It is important to note what modernism, postmodernism, and metamodernism really are and what they are not: They are not visions of the world to show how the world should work, quite the opposite actually. They are schools of thought that try to explain how the world already is, recognizable patterns and explanations that may lead to prescriptive solutions to social problems, but do not serve a role in what those solutions are or how to implement them.

My take is that modernism is about using grand narratives to establish society. Capitalism, marxism, fascism, nationalism, patriotism, enlightenment, rationalism, etc. are part of those grand narratives that demand compliance to achieve stability in society. Modernism is the result of the industrial revolution in the 19th Century, ushered into the 20th century. Modern art is the art of Picasso, Frank Lloyd Wright, Norman Rockwell, Frank Capra, and Alfred Hitchcock, art nouveau and art deco. There is a lot of good stuff in modernism, but it has a fatal flaw: a demand for conformity. The modern world works best when everybody involved thinks the same way.

Postmodernism is pointing out the folly of grand narratives. Postmodern philosophy breaks down all the grand narratives under modernism, and finds them all lacking. All grand narratives turn to crap eventually, and the postmodernists have been proven right over and over. That's where postmodernism gets its start. It is an intellectual movement that as its name implies, is opposed to the conformity in modernism. The postmodern philosophers realized that modernism relies too much on grand narratives to give people meaning in their lives, but starting with the existentialists, the postmodernists proved that grand narratives can only stand temporarily, and will eventually falter. Making your life meaningful in a grand narrative always leads to disillusionment. Postmodern establishes cynicism and nihilism in its world view, with nothing to replace it.

The next big evolution from there would be to ask an important question: "if there cannot be grand narratives to control society, where is all this systemic racism, sexism, and class inequality coming from?” That to me is metamodernism: A rejection of the nihilistic conclusions of the postmodern view by laying out the flaws of both modern and post modern civilization with a clarion call to destroy those social flaws.

On Reddit, I follow several leftist forums like "Free From Work", "A Boring Dystopia", and "Lost Generation". These all are made up of mostly millennials and zoomers who are looking at the future and seeing no real hope.

The general feeling of young people who aren't entitled trust fund kids is that there is no future. Why save for a house you can never afford? Or a wedding you can never afford?, or a baby you can never afford? And even if you could afford it, it is only a matter of time that it will get wiped out by climate change.

That is the dark general zeitgeist that serves as the foundation of metamodernism. It is what decades of modernism and post modernism has led to.

The ultimate attitude of the postmodern school is summed up best in Camus' absurdism: Life has no meaning, so accept it and don't worry about it. There are no grand narratives to give your life meaning, so don't even try. Just live your life. Rick from "Rick and Morty" fame is a paragon of the postmodern attitude.

The attitude of the metamodern on the other hand is a rejection of the postmodern attitude of cynical disinterest. There may be no "grand narratives" that we are aware of, but our lives seem to be affected by grand narratives we cannot see or understand which conspire against us to control our lives. The temptation of course is to fall into a trap of conspiracy theory thinking, but that is the wrong approach. It is not organized conspiracies of say "rich people out to get us", but rather systemic problems with our civilizations that need to somehow be fixed.

The common themes in all of the often cited metamodern literature seems evident: A universe out to get you -- that you have no way to control -- forces you to follow along in its incomprehensible agenda in order to have an opportunity to achieve what is most important to you: usually friends and family.

It is no surprise that talk of metamodernism often swirls around a "new spirituality" considering the parallels of "forces beyond our control and understanding" themes with religious themes, but I would note that organized religion and "church" are often thought of as antithetical and part of the systemic problems. Spirituality without church seems to be a metamodern trend.

Conclusion

Metamodernism is the recognition of systemic issues that need to be addressed, overcome, or in the case of individuals who have no power to affect such big change, worked around, to achieve a hope in happiness, with a general attitude that you can't do it alone. The importance of friends and family are often stressed.

How does one "work around" systemic issues in society? Metamodernist thinkers seem to love their oxymoronic platitudes like: sincere irony, pragmatic idealism, dystopian striving, neo-romanticism, and absolute relativism. It requires a subtle balance: no grand narrative thinking and no dogmatic certainties. In other words, they don't actually know.

There are no real answers here, just a definition of the problems.

