A Metarevolutionary Manifesto: Serialized (Part 6 of 50)

[This is Part 6 of a series of posts which serialize my book, A Metarevolutionary Manifesto. Read Part 5 here.]

If we wish to be metamodern metarevolutionaries, we must orient ourselves towards creating and refreshing new worldviews in which there is a common (non-relative) understanding of goodness, truth, love, and freedom. We must carefully wield the power of storytelling, mythology, symbolism, religious perspectives, and the transparent, generative blending of fact and fiction. The second half of the book will use these as components of the processes of transformation that exist in all complex systems. To further illustrate what marks the turn towards metamodernism, we may say that of the above, large parts of the world are currently particularly out of touch with the mythological/symbolic/analogical way of seeing—which is to say we’ve lost touch with imagination in the truest and most serious interpretation of that word. 

Jordan Peterson: “Mythological thinking is not mere arbitrary superstition. Its denigration—cascading even through literary criticism, in recent years—is not only unwarranted but perilous. This is not to say that religious institutions and dogmas are not prey to the same weaknesses as all other human creations. The ideas and patterns of action that underlay and generated those institutions remain of critical importance, however—remain important for sustaining individual emotional stability, maintaining group tolerance, cohesion and flexibility, supporting capacity to adapt to the strange, and strengthening ability to resist domination by one-sided and murderous ideologies.”

Mythology is the landscape we pattern with sacred symbols, which in turn pattern the landscapes in our minds. But at the time of writing, postmodernism’s distaste for metaphysics and modernism’s lingering mechanical-scientific worldview are interacting to shape a society that is uniquely out of touch with What Is—which is a space most readily expressed by way of symbolic language and analogy: These being forms of language which point at one thing, but express meaning beyond that thing. All symbolism, mythology, and art is a striving and reaching towards a transcendent absolute: the spiritual plenum of value that is sometimes pictured as a separate world, but is our very actuality and concurrent with every experience within it. A plenum being a space completely filled, and the content of a spiritual plenum being value (and thus meaning, beauty, wisdom, and love), mythology and its symbolic language express the “beyond” that is not truly beyond, but right here.

Gottfried Leibniz: “Thus there is no uncultivated ground in the universe; nothing barren, nothing dead.”

The myth of the zombie apocalypse expresses the death and decay of our moral duty to discover the immortal value in our universe—as an eternal possibility that can and must be actualized. Myths, whether Homer’s “The Odyssey” or Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” can’t be read simply as a series of events (narratively). They require a perspective, the symbolic and analogical lenses, which were at times commonplace, but at the present time must be reconstructed and given new life. 

Patrick Harpur: “Analogical ‘thinking’ is the way in which imagination chooses to structure itself. It is also a fundamental characteristic of imagination's primary products: myths. By understanding something of how myths work, and according to what rules, we shall understand better how imagination works and therefore what the human soul is like… Mythical events were not thought to have literally happened; yet in another sense they were true, as if they had. ‘These things never happened; they are always’, wrote Sallust sublimely.  Conversely, historical events are always mythologized (the Trojan war, for example). It is as if what literally happened is less important than what metaphorically happened. But the two are combined to create what ‘really’ happened.”

Carl Jung: “[So we can observe that] myth is not fiction; it consists of facts that are continually repeated and observed over and over again. It is something that happens to man, and men have mythical fates just as much as Greek heroes do. The fact that the life of Christ is largely myth does absolutely nothing to disprove its factual truth—quite the contrary. I would even go so far as to say that the mythical character of a life is just what expresses its universal human validity.”

So, what is “really” happening involves both the scientific, literal perspective as well as the mythological perspective. Again, the words used to describe the latter may initially strike people today as strange, archaic, or childish. But at various points in history, concepts like Forms, Archetypes, Daimonic Reality, Otherworld, Fairy World, Anima Mundi, Double-vision, or Imagination would have been readily understood. It is a tragedy and crisis of our age that we have allowed the Real to be murdered by the Literal. 

