Jason Ānanda Josephson-Storm on Revolution & Happiness

Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm is Professor of Religion and Chair of Science & Technology Studies at Williams College, and the author of “Metamodernism: The Future of Theory.” This is the first time I’ve done a second interview - and it is because I want desperately to understand what he means when he say Metamodern.

All right, Jason, thank you so much for accepting my invitation to come back and talk about metamodernism.

Yeah, it’s an honor to not only be on your program once, but twice.

It’s true. Just to catch people up, I first encountered you through your book The Myth of Disenchantment—which I really enjoyed. Then I discovered you had written a book on metamodernism, a concept that pops up here and there in my world of brand and cultural strategy. I was really keen to talk to you about it last time, and I’m excited to dive deeper today. The idea keeps resurfacing, and I find myself wanting to better understand it. So, let’s start at the beginning. When did you first encounter the term "metamodernism"? And what did it seem to mean to you at that time?

Sure. In a way, despite the title of my book, I actually came to the term “metamodernism” fairly late. The manuscript initially went out for peer review under the title Absolute Disruption: The Future of Theory After Postmodernism.

That was the original full title. And the peer reviewers kept saying, “Okay, we get that you're critiquing postmodernism—but what is the name of your positive project?” They wanted something I could identify with, or at least a shorthand for it.

I realized that made sense. I also wanted to avoid any egotism, like having it referred to as “Storm’s theory” or something. So I started looking at other movements and thinkers who were also trying to move beyond postmodernism.

And for me, when I was brainstorming during the revision process—thinking through what to focus on—I was reminded of some work I’d read decades earlier by the Nigerian art historian Moyo Okediji. He wrote an essay in a book about diasporic art, specifically focusing on both African and Jewish diasporas. I had picked it up while preparing to teach a course on diaspora, which, in the end, never got greenlit.

In that piece, Okediji used the term metamodern to describe certain artists he saw as working through—not just past—modernism and postmodernism. He used some really evocative imagery, talking about processes like fracturing and reappropriating elements of both the modern and the postmodern. And I remember thinking, that’s kind of what I’m trying to do.

With that in mind, I started looking around to see how else the term had been used. There were scattered instances—a volume here, a mention there—but overall, I wasn’t aiming to describe a fully established movement called metamodernism. I was more interested in trying to intervene in the current moment.

What I noticed among others using the term—and I’ve mentioned this before—is a shared sense that postmodernism needs to be worked through in order to be transcended. Where I diverge from most of the prior work on metamodernism is in the approach: a lot of people were focused on categorizing cultural works as modern, postmodern, or metamodern.

That’s not a game I’m against, but it’s not really the game I’m playing. I think there’s room for debate about how useful that kind of cataloging is, but it wasn’t my primary aim. I wasn’t trying to describe a shift—I was trying to trigger one.

And since the book came out, I’ve been really pleased to connect with others in the broader metamodernism space—people like Brendan Dempsey and others who are exploring the philosophical, political, and cultural shifts happening right now. What we all seem to share is this belief that postmodernism—however we each define it, and I do offer a specific definition in my book—is no longer the dominant framework. And that what’s needed isn’t a return to what came before, but the creation of a new mode entirely.

There’s definitely been a lot of conservative backlash against postmodernism. But what’s striking to me is that these metamodern movements aren’t part of that reactionary trend. Instead, they’re trying to forge a different—and often more optimistic—path forward. I can go into more or less specificity, but that’s the broad picture.

Yeah, yeah. That’s wonderful. I’m curious about drawing a distinction that I think is where you and I connect—the difference between describing a paradigm shift and triggering one. What’s your sense of the people who are trying to describe metamodernism as a paradigm shift? What does that look like to you? And then, what do you mean when you say you’re trying to trigger one? That feels bold and ambitious.

Yeah—yes, to both of those things.

So, on the first point: there are folks out there trying to describe this shift. One key figure is Timothy Vermeulen. I’ve met him briefly—he seems like an interesting guy. He and a group of colleagues contributed to an edited volume where they tried to understand why contemporary art movements feel so different now compared to the height of postmodernism in art and literature.

They landed on two main insights. One, which I think is genuinely useful, is that there’s been a kind of retreat or backlash against the cynical, ironic distance typically associated with postmodernism. I think that’s a valid observation.

Where I find their approach less helpful is in their definition of metamodern art as a kind of oscillation between modern and postmodern sensibilities. That framing is really hard to falsify. Once you define something as an oscillation, you can essentially include anything—because nearly anything can be read as oscillating between sincerity and irony, or whatever poles you’re working with. It becomes too inclusive to be analytically useful.

That said, I do think they were onto something in noting a tonal shift. I just interpret it differently. I don’t subscribe to the idea of a singular zeitgeist in the way some of them do. I think the picture is more complex than that.

I don’t believe we’ve moved neatly from modernity to postmodernity and now into metamodernity. That linear framing doesn’t really hold up for me. But I do think there were dominant, idealized artistic and academic models that gained traction in the 1970s and 1980s—models often labeled as postmodern—and those are no longer driving the conversation today.

For example, much of the discourse around postmodern literature focused on figures like Alain Robbe-Grillet, who essentially no one reads anymore. It would’ve been a mistake to assume, as some did back then, that that was the future direction of literature.

Similarly, when thinkers like Jean-François Lyotard were arguing that there were “no more grand narratives,” that may have described a narrow slice of cultural production at the time—especially in certain philosophical and literary circles—but it absolutely doesn’t apply today. In our current moment, we are awash in grand narratives. They’re everywhere, in all sorts of competing and overlapping forms.

So, while I may be critical of some efforts to define metamodernism as a kind of fixed era, I do think those thinkers accurately captured a tonal shift—a change in what Raymond Williams might call the “structure of feeling.” And I don’t want to downplay that. I think they were right to notice that something had changed.

Yeah. How would you describe that tonal shift? What do you mean by “structure of feeling”? What does that look like to you?

In the realm of art, I think we saw a kind of clutch—a moment of holding on, maybe even a panic—when postmodernism had reached a kind of saturation point. And to me, the most perceptive analyst of that moment is the late literary historian Fredric Jameson.