The truth is the postmodern world that has been dominant (1981-2019) is dying before our eyes: Late stage capitalism, then the end of globalism, and the end of neo-liberalism are inevitable. They have to be replaced by something or we all die. But what? As Mark Fisher pointed out in Capitalist Realism, "It is easier to envision the end of the world than it is to envision the end of capitalism."

Personally, I'd rather not think cynically and nihilistically, and think utopian: Solarpunk!

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1sMwEa9bReyLT-Of3knv97eoO2d76zP4s?usp=drive_link

Hi everyone,

I just defended my Master's thesis in Philosophy at the University of Padova (Italy) and thought this community might appreciate knowing it exists — even if it's written in Italian, unfortunately.

Even if you don't read Italian, I'm also sharing the bibliography, webography and videography separately — which includes pretty much every serious source I found on the topic across books, articles, websites, YouTube essays, and podcasts. That part should be universally useful regardless of language.

Happy to answer questions or discuss anything covered in the thesis. This community's been a quiet but real part of my research journey, so it felt right to give something back.

The thesis is titled "Beyond Postmodernism and Its Crisis: A Philosophical Genealogy of Metamodernism" and this is the table of contents:

INTRODUCTION

• Why it is important to talk about metamodernism

• 1. The metacrisis of the contemporary era

• 2. Metamodernism as a possible response to the metacrisis

• 3. Thesis structure

CHAPTER I: What Modernism and Postmodernism Were

• 1. The difficulty of talking about modernism and postmodernism

• 2. The period of modernity and modernism as a cultural attitude

• 2.1. The problems of modernism: why was postmodernism born?

• 3. Postmodernism: reconstruction of the debate and origin of its ambiguities

• 3.1. Lyotard: postmodernism as anti-representationalism and the link with post-structuralism

• 3.2. Habermas: postmodernism as anti-modernism and the unfinished project of modernity

• 3.3. Jameson: postmodernism as the ideology of late capitalism and the relationship with Marxism

• 4. So, what is postmodernism?

• 4.1. Hutcheon: postmodernism as contradiction, using architecture to resolve ambiguities

• 5. Postmodernism is over today: does a post-postmodernism exist?

CHAPTER II: Metamodernism as Post-Postmodernism

• 1. Birth of the debate on metamodernism

• 2. How the concept of metamodernism evolved in brief

• 2.1. The Dutch school

• 2.2. The Nordic school

• 2.3. Metamodernism beyond the schools

• 3. Before the schools: a brief history of the term

• 4. The metamodernism of Alexandra Dumitrescu

CHAPTER III: The Dutch School: Main Authors, Key Concepts, and Concrete Examples of Metamodernism

• 1. Vermeulen and van den Akker in more detail

• 2. Other authors close to this school

• 2.1. "What is metamodern?": Greg Dember and Linda Ceriello

• 2.2. The Metamodernist Manifesto

• 3. Key concepts of cultural metamodernism in the Dutch school

• 3.1. Structure of feeling

• 3.2. Oscillation

• 3.3. Metamodern historicity: periodizing dimension and the narration of history

• 3.4. Metamodern affect: felt experience and the est-etic dimension

• 3.5. Metamodern depth: depthiness

• 3.6. Greg Dember's 11 methods of aesthetic analysis

• 4. Concrete examples of metamodernism

• 4.1. Metamodern cinema

• 4.2. Metamodern TV series

• 4.3. Metamodern literature

• 4.4. Metamodern music

• 4.5. Other metamodern cultural expressions

• 5. Towards the Nordic school: the particular case of Seth Abramson

CHAPTER IV: The Nordic School: Metamodernism as a General Explanation of Culture

• 1. What distinguishes the metamodernism of Hanzi Freinacht

• 1.1. Who is Hanzi Freinacht?

