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Mursi Tribe by GV Prashanth on ArtStation.

This is in and of itself an understandable and honorable impulse. If modern life, or modernity, has disconnected us from nature, from our direct surroundings, from one another, from our bodies, from spiritual life, from the cathedral that is always present in earth and skies, the longing for and admiration of the remnants of tribal and animistic ways of life seems to offer a vital remedy. While we appreciate the freedoms and comforts of modern life, we all notice that we have piece by piece become creatures of the Internet, electronically mediated and photographically constructed cyborgs. No wonder we cannot save the environment from ourselves—and no wonder we feel alienated and lost in a world too artificial and confusing.

Our Problematic Longing for “the Indigenous”

Let us, before we go on, briefly reconstruct this newfound popular fascination with indigenous cultures. It entails:

• A shift in aesthetics, with expressions such as Afropunk (like the Afropunk festivalwhich attracts as many as 60k visitors.) On a wider scale yet, you have the increasing tendency to mimic (or co-opt or appropriate) native costumes and rituals in hippie/hipster festival occasions, not least as a part of the Ayahuasca tourist industries.
• An appreciation and honoring of indigenous lifestyles in the books of anthropologist David Graeberand aboriginal professor, Tyson Yunkaporta.
• The growth a vibrant scholarly counter-narrative to the economic “development” under the leadership of thinkers like anthropologist Arturo Escobar. Briefly stated, this position holds that it is a mistake to think of indigenous roots and cultures around the world as “under-developed” and that development itself cannot be thought of solely in terms of “extractive” economic growth. Rather, it is often the indigenous life forms that can and should inform the design of and solutions for humane, inclusive, and ecologically viable societies. Check out Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary — it’s got something for everyone!
• In connection with the above note, the growing use of indigenous technologies and practices as sources of design for homes, communities, and even infrastructure.
• The growing awareness that the defense of indigenous rights to land and conservation of lifestyles goes hand in hand with protecting vulnerable and vital ecosystems—see for instance the Amazon Sacred Headwaters Initiative.
• The increased fascination with indigenous wisdom and spirituality, often with the impulse to try to include representatives of such qualities in conferences and summits.
• The increased coverage of indigenous struggles for native rights and alliances in the mainstream media.
• And other elements you could add, I am sure…

By and large, this must be viewed as a kind of public awakening and there is good reason to celebrate it as an increasing awareness of the importance not only of our shared past and rootedness in ways of life that went on for tens of thousands of years, but also of the key role that can be played by the tribal societies around the world in the cultivation of multifarious expressions of genuinely vital and desirable—protopian — ways of life for people around the world.

Yet, I cannot escape the feeling that there is also something rather unsavory going on in our shared way of “grasping for” the indigenous. It is as if we all, even if out of very reasonable longings, cannot quite leave “the indigenous” alone—and that we tend to mash up too many, too different, and too rich and contextually situated cultures into one and the same concept. To push this line of argument further, I almost feel that we have developed an underlying vampiric relationship to animist cultures: like the archetype of an old, stagnated person wishing to steal the elixir of youth and vitality from a younger and less privileged person.

Have we subtly become the Wicked Witch of the West?

I don’t believe that this “vampiric” tendency is necessarily rooted in exploitation and ill-will. Rather, I believe that it emanates from a shared naivety on “our” (Westerners and others part of late modernity) behalf: The indigenous ways of life have become so foreign to us that we cannot help but to view them through an exotified, hyper-essentializing lens—one that subtly carries our post-colonial and orientalist heritage forward in new guises. In our eagerness to “be more indigenous”, to be wiser, more embodied, more at home in the world, to become ecologically sane, we tend to forget that the indigenous cultures of the world are not ours to simply take. This creates a somewhat awkward dynamic through which we want something from the members of indigenous cultures around the world—not as unique expressions of themselves, but as expressions of our ideas and ideals of “the indigenous”.

And need I point out, that whatever we Westerners and other late moderns seek to cram into this one single concept of “the indigenous” (and its purported “wisdom”) there is just no way that the term can encapsulate these wildly varied ways of life? From the San of southern central Africa, to the Mursi of Ethiopia (title image is of Mursi man), to the “Zuni” of Central America (not their indigenous name, for one thing), to the Inuit of Greenland, to the Ainu of Japan, to the Lue of Thailand (who are, by the way, “indigenous” but not tribal or animist just to make matters more complicated), to the Aboriginal Australians, to the folks of the Andaman Islands? I suppose, from an anthropological perspective, one could abstract certain qualities that these have in common—even if these elements often mix with modern systems of economic exchange. But when we apply our term “indigenous” to these contexts, we are of course only seeing each of these cultures through a certain lens—one that has nothing to do with their cultures, and everything to do with modern, Western, culture. Even if we all get degrees in anthropology and spend a few years writing ethnographies about “indigenous” ways of life, this will still be the case: the very idea to view them as anthropological is a modern concept.

Let us then compare the picture of Mursi man above to this image of the Tsaatan reindeer herders of Mongolia:

Tsaatan reindeer herders (and riders!) of Mongolia.

Tsaatan reindeer herders (and riders!) of Mongolia.

The two—the Mursi and the Tsaatan—are arguably more widely different than the lifestyles of any modern country, from China, to Mexico, to New Zealand. (I theorize about why this is the case in a former article on the relationship between chaos theory and cultural development).

Both of these images express ostensibly magical cultures (a wording I borrowed from a friend, Chuck Pezeshki. And it’s natural for us to long for magic in our lives. But is it the same magic across different cultures, and can it truly be caught with one word, “indigenous”? Can we “add indigenous and stir” to our progressive and transformative practices, hanging another dream catcher on our porch? Or are we being creepy?

With these points in mind, consider the following critiques of our growing tendency to long for the indigenous:

• There is always a risk of “appropriating” the indigenous cultures, meaning that the unique identities and expressions of these become part of our larger, commercialized systems, which in turn can harm the self-distinction and dignity of minorities.
• If tribal cultures are fetishized, large swathes of majority populations will “want something” from them, and this something may not even be there to begin with. This can be excruciating and frustrating.
• Our longing for the indigenous can often be expressed as “token” representation, either through musical performances at festivals or with just a few people brought in to the summit. This kind of artificial interpretation turns people into a kind of living museum objects to be collected. Gotta catch ’em all, right?
• The grasping to reconnect to the indigenous subtly ignores what they want—while refocusing on how we want their qualities to save us.
• Our engagement with postcolonial values (through universities mostly) can make Westerners (or other moderns) into the spokespeople for indigenous causes, supplanting their own voices (the “sub-saltern”, to use Spivak’s term).
• And, again, the very notion of “the indigenous” arguably makes the Mursi and the Tsaatan and the Inuit invisible to us: we just see our own concepts that smash them together, not them.
• We infantilize our fellow human beings by projecting upon them an aura of innocence, purity, and authenticity. The lives and ways of life of the multiplicity of animist and tribal cultures contain all the struggle, strife, evil, manipulation, violence, tragedy, and brokenness of human existence along with those qualities we find enchanting. It’s not for kids.
• We disrespect whole cultures and ways of life when we “want the cake and eat it too” by wishing to keep the perceived (or imagined) coziness of and magic of animist life, but at the same time not wishing to dispense with the comforts and freedoms of modern life. How is this disrespectful? It fails to see that these cultures are responding to the real pressures and demands of life, and that their unique beauties and communities have grown from that. If you rip out the nice part but ignore the challenge, you disrespect the suffering and hard work that goes into creating and upholding the beauty of that particular culture.

Our admiration of “the indigenous” and the discourse it brings in progressive and countercultural circles is certainly preferable to our recent history of viewing our fellow human beings, often of the oldest and most refined cultures on earth, as savages, and “natives” to be “civilized”. Of course, this view still occurs among less progressive people: a young Christian missionary, John Allen Chau, was killed in 2018 as he came to convert the uncontacted Sentinelese (after traveling there illegally).

But even with this apparent step up, all of the above critiques still seem to hold.

The Ever-Present Origin Revisited

The irony of it all is that, psychologically speaking, we perhaps never left our indigenous, animistic, or tribal homestead. I have thus come to believe that our search for a home in the universe is actually not about an exotifying anthropology (itself being a modern and distancing and abstracting way of seeing, which of course in and of itself takes nothing away from its value as a kind of knowledge, but does highlight that anthropology is unlikely to lead to a reconstruction of the indigenous in our lives).

Instead, I have come to believe that making the universe our home is about a very subtle but brutally honest introspection: it’s about seeing how the tribal, the animist, the indigenous element lives within us. It’s about noticing what is already there. What was there all along: it was our home for tens of thousands of years, and for many of us, since about ten millennia, it faded into the background of our awareness.

If we trace the lines of Jean Gebser’s 1950s work, The Ever-Present Origin, (without necessarily buying his whole framework or its details) we can note that Gebser held that consciousness has restructured itself throughout history:

1. from the Archaic world where everything seems to be One (where we live in a cave, under a close and intimate sky, undifferentiated from much in the natural world)…
2. to the Magic world where the inner world is differentiated from nature, here in the guise of spirits, magic, ancestral union with nature, and ecstatic ritual practices—all of which is expressed, of course, through art, an art that is naturally genuine, expressive, and beautiful (for the cave paintings in France to today’s rich animist expressions)…
3. to the Mythic world of religions and more elaborate and systematized mythologies of chiefdoms and civilizations, where magic is at one further remove from everyday life—belonging to a celestial, distinctly other realm…
4. and from there on to what Gebser calls a Mental world and an Integral 

Let us disregard for a moment that this early theorist of the shifting modes of consciousness (in arts, science, philosophy, and so on) had a somewhat different model than later scholars. (For an excellent introduction, see Jeremy Johnson’s book on Jean Gebser.)

What is striking is that Gebser points out that there appear to be deep structures to human consciousness itself, expressed in and through the types of culture we are part of and live by. And these structures can only emerge in and through one another. Thus, any one structure is never truly left behind.

What if the Archaic, Magic (often corresponding to tribal/animist/indigenous), and Mythic structures are still present in us—right here, right now? What if they’re just repressed, downplayed, shamed, hidden in plain sight? What if we never left magic behind in the first place? What if God only appeared to die?

There is almost a mystical element to Gebser’s thought here: The “later” structures of consciousness are always-already embedded within the earlier ones, just as the earlier ones are always-still present within the later ones, without which they would not be possible. I say “mystical” because it thus follows that the omega point of where consciousness travels is already inherent in the earliest expression of consciousness (presumably also non-human consciousness) while the alpha point is never lost however far consciousness travels and shifts. (And, indeed, due to this mystical element of his social philosophy, Gebser’s oeuvre was never quite as respected and known as it might have been).

The source of our consciousness, the basic “universe as a home”, is an ever-present origin. The endpoint is a return. Forward is backwards.

Upwards is inwards.

Evolution is involution.

Better understanding of “you” is better knowledge of the great “it” of the universe, which is ultimately a better understanding of me. So science is introspection—just by a wide and necessarily detouring arc.

It all leads back to the ever-present origin. To the primordial home: That life is beautiful and this world is worth living in, and it is a home, despite all of its apparent harshness.

Maybe, then, looking for the magical within small and relatively foreign cultures is a fool’s errand. Maybe we need to find the pensée sauvage, the wild manners of thought, feeling, and being, within our own cultures, within ourselves?

No—indeed, I should like to go farther still in this argument: Could it be that our obsession with “the indigenous” is in and of itself a kind of denial?

Now, consider the work of those “gone native” anthropologists—some of whom explicitly say they’ve had sex with gnomes (when on spiritual journeys with indigenous rituals, etc.). My favorite is the somewhat hyper-sexual work of Hans-Peter Duerr. This guy—gotta love him—wrote five very thick books just to disprove one book by an influential sociologist, Norbert Elias. And he pretty much failed to disprove Elias’s brilliant theory (on “the civilizing process”) and, by the way, missed the point with it.

Anyway, Duerr describes in his books the radical and dramatic entrance into a world more beautiful and alive than anything modern life can offer. This is Dreamtime; it is access to altered states, and it is a kind of understanding of the world that animists may understand but modern people lack.

No wonder he never quite came back from wonderland. Would you have?

Now, again—there is something subtly hysterical and unsavory about Duerr’s story. But could we, hand in hand, reconstruct that journey he took? Could we retrace those steps?

I know I am not being entirely realistic here, but let me finish the thought for the sake of completeness:

• Could we reconstruct the Archaic in our lives by creating spaces in which we strip down everything but the most essential? When was the last day when you didn’t quantify anything, seek to achieve anything, seek to play a role? Probably it was before you were two years old.
• Could the Magic be reconstructed by time away in neo-tribal settings, where we live close to nature and only have a small group to cooperate with and find meaning with? Could we dance rather than think so much? Sing rather than discuss? Who knows—maybe we would find that the Magic, the animist, the indigenous, is not entirely lacking in us after all? Either way, whatever we find, it would be real and come from us, not from what we tried to extract from the last few tribal cultures on earth, destroying them in the process.
• Could the Mythic be reconstructed—monastic time spent searching for our own truths and an intimate relationship to something bigger than ourselves? How many of us even quite know we have this opportunity? Could many more be offered it?

And, of course, to integrate all of that with “modern” life is what Gebser called “Integral”. I would like to call it metamodern or protopian.

The indigenous we’re looking for is closer than we think. Protopia is closer than we think. Not as in “it’s in a nearer future”. It’s more intimately weaved into our lives.

The “pensée sauvage” (Wild Thought) was originally a play-on-words by the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss: It referred to a flower, a wild pansy flower. The rare and wild flower, the thought that springs up out there in nature.

Well, as Henri Matisse once said: There are flowers everywhere, for those who deign to see them.

Stop looking for magic: It’s already here. Let’s just create space for it in our societies.

—

Hanzi Freinacht is a political philosopher, historian, and sociologist, author of ‘The Listening Society’, ‘Nordic Ideology’ and the upcoming books ‘The 6 Hidden Patterns of History’ and ‘Outcompeting Capitalism’. 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.

Governance is, in many ways, the most important question of all. In societies that are well-governed, people do well (as far as that’s possible in a world full of challenges).

In this article, I skip the wider and more universal framework for analyzing and diagnosing governance, moving directly to “the vision itself”: the more desirable forms of governance that may become possible only under the best societal conditions.

Let us briefly note: I am not presenting a certain system of governance that I believe is the best for all societies, in all situations. Rather, I am presenting a certain future “attractor point” of governance that I believe is possible (and desirable) to achieve if and when other problems have been dealt with to a sufficient degree: inefficient bureaucracy, failing monopolies of violence, lacking legitimacy, fragmented collective identity, short-circuited informational feedback cycles, coerced distortions of public discourse, and so forth—all of the classical problems of governance. In my earlier attempt at a “general theory of governance” I outlined eight fundamental, but highly abstracted, social functions, and argued that the problems of governance that we see in the world, across the board, come down to imbalances between how these eight principles play out (and I am grateful to One Project for having made this work possible).

So, needless to say, the “protopian” form of governance is not to be “implemented” in Afghanistan on Tuesday. Protopian governance is to be cultivated by agents sensitive to the limitations inherent to any reform and the risks involved.

I shall thus summarize the future of governance in three design principles. By “design principle” I basically mean a feature of a governance system, but—again—not “implemented from above”; rather, a design principle is a recognizable pattern that grants a sense of direction to the larger process of cultivating new forms of governance. Basically, I hold that we are to ask ourselves for each change: “Is this particular development in line with our design principles?”

Oh, and by the way, let’s give a definition of “governance” before we proceed:

• Governance is the capacity of humans to weave their individual streams-of-action into coordinated wholes, so that actions form chains that are coordinated across time and space, in a manner increasing the likelihood of desirable results and decreasing the likelihood of undesirable results.

And if you wish to add another layer to it:

• Governance includes the coordination of human communicative actions that determine which results are desirable and undesirable.

My friend, the philosopher Magnus Vinding, suggests in his new book, Reasoned Politics, that “politics” has two layers: a values layer (establishing what we want and why) and an empirical layer (establishing what is true about getting where we want, so as to inform policy and action). I think that works well: governance, in a comprehensive sense, is about coordinating actions, including establishing the values from which we govern and agree to be being governed.

With that much established, let’s delve into the three design principles.

Design Principle 1:
Don’t ask how to make governance “more democratic”; ask how to increase collective intelligence

It is a common trap to focus on the question of how to make governance “more democratic”. The reasons for falling into this trap are fairly obvious: Across the world, and from a century of historical experience and data, we can see that more democratic societies generally fare better than less democratic ones—or at the very least that they abuse their citizens much less.

Given such strong correlations with greater democracy (of happiness, of health, of education, of human rights, of peace, and so forth) and given the extremely strong position of “democracy” as an ideology or discourse across the world, this is of no surprise. It simply seems logical, according to our stubborn habit to think linearly, that if democracy has been good so far, more democracy is even better.

And, in a sense, there is good reason to believe that this is the case. It’s alright to seek to deepen and increase the level of democracy in the world—not least as it has begun to decline across the world (globally speaking, it has decreased for 15 consecutive years). For certain, most of the world needs more and deeper democracy, not less.

But what happens when you get to the highest scores on the international rankings of democracy? Is your society thereby perfect? Is no further development of your forms of governance possible or desirable? Is the story of humanity fundamentally the one about, as some have said, “getting to Denmark?”

But once you do “get to Denmark” (having a stable liberal democracy, a functional market, and significant social welfare)—does further development of the systems of governance cease to be desirable, or even possible? And does further development entail “more democracy”?

If by “more democracy” we mean that “more people get a greater say in more issues”, there is indeed no reason to believe that we should seek to attain that goal. As argued in Democracy For Realists (see here for a summary), you often get worse result for everyone involved by simply expanding how many people are directly involved in decision-making.

In that sense, then, “more democracy” is often the last thing you want. What we usually mean by “more democracy in the world” is not to involve as many people as possible in as many decisions as possible, but rather the cultivation of a number of interrelated institutions that tend to remove power imbalances and the obvious misuse of power. This makes it appear as though getting more people involved in more decisions, because the less democratic societies are also the worse governed ones, but this is manifestly untrue—it’s a so-called “spurious relationship”.

The underlying principle is simply that fewer distortions of information and suppression of voices and interests tends to create more intelligent and tenable decisions.

Collective intelligence is the capacity of a group to solve shared problems. At this point, fairly little is known about it and researchers are still arguing about whether or not it’s really “one thing” or if there are indeed different dimensions of it. But on a trivial level, we can all understand that some groups (or collectives or organizations) will be better able to solve common problems than others, and that this must reasonably be the case also for societies at large—even for civilizations.

All I am saying with this design principle is that there is no reason to seek to “increase democracy” in and of itself, for its own sake. There is no “democracy god” that will punish us if we don’t. Democracy is good because it increases collective intelligence (and mitigates collective stupidity)—until it isn’t and doesn’t.

Hence, the four great strands of democratic decision making: direct democracy, representative democracy, participatory democracy, and deliberative democracy cannot be viewed as inherently practically or morally superior to one another. Rather, you need to see which types of decisions can reasonably be made by which forms of democratic governance.

To increase collective intelligence often means to move complex decisions into the realm of participatory and deliberative democracies—i.e. involving stakeholders and creating citizen councils selected by sortition (lottery) to discuss a matter before a policy is decided upon. In a way, this means that fewer people get a say which might seem “less democratic”—but at the same time, a richer and more nuanced picture can come to the fore, and this in turn means that people’s opinions on a matter can less easily be manipulated by smaller elites or interest groups.

With such developments, we move towards “less democracy”, and certainly fewer instances of voting, but hopefully towards greater collective intelligence.

Design Principle 2:
Create Meshwork Governance and Ignore the Principle of Subsidiarity

Another trap for creating the future of governance is to follow the principle of subsidiarity: that decisions should be made at the lowest possible level, thereby as closely as possible to the people affected by the decisions. For instance, there is little reason for the EU Commission to decide upon how my local municipality organizes its waste management. We’re here in this little township, and we presumably know better what works for us.

There are a number of paradoxes with this line of thinking. Let’s stay with the municipal waste management example for a moment.

• Firstly, it is still the case that the waste produced by my municipality can and will affect people and environments beyond it. Is it truly just our decision?
• Secondly, there may very well be a majority within my municipality who favor a cheaper and less environmentally friendly waste management system (just pile it up and burn it), and if the environmentally friendly minority cannot appeal to a higher instance, court, or national parliamentary legislation, they will simply be outnumbered. However, if the environmentally friendly people can ally across the nation and across the EU, they can exert enough influence to change many municipalities. This is just as an example—but would you say that they are wrong to push for good waste management “for the sake of subsidiarity”?
• Thirdly, there are always issues upon which we cannot agree as to where the boundary goes between “who is affected”. Let’s say one community decides to have a very experimental and religiously fundamentalist school system—and neighboring communities now begin to fear for their lives and for civil war or acts of religiously motivated terrorism. Maybe the fears are unfounded—we’ll know within a few decades. Who has the right to sovereignty, the experimental religious community, or the larger number of neighboring communities who fear for their safety?

To be clear, I am not “against” the principle of subsidiarity. Of course, there is no reason for the state government to decide upon where my local scout club should go trekking. It’s just that it cannot alone account for much of how the future of governance can and should function.

I instead hold that a sort of “meshwork governance” is the direction of protopian development. By this I mean to say that units of governance can and should exchange influence over one another, so as to create a lattice, network, or meshwork of lateral representation. Simple example: Naturally, Denmark and Sweden are sovereign states and cannot decide upon one another’s policies. But since Denmark is very much affected by Sweden and vice versa, it makes sense to not only make some bilateral deals from time to time, but to actually exchange a bit of influence over one another. Denmark’s perspective can and should be present in many more decisions in Sweden, and vice versa. Let us thus say that Denmark and Sweden find a way to exchange 1% of their power over one another. Now, Sweden automatically takes Denmark a little more into consideration in all of its decisions and vice versa. The two harmonize a little better.

(It’s not entirely unlike the idea of double-linking in sociocracy.)

Given the above design principle of collective intelligence, which often is increased by (deliberative) council rule, such meshwork governance would often mean exchanging seats within different deliberative councils on topics which have many stakeholders. Let’s say we have a citizen policy council on reducing criminal gang activity in South Sweden, close to Denmark—it would make perfect sense to have Danish representatives, not only because these may give valuable outsider perspectives, but also because their own gang violence scene overlaps and interacts with the Swedish one and they may thereby have both their own interests to defend and hold key pieces of the puzzle. Eventually, you may find that you have enough stakeholders for your organization to be run up to 50% by others—while your organization now in turn affects decisions of its environment. You have gone from separateness and “sovereignty” to a meshwork of governance.

The direction, then, is not necessarily towards greater and greater subsidiarity, but rather towards more and more meshwork governance, where different units of power sort of yin-yang their way into greater coherence. As such, we are not establishing coherence from above through harmonizing legal systems etc. (although such moves may sometimes be warranted, too); we are instead piece by piece revealing what physicist David Bohm called an “implicate order” (in his philosophical, not his scientific, work). Things fit together, yes, but in highly complex and inherently non-obvious ways, ways that must be revealed by searching for the truth together and sharing a multitude of differing perspectives.

I have thus come to believe that the principle of subsidiarity is a very partial description of the future of governance, and that meshwork governance is the stronger attractor point. It opens up the question of who is a stakeholder and where: Are hospitals stakeholders in schools—if so, to which degree?

Design Principle 3:
Allow for Deep Feedback Cycles—Limit Fast and Shallow Ones!

