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February 23 - March 5, 2020
The norm system functions by doling out rewards to followers and conferring penalties to delinquents. It’s a delicate power balance. If you are an open homophobe in present-day Western societies, you will be punished and held back in a large variety of ways. People will argue against you, win arguments and score points on you as you are embarrassed and demeaned in front of your peers. You won’t get hired, you will get fired, you won’t have as many friends, you probably won’t get laid. And if you speak out too openly and aggressively, you can even be fined and go to prison. Talk about
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When it comes to gradual and honest inner growth, humans are slowly awakening gods. When it comes to the shifting of norms, we are lemmings. This account may strike some readers as cynical, but it’s really just basic sociology and psychology. We know that when there are strong incentives to feel a certain way, to adopt certain values, our minds generally follow suit.
Norms follow interests and incentives. I’m not saying that everyone is Machiavellian. People will honestly believe that the norms that serve their (perceived) incentives are their own, deeply held, values.
This is how the norm system functions, for better or worse. The norm system itself follows no morality and no norms, only a cold logic of penalty and reward.
The right for adults to freely engage in consensual same-sex relationships follows from the secular and liberal foundation of democratic society. Hence, denying this right either puts you in a position of rejecting modern democratic values alltogether, or, one of self-contradiction—both of which increase the likelihood of losing the debate in the end.
There is, of course, no reason to believe that the norm system of today is final or that it has stopped evolving. If anything, it mutates even more rapidly in today’s hyperconnected, complex world, not least as the result of an increasing interaction between conflicting norm systems.
Animal rights and veganism as we are no longer de facto dependent on animal exploitation for food and work and as the scientific worldview holds that humans are animals like any other.
Pedophilia, since we can probably prevent more kids from being molested if people aren’t judged for having unwanted sexual urges and if these can be openly dealt with.
Casual observers sometimes think Scandinavian countries are “postmodern”. The truth is, however, that only a minority can be said to function at the postmodern stage. What has really happened is that postmodern groups and alliances have successfully managed to influence the media and the political discourses in ways that have shaped the norm systems in these countries.
And despite the fact that the majority of the American population gravitate towards the modern value meme, it is the traditionals and the postmoderns who dominate the political discourse: gay rights vs. “traditional family values”, multiculturalism vs. white Christian majority culture, environmentalism vs. climate denial, feminism vs. traditional gender roles, etc. This struggle is just as much a cultural battle as a political one, with each side seeking to establish their respective values as normative for society as a whole, and to denigrate those of their opponents.
So what about the “forms of social penalties and rewards”? In highly unequal societies governed by earlier emotional regimes, the norms are upheld through more brutal forms of penalties and rewards: ostracism, corporal punishment, ideas about going to heaven or hell etc. In more equal and free societies, where the underlying emotional tensions are lessened, the norms are upheld with fines, definitions of psychiatric pathology, withheld social support, withheld recognition, subtle behavioral cues, ridicule and mockery, slander etc.
“forms of emotional expression”, (i.e. how people express themselves emotionally and interact in everyday life),
emergence of more “casual” and “sensitive” forms of emotional expression as people increasingly have the luxury of being “self-revealing” and “authentic” about their inner lives and feelings. They need to think less of “saving face” and displaying markers of prestige or honor. In these settings, it is often even taken as a sign of strength and maturity to be judiciously revealing and open about one’s weaknesses, knowledge gaps and insecurities.
But please note that purportedly “progressive” systems of norms can easily collapse and revert to “regressive” norms if they are not supported by corresponding value memes in the population—as well as by higher freedom and deeper equality. Again, Soviet communism comes to mind; the USSR had a partly progressive ideology but lacked in all the other regards (see Appendix B). All of these factors taken together determine the nature of a society’s cultural—and psychological—development. As we have seen, it is this cultural-psychological development that must be consciously spurred, so as to match
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Culture is also, and I would argue primarily, a developmental issue. Just as there are both different personality types and stages of personal psychological development, so there are types and stages of cultural development. And stage is a stronger factor than type.
At the very center of this model, I have placed cultural game change. This is the very vortex of all that has been discussed thus far—it is where all the dots connect. Metamodern politics is ultimately about building the frameworks that will evolve culture itself, that will change the games of everyday life.