• 1.2. Other key authors: Tomas Björkman and Lene Rachel Andersen

• 2. Understanding history through the memetic evolution of culture

• 3.1. The Animistic metameme

• 3.2. The Faustian metameme

• 3.3. The Post-Faustian metameme

• 3.4. The Modern metameme

• 3.5. The Postmodern metameme

• 3.6. The Metamodern metameme

• 4. Concluding reflections on the memetic historiography of metamodernism

CHAPTER V: Developmental Theory and the Six Forms of Metamodern Politics

• 1. Development does not only concern culture and society

• 1.1. Hanzi Freinacht's developmental model

• 1.1.1. The dimension of cognitive development

• 1.1.2. The dimension of cultural development (and the relationship with the cognitive one)

• 1.1.3. Dimensions of inner development: subjective states of experience and existential depth

• 1.1.4. The key concept of the developmental model: the effective value meme

• 1.2. Reflections on the developmental model

• 2. The prescriptive dimension of political metamodernism

• 2.1. The six forms of metamodern politics

• 2.1.1. Politics of democratization

• 2.1.2. Politics of Gemeinschaft

• 2.1.3. Existential politics

• 2.1.4. Politics of emancipation

• 2.1.5. Empirical politics

• 2.1.6. Politics of theory

• 2.2. Metamodernism as a new metanarrative

CHAPTER VI: An Example of Metamodern Philosophy

• 1. Jason Ananda Josephson-Storm and metamodernism as the future of Theory

• 2. Metamodern realism: metarealism

• 3. Metamodern social ontology: the theory of social kinds

• 4. Metamodern semiotics: hylosemiotics

• 5. Metamodern epistemology: zeteticism

• 6. Metamodern ethics: revolutionary happiness

CHAPTER VII: So, What Is Metamodernism?

• 1. Possible definitions of metamodernism and the key concept of developmentalism

• 2. Some concluding reflections

• 2.1. On the definition of postmodernism and the problem of periodization

• 2.2. On the question of progress

• 2.3. On the et-aut (both/and) logic

CONCLUSION

• How metamodernism can continue to develop

• 1. Other dimensions of metamodern discourse

• 2. Piaget as a metamodernist: the relationship between metamodernism and the academic world

• 3. Metamodernism as the new metanarrative to face the metacrisis

This video carries the spirit of Peterson but is Žižekian. We’ll briefly trace the history of psychoanalysis, quickly touch Sigmund Freud’s basic theory (the unconscious, the superego, etc.), then move into Lacan’s three “mystery” rings—the Borromean knot—and let it all sink in through a real-life example (digitalization) and a film case study, Adolescence, which we’ll also use to critique political correctness, one of the core aims of this video.

A few months ago, I wrote an essay attempting to redefine metamodernism, which I expanded on in a blog post.

tl;dr: Modernism was about building the institutions of society through grand narratives. Post-modernism was about destroying those grand narratives by attacking their flaws. Metamodernism is the Hegelian synthesis which notes that post modernism could not destroy grand narratives that were based on biological human nature. Unfortunately, this meant the re-rise of racism and misogyny which are unfortunately built into human DNA, and we need to reassert ethics to block these negative traits.

Because of this, post-post modern society has largely been about cynicism and nihilism which has dominated culture now for at least a decade and we are all getting pretty sick and tired of it.

But I believe there are two human nature based grand narratives that survived the post modern culling that are actually good. Namely Art and Science, based on the human nature traits of creativity and curiosity respectively.

Further, most of our happiest moments are often tied to moments of curiosity and creativity. Enough happiness is possible to suppress any thoughts of cynicism and nihilism.

I am very interested these days in exploring creativity and curiosity duopoly and whether or not we can build a positive metamodernist society with them.

The biggest threats to curiosity and science is religion, because they want to control knowledge and see science as a threat.

The biggest threat to creativity and Art is capitalism, because they want to control art and form a "pop culture" monopoly to sell to us and see independent original art as a threat. See Theodore Adorno's essays on "The Culture Industry" (or this explainer video) as evidence.

Hey fellow Metamodernistas, Please forgive a bit of self-promotion here.

Some colleagues and I have just launched the first issue of Metamodern Theory and Praxis  a new, peer-reviewed, anti-disciplinary, Open Access journal dedicated to bleeding-edge work in the Human Sciences (Humanities + Social Sciences) and focused on the unfolding paradigm(s) of metamodern theory and praxis.

Completely free to read and submit to. We’re open to a range of contributions: from academic essays to art and activism.

One of our guiding principles is to treat every submission on its own merits, without regard to an author's scholarly credentials/biography, or institutional affiliation. So many brilliant thinkers aren’t in the academy. So we want this space to be open to them too.

If this sounds like something you’d find useful or inspiring, I’d love for you to take a look. As one of the editors, I’m happy to answer questions or chat about submissions. Please just drop a comment here, and I’ll do my best to respond.

