tribal, Dunbar-style configurations, this period runs from the very beginning, three hundred thousand or so years ago until approximately the Bronze age in 3500 B.C.E. A very egalitarian, closely connected to the earth and the rhythms of nature. Animist, mythic beliefs prevailed, with humans cognizant of our intimate relation to the flora and fauna of a given area. The indigenous perspective has the tendency to be idealized by the modern mind, but there is much latent wisdom within these traditional ways of being.

Premodern/Traditional

This period can be bounded by the beginning of the Bronze Age and progresses into the Medieval period, roughly the fifteenth century C.E.  Patriarchal and supportive of the dogma of religious institution, these traditional societies were devoted to preserving knowledge of the past. Human groupings grew into villages, towns, and cities. Religious belief makes the jump to an omnipotent god from animist in orientation. Commerce and division of labor begin during this period.

Modernism

The roots of modernism stretch to the Enlightenment, the time of great intellectual flowering in 17th and 18th century Europe. In “The Master and His Emissary,” Iain McGilchrist points to 1905 as the beginning of a truly modern era (A brief digression: His thesis is worth exploring in detail—the idea that the exploitative left brain [The emissary] has assumed control over much of how we interact with reality, over the more holistic right brain [The master]. “The left-brain apprehends, the right brain comprehends” in his framing.). Modernism brought humanity reason, rationality, industrialization, mechanization, advancement in medicine and science, and through the capitalist economic model, created enormous wealth in mostly western nations. It came with a focus on liberation from the past and the discovery of objective, underlying universal truths, individual rights, and grand narratives. However, all these wonders and advancements came with flaws and contradictions.

Postmodernism

Beginning roughly after World War II, artists and intellectuals began to question the foundational tenets of modernism. Suspicious of the common universal narratives of the day, these humans pointed out the importance of context, marginality, irony, paradox, and how power relations and dominance hierarchies structure human society in previously unseen ways. Thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Jacques Derrida galvanized critique of existing power structures based on what appeared to be white, Christian, and male dominance hierarchies. Some thinkers point to the nineties as the era of “peak” postmodernism. However, many of our current culture war issues and political struggles are deeply rooted in postmodern ideology and the ongoing backlash to its essentialist excesses.

The Crisis Decision: Hypermodernity or Metamodernity?

By this point in our interconnected age, it is an old trope/saw/cliché that “The Chinese character for crisis is made up of danger and opportunity.” I’m not sure who first said this – it could have been Former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice discussing Iraq. Regardless, all signs point to it being a mischaracterization of the term. A closer definition of the Chinese character wejii would be “a dangerous time; a time when things start to go awry; a perilous situation when one should be especially wary.” For the English word Crisis, the roots go back to the Greek, just like the dad in My Big Fat Greek Wedding always maintained.  Krisis and Krino refer to “To Decide” and “Turning Point” respectively. So, this is where we are. Two paths diverge in the woods.

Hypermodernity

Probabilistically, the next natural step from postmodernism is likely “Hypermodernity,” a Blade Runneresque future that late stage capitalism is presently hurtling humanity toward. This can be defined as a deepening or intensification of modernity. One attribute of hypermodernity is an increasing emphasis on technology to solve pressing physical constraints of resources and the environment. In a hypermodern framing, yesterday’s knowledge is always less than our current knowledge. Corporate market power has beaten both the state and the commons into submission and reigns supreme.

Hypermodern Nightmares

Metamodernism

“Metamodernism. . . oscillates between a modern enthusiasm and a postmodern irony, between hope and melancholy, between naivety and knowingness, empathy and apathy, unity and plurality, totality and fragmentation, purity and ambiguity. Indeed, by oscillating to and fro or back and forth, the metamodern negotiates between the modern and the postmodern.” 

Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker, 2010  

“The central motivation of metamodernism is to protect interior, subjective felt experience from the ironic distance of postmodernism, the scientific reductionism of modernism, and the pre-personal inertia of tradition.”

- Greg Dember, 2018

The leading edge of metamodernism is already here (But so is hypermodernism, for that matter – that’s the danger). You can see it today in shows like Rick and Morty, Cobra Kai, Stranger Things, and Wes Andersons film, among many others. Metamodernism as a concept was first named by American professor Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, when he published “The Apocalyptic Fact and the Eclipse of Fiction in Recent American Prose Narratives” in 1975. However, the first consensus piece of metamodern literature is regarded as Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, published in 1996. Wallace’s work represented a departure from the jaded, cynical post-modern works of the time by filling the novel with contradictions—it was at times comic and serious, ironic and sincere, confusing and direct. It eluded easy categorization.

Sturgill Simpson, “Metamodern Sounds in Country Music,” 2014

Academics Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker wrote “Notes on Metamodernism” in 2010, pointing to changes in the artistic world, a key milestone in post-post-modern thinking. Luke Turner wrote a “Metamodernist Manifesto” in 2011. It represents an attempt to further articulate/encapsulate the artistic component of the nascent movement.  Some of the principles identified: “We must liberate ourselves from the inertia resulting from a century of modernist ideological naivety and the cynical insincerity of its antonymous bastard child…..We propose a pragmatic romanticism unhindered by ideological anchorage. Thus, metamodernism shall be defined as the mercurial condition between and beyond irony and sincerity, naivety and knowingness, relativism and truth, optimism, and doubt, in pursuit of a plurality of disparate and elusive horizons. We must go forth and oscillate!”