In his influential book on postmodernism, Jameson described it as a kind of cultural consciousness that emerged out of late-stage capitalism—one that had effectively flattened depth. He focused on figures like Robbe-Grillet, but also artists like Andy Warhol, who exemplified a kind of ironic collapse between high and low culture.

It was pop culture masquerading as high art, or maybe high art cloaked in pop aesthetics. Either way, the distinction between the two began to blur. You had this ironic detachment, a lack of affect, and a celebration of surface over substance—that was central to what postmodernism felt like at the time.

Against Jameson, thinkers like Cornel West rightly pointed out that he was only capturing a thin veneer of what was actually happening in the arts and culture at that moment. His analysis often excluded the experiences of artists from marginalized communities and overlooked working-class or everyday forms of artistic expression, which were just as vital, even then. He was focusing on a very elite stratum—arguably even within that historical moment.

Moreover, the economic conditions Jameson associated with late-stage capitalism were very specific to the 1970s and ’80s. He was interested, for example, in television as a dominant cultural force that shaped a unified sense of value, and in people being trapped in jobs they didn’t love but felt stuck in. But that’s not our world anymore.

Today, we live in a much more precarious economic moment. Employment is often unstable or gig-based. Television is no longer the dominant medium—social media and the internet have taken its place, fragmenting cultural consumption and identity in new ways.

Even Jameson’s analysis of the aesthetic collapse between pop and high art—what was considered “cool” at the time—is no longer applicable. What counted as cool in 1980s fine art or pop culture is very different from what’s happening now in either space.

There was a specific cultural moment at the start of the 1980s when things got dark and gritty—ironic, bleak, and self-aware. You could see it in Frank Miller’s superhero comics, or in films like Sin City.

Exactly—that’s what I was thinking.

Exactly. Good. We have similar cultural touchstones, but that's not what's happening now. So the next question becomes: what is happening now?

One thing to emphasize is that we’ve always lived in a more pluralistic cultural landscape than early critics of postmodernism acknowledged. There was never just one single postmodernism. Some cultural forms have remained consistent for decades, largely untouched by these sweeping theoretical frameworks.

Take mystery fiction, for example—one of the two biggest literary genres in the world. While there have been subtle shifts since the ’80s and ’90s, the genre’s core structure remains intact. Agatha Christie and Louise Penny might be separated by generations, but their narrative frameworks are strikingly similar. Some traditions simply persist.

I mean, they’ve diversified slightly, but not by much. The shifts are there, but they tend to be minor. So certain forms—like mystery fiction, for example—never fit neatly into postmodernism, and they don’t necessarily fit cleanly into whatever this new mode is either.

We can also see, in the aesthetic realm, a kind of backlash against some of the darker, grittier versions of pop culture. There have been tentative efforts to explore more emotively sincere, less ironic, and sometimes less dark forms of popular storytelling. Think of shows like For All Mankind or Ted Lasso—these don't align with the high-postmodern sensibility.

And we could dig further into the economic backdrop here. It seems likely that in an age of precarity, we’re craving more aesthetic reassurance than in previous eras. Television, too, is less dominant now—partly due to the pluralization and fracturing of the collective conversation, a trend that’s only been intensified by the siloed nature of social media.

All that to say: yes, I do see significant shifts over the past 20 years. I’m not claiming that things don’t change. But I do want us to be more precise in how we identify those changes—and also to recognize that cultural eras were never monolithic. Modernity didn’t apply evenly across the globe. Postmodernism didn’t dominate all artistic forms. And metamodernism, I don’t think, defines all art being made today.

Still, I do believe it’s useful to talk about particular developments in art, popular culture, and other cultural expressions through that lens.

And in terms of my own project—sorry, you were going to jump in.

Yeah, I was going to ask, because I think this is where I’m really curious—at a broad level, what are we actually talking about when we say paradigm versus zeitgeist? I feel you pushing back on the idea of a zeitgeist, but at the same time acknowledging that there are real shifts happening. You’re rubbing away a lot of boundaries, but also marking a few clearly. So, in your view, what’s the right way to talk about change? How do you approach it?

So, I do think in terms of paradigms—but I think of them in a much more Kuhnian sense, and even more so through the lens of Larry Laudan, a later interpreter of Kuhn. That is, I see paradigms as concrete models.

People may or may not be familiar with Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a groundbreaking text. Even those who’ve read it might not realize that the word paradigm was already in circulation before Kuhn used it. The term originally came from linguistics and pedagogy—a paradigm was a set of rote conjugations you memorized. Like: Ich bin, du bist, er/sie/es ist, and so on.

What Kuhn was interested in was how certain scientific works—including, notably, textbooks—came to function as paradigmatic frameworks that helped disciplines organize themselves. These texts provided a shared language, reference points, and a way of seeing the field.

One of the things people often underappreciate, which Kuhn says quite explicitly, is that it’s usually textbooks, not the original thinkers, that solidify a paradigm. For instance, Newtonianism as we know it lives on in a condensed, second-order way that goes beyond—and in some ways diminishes—Isaac Newton’s actual writings. It was later figures like Euler who helped codify Newton’s math, and much of Newton’s broader work—like his alchemical writings—was ignored. So what persists is a particular Newtonianism, which functions as a paradigm even after Newton himself.

Now, here’s where I diverge from Kuhn. He tended to treat scientific fields as if there were always a single, dominant paradigm at any given time. But thinkers like Larry Laudan have pointed out that fields often contain competing paradigms. You can have, for example, Lamarckian evolution, Darwinian evolution, and anti-evolutionist perspectives all in play within biology at the same historical moment.

Paradigms can be fuzzy around the edges, and sometimes fluid—but even so, certain models do come to predominate. They shape the terms of debate and the way people structure knowledge.

When I talk about postmodernism as an academic paradigm, what I’m really interested in is the process of anthologization—how certain kinds of textbooks and readers, like Postmodernism: A Reader or Postmodern History: The Reader, excerpted works from a range of thinkers and packaged them together as if they represented a single, unified movement.