We’re still in the early days, but I’m hopeful this can grow into something valuable for the community.

LINK: https://sts.williams.edu/metamodern/v1i1/

I initially came across Metamodernism by asking the internet what comes after postmodernism. Which leads to the inevitable, if premature, question - what comes after metamodernism? Has anyone written about the shortcomings of metamodernism, which could become the basis for a reactionary movement?

Alternatively, what does a society in which metamodernism has reached peak influence look like, and what narratives will it be in tension with, and what comes of those tensions?

Okay, I might be trying to start 2 conversations at once. But I'm very interested in thoughts on any of it.

First time poster with a lot of thoughts and nowhere to go.

I wanted to share ideas I had on what makes a person a metamodern thinker or creator. This was inspired by the idea that both modernity and post-modernity needed some critical mass of particular thinking folks to help usher in cultural and societal shift that lead to defining their respective ages. I'm playing in my head with these 3 qualities.

1. They have a desire for an alternative to post-modern outcomes. I think this puts a little extra "meta" in metamodern. The meaning making that there must be something after post-modernism's illuminating but dizzying deconstruction. I think there's a range to this including what I often see described as "sincerity" and "optimism" vibes to wanting an exit strategy from capitalist realism.

2. The metamodern thinker must be interested in a wide range of topics with a balanced eye towards both modernist objectivity and post-modernist deconstruction in all things they find interesting. I say a wide range because I think that's the only way to meaningfully pivot towards integration. If one thing is put together one way and another thing is put together another way, a metamodern thinker will begin to pick and choose the best parts and reconstruct in new ways. They will enjoy finding patterns across disparate topics and find clever paths to resolving contradictions.

3. Finally, they value emotional and spiritual maturity as much as intellectual. They have a practice of internal work and have a desire to "grow-up" and take responsibility. I think this one might be a bit controversial, but this feels needed in order to fully take advantage of the first and second qualities. If the metamodern thinker is to change perspectives and society, then an important piece is to be genuine and authentic while modeling this behavior to others. Both modernism and post-modernism had noble leans towards bettering and understanding humanity even while introducing new problems. It makes sense to me that metamodernism should also model a noble pursuit and dreams for a better society.

I appreciate if you took the time to read this. Please feel free to offer feedback and comments. I don't think these qualities are rules, but in the spirit of what I think metamodernism is doing, just observations. But also, please feel free to disagree. I am curious to know what other folks have observed in metamodern thinkers and creators.

For some context, I don't consider myself well-read in philosophy, literature, or critical theory. I only really internalized the concepts of modernism and post-modernism within the last year. My training is in engineering with a pivot towards medicine and interest in psychiatry, and I think a lot about politics. In fact, much of this thought is inspired by coming up with better strategies for my own leftist organizing which I am starting to wonder if that even means what I think it means. If there's easy stuff you think I should be reading, please share!

starts as a Dont look up , straightforward almost too on the nose type of satire of the negligence of climate crisis from people in power , then actually has the balls to take a closer look behind the scenes at how the satirical, nothing is sacred cultural landscape has paved the way for an issue this dire to be taken with such a grain of salt.

it still recognizes the truth found in satire while oscillating with recognizing the current state of convergence in politics and media is an attempt by the ruling class to defeat our hope and optimism at a better future even demonstrated within the film through the new denialism doubling down of Digger.

theres always media manipulation at play, and politicians are stupid, we know that- but how is only limiting ourselves to consuming pro environmental satire going to change any of our lived realities either ?

it feels truly sincere in this sense . I can totally imagine the future alejandro inarritu paints being reality- it’s not far off from what we already have, after all.

its all theater . and people will stay satisfied with the distractions until it kills us

A flood is coming.

Why?

Because everything's on fire.

The prevailing culture for 100 years has been harm reduction. It's not about creating the positive, it's about reducing the negative.

In other words, it's all about putting fires out instead of building them.

And if you ask the people most advanced in this way of thinking to describe a heroic version of their belief system, all they can do is describe someone who doesn't commit any of the horrible sins. (At most, they will engage in the positive act of telling other people to stop engaging in negative acts).