We have now pointed out some very powerful societal attractors that describe the developmental direction of society: how the state (or order) develops, how freedom develops, how equality develops, and lastly, how the norm system develops. Again, that’s what the next stage of politics must achieve: to create the frameworks for propelling growth into higher stages of cultural and psychological development.
Let’s see then if we can do the corresponding move for metamodern politics; let’s see if we can identify the simple, underlying pattern that creates a more harmonious whole—within ourselves and within society at large.
The fate of billions depends on a successful development of politics to match the growing complexity of the world if we are to avoid social disintegration and ecological collapse.
The arena of national democracy is just too limited in scope, state legislation too feeble a tool, and governmental institutions too ill-prepared and uninformed to prevent run-amok technologies, the unrestrained powers of multinational companies and the continuous destruction of the environment from causing immense suffering and death. Politics needs to evolve. Modern society is out of its depth;
Hence—remember: millions of lives at stake. At non-linear, long-term stake, but still. Not to mention if we shift the norms towards animal emancipation, against animal exploitation, where we have sixty billion land animals and over a trillion aquatic animals killed each year. When the stakes are this high, you don’t get to pretend you’re the good-guy by saying you’d just rather not relate to these issues. You are not the good-guy, you cannot remain innocent. And yet, we must remain playful, lest we are guaranteed to experience the failures that follow from fanaticism and disastrous
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Very, Very Quick Recap
The two main agents that embody and manifest this new political philosophy are “the process-oriented political party” and “the metamodern aristocracy”. The first is a more popular movement, founded upon and informed by metamodern ideas, but whose rank-and-file members are not necessarily at the Metamodern value meme. The second group, the metamodern aristocracy, is a small transnational “elite” who deeply embodies the metamodern values and ways of thinking, and who works to develop new metamodern theory and applications thereof.
Why is this general understanding “metamodern”? Is anything Hanzi says “metamodern” by definition? No. These theories are metamodern because they synthesize the ideas of modern progress through successive stages with a postmodern, critical sensitivity towards modern society. They offer a direction and a roadmap without relying upon a naive, materialist, linear and mechanical faith in science, rationality and humanity. There’s no statue of Lenin pointing us towards a glittering future. Rather, the metamodern view of progress takes as its point of departure the very failures, limitations and
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postmodern “deconstruction” must be followed by a corresponding re-construction: We must create new visions and pathways towards a relative utopia. This is where political metamodernism enters the picture.
You have to see that the six new forms of politics presented in the following are pieces of a greater puzzle; that they aim towards raising the prevalent stages of psychological development of the population as a whole, gearing life towards deeper freedom and equality—cultivating the listening society.
from modernity to metamodernity. You may recall from the introduction that the six form of politics proposed are: Democratization Politics: Aims to create ongoing processes for developing and updating the system of governance and the quality of institutions. Gemeinschaft Politics (politics of relationships and community): Aims to improve the quality of human relationships across all aspects of society. Existential Politics:Aims to support all people on their life’s journey and spur inner growth, mental health and strong moral integrity. Emancipation Politics: Aims to create ongoing processes
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Adding new forms of politics to the list of what is thought of as “the political” is nothing new. Governments in the 19th century naturally had fewer political areas of concern than do present-day ones. Even if the US Department of Forestry can trace its history back as early as 1875, the vast majority of environmental politics has emerged during the latter part of the 20th century. Today, there are even ministers of gender equality in countries like Sweden, and governments make significant efforts to regulate, fund and maintain sports and culture of all sorts.
First of all, it should be noted that none of these forms of politics are themselves answers to the problems of modern life in any static sense. Each of them is a process; one that can be more or less consciously recognized and monitored; more or less clearly articulated and productively acted upon.
The existence of these kinds of politics does not in themselves, of course, guarantee good politics within each field. It merely opens a host of potentials. The point is that these processes are ongoing in our societies either way,
The manifestation of these six new processes includes several ingredients: they must become seriously considered political issues that are discussed in the public debate, they must have batteries of interventions and experts working with them, and there must be serious efforts to expand this knowledge and understanding through the social and behavioral sciences—i.e. they must become part and parcel of academic life as well. There must be educational and career paths for people who want to work with these issues, and there must be sufficient recognition of this work. That’s how we get the new
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The second point to note is that we’re not—at this point—taking a hard stance on whether these new forms of politics should rely upon state bureaucracy, market solutions or civil society. The only thing that is certain, I would argue, is that the state cannot be entirely left out.
