A Metamodern Solution

I was inspired to write this article by the YouTuber Tom Nicholas, who tends to concentrate on social / political issues, and by another YouTuber, the science fiction critic Damien Walter. Tom introduced me to the idea of metamodernism, whilst ‘Damo’ is on a quest to find a new myth that would give meaning to society. It may have been Damo who coined the phrase ‘ the Metamodern Myth’, and I hope to help him out with a suggestion of what that myth could be. Metamodernism is what seems to be replacing the increasingly defunct Postmodern ideal.

Modernism was born in the 17^th and 18^th centuries. It was the idea that truth could be discovered through rational thought and scientific experiment, and that that could be used to help people improve their lives and mean that society would progress to become ever more healthy and content. It spawned a whole collection of ‘-isms’ –

ideologies that argued for certain solutions to society’s problems. Although there was plenty of disagreement over what plan to follow, in the Modernist period people generally felt that rational ideological plans were the way forwards and would lead to progress. This failed, because human beings are not rational creatures: The most obvious ‘-isms’ resulted in nightmarish societies, such as the Third Reich and the Soviet Union.

Postmodernism evolved in the 1960s as art and the 1970s as philosophy. Shocked by the atrocities of the War, perturbed by the economic situation and realising that to some extent technology was out-competing humanity in the quest for creative representation, it rejected truth as a concept and was suspicious of rationalism. Individuals related to each other as members of groups and groups controlled society through the power-dynamics of popularity, wealth and cunning. It was not the job of our leaders to come up with a plan, and politics became anti-political. Things just needed to be managed technocratically to give the people what they wanted. As citizens became consumers, sincerity became unfashionable and cynicism and psychological depression set in. It was followed by economic depression and a collapse in the confidence to change anything. It is hardly surprising that society is collapsing when our leaders feel it is morally wrong to have any idea how society should function – other than ‘the market’, which is more an institution than agenda. When Margaret Thatcher said there was ‘no such thing as society’ this was actually a self-fulfilling prophecy and society has been disintegrating ever since.

We now face several existential crises, and any sensible person would admit we need a plan to deal with them. But we cannot just pretend that Modernism didn’t fail, so it is difficult to have any kind of rational ideology relating to our situation without appearing naive or foolish. Therefore, since the mid 2010s political thinkers have been trying to embrace both Modernism and Postmodernism at the same time.

In many ways Donald Trump is the most extreme postmodernist imaginable: If there is no such thing as truth then there is no such thing as a lie, just ‘alternative facts’. Policies are enacted in a completely chaotic and irrational fashion, for order and rationality lead to

disaster. The disorder and the selfishness of the market have also failed, and therefore a new kind of disorder and selfishness is necessary. At the same time Trump is aggressively anti-postmodern: There are men and there are women, and that is that. The Americans are great, Mexicans and Muslims are not American and therefore not great, and America does not want it’s greatness diluted by the un-great. This is metamodernism as it exists presently. This right-wing incarnation of it has similarities to Fascism, but at it’s heart it is not Fascist – for the Fascists were fully committed to an ideology that they maintained was rational and helpful (at least to their particular nation). If Trump has an ideology he is not sincere about it and wouldn’t be able to admit it if he was.

What successful left-wing revival there has been seems to be stuck in the modernism of the past that has been rejected by society in general. I have a lot of sympathy with these ideas, but I recognise that society finds them unconvincing. The postmodern parts of leftist thought are what we term ‘woke’, and are currently being rejected by much of the left itself (rightly so). There is no reason why there cannot be a left-wing form of metamodernism. If it cannot be completely rational, maybe it can be reasonable. If it cannot know if it’s ideas are correct, maybe it can try them anyway and hope that they are. That would be better than the chaos of the right or the nihilism of the centre.

Metamodernism is a deeply schizophrenic philosophy, and I think it could be adequately described as a “mind-fuck”. But, for the moment there seems to be no other way to turn. As I have suffered from schizophrenia for the last 30 years, and I’ve had moderate success in working out stratagems to deal with it, I like to think I might have something to offer when it comes to a mad and contradictory philosophy.

