A Very Long-Winded Opinion on What I Understand as Metamodernism

                                                                     Metamodernism 

Conor Lumley

 

The Current Landscape

Children today have access to the complete wealth of human knowledge collected since the advent of history. Are there aspects of the internet that function as distractions? Yes; however, we should not throw the baby out with the bathwater because of fear.

And as for the statement that the internet means children don’t have to work to gain information, yes, this is true also. And because of this, we can reallocate the mental energy that would have been used to complete a menial task to more pressing issues, such as finding solutions to the existential catastrophe we have found ourselves born within. Mental illness is rampant in our generation, due to the fact we are forced to confront the world's evil, as well as our own, daily.

Social media, which once showed a façade of what life was, has become a more honest medium. One cannot scroll through Tiktok without coming in contact with videos of police brutality, racism, war crimes, or Karens wreaking havoc in a Walmart.

We have access to every philosophical system and know that none thus far have been worthy of the throne. One may find quick relief from watching “How to be a stoic” on YouTube, but it quickly becomes clear why this philosophy, as well as others, wasn’t the solution to all of humanity's problems.

Our flaws are constantly brought to the forefront of our thinking. We are too fat, but to be too skinny is worse. We are too emotional, but also too callused. Our generation is too lazy, our parents used to have to walk to school barefoot up a hill in the snow, but instead, we get the privilege of riding a bus whose fumes are quickly killing the planet’s atmosphere. “You people don’t have any real problems, your concerns are not valid.” It's psychological warfare.

The findings of the scientific community are also easily accessible. Concepts as complex as quantum physics are extremely popular within communities like YouTube and Reddit. The fact that our reality is but an illusion manifest by processes outside our control, mere patterns of energy propagating through lower dimensions, such as the ones we can experience. It's no wonder so many of us are full of dread and despair.

To pour salt on the wound, our inner desires for meaning and purpose of stifled by the philosophies of our predecessors. The death of God has become our parents' God. Faith is childish, including faith in science, faith in establishment, and faith in our abilities to be true to inner values (Note that I’m not saying being critical of systems is bad, the true danger is punishing those who entertain ideas). Opinions are not truths, and there is no such thing as truth. That is the paradox we are involuntarily subject to.

What are we to do with our birthrights? We cannot ignore that which we are presented. We see the good and the bad of each previous Aeon. To forsake the past, to forsake the idea that an ideal can be reached is suicide. However, to fully embrace the pursuit of an ideal, viewing it as infallible, is not only suicide but homicide. There is a third option. A middle pilar.

We must integrate everything while also destroying everything. We must keep an arsenal of paradoxes. Life in a reality full of contradictions cannot be survived with a single solution, for once you squash one roach, more come out of the woodwork. We must get to the source, something that can only be done by absorbing and embracing all. Understanding God kills him. But once a God dies, it always returns three days later.

Conception Of A New Paradigm

 

Our society is a secular mind residing within a religious shell. We maintain morality. Artifacts of the past lay scattered throughout our culture. We are taught that our ancestors are primitive and stupid. They believed wholeheartedly in fairy tales, they had seemingly meaningless superstitions. If they were magically transported into our age, they would be delighted to experience a more “civilized” way of life and would throw off the shackles of belief just as the intellectually minded people of our time have done. This is the unspoken lesson given to us through every history class we have been forced to take since we began our schooling career. But is this an honest view of the past?

Our ancestors were faced with their mortalities daily and found ways to manage this. They found ways to propagate themselves in such a way that they and their tribes could persist and create a better world for future humanity. As antiscientific as modern Christianity is portrayed, it is the New Testament that sparked scientific inquiry. Because “God is shown in nature,” it makes sense that they would want to understand nature, and from this modernity was born. In a way, Jesus’s teachings killed Jesus’s teachings. But as previously stated, in death there is rebirth.

Modernity offered an exponential improvement in daily life. Power was given to the individual, and not only power but responsibility. Want to change the state of society? Vote, protest, cause a revolution, destroy the leviathan. It is no longer an external power that oppresses you but your complacency. Any truth can be concluded through prudent scientific analysis. One must bear his cross, and in doing so become enlightened. And with this collective realization, utopia could be seen shining through the fog. However, this only lasted for so long.

Soon, the course mapped out by these beloved optimists grew stale. We were no longer seeming to head straight for Eden, and it became clear there were flaws in our course. Power was dispersed, but only to certain individuals. Why is this? The fallibility of the system itself. All men were created equal, and therefore a man who believes others are inferior has the same agency to control society as those who truly desire the best for the collective. Eventually, slavery ended, but racism persisted. Women could now vote, however, to this day they haven’t been able to secure equal wages and political positions as men. Freedom for all led to oppression of some. Evil is a systemic part of this collective dream.

To combat this, enlightenment was slain. Men like Foucault and Derrida deconstructed reality itself, showing its rotten core, and threw it in the firepit. The idea of truth is but a social construct. Moral systems are not fully moral. Philosophy itself is but mental arousal, and our true existential problems cannot be expressed in verbal explanation. Even language itself systematically oppresses. A new process of experiencing reality was formed, a post-modern way of existence, which refutes all and discriminates none (unless your sins were seen as overly heinous).

