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January 10 - January 28, 2020
You can gear these different parts of society to work together well and create happy human lives—or not. Given that we already do have a public sphere and a market, we can either tweak them so that they tend to generate sustainable happiness, or we can develop them in ways so that they become oppressive and create misery. But we cannot avoid the choice.
No. The current level of suffering in modern societies is not ethically justifiable. It is morally wrong to uncritically reproduce a society that displays the amount of misery and long-lasting traumas prevalent in modern countries—even the comparatively happy ones like Canada and Denmark.
Isn’t it unethical, or at least distasteful, to want to build a more kind, listening and inclusive society in the developed economies, when we should in fact be focusing on redistribution of wealth and more acute suffering? There are three answers to this. The first answer is that we can and should do both, so that the poor do become richer, but once they have become so, life can actually be happy—which was the point all along. The second answer is that rich societies are going on with their development and institutions either way, so we might as well make sure they do so in an efficient and
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Life is just much too full of suffering and lost potential, and this is keeping our populations from developing psychologically and becoming mature, genuine world citizens. People are hurt and afraid at a subtle psychological level—and are therefore self-absorbed, incapable of taking on larger perspectives and incapable of acting upon the very real long-term risks that are threatening our global civilization. We must, at all cost, make the world population much, much happier in the deepest sense of the word.
Sometimes people will even, in all seriousness, say that we need suffering to produce good books and screenplays. Of course, this line of reasoning is in opposition to the ethics that Immanuel Kant set up for us, to treat every human being as an end in and of herself—never as a means for somebody or something else. It also breaks the older Golden Rule, to treat others as we ourselves would wish to be treated. Besides, it’s completely wrong, if you look at the facts. The Nordic countries have happy populations relative to others—and this appears to work in tandem with a highly functional and
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We are not looking for a non-acceptance of the suffering of life (which only brings more misery), but for a profound acceptance of life as it is. Psychologically speaking, we want a radical acceptance of pain, so that we can deal with it much more productively and create happier (and less miserable) lives for people and animals. But to truly accept the pain of life and deal with it, we require a lot of comfort, support, security, meaning and happiness.
What we are looking for is to stop the mass-mutilation and torture of human beings—who are in turn fed with the agonized bodies of enslaved non-human animals. But then again, the happiness of our children and fellow citizens does not—should not—require further justification. We can and should create a happy society, simply because we care.
The fact that happiness isn’t everything, that it isn’t the only worthy personal and societal goal, doesn’t mean that it’s nothing and no worthy goal.
The suffering and stunted development of our citizens are not individual concerns, but matters of utmost importance to society as a whole. They are deeply political, ecological and economic matters. The stunted development caused by emotional suffering affects the individual’s quality of life as well as basic societal concerns such as security, public health and the stability of our institutions.
My lacking human development blocks your possible human development. My lack of understanding of you, your needs and perspectives, hurts you in a million subtle ways. I become a bad lover, a bad colleague, a bad fellow citizen and human being. We are interconnected: You cannot get away from my hurt and wounds.
Once you begin to be able to see the social-psychological fabric of everyday life, it becomes increasingly apparent that the fabric is relatively easy to change, to develop. Metamodern politics aims to make everyone secure at the deepest psychological level, so that we can live authentically; a byproduct of which is a sense of meaning in life and lasting happiness; a byproduct of which is kindness and an increased ability to cooperate with others; a byproduct of which is deeper freedom and better concrete results in the lives of everyone; a byproduct of which is a society less likely to
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a listening society, where every person is seen and heard (rather than made invisible and then put under surveillance).
how to support her in the developmental stages of childhood, adolescence and adulthood, how to support (and to some extent increase) her intelligence and creativity, how to help her to heal after hurt and loss, how to support her tendencies for universalistic values, how to support her towards developing more complex thinking—even how to support the acquisition of existential and spiritual insights that make death, pain and life’s disappointments more tolerable and manageable.
