WTF is a Metamodern Systems Thinker?
Path Notes # 2
Come let us build the ship of the future
In an ancient pattern that journeys far…
Robin Williamson (The Circle is Unbroken)
Something beautiful is emerging way out beyond the current paradigm.
It isn’t easy to see. It’s buried amidst the endless cycles of drama, outrage, fear and suffering. It’s drowned out by the cacophony of doom-mongerers, denialists, death-cult devotees, dumpster-fire politicos and dopamine-bandits all fighting over whatever scraps of your attention and soul remain. It’s a faint voice whispering in the back row while the parade of malevolent clowns and snake-oil salesman march up and down Main Street peddling their simplistic autocratic fantasies of a regression to some non-existent mythical golden past. It’s a shit show out there folks. Business-as-usual is clearly utter madness. Most of the alternatives look even worse.
And yet something beautiful is emerging.
The artists and shadowland visionaries are always the first to catch a glimpse of these things. They’re chimerical. Stare too hard and, like faint stars, they fade. You have to catch them obliquely, reflected in the eyes of the moon-drunk poets and jester-physicists, even if their words sound absurd. I’m not going to insult you by pretending I can do much better than that. But I’ll try and use this post as some kind of literary scrying mirror to catch an echo from the adjacent possible future.
Let’s start with the thinker part.
At the heart of all social change there will be a transformative idea. When such ideas are enacted through our behaviours, social institutions and technologies, they reconfigure our relationships – with ourselves, with each other and with the world around us. All revolutions begin in the imagination and a powerful idea can reverberate across the ages touching generation after generation.
Powerful, of course, does not necessarily mean good.
Our world is full of bad ideas that have been well executed at scale by generations of well-trained leaders, activists, managers and evangelists. Envisioned by the prophets. Enacted by the priests.
It can be startling to realize the degree to which we dwell in the imaginations of distant ancestors – whether our own and other peoples’. And it’s always worth being curious about the core idea at the heart of any proposal to change or improve things. Is there a fundamentally new idea here? Does the proposal involve the enactment or scaling of an existing idea? Which one? And, perhaps most importantly, what ecology of imagination does this idea exist in or emerge from?
Because ideas always exist in socio-cultural, ecological and historical contexts.
We like to think we’re unique beings having original thoughts that influence the world and shape history. But the reverse is also true; our ideas are also emergent properties of complex social and ecological systems at particular moments in time.
Buddhism emerged – and diverged – from the ecosystem of what we now call Hinduism. It kept enlightenment, meditation and reincarnation. It dropped the caste system and the theology. And it offered a radical idea; there’s a way off the endless wheel of suffering.
Christianity emerged – and diverged – from Judaism. It was shaped by the dynamics of the Roman Empire and the cultural patterns of desert pastoralism. And, like Buddhism, it found adaptive success in the face of increasing social complexity by offering ‘open-source’ membership that transcended racial, ethnic, caste and class boundaries.
Liberation and salvation available to everyone – not only the chosen elite.
Many of the secular principles cherished by progressive people emerged as Christianity first discovered the printing press and then got cooked by the Industrial Revolution. Nothing exists in a complex system if it isn’t in relationship to something else. Systems thinkers try to make those relationships visible.
Whatever our path of service, it is floating along in a river of historical ideas. Ideas that aggregate together as movements (belief systems, paradigms, philosophies, artistic forms, theologies) that shape our collective understanding of the world and our efforts to describe and influence it. We give those movements names that come to define an era. We seem to be on the threshold of a new philosophical era and one way to describe what’s coming is metamodernism.
For the sake of this story, we’ll call everything that either came before - or was displaced by – the modern industrial era, the pre-modern or the traditional. It’s a horribly simplistic way to describe the countless cultural lifeways of the human family none of whom saw themselves as being pre-anything. It makes modernity the reference point for all other paradigms which it obviously isn’t. But you get the idea. Because we’re all children of modernity now. Even if you’re living as part of an unbroken ancestral lineage in the most isolated place on earth, modernity is going to arrive on your doorstep one day – as a missionary, a miner, a National Geographic photographer, a virus or a change in the weather.
Whether we’re the privileged firstborn or we got abducted as the circus rolled through town, modernity has shaped us all.
It’s a philosophical worldview that was born in the Renaissance (C14th – 17th), shaped by the Enlightenment (C17th – 18th) and super-charged by the Industrial Revolutions (C19th) until it became the dominant global paradigm. It overturned centuries of traditional authority from religious doctrines to royal dynasties and almost everything in your life has been shaped by its foundational ideas:
- Science: there’s an objective reality that can be discovered through the scientific method and rationality.
- Secularism: religious beliefs and ideologies should be separate from decision-making in the public sphere.
- Individualism: a growing focus on the rights of individuals to pursue self-expression
- Technology: technological progress offers the basis for economic security and freedom from nature’s constraints – disease/climate/famine/darkness/distance/gravity etc.
- Progress: a utopian philosophy of social evolution, change and universal progress
- Politics: industrialized nation states (whether communist/capitalist/pluralist/imperialist) characterized by civil institutions and bureaucracy all trading, competing and/or cooperating within a global order.
Post-modernism reflected a growing disillusionment with modernity’s promises, principles and socio-ecological downsides. Emerging at the end of the 2nd World War it was fueled by mass media technologies, the dissolution of colonial empires, liberation movements (civil rights, feminism, anti-colonial etc.), soaring rates of college graduates, the counter-cultural movements of the 1960’s and the dynamics of the Cold War. Seen from the perspective of an increasingly diverse cross-section of the human family, it was clear that some of modernity’s grand narratives and universalist claims were at best partial and at worst self-serving fictions that tended to privilege Euro-centric, white, male, military-industrial, developed/wealthy/Northern nation perspectives. Modernity was a more partial perspective than it believed itself to be, and the post-modernists made that visible.
