The Metamodern Synthesis

What is Metamodernism?

The Wounded Cat (Portrait of Frida Khalo) by Alice Rahon

Modernism — the period from The Enlightenment to the Postmodern Age — divided the world into the True, the Good, the Beautiful, the Just, and the Profitable. The sciences took on the job of discovering what is true; moral philosophy, religion, and philanthropy took on the job of helping us be good; the arts took on the job of creating the beautiful; government — particularly democratic governance — took on the job of meting out justice; and businesses were allowed to take on the job of creating profit and making everyone wealthy. While postmodernism has challenged some of the hard epistemological assumptions which underlay these divisions, the divisions themselves have not been challenged.

And with good reason. They have served us very well.

The market — the realm of Profit — has created an immense amount of wealth that it has in turn distributed to people around the world. People worldwide are much wealthier than they had ever been before and now the poorest in many countries live far better than the kings of a millennium ago.

Science — the realm of the True— has created a great deal of knowledge about both the natural world, from physics to biology, to human psychology, culture, and society, including the economy. We now know more than we have ever known, and that knowledge is only growing exponentially.

Philanthropy — the realm of the Good — has allowed us to do more good around the world, for more people and for more different kinds of people, than ever before in history. The good we do is no longer confined to the few we know, but now has global reach.

Democracy — the realm of the Just — has brought greater freedom to people around the world, creating more opportunities for the expansion of the other spheres as well. Our ideas of justice are becoming clearer and truer over time, and we are becoming increasingly separated from vengeance as justice and, thus, becoming more just as a result.

Art and literature — the realm of the Beautiful — has resulted in a proliferation of art and literary forms, creating more artistic and literary variety, more perspectives on beauty (and sometimes against beauty — but a work against beauty is also on beauty). Our ideas of beauty have been expanded and challenged over time as a result.

The Modern Era divided the world into different realms, into different social orders. There had always been a market economy, though small, and a gift economy, though concentrated in the Church or other religious orders in other places in the world, which was also the focus of the divine economy, and there had always of course been an economy of power that competed with the organizations in the divine economy, but these all came into their own after the Renaissance, as they became separated from the Church and the ruling classes.

The result was the creation of different social orders. People could pursue technological innovation for its own sake, art for art’s sake, science for the sake of knowledge itself, profit for its own sake, goodness for it’s own sake, justice for its own sake, and even the divine for its own sake. The result was the emergence of democracy, a proliferation of religions and sciences and art forms and styles, and a rapidly expanding economy that truly lifted all boats.

However, it seems that each of these realms has become exhausted. That is the most succinct summary of postmodernism itself: it is the exhaustion of Modernism, the Postscript to Modernism. The postmodern critique of Modernism, needed as it was, was also the weakening of its strengths, and the dissipation of its power. What we are now witnessing is the last of the orders limping along, with replicability problems in the sciences, technology-as-physics becoming exhausted, an increasingly cynical view of the virtues of moneymaking, the attitude in the arts that “it’s all been done,” and the loss of faith in democracy and religion in equal measure.

Periods of exhaustion are also periods of decadence. The wealthy and the elites are just as disgusted with themselves as the rest of humanity are disgusted with them. Donald Trump and Joe Biden are the leaders of the two major political parties in the U.S. because they are the embodiment of decadence and dissolution.

So where does that leave us?

If Modernism brought us divisions and disciplines, Postmodernism has torn down those divisions and introduced multidisciplinarity. The problem is that multidisciplinarity keeps the divisions, doesn’t really bridge those divisions or challenge them in any meaningful way, but simply allows for multiple perspectives as legitimate. That’s something, but it’s hardly enough. It’s the same mentality that results in a kind of tolerance-based multiculturalism that maintains divisions — even encourages the continuation of divisions in the cases of those who oppose “cultural appropriation” — and this only results in further breakdown of knowledge and understanding.

Metamodernism is the promise of interdisciplinarity, of true bridge-building among disciplines, among cultures, races, sexes and genders, and among any number of paradoxical oppositions.

This isn’t to say that the disciplines in and of themselves aren’t useful or necessary. We will still need people working within those paradigms exclusively for the interdisciplinary scholars to work in, but we need to create a space for those interdisciplinary scholars, artists, etc. to work in.