Post-modernism had overcome its unconsciously oppressive father, seemingly distancing itself from all of the enlightenment’s flawed ways of thinking. And with this, social activism flourished. More people enjoyed a higher level of freedom. But this freedom came without a direction. The idea of a direction itself seemed to be frowned upon, even if not explicitly stated. Man was satiated with all the milk and honey he so desired. But a question began to bubble up from the depths of the collective unconscious, why am I doing what I am doing? My simple pleasures and relative comforts are amusing, but why am I given these in the first place? A wound had been covered with makeup, but this only caused it to ooze more. Just as enlightenment had bred its demons, which had to be overcome by postmodernity, the new philosophy harbored a shadow that was more covert and potent. This demon whispered in the ears of the youth, explaining how meaningless their pursuits were. We roll the stone up the hill, only to have it roll back down. But even if we made it to the top, what’s the point? Why must the stone reach the top in the first place? Even if Sisyphus was happy, his happiness was fruitless.

Post-modernism was never a means to an end, never a true child of the enlightenment, but instead a biological opposite, a womb. A set of conditions in which the essence of what modernity had set out to achieve could penetrate and develop. The idea was the father, its refutation had become the mother, and with the father now dead, only the bastard child two can redeem the trinity.

Why was postmodernity’s fatal flaw? That in refutation of modernity, it became its opposite, infinitely different yet equally as destructive. It created a duality to be reconciled. A feminine critique of a toxically masculine mode of existence. Therefore the child must be a hermaphrodite. Like the Baphomet, it must be a union of all opposites. It must embrace its humanity as well as its animal nature. It must make the below like the above, and in doing so create the above. The Tao is not to be understood as yin and yang respectively, but instead as two poles creating a unified whole. This means understanding that there lies both good and evil in all action. Things done in the name of the good only create new evils. Religion, which was a means of union with a transcendent good (in its later conceptions) has led to some of the worst actions ever manifest in human history. However, the same can be said for systems that sought to remove religion from society. 

We live in a time where postmodernity is suffering from its chronic illness, however, it has not yet died. We, like Moses, are in charge of leading the children of the future to Canaan, but we will most likely never see the land of giants for ourselves. The idea of the child has been conceptualized, as that of a prophetic revelation, however, the messiah remains in the womb, waiting for the right time to come to fruition. We can only observe the subtle shifts in perspectives that will allow our reality to form in such a way that will give this child a home in which it can properly develop.

Evolution of A Disposition

We are drawn to paradoxes, without consciously understanding why. The answer to this lies within works of artistic/philosophical expressions which have slowly sensitized us to the existence of such contradictions. As far back as the late 1800s, Nietzsche pointed out what he called the “metaphysical wound” which plagues our reality, the fact that the world is not what it ought to be. There is an ideal of perfection, however, we exist in a state in which this ideal can never be fully achieved. This, he states, shouldn’t stop us from striving to achieve the ideal. For the Ubermensch is infinitely distant, yet visible, and we must understand ourselves as steps on a ladder that will help future generations get closer to perfection, closer to becoming the “over-man” or what we may refer to as meta-human. His ideas gained traction but were widely misunderstood due to the vagueness of his language (whether that was purposeful on Nietzsche’s part is unknown).

His ideas found footing in what became esotericism, chiefly due to Alister Crowley’s integration of his philosophy into an already present stream of thought which survived within the bowels of religiosity since the time of Plato. This, although it initially gave such philosophical ideas a bad rep in the eyes of academics, would later become an integral part of what we now conceptualize as metamodern, the integration of a kind of neo-spirituality (more on this later).

Alongside Nietzsche, romanticism flourished. Nietzsche referred to Emerson as a true child of Dionysus, a figure from ancient mythology which he used to represent someone who truly experiences life in all its fullness, integrating passion into a world dominated by intellect (Apollonian existence).

During the turn of the 20th century, particular schools of academic philosophy began to become more sympathetic towards religiosity, such as the pragmatism of William James. It seems that having a religious system helps some people better relate to existence, and wards off certain existential dilemmas. James himself struggled with meaning in his youth, bringing him to the brink of suicide, but found solace in a pragmatic view of reality.

James, an important early psychologist, influenced others such as Carl Jung, who sought to map out human consciousness and in doing so discovered that a perceived relationship to the divine was an important aspect of psychic health. He came to view religion as a “proto-psychology” where gods and goddesses were archetypal representations of common psychic functions. What was thought of as transcendent morality was a mode of dealing with these inner forces which work unconsciously to try and sustain life. He adopted a spirituality in which he viewed the collective unconscious as the divine and his personal unconscious as a soul “anima” which unified him with this divinity.

