The following is an extract of the second chapter from Hanzi Freinacht’s unpublished book ‘The 6 Hidden Patterns of History: A Metamodern Guide to World History’. The book is not coming out anytime soon, but a webinar on the topic of metamodern history and the six metamemes will be held this autumn, four weekends in a row November 2 – 25. More details about the course can be found here.

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Hanzi Freinacht: There was no stone age. And there was no bronze age either.

The reason we’re still using these terms is simply because we’ve left it to the archeologists to define those epochs where none or very few written sources are available. And since archeologists often don’t seem very interested in social theory, they’ve simply named these epochs after the stuff they dig up.

This isn’t a problem when archaeologists talk about layers in the ground, of course, but things start to get silly when their terms are used as general measures of development. Allow me to mention a few examples:

In Sub-Saharan Africa they skipped the bronze age entirely and went directly from the stone age to the iron age. Does that mean they skipped a technological and social stage of development entirely? No, it just means that the Africans didn’t have access to tin and copper, the two metals needed to make bronze.

Or how about this one: To this day, you can find classifications of the Mayans or the Aztecs as “stone age civilizations”. Metallurgy in itself, however, wasn’t unknown since they knew how to craft objects out of gold (and bronze working was on its way). Sadly, gold isn’t very practical and can’t be turned into weapons to counter Spanish steel rapiers. It should be obvious that defining an agrarian civilization capable of building aqueducts, pyramids, and cities sustaining hundreds of thousand inhabitants as “stone age”—just because they had no bronze—completely collapses any sensible meaning-making that can be derived from the category. The Aztec empire was a Faustian civilization, comparable to ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia.

Or how about the Mayans? They used a material known as obsidian. Obsidian is a naturally occurring volcanic glass, and technically therefore a rock. This material, however, was used in similar ways as bronze in Eurasia, for decorations, weapons, tools etc. Another stone age civilization?

Then again, if we were to name an era after the most widely used material, the proper name should be the “wood age”. Why should we call it something else just because wood happens to occur less frequently in the archaeological records due to decomposition. Oh, and by the way, the wood age lasted roughly until the 20th century when synthetic materials finally took over. Ah, the wonders of the plastic age!

What I want to say with all of this is that we should define and name the way of life before the agrarian revolution not in terms of what kind of material we find in the ground, but rather in terms of what kind of society and culture we’re talking about. So instead of the stone age, my suggestion is that we start using terms that better describe the deepest patterns of social life itself: metamemes. As we have seen, this includes the prevalent “worldviewing” of a culture, but is not reducible to it.

What Is Animism?

Q: In chapter one you briefly introduced the animist metameme as one in which there’s no differentiation between body and soul, where totems and taboos determine the social dynamics of everyday life, and where people view the world through a lens of anthropomorphization and a nature enchanted with spirit. This is also what’s commonly understood as animism, the belief system that you’ve named this metameme after. Maybe you could say a little bit more about animism before we move on?

HF: I most certainly can. First of all I just need to mention that I agree with Yuval Harari that calling our ancestors animists is like saying that people in the pre-modern agrarian age were theists. Animism is a veeery broad category, and essentially an anthropological construct (as in, it was constructed by modern academics, anthropologists, not by the animist cultures themselves).

As such, it doesn’t say that much about a particular culture when applied to a group of humans. Anthropolo­gical and archaeological studies of tribal cultures show a staggering diversity that in many ways is much greater than that between contemporary world civilizations (Western, Chinese, Indian etc.). The idea of a world animated with spirit, from which the name is derived, is just one of many aspects of indigenous religions, and to most indigenous peoples their beliefs are so integral to daily life that they don’t even have a name for their specific mythology or any notion of “religion” itself. Unsurprisingly, the term has thus been criticized for being a colonial construct to define and categorize non-western peoples with little regard to what they themselves think about it, and for awkwardly lumping together a multitude of vastly diverse cultures into one neat category just to fit the Western mind. Yet, in recent times there have been activists and representatives of indigenous populations who’ve felt that the term does aptly describe their beliefs and who have thus self-identified as animists.

I’m thus painfully aware that “animism” isn’t a perfect term, but in lack of a better one I’ve decided to continue using it. In any case, the most basic definition of animism is that it’s a worldview where human as well as non-human entities, living and inert, are believed to possess some kind of spiritual essence, soul, or life force. The actions of animals are seen as intentional, planned, and purposive; and often, even inert objects or phenomena are believed to have intentions and a will of their own, too.

Animist thought is characterized by the idea that there’s no distinct separation between the spiritual and the physical world, that the whole world, both the subjective realms of the mind and the physical universe, is bound by webs of kinships. This is often accompanied by the idea that certain persons, families, or entire lineages are related to particular species of animals. This kind of thinking is also known as “totemic” and harbors a sense of belonging and close kinship with the natural world. Sometimes kinship even extends to plant life and weather phenomena, which are also considered to have magical capabilities and wills of their own. The supernatural world is seen as an accessible realm with beings one can interact with, almost like a separate tribal territory, and the means to access this world are believed to be various rituals and symbols.

By providing gifts to the spirits in the form of ritualized sacrifices one can improve relations with them, and it has even been observed that people have believed they could marry into the spirit world. In many ways it’s obvious that animists believe we can interact with the spirit world in similar ways as with other people; that humans and spirits are part of the same social reality and that the natural world has anthropoid, human, qualities. In addition to the supernatural animistic spirits, it’s also possible that our animist ancestors believed in the existence of some kind of single creator deity, like those observed among some modern-day animistic religions, and that ritual practices were imbued with apotropaic meaning (having the power to avert evil influences or bad luck) and perhaps involved sympathetic magic (using objects or actions resembling or symbolically associated with the event or person over which influence is sought).

Through the varieties of animist perspectives, we generally don’t see ourselves as “separate” from our environment (which, implicitly, the other metamemes tend to in different ways). We don’t perceive the natural world as something to be grasped intellectually as an object external to one self. There is a closeness and identification with the natural world that is primordial in the sense that it is what our minds naturally gravitate towards unless larger social structures upset this equilibrium and “force us” into the later metamemes—but, crucially, it also facilitates our interactions with the biotopes we are part of: we use the large expanse of our social minds to interact with the world more meaningfully. It has been argued, for instance, that this enables the hunter to become aware of him- or herself and what they’re doing while simultaneously taking in the viewpoint of the prey and feeling one with it. This helps the hunter to better predict the behavior of the animal. A life preoccupied with the spirits of the animals and the imitation of these through animistic rituals and dances are thus not purely what modernity would view as a “spiritual” matter, but embodied practices that enable us to survive, and thrive, together with the ecosystem we rely upon. Modernity needs at least nine years of semi-forced schooling to insert itself in our minds: animist culture takes hold so much more spontaneously. It is perhaps no coincidence that the neurological types we today know as ADHD are on average more successful within animist societies, as measured by survival metrics—usually as foragers, rather than hunters. Or, at least, a recent study published by The Royal Society argued as much. Perhaps this is because a wandering attention, always looking for the next quick reward, leads to more berries being picked, the environment more curiously scanned. In today’s world, in modern societies, people with ADHD instead, on average, live unhappier lives, with more broken relationships, and 13 years shorter expected life spans as compared to the general population. Needless to say, animist culture tends to be less alienating than modernity—and dramatically so for some groups whose neurology is better attuned to hunting and gathering, freely roaming around, rather than toiling in fields, factories and office cubicles.

Personhood is not locked up in human bodies or individuals. Winds, trees, non-human animals, ancestors, and spirits of vaguer shape and form are all persons with whom relationships are possible, and vital. This widened perception of personhood has been argued to make animism a “relational epistemology” where conceptions of self-identity are based on relationships with others rather than some essentialized individual self, anticipating the postmodern idea of the “dividual” where persons are seen as bundles of social relation­ships. In the animistic case that even includes relations with some that aren’t human.

The radicality of this extended personhood, and indeed its corresponding ethical embrace, can hardly be overstated. Animists ascribe personhood status to specific locations and innate natural objects like rivers or mountains. Before there were temples, the silent wonders of the natural world invited us to the sacred, to a sense of awe, of belonging, of wholeness. The process we today know by many names, of “alienation”, may exist in animist settings too, but almost certainly much less prevalently and saliently. Animism is not a perfect homestead for the human mind, but it is arguably still the closest we have come to feeling at home in the universe.

And perhaps it’s from this standpoint that the role of the shaman is best understood. Isn’t it baffling, if you think about it, that at different continents, in peoples separated by tens of thousands of years—say the San people in southern Africa (the world’s oldest and in that sense most successful culture, going on some 40 000 years) and the arctic Inuit and the Aboriginal Australians and the 250-person strong Tsaan of reindeer herders in Mongolia—you can always find one special category of person that can meaningfully be called “a shaman”? That is a truly stupefying finding, given how vastly different these cultures, languages, environmental life conditions, diets, and histories all are. And yet it’s arguably the most consistent finding of all of anthropology, right up there with the universality of marriage, burial, and dance. People can organize families differently, speak differently, fight differently—but they all have shamans, one way or another, even the smallest remnants of tribes. And the shaman fits in because they have to: when we live in nature, of nature, with nature, we must relate to, we must make contact with nature. The person who is a little less of the tribe, one of us, is a little more like one of the spirits of nature (a few parallels in modern life can come to mind; again, not least the neuroatypical among us). They become the bridge to nature and its worlds beyond. They jump head-first into the rituals, into the mysteries, into the unknown. As animists, we both exclude them and revere them. We are careful not to touch their most charged charms, as they are loaded with energy, with taboo.

It’s important to keep in mind that animist cosmologies in many ways are more specific and concrete, more particular, than worldviews reflecting later metamemes. It’s not so much the gods in general, some abstract life force, or divine principle, or concerns about universality and generality—as in organized religions and then in modern science—that are most central. It’s more a specific and proximate spirit, a particular magic force, or a certain geographical location, a certain ancestor. It’s common for indigenous populations around the world to have been strongly attached to sacred spaces (something that has been carried into many contemporary religions, for instance Mecca or Jerusalem). Accordingly, animist hearts and minds have suffered as modernity has defined ownership over or extracted resources from these sacred places—or simply removed them and built roads, pipelines, malls, and production plants on top.

Q: Thanks for the summary. So when did this kind of thinking emerge, approximately?

HF: Well, it’s difficult to say. Scholars talk about a “revolution of the Upper Paleolithic” starting around 50 000 years ago. However, excavations of ritualistic decorated burial sites dating back more than 100 000 years have led anthropologists and archeologists to believe that people had already begun believing in an afterlife at that time.

The first undisputed burial of a shaman is much younger though, c. 30 000 years ago, and happens to be a woman. This also coincides with the emergence of anthropo­morphic figurines and images, for example the famous half-human, half-animal “lion-man” figurines which indicates that people may have begun to believe in some kind of pan­theons of gods or supernatural beings, or at least sported shamanistic practices closely comparable to those known from contemporary foraging societies.

Q: If what we know about animism is primarily based on the lives of contemporary indigenous people, how can we be sure that this also applies to the way people lived twenty, thirty, and forty thousand years ago?

HF: You’re absolutely right that we should be careful about drawing too hasty conclusions about paleolithic society based on the lives of the last remaining hunter gatherers of today. First of all it can never be excluded that the mere presence of anthropologists and other observers has interfered with the studies. Secondly, all surviving foraging societies have evolved for a much longer time than the ones living 30 000 years ago, so it cannot be exclu­ded that they have developed complex traits that simply weren’t pre­sent back then. And thirdly, all foraging societies modern anthropologists have studied have been the ones living in the most marginal lands no one else wanted; areas located in harsh climates ill-suited for agriculture. It’s fair to assume that life in pre-agrarian Europe or China must have been quite different from that of the Inuit in Greenland or the ǃKung in the Kalahari Desert.

But apart from a relatively limited number of preserved eye-witness accounts of native Americans, before European invaders took over their lands and greatly disrupted their social complexity, we have almost no direct knowledge about what hunter-gatherer life was like in more fertile areas of the world. We also don’t know what paleolithic societies were like back when most of the planet was virgin territory and there were still plenty of large game to hunt. It’s not impossible to imagine that certain cultural features were lost as population densities increased, mammoths and other large land animals were hunted to extinction, and people had to make due with less and cope with increased competition from other groups of humans. We can’t exclude that the foraging societies we know about today have been impoverished versions of the ones who used to inhabit the earth.

Lastly, and most importantly, today’s animist societies and their dynamics are affected by the presence of other, larger societies that function according to other metamemes—most notably modernity and its global system of power and exchange.

Q: So what you’re saying is that basically we don’t really have a clue?

HF: Yes and no. It’s true that apart from the most superficial material aspects we can only guess how our ancestors lived their lives and how they thought. But that doesn’t mean we can’t make well-informed guesses based on archaeological remains and by critically analyzing anthropological investigations and historical eye-witness accounts.

After all, since so many strands of knowledge add up towards one and the same pattern recognition, it’s more than possible to triangulate our way to a form of understanding that, certainly, does not exhaust the intimate and nuanced understanding of any one particular animist culture, but does in fact quite clearly grasp the wider property space within which this wild diversity of human experience plays out. If we know present-day anthropology and is intricate descriptions of animist cultures around the world (combined with a backlog of almost two centuries of serious anthropological work), and we have a veritable revolution of chemistry-supported paleoanthropology (you can now study the remnants of food in teeth and guts), and you have a clear grasp of developmental psychology (e.g. that humans all go through an anthropomorphic stage of reasoning, and we can see how reasoning evolves into complexity and abstraction), and we see the deeper structures of the psychology of religion (so, generalizable patterns of how spiritual technologies and practices function), and we have models from human ecology concerning how culture emerges as a function of the ecologies or biotopes upon which it relies, and we have a strong tradition of sociological theory that elucidates the general dynamics of human interaction, well, then we can start talking. We can begin to trace the pattern of patterns, i.e. the metameme of animist culture. We can trace the realm of possibility, of potential. It’s not exactly evidence, but it’s a structure of so many interconnected indices that correct for and/or corroborate one another.

This triangulation of sources makes it abundantly clear that such a pattern as “animism” does meaningfully exist, does meaningfully describe a range of interrelated cultural expressions, even if the final evidence must always be found in real meetings with actual cultures. Depending on how you define “uncontacted”, there are up to over 100 uncontacted indigenous tribes left on the planet (they can still have metal tools or even t-shirts via trade networks with other not-as-uncontacted tribes, etc.)—and these remain exceedingly vulnerable to the germs prevalent in the global network and the social dynamics of modernity’s juggernaut (not to mention the zeal of postfaustian missionaries seeking new converts, or even the curiosity of postmodern anthropologists). But even at a distance, given the generalized knowledge of animism as a metameme, we can posit strong working hypotheses about some of the recurring cultural properties of these tribes. And such hypotheses can generalize into the past, into our own past, thus rooting our understanding of culture’s evolution.

So even if most of our theories regarding our ancestors’ social structures, beliefs, and ways of thinking are based on the last remaining hunter gatherers of today, or historical accounts of such peoples before modern societies annihilated or changed them, and even if we consider that the cultural diversity among contemporary hunter gatherers is nothing short of staggering, even among tribes in close physical proximity to one another, there are still some overall similarities. Sexual division of labor tends to exist and follow some patterns, but there are always new findings complexifying the overall picture—for instance, more and more examples and arguments are being presented for a significant prevalence of women who have hunted in hunter-gatherer societies. With that said, let me still go over the wider and general consensus: In most observed cases, from Inuit to San, hunting is mostly the domain of males while women usually do most of the gathering of plants and small animals. Fishing is usually a shared endeavor between the sexes. Men usually manufacture the tools used for hunting, while women make the containers for gathering and cooking. Clothes and the tools used for that is also the domain of women. Social structures tend to be simple and more egalitarian than those in agricultural and industrial societies, and food is shared between all members of the group, by necessity that is. And finally, on a spiritual and philosophical level, there are so many similarities among contemporary hunter-gatherers, whether that’s in the arctic regions, the Amazonas, or the deserts of Southern Africa and Australia, that it feels safe enough to assume that they might have had a lot in common with foragers of the past.

As such, I think we should be brave enough to try and reconstruct what prehistoric times must have been like from the best knowledge currently available—all while remaining ready to revise everything we’ve constructed once new and better information becomes available. But to be clear, I don’t have a gender agenda here, just looking at some salient and recurring social structures, noting that the Animist metameme tends to overlap with them.

The Animist Mind

Q: All these descriptions are fine, if rather superficial, academic, and “Western”—reductive. What about the inner lives of animist cultures? Are not animists more spiritually endowed, given their relational cosmologies, closeness to nature, and direct experience of natural awe and connection? Is not the tribal community more meaningful than following orders, keeping a schedule, intellectualizing, and going to an office job? I still feel you’re missing the real depth here, the true relevance—and maybe not treating the wild variety of animists with sufficient regard.

HF: Indeed—across the tremendous range of human experiments that tens of thousands of years of animist cultures engendered, with a variety we can today only begin to comprehend, as evidenced by, amongst many other examples, the sheer hotpot of human cultural forms that is gathered only on Papua New Guinea (the favorite part of the world of so many anthropologists)—can one even speak meaningfully of such a thing as “the animist mind”? It’s a fair question, an important one.

Is the animist mind an entity that we could at least sketch the outline of and learn from, give its proper due, and even integrate into the farther reaches of modernity—without falling prey to wishful caricature, inappropriate cultural appropriation, and/or commercialization?

I believe and certainly hope we can; on the one hand it appears arrogant for us to claim access to a “general animism” when all animist cultures are precisely so localized and particular; on the other hand, it appears defeatist and as an insult to our joint and universal human experience to assume that the insights and connection to nature of animism are forever lost to all of the later metamemes. Again, the key difference between a “modern” and “metamodern” historiography, is that the latter takes all of the metamemes not as merely “objects of study” (“why are all these people so non-rational?” and so on), but as serious expressions of cultural life relevant and important to the development of one’s own culture, of one’s very sense of self. So I feel that we have to try, however provisionally. Otherwise, we are excluding this element of culture that is still inherent to all of us, still repressed and marginalized. I’m not interested in animism as a curiosity, but rather for what it can teach me, or teach us—for how it can help mend modernity itself.

With that in mind, let me try to take a kind of middle position on the issue of the “inherent spiritual experience” of animist life. More than one anthropologist has a soft spot for the mystical, the occult, the spiritual—at least since its overlap with Western counterculture in the 1960s and -70s. This is deeply reflected in the discipline’s way of perceiving and ethnographically participating in indigenous and particularly animist societies. Famous examples can be found in quotes like this one, by the wonderfully weird German researcher, Hans Peter Duerr, in Dreamtime (German original from 1978):

“The ‘dream place’ is everywhere and nowhere, just like the ‘dreamtime’ is always and never. You might say that the term ‘dream place’ does not refer to any particular place and the way to get to it is to get nowhere.”

Duerr argued that Western (Modern) science fails to take animist spirituality, or the occult in other pre-modern societies, anywhere near as seriously as they deserve: that there is real knowledge there, real explorations of the farther reaches of reality—not just whimsical or childish experience to be “explained” by a superior intellect—i.e. forms of knowing that “objectivity” is ill-suited to capture and comprehend. Dreamtime is about the borders of subjective experience, while the science we know today always stays firmly within the narrow confines of waking consciousness and its conceptual frameworks of self and reality. Animist spirituality, with its ready access to trance through rituals, to communion with nature, to shamanic intervention, and sometimes hallucinogenic drugs and practices, can and does break through boundaries unimaginable by the average doctor or engineer. And they may do so massively, and much more often than the rare glimpses of spiritual experience allotted to us in modern life—depending of course on the specifics of the animist culture.

In a similar vein, archeologists David Lewis-Williams and David Pearce have argued, in their 2005 book Inside the Neolithic Mind, that if you examine sites of Neolithic art in Europe and the Middle East, you see signs of altered states of consciousness pretty much everywhere.

Q: Well, at least it’s open to such interpretations.

HF: Yes, you’re right.

Indigenous mythologies speak a similar language: one that sounds decidedly psychedelic. Altered states, induced through shamanism, ritual, dance trance, and/or hallucinogenics, seem to have played a pivotal role in the evolution of the mind itself, of culture itself. Animist societies are arguably themselves psychedelically driven to a significant—and competent, and mature—degree that later societies are not. There may be deep wells of knowledge available to these societies that elude us today.

At the same time, this line of argument—taking on a more equal footing with the Animist metameme than did classical anthropology, viewing them as cultures that have knowledge that we lack—may also need to be tempered, to be balanced, in order to avoid unrealistic expectations upon animist life. We especially need to steer clear of a certain uncannily growing undercurrent of Western coveting of animist spirituality, with its consumerist, almost vampyric, Ayahuasca-tourism and so on. The high regard in which our hippie friends all hold Animist culture is not necessarily harmless: it arguably invites destructive forms of appropriation. Let me be clear to the point of sarcasm: rich, beautiful, hyper-feminine, sexy and athletic, “embodied” Burning Man ladies skillfully dancing by a virgin lake in the jungle, spreading their Goddess worship via YouTube, have nothing on the direct cultural expression of wrinkled faces of a simple and rhythmic clapping and singing taking place in the Kalahari desert. The !Kung people are not putting on a show; there is no connection in their rituals to Bali’s global elite party scene and Instagram. Such Western reenactments of animist spirituality certainly miss the mark, however universally human longings for connection that such reenactments may be stemming from.

So, from the other side of the argument, we may trace the classical sociological claim made by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, in their 1966 book, The Social Construction of Reality, that human life always returns to that mundane social construction that is “everyday life”. There is, indeed, no reason to believe anything is different in Animist cultures. Yes, they access spiritual states more readily; yes, their everyday life is less alienating and “stuck in the head”; yes, their holistic cosmologies are less weird to the human mind and thus facilitate a smoother sense of connection to the world… But no, the average member of animist societies does not consistently walk around in dreamtime, transfixed by elevated spiritual states during much of their waking lives. Let us be realistic about it: The animist mind is spiritually affluent, but its life does not entirely play out in the Garden of Eden.

It should further be qualified that while, yes, animist societies do tend to be spiritually richer than modern ones, the types of spirituality that emerge in hunter-gatherer societies do not correspond to the mind-transforming practices pertaining to the Postfaustian traditions, i.e. the mysticisms of the great religions. In small Animist societies with limited divisions of labor, there are no specialized monks or nuns, supported via larger communities of food donors, who refine practices of mind purification over centuries and millennia, through tens of thousands of intense practice hours per person, under the strictures of severe discipline and extremely incentivizing belief structures about the cosmic significance of their work. That stuff comes along primarily with the Axial Age (as we shall return to). In today’s neurological research into the brain states of spiritual experience, it is particularly the Tibetan Buddhist hermit Dzogchen practitioners that stand out. It is these people, uniquely, that can all but blow up the brain scanning equipment of modern researchers with strong, persistent Gamma waves (the fastest brainwaves, associated with peaceful bliss and compassion). But it is interesting to note that the Tibetan tradition—arguably the world’s most radical and tremendous in terms of measurable spiritual development—is one that has integrated many distinctly shamanic elements into its unique interpretation of Buddhism. So something can certainly be said in favor of the profound potential value to be found in integrating the animist mind within the frameworks of later metamemes. This is what the aim should be for our present situation.

Simply stated, I do believe in the animist mind as a useful category, from which true and relevant insight can be gleaned. It is something to rediscover, to revisit and critically reconstruct in the context of today’s larger societies, even if it is far from the only form of spiritual and cultural reconstruction necessary for metamodern cultures to thrive.

Q: What about magic? It’s not just spiritual experience, community building, and the embodiment of the natural world as non-verbal knowledge that constitute the animist mind: it is a deep relationship to magic, speaking to the world around us.

HF: Absolutely. Magical thinking is inherent to the Animist metameme. Here’s what I make of it.

Causality, as a form of reasoning to predict and interact with the world, is always under development. There isn’t one form of “rational mind” and one form that is magical. We’re all magicians, of different kinds, to different degrees. Causality is, viewed in this larger historical context, just another form of magic.

What the modern mind sees as “that’s just magic”, is the animist mind’s real reasoning. A big part of that has to do with the lack of differentiation into conceptual categories. In ethnomedicine, the study of medical practices of indigenous societies, there are many examples of how you can affect the healing processes of the mind and body by using the right words and objects (snake’s teeth and so forth). In the animist mind, language has not been separated out as something “exterior to” the world of objects. Objects have not been separated from subjects. So the world at large appears as something that can be talked to, as something in which each phenomenon has its own deep “essence”, and that such essences can be affected by conversation with the spiritual realm. You cannot “see” causes and effects, you have to infer them. Likewise, the animist mind infers the presence of spirits.

It’s here that spiritual states, in which one feels no separate self, and where “dreamtime” is experienced, play a special role: When the animist mind feels most connected to the world, this mind can enter into relationships with spirits that are believed to affect the course of real events. The name of one object sounds, linguistically speaking, like the name of something else, and by using that object and speaking the right words, you can affect the essence of another, seemingly related object or occurrence or phenomenon. It’s a form of causality, a form of reasoning—but one that meshes well with spiritual experience. And to a certain extent, such magic can do its magic, and truly work—through processes we would today perhaps describe as Placebo effects and the like.

Animist culture, through its very access to magic, was so superior to earlier forms of Archaic culture that it could spread across the planet over a comparatively short period of time: Animist cultures took hold on all continents and other species of homo were outcompeted. It is with this in mind that I named this chapter: Raindance did actually conquer the world. It’s not just cute; it’s that powerful. It is a form of reasoning that, in many ways, works. But note, again, that by inferring the presence of spirits, the animist mind has already removed some of the “essence” inherent to the phenomena themselves, and started to reason about invisible causal forces: it is, relatively speaking, a kind of secularization, of seeing wider causal patterns. Every metameme constitutes this kind of de-essentialization of the experienced reality from which it springs.

All of this does not mean that magical thinking of this kind is unproblematic in today’s world; it needs to be critically revisited and integrated with the realities today to serve us well. But that’s another story.

Q: Alright, so let’s talk more about the animist way of thinking.

In the past, it was common for scholars to subscribe to the, in my opinion, misled idea that indigenous people are somehow operating within a prelogical mentality and that they’re not fully capable of conscious, critical thinking. This mode of “primitive” thinking has, traditionally, been contrasted with the “rational” thinking of supposedly enlightened Westerners. Fortunately, this colonial way of thinking has largely been abandoned within academia.

And then “you guys” come along.

It’s not that I don’t acknowledge at least some of the findings within the field of adult development, or that I’m blind to the obvious fact that human beings can, under the right conditions, continue to develop cognitively throughout their adult lives. What I find really hard to believe is that entire cultures, that is, functional human societies that manage to survive in nature, were to function on a level of cognitive complexity akin to that of a child.

If we look at how indigenous people reason, and how they intelligently solve tricky problems—and how they over and over again have tricked westerners, I find that there’s little reason to conclude that they should be living in some kind of prelogical dreamworld.

HF: First of all there’s no one saying that animist societies don’t give birth to highly intelligent people, or that they aren’t able to have well-reasoned and rational conversations about how to solve problems. Cognitive complexity is, like intelligence, a highly hereditary property, and high-complexity individuals can be found in all societies (but in advanced ones they’re more likely to spend their days conducting high-complexity tasks defined within a stronger division of labor).

Secondly, since MHC Stage 8 Primary is the minimum requirement to properly understand animism, and since this is the first stage to enable simple logical deduction, I’m therefore not claiming that animist cultures operate according to a prelogical mode of thinking but rather the opposite.

Indigenous number systems can elucidate this point of “logical, yes, but not as abstracted” somewhat: while studies in so called ethnomathematics do tend to complicate the picture far beyond the proverbial “they could only count to one, two, many!”, it’s also true that larger number systems only emerged in larger societies, none of which were animist. We’re considering Mayans, India, China, Babylonia, and so on.

Now, whether animist cultures operate according to a rational mode of thought is a matter of how we choose to define the term “rational”. If we’re equating rational with MHC stage 11 formal, the ability to solve problems with one unknown using algebra, logic and empiricism, which is the minimum requirement to properly understand modernity, then this wouldn’t be the dominant mode of thinking in animist societies (but there would of course always be individuals capable at operating on this level of cognitive complexity). But if you simply equate rational with the capacity to critically evaluate evidence and make decisions based on experience and rough cost-benefit analysis, then animist societies, and their adult members, would certainly qualify. It should further be noted that human skills and faculties always develop in response to life conditions, and so the people who live most self-sufficiently in the natural world will also tend to be the most developed in terms of practical capacities. Throw a bunch of STEM Phds into the wild, cut them off from civilization, and see what happens—The Lord of the Flies probably doesn’t even begin to describe it. That also goes for animist cosmology: it’s more “rational”, in a deeper sense of the word, than mechanics and existentialism, because it imbues life in the wild with order, community, and meaning, while empowering and undergirding the practices that enable not only survival but thriving. It also doesn’t turn dogs and other animals into weird machines with no soul (looking at you, Descartes).

Given that animist culture is closest to how our minds and emotions spontaneously function (you don’t need to force feed it to people with twelve years of schooling for it to take hold), many (but not all) animist cultures are also more rational in the sense that they resonate more effortlessly with how human hearts and minds function, which means less cognitive dissonance, less alienation, and less decay of the mind and of social relations. Animism supports lifestyles for which we as a species, biologically speaking, are actually well-adapted (whereas pulling plows or maneuvering office life, tackling bureaucracy and digital security, not so much). Animism is rational because it tends to generate, for lack of a better term, relatively healthy expressions of the human condition.

All of this holds true until modernity comes along: When subsumed by the larger systems around them, animists tend to suffer from depression and other mental disorders to a degree comparable to other groups of equal status or vulnerability within these larger systems. As David Graeber and David Wengrow love to remind us, colonial history is full of people who were given the chance to live in both animist and modern cultures, and given the choice after having really tried both, most people will willingly escape from civilization and “go native” (as happens to the anthropologists themselves, every now and then). A slower and more rhythmic pace of life, less plotting and politicizing, less top-down control, more human contact, ongoing and non-repetitive movement of the body, fresh air and direct contact with plants and soil, lack of diseases derived from domesticated animals; it all adds up to make animist ways of life preferable.

The main project that “rationality” has to wrestle with under modernity is actually to one way or another reverse-engineer our way back to life conditions that approach the impossible ideals already present in many of the animist cultures. I’m not romanticizing here: hunter-gatherer life is not the Garden of Eden, the norms that regulate sharing and equality can be rather repressive and so on. But overall, yes, we have every reason to creatively reconstruct many elements of animist culture and integrate it. While leaving remaining animists alone, not least as indigenous land rights tend to mesh perfectly with environmental protection and bioregion preservation. I guess what I am saying is that “the savage” isn’t necessarily “noble”, but they are probably rational.

In response to this line of reasoning, modern observers have sometimes, almost gleefully, noted just how willingly indigenous peoples, animists included, have abandoned their ways of life to settle into the relative comforts of modernity, with handouts and modern jobs, once contact is established. But the fact that the rationality intrinsic to animist cultures can be thwarted by what are arguably slippery slopes of temptation, addiction, and quicker rewards hardly proves that members of animist cultures “given a choice” would make such choices. It is rather comparable to the way so many of us can slide into addictions of drugs or addictive digital apps, not least if we had no premonition where this leads us. These “collective choices” of animist cultures do after all show up under circumstances where the trauma of contact is already a fact (you get hit by multiple epidemics, are pressured into a subjugated position, and have your cosmological beliefs undermined). And then there is the active manipulation by members of modern societies who for different reasons may “need to manage” the indigenous populations.

Q: Alright got it: prelogical, no; rational, depends. Sometimes animist ways of life are “more rational”, I agree. But what about the notion that animists were supposed to live in some kind of dreamworld?

HF: Well, don’t we all?

I mean, the way in which modern people believe that there’s some kind of divine objective vantage point out there from where the true state of the world can be obtained. That’s a cute little dreamworld, don’t you think? Or, what about the way in which the postmodern folks believe that the world is inhabited by vicious spirits like the patriarchy, gender norms, and capitalism—that simply need to be deconstructed, or with another word, “exorcized”, in order to clean the world of their malicious presence. That’s a dreamworld at least in my book.

Or how about the fact that essentially, we only have access to the hallucinations that our nervous system and senses conjure up to represent the world around us, never the world in itself. Dreams, in a broad definition of the word, is all we’ll ever know.

Q: Get to the point.

HF: Alright. I assume you’re referring to the way some imagine indigenous people to be living in a haze of make-believe with no connection to the real world because of their spiritual beliefs and colorful mythologies. That’s obviously mistaken. It would be the same as assuming that modern Westerners went about their daily lives with nothing but Newtonian equations, Ricardian economic models, and legal textbooks to guide their behavior.