I have found that when I am being paranoid, and I believe that the people around me have bad intentions towards me - but as yet they have not acted on them - I can put these ideas to one side and concentrate on looking for evidence that anything bad is happening. (There’s nearly always not.) Looking for evidence may seem like a completely rational solution - and it is, from the rest of society’s point of view. But it is not from my point of view, because your rationality can only act on your personal beliefs about what is going on in the world (well informed or not), and my personal belief is the world is against me. Most communication is delivered through unconscious body-language, and my mind is telling me that these people are out to get me – there is not always a way I can tell whether it’s their body-language or me. In order not to have a bout of stress induced psychosis I have to surrender, and lower my defences to an attack that my gut instinct is telling me is bound to come. This is against all human nature, and difficult.

Another way to put it is that I must admit to myself that I do not know the truth of the situation, and wait to see what happens next, whilst trying not to worry which way things will go. The situation is completely outside of my control, so why should I worry? I’ll worry if the bad thing actually happens, and not beforehand.

This attitude can be applied to the cosmic ‘Truth’: We don’t even know if there is a ‘Truth’, but I think we must assume there is one because thinking there’s not makes us miserable. People should take a more humble attitude, and concede that if there is a ‘Truth’ we are probably not clever enough to work out what it is. This does not stop us from taking a guess – based on what appears to be evidence, but may not be – about what ‘the Truth’ could be. We can work through compromise, arguing for what our guts tell us is right, but at the same time conceding that it might not be.

There are obvious problems with this solution: If you are willing to compromise enough to admit that your plan may be completely wrong, you may compromise your whole idea away and do nothing. On the other hand, if you are stubborn and only willing to compromise a little, you are essentially maintaining that you are the font of the definitive Truth, and it is extremely unlikely that you are correct.

It seems to me that the only way an ideology can be arrived at under metamodernism is collectively: there is no single agent of rational argument, the patterns of argument and reaction among individuals are so complex they may as well be random - a compromise may be arrived at that is hopefully reasonable to most of the group: After all, it is only a fact that the night is dark because we collectively agree that it is, it would be ridiculous to take an individualist approach to this matter. Argue your case to the group as stubbornly as you like, but then submit to the beliefs of the group, and do not attempt to undermine the group or leave it on the grounds that a decision went against you. This might seem like representative democracy as we know it, but it is quite different in attitude: If the decision of a party or a parliament should go against the wishes of an individual representative, it is not abnormal for that representative to refuse to concede that the group might be correct, and use their energy and time to scheme and undermine the collectively made decision. Soviet Russia may have proved that an anti-factionalism law wipes out any kind of democracy, but factional infighting could be reduced through a change of attitude and an increased respect for collective decision-making, worked out through the soft power of human relations rather than the brute strength of an imposed law.

The problem with postmodernism is that it drains all meaning from everything. The problem with modernism is that it involves a stubborn belief in a particular ideology that is highly likely to be flawed. A reasonable solution would be a compromise between various ‘-isms’ that can co-habit together – sometimes even in a contradictory way. Most successful societies are in reality run like this. Societies that are fundamentally religious or fundamentally nationalist or fundamentally capitalist or fundamentally Marxist have all been tried and have all been disastrous. It seems that running things based on the fundaments of one ideology is a bad idea whatever that ideology is. It is probably impossible to get the majority of the population to support one ‘-ism’, so if a real democracy is what is wanted then there has to be multiple agendas and viewpoints with power at any particular time.

Although societies have been run like this, the people running them usually only believe in one ‘-ism’ or none, but are forced to compromise through the political process. This may be achieved more easily – and without one side dominating for decades – if postmodernists concede that ideologies and government interventions are necessary, whilst modernists concede that their favourite ideology by itself just won’t do. This could be what Metamodernism is to the left: It would involve undermining the idea of individualism and empowering the collective, and it would emphasise compromise over adherence to a particular theory. Like modernism and postmodernism it is more a state of mind rather than solid agenda. There certainly would be contradictions where some of what society is doing makes no sense according to other things it is doing, but this happens anyway – the Metamodern philosophy would merely acknowledge that this is unavoidable and not some sort of crisis that must be solved. To put it in a word, it would be ‘chilled’.