These anthologies were almost always translated into English, primarily for a U.S. context. And yet, the U.S.—along with the broader Anglophone world, particularly Britain—had an outsized influence on shaping the very notion of postmodernism, despite the fact that most of the intellectual material was being imported from France, Germany, and elsewhere.

What also happened in this process was the extraction of select pieces of work from thinkers who were often in tension with one another, or even directly hostile to each other’s ideas—and who came from different disciplines entirely. Take, for example, Foucault and Derrida: for much of their professional lives, they didn’t get along, didn’t see themselves as part of the same intellectual project, and neither embraced the label of postmodernism. And yet, you open up a postmodernism anthology, and there they are—side by side. You get a snippet of Derrida, a snippet of Foucault, often stripped of the context or the parts of their thought that didn’t neatly fit the postmodern paradigm.

In this way, those anthologies created an illusion of coherence that didn’t really exist. The result was a version of “postmodernism” that looked far more unified—especially in the Anglophone academy—than it ever was in France or elsewhere.

In my book, I identify five key philosophical features that defined that postmodern paradigm. We can go into that if you want, depending on how granular we want to get. But the main point is that this was a paradigm—one that was actively taught, often across multiple humanistic and social science disciplines. That said, it wasn’t all-encompassing. There were fields where other paradigms prevailed.

Take economics, for instance. I’m literally looking out the window at the economics department right now, and it’s safe to say postmodernism never really reached those offices. Neoclassical economics, in many ways, was the furthest thing from postmodernism—or at least that’s one common reading. It came from a very different intellectual lineage, with its own blind spots and issues.

So, stepping back to your broader question about how we talk about change: I’m more than willing to grant that there have been large-scale shifts—concrete, structural shifts—whether in the dominant modes of capitalist production, or in social transformations like industrialization, urbanization, rising literacy, or the emergence of the internet. All of these have had clear, demonstrable impacts on both local and global forms of cultural and intellectual production.

But even so, those shifts don’t cleanly map onto something like a zeitgeist. They’re messier, more underdetermined. And what they tend to produce is not a singular mode of thought or feeling, but rather a pluralization—a diversification—of modes.

And so, the key point in my reading of paradigms—what sets it apart from the standard Kuhnian formulation—is that I think paradigms often generate multiple and sometimes competing models. We can still call them paradigms, or if we want to step outside of strictly academic language, we could think of them as exemplars, genres, or clusters of works that serve as reference points.

One more point I’ll add—mainly for the extra geeky readers—is another area where I depart from Kuhn, something I also argue in the Metamodernism book. Kuhn believed that you couldn’t translate between paradigms. He argued for what he called their “incommensurability”—that the terms and assumptions of one paradigm couldn’t be directly translated into those of another.

But here’s the thing: Kuhn made that case by comparing paradigms—by showing us how they differed—which means he was, in practice, rendering them commensurable. He was creating a framework to compare things he claimed were incomparable.

Now, that’s not to say there aren’t mistranslations, gaps, or aspects that get lost in the shift from one paradigm to another. Kuhn’s famous example was how the meaning of “motion” changes from Aristotle to Newton. And yes, that shift is significant. But even so, you can compare them. You can encapsulate the ideas of one paradigm within another.

It’s not that there’s ever a truly neutral vantage point where you’re totally paradigm-free. But we can say that Newtonian physics still works perfectly well within an Einsteinian world—as long as you stay within a certain scale. That’s important. The paradigms can overlap functionally, even if their foundational assumptions differ.

Yeah, that’s amazing. There’s so much in what you’ve just said. I love the idea that the term paradigm itself began as a metaphor—pulled from grammar, of all places. Kuhn used grammar to describe the evolution of thought in science.

Exactly—grammatical patterns.

And teaching. He was deeply interested in how language shapes thought. He was part of that broader intellectual moment we associate with the linguistic turn. Kuhn really saw scientific language as a language in its own right. That comes through not just in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, but in his later essays as well. When he revisited the topic, he consistently returned to the role of language.

So cool. And something else came to mind as you were talking—it might be a bit of a tangent, but I’m thinking about the idea of simultaneity in paradigms. Are you familiar with semiotics?

Yeah, of course.

Studying the dominant, recessive, and emerging—that whole framework—is a useful way to identify different layers of meaning or significance that are unfolding within a culture or category.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I think that framework can be helpful when we’re talking about paradigms, too. I’d agree with you there.

Is that right? I wasn’t sure—does that feel like a fair overlap?

I think so. Yeah, I think it's fair—at least at a certain level of generalization. Totally.

And so, just to circle back—because you asked earlier, and I want to make sure I return to it—what I was trying to do in my book Metamodernism: The Future of Theory was to take the paradigm of postmodernism that had been taught to a certain generation of us and work through it.

I learned that paradigm in grad school, and I went out of my way—made pilgrimages to Palo Alto, to Paris, and other places—places where people like Rorty and Derrida were active and doing their thing. I tried to absorb as much as I could.

And let me just check—can I cuss on your show, or should I avoid that?

Go for it.

Okay, cool. So, I don’t think postmodernism was b******t. I don’t think it was junk. I think it was valuable. But I also think that by the time I encountered it, it was delivering diminishing returns.

And what I wanted to do—really, as a way of working through my own intellectual heritage and training—was to figure out what parts of it were worth holding on to, what parts needed to be left behind or radically reworked, and how to grapple with a set of fundamental philosophical problems. Because postmodernism did help surface those problems, but it didn’t invent them—and often didn’t resolve them either.

So in the Metamodernism book, I took the postmodern paradigm as a kind of springboard—not as proof of my conclusions—and tried to work through what I see as five core areas. I think any serious scholar, or really any deeply engaged thinker, has to confront those areas and come up with their own responses.

And I should add: I believe in doing a kind of no-b******t philosophy. A lot of what gets called “theory”—especially in the hands of second-order thinkers, not necessarily people like Derrida or Foucault, who had deep commitments—is just rhetorical sleight of hand. It's people saying things that sound cool, without really caring whether it makes sense or leads anywhere.