I am here speaking of “society” in the abstract, not necessarily as a country with a state. Given that much of society will self-organize through other means than state institutions in the coming period (with blockchain technologies, transnational corporations, NGOs, strong city regions, industry hubs, supranational organizations and so forth) there is no reason to lock down our perspective to states only.
To be, or not to be democratic—that isn’t really the question. No, the intelligent question is the extent to which a society manages to include its citizens into the political processes; not whether a society is a democracy, but how democratic it has become.
Robert Dahl described in the 1950s and onwards. According to Dahl, democracy shows up as a power balance between different interest groups. Such balance forces the parties into a situation in which the following five criteria must be true (this particular definition is from a 1989 book):[76] 1. Effective participation:
Voting equality at the decisive stage:
Enlightened understanding:
Control of the agenda:
Inclusiveness:
faith in democracy has eroded in recent years. Without the prospect of further democratization, those who feel disenfranchised in modern society have become more inclined to abandon democracy altogether. As a remedy, I propose we update democracy; that we abandon the notion of democracy as a done deal and renegotiate its terms—that democracy, as it is currently realized, can only ever be a proto-synthesis; that it, by necessity, remains provisional and always subject to future revision.
But such diagnoses can also be understood as a malady of modernity aging, of the modern institutions, founded a century ago or more, having become unable to effectively tackle the complexities of metamodern (postindustrial, transnational, digitized, etc.) society—a society in which the key self-organizational flows occur on a much higher order of complexity. Thus, we are not only talking about restoring, revitalizing or “saving” democracy, but about fundamentally updating democracy and reimagining its institutions. Hence, we are asking a more radical and dangerous question: How do we reinvent
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starting point of Democratization Politics is thus a negative: There is simply no conceivable reason to believe our current forms of governance in modern democratic societies would be the only possible and best forms of governance for all posterity.
What if liberal parliamentary democracy isn’t “democratic enough” for governing metamodern society? To traverse the dangerous territory such questions lead us towards, we’d better have a good sense of a “true north” lest we can get lost and end up inventing new forms of oppression, tyranny, or political disintegration and collapse. Let’s look for such a true north. One undeniable trend is the increasing dispersion of leadership and decision-making.
Another undeniable trend has to do with the increased total volume of active decision-making, i.e. the sheer volume of information processed by organs of governance, and the complexity of the processes deliberately shaped by governance.
Money, of course, isn’t a concrete “thing” “the state” can “take” and then “spend”. That would just be a childish way of seeing things. No, money is a measure of people’s coordinated efforts to extract resources from the environment as well as their degree of coordination of agency with one another.
A third long-term trend is that democracy has evolved more checks and balances against arbitrary uses of power; hence there has been an increased accountability of decision-making. This one is difficult to spot in recent decades, as democratic development has stagnated and come to a halt. But if we look over the centuries of modern history, the pattern is obvious.
We may sometimes nostalgically look back at the times of Athenian democracy, of English coffee houses (17th and 18th centuries), of French salons (18th and 19th centuries), of worker socialist collectives (19th and early 20th centuries), or even the youthful energy of 1968. “Ah, those were the days”, we say, “when people cared, when everyone engaged in the political, in the public, in the civil sphere. Back then, folks were citizens, not merely idle consumers”. But we often forget that these expressions of political enfranchisement only reached small cliques of the overall population:
This leads us to a fourth long-term directionality; namely that democratic participation has thickened and deepened. Even if the younger generation of today appears to have a lower level of interest in public life (at least conventional politics),
Seen as a totality—and if we put the partly negative trend of neoliberal watering-down of public enfranchisement of recent decades into a greater historical context—there can be little doubt that public enfranchisement has increased dramatically.
Lastly, a fifth long-term trend has to do with the growth of democratic culture and values. Yes, Sweden was indeed a democracy even in the 1920s and the 1950s if we consider its institutions. But in the 1920s, a husband could still legally rape his wife, it was considered inappropriate to speak too openly against religion, people talked to one another differently depending on social status and title, and so forth. Up until the early 1960s, you could beat children, not only at home but also in schools. In short, culture was considerably more authoritarian, less tolerant, less
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