Nordic Ideology: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book Two

by Hanzi Freinacht

More “progressive” norms are the ones better suited for larger and more complex societies.

Cultural game change occurs when: populations develop into higher effective value memes, when there are shifts in the intimacy of control, the emotional regime and the degrees of equality, and when there are shifts within the system of norms.

we will look at the six new forms of politics, the new processes that can and should be instituted in order to make society productively transition into a metamodern stage of development.

Politics needs to evolve. Modern society is out of its depth; its scope is too limited and its influence too shallow to develop the cultures, psychologies and behaviors needed to keep up with its emergent structural complexity.

In Book One, I described the fundamentals of a metamodern political philosophy: the rise of “cultural capital” as a self-consciously organized political power, the increasing influence of the triple-H populations (hipsters, hackers and hippies), the obsoleteness and transcendence of classical Left and Right politics, the emergence of a new meta-ideology concentrated especially in the Nordic countries (Green Social Liberalism 2.0, or “the Nordic ideology”), the re-integration of the civic, personal and professional sides of life, a general both-and perspective, a transpersonal perspective of the human being, and “the view from complexity” which sees self-organizing chaos and fractals (rather than focusing on social power structures). Phew.

All of this is based upon a developmental (and dialectical) view of humanity and society; a perspective that looks at both external factors (systems, technology, economics, etc.) and internal factors (psychology, culture, spirituality and inner states)—in effect avoiding “developmental blindness” and “inner dimensions blindness”.

Effective participation: Citizens must have adequate and equal opportunities to form their preference and place questions on the public agenda and express reasons for one outcome over the other. 2. Voting equality at the decisive stage: Each citizen must be assured their judgments will be counted as equal in weights to the judgments of others. 3. Enlightened understanding: Citizens must enjoy ample and equal opportunities for discovering and affirming which choices best serve their interests. 4. Control of the agenda: “The people” must have the opportunity to decide what should be actual political matters and which should be brought up for deliberation. 5. Inclusiveness: Equality must extend to all citizens within the state. Everyone has a legitimate stake within the political process.

The recent rise of co-development ideals in the most progressive countries bears witness to this tendency. Co-development is the process of improving the quality of debate, dialogue and deliberation throughout all of society and across the political spectrum. It works from the supposition that we can’t possibly be right about “everything” and hence always need to learn from one another, friend or foe; if nothing else just to see where they’re coming from. This, of course, is a deeper democratic ideal and an early sign of a further deepening of democracy.

Thus, I have suggested five dimensions of what a deeper democracy may entail: increased dispersion of leadership; increased volume, complexity and efficiency of information processing; increased accountability and balancing of powers, putting greater demands upon the verifiability of decision-making; a deepening and thickening of de jure and de facto participation and popular support in processes of decision-making and opinion formation; and the growth of democratic, egalitarian and multi-perspectival culture and values.

If you like, you can call these five dimensions a way of increasing the collective intelligence of a given society; a means to “deepen” democratic participation. In this regard, a deeper democracy is one that lets solutions of higher orders of complexity emerge and gain legitimacy, thereby

allowing for more complex forms of society to exist and thrive.

Only democratization is really real, and only higher or lower levels of democratization can be said to exist. Democratization Politics can thus never

We start at the meso-level and then we use the increasing organizational and institutional leeway to gradually go back and forth between the micro- and macro-levels. Development starts at the middle and bounces its way up and down in increasing magnitude: from changing people’s ideas and habits, to changing national, transnational and supranational structures of governance. Democratic development oscillates.

“Today we are faced with the preeminent fact that, if civilization is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human relationships—the ability of all peoples, of all kinds, to live together and work together, in the same world, at peace”. —Franklin D. Roosevelt, in an undelivered address for Jefferson Day, intended for April 13th, 1945.

So what is meant by Gemeinschaft? The German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies made the important distinction between Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft. The former refers to the formal system of rules and regulations of a society, the latter to the more personal and informal bonds between people. Whereas Gesellschaft can be roughly translated into “society”, Gemeinschaft

does not have a satisfying equivalent in the English language. It is often translated into “community”, but that sounds more like we’re talking about a local neighborhood or a soccer club. And since we furthermore don’t want to imply it is the same as the political philosophy of “communitarianism”, we will use the original German word which moreover has become accepted in social science among English speakers.

To cultivate a society based more upon friendship, camaraderie, collaboration.

The main source of society’s ailments is that people’s behaviors, psychologies and social relations don’t function properly.

But the state also began to interfere in more intimate affairs such as child neglect, substance abuse, domestic violence, divorce rights, abortion and so on, so as to avoid the marginalizing effects of dysfunctional social relations at home.

Everything from private drug and alcohol rehabilitation programs, over child protection agencies, domestic violence awareness groups and women’s rights organizations, to local community efforts among youths to counter loneliness, bullying and idleness, can thus be seen as the expansion of Gemeinschaft Politics into the domestic domain.

As the world grows ever more complex, citizens will find it harder to avoid confusion and alienation and society will find it increasingly challenging to maintain high levels of belonging and togetherness—to maintain prosocial behavior and trust in others.