A lot of that work felt indifferent to actual clarity or substance—just buzzwords stacked on buzzwords. Someone might invent a phrase like “epistemological ontotheogenesis,” drop it into a chapter, and wrap it in some grandiose language. But when you try to unpack what it actually means, there’s not much there.

And then, if you pushed some of those thinkers on their claims, the ideas would often just evaporate. They’d either turn out to be truisms or vague, messy assertions that didn’t really hold up under scrutiny.

In The Metamodernism book, I’m committed to doing what I call a no-b******t philosophy. That means making my arguments clear. It’s a deliberate break from the stylistic aesthetics of postmodernism. Again, I don’t think people like Derrida or Foucault were trying to b******t anyone—but they were doing a lot of play. And Derrida especially, as time went on, kind of leaned too far into the free jazz of his own language. He started riffing in ways that, to me, became less helpful for doing actual philosophical work.

Maybe I’m just less of a poet than some of those guys—but what I want is for readers to be able to actually see what I’m arguing. I want my positions to be intelligible and, importantly, contestable. If I’m wrong, I want someone to be able to show that I’m wrong. There’s no value in producing a formulation that’s unfalsifiable, especially if it’s not helping us think better or more clearly.

Take Derrida’s point, for example, about writing preceding speech. That’s interesting—until he redefines “writing” so broadly that it includes any trace or mark on the world. At that point, the claim becomes either trivial or obscured. There is insight in there, I think—but it gets buried beneath the rhetorical flourish.

I also don’t think we should base arguments solely on authority. And ironically, many so-called postmodern theorists who were vocally anti-canon just went ahead and canonized a different set of dudes. Then they treated those figures as if they had privileged access to meaning or truth. If you wanted to understand how meaning works, they’d quote a line from Derrida instead of consulting linguistics or asking a diagnostic question about whether Derrida’s framework actually holds up.

It reminds me a bit of the medieval scholastics—at least, the way we’re taught to think about them. When they wanted to know how many teeth a horse had, the story goes, they’d check the Bible, then Aristotle, and only then would they consider looking at a horse.

Some scholars got caught in a similar trap—where philosophy became an exercise in commentary and interpretation rather than inquiry. It turned into an interpretive game around a newly canonized set of thinkers. I’m not saying everyone did that—props to those who didn’t—but it became a real institutional pattern. And in some ways, it still is.

You see it, for instance, when someone dares to critique Foucault. A Foucault scholar might respond not by engaging the critique, but by saying, “Well, if you’re criticizing Foucault, you must not understand him.” The idea that disagreement implies ignorance—that's a problem.

But I’m like—no, no—I respect Foucault. He’s one of the thinkers who’s had the biggest influence on my own thought. But he was wrong about certain things. And that’s okay. We can provide evidence for that. We can say, “Here’s some independent data. Here’s why this particular claim doesn’t hold up.” That doesn’t mean we throw him out completely—it means we acknowledge that he was a fallible person, like all of us.

And for me, that sense of fallibility is built into what I call metamodernism. I recognize that I’m going to make mistakes too. I think it’s crucial to admit that, to avoid some of the intellectual sins that led to the turn toward postmodernism in the first place—things like the universalizing tendencies of certain strands of Enlightenment thought, where a small subset of thinkers were treated as if they had infallible authority.

So all of this is to say: yes, I’m trying to recognize my own limits. But that said, I also set out to change scholarship by offering a concrete, no-b******t model for how we might do things better. I wanted to provide a set of practical, usable tools that could help us move forward—across epistemology, theories of meaning, and ethics.

That’s what I was trying to do in the Metamodernism book.

And honestly, I’ve been really delighted by the response. I think people recognized the need. There was enough of a zeitgeist shift that folks were ready for something that wasn’t just reheated postmodernism—or works that were supposedly critical of postmodernism but ended up replicating it in slightly different language, without really grappling with its problems.

Take something like new materialism. I found that school of thought inspiring for a time—but eventually I came to see that, in many cases, it was just transposing everything postmodernism had said about literature onto the physical world. So it felt like more of the same, dressed up differently. I’ll bracket that for now, but that’s part of the broader issue.

Anyway, the book came out, and it won a major book award—which was a really lovely surprise. It’s just been translated into Spanish, and a contemporary Spanish philosopher even described it as the most important philosophical work of the last decade, which is incredibly humbling.

I’ve also got Turkish, Vietnamese, and Chinese translations in the works. Though we’ll see if the Chinese edition makes it through—I have a footnote to the Dalai Lama, and that alone might be enough to sink it once they notice.

So what’s the footnote? How does the Dalai Lama figure into metamodernism?

Well, I have a long section in the book on ethics, and part of what I’m doing there is grappling with something I see as one of the enduring puzzles of postmodernism—specifically, postmodernism as a scholarly paradigm, not the artistic movement. Let’s bracket off all the art and focus strictly on postmodernism in the academic sense.

One of the things that seemed puzzling about it—at least to many observers—was the way postmodernist scholars often held, on one hand, to a stance of value neutrality or value relativism (sometimes labeled “cultural relativism”), and on the other hand, spent a lot of time calling out things like racism, sexism, and colonialism.

That struck many as a contradiction—but within the paradigm, it wasn’t necessarily seen that way. The prevailing logic was that criticism or deconstruction of values wasn’t the same as proposing values. You could call things out—expose the ideological, colonial, patriarchal underpinnings of a text or institution—while still claiming to be value-neutral, because you weren’t offering a positive normative project.

I think that was a mistake.

But this was the rationale: being a critic was seen as a kind of safeguard against complicity. If you didn’t commit to values, you couldn’t be co-opted. And so what emerged was a scholarly culture that became incredibly skilled at critique—we got very good at tearing things down, exposing power structures, identifying implicit biases, and so on.

Now, just to be clear, I do think that work is important. I’m not at all opposed to calling out racism, sexism, homophobia, patriarchy, and the rest. But I also want to suggest that this is not a value-neutral activity. It’s a value-laden one. And failing to acknowledge that made it harder for people to feel like they could take a stand for something. We stopped proposing solutions because we were trained to believe that any kind of proposal was inherently suspect.