The cosmology of a culture is one thing. The practical day-to-day behavior of individuals is another. The first certainly affects the other, but the world would be a really weird place if people had to rely exclusively on the symbolic artifacts of their culture.

As such, people might live in a culture that’s full of sentient mountains, invisible daddies in the sky, or divine numbers with universal revelations, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t reason.

A Revolution of the Upper Paleolithic?

Q: You mention that the emergence of the animist metameme coincides with what researchers have called “the revolution of the Upper Paleolithic” approximately 50 000 years ago. However, in David Graeber and David Wengrowe’s latest book The Dawn of Everything they write that it’s largely a Eurocentric illusion derived from the fact that because Europe is rich, it’s also one of the places where a lot of money has been poured into archaeological excavations. Now, as non-european societies are starting to catch up, increasingly earlier evidence for advanced human behavior is popping up all over Asia and Africa. What’s your reply to that? And, has it forced you to change your theory?

HF: No, I still think it’s fair to use the word “revolution” for what began to happen in the middle of the first centum millennium BC.

Graeber and Wengrow claim that the occurrence of more advanced toolkits, the emergence of artworks, and the replacement of the Neanderthals with Homo sapiens in Europe around 40 000 years ago is nothing more than a regional development. Europe was late to the party, they argue, since older remains have been found in other parts of the world.

Well, the Davids certainly have a point about not letting European findings determine the overall level of global human development in the Upper Paleolithic, and that the rest of the world most likely has a lot of surprises still hiding in the ground. But I think they present the case for a Paleolithic revolution rather weakly just so they can easily shoot it down and give the impression that the establishment once again has been proven wrong. I empathize with this impulse, but on this one their argumentation is just not solid enough.

First of all there’s a bit of a disagreement among researchers about exactly when this alleged revolution began. Some set the start date as late as 40 000 years ago (the date Graeber and Wengrow choose to fixate on), others as early as 60 000. However, the most common dating among those who talk about a revolution is approximately 50 000 years ago, and they back their claim up with evidence from all over the world, not only Europe.

The examples Graeber and Wengrow use to disprove the Upper Paleolithic revolution thesis are the 60 000 year old shell beads and worked pigment that have been found in Kenya, and the cave art in Borneo and Sulawesi. Well, the paintings in the Chauvet Cave in France, the oldest in Europe, are around 30 000 – 35 000 years old, and the ones in the Lubang Jeriji Saléh cave on Borneo are between 40 000 – 50 000 years old. Europe is thus late to the party, but the Asian findings still fall well within the range of 50 000 BCE—give or take a decem millennium (10 000 years).

Scholars are of course also debating whether it was a sudden or a more gradual development. But all in all there’s broad agreement that something quite spectacular happened since the archaeological remains from this period and beyond—around 60 000 – 40 000 years ago—show a sudden burst of technological progress and a flowering of human culture evident in hitherto unseen cave paintings and richly crafted artworks that in comparison make the earlier period appear crude and rather primitive. We’re talking about things that simply didn’t exist before—and they start appearing all over Eurasia, and roughly around the same time. Graeber and Wengrow even mention the remarkable similarities in terms of tools, instruments, and artistic ornaments stretching from Mongolia to the Swiss Alps. This indicates a shared genesis and a following explosion. So when people talk about “the revolution of the Upper Paleolithic”, or “the Creative Explosion”, or “our Great Leap Forward”, as Jared Diamond chose to call it, I’d still argue that there are legitimate merits to their claims.

The reason for this explosion, I believe, is that somewhere, someone successfully transitioned to the Animist metameme, which gave them an unbeatable competitive advantage, similar to that of the modern, capitalistic and industrial revolution, which then had the effect that other groups of humans either made the transition to the Animist metameme, too, or got outcompeted along with the Neanderthals.

And from this period on, humans succeeded in crossing large tracts of ocean to colonize Australia, they settled in the freezing cold regions of Siberia that not even the sturdy Neanderthals managed to live in—and they replaced all other hominids. They even managed to colonize the virgin continents of the Americas, never before settled by any other hominids—and they did so remarkably fast. In addition to this expansion, our species also managed to change the face of the earth by altering a host of eco-systems for posterity.

Q: And what do you think was behind this sudden development?

HF: Well, as you can guess, I believe it was a result of the animist metameme coming online. But why, then, did the animist metameme emerge at this particular point in time you might ask?

Some scholars talk about a “cognitive revolution” between 70 000 and 30 000 ago, and others about a so-called “linguistic big bang” around 100 000 years ago. We don’t know when exactly complex human language emerged. Some scholars put it as recent as 100 000 years ago, claiming it to be a unique and recent property of Homo sapiens, while others believe it to have appeared as far back as two million years ago in our hominid ancestors. Some speculate that the emergence of language was a relatively sudden event, among them Noam Chomsky who argues that a single chance mutation occurred around 100 000 years ago providing one lucky individual with a language faculty in a “perfect” or “near-perfect” state—others claim that it was the result of million years of evolution, arguing that it evolved from earlier pre-linguistic systems among our primate ancestors. At the end of the day we simply don’t know.

Most researchers into the topic on complex language and cognitive wiring for abstract thought all seem to operate within a timeframe of 150 000 – 50 000 BCE—the exact time leading up to the revolution of the Upper Paleolithic.

Q: Okay, so what exactly happened? And why did complex language give rise to a new metameme?

HF: I believe it has something to do with the unique feature that human language uses symbols. In other non-human species, representations of the external world rely on the detection of similarities and correlations between objects and events. Bacteria, as a crude example, can react to all manifestations of warmth and light in one way, and cold and darkness in another; that is, they detect similarities and react in a specific way to all occurrences of that sort. More advanced beings, such as mammals, evident by Pavlov’s dogs, can react to correlations, for example the sound of a bell, and connect that to certain events, such as the presence of food. However, both forms rely on “one-to-one” correspondences between internal and external events. Humans are capable of reacting to symbols which not only refer to things in the external world, but also whole collections of similarities and correlations so as to manufacture inner worlds of complex realities in their minds. This kind of symbolic thinking is a very advanced capability. It requires that one part of the mind keeps its representations, in the form of similarities and correlations, in the background, while other parts “distill their conceptual essence” into a symbolic form. This shift from the concrete to the abstract, “from separate indexical links between signs and objects to an organized set of relations between signs”, according to David Christian, is a very demanding task which requires a lot of cognitive processing power which explains why it only appears to have happened in our own species with our exceptionally large brains.

This very much correlates with Yuval Harari’s notion of a cognitive revolution 70 000 – 30 000 years ago, “the point when history declared its independence from biology”, as he frames it—a time in which memes, rather than genes, became the dominant factor of change on Earth. Up until this time, biological change, mutations in the genome that is, had been the predominant factor in determining the behavior of living beings. Homo erectus manufactured and used stone tools, but the design didn’t change for 2 million years until they went extinct. This suggests that their capacity to use stone tools was largely genetically determined; and without any substantial changes to their genome, their behavior wouldn’t change either. But Homo sapiens, on the other hand, hasn’t experienced any major genetic changes for the last 100 000 years, but our behavior has changed drastically. This means that we must have gained some cognitive abilities to transcend our genetic dispositions and move beyond into a mental space of memetic mutations instead.

Harari believes this made us capable of communicating with one another on a higher level of complexity and enabled us to tell myths and stories and develop social constructs, or imagined realities with another term. To properly grasp such imagined realities you need to be at least on MHC Stage 8 Primary, while MHC Stage 7 Preoperational gives you a flattened, but still somewhat functional, idea of such entities. And to come up with such mythical creations, you need to be at least at MHC Stage 9 Concrete.

Shared common myths also enable humans to collaborate in larger numbers above the magical limit of 150 persons our brains are biologically equipped to handle. This, I agree with Harari, is thus what enabled humanity to break the slow paced shackles of genetic evolution and venture onto the much faster highway of memetic evolution.

Q: Could you tell us why exactly it is that memetic evolution is faster? Is it always like that? I mean, cultures are often rather rigid and reluctant to change, and when it comes to changes in the environment, microbes and even insects have proven remarkable fast in their adaptations. Some species of animals actually appear to be much faster at adapting to climate change than humans.

HF: Sure, microbes (as we all know from the stubbornness of the common cold to bypass our immune system every season) can evolve remarkably fast. There’s also the famous evolutionary textbook example of the peppered moth that only took a century to change its color from white to black so as to adapt to the soot-covered environment of industrial Northern England. And it even appears that the animals in the Chernobyl area have evolved to have an increased tolerance towards radiation.

However, there can be little doubt that the evolution of human culture has been occurring at a pace that has no parallel in the natural world. The reason for this is that memetic evolution doesn’t need to wait for an advantageous mutation to appear in a lucky host and wait for everybody else to go extinct—instead, humans can simply change their behavior. Because memes are not transmitted through slow biochemical processes, but through signs and language, they can escape the biophysical constraints of genetics and spread much faster from one living person to another.

Memes, like genes, also do not always copy perfectly, but may change, or mutate with another term, through its host. They can also combine with other memes and create new memes over time. But memes don’t act as randomly as their biological equivalents either. New memes don’t emerge as random mutations from which only a few give its host an advantage, but emerge in the minds of human beings as conscious responses to their environment. This further explains why the speed of cultural development is so much faster than biological evolution: humans do not need to wait for nature to randomly come up with an advantageous meme, no, as active agents we can develop them ourselves by responding in a conscious way to problems we’re facing.

The last 50 000 years of history have been remarkable, not because of the biological evolution that took place, which is rather negligible, but because of the qualitatively very different things the human species did. And that, that’s what this book is about.

Art Comes First

Q: So, 50 000 years ago you say—give or take a few millennia. I agree there might have been a quickening of the pace of development beginning around that time, but more and more archaeological remains are being discovered from before this period which indicate that elements you consider animistic actually started emerging much earlier.

Containers believed to hold paint dating as far back as 100 000 years have been found in South Africa. And in the Blombos cave, also in South Africa, 75 000 year old drilled snail shells and ochre stones engraved with cross-hatch patterns have been discovered. I understand if you haven’t heard about this yet since it was discovered quite recently, back in September 2018 if I’m not mistaken, but it’s now officially considered the oldest drawing in the world. How does this fit into your model?

HF: It fits very well, actually. As I’ve stated many times already: art always comes first. As such, and as I’ll demonstrate throughout this book, we always find the earliest expressions of a new metameme in the arts, long before the metameme gathers momentum and starts making substantial changes to society.

Q: I know you would say that, which is why I saved the best for last:

Remains of pigment processing have been discovered dating back 250 000 years, which suggests that the capacity for symbolic thought was present from a very early age since such substances don’t have many practical applications. And then there are the Middle Paleolithic venus sculptures, the earliest representations of the human form, found in Morocco and the Golan Heights estimated at 500 000 – 300 000 BCE and 280 000 – 250 000 BCE respectively. This is right before the emergence of what’s conventionally considered the time of anatomically modern humans!

And it doesn’t stop there. In 1995, archaeologists in Slovenia unearthed the oldest known instrument, a flute estimated to be 50 000 – 60 000 years old. The surprise: It predates the arrival of Homo sapiens into Europe and must therefore have been made by Neanderthals. Recent discoveries of Neanderthal art include a 51 000 years old bone carving, a hand stencil and red-painted speleothems in a cave in Spain that’s more than 64 000 year old, and—hold on—a 130 000 year old Neanderthal eagle claw necklace found in Croatia. But all of these are quite recent compared with the earliest known geometric engravings, discovered in Java in the 1890s, which are—hold even more on—500 000 years old (!!!) and were created by Homo erectus—long before Homo sapiens even existed.

What’s your reply to that? That art is super duper first?

HF: I appreciate your persistence. A good Q should never settle for the pale words of a handsome old man without thoroughly scrutinizing their foundation first. But before we move on, I just need to mention that the Venus of Tan-Tan from Morocco, the oldest of the two so-called venuses, hasn’t been confirmed as evidently shaped by human hands. The rock’s shape might as well have been the result of natural weathering. The younger one from Berekhat Ram in the Golan Heights has probably been shaped by humans, but it’s unsure whether the purpose was artistic or utilitarian, (or whether it’s supposed to represent a human female at all. It might as well have been a penguin, or a penis, some have argued.) And experts still disagree on whether the 500 000 year old Homo erectus engravings should be classified as art since there could have been many reasons why someone would carve a few lines into some shells. I mean, I accidently made a few carvings into my kitchen table this morning, and despite the low requirements for something being considered art these days it would probably be a challenge to get my table accepted at an art gallery.

But alright, let’s give credit where credit is due and applaud the Neanderthals for having created the first instrument we know of. There might be other discoveries waiting for us out there, and whether the Neanderthals actually were the first to create instruments we’ll probably never know, but as of today the oldest flute in the world was made by one of them. It’s also clear now that they had many of the same capabilities as us and that it’s wrong to simply dismiss them as “mindless animals”. After all, we did bang some of them back in the days, as recent DNA research proves, so they must have had some alluring qualities to attract the attention of Homo sapiens (personally, I have an unusually high proportion of Neanderthal DNA, apparently). Or the other way around—”they” may have banged “us”.

Q: It thus appears that artists have existed for hundreds of thousands of years, and that Homo sapiens never had a monopoly on the arts. So does that change anything with your model?

HF: Not really. I know you don’t like me brushing off early occurrences by simply adding a proto prefix, so I’ll refrain from trying to get off the hook that easily here. Instead, I’ll ask you to see the metamemes as developmental potentials that, in some way, are always present, always available as long as the previous metameme exists in some form or the other. I also want you to keep in mind that memetic complexity isn’t exclusive to this species or the other. The metamemes don’t care about humans—we’re merely the best vessel for them at the moment.

Now, given that humans are born with the potentials for cognitive complexity ranging from stage 8 primary all the way up to a few unusual individuals reaching as high as stage 15 cross-paradigmatic, it’s highly plausible that in the 500 000 years the Neanderthals roamed this Earth there have been some individuals above stage 9 concrete (stage 10 abstract is the minimum stage to innovate the animist metameme). After all, we’re closely related to the Neanderthals and they actually had bigger brains than us. As such, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that some of them began painting on the walls and making instruments.

What we don’t see, however, is evidence of larger complex societies, rapid improvements in tool use, lavishly decorated burials, or any of the other things we associate with the Animist metameme. For some reason, the Neanderthals weren’t capable of advancing to the same stage of social complexity as our own species. This might have something to do with the Neanderthals lacking the cognitive ability to handle as many social relationships as Homo sapiens, as argued by Harari, which would severely limit the cultural progress that could occur in their societies (since it requires the interconnection of numerous brains in order to both sustain, and advance to, higher complexity). It could also have something to do with their brains functioning on a lower level of average complexity, which would make the occurrence of high complexity individuals much rarer, and thus the emergence of memetic innovations that much rarer, too. But, again, we don’t really know.

At the end of the day, the fact remains that Homo sapiens were the only species to fully transition to the Animist metameme. In the same way that the Romans and the Han dynasty might have had many of the traits we associate with modern societies, they never made the full transition to a capitalist industrial society. They never became truly modern. Likewise, although a few gifted artists among the Neanderthals may have stumbled upon ways of expression beyond the archaic metameme, their societies never seem to have become fully animistic. The reason why I believe we can safely conclude that they never made this transition, is because they would most likely still be around if they had. (But again, here I am, part Neanderthal.)

Not as Cute as You Think

Q: Indigenous people are known for living in harmony with nature and for their intricate knowledge about the ecological boundaries of the ecosystems that sustain them. Is this wisdom inherent to the animist metameme? And why is it that we seem to have lost much of this knowledge with time?

HF: There’s no doubt a lot we can learn from indigenous cultures about our relationship with nature, and I’m certain that the animist notion of non-separation from nature could help us cultivate a more benign and productive relation with the natural world. Yet, I would claim that the sensitivity towards ecological sustainability that many indigenous societies exhibit is a later development, and one that has emerged by necessity. The forager societies that over time didn’t develop such an awareness simply didn’t survive to see the present day.

We should really think twice before concluding that our exploitative and destructive relationship with nature is a modern invention. If we look back, many of our animist ancestors definitely didn’t live in balance with mother nature. They repeatedly exhausted their natural environments and didn’t shy away from exterminating entire species.

As late as 50 000 years ago our planet was teeming with big land-based animals—but shortly after humans entered their habitats, most of them vanished. Only in Africa have some of the large animals such as elephants, rhinos, and hippos survived into our age, but before that even larger animals, such as the Wooly Mammoth, the Straight-tusked Elephant, and the South American Mega Sloth, walked the Earth alongside humans. Walking may not have been the best line of action however, since running away as fast as they could would’ve been a more sound strategy once humans came along.

It’s still being debated what the reasons for these extinctions could have been, but the only factor that always seems to correlate with these is the appearance of humans. Like clockwork, all mass extinctions around the world happened within a few thousand years after the arrival of humans. It wasn’t just the case in a few areas, it’s the same story everywhere humans migrated into: Australia, Northern Eurasia, the Americas, New Zealand, Madagascar, Cuba. All these places lost their megafauna shortly after the arrival of humans.

And, not only the world’s fauna suffered; entire ecosystems got transformed once humans arrived. The first Australians, for instance, used a technique known as “fire stick farming” to ignite the natural environment on a regular basis to create large areas of grassland (like those of the East African savannah that humans were evolutionarily adapted to) in order to attract more easily hunted game. By doing so, humans created new ecological niches for them­selves, while destroying those of others. But humans also created new living conditions for other species. Since human-made fires were more frequent than naturally occurring wildfires, more ashes were produced and thus accelerated the circulation of nutrients across successive plant genera­tions. This enlarged the scope of some plants while marg­inalizing that of others. One of the plants that benefited greatly from these activities was the eucalyptus tree. The typical Australian landscape dominated by eucalyptus trees, what many consider the “natural” landscape of Australia, is in fact a result of human activities. These trees were initially not very widely distributed, but since they’re more fire resistant than other trees they spread extensively as humans continued to burn off the environment—and as these trees spread across the continent, so did the cuddly Koala whose only source of food is eucalyptus leaves. But the Koala’s not so cuddly cousin the Giant Diprotodon, a wombat-like creature about 2 meters high, was not so lucky. Along with some 60 other species of animals, including meat eating Kangaroos and car-sized Tortoises, the Diprotodon disappeared shortly after humans arrived in Australia.

Similar tales can be told from the Americas, Asia, and Europe.

Q: Why did many of the big animals survive in Africa, but not in Australia and the Americas?

HF: One of the explanations why we don’t see the same scale of mass exterminations in Africa, and to some extent in Asia, is that these continents’ larger size provided animals with more areas to remain hidden from humans. Another explanation is that since these regions were the ones in which humans initially emerged, they would accordingly have had more time to adapt to the gradually improving hunting skills of humans. Many of the native African and Asian animals are inherently shy and usu­ally run away at the first sign of human presence. But when humans entered Australia, the Americas, and other big islands with populations of large animals, the animals would suddenly be confronted with advanced hunting skills that none of them had encountered before. Consequently they wouldn’t have developed an inert fear of humans which would have increased their odds of survival significantly. The small frail looking hairless apes simply didn’t appear threatening to creatures often more than ten times their weight. As such, the physically unimpressive humans could just walk up to an unafraid animal and kill it with a well-crafted weapon. We have a striking example from the Galapagos Islands which remai­ned uninhabited up until the modern era and thus were lucky enough to be exposed to successful attempts of animal preservation. Here, the giant torto­ises, which were eliminated from other islands in the Pacific, don’t show any fear towards humans.

Australia and the Americas are believed to have lost about 70 to 80 percent of all mammals above the weight of 44 kg, and in Australia, all animals weig­hing more than 100 kg went extinct. In Europe, about 40 percent of the big animals disappeared, but in the native home of Homo sapiens, Africa, where humans initially developed their hunting skills, only about 14 percent vanished up until the modern era. Within perhaps as little as 2000 years after humans arrived, North America lost 34 out of 47 large land animals, and in South America it was 50 out of 60. The only areas where many of these species survived for a longer period was in Cuba and the rest of the Caribbean, but again, also here they vanished shortly after the first humans arrived. Mada­gascar followed a similar pattern. This island had due to millions of years of isolation evolved a unique collection of animals, however, within a mere 1500 years after humans arrived at about 2000 BCE, both the giant elephant birds, the largest in the world, and the giant lemurs died out along with most of the other large animals. And a similar fate was shared by a long list of birds, insects, and snails that had survived for millions of years, but suddenly vanished due to environmental changes to their habitat brought about by the disruptive activities of human settlers. In some cases, overhunting may have been the culprit, in other cases the transformation of the land by human hand can have been decisive, and others may have been the result of these two in combination when the disruption of entire ecosystems caused the disappearance of a single species to collapse a food chain.

Now, animals weren’t the only species to go extinct following the sudden expansion of Homo sapiens after 50 000 BCE. All other hominids would also suddenly vanish after having survived in Asia and Europe for hundreds of thousand years.

Q: How do we know with certainty that Homo sapiens were the culprit? Couldn’t it have been due to other factors, such as climate change?

HF: Well, evidence reveals that modern humans and Neanderthals coexisted in Europe for approximately 5 000 years until the Neanderthals eventually died out between 41 000 and 39 000 years ago. This coincides with the beginning of a cold period, but as with the aforementioned mass extinctions, climate had in fact changed several times prior to this event without leading to extinction. What was new this time was yet again the appearance of Homo sapiens. There are, in my opinion, simply no other sound explanations.

Q: Yet, the Neanderthals were so similar to us. They used fire, constructed shelters, and skinned animals to wear their hides as clothes. They made tools and were adept hunters just like their human cousins. Whether they spoke is debated, but they most likely had some way of communicating either with gestures and/or sounds. They lived in complex social groups, cared for their sick, and even buried their dead. So with all these seemingly human traits, why couldn’t they compete with Homo sapiens? What was the decisive factor that made our species prevail over our hominid relatives?

HF: You see, even the slightest competitive advantage could lead to complete genocidal replacement in the long run. This has repeatedly been observed throughout human history whenever one group with more advanced technology has invaded the territory of another. It has even been argued that minor physical differences between groups of humans can be decisive over time. The gradual replacement of Celtic peoples in eastern England by the invading Anglo-Saxons has, among other things, been ascribed to the latter being taller and more muscular than the former. This would be critical in a time where fates were decided in hand-to-hand combat. (The way in which the slightly bigger grey squirrel, originating from North America, has almost completely replaced the native smaller red squirrel in Britain thus echoes the Anglo-Saxon invasion 1500 years ago.)

Q: So, what do you think were the biological features that enabled Homo sapiens to outcompete the Neanderthals?

HF: Well, it’s not that the Neanderthals were physically smaller, or that they had smaller brains. They were sturdier and larger, although a bit shorter, than anatomically modern humans, and their brains were notably larger than ours. They would thus have needed more calories than modern humans, which could have been a factor when food was scarce and the two species had to compete for the same resources. So just like many of the big animals that disappeared, the Nean­derthals may have been more vulnerable due to their greater calorie dem­ands. That, on the other hand, could have been compensated by being stronger, and possibly also smarter.

What they most importantly lacked is the technical creativity and complex social coordination of Homo sapiens. While the tools of Neanderthals didn’t change much for hundreds of thousand years, the tools of Homo sapiens improved rapidly after 50 000 BCE. Prior to this period, the two species used similar tools, but the frequency and the way they used them differed considerably. The Neanderthals may have used projectile weapons for hunting, but that, if ever (the question is disputed), occurred very rarely. Instead, they mainly relied on ambushing animals and attacking them with melee weapons such as spears. Homo sapiens, on the other hand, increasingly used evermore sophisticated projectile weapons to more efficiently attack animals from a distance. Towards the end there’s evidence that the Neanderthals may have attempted to use the superior techniques of their neighbors, but their efforts seem to have been too little too late.

While remains from Neanderthals show that animals were hunted throug­hout the year, Homo sapiens tended to hunt either in the summer or the winter. This reveals that the latter probably moved more around, taking prey more selectively, while the former preferred to stay in a single location. The higher mobility of Homo sapiens most likely also made contacts between different groups more frequent, and thus made information more widely shared than among the Neanderthals who remained more isolated from one another. This would have made the Nean­derthals less inno­vative, while also having made them more vulnerable to ecological changes in their environment. Along with the limited contact with other groups, Neanderthal groups were also much smaller than those of Homo sapiens. According to some estimates, the latter outnumbered the former by a factor of nine which may have been decisive when the two species met or had to compete for scarce resources in the same area.

The lack of a division of labor between the sexes in Neanderthal societies would also have made them less competitive. The division of labor among humans, which initially was gender based, is widely considered one of the most crucial features of our success and a prerequisite for any higher forms of social complexity. It has been proposed that both male and female Neander­thals participated in hunting as their main occupation and that this caused a poorer extraction of resources from the environment than what would have been the case if females had specialized in other tasks. Without the initial division of labor between men and women, it’s also unlikely that any further forms of specialized tasks would have emerged among Neanderthals.

However, the overall most decisive factor that caused the Neanderthals to lose the competition was probably their lack of advanced symbolic language. Even if they did have some form of language, it most likely wasn’t as advanced as that of Homo sapiens. With advanced language, information could more efficiently be con­veyed from one individual to another and between different groups, making it possible to coordinate larger groups of individuals and facilitate a more effec­tive division of labor. That’s what happened after 50 000 BCE, and that’s what enabled the Animist metameme to take off.

Archaeological remains show that the Neanderthals met a grim destiny towards the end: malnutrition, cannibalism, and increased interpersonal violence among the last remaining survivors seems to have been widespread. A few individuals took refuge among the prevailing Homo sapiens (hey grandma!), but as a marginal phenomenon this doesn’t account for a merger of the two species. A similar fate seems to have been shared by other hominid species in Asia who disap­peared between 50 000 and 27 000 years ago. At the end of the Upper Paleolithic, only one species remained on the surface of the planet, and that was, with little surprise, our own.

***

Q: So, what you’re saying is that a soft metameme killed the Mammoth and the Neanderthals? How does that fit in with the other soft metamemes, the Postfaustian and the Postmodern? You had somehow given me the impression that the soft metamemes were the “good guys”; the necessary counter reactions to clean up the mess left by the ruthless hard metamemes. After all, with the Postfaustian metameme we got the moral teachings of Buddha and Christ. And with postmodernism, we suddenly got the means to seriously challenge sexism, racism, and the destruction of the environment. Animism, then, gave us rain dance and cave art—and off we went to conquer the globe and exterminate anything bigger than a Ford Fiesta!?

HF: I’m sorry if I’ve given you the impression that there are any good guys in this story. They’re all delicious bad boys in my book.

The thing is that the soft metamemes eventually take over, not because they’re nicer, but because they make their carriers more powerful. Might makes right, the saying goes, but the opposite is equally true. Right makes might because the truth is a mighty ally. Because the Postfaustian and Postmodern metamemes are aligned with more universal principles than the Faustian and Modern respectively, they’ll also create more coherent and well-functioning societies, which in turn makes them more powerful. And with that comes the capacity to take over the world.

Rain dance, spirit beliefs, and ancestor cults helped increase social coherence, defused social tensions, brought meaning to an otherwise bewildering world, improved social coordination, and made it possible for larger groups of human beings to cooperate in increasingly tighter networks of exchange. And yes, that also means larger groups of fighters, as Yuval Harari has famously argued in the opening to his book, Sapiens. Animism thus made societies stronger, larger, and more resilient—smarter, even—and with that they gained a competitive edge that enabled them to outcompete other groups of humans and hominids alike and expand across the world into climates where survival relied on increasingly demanding levels of social coordination.

The Postfaustian metameme is not different in this regard. The way in which Christianity and Islam spread across the globe, homogenizing and exterminating native cultures in their wake, speaks to the social power of such universalist religions. And when it comes to postmodernism, the conquest might not be visible on a world map, but it’s certainly visible who’s boss in today’s symbolic space of social discourses. The mainstream media is always disproportionately influenced by postmodern values, ideas, and sentiments.

Rain dance is a bad boy who conquered the world by starving out everyone who couldn’t dance; Jesus and Muhammad fired up a zeal that beat the crap out of anyone possessed by lesser spirits; and the #MeToo movement is currently making sure that no predatory patriarchs will survive the Darwinian struggle for the future. The meek shall inherit the earth, not because they’re meek, but because being meek makes more efficient levels of social coordination possible.

The Original Affluent Society?

Q: I don’t think it’s fair to compare the #MeToo movement and other important postmodern social movements with the crazy-eyed onslaught of the Abrahamic religions and the happenstance that animism empowered our foraging ancestors to such a degree that a lot of species went extinct. But alright, I get it. Our ancestors weren’t the cuddly saints we like to imagine them as. They, like any other invasive species, disrupted ecosystems and occasionally exhausted their natural environments.

However, the free roaming life of hunters and gatherers still seems preferable to that of the later stages. What’s your response to the idea of The Original Affluent Society, the idea proposed by Marshall Sahlins that we’d never had it as good as when we were living as foragers?

HF: Well, we have this stunning tendency to imagine the past and the future as extraordinarily less complex than the present: The past was like this one thing, the future is going to be like this one other thing—all while the present is like a lot of different things all at once.

Were people really better off back in the days of hunting and gathering? The obvious answer to that is: sometimes yes, sometimes no. I mean, in a span of more than 100 000 years, spanning most of the globe, with countless climatic ups and downs, is it really that inconceivable to imagine that there were good times, and bad times, for different groups of people, during different periods?

It’s not hard to understand where the idea of an original affluent society comes from when imagining what it must have been like for a band of hunter gatherers when migrating into a fertile virgin territory at a time when the climate was benign. No doubt things must have been swell when temperatures were between 20 and 30 degrees Celsius, lobsters and salmon could be pulled out of rivers, fruits were plentiful in the forest—and no other human competitors were present in the vicinity.

On the other hand, when climates suddenly changed for the worse, when temperatures dropped, or in times of drought, when there were suddenly too many humans in an environment that couldn’t sustain them, and there weren’t any obvious places to migrate to where things were better… Well, not so affluent anymore.

Advocates of Sahlin’s thesis would probably argue that despite the occasionally difficult times, society still remained more harmonious overall. Unsurprisingly, however, there are those who claim the exact opposite. In Sick Societies: Challenging the myth of primitive harmony, Robert Edgerton questions Sahlin’s notion that pre-colonial indigenous societies tended to be happy, healthy, and harmonious. Instead, he argues, by reference to a range of ethnographic writings, that many of these so-called original affluent societies were ripe with violence, misogyny, and social malaise.

Again, the obvious answer is that animist societies were both of these things. It’s the same when we ponder the eternally stupid question whether our animist ancestors were peaceful or violent. Graeber and Wengrow write that some tribes were as peaceful as hippies while others were as violent as a gang of bikers. I would even expand the analogy and claim that the very same hippie tribes could evolve into aggressive bikers in times of adversity, and evolve back into peaceful coexistence with others in times of plenty. Compared to both Sahlins and Edgerton I know too little about prehistoric times to back up my claim, but as a sociologist I know enough about human nature to be certain that that must have been the case.

So, is modern life worse or better? Well, one moment you’re eating oysters in a decadent Weimar Republic gay club—a few moments later Soviet artillery fire is forcing you to run for cover in what’s left of an underground Berlin train station. Or, one moment you’re living a happy family life in the suburbs—the next moment a financial crisis hits and you have to move into your car, all while your daughter is cutting herself and your son is addicted to opioids after a sports injury. You be the judge what’s better.

My observation is that the span of misery and bliss seems to increase at every stage of development. The worst that could happen to a hunter gatherer is arguably starvation, severe accidents, losing a fist fight to someone, and so on; and the best, a delicious meal, a cozy community gathering around a bonfire, and banging a hot stranger (maybe a sexy Neanderthal!). Compare that with the horrors of modern warfare, nazi death camps, scientifically informed methods of torture, and spending twenty years as a brainwashed pawn in a BDSM doomsdays cult that forcefeeds you psychedelics and rapes you until you’ve lost all sense of reality and self—vs.—blissing-out for hours from transcendental meditation, breaking all limits of physical pleasure at an MDMA-induced tantric sex orgy with a group of affectionate and well-attuned lovers, and being a metamodern aristocrat living completely unleashed while rewriting the very fabric of social reality. Again, you be the judge what’s better.

So not only is our current society causing new and deeper levels of suffering, it’s also generating evermore mind-boggling amounts of misery given that there are 8 billion of us to suffer (and 60 or so billion farm animals living under torture-like conditions)—while at the same time generating equally mind-blowing amounts and levels of happiness and pleasure. Dickens’ famous “it was the best of times it was the worst of times” holds true every time we pass a new developmental threshold.

