Metamodern Political Economy
Operationalizing value systems and good protocols after postmodernism
Hanzi Freinacht is an interesting character. But he is a character. There’s something beautiful, fitting, and decidedly metamodern about sociologist Daniel Görtz revealing that he’s the intellectual behind Hanzi, an avatar and nom de plume.
In other words, Hanzi, who wrote The Listening Society in a Swiss chalet, had been Görtz all along. But the chalet had not been fictional. Only Hanzi had. If the Swedish social entrepreneur Tomas Björkman is to be believed, the chalet still exists. And if this “Daniel Görtz” is also fictional, a mere AI simulacrum appearing on podcasts who has corresponded with me via DMs, then postmodern irony and play indeed prevail, and Sam Altman is the Messiah.
I am happy to have gotten to know the brilliant Görtz and his work more over the last few years. He not only shares an interest in Stage Theory, he thinks it has something to do with increased complexity.
As Hanzi says (cue video):
I have never called myself metamodern. Labels can become shackles.
Still, twenty-two years ago, I wrote the following passage to open Complexity Politics, a book I never published:
Welcome to the age of complexity. Like other intellectual movements, the age of complexity is characterized by a unique aesthetic. Where the Moderns made foundational structures the beginning or the end of inquiry, the Postmoderns thought structure was just another form of dogma.
Faith in the fixedness of things—truth, progress, order, and universal laws of nature—came at the expense of what is random, ironic, and mysterious about the world. Postmodernism offered something playful, at times, an intellectual movement that could celebrate irony and disabuse us of old habits. Some postmodernists seemed to delight in the paradoxes of language. Others played language games.
Somewhere in the play, though, the world got lost.
Though postmodernism as a movement seemed destined to stick around, there was a sense in which it could move little earth. Once research programs had been reduced to either critical theory, deconstruction, or discovering irony in all things, criticism, and narrative became the only remaining tools. The critical theorist tossed aside the tools of the thinker as a creative force—a builder. And she abandoned the faculties of exploration, observation, and discovery.
If reason, truth, and liberal inquiry were tools of the oppressor, what could replace them? If structure was just the dogma of a bygone era (or a blueprint for the Master's House), how would we know we live in the same world? The postmodern aesthetic, while occasionally strange and wonderful, operates in a vacuum. But in vacuums, human beings will begin to look for Archimedean Points to reckon with the world around them.
Perhaps the Postmodernist can appreciate one final irony. Structure has returned from the pyre's ashes. But the age of complexity isn't built on Enlightenment absolutes, traditionalist dogmas, or folk superstitions. It borrows a little irony from its postmodern predecessor. It preserves the moderns' rationality and skepticism. And it integrates the wisdom of the ancient traditions. Then it combines the best of these into a framework for worldmaking. But this is not the worldmaking of fantasy or science fiction. It is the worldmaking of creativity within constraints.
So now we’re in a new age—one that is after postmodernism.
Because we have never built much of anything with weapons (criticism) or toys (play), postmodernism left us sitting in a smoldering intellectual wasteland. We have to take up the tools of construction again. We could never wholly do without structure in our intellectual lives. While structure is still, in part, an aesthetic commitment, something changed. Structure is now a feature of self-organizing complexity. It demands coherence, even tensegrity, as a geodesic dome. In this way, the structure of our knowledge is indispensable to us, whether in building our theories, constructing our reality, or establishing common rules for playing more prosocial language games.
By the way, the universe doesn't care what we do. It will exert itself whether we like it or not. We either start to understand and approximate its flux and flow, or we try to go against it and suffer.
The lessons we must learn in the age of complexity lie between what philosopher Catherine Z. Elgin calls "the absolute and the arbitrary." Because we must now operate in areas devoid of many Enlightenment assumptions, we must look to structure itself for answers, that is, to the form and function of our claims within different fitness landscapes. We might therefore ask how some way of thinking about the world works in our lives.
Operating in the chaos of uncertainty, construction, destruction, and reconstruction are both the ends and means of inquiry. We will always work within our intellectual traditions—limited by language, culture, and human nature. And if we are indeed entering another aesthetic, cultural, and intellectual paradigm, we must be able to recognize its indicators.
If we’re in a new paradigm, how can we articulate its properties, its character, and its aesthetic more fully? And once our thinking gets infused with this aesthetic, what lessons will we take with us into the world?
Twenty years later, I published that passage in my 2021 book, After Collapse, because why the hell not? By then, though, I had not only learned more about stage theory but I got puffed up like Barney Fife because, at least, I’d anticipated metamodernism twenty years prior.
As antagonistic as I had been towards many aspects of postmodernism, I also held a grudging respect for some of its insights and patterns of cognition.
We should acknowledge that postmodernism formed a kind of intellectual swamp in which simple-minded social justice types got stuck. Perhaps the metamodernists can help them out of the morass. We must be quick, though. Postmodernism and critical theory are like acids, dissolving nearly everything they touch.
Features of Metamodernism
According to Hanzi Freinacht, though, one can’t be a metamodern thinker without at least a grudging respect for postmodernism. Channeling stage theory, one must transcend and include the useful and, indeed, healthy values or insights of prior stages.