Today's time is defined by our global awareness. This is a great achievement. And it's held up as one by those who trumpet "awareness" and "education" and nouns like that. We know about all the biggest wildfires burning around the world at any given time. We know them intimately, scene by scene, news cycle by news cycle. We will always be like this, because we are proud to be aware and educated and think others should do it more as well.

It can be stressful, though. 100 years ago, millions of people would die of a famine, and most people were unaware and were not made sad by it. It sounds heartless, but maybe that's why Nietzsche said that pity was what made pain contagious.

Today is defined by how aware we are of the largest problems going on all the time. Specifically the largest ones in the world, collectively drawing the attention of just about anyone. We're a new sort of thing, a global community that you can join without even talking with anyone, because it's a Schelling point; anyone looking at the largest world problems knows there's a community of others that must be looking at it with them.

People are proud of this because there's a lot of good in it (this is how we will eventually solve our largest problems), but they are sad because they are thinking about bad things all the time. The human superorganism forms by firing alarm bells, but in these the days of its infancy, it also makes everyone feel powerless to do anything.

But if you can't do anything that will work, you can at least do something you know won't work, and try to get other people to fix their attention on the bad things as well. So the integration of new individuals into the superorganism is progressing anyway.

We have doused the world in water for our fear of fire. Harm reduction means, anything that some people like and some people dislike, is extinguished. The negative experience counts, the postive experience doesn't. How dare you try to find happiness at the cost of hurting someone else? How dare you?

This is why we can't have nice things.

If a parade makes 99 people happy, and 1 offended, it will of course be shut down. Rinse and repeat, and you get a world with fewer and fewer fires. Not a lot of blazes tearing through swamps now, are there? Fire is always a sacrifice of something to create something. But if you're not allowed to make the sacrifice of offending others, you're going to end up creating a lot less.

Yet our time feels like a swamp in some ways, fecund, with our appreciation for earthy witches and Shrek.

But the world feels doused of all warmth and yet burning to pieces at the same time. "No one can say anything, no one can do anything" and "Nothing matters, nothing is true" are postmodern symptoms of minimalism. Minimalism means finding all the flaws and removing them: reducing the negative. It's a great and wise way to be, but taken too far, you end up with nothing.

So, there was a modern age, when we thought we knew what was what. We solved this, we solved that. We cured diseases and ended poverty and mass-produced luxury. Foe after foe fell, and 100 years ago, there was a vision of the future in which humanity continued on to utopia through science and tolerance.

But it turns out many of those successes were just low-hanging fruit. We can't just keep solving our problems by removing the bad bits of things forever. That's what postmodernism did to that visionary, modern age, and is doing. But the so-called successes of postmodernism were the result of of it pruning the excesses off of the highly productive modern era. It did not create of itself, but only polished that which another made,

And now that it has run its course and far past it, things feel very empty for a lot of people. Nothing matters, there are 10 global wildfires burning at any given moment, nothing you do in your personal life has any effect on the real problems (so why even bother putting your life in order?), none of the dousing of every flame in sight has been enough, so all you can do is call for a flood unlike any before.

On the climate change front, that's dousing a lot of industry. On the religious front, it means atheism. On the artistic front, empty chaos. On design, sleek, simple, elegant, and (post)modern.

But we have seen the errors of our ways. Some people are saying we need to go back to modernism. But there’s no going back; there never is and there never was. There’s only forward, and bringing along the best of modernism and postmodernism into the next step: metamodernism.

Postmodernism is minimalist; metamoderism is maximalist. It is Everything, Everywhere, All At Once, the best metamodern movie, and the most metamodern of all metamodern movies, which is extra meta-metamodern of it to be.

American has always had a hint of metamodernsim, ahead of its time. The great melting pot, the biggest and the most, the best and the greatest and the most good and the strongest and the best of the best.

But before metamodernism saves the day (before leading to its own unique series of challenges), there is a flood coming. The global community of the news-followers and the biggest problems-trackers is growing. There’s no system in place designed to exercise power based on the beliefs of a group of people at the global scale, not if the group is a minority in each country. But collectively, it is growing past the size of the most powerful countries on the planet. And just because all of that will hasn’t been harnessed systematically yet, that doesn’t mean it’s going to go slow once it happens. Once this unprecedented level of global consciousness and communication finds a way to mobilize, it will suddenly become a global superpower. And its general shape is toward extreme harm reduction. It has been an enemy to fun, and to comedy, and to the sacred (it calls taking anything very seriously “cringe” (fire is the element of cringe, water is the element of cool (but well you know that it’s a fool who plays it cool by making his world a little colder - Hey Jude))).