I understand that it’s not everyone who’s willing to accept the risk of paying a visit to the ever deeper lows that every new metameme brings about; that the prospect of maybe, maybe not reaching ever greater heights simply isn’t worth it. However, the question whether reaching these ever greater heights are worth the ever deeper lows remains a matter of temperament. Dreams of going back, back to simpler times, is an entirely legitimate position—and one that beyond the typical romantic nostalgia actually has some merits. For every stage, the span of misery and bliss expands, but there are also unique beauties that are lost and worth reexamining.

Beauties Lost

Q: Ahh, you’re referring to the concept of “beauties lost”. This is something I’ve been looking forward to discussing with you. In Nordic Ideology you write that a number of good things from pre-modern society were lost in the modernization process, such as the warmth and security of a close-knit rural community, a strong sense of belonging to a certain faith, the connection to the soil (or other ecological belonging), and so on. As a consequence, modern societies are chronically struggling with social problems, loneliness and alienation, and a low awareness of the natural world that’s keeping us alive—all issues that postmodernism is trying to address, but according to you, only metamodernism is capable of truly solving.

Now, in your earlier works you mostly talk about the beauties that we lost when we transitioned to modernity, but I hear you’re implying that the transition to every stage, every metameme, entails the loss of something dear to us. Is this correct, and if so, what are, in your opinion, the beauties lost from animism?

HF: Yes, it’s absolutely correct that every stage entails a loss of beautiful things. I will list these things for every metameme in the following chapters. When it comes to animism, however,  we’ve paid particularly dearly for the things we left in order to progress to the next stage.

First of all there’s the free-roaming life of hunting and gathering. In a way, this is the life we’re evolutionarily adapted to be living. Toiling in the field or at a factory or sitting in front of a computer in an office cubicle all day long aren’t “natural” activities to human beings. It can literally make us sick. Accordingly, when given the choice, humans mostly choose to do something else. We like to travel and see new places, be out in nature, and many of us are quite fond of hunting, fishing, and picking mushrooms and berries in the forest—all typical forager activities. Look at elites in any society—they tend to look suspiciously a lot like animists: the rich not only hunt and wander; they do so in small groups; they create initiation rituals and ecstatic parties where they dress up and paint their faces for Burning Man; they even start believing in spirits, healings, and tarot cards. Go to the court of a rich Silicon Valley magnet and within minutes you’ll have mingled with a shaman. Indeed, the princess of Norway just married one.

Then there’s of course the close-knit community that very few of us today get to truly experience. Many of us may have lots of friends and acquaintances, but the closeness and feeling of belonging one can experience from living in a small group where everyone’s survival depends on each other, and where the other members of the group are considered one’s extended family, is something many of us don’t even experience in our own families. The closest many of us get to experience this is, sadly, in the army, especially during wartime.

Closely connected to the above is the relative egalitarianism inherent to animist expressions of human relationships. Yes, it’s tricky to address the issue, as people will very likely attack from both sides: some claim that I’m idealizing animist cultures and subscribing to Rousseauian “noble savage” assumptions, others that I am infantilizing people and legitimating Western colonial supremacy. But if we understand that concepts such as “egalitarian” are not simple variables to measure, but rather deep patterns of rich fabrics of interaction, we can make more qualified claims that, yes, small and tribal societies do tend to have more egalitarian structures and relationships, and yes, there is a beauty lost right there. One part of this is the simple anthropological fact that slavery is not viable under conditions of nomadic foraging; another part of it is the closeness that grows from a society small enough for “everyone to know everyone”, where steep hierarchies become too absurd to maintain. But most of all, imagine if you had to live out your life within the bounds of your family and high school class, with no access to other means of recognition by larger groups—of course people would tend to want to keep you in your place, socially speaking. If you shone too much with your work results, or grabbed a too big part of the pie, people would gang up on you and mock you within seconds. Your actions would self-regulate towards egalitarianism, and you would in turn feel that nobody else should rise above the crowd either, now that you couldn’t. This is exactly the pattern that is most commonly observed in tribal communities; there is a dogged pressure to share everything equally all the time! But if we under such conditions find a piece of food out of sight of the others, we are actually less likely to share it than are members of non-animist societies. So egalitarianism is there, and it’s beautiful, and it’s lost—but it’s not utopian or without its own all-too-human dynamics and frustrations. Which is, I suppose, why there were so many seeds growing out of Animist egalitarianism and into Faustian hierarchies, as we shall see.

Then there’s the connection to nature and the sense of being part of a natural world that’s greater than one self. Such things are mostly lost on us individualized modern urban dwellers. The alienation many modern people feel is not only derived from this lack of connection to other humans, but also from the disconnection to the natural world. It’s scientifically proven that simply being in nature is good for our health, and people often report feeling more alive and connected to the world when they’re out in nature. Sadly, many urban dwellers don’t have that possibility in their busy daily lives, and underprivileged groups often never get the opportunity at all.

I understand that this “beauty lost” sounds like another cutie, but it really is not. Consider the fact that these connections to nature, weaved into culture through totem and taboo, build on vast time frames of feedback cycle from environment: best not kill all the buffalo, don’t burn down the jungle, protect the sacred headwaters, and so forth. Over millennia of trial and error, or punishments by nature, of learning the hard way, animist cultures have been environmentally wiser and more subtly in tune with the environment than any others. Modernity is not 40 000 years old, nor can it grow that old; it has to mutate faster and faster to even survive. San culture is that old and could very well live on for as much longer if it weren’t from disruptions by modernity.

And finally there’s the loss of a world enchanted with spirit. One of the greatest sacrifices that we had to make in order to obtain the powers of a scientific worldview is that we not only had to kill God, but also the holy spirit. What I’m referring to here is of course what Max Weber called “disenchantment”, or “Entzauberung” in German which directly translates into “de-magic-ation”. Disenchantment is the way in which the modern rationalization project demystifies the world and renders it increasingly transparent. Of course, Max Weber addressed how science eroded the traditional postfaustian religion, but the disenchantment process didn’t begin with the Enlightenment, it began all the way back when we left the Animist metameme. At every stage, the world becomes a little more demystified and transparent, and thereby a little more disenchanted.

Q: Are you saying that the Postfaustian metameme is more disenchanting than the Faustian one? And that the Postmodern metameme is more disenchanting than the Modern one? Aren’t the soft metamemes the more spiritual ones?

HF: The soft metamemes are about culture and ethics, but that doesn’t necessarily make them more spiritual in the magical sense of the word. Just think about it, the Faustians took the gods out of the rivers and mountains and handed them over to the domain of experts; and then the Postfaustians purged all those gods for all their perceived incoherences, rationalized them and reduced them to abstract ideas, and took them off the free marketplace and handed them over to the religious authority of the state. Then the Modern project came along and killed God entirely—and finally the Postmoderns drop-kicked the divine vantage point of God out of existence!

Q: Uhm, I’m not sure I’m following you there!?

HF: Don’t worry, I’ll elaborate as we proceed with the story. For now, just keep in mind that the disenchantment process has been underway for millenia, and that this is, perhaps, one of the greatest sacrifices the human soul has made in exchange for civilization.

But let’s return to the Animist metameme. In a way, this is the home we never left. It is, as I mentioned earlier, the only metameme we’re evolutionarily adapted to. We’ve had millions of years to adapt to a life of hunting and gathering, and then we’ve had around 50 000 years to develop a spiritual and cultural superstructure (I actually don’t like using the term “purification generator” for this one) to refine, enrich, and enhance this way of life. Animism is thus our first culture, a way of thinking and being that’s intuitive to our minds if we’re not taught otherwise, or not “corrupted” by civilization. Children, for example, will on their own develop ideas about an animated world and usually ascribe intentions and wills to inanimate objects. The thing is, our minds are simply wired for an animist worldview, and our bodies are adapted to the hunter gatherer way of life.

Consequently, one of the goals of metamodernism must be to find ways to reincorporate many of the social and cultural qualities of animism in order to increase our physical and emotional well-being, and to give us a greater sense of wholeness.

There’s a lot we can learn from indigenous cultures, and I’m not just talking about their knowledge about which plants have healing properties, and which ones can make you high. Indigenous societies have social design solutions that are, in terms of resource footprint, extraordinarily efficient. Indigenous societies can generate happy and healthy human beings with a fraction of the resources compared to modern industrialized societies. In a world that’s on a crash course towards a future where material resources will become scarcer and life will be even more chaotic and precarious than before, learning to make due with less, and still feel happy and resilient, will be vital if we are to survive as a species.

Nature preservation is another field where indigenous wisdom can help us, well, save the world basically. Indigenous cultures often have an abundance of vital knowledge about the ecosystems they inhabit and how to live in a sustainable balance with the land. This is of course something we should learn from. But extracting knowledge from indigenous people to help do something modern people remain notoriously lousy at can only take us that far. What I’m advocating is that we reinforce indigenous land rights so that the people who truly master the craft of nature preservation can function as custodians of the lands. It would probably be more efficient to have people with a deep connection to the land, rather than some faceless government organization, tend the health of the lands not used for agriculture. In addition, once people have a strong legal claim to a certain area, and the necessary protection to remain there,  and have lived there for a longer time, they will also be much harder to get rid off in case the political winds change in favor of someone wanting to go full Bolsonaro on mother nature.

That more and more people are opening their eyes to indigenous wisdom is no mystery. As the multidimensional crisis of our modern civilization worsens, it will become increasingly evident that some of the keys to solving our problems are to be found within indigenous cultures.

Q: Alright Hanzi, nice try. I see you’re trying to give the Animist metameme as much cred as possible so as to prevent a shitstorm when the book comes out, well knowing that indigenous wisdom currently is the hottest hot and that people would come after you and kick your ass if you were to say that indigenous cultures were uncivilized or under-developed.

But at the end of the day, that’s still what you’re saying, right? I mean, the Animist metameme is, according to your model, on a lower stage of development, and the Modern one is on a higher stage. Sure, I get it, you’re no fan of modernity, you want for us to evolve to the metamodern stage, but that still implies that development is good and that indigenous cultures ought to evolve.

What’s your reply to that?

HF: First of all, and I reckon I’ll have to repeat this again and again, the metamemes model is not a normative model. A modern society is not necessarily better than an animist one, or a postfaustian one for that matter. It all depends. Modern societies can, as we all know, be severely pathologic. But so can animist ones. And there ought to be no doubt that certain modern societies manage to generate a lot of healthy and happy citizens and that everyone else would have a lot to learn from these, just like we evidently have a lot to learn from indigenous cultures, the great world religions, and so on.

Try to think of it in terms of complexity and maturity. The later metamemes are on a higher level of complexity. I think there can be no doubt that our modern global civilization is much more complex than a band of hunter gatherers. Yet, the later metamemes are also more immature. Our modern civilization has only been around for about 200 years, it’s super complex, but also super immature. Compare that with the aboriginal culture in Australia. They have been around for 40 000 years. Their way of life is relatively simple, but the wisdom that has accumulated over four millennia of surviving in the harsh environment of Australia is nothing short of astounding.

The reason for the apparent paradox that so-called “primitive” societies can offer us supposedly “advanced” moderns so much wisdom, is derived from the fact that our modern industrialized civilization is so young, barely an adolescent, while many of the indigenous cultures out there are aging sages with all the wisdom that comes with old age. But remember, there was a time when the aboriginals of Australia and the natives of North America were just as ignorant and reckless as us. They too caused mass extinctions and exhausted their natural environments. The reason that we today find such a refined awareness about the balance of nature among indigenous people is probably not because they concluded through deduction that nature would have certain breaking points. No, that’s not how humans usually work. Nature is a hard and unforgiving mistress, and through tens of thousand years there have inevitably been numerous cataclysms and collapses to grow wiser from.

Similarly, indigenous cultures have had tens of thousands of years to adapt and refine their social systems to the life of hunting and gathering. We, on the other hand, have only had a few generations to adapt to industrialization, and now even that’s over in many parts of the world and we have to adapt our social systems, gender roles, way of parenting, work life, and so on, to an entirely new digitized life style. It’s no wonder that we’re a bit lost.

So, my reply is that yes, the Animist metameme is a less complex metameme than the Modern one. But, that doesn’t make it better or worse, yet given the time it’s been around it certainly makes it considerably wiser than the later ones. As such, I’m not just paying lip service to all those hippies who think we should learn from indigenous cultures, I sincerely believe that there’s profound wisdom to be found that we won’t find anywhere else. Plus, the beauties lost from all metamemes are to be rediscovered if we want to reach a higher synthesis in a metamodern future.

The Animist Metameme Today

Q: You began the first chapter of this book with a quote from Theodor Adorno, stating that “modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological category”. I assume that applies to all the metamemes, including the animistic one. Now, this chapter has mainly been preoccupied with the past; and when taking up examples from the present, then merely as a means to help us understand history. As such, I’m curious if you couldn’t say something about the Animist metameme in today’s world? Where do we find the animist metameme today? And how does it look in the modern world?

HF: As you imply, all metamemes have a beginning, but never an ending; some residuals from earlier metamemes always remain present, while others have a stubborn habit of reappearing in new forms and new contexts.

Such residuals can broadly be divided into three main categories:

1. Survivors: These are the people who still live, either fully or partly, in accordance with an earlier metameme.
2. Reenactments: Those who’ve already made the transition to a later metameme, but still keep some of the symbols and rituals from an earlier one as a means of identity and culture; or, have recreated or appropriated such elements and incorporated them into contemporary contexts for purposes of art and spirituality, or sher entertainment and aesthetics.
3. Regressions: Are those from later stage societies who’ve either adopted the ways of an earlier metameme, or subscribe to newly emerged ways of thinking that follow the logic of an earlier stage.

The survivor category obviously applies to the ever dwindling number of contemporary hunter gatherers who haven’t been incorporated into the modern world-system. Not all who consider themselves indigenous fully belong to this category, only the few remaining groups of people who live isolated enough from modern civilization to keep their traditional way of life and way of thinking more or less intact. Most of today’s indigenous populations have been influenced by modern peoples to such an extent that they do not fully qualify for this category. Many sustain themselves from farming, and in some cases even tourism or trade, and many have been exposed to Christian and Islamic missionaries which, even in cases where full-scale conversion hasn’t occurred, has changed their spiritual lives to such an extent that they’ve become more similar to faustian and postfaustian religions than typical animist ones. (Animists typically don’t worship their gods, and they certainly don’t have any notions of punishment and rewards in the afterlife. Their belief systems don’t include a moral dimension, and they usually don’t have a preeminent deity either. When we find such elements in animist religions, it’s a sound indication that they’ve been influenced by Christians or Muslims.)

The cargo cults in the Pacific is a good example of how sensitive animist cultures can be to outside influence. During the Second World War, the US military’s presence in Melanesia, and above all their precious cargo of various goods, made such a strong and lasting impact on the local population that they after the war began performing various sympathetic magic rituals that drew direct inspiration from the daily activities of the army personnel they had observed. Rituals mimicking parade ground drills with wooden rifles, the construction of life-size replicas of airplanes from straw, and carving headphones out of wood to wear them while sitting in fabricated control towers, all in the hope that the soldiers would come back and cargo once more would drop from the skies, are performed on a regular basis to this day. In a similar fashion, a royal visit to the island of Vanuatu in 1974 convinced some of the locals that the husband of Queen Elizabeth II was the son of a mountain spirit referred to in their legends. In the following years this belief spread and gave rise to a religious sect believing in the divinity of Prince Philip.

Okay, that was a bit of a sidetrack, but you get the idea, the “pure” animist survivors are few and far between, and even where they exist we can’t always be sure they haven’t been influenced by the outside. It’s therefore far more common to find communities that have remained partially animist, especially in those parts of Africa that haven’t adopted Christianity or Islam. Traditional African religions contain many animist elements such as totemism, shamanism, nature worship, and ancestor worship, and many of these elements have made their way into the Voodoo tradition of the Caribbean. Lately, voodoo has even been declared the national religion of Haiti. This idea is however a very modern conception and is more an expression of national pride and identity than an indication of an animist worldview. Most people in Haiti remain Christian. As such, this is more an expression of the second type of residuals: reenactments.

“Reenactments” are common in indigenous societies who’ve made the transition to modernity but have kept many animistic symbols, practices, and artifacts as part of their identity and culture. These people often explicitly have an animistic “culture”, but are for the most part modern. A good example is the Inuit in Greenland. The Greenlanders are essentially a modern people: they have a strong sense of nationhood, with their own flag, a standardized national language, and a 100% literacy rate. Most people are secular, but are still members of the national Lutheran state church. They have a well-developed welfare state, are well-integrated into the capitalist world economy, and have a GDP pr. capita close to the European average. And, although the country is formally part of Denmark, Greenland has home rule and is a parliamentary democracy with a multiparty system. But despite all of these modern characteristics, the Greenlanders still keep their animist roots in high regard. Greenlandic folklore, which consists of myths and legends that are unmistakable animist, is considered central to the country’s culture, and the famous carved tupilak figurines, originally thought to protect its owner against enemy attacks, are likewise integrative to Greenlandic culture—and is also a popular souvenir. The mask dance was brought back and re-invented in the 1970s, and recently, young Greenlanders have started getting traditional facial tattoos. Both of these traditions originally had spiritual connotations, which explains why Christian missionaries were so keen to get rid of them; today however, their reenactments are more an expression of national identity and a way of dealing with the colonization of the past. Similar expressions can be found among indigenous populations in the US and Canada who, like the Greenlanders, are modern citizens in some of the most advanced societies on Earth while also identifying strongly with their animist past.

Another animist reenactment in the modern world is the World Indigenous Games, a kind of Indigenous Olympics, in which indigenous athletes from all over the world come together to compete in both modern disciplines such as football, and more traditional ones such as spear throwing and canoeing. The event is structured in a similar way to the Olympics, and is as such an inherently modern contraption.

Animist reenactments are of course also prevalent in arts and entertainment. The Copenhagen-based experimental folk music band Heilung is a good example of modern musicians attempting to reenact not only the music of the past, but more importantly its spiritual essence and feeling. The band mainly draws inspiration from Northern European bronze age and early iron age (Faustian), but their performances have many animist elements revolving around oneness with nature and dealing with various spirits.

Reenactments of the Animist metameme are very common in postmodern New Age and hippie contexts where people seek to reconnect with nature and a more spiritual life free of religious dogmatism. Everything from tribal tattoos, over dream catchers, to ayahuasca ceremonies, and spirit animals, have been appropriated from animist cultures by postmodern Westerners who’ve  used them for spiritual, cultural, and often merely decorative purposes. Here, however, the line between playful (or exploitative) appropriation of animist symbols and rituals, reenactments with another word, and outright regressions can be razor thin. One easily spills over to the next.

On one hand we might encounter privileged members of the “yoga bourgeoisie” (upper middle class folks who’re into spiritual stuff) who’ve taken it a bit too far by suddenly adopting all kinds of magical ideas after a great too many ayahuasca ceremonies in the Amazon rainforest. On the other hand we have the less fortunate, what I in my earlier books have called the “astrology proletariat”. These are people with few resources and troubled souls who’re lured into believing all kinds of nonsense by scrupulous quacks who just want their money and attention.

Those belonging to the first group are usually highly educated, well-functioning human beings who’ve enjoyed great success in their careers—which is where they got all that money from for those pricey yoga retreats in Bali and psychedelic expeditions to the rainforest. They rarely replace their fundamental modern or postmodern worldview with an animist one outright, but merely sprinkle a few animist ideas here and there. When you confront them with their magical thinking they’ll often snap out of it without much resistance. Those less fortunate souls belonging to the second group, however, tend to be more “true believers” who’ll defend their magical worldview more fiercely. This is often because they’re in a more desperate life situation that really calls for a miracle! These are the people who for one reason or the other, whether that’s an insufficient level of cognitive complexity, depth, code or just a very difficult low-state life, haven’t made a successful transition to the Modern metameme. They tend to have never felt comfortable with the modern worldview that surrounds them, nor the postfaustian or faustian ones for that matter, while the postmodern one is too advanced for them to wrap their heads around; so when exposed to animist ideas they feel right at home. This makes them vulnerable to all kinds of exploitation, for example modern-day shamans who’ve wrapped up the old indigenous tradition in new clothing and are selling their services as therapy. Yet, many of these folks don’t necessarily start appropriating existing indigenous cultures, or those of the past, but are more likely to gravitate towards newer and more contemporary ideas that in some way or the other follow an animist logic. This can be about the healing qualities of crystals, or the way they can defend you against evil spirits, which in today’s world has given rise to a multibillion industry. You see the same phenomenon in the supplement business where people who ascribe magical abilities to vitamins are being exploited by scrupulous companies who sell them normal supplements at overprice claiming that their brand is particularly miraculous. Another good example is the Flat Earth Society (fyi.: Faustian civilization discovered that the Earth is round) which is basically a club for people on a lower level of cognitive complexity. If you’re on concrete or below, the abstract idea that there’s a difference between how one perceives the world (flat) and how the world really is (spherical), is so contradictory that it leads to cognitive dissonance, which will make you inclined to gravitate towards someone telling you that your personal intuition is right at that you’ve been lied to all along. And then there’s the QAnon conspiracy movement. And various cults of all such. And so on, and so on. It’s really sad.

As I said, the difference between reenactment and regression can be razor thin, but a good rule of thumb is that when people start believing all kinds of nonsense, when it has become obviously pathological, then we’re dealing with a clear-cut example of a regression and not just a reenactment.

Q: That’s very interesting, but what about the archaic metameme, are there any examples of the pre-animist metamemes residuals popping up on later metamemes?

HF: It’s funny you should ask. As I said, all metamemes have a beginning, but never an ending. Within animist cultures, it’s common to dress up like animals and mimic their behavior in various rituals. In a way, although it’s part and parcel of the Animist metameme, it’s a reenactment of pre-animist, or pre-metamemetic, conditions.

We could talk of a fourth category, something we could call morphed residuals. At every metameme, we see that people cultivate praxises that are reminiscent of earlier metamemes despite being wrapped up in the culture of the present dominant metameme. In catholicism, despite the scriptures strict adherence to monotheism, we have all the saints which in practice is so similar to the previous metameme’s pantheon of gods. And in Islam, we have the ecstatic dance of the Suffi, which is inherently the adaptation of an animist technology. Modern people often view science as some kind of god, and scientific institutions as a replacement for religious authority, and among postmodern believers, the writings of various kinds of critical theory as a replacement for scientific truths.

It’s difficult to escape the past, and for many of us it can be close to impossible to fully adopt the presently dominant metameme. As a result, common people often attest to adhere to the metameme of the day, but in practice they do so in a way that has many similarities with earlier and less complex metamemes.

***

HF: With the emergence of the Animist metameme, the memes themselves started to take over our bodies and began to organize life according to their own, cultural, logic. A strange ghost had entered the biological machine as if the human body had gotten infected with an abstract alien life form. An emergent pattern started to take form in the collective of human behaviors. Memes became the rulers of genes. But it was a Faustian deal.

—

A webinar on the topic of world history and the six metamemes will be held this autumn, four weekends in a row November 2 – 25. More details about the course can be found here.

Hanzi Freinacht is a political philosopher, historian, and sociologist, author of ‘The Listening Society’, ‘Nordic Ideology’ and ’12 Commandments’. Much of his time is spent alone in the Swiss Alps. You can follow Hanzi on Facebook, Twitter, and Medium, and you can speed up the process of new metamodern content reaching the world by making a donation to Hanzi here.

 

Psychologists have long studied and quite successfully described stages of psychological growth, of adult development. As life unfolds, so may we, as human beings, as personalities.

But can culture evolve? The stages of cultural development have been approached many times but never been comprehensively, coherently, and convincingly captured.

The failures of developmental social theory have left authors like David Graeber and David Wengrow able to claim that stages of evolution of society do not meaningfully exist at all – that the very notion is a delusion of Western bias.

Until now.

The critics of the idea of evolution could not be more wrong. What has been lacking is only a sufficiently deep, abstract understanding of the great patterns of patterns, of the patterns that connect. This is what is captured by the notion of metamemes: the focus of this course. It’s the DNA of history.

It’s not Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age. It’s not from bands to tribes to chiefdoms to states.

Hanzi Freinacht – this time mostly in the guise of Emil – presents a redefined theory of historical evolution, one that at a surface level may look similar to well-known models like Spiral Dynamics, but that at a closer look has become something entirely different, and one that meshes with the specific skills and knowledge of a trained historian.

The metamemes follow an inherent  and elegant logic, and this logic is unearthed in a manner that reveals how all of the leading thinkers have been groping the elephant from different angles.

This course invites you to a behind-the-scenes look at Hanzi Freinacht’s redefinition of all hitherto prevalent models of cultural development. And once you see the models, all of history looks differently.

History as you know it, is history.

Tickets can be purchased here.

—

Sessions take place on Saturdays and Sundays in November, 19:00-21:00 CET. All sessions will be recorded and made available shortly thereafter. Here’s the program:

Weekend One: The 6 Hidden Patterns of History (and why they’ve been so difficult to spot)

The metamemes have been missed by all the world’s leading thinkers. Why? There is an explanation, and once you see it, it becomes readily apparent not only how the past has developed, but also how the seeds of the future look from today’s perspective.

Saturday November 2:

• What is a metameme?
• How the “skewed” development of the metamemes makes them so hard to identify (but impossible to unsee once you’ve learned how to spot them)
• Why art always comes first (and why ethics, sadly, always comes last)

Sunday November 3:

• The hidden rhythm of history
• Why some stages of development are “hard” and others are “soft”
• Why postmodernism cannot beat capitalism (despite wanting it so badly)

Weekend Two: Where are we headed? Empirical pessimism, theoretical optimism

In the second weekend we’ll look at the future and Emil will show you where the attractors seem to be taking us. These sessions aren’t for the faint of heart, so brace thyself. You’ll get a sweeping overview of the wild torrents we’re going through and hopefully get a better idea about where to position yourself so as to make it through these crazy times that are coming.

Saturday November 9:

• How to “outcompete” capitalism
• The new emerging class structure in late modernity and beyond (and where you fit in)

Sunday November 10:

• Why metamodernism might be the last stage of development before the singularity
• Why we’re approaching a “postmodern dark age”, not a listening society

Weekend Three: History Freestyle with Emil

During the third weekend it’s time to jam. Hanzi’s got a massive unpublished material on history and socio-cultural development that Emil can present. Participants can send in proposals to historical and societal topics they would like him to talk about. No woo-woo stuff though, Emil is tired of that.

Saturday November 16 & Sunday November 17: You decide!

Want to hear a metamodern perspective on the French Revolution? You got it. Want to understand the rise, and fall, of patriarchy? No problem. Globalization and colonization? Would love to. The Axial Age and the rise of universal moral religions and philosophies? Unless you want to hold hands and meditate, certainly, Emil can deliver a razor sharp analysis to expand your consciousness on that one, too. And he can even talk for countless hours about how kick-ass our animist ancestors were, and what we can learn from the present ones without things going off rails woo-woo.

Bonus sessions with Johan Ranefors and Daniel Görtz

Finally, after the main course you are welcome to participate in a couple of bonus sessions with Johan Ranefors and Daniel Görtz. Johan is a meta-theorist associated with the Archdisciplinary Research Center (ARC) who has further developed Michael Commons Model of Hierarchical Complexity, and Daniel is Emil’s long-term partner in crime and the “other half” of Hanzi.

Saturday November 23: Johan Ranefors (a rare species of computer science-based metatheorist)

• How the hidden rhythm of the metamemes fits with the Model of Hierarchical Complexity
• How the Model of Hierarchical Complexity can help us make sense of socio-cultural evolution

Sunday November 24: Daniel Görtz

• Epistemic corruption and why we can’t move on before we’ve seized the means of communication
• Why transnationalizing the internet platform monopolies is a historical attractor point (and why Bezos and Zuckerberg don’t stand a chance in the long run)

Note that this course is the first and only place in which Johan’s metatheory is presented thus far (and this is almost true of Daniel’s presentation as well).

Pricing

Low income: 1650 DKK (c. € 220)

Standard: 2000 DKK (c. € 270)

Abundant: 2500 DKK (c. € 335)

Tickets can be purchased here.

Your host

Emil Ejner Friis (b. 1981) is a theory artist and a teacher of metamodernism, he is a co-founder of Metamoderna and one of the writers behind Hanzi Freinacht. He has spent the last ten years trying to figure out how to create a listening society, a kinder and more developed society that deeply cares for the happiness and emotional needs of every citizen.

He has tried and failed at creating a metamodern political party, he has tried and failed at creating a metamodern IT company, and he has just plainly failed at ever finishing his not-so-metamodern university studies by being drawn to all kinds of adventures to try and save the world instead. Until recently he was living on a remote tropical island where he was swimming with dogs every day. He just moved back to his old university town Lund to pursue an academic career. We’ll see how long that lasts.

When he’s not writing and theorizing, he’s conspiring with other metamodernly inclined hackers, hipsters, and hippies to outcompete modern society. To pay the rent he sells words, all the best words.

Emil is a skilled and experienced speaker with a reputation of being entertaining and good at making complex ideas easier to digest.

The following is an extract of the first chapter from Hanzi Freinacht’s unpublished book ‘The 6 Hidden Patterns of History: A Metamodern Guide to World History’. The book is not coming out anytime soon, but a webinar on the topic of world history and the six metamemes will be held this autumn, four weekends in a row November 2 – 25. More details about the course can be found here.

—

Hanzi Freinacht: Let’s begin this chapter with a blurry “jpeg” image of the six metamemes, the six hidden patterns of world history. 

Before we go on, I’d implore you to get a bucket and to keep it within reach. I expect especially postmodernly minded readers to react with strong contempt and violent allergy towards what follows. If this is you—if you find your fingers clutching spasmodically and a dark brooding voice inside you spells the word “linear”—just know your reaction is normal and an expected part of the process.

But do come back after you’re done vomiting—it gets more interesting, I promise. It’s a bit like Mother Ayahuasca, really: It takes a bit of throwing up to reach a breakthrough.

Here we go:

• The Animistic metameme: Beginning with the “revolution of the upper Paleolithic” around 50 000 years ago. Characterized by animistic beliefs, totemism, shamanism, and ancestor cults that bind together larger bands of hunter-gatherers. This is also the metameme that gives rise to the first early art works.
• The Faustian metameme: From the beginning of the agricultural revolution 12 000 years ago, blossoming with the great agrarian civilizations from around 4000 BCE. Characterized by notions of power gods, monumental architecture, and increased social stratification with privileged rulers on top with considerable means of organized violence. This is the metameme where we see the rise of powerful individuals.
• The Postfaustian metameme: Beginning shortly before the axial age c. 800 BCE, in some aspects as early as 2000 BCE, but to its fullest extent only to blossom after 500 CE with the consolidation of the great moral religions such as Christianity, Islam and Buddhism. Characterized by transcendental ideas of salvation, literary traditions on ethics, and social critique. This is the metameme that gives rise to the so-called “righteous rebels”.
• The Modern metameme: Beginning around 1500 CE, but in some aspects found in its proto-variant as early as 500 BCE. Blossoming only in the 19th and 20th century. Still the most prevailing metameme today. Characterized by rationalistic and scientific thought, notions of progress and material growth, and emancipation from arbitrary religious and political control.
• The Postmodern metameme: Only to emerge in the 20th century, though some aspects appeared in the late 18th century. Yet to fully blossom. Characterized by a critique of rationalistic thought, established power relations and a greater concern with environmental and social issues.
• The Metamodern metameme: Emerging as we speak.

Q: No, I’m fine. Really. Thank you for this introduction. Disgusting as it was.

…But it is linear—you really cannot deny that. I’m not saying this as a judgment, just a description. It’s a mainstream, Western, linear view of history. That has its place, perhaps, but it is of course not the only kind of history, nor necessarily the most relevant one in our day and age.

So your world history is for just seeing the basics from a Western mainstream perspective, as a linear progression, and then people can challenge it and nuance it, correct?

HF: No, it’s not linear, it’s not mainstream, and it’s not the Western standard (“Whig history”) model.

“Linear” means, by definition, that the more you add of something, the more of the same you get. Like following a line. Add more sugar, it gets sweeter. Add more salt, it gets saltier. Within certain ranges, these are linear equations.

Now, add more spirit worlds and rain dances… and you get high-rise pyramids, elaborate temple cities, and trade networks upholding armies allied with scribes who keep track of taxes and the number of captured slaves. To call that a linear equation is to take a very creative view on mathematics.

Add more of warrior god pantheon worship and bloody triumph of mass honor killings, and you get… Jesus. And the Buddha. And saints taking over from heroic warriors as the highest ideal of human accomplishment. And a universal order manifesting in literal wonders of beauty (cathedrals, mosques, and so on) that tower over every human settlement in honor of the divine, of universal brotherhood. Sure, linear.

