[This is Part 5 of a series of posts which serialize my book, A Metarevolutionary Manifesto. Read Part 4 here.]
Without this recovery of the optimistic worldview, we will become increasingly zombie-like: Always moving, but getting nowhere. The propped-up corpses of the old worldviews still wander like lost souls—lifeless vessels of something formerly human; dead stars whose dwindling light we still perceive in our sky. This is why we have chosen to spotlight our meaning crisis as the prototypical crisis-which-causes-crises. If the world is spiritually empty, then power and violence would indeed be at the bottom of the metaphysical stack—all values and morality would be window-dressing for an absolutized relativism, and there would be no real justification for attending to one crisis rather than another, or even accepting that there is such a thing as a crisis at all.
D.C. Schindler: “It is generally assumed that the only way to protect the freedom of the other is to keep at bay any claim to objective or absolute truth, because such a claim seems to lead necessarily to oppression. In fact, the very opposite is the case. Violence and the imposition of points of view is always and in every case the result of a failure to affirm absolute truth in its absoluteness. Tyranny is the identification of a partial view with the whole, and thus an injustice to other parts… The problem with dogmatism is that it is essentially relativistic: by making a particular claim definitive in isolation from the integral whole within which that claim would have its reasonable and sense-giving ground, dogmatism ends up absolutizing the relative… The problem with relativism is that it is essentially dogmatic: by equalizing all perspectives in a wholly undifferentiated manner, relativism makes each perspective in itself a kind of self-contained totality, which is therefore on its own terms incontrovertible and thus definitive.”
No manifesto could genuinely approach justice in that Flatland world—because if value is not real, it can only be created from relative standpoints, of which no two are the same. As Schindler suggests, both dogmatism and relativism are both simultaneously tyrannical and nihilistic—and we are suggesting that optimism is the way out. It is not a “hoping for the best”, but a radical metaphysical shift which does not give the final word to the dictates of Power. Power is real, but is not the first principle of reality.
Optimism, as we understand it, is the metaphysical claim that the love story between Value and Action is the most real and most fundamental feature of our world—and that makes it discoverable; possible and therefore actualizable; absolute in a way which includes and implies the relative, rather than relative in a way which excludes and denies the absolute. In the following sections of this book, we will attempt to develop a metaphysics which does not smuggle in nihilism, and therefore provides the grounding for meaningful action.
To begin that task, we need to understand historical eras such as the Modern and Postmodern, which are informing the prevailing feelings, worldviews, and crises of our present moment. Forming in place of the zombified worldviews of these two eras is metamodernism.
Timotheus Vermeulen & Robin van den Akker: “Metamodernism…is a structure of feeling… [It is] a constant repositioning between attitudes and mindsets that are evocative of the Modern and of the Postmodern but are ultimately suggestive of another sensibility that is neither of them.”
Seth Abramson: “Metamodernism is variously called a cultural paradigm, a cultural philosophy, a structure of feeling, and a system of logic. All these phrases really mean is that, like its predecessor’s modernism and postmodernism, metamodernism is a particular lens for thinking about the self, language, culture, and meaning—really, about everything.”
Hanzi Freinacht: “Each of [these] is a kind of underlying structure of the symbolic universes that constitute our lived and shared realities.”
Metamodernism, as it pertains to our current area of focus, is a general way of describing a society coming to grips with the loss of meaning and worldviews symbolized by the zombie apocalypse. The historical eras defined by modernism and postmodernism had ways of feeling and seeing the world which are understandable from our present view, but can now only be considered “undead” rather than truly alive. The grand narratives (including postmodernism’s grand narrative that there can be no grand narratives), symbols, myths, and structures of feeling contained in these worldviews no longer serve their core function: Being a shared medium in which individuals become a community and mutually support the discovery and transformation of values, ideas, outlooks, practices, and the whole ecology of patterns which we reciprocally shape and are shaped by.
Naming these cultural epochs is a way of understanding some of the most important questions every generation asks, and the kind of answers we come up with. It is a way to view ourselves. And, different as modernism and postmodernism have been, both, in their own ways, were fatally nihilistic and narcissistic. The metaphysics contained in the worldviews of these eras say that values, goals, and meaning come from “within”, and that any other claim is no more than veiled power. Common in these old, broken worldviews, which live parasitically in human hosts, is an ontology of power (i.e. “value” and “meaning” are not real, and rather are versions of, or expressions of, power—the “ultimately real” feature of the nihilistic orientation). Further, modernism and postmodernism have been witness to a pendulum-like swing between relativism (all theories are equal) or absolutism (only one theory is right), and theories of selfhood which tend towards the pathological versions of either individualism or collectivism. This alternation is conveyed mythologically as the “death of God”, which is not the death of the Christian “father in the sky” specifically—it is a death of a god, but not The Death of The God.
Mark C. Taylor: “Throughout the history of the West, God has repeatedly disappeared by becoming either so transcendent that he is irrelevant or so immanent that there is no difference between the sacred and the secular… In monism, God and the gods disappear by becoming indistinguishable from the world—when everything is sacred nothing is sacred. In dualism, God and the gods vanish by becoming so distant that they are inconsequential and thus disposable—when the divine is totally absent, nothing is sacred… Monism and dualism are both theologies of death… To overcome this destructive nihilism, it is necessary to cultivate emergent creativity in complex adaptive networks that figure, disfigure, and refigure what once was believed to be the substance of things seen and unseen. Always after God, the endless restlessness of the Infinite is the eternal pulse of life… The Infinite, then, has two [interdependent] rhythms: finitizing the infinite and infinitizing the finite.”
