As he climbed to the mound’s summit, he let out a long, deep, piercing howl, his face solemnly turned skyward. A serene calm came over his expression, as he gazed out across the many gathered with sad eyes. He sniffed. The crowd grew silent; only a few lonely barks and excited whimpers echoed back to him. At a distance more were amassing still. Clearly something was astir ...
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Hanzi Freinacht at the bar, recorded talking about the development of values: "I want to talk about values. Let’s begin with this question: 'What are good values?' How do you know if the values that you hold true to your heart are valid? How do you know if they’re efficient, if they’re true, if they correspond to the real problems out there in the world? Are some values perhaps better than others?" ...
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But if the totality of experience must always elude me, as it is infinitely larger than my ability to delineate its parts and direct attention towards them, I can at least use very broad strokes to review its territory. Within this field of being, I can count at least three categories, three worlds at different remove. There is 1st person reality, 2nd person reality and 3rd person reality ...
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In my opinion, nobody is more over-valued than the great internet phenomenon Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychology professor. As a psychologist and university teacher he is pretty good, even great. As a political commentator and interpreter of our time, he is simply not. Camille Paglia, who joins him for this talk, is also talented and interesting, but ultimately a poor and unreliable guide to understanding culture, politics and society of today. I’ll comment and show you they’re wrong about most things they are saying – including almost all of their central arguments. Some good stuff is in there, but most of it is just plain wrong, incoherent, and very poorly argued ...
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Wisdom is always defined as something entirely beneficial and unproblematic. It is argued by more people than I could name, that “wisdom” is what humanity needs to solve its multifaceted crisis. Given all the emphasis that I have put on discussing adult development (and the existential aspects thereof) in my book The Listening Society, I might be expected to enthusiastically support this trend. Yet, over the years, I have increasingly taken a skeptical position. The reason for this skepticism is rather simple: I have yet to see a credible attempt to “operationalize” the concept; to make it workable. If wisdom is such a serious matter, how come all its proponents only ever come up with vague and indirect ways of seeing it and measuring it? And what exactly is it that wisdom “does” – exactly how does it solve all manner of problems and “wicked issues”? ...
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The purpose of this post is a word of warning. There are comm­unities with the express purpose of bringing people to higher subjective states: spirit­ual communities. I am not primarily thinking of the medieval monastic trad­itions (to which we return in the next book, when we dis­cuss “exist­ential politics”). Monastic life also had many other roles, and such a central place in European society, that it was far from a purely spiritual congregation. The closest thing to truly contemplative comm­unities has historically been the Buddhist monasteries and the Vedic yoga traditions, although these too have had many other societal roles to play ...
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The theory that is today the Model of Hierarchical Complexity was first pres­ented by Michael Lamport Commons and Francis Asbury Richards in the early 1980s. It builds directly upon the Piagetian model and the work of Kohlberg and can be consider­ed as neo-Piagetian (although some call it “post-Piagetian”), bec­ause it large­ly suppo­ses that the Piagetian model (with cogni­tive stages) is corr­ect, but that there are sev­eral stages above what a normal human adult achieves, high­er stages that only a minority of the adult popula­tion reach. According to the neo-Piagetians the study of these stages can ex­plain a lot about humanity and society ...
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Want to know the reason why moral philosophy almost never makes a differ­ence, why most academic moral philosophers remain rather use­less? After all, we are obliged to ask: Why don’t they manage talking people into being vegans, selling their cars and giving away more of their money to charity, and being more selfless generally? Or even getting us to do what makes us happy either way, accord­ing to happiness research (give away your stuff, exercise, do mindfulness, eat healthy, walk in nature, don’t stress, have more sex and care about others)? A moral philosopher can still help us come to the right conclusions, given we agree on the pre­m­­ises, but they seldom seem to drive the ethical development of society. Why don’t moral philosophers make any noteworthy difference? It’s because they don’t have their behavioral science and psychology strai­ght. They don’t understand that humans are, in a manner of speak­ing, behav­ioral robot ...
