[This is Part 4 of a series of posts which serialize my book, A Metarevolutionary Manifesto. Read Part 3 here.]
Chapter 1.1.1
METAMODERNISM
“The question as to the meaning of life cannot be answered in one sentence or a few maxims. The answer to it is one’s worldview. But we had no worldview. We had available a few vestiges of the old and some embryos of the new, but nothing more. And the only discernible force in that vacuum was the inertia of fear: an inertia that was meeting with no resistance and hence had every chance of going on forever.”
- Valentin Turchin
The zombie zeitgeist has entered a new phase, and in place of the initial unveiling of a crisis of meaning, we have perhaps inevitably begun to see the rise of new life within the time-worn symbol of the zombie. There are, today, an increasing number of zombie stories whose focus is a reconstruction, a resurgence of meaning, in a world which is inhospitable to the worldviews of non-zombies.
There is reason to believe that the zombie apocalypse, which began as hairline fractures in the collective edifice of meaning, has reached a crucial turning point: Nobody can deny any longer that we are looking at a pitiful heap of stones which once formed something magnificent. And there now seems to be less of an appetite for wallowing in despair at the sight of these ruins, and in its place we are seeing the outward signs of our inner hunger for meaning. We have lost our optimism—the kind that is not opposite pessimism but rather nihilism, as well as what we might call “Flatland” ontologies which predict, with robust accuracy, the descent into hellish meaninglessness.
R.M. Fisher: “I had decades ago come across references to ‘Flatland’ as a metaphoric notion which represented the linear (scientific-technomechanical) mindset and values of the modern West that have dominated the natural landscape of so much of the planet, especially intense in our cities and farmlands—called the Flatland grid. It was thought to be quite ‘unnatural’ and causing much of our problems in the environment as well as our mind… In my view, this anti-Flatland work is the core curriculum (and politics) of the Integral Movement as a whole, both prior to and after the contributions of Ken Wilber.”
Ken Wilber: “We basically live in Flatland, and that’s the real problem.... We can’t even talk about helping people grow and develop the levels of consciousness if they don’t even know that there are levels of consciousness in the first place. So one of our main problems is simple education, getting these ideas circulated. If you only believe in Flatland, there’s no way out.”
Marilyn Ferguson: “[In] Flatland, the characters are assorted geometric shapes living in an exclusively two-dimensional world… As the story opens, the narrator, a middle-aged Square, has a disturbing dream in which he visits a one-dimensional realm, Line-land, whose inhabitants can move only from point to point. With mounting frustration he attempts to explain himself—that he is a Line of Lines, from a domain where you can move not only from point to point but also from side to side. The angry Linelanders are about to attack him when he awakens… Later that same day he attempts to help his grandson, a Little Hexagon, with his studies. The grandson suggests the possibility of a Third Dimension—a realm [reality] with up and down as well as side to side. The Square proclaims this notion foolish and unimaginable.
That very night the Square has an extraordinary, life-changing [transformational] encounter: a visit from an inhabitant of Spaceland, the realm of Three Dimensions. At first the Square is merely puzzled by his visitor, a peculiar circle who seems to change in size, even disappear. The visitor explains that he is a Sphere. He only seemed to change size and disappear because he was moving toward the Square in Space and descending at the same time.
Realizing that argument alone will not convince the Square of the Third Dimension, the exasperated Sphere creates for him an experience of depth…Having had an insight into another dimension, the Square becomes an evangelist, attempting to convince his fellow Flatlanders that Space is more than just a wild notion of mathematicians. Because of his insistence he is finally imprisoned.”
The author, Edwin Abbott, narrates from this Flatlander’s perspective.
