This makes this Integral/Metamodern stuff seem like a dysfunctional version of Sufism. The Sufis also believe in developmental stages, in higher consciousness, yet, see this quote from Rumi:
"The one who sees the ray of divine power in the smallest things in the world is a person of high understanding and high aspirations. Such a person respects himself and others and does not disdain the smallest of tasks, for he sees them as manifestations of divine power."
Cuts through any sense of superiority someone may be developing, doesn't it?
Great quote Carlos I hadn't come across that Rumi line before. It makes me think of becoming more abstract vs. becoming more concrete. I feel like we need the simplicity cutting through our sense of superiority now and again (and again and again) otherwise we start to float off into the abstract. I think Metamodernism like Sufism (and perhaps unlike Integral) has that aspect towards grounding as well as its developmental path for consciousness. Seems to me like it faces a challenge though: to become drunk on the word wine and lose itself in abstract superiority or to remember its size in simplicity!
1. Integrals don't position themselves at "top" of the stage hierarchy, but at the *penultimate* position. This leaves room for the guru to whom they prostate themselves, and leaves room above for them to eventually grow into a guru themselves. Integral's uncritical guru problem (Adi Da, Andrew Cohen, Marc Gafni, Wilber himself, etc) shows the power pathology very clearly.
2. You correctly identify the many, many motte and bailey formations in the rhetoric of Integral, or in metamoderns like Dempsey, but you can sharpen your view by seeing motte and bailey as the entire style, the embodied experience, the "cogntive shape" of the Wilberite ideology. There is no question or critique that Wilberites or Dempseys won't cheerfully embrace--thank you for your service! But watch in the next essay or forum thread how they fall back into the same simplistic color codings and slogans and catechisms, as if the critical exchange never occurred. The greatest irony of their pop Hegelianism is that the encounter with the opposing view never causes a mutation or fork or aufhebung, never EVOLVES. More strongly: for a Wilberite, the encounter with the genuinely critical Other DOESN"T LEAVE A TRACE.
3. What this demonstrates is that Integral / Metamodern is anti-dialogic. The encounter with the Other is scary because it risks fundamentally changing you. The Integral has to be completely protected against this risk pre-emptively, made safe from change, in order to risk it at all. This is the function of Spiral Dynamics: one knows in advance not just that one is superior, second tier, but that one has "transcended and included" the critic's perspective IN ADVANCE. One has already "worked through" the inferior stage and understands it from the inside. The Other is emptied of any possible contribution to the exchange in advance, and this is a CONDITION of permitting the encounter at all. Of course Integrals can play at imitations of dialogue - "Why thank you, Mr Atheist Orange, I've learned so much from this exchange!" but the condescension is obvious because the dialogic exclusion is foundational.
4. Put it another way: if I have "transcended and included" you, then I could carry on the dialogue between us without your presence. In the Wilberite encounter, I ERASE YOU ALTOGETHER, replacing you with the imago of your developmental type in order to serve my own narcissistic supply by an easy "win." You cannot contribute any new knowledge or capacity because I have already claimed ownership of it in advance. If I walk away with anything new from our encounter, it is only because your inferior presence allowed me to midwife it out of myself, where it already existed--though occulted--before we met. Afterward you can be discarded as a husk, like any disposable untermensch. This absolute erasure is the whole point of Wilberism and its derivatives. Calling it "We Space" or "co-creation" or "The Listening Society" is a greenwashing tactic.
5. This explains why Integrals, though they want to steal its prestige and mimic its rhetoric, can't help but reveal their venomous hatred of science if you let them talk long enough. (The hysterical claims of Dempsey et alia--maybe you too--that science and materialism have led to nihilism are the fundy shadow crying "Satan!" and "Sin!"). It's the IMAGE OF THE ENCOUNTER that triggers their hysteria. Science doesn't "transcend and include": that's the Wilberite image of a structure eating, digesting, and eliminating the Other with no change except onedimensional "growth," becoming a more bloated ideological version of itself. Science, by contrast, has to be changed by the encounter. When a scientific hypothesis encounters a fact it cannot absorb, the entire structure of the hypothesis must change to accommodate it. If a hypothesis encounters facts that wholly undermine its axioms, it doesn't "transcend and include"--the theory DIES. It's scrapped and a new hypothesis is constructed to connect the data. Needless to say, as an IMAGE OF ENCOUNTER, this prospect of dialogic ego-death is horrifying to a spiritual narcissist. Even the most corrupt, Lysenkoist scientific process cannot play motte and bailey forever. Hence the Wilberite need to declare "metarationality" as a higher woo stage which infallibly preserves one from risk and change, as well as from the most basic rigor and discipline of critical thought.