This point is a more abstract nature than the two above ones—please bear with me. At the same time, it can be stated yet more concisely: We tend to overemphasize short and shallow feedback cycles while ignoring the long and deep ones. Instead, we should increase our capacity to make fundamental and structural changes, while being less sensitive to short-term trends and pressures.

A few examples might be in order.

For instance, it is very difficult to change and update institutions of governance in most countries. An example is the United States, which has been in a cycle of institutional decay for the better part of a half-century, and unable to escape its rut. Small interest groups affect policy too much, which incapacitates governance, which undermines public trust, which creates a pressure for smaller government, which makes renewed governance structures even harder to fund and achieve. As a result, American society as a whole becomes less and less efficiently governed as the decades go by (and, as stated above, the quality of governance is the number one determining factor of its thriving). Because no agent can successfully update the system of governance, it continues to decay.

At the same time, consider the fact that businesses in the US and elsewhere report results four times a year, and that these quarterly reports have huge impacts on their funding, prestige, and future. Hence, they will break and bend to present fairly narrowly defined results in these reports. They are here stuck in very short feedback cycles, ones that in many ways affect society at large and thereby shape also how policies and public discourses are played out. Even within one 4-year presidential term, feedback cycles of public opinion, how the economy is going, and so on, can lead to swift changes of course and the interruption (or at least disruption) of numerous important long-term projects and investments.

Our governance systems react too fast to too shallow feedback, and too weakly to slow feedback cycles, like those of the environment.

Hence, the governance of the future can and should have more “reboot functions” built into them. These can look in many different ways, but the key principle is that there should be specific features that allow for the governance systems themselves to be fundamentally updated periodically—i.e. systems of governance should have special functions to make sure the “rules of the game” are updated in accordance with deep, structural changes. It is not wise and advisable to run a country in the internet age with a constitution drafted at the beginning of the industrial age. And so, constitutional reform should be made more accessible with periodic intervals. In practice, at the national level, this may mean that, once every 20 years, you can change the constitution with a simple majority vote. This would mobilize “deep reformist” to concentrate on how to use the next opportunity to change the fundamental game rules of their country. On other levels of governance, it could take different forms.

At the same time, the sensitivity to short feedback cycles may actually need to be reduced. We have become accustomed to thinking that more feedback information, more documentation, and quicker iteration is always a good thing. We tend to condemn, in harsh if superficially polite words, the rigidity of those who will not be open to criticism and feedback. However, for feedback to be truly valuable, it needs to be a) generalizable across multiple situations and settings, i.e. based on multiple data points, and b) properly processed as a piece of meaningful information, i.e. the best available interpretation must come to the fore for the right corrective steps to be taken.

It should also be noted that such data processing is a costly endeavor for all parties involved. The contemporary hysteria of consumer capitalism and services of public administration that spam us with emails and even intrusive survey phone calls “wanting your opinion!” is not a mark of humility or intelligent governance. Most of this information falls flat, is based upon the wrong questions being asked, is never fully followed up on, and so forth. They also drive an unsavory trend of hyper-quantification in society, the harms of which are too complex and numerous to be discussed here.

I suppose that a more listening society should also be better at leaving us the f* alone, while focusing on slowly building bases of carefully considered information for slower and more profound changes. This will increase stability and save considerable resources while still making society more flexible.

To summarize and coordinate this last point with the first two design principles:

• Greater collective intelligence will tend towards fewer people more deeply involved in more multi-perspectival and disinterested (because we select also neutral representatives) processes of deliberation in councils, with a greater emphasis on the quality of the communicative process. The development of new systems of governance are evaluated on the basis of collective intelligence, not “democracy” in and of itself.
• Such councils will in turn create an increasingly complex meshwork of cross-influence, hence converging on a deeper and deeper coherence, without there being one central authority that forces them in line.
• And such councils will be committed to serving long-term and deep transformations, while being designed to resist short-term pressures and trends. This is achieved by replacing the “collect feedback” trend with more long-term qualitative learning processes of the councils, and by creating the feature of periodic “reboot functions” through which the purposes and values of the councils can be redefined.

As such, the vision of Protopian governance is, very simply put:

• A large set of different units of governance that are tailored to maximize the collective intelligence with which different topics are managed, which are laterally connected into a meshwork of mutual influence, and which continuously evolve by periodically updating their constitutional forms and the stated purposes they serve.

There is, of course, more to the idea of Protopian governance—but this would be the bare basics. And that’s enough to reshape the world. Remember, though—don’t build this from scratch: cultivate it with a sensitivity to the initial conditions of the societies within which you act. Protopian is the next step after Liberal Democracy, and while there may be opportunities for developing countries to cultivate it, it always builds upon transcending and including the principles of democracy. The point is that development is never linear, and so even as Protopian governance grows from the soil of liberal democracy, it looks and feels quite different from it.

—

Hanzi Freinacht is a political philosopher, historian, and sociologist, author of ‘The Listening Society’, ‘Nordic Ideology’ and the upcoming books ‘The 6 Hidden Patterns of History’ and ‘Outcompeting Capitalism’. 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.

Let’s start with pointing out the glaring irrationalities of the criminal justice systems of today—in functional liberal democracies, that is. We may leave aside the more obvious case of autocratic or corrupted systems. We may even leave aside the critique of the irrationalities of the hyper-imprisonment practiced in the USA due to what appears to be the confluence of the economic incentives of the “prison-industrial complex” with racial and class biases. Let us target instead target the shared philosophical basis of liberal, democratic (modern) systems of law, even when they function as they purportedly “should”. This critique holds equally for the (largely Anglo-Saxon) common law and the (largely European) civil law traditions.

The somewhat gruesome public spectacle of the ongoing Johnny Depp and Amber Heard trial is only a case in point—whatever it is we’re watching, it is hardly a rationally organized process of finding the best solutions for healing of relationships, the restoration of personal dignity, and guidance towards desirable future behaviors.

“Equality Before the Law” Is Not Justice

If we take these goals (relational healing, protected personal dignity, and behavior change in pro-social directions) as being the “rationally desired” outcomes of our judicial processes, it is difficult to see why the current consensus of criminal justice would be the best possible one. It works, one way or another, like this:

• The parliament decides, through a majority vote, upon the legal consequences for a certain crime or transgression, while giving an as clear as possible definition of that transgression: say, murder or theft results in the sentencing to a so-and-so long term in prison.
• The justice system ensues a chain of events, from the reporting of the alleged crime, to the investigation into the matter by police and prosecutor, to the trial with a defense by an attorney and the sentence by a judge (and/or citizen jury).
• The sentence takes effect and the parties are subjected to the consequences of the trial: parties may receive new rights and obligations (such as getting compensated by the other party, staying away from the other party, or going to prison).

On the face of it, to our common sense, it appears as though “justice has been done”. People were held responsible according to the laws that were laid down democratically, equally for all of us, and they had the same opportunities as everyone else to know the law and to act in accordance with it. But this view misses a deeper point: There is no rational reason to believe that what was decided upon in a completely different context (a parliamentary promulgation of a piece of law code) can and should lead to the most desirable outcomes for the parties involved in this specific little tragedy, including for the “victim” or injured party, and the public. No argument is made for why specifically “six months in prison” makes good or repairs this particular transgression, say, the theft of a car. Will the victim feel vindicated? Will the thief learn their lesson? Will the public feel that justice has been done, and will it be protected from further thefts? We just don’t know.

Whereas our legal systems do, after all, have considerable leeway for case-to-case adjustments (there are scales of sentences, age limits, ameliorating circumstances, and so forth), they are—on the whole—not capable of truly managing the unique complexities of each social situation, of the specific tragedies of the humans involved: their narratives, their emotions, their behavioral responses. To sum it up, we could note that:

• The communicative process of the trial itself is not optimized for personal expression and mutual understanding—and this means that the parties communicate at, to put it mildly, a less-than-optimal level of clarity and self-knowledge.
• The parties involved in the trial are not supported to deal with the often exceedingly emotionally difficult situation that the trial entails.
• The actual emotional and material needs of the victimized side are not brought to the fore, nor sufficiently developed to their end-point: Do they seek safety from further transgressions by the offender, do they desire revenge, do they seek the restoration of personal dignity, do they wish to hear a sincere apology, are there economic or practical needs that should be addressed?
• The legal sanctions, punishments, or other consequences are not argued for in terms of behavioral-scientific terms, given the specific profiles of the people involved—they are simply assumed to be “just” because “the people” (represented by parliament) have laid down a certain law.
• The actual results in terms of healing, restoration of dignity, and behavioral changes (or learning, or new self-awareness, or changes of attitudes) are not followed up upon, recorded, and learned from for future cases.
• No list or battery of different possible, case-tailored, interventions is consulted and drawn upon for the optimal expected results given the specific personal profiles and needs of the parties (nor are the results of such interventions recorded for future uses).
• And, as already in part mentioned, no psychological-behavioral profiles are made of the parties that would help predict which interventions would be the most likely to have desirable long-term effects.

In short, there are very little “rational” processes involved in our systems of justice. Rather, the prevailing sense of justice appears to be based upon a kind of “civic religion”: We have faith in our police, prosecutors, attorneys, and judges as enactors of an abstracted “will of the people”. The early system of laws from Babylonia, Hammurabi’s code, purportedly rested upon inspiration from the god Marduk. Perhaps, today, we are not all too different—except our “god” is this abstracted “will of the people”.

But when we turn to this “the people” as the source of our justice and all judgments made, it seems to dissolve into thin air: who exactly is it that wills that this particular person should be sentenced to six months in prison, not four, nor seven? Popular sentiments very often wish for fiercer punishments and feel outraged at how easily many of our criminals get off the hook after even the cruelest behaviors. It is quite clearly not the people or community that genuinely “wills” the sentences into being. And by what rational arguments do we make such drastic interventions? If we, for instance, by force imprison a person, would it not be reasonable to ask of our justice system that it has genuinely sound, case-specific, arguments for doing so—in that particular case?

Or to put it differently: The decisions made by our courts are arguably as crucial and important as the medical decisions made by doctors or psychiatrists. Would we trust in the soundness of medical decisions that were based not on diagnostics of the specific case and best practices according to medical science, but upon fairly arbitrary rules of thumb laid down by “the will of the people”? If your doctor did not take tests and consult medical journals, but simply said that “the law states that a person with your condition should have this treatment”, would you feel that “medicine has been done”?

It is, I feel, safe to assume that we would find such a procedure neither safe nor sound. Why then do we so willingly accept this level of arbitrariness when it comes to judicial procedures and the dramatic results they bring? Why are we so surprised—even perpetually shocked—when different courts reach wildly different conclusions in the very same cases, resulting in opposite verdicts?

This should arguably lead us to question the very principle of a certain “sacred cow” of modern society: namely, our equality before the law. Maybe we cannot be truly equal—perhaps we shouldn’t even be equal, because what appears as surface-level equality is truly an institutionalized insensitivity to what every situation calls for. Perhaps, in some cases, imprisonment makes perfect sense to remedy some of the ills of a crime, whereas, in other cases, the very same intervention can be entirely detrimental for all parties involved. If we truly care about the fate and well-being of the parties involved and the effects upon the larger community— if justice and care are combined into one—should we not wish for a more case-tailored form of justice? Such a justice may, at the surface level, appear less equal. But the results it produces could very well be in service of a deeper, underlying equality:

• Equality before the law does not mean that the same law applies equally to everyone, but that the same processes of finding the best solutions are the inalienable right of all citizens.

I have thus come to believe that the justice systems of the future would be more akin to how we today approach medical or psychiatric procedures. Medicine and psychiatry are of course, to say the least, no angels. They are subject to all the biases of corruption, economic incentives, personal interests, undue mutual dependencies, bureaucratic fallacies, and misuses of power that mark all parts of society. But at least they do build upon a rational-scientific ethos that, in theory, tailor every intervention to the specific diagnostics of each case, working according to the best practices to try to predict the most desirable outcomes. It is that principle I am after.

Beyond Restorative Justice

No doubt, some readers will be familiar with the Restorative Justice movement and its theory proposed by criminologist John Braithwaite. The idea here is to create dialogical processes that lead to resolution, forgiveness, healing, mutual understanding, and repentance of the involved parties. While I have considerable sympathy for this position and its ambitions, I also believe that its failure to spread and take hold in our institutions over the last decades ultimately comes down to its exaggerated emphasis on “soft values” (or what I have termed “game denial”). Not all situations can realistically be treated in mutually enriching dialogues under the guidance of well-intentioned mediators: there are violent crimes, rape, extreme animosities, false accusations, and of course, manipulative and anti-social persons who squarely lie. Dialogues in such situations can be destructive and even traumatizing. The same system of thought also has difficulties dealing with the very real existence of the monopoly of violence: supposed perpetrators “must” come to the dialogue table—but who exactly enforces this “must”? Furthermore, Restorative Justice downplays the role of moral outrage and the sometimes arguably justified need to seek punishment against transgressors; the wish for revenge is a strong and ubiquitous human emotion that must also be allowed its place—and even in cases where it is not deemed to be justified, it can only be ignored at the peril of further raising social tensions.

A further development, in my view, has been suggested in the guise of the Therapeutic Jurisprudence framework, associated with legal theorists David Wexler and Bruce Winick. It takes as its starting point that “law as a social force (or agent) […] inevitably gives rise to unintended consequences, which may be either beneficial (therapeutic) or harmful (anti-therapeutic)”. Simply put, this discipline tries not so much to make justice as “nice as possible” like Restorative Justice arguably does (which thus reflects what I view as a “postmodern” position on justice), but rather seeks to academically establish “what really works” in terms of the interventions of the justice system (thereby nearing what I take to be a “metamodern” position). It has no principled argument against punishments, as Restorative Justice has—it just holds that any measure taken, including the trial itself, should be scrutinized for desirable and undesirable consequences.

The Therapeutic Jurisprudence position is closer to my own, but to my knowledge its adherents have yet to formulate a comprehensive vision of a truly therapeutically functional justice system. To the followers of Therapeutic Jurisprudence, the goal is not to reject the entirety of our current legal systems, but to improve upon their functioning by means of careful research into the real consequences of different judicial procedures.

Protopian Justice

This latter point, to offer a paradigmatic alternative to our justice system as a whole, is what I would like to sketch in the following, drawing in part on both of the mentioned traditions, Restorative Justice and Therapeutic Jurisprudence.

I would thus summarize the vision a future, metamodern or protopian, justice system as follows:

• Thetrial itself is viewed as a major communicative event with great social consequences for its parties and the wider community. Thus, the trial begins with a phase of “communicative preparation” through which specifically educated expert mediators interview the parties (individually, not together) so as to help them clarify and advance their respective positions: What is their narrative through which they make meaning of the events? What do they truly want? What are they afraid of? What emotional needs do they have? Can they be brought to reach greater peace and clarity about what they seek to achieve and what their interests are? What is it they wish to express or communicate?
• The court takes stock of the psycho-social parameters of the situation: Who are the people involved, psychologically speaking? A bar fight between two 20 years old men is arguably different than a fight between two 80 years old ladies in a nursing home, even if the factual circumstances may converge (a jug was smashed against a forehead, etc.). Collect relevant data, so that more desirable consequences of the trial can be predicted.
• This data is stored and compared to a wider battery of possible interventions, and different interventions are weighed for pros and cons in the given situation, with an eye to the specific profiles of the people involved (including their psychological, social, and psychiatric profiles).
• A larger and wider list of possible legal interventions is collated across many trials, so that the window of possible options widens as the legal system develops through new cases in court. Agents from across society—public, private, and civil society—are allowed to offer interventions that are scrutinized for empirical results and can thus be added to the list.
• The court proceedings themselves are guided by the aided communication of expert mediators, where the parties are encouraged to express their genuine interests and emotions along with their version of “the truth” of the events that occurred, with sensitivity to the larger social situation as a whole.
• The court reaches a verdict by arguing that their proposed intervention will have the best possible (or least possible negative) consequences for the parties involved, especially in terms of support for the “victims” of crime. This is done by referring to empirical data on 1) this particular set of interventions for 2) this particular type of persons in 3) this particular kind of situation. If no such relevant data can be found, the next best empirical data are generalized from and argued from in terms of deductive reasoning.
• The social, emotional, behavioral, and community results for all parties involved are followed up upon within a relevant time frame, evaluated according to standards of empirical research, and recorded. If the results of the interventions are deemed undesirable or insufficient, the court decision may be corrected and a new set of interventions set in motion.
• Upon the making of the verdict, a communicative process is initiated with the parties involved to explain the reasons for the verdict, according to communicative strategies suitable for a person of their personal profile (a young, banlieue gangster may need another way of being fully informed about the verdict and its rationale than an educated, white-collar tax evader, etc.) This communicative process continues for some time until the greatest possible peace has been made with the verdict and the parties, if possible, can explain its effects and rationale in their own words. They may not agree with it, but to maximize the level of support for the verdict, this is a very important—and today entirely overlooked—step.
• All collected data goes in a public database, where “big data” crunching allows for the legal professionals to search predictive, behavioral data on the best possible outcomes of interventions for this particular kind of case with these particular types of persons with these particular interests. This data base largely replaces the common law practice of precedent(a principle or rule established in a previous legal case; also a thing in civil law). This avoids issues of “path dependency”, through which a legal intervention can take hold and keep existing for long despite its negative consequences or lack of evidence for desirable consequences.

In short, we should build our legal system on a combination of curated communication, behavioral science, and a growing public “big data” base of empirically verified knowledge. As such, each legal intervention should be, not perfect, but at least as well-argued as it possible can be at that point in time.

We must never lose from sight the fact that the court proceeding are in and of themselves an exceedingly important event in people’s lives. This is, by the way, why we keep making court process movies: they are dramatic performances where meaning and truth are decided upon by the community—and the communication that takes place in the courtroom can sometimes, or often, be of greater consequence than the verdict itself. There are cases in which this is fairly obvious: I once watched the live trial of two early teenage girls who had been caught shoplifting for cheap fashion—and, of course, the main event was not whatever sanctions they suffered, but that they had to face an awkward situation and be reprimanded. But the same can arguably be said of many other courtroom dramas. These have effects upon the people involved, upon society at large. These effects must also be optimized for. They are an inherent part of any justice worth its name. The future of justice must thus remove not only the arbitrary element of the verdicts themselves, but also the arbitrariness of the communicative processes that lead up to them (which, in turn, also affect the quality and rationality of the resulting verdict).

I have thereby presented an argument that flies in the face of another sacred cow of modern society: “the law” itself—here viewed as a secular, modern form of religion. We should, in a sense, further secularize our legal system, because we all deserve a more socially sensitive and well-argued practice of legal justice than the one we currently have. It is for this reason that I in the title of this article argue that we need to go against the law. To be for justice must ultimately mean to be against “the law”. “It’s the law” is just not a good enough argument for such serious matters as legal interventions enforced through a monopoly of violence. It’s a tautological argument, hardly case-sensitive, and lacks all rational basis.

With the system I have proposed above, we won’t be as “equal before the law”, but we will consistently get better results from the legal system, and thus greater justice in our lives, including values of deeper equality.

What I suggest is ultimately that we move from one level of abstraction in our relation to “the law” and justice, to another, higher level of abstraction. Although all societies need norms to function and to thrive, it should come as no surprise that different norms can and should apply in different settings and situations. What binds the norms together would instead be a set of “meta-norms” (i.e. norms about norms) which help regulate which norms should apply and when. To discuss the meta-norms themselves falls outside the scope of this article, but the matter has been treated in Daniel P. Görtz and Michael Lamport Commons’ 2015 article that discusses the paradoxes of how the standards of care are always changing, and thus legal disputes about them cannot simply be settled with legal precedents. Basically, we need deeper principles—meta-norms—that help us argue for how norms are locally created in each new complex situation, and why they can and should apply there. As such, we begin to uphold not monolithic, rigid norms, but a more resilient network of norms tailored to each situation.

We are thereby not “equal before the law”, but equal before the meta-norms. This may superficially look like lesser equality, but, as I have argued, it reflects a deeper, underlying equality between citizens.

At the fundamental level, this proposed model of justice is an update of our legal institutions in terms of their capacity to manage “chaotic situations”, as I have earlier argued is increasingly needed for our societies to function as the complexity of social life increases. Because a butterfly’s wings can shift the storm, we need greater precision and case sensitivity in our legal systems. If not the precision of a the batting of a butterfly wing, at least approaching that as closely as possible.

Failure to update our institutions accordingly (to the new realities of increased complexity), I believe, can and will result in an increasing number of institutional failures that stack up over time and keep causing irregularities and confusion, the beginnings of which we are already seeing across the world— ultimately resulting in the loss of legitimacy of these same institutions in the eyes of the public. And that, my friends, spells social decay, if not collapse.

You Can’t Afford It!

No doubt, this form of justice would be more labor intensive and thus expensive than the current one. On the other hand, consider these points:

• The current, modern, system is already considerably more expensive than its medieval forebears. And yet, despite its great costs, it is something we willingly pay for to achieve even a modicum of “legal certainty” (that miscarriages of justice or undue influence upon the courts are minimized and so forth).
• Given the exceedingly high expenses incurred by each and every failure of justice—from continued crime, to the unhealed wounds of victims, to wasted time in lousy communication processes, to failing support for the justice system, to the negative social consequences in people’s lives, to the sheer mockery that the media can make of our trials—consider how many costs are actually saved. Effective justice is the hallmark of a good society. Do we really wish to pay the long-term price of an increasingly ineffective justice system?
• And, most basically, institutional reform is always costly, but sooner or later always necessary. The societies that make wise, long-term investments are likely to reap the benefit. Those who refuse to pay the premium will have greater prices to pay along the way.

As we move forward with experiments with protopian forms of society, it is my dearest hope that reforming the justice system in such settings will be a top priority. Without a justice system that goes beyond the modern impasse, and leads the way to metamodern futures, it is highly unlikely that such systems will be able to survive and take root.

The myths of “the people” and “the law” have served us well, at least since the Code Napoleon and the Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch. But the people is not a monolith with one sacred will; it is a chaotic collection of specific personal situations and tragedies, each of which deserves to be heard and met in full, according to its own premises. And the law can only truly be just and equal if it takes that into account. Thus I hold that we must dispel the myths of “the people” and “the law” in order to move towards a justice worthy of a more listening society.

—

Hanzi Freinacht is a political philosopher, historian, and sociologist, author of ‘The Listening Society’, ‘Nordic Ideology’ and the upcoming books ‘The 6 Hidden Patterns of History’ and ‘Outcompeting Capitalism’. 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.

A cosmopolitan heart—one that seeks to expand upon human solidarity and engender (what I have called) Protopian futures that protect meaningful, rich, and historically rooted local identities and communities while linking these to world-wide goals like curbing climate change, maintaining peace, eradicating poverty, and protecting non-human animals—cannot afford to ignore the power of nationalism.

The Case for Transformative Nationalism

Of course, the socially-constructed nature of nationalism doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t take it seriously. Money, for instance, is also “just” a social construction, but nonetheless a very powerful one that shapes and steers our lives whether we like it or not.

This should give us hope and pride: even though, like any powerful social construct, there is a very serious essence to it, certain non-arbitrary natural and rational roots, it doesn’t mean, however, that we should take the idea of the nation at face value. The degree to which it is a social construct is the degree to which we have the agency to decide upon which world we’ll live in: arbitrary choices went into construction yesterday and there will be rational choices to be made tomorrow. The nation is a work in progress.

Point being, we have to be both serious and playful with nationalism. We have to engage in the “serious play” with the nationalism so as to harvest its power for the good of the planet.

Just as with the stance on “transculturalism” vis-à-vis identity/culture, so the metamodern mind must take an “ironically-sincere” stance towards nations, nationalism, patriotism, and identity—weaving these forces as intelligently and ethically as possible on a case-to-case basis.