And add some more of that, and you get… businessmen? Yes, lots of snazzy, shrewd capitalists turning everything under the sun into profit machines, with science itself serving as the strongest reinforcer for this to occur, until the entire world is swallowed up and ecosystems are destroyed. Some line we’re drawing. It’s a little curly, though, don’t you think? Like a spiral, even?

And add more of that, and you get… a whole blinking army of vegan feminists, intellectuals, and environmental activists who love diversity? And a virtual flood of obsessions with the minutiae of language use and its implications for social justice and power relations? Whoa. That would be postmodernism.

No, it’s not linear. The whole point of the model is that each stage is a qualitative shift, breaking the apparent “line” of the former metameme and taking a fundamentally different direction.

And it’s not the Western mainstream story, either. Because the Western mainstream would not admit that the postmodern minorities that emerge to critique it are absolutely right that the modern project is both tragic, doomed, and not a simple form of progress. And it would not admit that Animism was perhaps the best way for humans to live, nor that Postfaustian religions were in many ways a greater achievement than modern science, Modern Western mainstream historiography could even have problems admitting that colonialism was fundamentally a crime against humanity—and that global and big history must be released from the shackles of Western-centric parochialism, thereby honoring indigenous traditions as well as balancing the six, not one, mutually independent birthplaces of civilization: China, Indus River Valley, South America, Mesoamerica, Egypt, and Mesopotamia (where “Western civilization” is nothing more than a grandchild of the last two).

Postmodern historiography does see and admit these things. It does challenge the Western mainstream and its thinly disguised roots in 19th century colonialism, nationalism, and male-centrism. And my point is: Metamodern historiography entirely agrees, and seeks to proceed in this endeavor! We just want to do it better and more holistically, producing more useful theories for actually reducing the suffering of the world.

But the problem in our days, if you ask me, is that the postmodern mind cannot tell the difference between Modern historiography (yes, linear, Western, mainstream, apologetic for colonialism, blind to issues of gender and environment, reproductive of arbitrary power relations, and so on) and a Metamodern historiography, as the one in this book.

Understanding the metamemes, as the hidden patterns of history, is not the Modern mainstream history. It’s an expression of a Metamodern view of history, and as such it goes beyond Postmodern critiques of everything that moves (or everything that moves in what looks like a line).

Q: Nice. Sure, call me a postmodernist if that makes you feel safer in your Western-centric little ivory tower. I’m happy to be one if that means I fight against the long tradition of ranking peoples and cultures and epochs according to an unjust and cruel hierarchy of “evolution”. Folks like you are many, people like me are few and far between. The world needs a few of us as well.

And do tell me again that you have a more “evolved” perspective. It just proves my point: You are part of the same old, same old, white guy stuck in a square, wanting to box the world neatly into more rigid square boxes, to control it, and put yourself on top. Also in a box. I’d say it’s cute if I weren’t so utterly disgusted, given the profoundly murderous history of this very tendency. You’re even trying to appropriate the resistance of others and make it a part of your box-theory-of-boxing-everything-that-is-alive-and-organic-and-wobbly. You don’t like wobbly, I get it. You can’t handle it. It’s hard to control. I feel for you. It must be difficult to live so afraid of uncertainty, to be so much in need of controlling everything.

However, however. I do see what you mean about “linear”, I’ll give you that. That’s not exactly what I meant with linear, though. The fact still remains that you literally lined up the metamemes in a progression: I can flip back to the page, take a pencil, and draw a damned line between your stages or metamemes on the paper! But the sequence isn’t as simple as you say. You don’t claim that Animism grows out of Modernity, for instance. For my part, I can think of many ways in which it might, and it has—say, in the German Wandervogel or Lebensreform movements at the last turn of the century. People react against modernity and start seeing the spirits in nature, in their own people, reconnecting to the organic and simple, to the animal side of human life.

HF: Well, uhm. About me calling you a “pomo” (postmodernist)… Let me respond to that first and then get back to the main thread.

Please do note that you’re calling me an inheritor of positively genocidal tendencies and charging me with moral responsibility for those things. And then you’re calling me a box-man and all that, and going after my race and gender, framing me not for what I say but for external attributes I really cannot do anything about. At least you should ask yourself why you get to frame me and my argument but if I do the same to you, only in a less unfair manner (framing your position, not your skin color), I’m suddenly the pinnacle of evil? If you don’t like having your position framed as pomo, why then do you insist on framing my position, and also my person?

I guess I sometimes do call you “a pomo”, at least in regard to how vehemently you resist stage theories—or the good ones, not the poor ones. The difference is, though, that’s an assessment not of you as a person or collective category, but of the content of your argumentation. And not only that—it’s a fairly positive assessment. I thereby say that you hold almost all of the values that I also hold and cherish. It’s only that I have a different view on how to defend and manifest those values.

Q: Yada, yada. Hurt white men… Heroes of the whole world, who nobody in the world ever asked for. So sensitive. So fragile. Can’t take two seconds of critique. So used to being the talker.

HF: Sure. I don’t think we’re getting anywhere on that one. Back to the actual discussion, then.

I’m not saying that nothing Animist can ever come from modernity. I’m not. Indeed, this kind of emergence (earlier metamemes from later ones) is an important theme throughout this book. All of the metamemes always coexist as generative potentials.

What I am saying is that they must first emerge sequentially. There’s just no way for a band of twelve people in the desert foraging for roots to invent Newtonian physics and then to critique its implications on how it makes for a mechanistic cosmology and thus an alienating and anti-ecological worldview with a Cartesian ghost left echoing in the machine, feeling lonely. It just doesn’t happen. You don’t get Modernity and Postmodernity directly from Animism. You don’t. If that’s “too linear” for you, you’re just being dogmatic, sorry.

If I may deconstruct your position for a bit, you seem a bit stuck on the dogma, the underlying supposition, that lines are bad. But reality is more complex than that. Lines are sometimes good, sometimes bad. Lines do exist, also in living systems, even in mycelia. Sometimes lines describe the relationships between things accurately. The dance of the universe follows many geometric shapes, some of which happen to be lines.

Again, I said you’d really need a bucket, and I did promise you more interesting nuance if you could only finish vomiting. It’s normal. I understand. Just pull your hair back. Here’s some tissue.

But just to really get the line-allergy issue under control, let’s do it like this. When I wrote the summary blurry jpeg image paragraph, I had little choice but to line the things up on the paper, indeed forming a line in a superficial sense. That’s a limitation of communicating in this format, on a two-dimensional surface, in text. A more accurate way of describing the progression of metamemes is that they branch off from one another in one tree, where each new branch is smaller and younger than the last. Like this:

I wish to credit my good friend Joe Lightfoot for being the one to come up with the idea of presenting the stages as a tree. For the rest of eternity, the official name for this model will thus be known as The Lightfoot Tree™.

The Lightfoot Tree™ illustrates the proportions of the stretches of time within which humans have lived in and expressed the different metamemes. In today’s world, modernity looks like the biggest one on the surface (because there’s just so much of it across the planet), but all of the oldest and in that sense most trial-and-error evolved cultures that jive with their direct environment are animist. Modernity is only about five centuries old. The oldest Animist cultures, say, the San people in the Kalahari desert, are literally close to a hundred times older. That’s the trunk of human experience. That’s the cultural and psychological homestead of humanity.

(And this model mirrors, by the way, the bifurcation diagram in chaos theory. It’s a bit more technical, and way ahead of where we are in the discussion, but I have added a discussion of the connection between metamemes and the bifurcation diagram in the appendix to this book. I recommend reading it, after having finished the book.)

Q: That’s… pretty gender-typical ‘splaining. But in keeping with my value of being a good listener (something white men with big ideas like yourself aren’t exactly known for), I’ll humor you. I know you’re trying to talk me into something, but hey, I’m confident I can resist so I may as well hear you out, even if I more or less already know what you’re going to say. Because I’ve already thought of this discussion and come farther than you have.

Okay, so let’s say you have these metamemes branching off organically from one another, where Animism is the biggest and oldest root, with tens of thousands of years of lived history. At least it’s better than a staircase of human history leading up to George H. W. Bush and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Modernity is just one of many ways that humans live and express themselves, fine. And Western societies are just one set of expressions, in turn, of modernity. There is so much human richness that arose long before anything one might call “modernity” ever appeared. And there do come beautiful and interesting things after and beyond it—sure, we can call that postmodern, if we want. A more critical and nuanced mind can notice that, for instance, an Amazon tribe’s shamanic practice can be wiser and more embodied than anything modern life ever cooked up in its soulless office landscapes.

But since you’ve added a stage after the Postmodern metameme, I can’t stop wondering if it wouldn’t be possible to add a stage before the Animistic one? (Again, I don’t buy the idea of stages, or branches or however you’d like sneakily to rebrand it, but I’ll play along to see how your thinking makes sense internally, regardless of my wider perspective. I’m just interested in the social phenomenon of people thinking like you do. I’ve always been like that, interested in people, even the bad ones and the vulnerabilities that drive them.)

HF: Ah, I’m happy we can speak on friendlier terms, even if just as a truce. It’s all I ask for. And yes, by the way, modernity is only one of many human expressions, and Western modernity is only a subcategory of that. Exactly correct, dear Q. And this whole “Western modernity” has been blown out of proportion in terms of its influence on the world, with partly disastrous consequences. We completely agree!

It’s just that to balance this out and bring about a global order that actually honors and integrates the multiplicity of human experience, we need to first admit that there is such a thing as modernity—the Modern metameme—and that it’s not the same as simply “being Western”. We need to understand what it actually is. And we need to not implicitly hold Western societies to a higher standard than other cultures, because that’s treating one thin sliver of human expression as the adult and all the others as the children. Western guilt vis-à-vis the rest of the world has an unfortunate way of smuggling Western supremacy in through the back door.

But, yes, whether there’s a stage before the Animistic one is a really good question. It’s almost as if I was telling you what to ask.

If it wasn’t for the fact that my publisher had already marketed this book as “The 6 Hidden Patterns”, we might as well change the title to “The 7 Hidden Patterns of History”. The Animistic metameme obviously didn’t appear out of nowhere, but emerged from a more rudimentary stage of development.

This more rudimentary stage doesn’t contain any of the Animistic metameme’s typical features such as spirit beliefs, mythological narratives, and works of art. I have refrained from dedicating a chapter to it since there really wouldn’t be much to say, and since most of it would be based on speculation anyway. The main way in which this—let’s call it the Archaic—metameme, differs from an “animal” condition to use a clumsy term, is in its technological features. It includes spoken language, domestication of fire, and tool use. These are the innovations that initially made humans, or more specifically hominids (since there were several subspecies of humans at this level of development), so different from other animals.

But, tellingly, the Archaic metameme left little to nothing in the way of art.

It had been around for over 300 000 years, maybe even more than a million (a group of archaeologists just unearthed the remains of what they believe is a one million years old campfire), since “the dawn of homo sapiens as a species”. It clearly encompassed other species of homo: homo habilis, homo erectus, Neanderthals, and Cro-Magnon. If we study the period of about 70 000 years ago, there were at least six different human species on earth.

It’s old. It’s Archaic. Hundreds of millennia of ongoing human life, and no art. That very fact should make us pause. It’s on the very edge between biological and cultural evolution, which is also why it encompasses different species of hominids.

Here’s the watershed moment where a cultural evolution began to decide the fate of biological evolution. That’s something we’re entirely used to in the anthropocene, where mustard plants have become everything from spinach to cabbage to cauliflower, and wolves speciate into 360 species of dogs—biological realities that match cultural evolution (from herding to handbags and Hollywood showoff, in the case of shepherd dogs and chihuahuas). But 70 000 years ago, it was rare for culture to determine the fate of biological evolution—Archaic was shared across species of the genus “homo”, but when Animism took root, certain groups started to kick some serious butt and drove the others to a combination of extinction and biological assimilation. Culture had slowly started eating the biosphere already back then. 

The Archaic metameme entails the beginnings of “culture” that accumulates learning in a way that makes culture come alive as its very own form of evolution. It is thus not only the first metameme, but also the first “hard” metameme. It established the foundational material conditions, or the “coordination engine” if we are to use my terminology, of the first human societies; a way of life that on a fundamental level remained the same until the agrarian age. But in between, with the emergence of animism, a new cultural superstructure was created on top of this hunter-gatherer coordination engine. But, in spite of all the cultural advances that animism brought about, the “hard” material conditions remained the same: people had to hunt and gather to get food, they depended on open fires for cooking and keeping warm, and they used language to coordinate life in small groups of wandering bands.

Q: Whoa, wait a second, “hard” metameme? “Coordination engine”? What do you mean? You can’t keep making up new words without explaining what you’re talking about.

HF: Oh sorry, I haven’t explained that yet. Take a deep breath and let me elaborate.

Q: You don’t need to tell me how to breathe, but go on.

Hard and Soft Metamemes

HF: Remember the particular rhythm I mentioned in the introduction? What I’m referring to is this dialectic dance in which one metameme brings about new economic and political conditions, and then as a counter reaction, the next metameme brings about new cultural and ethical codes to alleviate the (mostly unintended) ills of the former. Just to be clear, I don’t mean to essentialize the terms “hard” and “soft”; they merely serve as short and practical ways to imply that some metamemes bring about “hard” technological and organizational changes, while others bring about “soft” ethical and cultural changes. Simply stated, even if Postfaustianism is a “soft” metameme, there was very little softness going on in its purest instantiation: the Spanish Inquisition. Likewise, Modernity is a “hard” metameme, but it got rid of slavery and corporal punishment, which arguably made the world a “softer” place.

Hence, not everything about Modernity is “hard”. But Modern capitalism still has some “harder” edge than the Postfaustian medieval morality: Postfaustianism changed what came before it (Faustianism) into something softer, increasing the emphasis on spiritual values. Modernity was a more profane development, working not through new religions as much as with new modes of getting things done.

On this more abstract level it makes perfect sense to say that:

• Archaic is a hard metameme, because it forms the basis of hunter-gatherer tech.
• Animism is a soft metameme, as it builds on the already-existent hunter-gatherer tech and generates the mythologies, stories, and spiritual and artistic animation of the natural world associated with the thousands of unique expressions of Animist cultures across the world.
• Faustianism is a hard metameme, as it’s associated with some technological advancement (typically, but not necessarily, agriculture, as we shall discuss later) that allows for larger populations to co-exist as one culture or social unit, one civilization.
• Postfaustianism is a soft metameme as it builds on the emergence of civilization, challenging and rearranging its social relations and ethical expression.
• Modernity is a hard metameme as it revolutionizes the economy and the sources of available power.
• Postmodernism is a soft metameme, because it critiques and remedies the injustices and inconsistencies of modern life, always seeking to establish that “another world is possible”.
• Metamodernism is a hard metameme, as it emerges only in fully post-industrial forms of life that are based around the Internet and its unique life conditions and social games.

Let’s trace these contours a bit further.

The combination of agriculture and centralized governance, which makes up the core of the Faustian coordination engine, fundamentally didn’t change with the Postfaustian metameme that followed: most people remained farmers, whose production surplus was siphoned off to an elite who controlled them by a monopoly on coercive force. With a few exceptions, that’s how life was organized in most agrarian parts of Eurasia for millennia up until modern times. (The picture is more complex of course but more details later.)

The Postfaustian metameme did, however, change the ways in which people relate to one another. Prophets, philosophers, and what sociologist of religion Robert Bellah called “righteous rebels” introduced new moral teachings to make society less brutal and, if not in practice, then at least on paper, put certain restraints on rulers and what they were allowed to do. Postfaustianism and its great spiritual traditions like Buddhism, Christianity, Islam etc. thus made life a little “softer”, hence the name “soft” metameme.

On one hand we can talk about a cultural superstructure on top of the Faustian metameme, on the other, and if we want to be cynical about it, merely a thin veneer around it. After all, preaching non-violence, equality, and charity can only take you so far. And despite the fervor with which religious authorities fought (what they saw as) superstition and tried to educate and enlighten the masses, Postfaustian society remained rather ignorant, poor, and violent. This only began to change with modernity. The Postfaustian critique of Faustian society simply wasn’t enough to change the foundational economic and political structure of society. The Faustian engine only began to yield as modernity brought a new “hard” engine of coordination into existence: capitalism and mechanized industrial production powered by fossil fuels. Society didn’t become the kingdom of brotherly love and enlightened spirituality many postfaustians had envisioned, far from it, but modernity did effectively minimize many of the issues Postfaustian society was struggling with such as poverty, oppression, slavery, superstition, and violence.

Q: Seriously, are you saying that capitalism has led to a more peaceful world? That it has made way with poverty and oppression? I’d say the opposite is the case.

HF: Do we really need to go through this again? Sigh… 

The fact that you can sit here comfortably and critique me, and everyone else, including the ruling class and the government, ought to say something about the social and political progress that’s been made. And how come you’re not dead yet, you seem well into your forties? So you haven’t been drafted to serve in the King’s army against his rebellious duke of a cousin you say? And when was the last time your lord whipped you for not plowing the fields properly? Ah, you say you work at the university? You and how many million others worldwide?

Q: Okay, okay, sure, some things have certainly improved in the rich part of the world, but the poverty, oppression, and violence has just been outsourced to the third world.

HF: Say that to the billions of people in Asia and Latin America who’ve been lifted out of acute poverty during the past 50 years of globalization. Sure, life is still hard, but you can’t argue against better nutrition, higher average life span, lower child mortality, higher average living standards, and so on, and so on. Sure, the West has supported a number of oppressive dictatorships around the world, but overall, more people live under democratic governments now than 100 years ago. How many people lived in democracies that respected human rights before the dawn of capitalism? Zero.

Your critique of global capitalism’s many unfortunate consequences is valid and important. On another occasion I would gladly discuss with you how people in poor countries are being exploited to serve the needs of those in the rich. But I’m not trying to defend capitalism. I have another project in mind, and that is to show that hard and soft metamemes interact with each other in a surprising manner: It’s very often the hard metameme that finally turns the values of the former, soft, metameme, into a reality. The hard has a soft edge, the soft has a hard edge.

This touches upon one of the main points in this book and the next (Outcompeting Capitalism), namely that postmodernism doesn’t offer anything to replace modernity’s hard engine of coordination with. Postmodern rebels can critique capitalism, and they can win the moral high ground and reign supreme in intellectual life, which isn’t entirely without its merits since it enables them to define what’s good and evil. But that doesn’t suffice to deliver on many of postmodernism’s promises. In the end we might get vegan hamburgers in recyclable bags sold to us by a highly esteemed minority person during pride month at McDonald’s, and top it off with an organic fair-trade coffee at a unionized Starbucks, but beneath it all the engine of industrial capitalism is still running the show.

In a way, soft metamemes are all about ethics—but the hard metamemes are about how to apply the ethics that were developed within the frames of the preceding metameme. You see, postfaustians (religious folks) are generally more likely than modernists (mainstream people) to give money to the poor or refuse military service, and postmodernists (woke folks) are more likely than metamodernists to be vegans. But that doesn’t mean postfaustians are better than modernists at creating a fair and peaceful society, or that postmodernists are better than metamodernists at creating a humane and sustainable society. Or rather: for slavery to be abolished, you need postfaustian moral indignation in an industrial society created by moderns; for non-human animal slavery to end, you need postmodern morality acting in a more metamodern society. The hard metamemes add rather little in terms of moral awakening to the soft ones, but they operationalize that new morality and create the real, material conditions for it to go from fantasy and jargong to reality and law.

On a societal level, it takes a hard metameme to walk the talk. Yet, the ways in which hard metamemes apply the ethics of their predecessor tend to feel severely heretical to those who’re still subscribing to the old ways of thinking. To postfaustian Christians and Muslims, modern banking practices such as payment of interest, or usury, and the idea of scientific inquiry, were literally heretical back in the day. People were burned alive for these deeds. Still, modernity succeeded where postfaustianism failed and ended slavery, got rid of tyrannical overlords, and created welfare systems to effectively care for the poor.

Likewise, this very book tends to feel nothing short of heretical to pomos (again, see my next book…). For now, I just want to clarify the difference between the foundational coordination engine that emerges with the hard metamemes like the Faustian and Modern ones, and the overarching cultural and ethical superstructure that the soft metamemes like the Postfaustian and Postmodern ones build on top of these.

***

Q: You talk about agriculture and industrial capitalism as “coordination engines”, but isn’t “engine” a rather mechanistic term that can mislead us into seeing a complex system like a human society as a more linear one like that of a machine? Using such terms is a bit male-centric, too, but I can forgive you for your boyish fascination with things that go “vrmm, vrmm” if that’s your thing.

HF: First of all, the term “engine” is actually rather feminine if we look at its etymology. It’s derived from the Latin word “ingenitum”, which is the past participle of “ingignō”, meaning “to instill by birth”. And when we remove the in- prefix, then we’re left with gignō which directly translates into the unambiguously feminine act of giving birth.

I was also tempted to use the word “motor”, which is largely interchangeable with “engine” in the English language. “Motor” is derived from the Latin word “mōtō” which means “to set in motion”. I settled for “engine” because it sounded better, but the etymology of these two words very much captures what I want to imply, namely an underlying generative structure—or function, if you will—that sets everything else in motion.

Yet, the image of a car engine is not entirely without merit. We all know there’s only so much you can do if the engine is old and doesn’t run very well. Replacing it is a massive endeavor, but it can be done, and if successfully so, you basically have a brand-new car—which is what I want to emphasize with the term “coordination engine”. (I know most people would just scrap the old car and buy a new one, but when it comes to societies we rarely have that luxury.)

And, again, the hard metamemes come with a whole new coordination engine: a new engine that creates patterns of how the actions of real human beings are coordinated with one another, how they are woven together, how they make up a social fabric.

Q: It’s a bit abstract. Can you state as clearly as possible what a coordination engine is?

HF: The coordination engine is the underlying pattern of how people coordinate their actions with one another and the material flows around them, through space and time. This means that they can coordinate via hunting-gathering and camp-fire talks, by seasonal work efforts to sow crops, through labor markets and state regulation and national currency, and so on.

It’s about the economy in a wide sense: about how human activities link up with one another. Think about it: “an economy” is basically a pattern of coordination of human agency over space and time. I mine some ore, the shipper brings it to your plant, you smelt it and purify it, someone else takes it to a factory, the factory worker shapes it, the marketer markets it, and the retail person sells it, and the dinner guest cuts a potato with the knife that has somehow made it into her hand. An unbelievable chain of coordinated actions made that very knife hit that very potato on that very plate. In today’s world, the economy consists of countless billions of such coordinations every day. It’s human hands moving all parts, yes, but the pattern that coordinates the hands takes on a life of its own, as it were, beyond any and all comprehension of any one single agent. You might call it “an invisible hand” if you wish, but there is no reason to assume that such an entity only works through “the market” and only creates wealth. To see what a society is, in its material and social reality, is to see what patterns are in place to coordinate all of those behaviors and material flows.

And that’s the coordination engine: the emergent pattern of economic activity, the shape that economic activity takes. It’s a deeper and more generalized (and abstracted) term than the old Marxist “mode of production”. How things are “produced” is just a thin sliver of the actual coordination engine. The coordination engine includes how everything is transported, managed, powered, distributed, priced, sold, advertised, consumed, understood, experienced, disposed of, possibly recycled, calculated, and so forth. How human action is coordinated. It’s a dance, just one that includes production lines. The coordination engine interacts with material reality, by patterning it into everything from potato chips to skyscrapers to jet fighters into one seamless flow, but it’s not reducible to “the material”. It’s an informational entity. It’s the DNA, if you will, of the economy. You’re made of the potatoes you ate, materially speaking. But without your DNA, you’d still be a sack of potatoes (and who knows, maybe there’s still a chance you might be). Without the coordination engine, the “material economy” would still be minerals in the ground and fish in the sea. But the emergent property that we call cultural history intervened, and it transformed minerals and fish alike into human products with their own specific meanings in the economy.

The hard metamemes stem from updates of this coordination engine. The soft ones do not entail a revolution of the coordination engine. They revolutionize its overarching cultural superstructure.

Q: When you talk about an “overarching cultural superstructure” I’m a bit confused whether you’re intentionally using Marxist terminology. To Marx, a society’s superstructure is the culture, ideology, norms, and identities people inhabit, all the relationships and ideas not directly related to the mode of production such as institutions, political power structures, roles, rituals, religion, media, and so on. On one hand I see similarities between you and Marx in the way you claim the superstructure is dependent on the coordination engine, what Marxists called the “base”, but on the other hand you seem to be talking about something entirely different since the metamemetic superstructure emerges after the coordination engine, and, although dependent on the coordination engine, actually seeks to topple the power structures of the hard metameme. According to Marx, the superstructure merely reflects the ruling class’ interests by justifying how the base operates and by defending the power of the elite.

HF: I actually didn’t intend on using Marxist terminology, but was just looking for a good word to describe what kind of animal we’re talking about. However, since “superstructure” already has this very particular connotation among Marxists, it probably isn’t the best term after all.

Plus, now that I’m thinking about it, a structure is a fixed entity anyway, derived from the Latin word “structūra” which literally means “building”, which is far from the dynamic creature we’re dealing with here. So let’s reconsider: If we have an underlying engine that’s responsible for how everything is being coordinated, what sort of thing is this cultural movement that critiques its flaws and ethical shortcomings? What does it do?

Q: I don’t know, something that corrects flaws and errors, something that generates coherence?

HF: Yes, we could talk about a generator; something that is dependent on the power from the engine to “give birth” to something else (Latin: generō, same root as gignō, the noun “Genus”, “birth giving”!). And what is that something else? Coherence you say, or perhaps even better: purification.

From all the incoherences of the former metameme, all the impurities and pathologies, the type of cultural superstructure created by a soft metameme is, in essence, a purification generator aiming to address the entropy caused by the previous hard metameme’s engine of coordination. Humans are conscious agents. We don’t just follow economic and social structures blindly. We reflect on them, comment upon them, critique them, wrestle the cognitive dissonance that emerges. And sooner or later our conscience catches up, and we decide it’s time to come clean, to do the right thing, as far as we can imagine what that might entail. That’s the soft metameme taking hold.

We could call it a “coherence generator”, but let’s settle for “purification generator”—it sounds better, I think.

Q: Okay, I think I understand. What you’re saying is that first we have the emergence of a new way of production and governance, a new “hard” coordination engine in your words—and then we have a critique of the new hard facts of life, which brings about a cultural revolution of sorts, the cultural superstructure or so-called “purification generator”, that manages to make life more tolerable, more fair, and a little less brutal, but without replacing the productive and governmental foundation of society—which is only replaced by the emergence of a new engine of coordination on the following stage.

Yet, if we look at actual historical developments, the rhythm, or pattern, you’re talking about doesn’t really appear to hold up with the chaotic realities of history: For most of the period we categorize as the modern age, from the early 1600’s and well into the 1900’s, things were quite nasty and brutish nonetheless. The enlightened ways of modernity didn’t seem to have much of an influence on how people treated one another during this period despite all the progress that had been made in science, philosophy, and industry. And if we take the Renaissance in Northern Italy in the 1300’s and 1400’s, it’s remarkable to observe how modern and secular they were in their artistic expressions despite society being as medieval as it was back then, or Postfaustian as you’d call it. In addition, many of the things you define as Postfaustian can be found in the earliest civilizations, way before the emergence of the great world religions around 500 BC.

What I mean to say is that societal developments don’t seem to proceed in these neatly ordered sequences you claim. Reality is much more chaotic than that. What’s your reply to that?

HF: I’m glad you brought this up. This brings us to the second aspect of the rhythm, namely that metamemetic development is “skewed”.

Development Is Skewed:
Art Always Comes First, Morality Comes Last

HF: Metamemes do not emerge as full packages containing everything we need to transition from one stage to the next. And they do not change everything at the same time. Some things emerge before others, and some things take longer time to come into being.

Q: Okay, I got it. What you’re saying is that progress is less predetermined and that there are still a lot of surprises regarding how things actually unfold—but, the metameme model gives us a rough sketch on what to expect and how things generally behave. It’s fuzzy, and it’s supposed to be, so that it doesn’t get too absolute and rigid, so it allows for richness, nuance, and exceptions, right?

HF: No, not really.

I’m claiming that there is a very specific pattern to this developmental sequence, and that it follows a particular logic which can help us to interpret the past and to a certain extent even reason about the future more accurately.

 have very little regard for the great intellectual copout of our time: “it’s nuanced, it’s full of contractions, it’s complex”. Yes, it’s complex. But underlying every complexity is an elegant simplicity. So also in cultural history. Chaos is complex, sure: but chaos theory is relatively straightforward. That’s the sort of insight we’re looking for.

It’s just that the specific pattern is hidden, as it were, in plain sight. Now we shall look past surface phenomena—say, the “bronze age” and other categorizations of the modern mind—and see the elegance that connects and explains how simplicity and complexity forever dance together to the melodies of reality. If reality weren’t patterned, the wonderful chaos of music, even jazz jams, wouldn’t be possible.

Let me restate the old dictum: “Art always comes first!”. What this means is that art is always the first step in a new metamemetic sequence of development. The first elements of a new metameme always occur within the arts, so if you want to get an impression of what the next stage might entail, you should figure out what cutting edge artists are up to.

What fewer people are aware of is that morality, or norms, is always last. I’ll return to why that is in a minute. First I’d like to show you the full metamemetic sequence of development:

1. Art
2. Philosophy
3. Entrepreneurship
4. Politics
5. Morality

There’s a logical reason why art comes first, namely that it only takes one highly gifted person who’s ahead of their times to create an artwork that breaks with the conventional logic of the current metameme. What artists do, or more specifically, what some artists are talented enough to do, is to sense many of the yet-to-be-obtained potentialities of reality. They can, in a way, “taste” the future, or, if you’ve read my previous books and are familiar with the terminology, feel the “attractor points” and follow their direction further and deeper than other, less sensitive, and less attuned, individuals. And they do so without having a formalized language to describe what they see. They just do it. And exactly that’s why art is so important: Art can describe that which we’re yet to have a language for.

This is also the reason why philosophers come in second. They have to go through the trouble of developing a common, conceptual language to painstakingly describe all the things artists just feel. For philosophical truths to become established it also requires all the drama of scholarly peer review. Artists don’t need to bother with that shit.

And when the philosophers (and other thinkers who might not necessarily identify as such) are done with it, the new ideas start trickling down towards all those shrewd entrepreneurs and activists wanting to change the world.

And from these disruptions, politicians finally wake up and try to adapt society to the new conditions.

And finally, long after the first artist and philosophers discovered the new metameme, new values and moral codes, a new system of norms starts propagating throughout the wider population. This is, by comparison, a very slow process that always faces the inertia of the old ways: people hold each other back, the habits and customs of one sets limits for the expression of another. You can be as gay as you want; if every sibling, cousin, friend, uncle, aunt, teacher, and colleague you’ll ever meet hate gays, you won’t be able to go very liberal on that issue. Norms can change like avalanches, yes, but they by definition follow the crowd.

Morality, or more specifically the common average morality of a population, is last exactly because it requires so many more people (who generally don’t care about art and philosophy) to subscribe to the ethics of a new metameme in order to change the norm system of a society. A new morality cannot really be said to have taken hold if only an elite minority of intellectuals subscribes to it. It needs to be shared by the majority. And when that finally happens, artists and philosophers have already discovered the next metameme, and entrepreneurs and activists are already starting to disrupt the world once again. 

As such, there will always be a metamemetic lag, or developmental imbalances, between different parts of society, with many negative consequences as a result. That imbalance, in turn, actually explains “what’s wrong with the world”, and what will keep being wrong, better than any other theory I’ve ever heard of. We will return to this tragic state of affairs many times throughout this book.

If you’re familiar with the Model of Hierarchical Complexity, which I introduced in The Listening Society, and if you want to learn how this sequence of development fits into that, you can take a peek in the appendix of this book where I make use of a clever model developed by my good friend Johan Ranefors.

***

Q: Okay, it kind of makes sense that art would come first and common morality last, but can you back that up with historical evidence?

HF: Yes I can. That’s what this book is about. But first we need to agree on the definitions.

When people think of “modern art” they probably think of Picasso. And with good reasons since that’s the kind of art that has been labeled “modernism” in art history textbooks, and since it’s also the kind of art you’d typically find in a so-called “modern” art museum. Or, as we like to say these days, museums of contemporary art, so they can contain other things than just “modernism”.

But, in my more theoretically specific and abstracted vocabulary, Picasso wasn’t Modern, he was Postmodern. Rembrandt was Modern.

Because the term “modernism” is so laden with connotations as the “art of high modernity”, I avoid using the term in this book. Instead, I speak of the classically sociological term: modernity. This term much more closely resembles what I mean with “the Modern metameme”.