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Metamoderna is happy to announce that 'The Listening Society – A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book One' by Hanzi Freinacht is now available for purchase as paperback and Kindle eBook. The Listening Society is the first in a series of books on metamodernism by Hanzi Freinacht and book one in a series of two on politics. The second half, titled Nordic Ideology, is planned for release spring 2018 ...
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We desperately need a deeper kind of welfare, beyond the confines of material welfare and medical security – a listening society, where every person is seen and heard. The answer to how we can achieve higher levels of happiness and decrease overall suffering is that we today know so much about the human mind, the brain, and the human being in her totality Political metamodernism is the rebellious act of taking this vast knowledge into our hands – and to boldly shape it into usable politics; into wonderful but dangerous “social technologies” that can be used to funda-mentally improve the lives of a majority of the citizen ...
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Should we really make people happy? Is it a viable goal for society? To some it may come off as an unnecessary question, “of course we should make people happy!”, but a lot of people tend to be annoyed about the notion of happiness as a societal goal and often argue that there are higher and nobler objectives than mere happiness. That seems to stem from the failure to properly make the distinction between hedonic happiness (pleasure, enjoyment, fun) and eudemonic happiness (meaning, purpose in life, and peace of mind). But the thing is that neither should be favored over the other and both of these can be supported for the long-term development of each person as well as society as a whole ...
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Metamodern political thinking constitutes a breach with liberalism and liberal democracy as we know them. Not only is it a death sentence to the individual, like the one I issued in my previous post, it is also a virtuous attack on the silly liberal notion that one can be “the good guy”, that it’s possible to simply chose the “right” political position – or – that one can remain untarnished, pure and innocent by doing nothing, by not taking a stance. We must put an end to this naive and harmful position I have termed “the liberal innocent”. It is this innocent that has to die. We must hereby issue a fatwa; shoot on sight ...
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In modern society there is a widespread idea about “the individual”. The idea of the individual is actually an ingenious solution to a difficult social-philosophical problem: should we focus on society as a whole, or on its different parts and singular processes? This view has served us greatly in the past and made it possible to avoid the totalitarian, oppressive and very pathological form of modernity we’ve encountered in the 20th century. But individualism doesn’t really seem to cut in any longer, it doesn’t fulfill its function as an effective unit of society’s self-organization, it can’t solve many of social problems and often it even stands in the way of an adequate resolution of these. But entering the opposite ditch of collectivism evidently has its fair share of problems too. So as a solution to transcend this dilemma, without compromising one or the other, allow me to introduce the transpersonal perspective: a way to go beyond the individual without suffocating it ...
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What exactly is the difference between postmodernism and metamodernism? What are the crucial differences between the ways the term “metamodernism” is used to describe a cultural phase, a developmental stage and a philosophical paradigm? And what’s the deal with this new thing that has come to be called “political metamodernism”? Here you’ll get the answers to these questions and find out why it’s important ...
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We began this series of six articles with the aim of conquering the term “metamodernism” by arguing that metamodernism must be more than a “cultural phase”. I hold that we should not be satisfied with a metamodernism that only describes certain shifts in culture, arts and architecture, but that the promise of metamodernism is much greater: we are shifting from one historical epoch to another and I think that metamodernism can offer a general and universal worldview that people can adopt to partake successfully in its historical development. In this last article I turn to the metamodern view of humanity itself. Not only does the view of humanity evolve through different historical epochs, but so do the ideas about how humanity can and should be transformed ...
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“What is society?” is the classical question of sociology. The question could easily be asked within anthropology, economics, political science, psychology or philosophy and the humanities. But it has stayed within the field of sociology; it is this discipline that purports to wrestle and at least provisionally answer the question. It is a question that grows out of a developed “naturalistic” worldview, in which humans have required a 3rd person view of reality, as something to be viewed “from the outside”, beginning from the Copernican, Baconian and Newtonian revolutions of cosmology, scientific method and physics. Once nature began to be differentiated as a category and described (“it is a set of objects locked in mechanical motion through space” (Newton), so society itself began to appear as a category that “is something”. But as society and our perspectives evolve, so does the perspective from which we can “see society itself”; new ways of asking what society is appear and new answers and intuitions emerge ...