The chart below is taken from Lene Rachel Anderson’s book on metamodernism. One note – the metamodern approach incorporates elements from all the ages that have come before. This is key. The complexity of the world today demands that we synthesize from every era, in a bricolage-like, boutique, bespoke approach to different contexts.

One of the issues metamodern thinkers aim to address is preparing humans properly to survive, thrive, and derive meaning from the world. Our present industrial age, mechanized, and reductionist educational models are not suited to develop the level of emotional and intellectual maturity required for the time, in their present configuration. Lene Rachel Anderson and Zak Stein address this topic in their books, Bildung: Keep Growing and Education in a Time Between Worlds: Essays on the Future of Schools, Technology, and Society. In the books, the authors lay out alternative frameworks of whole life education. Like patient gardeners, their goal is to facilitate the growth of both a stronger sense of individual human interiority and a systemic, holistic understanding, in order to situate humanity within the planet and larger cosmos. “Cosmopolitan Localism” is an apt descriptor of their approaches. 

Scholars Daniel Gortz and Emil Esper Friss are the minds behind the fictional character “Hanzi Freinacht,” who is the author of The Listening Society and Nordic Ideology. Their work is a major component of metamodern thinking. Some selected metamodern stances from the appendix of The Listening Society are highlighted below to give you a sense of the text:

Stance Towards Life

·      To be exquisitely ironic and sincere, both at once.

·      To be both extremely idealist and extremely Machiavellian.

Stance Towards Science

·      To celebrate and embody non-linearity in all non-mechanical matters, such as society and culture. Non-linearity, in its simplest definition, means that the output of a system is not proportional to its input.

·      To have a “systems view” of life, to see that things form parts of self-organizing bottom-up systems: from subatomic units to atomic particles to molecules to cells, to organisms.

Stance Towards Reality

·      To see the fractal nature of reality and of the development and applicability of ideas, that all understanding consists of reused elements taken from other forms of understanding.

·      To be anti-essentialist, not believing in “ultimate essences” such as matter, consciousness, goodness, evil, masculinity, femininity or the like—but rather that all these things are contextual, and interpretations made from relations and comparisons. Even the today so praised “relationality” is not an essence of the universe.

Stance Towards Spirituality, Existence, and Aesthetics

·      To recognize the esoteric, spiritual disciplines and wisdom traditions East and West relate to real insights of great significance—a recognition of the importance of mysticism.

·      To take philosophical, cultural, and aesthetic matters very seriously, as they are seen as inherent dimensions of reality, not just “additional woo-woo” on top of physics.

Stance Towards Society

·      To believe that we can always synthesize the knowledge we have about society to overarching narrative, a meta-narrative, but that this metanarrative is never taken to be a complete synthesis, but rather always a self-critically held, but necessary protosynthesis.

·      To celebrate participatory culture and co-creation of society through non-linear, interactive processes where the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

Stance Toward the Human Being

·      To see that every person has a three-dimensional view of reality of her own, consisting of an ontology (a strong sense of what is real), an ideology (a strong sense of what is right), and a self (a strong sense of one’s own place in reality)—and that these three dimensions can be described in a pattern of sequentially unfolding developmental stages.

·      To have a non-anthropocentric view of reality, where human experience is not the measure of all things.

Metamodern Dreams  

Where do we go from here?

As Einstein (or was it Taylor Swift?) once said, “We cannot solve problems with the same level of thinking that created them.” It is an unresolved question whether humanity can muster the ability to solve collective action problems on a planetary level. This will involve a large-scale paradigmatic shift in individual and collective thinking, as well as wholesale changes to the “growth at all costs” model of globalized capitalism. But, we have to try. Zak Stein and Marian Partington discuss the “Post Tragic” mindset, saying,  

“The Post-Tragic sensibility and stance therefore offer a response to personal and societal hardship that may become critical as the interlocking crises of our times continue to bite. We will need to remain positive, but that positivity will have to be informed by the pervasiveness of suffering and uncertainty.”

Moving forward with pragmatic idealism and informed naivety, metamodernism asks us to be loyal to the cause of humanity and the planet, while contrarian to the status quo that hurtles us toward dystopian hypermodernity. The only way to the other side is through.

Sources for further inquiry

Metacrisis

Nate Hagens

Good explainer by Kyle Kowalski here

Limits and Beyond- Sequel to The Limits to Growth

The Consilience Project

Grey Swan Guild- Improving Collective Sensemaking

Metamodernism

Timotheus Vermeulen & Robin van den Akker: Notes on metamodernism

Lene Rachel Anderson: Bildung

Hanzi Freinacht: Metamoderna.org

Greg Dember

Too many amazing people to list: Perspectiva

Thomas Bjorkman and Jonathan Rowson: What is Emerging?

Luke Turner: Notes on Metamodernism

David Fuller and Alexander Beiner: Rebel Wisdom  & Rebel Wisdom YouTube Channel

Peter Limberg, Steward of the Stoa

Terry Patten

Brent Cooper: Metamodernism at Abs-Traction

Gregg Henriques & Daniel Gortz article for Psychology Today on Metamodernism

Jordan Hall - Good Rebel Wisdom video here

Metamodern TV & Movie List

Master List of Academic Metamodern sources

All Images from Shutterstock unless otherwise denoted

 Suggested Metamodern Start Points