And that’s what I push back on in the ethics chapter of the book. I argue that we need to reclaim the ability to build positive projects—that there are legitimate, philosophically rigorous ways to bridge fact and value. I try to offer some concrete thinking about that, including how values don’t necessarily contaminate scholarship if we’re explicit about them, and if we embrace a more modest, pluralistic understanding of academic inquiry.

I'm part of what you might call the tolerant left. I believe in allowing opponents into the conversation—because I think good arguments are stronger than bad ones. And when we try to silence dissenting views instead of engaging them, we often end up giving those views a kind of rebellious credibility they don’t deserve.

Now, how does the Dalai Lama figure into this? Well, I cite him briefly in a footnote as an example of someone who’s tried to articulate a kind of secular ethics—an ethics not rooted in religious doctrine but in shared human values. That idea was part of a broader point I was making about the possibility of articulating a value system that isn't absolutist, but still meaningful. And that, apparently, might be enough to raise a red flag in China.

Let me just say, for the record: I’m not saying we should be letting actual Nazis into the conversation. We may have to draw a hard line there. But bracketing that out for a moment, I do think we can—and should—argue about values. The idea that values are somehow untouchable or entirely extrinsic to the domain of scholarship is, I think, a mistake.

In reality, values are often deeply entangled with factual claims. Or to put it more strongly: values often depend on factual claims. Questions like, “How many children are being fed by USAID?” or “Is global warming actually a human-made phenomenon?”—these are factual inquiries that shape our moral stances. Our values emerge from our understanding of the evidence. So scholarship can’t pretend to be value-free if it’s engaging with real-world consequences.

That said, I want to reaffirm the importance of calling out harmful structures—racism, sexism, homophobia, colonialism. That work matters. But if that’s all we do—if critique is the endpoint—we risk building a culture of pessimism, one where problems are seen as intractable, and solutions are never imagined.

So the question becomes: what is the positive flip side of critique? What’s the mirror image of that critical impulse?

In the book, I talk about this in terms of what I call revolutionary happiness. And here, I’m drawing from two pre-existing philosophical traditions. In some ways, this might be the least “original” part of the book—but I’m completely fine with that, because what I think is fresh is how I bring these traditions together.

On one side, I draw from critical theory—that is, the tradition of scholarship devoted to diagnosing structures of domination, oppression, and victimization. I’m thinking here of the Frankfurt School, but also of more contemporary forms like critical race theory, gender theory, and related work. That tradition is essential.

But I want to flip it. I want to ask: what would a reconstructive version of that look like? What would it mean not only to critique racism, for example, but to seriously imagine what a post-racist society might be? I’m not saying we’re already there, far from it—but I think it’s vital to hold onto the idea that racism is a hard but solvable problem. And that opens space to ask: what concrete steps can we take toward being better anti-racist actors? What would a just society actually look like?

That’s one part of it.

The second part draws on a different tradition—perhaps more surprising: virtue ethics. The name is a little misleading, but what I’m talking about goes all the way back to the origins of the academic project itself—ancient Greece—where one of philosophy’s core purposes was to help people figure out how to live a good life.

And it turns out that this is actually a fundamental and important thing. When I talk to my students, for example, many of them don’t really know why they’re in school—other than some vague sense that it might lead to a job someday. Whether those jobs will exist or not is anyone’s guess.

But what I do think we can offer—whether our students end up wealthy or struggling—is a space to reflect on what it means to live a life worth having lived. What does it mean to live a good life?

That’s where I start connecting things to an Aristotelian discourse—specifically, Aristotle’s concept of eudaimonia, which can be translated variously as “well-souledness,” “well-spiritedness,” or more accessibly, as flourishing. What does it mean to flourish?

And from there, I want to explore what happens when we bring together critical theory and virtue ethics. For example: What does a flourishing, post-racial society look like?

Now, I should note that I want to revise virtue ethics a bit. It’s often presented as a highly individualistic project—about cultivating one’s own inner virtues in isolation. But that’s not how Aristotle originally envisioned it, and I don’t think that’s how it should function today. Because if you’re living in an unjust society, then flourishing can’t just be a private achievement. People need to be able to make demands on the social order—to call for real, systemic change.

That’s crucial. Another important distinction I make in the book is between what Aristotle called eudaimonia and what he called euphoria. I translate that distinction into what I call lowercase “h” happiness and capital “H” Happiness. Lowercase happiness is passing, surface-level—it’s the feeling you get from eating a great bag of chips or having a nice bike ride. And that’s fine! But what I’m calling for is something deeper: capital H Happiness. A kind of foundational flourishing.

This lets me connect to other thinkers too—people like Hannah Arendt, who wrote about the relationship between happiness and political freedom. And it lets us revisit values that still matter, even if they’ve been misused or hollowed out—like the revolutionary American ideals of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” If we interpret that last one as capital H Happiness, I think we can recover something genuinely meaningful—without needing to idealize the Founders or slip into nostalgia.

All of this is to say: I want to call for a kind of revolutionary human flourishing. And this is where I depart from many others—finally—and where the Dalai Lama comes into the picture.

I don’t see virtue ethics or the question of the good life as something that only happened in ancient Greece. That conversation took place in other parts of the world as well. In early Confucian thought, for instance, there was a serious inquiry into what flourishing means. Similarly, in early Indian Buddhist contexts, there was deep reflection on what it means to live well, to live ethically, and to live meaningfully.

And here’s where I try to tie the pieces together: what I take from figures like the Dalai Lama—especially in his commentary on the Indian thinker Shantideva, which I cite in the book—is the idea that compassion is central to what it means to live a happy life. So if there’s one virtue I’m really standing up for in the book, it’s that: compassion.

That’s because we’re not atomized individuals, despite what some philosophical or economic models might suggest. We’re not isolated units floating through the world on our own. That was one of the central errors, I think, of neoclassical economics and of methodological individualism more broadly—both of which I critique elsewhere in the book. In truth, we’re entangled. We’re enmeshed in each other’s lives.

