Metamodernism Critique Part 3: Why a Single Spiral?
An enantiodromiatic mess > single spiral?
This is the third in a series of critical ponderings on Metamodernism. As mentioned in the first instalment there will be a podcast interview with Brendan Graham Dempsey on his Metamodern Spirituality podcast afterwards to chat through some of these criticisms. Previous instalments: Intro, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6.
Last week we discussed the red thread running through many Metamodernist schools: “transcend and include”. It’s an indicator of the Wilberian Integral DNA running through Metamodernism. It’s the idea that each new cultural logic/developmental stage/episteme somehow has access to previous levels (i.e. those with the Metamodern cultural logic have the Postmodern, Modern and Premodern cultural logics “available to them”).
In this instalment, we are going to prod this notion further and ask: why a single spiral? Let’s work with a highly generalised version of history. Why should we think of culture as having a linear developmental scheme? That is a relic of Wilber reading too much developmental psychology1 or, what is more likely, too much Hegel (why do all roads seem to lead back to Hegel).
Let’s consider two alternative grand narratives of history: Thomas Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions and Iain McGilchrist’s tale of two hemispheres.
We looked at Sowell’s work back in 2022 (link to article/video) so if you want to learn more there’s a whole piece there for you. But, in a nutshell, Sowell’s “visions” are akin to worldviews. They give us a way to navigate a reality “far too complex to be comprehended by any given mind.”
“Visions are like maps that guide us through a tangle of bewildering complexities. Like maps, visions have to leave out many concrete features in order to enable us to focus on a few key paths to our goals.”
There are a plurality of such visions active in our society. In A Conflict of Visions Sowell does a deep study of two: the “Constrained Vision” and the “Unconstrained Vision”. These visions map more or less onto our right-left political spectrum. Those with these visions hold very different maps of the world which bring them into antagonism on just about every issue under the sun.
Fundamentally it comes down to an axiomatic disagreement. The Constrained Vision folk think that humans are essentially bad but society has civilised us (Hobbes, Burke, Adam Smith) while the Unconstrained Vision folk think we are essentially good but civilisation has corrupted us (Montaigne, Rousseau, French Revolution, Anarchism).
Without getting too deeply into the Sowellian weeds, I merely want to sketch this theory enough to point out that, for Sowell, the political history of modernity has not been of a “transcending and including” à la Wilber2 but of two conflicting visions. Rousseau didn’t “transcend and include” Hobbes’s Constrained Vision of the world. He developed in opposition to Hobbes, not by sublation. He didn’t evolve through Hobbes’s vision of the world but reacted against it. In turn, Edmund Burke didn’t evolve through being an Unconstrained Vision advocate of the French Revolution to being its sharpest critic. He developed in opposition to it rather than by “transcending and including”. Hobbes and the French Revolution are the external antagonists against which Rousseau and Burke sharpened their intellects. Agreement lets the mind grow placid; disagreement is an attractor whose gravity draws consciousness to it.
Agreement lets the mind grow placid; disagreement is an attractor whose gravity draws consciousness to it.
With the Constrained and Unconstrained Visions we can see a political history of modernity that is not one of developmental transcendence and inclusion but of conflict. More on this later.
But now let’s talk about another vision of history that is closer to the heart of Metamodernism: Iain McGilchrist. I read McGilchrist’s monster of a work The Master and His Emissary before heading off on the Camino de Santiago across the north of Spain last summer. Between that break, the book’s vastness, and its behemothian sequel The Matter with Things, I never did get around to a compact discussion of McGilchrist’s thesis that I can share with you now. So I’ll do my best to cram his theory down into a couple of paragraphs.
Essentially McGilchrist’s work is a cross-breed of neuroscience and history. The first prong of his work is articulating the differences between the left- and right-hemispheres in the scientific literature; the second prong is showing how historical eras show an oscillation between these two “ways of being”.
For our purposes here we can reduce this to a tension between a romantic (right-hemisphere) and a rational (left-hemisphere) worldview. The former is melancholic, embodied pathos; the latter optimistic, gung-ho logos. The former a generalised floodlight; the latter a specialised spotlight. McGilchrist sees history as oscillating between these two poles. The Renaissance was a right-hemispheric period; the Scientific Revolution a left-hemispheric; Romanticism right-hemispheric; Modernity and Postmodernity have very much been left-hemispheric.
That’s a brutal oversimplification but it’s enough for our purposes here. The point I want to make is that McGilchrist’s account isn’t one of sublation but of tension. It is, to use a Heraclitean term, enantiodromiatic. That is to say, it is a pendulum that swings too far one direction then lurches back the other way in compensation (though McGilchrist believes that a runaway effect has taken hold and the left-hemisphere now threatens to rule forever; I disagree. That’s a whole other pot of fish). This is a dualistic vision of history in which two poles operate in tension with one another3.
That culture doesn’t evolve by “transcending and including” should be obvious to anyone who stumbled into any subculture ever. Reading Wilber is a painful exercise in what we would now call anti-SJW or anti-Woke sentiment. One gets the distinct sense that the transcendence is only in words — skin-deep and theory-bound. Consider the Atheists vs. the Christians and Muslims. It’s hardly a discourse populated by digesting the other point of view. Instead, it’s about finding the chinks in the other’s armour. It is memetic war, not transcendence and inclusion.
