Let’s try to answer the following question: What is world history from a metamodern perspective?
We can start from the negative:
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 is it that structures and drives the elements of information? That’s what propels history; which is to say, that’s 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 earthquake and following 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 my work, 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. (We can of course begin to imagine memetic evolution beyond biological life, and thus a cultural history in a non-organic substrate, like AI, for instance. But let’s set that aside for now.) 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’s memetically significant. Events that don’t change memes aren’t really “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, overarching metamemes.
Thus, metamemes are patterns-of-cultural-patterns. The metamemes are the hidden patterns of history.
***
Of course, we cannot entirely remove the biological species Homo sapiens from the equation. As such, it is both about human beings and not about human beings as such. The thing is, 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 became 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) much larger brains can be grown in those squishy wet things than in our rigid skulls. Perhaps they can be a good seed for a superior substrate for memetic evolution; perhaps other species will take up the baton of memetic history; perhaps 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, the study of metamemes revolves around the study of human history. 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.
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.
