“Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological category”
—Theodor Adorno
The following is an extract of the first chapter from Hanzi Freinacht’s unpublished book ‘The 6 Hidden Patterns of History: A Metamodern Guide to World History’.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.
The previous chapter, “The 6 Hidden Patterns of History: Introduction”, can be accessed here.
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HF: 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:
- Art
- Philosophy
- Entrepreneurship
- Politics
- 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:
- Archaic: Simple spoken language.
- Animist: Abstract spoken language, and images and sculptures that represent what they look like.
- Faustian: Images that represent something else than what they look like: symbols for simple written messages and basic accounting.
- Postfaustian: Writing in abstracted texts, such as literature and algebra (not just inscriptions on graves and monuments).
- Modern: Printed texts (printing press, standardized alphabet and spelling, “codex” books, newspapers, mass distribution).
- 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.