As philosophical discourse persisted later through the 1900s, such streams of thought seemed to dim. Post-structuralism began its work by tearing down the idea of grand narratives present in such philosophies. This development was very important, for it showed that this Dionysian element had not been completely refined. Post-modernity can be seen as a crucible, which applied heat enough to melt away any impurities which may have diluted said ideas. It burned away personal bias, which plagued the works of Nietzsche and Jung, who often failed to realize their own experience cannot be completely generalized to the collective psyche. They, like the prophets of the old testament, were but reflections of the messiah. Post-modernity showed us that reality itself is a polarity.

Modern man is left to grapple with this dichotomy; meaning and lack thereof. Some have begun to see consciousness as a Piagetian development, as time progresses not only do species evolve but their conscious awareness of the ultimate state of reality does as well. Some choose to see this progression in a Hegelian sense (a metaphorical structure used in this essay), only with thesis and antithesis can a final synthesis be reached (however, in this case, although striving towards an end, it is most likely that this synthesis will later prove to be but a thesis to another antithesis). This meta-man, although well versed in all aspects of philosophical thinking (thanks to the internet), finds solace in works of religious sympathetics who satiate an inner need for meaning in a world devoid of it.

However, with that said he is faced with the task of integrating new scientific findings. At first, this task was daunting, but the progression of our understanding of the infinitesimal has hinted at a universe that is merely a simulation, with consciousness being means of computation on a grand scale. Objectivity is being discarded, and our individual subjective experiences are understood as infinitely different from one another as if existing in parallel to one another (harkening back to the Leibnizian idea of the monads which cannot come in contact with one another). The prevalent universal patterns seem to suggest a reality greater than our own, which emanates down, allowing cosmic waves to form the quarks with which the mater itself is comprised. With experiments such as the double-slit, it is shown that all matter exists in a state of superposition until observed by a conscious entity. The implications of this are not fully understood in the academic community, which further fans the flame of metamodern thought, allowing it to create metaphysical systems which can reconcile this fact.

Spiritual systems, such as neo-Gnosticism, Wicca, neo-paganism, hermeticism, Sufism, Buddhism, and other “esoteric” understandings of previous religions integrate the Jungian ideas of the archetypes with the platonic forms, as a way of understanding the universe as a greater conscious system functioning on a plane of existence with which our observable universe is only building block. These systems emphasize subjective experience over dogmatism, with many taking aspects from each system and integrating them into their own (just as Jung suggested the creation of a personal myth). They value self-knowledge overall knowledge, following the maxim of the Delphic oracles “Gnothi Seauton.” These communities find their homes in internet forums, allowing a mix of ideas from all around the world.

One must bracket this subjective experience off from his perception of the objective (even if the objective is illusory) to avoid the same pitfalls which fell upon pre-modern religions which bread the dogmatic thinking that later poisoned enlightenment thinking. One must cultivate his inner life while also maintaining an outer life as if the two were separate from one another. In a world of paradoxes, one must become a paradox. This means respecting everyone’s inner pursuits, no matter how they conflict with your thinking, and understanding that each consciousness is different from one another. However, an ego must exist which emphasizes communal values to allow society to exist in such a way to encourage personal development. The thought process is that if every man is allowed the ability to introspect and truly understand and control his psyche, then the community as a whole would benefit.    

An example of metamodern symbolism within works of art:

Howls Moving Castle

            Within this film, Miyazaki (See also “Spirited Away”) grapples with his own psyche in a highly Jungian sense. The movie is in the third person, where the main character Howl (a young wizard dealing with personal and societal struggles) lives in a large moving castle, representing his mind. A young and unassuming girl comes in contact with a witch who curses her to look like a crone and her only hope is to find the elusive Howl and ask for help. The only catch is the girl cannot mention the curse to anyone.

            Upon finding Howl, and being that she cannot speak of her curse, she becomes somewhat of a housemaid/mother to the young wizard. She begins by cleaning his castle, and after a series of adventures leading to Howl overcoming his emotional issues, the girl returns to her natural state, and the two live together in a new castle. Here it is easy to see the Jungian story of the Anima and her effects on the male psyche. Howl represents Miyazaki’s ego, of which becomes improved through exposure to the deepest levels of the unconscious (Anima- represented often times as the triple female: Lover, Mother, Crone. This symbolizes the development of our relationship to the unconscious over our lifetime. The castle representing the mind harkens back to Jung’s works on dream interpretation where he says the mind is symbolized as a childhood home with many rooms.

 

Music with metamodern undertones:

1.      The Empress – Empressionism

2.      Walk – Denzel Curry

3.      Phantom Regret by Jim – The Weeknd

4.      Roads – Portishead (My personal favorite on this list)

5.      My Body is A Cage – Arcade Fire

6.      Alright – Kendrick Lamar

7.      The Dead Flag Blues – Godspeed You! Black Emperor

8.      Seigfried – Frank Ocean (potentially alluding to the vision of Siegfried seen by Jung prior to WW2 recorded in Liber Novus)

9.      Holy Fucking Shit: 40,000 – Have a Nice Life

It may be easier to experience metamodernity through art, it's more of a feeling/disposition towards existence rather than a metaphysical explanation of it. But that’s just my personal opinion. This was not an exhaustive tractate on metamodern ideology but rather parts I personally resonate with and feel capable of discussing.