6. Why did Wilber stake his entire project on a nobody like Clare Graves? This one is easy. Unlike other developmentalists who posit a linear ladder (bad enough, in many ways), Graves posited a CHASM between first and second tier. Crossing from green to yellow is not simply the addition of one new perspective level, n+1, a la Kagan or Cook-Greuter: it is the full access to ALL the previous framings AND the natural intuition of how they relate to each other. In a single stage graduation, one goes from a single truncated perspective to the rainbow multiverse, from subhuman to fully human. Graves makes BINARY the division between the developmental haves and have nots: being "second tier" is a necessary condition for having any idea worth expressing whatsoever. Ideologically, Graves maximizes narcissistic claims of omniscience and non-reciprocity for the higher stages like no other developmental theorist.
This is the drug that Wilber could not resist, and this is the function of SD in Integral. One proves one's rhetorical authority not through argument and empirical evidence, but through the virtue-signalling demonstration of second tier status, as the ugly adolescent chaos of any Wilberite forum will amply demonstrate. Wilberism and Scientology are superb case studies in how effective, how psychologically regressive, and how socially poisonous the blackmail of 'developmental social comparison' up a designated stage ladder can be. Wilberite and Metamodern gurus prompt their acolytes to a stage rat-race up to their own OT3 level exactly as L Ron Hubbard did. The process is no less lobotomizing, and the arrival point is no less stupid than the story of Xenu.
Apparently you're pals with Dempsey now--haven't watched the video--but notice this overwhelmingly important motte and bailey: after appearing to concede the ideological problems of stage theory, he'll repeatedly slap up a color-coded WILBERITE image of SD to illustrate "stages." After giving himself plausible denial by admitting the "problems" with some stage models, he then repeatedly NORMALIZES Spiral Dynamics as the primary referent. Contact with critique does NOT CHANGE THEORETICAL/IDEOLOGICAL BEHAVIOR.
The most important little chart that Wilber ever made was the "conversion chart" lining up Kagan, Cook-Greuter and other developmentalists with Graves to show they all intuited "the same thing." Of course none of the others had the Gravesian "chasm" between tiers. The function of the chart is to CONVERT ALL OTHER DEVELOPMENTAL THEORIES BACK INTO SD, which provides the maximum anti-dialogic yield for ideological protection and colonization.
Epilog
(Dempsey is a Christian *priest,* in the unflattering Nietzschean sense. Reading your latest posts here I get a glimmer of hope you're moving beyond both. For all his wheezy "Greek" handwaving, Nietzsche is pathetically and poisonously Abrahamic in the end. "No Christ, no anti-Christ": that's my aphorism, the minimum condition to have any hope for a world with apocalyptic mentalities in charge.)
Sorry it took me so long to respond I've been in the final stages of finishing up the next video.
I loved this reply thank you so much for taking the time to write it. You have articulated things that I had failed to in my critiques. And you connected it to my new series of critiques of nihilism/meaning discourse.
I hadn't thought of Clare Graves as the root of a lot of this but you are right — how odd that he would propose this whole second tier. I always thought of Cowan and the other guy as the stem but I guess they just added a bit of colour to Graves spine.
1. very good point. Leave that space open for a post of humility I'd thought of but not as the open pedestal for the guru to sit upon
2. another astute point. Though I disagree with the framing a little. My readwise has been throwing up some Kuhn recently and one good point that is relevant here is how the scientists will cling to the old paradigm even when they can see the problems with it unless there's a new one (I'm thinking it was about Leibniz critiquing Newtonian static space as being unnecessary within that paradigm but this not being picked up on until Einstein). The pop Hegelianism is motte and bailey then but I don't see it as being from a dishonest manoeuvre but a human psychological limitation. Though that of course makes the whole play of transcend and include a bit sillier.