The way in which Picasso—and other painters from the late 1800’s and onwards—began creating abstract compositions with little to no resemblance to anything in our visual reality is simply in direct opposition to the modern photorealistic approach that preceded it. They were exactly breaking away from modernity. They just did it during the period of high modernity. But art always comes first, so they were ahead of their time, thus expressing and manifesting the Postmodern metameme.

Q: Okay, but how exactly do you define modern art then? Not modernism, but your idea of “the art pertaining to the modern metameme”.

HF: If we take Modern painting, for example, two things stand out: 1) mathematically correct perspective, and 2) photorealistic lighting. There are of course other things, but these two are the most important if we are to identify modern art in the visual tradition.

The ambition, and technical expertise, to create realistically looking representations of the world, obviously captures the spirit of the modern scientific ethos of mapping the world as objectively accurate as possible. People have always tried to accurately depict the physical world, yes, but it wasn’t before the Renaissance, in which the Modern metameme came online, that anyone truly succeeded. If you look at art from the Middle Ages and earlier, from all around the world, beautiful as it is, you wouldn’t exactly call it photorealistic. Look at a Rembrandt, and it could be mistaken for a photograph from a distance—a heavily filtered one, but nonetheless very realistic looking. You don’t find that level of realism anywhere else before that time.

Mathematically correct perspective, also known as linear- or point-projection perspective, was first developed in Northern Italy in the 1400’s, and realistic lighting began with the Flemish oil painters, likewise in the 1400’s. That these two modern art techniques first emerged in Northern Italy and the Low Countries is hardly a coincidence. At the time, these were the two economically most advanced regions in Europe, and probably the world. It’s also here we find the first instances of capitalism’s two foundational pillars: modern banking (Italy, 1300’s) and the corporation (Netherlands, 1600’s).

Q: Hmm, there’s really a lot of confusion around the term “modernity”. Normally we talk about the modern period starting after the American and French revolutions. The period before that, starting from around the time of Columbus’ first voyage to America and the Reformation in Europe is often termed the “Early Modern Period”. Some, however, see the Renaissance as the beginning of modernity, just like you, whereas others see the Enlightenment in the 1700’s as the time when the world started to become modern. But in Scandinavia, they talk about the “Modern Breakthrough” for the period 1870-1890. So when did the world actually get modern then?

HF: Yes, it is confusing, and it obviously depends on how you define modernity. But I think the model of skewed development can truly be of help here, not least by helping us to properly distinguish what’s Modern and what’s Postmodern and Postfaustian, and how different elements emerge at different times.

Here’s a brief overview: 

• Emergence of modern art, 1400s: In Northern Italy we have Masaccio (1401–1428) who was one of the first to use linear perspective in his paintings, and in Flandern we have Jan van Eyck (1390–1441) and Robert Campin (1375–1444) who pioneered the oil painting technique to produce realistically looking lighting. Although the Renaissance also was a time of social change and new humanist ideas challenging the doctrines of the Church, which among other things led to the Reformation, it was primarily an era of artistic advances. Proper Modern philosophy would only emerge in the following centuries.
• Emergence of modern philosophy and science, 15-1600s: René Descartes (1596–1650) is widely considered the first modern philosopher. He was the founding figure of continental rationalism, later advocated by Spinoza (1632–1677) and Leibniz (1646–1716). This was opposed by the empiricist school of thought on the other side of the English Channel, consisting of Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), John Locke (1632–1704), George Berkeley (1685–1753), and David Hume (1711–1776).
  This is also the time of what has later been called “The Scientific Revolution” which consisted of a series of events that marked the emergence of modern science, with the 1543 publication of De revolutionibus orbium coelestium of Copernicus (1473–1543), which put the sun in the middle of the solar system, often cited as its beginning, and the 1687 Isaac Newton (1643–1727) publication Principia which formulated the laws of motion and universal gravitation widely considered its culmination. Scientific institutions were established in London, the Royal Society, in 1660, and in Paris, Académie royale des sciences, in 1666. As you can see, the Scientific Revolution was in many ways the forerunner to the Enlightenment, which in turn came into being as Europeans (mostly men of upper classes) tried to grapple with the social and metaphysical implications of the clockwork universe implied by science.
• Modern entrepreneurship, late 1700s – 1800s: This is of course the time of the (first) Industrial Revolution which began in Britain with the introduction of coal powered steam engines in textile production. Thomas Newcomen invented the first commercially successful steam engine in 1712, which James Watt vastly improved upon in 1776—the same year that Adam Smith, also known as the “The Father of Capitalism”, published his magnum opus The Wealth of Nations, which is widely considered the first modern work on economics. (And the same year as another modern development, the American Declaration of Independence). Modernity spreads into society at large, as a form of enactment.
• Modern politics, 1800s – early 1900s: This is the period where we see the development of the modern state in Western Europe and North America. This development can be said to have started after the Napoleonic Wars with its lasting legacy of Code Napoléon and the consolidation of centralized nation states. The 19th century is also the time when European states began constructing modern bureaucracies (which had already been pioneered by the Chinese 2000 years earlier however). This period culminated at the end of the First World War with the abolishment of monarchies (or reducing them to mere figureheads) in Europe, the introduction of universal suffrage in many countries, and the establishment of the first socialist republic in the USSR. In many ways, however, it wasn’t until after the end of the Second World War with the defeat of fascism and the founding of the United Nations and the Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 that the modern political order had finally been established.
• Modern morality, after 1945 (still ongoing): It has only been after the end of the Second World War, and with that the defeat of regressive modern faustianism in the form of fascism, that a truly modern morality has begun to dominate—and then, only in the most developed parts of the world. Only quite recently have values such as secularity, plurality, and tolerance been embraced by a majority of the population in this part of the world. The majority of the world’s population remain largely religious and still subscribe to Postfaustian, and even Faustian, codes of morality.

***

Q: I see that you define modernity in terms of secular philosophy, science, industrial production, human rights, and democratic governance. So in effect, what you’re saying, is that the world hasn’t become fully modern yet, right? I mean, billions of people still live and work under pre-industrial conditions, and only a privileged minority in the world’s wealthiest countries can be said to live in politically modern states that respect human rights and have universal suffrage.

HF: You’re right, modernity remains an unfinished project, as Habermas pointed out in 1980. Bruno Latour had his own spin on this idea, summarized in the book title We Have Never Been Modern (Latour, arguably a late postmodernist thinker, meant to critique not the lack of modernity in the world, but hole at the center of the modern project itself). I very much agree with Habermas that much is still to be done in the realm of modernity, but his argument that it’s therefore too early to be thinking about the possibility of a postmodern world is quite mistaken—especially today more than 40 years later. Postmodernism had been well underway in arts and philosophy since before Habermas was wearing diapers, and today we are well into a phase where the economy and politics are becoming increasingly postmodern. And if we look at some of the most progressive places on Earth, in cultural hotspots like San Francisco, Stockholm, or Berlin, postmodern norms have already become predominant in a significant proportion of the population.

I believe the metamemes model can help us make sense of the fact that development is not only unevenly spread geographically, but also that developments that otherwise belong together emerge at different intervals, because…

Q: …because a metameme is a qualitative, not a chronological category, to paraphrase Theodor Adorno.

HF: Exactly.

Q: Alright, I get it, it’s obvious that some societies seem to be in the process of becoming Postmodern at the same time while others are struggling to become Modern. And it also makes sense that we can have postmodern artists and thinkers in a society that’s still predominantly modern, and that we can have a country that has just made the transition to a modern industrial economy while its politicians and most of its population are still stuck in a largely religious, postfaustian way of thinking.

Still, something about the bullet points above rubs me the wrong way. It comes off pretty old-fashioned, in my opinion. It’s remarkably similar to the kind of progressivist mainstream historical narrative we’ve been told over and over again. I thought we had come further than that. You might still find this kind of stuff on the Discovery Channel, but among serious scholars in the historiographical sciences this way of thinking has largely been abandoned. I’m sorry to say it, but it does appear like classic Whig history to me, just in a new and (tying-to-be) flashy dressing.

We now know that many of the things we associate with modernity actually have indigenous roots and that many of the ideas of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment had already been discussed by earlier Islamic, Indian, and Chinese philosophers. Some Enlightenment ideas may even have been direct derivations of Native American critiques of European societies, hence placing the genesis of modernity in Europe within its own dialectic, but in its very meeting with foreign and freer cultures and creeds. So when we talk about modernity as this universal thing that emerged in Europe, isn’t that just a symptom of the eurocentrism derived from the West being the first part of the world to industrialize and colonize the rest?

True, there’s no denying that the West developed far in a sense “superior” weapons and means of production, which also gave them the resources to support a great number of artists and philosophers. But if we look at global capitalism, colonialism, slavery, and the environmental destruction caused by modernity, it all doesn’t seem very enlightened. Sure, a small minority of the world’s population enjoy a lot of political freedoms and live in material abundance, but what’s the value of that if the majority has to put up with poverty, exploitation, and oppression—things often sanctioned by Western governments so as to keep their privileges and influence in the world.

And then, if we look at indigenous societies from around the world, contemporary and historical (before the Europeans killed them off), and even ancient farming communities, we find that people lived in far more egalitarian and democratic societies than even the most developed Western countries today.

What’s your reply to that?

HF: Ah, well done, sounds like someone has been reading David Graeber and David Wengrow’s latest book The Dawn of Everything. All of the above critiques will be addressed in this book, so don’t worry. But I can briefly reply to the two basic propositions you’re questioning: 1) the European origins of the Modern world, and 2) that modernity led to moral progress.

If we take the first objection, it’s true that modernity is not an inherently European phenomenon. But it’s not Asian, African, or native American either. Modernity emerged from the meeting between cultures, from the exchange and cross-pollination of memes from all around the world—the Europeans were just the ones to establish the global world system in which all of this took place. And since they then became the ones located at the center of this huge world-encompassing network, they were also the ones to reap the greatest benefits from it and thus become the ones to make the transition to the Modern metameme first. We’ll return to this topic in the chapter on modernity.

It’s also true that we can find elements that are ostensibly modern from different parts of the world before the modern era. There’s rational meritocratic bureaucracy established by the Qin and Han dynasties in China; you have the Islamic Golden Age which gave rise to a number of secular philosophers and natural scientists, for instance Ibn al-Haytham who was a significant figure in the history of the scientific method and by many considered the “world’s first true scientist”; and you have various deliberative and consensus-driven, and in a way democratic, forms of governance among pre-Columbian American societies. These are all impressive accomplishments. But we’re merely talking about proto-modern elements that didn’t quite make it all the way, and didn’t lead to the emergence of truly Modern societies.

Q: Not so fast, old man. You can’t just dismiss everything that doesn’t fit into your model by throwing a “proto-” prefix in front of it. You need to argue what exactly it is that doesn’t make them fully modern.

HF: Fair enough.

Being a precursor doesn’t suffice to be labeled modern; the meme in question needs to develop into a form that becomes part and parcel of the overall metameme: that is to say, many things have to interconnect and reinforce one and the same underlying principles, ones that in turn define the core of the metameme at hand.

The principles of double-entry bookkeeping and linear perspective, for instance, haven’t changed since they first occurred back in the Renaissance; and the scientific method as it was formulated 400 years ago is still the first thing any aspiring scientist has to learn to this day. Yes, Ibn al-Haytham did emphasize the importance of experimentation, but he did not formulate the scientific method. And neither did Aristotle, who likewise used inductions from observations to infer general principles.

For something to be termed modern, it also needs to be consistent with the overall logic of the Modern metameme. If we take the Chinese state bureaucracy, which they pioneered around 200 BC, almost 2000 years before anything similar appeared in Europe, it was ostensibly modern in the way it favored meritocratic and rational principles of governance, but—and this is a big but—it remained inherently Faustian in the way it was constructed along the lines of absolutist governance. No Montesquieuian division of powers existed at the time, which, after all, is at the core of Modern governance, no references to “the people” as the ultimate sovereign.

Certainly, the way in which Native Americans managed to make decisions by gathering the community and deliberating their way to consensus can be interpreted as democratic, and to some extent, even more democratic than what we have today. But the capacity to sit down in a large group and have a well-reasoned conversation about what to do as a community is not enough to qualify as being a Modern democracy. There needs to be a clear conceptual and institutional distinction between the entity that rules—the demos—the people or source of power—and the thing that they rule by and through—the state. And there needs to be a clearly demarcated public sphere, a civil society, that through the free exchange of information enables the formation and exchange of opinions about matters related to the governing of the state. Neither of these were present before the Modern era. 

Likewise, even lively markets—such as the medieval Arab world—that lack the institutional and system-wide frameworks specific to capitalism (accounting, the firm, stock markets, central banks, banking, free enterprise and wage labor, means to mass-communicate marketing, private ownership of land and factories, intellectual property, trade law, consumer law, antitrust law, regulated bankruptcy, brigand violence under control by police force, checks to balance government partiality on the markets, wide middle class with consumer markets geared to them…) aren’t in and of themselves Modern in the sense we’re discussing here. Lively markets have existed before what can stringently be called modernity. Capitalism, in its different guises, is an inherent element of the Modern metameme. Market economies at large, is not necessarily so.

As shall be discussed in the chapter on the Modern metameme, there is an underlying theme that runs through all things truly Modern: the principle of “intersubjective verification”. This holds true from the “correct” perspective 3D painting, to the scientific method, to the principles of democratic governance, to the functioning of capitalist markets. But we’re getting way ahead of ourselves.

For now, let us simply note that we can always find precursors to and similarities with a metameme, like Modernity, but that we need to confirm that the studied phenomenon (say, market economies) has evolved into a mature enough form so that on a fundamental level it’s more or less identical to later expressions of the meme, and we need to look at how well it fits into the overall memetic structure and logic of the metameme we’d like to associate it with. 

Q: But what about moral progress? Sure, modernity gave us a lot of advances that made our lives more comfortable, but I would still argue that it’s a dubious claim to say that we’ve made much moral progress as a species.

HF: People are often willing to overturn the whole idea of progress, that there are stages of development, because we are still to see the ethical implications of a new metameme. So please allow me to return to the proposition that “morality always comes last”. I truly believe it can help make sense of the common confusion about progress and ethics.

Let’s take a short break and I’ll give you an example. Do you want anything from the bar?

***

HF: The way our attitudes towards homosexuality have changed over the years is a really good example of how slow the development of a society’s common morality is, how slow the norm system is to change.

Denmark was one of the first countries to decriminalize consensual same-sex sexual activities back in 1933, with Sweden following suit in 1944. Sweden removed homosexuality from their list of mental diseases in 1979, and Denmark in 1981. But this doesn’t mean that people generally thought it was completely acceptable to be gay in progressive Sweden or Denmark back in the 1980s and 1990s. Calling someone “gay”, or any associated term, was generally considered an insult back then—and a common one indeed. In the 1980s, most people thought gay people, especially gay men, were kind of disgusting and that there was something wrong with them—but that they should still be tolerated as long as they “kept it to their bedrooms”. Throughout the ’90s, as bigotry and narrowmindedness gradually went out of fashion, homosexuality instead became this kind of joke: it was okay to be gay, “if that’s how you want to live your life”, but it was still considered kind of silly and weird. Only quite recently did we reach a point where it’s no longer considered okay to dislike gay people and make jokes about them. 

You see, first it took a couple of centuries until politicians took the full consequences of the Enlightenment ideas that everyone is created equal and that people should be free to do whatever they want as long as they don’t harm others. And then, almost a century after homosexuality was decriminalized, we finally reached a point where homophobia, rather than homophilia, is considered morally appalling.

The counterculture of the 1960s 1970s also serves to illustrate this developmental “skewness” when it comes to moral progress. Many associate the “hippie era”, the time in which the boomer generation came of age, with that of the Postmodern metameme coming online. This is only half true. Yes, the hippies are a Postmodern phenomenon, but the things in that era that actually succeeded, such as the civil rights movement, women’s movement, and the sexual revolution, were not Postmodern, but inherently Modern. Equal rights for women, ethnic minorities and gays, and the freedom to have consensual premarital sex, are essentially expressions of the modern Enlightenment ethics. Everyone’s created equal and do what you want as long as you don’t hurt others, you know. The things the hippies and other counterculture proponents failed with, such as ecological living, second wave feminism, communes, and psychedelics, remained fringe phenomena exactly because they require a postmodern morality code in order to enter the mainstream. It’s only recently that these things have begun to become mainstream, exactly because it’s only now that we have a significant proportion of the population gravitating towards postmodern values.

Q: I see, so because of this developmental skewness, what we think of as modern is oftentimes postmodern—and the other way around. Since the two metamemes overlap, with some elements of the former emerging at the same time as elements of the latter, it’s difficult not to accidentally mix them up.

That of course asks the questions: when did the world get postmodern then, or, are we done becoming postmodern? 

HF: We have been in the process of becoming postmodern for a while now, but postmodernism is obviously far more unfinished than modernism. Here’s a rough timeline:

• Postmodern art: William Blake’s “Newton” from 1795 is a good example of an early Postmodern artwork in the way that it depicts the renowned scientist Isaac Newton in a crouched position fully absorbed by the rigid rules of his compass while ignoring the colorful rocks behind him, symbolizing a narrow and blind focus on scientific principles.
  The Romanticism period in many ways constitutes the earliest expression of the Postmodern metameme, as its “fantasy-like” art deliberately works upon the background of Modern photorealism and rationality, enhancing it to reenchant reality and to create new connection where Postfaustian wholeness has been severed by modernity, by science, by Enlightenment.
• Postmodern science and philosophy: From chemistry and biology upending much of the mechanistic Newtonian worldview, to Darwinian evolution introducing the earliest form of “chaos theory” to social sciences being born short after—sociology in general and Marxism in particular—to philosophy soon taking up arms against rationalism in the guise of first Schopenhauer, then Nietzsche, and then Freud, laying the foundations for the dominance of Postmodern thinking throughout the 20th century.
• Postmodern entrepreneurship: Early precedent in the consumer society of 1920’s USA, abrupted by the depression and World War 2, only to go ahead on full steam after that: images and intellectual property now drive the economy. Marketing, movies, PR, product placement, stock market booms based on expectation-management campaigns (think Tesla’s wealth despite its bad business, etc.) increasingly become the organizing principle of the economy after the 1950s.
• Postmodern politics: After the Cold War. We have the green movement, the queer movement, the spread of discrimination laws, a steep increase in the interest in radical or deliberative democracy—it’s still to fully blossom (but the development can always be interrupted by e.g. climate crisis or other shocks to the world system).
• Postmodern morality: Just getting started. To this day, even in the most progressive countries in the world, only a minority subscribe to postmodern values. In a country like Denmark or Sweden, maybe around 20%, similar to that of California, New York City, or Berlin.

In the graph below you can see how the skewed development of the metamemes wax and wane and weave into each other.

As you can see, development is skewed. The metamemes overlap. That’s why you can’t just “catch them in time”. You have to understand what they truly are. But once you have them sorted out and clearly understood, you can study expressions of them, and indeed how they can explain much of the events in history and how these are interpreted.

HF: As you can see above, the middle of a metameme’s developmental sequence, step three entrepreneurship, is simultaneously the beginning, step one art, of the following metameme, while at the same time the end, step five morality, of the preceding one. As such, the time in which the morality of the Modern metameme finally became dominant, the 1960s – ‘70s, is simultaneously the time of the great postmodern “entrepreneurial” projects starting off, such as critical theory, postcolonialism, queer feminism, and environmental protectionism—which only recently have entered mainstream politics and today are in the process of changing the common norm system. Interestingly enough, the same period has also fostered the early beginnings of metamodernism, within the art world from the 1970s (at least vaguely so, if you know where to look), in philosophy in the 1990’s (most prominently, perhaps, integral philosophy), and most recently in entrepreneurship (metamodern activists, yay). Don’t worry about it, I’ll provide you a guide to the metamodern metameme towards the end of this book. For now, I just want you to get an understanding of the developmental “skewness” and how it manifested in recent developments.

Q: What about the Postfaustian metameme? If we are to be consistent, the 1800’s, the period where we see the emergence of Modern entrepreneurship and Postmodern art, would also have been the time of Postfaustian morality, right?

It ostensibly appears a bit weird if that was actually the case, however, given how far removed the 1800’s were from the Christian medieval ethos centuries earlier, but that’s what the model implies if we were to add the Postfaustian metameme into the model. 

How do you explain that?

HF: You’re absolutely right. I omitted the postfaustian metameme to prevent the illustration from becoming too cluttered. But yes, the 1800’s were in fact the period, in the West that is, when the Postfaustian norm system, in this particular case Christian morality, became dominant among the wider populace.

I know what you’re thinking, weren’t the medieval period, the so-called “dark ages”, the period in which people were the most religious? Weren’t the preceding period, from the early modern period and onwards, characterized by increasing secularization and rationality—culminating with Nietzsche in the late 1800’s, the very same century that’s considered the peak of Postfaustian morality, when he declared God dead?

But hear me out. The idea that people were super duper Christian back in medieval Europe is only half true. Sure, almost everyone identified as Christian, but to a large extent they didn’t really have a choice. The Church had some, how can I say this, rather convincing methods to ensure people remembered who the only true God was. Secondly, the harsh life conditions of the period, coupled with the widespread ignorance and almost non-existing literacy, made the idea of divine salvation a very compelling story to most people. But—and this is a big but—that doesn’t mean that they automatically internalized the Christian moral codes and started following them from the purity of their hearts. They couldn’t even read the damn Bible, or Quran, or even Torah (even if Jewish literacy rates were a bit higher). The fear of going to hell seems to have been the principal moral consideration among common folks. And if you study the truly medieval times, before the Reformation, the followership of Catholicism was in practice littered with magical thinking, saint worship, superstitions, residuals of pagan worship, and folk wisdoms that didn’t really have much to do with universalist top-down one-unifying-principle Postfaustian religion.

That started to change in the West in the 1800s. This period is not only characterized by rapid industrialization; it’s also the age of countless Christian revival movements and pentecostalism. This significantly overlapped with humanitarian organizations like the Salvation Army and the Red Cross, and not least the (anti-slavery) abolitionist movement, within which Christian ethics and beliefs were the driving force.

Think about it: Is slavery okay from the perspective of an all-seeing and all-loving God that sees the equality of everyone’s soul—i.e. the Postfaustian basis of morality? No, not by any stretch of the imagination. Then why does it take from 500 BCE to 1865 CE to really win the fight over slavery? Because art comes first, morality comes last, that’s why. It takes time for a metameme’s values to fully take hold in the majority population.

It’s clear that it was only because of the material abundance created by the Modern metameme that the Christians could finally get serious about the whole tending the flock and loving thy neighbor thing. Similarly, the Postmodern social justice ethics only seems feasible once the metamodernists get started building that listening society, as described in my book with the same title. But that’s another story. Let’s get back on track.

Q: Alright, I think I get what you’re trying to say now. I have a few more questions, and I still think you’re wrong, but let’s take a short break before the bar closes.

On Coordination Engines and Purity Generators

Q: There’s something in your model that’s confusing me. You say that philosophy always comes before economics, or “entrepreneurship” as you call it in your five-step model, but capitalism, which is this quintessential modern economic innovation, started around the same time as the Renaissance. This is centuries prior to the scientific revolution and the first modern philosophy, step two according to your model, and around the same time as the first modern artworks, step one according to you.

Admittedly, it feels good claiming that art and philosophy always come first, but the historical materialism of the Marxists still seems to hold sway on this one: real, material conditions set the stage for human life and culture. Sure, the Industrial Revolution comes after the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution, but isn’t that just an extension of modern capitalism, a logic born in the late Middle Ages?

HF: You’re absolutely right that 1) capitalism is a core innovation of the Modern metameme (capitalism is, after all, the first step of its coordination engine), and that 2) the beginnings of capitalism can be traced further back than most other modern developments. This does not, however, disprove the developmental sequence in which entrepreneurship comes in third after art and philosophy. 

Consider this: The kind of capitalism, or more specifically, the elements of capitalism that emerged in Northern Italy during the Renaissance (with important inventions such as modern banking and double-entry bookkeeping, and thus the systematic tracking and optimization of “profit”) would undoubtedly go on to shape the subsequent period profoundly. Yet, it wasn’t before the 18th-19th centuries that a society emerged we would normally call capitalistic. Before that time, most of the economy remained rural and largely unmonetized. Landed nobles, not capitalists, were the ones setting the pace of economic life prior to the Industrial Revolution. It also took a few centuries for some of the other key components of capitalism to appear, such as central banks, corporations, and stock exchanges (all in the 1600s). As such, it’s only when all of these elements (modern banking practices, double-entry bookkeeping, national central banks, corporations, stock exchanges, fossil fuels, steam engines, industrial mass production) come together that we see the emergence of something we can call modern entrepreneurship.

Q: Well, it’s not like modern art was fully developed when it first appeared in the Renaissance either. Everything has a beginning, and what emerged in Northern Italy in the late middle ages would eventually develop into industrial capitalism. Seems like you’re cherry-picking to make it all fit with your little homemade five-step model here?

HF: When I put entrepreneurship in the middle of the five-step developmental sequence it’s because it’s here that we see the emergence of an entirely new kind of economic actor. In regards to the Modern metameme it’s the industrial capitalist, who’s a very different fella than the mercantilist trader who dominated the preceding era (and in many ways have more in common with the merchants of the pre capitalist period). It’s when capitalism is finally coupled with mechanized industrialism that we get a truly modern economy and society. This is a rather conventional view by the way. Most historians agree on calling the era before the Industrial Revolution “the early modern period”, and it’s only in the 19th and 20th centuries that we start having something sociologists call modern societies.

In regards to the Faustian metameme, however, the conventional view is to compare the Industrial Revolution with the Agricultural Revolution. But here it would actually be more pertinent to compare the emergence of agriculture with the emergence of early capitalism. You see, the agricultural revolution happened about 12 000 years ago, but that doesn’t mean that a completely different society emerged instantaneously, you know, with cities, pyramids, pharaohs, standing armies, and all that jazz we associate with the Faustian metameme. In fact, the Agricultural Revolution wasn’t as much of a revolution but rather a relatively slow and incremental process with many ups and downs. For thousands of years people were still hunting and gathering while complementing their diets with a little farming on the side, and there’s plenty of evidence that people were going in and out of farming depending on the circumstances. It’s only around 4000 BCE that we see the first agrarian civilizations crop up; and only then does the full Faustian coordination engine start humming.

Q: Ah, you’re referring to the two-step model from Outcompeting Capitalism that you can read on the Metamoderna website?

HF: Yes I am. If you’ll allow me to elaborate.

Both the Faustian and Modern coordination engines developed in two steps. If we start with the Faustian coordination engine, step one is the agricultural revolution per se: This initial step revolves around the management, investment, and timing of the surplus energy of the natural world.

Agriculture is thus the management of nature.

What’s being coordinated here is of course seeds and animals (with soil and season). Instead of immediately consuming these natural resources, extra labor energy is put into managing them in such a way as to gain a greater yield the coming harvest. 

Investing surplus today to reap a profit in the future? The logic here is very similar to that of capitalism, don’t you think? We’ll come back to this.

Step two of the Faustian coordination engine is the emergence of state-like structures or “civilizations”. This step revolves around the exploitation of a new energy source: human bodies. Humans can be accessed and accumulated in increasing numbers because agriculture feeds enough of them on a small enough area and soon enough keeps them in place (they gradually lose their ability to go back to hunt and forage, or at least all of them cannot just disperse into the wilderness and survive).

Now, as long as there have been humans, some have exploited others for their labor. What I mean with human bodies as a new exploitable energy source is the way in which large agricultural societies manage to create new societal functions and strata from the surplus production of farmers and herders.

This is where we see the emergence of an increasingly diverse and hierarchical division of labor, with full-time warriors, scribes, craftsmen, merchants, and so on. Suddenly we get big cities with temples and monuments, and of course, kings and queens. And that thing we’re all a little less proud of: slavery, concubines and prostitutes included. All the things we have later chosen to call civilization.

“Civilization” is thus the exploitation of surplus energy from human bodies.

When these two elements, agriculture and civilization, start converging, that’s when we have the emergence of the Faustian engine of coordination. It starts coordinating nature for increased food yields, and then bringing more and more human bodies under its control.

***

Like the Faustian coordination engine, the Modern one also emerged in two steps.

Step one is the emergence of capitalism: This initial step revolves around the management, investment and timing of the surplus energy of the human world.

Can you see the similarity with the first step of the Faustian coordination engine? Here, however, it’s the surplus energy of the human world instead of the natural world that’s being managed and coordinated over space and time. And the surplus energy we’re talking about here is, of course, labor.

Capitalism is thus the management of human labor.

Investing the surplus of human labor into new, more productive, activities is basically the core of capitalism—and that goes whether it is the state or a private entrepreneur who does it. (This means, by the way, that Soviet communism wasn’t less “capitalist” than its counterpart in the West, hence it has often been termed “state capitalism”. More on that later.) You invest people’s work into some time-saving activity, and that creates more work hours you can invest into more time-saving. And, boom, in a blink of historical time, you get today’s swelling world of global capitalism.

We need to note that economic profit (unlike accounting profit), in this sense, was something entirely new that capitalism brought to the table. With this perspective, we can see what economic profit really is, what GDP growth is: you manage people’s time schedules, and voilà, you can get more “man power” out of the same unit of time! That’s what bookkeeping and banking and companies enabled.

The Faustian coordination engine never managed to effectively and consistently invest its surplus labor so that you could get more out of the same time unit. It merely exploited what was currently available through plunder or taxation (which is often more or less the same)—and then it brought more land and human bodies under its control by controlling bigger armies.

If the elites had any extra money (which is, essentially, surplus labor) they didn’t use for conquest or defense, it often just got locked away in treasure chests. And when it finally got used, it was rarely invested in new productive measures, but merely spent on embellishment and luxury items or to build big castles or pyramids and so on; it basically went to waste­—according to the logic of capitalism. But when the Dutch of the 1600s managed to pool their resources, and joint risk, into companies (the first of their kind), they created social machines with delicate mechanisms to generate increased economic growth by the diligent management and re-investment of human time and effort.

Money in a mattress doesn’t do anything. Put it in a company and it does tremendous things, for better or worse.

This leads us to the next step.

Step two is the Industrial Revolution: This step revolves around the exploitation of a new energy source: fossil fuels, mainly. 

The second step of the development of the Modern coordination engine is also, as you may have noticed, similar to the second step of the Faustian one. But rather than a human energy source, this time it’s a natural energy source—so we’re seeing an exact reversal of the nature-human sequence of the Faustian metameme.

Industrialism is thus the exploitation of surplus energy from the natural world.

Just as much as the second step of the Faustian coordination engine revolved around developing all the intricate social and technical mechanisms to exploit the human energy source, the industrial step of the Modern metameme is about developing and mastering all the mechanical devices and means of distribution to exploit the energy of fossil fuels as efficiently as possible.

Only after the Industrial Revolution do we see the emergence of truly modern societies. It’s when the social logic of capitalism finally converges with the technical expertise to access the hitherto untapped potential of millions of years of solar energy trapped in the ground that we see this explosion that leads to the assembly line, women’s suffrage, mass literacy, the internet, plastic Barbie dolls, and the atom bomb.

***

Q: Ah, I see. Step one (agriculture in the case of the Faustian, and capitalism in the case of the Modern metameme) emerges, in its earliest forms, around the same time as the first artistic elements of their respective metamemes; but it’s only with step two, when a number of innovations all come together, that we see the full brunt of the new metameme.

Step two, in your two-step coordination engine model, is thus step three entrepreneurship, in your five-step art-comes-first-morality-comes-last model. Right? Confusing, but I think I get it. You need to work on your terminology though.

So what about the Postfaustian and Postmodern metamemes? Because they’re “soft” metamemes they don’t give rise to a new engine of coordination, but what happens when they reach the third entrepreneurship step in your five-step model then? What kind of entrepreneurship corresponds to the agriculture/civilization and capitalism/industrialism of the hard metamemes? I can see that soft metamemes would have their 1) art, their 2) philosophy and science, their 4) politics, and their 5) norms. But their 3) economic and technological mechanisms to restructure society?

HF: It’s correctly understood that soft metamemes don’t bring about any substantial changes to the way in which the economy works. And even if technological advances do occur every now and then, even during the so-called “dark ages”, it hardly has anything to do with the Postfaustian metameme as such. (I mean, there doesn’t seem to be anything preventing a Faustian society like the Romans, who were capable at building aqueducts and using concrete, from inventing the windmill or the stirrup, both medieval inventions. In an alternative timeline, I can’t see why it couldn’t have happened.)