Metamodernism, from this high-level overview, is the mediation of our past, present, and future relationship to the sacred and the real. It is a constellation of emerging worldviews which embody the movement between the finite and infinite—including and transcending the monisms and dualisms of the past. It is a unity of opposites, a marriage of Heaven and Earth, a cycle of birth-death-rebirth which is so well-known in the “Hero’s Journey” of mythology, but tragically absent in the way we approach life in general.
Joseph Campbell: “The mythological hero, setting forth from his common-day hut or castle, is lured, carried away, or else voluntarily proceeds, to the threshold of adventure. There he encounters a shadow presence that guards the passage. The hero may defeat or conciliate this power and go alive into the kingdom of the dark (brother-battle, dragon-battle; offering, charm), or be slain by the opponent and descend in death (dismemberment, crucifixion). Beyond the threshold, then, the hero journeys through a world of unfamiliar yet strangely intimate forces, some of which severely threaten him (tests), some of which give magical aid (helpers). When he arrives at the nadir of the mythological round, he undergoes a supreme ordeal and gains his reward. The triumph may be represented as the hero's sexual union with the goddess-mother of the world (sacred marriage), his recognition by the father-creator (father atonement), his own divinization (apotheosis), or again —if the powers have remained unfriendly to him—his theft of the boon he came to gain (bride-theft, fire-theft); intrinsically it is an expansion of consciousness and therewith of being (illumination, transfiguration, freedom). The final work is that of the return. If the powers have blessed the hero, he now sets forth under their protection (emissary); if not, he flees and is pursued (transformation flight, obstacle flight). At the return threshold the transcendental powers must remain behind; the hero re-emerges from the kingdom of dread (return, resurrection). The boon that he brings restores the world (elixir).”
The failure of old worldviews to undergo the archetypal death-of-self and rebirth-into-higher-self has led to our zombie apocalypse, which now looks like a cruel joke, or pseudo-rebirth. Even the characters in The Walking Dead seem to get it: “I can’t profess to understand God’s plan, but Christ promised a resurrection of the dead. I just thought he had something a little different in mind.”
It is the project of metamodern metarevolutionaries to provide a viable alternative to meaninglessness, which requires a negotiation between potentially opposing (and potentially complementary) poles like relativism and absolutism, science and religion, East and West, and so on.
Joseph Campbell: “The pairs of opposites (being and not being, life and death, beauty and ugliness, good and evil, and all the other polarities that bind the faculties to hope and fear, and link the organs of action to deeds of defense and acquisition) are the clashing rocks that crush the traveler, but between which the heroes always pass.”
Living in our metamodern era means passing, heroically, between opposites, and emerging beyond the Traditional, Modern and Postmodern worldviews which have outlived their purpose.
In the context of the Flatland in which we currently find ourselves, metamodernism is an ecstatic mode of being—a leap to a new dimension. As we break the spell of nihilism and rediscover optimism, we will remember that meaning is real; some things are more meaningful than other things; and ambivalence towards its discovery and transformation leads inexorably towards the living-death of the zombie apocalypse. Metamodernism challenges us to become our true selves, to become more whole, and to discover the goodness which, in its state of absolute possibility, is ready to be brushed onto the canvas of actuality.
Visually, metamodernism is the way of the spiral, the symbol of the journey which continually includes and transcends itself without forgetting its center. It is like Aker, the Egyptian god depicted as twin lions balancing a red sun: A unity of opposing, paradoxical tendencies.
Zak Stein: “The metamodernist has her own unapologetically held grand narrative, synthesizing her available understanding. But it is held lightly, as one recognizes that it is always partly fictional—a protosynthesis.”
A metamodern “protosynthesis” of grand narratives has elements of the old, but as a reconstruction also forms a new whole with different qualities than those of its parts. A defining difference between the postmodern and metamodern eras and their overarching modes of feeling/seeing/being is that deconstruction is no longer the focus. It exists in the metamodern worldview, which includes and transcends its predecessors, but is replaced with a tentative reconstruction of meaning, values, and worldviews.
Seth Abramson: “In the early 2000s, a scholar from New Zealand, Alexandra Dumitrescu, analogized metamodernism to ‘a boat being built or repaired as it sails,’ and it’s precisely this sort of reconstruction that metamodernism permits—a manner of construction in which we simultaneously acknowledge that things are still in pieces, but also that the pieces we have must be treated as useable even if we still have some doubts about that. A metamodern ‘reconstruction’ is not merely a ‘construction’ because it recognizes that we are trying to ‘repair’ something that was previously deconstructed; and it’s not a deconstruction because we are, however cautiously and skeptically, setting about trying to build a ‘whole’ object.”
All creatures, including humans, exist with the same kind of generative tension—a balance between exploration (finding the new in the unknown) and exploitation (using what you found). Life exists as pockets of order within a sea of disorder; and yet it thrives at the edge of that chaos. Such is the structure of feeling that metamodernism embodies.
John Dourley: “As such, life is always a triumph of the power of integration over against the tendency to disintegration and nothingness. Life as integration triumphant and disintegration defeated is evident in all of the major opposites Tillich introduces in his work but is dramatically so in his depiction of the conflict between power and meaning. The most general work of the Spirit as the unifier of opposites is to unite power and meaning and so to foster life.”
Too much exploration of the unknown doesn’t leave enough room for exploitation of already-explored territory—or in other terms, synthesis of the best-available information. In a similar sense, the “lightly held” grand narratives of metamodernism seek to reconcile our need for worldviews (order) with their vulnerability to corruption and tendency to become dogmatic or ossified. And so we embody just enough order that we may remain intimate with chaos.
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