3. and 4. resonate deeply. The inflation in these worldviews is...unfortunate. As Norm MacDonald would say: the worst part is the hypocrisy. But I think that's baked into the theory.
5. this is where the mapover with the Nihilism/Meaning critique begins and I appreciate it. However I think you have a romanticised view of science. At least in my Kuhn-influenced perspective which you may disagree with (plenty do). I think that scientists will abandon a hypothesis easily but a theory takes much long to die and comes into the above point. I think theories become axiomatic and play such a foundational role (depends on the scope of theory of course — I'm thinking at paradigmatic level as with Darwinian evolutionary theory, Newtonian theory etc) that it isn't simply tossed aside. So long as it's still workable the scientist will continue with the theory in the absence of a better one because you can still make headway in the meantime rather than heading off into the fog without a clue of your bearings. Paradigms and systems of thought (like Hegel) are fundamentally orienting and that's the problem here. Of course you provide a better alternative — the other developmental theories that lack the crack cocaine of ubermensching (well, lack it more than SD)
6. and epilogue. I like Brendan. I think he's a good guy and is trying to do a good thing and it's a thing I believed in before. I may not agree with all the hierarchising now but I don't think that makes him a bad actor and certainly not a bad person. Just someone I repsectfully disagree with. As for Nietzsche yes there is some moving beyond the nihilism/meaning framing going on and the whole fascist-adjacent wordlview that seems to come with that. The apocalypse is alive and well in Fritz as much as any fire and brimstone sermoniser and it's everywhere in our secular subcultures as well.
Once again: interesting comment. You articulated a few things and made a few connections I really enjoyed and I appreciate it (even if I'm not so keen on some of the framing but hey what's life without a little colour)
I have been going back to the Listening Society lately, attempting to see how relevant it still is and if it has hit the spot. I have to say that I am impressed at least by Hanzi's ability to anticipate objections, reactions, allergies and suspicions to his arguements is one of the most entertaining and intellectually interesting things, especially the fact he even categorizes them and gives them names. Now when it comes to the introduction to developmental stage theories, Hanzo does a very good job at not only anticipating allergic reactions and objections but also the dangerous and unconstructive ways in which uch theories can be used.
But also, to be totally fair, even if metamodernism is proposed as an emerging meta-stage that includes and transcends, this developmental path is clearly distinguished from frameworks of personal development which are much more plural. Not only does he mention that there are many stage theories beyond Common's "Hierarchical Complexity" but he mentions that this framework itself is focus on a very narrow aspect of the whole self. To be totally fair, there is no sense of a single developmental trajectory for people after reading the book but at least 4.
The fact though is that still, the bigger value meme or metanarrative of metamodernism has this singular sense of Hegelian sublation. There is also a kind of a feeling of deterministic neccesity of this cultural stage if one sees history in an evolutionary-mode. I am much more concerned by his highly biased preachy view of "Green Social Liberalism 2.0" as politically necessary than the Metamodern cultural code (but maybe I should get my own critique written down, someday).
I think the real elephant in the room here is the lack of embodiment and the allure of the high of high-falluten all-encompassing metatheory. Being on that mode for too long really minimizers the importance of small things and joys and can be even antisocial (if you are on that mode, then all problems are big problems and the struggles of your fellow human on a different developmental stage suddenly becomes miniscule and irrelevant). I think that what metamodernism really needs is to touch grass. Actually not only touch it but, showers in it, eat grass and maybe even for a single second, be like grass, a tiny thing without cosmic importance.
I am so out of my depth here, as I struggle to ingest and digest all of these ideas and references, but I am like a kid in a candy store with it all; I don’t know which tempting and seductive morsel to grab and gobble up first! Having come to reading (devouring) philosophy later in life, I am woefully behind the curve. But I have to say, stumbling onto your YouTube channel a few years ago helped light the path for me as I continue to read, learn and try to make sense of it all, fully realizing and accepting the fact that I’ll never get to the end of that path. Thank you! And I also appreciate the comments others have made on your posts too.
Haha well I'm glad you're enjoying the candy store Carla and I hope it's giving you a taste of which direction is going to give you the most bang for your buck! I'm so glad to hear that the YouTube channel has been a friend on your journey. Also I admire the attitude of never reaching the end of the path; I find it's a bittersweet grief I have to continually come to terms with
Hello. First an honest thank you for this wonderfully argumented series.