But soft metamemes bring about new “purification generators”, remember? So if the entrepreneurial third step of the hard metamemes is the coming online of the coordination engine, the corresponding step for the soft metamemes is the consolidation of the purification generator. This is when the ethos of the emerging soft metamemes make their way into new powerful institutions, which in turn begin reshaping norm systems, behaviors, and relations across society. 

In the case of the Postfaustian metameme, this consolidation and institutionalization started happening towards the end of the Roman Empire with the establishment of the Roman Catholic Church. If you compare Roman times with the moral economy of the Middle Ages, for instance, it’s clear that the pre-Christian Romans were technologically comparable to the medieval period (give or take an aqueduct or a windmill), but their ethics were, shall we say, of a cruder kind. You can see a similar dynamic in non-European cultures, like the Islamic world and China, when these become permeated by postfaustian Axial Age religions and philosophies during the first millennium AD.

The so-called “righteous rebels” of the Axial Age enter the mainstream, to use a contemporary phrase, at a stage when civilization reaches a certain level of maturity (which is often followed by a collapse, as with the Roman and Han empires), and thereafter they move into positions of power. In and around the circles of power they manage to shape the instruments of governance to some degree, but they certainly also become shaped by the very same power structures that they initially rebelled against.

The Postmodern metameme follows a similar pattern. It’s when capitalism enters its late-stage form with the onset of modern consumer society during the second half of the 20th century that we see the rise of postmodernism’s righteous rebels and affiliated “churches” such as queer-feminism, post-colonialism, and environmental protection. These rebels can be said to constitute a new “priesthood”, also known as the inherently postmodern invention of the “intellectual”, whose mission it is to discipline and correct those unfortunate souls who still gravitate towards the earlier value memes (in this case the term “value meme” is more suitable than metameme). 

Critics will point out that the “wokeism” and “political correctness” carried out by these so-called “social justice warriors” are elitist instruments of control, while advocates of anti-racism, feminism, and environmental protection will argue that “speaking out” against injustices is the only way to “raise awareness” around critical issues. But despite the “underdog” identity of most of these critics of modern society, it’s becoming more and more evident that the critical postmodern ideologies that emerged in the 1960’s and ‘70’s to a great extent have entered the mainstream and that governments, and even companies, have adopted many of these ideas, at least nominally.

The power pomos are here to stay, and they are becoming increasingly intimate with the governing control structures of Modern society—whether they’ll admit it or not.

On Emotional Regimes and Information Technologies

HF: So, just to quickly summarize: Step three entrepreneurship, the middle of the art-comes-first-morality-comes-last model, is in many ways “the peak” of a metameme since this is when the coordination engines of the hard metamemes start humming, and when the purification generators of the soft metamemes get consolidated and institutionalized.

So, in the same way that the Faustian equivalent of the Modern industrial capitalists are the great empire builders of the ancient world; the Postfaustian equivalent of the Postmodern social movements are the religious institutions of the medieval world.

Any further questions?

Q: Yes. I’d like to know if there are any specific instruments or mechanisms with which the metamemes shape social relations and affect people’s behavior? I mean, there must be some new social technologies emerging that make it possible to go from one stage to the other.

HF: Yes. If you remember the emotional regimes, aka. The Spectrum of Judgment, from my previous book Nordic Ideology, you’ll know that we’ve progressed from the fear regime, over the guilt regime, shame regime, and finally to the slave morality regime of today. Each of these, as you can guess, correspond to one of the metamemes: 

With the Faustian metameme it’s clear that the predominant emotional regime to regulate people’s behaviors is fear—if you don’t do what you’re told, you get tortured or killed, as simple as that. 

With the Postfaustian metameme a more subtle emotion takes the forefront, namely guilt—you owe it to God and the community and common decency to do what you’re told, otherwise you’re a bad person and you’ll be excommunicated.

With the Modern metameme the emotional regime becomes even more subtle as the emotion that’s manipulated to make people comply is shame—you can do what you want, but if you want certain things, and if you don’t do things in a certain way, you’re a disgusting person and no one’s gonna like you.

And finally, with postmodernism, the most subtle emotional regime of them all, slave morality—you can do what you want, want what you want, be who you are, be weird and kinky, unique and full of faults, but above all, do NEVER EVER believe you’re better than anyone else, that you’re the hero, that you have something out of the ordinary to offer the world. Be humble, or no one will take you seriously.

Don’t worry, I’ll go into detail with each of these in the following chapters. For now I just want to show you that they exist.

***

HF: Another important aspect of the development of metamemes are the information technologies that fuel their growth and propel them forward. These technologies are in fact so important that the metamemes could barely exist without them, and most definitely wouldn’t allow for any further development beyond a very early proto stage.

Here they are:

1. Archaic: Simple spoken language.
2. Animist: Abstract spoken language, and images and sculptures that represent what they look like.
3. Faustian: Images that represent something else than what they look like: symbols for simple written messages and basic accounting.
4. Postfaustian: Writing in abstracted texts, such as literature and algebra (not just inscriptions on graves and monuments).
5. Modern: Printed texts (printing press, standardized alphabet and spelling, “codex” books, newspapers, mass distribution).
6. Postmodern: Mass Media: Transferred images and sounds (printed images and photographs in magazines, books and newspapers, gramophone records, radio, cinema, television, “simulacra” en masse).

I’m sure you can see the logic of what’s going on here. Obviously, writing was a prerequisite for running the Faustian civilizations of yore. And it’s clear that the Postfaustian philosophies, wisdom traditions and world religions of the Axial Age wouldn’t have been possible without literature. In fact, it’s quite possible that the Axial Age emerged as a direct result of writing morphing into literature, giving thinkers and social critics a medium to express their ideas and engage in exchanges with each other over longer distances in time and space.

In the same vein it’s pretty obvious that modern philosophy and the scientific revolution wouldn’t have taken off without the printing press. Moreover, neither would the Reformation which by many is considered an important stepping stone towards modernity. A century before Luther attempted to reform the Catholic Church, Jan Hus tried something similar. In the latter case, the revolt didn’t spread out of Hus’ home province of Bohemia, in the former, aided by cheaply printed pamphlets of Luther’s 95 theses, the critique of the Catholic Church reached most of Europe and the new protestant faith spread like wildfire in Northern and Central Europe. Surely, the printing press began functioning like a catalyst for the spread of ideas as it enabled people with few means to take part in intellectual and political life.

Q: So what we’re dealing with here is a continuous democratization of information, which can be seen as a kind of backengine to much of the emancipatory developments of history, right?

HF: Not quite. The way in which new information technologies have eroded existing powerbases control and monopolies on information is definitely an important development that has shaped and is shaping history. But we need to keep in mind that the proliferation of new and more efficient information technologies is not only leading to emancipation and social progress. After all, Radio brought Hitler to power, and Twitter definitely played a crucial role in the election of Trump back in 2016. In fact, it seems like the rule rather than the exception, that whenever a new information technology enters the picture, it initially causes great disruptions which lead to more reactionary and violent setbacks than progressive emancipatory advances.

If we take the printing press, for example, it surely made the Scientific Revolution and the subsequent Enlightenment period possible—but only after 150 years of bloody religious warfare. And if the printing press gave us religious wars, the internet seems to have given us identity wars.

Just think about it. Has the internet created any of those anarchistic green blockchain utopias progressives are dreaming of these days? Not really, right? But it gave us ISIS and arguably Trump, along with all those alt-righters, militant incels, and flat earthers.

These are all examples of developmental imbalances.

***

HF: This is the end. The end of the beginning of this book. By now you should have an overview of the theoretical framework of the six hidden patterns. Below you can see a table containing the metamemes between the Animist and the Metamodern ones and their respective emotional regimes, information technologies, and coordination engine/purification generators:

	Faustian	Postfaustian	Modern	Postmodern
Step three: Entrepreneurship	New coordination engine: Agrarian Civilization	New purification generator: Universal religions and philosophies	New Coordination engine: Capitalist Industrialism	New purification generator: Critical theory, public intellectuals, social justice movements
Emotional Regime	Fear	Guilt	Shame	Sklavenmoral
Information Tech	Writing	Literature	Printing Press	Electronic Mass Media

 

Q: But what about the internet? You mentioned radio and tv, but is there a reason you didn’t mention the internet?

HF: Yes, that was intentional. The internet is the information technology that’s making our world metamodern. That, however, will be a topic discussed in the last chapter of the book. Now, it’s time to wind the clock all the way back to our earliest history when rain dance conquered the world. Up next: The Animist metameme.

—

A webinar on the topic of world history and the six metamemes will be held this autumn, four weekends in a row November 2 – 25. More details about the course can be found here.

Hanzi Freinacht is a political philosopher, historian, and sociologist, author of ‘The Listening Society’, ‘Nordic Ideology’ and ’12 Commandments’. Much of his time is spent alone in the Swiss Alps. You can follow Hanzi on Facebook, Twitter, and Medium, and you can speed up the process of new metamodern content reaching the world by making a donation to Hanzi here.

“Stage theory…

Is BS.

Always was.

And it is colonial as hell.”

—Nora Bateson

 

The following is an extract of the introduction chapter from Hanzi Freinacht’s unpublished book ‘The 6 Hidden Patterns of History: A Metamodern Guide to World History’. The book is not coming out anytime soon, but a webinar on the topic of world history and the six metamemes will be held this autumn, four weekends in a row November 2 – 25. More details about the course can be found here.

—

Q: Okay Hanzi, let’s get right at it. You claim to have discovered these patterns that explain much of world history—“metamemes” you call them.

But when I look at your theory it seems like just another wildly speculative “stage model”, where one stage of society builds upon another—and civilization “rises” to new heights. This is denigrating the richness of history, reducing human experience, flattening cultures past and present. Cultural history is much more than that.

Over and over again, history has taught us that, in the end, every such grandiose metanarrative comes crashing down under the weight of its own incongruities. How can you be sure that your model eventually won’t go down like all the rest?

HF: Hopefully, my model will go down some day. It will be obsolete, proven incorrect. If not, it would indicate that humanity had ceased improving upon her models of reality, and that would be bad news. I sincerely hope that all the errors I’ve made will be discovered, and that my model will be replaced by better ones. For now, however, I’m convinced this model is one of the best currently available metanarratives about world history.

But alright, I sense you don’t like the very act of creating what I call “metanarratives”, or any versions of grand histories. So let me stay a moment on that topic.

A metanarrative is “a narrative about narratives”; it’s a wider story that connects the different stories around you. These can be the stories of nations, of dynasties, of civilizations, the stories of technological progress, the stories of oppression and liberation, the stories of genders, of humans and the environment, and so forth. A metanarrative is a way of organizing and interconnecting the different accounts of the world and how it works, and—in the case of history—what actually happened. There are many stories about world history, but how do these fit together, if at all? A metanarrative shows how the different ways we have been taught to “listen to the melodies of history” form a larger whole, one that is not just a jumble of contradictions.

Metanarratives are a bit like world maps; they don’t show a lot of detail and are rather inaccurate when you zoom in, but they are still indispensable when we need an overview on a global scale. It’s alright if you don’t like my world map. But let me ask you, once you’ve seen and understood the one presented in this book: do you have a better one? Implicitly and unconsciously held maps are maps nonetheless.

But, sure, there are reasons to be suspicious of metanarratives, to be incredulous of “grand histories”.

One reason that many people are “against metanarratives” is that they feel these come with a risk of being totalizing: i.e. when you try to understand how things fit together, you also tend to squeeze everything into one and the same framework, ignoring the subtleties and details of each unique and surprising part of history, and as such metanarratives can even be used as instruments of control or the legitimization of unjust power. You force your intellect upon the richness of reality, as it were. Think Marxism and its story of how history evolves (from “primitive communism”, to slave society, to feudalism, to capitalism, to communism). Consider how it has been used as a blatant instrument of oppression. Or why not stop to consider how Western mainstream history of “increasing freedom” (so-called Whig history) still to this day serves colonial and supremacist purposes against indigenous populations, the Global South, or even against the environment and “nature itself” (that last term I use only with caution). Totalizing visions can be dangerous, even evil. Granted and agreed.

But, if you think it’s better to not use a map at all since it’s certain to have inaccuracies and one day will become obsolete, go ahead, navigate the world’s oceans without one, burn all the maps you like. For my part, if I was a 17th century sailor, I’d still prefer the crude maps of the time, sea dragons and mermaids and all, over sailing out blindly or waiting around for the GPS to be invented.

Q: Sure, if you were a 17th century sailor. But let’s bring this closer to home: If I was a respected scholar, I certainly wouldn’t risk my academic credibility by making up such far-fetched lofty “theories about everything”.

HF: Of course you wouldn’t, dear Q for Questioner. It’s much safer to merely critique, isn’t it? But there’s a word for that: cowardice. Or two words: intellectual cowardice.

People are so afraid of being told they’re wrong or that they’ve made a mistake that they’ll rather spend their entire careers making microscopic additions to existing theories—or stay on the safe side of the fence and make a career out of tackling anyone who dares saying something novel, substantial, or, Zeus forbid, comprehensive.

In my opinion that’s not only gutless and boring; it’s also as dangerous as the misuse of large perspectives, since it discourages people from taking on the important task of connecting the dots. In our days, metanarratives have gone terribly out of fashion. At the very same time, people have reported epidemic levels of confusion and loss of meaning. Maybe that’s not entirely a coincidence?

Meanwhile, humanity is facing planetary-level issues of ecology, climate, security, and technology—which are all interconnected and can arguably only be resolved together. Or at least each of the issues interacts with the others. Responding to one inevitably leads to dealing with another. But we’re disallowing ourselves from asking how the problems interconnect, because that would mean we’re doing “grand histories”, right? Well, maybe it’s time we try on some new ways to tell the big stories. Metanarratives can save lives. They can save civilizations. Or, said differently, lack of metanarratives can kill off civilizations. And take ecospheres with them. It’s happened before that civilizations drive off a cliff because their people failed to see the bigger picture they were part of. It can happen again. Actually, it is happening again.

If you want to ignore the need to gain clarity in today’s world facing multiple interconnected crises, I’ll buy you a drink and we’re done. Go stick your head in the postmodern sands of relativism. Sure, you can be the noble rebel who exposes the great Hanzi Freinacht as a dilettante and a fraud. As long as you let me say what I have to say, it’s on the house.

***

Anyhow. The thing is, whether we like the idea of metanarratives or not, we all carry around some version of a crude and incomplete world map, or “universe map”, anyway. We just do it implicitly, even unconsciously.

That is, we all have some overarching narrative about “how the world works”. And every now and then we’re in situations where we need to use our implicit homegrown maps. So why not bring them out in the open, make the maps explicit, so that we together can improve upon them, and—who knows—maybe even turn those mermaids into anatomically correct sea lions.  

Metanarratives are urgently needed since the existential problems we’re facing as a civilization can only be properly viewed from the grandest and most long-term perspective possible. We’re not looking for the biggest story just to feel important (even if it would be unwise to try to suppress the all-too-human drive for existential significance). It’s very obviously the case that events across the planet affect one another, that they are, again, interconnected. To change events means to see how they connect, how they emerge together. This requires us to somehow use and relate to “the story that connects all the different stories”.

Q: And you, Hanzi Freinacht, mean to tell us how “all things interconnect”?

HF: Maybe not how “all things interconnect”, but I am certainly outlining a model for seeing many interconnections that we would clearly otherwise miss. 

So who do I think I am to even be allowed the pursuit of such a noble goal?

Well, who is anyone to take up such a task? What authority could we possibly defer to? I guess we’ll just have to make do with limited, wounded, mediocre people who pretend to be great philosophers, and then scrutinize their work.

Anybody really has the right to take a shot at it, don’t you think? Or should we just abstain from any discussion about the overall development of global civilization? What kind of humility would that be—one that silences perhaps the most important discussion we can have?

***

HF: Let’s get back to the main question: the resistance to grand narratives in general, and stage theories in particular.

I think this widespread and persistent resistance to stage theory is as relatable as it is regrettable. If you examine it closely and attentively, it actually dissolves into thin air. Let me walk you through this argument step by step.

First of all, everyone seems to be fine with two-stage models. This sounds strange, but is very obviously the case if you stop and look around. Most people don’t think of themselves as stage theorists when they suggest or employ models with only two stages. But, truth be told, every time you come up with some version of the idea that “the old way of doing things is mechanical, hierarchical, and bureaucratic, but now there’s this new way of doing things that’s organic, egalitarian, and creative” (this is a very common one these days, perhaps even the dominant model), you have inadvertently created a stage model, and a model that’s normatively hierarchical with the later stage considered at least somehow “better” and more advanced than the former, and it is a model in which people are thought to need to grow out of, or wake up from, the mechanistic view and “realize” the ecological/organic/mycelial one.

People are doing two-stage models all the time—and no one is complaining: The notion that we’ve gone from the age of the nation state to that of a global world order. No one blinks an eye. That we’ve transitioned from an industrial economy to an information economy. That we’ve gone from monarchy to liberal democracy. Conventional wisdom. Or we can go on to two-stage models that are widely accepted in academia if not by the public at large: That we have gone from mechanic to organic solidarity (in Durkheim’s classical sociology). That we’ve gone from “mode 1” to “mode 2” knowledge production (a thing that became big in the sociology of science in the 1990s). That after patriarchy comes a society emancipated through feminist critique. That after colonialism comes a postcolonial heritage.

It’s an interesting thing to note, isn’t it? People are dire opponents of stage theories. But they still subscribe to and even propose two-stage theories—just as long as they can hide that it’s actually a stage theory. So, underneath the resistance, people actually are not opponents of stage theory. Scratch its surface and the resistance dissolves in your grip.

Three stages is a bit more controversial, though. The privilege to create three stage models seems to be reserved for established geniuses. Jürgen Habermas, for example, who’s widely considered the world’s greatest living social theorist, uses a three-stage model to describe the transition from a traditional to a modern society. Marx and Engels claimed, in the part of their theory people tend to talk about, that we’ve gone from feudalism, to capitalism, and soon communism. And then of course there’s Hegel’s famous dialectics, popularized as the “thesis–antithesis–synthesis” model—a three-stage model. (Fichte actually came up with that one, but it is mostly associated with Hegel.)

But more than three stages—that’s heresy! You lose all credibility and are condemned to wander the desert together with all those obscene adult development theorists and new age folks.

Q: Well, maybe there’s a good reason for this. Maybe it’s because the credibility of a model diminishes exponentially with each stage added. If Habermas, an esteemed professor of philosophy and sociology, spent a large part of his career carefully elaborating for three stages, with thousands of pages and many peer-reviewed articles to back up his claims, it quite honestly appears a bit frivolous when you pop out of nowhere with—judging from the title of this book—six new shiny stages that you just pulled out of your ass.

HF: I understand your concern. I fully agree that there are a great too many stage models out there conjured up by folks who seem to have catched the stage theory flu and now want to be a pioneer of “humanity’s next step” by making their own unique stage model, and, may god have mercy on their souls, by adding higher and higher stages to existing models (and by doing so implying that they themselves must represent a super high stage to have discovered these stages)—a practice I call “stage stacking”. Most of these models are in my opinion not very well-founded and the world would probably be better off without them.

But the model I’m going to present, and the stages in particular, are considerably more well-anchored in today’s academic conventions than you may have been led to believe. So before we move on, allow me to first—only impressionistically (simplifying to the degree that it’s downright incorrect, but gets us a snapshot, a picture we will be able to tear down and then rebuild as this book progresses)—introduce the six metamemes:

1. Animist: Hunter gatherers.
2. Faustian: Early agrarian civilization.
3. Post-faustian: Axial-age moral religions and philosophies.
4. Modern: Industrial and capitalist civilization.
5. Post-modern: Postcolonial, queer, and environmental critique of modern society.
6. Metamodern: The new emerging metameme based on the cultural logic of the Internet.

Don’t let the introduction of new terms such as “metameme” or the unfamiliar names of some of the stages confuse you.

But, now, let me point out that what I am doing is a lot less controversial or far-fetched than it may first appear.

For this book, my point of departure is actually the century-old academic discussion on modernity (stage 4), which, since the late 1970s, has been accompanied by “the postmodern” (stage 5), i.e. the idea that something comes after modernity, something inherently different from our classical notions of modern life, and that it has begun to challenge and gradually replace it. This already well-established framework is in fact a three-stage model since the whole idea of modernity implies a decisive break with the past; that modernity is something new and vastly different from anything that has existed since the beginnings of civilization. The pre-modern–modern–postmodern model is thus not something I just pulled out of my hat, but a rather conventional framework that is commonly used among the bulk of scholars and social theorists today. The idea that there are such things as modernity and postmodernity (and something that came before) of course has its opponents. But most scholars know it well, and even if they don’t use it themselves, they generally don’t protest its use by others.

The “pre-modern” category may fulfill its purpose just fine when you want to describe the present or near-past, which is what most social theorists are concerned with. But every historian ought to agree that, for the student of cultural history writ large, it simply doesn’t work to lump the entirety of human history prior to the past couple of centuries into a single juggernaut category. There’s a substantial difference between the pyramid-building civilizations and free-roaming paleolithic hunter gatherers that preceded them by tens of thousands of years, which at least merits the creation of two separate categories or stages. This should hardly be a controversial claim within neither historiography, nor archeology, nor sociology. In fact, the classification of human societies and historical eras into one of the three categories: 1) pre-agrarian, 2) agrarian, and 3) modern industrial, is so conventional that it’s almost embarrassing to explicitly mention it. And then we have all the smart social theorists eagerly engaged in the discussion about what comes after modernity, including if or how we’ve already made such a decisive break from classical enlightenment modernity. Some talk about postmodernity, others about “late modernity”, some use the term “hypermodernity”, but no matter the preferred term, we’re talking about a stage (or whichever term scholars prefer to use: phase, epoch, and so on) following the modern one.

One big part of the problem is that most social theorists aren’t historians, and most historians aren’t social theorists. The job of social theorists is, most often, to analyze and describe contemporary society. As such, they’re mostly preoccupied with modernity and postmodernity while the pre-modern stages remain largely ignored. Historians, on the other hand, are generally not too interested in social theory, or, for obvious reasons, contemporary society, so they tend to be unaware of or uninterested in the idea of the postmodern.

Depending on which country is being discussed, or which school of thought is applied, you have a veritable jungle out there of different time periods, eras, epochs, and so on. For the most part, however, all of these don’t help much to understand and explain history and the world. They merely function as chronological categories, rarely as qualitative ones. I’ll get back to this part about chronological versus qualitative categories in history, but very briefly: “The Middle Ages” is a chronological category, i.e. it’s a certain period of time (circa 500 to 1400–1500 CE), Modernity on the other hand is more of a qualitative one (it denotes certain forms of culture, as we discuss in this book). Chronological categories aren’t very useful for understanding the world. We must have qualitative categories to do so.

It’s also worth mentioning that pre-agrarian times remain largely neglected by most historians. After all, their job is to analyze written sources, and as such, everything before the agrarian era—what historians rather impertinently dismiss as “prehistory”—is largely beyond their field of expertise. “Prehistory” then, has become the domain of archaeologists, but for the most part they’re too busy digging treasures up to care about what their more theoretically minded colleagues in other departments are up to.

So here’s the model most historians, sociologists, and anthropologists would agree on if they were talking with each other:

1. Prehistory, hunter gatherers, stone age
2. Premodern, traditional, agrarian civilization
3. Modern, industrial civilization
4. Postmodern, late modern, hyper modern etc.

My point is that even if most historians and social theorists are too busy with all kinds of other stuff than to “obsess” about stages, the established discourse within the social sciences actually already implies a four-stage model. Fortunately, however, most of them remain blissfully unaware about the heresy they’re guilty of! Many of them could literally risk their careers if they expressed the stage model that everyone is already taking for granted. Stage theories are instruments of oppression, right?

So, what have I done to get to six stages? Well, I’ve simply divided the so-called “pre-modern”, “traditional”, (or whatever scholars want to call the way of life between the agricultural and industrial revolutions) category into two separate stages. The reason ought to be fairly obvious: This category is just too broad. The differences between the early pyramid-building slave societies, and the later cathedral-building ones with their moral religions and literate traditions, are simply too numerous and deep-going to adequately fit both kinds of societies within the same category. 

To me, the contrast between the former (pyramid) and the latter (cathedral) always seemed like one of a magnitude similar to that between modernity and postmodernity.

But there is more to it. The two stages even have a similar dynamic between them as the Modern and Postmodern metamemes: Postmodern looks and feels a lot like Modern, still relying on some kind of late-stage industrialism, but there are profound shifts in culture and values that take place. Correspondingly, the world religions like Buddhism, Islam, or Christianity seem to reorder still-agrarian societies according to values that, among other things, question slavery, war, inequality, and the arbitrary use of power. As such, I chose to add the -post prefix to the latter of the two stages, Faustian and Postfaustian together constituting “pre-modernity”. (Why “Faustian” to begin with? I’ll be back to answer that one.)

To truly notice the difference between Faustian and Postfaustian cultures, just compare the Babylonian ritual where the high priestess literally has sex with the king on a table in front of everyone (this was to celebrate the advent of spring)—compare it with the celibate life of Christian or Buddhist monks. Indeed, it’s difficult to imagine more different cultural expressions: going from slam-bang orgies on the table and “sacred marriage” to chastity and contemplation of moral universality. Of course, Catholic priests do get their action too, but it’s always a very clandestine affair.

So, all I did was say that we can’t lump all of “pre-modern” into one big basket. And I split it into two, which I call Faustian and Postfaustian.

Q: So what you’re saying is that you’ve merely added one additional stage to the existing sociological and historical framework, and then begun exploring what the next stage following postmodernity might look like?

HF: Yep, pretty much. But, although that doesn’t sound like much, it’s the final piece of a puzzle that opened up a whole new understanding of history, society, and cultural development. It revealed a pattern, a pattern that has been hidden in plain sight, namely that societal development has a certain rhythm; that the peculiar dichotomy between modernity and postmodernity isn’t something entirely novel, but simply echoes a pattern that has occurred before. History is linear, sure, with one thing leading to next, but it’s also cyclical, with certain patterns that repeat. Linear and cyclical, both at the same time, like a spiral. Or a fractal.

The spiral of history. Even that, however, may conceal more than it elucidates. If you allow me to stretch our geometric metaphors out of shape: The spiral is imperfect, it has exceptions and cracks, and if you zoom in on it, you notice that each part of the spiral in turn consists of smaller spirals. History is a complex structure, yes. But it’s not entirely without structure, nor without elements that could, on some levels of analysis, be compared to lines.

The exploration of this structure, without falling back on the cop-out of saying “it’s complex” to avoid any and all real explanations, will be the overarching theme of this book.

Are Stage Theories BS?

Q: So, Hanzi, Nora Bateson, the daughter of the polymath biologist Gregory Bateson (also known for his role in the development of cybernetics), once wrote on social media that “stage theories are bullshit” and “colonial as hell”. She’s also, I should mention, a respected person in her own right among the world’s forward-looking people. True, Nora Bateson was mostly commenting upon theories of psychological development, a topic you’ve discussed in your other work, but don’t you think she may have a point here? After all, if you organize cultures into stages of development, some will be higher and others lower.

Can you hear what that sounds like, “higher and lower cultures”? How do you know you’re not just speaking from within the bias of your own culture, making it appear “higher” when it’s really just different, perhaps even worse?

HF: Believe me, I understand where this is coming from. When it comes to the stages of psychological development, people are fed up with developmental stage fetishism and its pathologies. We have grown weary of entitled white men on their ways to conspiracy meetings about how to raise the rest of humanity to their self-proclaimed heights. And the colonial heritage is very real still today, with real people suffering real consequences. I get it, no more cults and dominator hierarchies (and the mandatory forced therapeutic BDSM that follows like a shadow) based on stage theory excuses! Out, raus, get out!

Yes, I too have grown wary of stage-mania. I often find myself in arguments about it. The path forward is to support generative conditions for happiness and healing, “the listening society”, not forcing one’s idea of “development” and “stages” down people’s throats.

Q: And yet…?

HF: The problem is that many stage theories still describe and explicate data in manners that none of their denunciators can match, not even close. Sure, there are holes to poke with difficult-to-explain exceptions. There are critical perspectives to reincorporate, from postcolonialism, to feminism, to situationist psychology, to indigenous perspectives, to Deleuzian rhizome-perspectives, to animal rights, to skill theories (that diversify growth into smaller and interconnected threads), to the sociology of knowledge of whose purpose the theories serve… The list goes on. All of this comes from an egalitarian ethos I share. But the bottom line is that none of this actually disproves the simple fact that people and other organisms—and, yes, cultures, too—do develop in discernible stages.

I mean, how do you explain that all other things in the universe seem to be sequentially ordered, that every relational property always has prerequisites for its emergence? So why not the psychologies of humans? And why not human societies and their cultures, too?

Or, in the case of stage theories in the realm of psychology, how do you explain that different researchers from different fields have come up with roughly the same stages of psychological development, with roughly the same characteristics, and with roughly the same distribution of people at each stage? And when studied empirically, these stages have lined up with “equal spaces” between them, which means that a) the stages measure something discrete and not something fuzzy or gradual, and b) each stage shift corresponds exactly to the stage shift before and after it. You cannot explain that stuff away so easily.

The stage-theory resistors make up, by a wide margin, the dominant position in academia. That means it’s dangerous for your career to believe in stages. To be against stages is the safe mainstream position to take. But my point is that the stage-theory resistors are as wrong, and as dangerous, as the stage-theory fetishists. 

You can never deduce an “is” from an “ought”: Humans “ought” not to develop in stages, because it’s colonial (or take your critical pick), thus stage theory “is” not true. Now that’s a serious fallacy. If stage theories meaningfully describe and predict real patterns of the world, they do, like it or not.

Q: But how do you prove that your stage theories are true to begin with, that the metamemes are real?

HF: You might as well ask if the medieval period was real? Or the Stone Age? Or what about the Enlightenment or the Industrial Revolution, were they real? What I’m claiming is not absolute truth. But I do claim that the metamemes I discuss here are more real than loose categories such as the Stone Age or the Enlightenment—because they describe patterns with much greater depth and precision, and thus better explain what happened and why.

But the question is not so much if they’re real or not, whether metamemes exist or don’t exist. The question is rather which one of these two statements is more true:

• That metamemes are real
• That there are no such patterns to history at all

If there is no such pattern to history, how does one explain why Cleopatra wasn’t a queer feminist? “Because nobody taught her?” Well, nobody taught Judith Butler either. She figured it out herself. Is there a historical pattern to this? Yes. The question is only if one can come up with another, better historical pattern that explains more phenomena in more coherent and relevant ways than those explained by the metamemes.

Some believe we simply cannot talk about larger abstract entities like modernity and postmodernity. But the question is not if we can talk about modernity or not—I just did—but rather, if you’re well-equipped enough to do so in a stringent and productive manner. Those who refuse to talk about it simply cannot participate in the discussion.

Q: Well, I could dismiss the entire discussion on grounds that I simply don’t acknowledge the existence of the patterns you’re talking about?

HF: You could. And you can ignore the discussions about why the earth isn’t flat. Life still goes on. Lightning doesn’t strike you. Each to their own.

But okay, if you don’t like the word “pattern”, here’s another one for you: “theory”! We all use theories when we conduct historiographical research—whether we say it out loud or not.

Please keep in mind that the metamemes are just models or representations of reality, not reality itself. But our knowledge about “reality” can only consist of narratives, symbolic structures made out of signs. Some of these are often called “theories”. 

As far as I can see, those who think there’s no such thing as “modernity” simply have too poor theories and too vague definitions of what “modernity” means. It’s easy to not believe in something you cannot define yourself. They entirely miss the point of the discussion because it’s not about whether entities like these “exist” or not, but whether the contents and mechanisms attributed to the concept are valid explanation models. What is relevant to the discussion is the context which has already been outlined—not the fact that there is a context, and whose existence as a “real” entity can be brought into question.

The question isn’t to be or not to be. To explain or to confuse—or to just cop out and avoid any real exploration in the first place—that is the question.

So the measure of success is not whether I have “solid proof” of the existence of metamemes, but simply whether or not I’m less mistaken than someone else. If my hypothesis about metamemes is less wrong than other ones attempting to explain historical change, then it’s valuable and worthwhile considering on its own terms.

Q: Okay then, so how do you prove that stage theory is “less wrong” then?

HF: Still not getting it, I see.

Listen, I don’t need to prove that “stage theory in general” is a good thing or less wrong. I just need to disprove all out-of-hand dismissals of all stage theories, and then go on to make the case for my own stage model.