Patrick Harpur: “The parallel world of the Irish fairies was, for Yeats, synonymous with ‘imagination.’… A whole world, peopled by fierce daimons, which has a life of its own… The only concern of the Primary Imagination, wrote another poet, W.H. Auden, is with sacred beings and events… Auden’s sacred beings and events are our daimons, archetypal images which Imagination generates… It must be emphasized that Imagination in the poetic, Romantic, true understanding is pretty much the opposite of what it has come to mean—something unreal and invented, what Coleridge called ‘fancy’… Imagination…spontaneously produces those images—gods, daimons and heroes—who interact in the unauthored narratives we call myths… This view of a mythopoeic—a myth-making—Imagination is so foreign to all but the most Blakean of us that it may help further to return to its prototype among the Neoplatonists… They…recognized a whole daimonic state, partly physical and partly spiritual, which mediated between our sensory material world and the spiritual or ‘intelligible’ world of Forms… This intermediate world was called Psyche tou Kosmou, the Soul of the World—although it was better known in Latin-speaking Europe as Anima Mundi… To see with the eye alone is to see the world as if in single vision, as two-dimensional only, as literal. To see the world through…what Blake called ‘double vision’, which perceives in greater depth, beyond the literal to the metaphorical…sees the sun…also as a heavenly host. We need double vision to see daimons—to see that they are real, but not literally so.  Unfortunately we have become so literal-minded that the only reality we recognize is literal reality which, by definition, rules out daimons.”

Metamodernism marks the end of life in Flatland. Its general orientation is movement towards the worldwide reconstruction of worldviews which include the past, transcend the present, and continually adapt to the future. Metamodernism is also a worldwide return of the philosopher, the return of metaphysicians, and a moment of nonlinear and discontinuous personal-cultural transformation which will give birth to a new synthesis of worldviews. Our new direction values the scientist, artist, shaman, psychologist, doctor, saint, and alchemist alike, and sees their work as a complex system—that is, as inextricably connected and co-evolutionary, and all ultimately pointing towards the actualization of perfection, a sort of Holy Grail: Unobtainable in totality, but obtainable in degrees by way of accepting the quest to pursue it.

As with the reference above to the Holy Grail, many today can still recognize elements of the Hero’s Journey, made famous by Joseph Campbell. But most are unaware of its connection with ancient shamanic practices—such as the “ecstatic trance” or “flight of soul”. 

Patrick Harpur: “When Joseph Campbell…analyzed hero myths from across the world, he identified many universal elements, such as the call, summoning the hero to his adventure or mission; his reluctance or refusal; his acceptance and setting out; his crossing of the threshold into an Otherworld; encounters with supernatural helpers; his ascent or descent; his initiatory trials and ordeals, notably his ‘death’ by being dismembered or devoured; his resurrection and return with the treasure—the healing herb, elixir of life, Golden Fleece or Holy Grail. This is also essentially the pattern of the shaman's otherworld journey.”

Ira Progoff: “[Similarly,] Eliade has demonstrated the importance of the ritual event of initiation in which the death of the individual and his rebirth are symbolically enacted. He has shown that whether it is the initiation of a teenage boy into the mysteries of the hunter group, or the initiation of a medicine man into the higher mysteries of the tribe, the goal is a transformation of consciousness that enables the initiated one to enter a larger dimension of reality.”

The hero is the mythological revolutionary, and the revolutionary is the literal hero—they are reflections of each other. Metarevolution is metaheroism—a coherent, organized complex of revolutionary action. We can only allude to it now, but we will explore exactly these kinds of things in the second half of the book because, although, modern stories like “Star Wars” were based explicitly on Campbell’s work (which revealed the common patterns of heroism in all times and places), we have made ourselves spectators of this reality, rather than participants. That is what is meant by “loss of soul”—it is a disconnection between literal and mythological revolutionary-heroes. To save ourselves and the world, then, requires actions which produce symbols/myths, which in turn guide actions, and so on in an infinite feedback loop.

It’s one thing to have these things woven into our cultural stories, and quite another to consider them part of a sacred, collective space of our consciousness (or soul)—a mythological mirror which reveals truer and truer versions of ourselves as we gaze into it. 

Patrick Harpur: “Who knows what other worlds are possible for the truly daimonic human—the legendary shaman, the Zen master, the Taoist sage, the Christian saint, the visionary artist?”

Metamodernism, seeking to answer this question, therefore recognizes the absolute necessity of understanding how the processes of transformation require simultaneous action in “multiple worlds” (which can also be thought of as the “material” and “spiritual” aspects of the same world). And, in addition to reconnecting these worlds (making them more like two sides of one coin), it is equally important for the resolution of our meaning crisis and metacrisis that we have the “right” heroes. Mythological heroes like Hercules still reflect our “literal” world’s most common way of relating to the “Otherworld”—which is to say that the dominant worldviews of today denigrate the mythological-symbolic realm, dismiss metaphysics (resulting in life in Flatland, and Power’s rise to ontological supremacy), and thus undermine the basis for generating new myths and symbols which affirm a healthier relationship between domains of reality. 

Patrick Harpur: “The classical hero has one divine parent. He is half man, half deity. When the gods are done away with, the divine half of man is assumed wholly by the human half.”

This is what has been called the death of God, but is really the death of the purely transcendent, absolute God and the divinization of the immanent God (the God-man or Übermensch). 