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In modern life, spiritual, existential and aesthetic aspects of life have all taken a backseat. Of course there’s lots of these things going on, but there’s still a sense of woo-woo, pretentiousness, silliness, embarrassment, light-headedness, fake, fraud, self-aggrandizement and so forth. Physics, economics and possibly sexual drives and desires are viewed as “most real” – and the rest as epiphenomena, as fluff. Already Kant observed that we’re embarrassed to be found on our knees praying, as the modern worldview has an inherent difficulty reconciling the spiritual sides of life and its own necessarily religious foundations. The metamodern path is not to let in the spiritual woo-woo and artsy pretention, but to struggle to reconnect to the fundamental religious core of reality ...
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One’s understanding of science is intertwined with, but distinguishable from, one’s view of reality at large. There’s the classical distinction made between physics (the study of the natural realm and the relative interrelations of its parts) and metaphysics (the relation to reality as an absolute and the idea that reality in itself is beyond any particular fact or pattern). So what is the metamodern view of not only science (this particular category of human endeavor), but of reality itself? ...
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Every self-respecting (and in this case, self-ironic) philosophy must relate to knowledge. What can we know? How can we know it? What knowledge should count as most fundamental and valuable? What to make of subjective experience, social constructions, religions and spirituality in the face of scientific inquiry? ...
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Now for the million dollar question: What is metamodernism? There are three different ways of viewing this, each of which is related to the other two. We’ll delve into the deepest and most significant of these three meanings. We’ll dive deep and fast, so please hold on to the mouse or smartphone. Also, the definition of metamodernism is contested, and yours truly is admittedly a contestant ...
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Metamodernism is destined to beat postmodernism in the long run, just like postmodernism is currently beating modernism and modernism won over the ancient regime of its pre-modern predecessor. But we’re not just talking about philosophical schools here, we’re talking about entire mindsets, paradigms if you like, that have emerged from the intricate and reciprocal processes between societal developments and human psychology. Accordingly the emergence of metamodernism and its predecessors has a historical dimension that would serve as an insightful and pedagogical point of departure to understand it before one ventures into a more comprehensive investigation of its societal, philosophical and psychological facet ...
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It has become increasingly commonplace in our days to speak of the classical Left-Right scale as outdated, but somehow few people seem to be able to clearly articulate what that means, and even fewer have sufficiently explicated the philosophical underpinnings and political consequences of an ideology that genuinely lies beyond Left and Right. Going “beyond Left and Right” means that we make questions of the relations between public sector, private sector and civil sphere into open discuss¬ions where the best empirical arguments for each mechanism, in each case, must be taken into consideration ...
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There are a few loopholes around feminism, multiculturalism and the striving towards social inclusion and multiplicity that few people seem to be aware of, but many people certainly should. These insights are especially important for organizers of “process oriented parties”, i.e. the budding metamodern political movements you can find in places like Sweden and Denmark ...
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What’s the political party of the metamodern age? The answer is the process oriented political party – a party that is less about content, and more about the political processes that lead up to the best policies. A party about nothing. And the closest thing to a truly process oriented political party to date is the Danish party The Alternative. Instead of being based on a readymade political program, the party was formed around a set of principles and values for how to conduct good political discourse and dialogue. Most central to the party’s founding and organization is the how, rather than the what ...
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It seems as if one meta-ideology has been victorious and come to dominate the entire political spectrum in the Nordic countries. On the surface level you’ll find parties that nominally subscribe to traditional ideologies such as socialism, liberalism and conservatism like in any other western democracy, but if you look closely you’ll notice that they all seem to advocate some form of social-liberalism, with at least a modicum of green, environmentalist hue. All of the parties that are currently represented in the parliaments of the Nordic countries have diverged significantly from their ideological roots to an extent where they in practice subscribe to different variants of the same overarching ideology ...
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In the Nordic countries we are beginning to see clear patterns of metamodern politics at play. That’s because the goldilocks conditions for revolution are to be found in places where everything functions and runs smoothly. The Nordic countries are extremely ordered societies, even today under the pressures of globalization and immigration. And it is within the framework of this extreme level of order – and the far progression of the dynamics inherent to modern society – that transformative political revolutions occur ...