In medicine this insight is called the “biopsycho-ecological paradigm”.[32] In psychology it is similarly called the “bio-psycho-social model”. In politics and welfare policy we can call it the listening society, which is the deeper form of welfare that metamodern activists strive to achieve. Political metamodernism is the rebellious act of taking this vast knowledge into our hands—and to boldly shape it into usable politics; into wonderful but dangerous “social technologies”
We are speaking about conscious and deliberate social-psychological and cultural development.
It is my responsibility that the integration of immigrants is working poorly, that so many young women suffer from anorexia, that so many people live their lives with a pervasive lack of meaning and never truly work to improve the world. I could have changed social reality, thereby changing the lives of these fellow beautiful creatures under God. It was me all along. It always will be. This is the commitment of the metamodern activist.
Whereas Cripps writes primarily about climate change, her ideas certainly apply to a wider context. The more you understand how society’s ills are caused by the psycho-social environment (i.e. the interplay of people’s inner lives and the arenas of everyday life) the more obliged you are to change and develop these realities.
Building—or cultivating—the next and deeper layer of social welfare requires the ongoing posing of two questions: How can good conditions and prerequisites for human flourishing and “thrivability” be brought about? How can this be done in a manner that is open, democratic, non-manipulative—without a “creepy” undercurrent of control?
liberal innocent. From that position their hands are free to attack anyone who tries to make suggestions about how society might be different and better, by labeling them control freaks, arrogant or naive. These are the people who fail to accept the risks, and thereby make themselves complicit in the suffering of all who are mutilated under the unacceptable cruelty of our prevailing society. Higher freedom begets greater responsibility; and we are freed together, or not at all. For the reader who does not accept the risks, who asks for freedom but does not take the responsibility, I have
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Everybody should have the benefit of talking to a kind, listening professional therapist while growing up (just think of how the number of molestations would drop, how kids would treat each other better, how family life would improve). Everybody should get to learn to meditate, both with mindfulness and other techniques so that one can handle stress and get in touch with one’s own emotions.
Everybody should get a year off once in a lifetime to go look for new purpose in life and make tough life decisions under professional care and support—in a kind of secular monastery. Everybody should be “nudged” and supported to consume both healthy and sustainable food that prevents depression and supports long-term societal goals. Everybody should be trained in social and emotional intelligence
The most reasonable answer is that, on average, society as a whole would be safer, saner and kinder—and that these effects would accumulate over decades and generations until a new and higher equilibrium of happiness and lower suffering is reached.
This in turn would save humongous costs and let much more people spend their lifetimes in productive service of themselves and others. So the whole idea of a listening society is possible because, after its initial investments, it saves a lot more than it spends. It saves the increasingly pressured welfare system.
A deeper welfare, a listening society, is possible because we live in a postindustrial age and because we are now beginning to have the knowledge to execute it successfully; new social technologies are being made available. And the knowledge about how to continuously improve upon the implementation of such social technologies is growing.
The problem for the established political movements is that they all build upon ideologies that were founded during the industrial era.
Even if the socialists got everything they wanted, life would still be full of inequalities and misery. Even if the libertarians got their way, most people would not be free. Even if the Greens got their way, society would not be sustainable in any deeper sense. By offering a bid for a “Green Social Liberalism 2.0”, one begins to build a new layer of society, on top of the modern society and its project of progress and enlightenment.
The cultivation of a deeper layer of welfare is necessary because the current system and its political visions are increasingly bankrupted under the globalized internet age.
What is lacking in our day and age is the ability for people to manage complex problems that require patience, knowledge, oversight, creativity, mutual trust and friendly co-operation across sectors, scientific disciplines, cultures and subcultures. In a phrase: the management of complexity. Or, with a term we shall get back to, we require greater collective intelligence
As a population, we are not ready to face up to and live in the society that we ourselves have created. We are out of our depth. Or, as Robert Kegan—the Harvard adult development psychologist—has suggested, we are in over our heads.