And that means my flourishing is inevitably tied to the flourishing of the people around me—of the community I’m a part of. That community might be as small as your family or your neighborhood, or it might scale up to larger networks or even the global context. There are pros and cons to widening that scope, of course. But whatever scale you're working at, the core insight holds: flourishing is relational.

And there's good evidence for this in contemporary psychology and in what’s sometimes called “happiness studies.” That research consistently shows that people report greater happiness and life satisfaction when they dedicate part of their lives to helping others. You can see this play out in simple, tangible ways. If I eat a bag of chips, there’s only so much joy I get from that. But if I give that bag of chips to someone who’s hungry—say, a homeless person who might be starving—I feel a deeper and longer-lasting sense of satisfaction.

Now, of course, we need to be careful. This isn’t a call for self-martyrdom. We need to understand boundaries and avoid turning compassion into self-erasure. But I do think there’s a lot we can tease out and develop to deepen our understanding of what compassion really means—and why it matters so much.

And I try to do more work than some other thinkers in terms of figuring out the texture of that compassion—what it looks like, how it operates, what it actually feels like in human terms. But anyway, that’s where the gesture to the Dalai Lama’s interpretation of Shantideva comes in, and his argument that compassion is central to human happiness. That’s the footnote—the one that might cause issues with the Chinese translation.

Right. Yeah. They don’t exactly love the Dalai Lama.

No, they really don’t. And if that footnote does anything, it gets us right to the heart of what excites me about metamodernism—both in its diagnosis of postmodernism and in its reconstruction of something beyond it.

I mean, I’ve been thinking about this for years. I went to a liberal arts school and took a literary criticism class, and I remember learning what it meant to be a critic. It was powerful. Seductive, even. There was something thrilling about being able to pull things apart like that.

But until hearing you frame it the way you do, I hadn’t really thought about it as being grounded in a kind of value neutrality—this sense that I wasn’t making claims or proposing anything, I was just revealing truths. Just being an agent of destruction, as you put it.

And it does feel like we’re at the end of a long era where that mode of critique shaped so much—our social life, our cultural habits, even our politics. Maybe I’m being melodramatic, but I also feel like something is shifting. And the way you describe it—especially the emphasis on flourishing and compassion—it resonates deeply.

I remember, last time we talked, you mentioned becoming a father. And you spoke about how the absence of any constructive instinct in the work that came before really hit you, and how that helped drive some of your thinking around metamodernism and flourishing.

So I guess I’d love to hear you respond to any of this—but also speak to the practicality of it. I’m a father too, in a small town. I feel this drive to help my community have the kinds of conversations we just don’t seem capable of having. And to go back to grammar for a moment—maybe we don’t even know how to be constructive anymore. Maybe we’ve forgotten how to disagree productively. Is that part of the same thread for you?

Yeah. Let me underscore three things you just said, because I fully agree with you. First, this idea of critique run amok—criticism that becomes oddly dogmatic, and often incapable of turning its lens on itself—has absolutely taken root, both in intellectual circles and in broader public discourse.

And it’s had a corrosive effect. I think it’s contributed to a kind of cultural and political exhaustion. I say this as someone on the left—I identify as a leftist—but I also believe that, in recent decades, much of the left has focused almost exclusively on calling out the negative, without articulating a positive vision to work toward.

That imbalance breeds cynicism. It leaves people disempowered, feeling like nothing can be done. If the only narrative around climate change, for example, is one of inevitable extinction—no escape, no alternatives—then of course people are going to feel helpless. But in doing that, we overlook the things that can be done to improve our lived environment.

That kind of fatalism drives disengagement. It lowers voter turnout, suppresses civic participation, and feeds a sense of collective paralysis.

Second point: I do believe in critique. Deeply. It has its place, and it matters. But I see it as the first step, not the last. We should absolutely begin with a rigorous, even relentless critique of what exists. But after that comes the harder, more vulnerable work: sticking up for something. Saying, “Here’s what we believe in,” and then doing the work to imagine and articulate a better world.

That’s where I differ slightly from the “post-critique” crowd. I’m a fellow traveler, but I don’t think we’ll ever be done with critique. I just think we can’t end there.

And this connects directly to what you said about learning to have hard conversations. We need to recover the ability to engage disagreement—not just to point out what's wrong, but to do so with the goal of building something better. The weight, the responsibility, lies in taking that next step. Even if it's a long, difficult road, the work is to imagine and work toward a better future.

And finally, yes—this perspective came into sharper focus for me through parenthood. I was writing the Metamodernism book during the process of becoming a father. My daughter’s six now—it’s wild how quickly time passes—but that transition really clarified something for me.

I realized that the postmodern, deconstructive approach often terminates in a kind of cynical nihilism. And that ends up disempowering both individuals and communities. So I started asking: how do we move forward, without pretending the world isn't complex or difficult? How do we struggle—positively, and with clarity—to make it better?

That’s what I wanted to figure out. Not as a naive gesture, but as an honest and hopeful one.

With metamodernism, I’ve tried to offer some resources for moving forward—not just within philosophy, epistemology, ethics, language, and the social sciences, but also in terms of how we might rethink political engagement and our relationships with those around us.

We need positive projects. But we also need to be mindful of the traps we can fall into while pursuing them. One trap is ignoring suffering—turning away from injustice or pain for the sake of optimism. That’s not what I’m advocating. Another trap is trying to produce an overly homogenous vision of the future, where everyone’s supposed to think or feel the same. I’m deeply committed to pluralism, and to preserving space for difference.

That said, I also believe that working together—across those differences—is one of the most powerful ways to transcend the very divisions that challenge us.

Let me give you something concrete. In the sociological literature, there’s compelling evidence about how to meaningfully fight racism. As someone who considers himself an anti-racist activist—and that goes back into my personal history, which I’ll bracket for now—I want to be honest about what’s effective.

Calling people out for racism is sometimes necessary. But it often puts people on the defensive. Nudging, or gently challenging, can work—but the most powerful tool seems to be collaborative engagement. When people from different backgrounds work together on a shared project—especially something that matters to their local community—it opens up space for transformation.

