What is Metamodernism?

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I've heard this name dropped a few times recently and thought this article offered an interesting unpack of the content:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog ... amodernism

The overall idea - it's on one hand an agreement with many of postmodernism's critiques of modernism but at the same time a rebuff of the chaos and falling timbers in favor of a light, organized, and responsive pluralism. The author threw in 'transcend and include', I'm sure a lot of the people involved in this are Ken Wilbur inspired and it will be interesting to see if this in any way matches their 'integral' loop once it hits the ground.

I might be leaning towards something like this but I'm not sure. The article doesn't have a lot of detail on what it is philosophically or how it differs from a more skeptical and self-aware modernism.

Agreed - I thought it would be at least good to see someone define it first. A lot of the people that I listen to regularly, like Daniel Schmachtenberger, Jamie Wheal, Jordan Hall, etc., are either involved or considerer adjacent. There could be a value as well in trying to avoid letting it get politically pigeonholed before it gets anywhere, otherwise it would just collapse as a subspecies of something that's already well-known.

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Hehe It's Not Necessary

To Label 'It' Anything

Humans are Resourceful

Litter Critters Give Them A Path

And They Find Another One That Works Better

Information/Arts Are Free Now And Practically

Uncensored In Most Places on Earth

The Paths Are Here And

Folks Are Free

To Choose

What Works

For Them And Create

New Paths At Relative

Free Will As Always This

Is NaTuRE ALL They Surely Will

Some Will Rise Some Will Fall Now

No Different Than Waves on A Beach...

---

Western Civilization is over.

It's a project, that's for sure.

---

"Western Civilization Is Over"

All Who Will Be Worried

Is Domesticated

Wild-Life Now

Including Humans...

Simple Solution Go Feral

With Teeth And Claws

Foraging For

What's

Still Left Real

to Love And Eat...

The Rest Is Only A
Clothed Hallucination We

Create Like Everything Else

We Create With Our Minds

As Long 'As This Peace Lasts'

Where i LiVE AT Least Gonna

Make It The Most EPiC Story Possible

Cause

i CAN

AND WiLL

And Sure
i'll Write my Own
Story too Yes this
Is 'MetaModernism' My Style

As i Am Welcome to Appropriate

What Ever Metaphor i Choose

And Change the Meaning Freely Now

All The Colors Now Human Imagination
And Creativity Makes When Let Loose Wild

Mastering All The Tools of Western Civilization

Others Make As Western Civilization Becomes my Slave Now

And Yours

Too Unless

You Are Afraid

And Only Stay A Slave...

To Whatever Tribal Ideology
Rules You Outside of You As

'You' Become That Tool...

Just in my

View of Course

The Way i See it

Most Likely not Like You...

Yet On the Other Hand i Document

What i Do Works Irrefutable As Such...

"BeCoME A Wittiest Fool" Considering Neuroscience

Shows We Basically Hallucinate Our Reality Based On

Experiences Former We Hallucinate And Co-Create too...

We aRE All 'Fools' This Way Might As Well Be A Wittiest Fool We Hallucinate True

All of Life IS Chaos Magic Neuroscience SHoWS It Create A Great Work of Life BE ART....

When Less Than

A Grain of Sand

Becomes A Star ONE Arrives

No Different Than OZ Returning

Home To "Kansas' A 'Point of No Return Now'

Today Has Been A Great Day The First Day my Wife
Ever Questioned A Verse in the Old Bible; Why Does

'God' Say God Will Protect You From Harm When Folks

Get Harmed Every Day Who Believe in God Three Words 'The Book Lies'...

Do Like i Do

Find Your

Own

Truth Within

And Write Your Own

Bible That Tales no Lies...

You'll Be Confused And Amazed

At First Yet Humans Again Are Resourceful

Little Critters Won't Be The First Time Someone Writes Their Own Bible

And Plays All the Characters The Way They Wanna Hallucinate Life Now

That Much We Will Master What We Give While Everyone Else Consumes What's Taken...

Hint:

Anything
Goes Hard

For Some

Folks to Hear

Yet Even History

Shows Anything Goes...

Again Waves Do Rise And Fall

Never The Less Waves Exist As
Rain Drops And Oceans Whole

i For One

Don't

Mind Being

All Three At Once
Night or Day Matters Not...

Note: This All A 'Koan' Create It As You Will i Sure Do...

Matter of FAct More Reasonably Art Every Word i Write IS

Just

Because i Am

i Can Will Do Create Now

Actually It's What ALL Humans Do

Whether They Realize IT or NOT They Create Now (God)

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I don't care for how steeped the article is in ivory tower vocab--it kind of undermines my faith in the articles ability to explain new patterns of understanding when it does so in a way that the psychologically uninitiated cannot understand. I'd love to see this article in plainer English. (I realize the irony of this given my usual choice of vocab).

