The Listening Society: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book One

by Hanzi Freinacht

The reason that markets are much more prevalent and important is that there is a certain property of this system that e.g. mountaineering does not have: high “alignability”. If it were mountaineering that had such high alignability, it would be more central: We could just align its different parts in ways that created more value.

We have traveled away from concrete reality: Whereas “blefuscity” is an abstract concept, you can still see it with your eyes, feel it with your hands. And we have arrived at a much less tangible world: the “alignability” of systems and how it creates value.

And we have abandoned the topic (mountaineering). That’s what a cognitive advance often looks like: That which seemed so important at an earlier stage seems less so—and more contingent—when viewed from a higher cognitive vantage point.

Anti-racist argument: Racism emerges as different cultures and status hierarchies interact, where ethnic markers are used in order to increase one’s position in the status hierarchy. It should be prevented by the creation of both greater psychological security and by the facilitation of productive dialogue about cultural differences.

Green argument: The logic inherent to the economic system is fundamentally alien to the logic of the ecosystems of the many biotopes. This means that there is no self-regulating feedback cycle directly present between our economic and technological expansion and the ecosystems upon which we depend.

Note that the different political stances at stage 13 Metasystematic generally have more in common with one another than with the corresponding ideological positions at the earlier stages. This has important implications for metamodern politics.

Within academia, in my case in sociology, a similar insight dawned on me: Almost nobody ever comes up with a new idea (a real new theory). The ideas are always reused versions of things others have said, or simply applications of these ideas, or at most a small, often rather questionable, tweak to someone else’s theory. The very top people of each field seemed to be the ones who had come up with one new theory—and out of these only very few theories seemed to make much sense.

Downward assimilation means that, because of our ability to share a common language, you can take a word, symbol, sentence or even an attitude, that originated at a higher order of complexity, and still use it. Your use of that symbol will then inevitably follow the logic of your own stage, but it might still bring some meaning with it,

In societies like Sweden, it is popular, especially among the younger citizens, to speak about things like “norms”, “structures” and “identity”. However, only a minority tend to be able to actually understand these concepts at stage 12 Systematic or above. This certainly includes students of sociology, the often idealistic young people I’ve had the pleasure of teaching. Instead, people will recast these concepts at stages Abstract 10 and Formal 11. Norms are taken to mean “social rules that create inequalities” and are always seen as bad.

“identity” comes to mean self-confidence, rather than the interactive construction of a “self” as discussed by the classical social psychologists.[102] The second concept, scaffolding, brings some hope to this misery. It is possible, namely, through the means of language and communicative actions, to support someone’s cognitive stage upwards—not just one, but two stages. Language has to be nature’s most awesome creation! Through language and interaction you create a “scaffold” that helps the other person to partake in behaviors that would otherwise be beyond his or her cognitive stage.

The same goes for the rest of us: Language structures seem to be able to help us more than a bit. That’s largely how education works. But it usually takes long hours of interaction with people who are of higher stage than ourselves and who really walk us through the correct sequences again and again. So this social-psychological aspect of development creates plenty of room for flexibility

The common language also “stores” structures and patterns for us to use, so that a certain thought or behavior becomes more easily attainable. For instance, it is easier to understand what a “gravity field” is once people have discovered, named and explained it.

Phew! It should come as no surprise that the MHC stages are hidden in plain sight. When the underlying order in the chaos is so difficult to see, it can be very tempting to conclude that the world is simply fussy, disordered—and even to wear that skeptical conclusion as a badge of anti-reductionist honor, as a mark of our own open-mindedness, humility and spirituality. But there is nothing open-minded, humble or spiritual in failing to see—and properly respond to—the undeniable regularities in human behavior that are revealed by the elegant but merciless simplicity of experimental, empirical science.

But remember what David Hume taught us: an “ought” cannot be derived from an “is”. The fact that something happens to be true doesn’t make it right in a moral sense. Likewise, the opposite is true: an “is” cannot be derived from and “ought”.

In the future of democracy cognitive stages may have an important role to play. But the point is not to exclude the voices of all the stage 10 Abstract and stage 11 Formal thinkers—that would be unethical and sure to backfire dramatically. The point is to create processes in which people’s perspectives make up a part of a larger whole, a whole which resides at a higher order of complexity. The main political implications have to do with the cultivation and design of a deeper democracy, not the contrary. In our current political system we are not nearly democratic enough, and that’s exactly what holds the more complex ideas and solutions in check. In a good democracy the more complex answers to life’s problems can emerge, answers that are more inclusive to a multiplicity of interests and perspectives. In a poor democracy, the lowest common denominator sets the limit.

