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September 23 - September 30, 2017
says the metamodernist[114]—if all perspectives are to be included for us to be able to strive towards universal values, how come that the only perspective you pomos (postmodernists)[115] seem to value is your own?
You are against all grand narratives, all stories about how the world at large is evolving, because you find them monolithic and oppressive. You are against all overarching maps of society and reality, because you think they reduce the richness of life and existence too much. And you always strive to be on the critical side of things, always against stuff. And you say you don’t really believe in progress and development, only in changes of cultures, interpretations and power structures.
For a while it was “democratic socialism”, but after 1989 we haven’t really seen any credible claims for it. Then it was “deep ecology”, but the world is industrializing and consuming and modernizing faster than ever. Then you came up with queer feminism and updated versions of radical feminism, which is nice, but nowhere is there any evidence that “breaking the hetero norm” and “crushing patriarchy” bring forth any true revolution, or lead to an otherwise fair society. Frankly, women have been more liberated by the pill and other advances of medicine, than by postmodern theory. And then you
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You don’t truly use a multiplicity of perspectives; your “multiplicity of perspectives” is limited to an epistemological one (views of knowledge and how it is attained)—it is never an ontological multiplicity (viewing reality itself as shifting according to perspectives).
From a symbol-stage G Metamodern perspective, this is just not enough. You have to make yourself more vulnerable than that: You have to try to construct a synthesis from all that you know from the earlier symbol-stages, in order to create a society that solves the three major problems of modern life: the excessive global inequalities, the alienation or neurotic anxieties of modern life, and ecological unsustainability.
To have solidarity with someone, you must also have solidarity with their perspective. This means that one must also understand power hierarchies—not just as “evil spirits” in the form of class structures, patriarchy, discourses, etc. to be exorcized with “critical perspectives”—but as differences of developmental stage. And pomos are generally at a higher developmental stage than modernists.
We must learn to listen to another person and to see with her eyes and to merge our reality with hers, to see how her perspective is a real, ontological, part of reality. Listening to a stranger becomes the highest form of jihad.
This is the deep listening. The constant listener.
Criticism: the creed in the front of the book seems to be spot on and just plain sloppy.
The format of the book is similar to a Wilberian presentation (with fewer additional comments within parentheses), that intriguing narcissistic tendency to present ones deep seated duty towards the ever changing enlightened attitude.
This is not a systematic theology or philosophy...nor should it...nor could it be...
If you see that social reality is constructed, that it is a form of patterned “meta-narrative”, and that there are serious gaps and limitations in that narrative—aren’t you obliged to try to reconstruct it? To create a new story about humanity, society, reality and progress? To suggest a proto-synthesis?
This is Harari's technique. Harari has more cohesive professional writing. Hanzi seems to let out his story too frequently. Yes, it is fine that you are at the pinnacle of society. You , with your UBI in place, swank housing, romantic views. You are the aesthetic we young men strive to become and you are the social butterfly, alighting upon any and every flower and taking a bit of nectar as you move along. You may see your circle as the center of the fractal spiraling out into the world at large, and that is okay. If you must share your life then we too must share ours. But need this sharing be done within a writing such as this book?
By virtue of its own dialectical logic, by the structure of its symbols and their interrelations and by its inherent self-contradictions, postmodernism is the midwife of metamodernism. Now let’s get out there and kick some pomo ass.
This is not gross subtle and causal states. This is another developmental model from low to high, a sort of spiritual developmental scheme.
“The hour-hand of life. Life consists of rare, isolated moments of the greatest significance, and of innumerably many intervals, during which at best the silhouettes of those moments hover above us. Love, springtime, every beautiful melody, mountains, the moon, the sea—all these speak to the heart but once, if they in fact ever do get a chance to speak completely. For many men do not have those moments at all, and are themselves intervals and intermissions in the symphony of real life.”[116]
her cognitive complexity, and the development of the cultural “code” she has “installed” through her participation in society. Both of these constitute a kind of “exterior” reality, meaning that they can both be intersubjectively recognized and in some sense “objectively” studied. There really is an empirically observable side to these two: You can put people or animals through cognitive tests and they will consistently behave according to a certain cognitive stage, and you can study the pattern of their symbolic understanding of the world, in which case they will consistently gravitate
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fields—for instance, existential therapy—but it must simply be admitted that these fields have yet to produce a systematic theory of development equaling the MHC.
the overall subjective state of the organism is not its emotions. It is something more fundamental. In a stricter sense, when we wish for the happiness of ourselves and others, we wish for higher subjective states and the avoidance or passing of lower ones: We don’t necessarily mean the feelings of happiness, even if that may also be important.