First, we need to remember that you can always craft good or bad stage theories. If I claim that the first people were made of ice, then they became made of fire, and today more and more are being made of iron, that’s a bad stage theory, and it’s exactly as useless as it sounds. It’s incorrect. It does not explain the world or its events. And applying that theory will have awful consequences (for instance, thinking that the ice people are resistant to freezing temperatures). If I claim that feudalism grows into capitalism which grows into communism, I’m also wrong, even if it’s a tad better than the last idea. Still, the belief in that incorrect stage theory arguably killed off a hundred million people during the 20th century. If I claim that agricultural civilization grew out of stone age hunter-gatherer lifestyles, and eventually began spreading and displacing such lifestyles, I’m more or less right. Now, if I apply that theory wisely and non-dogmatically, it can be useful and offer guidance to matters of e.g. indigenous rights, developmental economics, foreign aid, gaining independence in mind and lifestyle towards modern civilization, and even for ecological adaptation.

My claim is not that “all stage theories that anyone ever crafted are true and useful”. That would be a preposterous claim. But—and here’s my point—it is equally preposterous to claim that no stage theories can ever explain anything or be useful for anything. Steps happen. You can trace them, more or less successfully so. And if you know a lot about stage theories of psychology, history, society, anthropology, economy, technology, and even biology and complexity science, you can weigh and combine stage theories until you see deeper and more water-tight patterns.

So, instead of asking whether stage theories—in general—are “true” or not, wrong or less wrong, how about we ask the simple question: 

• Are there issues that can be explained entirely without stage theory, i.e. without one thing sequentially building upon another?

Let’s take a few examples:

There is overwhelming evidence that human reasoning develops in steps. For instance, there has never been one (1) single human child that first learned algebra and geometry, and then learned to count. Every single person who has these capacities first learned to count, then to add and subtract, then to multiply and do division, and so on. Algebra and geometry imply counting in every case. Thus, there have been no, zero (0) societies in the history of our planet—and we can assume in the universe—that invented algebra but not numbers that came in sequence.

Now, is this useful information? Depends on what utility you seek, of course. But if you want to teach kids math, for instance, try starting with algebra before you teach them to count to three. You’ll be stuck at the beginning and never teach them anything. Also, you’ll torture the poor little ones with boredom.

Maybe, by now, there is a way out of stage theories through the application of absinthe. Go to Prague, drink plenty of absinthe, watch an Ionesco absurdist play, stare at a wall, and go ahead and claim that “well, who knows what the ‘use’ of anything is, at the end of the day?”. (But for my part, I don’t think you are very useful in that case). Sure, have fun. Just don’t tell me you’re saving the Global South or anything; you’re not. You’re just being tone-deaf to the melodies of life and the needs of others.

Meanwhile, the argument is settled: anyone who cares about human beings and animals not suffering must admit that stage theories can and do explain real and relevant realities. And because relevant realities can be explained, and relating to reality is a necessary part of responding to it, including caring about others, learning about stage theories can be a productive endeavor. Ignoring it tends to be destructive in the long run.

Let’s take a few more bites of that one. Where can stage theories, more of the kind we explore in this book, be useful?

• Trump supporters: Deplorables? Maybe. With a stage-theory perspective, one can easily see that Trump supporters are, on average, in a different spot in terms of the development of values, worldviews, and even personalities. Hence, relating to them as “deplorable” is counter-productive; rather, their specific needs and desires must be met and dealt with, which tends to support further development.
• The Greenlandic Inuit exposed to the “blessings” of modern (Danish, colonial) civilization? If their social fabric was based around smaller groups and older worldviews, maybe massive exposure even to the (relatively benevolent) Danish welfare state of the 20th century (this was not Belgian Congo, after all) simply ripped their societies, cosmologies, and personalities to shreds and left enormous amount of pain to be filled with consumer goods and cheap liquor? Exactly what happened. A stage theory perspective like the one presented in this book makes it abundantly clear why such exposure to modernity can be destructive and highly unethical.
• “Successful” sprints to modernize economies, like Japan and South Korea, have nevertheless left societies full of stress, anxiety, and impossible social norms to live up to. (No one is having babies, or hardly any sex for that matter. Goodbye future). Ah, a developmental perspective like the one in this book shows that if you force a lopsided and hurried development of the economy, the culture will be shocked to a degree that often destroys human life conditions from the inside out.
• Integration of immigrant groups into multicultural societies? We could make it about civilizations and culture “clashing” against one another. (“Those Arab Muslims should become more like the French majority!). But at the end of the day, the real fault lines are drawn between stages of cultural development, not between cultures, where it’s the less universalist values of earlier stages on each side of the majority-minority divides that are locked into conflict. Guide towards more universalist values on both sides, towards “higher stage”, and you stop pouring gasoline on the fire and instead begin to resolve the problems.

Lastly, there’s the whole issue of data explained by developmental theories. For instance, in psychology, there are a number of large research programs that again and again show that people’s reasoning, values, and personalities develop in manners partly corresponding to how cultures develop (as I discuss in The Listening Society). If you can come up with theories that better suit the data feel free to present them! Just as you’re free to present a better theory than gravity of why things fall than Newton did. Einstein actually did do that, so I’m not saying it’s impossible, just that it takes more than just dismissing the models out of hand.

So what’s the better explanation for what appears to so many researchers as clear stages? On this, however, there is silence. And, where there is empirical and theoretical silence, moral condemnation tends to become louder.

Q: I take it you’re referring to the claim that stage theories are “colonial as hell”. But even if stage theories in some situations can be very useful, that doesn’t exclude that they simultaneously can be harmful. I mean, it’s a rather high price to pay for a few theoretical aha-moments if it turns people into a bunch of judgmental stage-obsessed progressivists who’re more concerned with raising civilization to a new level of imagined enlightenment than with social and global justice.

What’s the point if the whole thing just leads to chauvinism and eurocentrism? Or eugenics: “the creation of a higher man”? Or communist totalitarianism: “the birth of a higher form of society”?

HF: I sincerely share your concern with these possible pathologies, and I encourage everyone to speak out the moment they show their ugly face. Stage theories can invite misuse in these ways.

Even with these concerns in full view, I would actually claim that stage theory isn’t only analytically preferrable, but even, which is an entirely separate issue, morally preferable. Try these out:

• Stage theory helps non-judgment: If someone has a crude opinion (Trump supporter, ethnocentrism, mainstream consumerist capitalism, etc.), it’s due to a lack of the privilege that supports growth, not to an inherent flaw of the person. Remove the developmental perspectives, and you’re back where Hillary Clinton started: “The basket of the deplorables!”
• Stage theory supports equality: By seeing that some people have had more opportunities to develop, one can develop programs to support those who are psycho-socially underprivileged. If you are, as many of the resistors would have it, shamed and ostracized for your research into measuring this, the weak, not the strong, suffer for it.
• Stage theory binds cultures together: Without stage perspectives, people mistake cultural spheres for having immutable qualities that cannot be reconciled (the Arab world, the West, etc.). With a developmental perspective, you can see that stages cut across cultures and offer venues of mutually beneficial exchange. We mentioned this one before, but it’s a crucial one and worth repeating: Defending human rights in the face of abuses by the Rwandan regime is not “Western arrogance”; drilling for oil with the help of Sudanese warlords forcing local populations out of the way with waves of child soldier militia terror, is.
• No direction: Okay, so no more measuring of deep, inner progress. Fine, but then we’re left with lowest common denominators such as GDP growth, which is killing the planet. Stage theory shows a deeper direction: higher stage can mean something like going more inwards, being more nuanced, more multiperspectival, more integrated, more differentiated, in greater resonance. You can argue for those things without stage theories. But the moment you systematize your understanding of how more nuanced and inclusive perspectives are achieved, you have ended up with some sort of a stage theory. Without such a stage theory, society loses its sense of direction at the very moment we need it the most.
• More multiperspectival: Stage theories allow for different truth claims to hold up at different stages without resorting to analytical violence; you can show how things fit together and how one thing leads to another.
• Less Western-centric: The profound relativism that we’re left with in the vacuum of no-stage-theory is a distinctly Western phenomenon, one that presses itself upon and violently uproots cultures around the world, because their developmental traits are not seen, heard, and respected.
• Better for kids and animals: With a developmental perspective, one can better see the unique needs of kids and animals and serve them in ways that are conducive to their dignity, health, and, where appropriate, growth. For instance, Eriksonian stages are key to supporting children in fulfilling their specific needs.

Then again, if it’s “better” not to believe in stages than to do so (despite the evidence), aren’t the resistors creating a stage hierarchy of their own where they feel that they have considered the issue further and deeper? How can they defend even their own position without an implicit stage hierarchy?

Anyway. As I’m keen to point out, stage theories aren’t everything. There are other just as vital aspects, including context, culture, and relationality. But that doesn’t make them into nothing.

So take arms against developmental fetishists and elitism, by all means! But do not fall for the fad of throwing babies out with bathwater. Not only are you making an analytical mistake; you’re letting down the babies.

Q: Always want the last word, don’t you? How about I have the last word for once. I still think I’m the good guy and that people who believe in stage theories are morally and intellectually inferior to me and should listen to me and learn from me, until they one day realize how right I was. I will always stand up for the alternative voice. You’re a mansplainer! I’m the side-view! I’m the surprise! I’m the rebel! This never gets old!

A History without Time

Q: So, please indulge me—it’s your book after all, so I’ll have to endure the obviously gendered ‘splaining—what exactly is a metameme, and why did you choose this term?

HF: I realized that the term “effective value meme”, which I’ve used in my previous books, didn’t quite fit when describing stages of cultural development on a societal level. The effective value meme is an aggregate of the four dimensions of psychological development I introduced in The Listening Society. This is what determines whether a person has a modern, postmodern, or traditional (postfaustian) worldview, for example. Although the particular stages are the same, and in turn are intimately connected (in the way that modern societies, for example, tend to generate a lot of people with modern values, and that these in turn tend to create modern societies), I still felt that the term “value meme” was inadequate when applied to the much broader field of social and cultural development. The socio-cultural stages contain so much more than just values and worldviews, there are also all the technological, political, institutional, and artistic aspects that come with the territory. Having two different terms also helps distinguish whether we’re talking about psychological or societal development.

So, I had to ditch the word “value”, but I wanted to keep the word “meme” since that’s essentially what cultural development is all about. In a way, what it’s only about. Memes (not to be confused with the illustrated jokes people pass around on social media) are non-physical self-replicating units of cultural information that are transmitted through signs and symbols. Think of all the ideas, inventions, attitudes, behaviors, and styles that spread among people through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, and so on within and even across cultures. You can see them as culture’s equivalent of biology’s genes, or as the “building blocks” of culture.

Now, memes don’t just randomly occur and spread. Like anything else, their emergence and proliferation are developmentally determined. The memes come bundled in non-arbitrarily ordered collections of developmentally determined “umbrella” memes. These overarching memes, these stages of cultural development, are patterns in how humans organize knowledge, thus the “pattern of patterns” of societies and civilizations. Throwing the “meta-” prefix in front of the term “meme” just seemed like an open goal here.

Q: Why do you keep insisting on making up your own words? Wouldn’t it make it easier for your readers if you just used existing terminology, and perhaps be a bit more honest given that your ideas aren’t that new and simply build on existing theories? I mean, the more words you come up with, the harder it gets to read and the more confusing everything becomes. How about just using the already existing term, “memeplex”?

HF: First of all, the world would be a much poorer place if people didn’t develop new words to explain an ever more complex reality. 

Secondly, what some writers (like the consciousness scholar Susan Blackmore or the philosopher Daniel Dennett) call a memeplex, which is short for meme complex, simply refers to any large and coherent pattern of memes. This includes stuff like languages or dances or rituals or architecture. The metamemes are a subsection of the memeplexes; they are the patterns of how cultures can be described in developmental terms; if you will, in developmental stages. Metamemes are specifically defined, very large, memeplexes; they evolve in a recognizable and logical sequence (hence “developmental”). 

Here’s an example: A meme could be ballet. Did any tribal culture, anywhere in the world, ever generate a dance that resembles ballet? No. They produce an incredible array of dances and prances and rituals, but no ballet. Why? 

Q: Uhm, because ballet is a Western invention…?

HF: Well, then, why did no medieval European societies ever produce ballet dances?

No. Ballet is not primarily tied to geography, ethnicity, or race. The answer is that ballet is Modern. It’s generated under the logic of the Modern metameme.

In fact, ballet sprung out of fencing and the court society centered and modeled on early Modern France. Like a racing car, ballet is based upon removing all but the most necessary movements. In a sense, it’s ultimately utilitarian. That’s what creates its elegance. It’s Ockham’s razor applied to the movements of the human body. It’s the Enlighten­ment paradigm embodied in motion.

The chance of ballet emerging in a pre-Modern context is simply zero. Zero. Ballet did not come about arbitrarily. Sure, there are arbitrary elements to it which were shaped by individual people or European culture, but there are many prerequisites specific to early Modern life that make it possible for something like ballet to pop into existence. Ballet isn’t Animistic (like hunter-gatherer societies); it’s Modern. No Ockham’s razor, no Enlightenment—no ballet.

Q: Uhm, there are some things to explain there. But first of all, this sounds pretty racist to me. You’re saying that Western ballet is better and “more advanced” than all the tribal dances in the world. Who are you to say? Good grief. This developmental perspective of “metamemes” can really make some Western people quite blind. Isn’t the measure of “more advanced” in itself your narrow Western bias? You think, like in the 19th century, that Europeans, white men, are “more civilized”?

HF: You said better, more advanced, and more civilized. I didn’t say that.

I said that, descriptively, certain memes (like ballet) pertain to certain metamemes (like modernity)—by logical necessity. This may interact with certain geographical and ethnic entities like “Western” or “Indian”, but it’s not a theory about such entities.

My claim is, rather, that such entities, “civilizational cultural spheres”, are ultimately epiphenomena; i.e. they’re a lot less important than we’ve usually been taught to think. We tend to over-essentialize them, to ascribe too much explanatory power to “Western”, “Indian” and so on. If you think about it, it’s obvious that I have much more in common with a contemporary urban Indian than a German peasant in the 1700s. The memetic distance is simply much smaller to the contemporary Indian citizen.

But again, about ballet, the burden of proof is on you: show me ballet (or something that corresponds closely to it in terms of choreography) emerging in a hunter-gatherer setting, and I shall solemnly eat my hat. I’ll record it on YouTube so you can revel in it on repeat and in slow-motion. Then go on finding an Animistic theory of gravity, Animistic social science, or Animistic stock markets. And I’ll eat the whole hat stand. The burden of proof is yours, not mine.

If you start from the negatives, and work by falsification, it becomes obvious that history is non-arbitrarily ordered. What I mean by that is that you can look at all the things that obviously do not exist in, say, pre-Modern societies, and which cannot emerge without the Modern (or later) metameme. Show me the Picasso of the 11th century? Poststruc­turalist critique of literature in the Warring States period of China? No?

I’m not saying that ballet is “finer”. I once watched Swan Lake in Copenhagen. God be my witness, it bored me to tears. Not going back there. I had much more fun doing an ecstatic tribal style dance around a fire at a Burning Man event. Naked, except for the beard.

I’m just saying that it pertains to the Modern metameme, and I shall labor to explore the meaning of this throughout this book, layer by layer.

Death metal, as in that Norwegian music genre, is also (late) Modern. But, of course, fearsome songs about blood, gore, and demons are found across all the metamemes—we shall go on to see how such things as death metal can be understood. Is opera truly “Western”? What about Chinese opera, then? Western opera and Chinese opera showed up in different settings, the Chinese version evolving considerably earlier and indep­endently, in a more pre-modern setting, today counting over a hundred regional styles. But neither tradition could have been generated in an Animistic context.

Calling ballet “Modern” is not a matter of preference—taste always depends on the eye of the observer; one may prefer things for any number of reasons. It is simply a point about the non-arbitrary nature of history. History is structured. It’s not, to use a worn expression, just “one damned thing after another” (ODTAA). History has melodies; I would say, beautiful ones. And it has a certain direction, albeit a meandering one that easily gets interrupted.

So, if history does indeed play in discernable melodies, why not listen to them? And if it’s pointing somewhere, why not trace its path?

***

Q: Okay, so you believe there is a spirit of evolution, a force that propels the direction of history, from the Big Bang, through cosmological history, through biolo­gical evolution, and then through cultural stages of evolution, driving the universe towards a goal of unification?

HF: Actually, no.

Or rather, we can and should remain agnostic about any such force. The moment we start believing in such an entity, and that we can some­how intuitively or intellectually tap into this force and serve its purpose, we become tunnel-visioned “true believers”, fanatics set on a particular direction of history and thus blind to the multiplicity of perspectives and the richness, contradictions, and paradoxes of history. We implicitly take ourselves to be prophets, speaking the word of God, which—again—belongs to no one: An unforgivable vanity, a cardinal sin.

Rather than aligning ourselves with “the force that propels history”, we should “listen to the melodies of the future”. That can still involve listening intuitively, following our hearts. But even the subtle whispers of the heart do not grant us knowledge of where history is going.

Evolution doesn’t “look ahead” and push itself towards a goal or end or “singularity” or what the Catholic mystic Teilhard de Chardin called the “Omega Point”. The intellectual laziness of such thinking has always abhorred me.

It would be more accurate to say that evolution “stumbles forwards”; it doesn’t really see where it’s going, or why. People like ourselves can think we know where we’re going. But the universe always surprizes us, and the stumbling march of history always turns out to be orthogonal to what we imagined. It feels more likely, then, that we live in a universe that also surprises itself.

Take something like the Russian Empire—there is little if any apparent connection between the presumably Viking (or Varangian) chieftain Rurik’s establishment of Novgorod in 862, the rise and fall of the Kievan Rus, the regrouping of post-Mongol Russian power around Moscow, the purges of nobility under Ivan the Terrible, the establishment of Saint Petersburg under Peter the Great and the thousands that died in the process, and the defeat at the Crimean War, and the royal court being enthralled by the crazed faith healer Rasputin in the early 20th century—and the emergence of the Soviet Union and its role in the Cold War, as well as its collapse some 80 years later, with resulting stagnation and failed trans­itions to liberal capitalism and the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. If there has indeed been a direct­ionality and pattern to this evolution, it has certainly been one full of contra­dictions, blunders and meaningless failures and mistakes. Cath­erine the Great, a German-born ruler who corresponded with Voltaire and embra­ced the Enlightenment, later turned her back entirely on the Enlighten­ment ideals in the wake of the French Revolution. She pivo­ted—as did her evolving country.

The whole thing doesn’t “see where it’s going”. Today’s Russia stum­bled itself into existence through failures, tragedies, and paradoxes—through twists and turns of human ingenuity, vanity, tragedy, and sheer stupidity. As did all of the world’s nations. Crash, boom, bang, oops—death, decay, suffering untold. Tragedies and cruel jokes at the expense of the human spirit. Absolute absurdity. And in the midst of it all: creation—the emergence of the utterly unexpected, the stumbled-upon, which still somehow germinated through many criss-crossing patterns of hum­an agency, foresight, and intentionality.

Simply put: the existence of directionality and pattern do not presuppose a pre-given, or God-given, purpose. Historical evolution has recognizable patterns and directions, but probably no “end-goal” or “telos”. And if it has no end-goal, it has no particular “destiny”, either. I view our intentions and goals for society nihilistically; they may serve as necessary little “religions” for us, but they never turn out to be right. And thus nobody is destiny’s child or God’s prophet. Not even Beyoncé.

To the extent that we wish to shape the future with this book, we need to be sincere interpreters and analysts, but only ironic prophets.

If there is indeed a spirit of evolution that guides this story, we must conclude that it’s a rather clumsy and incompetent one. It’s all over the place, working in “mysterious ways” to say the least. And yet, with a bird’s eye view, we can also conclude that it has not stumbled entirely at random. Even the chaotic and grim history of Russia has emerged thr­ough epochs that follow certain cultural patterns: the metamemes.

***

Q: Uhm, okay. So when did these metameme periods happen then?

HF: Wrong question. You still haven’t understood it. Metamemes aren’t like Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and so on.

The philosopher Theodor Adorno famously argued that “modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological category”. What he meant by that is that it’s not really meaningful to try to understand at what particular time the world “became modern”—the answer to this will vary depending on the context. Much of the world still today isn’t modern in a meaningful sense. Rather, one must struggle to understand why modernity emerged, thr­ough which mechanisms, which properties delineate it from non-mod­ernity or pre-modernity. That would be the only usable explanation, be­cause that’s what has real explanatory, and, ultimately, predictive power. That’s also how the classical sociologists of the late 19th century approached the study of modern society.

And I couldn’t agree more, dear Adorno. Modernity is one of the six metamemes. None of the metamemes are “chronological categories”. They’re not periods. They’re not eras. They’re not epochs. They are something else.

They are certain patterns of history—certain qualities, certain prop­erties, certain logics, certain dynamics. They are large patterns-of-patterns; they are overarching patterns-that-connect. As such, meta­memes stretch across and through any crude periodization we may conjure up. They slip through any attempt to catch them chronologically, to freeze them in time.

Think about it; the events of world history have nothing—or very little—to do with the year numbers and epochs we ascribe to them. Sure, years give us intervals of time, but beyond that, epochs and years are completely arbitrary. They are, in that sense, unscientific—because they offer no explanatory or predictive power. They are fancies, little more.

The metamemes are qualitative categories. That is to say, you can describe how they work. What they do. What they are. Now that is truly an explanation. Saying something is “medieval” or that it happened in 1212, is not.

And for this reason, this will be a quite unconventional history of the world. I rely on sequences and years, yes, on historical time and geographical space. But that’s not the focus. I’m offering you a qual­itative understanding of the history of the world, a history of the patterns that drive and shape the cultural world; if you will, a history without time.

***

Q: Okay, Hanzi. Fair enough. So you want to try out a new way of telling the history of the world. I can see how that would excite you and make your insignificant little speck of a life seem worthwhile, perhaps even compensate for a few childhood traumas and belittlements that life has heaped on you. Good luck with that.

But I still don’t quite get how you view this “history without time”—I mean, what is history if not a series of events in time? Please answer me directly: What is history?

HF: Nice punch. Indeed, what is world history?

It’s not primarily, as Marx and Engels would have us believe, the history of classes and their struggle against each other.

Nor is it the history of kings and queens.

It’s not the history of nations, or even cycles of civilizations, their ebbs and flows, their rise, decay, and downfall.

It’s not the history of the everyday life of living, breathing human beings.

It’s not the progress of technology in itself.

It’s not a series of events, what is sometimes called “one damned thing after another” (ODTAA).

And it’s definitely not the history of human races and their struggle to the death, race against race, thank you very much.

It’s not even the history of humanity as a whole, of the species homo sapiens. What a silly world history that would be.

So called human history, the history of the world, what is commonly known as “cultural history”, is the history of memes.

This is, need I add, an informational view of history. We are answering the question: What structures and drives the elements of information? That’s what drives history; which is to say, it is what explains and connects the events. Information is the element that coordinates human actions, and it thus guides human events, including human responses to natural events.

When the Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire wrote his reflection on the tsunami that hit Lisbon in 1755, he changed the human response to it: perhaps it was not, as commonly believed, a punishment from God; perhaps it was just a meaningless natural event. In his Poème sur le dés­astre de Lisbonne, Voltaire notes:

“’If it be true,’ they said, ‘that whatever is, is right, it follows that human nature is not fallen.

If the order of things requires that everything should be as it is, then human nature has not been corrupted, and consequently has no need for a Redeemer.

[…]

if the miseries of individuals are merely the by-product of this general and necessary order, then we are nothing more than cogs which serve to keep the great machine in motion; we are no more precious in the eyes of God than the animals by which we are devoured.”

In Voltaire’s voice we can hear a new metameme—the Modern one—emerging to challenge the old, in my terms Postfaustian, one.  This changed how history was understood (blind mechanisms rather than God’s will), just as I try to change how history is understood in accordance with a metamodern perspective.

Indeed, Voltaire himself went on to write an early-modern account of world history, An Essay on Universal History, revised multiple times until his death in 1778. In this treatise, Voltaire shocked his Europ­ean contemporaries by holding that European nations are not inherently more advanced than others, praising the achievements of Indian and Chinese civilizations. He was looking for a truly general history of the world. In this book, I try to contribute to a corresponding update of our understanding of what history actually is.

So let’s focus on memes. Look at it this way:

The history of the physical world is cosmology. The history of the planet is geology. Geological properties can only emerge within a larger cosmological story. The history of life, this self-organization of complex, sentient entities, is biology. Life can only play out in some select corners of the universe, where goldilocks conditions allow it, in an interplay with geological settings. Biology carries within itself molecular patterns that we call genes—carriers of information. Biology, or natural history, is the history of genes and their evolutionary struggle.

Cultural history, what we usually just call “history”, is yet another level up of emergence and abstraction. It exists within a biological framework. You need biological creatures with malleable bodies into which memes can be encoded. Memes are patterns that are imprinted, not into the mole­cules of the creature, their DNA, but into some more readily changeable part of the body, like connections between nerve cells. Memes are memo­ries, learned skills and crafts, stories, ideas, taken-for-granted assump­tions, languages. They are transferable patterns imprinted in a more abstract layer of bodily configurations (as compared to DNA). And they transfer through communication and imitation.

The word “meme” took on a life of its own after Richard Dawkins introduced it in his book The Selfish Gene from 1976. He juxtaposed it with “gene”. It was a good move. Memes are like ghosts-of-abstraction that, as it were, possess the biological bodies of their carriers. They emerge through ongoing interactions between hum­an beings, and then take over those same human beings and control the movements of their bodies, shaping very specific patterns of move­ments of the body. Biologically, I can be a light-skinned homo sapiens with green irises and long legs. Culturally, I can be a Russian-speaking, socialist ballet dancer. Through the medium of my biological body, memes “remote-control” me and make me do pirouettes for the glory of Stalin. When I open my mouth to speak, my tongue will move in a specifically Russian manner. I’m a memetic creature as much as I’m a genetic one—just as much as I’m a physical object with a certain mass, speed, and position in space-time. I have emerged on all these levels: physical, biological, and cultural. 

Cultural history must thereby, necessarily, be the history of how all memes emerge, how they struggle, combine, and evolve, and how they steer the world. Because culture consists of memes, whereas genes can only be transferred and experimented with through new generations, through new bodies (with some leeway for epigenetic factors, i.e. how genes are turned on and off during a lifetime), memes can evolve much more quickly and according to another logic entirely. And that logic is culture, and its development is “history”. An event is “historical” because it is memetically significant. Events that do not change memes are not “historical”.

Memes are more malleable than genes. We cannot all get green eyes and red hair, but we can all learn at least some Swahili, if exposed to it. Given, of course, that we have the biological prerequisites for the meme to transfer to us (brain, ears, tongue, etc.).

Or look at it this way, from the negative: Is it possible to write a piece of history without discussing matters of class? Yes. Without describing the doings of kings and queens? Yes. Without relating to nations? Yes. But is it possible to discuss any cultural history without relating to memes? No. Because memes are the most fundamental category of history.

And metamemes are the fundamental patterns of the memes them­selves. The memes don’t emerge independently, but in relation to each other. They emerge as functions of larger, more fundamental, meta­memes.

Thus, metamemes are patterns-of-cultural-patterns. The metamemes are the hidden patterns of history.

***

Q: I’d still say that this is a history pertaining uniquely to humanity, right? Memes are about humans and the things we do. Humans have culture!

HF: Okay, so it is and it isn’t. Humans have more complexly malleable bodies (their brains, in particular) than other known creatures, and thus they happen to currently be the main carriers of cultural memes on our planet. Memes evolve prim­arily within and through humans. But hey, other animals have memes too. Researchers have shown that whales in the South Pacific have differ­ent songs that spread as fashions over time. Those are memes, too.

There is nothing special or chosen about homo sapiens per se. It might as well have been another creature that had become the main substrate of memetic evolution—and who knows, it probably will be sometime in the future. Octopuses come to mind; maybe (if bioengineering is applied) larger brains can be grown in those squishy wet things than in our rigid skulls. Maybe they can be a good seed for a superior substrate for memetic evol­ution; maybe other species will take up the baton of memetic history; maybe one day the entirety of human history will appear as trivial as whale songs traveling across the South Pacific. Our memetic descendants aren’t necessarily the same as our genetic ones.

So the main juxtaposition is not humanity versus nature, nor humans versus non-human animals. What a stupid, arbitrary, illogical division that would be! The main juxtaposition is between two different levels of emergence: genes and memes. Biology and culture. Genes come before memes. Culture is contained within the confines of biology, even as culture can operate upon and reshape biology (through selective breeding, genetic manipulation, food and lifestyles, and so on). Human biology is not, as many have claimed, “a constant”; it just evolves slower and by another logic, not least when affected by fast-evolving culture. Of course society shapes organisms, and thus biology. But memes are their own thing; they escape the limits of genetic evolution.

Memes create something beyond biology: imagined worlds of culture, religions, philosophies, paradigms, stories about the universe, grand dramas, narratives.

If we are, then, to go beyond our speciesist narcissism, and quite frankly grow the hell up, we need to start telling history like it is: not about humanity, but about memes. Humanity is only interesting because it happens to be good at carrying and thus generating memes, so that cultural evolution is sparked. What a spark, though!

If this seems a bit gloomy—if we feel a little less species-special—there is a silver lining to it. Namely, if we’re no longer “the chosen ones” we’re also off the hook in terms of species-specific guilt vis-à-vis the biosphere as a whole. It’s not that humanity is bad and nature is good. It’s that nature evolves into meme-carrying creatures, like you and me, and some memes tend to wreck their own biological substrate (just as biology has wrecked its geological substrate throughout the Earth’s history). That’s it. Memes can wreck the human body that carries them—Kamikaze pilots come to mind—or they can wreck the ecosystems they depend on. Ecological disaster can happen for a number of reasons (like comets or volcanos or systemic limits in a stage of biological development); the present crisis has emerged because memes follow another logic than ecological systems do. Our cultural evolution is shredding the basis of its own biological substrate.

The memes can sustain their evolution only by somehow adapting to and accounting for ecological systems. They must either include the biosphere, or perish. This clash between meme and gene, culture and biology, would have occurred even if memes evolved most rapidly through some other biological substrate, through another species. So if humanity is not special, this means we’re not “special good or bad”.

That being said, yes, we shall study human history in this book. And some biological properties that are particular to humans shape how our particular sequences of memes play out.

All said and done, welcome to this new—not modern, nor postmodern, but metamodern—view of cultural history. It’s about humanity as the essentially cultural mode of being in the universe. But the story is not inherently human-centric. It strives to link up seamlessly with “big history”, with emergence and complexity across all known phenomena. It strives to be cosmo-centric, and to reflect the values that care for all beings and the interconnectedness of all perspectives.

—

The next chapter, “Chapter 1, A Brief Introduction to the Metamemes Model” can be accessed here.

—

A webinar on the topic of world history and the six metamemes will be held this autumn, four weekends in a row November 2 – 25. More details about the course can be found here.

Hanzi Freinacht is a political philosopher, historian, and sociologist, author of ‘The Listening Society’, ‘Nordic Ideology’ and ’12 Commandments’. Much of his time is spent alone in the Swiss Alps. You can follow Hanzi on Facebook, Twitter, and Medium, and you can speed up the process of new metamodern content reaching the world by making a donation to Hanzi here.

Guest post by the author of Octopusyarn.

I’ve speculated on the Structure of Metamodern Religion in terms of its philosophical and coordination layers. But how might all of this make a difference in your life? 

In order for Metamodern Religion to become a lived reality and actually have an impact on people’s lives, it needs to flow into culture, shared practices, and personal meaning. 

The last section of the tree explores the importance of ecologies of practice and how they manifest as personal meaning in Metamodern Spirituality. Just like Religion creates a numinous excess on the cultural level, Spirituality creates surplus coherence within a person.

Ecologies of practice

Psycho-technologies are a critical part of any religion. Religion is less about what you believe and more about what you practise. Only sustained engagement with practice over years will lead to personal transformation. And there is no silver bullet, one-size-fits-all practice. Rather, a range of practices that complement each other is a more promising approach. We can think of those as “Ecologies of practice” (Vervaeke). 

Most ecologies of practices combine personal, interpersonal, and collective practices. They also act on multiple levels, e.g. mind (attention/awareness system, relevance realisation, etc.), body (movement practices), and soul (emotional practices, ensoulment). The simple taxonomy below uses some of these distinctions to classify psycho-technologies into 9 categories. An effective ecology of practice would probably combine practices out of each of the categories. Note that each of these categories just contains a few examples, which could be further subdivided.

There are many other possible classifications that might be helpful to create a well-rounded ecology of practice. What is important is that the ecology supports the holistic development of its practitioners. That is to say, it includes practices that address different dimensions of development. Mental models are helpful in distinguishing between these dimensions and ensuring that practices for all of them are included in a given ecology of practice. Relevant models include John Vervaeke’s different kinds of knowledge (4P), Zak Stein’s Metapsychology, and the developmental model used by Hanzi. 