Or another way to approach the problem. Pablo Picasso was, at least according to Michael Commons and his friend Albert Erdynast, cognitively at stage 15 Crossparadigmatic—so he produced art at this stage.[104] What then happens to the “field” of art? Does it become stage 15 Crossparadigmatic in itself, so that all who continue working from Picasso’s insights as a starting point produce art at this stage?

The cognitive stage of the individual is not the same as the stage of the symbolic universe that she has available, the words and ideas that she has learned and “internalized” and been “socialized” into.

Let’s use a computer analogy; they’re so popular these days. If the last two chapters discussed the cognitive hardware (processing power, etc.), this chapter discusses the software, hence the choice of word “code”. How smart a cultural piece of software are you “programmed” with? The relation between hardware (brains) and software (symbols) is obviously one of many complex interactions—for instance, you can’t run too advanced software on too simple a computer

My claim in this chapter is that there is a stage difference between the various forms of cultural code available to people today, and that this stage difference follows a logic inherent to the meanings of the symbols and their interrelations, rather than being inherent to the cognitive stage of the specific organism. Each such code contains within itself a toolkit consisting of interrelated symbols, which can be used to interpret the world.

This development depends upon there being communities of people who speak a language—it is the development of that language: symbolic development.

Each of the stages creates language code that is inherently more advanced than the previous stage. There is something real in the logic of how each symbolic universe is constructed, and this realness forces the direction of human history.

We are speaking of the evolutionary development of memes (non-biological cultural patterns that spread through communication)—where some memes can only show up in more complex societies.

(The 6 Hidden Patterns of World History),

This chapter is simply about the idea that different such codes are downloaded into the single individual—with lasting effects on his or her developmental psychology.

Even today, the majority of the world’s population, by quite a margin, still operate primarily with pre-modern cultural code. But in the meantime, the modern symbols have broken down under their own weight. This has produced a new cultural code, which is here called “post”-modernism. And then—even postmodernism has broken down, and in comes “meta”-modernism. There is a pattern to this, a Realdialektik: You cannot go from traditional religion directly to metamodernism. Only when postmodernism has been around for decades, can metamodern symbols start breaking through and become part of society.

Each of these metamemes operates as a set of thousands of propositions and assumptions about the world which interlock into a self-supporting whole, a kind of ecosystem or equilibrium.

So each one of them roughly have an ontology (theory of reality and what is “really real”), an ideology (“theory of what is right and good”) and an identity, an idea of who or what the self is.

stages of symbolic development show up as structures in language, logically organized into ever more complex, differentiated and integrated patterns. They each create a blueprint for the creation of narratives: So the language tools are not only metamemes, but also meta-narratives. There is always a rough, underlying story (narrative) about reality from which humans operate, from which they create new “code”, new knowledge.

The ability to understand a longer story or a narrative requires MHC stage 9 Concrete, as discussed in the previous chapter. Most adult people have been at this stage or above for the last 200 000 years. So a normally developed adult can “download” or install any of the metamemes,

The young man simply doesn’t buy into Alexander Luria’s could’ve-should’ve. Each society is bound up with a world of symbols, a world of knowledge.

Jürgen Habermas (in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity) and the German developmental sociologist Günter Dux,

The vast majority of prominent scientists in the world today, while often cognitively being at MHC stages 13, 14 and even 15, still primarily rely on the modern symbolic toolkit.

We have already discussed the issue of “downward assimilation” during the last chapter. The majority of people with access to postmodern code accordingly use a “flattened” and simplified version of it. By necessity, the same goes for metamodern code, which only less than two percent have the cognitive hardware to operate successfully. This makes the path ahead pretty dangerous—people

To invent a whole symbolic universe takes a civilization, and the metamodern symbolic toolkit is yet being born. So even if a person happens to be at a high cognitive stage and is developed in other regards (state and depth, as you will see), this doesn’t mean that they magically gain access to the symbolic worlds of future civilizations.

Remember, remember: The code is its own developmental dimension, not to be confused with the cognitive hardware.