Also just wanted to mention for transparencies sake, that I originally wrote this comment as an answer to your third post, but now as I was about to post it I noticed and read this and find it fits even better here:
Trying to play off your analysis, and building on your rhizome metaphor, I would like to propose a small expansion of it, from the rhizome to the metaphor of an ecology / an ecological system (a short websearch tells me anthropologists have been using this metaphor for some time already, see "Cultural Ecology" or "Ecology of Knowledge" (Finke)). Viewed through this metaphor, metamodernist culture might be an evolution out of another species like post-modernism, but it doesn't mean that it superior to it (as a dolphin is not supperior to a cow, and neither a chicken to a dinosaur). Depending in which context/ecological conditions the organism is placed it can be fit or not for survival, essential for the ecosystems sustainability or a destabilizer/invasive species that wrecks the systems temporal homeostasis, or it can serve any other function within it. I would even go on to argue, that the hierarchic view of species within ecosystems is actually just a peculiarity of the western anthropocentric worldview, which ignores all of these contextual complexities. So in the same sense as indigenous and mystic knowledge reminds us to not elevate ourselves over nature, I would second you in cautioning us as metamodernists to not elevate ourselves out of the cultural ecosystem, as having transcended it. We haven't and we won't.
Yet nonetheless, I do think that metamodernism can play a quite important and regenerative role in the cultural ecosystem. And if the length of my message is not annoying already, I'd like to offer just one of the many functions that I believe metamodernism can wisely play. And namely the role of Mediator. As you've noted, the "transcend and include" which you exemplified in the previous post with Contrapoints is the exception to the norm in current culture. So, I also believe that "true" metamodernism (non-dogmatic, humble, non-hierarchic), is also this exception to the norm, as this attempt to truly understand the other cultural logics, via even epistemological methods like perspectivism (the shaman embodying the raindeer in order to understand it better) can only be done with true humbleness, and not with proclaiming one's own cultural logic as the climax of cultural logics, thus blindly reproducing the same ingrained hierarchic structures of dominator cultures and supremacism. And if we accept that by managing this immense task, of understanding both the centrist dad, the incel, the anarchist, the australian indigenous native etc. - metamodernists can function as a glue between them - helping in making transparent and visible deeper commonalitieis as well as deeper differences - thus facilitating coordination capacity among them - and finding collaboration leverage points between them. If used wisely and humbily the metamodern logic can act as the glue of the cultural ecosystem, with the powerful capacitay of transforming conflict into generative creative tension and thus creating new impressive and transformative forms of collaboration amongst logics, without reducing the whole thing to a unitary whole, I.e., a true pluralism, a world of many worlds.
Maybe to make it more concrete I see Metamodernism acting as something akin to Miki Kashtan's "Highest Common Denominator" methodology for conflict transformation. Or a trade union organizer, talking to 40 workers to find their common needs, oppressions, frustrations and demands in order to support in the development of collective agency.
I hope these few jumbled ideas can resonate somehow and if they do, please feel free to use them as however you see fit, without feeling pressured to mention anyone. And of course, I am very curious of your impression and critique.
Great to hear you're enjoying the series Sergiu and I appreciate the deep engagement with it. And I have to say that our visions of Metamodernism are in deep harmony. It is this vision of "Metamodernism as emulsifier" that I am most keen on. There's a later instalment in the series that outlines just this (after deconstruction comes reconstruction some Metamodernists would say) and connects it with other metamodernist thinkers who have expressed similar sentiments.
I think this would require a shift in the Metamodernist subculture. I think the hierarchical transcend and include food chain is the fascination of the subculture (I could be wrong of course since I am but a peripheral lurker). It seems to me that this is a fascination with the very existence of metamodernism and ends up being Narcissus lost in the pool.
As I'll talk about in that instalment the Mediator framing requires humility because there is a possibility of failure. We may fail to accurately take the others' perspective/s. It is not guaranteed by our being the apex complexi-brains in the ecosystem (I'm a fan of the ecosystem fram as you might have guessed!). Getting humble and doing the work, Metamodernism may have a huge amount to contribute but I fear it's more on a trajectory of Narcissus — fascinated by its own complexity and hierarchical superiority. A shame.