Patrick Harpur: “Psychologically, we say that the ego suffers an influx of unconscious contents which it is unable to accommodate unless it drastically inflates itself, arrogating to itself archetypal powers that should be held at a distance because they are the property of the gods... Heracles (or Hercules) cannot bear daimons or images. He cannot think about death. His twelve labors are largely taken up with slaughtering or enslaving the fabulous beasts that embody the otherworldly powers of imagination... His attitude to the Underworld, so crucial in understanding any relationship to soul, is what would now be called dysfunctional. Where other heroes go to be initiated or instructed, Heracles goes on the rampage. Club in hand, he forces Charon to carry him across the river Styx. On the other side, the shades of the Dead flee from him in terror, just as our dream images flee from us when we wake into our rational egos... Finally, he drags the guardian of Hades, the three-headed dog Cerberus, up into the daylight world where it does not belong. Heracles seems unable to imagine. ‘Rather than die metaphorically, as initiation demands, he kills literally, even attacking death itself’, writes Hillman. The lack of initiation is disastrous. It means that Heracles remains a daimon-killer, constantly denying the imagination, the Underworld and death.”

The Ego seeks wholeness: The individuation of the Self; the part’s striving to embody the whole. The “Heraclean” or “Herculean” Ego is that which rejects the Otherworld, and thus projects this separation as a mythologically-expressed Shadow: the zombie. The monster is perceived as external until, upon reflection, it becomes clear that it is only the outward expression of a deeply unmet need for meaning, and a dysfunctional relationship to this Otherworld—that realm of symbols, creativity, imagination, and the transformative chaos which incubates new life.

The point is, whether we are talking about a kind of modernist scientific worldview with an ontology which, like Hercules, is wildly out of touch with whole regions of reality, or the incoherent postmodernist tendency to reject hierarchies of all kinds, there are no shortage of Flatlander worldviews which metamodernism must learn from and, ultimately, move beyond. The mood of metamodernism is the joyfully uncertain, constantly creative, incubative striving to unify the unresolvable tension between pairs of opposites—to build a structure of “tensegrity”. 

Matheus Pareira: “Buckminster Fuller created the term ‘tensegrity’ to describe ‘self-tensioning structures composed of rigid structures and cables, with forces of traction and compression, which form an integrated whole’... It creates an interconnected structure that works biologically like muscles and bones, where one element strengthens the other.”

John Wild: “[It describes, literally and as analogy,] an order of divergent tendencies which on the whole support one another.”

Heraclitus: “The cosmos works by harmony of tensions.”

This, again, is a common thread between the feeling of metamodernism and the action of metarevolution. From modernism’s certainty and postmodernism’s skepticism, we arrive at metamodernism’s lighthearted seriousness and tragedy-tempered sense of hope. Through the last century, we have (hopefully) learned what it is like to live through a zombie apocalypse—a world with no viable worldviews. So our starting point is now this mode of pragmatic reconstruction which recognizes that we can’t exist as islands of meaning, and that being human always includes self-transcendence, or stepping outside of ourselves. Even more broadly than the matter of what today’s common worldviews leave out, we need to consider generally how urgently we need optimism in its true sense (and the cultures which embody them) to fulfill the moral duty of being human. How might one person remain whole and yet find greater wholeness in community with others? How does one create a healthy, dynamic, generative balance between self-assertiveness and self-transcendence—between the center of action called the Soul, and the center-of-centers called the World Soul? 

Scott Barry Kaufman: “Indeed, so many people today are striving for ‘transcendence’ without a healthy integration of their other needs—to the detriment of their full potential. This ranges from people who expect a mindfulness retreat or yoga class to be a panacea for their traumas and deep insecurities, to spiritual ‘gurus’ abusing their positions of power, to the many instances of vulnerable people (especially vulnerable young people) seeking unhealthy outlets for transcendence, such as violent extremism, cults, and gangs. We also see this at play among the many divisions we see in the world today. While there is a yearning to be part of a larger political or religious ideology, the realization of this yearning is often built on hate and hostility for the ‘other,’ rather than on pride and deep commitment for a cause that can better humanity. In essence, there is a lot of pseudo-transcendence going on.”

Aldous Huxley: “Moreover, when pseudoreligions with a strong emotional appeal make their appearance, they immediately win millions of enthusiastic devotees from among the masses to whom the real religions have ceased to have a meaning or to be a comfort.”