Reductionist science — based on the Modernist model — has to be replaced by complexity science, with an understanding of the systems being studied in the different fields as complex systems with strange attractors and bipolar feedback (positive and negative feedback simultaneously); structured by networks, as dissipative structures, and primarily in the area of criticality; as naturally creative, naturally changing and growing, naturally emergent. That requires an understanding that these systems are all fundamentally similar — this is the meta of metamodernism.

Thus, scientists need to look outside their fields for inspiration. Darwin did. He looked to the economists, and he found the theory of natural selection. It was a beginning, not an end, to evolutionary understanding, but that beginning could not have happened without the works of the economists. Interdisciplinarity is needed for new ideas, for a renewal of the sciences.

And not just scientists need to look outside themselves. Artists, too, need to look outside the artistic community to find understanding and inspiration. We need artists and writers who are much more deeply informed about economics, technology, the sciences, logic, organizations vs. self-organizing network processes, and human social psychology. They need a deeper understanding of evolutionary processes, evolutionary outcomes, and evolutionary foundations. They need an understanding not just of the differences in other cultures, but the deep structural similarities among them all. They need to read The Iliad and the Popol Gol and the Sundiata. They need to respect all cultures equally, and that means loving all cultures and becoming exposed to and influenced by works from those cultures. Not a kitsch version of those cultures, but as deep an understanding as possible (which means understanding that there is no such thing as an African culture, but rather that there are 3000 cultures in Africa).

This doesn’t mean I’m suggesting that artists ought to be doing science, nor that scientists ought to be writing poetry, but rather that understanding the value of these things will benefit scientists and artists in their own works in ways they cannot begin to predict.

I say this because when it comes to politics, too many think that the government ought to become more “interdisciplinary” in this way, not only doing things governments are good at (threatening to kill people or killing people for not obeying the law), but doing things in other areas, such as science and philanthropy. That’s not what I’m talking about. Democratic governance can be influenced and inspired by aspects from other disciplines, but in the end, it has to stick to what it’s good at, and that is ensuring justice through taking on the role of third party vengeance-seeker.

While we do need areas that specialize in the Good, the True, the Just, the Profitable, and the Beautiful, there is a degree to which everyone needs to be good, true, just, profitable, and beautiful. If virtue aims at the beautiful, there is a connection between the good and the beautiful. If beauty is truth and truth beauty, there is a connection between the true and the beautiful. If the just is fair and the fair is beautiful, there is a connection between the just and the beautiful. If we don’t have a ready phrase from a philosopher or a poet on the connection between profit and beauty, that’s hardly because there isn’t a connection, only that we may not be surprised if people from the gift economy (philosophers and poets) aren’t looking for beauty there.

If the Good, the True, the Just, and the Profitable are all part and parcel of the Beautiful, they are all in a real sense interconnected. The good is true and just and profitable. The true is good and just and profitable. The just is good and true and profitable. And the profitable is good and true and just. They are all interconnected. If we don’t find them connected, it’s because we have disconnected them. And when they are disconnected, they start to degrade each other. We have to understand that the profitable is in fact good and true and just and beautiful in order for profitability to become more available and accessible to everyone. We also have to understand that there is no justice that blocks the truth, discourages us from being good, prevents profitability, or banishes the beautiful.

We also need to understand that an appropriate level of skepticism of each is absolutely necessary to maintain them. Postmodernism ended up going too far, but the original impulse was correct. We must always question, always challenge in order to maintain the systems of truth-creation, good-creation, justice-creation, profit-creation, and beauty-creation. There is a role for immanent criticism in each and every one of those areas, and for criticism from outside their realms. We need a complex set of criticism and support, questioning and belief within and without each epistemological ecosystem creating these ways of knowing.

The key is maintaining a balance between the two. Postmodernism went too far in questioning; Modernism went too far in acceptance. Metamodernism is the belief in the balance between the two. Trust, but verify. And not just a balance between these two, but a balance among all the orders. A balance between the social and the individual, a recognition that we are individuated through our social, cultural, economic, artistic,political, familial interactions. We are always already social, but are also unique individuals precisely because we are a combination of our genetic, epigenetic, cellular, neurological, and various social interactions.

Who is ready to move beyond this decadent late-stage postmodernist world and embrace a new, more complex, more accepting paradigm? We will only lose the chains on our minds if we do.