Edwin Abbott: “I call our world Flatland, not because we call it so, but to make its nature clearer to you, my happy readers, who are privileged to live in Space… And the necessity of this I will speedily demonstrate. Place a penny on the middle of one of your tables in Space; and leaning over it, look down upon it. It will appear a circle. But now, drawing back to the edge of the table, gradually lower your eye (thus bringing yourself more and more into the condition of the inhabitants of Flatland), and you will find the penny becoming more and more oval to your view; and at last when you have placed your eye exactly on the edge of the table (so that you are, as it were, actually a Flatlander) the penny will then cease to appear oval at all, and will have become, so far as you can see, a straight line… Does this still seem strange to you? Then put yourself in [another] similar position. Suppose a person from the Fourth Dimension, condescending to visit you, were to say, ‘Whenever you open your eyes, you see a Plane (which is of Two Dimensions) and you infer a solid (which is of Three); but in reality you also see (though you do not recognize) a Fourth Dimension, which is not color or brightness nor anything of the kind, but a true Dimension, although I cannot point out to you its direction, nor can you possibly measure it.’ What would you say to such a visitor? Would not you have him locked up? Well, that is my fate: and it is as natural for us Flatlands to lock up a Square for preaching the Third Dimension, as it is for you Spacelanders to lock up a Cube for preaching the Fourth. Alas, how strong a family likeness runs through blind and persecuting humanity in all Dimensions! Points, Lines, Squares, Cubes, Extra-Cubes—we are all liable to the same errors, all alike the Slaves of our respective Dimensional prejudices.”
Joseph Campbell: “That is the hero’s ultimate difficult task. How render back into light-world language the speech-defying pronouncements of the dark? How represent on a two-dimensional surface a three-dimensional form, or in a three-dimensional image a multi-dimensional meaning?”
Ken Wilber: “This is the major story of our time. Flatland.”
As noted in the previous section, there is a connection between the “divinization of man” (as in Nietzsche’s Übermench), the “death of God” (loss of the absolute), zombies, and the Flatland metaphysics which are broadly characterized by meaninglessness—a severing of Heaven and Earth; a disconnection between our immanent, relative experience and the domain of the absolute which is the ground of that experience. It is a metaphorical collapse of three-dimensions (or more) into a two-dimensional plane; and, thus, represents the condition of “shrinking metaphysical distance” of which we spoke. All of this is summed up in the story of Flatland, the story of our time, which depicts the loss of meaning through loss of dimensionality. It is a non-spatial phenomenon made more understandable via spatiality. The true collapse is metaphysical, not physical.
As ontologies evolve and solidify into era-specific worldviews, we come to define the historical and present moments by these views and the cultural-institutional patterns they imply. In the present context, we are particularly interested in the eras called Modern and Postmodern, the two most recent cultural paradigms (which contain different but related worldviews with discernible commonalities), as well as the Traditional and Archaic worldviews which preceded these. These are the main ingredients which are currently being combined and transformed into something new: The Metamodern era. Understanding this global cultural shift will give us insight into the context of our meaning crisis—because previous eras had their own meaning crises, but our own, situated within metamodernism, is unique.
Understanding each of these eras requires us to examine symbols and myths, for the important reason that symbols eternally point beyond, including and transcending themselves. In some important way, they voice the unvoiceable.
R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz: “Whether it is a natural or combined image, or a conventional sign, the property of the symbol is synthesis… The symbol is the static form of the relationship between two moments which are incomprehensible in their simultaneity, [and] the juxtaposition of symbols makes possible the expression—without formulation—of identities of nature which can manifest in opposing dualities.”
D.C. Schindler: “[Similarly,] an image is volatile by nature. It is not simply a thing lying next to other things, because its own reality does not simply belong to it but lies in part elsewhere. We look through a photograph of a loved one as much as we look at it, in the sense that our attention moves to the person that we know and doesn’t come to a stop at the colored shapes on the surface. An image is in a decisive way what it is not. In this respect, we ought to think of an image not primarily as an object, but as a task to be accomplished: it has a goal beyond itself that must be reached, and it is itself constituted by the movement toward this goal. Plato captures precisely this inner tension of images in the Phaedo, where he describes them not primarily as things but as actions, using the verbs…meaning ‘to reach out toward’ and ‘to be eager for’.”
In this way, Linda Ceriello presents a case that the zombie is not only a symbol of present despair and the collapse of worldviews, but also a bridge back to the very best of humanity.