It is a major challenge for people to stay sane in this world full of contradictions, temptations, distractions and stressful yet devilishly vague demands. No meaningful story is given beforehand (unless you are part of some religious sect, but even these positions are increasingly precarious). Not only must we stay sane; we must find and keep direction in all of this; we must stay active, even as our activities are rarely “necessary” in any direct, concrete sense. If we fail to do this, we can easily land in socially and economically precarious situations. Many of these challenges require us
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We are leaving behind the economy in which you were defined by your profession. Increasingly, people are defined and acquire their social value through a wider array of identities, including civic, personal, aesthetic and existential ones. This has two major implications. Firstly, people will need much more emotional support in order to grow into maturity and to be able to play with the many possible and confusing identities—instead
Secondly, many new professional roles need to be invented to match the transformations of labor, as robotization and digitalization progress.
Many of these jobs can and should be concerned with the meaningful activities involved in creating a listening society (a huge amount of work is needed helping kids, designing public spaces, supporting life stage transitions, improving upon diet, organizing citizen deliberation, evaluating and developing all of the above, and so forth). So the listening society is necessary both as support to the citizen and as a new source of meaningful, productive work opportunities. Moreover, the listening society is necessary as a competitive edge in the global economy. The regions that will be able to
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The listening society is, plainly, much more powerful in a digitalized global economy, than is the capitalist liberal democracy.
We have seen similar macroeconomic effects with HDI-rankings (Human Development Index): human development drives economic growth.
What we can do is to look at the totality of these interconnected life experiences: at the fabric of hurt and bliss. Most people don’t see it. They don’t recognize how brutish and cruel life is even in the most developed of countries. “Things are fine nowadays”. Right.
given that so many people live in such broken worlds, should it surprise us that we cannot handle transnational challenges such as climate change, globalization, poverty and the disruptive effects of technological innovation?
My favorite example is meditation in schools. Basically, you can teach kids to meditate in schools and you see not only lower rate of bullying and sick-leaves (among teachers especially), but also better school results, and most of all, better psychological health and the development of more pro-social behaviors.
works through two major mechanisms. The first mechanism is that people learn the skill of self-awareness, calming their own minds and not overreacting. That is of course useful in all walks of life. The second mechanism—and perhaps the more important one—is that it changes your mental and emotional state then and there.
Would not the whole social climate be somewhat softer and kinder, a little less tense and stressed? And now imagine that this goes on for 12 years. Do you imagine there might be an accumulation? During that time, her school experience teaches her a lot about what to expect from life.
Unfortunately, our governments haven’t begun to take these things seriously. Just like medieval governments didn’t take reading and writing skills of the population seriously—until some Protestant countries began to outrun the other European powers as literacy rose.
We simply haven’t advanced to that stage of thinking—a stage where you see that the inner development of each person is intrinsically connected to the development of society as a whole.
Even if some of the cited studies are a bit old, there has been an exponential increase in the number of mindfulness studies in scientific journals—which is one, but far from the only, form of meditation. The last few years it has really taken off. As we speak, we’re getting several new peer reviewed studies per day.
For instance, giving all kids access to simpler forms of talk-therapy can dramatically reduce depression and suicide rates (this was tried in a provincial town in northern Sweden recently; the depression rate dropped from 9.5 to 1.5 percent in two years).
Or you can use carefully and professionally guided forms of massage and other non-sexual touch to increase oxytocin levels in the brain and make people treat one another better and thus uphold social orders in a more egalitarian manner.
The great economist Amartya Sen coined the term “development as freedom”. He meant that human development and civil liberties could be drivers to lift populations out of poverty. Psychological and social development can—and will—lift us out of spiritual and emotional poverty.
The point is that these aren’t inherent moral qualities that people either have or don’t. They are, to a certain extent, skills that can be learned, honed, maintained and developed. Emotional intelligence can be associated with better psychological and physical health, less bullying, and better leadership performance.
that their brains light up more or less when they see happiness or suffering (this part seems to depend a lot on genetics).
Collective intelligence is the general problem-solving ability of a group, organization or society.
One of the central findings of this research program is that a group’s collective ability to solve problems and perform tasks is not strongly correlated to the average and maximum IQ of the members (although there is a small correlation).