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This is a response to a critique of my work appearing on Bunker Magazine 15 April. The author remains anonymous but his or her political identity is quite clear – he or she is firmly based upon what I would term is a more “classical Left” perspective. In the following, I repeat the article in its entirety and give my responses. It’s presented as Anonymous Author (AA), interspersed with responses by me (HF) ...
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Today we are experiencing an era in which several extremely far-reaching revolutions of technology, thinking and behavior are occurring simultaneously. For better and/or worse, profound changes are very likely to take place in the coming decades. The scientific revolution of the 17th century, the Enlightenment of the 18th, the industrial and chemical revolutions of the 19th century and even the combustion engine and the communications of the 20th century were all peanuts in comparison to the scope of what is going on today. It is as if all of these revolutions were happening at once ...
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The metamodern aristocracy is a class of people who have a combination of factors in their psychological, existential and cognitive constitutions that allow them to play a certain role on the new historical world stage of the metamodern age. But they are also people of social, economic and cultural privilege, who have the time, energy and emotional fuel to expend for abstract endeavors such as developing the future of the world-system. What we are looking for is a nicer, softer, more nuanced and flexible form of Leninism, an avant-garde, or vanguard, of people who recognize and align with some of the deep structures and long-term attractors of our age, and who cooperate transnationally to bring about profound changes in global society ...
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These people are not just annoying, they are also about to take over the world. They are the ones with the highest amount of cultural capital, which they trade at increasingly favorable exchange rates, and, with which they’ll eventually outcompete capitalism. And their progressive and postmaterialist values generally make them more concerned with the transition to an ecologically and socially sustainable society than making a buck to buy nice things. It’s not that they are better than normal folks, but they are the ones to invent all the things to save the world ...
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The Alt-Right is a child of our time, a memetic mutation born from dissent, anger and resentment towards a perceived ruling elite thought to be out of tune with popular opinion. Our postmodern age has fostered an intellectual climate that has alienated a large part of the population and created an ideological vacuum from which the Alt-Right draws its power. But even if the Alt-Right should be seen as a counter-reaction against postmodern ideology, it’s just as much a postmodern phenomenon itself. It differs from previous currents to oppose postmodernism in the way it has adopted certain postmodern methods and insights to conduct the resistance. So even if the Alt-Right in many respects entails the absolute opposite to postmodern values, as a societal development it’s inherently postmodern ...
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The Alt-Right is currently one of the most hotly debated terms around, and for good reasons too. It's more than just plain bigotry. It has come to denote a new political current that displays some very novel properties that justifies the usage of a new term. Consequently it would be a mistake to merely dismiss it as old wine in new bottle ...
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How do you outcompete capitalism? I don’t mean just another naive notion of abolishing capitalism, but really, outcompete. How we replace capitalism with superior means of coordinating people’s economic actions while reducing the importance of monetary exchanges. In this post I’ll investigate the nature and history of capitalism, its future and how we’ll eventually go beyond it – a tale about how the logic of money came to dominate our lives and how it’s going to be replaced by a superior one in the future ...
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So what is the Alt-Left? Currently there’s a discussion going on about what exactly constitutes the Alt-Left, and as expected a lot of misunderstandings exist regarding what such a position would entail and what it is that justifies the introduction of a new term. But of equal importance is what the Alt-Left is not, what doesn’t qualify to be treated as belonging to a new branch of the leftwing. Here I’m going to shed some light on a few of the most prevailing misunderstanding ...
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A new form of progressive thinking is needed due to the failures of the Left to adapt to the changes of the global, digitalized world-system and its postindustrial centers. But all of this flows not only from an analysis of our time, but also from more fundamental shifts in perspective. In this post we take a look at some of these shifts in general perspective and how they create a platform for a new form of politic ...