I thus suggest the position of transformative nationalism. This is a position that recognizes the inescapable power wielded by nations and nationalism as manners to coordinate millions of people across time and space, providing a sense of hope, pride, meaning, and even transcendence to their citizens—but at the same time views national projects as always being subject to potential transformations in a more desirable direction. We are all transformed by the nations we live by—but at the same time, by sociologically grasping these forces, we can in turn transform how our nations bring forth identities, not only within each nation, but also identities that go beyond the nation, that reach upwards towards the universal, and inwards towards the personal and introspective.

In other words, we will need to continue to deal with the fact that nationalism exists—so we may as well make the best of it. There is reason to assume that we currently have the nations and nationalism we deserve. We should strive towards nationalist projects that truly deserve our hearts, hopes, and struggles.

In regards to the nation, the metamodern mind is committed to a particularity in service of the universal. This means that our particularities of identity, expression, and sovereignty are defensible and justifiable only when they are also non-parasitic parts of a larger whole. Hence, nationalism is pathological when it oppresses smaller units and when it corrodes larger systems, but benevolent when it protects smaller units and contributes to cosmopolitan collaboration. Or to put it in simpler terms yet: Nations and nationalism are “good” to the extent that they foster pro-social behaviors, and “evil” to the extent that they hinder solidarity and spur aggression.

Oh, if it were only so easy! As readers will be acutely aware, we live in a world of paradoxes. People act with aggression and cruelty because they are faced with genuine dilemmas, because life itself lands us all in complex and ambiguous situations, where defending one good often entails undermining and destroying another. We are all “defenders”, chosen by fate, we tell ourselves, to fight for one good at the expense of something else that we perceive as less good.

The best we can do, thus, is to develop a kind of moral compass in regard to this most powerful of social forces. Here, we can allow ourselves the patriotic love of our nations, their romanticized pasts, customs, and traditions. If something is endowed with such a high status, as to be worthy of our sacrifices and even our deaths, it makes perfect sense to question what those projects are, and how they reflect ethics worth defending.

Nationalism in and of itself is not parochial or regressive. The will of the citizens in Ukraine to define themselves as a distinct nation with a right to a sovereign state not ruled from Moscow is obviously not regressive. The same can be said about the Indian struggle for independence from the British Empire, and the countless other nations that won their independence during the process of decolonialization in the second half of the 20th century. Nationalism replaced the increasingly outdated notion of empire in Europe during the 19th and early 20th centuries, and a similar process took place in the rest of the world following the Second World War. In that regard, nationalism has clearly been a progressive force—even if excesses, mistakes, and tragedies do litter these histories of emancipation.

On today’s global scene there is arguably a pertinent lack of imagination concerning the roles and goals of national projects and thus for nationalist pride worthy of our love and sacrifice. As such, it is of no surprise that Ukraine’s struggle against the Russian invasion spurs such engagement from people around the world: finally, people feel, there is a struggle worth hoping for.

But there are little glimmers of what future national identities could be built around. The President of Costa Rica just announced that his country is making a commitment to adopt the Inner Development Goals framework, building on what he calls “a long-standing tradition of peace, human rights, respect, and sustainable development”. (I have recently discussed similar visions here and here). This is just one example of when national pride is being redefined, nationalism transformed: Could it be a matter of national pride to develop the inner qualities and civic virtues of its administration and citizenry at large?

What other transformative nationalisms are possible? Could countries begin to build identities less based on wealth, power, and prestige, and more on “being a good country for the world”—as described by the Good Country Index? The usual suspect, Sweden, currently tops that list, and Swedes tend to be somewhat smug about it, with their Nobel prize tradition and so forth. But there is increasingly good reasons to believe that the most vital and interesting such projects may come from the Global South.

Could there even be a transnational order—or a planetary order—that scaffolds and spurs on such engagement, or other forms of imaginary community yet to be imagined?

I am writing this from a library where they currently celebrate “Europe day”, with free lectures and presentations on the topic. Europe, the EU, as an idea and ideal, is an interesting step along the way—a continent-wide and vision that links to a wider, if somewhat bland, sense of identity, hitherto falling short of the visceral emotions we associate with nationalism. But the very fact that it is happening underscores the point: nationalism can be transformed, and through it, we can transform our inter-human (all-too-human) relationships.

The Problem with Nationalism

Let us begin with a simple sociology of the inherent problem with nationalism: a way to gauge when nationalism becomes a force of evil.

The problem with nationalism arises when it subjects other levels of identity to its own logic. We have been accustomed to that national identity has been the primary, but identity is multi-layered and its different layers must be balanced and cultivated on their own terms.

There are roughly seven layers of identity, from the individual to the planetary:

1. Individual
2. Group (or Movements)
3. Incorporated Group (Company, NGO, pre-modern state)
4. Platform/System (The Market, Media, Parties, Industry Orgs. etc.)
5. State (Modern state)
6. Transnational Cooperation
7. Planetary Governance

As you can see here, the modern nation state is level five.

According to Francis Fukuyama, the modern state is defined by having a centralized, merit-based bureaucracy that is able to register its population, levy uniform taxes, control the military, and regulate society. Such an entity emerged for the first time in history in China with the Qin Dynasty in 221 B.C., but in Europe it wasn’t until the 19th century that a similar level of political development was reached. It was only with the full bloom of democracy that a truly “level 5” state came into being—the state as we view it today.

Prior to that, as students of history are often taught, states were more akin to companies than they were to modern states: the point of politics was to generate wealth and revenue to whomever was in charge. It is thus a telling sign that the colonial empires that the Europeans built were initially privately owned trading companies (level 3—the “incorporated group”, i.e. a group that becomes a legal entity) which later evolved into colonial empires, multinational trading blocks (level 4) governed from a central nation state (level 5). The imbalance between a modern level 5 nation state in Europe submitting far-away territories to a level 4 logic with the intention of level 3 gains (profit for capital owners) was thus a socially, economically and politically unsustainable endeavor in a rapidly modernizing world. The push for level 5 structures world-wide, which necessitates corresponding national identity to go along with it, should thus be seen as a necessary and healthy progression.

“Level 5”, the modern state with democracy, human rights, freedom of speech and association, and a market economy, provides a framework for all of the four lower levels to act according to their own logics. However imperfectly, that is its function: It allows for individuals to go about their business, protecting them from one another (level 1); it allows for loose groups and movements to form (say, climate protesters gathering on Fridays—level 2); it allows for businesses to register as legal entities and become groups whose members can be exchanged, but can still be held legally responsible for one another (level 3); it offers community of national media, as these discuss the common interests within the state’s jurisdiction, a currency, and a market for businesses and labor unions (level 4); and it reproduces itself as a national identity, through national education, while maintaining a monopoly of violence with the army and the police, while setting standards for how laws are made for all the other levels to interact (level 5).

Now, what happens if a small group, say a network of rich families (level 2), hijack the level 5 state structures for their own benefit? You get corruption. The level 5 structure starts acting in manners that benefit only this smaller group, while oppressing individuals (level 1), other groups (level 2), businesses (level 3), and skews truth-seeking in media and fair play on the market (level 4). You get a nasty combination of corruption and corresponding oppression—so as to uphold the interests of the smaller group.

Fundamentally, what you get is a short-circuited information feedback system. The current situation in Russia comes to mind.

There are milder versions of such corruption. What happens if large corporate agents unduly influence policy making, such as in the United States? Level 3 has too much control over level 5: corruption. Or what happens if the most public platforms (level 4) are run by profit-seeking level 3 agents? You get Facebook/Meta, Twitter, Amazon, and the rest of our platform capitalism economy—also a form of corruption.

When “the party” runs a state, like in China, you have a level 4 agent that has colonized the entirety of level 5—it’s even in the name: “a party” means a part; a part is running the whole. There are some advantages to collapsing the social order in this manner, namely that you can more easily coordinate the entire market if you directly control it. But, of course, it comes at the expense of the oppression of agents on all the levels.

At the very worst end of the spectrum, you have single individuals like Colonel Gadhafi or Kim Jong Un running the entire state structure—with disastrous results. Corruption and oppression always go together, sooner or later. At the most trivial level, you have things like peer pressure—a group oppressing the free expression of an individual, or a peer group being dominated by one particularly tenacious person.

What we have seen again and again in history is how the sheer coordinating power of the fifth layer of social emergence, the state layer, is manipulated by smaller groups. In all such cases, the nationalism that is engendered is skewed away from universal interests and harnessed to maintain the power of the few over the many—and such consolidation of power can only be justified by the threatening enemies at the door or in the backyard. Here, nationalist fervor always becomes aggressive. Level 2 groups, be they Jews or Armenians, or even class enemies that are thought to be contrary to the patriotic project, are targeted and persecuted. Or, of course, foreign nations.

Likewise, we can also see how maintaining national identity at level 5 can hinder higher, more abstract forms of solidarity: think the nationalist resurgence across Europe and the United States in recent decades. The transnational solidarity of our nationalist anti-immigration parties—in terms of aiding refugees or committing to ambitious climate goals—is, to put it mildly, rather scant.

So, the inherent problem with nationalism is that it can be misused for less-than-national purposes under the guise of national cohesion and universality—and that it has a natural “roof” in that it by definition does not include transnational and planetary solidarities. The nation has to be a ‘conductor’: a part of the international whole and a whole to the individual parts and a part of the international whole and a; to not usurp international order for the sake of its interest and to not be usurped by the private interests of some individuals.

The Richer Tapestry of Identities

For thriving and flourishing future societies to emerge, we must thus situate the forces of nationalism with identities pertaining to the six other layers of social emergence.

A person is not only the citizen of a certain nation-state—even if totalitarian states do their best to colonize all other identities and subsume them under the national one—she is, as we have already stated:

1. A unique individual with a life story and identity of their very own.
2. A member of groups, families, communities, networks, and movements.
3. A member of certain companies or organizations.
4. A certain class and social position within the wider platforms of society.
5. And yes, a citizen of a nation, but also…
6. A member of a transnational gathering of nations (say, “the West”, the communist world, “the international community” with the UN, etc.)
7. And an earthling, one way or another, with her feet on the ground on this planet of ours, under the same sky and the same sun, even sharing a history with all life, even a cosmic history going back to the big bang for all we know.

Nationalism has now, for the better part of two centuries, been the strongest of these forces—not because it is the most important identity for most of us (by far the most of us care more about our own stories and our families, for instance: even Stalin was shocked to hear that a boy snitched on his own father during the Soviet purges), but because it has been able to spur the emotional energy of many people simultaneously, thus coordinating so much human agency across time and space. True, private enterprise is now also entering the space race—but it is a telling sign that nations, not companies, have had such a head start in this field, and that the general public has expressed much more excitement about planting the flag of their nation on the moon than vanity space flights for billionaires.

Nations and nationalism have coordinated the identities and efforts of individuals, groups, companies/organizations, media landscapes and markets, and nation-building projects. That’s why nationalism is so powerful.

But identity and meaning-making do not begin, nor end, with national loyalties and identities.

Our moral compass should thus be guided by a sense of balance of these seven layers of social emergence. The point is not to destroy nationalism in a bout of cosmopolitan or localist-municipalist fervor and relegate it to the dustbin of history, but to balance it with these other forces—so that it may co-emerge more harmoniously with all of them.

In many parts of the world, where “level 5” is not yet fully online and functional, this may very well mean to establish stronger and more resilient state structures—curbing corruption, tribalism (voting only for own ethnic group parties for clientelist policies, etc.), and, yes, instilling a sense of patriotism for the national project. Ukraine is arguably seeing such a moment right now: The current president Zelenskyy’s background as an actor and comedian of the anti-corruption comedy show The Servant of the People and coming to power with a party of the same name, speaks to this. Before the war began, most observers were adamant that Zelenskyy was failing in his battle against corruption in Ukraine—but the surge of patriotism experienced over the last months may very well be a turning point. People will perhaps be more ready to report taxes when a spirit of patriotic pride has been instilled through the struggles and sacrifices of the war effort, with the whole world watching.

But for many parts of the world, the Western countries perhaps primarily, this balance can and should be loaded more towards engendering more transnational and planetary identities (levels 6 and 7)—not least as our economies and work lives are already increasingly virtual and beyond national borders. Interestingly enough, there is a case to be made that no genuine nationalist pride will likely resurge until we can begin to see our nationalist projects as parts of larger, transnational and even planetary wholes. A nation is formed in the struggle against other nations, but it becomes mature in cooperation with them. Self-aware, self-critical nationhood is the ground of international peace.

Can your country be the best at creating peaceful transnational relations, for a sustainable and sane relationship to the ecologies we live by? For this to occur, we must engender transnational and planetary identities that are deeply rooted within us, so that we can begin to demand of our nations that they make us proud vis-à-vis the larger scheme of things. Lacking such identities, we will likely continue to view our own nations as dislocated, afloat in a confusing world “out there”, and we will continue to be tempted by promises to “save the nation” to “make it great again” and so on. And, as we have seen, such nationalist sentiments are not genuinely universal even for the members of their own nations—they are almost always drawn upon and activated by smaller interest groups; they are always manipulated by agents at the lower layers. They don’t lead to patriotic cohesion, but to yet greater corruption.

A national identity that I would be genuinely proud of, and prepared to make large sacrifices for and studiously file my taxes for, is one that protects individual life stories and the sanctity of private life, while actively creating the generative conditions for groups and communities to form and experiment with ways of life, while being a homestead for ideals and values that include all humans, non-human animals, and the environment. Rooting our identities in such universalist strivings can give us the bearings to transform our national identities into something we can truly be proud of. My nation would be the one that is the best at engendering the conditions for Protopia to emerge—i.e. a society that balances its information systems so that corruption and oppression are minimized, which is to say that freedom, in a deep sense of the word, is increased. It is a place where many little forms of the beautiful life become possible.

This shift entails, of course, a change in how history is taught: The educational system can and should root our histories in all seven layers. It is when viewed within this richer tapestry of identities that nationalism falls into place as a force for good: My nation is worth fighting for, not because it happens to be mine and we’re better than others, but because I can see its role in a greater scheme of things. At least to me, that feels transcendent. If I haven’t bowed to any flags lately, it’s because I haven’t found any I’m sufficiently proud of.

Through the UN and other transnational bodies, we do have some beginnings of transnational identity or civil society. But these are weak and very imperfect. I would suggest that the next truly fruitful nationalist project comes in the form of actively establishing a firm sense of transnational and planetary identity in the population—that this in and of itself becomes a source of national pride: we are the people who deign look skywards.

Costa Rica surprised us with its new commitment to the Inner Development Goals. But could this be the beginning of a surge of nationalist projects where pride comes from becoming bastions of cosmopolitan values that marry inner development to what is common to all of us?

Panarchy: Designing the Nation for a Protopian Future

Daniel Fraga, a Portuguese architect and friend of mine, recently released a new book with the title Ontological Design: Subject is Project. The notion that “subject is project” means that we must either design ourselves and one another by affecting our contracts, or, be designed by others without having much influence on the matter. The design of national identities is thus also one of designing the “political (hu)man”.

Although many aspects of our national identities can be said to have emerged organically throughout the centuries, there is little doubt that deliberate “design choices” have been made and carried out and coordinated on behalf of state actors and activists loyal to the state’s nation-building projects. As I have argued above, benevolent and malevolent nationalism are functions of informational architectures: The challenge is to create networks of information that balance the seven categories of identity with one another.

It is not a simple question of “social engineering” versus “letting things evolve organically”, since what evolves organically is necessarily the results of so many different agents attempting to shape (and, yes, engineer) their social environments—from a singular people to states. Hey, even animals do it when they build nests. What we think of as “social engineering” in the negative sense of the term is only the result of when states have over-stretched and transgressed the boundaries of individuals, groups, and so on. Rather, it is a question of weaving more balanced control over information with an eye to how the interactions play out: How can freedom and creativity be increased at each of the layers, without trampling the freedom and creativity of other layers? Very often, this comes down to free access to shared, relevant information.

Talking of how we co-create ourselves as political subjects with certain civic virtues comes with a nasty history of homo sovieticus: the idea that you could transform people into good socialists by education, upbringing, and propaganda. But, again, this failed case of social engineering only bespeaks how important it is that state power and its identity projects are balanced. We all got our values from somewhere; we were all taught and molded to some extent. The question is only if we should turn our gazes back at the machinery that molds us and begin to ask more of it—to hold it to greater public scrutiny. Can we partake in ontological designs that inspire us more, while allowing us to remain the sublimely mediocre little people we always were? If national identities already did design us, is it not within our right to ask how national identity itself is designed?

What inspirational stories or narratives must thus be weaved for us to converge around globally, still honoring the richness of civilizations and cultures around the world, while respecting our personal integrities?

Let me take a stab. A tentative one. But I think we should allow ourselves visions in these dreary times. Visions held with sincere irony.

The Metamodernist vision, its “Protopia”, is not one of a cosmopolitan “world state” or the like—not a monoculture, not a monolith. A “world state” would still be a level 5 structure, but a level 5 structure masked as a level 7 structure oppressing its subordinate level 5 and 6 structures. This would be as unsustainable as the colonial empires of yore.

Instead, we need to go from the current “anarchy between states” as described by realist scholars of international relations to a “panarchy”—an ordered network within which multiple forms of statecraft can be experimented with, albeit within some basic planetary frameworks of human rights and ecological boundaries. As such, new self-definitions of Ethnos and Demos (the organic and systemic aspects of our national identities, as I defined in the last article, point 2 of 20) can be experimented with, as well as the emergent relationships between the two. We don’t need fewer identities, we need a greater multiplicity of them, but converging around a few generic traits that impede them from exploiting one another.

Thus, the narrative and vision of the planetary layer 7 is not an almighty “global state”, waiting to be hijacked from below by all the six other layers, eventually likely collapsing into a global totalitarian dictatorship, and from there on into mayhem. It is a loose but resilient framework that holds the space for state-level structures to emerge, to transform, and to adapt in interaction with one another. It is a widely (but never universally) agreed upon set of regulations for transnational relations and expectations upon what states may and may not do—while still investing in the creation of new governance structures where needed, at the levels of social emergence needed (1 to 7). Its ultimate role is not to rule the world, nor even to unite it. States that breach the planetary norms would not be invaded, but find a concerted lack of cooperation from the planetary community, ultimately making them less likely to increase their power—like a bad-tempered kid on the playground with whom the other kids refuse to play.

Simply put, the role of the planetary layer 7 is to balance out all of the layers below it, so that they stop oppressing (higher layer colonizes lower ones) or corrupting (lower layer colonizes higher one) one another. It is a framework that monitors and regulation these complex interrelations, and makes them publicly visible and known as shared information. Layer 7 does not control the lower layers; it must be construed such that it brings forth the conditions for each of them to flourish according to their respective social dynamics.

The dream I propose is thus not a united world—but at least a somewhat successfully coordinated one. One that has “harmony” not at the surface layer, as in no visible tensions or open conflicts, but harmony in a more underlying sense that systems of information are balanced so as to decrease corruption and oppression. Its principle is that power is not misused—and that points of tension are skillfully addressed with an eye to their transformational potential.

Such a “panarchy” must also include an increased individual liberty to choose national identities and loyalties while having greater capacities to migrate and reintegrate (along the lines of what Song and Jenkins have discussed, point 8 in the last article). The panarchy would work to increase people’s rights to choose their countries, making voting with one’s feet an increasing possibility, which in turn would lead to different state structures attracting the people most likely to thrive within them.

As such, states and national identities would be subject to transformation, while experimenting with ways to design whole worlds for people to live in, and thus be shaped by. The end result of such a vision is not one blueprint for how states should be governed and identities formed, but rather a patchwork of increasingly specialized and niched states that serve vital functions for one another, based on their economies, forms of governance, and identities. This is why I call it “transformational nationalism”; it is the national pride that demands of our nations that they transform into something better than they have hitherto been. It is a national pride in the uniqueness of the national project and its role in the world, pride in the striving of the national project to become a meaningful part of our own evolving journeys as relational beings.

It is not entirely unlike what the nation state (level 5) did for the company (level 3): but setting frameworks for it be registered in the abstract as a legal entity and function on a market, it unlocked an untold experimentation with ever specializing endeavors. I am not saying that our nations should be like companies; I am saying that they have the untapped potential to be as flexible and creative as our companies have been. This, I hold, would result not in a monolithic world, but in a widely multiplistic world, where there is an underlying implicit order to the chaos. It is not a journey without risks, but it is one within which national pride can be used for truly inspiring and worthwhile projects.

Somewhere to Start

Naturally, visions such as these bring forth more questions than answers. On what basis should the panarchic layer 7 build its power, if it is not based on a global monopoly of violence, for one? (Hint: free, public information, based on the principle of the commons, but it’s a longer story). But without the beginnings of transnational identities, blooming into increasingly planetary ones, it is difficult to see how a planetary civil society could emerge that could put forward the necessary solutions and hold nations to such standards.

I hold that nationalist pride can and should be harnessed to work towards such ends, even as the project must necessarily be an open-ended one. With enough shared sense of direction, however, I believe that a growing global population of people with a strong planetary identity can begin to form the basis for the many movements and institutions necessary for such a world to come into being. While the panarchy cannot be based solely on the power of states, pressing for state agents to act in its direction is an inevitable step along the way. And for that, a strengthened planetary civil society within different countries is needed.

At this point, I would simply suggest that it should become a self-aware point of national pride to innovate and drive forth the possibility of such a development. The nations that are first movers in this regard will likely be richly rewarded—with populations identifying with transnational and planetary perspectives, they will likely function better than others on the global scene.

The human web generated the nation-state through processes of trade and technology that lie beyond it. But this same “human web” that now spans across our planet has yet to reintegrate the sheer force of nationalism into a larger whole, a larger whole that brings forth greater multiplicity and creativity untold.

Creativity is dangerous, of course. As is multiplicity. But they are ultimately what life is about—so I hold it’s worth dreaming dangerously.

—

Hanzi Freinacht is a political philosopher, historian, and sociologist, author of ‘The Listening Society’, ‘Nordic Ideology’ and the upcoming books ‘The 6 Hidden Patterns of History’ and ‘Outcompeting Capitalism’. 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.

Let us see how the world’s best thinkers on nations and nationalism have approached the topic. Rummaging through my own book shelves I found at least 20 different ways to approach it. I’ll quickly overview all of these.

In a follow-up article, I will sketch a desirable role for nationalism in a planetary world truly worth fighting for.

We can imagine worlds without borders, we can dream of heavens that unite us all, our planet viewed from space—but at the end of the line, the strongest social force to ever explode on this planet is the nation. Astronauts, cosmonauts, and taikonauts, despite their claims to seeing the world as one, a “a blue marble in space with no borders” and so on, are indeed so much part of nationalist projects that the very title of their profession varies according to national loyalties.

That doesn’t make the nation eternal, or always good. But it means we’d be foolish to underestimate it. It’s a force we must understand so as to creatively and sensitively guide it towards universal and ethical ends.

Nationalism: The Strongest Social Force?

On a very basic level, most observers agree that nationalism—in theory—can be harnessed for both ethically viable and pathological purposes. As a social dynamic, it is the same as what we call “patriotism”; it’s just that we tend to call it patriotism when it’s attributed to the perceived underdog and/or when the actions it brings about are viewed as positive. People get swept away in collective effervescence and pride, giving blood, toil, and tears for the national or patriot cause.