Post-modernists began to challenge modernity’s cherished notions of singular progress, absolute truth, universal values and explanatory frameworks. Reality, it suggested, is fragmented, subjective and context dependent. Diverse voices and experiences are systemically excluded from dominant narratives. Hierarchies are bad. Things are relative not absolute. Your truth is not my truth. Nobody calls themselves post-modernist nowadays; real post-modernists reject such essentializing labels and for many it's a term of abuse like ‘woke’ or ‘new age’. But it’s become the dominant intellectual movement of 21st century cultural elites.
Just as modernism developed in lockstep with western science (Bacon’s scientific method, Newtonian physics, Cartesian rationalism etc.) post-modernism emerged alongside the complexity sciences and they share some important overlaps. Both are critical of reductionism and simplistic explanatory frameworks. Both recognize the contextual, non-linear and entangled nature of reality. Both emphasize contingency, uncertainty and multiplicity. But while the complexity sciences are able to explain, predict, intervene and create with increasing value and precision, it is hard to say the same of post-modernism. Like Romanticism before it, post-modernism is a tradition of critique that reveals the flaws and invisible dynamics within the current system but has few viable strategies for fixing them. Its critics would say that it has reached the end of the line and is being consumed by its own logical inconsistencies and endlessly fractal deconstruction. The party’s over. It just doesn’t know it yet.
Metamodernism is more of a question than a movement and almost nobody has heard of it.
It’s one name for the thing that has to come next if we going to figure this shit out people!
It’s the ‘post’ post-modernist integral movement that somehow must incorporate the best of pre-modernist traditionalism, of modernism and of post-modernism alike. None of them are going away any time soon but none on their own provide the generative conditions for human and planetary flourishing at scale. And they have to live together on a finite planet with atom bombs and spiralling carbon emissions. Fuelled by the hyper-connectivity of the internet age, metamodernism is an integrating framework that is attempting to resolve some the tensions that so many of us find ourselves holding between:
- Individualism and collectivism: how do we find individual purpose, meaning and self-expression while developing greater collective awareness, responsibility and reciprocity?
- Unity and diversity: how do we perceive ourselves as a single planetary species while honoring the rich diversity of our cultures, traditions and perspectives? And how do we do so without ignoring or replicating the disparities of the past and present? How do we transform legacies of pain and suffering inherited from our ancestors while imagining a flourishing future?
- Hope and cynicism: how do we hold a motivating and visionary optimism as we approach real world challenges without losing our critical awareness and spiralling into despair or fantasy?
- Tradition and innovation: how do we maintain a sense of cultural continuity while prying the cold, dead fingers of history from around our throats? How do we embrace the new and make space for creative and discontinuous emergence without leaving ourselves unmoored? What does it really mean to sit at the deathbed of one worldview while attending to the birth of another?
- Truth and beauty: objective reality exists and there are ways to discover and know it. At the same time all knowledge and experience has a subjective and aesthetic quality. How do we honor the many ways of knowing without becoming absurdly relativist? How do we align our cultures and institutions in a beautiful way with complex reality?
- Technology and nature: how do we balance our astonishing and world-shaping technologies with the realities of living together on a fragile planet that has a narrow band of climatic conditions that support life? How do we move beyond ‘solving the environmental crisis’ to becoming a ‘caretaker species?’
- Secularism and spirituality: how do we integrate the deep insights and practices of spiritual tradition without creating or reinforcing oppressive frameworks of shallow superstition and fanaticism?
- Sex and death: how might we come into a mature relationship with eros - the pulsing energy at the heart of creation - without denial, repression or the delirium of possession? How do we truly love ourselves, each other and the living earth?
- Consciousness and culture: how do we attend to the cognitive and developmental tasks of social change? As the existential challenges we face as a species come into focus, what must we not only do but who must we become to address them collectively? What does it really take to cultivate the collective capabilities required to respond adaptively and creatively in these complex times? How might we participate in the evolution of our own consciousness?
- Sincerity and irony: how do we convey the nuanced complexities and contradictions of reality with some self-awareness, humor and a certain epistemic humility? Put another way, how do we communicate with each other about important things without being preachy, opinionated bores? How do we dream together across cultures and lifeways?
If you too are living into some version of these questions and polarities, then your curiosity is helping to shape the metamodern era. It’s not a movement that you can sign up to with a set of orthodoxies and beliefs. It’s more like an attractor that’s emerging. I first stumbled across the term in Terry Patten’s book A New Republic of the Heart. The writings of Hanzi Freinacht, Brent Cooper and Zak Stein were gateway drugs that led to an entire ecosystem of writers, scholars, artists, activists, solarpunks, dreamers and troublemakers that I’m starting to discover.
Be warned: some of it feels like the gallery notes for a pretentious avant-garde art exhibit!
Obscure, self-referential language with a lot of long words? Tick!
The musings of a self-important intellectual elite who sound like they’ve never done an honest day’s work in their life? Tick!
A whiff of hype and horseshit amidst the brilliance? Tick!
But that probably says more about me than ‘them’ and it’s probably been true of every group of intellectuals, revolutionaries, dreamers, artists, adventurers and early adopters that has ever sat around in cafés and waterfront saloons surfing the updrafts of an emerging future. And here I am, sitting at a nearby table catching snippets of their conversation and curious to lean in further.
Because something beautiful is emerging and I want to be a part of it.
Welcome to the metamodern era!
Julian
p.s. A bow of gratitude to Violetta Ilkew for turning me on to Jacob Collier after the last post. These harmonies are simply stunning! And here in return is some suitably surreal metamodern country music!