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Here we take a look at some general political intuitions and stances that set the Alt-Left apart from the Old Left. This includes some rather sensitive topics in which our friends on the Left tend to react emotionally. The central issue here is that we are shifting from a “resistance stance” in which the Left is seen as reason and morality resisting the unjust structures of the world knowing that “another world is possible”, to a developmental stance, in which the mission is to improve upon the many faulty processes that constitute the world order ...
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The main difference between the Old Left and the Alt-Left is that the latter focuses more on the cultural, behavioral and psychological sides of economic life. In a world where material resources are relatively abundant and information and information processing become dominant in economic life, money begins to matter less than e.g. cultural capital, good social relations and access to high quality information. What is lacking is not stuff, or money, but intelligent solutions for distribution, value creation and ideas about what to do with our lives in the first place. To create a fair and sustainable global order we must create better social settings for people to do worthwhile thing ...
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This is the first in a series of blog posts were I’ll attempt to provide a rough outline of the positions of this emerging Alt-Left. You will find, over the years, that these positions will become increasingly common. This is because they reflect the attractors of how society is evolving: we are entering a new age, with an entirely new form of global economy and society. This means that many of the Old Left positions become unsustainable, irrelevant or downright counterproductive ...
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It’s a good question, isn’t it? Because, with all due respect, the Left doesn’t really seem to be going anywhere. It’s losing big time at the moment, so something must be wrong with it, right? Accordingly one finds a lot of answers out there, but few of them have much merit. Here are the five major reasons why the Left is losing ...
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The times are a-changin’. And often we find recourse to previous times to understand ongoing events. The confusing and volatile conditions of the present have been compared to the turbulent times of the first half of the 20th century, in particular the period between the two world wars. This comparison has its merits, but it’s not without dangers of becoming too anachronistic if our allegories are taken too literally and if we fail to include a sound analysis of the present. It’s important to keep in mind that we’re living in a vastly different world than our close ancestors a century ago. So even if some of the mechanisms and patterns seem to be similar, the outcomes are likely to be very different ...
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In recent years many have compared our times with earlier epochs. Are we approaching a new 1914? Or is it perhaps more accurate to make comparisons with the 1930s? After all, the stable and predictable world order that followed the Second World War seems to be nearing its end. Another chaotic period to decide the future order of the planet appears to be what we can expect to live in for the foreseeable future. That does sound like an echo of the turbulent first half of the 20th century ...
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So you consider yourself a Leftie? Or perhaps you just want to educate yourself, getting up to par with your worst adversaries ever to come out of the Hell of progressive thought and action? In any case, you’re more than welcome to enjoy this brief presentation of what makes someone Alt-Left ...
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To know what is useful to a dog, one must study dog-nature. This nature itself cannot be deduced from the principle of utility. Applying this to Man, he that would criticize all human acts, movements, relations etc., by the principle of utility, must first deal with human nature in general, and then with human nature as modified in each historical epoch. Bentham makes short work of it. With the driest naïveté, he takes the modern shopkeeper, especially the English shopkeeper, as the normal man ...
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The world hardly noticed when the Danish party The Alternative snuck their way into parliament with almost 5% of the votes, less than two years after its founding was announced. And why should the world notice such menial, peripheral affairs in the quiet corners of the world? Because this event reveals a certain greater cultural pattern that come to affect the world at large ...
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This outline confirms Zavarzadean metamodernism—both literary and cultural—not only as a new paradigm but also one which contemporary metamodernists have continued to explore in their own writing ...
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In the fifth of six ruminations on recent developments in metamodernism, I address the reading of Jameson that seems to animate the outlier meta- modernism of Vermeulen and van den Akker ...
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A fourth of six ruminations on recent developments in metamodernism, rebutting misperceptions of Zavarzadean metamodernism and attempting to remedy these by close-reading Zavarzadeh’s seminal text ...
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This is the third of six ruminations on recent developments in meta- modernism. It addresses a recent essay on the topic by cultural theorists Vermeulen and van den Akker ...
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In contrasting metamodernism to previous cultural paradigms, I insist that the failure to account metamodernism a “movement” is at the heart of an error that now threatens ongoing metamodern research ...
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This is the first of six ruminations on recent developments in meta- modernism. It addresses the question of whether and how metamodernists can come to an agreement on the basic principles of the philosophy by developing a rudimentary outline for metamodernism ...