Organisms don't really seek or avoid certain emotions, but they seek to raise the level of their subjective state and avoid low states.[130]
But I think that the mystics and transpersonal psychologists who have studied the higher stages tended to overemphasize the higher, spiritual states at the expense of low and medium states. They don’t sufficiently account for the varieties of everyday life (in the medium range) and how these are unavoidably continuous with both the highest states and the lowest ones.
is a catch-all phrase for those human activities, experiences and practices which concern the three highest categories of subjective states—and the perspectives on life and the world that flow from such states (and the elaboration and teaching of these perspectives). In this sense, spirituality has little or nothing to do with specific religious content or belief. It is according to this definition that I claim that spirituality is important for society as a whole.
How much freer and more secure and effective in everyday life must not the person at median state 8 be compared to median state 7, all else equal? Just one state up. The behavioral difference must have massive social and political implications.
Just imagine how differently society would function if many more of us were in higher states a larger portion of the time. Not only does the development of the subjective state seem to be a moral imperative (the right thing to pursue for the sake of people’s well-being); it would also, we can assume, create a considerably less dysfunctional society in a far-reaching variety of ways. I would say that Doctor Ride-High has achieved a certain kind of wellness, a general well-being that affects all aspects of his life and all of his relationships in mostly positive ways. Perhaps we would also, in
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State is related to personal development, it seems, but it is not the same thing. Stage development does not predict state or vice versa.
The Credibility Problem of Higher States
Just as people at lower complexity only understand flattened and caricatured versions of ideas, perspectives and behaviors of higher complexity, so are the higher states difficult, if not impossible, to convey to people who don’t share the same experiences.
But he is making statements about reality that simply seem not only foreign, but even insulting and outright preposterous to most of us. Compared to the subjective experience of what everyday life usually feels like, Emerson appears to be fantasizing and exaggerating. Why should we believe him?
It has been described in many sources that such spiritual states very often have lasting impact on our overall psychological development.[144]
In short, the higher states, because they are subjective experiences rather than intersubjective facts, cannot be communicated or “proven” to those of us who do not experience them for ourselves.
This does not mean that we cannot "force" this upon others in a kindly manner. We are not talking about harming anyone in the long run, only awakening them. How?
Of course, wisdom teachers can also be perceived as exceptionally inspiring and awaken awe or spiritual experiences in their followers. But this is more often true of those who have some spiritual experience themselves, or who otherwise have committed to a spiritual worldview.
A possible antidote to this social-psychological malady might be to democratize spirituality; to make it more participatory, transparent and based on measurable results. Such attempts are being made in and around the Burning Man festival culture, and notably in the Syntheist (“religious atheist”) movement which recently emerged in Stockholm—and some interesting prospects along these lines have been brought up by public intellectuals like Sam Harris (in his 2014 book Waking Up, Harris, a renowned critic of all things religious, makes his case for a scientifically supported exploration of
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Yes, the subjective state of organisms is the most important thing in the world, and yes, it should therefore be made a central goal of society. And yes, it has great significance for the overall development of people and societies. But no, having higher state does not give you all the answers. And no, we should not build a society that creates hierarchies based upon vague and unverifiable phenomena such as subjective state. And YES, more research is needed.[147] But we must try to optimize subjective states, as a society as well as single organisms. We are all always-already in some kind of
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way, spiritual or existential depth is its own dimension of development: It is something quite different from having high cognitive complexity or access to a more updated symbolic code, or even having a high median state.