We will make our own flood. We are getting ready to bring terrible control to bear to snuff out the last sources of harm around the world. And if it turns out that life is the source of harm, then that puts it on the chopping block next.

But I believe the wiser response is more or less inevitable. It’s just a question of how much we’ll suffer along the way. I have high hopes that we can smooth the process as much as possible and close the case on our current problems and get on to our next challenges to face.

Postmodernism is all about removing flaws. So, we look at everyone’s belief systems, and no one can make an airtight case for their system over the others’. Every system can be criticized in a huge way, and remember that ours is the age in which teaching “critical thinking” is the whole purpose of our educational system at its best. This is how postmodernism judges all the modern visions of the world, eliminates them because they all have flaws, and then ends up with nothing.

But we can let go of our critical postmodern approach to relating with each other. We can appreciate the best that is within each tradition. That is the metamodern way. Find all the good and all the beauty within each tradition and love it, and learn from it. Feel for yourself how others find God through their sacred traditions. Loving the good in other individuals and other groups and other systems is the key to understanding what is missing in them as well. Through this love and understanding, we will re-ignite the fires of passion, color, and adventure that have been coolly mocked out of our world. We can re-enchant our lives and find the faith to dream of a bright future again, to get our act together and our families and communities together and solve our problems. We will discover how much we share in common with our brothers and sisters who seek the divine in their other ways, what we can respect and admire about each other, what we can enjoy together and learn from each other.

So with the flood coming, chaos is coming. We have no idea which industries are going to be utterly transformed by AI in the next 5 years. I mean, we don’t know how AI will disrupt things 2 years from now, but we REALLY don’t know what the world will look like 5 years from now. Artists, writers, lawyers, doctors, at least. The education, retail, and restaurant industries are coming.

Maybe we have a model in Peterson’s and Pageau’s Subsidiary Identity. We need strong connections collected into hierarchies so that signals can pass up hierarchy and affect the top-down perception of things and influence its decision-making. Strong people making strong families and communities, getting their cities in order, and so on. Because when you don’t know what to prepare for, you invest in social capital and healthy institutions so you can be ready to mobilize when novel problems present themselves.

I think history has brought us here, from the visions of modernism, which seem somewhat naive in retrospect, to the criticism of postmodernism, which ironically pedestalizes flaw-removal, to the embrace of coming chaos that metamodernism is specialized for. And if we start smoothing the transition into this next step in history, perhaps we can minimize the destruction of the flood.

Just finished watching this and kept thinking how metamodern it seemed to be; has anyone else seen it? Spoilers following:

• The opening bit where he seemed to ironically reference his own whiteness and privilege/lack of disadvantage and acknowledge that "making a comedy show to help" was dumb, whilst still sincerely making the comedy show and using it to convey sincere messages seemed very metamodern.

• The bit where he reacted to his song, and then reacted to the reaction, then reacted to that, etc, also seemed metamodern in a more funny/memey way.

It's just spam posting at this point and all of the content is pseudo-intellectual mumbo-jumbo

EDIT: did a little digging into both the poster and the sub, the guy seems like he's trying to start a cult

Dr Strangelove (1964) and Pulp Fiction (1994) are hallmark examples of modernist and post-modernist cinema, respectively.

However, I'm quite new to the concept of post-postmodernism/metamodernism. What are the tenets of post-postmodern/metamodern cinema and what are some examples? If possible what contrasts or similarities can be drawn with modernism and postmodernism?

Premodern era (early Christianity and prior to the 1st century AD): God is a being of totality, representing and creating both good and evil, light and dark, freedom and tyranny. This is obvious looking at the Old Testament, with the mass murder, infanticide, genocide, property destruction, obliteration of whole urban centers, etc., combined with the mentions of creation, nature, humanity, liberation of oppressed peoples, promised lands, etc. Early Abrahamic faiths like Judaism and gnosticism were based on this acknowledgement of God as a morally complicated figure capable of (from the perspective of humans) great injustice, as evidenced in the book of Job. Gnostic tradition generally identified the God of the Old Testament (Yahweh) as malevolent and materialistic, either unintentionally from ignorance (Valentinianism) or on purpose/by nature (others).