Our future civilization depends on fellowship, higher levels of love and friendship.

In the last instance every trace of human meaning and spontaneity are effaced under the blind logic of power.

The bad-guy in the book, O’Brien, who works at the Ministry of Love, says in earnest that there is nothing left of life, but at least he and others can have the consolation of tormenting the weak.

“But always—do not forget this, Winston—always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.”

I have worked hard to make this point before: We are now reaching a point in world history in which sustaining society means transforming it. Rebirth or bust. Metamodern Renaissance.

First of all, the Ministry of Gemeinschaft would lead the ongoing production of high quality, detailed censuses of people’s lives over months, years and entire lifespans: how much loneliness, how much issues of trust among our friends, how often we feel the need to lie to one another and in what spheres of life (personally, professionally), what deeper insecurities drive us, how functional and satisfying our relationships are, how much we identify with ethnic or political groupings—and so forth.

A second area of concern for the Ministry of Gemeinschaft would be to devise, implement and evaluate social innovations, practices and institutions with the aim to advance the generative conditions for Gemeinschaft throughout society.

1) measures to train emotional, social and collective intelligence, 2) organized community housing for families and the elderly, 3) support for local citizen discussion clubs led by professional facilitators, and 4) making room for civil society projects in public spaces.

Measures to train emotional, social and collective intelligence:

Measures to increase the emotional, social and collective intelligence of children could include training sessions in school to successfully read facial expressions and body language, guessing the hidden motivations of others, participating in games of perspective taking (in which you need to take others’ perspective of oneself in order to succeed), training

team formations and task delegation to compete against other groups in tasks of collective intelligence—and so forth.

Emotional intelligence would mean more self-regulation of behaviors and less conflict; social intelligence would mean people maneuver better in work and family environments and have an easier time finding ways to help one another out; and collective intelligence would increase the ability of people to find their respective strengths and cooperate in more complex and dynamic patterns of teams, organizations and so forth.

Organized community housing for families and the elderly:

It would make more sense to have housing systems which are hybrids between private homes and shared spaces.

These would form medium-sized communities with a variety of different apartments. Elderly citizens could move to shared spaces that are safe for frail and weak bodies, letting families with children move into their houses rather than the seniors holding on to them, partaking in shared gardening projects, sharing some burdens of cooking, baby-sitting and so forth. There would be a facilitated framework for democratic decision-making and partly shared ownership—with relevant training offered to key people.

People would retain personal freedom but still have a communal context.

Support for local citizen discussion clubs led by professional facilitators: Modern parliamentarism and the traditional civil organizations of class and special interests are severely underequipped for meeting the demand for democratic participation in today’s society.

If such initiatives for small-scale co-development and citizen engagement were present across society as a normal part of life, the gains could be immense: People would hear more perspectives, develop their own opinions and quite generally be more robust in their roles as citizens.

If citizens could sign up for a professional facilitation training and could be afforded small budgets or just meeting venues, this could improve society’s overall social capital (interpersonal connection and trust) and its collective intelligence in many ways.

Making room for civil society projects in public spaces: It is somehow taken for granted that most of the public spaces of a modern

consumer society should be reserved for commercial activities.

Gemeinschaft. People and organizations should be able to book public areas that are frequented by many fellow citizens and use them as meeting places and platforms for artistic, cultural or social ends.

But you can come up with more ideas. A corps of professional “listeners” in public service institutions and in healthcare? A concerted effort to improve the conflict management and mediation skills in work-life? Programs for intergenerational mentorships?

To, what I believe will be the only way of productively handling and developing ethnic identities in a transnational world order of increased global interconnectedness, trans-culturalism.

The intelligent reader may already have noticed how each of the four positions seem to correlate with effective value meme: postfaustianists, or traditional conservatives, usually favor nationalism; modernists, the mainstream in most Western societies, tend to gravitate towards the more civic stance of non-nationalism; postmodernists, the “politically correct” elite, are almost always devoted multiculturalists who unanimously defend the position of inter-culturalism. And if you agree with most of the section below on trans-culturalism, then it’s a good indication that you’re metamodern.

Nationalism is the position that defends what is perceived as one’s “own” nationality, state and ethnicity from the perceived threat of other cultural units.

nationalism as a reactionary movement does not really offer any credible paths to creating a regulated and functional transnational order, and it tends to feed conflicts and misunderstandings.

Non-nationalism is what I call the reliance upon the modernist project—in its capitalist or communist forms—to simply supersede and eventually efface the ethnic differences between people.

Inter-culturalism (or multiculturalism) comes in different forms. You have multicultural state ideologies, which emphasize the importance of inclusion and diversity, claiming that the more diverse cultures you have, the better. You have corresponding anti-discrimination and pro-diversity policies in companies. You have “inter-faith dialogue” movements, which seek to find common ground and mutual respect among believers of different faiths. You have “affirmative action” programs, international children’s summer camps, the peace movement, political correctness seeking to ban whatever words have become racist slurs—and so forth. Among theorists you find such thinkers as the philosopher Charles Taylor, who emphasizes the importance of ethnic minority groups having “rights” to the preservation of their culture.