Linda Ceriello: “The creators of The Walking Dead have ultimately presented us with a kind of thought experiment: If you knew that all your monumental effort just to sustain life might, in the end, still not be enough, could you, like our protagonists, still get busy doing what is needed to care, and to carry on? The characters’ struggles with meaninglessness—the kind bred into our postmodern age (and indeed perhaps symbolized here by a zombie apocalypse)—reflect our own… The viewer is ultimately presented with what may be called a more metamodern outlook of embracing the paradox of what it means to survive against such fundamental futilities. That is, with the endless seas of flesh-eating corpses comes a stark undercurrent of understanding about the human condition—that the choice to keep aggressively fighting them off, only to watch more undead rise in their place, is both a Sisyphean kind of ridiculous, and, at the same time, a way of actively choosing life and meaning. Are their efforts naïve? Probably. In the show’s reframing of salvation narratives, it turns out that a pretty big dose of a naïve faith in humanity is required, and, the viewer is led to hope, just may save the day.”
Ceriello shows how symbols which have been used to convey our despair can be redirected as carriers of hope. However fragile our relationship with hope might be, the only alternative is living-death. This is why TWD in particular exemplifies the quasi-religious hopefulness and sense of goodness which is presently being resurrected. Other (more lighthearted but still salient) zombie fare includes the 2013 film “Warm Bodies” and the 2019 television series “Daybreak”—relevant here because both play with the boundaries between humans and zombies, and it’s there that we have our next clues about our meaning crisis and metacrisis.
Warm Bodies in particular shows the evolving symbolism of the zombie. The film presents two categories of undead: “corpses” and “boneys”. Boneys are a zombie’s zombie: Somehow more dead, more empty, more aggressive and destructive. This places the corpses in a more liminal space between the boneys’ absolute loss of humanity and the humans who face the risk of zombification. Warm Bodies opens with the inner monologue of the film’s star corpse, who simply goes by the name “R”.
R: “What am I doing with my life? I’m so pale. I should get out more. I should eat better… What’s wrong with me? I just want to connect. Why can’t I connect with people?”
Rather than being a film about a mysterious outbreak which causes strange, cannibalistic behavior, the art and media of our current era take it as a given that the world is full of zombies. The real question is: What now?
Films like Warm Bodies have begun to reverse the flow of the zombie outbreak—over the course of the story, the corpses regain their humanity. The titular warmth refers to the personhood-affirming nature of connection and love, which is displayed through simple yet ostensibly radical acts such as holding hands. The hopeful overtones in this latest evolution of zombies’ symbolism is, like all images, also a call to action. In the context of our metacrisis, and the meaning crisis it contains, nothing could be more urgent than a story which says: Zombies are us, but we don’t have to be zombies. And it implies the idea that as a world we have moved beyond alien invasion mythology, representing a cultural fear-of-the-Other, and into a more mature phase of self-unease.
Carl Jung: “Coming to terms with the Other in us is well worthwhile, because this way we get to know aspects of our nature which we would not allow anybody else to show us and which we ourselves would never have admitted.”
Affirming that there is a bottomless pit of dark, hopeless, meaningless, cruelty contained within the possibility of being human is equally an affirmation of our moral duty to “come to terms with the Other in us” and use it to propel us to greater heights. This fear of our ubiquitous zombie-potential is not misplaced, nor a cause for surrender. It is a natural stage of development; in a sense, we had to become zombies before we could fully realize our humanity. As one of the humans in Warm Bodies says while addressing R, the unusually-human corpse: “You know, I can see you trying. Maybe that's what people do. You know, we try to be better. Sometimes we kind of suck at it. But I look at you and you try so much harder than any human in my city. You're a good person, R.”
The way out of the zombie apocalypse (or meaning crisis) can’t be the same things which caused the initial outbreak of meaninglessness. The way out is to dream again, and never give into the voice which dissuades us from this supremely-human action.
