Is Metamodernism an Answer to our Postmodern Troubles?

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An interview with Hanzi Freinacht   

The Listening Society by Hanzi Freinacht speaks in a new and fresh way about how humanity can get beyond the many crises of our time. It offers us metamodernism.  

This isn’t just a new term or slogan but a deep examination of the fault lines that are fragmenting our society. For about thirty years, postmodern philosophy has been popular as a critique of our modern world’s roots in reductionism and materialism–and of course, its culmination in the neoliberal economy.  

The story of science and progress, postmodern philosophy said, is not necessarily true. Viewed from the perspective of the oppressed and weak, the progress of civilization often amounts to little more than exploitation, smoke screens, excuses, and a more systematized oppression.

While this is an important and valid critique, the postmodern approach has its own onesidedness. With its pluralistic relativism, where there is no truth anymore, postmodernity created its own limitations. As a worldview where everyone and no one is right at the same time, it had a hard time to offer a new vision for our human future. Metamodernism has an answer to both of these limitations.

Metamodernism entered the scene only once the Internet and the social media became truly dominant factors in people’s lives. It is a new worldview – some call it integral – which combines a modern faith in the potential of human development with a stark postmodern critique.  This perspective, presented by Hanzi Freinacht in his books, offers a view of reality as a long developmental journey towards greater complexity. But it’s not only this process of complexification, because the metamodern also values existential and spiritual depth.What would a metamodern approach mean for the evolution of human society and culture? 

In this week’s Radio evolve, Thomas Steininger talks with Hanzi Freinacht about the vision of metamodern society.