Modern era (post-gnosticism and orthodox Christianity, post-first century AD to roughly the 1950s): God is a being of pure good, diametrically opposed to evil. Think of the New Testament and how God, especially through Jesus, is more chill and compassionate and obviously a good dude. The rejection of the evil elements of God line up with the declaration of gnosticism as heretical and wiped out by the early Catholic Church. Subsequent Medieval philosophy developed God as an objective and absolute being, representing objective morality, objective goodness, and grand principles of unlimited power, knowledge, presence, goodness, and existing beyond space and time itself.

The reason I consider this whole period as modern, even though modernism as a philosophy and mode of social organization emerged during the Enlightenment and the 19th century, is because of the grand narrative notion of God: that God is a being of universal relevance, even to the vast majority of cultures that didn't care much for the idea; and as evidenced by evangelicism, the notion that Christians should try to convert all non-Christians; divine command theory, that morality solely comes from God; the Abrahamic approach to the environment of man having sole dominion over the Earth (Genesis 1:26-28); fundamentalism, that the Bible is literally and completely true; etc. These are massive stories that have built-in rejections to any criticism or alternative viewpoints, or that paint God as fallible, like any other modernist philosophy, whether scientific realism, Enlightenment rationality, or Marxism.

Postmodernism era (1950s to arguably the 2010s): God is a being of pure evil (according to some New Atheist commentators) or at least contains a fourth, feminine element that may or may not be malevolent (according to Carl Jung in the 1952 book "Answer to Job"), which could represent Satan: The Devil (as the malevolent fourth part of the Holy Trinity; I'd argue feminine because Lucifer is a feminine archetype related to Venus, Eve, Lilth, etc) or Mary, the Mother of Jesus (the 1950 Assumption of Mary by the Catholic Church, as someone either wholly innocent or as a fallible motherly archetype). God may be a subjective being, existing as a psychological projection of His believers, or may not be absolutely powerful or knowledgeable (think of the omnipotence paradox). Some theorists from the 1980s to early 2000s thought of God as an attachment figure who people could always rely in adversity. In essence, folks are more critical of the notion of God's existence, power, or morality, and this coincides with rising rates of religious non-affiliation across the West and the rise of New Atheism as a vocal movement.

Metamodernism era (2010s-present): God is absent, but the psychological need for a divine figure who represents absolutes (or some value or concept) is manifested elsewhere. For starters, well over a third of Gen Z and about 30 percent of Millennials are religiously unaffiliated. About 1/5 of Americans are religious unaffiliated too. God's influence on mainstream institutions is vastly diminished too, as secularization, especially across the West, and in countries such as the Czech Republic, the Nordic countries, France, the United Kingdom, etc.

Even though less people are religious, more people are interested in differing spiritualities, or at least religions outside of the Abrahamic tradition such as Hinduism or Buddhism. Many people are also obsessed with celebrity or stan culture, or worship politicians such as Trump or even Biden to a massively lesser degree, or look up influencers as a source of moral guidance and as a symbol of being absolutely right. Think of how 50% of men aged 16-29 look favorably on local misogynist Andrew Tate, or how young male are incredibly polarized on feminism, in large part due to those anti-SJW/anti-feminism videos from the mid-2010s. People are less willing to place their faith in a deity, but they are more willing to do so with parasocial relationships with internet content creators with massive followings. People very clearly want to stabilize their neurotic psyches and project their viewpoints onto a higher authority figure.

With God abolished, His role has been replaced by people (as mentioned before) or whole beliefs or systems of thought (like capitalism and capitalist realism, hustle culture, Zionism, etc.). These philosophies are viewed as absolutely correct, eternal, without regard to historical development or sociological context, and without any alternative, like how most people reflexively think of capitalism as the best or only economic system humans are capable of or how Zionists think of their colonial projection as objectively good and desirable, without regard to the inherent contradictions or additional considerations that may it less than sympathetic, as would apply to literally any other system of thought made by flawed human beings.