We have arrived at a point where we must begin to reconstruct our broken world, not argue about which part of it is most broken. The hero-philosopher who escapes Flatland (or, similarly, the cave in Plato’s myth) and returns with a transcendent treasure must not be imprisoned or killed for the crime of incomprehensibility. The health of a society may be judged by how well it integrates the unknown. And in consideration of the intertwined nature (or even oneness) of subject and object, a broken world and a broken worldview are essentially the same. A worldview births and nourishes purpose, coherence, and significance: The ingredients of meaning. And we tend our worldviews as gardens which require attention and love. Every worldview has its metaphysics, which is what we use to make sense of ourselves, our values, and our actions. It is a shared medium in which our individual choices leave traces and influence our collective future.
The dark side of our consciousness is represented mythologically by zombies, whose defining trait is not just emptiness, but rather a contagious meaninglessness: Metaphysics + mimetic desire. The bite of the zombie is equivalent to human choices which destroy the common ground upon which all life depends, as well as the mimesis that connects humans and other centers of action. Zombieness is metaphysical nihilism and an absence of optimism in its truest sense. And this understanding of optimism shares much in common with moral realism and natural law, which state in different ways that value (or meaning or goodness) is not created so much as it is discovered in its state of absolute possibility, and may be made actual in (or by) centers of action.
David O. Brink: “Whatever else realists might claim, they usually agree on the metaphysical claim that there are facts of a certain kind which are independent of our evidence for them.”
Russ Shafer-Landau: “[So] moral realism is the theory that moral judgements enjoy a special sort of objectivity: such judgements, when true, are so independently of what any human being, anywhere, in any circumstance whatever, thinks of them.”
David O. Brink: “The traditional opponent of moral realism is the nihilist...who denies that there are moral facts or true moral propositions or, as a result, any moral knowledge... The nihilist thinks that moral predicates such as ‘good’, ‘fair’, and ‘wrong’ fail to refer to real properties.”
J. Budziszewski: “[However], the whole idea of a moral law is that it binds us whether we like it or not. If it really were just a social convention—if we could make it up and change it to suit ourselves, so that we weren’t bound unless we wanted to be—then it wouldn’t be morality… [It is in this sense that] St. Thomas denies that the basic structure of morality is a construct. It is not rooted in human will and power. Rather it is rooted in nature, in the structure of creation, in the constitution of the human person—in something we cannot change by human will and power. In fact,…[St. Thomas] holds that morality stands in judgment on human will and power. The Good and the Right are not things we invent, but things we discover.”
Richard J. Regan: “[In other words,] Aquinas…links human law essentially to natural law… This linkage is absolutely essential if human law is to qualify as law at all, that is, to be morally obligatory. And human law, if it departs from the natural law in any way, is no law at all, that is, not morally obligatory.”
John M. Rist: “[And] if moral realism of a Platonic sort fails, then Thrasymachus or his modern equivalent wins… Without [the Platonic] Forms, moral nihilism…cannot be defeated philosophically.”
Natural Law and moral realism are part of the optimistic orientation; they are opposite to the nihilist’s claim that there is no value per se, and that any claim to know what is right or good is no more than an expression of personal power and preference. Our view, as optimists, is that meaning is a fact of possibility and a constant of actuality, and worlds differ from one another only in degrees of honesty in their perception-representation (Becoming) of the perfection inherently possible in Being. Asserting our humanity through the construction (or reconstruction) of a viable and optimistic metaphysics is an undeniably urgent challenge in the context of our present metacrisis. Indeed, every crisis within it seems to branch off from the questions which are raised through our standing in the middle of our two orientations.
Nihilism has been winning. It is the dominant and even default orientation; it is gleefully taught in universities and mindlessly instantiated in our politics. We are laying in the shadow of “The Raven”, like the protagonist in Poe’s poem, but we must nonetheless arise in metarevolution and heal the inner human experience and outer world, which are unified in their pleasantly insatiable tendency towards meaning and beauty. For all the bitterly cold despair which finds expression in the symbol of zombies, the metamodern era holds the potential for a resurgence of optimism. So, as a bridge between the common worldviews of the zombie apocalypse, and the embryonic worldviews of our metamodern age, we are presently focused on the root causes of our era-specific pathologies; or in other words, asking what was lost, and what must yet be found.
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