And then after the “great historical events”, there is a sense of shared pride for the nation, a belonging, a characteristic form of deep sorrow of how we suffered through this. The American Spirit is not found in “artificial Americana” of Hollywood teenage movies, but in the solemn, rugged freedom you feel walking across an old bridge of its glory industrial age, listening to the blues, encountering the lonely vastness of the Great Plains or the Rockies, and hearing the dreams of young people and how they take it as their birthright to try to pave their own life paths. There is a romantic feeling to it that cannot be transmitted other than by being in the country for at least a period of time, by knowing the people, the environments, feeling its history. As foreigners, we can get little premonitions of the national pride of the USA, of the passionate but desperate absurdity known by the French folk spirit and its scent of revolution, of the grim Slavic sorrow of Russia, suffering and struggling from Ivan the Terrible, to the “Great Patriotic War” (WWII) and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Like lovers, we tend to believe, at least on some level, that the nationalist sentiments tied to our own country are the strongest ones. But the art of ethnography and cultural perspective-taking can relieve us of such illusions: The national love stories of others are stronger than we can imagine. As Westerners, we are only now waking up to the force of nationalism in China and India.

History, language, music, art, food, and customs meld into one pattern—and this pattern is linked to a monopoly of violence. Given this “layered” nature of nationalism, it is as the depths of the sea: Invisible at the surface level. You need to dive into the depth of a collective psyche to see it, to feel it. It’s alive, and it’s always powerful, because it’s always sad, and it’s always proud—even if the pride may be a wounded one. When it rises from the depths, it can come as salvation, as ecstasy, as sudden unification, as unfettered rage, as terror, as genocide, as total war.

Individually, nationalism is not the strongest social force in the lives of most of us—we care much more about our personal life stories and of our families than about countries and nation states. But think about it: It’s the only social force that can involve millions of people and that people can be be prepared to kill and die for. Millions of people wouldn’t die for your life story or your family. Only you would. So it’s because a lot of people care not-so-little about the same thing that it’s such a strong force. In statistical mechanics, an average flow of a trillion particles will explain the events of the world better than the bouncing back and forth of any one particular particle. If ten million people in a certain geographical area simultaneously feel a bit of shame and respond with a bit of rage—but, individually, less so than if they had personally been slighted by a neighbor—what happens? A force is unleashed that spells murder and mayhem upon anything that comes in their way. Can big corporations truly compete with that power, even in our global days? Last I heard, McDonald’s is becoming “Uncle Vanya” in wartime Russia.

Most of us have a negative connotation to the word “nationalism” (although a growing minority on the right tend to disagree) and a positive connotation to the word “patriotism” (although some of our leftwing friends might disagree). Just like one man’s terrorist can be another’s freedom fighter, one’s chauvinist nationalism can be another’s patriotism.

To note this is not to say we are stuck with relativism. Although relativist stances can initially help us challenge our own biases, they offer no moral compass, and so they tend to inadvertently lead to a “might is right” perspective—as many critics have noted. So, even without accepting the naïve division into “good” patriotism and “bad” nationalism, we can be committed to using the forces of nationalism for good, to the best of our capacities of compassion and moral reason.

If nationalism is both terrible and wonderful, let us at least approach it with multiple perspectives, and try to get a rich and nuanced view of it. We cannot know what the fate of nationalism will be, but we can be almost certain that it will continue to play pivotal roles at key moments of world history. Ukraine is seeing the birth of a proud nation with more patriotic citizenry, perhaps even capable of curbing its history of corruption; those observers of the conflict from around the world who have wounded national pride at the hands of “the West” tend to hope to see a Russian victory over Western hegemony; and Russia itself is acting from a nationalist framework, whatever the geostrategic aspects of it may be.

There is no understanding the situation we are in without understanding the nature of nationalism. In short, this decisive moment is one of nationalism. As will future moments be. Those that understand this force the best will, perhaps, shape the history of the world the most.

20 Ways to Understand Nationalism

The different perspectives each have their scholarly proponents that I shall also mention. Let me first say two things.

Firstly, I agree with all of them—even as they seemingly contradict one another. But I believe their perspectives are “true but partial”—and I believe that seeing all of the perspectives together facilitates a better understanding of the phenomenon. However, simply listing the perspectives doesn’t really make us wiser. Rather, we have to try to see how they compare to one another, how they partially overlap, and how they form parts of a greater, non-arbitrary view of nations and nationalism. It is by seeing the “property space” within which the different perspectives arise, and then coordinating the perspectives in a case-sensitive manner, that the secret good nationalism is unlocked.

Secondly, of course, mentioning the scholars and their work is by no means a claim to discuss any of them exhaustively. I will offer abstracted versions of their views, hopefully skillfully abstracted ones. I will also on occasion bend their terminology or adapt it for the purposes of example of convenience. But it is the fate of the comprehensive social theorist to be a dabbler—and if I have an anthem I swear by, it’s the dabbler’s tragic and proud way of life.

Let’s go.

1. Nationalism, as we think of it today, only emerged fully in the 19th century (Hobsbawm), and did so as a companion to a certain, industrial, mode of production (Gellner)

Eric J. Hobsbawm, one of the greatest historians of the 20th century, wrote Nations and Nationalism since 1780 in which he lays out a detailed account of how the “nation state” in many ways was “invented” in the 19th century, which involved a significant amount of social engineering on the behalf of rulers and bureaucrats. The nation state is when there is a “congruence between a political and a national unit”. This is a definition that Hobsbawm draws directly from the philosopher Ernest Gellner, whose 1983 work (also titled Nations and Nationalism) argued that nationalism must be a distinctly “modern” social phenomenon. Basically, for big economies to function, you must educate wide populations, and that requires a homogenization of language; hence nationalist projects begin to abound.

With this view, we must not lose from sight that nationalism is a historical phenomenon, and thus that it arose one time, not so long ago, and that it may shapeshift. Yes, there are older histories of many of our countries, but even these histories were defined and written, often romantically so, in the 19th century, by people who specifically wanted to engender nationalism.

2. Nationalism consists of two categories of “the people”: Ethnos and Demos (Bauhn)

The distinction between Ethnos and Demos is an invention of my own, detailed in my 2019 book, Nordic Ideology, although it’s a fairly long-hanging fruit. The closest thing I have found is in Swedish philosopher Per Bauhn’s 1995 work, Nationalism and Morality, where he distinguishes between “civic” and “ethnic” nationalism—and claims that only the former is ethically defensible (a position I feel sympathy for but must ultimately disagree with).

Ethnos is the people in their concrete, organic, customary reality: the Swedes of Sweden, with certain traditions, language, looks, habits, religions, norms, and so forth.

Demos is the “the people” qua citizens of a certain political unit: All free men of Athens, all citizens of the Kingdom of Sweden, of the Republic of India, and so forth. As such, you can have any race, religion, etc. as long as you are in a relationship of rights and obligations towards the polis, or whichever unit of polity you serve and which serves you. There is a social contract present, in one way or another, and it is of such a universal nature that your particularities cannot and should not make a difference. This is perhaps more the sort of loyalty that de Tocqueville had in mind when he penned his treatise, Democracy in America.

The political Right (not the libertarian one) tends to seek to defend the organic Ethnos against the impersonal and mechanical Demos. Adolf Hitler, for instance, specifically argued that the notion of “German citizenship” became devoid of meaning if it was not based on being ethnically German.

The political Left tends to seek to defend the universality and fairness inherent to inclusion in the Demos against the particularity and favoritism of Ethnos.

In reality—or this is my belief—neither Ethnos nor Demos can be conclusively destroyed by the other principle, even if they are both always in a state of evolution and change. They must evolve together, and they must be braided as two streams, from the particular, towards the universal, and back again.

3. Nationalism is an expanded form of tribal community, but not the same as tribalism, and thus a precursor to cosmopolitanism (Harari)

The world-famous historian and author of Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari, notes that, while nations are not the same as tribes, they do after all get people to have solidarity with one another, even millions of complete strangers—paying taxes, helping each other out, and so forth. As such, Harari seems to situate himself in the “expanding circles of solidarity” camp: the claim that there is an evolution from solidarity only with oneself or the closest few, to solidarity with a larger tribe, to solidarity with a nation of people who share certain traits, and from there on to solidarity with all people, perhaps even with nature and animals.

Harari thus means that it would be unwise to vilify nationalism, as it has a “bright side” and can be viewed as one step in the evolution from ego-centrism, to planetary eco-centrism. Without functioning nationalism, many people would lack social security, healthcare, education, protection, and so forth. Thus, don’t try to remove this building block of human solidarity: It is an expanded or abstracted form of tribal community, necessary for yet more expanded and abstracted forms of solidarity to emerge.

4. Nationalism, or just any ethnic identity, always builds on an us-versus-them logic (Barth)

The Norwegian anthropologist Fredrik Barth famously argued that all ethnic—and thus national—identities must per definition be based on some negation or opposite. We don’t need a national identity to signify that we are not from Mars (“earthlings” isn’t really an ethnicity). But being French, Indian, or even European all mean something about who we are and who we are not, who we are distinct from.

In other words, the whole point of being Danish is that you’re not Swedish. If all people who were Danish were also Swedish (as is the case for people with double citizenship, etc.), Denmark would not exist as a specifically national identity. It would just be a regional flavor of being Swedish (if we assume, then, that all Danes were also Swedes but not vice versa).

As such, national opposition is built into the very concept of the nation. All national pride, from history, to language, to sports, to customs, to values, to religion, to economic achievement must have at least some element of us-versus-them.

5. Nationalism is forged by conflict; the nation-building through war thesis (Sambanis)

In extension of the us-versus-them logic is the idea that conflicts bring nations into being; the so-called nation-building through war thesis propagated by, among others, Nicholas Sambanis. The reason Danes aren’t Swedish is because Danes and Swedes fought countless wars, and that the Kingdom of Denmark managed to remain a sovereign state and thus didn’t become Swedish.

This is a reversal of the conventional nationalism-leads-to-war wisdom. Conflicts create the need for increased social coherence and in-group solidarity, which incentivizes nation-building endeavors and narratives pertaining to a shared identity and an idea of a “we” worth dying for.

This causal direction has become apparent with the war between Russia and Ukraine. Ukrainian identity wasn’t very strong, especially in the south and east, when the country won its independence in 1991. A large share of the population spoke Russian, not Ukrainian, and elections throughout the period showed how the country was divided between a “Ukrainian” west and a “Russian” east. A large share of the population still had a Soviet identity, identifying with the country they were born in. This began to change with the Euromaidan revolution in Kyiv and Russia’s attack on Ukraine in 2014. Over the years, the number of Russian-speaking Ukrainians longing to be ruled from the Kremlin has dwindled, all while a new West-leaning identity has grown stronger, seeing Ukraine as the freedom-loving antithesis to authoritarian Russia. And today, after several months of war, plunder, and genocide, Ukrainian citizens across linguistic barriers have rallied behind the flag while each day of fighting is feeding an ever greater pride in being Ukrainian. I would go as far as saying that we’re witnessing the birth of a nation here.

If we look at history, the nation-building through war thesis has a lot of merit: The German nation-state was founded through three successive wars with Denmark, Austria and France. And what would American identity be without their revolution and war against the British? The French without the storm of the Bastille and the following wars with the rest of Europe?— Sweden without Denmark? Denmark without Sweden? Tom without Jerry, Jerry without Tom? You get the idea.

This doesn’t mean that national identities can’t emerge without violence, but the fact remains that wars and revolutions shape our collective identities and that such conflicts tend to remain at the center of our national narratives.

6. Nationalism is socially constructed (Wendt) and an “imagined community” (Anderson)

In the scholarly discipline of “international relations”, Alexander Wendt has been a longstanding proponent of “social constructivism”. This is to say that yes, ethnic identities are always defined in opposition to one another, but then they are also changing depending on how the actions of one’s counterparts are interpreted—and their actions, of course, depend upon how they interpret “our” actions.

As such, national identities, and even whole nation states, can shift dramatically in meaning from one day to the next, simply because of how the actions of other national units are interpreted. Are France and Great Britain humiliating the German people? Let’s get back at them (WW2)! Is Russia invading countries for no good reason? Let’s resist heroically (Ukranians) or join NATO even if it costs us the pride and sovereignty that neutrality lent (Finland and Sweden).

Wendt’s vision is not so far away from that of the anthropologist, Benedict Anderson, who coined the term “imagined communities”. Nations are imagined communities because we cannot, obviously, actually have much to do with most of what our nation states are up to. Oftentimes, we cannot even name the basic bureaucracies, laws, and institutions of our own countries, and yet we really feel we’re part of them. Interesting, isn’t it? We’re imagining things. And then we’re imagining things about other countries too, who we then interpret and feel act towards our own country.

Without all of that social construction going on, it’s hard to see how nations could exist at all.

7. Nationalism can be “activated” by different agents for different purposes (Brubaker)

The sociologist Rogers Brubaker argued in his 2006 work, Ethnicity Without Groups, that ethnic identities and nationalist fervor are not inherent to the groups themselves. Rather, in moments of conflicting interest, conflict, or any other shared political interest that may come up, much smaller interest groups begin to speak of ethnicities in distinct us-and-them terms, so as to engender and mobilize the strong forces of nationalism. As such, small political groups have time and again “activated” wider sentiments of nationalism to launch aggression again perceived competitors of enemies.

This is made apparent by examples that Brubaker takes from e.g. the Yugoslavian war of the 1990s: people who had lived peacefully as neighbors or even friends could become deadly enemies the moment that nationality was weaponized. The weaponization of nationalism, however, did not at all have to coincide with actual interests of the ethnic group in its entirety—rather, it tended to coincide with the interests of much smaller groups that were of a political, not an ethnic, nature.

8. National identity is more fluid than we normally think it is (Jenkins) and can be subjected to individual choice (Song)

The sociologist Richard Jenkins points out in his 1997 work, Rethinking Ethnicity, that relationships fall across a scale from the less formal ones (“we’re buddies!”) to the more formal ones (“you’re a citizen of the USA!”) and that ethnicity and nationality can slide across this scale. As such, people can creatively use different positions on this scale to further their own interests or try to gain recognition or otherwise improve their lives—often entailing rather elaborate balancing acts of being “Chinese American” and so forth. However monolithic nationalism can appear from the outside, or at the macro scale, it tends to dissolve into a thousand unique realities whenever we zoom to the micro-sociological scale. The categorizations of nationalism are never straightforward—they always entail all sorts of negotiation, maneuvering, and sometimes deliberate manipulation to fit in. Likewise, people try to employ ethnic or racial markers to groups they seek to control or feel that they fear. Touchy questions: In today’s Europe of Muslim, Arab, and criminal gang uprisings in banlieues—who is considered to be representative of these uprisings? It’s a question that cuts to the heart of the French Presidential election.

Miri Song, also a sociologist, expanded upon these questions in her 2003 work, Choosing Ethnic Identity. With ethnographic case studies, she showed that not only was national belonging always being renegotiated at the micro level; it was even the case that people make whole personal projects of creating themselves as a certain national and ethnic identity or mix of identities. Sometimes your skin color makes it harder for you to be the ethnic identity you wish, sometimes it makes it easier. Sometimes you get stuck between two identities, always categorized as “the other” and so your alienation and resentment grows. “The people” that is the object of a “national project” always consists of conscious, alive, participants who seek to choose their own identities.

9. Nationalism can draw upon several co-existing ethnic identities (Taylor)

It is true that nationalism has been defined as the convergence between an ethnic identity (Swedish) and a political unit (Kingdom of Sweden). But, in practice, there are always multiple ethnic identities present within a state’s territory, and these can even be drawn upon as a part of the same nationalist project.

USA and Canada would be typical examples of such a nationalism, as these are originally not ethnic tribes, but charter-based projects for a variety of (mainly) settlers or colonizers. It is perhaps not then a coincidence that the great theorist of a multicultural state, the philosopher Charles Taylor, is Canadian. But for such multi-ethnic nations to function and not fall apart, they must develop ways to give recognition (nationalist pride, one way or another) to its different groups.

Thus, if nations struggle for recognition, so do ethnic groups within nations—but it is possible for nationalism to include the recognition of several ethnic identities, the struggles of which are thus conjoined.

10. Nationalism is an ideology like liberalism and socialism, with a moderate and extremist (anti-democratic) wing (Lipset)

First published in 1960, Political Man by sociologist Seymour Lipset explored the conditions for political democracy. Here, nationalism was considered to be an ideology that could take parliamentary or anti-parliamentary forms. In the latter case, it is extremist nationalism and overlaps with fascism or Nazism—thus being antithetical to political democracy.

This is, I suppose, an outdated and not very original view of the topic. I bring it up given the deep roots of nationalist extremism in today’s Ukraine (which Putin’s regime also used as a pretext for attacking the country). If Ukrainian nationalism is crucial for defending and rebuilding the country, and has the rest of the world awe-struck, it undeniably also has this ingredient. Sometimes, the word “nationalism” can simply be used to denote these violent, racist, chauvinist, and criminal elements of society. It’s difficult to have good nationalism without at least an element of this—as the 2014 Maidan Square protests in Kyiv made apparent. The protests that ousted a pro-Russian illegitimate president also sported a presence of fascist marauders.

11. Nationalism is an expression of “identitarian politics” (Dahl) or “identity politics” (Fukuyama)

My personal friend, the sociologist and expert on the far-right and the history of fascist and identitarian ideas, Goran Dahl, has described in older and recent books that nationalism is a commitment to a certain organic identity—not unlike entirely what I called the “Ethnos” above. As such, it marries a commitment to the particular (not the universal) to a commitment to the collective (not the individual). Our collective particularity—when that is the main category of your politics, then you’re a nationalist, to put it simply. Nationalism is often (but not always!) tied to a “radical conservatism”, to a “revolution from the Right”—and to ideas of reaffirming a lost sense of national pride, sometimes even with esoteric ideas of the reestablishment of a Golden Age (Compare to the party name of the Greek Nazis, Golden Dawn).This is described in his work, Radical Conservatism and the Future of Politics.

Goran Dahl has very little in common with the political scientist, Francis Fukuyama, but indeed, in the latter’s 2018 book Identity, Fukuyama also makes the case that cultural identity is becoming a stronger force in today’s world, and hence culture wars and nationalism can be understood as a struggle for recognition of certain identities. As Fukuyama writes, nationalism (and Islamism) can be understood as a “species of identity politics”.

(I have argued similarly in The Listening Society).

12. Nationalism is the strongest social force when things hit the fan (Mearsheimer)

John Mearsheimer (who just rose to internet fame through his NATO-critical commentary of the Ukrainian war, but was in fact already known as the world’s no. 1 scholar of international relations of the “realist” school) means that, when it really comes down to it, we can rather safely make a few rather crude assumptions of how the world works:

1. When it really comes down to it, nation states are made up of monopolies on violence, and thus they’re more or less in charge of what happens.
2. The nation states don’t control one another, and so they have to play against one another in a sort of international “anarchy” where the strongest players will win and get their way, pretty much regardless of who the “good guy” might be in that situation.
3. And for that reason, when nations eventually come into conflict, national loyalty will very strongly tend to trump other loyalties (to ideas, to economic classes, to non-national identities).
4. This means that conflict and competition can activate nationalism, and that nationalism thus again and again reveals itself to be the strongest social force, even if it may be so dormant in periods that we almost forget about it.
5. We do ourselves a favor by not forgetting that: the struggle between nations, not ideologies or other things, is the strongest predictor of how nations act, and also the strongest force that drives people when things hit the fan.

As Mearsheimer has explained in seminars and interviews that comment upon the war in Ukraine, the reason it’s so difficult to capture a country is precisely that: the invading force triggers the force of nationalism. The same happened, he maintains, in e.g. Afghanistan.

13. Nationalism is a form of “false consciousness” (Miliband) and is generated by an “ideological state apparatus” (Althusser)

Although the “realist” Mearsheimer supported Bernie Sanders in the US elections, he is pretty much the direct opposite of Marxist thinkers in terms of the analysis of basic notions like nationalism.

If we look at the latter group, they all somehow echo Marx’s view that national identity is a distraction from the “real” or “material” identity of class. And, indeed, to the credit of Marxists, it was true that the Nazis directly sought to use national identity as a way of neutralizing all struggle between classes in Germany and instead direct the us-and-them logic towards other nations and “races”, while “uniting all classes” in a positively framed category of the Third Reich and its Volksgenossen.

Ralph Miliband, the political sociologist, wrote in his 1969 work The State in Capitalist Society that the state—including its ideology and identity—is ultimately a vehicle of the ruling class. Its oh-so-moving national narratives are little more than that: excuses for people to go along with the interests of the already powerful. Power legitimizes itself through “politically socializing” the population, and nationalism is a part of that. “Ideology” in this sense is not thought of as just any set of political ideas: it means a certain veil that masks and normalizes injustices in society.

Another Marxist, of the structuralist brand, Louis Althusser, held that there is an “ideological state apparatus” that calls us forth as citizens and subjects of state power—not least through education and the media. As such, each of us is structured as a “subject”, as someone who acts and thinks in a particular way that reproduces society. Nationalism is part of this—similarly to Miliband’s perspective. But with Althusser, ideology cannot as easily be seen through or transcended; rather, it must be reconstructed in a new (for Althusser, communist) manner.

Marxist scholarship spoke relatively little of patriotism or positive nationalism, although it is fair to assume that for them, true patriotism should be towards universalist, socialist or communist, projects. Note for instance that the Soviet Union is more or less the only country that has had no geographical or ethnic denotation in its name.

With this perspective, you could still view the Ukrainian resistance against Russian aggression as a form of benevolent patriotism—but you’re suspicious of the tendency to emphasize national belonging over class and material interests, of its power to justify new inequalities as soon as the war is over.

14. Nationalism arose in the age of globalization—and since decolonization from the 1950s and onwards, new contenders have risen to challenge the power balance

What we classically associate with “nationalism” brings forth mental images of France, Germany, and the like: European countries becoming nation states. In today’s world, however, the most impactful nationalist projects are not the “nationalist” parties in these countries, but rather the nationalisms of former second and third world countries.

As such, nationalism plays a key role in the “rise of the Global South”. Robert B. Marks notes in the 2007 book, The Origins of the Modern World, that the association between “modern” society and the West is a pretty short parenthesis in world history. It’s thus, we might reason, likely to balance out as modern society spreads and takes root across the world. A very similar line of argument is detailed in the particular comparison between the industrialization of Europe and China in Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence. Should we be so surprised by the ferocity of Chinese nationalism when this chasm is closed? Likewise, Janet L. Abu-Lugod details the time Before European Hegemony in her work with that title, and by that she refers to the late middle ages. The greatest nationalist movements of today all seek to challenge this hegemony, this dominance of the West—and that’s not always a good thing, as such vengeful nationalism is often a violent and anti-democratic one.

Finally, one could mention the work of economic development and poverty scholars like John Ibister, who in Promises Not Kept details the many betrayals of the rich world vis-à-vis poor countries. Naturally, such narratives of economic subjugation and disrespect tend to fuel nationalist movements that resist the Global North and seek to establish Global South sovereignty, solidarity, and pride.

Naturally, Russia very deliberately caters to this aspect of nationalism in today’s world when its government maintains that they’re invading Ukraine in “the fight for a multipolar world”. Many people around the world cannot help but be enthused: Shall this spell the end of Western hegemony, of hurt pride, of promises not kept?

15. Nationalism is a search for roots, for emotional grounding, in the fragmented condition of postmodernity (Friedman)

Jonathan Friedman, the anthropologist, is also a bit of a friend of my own. His way of understanding nationalism is a multifaceted one that I shall have to simplify for the sake of argument.

In his 1994 work, Cultural Identity and Global Process, Friedman touches upon nationalism many times. He means that globalization uproots and confuses our identities. People thus respond by looking to spark or revive nationalist identities—it’s not only postcolonial nationalism that is rising, so is Flemish, Basque, Scottish, and so on. As such, nationalism far from always integrates societies; separatist nationalists also destabilize and disintegrate them. This form of nationalism increases with globalization, and while it is to a significant extent caused by globalization, it is also inherent to the resistance towards (and the backlash against) it that we know today.

16. Nationalism can be a form of resistance against globalization “from below”, revitalizing local and national histories (Overgaard, Andersen)

Morten Overgaard, also a friend not-of-the-same-political-views-as-myself, has envisioned a new role for nationalism in the established of future societies and economies (which he, using a the same term as I do, calls “metamodern”, although attaching a different meaning to the term).

For Overgaard, nationalism can be used to create the organic bonds that should be activated for “national collective intelligence”—hence detaching more and more of the economy from the processes of globalization and establishing a more commons-based economy, where the solidarity required for the commons to function builds on nationalist, cultural cohesion. This is discussed in his book, National Collective Intelligence. In my mind, there are too many possible slides into far-right aberrations for this to be a viable path.

Another Danish acquaintance, Lene Andersen, is less attracted perhaps to nationalism as such, but nevertheless argues for the establishment of stronger local, national, or regional (e.g. pan-Scandinavian) identities as vehicles for greater Bildung (German term, roughly meaning education in a holistic sense). She also associates this with “metamodern” future societies (as with Overgaard, though, in a manner that differs from my own). This is, I would say, a learned form of nationalism concerned with the interface between tradition and the psychological development of a population. Andersen lays this out in her book, The Nordic Secret.

Wartime economies like Ukraine’s actually don’t fall so far away from the visions of Overgaard and Andersen: people are cooperating and exchanging in distinctly non-capitalist manners based on national identity (Overgaard) and are actively seeking to protect their cultural heritage from destruction and viewing this as a test of personal character (Andersen).

17. Nationalism expresses a deeper underlying “clash of civilizations” (Huntington)

An argument that is very well-known but cannot be missed if this list is to be exhaustive is that of political scientist Samuel Huntington. In his classical The Clash of Civilizations, Huntington holds that it’s not nations that will be the center as our world progresses into a new age: it’s larger communities of nations, bound together by deep, underlying, civilizational patterns and heritages.

The clash of civilizations according to Huntington (1996) The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. From Wikipedia.

Although the war in Ukraine can certainly be perceived as Ukraine fundamentally being torn between two such civilizational spheres, there are, however, also many counter-examples to Huntington’s predictions: Orthodox countries like Bulgaria, Greece and Romania closely aligning themselves with the West, not fellow Orthodox Russia; Confucian countries like South Korea and Taiwan, together with the insular civilization of Japan, also aligning with the West against China and Russia; Islamic countries more (or at least equally) interested in clashing with fellow Muslim countries as with other civilizations; and so on. In the case of Ukraine today, the “cleft country” aspect seems to have more or less vanished through the war with Russia, uniting the entire country, Western Ukrainian-speakers as well as Eastern Russian-speakers, against the Kremlin-controlled invaders.

That Ukraine and most of Orthodox Eastern Europe seems to have “defected” to the West, does not, however, take anything away from the fact that most Russians generally tend to identify with being a distinct Orthodox civilization that is different and in opposition to the West. The same can be said about the nature of Chinese nationalism, or Indian for that matter, not to mention the role of Islam in shaping identities in the Middle East.

In Huntington’s view, then, nationalism is a strong force, but it has deeper, pan-civilizational undercurrents that should not be underestimated.

18. Nationalism is also resisted by “transnationalism from below”

In Transnationalism from Below (1998), an anthology by Michael P. Smith and Luis E. Guarnizo showed with plenty of examples that our common sense notion that “nationalism happens from below” and “transnationalism happens from above” is often a mistaken one. It just as often happens, mostly in the third world, that nationalist projects of nation states are faced by resistance from below, which swear by transnational solidarities and identities.

Poor peasants resisting the corporate influence on governments in Latin America, Mexican migrants resisting national borders, Hong Kong’s resistance against China’s nationalism—these are transnational by nature, working against nationalist projects, but without having any “global state” or the like in mind. This is a popular trope to study for social scientists, so further anthologies provide a flood of book chapters. Roxann Prazniak and Arif Dirlik have edited another one, titled Places and Politics in an Age of Globalization. In its ninth chapter, for instance, anthropologist Arturo Escobar (also an acquaintance) details how the mainstream versions of “economic development” are challenged from below, by those who should purportedly be developed by someone else.

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s work, Assemblage, could be said to follow a similar pattern: movements of resistance and solidarity exist around the world—feminist, queer, indigenous, minority, worker, environmentalist,, precariat, and so forth—and these all need to challenge national vestiges of power. Hence, they tend to ally and link up transnationally, however provisional and practically limited such “assemblages” of movements may be. This is also, thus, a transnationalism from below.

In the context of the Ukrainian war, you might notice how the LGBTQ+ communities scramble to show solidarity with Ukrainian peers. This is not a nationalist move—it is a transnational solidarity that resists the logic of nationalism.

19. Nationalism can be reconstructed as planetary belonging

My friend Jeremy Johnson has argued in his chapter in the 2021 volume, Metamodernity, that it makes more sense to speak of the “planetary” than the “global”, because the former seems to encompass a wider view. It’s not just that people interact “across the globe”—it’s that we’re all part of one and the same planet, with a shared history that dives into the biological and geological processes we live by.

This theme can be reflected in other thinkers. In Paul Raskin’s (founder of the Tellus Institute) book, Journey to Earthland, the argument is made that, if national identity could be formed around abstract countries, it should also be possible to create a “country” that spans across the earth in its entirety, as a planetary system. For Raskin’s imagined country, “Earthland”, globalism is the new nationalism. It commits to shared values and common interests, but otherwise leaves more room for unique cultural expressions than nationalism did.

Raskin does not truly respond to the theorists who emphasize the necessity of us-and-thems for national identity to even exist (who is the “other” of Earthland? Mars?)—but read together with Johnson’s shift from “global to planetary”, he at least makes an interesting claim: that people could become as enamored with the emerging planetary identity as they have been with their nations. He points out that nationalism also arose from smaller social units and tribes.

From this perspective, the Ukrainian war could be viewed not as much as a struggle between nation states, but rather as one between nationalist movements and early forms of planetary ones: “Earthland” is emerging through the transnational support of Ukraine. Perhaps nationalism for Earthland could, after all, become a power to reckon with?

20. Nationalism can be reconstructed as bioregionalism

Finally. While globalist cosmopolitans dream of Earthland, deep ecologists dream of a return to the earth in another manner: that the future of political organization should be based on the ecosystems that people are part of, that they live in.

This position is called bioregionalism because it means that your home would be defined not by nations as we have known them, but by the bioregions we inhabit. For such deep ecologists, it makes more sense to define and protect the borders of the specific part of nature you live on together with other people. If nations were to be redefined as bioregions, the entire identity, institutions, and customs could be harmonized with the environment.

The future of national identity would thus be to morph into bioregionalism. Although there is undeniably an increasing interest in reconnecting with the environment around the world, to me the bioregionalists fail to understand just how strong the current form of nationalism is. Thus far, very few people die for their bioregions (indigenous activists in the Amazon, etc., would be the counter example).

But maybe there is more to it: If there is a positive future for nationalism, perhaps it could at least draw upon bioregionalist influences? Looking at the Ukrainian war again, it holds true that environmental aspects of geopolitics and nationalist struggle were activated around Chernobyl. Ukrainians needed to identify with the soil itself, as the presence of the invader became an environmental security threat.

Multi-Perspectivalism or Astrology?

I have long maintained that “whoever has the most perspectives when they die, wins”. I hope I have hereby contributed to a victorious death on your behalf.

But there is, undeniably, a disconcerting part of this exercise:

It is that pretty much all of the 20 perspectives can, with a bit of imagination and finding the facts that happen to suit their different claims, seem to describe and at least in part explain e.g. the conflict in Ukraine. At the same time, many of the perspectives seem to contradict one another. It sounds eerily like astrology: Read the Gemini, and you’re it! Read the Libra, you’re probably also it!

If seemingly contradictory theories can be confirmed with the same cases, is this not just a sign of the hopelessness of any social science? Should we give up—it’s little better than astrology, after all? The “clarity of mind” we gain from adopting one perspective over the other may be entirety illusory. We’re seeing patterns in the world because we’re teaching ourselves to look for those very patterns.

Here’s what I hold. Simply cataloguing perspectives and applying them is not enough to make us much wiser. It’s the first step, yes. These 20 perspectives are building blocks for your reasoning. They’re there to jog your mind, to help you get out of preconceived notions. It’s easy to see that anyone who doesn’t know of one of these perspectives is less smart for it.

But the next step is to coordinate the different perspectives—to offer a synthesis, a path forward for nationalism that is congruent with metamodernist values and Protopian goals. This shall be the topic of my next piece.

—

Hanzi Freinacht is a political philosopher, historian, and sociologist, author of ‘The Listening Society’, ‘Nordic Ideology’ and the upcoming books ‘The 6 Hidden Patterns of History’ and ‘Outcompeting Capitalism’. 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.

Alice In Casino Wonderland

Suddenly, the digital rights to fairly ugly little “cryptopunks”—i.e. pixeled retro 1980s style images of punks that you can own in the same manner that you own a piece of Bitcoin—are being bought and sold for millions of dollars.

Stupefying fortunes made and lost overnight, a veritable digital Klondike of speculation arises alongside obvious perversions of artistic endeavors as artists and collectors scramble to make a fortune. Prices skyrocket. “Bored apes” join the fray and Madonna got one. Many more projects struggle to become part of the action. A whole market mushrooms with at least a dozen marketplaces like Rarible, OpenSea, Larva Labs (where you can now get your very own cryptopunk for as little as 200.000 USD, but don’t ask about the expensive ones) and so on. In the background lurk major anonymous collectors like the legendary WhaleShark who reportedly owns 400k NTFs (enigmatically self-describing as a “social entrepreneur and investor with a focus on disrupting the status quo, while elevating the brave and dedicated communities behind the innovation”).

Of course, scams have proliferated in no-time. As wasps to non-zero Pepsi, grifters have amassed and scrambled to profit. This article lists ten types of scams that have already been identified and victimized many. I’m sure there’s more of where that came from.

Cryptopunks.

NFTs = The “Contemporary Art” Market Crossed with Cryptocurrency

I will refrain from a closer discussion of the technicalities of NFTs as many others have already done good jobs at explaining the phenomenon and it’s already being discussed by more people than I could overview. Basically, you become the owner of NFTs on a blockchain that guarantees that the image is owned by you, even if it’s a digital image that of course anyone else can still download and use. While anyone can have a printed postcard of the Mona Lisa, there is only one “real” Mona Lisa in the Louvre. The blockchain code is the digital counterpart of your owning this “real” Mona Lisa.

What I wish to draw attention to are instead the sociological traps and potentials of the rise of this phenomenon. Particularly, I am committed to the generation of new societal forms that can be called “Protopian” (i.e. societies that can flourish on the other side of modern life), and I’d like to lay out how the NFT phenomenon—for all its obvious wackiness and distortions of incentives and income distribution—can come to play a key role in the creation of social experiments with new and better adapted ways of organizing societies around the world.

The NFT phenomenon may be a hype with huge distractions of speculation and a long shadow of criminality. But its sheer force is undeniable: anything that can move countless millions of dollars across the world can only be viewed as an economic energy to be reckoned with. And such a strong force can and will, arguably, also be harnessed for socially sane purposes, along with the insane ones.

The NFT revolution combines two principles:

• The creation of cryptocurrencies on a blockchain.
• The speculation in contemporary art and art collections.

In brief, each NFT artwork is a unique “coin” or bill with a value seemingly arbitrarily attached to it. It’s just that the coin is the artwork in an of itself, or rather, the coin is the code that says you own the “original”. Like with money, if enough people “believe” in that value, it’s there. Poof. A lot of rabbits are being pulled out of a lot of hats. Some of the hatters go crazy, some become filthy rich. Both things have been known to coincide.

To better understand how the rise of the NFTs is part of a new social and economic logic, where cultural capital rules and drives financial capital (previously discussed by me here and here), we need to investigate the nature of how the arts (and their markets) have developed over the last decades.

The Social Construction of Reality Becomes Transparent

This discussion, in turn, shall lead us to an understanding of a more generally pervading principle of sociology: the social construction of reality or social constructionism. Simply put, we have gone from a (Modern) situation in which social construction was mostly unconscious and implicit, to one where it has become understood to a point where it can be hacked (Postmodernity), and we are now entering a cultural situation where it is becoming obvious and apparent, out in the open in all of its absurdity, and can thus be actively harnessed for purposes good and evil (Metamodernity). The genie of social construction is, as it were, out of the bottle for all to see—and for many more of us to use.

A new social game emerges: whoever can make others believe in the value of their tokens, wins. It’s the game of social magic. The game of wizards of social construction. And to increase the value of your tokens, you have to get people to believe that others will believe in it, too, so that their investments will pay off in terms of spiking valuations. The mastery over social construction has risen to the top of the savviest minds—in tech, in finance, in arts, and soon across the field.

The NFTs lie at the very crux of this story—they started out, unsurprisingly, as a mechanism for a few people to get unreasonably rich unreasonably fast, quickly slid to ignoble uses, and are now beginning to increasingly become a genuine transformational potential for the common good.

My claim is that NFTs can play a key role in releasing our joint imaginative efforts to redefine social realities. This happens first, perhaps, within virtual worlds and the Metaverse (the emerging, immersive version of the Internet). But, as what Baudrillard called hyperreality increasingly drives and reorganizes the experience of and relationships pertain to everyday life, life and society as we know them can also transform as a result.

Inventive and idealistic employment of NFT technologies and investments can thus drive projects that redefine human relationships and create opportunities for what I call a Metamodern society.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. How does this startling phenomenon relate to a wider sociological shift of our shared consciousness?

Postmodernism—and the Magic of Fake It ’til You Make It

To fully make the argument here, to see how and why the NFT market could evolve, we need to take a detour into the world of postmodern art.

In sociology, the term “passing” refers to a person’s ability to blend into a certain social context. For instance, I have crashed more than one academic conference since I simply “pass” as an academic, even enjoying a few nice buffet leftovers in the process. If I were a rugged, street-roaming mendicant, I wouldn’t have made it past the door to the seminars and keynotes. I have academic “passing”. I probably couldn’t have crashed a party held by biker thugs. You can pass a middle class, straight, or anything else. Passing is often a certain privilege—and it allows entry and access to certain networks. It’s one of the key mechanisms of how class society reproduces itself.

Learning a few manners and mannerisms to “pass” can go a long way. More than one inventive grifter have discovered as much: You can become “passing” as parts of the superrich elites. Recently, the world has watched in morbid fascination, on Netflix and other media, the workings of the Tinder Swindler (a common criminal who designed an elaborate scheme to live a superrich life, impressing the next woman with the wealth he scammed off of the last lady, in what amounted to a huge and uniquely pernicious pyramid scheme), Anna Sorokin (who impersonated a wealthy German heiress just to impress the upper echelons of New York society, of course mixing in a lot of contemporary art in the scheme), the Danish Stein Bagger (who simply conned his way to millions by making it appear as though he had a big company and getting plenty of loans), and, of course, the cult-like and worldwide scam that was the WeWork open office complex (which was made possible by an especially energetic and charismatic company founder who left so many lives in shambles). Fake it until you make it, right?

The Tinder Swindler—“passing” as a rich gentleman.

In their very own way, the financial system and stock markets have followed a similar logic, where social reality has been hacked—with very real consequences. The GameStop debacle that shook Wall Street in early 2021 (where Reddit users caught major investors in a “big short” and pumped the value of the stock to unearthly heights) is just one example. Another is the housing mortgage bubble of 2008—it heralded a new age of wild speculation, a virtual reality detached from the material economy, following its own logic but ultimately affecting economic realities. Fortunes made, fortunes lost, livelihoods destabilized. Virtual actions with very real consequences.

Unsurprisingly, the art world—which tends to portend social logics in so many ways—saw its own corresponding scandals play out already in earlier decades. And this, too, was honored with its own Netflix documentary. In Made You Look: A True Story about Fake Art, the story of a major scam is detailed. A large number of fake paintings were sold by New York’s most respectable art dealer, Knoedler (founded back in 1846!), and ended up not only in the private collections of the superrich, but in renowned galleries like the Metropolitan.

These weren’t exactly “copies” of art; just paintings made in the styles of major American 1950s artists like Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, and Mark Rothko by a Chinese math professor in his garage in Queens. Then a few grifters went ahead and made up stories about the provenance of the paintings (they had been bought by an anonymous family back in the 1950s and had now been rediscovered, etc.). Beginning in 1995, the scams went on for well over a decade and involved over 80m USD—until eventually forensic analysis revealed that there was paint used only invented in the 1970s, the observation was made that there was no evidence of the paintings existing in old photographs with the painters, and so on. Knoedler, the “finest” art dealer in America, came down as a house of cards.

Knoedler Gallery in New York, before it closed in 2011.

Interesting as this documentary is, it seems to miss what in my mind is the main point of how the art market developed: that postmodern art itself had exhausted itself as a movement and begun to run amok as a Warholesque replica of its original impulse. The postmodern creative spark was no longer the crux of art itself, nor of the inventive genius and prescience of the artists, but the very field had been colonized by rich art collectors who wished to exchange financial capital for prestige and cultural capital, by the art dealers who pandered to this impulse through exclusive auctions, by designated experts who propped up the value of the art with so much sophisticated “analysis”, and—eventually—by downright con artists who managed to “pass” as any of the above. And, it should be said, by a growing cadre of fairly manipulative artists who exchanged artistic genius for the genius of magicians: to create scenes in which their artwork was valued and esteemed by the people who were, in turn, valued and esteemed in society at large.

What we normally refer to as “modern” art (pertaining to the “modernist” period) is a wide umbrella of art movements that, in painting, were prevalent roughly from the 1920s and onwards—but it may just as well be called “postmodern” art. If you look at the Wiki articles for Modernism and Postmodern art, many of the examples discussed overlap. This is because the social logic embodied within the arts always develops somewhat ahead of culture and society at large—so at high modernity, from the 1920s and onwards, you already see postmodern logic playing out in the realm of the arts.

This logic took a firm and undeniable hold of the art world when Marcel Duchamp put a porcelain urinal on display in a museum in 1917 and called it The Fountain. In one stroke, he revealed the social construction of the very category we designate as “art”: art was art because it was being branded as such when displayed and revered in a museum. It caused a splash (no pun intended) and a scandal—which made the piece of art famous, and thus incredibly valuable. The postmodern tendencies of irreverence, ironic distancing, deconstructing social realities, critique, open questions, and social construction are all but painfully apparent in retrospect—even if the commentators of the time didn’t use the term postmodern (although, emblematically, the term was first used in a book published by a German philosopher the very same year).

The Fountain by Marcel Duchamp, 1917.

It was this tendency of irreverence towards the categories of modern society (art, religion, economy, and so forth) that in turn underlined much of the creative explosion in the decades that followed: we saw the rise of Picasso, Dalí, and all the rest of the geniuses that found ways of breaking away from modernity and its three-dimensional Newtonian space (which, in turn, goes back to the Italian Renaissance).

In the 1950s, especially in New York which was a sort of cultural center of the world after the Second World War, this movement culminated with the likes of Jackson Pollock (the wild expressionist who sought to express raw, internal states on the canvas with no inhibition or filter of interpretation or translation) and, of course, Andy Warhol.

Convergence, 1952, by Jackson Pollock (from jacksonpollock.org)

At this point in time, the 1950s, there was arguably still a generative explosion of innovation in postmodern art. Pollock was not “just splashing paint like a kid” and adding a few nails for good measure. A host of research has revealed fractals in his paintings, an increasing complexity of these fractals as his career progresses, and even an increasing appeal of the more complex fractals to viewers in controlled experimental settings. There’s more to it than splashing colors and furiously adding nails.

But, most of all, it was Warhol who epitomized the consummation of postmodern logic in the arts: his work melded with his public persona and it showed a collapse between the popular and “fine” art, a ruthless reflection of the endless simulacras of modern copy-paste society, lifestyles of norm-breaking with a shrug at his famous New York venue The Factory, and his own replies in interviews always being deliberately devoid of meaning: “I don’t know what the art is about, you tell me” and so forth. Warhol was the pure embodiment of postmodern cultural logic in the art world, a kind of Foucault of the arts (as in the archetypal postmodern scholar/philosopher a few decades later, Michel Foucault). While the two are almost diametrically opposite in terms of demeanor and temperament (one mellow and shy, the other veritably sparkling with opinionated intensity), their biographies do indeed show more parallels than could be ignored. Warhol did not just comment upon the flatness of meaning in art, he lived it to the fullest, ironically thereby achieving an artist’s life like no other. It’s hard not to admire him: when asked, he plainly told everyone exactly what he was doing—he was just never believed or taken literally, which was largely the source of his success.

The creative venue of innovation opened up by Duchamp was in effect exhausted by Warhol (who, surprise-surprise, counted Duchamp among his greatest influences). “Post Warhol”, what was there really for postmodern art to do? What was left to reveal? The category of fine art had already been broken out of, by its own master, its own Houdini.

In many ways, the historical moment of postmodern art was over before the 1960s had passed. But, of course, that’s only true in terms of its ingenuity, originality, and deep relevance to culture. For most of us, it had just started! And so, millions of artists, dealers, collectors, and curators sought to join a party that was already over. A lot of money became involved. Bubbles started being blown up. Municipalities started paying huge sums for modernist sculptures and painting to fill up public spaces and institutions. The age of “incomprehensibly sophisticated culture” was here—always promising wealth and prestige to the acolytes refined enough to appreciate it.

Meanwhile, “the world spirit” (to vulgarly misuse Hegel’s term) had moved on to new horizons. What was left was a game of trying to become part of this action, of this moment of cultural breakthrough—as though it could be frozen in time, and, like a Warhol triptych, repeat itself in ever new shrill colors.

Now, in light of this analysis, I urge the reader to consider this fake Rothko painting that the Chinese math professor had made (drawing on the centuries-old East Asian tradition in art and crafts, to studiously copy works of art):

Pei-Shen Qian painting in the style of Mark Rothko, one of the Abstract Expressionist fakes sold by the Knoedler Gallery. Luke Nikas/the Winterthur Museum.

It’s a good “Rothko”—well made. But what of the painting itself, viewed apart from all connotations of “fine art”?

Well. What can we say, in all honesty? It’s two squares. It looks like someone’s been sampling two paints on a yellow background. If it’s sublimely beautiful, you tell me how and why.

Nevertheless, please do note that leading art dealers, a number of accredited experts, and buyers, and exhibition curators, all agreed that this was a sublime piece of rediscovered art. Note, moreover, that people reportedly fell deeply in love with this painting and exchanged millions of dollars for it. If there ever was a naked emperor, this is it: it came in the form of two squares on a yellow background—not even as a porcelain urinal. This was a situation in which scams were just waiting to happen, given that there was already such a degree of apparent bogus to the whole endeavor.

A part of us might be thinking that these superrich pretentious snobs had it coming. But there is more to it. They were part of a social logic playing out at the heart of Western (and even global) culture.

The very fact that the legendary Rothko could so easily be forged—in fact, that this was the attractor point awaiting the entirety of the postmodern art—should be obvious: It’s not really a very interesting painting in and of itself. Rothko just made squares, lots of squares. The real action was made up by the social processes that placed his squares in sacred spaces called museums and galleries, and then a postmodern priesthood of art scholars sprinkled their fairy dust on it. It was made to “pass” as art, because it was good at slapping the art world’s pretentions in their face. And then replicas of this irreverence were bound to show up. Capitalism, I guess, always wins. It gobbled up Rothko just as easily as the symbol of Che Guevara. If postmodernism sought to escape from the confines of modern disenchantment and hypocrisy, to at least be honest and authentic about just how artificial and synthetic our world is, late modernity responded by being massively inauthentic about authenticity. Checkmate.

Postmodernism flattened the view of art, revealing that its mystery is to be found outside of the artwork itself—in its contexts, in the participant eye of the beholder, even in the angle of observation. But the God of Cruel Jokes caught on, and turned this on its head: “Okay, so if the sacred can be constructed by manipulating context, I shall manipulate the context of postmodern art and sensibility to create meaningless money machines.”

After Warhol the artist, whose work is fundamentally emancipatory, came the Warholeque monster that we today know as contemporary art: a vast factory (sic!) of empty simulacras of feigned authenticity and phony critique. And cash.

Like all other social logics, postmodernism imploded: it collapsed under the weight of its own premises. As art, certainly—and as philosophy, increasingly so. When it collapses, it exacerbates the logic that came before it: that of mainstream, modern, consumer capitalism.

How NFTs Bring Social Construction to Its Conclusion

Now, only a few years after the humiliating own-goals of the art world, the NFTs emerged. The money involved is magnitudes larger and the whole thing seemed to emerge out of nowhere.

If we compare the way in which “value” is created and ascribed to a Rothko, to say, a cryptopunk, the two are similar. But a cryptopunk can, without even having material existence, be much more valuable. It doesn’t claim originality, nor a noble pedigree of provenance (“this was owned first by the Queen of England and kept in Buckingham Palace, then by Paul McCartney, then by Xi Jinping, and now it is yours!”). It doesn’t claim genius. It is not part of profound commentary of our world. It has no sacred aura. It’s just valuable because people speculate that it will become more valuable, because more people are believed to speculate in the future.

Does that mean that the cryptopunks are nothing more than a bubble, like the tulips of 1637, these fleurs du mal? No. For certain, the NFT market as a whole will see bubbles, rises and falls, and whole sections going defunct after some craze or pyramid scheme. But the cryptopunks—and the Bored Apes, peace be with them—will remain valuable simply because they have passed a threshold of enough of speculators. Their prices will vary, and they are far from “sound investments”, but, like a Rothko, they have become valuable because they are so damned famous (at least, collectively speaking), and they are so famous because they are valuable. So at least these will continue to hold value—or that’s my bet, but please don’t take financial advice from a social theorist.

But the most valuable NFTs are more like the fake Rothko than the “real” ones. The fake Rothko is recent. It’s made for money. It’s made for speculation. It’s made to be a money reserve, where investments build on rising expectations of rising expectations.

The difference between the fake Rothko and the cryptopunk is that the latter is honest about its dishonesty and absurdity. It just builds on the craze and momentum of cryptocurrencies and found a niche in this market: If people are already investing in “just a piece of blockchain”—why not mint unique pieces of “just a piece of blockchain”? It just happened to find a way to “pass” as a currency, and thus as a way to “pass” as an art investment.

It’s actually a lot like what Warhol himself did with the art world. He was entirely honest about the meaninglessness of what he was doing, thereby ironically enchanting his work and persona with an especially mystical lure. He appeared to be able to break the rules of social reality, which made him and his work sacred, larger than life. There’s a whole literature on these things in the sociology of religion. Warhol (and those like him in those select moments of history) seem to “walk on (sociological) water”. From thereon, everything they touch becomes gold.

Now, the originator/s of the cryptopunks have done something similar: they have created a phenomenon that seems to defy all social reason. The sheer banality of the cryptopunks (I could probably have made them in Paint when I was about 14–15) spits in the face of art being art, and it spits in the face of cryptocurrencies being practical means of exchange.

It’s a speculation that knows its a speculation. A construction of unreasonable fortunes of wealth that we know are absurd—and somehow damned funny. Like the GameStop stock explosion, it’s the revenge of pajama-clad basement hackers against the world of fine arts.

And that defiance of all reason drives the damned things to yet higher soaring valuations! It’s irony and sarcasm taking over the world, and now dictating where millions and millions of dollars do and accumulate.

Going from Bad to Good: Speculation for Cultural Capital

Now, in a world where the unequal distribution of wealth and the skewing of incentives away from honest work are major problems, there can be no doubt whether the NFTs are mostly good or bad. They are beautiful flowers, in a way, at least given the sheer audacity and weirdness of the social logic that brought them to life—but if so, they are still flowers of evil, fleurs du mal.

But just as all good things are also bad, so all bad things are also good. And especially powerfully bad things can lead to especially powerful good things.

The NFTs have opened up a certain Pandora’s Box of “speculation in just about anything”. Here’s my main argument:

• Because the NFTs have made it apparent that you can create avalanches of speculative value worth millions and millions based on the most banal and stupid little things, they have also opened up the space of shared imagination for speculation in investments into increasingly meaningful 
• The very fact that real, hard money is being spent on NFTs is exactly what unlocks their potential for becoming generators of new social realities: this sort of money makes something that was “unreal” yesterday suddenly become “real” today.

And meaningful things are those that have cultural uniqueness and value to people. Meaning, the management of complexity in society, and transformations are the main scarcities of our day and age. Up until now, you couldn’t buy a piece of it with your money. Now, as the world scrambles to create the “best NFTs”, the best ones will—and this is my little ironic prophecy—eventually turn out to be the most meaningful ones.

First, I suppose, this will entail more and more enticing and interesting artwork.

Secondly, from there on, NFTs will be minted that take stakes in the development of entire bodies of philosophy and literature, where sentences and statements are bought and sold, while funding further creative thinking.

Thirdly, solutions to social problems and postcapitalist cooperatives that resolve (like, e.g. Cooperation Jackson) will be able to be speculated in—not because you “want to help them”, but because you understand that others also want to own a piece of this unique piece of social experiment “before it became cool”.

Fourth, you might even see speculations in the creations of entire societies—initially, of course, the unhoused younger generations may be buying virtual real estate in cyberspace and stimulating the creation of all sorts of online worlds (gaming-gone-wild), but eventually, stakes can be bought in experimental societies themselves, in Protopian projects. Imagine you own a piece of the future form of nation-state that effectively resolves issues of work and distribution, versus if you own a cryptopunk—which one do you think will be most cherished in the end?

We can collectively begin to speculate in cultural capital, in sociological imagination, in the artworks of life itself. It will take many more imaginative leaps to get there, but there is good reason to believe that such an attractor point could be on the horizon: in a world where meaninglessness is exposed in all of its vulgarity, the genuinely meaningful would likely become highly valued—indeed, valued enough to explode in crazy evaluations that defy all social logic. And so idealistic recreators of society could begin to manage billions through collective and democratic forms of governance.

In terms of development from modern life, to postmoderity, and onwards to what I call “metamodernity” the most fundamental principle is this one:

• Modernity divides social reality into clearly distinguished spheres, like art, religion, market, politics, science, the civil sphere, and private life.
• Postmodernism challenges and breaks out of the confines of these categories, escapes the implicit definitions of “what art can be”.
• Metamodernity begins to come online when art has escaped from its modern confines and now, as a genie out of the bottle, begins to recreate all of society in its radical experimentation and creativity.

Let’s be honest, it’s an equally wondrous and terrifying prospect.

Future: Metamodern Intellectual Property

The above discussion promptly leads to another one: If the multitude of “pro-social” and transformative movements and creatives are to wrest control over the speculative madness of our age, we would need new forms of intellectual property to manage such projects.

For NFTs to begin to play socially creative and positive roles in the search of Protopian solutions to the troubles of modern society, we must also reimagine the intellectual ownership structures themselves—not least as much of the symbols that could be issued as NFTs would necessarily be intellectual innovations and memes.

In her book chapter of the 2021 volume Metamodernity (in which I also have a chapter), Siva Thambisetty argues that there is something rotten in the kingdom of intellectual property (IP). While the purpose of IP has been to spur innovation and protect innovators, it has also created artificial scarcity, skewed incentives, shifted games from innovation to legal battles, excluded the needing, and radically centralized economic power to few hands. Likewise, my friend Rufus Pollock has written a book titled The Open Revolution that argues for rewarding innovators through a system that still guarantees open access to the innovations themselves (not entirely unlike how Spotify or national license services function for music).

If there are speculative bubbles of “art investments” (where art itself, then, increasingly spills over into other realms and begin to redefine them) in increasingly socially and culturally meaningful endeavors, there should reasonably be regulations that guarantee the accountability of the projects as well as making certain that a part of the speculative drive actually benefits the project itself.

This would be an entirely new form of market—a synthesis of intellectual property, philanthropy, the financial market (including stock markets), and, of course, blockchain and the art market.

At this point, the jury’s still out on what such regulations might look like exactly. All I am saying is that such a new beast would require new regulations and clarified rules of engagement—and that the states that are first movers in innovating this kind of “metamodern intellectual property” are likely to attract a truckload of capital that can be used also by the state itself.

This last one is a tall order. But, as any respectable sociologist will tell you, states and markets develop together as new technological tropes emerge. The home of the next level of intellectual property will thus likely also become the center of metamodernism in the world, with the largest concentration of Protopian experiments.

Protopian experiments are necessary to transform society from its modern trajectory of unsustainability into something more stable and desirable. And Protopian experiments could be funded by self-consciously speculative NFT bubbles.

Or, put differently: If we can swindle ourselves into doing stupid things, we can also swindle ourselves into doing good things. It’s a pyramid scheme turned on its head: taking speculation and directing its forces to those who imaginatively create better societies around the world. It’s a weird path, for certain, but one that shouldn’t be ignored.

That is why I can say—if not with certainty, then at least with some hope—that these flowers of evil can one day save the world.

—

Hanzi Freinacht is a political philosopher, historian, and sociologist, author of ‘The Listening Society’, ‘Nordic Ideology’ and the upcoming books ‘The 6 Hidden Patterns of History’ and ‘Outcompeting Capitalism’. 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.

Protopians Must Live by Sincere Irony In Order To Cultivate the Necessary Mutual Trust

As an author, how do I build trust with the reader? It’s a valid question. Trust is hard to come by these days.

Mutual trust generally consists of four dimensions, I would argue:

1. competence (or credibility, that you know the other person is capable of doing what you need them to do),
2. goodwill (that you have reason to believe in the benevolent intentions of the other),
3. reliability (that what is agreed upon or claimed will be lived up to, most of the time), and
4. alignment (that our interests align and don’t contradict one another).

If all of these four are in place, a solid foundation of mutual trust can form, from which beneficial and creative collaborations can flourish. When people build trust in e.g. work relationships, they tend to forget about the last one. The secret is to reveal to others what you really want, and to ask the same of them. People will often gladly tell you. Find the people that want, not necessarily the exact same, but things that can be truly aligned with your goals. Then you know that they will genuinely wish for your success (in a deep and wide sense of the term), and they know that you genuinely wish for theirs.

You could arguably add a fifth dimension, which has to do with emotional report or resonance; that you feel seen and understood. This last aspect is important, but it often tends to be overemphasized in our time, as people are starved for authenticity and connection. It will likely fall into place if all the other four dimensions are there. What good, after all, is an emotional connection if you end up not being able to rely upon one another and if your goals collide?

So let’s build trust. It’s a tall order, but it’s how we truly prosper as the social beings that we are. People find many, warranted or unwarranted, reasons to mistrust one another. And yet, lives are only as rich as the prevalence of trust. We move together, as people like to say, “at the speed of trust”. When it comes to the relationship between an author and a reader, trust is also necessary for the author’s messages to be heard and sink in with the reader.

Strange as it may sound, my main method for this trust-building with the reader is irony. Slightly crazy people like myself, who say unusual things, invoke a natural level of suspicion in readers and listeners. It just comes with the territory. But by adopting an ironic stance, I am conveying to you that I’m not taking myself too seriously. There is room for critique, for questioning, for jokes, for open ends. That is the magic of irony, if done correctly and with the right kind of twinkle in the eye. If I went on like a frenzied agitator, you’d be right to suspect me of tunnel vision, fanaticism, or hubris. The very fact that I’m approaching the whole thing like more of a joke shows you that, in the greater scheme of things, at least I know when I am saying something somewhat outrageous, and I understand that, at the end of the day, the joke is on me. At least I know that while I do act as a comedian at times (this most Satanic of professions), I am also the butt of the joke. It shows you that I have at least some ability to take an outside perspective on how my message is perceived and taken in. Irony is, strangely enough, a token of my sanity. As it were, the use of irony grounds the dangerous electric wire of authenticity and hope, so that a stronger current can run through it. The sincerity of my message is carried forward through the channels of irony and (a lighthearted form of) sarcasm.

In the end, it’s how much authentic life experience and thinking I manage to convey, how well I connect to who you are as a sensing and emotional being, that determines the effect of the article itself. This article itself also consists of four dimensions:

1. the ideas themselves,
2. the writing down of, packaging, and formulation of those ideas,
3. the angle through which the ideas are spread and marketed to the right readers, and
4. the reception and use/application of the ideas by real people in real situations.

When push comes to shove, the only dimension that truly matters is the last one; the actual effect of the article in real people’s lives, even those who didn’t read it themselves, is what the article ultimately “is”. And that requires a certain quality of trust and something else, a quality pulsating through the pages and beyond.

What, then, is that power running through the wires at the speed of trust? Again, it is authenticity. It is sincerity. The mastery over irony allows, at least in our cultural context of so many peddlers of messages and ideas, for sincerity to blossom. One has to display one’s own weaknesses and limitations for people to know that what they’re getting is, after all, the real thing. I’m saving you the trouble of joking at my expense and revealing my weaknesses and intentions, because they’re already revealed and analyzed asunder for your enjoyment (but do feel free to add your own critiques and jokes!). And this requires a certain stance, a stance of ironic sincerity, or sincere irony, whichever formulation you prefer. The two qualities contain one another; they are conjoined in cosmic dance, a yin-and-yang, a Shiva-Shakti act of revolutionary lovemaking.

It’s a riskier and, I would argue, gutsier stance than being either ironic or directly sincere. It’s a carefully crafted both-and. It’s the jiu-jitsu path to sincere relatedness. If we’re ironic about our life projects, then we can also allow ourselves a few big dreams, a bit of French revolution in the air, even a bit of religious fervor, of piety and faith. And that’s something modern human beings have been lacking. Who would have thought that faith and piety would return through irony and its God of cruel jokes?

Frank Sinatra. By Ike Vern.

Did It Whose Way?

One can even argue that there’s a three-step process of personal growth and cultural expression: first, authenticity/sincerity, second, irony/nihilism, and third, sincere irony. This third one comes in many flavors that capture slightly different sides of it: informed naivety, magical realism, playful struggle, pragmatic romanticism, even conservative radicalism.

Let me illustrate this by way of Frank Sinatra’s song, My Way. You remember the song, don’t you? Sing it silently to yourself with the help of these lyrics. Yes, all five verses.

And now, the end is near
And so I face the final curtain
My friend, I’ll say it clear
I’ll state my case, of which I’m certain
I’ve lived a life that’s full
I traveled each and every highway
And more, much more than this, I did it my way

 

Regrets, I’ve had a few
But then again, too few to mention
I did what I had to do
And saw it through without exemption
I planned each charted course
Each careful step along the byway
And more, much more than this, I did it my way

 

Yes, there were times, I’m sure you knew
When I bit off more than I could chew
But through it all, when there was doubt
I ate it up and spit it out
I faced it all and I stood tall and did it my way

 

I’ve loved, I’ve laughed and cried
I’ve had my fill, my share of losing
And now, as tears subside
I find it all so amusing
To think I did all that
And may I say, not in a shy way
Oh, no, oh, no, not me, I did it my way

 

For what is a man, what has he got?
If not himself, then he has naught
To say the things he truly feels
And not the words of one who kneels
The record shows
I took the blows
And did it my way

 

Yes, it was my way

When we read this we hear a clarion call to authenticity, to being true to ourselves. We hear Sinatra, singing in 1969, at the fairly ripe age of 53, a modern anthem of American (and Western) individualism, reflecting a long and rich life experience. Even a bit of wisdom, albeit the Wisdom of the West. Like you, I’ve also struggled to cut loose from societal expectations and inhibitions, and I too long to reflect back at my life, feeling, in truth, that I did it my way. I remember a good friend who would even listen to the song alone in the car during a period in her life where she was suffering from having chosen the wrong professional path for herself. Eventually, she did break free, went back to school, reeducated herself to be a medical doctor, and attained a fulfilling career somewhat late in life. And, in the end, I think she stopped listening to this old song, because she could truly say she did it her way. Here, you have a hymn to authenticity, to a sincere life: For what is a man, what has he got?/ If not himself, then he has naught / To say the things he truly feels / And not the words of one who kneels. Seriously, my eyes tear up when I hear that. The words do speak to me.

Beautiful. Now consider these little factoids. Who actually wrote this song? It was not Frank Sinatra. It was Paul Anka, another singer (“Oooh pleeaase, staaay by me, Diiiaa-naaa!”). And how old was he when he wrote this old man’s reflection back on a life well-lived? 26. And what kind of life is Paul Anka known for having lived? One of Beverly Hills decadence with Swedish (etc.) Hollywood housewives who openly admitted to being gold diggers. Hardly a pinnacle of wisdom and authentic connection. Most likely, in a stroke of marketing genius, Anka placed the song in the reverberating vocal chords of the person from which it would be best received. The melody of the song was bought from an obscure Frenchman by Paul Anka for one dollar, and Sinatra showed up to their meeting with a number of mafioso types. Sinatra then went on to use the same song for the next 25 years or so, always doing a new comeback with a new farewell tour. Sinatra’s daughter later revealed that he came to hate his signature song: “He didn’t like it. That song stuck and he couldn’t get it off his shoe. He always thought that song was self-serving and self-indulgent.”

You’d have to look far for an ounce of artistic authenticity behind this song. Every penny was squeezed systematically out of this piece of poetry. That’s the song’s real bottom line. The anthem of modern Western authenticity is a result of a marketing stunt. “Once you know the notes to sing, you can sing most anything”, is a lyrics line from The Sound of Music. Well—once you know your marketing, you can sell most anything. There’s another, darker, snippet of the Wisdom of the West.

And now we’re getting into the second stage: irony, or even nihilism. Here’s the thing. Our senses only ever interact with surfaces. We so like to believe that we can feel into the deeper essences of the realities behind it all, but alas, experimental psychology lays its somber verdict: we respond to what reaches our senses—and nothing else. The rest we simply conjure up in our minds and emotional wiring. Automatic responses to stimuli. Endless facades, an inescapable prison of surfaces. The world is flat, and how we experience it can be endlessly manipulated because, ultimately, the mind itself is flat. And it is endlessly manipulated. If every situation is socially constructed, guess who rules the world? Whoever is the best wizard of Oz, whoever pulls the levers of social construction, whoever frames the situations within which events play out. The engineers of symbolic and situational machinery. Whoever knows their marketing. And what’s the ultimate treat for the social constructor? It’s to construct situations whereby authenticity is enacted. But even authenticity is an act. This is true down to the biochemical level: bigger pills will have greater placebo effects, and more suggestible people (often the spiritually and religiously inclined) will experience greater placebos. That is also to say, the more gullible people will.

And so a righteous rebellion stirs in the ironic mind: “Not me, I won’t be the sucker.” There’s one born every minute, they say, but not this one. I’ll question, I will tear down the facades, I will joke back, I will study the minutiae of social control, I will fight power structures, I will “deconstruct” your messages and marketing, and I will see the ideology and self-interest behind your purported virtues and values. In the end, the joke won’t be on me, it will be on whoever thought they could lure me in, fool me, and rule me.

Armed with an ironic stance towards society and its surfaces, always revealing the emptiness behind the words, the techniques used to manipulate us, and the crude ever-present workings of power, this type of mind becomes like a Houdini, breaking out of the prisons that others have created for us with their subtle-strings-attached offerings. And so a form of grim nihilism creeps in. Frank Sinatra is not singing about being authentic: read the context of the song, and you notice he’s really singing about consumer capitalism, about using the longing of people with suppressed dreams to make a buck and, while you’re at it, get a Beverly Hills house and the gold digger wife that comes with it.

But, then again, if we’re always dispelling the enacted enchantments of everyone else, where does this leave us? It leaves us in a place where there is really nothing left to believe in, to commit to, to live for, except the resistance and irony itself. That’s a pretty high price to pay. And it may not be the most, well, constructive stance towards life.

Enter a new sincerity; an ironic sincerity. This is the third stage in this simple model. What if you do realize exactly how Sinatra’s song was deliberately constructed by a sly mind that wanted to play on your vulnerable strings—and you choose to still believe in it? What if there is a place beyond pure irony, an irony taken so far that it turns on itself? A skepticism that is skeptical even of itself? Then the irony inverts, and, like a well springing open, something else can flow from it: hope, idealism, sincerity, connection; yes, even childlike trust, religious faith, spiritual piety. This faith is made of other stuff than blind or naive belief; it grows from the ruins of an ironic revolt against the lies and obfuscations of the world. Its hymn is a subtle one, a vague whisper: After deconstruction, reconstruction must follow.

So once you’ve learned to question the world and to pick it apart you begin, with sincere irony, to reconstruct it playfully. You begin learning the art of mastering the many placebo effects around us, for the benefit of our own happiness and sanity, and for the benefit of others. Another quote would be in order, one by the American novelist, David Foster Wallace:

“Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the ‘Oh how banal.’ To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows.”

Exactly. This is sincere irony expressed better than I could have caught it. It’s from his A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments, published in 1998. This was a voice ahead of its time. By making ourselves intentionally gullible, for just a moment, we get all the real (even biochemically observable) advantages of a stronger placebo effect. One such placebo effect is happiness, optimism, a sense of direction, a sense of agency, and even free will, a higher “subjective state” in everyday life.

We meet Morpheus trying to peddle us a red pill (the grim truth), and sure, what the hell, we’ll take it. But! Then we swiftly snatch the blue one (happy illusion) out of his other hand and gobble it down, too, before he can stop us. If Neo would have done that, he would have beaten the Matrix much more easily, and he would have had more fun along the way, too. Too bad nobody told him about that third option, the ironically sincere one.

How does being sincerely ironic empower us, then? Think about it. If you internalize the ironic ridicule of others before they have a chance of applying it to you, you can more easily shrug it off; you can work from a place of near invulnerability, and thus dare to be truly vulnerable, and thus bravely constructive, finding and suggesting new pathways for yourself and society. Mastery over irony-turned-on-itself allows for new sincerity. And extreme sincerity even becomes the sharpest weapon of irony, because it’s just so damn outrageous. This does not shield you from constructive criticism; rather it opens you up to it, because you always-already expect to be incomplete, to be open-ended, to be improved upon.

In the face of every “how dare you!” that inevitably comes your way, irony shields you. You are not shielded in the sense that “I tense up and lock it outside”. It’s more like an electric wire that carries the current of your dearest truths (again, open-ended truths to be improved upon by you, the reader). Yes, you will be laughed at and looked down upon, accused of “cringe”, eyes will be rolled, and all of that. But the very acknowledgment of that fact releases a creative spark, a freedom of expression that runs deeper than any bill of rights could guarantee.

And so I can say, with all the force of conviction, that sincere irony, in the hands of sublimely mediocre and ridiculously ordinary people, will change the face of the world. Because that’s where the wild things are. The sincerely ironic can reconstruct the world by virtue of their untamed imagination, which comes with the trust they build. The child returns; the beast is unleashed.

Where, then, does this leave us in regard to Frank Sinatra’s song? Well, look at it this way: The fact that the conception of the song and its powerful lyrics involved a clever marketing stunt does not need to take anything away from its quality of beauty. If it is true that all that ever reaches us is not the inherent “essence” of the thing we experience, but rather a surface that stimulates something in us, a surface that touches our senses and moves something inside of us—then does it not follow that the quality of the song belongs to the personal experience of the listener, rather than to the motives of its creators? Or, put differently, does not the acknowledgment of the fact that “all is surface” carry within itself the proposition that authentic expression can be found in anything that plays the strings of our soul, no matter for what reason?

Again, you can see that we’re taking the blue pill, after we’ve taken the red one. Stir, and it’s a purple cocktail, an elixir from the very crossroads of fact and fiction. Hence, it is by enriching our own capacity to experience the magic of reality that we can reclaim the qualities of hope, of progress, of faith, even after our ironic distancing from them. And so we can begin to find the nuggets of beauty in the cultural ruins that irony and nihilism leave behind: My Way may not be the result of the trembling heart of Frank Sinatra looking back upon his life, but it is the result of the sense of freedom and individual dignity offered by American life of that period, for all of its faults and vices. It hits home for many of us because it still expresses this collective experience, without which the song could never have been imagined in the first place. And so, we can simply enjoy it with good conscience, taking the power back of our own construction of meaning in the world; intentionally making ourselves credulous, gullible for just a moment. We can use it to, among other things, give our “subjective state” a little boost.

So after “deconstructing” and picking apart the many tricks played upon us, we can now “reconstruct” new tricks for the sake of magic and direction in our lives, and in the world around us. We can become our own wizards of Oz (and of one another), and begin to deliberately run the machinery of our own illusions, re-enchanting reality. Dorothy Gale found a little unassuming man behind the machinery that ran the smokescreens of the “great wizard of Oz”, and shouted accusingly “You’re a bad man!”, angry for having been fooled. To which he replied: “I’m not a bad man, just a bad wizard”. In the end, the wizard turned out to be (sublimely) mediocre, like the rest of us. But we can take up the mantle of all dispelled conjurors, and together co-create a more enchanted reality to live in. Dorothy could have stayed behind the curtains and learned a thing or two about running the machine herself. Would that prospect not lead us towards a more compelling open horizon than pure irony? We have worlds to construct, always finding new sources of magic. That is ultimately the reason I feel this stance, sincere irony, can salvage our souls and let us struggle playfully together towards beautifully impossible but tremendously important goals. Again, at the end of irony, at its omega point, when skepticism is turned even on itself, it brings that spark of the creative imagination that belongs only to the faithful.

Photo by Diana Vargas on Unsplash

Jesus: Lost and Found

At one point or another, I suppose it is inevitable that we should ruin this dinner party by talking about religion. As William James, this American “father of sociology”, wrote in his 1902 The Varieties of Religious Experience: “Religion, whatever it is, is man’s total reaction upon life”. It’s how we relate to the whole. Also known as: “the question of life, the universe, and everything”. Or, simply: What is of ultimate significance? What is, when all is said and done, truly important?

Let’s keep this broad view of what religion is in mind. What, then, can a sincerely ironic stance do for our religious relationship to reality, ourselves, life, the universe, and everything? Where does it leave that “faith” we were just speaking of?

Here, you can see a similar but distinct progression as the one outlined above: from sincere belief, through nihilism and skepticism, towards sincere irony. If sincerity would mean something like “believe in Jesus as the son of God, and as your personal savior who made miracles happen” where God is the ultimate source of all true, good, and beautiful in the world and the everpresent creator of it all, the nihilistic stance is simply to not believe in any of that: it’s bullshit.

And, of course, it is bullshit. Jesus couldn’t heal the sick, turn water into wine, or walk on water, nor was he born by a virgin, nor was he the son of God, nor was he resurrected. Mohammed couldn’t move a mountain, and Buddha didn’t fly around and cast fireballs (yep, that’s a thing in the scriptures); he didn’t even teleport across the Ganges. And even if God was in the world making miracles happen, why on earth would the focus be on wine and fireworks, or getting teenagers pregnant without consent (i.e. the Virgin Mary)? It’s preposterous not only at the level of empirical claims; it’s preposterous even at an existential and spiritual level, just too dumb to do any notion of God or [other placeholder of ultimate significance] any justice.

Yeah, yeah, of course we don’t believe in that stuff. But there are mysteries, things beyond our comprehension, things like… special and difficult-to-understand capabilities of rare, accomplished, spiritual masters, right? Things like Rupert Sheldrake’s biology of morphic fields, new frontiers of science that rediscover spiritual perennial truths beyond the rational mind. Or at least the possibility thereof. There are synchronicities and serendipities too unlikely to have occurred naturally. There are energies. Flows.

No, it’s all bullshit. There aren’t any miracles. Not even just a little, not even in a profound transrational sense, not even in the distant East. So stop it. No, Ruper Sheldrake’s theory of telepathic dogs isn’t correct. There aren’t any morphic fields and dogs aren’t telepathic. Certainly, with Joseph Campbell, that great interpreter of myths, we can look at “walking on water” as a metaphor for “mastering our unconscious” and so on; but believing in the miracle itself very demonstrably does harm. I won’t bore you with the work of the “new atheists” who labor to show this, but they do have a point.

It can feel a bit brutal, but it’s time to take the red pill. We live in a world entirely devoid of all magic and all miracles. That is to say, we live in a world where things are caused by other things in replicable, if complex, manners. That’s the same as understanding that there are no nooks and crannies left of magic or miracles, not even at farthest reaches of the mind, the universe, the far East, life, and everything. All in this sense “metaphysical” claims of all the religions are entirely false; and there is really no need for a shred of mercy or sentimentality about it.

Well yes, I see what you’re saying Hanzi, but…

No, seriously, stop it. You’re not doing yourself or anyone else any favors with that stuff. There is no “but”, no “both and” here, no “higher synthesis”, no hidden pattern in profound symbols that reveals an esoteric truth that unlocks your chosenness, no meditative insight that saves the metaphysical claims of any of the religions… No multiperspectivalism that puts you into contact with the indigenous spirit worlds. No healing practice that sends energies through the deepest layers of consciousness across continents.

That’s what killing God feels like: it’s a brutal dead end. It’s not supposed to feel good or right. It just is what it is: the death of ideas that are false. And then we go after all the saints and sages (they’re mediocre), every miracle, every siddhi, every magic residual in the known universe. Kill, kill, kill. Die, die, die.

And together with the magic, we also kill off all crazy guru abuses, many of the cults (but cults can and do still show up in political and self-development guises), and our tendency to disregard and disrespect science. We also kill off New Age abuse of desperate people, the cruel commercialization of the human soul where sad people pay for expensive crystals. Oh yeah, and then we kill the notion of “the soul” because that’s also magical thinking. Santa, too.

And now, if the red pill has been properly gobbled down, and only then, do we take the blue pill. It’s the ultimate marshmallow test of humanity. Real magic is felt, not believed. Or let me restate that a bit more precisely: Magic is an experiential, not a cognitive, category.

We can reconstruct God, yes, but only after we’re done properly killing them. Now, we are free to reconstruct religion, to delve head-first into the faith of the faithless (with the words of the philosopher Simon Critchley).

So the answer to the question of life, the universe, and everything, can indeed be a better one than an absurd “42”. Once you’ve grounded the wire of spirituality with relentless skepticism and ironic distance and the most ruthless nihilism imaginable, you can begin to reclaim the spiritual realm. If you want to be crude about it, you could say that spiritual experience exists within and beyond the traditional religions, but that it becomes a good and constructive force in our day and age only at the other side of atheism. By first mastering atheism, for all of its unimaginative and judgmental simple-mindedness, we can begin to unleash the power of spirituality in our lives and beyond. Religion is recaptured from the monster of modern life.

Enter sincere irony: the teachings of ironic prophets. The religions that can grow and prosper in this realm aren’t exactly religions as we normally think of them. They excavate and revive not the metaphysical and miraculous claims of the contemplative traditions of religions, but their existential truths. And yes, the religions are true, they were right, as all of them point to insights that are correct but which modern everyday life is oblivious of.

Take Jesus, for example. It is true that we lost him as the literal son of a heavenly father and cosmic creator in our merciless purge of all magic from the world. We lost him, of course, in the sense that we no longer believe in what are, if you’re entirely sober about it, childish bullshit fairy tales. But now we can find him again, in a more mature and adult relationship. He’s not our savior or daddy figure. But he’s not entirely wrong, either: non-judgment and forgiveness really are higher truths if you look at it, there are very good reasons indeed to try to find universal love for all and to live by it; and, yes, we really are sinners in that we shouldn’t think of ourselves as inherently good but rather become good by always seeing how we are flawed and limited in our moral capacities. And yes, there really is a whole kingdom of God within us, waiting to be discovered in the higher reaches of our inner subjective states which also reach into the depth and core of our being. And yes, people who came before us really did go through torture for us to be here, so a little damn gratitude wouldn’t be such a bad idea. As far as I can see, Jesus has more correct and insightful things to say than almost anyone I can think of.

Likewise, with the Buddha, we can see that you literally can advance through the stages of meditative absorption if you diligently practice meditation, and that this even shows on a brain scanner. And yes, the stages are roughly yet correctly described and they can be taught and learned. And yes, our desires are always functions of our own minds and end up being frustrated one way or another, and we do well to transform their nature towards becoming less self-centered. And yes, we really do experience a loss of the discrete “sense of self” if we experience the deeper meditative and “higher” inner states. And all experience, pleasurable or painful, even the sense of a separate soul, really does melt away in a radical emptiness if we study it closely and attentively enough. Once we identify with the deeper layers of the mind, and with the consciousness of which we are a part, we can easily see that doing harm to others, to anyone, is in a sense doing harm to ourselves. So even the law of Karma has something going for it: What goes around comes around. That’s true even on a practical level. On average and over time, we tend to benefit from kind actions, when they are performed with discernment. The more we focus on others, the easier time we usually have maintaining a good subjective state ourselves, and genuinely kind actions tend to reward us with nice surprises later down the road, if seldom in the ways we expected. Even if counter-examples show up in the short run (we try to be kind and feel cheated, etc.), karma is certainly worth believing in, sincerely.

And with Islam we can experience a sense of wholeness or oneness that has indeed been shown empirically to support happiness and wellbeing (whereas the bleak belief structures of Buddhism, “everything is suffering”, actually tend to make you less happy unless paired with extensive contemplative practice). By focusing on one principle, one God, one path, we can feel more at home in the universe. Research has even shown that Muslims have the highest score of sense of “oneness” (which in turn correlates with life satisfaction) and atheists have the lowest. Oneness is a genuinely psychologically helpful fiction, like the belief in free will. People feel better and are healthier if they believe in free will, even if it factually speaking doesn’t exist. You get a sense of direction and control, and that affects how your mind self-organizes and avoids dumb excuses. Praise Allah for those placebo effects!

With indigenous religions and rituals, we can begin to reconnect to our bodies, to our communities, to nature, to the complexities of the world around us. We can come into contact with spirit worlds, not as a source of magic in the literal sense, but as a source of relationality and connection, not to mention a sense of enchantment. How inventive we must be, and how attentive to respecting the wisdom of the oldest cultures on the planet, to tap into this ancient homestead of the human psyche! Animist worldviews, for all their differences between them, were in some way or form how humans lived and expressed themselves for at least tens of thousands of years. It does make sense to think that what humans adapted to for so long also makes sense at a psychological level, more so than our modern lives. Arguably, the more we connect to this wisdom, the greater role can also be played by indigenous wisdom in creating new forms of sustainable life and community.

I would even include, among the things we can playfully reconstruct, the zeal of the revolutionary, of the communist, the anarchist: the belief in the possibility of overturning the injustices of society, of imagining new worlds for humans to live in. This is the fire of the French revolution and its sense that this moment can birth new worlds through an uncompromising commitment to justice. Many of the people who were part of anarchist Catalonia in the 1930s later remembered it as the happiest and most beautiful days of their lives. What a source of energy and agency such “revolutionary happiness” can bring! “The irrepressible lightness and joy of being communist” as philosophers Hardt and Negri once wrote about, can be channeled, if it is only approached responsibly; that is to say, playfully and ironically. And, of course, one must understand that there is no such thing as what Leon Trotsky called “the permanent revolution”; revolution occurs in moments of seismic change, in social and psychological earthquakes; it is analogous to falling in love, as discussed by the Italian sociologist Francesco Alberoni. Between such “moments of movement”, there is institution, habit—longer stretches of mediocrity. But still, these moments—of the dramatic, the tremendous, the musical—are real enough, and they can be sparked. They really do happen in people’s lives; a sense of complete, shared ecstasy taking over one’s entire being, and they really can change society.

And beyond the political passions that stir the soul, even the occult can be played with: dark rituals, satanic cabaals, sex magic, and so on. Sure, the Order of the Golden Dawn never quite delivered on its mysteries and magic spells, nor did any of the esoteric groups of the last turn of the century. But reinvented magical rituals that draw upon the inner beast and its carnal desires, unfiltered dreams, and raw emotions can certainly release strong forces in our lives, at least for short, revolutionary moments. For what it’s worth, they inspired rock bands by the dozen, too. The variety of practices called “chaos magick” involves making ourselves entirely suggestible, entirely open to new beliefs, so as to actively reshape our own minds. The occult paths can help us hack our minds, dramatically and profoundly: they include the “fuck like a beast” insight to a degree that Christianity and classical (Theravadan) Buddhism did not. Or, less drastically, there is the ongoing popularization of BDSM and sex-positive events. Tantric sex is part of such explorations, as is tantra in the deeper and original sense (spirituality beginning from the embodied) and the use of sacred symbols. Pagan revivals of Odin and summer solstice rituals can also play a part here, but make sure not to link these to those crazy far-right ideas.

And, of course, there’s the whole reinvention of psychedelic culture and practice, making it more therapeutic, science-based, and responsible (a promising area—I’m also connected to the Psychedelic Society in the UK and respect their work—but it is one in which I’d like to see more caution and healthy conservatism; addiction and psychiatric harm are real things, as are abuses within this field). However, I’ll leave that last discussion to others.

Simply stated: There are a lot of blue pills to take, and they can bring us closer to truth, rather than farther away from it. This includes “transrational” truth; existential truths that lie beyond our analytical minds, but somehow ring true from a place within and beyond us.

Oh, let’s be honest—how we long for the ecstatic, for some real magic in our lives, for what life was supposed to be! And—as the mystical traditions taught, and the religions hinted at in their mythologies—truth brings us closer to magic, while illusion has it that the world is plain and mundane. In that sense, all the religions were right, and today’s prevailing atheist-rationalist-materialist-reductionist-scientist worldview is false.

Photo by Alain Pham on Unsplash

Praise the Shallow

By now I imagine a question may come to mind for some readers, the more seriously religious ones. One might think that Hanzi takes a too sloppy and superficial view of religion, one that does not allow for serious commitment and depth that pertains to following one particular path. Should, then, religion and spirituality always remain piecemeal, only a collage of different trends that happen to pop up on the internet? What about going deep into and following a tradition, a contemplative path set by centuries of hard-earned human experience of the practitioners before us? Will deeper truths really reveal themselves to us if we treat these human accomplishments without respect? There’s Kierkegaard’s old “either-or”: make up your damned mind and take a leap of faith to live for something, and commit to that path! Or, with another saying that recurs these days from serious spiritual practitioners and followers of a path: “You have to eat the whole fish.” That is to say, to reap the full benefits of a spiritual path, of a contemplative religion or form of mysticism, you have to work according to the internal logic of that path and stay on it, like any good training program. Otherwise, it’s like you’re hopping back and forth from golf to basketball to chess—and neither path will open up and reveal its secrets to you, and none of them will yield to mastery. And it’s mastery that transforms you.

Okay, fair point. Well, the problem is—and I’ve seen this again and again—that the whole fish eats you. You think you’re going on a deep spiritual path, with your critical mind intact, but before you know it, you’re posting childish gobbledygook about miracles on Facebook to prove that your religion is the true one after all. You have lost touch with all shared reality, and as such you’ve lost all relevance to the world we live in. Why does this happen? Because you invest your life’s entire project in the narrative of one religion, to the extent that you so badly want all of its premises to be true, to be The Truth. In the end, at some deep level, you sell out the truth for some emotional and spiritual candy bars (for some inner rewards).

There’s a certain threshold we can pass, a great price to pay: a certain kind of sanity we’ll likely never recover. You thought you were an intrepid explorer of the kingdom within, but what you’ve become is actually no different from a Flat Earther (the folks who literally think the earth is flat, it’s a big thing these days). And then you start trying to convert everyone else to your beliefs, while bankrupting your own philosophy by tying it to your blatantly incorrect beliefs.

I’m not saying we can’t go deep into one tradition, or that it should always be avoided. All I am saying is that taking the red pill first, and then trying out several blue pills, is the safer and more productive way of being religious. From a position of sincere irony, you can then go deeper and deeper into the paths that open to you. You make certain that you don’t get sucked into one tunnel-visioned perspective, consuming you like a raw, rattling fish.

Many of these topics of “reinventing religion” have been explored by other works, like my friend Nick Jankel’s Spiritual Atheist, or why not Jamie Wheal’s Recapture the Rapture, and this is not an article on theology or religion. Cognitive scientist John Vervaeke has labored extensively to meet the meaning-crisis with a reinvention of religion for our time, sketching the deep structures of a reconstructed religiosity. Suffice to say here that sincere irony allows for the multi-pronged open exploration of faith, for the re-enchantment of a world left in spiritual shambles after the death of God. As such, we can meditate, pray, dream, play, and practice what Layman Pascal calls our “spiritual style” with no sense of shame or embarrassment, with no apologies made.

We can even try to speak our own truths about the great cosmic joke, and become ironic prophets of our own—and of one another. As such, the field of religion, of all of the religions and their perennial wisdoms (which are related but distinct), even of revolutions and the occult, open up to us. We can begin to practice piety in a space that is safer and compatible not only with modern science, but also with critical thinking, and with the sincere irony that increasingly marks our digital age.

But remember. All the religious and spiritual experiences of the world will not efface broken dishwashers and people cutting in line at the bus stop. Religion and zeal can be reinvented and rediscovered with sincere irony, as can wisdom, faith, rapture, ritual, mystery, and contemplation, but they only ever return us, after some wild roller coaster rides through passion, over transcendence, and into inner peace, to a (hopefully) sublime mediocrity. It is this sublime mediocrity, this inescapable “ground of being”, that we’re perfecting.

So, once you’ve truly killed God, you can take the blue pill and begin to use those sought-after both-ands of science and spirituality of the left and right hemispheres of the brain. Here, you can combine ruthless reason with the perfectly unreasonable longings of the (scientifically speaking, non-existent) soul. Before the proper death of God, magic will always sneak in, not as a wonderful re-enchantment of the cosmos, but as an endless source of deceit and disappointment. Even the saint, even the prophet, is mediocre. In the end, even Jesus doesn’t look a lot like Jesus (simple thought experiment: what would you think of a guy who, in a fit of self-righteous rage, turned over the table of some poor tourist trinket vendors at a cathedral?). And that’s why we need to lose him—and then find him, again and again. And that’s the real miracle of religion: You can kill God, you can even crucify Him and mock Him with a crown of thorns while you’re at it, and He still shows up three days later, happy to go.

If God is always on His way to the guillotine, if He’s always beheaded and overturned by a new revolution of the critical mind, of new perspectives and life experiences, what you get is The Headless God. An open-ended God. A God of exploration. Now that is the God that’s left even after the crudest murders of the sacred, and that’s a God truly worth worshipping. If being whacked by the critical mind, if being crucified and denied, if being killed and mocked, still doesn’t kill you and you are still reborn, still wearing the crown of thorns, well then at least my hat’s off and I’m on my knees before you, ready to give you everything. With this view of the divine, “the sacred” is revealed through a relentless series of iconoclasms.

This sincerely ironic reconstruction of faith goes beyond the tired cliché of “spiritual but not religious” (which is, for many reasons we needn’t belabor, a dead end): it helps us to reinvent not only spirituality (the experience and expression of the higher inner states), but religion itself (the meaning-making fabric of our relatedness to reality). Religion is redefined; it escapes its confines and combines with art, science, and critical thinking; it becomes tailored to the Internet age and to every unique person and to every context, to every moment. Not every moment and aspect of life can realistically be “spiritual”… But we all do have some kind of “religion”. Hence, rather than trying to be “spiritual but not religious”, we should admit that we’ve been “religious but not (always) spiritual” all along. If that makes sense.

Sincere irony can rescue God. And then God does save our fallen souls at the auspicious crossroads of fact and fiction. Isn’t that sublimely mediocre?

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

The Sound of Both Ands Clapping

As a last note on this, I’d like to mine the gold strains of some other both-ands that are closely related to sincere irony.

A famous Zen koan asks “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”. The Zen koans were designed to radically break us out of our conceptual minds and lead us into the realm of pure paradox and the strokes of wordless insight that thrive there. Perhaps at a somewhat less profound level, there are paradoxical both-ands that capture different aspects of the “oscillation” between irony and sincerity. Some of these have been proposed by the Dutch art scholars, Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van der Akker: pragmatic romanticism, informed naivety, and magical realism.

Now, we have to choose our both-ands carefully. Not all both-ands are born equal. The point is that the two seemingly opposite elements must conflict in a manner that sparks a desirable field of possibilities. So, you cannot walk around both-anding just anything and think that you have achieved a greater synthesis or wisdom. Both rob the bank and give to the poor? Well, it’s good enough for a fairy tale about Robin Hood, but probably not a good idea in reality. Both being nationalist and socialist? Well, that spells National Socialism, a.k.a. Nazism.

As mentioned, the philosopher Kierkegaard titled his most famous work “either or”: you have to make up your mind sometimes, take a leap of faith, take a stand, to truly live in authenticity. But the point here is that both-and contains either-or; but either-or does not contain both-and.

If you’ll allow me a bit of tangled reasoning:

• It’s not either “both-and” or “either-or”;
• it’s both “both-and” and “either-or”.
• It’s both-and with discernment.

All of this is just to say that there are productive and destructive paradoxes; so you cannot combine just any contradiction arbitrarily (again, combining both toilet and kitchen is not a mark of wisdom). To do both-ands well, you have to define the two opposing elements non-arbitrarily, in manners that make sense on a deeper level that enriches both sides. And you do this by first differentiating between the two, separating them out fully, and only then do you experiment with combining them. You differentiate, and then you reintegrate where possible and desirable.

Let’s get started with some more both-ands, then. Good ones, not bad ones.