There’s a great example involving community playgrounds. You have folks who may hold racist views, but when they join a project to build a playground alongside people from different racial or ethnic groups, those day-to-day interactions, that shared investment, begin to chip away at prejudice. That’s far more effective than confrontation alone.

And beyond just addressing bias, having a shared positive project helps knit communities together. It gives people ways to interact, to iterate together, and to develop mutual trust.

Now, that doesn’t mean everything’s always harmonious. I come from a family that loves to argue—it’s part of my heritage. But we argue with love. And that’s key. There’s a difference between agonism and antagonism. Agonism is a kind of productive disagreement, a passionate engagement rooted in mutual respect. You see this all the time in small-town town halls—especially in New England—where people stand up, argue loudly, and disagree fiercely. But they’re still participating in a shared civic life. That’s the kind of engagement I want to support—one that makes space for difference, disagreement, and collective striving toward something better.

But we don’t pick up guns and shoot each other over it—and that’s a very fundamental line. That line matters.

All of this is to say: there are different ways we can work to improve relations across boundaries and divisions. And one of the most effective ways is through shared, collective projects. Unfortunately, the left—where I see myself—has often struggled to articulate positive projects. There have been exceptions, and some of them have been powerful and inspiring. But in a lot of the dominant discourse space, we’ve defaulted to the negative. We just call people out. We identify what's wrong, and then we stop there.

Not only that, but we’ve developed a habit of calling out rather than calling in. I’m borrowing that language from some feminist activists, who’ve articulated this beautifully. Too often, the left operates as an exclusionary force. We identify a problem with someone—a thinker, a writer, an activist—and then we kick them out of the fold.

Now, I’ll be clear: sometimes that’s warranted. Again, say no to Nazis. There are lines. But if we’re genuinely committed to values like restorative justice or reparative justice—and I am—then we need to think seriously about what it looks like to provide people a way back in.

If someone says something harmful or offensive—especially to a particular community—then yes, we should name that. But then we need to have mechanisms through which they can engage in a process of reflection, repair, and maybe even reconciliation. It can’t just end in exile. There should be a path forward.

Of course, that process has to be led and shaped by the communities affected. I can only speak to the groups and identities I’m personally located in, and even then, I don’t speak for them. But the fact that we rarely even have conversations about what reentry might look like—that’s a real problem. It’s contributed to declining margins in voting, lower engagement, and less ability to build coalitions.

We’re fast to boot people out. And while I’m not saying we should make excuses for bad behavior, I am saying we need to distinguish between behavior and the human being. We can call out the bad behavior and still ask what it would take to invite that person back in.

The lack of that kind of thinking—of that kind of structure—has led to a version of left discourse that, at times, becomes counterproductive. We’ve seen that in some of the slogans we’ve embraced. My fellow lefties… we’re not always great at slogans. And sometimes, our slogans end up doing real damage.

Take Defund the Police, for example. It was a deeply unpopular slogan. And I say that as someone who was involved in justice reform circles. I know what we meant—or at least what I thought we meant—but that wasn’t what most people heard.

I think what we really wanted—and what many of us were actually calling for—was more social workers, a demilitarized police force, and stronger, more trusting relationships between law enforcement and the communities they serve. Often, that meant recruiting more officers from within Black communities, for example. It meant reducing the disproportionate violence against people of color.

We didn’t need to defund the police. That slogan, unfortunately, discredited much of the justice reform work we were deeply committed to. So we have to be careful with the language we use. Words matter. Slogans can either open doors or slam them shut.

And beyond that, we often fail to offer pathways out—especially to those we’ve positioned as ideological or political enemies. That’s a missed opportunity.

Right now, I believe we’re headed toward an economic crash. There’s a growing body of evidence suggesting we’re not far from serious financial disruption. When that happens, many of the people who voted for Trump—especially those in economically vulnerable regions—are going to see their livelihoods collapse.

And here’s the thing: we need to figure out, without condoning racism, homophobia, transphobia, or other forms of bigotry, how to bring people back in. That doesn’t mean there’s no need for change. People will need to reflect and grow. But we also need a discourse—especially on the left—about how to build bridges again. How to create collective projects that aren't only for "our side."

And maybe it’s not even about bringing people into the left. Maybe what we need are new, shared efforts that cut across traditional political lines—projects rooted in common concerns, not filtered through the endless polarization that defines so much of American politics today.

That doesn't mean embracing triangulated centrism. There was this old idea—especially during the Clinton years—that if you just split the difference between left and right, you’d reach some stable middle ground. I think the Harris campaign, to some extent, inherited that logic. But I don’t think it works.

People don’t make political decisions that way. They’re not parsing out policy positions on a neat ideological spectrum. People are moved by stories. They’re dissuaded by anecdotes. They’re persuaded by a vision—by a call to build something better, something they can believe in.

And you can make compelling cases for justice and equity without leaning on polarizing buzzwords. If you approach people with care and clarity, you can build coalitions that create the conditions for different kinds of politics to emerge—politics that aren’t stuck in the same old binaries.

The assumption on the left that “demography is destiny”—that demographic shifts alone would inevitably deliver progressive victories—has turned out to be wrong. And we’ve seen the cost of that miscalculation in recent national elections.

I think that regardless of whether we identify as left, right, or somewhere else on the political spectrum, we need to start identifying issues of shared, common concern. And I genuinely believe that a lot of people—not just in the U.S., but around the world—are persuadable. They’re open to investing in projects that strengthen communities, protect public health, and clean up our air and water.

Take something like toxic sludge being dumped into rivers. Sure, there may be members of Republican leadership who’ve supported deregulation measures that allow for that—but most everyday Republicans don’t want that either. Environmental stewardship used to be a conservative issue, after all. It wasn’t always the domain of the political left. There's no reason we can't build local initiatives in a way that invites broader buy-in across political lines.

Personally, I believe the climate crisis is one of the defining challenges of our global society. And I also believe that dreaming big—hoping, working toward ambitious goals—is a far more effective path to change than defaulting to cynicism. Yes, it's a struggle. And yes, political change is often frustratingly slow. But if we commit to it—patiently, deliberately—I think we can create real transformation.

