The concept of the “metameme” came about as a result of realizing that the term “effective value meme”, which I’ve used in my 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 remain intimately connected (in the way that modern societies, for example, tend to generate a lot of people with modern values, and these in turn create modern societal structures), 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, such as all the technological, political, institutional, and artistic aspects that make up the whole of a society. Having two different terms also helps distinguish whether we’re talking about individual, psychological development or collective, societal development.
So, I had to ditch the word “value”, but wanted to keep the word “meme” because that’s essentially the central feature of cultural development. In a way, it’s the only feature. Just consider it: 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 so many other things, their emergence and proliferation are deeply developmentally determined. 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.
The reason I didn’t just use the already existing term “memeplex”, which is short for “meme complex”, is that this word 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; and 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?
Because ballet is a Western invention? Well, then, why did no medieval European societies ever produce ballet dances? The thing is, 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 to achieve the goal of winning. 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.
Now, I’m not saying that Western ballet is better and “more advanced” than all the tribal dances in the world. And I’m definitely not claiming ballet to be more civilized. What I’m saying here, is 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: 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.
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? Post-structuralist 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.
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. 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’s 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” (ODATAA). 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?
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So, does this mean that 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?
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 don’t 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, 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.
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The metamemes are not like time periods, i.e. 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 of the word. 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’re large patterns-of-patterns; they’re 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’re 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, the metamemes offer 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.
If you’re interested in learning more about metamodernism and the philosophy of Hanzi Freinacht, the Metamodern Academy with Emil Ejner Friis is offering an online introduction course in November 2026 here, and if you’re interested in a more comprehensive experience, you can join the new Updated Master Class here.
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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, Medium, and Substack, and you can speed up the process of new metamodern content reaching the world by making a donation to Hanzi here.