There is one more aspect we should bring up before we go along: the amount of information or code at each symbol-stage. So let’s make one more distinction with the help of our computer analogy: There is a difference between installing an entire symbol-stage and downloading more content at that stage. With time the content can easily take up more space on a hard drive than the program, but the installed program still determines how well the content files can be used, if at all.

non-obvious, dynamic relation between MHC stage and symbol-stage; they can support or thwart one another, etc. It should still be noted, however, that higher MHC stage makes the “installment” and “downloading” of a higher symbol-stage of code more likely

will just quickly address it here and kill it before it grows into a brain tumor. The answer is no. None of this implies either teleology (that nature or God or whatever “wants” certain things to happen) or determinism (that it is already determined exactly what will happen).

The list goes on. In more spiritual circles you might find more explicit ideas of an Eros, a force of love that guides the evolution of the cosmos—or teleological interpretations of Lovelock’s famous Gaia theory (a theory that by no means needs to imply teleology). Some people will also use the concepts of complexity and emergence in corresponding, teleological, manners.

Even if we can describe certain patterns of how societies develop and how the metamemes follow an inherent Realdialektik, we have not said anything about what effects or meanings these patterns may have. Depending on other issues, such as technological development, ecological crises, etc., the developmental sequences can play out in any number of ways and come to have any number of meanings in history.

Before recorded history we can see plenty of evidence of an animistic culture with Stone Age art and mysticism, totemism, ancestral worship and tribal relations. But then again, even before that, Homo sapiens have been around for at least 70 000 years counting from today (that’s when humans are believed to have been both anatomically and cognitively much like today’s people)—long before such traces appeared. And for a long time, there were at least six species of hominids (Homo erectus, Neanderthals, and so forth). Strangely, they did not leave such traces behind. So people must have had forms of culture that preceded the animistic one, “archaic” cultures that to a lesser degree conjured imaginary worlds of art and mysticism, but still buried their dead (albeit without much ornaments) and cared for the sick and elderly. This is symbol-stage A Archaic.

Whereas such cultural expressions are relatively common in modern people (astrology, belief in magic, angels, ghosts, ancestors, spiritual medicine etc.) it does not really inform any of our political movements, sciences or major religions. That’s symbol-stage B Animism.

agriculture we have what I call a faustian age; symbol-stage C. I call it “faustian” because people can now reach for power, glory and mastery over others through organized violence and accumulation of military prowess—controlling territories, resources and populations. Like in the story about Faust, you can “sell your soul” for ascension and power. Agriculture brings a first corresponding control over nature, and the end of nomadic life makes possible accumulations of tools created through artisanship, which in turn makes possible and necessitates the differentiation of labor (people become smiths, potters and bakers). In the cultural code produced at this stage you get heroic stories, like Gilgamesh, who in his death lives forever in the walls of Uruk, and the many gods of the Indo-European pantheons, from Greeks to Vikings and Slavs, and their counterparts in e.g. the Aztec faith.

These constitute coordinations of (groups of) paragraphs into coherent narratives, which corresponds to MHC stage 9 Concrete. Symbolic toolkits and symbolic universes at the faustian stage are still being invented and used today—you can see it in (often criminal) gangs, neo-Nazi organizations, some of the gang and tribe related religious practices in West Africa, and to a certain extent, in some of the cultural expressions of adolescents in Western countries.

Around 2500 years ago, across the Eurasian continent, there was a widespread critique of the “might makes right” logic of the growing faustian societies.

It is here that you find all the classical religions: from Judaism on to Christianity and Islam, over Zoroastrianism to Hinduism with the birth of the Buddhist and Jain traditions—and the Confucian and Taoist traditions.

All of these traditions abstract from the stories and narratives of their time, certain universal understandings (you go from MHC stage 9 Concrete stories to stage 10 Abstract concepts). There is not just “the gods”, but a “God above all gods”—the ultimate abstraction. But this is not only found in Abrahamic religions, you have the Brahman in Hinduism, formless emptiness as the ground of being in Buddhism, the Tao in Taoism, the Tian (heaven above all the gods) in Confucianism, Ahura Mazda (the lord of wisdom) in Zoroastrianism,

Particularly Socratic philosophy, Taoism and Jainism stand out, I would argue, as more radically critical of their own societies. But I am claiming that it is no coincidence that they appear under comparable historical circumstances

the logic encoded into the postfaustian symbols? The basic idea is that there is something unnamable beyond all stories we mere mortals can tell ourselves, a universal truth beyond anything we can comprehend, to which we must ultimately surrender. Exit the god-king, the pharaoh; in walks the righteous rebel.

Beyond all human affairs, beyond all of our dramas and passions, lies something far more absolute, a reality more real than our everyday lives. You have a God or Universal Truth, and the human being has a soul of her own.