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The intellectual internet reverberates. Small gods pause for a moment. Something interesting happened yesterday. The moral philosopher, neo-atheist, critic of Islam and all things religious (and secular proponent of meditation and spirituality) Sam Harris released a fascinating recent e-mail exchange with the intellectual giant of the Left: Noam Chomsky ...
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Is there such a thing as Karmic law? What goes around comes around, huh? Or does it? Everybody gets what they deserve in the end. Or do they? Or how about this one: Does being a good person ultimately count for more than being powerful and successful? Is the world a fair place, a cosmic order of morality? ...
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There are reasons for political opinions, different orders of causation. People hold opinions because. These different orders constitute separate but interconnected logics of causation that can all be, and have been, studied as their own separate fields of inquiry. These different kinds of because can be described and related to one another. I propose here to present a list of these different orders and some of their most important interrelations, as far as my theorizing can take me at this point ...
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Political freedom is a scale from seven to one, where seven is North Korea and one is the US, France or Sweden. At least according to the Washington based NGO Freedom House www.freedomhouse.org. Here’s the deal: There is one score for political rights and one for civil liberties. And when a country gets to one in both scores – it is free. But is that all there is to it? Is that the endpoint of human freedom? ...
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This is the second post regarding the major objectives of metamodernism. The first, on the political stance of Game Change, was a political follow-up on the post ‘5 things that make you metamodern’. This post will introduce the major underlying philosophical concept behind the metamodern project: Proto-Synthesi ...
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The purpose is to present the two major objectives of the metamodern project, politically and philosophically. This post, part one, introduces the underlying political thinking behind metamodernism. We call it Game Change. Failing to understand this principle leads to very serious mistakes; such failure transmutes glowing idealism into murder most foul ...
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What would be a sane, pragmatic and holistic approach to gender equality in society? I would argue that we have three fundamental aspects of the gender-sex-equality-identity-relationship-reproduction complex (for short: the gender-political complex). Yes, these things are intrinsically linked to one another and can be treated as one single gender-political complex ...
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The basic stage theory proposed here is: modernist -> postmodernist -> metamodernist. So don’t skip past postmodernism, that especially goes out to the integral community, because you will end up with a cheap, empty tin version of metamodernism. Here’s a list of five key insights that make you metamodern ...
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Russia may have won Crimea and the separatists may be gaining control over parts of Ukraine. But the war was over before it began. It was won by pop, clothes, style, sensitivity, yoga, food - and rock and roll. No half-naked cowboy president can compete with the lean muscles of an American movie star like Brad Pitt, no steely gaze can seduce better than the brilliant smile of Clooney ...
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We see an international civil society defining what is pure and sacred (free press, humor, satire) and impure and unholy (terrorism, fundamentalism, attacks on the free society). But what social realities do these exclamations of moral indignation result in? Perhaps they have undesirable effects. Perhaps even, they have the same as the actions of the terrorists themselve ...
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This is the second post on economics, challenging the orthodoxies of the Left critique in our time. It is about another Greek drama, about agony and ecstasy in twelve parts – about why the glimmering hopes of a radical change will not materialize and be met this time around ...
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Thomas Piketty's book Capital in the Twenty-First Century hit the world like a battering ram. The public conclusion: inequality is growing, there is a top 1 % with exponential wealth accumulation, and the middle classes have been outmaneuvered by global capital. The left has gained renewed rhetorical and political legitimacy. But is this a correct reading of Piketty's research? ...
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How does metamodernism, an academic study of art and culture, relate to the recent developments in politics seen in Scandinavia and elsewhere, with movements like the Alternative? Indeed, how can we say anything meaningful about the pattern that connects metamodern art, politics and culture? ...
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I want to speak today about something else; about the birth of metamodern political consciousness. For me it is no joke. I want to be vulnerable now to begin with. Later, when I trash intellectuals, score cheap points and rage against the machine, remember that Hanzi Freinacht is only kidding around. Know that I am a vulnerable, bleeding soul just like you ...
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