This makes this Integral/Metamodern stuff seem like a dysfunctional version of Sufism. The Sufis also believe in developmental stages, in higher consciousness, yet, see this quote from Rumi:
"The one who sees the ray of divine power in the smallest things in the world is a person of high understanding and high aspirations. Such a person respects himself and others and does not disdain the smallest of tasks, for he sees them as manifestations of divine power."
Cuts through any sense of superiority someone may be developing, doesn't it?
Great quote Carlos I hadn't come across that Rumi line before. It makes me think of becoming more abstract vs. becoming more concrete. I feel like we need the simplicity cutting through our sense of superiority now and again (and again and again) otherwise we start to float off into the abstract. I think Metamodernism like Sufism (and perhaps unlike Integral) has that aspect towards grounding as well as its developmental path for consciousness. Seems to me like it faces a challenge though: to become drunk on the word wine and lose itself in abstract superiority or to remember its size in simplicity!
To add some complexity:
1. Integrals don't position themselves at "top" of the stage hierarchy, but at the *penultimate* position. This leaves room for the guru to whom they prostate themselves, and leaves room above for them to eventually grow into a guru themselves. Integral's uncritical guru problem (Adi Da, Andrew Cohen, Marc Gafni, Wilber himself, etc) shows the power pathology very clearly.
2. You correctly identify the many, many motte and bailey formations in the rhetoric of Integral, or in metamoderns like Dempsey, but you can sharpen your view by seeing motte and bailey as the entire style, the embodied experience, the "cogntive shape" of the Wilberite ideology. There is no question or critique that Wilberites or Dempseys won't cheerfully embrace--thank you for your service! But watch in the next essay or forum thread how they fall back into the same simplistic color codings and slogans and catechisms, as if the critical exchange never occurred. The greatest irony of their pop Hegelianism is that the encounter with the opposing view never causes a mutation or fork or aufhebung, never EVOLVES. More strongly: for a Wilberite, the encounter with the genuinely critical Other DOESN"T LEAVE A TRACE.
3. What this demonstrates is that Integral / Metamodern is anti-dialogic. The encounter with the Other is scary because it risks fundamentally changing you. The Integral has to be completely protected against this risk pre-emptively, made safe from change, in order to risk it at all. This is the function of Spiral Dynamics: one knows in advance not just that one is superior, second tier, but that one has "transcended and included" the critic's perspective IN ADVANCE. One has already "worked through" the inferior stage and understands it from the inside. The Other is emptied of any possible contribution to the exchange in advance, and this is a CONDITION of permitting the encounter at all. Of course Integrals can play at imitations of dialogue - "Why thank you, Mr Atheist Orange, I've learned so much from this exchange!" but the condescension is obvious because the dialogic exclusion is foundational.
4. Put it another way: if I have "transcended and included" you, then I could carry on the dialogue between us without your presence. In the Wilberite encounter, I ERASE YOU ALTOGETHER, replacing you with the imago of your developmental type in order to serve my own narcissistic supply by an easy "win." You cannot contribute any new knowledge or capacity because I have already claimed ownership of it in advance. If I walk away with anything new from our encounter, it is only because your inferior presence allowed me to midwife it out of myself, where it already existed--though occulted--before we met. Afterward you can be discarded as a husk, like any disposable untermensch. This absolute erasure is the whole point of Wilberism and its derivatives. Calling it "We Space" or "co-creation" or "The Listening Society" is a greenwashing tactic.
5. This explains why Integrals, though they want to steal its prestige and mimic its rhetoric, can't help but reveal their venomous hatred of science if you let them talk long enough. (The hysterical claims of Dempsey et alia--maybe you too--that science and materialism have led to nihilism are the fundy shadow crying "Satan!" and "Sin!"). It's the IMAGE OF THE ENCOUNTER that triggers their hysteria. Science doesn't "transcend and include": that's the Wilberite image of a structure eating, digesting, and eliminating the Other with no change except onedimensional "growth," becoming a more bloated ideological version of itself. Science, by contrast, has to be changed by the encounter. When a scientific hypothesis encounters a fact it cannot absorb, the entire structure of the hypothesis must change to accommodate it. If a hypothesis encounters facts that wholly undermine its axioms, it doesn't "transcend and include"--the theory DIES. It's scrapped and a new hypothesis is constructed to connect the data. Needless to say, as an IMAGE OF ENCOUNTER, this prospect of dialogic ego-death is horrifying to a spiritual narcissist. Even the most corrupt, Lysenkoist scientific process cannot play motte and bailey forever. Hence the Wilberite need to declare "metarationality" as a higher woo stage which infallibly preserves one from risk and change, as well as from the most basic rigor and discipline of critical thought.