Different practices will work for different communities. Each “atomic community” will have its own ecologies of practice, as well as the institutions in which the different types of development take place. 

The role of Cosmopolitan Shamans will be to help construct and implement practices for a given community and support the development of their members, as well as exchange knowledge between communities.

Note that while the practices on the community and even interpersonal level may be institutionalised to a large degree, personal ecologies of practices may vary more, since they need to be adaptive with regard to the personality, development, and circumstances of that person.

Metamodern Spirituality

So how does all of this solve the meaning crisis? The entire structure of Metamodern Religion will manifest in different ways on a personal level. The shared elements from the overarching narratives to communal practices provide a fecund scaffolding for personal meaning to emerge. Metamodern Spirituality takes into account preferences, personal history, goals, idiosyncrasies, etc. Just like Religion integrates the strands of society into an overflowing coherence, spirituality creates “surplus coherence” on a personal level. This spirituality is always in relationship with others, the community, and the whole. So rather than an “individual”, we might use the term “dividual” to highlight the primacy of relationship and interconnectedness. 

The metamodern dividual will be deeply in relationship across different scales. We want development and harmonisation to take place at every fractal level:

• Different parts of one’s psyche are in dialogue intra-psychically, leading to more and more harmony, acceptance, and self-knowledge.
• Close interpersonal relationships will significantly shape the views of self, world, and purpose. Deepened by interpersonal psycho-technologies, these relationships – whether with parents, friends, lovers, or mentors – are foundational for personal meaning.
• There will often be different-sized groups (depending on the social arrangements of a community) that provide anchor points for identity and purpose: from Squad (3-10 people) to Clan (20-50) to Tribe (150-250) and all the way up to the atomic community (thousands). Each of these will have its own missions, stories, practices, etc. that will shape its members.  
• At last, there is also a relationship with the whole. A deep meaningfulness arises from the sense of interconnection with the planet, and from participating in the co-creation of God herself.

Across all of these scales of relationship, meaning arises because of the participatory and perspectival knowing that is cultivated through practices of different kinds and supported by appropriate narratives. Numinous excess emerges from harmonisation across the fractal. 

What specific practices will do that for a given person will depend a lot on their personality and circumstances. That is why a specific practice regime needs to be constructed for each person, ideally with the help of a local shaman. At the core of Metamodern Spirituality is the continued development of the person across different dimensions.  

Not just the practices need to be adapted on a personal level, but also the narratives and maybe even the art. From a shared grand narrative, the mycelium is winding all the way to the personal level where dividuals construct personal myths (e.g. described in Building the Cathedral). Artistic creation and even ritual engagement could help bring alive personal mythologies, similar to early experiments we are observing today (e.g. “Life Art”)

Proper participation means asking “what means “right relationship” here?”, “what is mine to do?”. Whatever talents,  predilections, and idiosyncrasies are present need to be cultivated and brought into participation. Notions of Unique Self and Ikigai come to mind. However, we don’t need to strive to create an integrated whole on a personal level, to become a fully coherent monolith. I think the goal of harmonious differentiation is more adequate for our times. A well-adjusted dividual hosts a symphony of selves. More on this here.

Alright, we are nearly at the end of our journey through the Structure of Metamodern Religion. 

It turns out, I turned the tree of life into a dense conceptual jungle, thank you for meandering with me. Here is the whole picture again:

What a treat to be thinking about how to address societies’ biggest problems with a complex system of interlocking holons that engender fractal transjective transformation to create a resilient social fabric. As ludicrously ambitious as it may seem, I think we have a real shot at solving both the meta crisis and the meaning crisis by supporting the development of Metamodern Religion.

The exciting thing is that all of these aspects mapped to the different spheres are already coming into being. Now. The galaxy brains linked throughout this text are busy tackling different aspects and are gathering communities and resources around themselves. Powerful psycho-technologies from yoga to meditation and psychedelics are entering the mainstream. More beautiful (and truthful) narratives than the old “infected monkeys on a small speck of dust lost in an infinity of empty space” are gaining hold. The AI community has realised that human alignment is the true alignment problem. Web3 is building new technologies for global coordination (when they are not busy scamming each other). We are seeing the shoots of new art forms emerge. 

Where do you want to contribute? You can pick a sphere of the structure presented here, jump around between them, or work your way up the tree. If you don’t know, the latter is probably a good place to start. See how you can rekindle meaning in your own life. Pick up some practices, or an entire ecology of them. 

You might also want to find the others: Liminal web, Metamodernism, GameB, Parallax, and TPOT are some of the venues where you might find them at the time of writing. But don’t get hung up on the names – the network of Cosmopolitan Shamans is fluid and fast-changing and the tantric spark tends to move as soon as any one of them becomes too well-known. 

I’ll wrap it with a list of further resources, all of which influenced this exploration significantly:

• Alexander Bard & Jan Söderqvist: Syntheism 
• Brendan Graham Dempsy: Emergentism
• David Chapman’s Meaningness and Vividness
• Gregg Henriques’ UTOK
• Hanzi Freinacht: The Listening Society & Nordic Ideology, Blog 
• Ken Wilber: Religion of Tomorrow
• Scott Alexander’s Meditations on Moloch and Archipelago or Atomic Communitarianism
• Youtube
  • Videos
    • Bonnitta Roy: Origins of the Self: An Integrated Model
    • Brendan Graham Dempsy and Layman Pascal: Multi-perspectival Spirituality
    • Daniel Görtz: In pursuit of a headless god
    • Daniel Schachtenberger: Converting Moloch from Sith to Jedi
    • Jill Nephew: A Complete “Theory of Everything” for Addressing the Meta-Crisis
    • John Vervaeke & Jordan Hall: Religion that is not a religion (also subsequent videos)
    • Matt Segall: Anatheism
    • Nora Bateson and Daniel Schmachtenberger: Learning how to be in the world
    • Nora Bateson: Warm Data
    • Zak Stein: Metapsychology
  • Series
    • Brendan Graham Dempsy: Metamodern Spirituality Playlist
    • Layman Pascal & Bruce Alderman: Future Faces of Spirit
    • Daniel Schmachtenberger & Nate Hagens: Bend, not break

—

The author is a technology entrepreneur and investor who prefers to remain pseudonymous. 

On his blog, he expresses his long-standing interest in philosophy, psychology, and psycho-technologies. As a technologist, serious meditator, and denizen of the liminal web, he likes writing at the intersections of different fields.

Guest post by the author of Octopusyarn.

Global problems from climate change to arms races need global, or better yet, planetary solutions. Religion may be able to defeat Moloch, where all international treaties have failed before. If it is to address the crises outlined in the previous part, Metamodern religion needs to enable Cosmo-local coordination. 

However, attempting to enforce a monolithic religion on a planetary level would likely lead to dystopian outcomes. Different cultures and ways of life need to be preserved, potentially even traditional religions like Christianity, with a few tweaks. The weaving of the social fabric happens on a local level. Cosmo-local coordination seems like the way forward: A minimal planetary layer that allows for a variety of local cultures.

The middle section of the tree contains both principles for global coherence and ways that they can manifest in a plurality of contexts.

Omni-consideration

At the core of a shared moral framework should be something like Omni-consideration, a term used by Daniel Schmachtenberger. 

What is the most fundamental lived reality of conscious experience? Suffering is bad, pleasure is good. This seems like an experiential axiom, whether we have a formalised theory of consciousness or not (Mike Johnson, the grey eminence of qualia structuralism, suspects valence might be the “Rosetta Stone” of consciousness). If this can’t be our shared basis for coordination, nothing can. 

Omni-consideration derives directly from this axiom of emotional valence: We should attempt to maximise pleasure and minimise suffering (over the long run). The concept of Human Rights is a subset of this way of thinking, but Omni-consideration goes much further: it implies care not only for all humans but all conscious beings (and the environment as a result). 

Omni-consideration implies the practice of considering the impacts of one’s actions and decisions on all stakeholders, including but not limited to oneself, other people, other species, future generations, and the environment. It also prohibits externalising harm somewhere else for the benefit of a narrowly defined group or outcome. To truly live this, decision-making would need to take into account the interconnectedness of living systems and n-th-order consequences. As elaborated by complexity science with its understanding of non-linear dynamics, we need profound humility when judging what effects any action may have. In terms of moral reasoning, this humility implies a parallax between utilitarianism, virtue ethics, and deontology. 

Planetary governance

We won’t get around sharing the same planet. Actions with a global effect (e.g. environmental damage) concern all of us. 

Planetary governance is the most important piece for solving the external Meta Crisis, and might only become possible through the spread of Metamodern Religion. Specifically, through the principle of Omni-consideration being taken seriously, supported by the structure of feeling within Integrative pluralism.

There are straightforward implications of Omni-consideration, such as a principle of non-violence and a notion of fundamental rights. In addition, More indirectly, it implies mitigating existential risks of all kinds – from rogue AGI to climate change. Uses of technology that endanger large swaths of the population or even the possibility of life on the planet altogether need to be strictly controlled. We need to learn how to live within planetary boundaries.

While a likely starting point is a social contract, eventually, there would need to be a planetary governance process (potentially combined with a monopoly of violence) around these issues in order to effectively enforce such rules. We already have bodies like the UN that try to guarantee and promote global peace and human rights with mixed results today. The current failure modes of the UN (e.g. stalemate in its security council, fossilised power relations from past wars, institutional bloat, etc.) would need to be addressed. 

As you surely notice, we’re entering geopolitical LaLa Land. 

How could we ever get everybody to agree on shared rules? Even less plausibly, how could we exit the arms races we are currently engaged in and get the powers that be to hand over their toys? How could a global monopoly of violence possibly not degenerate into a totalitarian one-world government because of unchecked power? Good questions, no easy answers. However, it seems inevitable that we will need some form of planetary governance because of the global nature of these issues. That fact that the largest collective bodies currently are nation states arguably exacerbates these issues through the competitive dynamics between countries. 

What does this have to do with religion? 

The only cases where coordination failures have been solved are to be found in religions. An example is Shabbat in Judaism, the day when it is prohibited to do any work at all. This rule is enforced to this day with strong social norms and deterrence by a large punishment. Religious law has successfully bound an arms race (on time spent working in this case) within Judaism (as Schmachtenberger explains), resulting in more social coherence.  In addition, Planetary governance is necessary as a political scaffolding that allows for the sefirot below to function. For example, universal freedom of movement between the different cultures and states is needed for Atomic communities to function.

Before any kind of planetary governance will become possible, there will need to be significant shifts in culture. Jeremy Johnson describes going planetary as moving beyond anthropocentrism and starting to relate to the Earth as a living system (see the Gaia hypothesis). It also entails a structure of feeling that makes global interconnectedness palpable on an everyday emotional level. As it turns out, a new aesthetic sensibility is not just required as a precedent for enabling planetary governance, but the keystone of the entire structure of Metamodern Religion. 

Integrative pluralism

At the very heart of this proposed structure for Metamodern Religion is Integrative Pluralism: the recognition that there are always multiple valid ways of understanding a situation and that by bringing these perspectives together, a more holistic and complete understanding can be achieved. Moving through Wilber’s quadrants, we can see the same issue from completely different points of view, subjectively, culturally, scientifically, and systematically. There is a fractal pattern opening up by zooming into each quadrant and applying the framework again, as demonstrated by Hanzi’s exploration of ethics.

“The task is to see reality as it is, the method is to look through millions of eyes”
—Nietzsche

We could therefore expect that the core task of Metamodern Religion will be to weave together these different perspectives, such as culture, science, and spirituality, with the human experience of our times. It should accommodate the integration and coherence between the different ontological categories and vantage points within them. Like a prism, Integrative pluralism crystallises all of the abstract sefirot above and emanates specific manifestations of them in the more concrete spheres below. 

The Glass Bead Game of harmonisation

This integration happens primarily through art. While it may seem daunting, this would not be the first time humans engage in sweeping religious integration: We can think of the great religious art of the past, from the Bible to Dante’s Divine Comedy, from the great Gothic cathedrals to Michelangelo’s frescoes as predecessors.

Before Metamodern Religion can emerge, we need an artistic renaissance. Entirely new art forms and practices are what will produce the symbols, myths, and collective experiences at the core of a new Cosmo-local religion. This process of harmonisation and integration reminds of Hesse’s Glass Bead Game, a fictional play that synthesises all arts and sciences. 

We need our own Glass Bead Games. Whether it’s interactive media, AI-powered experiences, VR/AR, or blockchain (or all of them), I expect technology to play a vital role too. I’d also expect the art to be much more participative and created by collectives rather than individual artists. 

The work of Olafur Eliasson is a prime example of art centred around multiperspectivalism, creating an aesthetic that works across cultural backgrounds and levels of development. Yayoi Kusama’s art re-enchants modernity with bright colours and opens up the sublime dimensions of the mundane. Early examples that lean into co-creation include experiences like Nora Bateson’s warm data lab, David Chapman’s hyperlinked books (e.g. Vividness) written in public, or genre-breaking experiments like Meaningwave or In Shadow. Laurence Currie-Clark has brought a version of the Glass Bead Game to life as a collective inquiry practice and is now expanding it into an experimental social media platform. Plantoids are an example of how the use of technology in art can engender co-creative spaces and ecological thinking.

The texture of numinous excess

This integration of different strands of a culture at any time is what generates the binding energy of religion. Layman Pascal describes it as the core of religion as a process: the “surplus coherence” achieved by this integration generates the “numinous excess”, the religious feeling of awe and wonder. Tiferet, the sefira at the very heart of the tree, where I placed “Integrative Pluralism”, is often titled “Beauty”. We will know our Glass Bead Games are working if they produce this sense of numinous excess in participants from diverse backgrounds. The task here is nothing short of building the cathedrals of our age. We need a return to beauty while still folding in the critical deconstruction that has been prevalent in contemporary art. 

The feeling structure of metamodern art is still in the process of unfolding. Some potential elements are the following: 

• Metaxis. Holding sincerity and irony in superposition results in an in-between quality: neither entirely serious nor ironic, but both at once. From leaning into the apparent contradiction, a new kind of beauty emerges, like a moiré pattern. Irony adds dimensionality to the sincerity, while sincerity adds depth to the irony. Contemporary metamodern art is diffusing this sensibility to wider and wider audiences. 
• Planetary Communitas: Communitas is the interpersonal connection our ancestors may have felt in their religious rituals. A blending between individuals into a felt sense of group-consciousness. We want a similar sensibility but with a wider circle of concern, including all of humanity, to other species, and to the planet itself. Not just understanding the interconnection of the ecosystem intellectually but viscerally feeling ourselves as part of its wholeness. 
• Aperspectival hyper-textuality: I expect art forms enabled by technological capabilities (VR/AR/AI) that will be more interactive and informationally dense. This may induce a new sense of time created by the hyper-textuality of technological augmentation: Moving from linear time to what Gebser calls “aperspectival”, where the spectator/participant can zoom in or out, co-creating the art as different vantage points are activated. This may be a way to perceive Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects. 

The jargon above is pointing at different potentially relevant elements and not to be mistaken for a complete description. 

Atomic communitarianism 

What do traditional religions and countercultures from hippies to reactionaries all have in common? They share the mistaken assumption of universalism: that their specific solution to social organisation is the best possible way of organising society everywhere, at all times. It seems obvious that there are certain trade-offs in cultural space and that for different people and circumstances, different solutions will better support their thriving: 

• Different social norms may be required for different circumstances (e.g. variations on family structures vs. more tribal arrangements, monogamy vs. polyamory, more or less fluid roles in society, diet, etc.).
• Different political and economical frameworks, and different relations to technology: from liquid democracy to a constitutional monarchy of philosopher kings, from neo-Luddism to fully-automated luxury communism.
• Different variations of the overarching narratives, different shared rituals, and different archetypal myths, all coloured by the idiosyncrasies of place and culture. 

There is no universal answer for social organisation. Is it possible to rejoice in our differences instead of incessantly trying to convince each other that our way of life is “right”? A healthy social pluralism seems possible as long as we can agree on some minimal common ground to avoid diverging into factions so different they can’t communicate any longer. The principles of Omni-consideration and (minimal) Planetary governance are plausible directions. As long as anybody can freely move between communities, multiple solutions can be explored in parallel. 

In order for communities to function within Metamodern Religion, there will likely be some commonalities, including: 

• A new localism and connection to the ecosphere, communities caring for their bioregions. 
• A developmental approach, helping its members grow in different dimensions, supported by an ecology of practice. 

The general idea of this sefira is described in Scott Alexander’s Archipelago and Atomic Communitarianism. There is also an alignment on this point in the Game-B community, where so-called “Proto-Bs” could propose local solutions radically different in social architecture towards the same global aims of a thriving, non-violent, and sustainable culture. 

Cosmopolitan Shamanism

This is all quite complex. How could such a convoluted structure possibly scale to a global religion? 

The answer is that not everybody has to fully understand every part of it, participating is enough. I can type these words without knowing how my laptop works. It is much easier to function within a given system than work on the systemic level itself. Only a small part of the population will be called to do the latter and both help midwife Metamodern Religion and then improve and maintain it. These “shamanoid” personalities (as Bard calls them) would need to understand the functioning of the structure as a whole and likely undergo significant training to take up their role as stewards or “priests” of Metamodern Religion. I call them “Cosmopolitan Shamans” since they are needed across the different Atomic Communities all over the world, and at least some of them would also travel between them. 

Cosmopolitan Shamans have a number of critical functions across the structure of Metamodern Religion, both between and within Atomic communities: 

Between communities: 

• Maintain and update the Structure of Metamodern Religion as situations change, e.g. its overarching narratives and shared standards.
• Interconnect the different atomic communities to ensure alignment with the overall structure and transfer knowledge between them. 

Within communities:

• Develop art, culture, and practices within atomic communities.
• Steward the different atomic communities, ensuring sustainable bioregions, a healthy social commons, and the continued development of its members. 

Likely, different specialised roles would emerge to fulfil these different functions, i.e. staying in place to steward a specific community or travelling between them to facilitate knowledge exchange. Shamans may also be called to work on philosophical frameworks, narratives, or practices respectively, or to create art. There would need to be a globally connected network of Cosmopolitan Shamans that allows for their recruitment and training, as well as an exchange of knowledge and experience. The mycelium of Metamodern Religion. 

Since there is a significant degree of responsibility and power in this function, the membrane of who may take up the training needs to be clearly defined: Likely, self-selection, peer-verification, and mutual training would all be involved. Before being able to take up a specific role, aspiring shamans should demonstrate an understanding of core narratives and the underlying philosophy. They would also need to master a wide range of practices and show a strong ethical commitment. 

The shamanic network would need to be able to work with whatever power structure is at play (from technologists to political leaders) while maintaining independence from it. We can imagine a number of techniques from camouflage to an internal “immune system” for this shamanic network to maintain its independence. The network would also need to avoid institutional inertia and maintain its fluidity. While it may share elements with religious secret societies of the past, from the Freemasons to tantric Kaula, there will also be key differences: Since Cosmopolitan Shamans need to both be able to recognize each other and be recognized by all members of their communities, a paradigm of “self-secrecy” or “open conspiracy” seems more likely.

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Next: Bringing it home, into your life

From setting the context in the first part, to the philosophical musings in the second part, you’ve followed me through meandering and dense speculations of how a new religion could facilitate global coordination while remaining pluralist. The final part of the series will bring all of this home. Home into our own lives. We’ll look into how ecologies of practice can connect to these larger structures and lead to personal meaning and fulfilment. Metamodern Spirituality is doing the same work of integration and harmonisation that religion does culturally on a personal level. As above, so below. Stay tuned.

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The author is a technology entrepreneur and investor who prefers to remain pseudonymous. 

On his blog, he expresses his long-standing interest in philosophy, psychology, and psycho-technologies. As a technologist, serious meditator, and denizen of the liminal web, he likes writing at the intersections of different fields.

Guest post by the author of Octopusyarn.

In the previous part of this series, I have presented a broad definition of religion as the social fabric that orients culture through integration. I also made the case that in order to solve the Metacrisis and the Meaning Crisis, we will need to replace our deficient Western religion (a blend of consumerism, scientism, and humanism) with the emerging Metamodern Religion.   

This part focuses on the first of three sections of the tree, describing the philosophical framework for Metamodern Religion: bringing together science and post-structuralist insights while remaining flexible enough to hold multiple cultural interpretations, including traditional and indigenous ones.

• The Ineffable, at the crown of the tree, at once enables and relativises the 2 following sefirot. 
• A Post-Metaphysical God serves as a placeholder for the best possible integration of ultimate value and scientific understanding at any given time. 
• Self-aware Narrativity allows this God to become antifragile through continuous deconstruction and hopefully prevents dogmatism and fundamentalism. 
• Meta-rationality is the intellectual stance that can overcome relativist nihilism. It at once affirms rationality while acknowledging its limits, and aims to navigate between different modes of thinking. 

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“The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.“

Akin to the original kabbalistic scheme, we start with the ineffable i.e. REALITY beyond description. It seems like this fountain of mystery is shared by most of the world’s traditional religions. Just like the Tao can’t be named, God in the Abrahamic traditions cannot be pictured. Similarly in Hinduism: Brahman, the ultimate reality that underlies all of existence, is said to be beyond all name, form, or attributes – “neti neti” – not this, nor that. Also the (Mahayana) Buddhist concept of emptiness, Shunyata, points at an ultimate reality that lies behind the appearance of things, which don’t have inherent existence but arise dependent on one another. 

As perennialism asserts, this sort of non-dual mysticism seems shared by major religions. Any of the theistic traditions could insert their favourite term for God here as long as they concede that ultimate reality (God) can’t really be described and their name is as good as any other. Even though we may never hope to describe reality in its totality, we should not give into the temptation to cover up anything vaguely spiritual or complex with the veil of ineffability. We can become more precise in describing different states, stages, and aspects of reality, as argued by Layman. 

A key consequence of placing ineffable mystery at the crown sefira is that it allows for ingress of novelty into the system: as major breakthroughs are achieved, whether scientific, cultural, or spiritual, they come in from the top and percolate down to update the system appropriately. Just like in the original kabbalistic tree of life, the entire model below emanates from this point. The ineffable couples the system with reality, making sure the map never ceases to represent the territory accurately, and acting as a reminder not to mistake the former for the latter.  

Post-metaphysical God

What would religion be without a concept of God? Even though it’s arguable the term may carry too much historical baggage, it seems like an equivalent pointer of ultimate value is critical for the overall function of the system. Also for reasons of backwards-compatibility and inclusivity, it makes sense to call a spade a spade – and a God a God. 

However, it should be clear that we are not talking about an all-powerful personal God with agency, intentions, etc. The type of post-metaphysical God envisioned should be fully compatible with a rationalist/scientific worldview. Functionally, it provides a focal point for shared values as well as a container for the most parsimonious ontologies and cosmogony.

The values imbued should be maximally inclusive and universal. A plausible example are the “4L”, as described by Gregg Henriques:

• Life – the living ecosystem and its continued increase in complexity
• Love – the relational force between all of the parts; right relationship
• Light – consciousness and the value of internal experience 
• Logos – the patterning or order of the Cosmos, the ground of intelligibility 

It bears repeating that any post-metaphysical conception of God always grows from the unspeakable mystery (and can be shredded back into it). Any Metamodern God is always a God of the “in-between” – Deus Metaxy. God emerges from an ever-evolving, interconnected net of relations. In some instances, “God” as a concept may also be used to ground any axioms used, for example, fundamental physical forces or fields, time-space (or the place before/beyond it), or even consciousness. 

The post-metaphysical trinity   

In many religious systems of the past (e.g. Christianity or Hinduism) as well as more recent attempts from Wilber’s Religion of Tomorrow (which was influenced by Whitehead) and Bard’s Syntheism, God is split up in at least a triad of different aspects. It seems critical for a post-metaphysical God to be multi-dimensional to accommodate a spectrum of values and to ground different axioms. 

Forrest Landry’s Immanent Metaphysics is made for mapping abstract triples, so using its triplicate modular isomorphism to classify different ideas of holy trinities seems opportune. The table below includes the core values above, scientific axioms, Christian, Hindu, and Buddhist concepts, as well as relevant post-metaphysical conceptions of God by Bard and Wilber.

The examples above (and even the triplicate structure itself) are merely placeholders. A metamodern theology could be imagined as the continuous deconstruction and reconstruction of the post-metaphysical God. In order to truly reflect the best scaffolding possible at any time, this would require an ongoing interdisciplinary dialogue of scientists, mystics, and philosophers.

 

Grand narratives return in a mycelial form  

In addition to the God concept, we also need compelling and accurate stories about topics generally addressed naively by religions or unintelligibly by philosophers: 

• The origin and teleology of the Cosmos, and our role in it as a species. 
• The nature of the sacred, the good life, and their ethical implications. 
• Kant’s 4 questions: “What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope for? What is man?” 

Importantly, we’re not looking for a single theory of everything, but a mycelial structure of coherent yet branching stories. We’d expect Bard’s categories of logical, mythical, and pathic narrative (as described in this short piece) to be present in many permutations: These stories need to resonate in different cultural environments and potentially even tie into previous religious traditions. We want stories so good that they’ll be declared as a lost Gospel or a new buddhist Terma by traditional religions.  

Traditionally religious speculations have already been coming back as hypotheses wrapped in “science-y” language for the past decades already (see the demarcation problem). The simulation hypothesis is just tech bro gnosticism. The Omega point and the singularity are Silicon Valley eschatology. Cosmological inflation, complexification, quantum entanglement, many worlds. Many words. And all of them have religious implications and offer competing grand narratives, whether their pundits admit it or not. Many of them tie in with great religious traditions and philosophers alike (Hegel, Whitehead, Bergson, de Chardin). A re-integration therefore does not seem out of reach, and we will continue to see more convincing attempts. The prototypical example is Wilber’s Integralism, and more recently, Metamodernism. Interesting attempts that focus even more on the narrative aspects continue to show up, e.g. Dempsy’s “Emergentism” or Azarian’s “The Romance of Reality”. 

While the vanguard of science is still undecided on major questions (e.g. interpretations of quantum mechanics or the nature of consciousness) and different narrative strands will end up with quite different interpretations, some common elements seem clear. First and foremost, a development through time with distinct phase changes of emergence with increasing complexity seems like a common denominator.

Gregg Henriques’ Tree of Knowledge system pictured above is a recent version of this general pattern. Humanity is at the cusp of this development toward higher complexity. We are the universe waking up to itself, or something like that.

Self-aware narrativity

Now that we’ve created God, it’s time to kill her again. We do that by realising that all concepts and stories are ultimately constructed and empty of inherent meaning, grounded in the principle of the ineffability of reality. The sefira of self-aware narrativity balances the creation of a post-metaphysical God with its deconstruction. However, this negation of Ultimate Truth does not mean that we are forever condemned to a relativistic nihilism of ever-fragmenting, incompatible narratives. Ihab Hassan intuits a via negativa opening up through the void of deconstruction. We will get back to “truth”, “trust”, and “spirit” through nihilism – “For only through nihilism is nihilism overcome.” (read Brendan Graham Dempsey’s analysis of Hassan’s essay here). 

Recognizing that all language games are constructed and result in different topologies of meaning and power protects against the pitfalls of dogmatism and universalism. However, just because we can never articulate the Ultimate Truth doesn’t mean we need to remain silent. We can move ever closer to the shifting of reality with more refined, coherent, and parsimonious narratives. Once we accept that, the task becomes affirming our shared humanity in the best story we can come up with at the time.

An anti-fragile God and made-up prophets

Being self-aware of its constructedness, a metamodern God needs to be able to sustain critique. Daniel Görtz describes this concept of a headless God as follows: “It is a God whose altar can be pissed upon, (who) is insulted again and again, yet remains sacred, and is resurrected. (…)” A metamodern God is “always on his way to the guillotine.” 

This dynamic creates antifragility: Whatever belief structures are left standing after repeated ferocious critique can be believed in with much more conviction. Critique also acts as a pruning function to get rid of structures no longer needed. There should be no hesitation in tearing down any narratives that are disproven by our scientific advances in order to reconstruct ones that better reflect reality. 

If we can acknowledge that our God is ultimately fictional, we can also extend that principle to our prophets. We don’t need historically accurate or even living mouthpieces of God, fictional prophets will do just as well. Arguably, made-up prophets are even better: It absolves any popularisers of Metamodern Religion from the need to live up to people’s expectations. Any human will invariably disappoint when perfection is projected on her. On the other hand, a fictional character can effortlessly fill the most heroic shoes. With fictional prophets, we neither have to wait for our saviour nor be devastated about the inevitable fall from grace of our priesthood. 

By shifting the focal point of imitation to fictional characters, we are also protecting against  gurus who soak up projections to become psychopaths drunk on power. It also invites others into co-creation: Since there is no need for historic accuracy or priestly authority, anyone can add to the mythos of our made-up prophets. The invitation even extends to putting on the mask of the prophet themselves, without ever identifying with it. In this way, the prophet stops being a person and becomes a mode of being.   

The great Hanzi Freinacht is a prime example: The persona of the Nietzschean philosopher with captivating jawbones and imposing beard allows the authors to enter a prophetic mode they might otherwise be too modest for, without taking themselves too seriously. 

Stealing the Culture

This ain’t no fun as a single-player game; Metamodern Religion only comes to life with a collective of believers. We need to “steal the culture”, as Vervaeke says. Metamodern Religion has structural advantages in the memetic landscape and could convert increasing numbers from both the “spiritual but not religious” crowd as well as traditional religions.    

The dialectic between the creation of a Post-metaphysical God and the deconstruction of Self-aware narrativity could produce ever more compelling narratives. As time progresses, the petrified dogmas of traditional religions will appear more and more inconsistent. All the while, the population on average develops further and Metamodern Religion will exert an inexorable pull on adherents of traditional religions. 

At the same time, more scientific minded people would notice that the stories are in agreement with their worldview but provide much more personal and collective meaningfulness, so they too would be tempted to join in. Filling the God-shaped hole in their hearts in a way that doesn’t compromise on rationality could seem like a no-brainer.  

Metamodern religion will only feel intersubjectively real once a critical mass of “believers” subscribe to it. Just because we know that it’s just a story we made up doesn’t make it feel any less real. To the contrary, many metamodernists will only believe a story because they know they made it up. There is a certain bootstrapping principle at play here that reminds the concept of Hyperstition. Like a collective placebo effect, we might be surprised how real our headless God will feel once enough of us have agreed on a version we could believe in. 

Meta-rationality: Crossing the abyss

Camus juxtaposed the seemingly inherent need for meaning with the “unreasonable silence of nature”, a condition he titled the Absurd. If all truth is socially constructed, and it’s all really just power games deep down, why do anything at all? This feeling of absurdity, and the relativistic nihilism implied by the postmodern metameme is the abyss we need to cross. 

Meta-rationality, as described by David Chapman, is the stance that can overcome this nihilistic attitude without losing any insights of the postmodern critique. It affirms that rational systems and truth seeking makes sense to a certain extent and in certain contexts. By distinguishing between different methods of rationality and explaining their applicability and limitations, we can have our cake and eat it too. Yes, there are real patterns out there. We can reason about them, and we can be closer or further away to describing them accurately. And no, most of reality can’t be formalised well enough to apply strictly rational methods to. A lot of things we care about are socially constructed and too nebulous and interactive to capture in formal systems. Sometimes we can still reason about them, but only with fuzzy logic, or as Layman Pascal suggests, using the operators “somewhat”, “kind of”, and “almost”. 

In the context of Metamodern Religion, Meta-rationality allows us to distinguish between areas where we can formally strive for a better solution (e.g. the degree to which narratives map onto scientific theory, the game theory involved in global governance, or the empirical effectiveness of psycho-technologies), and areas where multiple solutions are called for.  This meta-rational understanding allows us to hold both relativism/narrativity and the aspiration towards truth in parallax. What David Chapman calls the “complete stance” or the “fluid mode” is also in line with the Metamodern principle of sincere irony: We are ironic because we know it’s all just language games on some level and sincere because we also know that there are better or worse games we could play, and because there is profound value at stake. 

So we indeed each need to shape our personal meanings (as we’ll see in the final sefira), but those should connect to a larger narrative that affords social cohesion around shared values (getting us out of the Meaning Crisis). This collective narrative should also *almost* map to real patterns in “objective” reality.

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The author is a technology entrepreneur and investor who prefers to remain pseudonymous. 

On his blog, he expresses his long-standing interest in philosophy, psychology, and psycho-technologies. As a technologist, serious meditator, and denizen of the liminal web, he likes writing at the intersections of different fields.