One of the mistakes I think we on the left have made is not having a strong long game. The right has been playing that game for decades. Institutions like the Heritage Foundation have spent years building infrastructure, shaping narratives, and strategically working to reach this current political moment.

Meanwhile, on the left, there’s sometimes this sense—especially in popular discourse—that if racism wasn’t solved by electing Obama, then it’s simply unsolvable. Of course, many activists know that’s not true. But in wider public sentiment, there’s often a feeling of discouragement: If it hasn’t happened by now, it’s not going to happen.

That kind of disillusionment is dangerous. We can’t afford it—especially on issues like climate justice and racial justice, which are deeply interwoven. We need to embrace the idea of long-term struggle. That means investing in community-building. It means shifting focus away from the obsession with top-of-the-ticket races—because while presidential elections matter, they’re not the only space where change happens. And yes, it’s troubling how much power has been consolidated in the presidency, especially with recent Supreme Court rulings. But we can’t let that distract us from the real power that exists at the local level. There is so much we can do through grassroots organizing. And I, for one, am a big advocate of starting there.

Yeah, it’s beautiful. And we’ve run out of time, but we’ve ended right where I was hoping we would. I’m curious what you’d want to leave people with—something about metamodernism as a way of being in the world. How do we move through the day with this idea of revolutionary happiness? Maybe you’ve already said it, but as a final thought: what does it mean to live in this new paradigm?

Yeah. So first, I’d say this: we need to resist the imposition of what economists and political theorists have called homo economicus—the idea that human beings are primarily motivated by self-interest, especially economic self-interest.

That idea is not only flawed—it’s harmful. When people internalize it, when they start to see themselves through that lens, they end up miserable. Just look at some of the wealthiest, most powerful people in the world today. Many are deeply unhappy, emotionally stunted, even destructive. The model doesn’t work—not for them, and not for the rest of us.

So instead of chasing that vision, we need to start asking: What are the real conditions for human flourishing?

Of course, that can include economic stability. Absolute poverty is devastating, and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise. But wealth alone isn’t enough. Flourishing isn’t just about security—it’s about meaning. It’s about living a life worth having lived.

And in politics, we often fall into the trap of appealing only to economic self-interest. We try to persuade people with numbers: "Here’s a policy that will save you 2% on taxes," or, "This reform will slightly reduce inflation." Those things matter, but they rarely inspire. They’re not the language of purpose.

What people really want—across the political spectrum—is to feel like their life means something. Many want to live ethically. They want to be part of something larger. The language of solidarity, of collective action, of shared moral striving—we can reclaim that. We need to reclaim that. It’s part of what I mean by revolutionary happiness.

And here’s another key point. We are living through dark times. And dark times don’t make utopian visions irrelevant—they make them essential.

There’s been a strong critique, especially in the wake of postmodernism, of utopian thinking—a suspicion that it’s naive, dangerous, even totalitarian. And there’s some truth in that critique: utopias can become authoritarian when they’re treated as blueprints. But that’s not the kind of utopianism I’m advocating.

What I’m calling for is something open, something aspirational—a vision of the future that we move toward together, knowing we may never fully reach it. But the point isn’t perfection. The point is to orient ourselves toward something better. To cultivate a politics—and a daily practice—of hope, of ethics, of compassion, and of shared flourishing.

That’s what metamodernism is about. It’s not a finished doctrine. It’s an invitation.

Marx critiqued the utopian socialists, and figures like Margaret Thatcher famously dismissed alternative futures altogether—claiming “there is no alternative.” The word utopian often gets used as a slur, as if imagining a better world is naïve or dangerous.

But bracketing out utopian or better-world thinking only traps us in a kind of hopeless present—a morass that feels inescapable. And I think we need to imagine our way out of that.

I'm a bit of a sci-fi geek, so I say this with love: we need to think science fictionally about possible futures. We need to embrace utopian thinking—not as a rigid blueprint, but as an open invitation to imagine a good future. In fact, we could even play with the spelling—e-utopia, as in eu (good) from eudaimonia, meaning flourishing. A good place.

Now, to be clear, I’m fudging the spelling a bit. Traditionally, utopia comes from the Greek ou-topos, meaning “no place.” But I'm intentionally reframing it: eu-topia, a “good place.” Though I admit, if I say the good place, people might just think of the TV show—where, spoiler alert, the good place isn't actually that good.

But you get the idea. We need visions to struggle toward. Future dreaming isn’t a luxury—it’s a political necessity. And yes, I have very specific ideas about democratic reforms and concrete policy strategies, but we probably don’t have time to dive into all that here. What I can say is that acting locally is a powerful and essential first step.

I wish we had more time—I’ve got another twenty minutes, but I know you need to run.

Yeah, I do. I’m sorry to say. But I could keep talking to you for hours. If you’re open to it, I’d love to do a follow-up sometime—especially to dig into governance and policy. That part’s fascinating too. Connecting the philosophical dots to real-world structure—that’s where it all comes alive.

Absolutely. Always happy to talk, and always happy to try. So, to tie it back to metamodernism as a final thought: there are a lot of us out here—friends, allies, thinkers, artists, organizers—struggling together to figure out what tools we need to meet this moment. For those in the academy, I’ve tried to offer some philosophical resources. Others are working on concrete political strategies, artistic expressions, or interventions at the level of culture and zeitgeist. We’re still figuring it out. We haven’t gotten all the way there yet. But we’re trying.

Postmodernism gave us some valuable insights—but it didn’t get us far enough. We still have a long way to go. And as we work through that journey, especially in times that feel dark or uncertain, we need to lean on community. On solidarity. On mutual aid in all its forms.

Because when we do that, we can begin to build better and brighter futures.

That's beautiful. Thank you so much. I really appreciate this conversation—and especially the reminder that utopian ideas aren’t outdated. They’re essential, especially in dark times. I take that to heart.

Thank you. It’s always a pleasure to chat.

Bye, Jason.

Bye.

Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe