“Stage theory…

Is BS.

Always was.

And it is colonial as hell.”

—Nora Bateson

 

The following is an extract of the introduction chapter from Hanzi Freinacht’s unpublished book ‘The 6 Hidden Patterns of History: A Metamodern Guide to World History’.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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are Stage Theories BS?

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

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

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

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

Q: And yet…?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HF: Still not getting it, I see.

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s take a few examples:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A History without Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

HF: Actually, no.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

Nor is it the history of kings and queens.

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

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

It’s not the progress of technology in itself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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