Heinrich A. Rommen: “They wanted something to live for, but they had lost the causes of life and did not know what to do with it. They grew tired of the individualist and autonomous ethical culture of their fathers and that serene egocentrism which appeared so utterly foolish… The horror vacui drove them to the new myths of quasi-religious collectivism, whether racial, economic, or national in its irrational transcendency… So the myth-making pseudo-religious political creeds…succeeded in conquering souls. Thus the new political philosophies show that their deepest roots are in a specific idea of man as an unfree particle of the masses, depersonalized, without individuality, self-responsibility, or individual reason and conscience. Whenever the religious sphere becomes empty, whenever the belief in man’s individual reason and consequent self-responsibility disappears, the dignity of man disappears, too.”

Understanding of selfhood (one of the major features of any worldview), is itself a crisis within our meaning crisis and metacrisis. And today, people seem to have just two terrible choices in ideologies (or pseudoreligions): The disturbingly empty, fracturing, unempathetic individualist ones; or the dehumanizing, suffocating, all-coercive collectivist ones. A focus in the second half of this book will be discovering ways to form a generative unity of opposites between pathologically individualistic and collectivist tendencies, which is a mirror image of the resolution that must occur between the immanent and transcendent God, so that we may finally stop killing Him; or, to demythologize, we must understand the nature of the Good, which is both absolute and relative. Without value per se, there is only “valuable for me”—which is optimism’s implosion into nihilism.

D.C. Schindler: “Liberation, in other words, is the movement from a sheer ‘self’-centered view of reality to a bonocentric view.”

Donald Rutherford: “For a will to be free is for its choice to be determined by a knowledge of the Good.”

D.C. Schindler: “To put it another way, it is a movement from the reduction of a thing to its relation to me, to seeing it as existing in its own right, as Good in an absolute sense.”

The path leading out of our meaning crisis is marked by metamodernism’s cultural shifts in feeling/being and newfound openness to grand narratives, values, and meaning. We’ve seen that we do not get to “shut off” this part of reality: The vacuum of meaning is automatically filled with zombies (which, you’ll remember are “placeholders” of meaning, implying that the available space for meaning to be actualized must necessarily decrease in proportion to their prevalence). The now well-known devastation happening in our natural environment must be contextualized with knowledge of an equally scourged Otherworld—that realm which speaks to us in symbols and myths, and is currently showing us our Shadow in the risen-but-soulless bodies of zombies. 

Having become detached from the Otherworld and from past sources of transformation and self-transcendence, such as traditional religions, there is an increasingly misplaced appetite that arises from the decreasing metaphysical distance between perceiving-subject and love-object. In other words, when the “transcendent God” is killed (and humanity begins to model Hercules’ violently detached relationship with the Otherworld), He becomes an entirely “immanent God”—and human self-transcendence and development are arrested. When meaningfulness is said to begin and end in the individual, and the idea that we must reach beyond ourselves to become fully ourselves is wholly rejected, we are rejecting the depths of soul and the heights of spirit. But we must learn to mediate between these domains of reality and humanity. Self-transcendence is an undeniably important part of being human, and in its healthy form is not something that takes over individuality, but rather contributes to individual wholeness.

To summarize, our meaning crisis and loss of worldviews is adding fuel to the fires of our metacrisis as a whole. And one symptom of this is that unhealthy forms of transcendence, as in the inculcation to an extreme political ideology which erases the wholeness and “end-in-himselfness” of the individual, are emboldened by a lack of healthy alternatives. Unhealthy self-transcendence destroys freedom and the wholeness of individuals. And this is an area of our metacrisis which can’t be ignored. The escape from our meaning crisis is also, necessarily, the perfection of freedom and love. As metarevolutionaries, we will need to construct worldviews which do not parasitize (dehumanize). And metamodernism is the name for the ecology of worldviews which is emerging to face exactly these challenges we’ve been exploring.

The way of seeing/feeling/being encapsulated in the spirit of metamodernism allows us, even while staring down a terrifying zombie apocalypse and metacrisis, to find the strength to act. 

Seth Abramson: “Theorists describe this way of thinking as an ‘as if’ philosophical mode; that is, the metamodernist chooses to live ‘as if’ positive change is possible even when we are daily given reminders that human culture is in fact in a state of disarray and likely even decline.”

We can be sure of neither our survival nor our extinction in the coming decades. But our overarching goal is to make life as good as possible, for as long as possible. And this, as we’ve said, requires transformation of world and worldview in tandem. Where the old, undead worldviews keep us trapped in Flatland by offering metaphysics in which Meaning and Beauty are said to be nothing but the ontological children of Power, metamodern worldviews seem to be leading towards the rediscovery of meaning. The escape from Flatland, the resolution of our crisis of meaning, and the ritual shutting of the door to nihilistic power-ontologies, begins with addressing ourselves to the Good itself, which is the absolute first principle of every action. There can be no change without belief in each other, and no reason for change without value-ontology—which is to say, belief in the Good.

[Read Part 7 here.]