If this philosophical movement was to occur it would represent popular ideas and solutions, but would only include the vaguest of ideologies, or perhaps none. There would be no reason to assume the general mish-mash of thoughts expressed something that was the “correct” plan of action, it would be up to political leaders to make something out of them for the purposes of electoral advantage. It would not represent an alleged ‘Truth’, nor would it deny there was a ‘Truth’, it would just generate a collection of ideas that people in general felt were reasonable.

In thinking about this I was reminded of the classical Greek system of democracy. The democratic Greek cities elected no representatives and instead the citizens met in the assembly to make decisions. They had something like parties but membership was allotted randomly and an individual may have had nothing in common politically with most of their group. The groups were not even of equal size, and there were something like seven groups / parties in an assembly. Current issues were first debated within each group, the group would democratically decide what the group supported. When the groups all met together they would vote as blocks, however their members had decided the group should vote. This meant an individual citizen would quite often end up voting against what they personally supported in the general assembly vote. The system was somewhat random, not particularly rational, but seemed fair and was certainly democratic (as far as the citizens were concerned – not everybody was a citizen).

I’m not suggesting this as an appropriate constitutional arrangement for the 21^st century, merely as an example of individual compromise that generated a collective opinion, not based on any particular ideology. Each citizen got the freedom to vote as they chose, but then had to submit to the will of the collective. In a way, it was metamodern. The Chinese seem to have managed something similar in the economic field, if not the democratic one. They rejected the modernist version of communism in the 1970s and embraced what they call ‘market socialism with Chinese characteristics’. This seems contradictory and deeply metamodern. It allows individual engagement with the market for profit but the government has collective control over the economy through the market. It has worked well for the Chinese who have entirely skipped postmodernism and it’s depressive cynicism.

I’m not trying to argue for a political system here, just a philsophical framework for organising politics and society. After all, modernism, for example, can support some radically different political systems, and there is no reason why metamodernism shouldn’t.

‘Damo’ of the Science Fiction Channel speaks of the grand myths of the past, and hopes for something just as exciting for the future. There were the heroic ideals of the tribal ancients, the moral righteousness of the feudal medievalists, the progressivism of the rational moderns - and then what? Anything but Market Solutions? What I am suggesting sounds rather mundane in comparison – and possibly should be ‘jazzed up’ by a good science fiction writer. But all these philosophies of the past involve the promise of a future utopia, in this world or the next. Perhaps the human race has become grown up enough to realise that utopias are impossible – attempts to implement them generally result in a dystopia. Or maybe a science fiction writer could create a utopian society where people compromise and try to get along, rather than try to win at all costs and smash their political enemies. What about a society where we contradict each other and even ourselves? Where we agree to disagree on many issues but find some common ground where it really matters? Heaven must be a dull place if you can’t have a clash of opinions with somebody you suspect might be a contradictory idiot, over the style of glorious angelic harmonies available (which will be infinite). Are you even allowed to be a contradictory idiot in heaven? – if not, few of us will be happy there.

For years I believed I was in telepathic communication with people whom I love dearly, but have never met in physical reality. At the same time I believed I definitely was not a telepath but a schizophrenic, the whole notion of telepathy was ridiculous and it made me sad that my dear friends were just a fantasy of a malfunctioning mind. Now I believe with total certainty I’m no telepath, but I still love my imaginary friends. If I can improve myself and recover whilst being utterly opposed to my own beliefs, then society can improve itself and recover whilst nobody totally agrees with anybody. It doesn’t have to make sense, it just has to work adequately. That is my Metamodern Solution.

I sincerely believe in all this, despite the fact that I argue that sincere belief in alleged solutions is dubious to say the least. Some say us schizophrenics are hypocritical. We prefer the term “contradictory”.

My thanks to Tom Nicholas, for inspiring me with his video essay ‘Postmodernism is DEAD: This is who killed it’. Upon having metamodernism explained to me, something happened in my head.

Big respect to ‘Damo’. Please continue to fight the good fight against people who say that The Culture is neo-liberal, and continue your quest for the metamodern myth. PKD made me buy your T-shirt!

Martin Gooding