But it is only when such experiences become integral to our ways of seeing the world, of relating to existence, that they can be said to have become part of our depth.
greater depth, happiness does indeed appear as a less self-sufficient goal, as less of an “ultimate significance”, no longer an end in-and-of-itself.
Depth is something that develops and accumulates over time. States come and go; depth very rarely decreases (only if you become senile or the like)—once you have reached a level of depth, it tends to stay.
In the future, perhaps, we will have greater knowledge and expertise of the integration of higher states as well. This knowledge has thus far belonged chiefly to the spiritual lineages, to different forms of pre-modern yoga and so forth. Let’s hope that changes: We have some promising trends in “positive psychology” and research on mindfulness.
This is the next area of true development. Think brainwave technology, early introduction and general lifestyle arranged around meditation techniques and other care of the body and mind, positive drugs that enhance.
A lot of the less-than-fully-functional people in society tend to out-depth most of us—or at least they have the potential to do so. Broken and crazy people, for all their limitations, often live in greater worlds;
This attraction to the homeless mind way of seeing.
to work for the happiness of all is not a denial of tragedy.
What grows out of a clear recognition of the tragedy of existence, is not the relishing of pain, or the excusing of misery and injustice. It simply means, as suggested by philosophers of 2nd person relatedness such as Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas (and the Judeo-Christian tradition they build upon), a surrender to the primacy of the “thou”, the you-ness of reality; the “youniverse”, if you like a play on words.
I am nothing without you. I am born through you, and I must live, ultimately, in service of you. It is the recognition that, fundamentally, I love you—that love is a fundamental faculty and a realization rather than a specific feeling. Just having “compassion” towards you must always be an understatement; indeed an insult. I must live in service of you.
Good.
that only broken hearts can save the world.
But most conflicts are avoided in everyday life because we tend to keep most everyday institutions related to shallow aspects of life. It is much easier to create and maintain social settings and institutions that revolve around lower depth: It takes considerably less sensitivity and skill to set up a manual labor team, a movie night or a game of golf, than it does to set up an a successful psychotherapeutic treatment, a genuine talk about the meaning of life or a truly sublime shared spiritual experience.
a strategy that is, naturally, difficult to translate to most other social settings.
A crucial aspect of the maturation of humanity is that we not only begin to actively and deliberately cultivate depth in all three aspects (beauty, mystery and tragedy) as well as depth in both its light and dark form—but also that we create institutions and social settings in everyday life that are much more proficient when it comes to accommodating our inner depths. This includes managing the inescapable and troublesome fact that people are at different levels of depth.
I have yet to see a credible attempt to “operationalize” the concept; to make it workable.
I believe we are working on this; it is in its adolescent stage, focused upon the habits towards self-improvement... a better diet and a stronger body and a saturated mind.
change. How come so few of the classical wisdom teachers taught us about sustainability (with some North American exceptions) or animal rights (with some Eastern exceptions)?[152]
The proponents of wisdom fail to differentiate between pretty much all of the dimensions we have explored in these chapters: cognitive complexity, IQ, symbolic code, subjective state, existential depth (and the lightness or darkness of that depth), mental health and having a well-integrated personality, Eriksonian life phases—the list goes on.
Wisdom is great depth, plain and simple. Nothing more, nothing less. So, the way I use the term, wisdom has to do with things like spirituality and transcendence but not really with being smart or “proficient at living a good life”.
Complexity, or MHC stage, adds to your effective value meme because it helps you see and relate to more abstract layers of the world.
the later symbolic codes are developed specifically to suit the realities we face in larger and more complex societies.
Of course, they did not magically gain access to the symbolic codes of future civilizations, but their “implicit knowledge” about reality impelled them to take up very radical and progressive views:
former is about patterns in the development of society, whereas the latter is about the psychology of a single person or small social setting.
But the metamodern mind also realizes that an inclusive and harmonious society cannot be achieved within the confines of modern life or by means of a postmodern critique thereof. Hence, a new society must be created from the modern one, which means that the metamodernist must ultimately be against modern society.