6. Why did Wilber stake his entire project on a nobody like Clare Graves? This one is easy. Unlike other developmentalists who posit a linear ladder (bad enough, in many ways), Graves posited a CHASM between first and second tier. Crossing from green to yellow is not simply the addition of one new perspective level, n+1, a la Kagan or Cook-Greuter: it is the full access to ALL the previous framings AND the natural intuition of how they relate to each other. In a single stage graduation, one goes from a single truncated perspective to the rainbow multiverse, from subhuman to fully human. Graves makes BINARY the division between the developmental haves and have nots: being "second tier" is a necessary condition for having any idea worth expressing whatsoever. Ideologically, Graves maximizes narcissistic claims of omniscience and non-reciprocity for the higher stages like no other developmental theorist.
This is the drug that Wilber could not resist, and this is the function of SD in Integral. One proves one's rhetorical authority not through argument and empirical evidence, but through the virtue-signalling demonstration of second tier status, as the ugly adolescent chaos of any Wilberite forum will amply demonstrate. Wilberism and Scientology are superb case studies in how effective, how psychologically regressive, and how socially poisonous the blackmail of 'developmental social comparison' up a designated stage ladder can be. Wilberite and Metamodern gurus prompt their acolytes to a stage rat-race up to their own OT3 level exactly as L Ron Hubbard did. The process is no less lobotomizing, and the arrival point is no less stupid than the story of Xenu.
Apparently you're pals with Dempsey now--haven't watched the video--but notice this overwhelmingly important motte and bailey: after appearing to concede the ideological problems of stage theory, he'll repeatedly slap up a color-coded WILBERITE image of SD to illustrate "stages." After giving himself plausible denial by admitting the "problems" with some stage models, he then repeatedly NORMALIZES Spiral Dynamics as the primary referent. Contact with critique does NOT CHANGE THEORETICAL/IDEOLOGICAL BEHAVIOR.
The most important little chart that Wilber ever made was the "conversion chart" lining up Kagan, Cook-Greuter and other developmentalists with Graves to show they all intuited "the same thing." Of course none of the others had the Gravesian "chasm" between tiers. The function of the chart is to CONVERT ALL OTHER DEVELOPMENTAL THEORIES BACK INTO SD, which provides the maximum anti-dialogic yield for ideological protection and colonization.
Epilog
(Dempsey is a Christian *priest,* in the unflattering Nietzschean sense. Reading your latest posts here I get a glimmer of hope you're moving beyond both. For all his wheezy "Greek" handwaving, Nietzsche is pathetically and poisonously Abrahamic in the end. "No Christ, no anti-Christ": that's my aphorism, the minimum condition to have any hope for a world with apocalyptic mentalities in charge.)
Sorry it took me so long to respond I've been in the final stages of finishing up the next video.
I loved this reply thank you so much for taking the time to write it. You have articulated things that I had failed to in my critiques. And you connected it to my new series of critiques of nihilism/meaning discourse.
I hadn't thought of Clare Graves as the root of a lot of this but you are right — how odd that he would propose this whole second tier. I always thought of Cowan and the other guy as the stem but I guess they just added a bit of colour to Graves spine.
1. very good point. Leave that space open for a post of humility I'd thought of but not as the open pedestal for the guru to sit upon
2. another astute point. Though I disagree with the framing a little. My readwise has been throwing up some Kuhn recently and one good point that is relevant here is how the scientists will cling to the old paradigm even when they can see the problems with it unless there's a new one (I'm thinking it was about Leibniz critiquing Newtonian static space as being unnecessary within that paradigm but this not being picked up on until Einstein). The pop Hegelianism is motte and bailey then but I don't see it as being from a dishonest manoeuvre but a human psychological limitation. Though that of course makes the whole play of transcend and include a bit sillier.