Still, I've been waiting for a while for post-modernism to die. It's served its purpose of questioning the certainty of the past, but we need to move past the irony and irreverence for it's own sake. We need a kind of new certainty and sincerity--one that recognizes that the deconstruction of antiquated ideas under post-modernism was necessary, while also recognizing the need to accept and assert the new perspectives formed under post-modernism with sincerity and clarity. Especially because reactionary conservatives have begun to weaponize post-modern irony against itself. Consider the usage of memes to spread reactionary beliefs. As post-modern ideas become more mainstream, right-ring became the counterculture. Thus, irreverence for contemporary ideas becomes increasingly reactionary. Post-modern irony was useful when it questioned conservative christian hegemony--that same irony is dangerous when it is used to undermine ideals that spread as a result of questioning that hegemony: feminism, queer rights, religious equality, secular government, etc.

Western civilization as conservatives understand it killed itself. Nationalism gave us two world wars. Capitalism gave us environmental destruction, inequality, and autocracy. Refusal to accept democratic socialist reform gave us violent leftist revolutions which were hijacked by tyrants. Archaic understanding of Christianity gave us bigotry.
Nothing did more to discredit Western Civilization (as conservatives understand it) than Western Civilization itself.

I think it's jargonny more for the sake of being as non-committal about final form as it can by while explaining the rules that define it as tightly as possible, thus it goes in a very technical direction.

The idea seems to be: admit that ripping things down has its limits, that cultural needs vary across groups, that our world is filled with complex problems that can't be solved with a top-down media or government instruction for the populace that's one-size-fits-all, and from there how do we have a media and government ecology that allows for variation across populations while simultaneously catering to the needs of each in a non zero-sum way, and on top of that doing a good job with both national security and reducing the need for national security by trying to play the same positive-sum games with other countries as well as possible.

That had been my general understanding. It's something I think can get behind. I'm a believer in the need for synthesis.
We will just need to take care that its ideas and rhetoric are not appropriated by reactionaries to undermine it. They've learned that since they can't come up with new ideas, they are left with disguising old ideas in new clothes.

I don't know if you're familiar with the names but Daniel Schmachtenberger, Jamie Wheal, and Jordan Hall are all good listens.

It's a funny thing in that I have a tough time occasionally parsing these things, ie. these are Game B guys who are in principal at least one foot in to Metamodernism (TM) but they're more known as GameB top brass thinkers and in a lot of ways there seems to be a lot of overlap between the two camps, just that metamodernism as I understand it is more of a political and civic philosophy where as GameB is much more like 'GameA is falling apart, what can we potentially do - based in altruism but informed by what vulnerabilities GameA exploits to win - that will outsurvive or replace GameA as it crashes of its own dysfunction?'. They're two slightly different tracks, particularly considering that metamodernism is coming at it instead from 'if we take modernism, postmodernism, Ken Wilbur, and try to shake out the best ideas - what do we end up with?' - which is a slightly different proposition but it seems to land quite close.

Metamodernism has been around for a decade or so in the arts - it's been coined by the guys, Vermeulen and Akker, mentioned in the paragraph about it as a socio-cultural phase.
For a while I was quite interested in it, because the post-modern irony felt flat and played out to me. It's the aesthetics of generation-x, while metamodernism feels like a good description for the aesthetic sensibilities of millennials - an example would be organic, fair-trade fashion, which used to be for hippies until about a decade ago, and has since been designed by and for hipsters. Or organicfood, which used to be all wholegrain sugarfree and awful, but for ten, 15 years has become varied, interested in specialties and craft and pleasure. It's a synthesis of the idealism of the environmentalists and hedonist consumerism.

The obvious problem is that postmodernism wasn't bread in a lab, but grew out of a late-capitalist society - and I'm by now pretty sure that metamodernism as a socio-cultural movement is no longer a synthesis of modernist progressivism and postmodernist skepticism, but has been recuperated by capitalism...
the perfect image for that is the wealthy SUV-driving soccer mom who buys organic quinoa. (as you may know, quinoa used to be the healthy staple food of parts of South America- but due to its popularity, it's being exported to the US and Europe now, while the indigenous farmers of South America have to rely on less nutritious crops like potatoes).

you can't just prescribe a mindset like metamodernism - postmodernism wasn't invented by philosophers and pushed onto people. Postmodernism is a materialist mindset that grew out of what capitalism did to social structures (you know: all that is sacred is being profaned, all that is solid melts into air, as Marx wrote about the socio-cultural effects of the capitalist mode of production).

To paraphrase Joseph Goebbels: When I read the word metamodernism, I reach for my Baudrillard.

I have a different take living in the US. For the cultural and media McDonalds we've been raised on I'm surprised we can still even pronounce multisyllabic words. Anything, even cut/diluted a bit from base-potency, is still a better trajectory than Kardashians, donkey vs. elephant, what celebrity is in rehab, or which end of the apparatus goes in your mouth vs. up the butt.

The US is Pleasure Island from Pinocchio if I've ever seen it.

The city of Munich, which I live near, gave up its vaccination-prioritization program for teachers the other day, because teachers weren't interested in getting vaccinated anytime soon. I'm not sure if Europe is that far behind the US.

I have the strong feeling that the next "big philosophy" is going to be non-human. - we're basically still in the romantic period, where the depth of human wisdom and emotion is the be all and end all of everything. But I think the growth of AI in every sector will put an end to this, it will decide on when and how to treat people, it will make decisions, and it will allocate resources. The Trekkie in me is looking forward to this, but the Marxist already knows that this will help Elon Musk reach immortality before it will distribute food so that Somali children aren't being starved by the global commodity markets.