Pragmatic Romanticism

Pragmatic romanticism is the principle of both taking up an unapologetically romantic stance towards life, like those passionate painters, poets, and philosophers of Romanticism in the 19th century, and to do so as pragmatically as humanly possible. Yes, life should be enchanted, and yes, you have to follow that unique inner spark and express your individuality, because only that can truly bring harmony between what is within and what is around us. Yes, mountaineering and (with the words of Jamie Wheal) “recapturing the rapture” of nature lead to a sense of the dramatic! The tremendous! The cosmic images of the Hubble space telescope speak to us, and then they can speak through us, as we channel our inspiration into the world. The romantic moment, be it of spiritual bliss, creative insight, or even falling in love, makes the entirety of the world and its suffering somehow “worth it”. And yet—none of that will by itself resolve, for instance, the climate crisis. And the climate crisis will sweep much of the potential for such beauty off the face of the Earth. Thus, it is by stretching the soul between these two poles, by holding on to them both at once, that one can create movements that work from the spirit of the romantic, and towards real solutions. But think about it: Do you think that being purely pragmatic is enough? Where will the strokes of genius come from? Where will the tenacity to go that extra mile come from? Where will the inspiration that fuels profound transformation of the entire economy and way of life come from? It comes from the bleeding heart, from a sense of tragedy, from those moments when we are in love with life. There is, in this sense, nothing more pragmatic than pure, unapologetic romanticism. Pragmatism is lost without love and rapture, without the romantic. But the moments of rapture cannot sustain themselves. A climate movement, for instance, can only be truly successful if it deliberately uses the love for and mystery of nature to fuel human engagement with science, policy, and the dirtiest of all: politics. (The same could be said, by the way, of marriage.) So if the world has been divided between pragmatists and romantic souls, it appears that a most fruitful paradox to meditate upon becomes pragmatic romanticism. The two may perhaps never be happily married, but in the both-and that attempts to grasp them in one embrace, there is creativity and hope to be found.

Informed Naivety

Informed naivety is the both-and of knowing that what you believe in is indeed naive, seeing how it is “impossible”, but still working from that vision because it will still move things in the right direction. So maybe it is naive to think that climate change can be curbed, or that political polarization can be mitigated and people can begin to understand one another better, or that we can create free and fair solarpunk autonomous zones of postcapitalism and distributed governance. But the very fact that people do insist on working naively on those issues means that potentials emerge that otherwise wouldn’t have. The world is run and reproduced by realists, but it is transformed, bit by bit, by dreamers. The sci-fi author Ursula Le Guin once noted that, in times prior to democracy, the end of the divine right of kings was unimaginable, and that today, the end of capitalism is equally so. Yet, democracy did emerge, once the conditions were ripe for it. It is by being students of such conditions of transformation and change that we can adopt and live by an informed naivety. Such naivety keeps some of our childlike qualities, like innocence and directness of experience, but attempts to marry them to the discerning and protective mind of the educated adult. It keeps the door open to alternatives, to other worlds, and it feeds our (non-existent) souls with hope and inspiration. The cypherpunks and the hackers of the Ethereum blockchain community serve as an example: The deeper they delve into computation and the crude incentives of economic modeling and finance, the more they can begin to imagine radically different futures of freedom and equality under decentralized cooperation.

Magical Realism

Magical realism you might have heard of already: It’s a big thing in literature, with authors like Haruki Murakami (author of e.g. Kafka on the Shore, 2005) combining a bit of social realism, and renderings of everyday life and history, with magical interruptions that break through common reality, in a sense commenting upon it and helping us reach deeper beneath its surfaces. And so boring bus rides and visits to libraries are combined with talking cats and forces of fate that drive the story: “Your problem is that your shadow is a bit—how should I put it? Faint.” comments the black tomcat. It speaks to something many of us can recognize, a lacking sense of fullness when we’re not following our inner path, but it couldn’t have been as succinctly described without the invocation of magic into the narrative, in this case talking cats and thinned-out shadows. This has been an influential movement around the world, particularly in Latin American 20th century literature. Literary scholars are crazy about it and love to write dissertations on the topic. But in this context, I’m thinking of magical realism in the sense where it is applied to life itself, even beyond the realm of art and literature. Yes, we may need to “stick to reality” to remain sane and effective; but our experienced reality is always a projection of our minds, as cognitive science has revealed with increasing clarity. And, as discussed, our minds are more pliable and plastic than we normally imagine, so we can always play with how the world is perceived, interpreted, and participated in. We have available to us the vast potentials of magic and mystery; and, indeed, the farther we travel into the true mechanisms of reality, the farther reaches of relativity, quantum physics, of cosmology, of big history, of complexity, of studies of consciousness and cognition, of sociology, the more mysterious it all actually seems, and the more tools of re-enchantment indeed become available. This is actually a path taken by some of the most forward-thinking performance magicians of our day and age: My friend, Ferdinando Buscema, loves to reveal some of the “magic” behind his tricks, and, in that same move, he ironically makes the tricks seem yet more magical. As such, he combines his background as a mechanical engineer with the art of magic. Ferdinando was inspired by TechGnosis, a 1998 book by Erik Davis, which explores the historical connection between technology and magic and a deep view of cyberculture; indeed, he was inspired to such a degree that he committed the entire book to his active memory, word for word, including the position of each word on each page, in effect carrying the book with him at all times. There is magic in technology, and technology in magic. So magical realism does not only use magic to re-enchant the world of crude physics and reason; it uses crude mechanics to enhance our connection to the magical. In the mathematician Warren Weaver’s 1949 article “Science and Complexity”, he guides us through the development of science, through mechanical physics (things that are sure to occur), to statistical chemistry (things that are likely to occur), to complexity in life and society: that which seems unlikely, impossible even, but nevertheless occurs despite it all. The magical, the emergent, sparks from building step by step on the crudest and simplest rules. And strangely, that somehow makes it even more enchanted, even more connected to the basic movements and regularities of the cosmos. The understanding of complexity as a field of science springs from crude mechanics and reductive physics, and yet, from that very same complexity, springs what appears to be magic.

Each of the above (pragmatic romanticism, informed naivety, and magical realism) somehow relates to the difficult interplay between the left and right hemispheres of the brain. We need to practice stretching our minds between two polarities: from profound enchantment and sense of intuition, wholeness, and radical openness on one hand (right hemisphere), to understanding complexity and the crudest scientific and logical discernment on the other (left hemisphere). It’s interesting to notice how great resistance there is to this simple insight. The world of humans consists almost entirely of people of one type or the other—those that seek to save science, realism, and reason from magic, idealism, and woo woo, or those that seek to save the spiritual realm from cynicism, scientism, and reductionism. In the greater scheme of things, it’s okay that different people take different positions on one side or another of this polarity, even different cultures do, as it’s part of a greater oscillation that runs through society at large. But for sublime mediocrity to be served best in our own lives, the richest position by far is an uncompromising, but calibrated, both-and.

Other Both-Ands

Except for these three both-ands, you can extend the list. Here are some suggestions of my own: the crossroads of fact and fiction, struggle-reborn-as-play, conservative radicalism, game change, and, of course, sublime mediocrity.

• The “crossroads of fact and fiction” is the place where dabs of fiction are used to speak more truly and clearly about facts and reality.
• Struggle-reborn-as-play is when we deepen the sense of our struggles for a kinder and more just world to the point where the love of and gratefulness towards the world becomes apparent as the very underlying source of these same struggles, so that they suddenly appear less like a war and more like a playful experiment. We become “happy revolutionaries”, committed to and flowing from what social theorist Jason Storm has called “revolutionary happiness”.
• Conservative radicalism is when you commit fully to transforming society, but take a careful and gradual stance towards how radical transformation can realistically come about.
• Game change (as described in detail in my other work) is when you accept that life is a game with winners and losers, but still think it’s an unjust game, and resolve to change that game for the better in regards to all of its players.

And beyond that, there are more dangerous but still potentially fruitful concepts that we should only approach with the greatest caution, because they can easily misfire and bring “the worst of both worlds”: sneaky kindness, hierarchical equality, religious nihilism, or idealistic machiavellianism. Without venturing into these, explore them at your own peril. My other work certainly tries to venture into these treacherous waters and time will tell if I overstretched.

Wrathful compassion is another somewhat risky one. I got it from a friend, Anasuya Sengupta, who is, in my own estimation, an exceedingly accomplished social justice activist. She’s the kind of person that many feminists and (anti-)postcolonialists aspire to be; always very enmeshed in the down-to-earth duty to balance out the injustices of the web and of information, always taking up new projects to help people in need in real communities around the world, and always very well informed and thoughtful in her theoretical underpinnings and methods of collaboration. Never complaining or bitter, even in the face of harsh difficulties, always constructive, active, and brave. If you ask her about the source of this admirable and rare level of engagement, she speaks of that quality of “wrathful compassion”. I’m not sure I’d recommend it for everyone: it requires the wrath to be truly felt and embodied, and then connected to a source of compassion that flows from a genuine sense of injustice. In theory, any abusive leader, or destructive rebel, could claim that their mistreatment of others is really just a deeper expression of wrathful compassion. It could easily be used as a justification for why certain basic ethics don’t apply to us. But it is, as far as I can tell, a very powerful both-and if done correctly: the unstoppable energy and agency of wrath, channeled towards universal purposes motivated by compassion.

Yet another, somewhat less dangerous, one is empirical pessimism combined with theoretical optimism: yes, it is true that civilizational collapse may occur sooner or later, and yes, we’re all mediocre and likely to fail to change the ways of the world, and yes, things always go horribly awry sooner or later (pessimism, then, in the empirical sense: what will actually happen is often pretty bad: hence, “empirical pessimism”). But it is still true that whenever we find out something that brings us closer to truth, justice, and beauty, such qualities nevertheless manifest (so, in theory, the greater good is always there as a potential, and still worth striving for: “theoretical optimism”). The two sides actually fit together: admitting that death, collapse, the ubiquity of mistakes, crash boom bang, are the rule, not the exception, takes nothing away from the sense that all things connect in the end, in a larger view, and are worth resolving with truth-seeking. So in the short run, the conservatives and cynics are always right: “It’ll never work, guys. Get a job. And a damn haircut.” But in the long run, at least some of the most radical among us always turn out to be right: democracy did emerge, as did human rights and gender equality before the law, and the social welfare state. The universe has literally evolved from dust to Shakespeare, why then should it stop now? It’s a tragic and eternally broken world, but because there is such a thing as truth, the very same brokenness always holds the promise of something unimaginably wonderful emerging. The tragedy of the universe also holds within it the capacity for the good and the just, towards which the truth leads us. It’s pretty close to Gandhi’s old dictum: “Truth is God”. That’s a God worth keeping and submitting to.

The Double Extremist Stance

All of these are fruitful, if not innocent and harmless, paradoxes for us to contemplate, to play with, and to experiment with. What is the sound of both ands clapping? What potentials are we keeping ourselves from by thinking that one extreme always excludes its apparent opposite? The balanced mind is not necessarily one of golden means, of averages and compromises; a stronger balance can be achieved by becoming not just an extremist, but a double extremist. The farther you go in one extreme, the more potential is actually opened up at the seemingly opposite end of the spectrum, resulting in a wider embrace of life and reality. For instance, we may attempt to be extremely secular, and extremely religious, both at once.

Life is always-already an experiment, and thus it is actually irresponsible for us not to take seriously its vast possibilities and potentials. We have every right to try to transform society, and ourselves, even if it is admittedly always a dangerous business. Because the status quo is also dangerous, also insane. With this call to live by sincere irony, I thus invite you to take a stance of enlightened madness, of double extremism, and to help to turn our struggles into play.

Not only does this stance fuel a sense of hope and humor during life’s darker tunnels and its sub-mediocre patches of tragedy, but it powers our shared capacity to reimagine and reshape our lives, and ultimately the world. Even if (and when) we fail, that’s a win for Protopia.

—

Hanzi Freinacht is a political philosopher, historian, and sociologist, author of ‘The Listening Society’, ‘Nordic Ideology’ and the upcoming books ‘The 6 Hidden Patterns of History’ and ‘Outcompeting Capitalism’. 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.

Summary So Far

By now—if you have read the previous articles that outline the eight pathways to a new planetary paradigm of education—a vision of the future of global education has begun to crystallize. Briefly put, I have roughly suggested an educational system that:

1. Emphasizes the cultivation of a multi-dimensional ecological relatedness.
2. Works to counter and adapt to the disruptions of technological innovations.
3. Leverages tech for purposes of tailoring education to the individual and supporting learning through modelling.
4. Emphasizes inner work and creates safe spaces for this to happen, while cultivating trust and training teachers in how to do so.
5. Is organized as a network, connected to other spheres of society through real-world projects, and managed with sociocratic principles of self-governance.
6. Is tailored to prioritize the cultivation of basic traits and meta-skills over specific knowledge content, while still prioritizing the hard work of learning to study more efficiently, and includes an expanded sexual and gender-relations education.
7. Gives Global South countries a say in how world history and social science are taught in the Global North and makes Big History the backbone subject of all other subjects.
8. Has a second layer of virtual networked education, tailored for the needs and concerns of global refugee populations

… but this series is not here to present a vision of the future of education. These particular suggestions may be revised or exchanged. Our main emphasis is, and remains, to present the map of the eight pathways from education as we know it, to a new paradigm of education.

What’s Holding Us Back

Through this study I have come to believe that a major shift in the world of education is held back primarily by three factors:

1. That key agents do not have a shared map or understanding of the basic shift between paradigms of education, and thus find it hard to work together and achieve consistent results.
2. That key agents at the top leadership level hold each other back by failing to align interests, goals and projects in accordance with a shared understanding and mutual aid.
3. That political and economic systems limit the degrees of freedom that reformers have to act.

Simply stated, agreement upon a shared map of how education can and should be transformed is necessary for real progress to be made—what are the different pathways and how do they interrelate? The map does not have to be perfect to be usable, nor is agreement required about the details. It only needs to be “good enough for now, safe enough to try”; it just needs basic consent from key stakeholders (as the formerly discussed sociocratic method of governance states). Not consensus—only consent.

And it is by having such a shared map, that rifts between different global organizations, countries and other key agents can be bridged. If key stakeholders show up at a workshop with such a shared framework in mind, the ability to reach shared understanding and align interests may be increased. Again, even if the map may need improvement, it can offer a place to start from.

And from there on, strategic alliances of reformers can be forged around the different pathways, or other projects that relate to them and have synergies with them, or in synergies across and between them—and this can help to escape the political and economic constraints that hold the field of global education, and its key players, in check.

This requires a kind of non-linear leadership; not the leadership of going from A to B, but leadership that works synergistically—or even, as manner of speaking, alchemically—to transform gridlocks into opportunities, to travel through a maze of pitfalls and opportunities for change. The more people have a shared map, the easier they can cooperate and find pathways through the maze. May non-linear leaders emerge and rise to the task.

It’s All Connected

Synergies between these eight pathways are possible in more ways than can be imagined beforehand, not least as the pathways still need to be trodden and further explored—but most of all, because each synergy effect is case-specific and must be discovered within its own unique situation.

That being said, let us look at some of the chains of synergies and interrelations between the different pathways.

• Strategically countering the negative effects of mobile technology’s tendency to hijack our attention and take us out of the present moment is necessary for serious inner work to take place in educational settings.
• Serious inner work and being present in the moment is necessary for us to be fully engaged with the beauty of nature and our sense of connectedness to the biosphere.
• Connectedness with the biosphere and direct experience of nature is nurturing for our mental health. • Good mental health is necessary for cultivating meta-skills such as compassion and sensemaking.
• The meta-skills of compassion and sense-making are necessary for the perspectives of other cultures to be truly understood, such as if the Global South perspectives are included into the curricula of the Global North.
• The Global South perspectives are necessary for populations around the world to better understand the realities and perspectives of refugees, the vast majority of whom are from this region, and this can boost the support for their education via virtual systems of empowerment.
• When networked virtual systems of education are created for refugee purposes, this can also spur innovation in the leveraging of tech in other parts of global education, leading to Big Data being used there to tailor education to individual needs according to algorithms.
  Big Data and AI-driven education can free up teaching time and let teachers focus more on connecting personally with their pupils, engendering greater mutual trust.
• Greater mutual trust and freed-up teacher time can help shape education in a more networked direction.
• A more networked education can offer greater support to the introduction of more real-world projects.
• Real-world projects can offer a bridging out to other systems of society, thus creating a basis for more community-based schooling.
• A more community-based schooling can offer a more experiential and less cerebral kind of learning.
• A more experiential and less cerebral learning can offer better prerequisites for serious collective and individual trauma work.
• Serious trauma work can help to heal not only painful histories and issues of ethnic identity, but also issues of gender conflict and identity.
• Healing painful ethnic relations and histories is necessary for members of the Global South to leapfrog into a new economic, technological, and cultural era of greater planetary equality.

The list could go on. The point is, again, that these pathways interconnect. They all point in a similar direction: towards a new paradigm of education. Exclude one of the paths, and our non-linear road to a rewired global education becomes more difficult. If the map takes hold, more non-linear leaders will become skilled at seeing and navigating these connections, grabbing the moments given to transform education through strategic alliances across nations and sectors.

Of course, the pathways interconnect not only with each other, but also with the wider systems of society, culture and economy. To transform education is, ultimately, to transform society itself. By extension, transforming global education is to transform global society.

At this moment in history, East and West are meeting as equals and finding ways to integrate. North and South are meeting as equals. Industrial society is giving way to information society. And society is shifting from the national to the transnational and global. Each of these shifts occur within and through education, since education is the largest interface between each individual human being and her society.

To transform global society into what it must become, we must grow as cultures, nations, and human beings.

And growing means learning. And learning means playing.

So let us play.

—

Hanzi Freinacht is a political philosopher, historian, and sociologist, author of ‘The Listening Society’, ‘Nordic Ideology’ and the upcoming books ‘The 6 Hidden Patterns of History’ and ‘Outcompeting Capitalism’. 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.

“A refugee is someone who survived and who can create the future”.

—Amela Koluder

According to pre-Ukrainian war figures from UNHCR, there are currently around 7.4 million school-age refugees, of which 3.7 million are out of school entirely. It has been estimated that 63% of refugees are enrolled in primary schools, only 24% in secondary school, and 3% in higher education (compared to 91%, 84% and 37% globally).

It is, naturally, of utmost concern that these children are reached by quality education, as lost years of schooling will likely affect their lives and their chances of ever finding homes and livelihoods in the economies and societies of established countries. It is not a far stretch to also consider the rest of the some 22.5 million refugees, the adults and preschoolers, as deprived of educational resources and opportunities and lifelong learning.

As the wave of refugees from Ukraine attests to, there is, unfortunately, little reason to believe that this is the last, or smallest, population of refugees that will exist; the many chaotic conditions of life and changes in global society make future waves of refugees likely to emerge:

• As argued in the previous article in this series, the world is more interconnected at the global and transnational levels, which breaks open what sociologist Ulrich Beckcalled “the container state”, making states unable to handle populations that fall between the cracks of defined citizenship.
• The increased mobility that communication technologies (and transport) allow make people more likely to move when their life conditions become unbearable.
• The political (and popular) reluctance to accept and successfully integrate migrants, often for fear of being socially and economically overburdened or to experience clashes between cultures.
• The displacement of populations due to the effects climate change (and other environmental factors).
• A, at least in some regards, more unstable geopolitical world order.

Taken together, there is little reason to be optimistic about this problem solving itself; despite the best transnational efforts, refugees and displaced populations living in camps and under vulnerable conditions will likely be here for times to come. Of course, the main thrust can and should be to reduce the sheer number of refugees and displaced populations—but the world of education cannot ignore the fact that refugees exist and that all stand to benefit from their inclusion into education.

If the new educational paradigm is to be truly global in its nature, it simply follows that strategies must be tailored to educate refugees—the world’s current refugees, and the refugees of the future.

A great opportunity is to leverage mobile technology to support education among refugee populations (not least mobile technologies do play an increasingly important role in refugee lives, 39% of households are estimated to have access to an Internet-capable device). Mobile technology could help to increase the reach and quality of the education of refugees. UNESCO has indeed already investigated this opportunity, claiming that the potentials are there but also that more research is needed to progress effectively.

In the following, I offer a few considerations about how “a new paradigm of education” could translate into and inform measures to empower and secure the education of refugees.

A Global Virtual “School System of Last Resort”

A fundamental issue of being a refugee is that one’s citizenship is often not fully recognized; one “falls between the cracks” and is thus deprived of the rights and services bestowed upon citizens of different countries.

Without clearly identifying people as citizens, state structures are often inept, and sometimes oppressive, towards the sans papiers. It may thus be beneficial to create an internationally funded schooling system that enrolls people without such requirements, giving each an identity number, and tracking their progress longitudinally: which courses have they taken, what are their interests and special needs, and so forth. Such a system could exist virtually and have its own staff; it would be a Global Virtual “School System of Last Resort”. This could offer refugee learners at least some sense of educational belonging and continuity.

Another fundamental aspect of being a refugee is that one is often on the move; trying to find a viable place in the world for oneself and one’s family. If already enrolled and tracked in a virtual school, it may be easier to pick up where one left off.

Naturally, such a system can and should be combined with actual teachers who can visit refugee camps and teach there. But for these to have good understanding and data on the progress of learners, and for this to be done with continuity, it is also beneficial to gather data on the learning progress of refugees.

Whereas it may be unrealistic to ever expect the quality of refugee education to match conventional institutions, both systems may benefit from a shift in perspective towards the “network schooling” as discussed under the “Protopian Education Five” part of this series. The aim would no longer be solely to reach as many as possible with quality education (although that is, of course, a viable goal), but also, and perhaps primarily, to inspire and encourage disenfranchised children and young to create their own learning projects, and supporting the acquisition of knowledge they need to solve real-world community problems and or produce benefits for themselves.

It is thus worth considering whether network schooling, supported not only by mobile tech, but also Big Data, could be a model for refugee education. In a networked world, where more people are excluded, there need to be networks of learning even beyond the state level.

Migration Flows and Citizenship

Another perspective I would like to offer concerns how and in which ways refugees are taught and empowered. It is no secret that more educated refugees generally fare better than uneducated ones, having more knowledge and skills to manage the demands of paperwork and legal frameworks that face them.

If migration flows continue to increase, and if states continue to fail to manage them, there will be an increasing number of people who, at least in effect, lack a proper citizenship. Hence, one of the educational goals of refugees may be to learn the basics of what citizenship of different relevant countries entail, how they are acquired, and what expectations and obligations that come with them. In other words, it may be a high priority to empower refugees to increase their chances of becoming fully enfranchised citizens of relevant countries; this would facilitate the process of arrival and integration into new communities, and help refugees to make life choices about migration on better grounds.

Such programs of education cannot guarantee that refugees do indeed acquire citizenship and new homes in desired countries. But there does appear to be a mutual interest here: receiving countries can invest in equipping refugees with proper understanding of their countries and systems in order to better be able to accept and integrate refugees; refugees are likely to have a strong interest in learning about how to change their situation—and make informed choices in difficult situations.

Like everyone else, refugees naturally have a will and wish to learn about other issues as well, and getting a proper education for its own sake. However, assuming that the goal of most refugees is to change their situation into a more stable one, it makes sense to make education as empowering as possible to this end. In the end, even if refugees are in many ways victimized populations, it is also the refugees themselves that can do the most to change their situations—and there is thus a strong argument to do everything possible to empower them to do so.

Strong forces might disagree with such a solution: many countries would prefer to avoid informing refugees about how to come to their country and how to become a citizen, so as to avoid the initial costs of accepting new members of society. However, if countries pledge to do this together, and via a shared educational system deliberately designed for the purpose of refugee education (as discussed above), the results may indeed be balanced and manageable—more so than the current situation in which the refugee populations are effectively locked out and accumulate in larger numbers.

In conclusion, the global education system must prepare for a world in which refugees are a reality; but this does not mean that nothing can be done—on the contrary, it means that the right educational institutions and practices can not only mitigate the harms of displacement, but even help reduce displacement itself, establishing new pathways to citizenship, by empowering the refugees.

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Hanzi Freinacht is a political philosopher, historian, and sociologist, author of ‘The Listening Society’, ‘Nordic Ideology’ and the upcoming books ‘The 6 Hidden Patterns of History’ and ‘Outcompeting Capitalism’. 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.