3. and 4. resonate deeply. The inflation in these worldviews is...unfortunate. As Norm MacDonald would say: the worst part is the hypocrisy. But I think that's baked into the theory.
5. this is where the mapover with the Nihilism/Meaning critique begins and I appreciate it. However I think you have a romanticised view of science. At least in my Kuhn-influenced perspective which you may disagree with (plenty do). I think that scientists will abandon a hypothesis easily but a theory takes much long to die and comes into the above point. I think theories become axiomatic and play such a foundational role (depends on the scope of theory of course — I'm thinking at paradigmatic level as with Darwinian evolutionary theory, Newtonian theory etc) that it isn't simply tossed aside. So long as it's still workable the scientist will continue with the theory in the absence of a better one because you can still make headway in the meantime rather than heading off into the fog without a clue of your bearings. Paradigms and systems of thought (like Hegel) are fundamentally orienting and that's the problem here. Of course you provide a better alternative — the other developmental theories that lack the crack cocaine of ubermensching (well, lack it more than SD)
6. and epilogue. I like Brendan. I think he's a good guy and is trying to do a good thing and it's a thing I believed in before. I may not agree with all the hierarchising now but I don't think that makes him a bad actor and certainly not a bad person. Just someone I repsectfully disagree with. As for Nietzsche yes there is some moving beyond the nihilism/meaning framing going on and the whole fascist-adjacent wordlview that seems to come with that. The apocalypse is alive and well in Fritz as much as any fire and brimstone sermoniser and it's everywhere in our secular subcultures as well.
Once again: interesting comment. You articulated a few things and made a few connections I really enjoyed and I appreciate it (even if I'm not so keen on some of the framing but hey what's life without a little colour)
I have been going back to the Listening Society lately, attempting to see how relevant it still is and if it has hit the spot. I have to say that I am impressed at least by Hanzi's ability to anticipate objections, reactions, allergies and suspicions to his arguements is one of the most entertaining and intellectually interesting things, especially the fact he even categorizes them and gives them names. Now when it comes to the introduction to developmental stage theories, Hanzo does a very good job at not only anticipating allergic reactions and objections but also the dangerous and unconstructive ways in which uch theories can be used.
But also, to be totally fair, even if metamodernism is proposed as an emerging meta-stage that includes and transcends, this developmental path is clearly distinguished from frameworks of personal development which are much more plural. Not only does he mention that there are many stage theories beyond Common's "Hierarchical Complexity" but he mentions that this framework itself is focus on a very narrow aspect of the whole self. To be totally fair, there is no sense of a single developmental trajectory for people after reading the book but at least 4.
The fact though is that still, the bigger value meme or metanarrative of metamodernism has this singular sense of Hegelian sublation. There is also a kind of a feeling of deterministic neccesity of this cultural stage if one sees history in an evolutionary-mode. I am much more concerned by his highly biased preachy view of "Green Social Liberalism 2.0" as politically necessary than the Metamodern cultural code (but maybe I should get my own critique written down, someday).
I think the real elephant in the room here is the lack of embodiment and the allure of the high of high-falluten all-encompassing metatheory. Being on that mode for too long really minimizers the importance of small things and joys and can be even antisocial (if you are on that mode, then all problems are big problems and the struggles of your fellow human on a different developmental stage suddenly becomes miniscule and irrelevant). I think that what metamodernism really needs is to touch grass. Actually not only touch it but, showers in it, eat grass and maybe even for a single second, be like grass, a tiny thing without cosmic importance.
I am so out of my depth here, as I struggle to ingest and digest all of these ideas and references, but I am like a kid in a candy store with it all; I don’t know which tempting and seductive morsel to grab and gobble up first! Having come to reading (devouring) philosophy later in life, I am woefully behind the curve. But I have to say, stumbling onto your YouTube channel a few years ago helped light the path for me as I continue to read, learn and try to make sense of it all, fully realizing and accepting the fact that I’ll never get to the end of that path. Thank you! And I also appreciate the comments others have made on your posts too.
Haha well I'm glad you're enjoying the candy store Carla and I hope it's giving you a taste of which direction is going to give you the most bang for your buck! I'm so glad to hear that the YouTube channel has been a friend on your journey. Also I admire the attitude of never reaching the end of the path; I find it's a bittersweet grief I have to continually come to terms with
Hello. First an honest thank you for this wonderfully argumented series.
