The Flip, the Formation, and the Fun: A Metamodern Framework for Human Futures with Jonathan Rowson
Jun 26, 2024
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Philosopher Jonathan Rowson discusses metamodernism, calling for expert generalists to bridge disciplines and achieve a holistic understanding of reality. The podcast explores meta and poly crises, climate change perspectives, and strategic thinking for a post-growth world.
Embracing the expert generalist role promotes bridging gaps and synthesizing information effectively.
Integrating systems, souls, and society fosters understanding of complex global challenges through diverse perspectives.
Collective individuation aligns personal growth with societal needs, encouraging meaningful work for positive change.
Deep dives
Understanding the Meta-Modern Sentiment
Seeing others as more human and recognizing everyone's struggles, whether as parents, artists, or chess players, can foster connections and mutual understanding. Jonathan Rausen emphasizes the importance of engaging in conversations as equals and acknowledging our shared complicity in global challenges.
Becoming an Expert Generalist
The concept of being an expert generalist involves having deep knowledge in at least one area while possessing the agility to understand expertise in various fields. By combining specialized knowledge with the ability to seek expertise in different domains, expert generalists can bridge gaps and synthesize information effectively.
Navigating the Global Predicament
Jonathan Rausen discusses the importance of integrating systems, souls, and society to understand complex global challenges. This approach emphasizes the connection between external systems and internal human aspects, aiming to foster conversations that incorporate multiple perspectives and bring together diverse fields of knowledge.
Collective Individuation for Addressing Global Challenges
The concept of collective individuation involves integrating personal growth with cultural and societal contexts. By aligning individual development with the needs and challenges of the world, people can find meaningful work informed by the global predicament. This approach emphasizes finding purpose within the context of wider societal issues, encouraging collaborative efforts for positive change.
Existential Analysis of Individual's Disposition Towards Life
The concept of pre-tragic, tragic, and post-tragic stations of the self, developed by Zach Stein and Mark, presents an existential analysis of one's disposition towards life. Unlike traditional developmental models, these stations focus on the individual's relationship with experiences rather than progression through stages. While pre-tragic embraces the positivity and simplicity of life, tragic embodies moments of loss and heartbreak, prompting individuals to feel and process these emotions. The post-tragic phase integrates the energy of pre-tragic with the reality of tragic experiences, emphasizing a deeper understanding of life's meaning and value.
Navigating the World Events: Post-Tragic vs. Tragic
In the context of current global events, individuals often oscillate between the post-tragic and tragic states, adversely impacting their well-being. The constant exposure to significant world events can lead to emotional turmoil and mental strain. Encouraging a shift towards residing predominantly in the post-tragic realm involves techniques such as cultivating resilience, focusing on local engagements, and being mindful of the information consumed. Balancing awareness of global challenges with personal joys and connections is essential for maintaining emotional stability and fostering a healthier outlook on life.
Engaging with the human predicament requires new ways of understanding the world - novel perspectives that are rooted in a more holistic and interdependent mindset than those dominant in the industrialized society of the past few centuries.
Today’s conversation with philosopher and social scientist Jonathan Rowson dives into the emerging ways of being that could serve us as we move toward a post-growth world, including what he has found particularly helpful in his decades of work studying the metacrisis.
In a world of (often siloed) hyper-specific experts, how would valuing the role of the “expert generalist” both change the face of academia and help us understand the world from a more holistic systems perspective? How does metamodernism merge the best of modernism and postmodernism to create a more comprehensive and constructive view of reality? How do we find and embrace our calling in the context of the metacrisis in order to take purposeful action forward?
About Jonathan Rowson:
Jonathan Rowson is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive of Perspectiva, a publishing house and praxis collective based primarily in London. Perspectiva describes itself as an urgent one-hundred-year project to improve the relationship between systems, souls, and society in theory and practice. Jonathan is a philosopher and social scientist by academic training and has degrees from Oxford, Harvard and Bristol Universities. He has written extensively on the idea of metacrisis as our multifaceted delusion, and he is increasingly focused on experiments in community and spiritual praxis to help shift socio-economic immunity to change. He is an Open Society Fellow and a Fellow at The Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity at the University of Surrey. In his prior role as Director of the Social Brain Centre at the Royal Society of Arts he authored influential research reports including A New Agenda on Climate Change, Money Talks, and Spiritualise. He is also a Chess Grandmaster and three-time British Champion (2004–6) and views the game as a continuing source of insight and inspiration. His book, The Moves that Matter – A Grandmaster on the Game of Life was published by Bloomsbury in 2019.