It’s incredibly rare that a thinker truly takes another’s point of view. That’s why I’m such a fan of Contrapoints’s early work — she had a genuine understanding of the alt-right point of view. She was fluent in 4Chan. It wasn’t a question of “Contrapoints DESTROYS The Golden One” or “Contrapoints OWNS Incel”. Instead, she was able to understand the other side enough that she changed many of their minds. Hence her nickname: “the alt-right whisperer”. Compare that to Jordan Peterson’s arc.
Transcend and include is the exception, not the rule.
Instead of a history which evolves linearly via decentration, we have “a war of all against all”. I’m more of a Sowellian than a McGilchristian or an Integralist in this sense. I don’t see the evolution of culture as a singular arboresque telic unfolding but as a pluralistic rhizomatic chaotic evolution. As the OG Metamodern theorists Vermeulen and van den Akker put it4:
“One should be careful not to think of this oscillation as a balance however; rather it is a pendulum swinging between 2, 3, 5, 10, innumerable poles”
Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions is about the Constrained and Unconstrained Visions but he is far from believing that these are the only visions at play in society. Culture, at any stage in its history, cannot be reduced to a singular vision. It is always a multiplicity of wrestling visions. Some will be more left-hemisphere-esque; others more right-hemisphere-esque. Some will be relevant to the political domain; others to the aesthetic and others to spirituality, love, business and any other monster bucket of human experience. There is no linear hierarchy spiralling upwards to an Omega Point. There is a rhizome evolving in new and unpredictable directions (even if “determined” by the economic Base à la Marx).
Where does that leave Metamodernism? Hardly an all-encompassing Zeitgeist — a shorthand for this moment in history. But maybe it can still be something of immense value. Another vision among many perhaps, but not one without a lot of value to offer. It removes the assurance of specialness from the Metamodernism subculture but this too may be a blessing (see Jon Ogden’s piece on complexity vs. maturity). Metamodernism may be an emergent vision and that vision (stripped of its Hegelian/Marxist/Wilberian trappings) has a lot to offer. More on this in a later instalment where I’ll articulate my humbler vision of Metamodernism.
Once again, for anyone, for any Metamodernists (or other critical readers) reading, I’d love to hear your thoughts on any blindspots, oversights, errors, distortions or strawmen you see in this or any other piece in the series. As I said in the intro this isn’t some polished piece of art but a wrestling to articulate something I sense. If I’m mistaken I’d love to know; future pieces can benefit from that knowledge.
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Though I might be able to map the conflict model that follows below onto developmental psychology by drawing on Module theory of consciousness as the likes of Michael Gazzaniga and Marvin Minsky argue for.
I should probably write about the differences between Wilber’s “transcend and include” and Hegel’s aufhebung at some point. Hopefully I’ll get to it in this series though OG Hegel is far from my domain of expertise. For our current purposes they are the same.
Of course according to McGilchrist, the right-hemisphere has an attitude of “transcend and include” but the left-hemisphere doesn’t and is a bit of a (ab)user.
i appreciate your writing so far and largely agree. it’s a bit myopic and arrogant to suggest there is a linear evolution of consciousness, and that metamoderns hold the singular key to what comes next
i agree the hegelian notion of ‘transcend and include’ doesn’t seem to be true in terms of the messy details of reality, there does seem to be something to the idea that development is due to some reconciliation of opposites, a checking of each other’s extremes, and the subsequent manifestation of something that transcends and includes both of them—at the border of chaos and order, progress and tradition, mythos and logos, etc etc. in its concrete details, this may be described as a rhizomatic, fluid and unpredictable change, but i see overarching, dare i say archetypal attractors inform the particulars.
from this high-up view, all of philosophy, both elite and folk, are a recapitulation of perennial wisdom that has been known for millennia, just leaning more to one side of a duality or the other, finding more one-sided facts or buy-in (like science’s success repressing formal and final explanations in favor of the material and efficient) going too far in that direction, and necessitating a compensatory correction (as complexity and chaos theories are reviving essences and telos in more nuanced and evidenced formulations) things both do and do not change.
in terms of postmodernism and metamodernism, i see both as two attempts to be more critical of modernism’s excess faith in itself. postmodernism and its deconstructive focus has been more respected, but as whiteheadian David Griffin argues, a quasi-metamodern, ‘constructive postmodernism’ can be traced back to Jung and Whitehead and undoubtedly many others, but this line of thinking has been more underground, or seen as disreputable, with close ties to New Age thinking. metamodernism seems like a move to try to legitimize this thread of thought in light of contemporary science that no longer validates an emphasis on reduction, randomness, and disparate particulars.
that would be my take for a more humble metamodernism. can’t wait to read yours
I'm a bit confused as to what your actual critique is—and maybe it's in part my own misunderstanding of metamodernism, or a misunderstanding of your argument—but I have never understood these periods defined by a cultural logic to be truly totalizing. People were still dogmatically religious (premodern) in the modern era, etc.
I have always understood metamodernism as a response to the emptiness inherent to postmodernity. A response intended to transcend and include. But that's not the only response to this emptiness—you can also find endless new spaces to consume/find pleasure that temporarily take away the pain of this emptiness because of their novelty.
I am an addictions counselor and see so many clients who just keep moving, from substance to substance, process to process (gambling, social media, etc.), never taking that next step of actually grappling with the logic itself.
In short. I just don't think that metamodernism is meant to be a characterization of the whole of our cultural milieu, but rather the 'cutting edge' of our artistic and philosophical approach to reckoning with the limitations of the previous cultural era. Our zeitgeist will likely never shift much beyond this late capitalist logic completely preoccupied by consumption. Metamodernism is the ethos of those in recovery from the addiction of postmodernity/late capitalism.
Apologies if I've overlooked something major.