Also just wanted to mention for transparencies sake, that I originally wrote this comment as an answer to your third post, but now as I was about to post it I noticed and read this and find it fits even better here:
Trying to play off your analysis, and building on your rhizome metaphor, I would like to propose a small expansion of it, from the rhizome to the metaphor of an ecology / an ecological system (a short websearch tells me anthropologists have been using this metaphor for some time already, see "Cultural Ecology" or "Ecology of Knowledge" (Finke)). Viewed through this metaphor, metamodernist culture might be an evolution out of another species like post-modernism, but it doesn't mean that it superior to it (as a dolphin is not supperior to a cow, and neither a chicken to a dinosaur). Depending in which context/ecological conditions the organism is placed it can be fit or not for survival, essential for the ecosystems sustainability or a destabilizer/invasive species that wrecks the systems temporal homeostasis, or it can serve any other function within it. I would even go on to argue, that the hierarchic view of species within ecosystems is actually just a peculiarity of the western anthropocentric worldview, which ignores all of these contextual complexities. So in the same sense as indigenous and mystic knowledge reminds us to not elevate ourselves over nature, I would second you in cautioning us as metamodernists to not elevate ourselves out of the cultural ecosystem, as having transcended it. We haven't and we won't.
Yet nonetheless, I do think that metamodernism can play a quite important and regenerative role in the cultural ecosystem. And if the length of my message is not annoying already, I'd like to offer just one of the many functions that I believe metamodernism can wisely play. And namely the role of Mediator. As you've noted, the "transcend and include" which you exemplified in the previous post with Contrapoints is the exception to the norm in current culture. So, I also believe that "true" metamodernism (non-dogmatic, humble, non-hierarchic), is also this exception to the norm, as this attempt to truly understand the other cultural logics, via even epistemological methods like perspectivism (the shaman embodying the raindeer in order to understand it better) can only be done with true humbleness, and not with proclaiming one's own cultural logic as the climax of cultural logics, thus blindly reproducing the same ingrained hierarchic structures of dominator cultures and supremacism. And if we accept that by managing this immense task, of understanding both the centrist dad, the incel, the anarchist, the australian indigenous native etc. - metamodernists can function as a glue between them - helping in making transparent and visible deeper commonalitieis as well as deeper differences - thus facilitating coordination capacity among them - and finding collaboration leverage points between them. If used wisely and humbily the metamodern logic can act as the glue of the cultural ecosystem, with the powerful capacitay of transforming conflict into generative creative tension and thus creating new impressive and transformative forms of collaboration amongst logics, without reducing the whole thing to a unitary whole, I.e., a true pluralism, a world of many worlds.
Maybe to make it more concrete I see Metamodernism acting as something akin to Miki Kashtan's "Highest Common Denominator" methodology for conflict transformation. Or a trade union organizer, talking to 40 workers to find their common needs, oppressions, frustrations and demands in order to support in the development of collective agency.
I hope these few jumbled ideas can resonate somehow and if they do, please feel free to use them as however you see fit, without feeling pressured to mention anyone. And of course, I am very curious of your impression and critique.
Great to hear you're enjoying the series Sergiu and I appreciate the deep engagement with it. And I have to say that our visions of Metamodernism are in deep harmony. It is this vision of "Metamodernism as emulsifier" that I am most keen on. There's a later instalment in the series that outlines just this (after deconstruction comes reconstruction some Metamodernists would say) and connects it with other metamodernist thinkers who have expressed similar sentiments.
I think this would require a shift in the Metamodernist subculture. I think the hierarchical transcend and include food chain is the fascination of the subculture (I could be wrong of course since I am but a peripheral lurker). It seems to me that this is a fascination with the very existence of metamodernism and ends up being Narcissus lost in the pool.
As I'll talk about in that instalment the Mediator framing requires humility because there is a possibility of failure. We may fail to accurately take the others' perspective/s. It is not guaranteed by our being the apex complexi-brains in the ecosystem (I'm a fan of the ecosystem fram as you might have guessed!). Getting humble and doing the work, Metamodernism may have a huge amount to contribute but I fear it's more on a trajectory of Narcissus — fascinated by its own complexity and hierarchical superiority. A shame.