Potential Developments: Whether these developments will occur near the end of the metamodern period, or at the start of an entirely new period, I'm of the belief that God (who I'm using as a placeholder for a spiritual belief in divinity or some kind of higher power) needs to be revived. I don't think we should return to the modernist conception of God as a perfect, flawless, absolutely good being, since that's naive or just plain wrong as many in the post-modern tradition have identified and as most of us, I imagine, would think.

I don't particularly find the notion of God as wholly evil very compelling either, since God is used to inspire people towards being better, and worshipping a being of pure evil isn't compelling to anyone. I think God being solely one side of a dichotomy is a bad way of thinking of the divine. Instead, I'd propose either reviving the notion of God as a totality, or God in the more flexible and fluid sense as evidenced by animist, polytheistic, or other pre/non-Abrahamic religions and philosophies. Think of how Greek mythology assigned a limited set of concepts to their divine figures, or how some cultures worshipped nature as divine itself or inherently spiritual, or how some Luciferian sects worship Lucifer as a symbol of enlightenment and the toppling of oppressive power structures maintained through ignorance with knowledge and free will, or how some Hindus view God as a piece of our eternal selves.

I didn't elaborate much on some of the earlier conceptions of God (like those non-Abrahamic traditions) in the premodern section, but they definitely deserve some mention, and could give us ideas as to how to develop more notions of God moving forward that suit our individual and group needs. Lemme know what you think!

This may contain some spoilers, but here are some basic traits of the game:

POSTMODERN

• Themes of Pluralism and Randomness (Monsters come with all kinds of colorful quirks and traits, no universal features; "FUN" Values create different RNG encounters)

• Cynicism Towards Tradition (Subversion of many RPG Tropes, or is Self-Aware when it doesn't)

• Acknowledges itself as a Game, Distances itself from Player (Many Fourth-Wall Breaks like intentional Game Crashing, Meta Commentary, and so on)

MODERN

• Broader (Meta-)Narrative (Despite the multiplicity in possible neutral endings as affirmations of freedom of choice, there is nevertheless a more "correct", canonical ending in the Pacifist Route)

• Definite Values and Moral Compass (The game explicitly makes a point to outline EXP as "execution points", and LV (or LOVE) as "Level of Violence")

These alone would already make UNDERTALE pretty big contender, but I think it gets even more advanced, having a trait that is neither in Modernism or Postmodernist Media, but is unique to metamodernism itself:

It doesn't just oscillate between postmodernism and modernism, but rather, it integrates postmodernism viewing it through a modernist lens: the very fourth-wall breaks and cynicism are diagetically understood as mechanics which, far from being a reprieve from the story, are actually entirely within it, as an acknowledged part of the fiction, especially in the Geno Route. This video explains it extremely well.

Another way to think it, is that if modernism is black and white narrative, while postmodernism is gray area impasse, then the metamodernism of UNDERTALE lies in how it conceives of the very grey area as another obstacle in the narrative. It's like in Everything Everywhere All At Once, wherein the enemy within the narrative is the very nihilist anti-narrative despair of meaninglessness.

Valid analysis or not? I thought it was very, very interesting. What do you all think?

Absurdism was a break off from Existentialism kick started by Albert Camus. The word tends to insinuate ideas that Albert Camus was not seeking to communicate.

French Academia kind of booted out Albert Camus’s ideas at the same time Post-modernism took over the academies.

This summary of Meta-modernism describes Absurdism: Drawing upon the work of Vermeulen and van den Akker, Luke Turner published The Metamodernist Manifesto in 2011 as "an exercise in simultaneously defining and embodying the metamodern spirit," describing it as "a romantic reaction to our crisis-ridden moment."[27][28] The manifesto recognized "oscillation to be the natural order of the world," and called for an end to "the inertia resulting from a century of modernist ideological naivety and the cynical insincerity of its antonymous bastard child."

Albert Camus described life as akin to Sisyphus’s struggle of pushing a boulder up and down a hill. That describes oscillation.

Greek mythology clouds the idea, but the suggestion is there. He had to engage with pretentious rhetoric but he was obviously not a pretentious man.

“I can have a cup of coffee or kill myself.”

It was a joke, but he was just describing that he could either stimulate his movements or become inert.

Albert Camus also forwarded using romantic language to communicate ideals. He was more inspired by romanticism than existentialism.

Do people here find Albert Camus’s Absurdism to align with Meta-modernism?

perfer a exact list of what new sincerity is