For my part, I had shed so much of modernism’s foundationalism. I had developed an appreciation for contingency, irony, and play. Yet, there had to be something beyond postmodernism.
Furthermore, writes Hanzi:
The metamodern way of thinking is a reaction to the postmodern relativistic dogma that progress was an illusion and that all you can say is that things change, not that any kind of development takes place.
Progress happens, with compounding returns to knowledge.
I have always been mildly whiggish in this regard, even though the Whigs were decidedly modern. Developmental progress, viewed through a complex systems lens, transcends and includes aspects of whiggishness.
It’s also silly to deny that hierarchies of value or certain types of authority must always be deconstructed or dismantled in the end. Hanzi again:
There are hierarchies according to complexity, which is not to say that more complexity necessarily is better. But there are also things that can be ordered according to their ethical validity. Love is better than hate. Parental leave is better than child murder. If you’re a relativist and believe no such thing can be determined, then you’re probably postmodern, but then you cannot even justify that, that claim of yours should be more valid than another.
Emergent hierarchies (or holarchies) are not formal hierarchies like Taylorite firms or authoritarian states. Emergent hierarchies are more like Sierpiński gaskets, human fractals, or natural ecosystems. We can also point to hierarchies that are appropriate to physics’ form and function, such as those generated by Adrian Bejan’s Law of Flow.
Returning to the integral theorist’s concept of transcend and include, Hanzi writes:
Where the postmodern mind restlessly aims at deconstructing the world of signs, the metamodern has grown tired of this endeavor and takes on the task of reconstructing our symbolic universe and reconnecting it to other aspects of reality.
Reconstruction follows deconstruction, says Hanzi.
Relatedly, like Ken Wilber, Hanzi reminds us that “yes-and” thinking is a step up from either/or thinking. This is not to say that either/or thinking is always inappropriate. Manichaeism has its place. It is rather to argue that methodological Hegelianism (a la Alexander Bard) or Kantian thesis-antithesis-synthesis methods are (ironically) the key to upgrading liberal pluralism for the age of complexity metamodernity.
And this leads us to metamodern protocols for a complex world.
Getting Hanzi With Governance
Imagine twin babies separated at birth. One gets raised in Europe, then the other in the US. Nurture would do its things with the babies, but twins can’t help but share similarities due to their natures. If they were to reunite as adults, the twins would look at each other curiously, often disagreeing, but they would share important overlapping insights.
I want quickly to point out features of Metamodern governance that comport with ideas you’ll read here at Underthrow. Hanzi sets these out as “design principles,” where design refers to protocol design more than god-forsaken ‘systems thinking,’ which is mostly bullshit. (More on that another time.) My commentary follows each of Hanzi’s design principles:
Design Principle 1: Don’t ask how to make governance “more democratic”; ask how to increase collective intelligence
Amen. Democracy has few redeeming features that are inherently beneficial, though these can just as easily be detrimental. It is that it is at least theoretically possible to throw out the worst ‘officials’ in a traditional hierarchical system maintained by majority rule if you can persuade 50 percent-plus one voter that some official is indeed the worst. More voters voting harder guarantee nothing except a regression to the mean. Most voters aren’t civically engaged Aristotelians. Most are hapless conduits of memetics and mimetics, pulled along by demagogs and would-be dictators.
I could go on. Democracy is overrated.
Not only do we want to make it easier to toss out the worst, but we also want to dissolve oppressive dominance hierarchies to start with. We know that superior systems of collective intelligence and coordinated action will mean more of those emergent hierarchies that the system and its participants select for and select, respectively. When collective decision-making is unavoidable, those who are in a better position to make certain decisions on others’ behalf will be empowered to do so, but using far more relevant and localized feedback mechanisms.Design Principle 2: Create Meshwork Governance (and Ignore the Principle of Subsidiarity?)
Meshworks are networked systems in which the elements, usually people, can retain features of individuality (such as their preferences) while operating in flowing—sometimes changing—coherence with other elements. In such flows, the integrity of a meshwork remains coherent and continues to morph according to the balanced needs of the elements and the integrity of the whole.
Now, it would seem Hanzi and I disagree about a “principle of subsidiarity,” which states that decisions should be made at the most local level feasible, though I suspect our disagreement is merely apparent. Hanzi offers the example of a local municipality whose inhabitants pollute, and the pollution affects surrounding municipalities. He concludes: “it cannot alone account for much of how the future of governance can and should function.”
While one might agree that such a principle cannot work in isolation, a subsidiarity rule is one kind of meshwork protocol. Strictly speaking, in the case of the town whose waste affects the neighboring town, the neighbors are justified in seeking redress, which means localism is not feasible in that case. (This is also what I love about English common law: it has the benefit of extracting cosmopolitan lessons from local patterns.) So, if they use the common law courts to settle their dispute as a level ‘up’ from strict localism, the people in Town A might have a tort case to bring against Town B. Such comports with a principle of subsidiarity. I suspect Hanzi would agree, given a common definition of subsidiarity that involves feasibility. Otherwise, absent any feasibility criterion, a simpler subsidiarity rule would indeed be a non-starter.Design Principle 3. Allow for Deep Feedback Cycles — Limit Fast and Shallow Ones!
What’s strange about this one for me is, while I agree that we need more “deep” feedback cycles, one of my favorite criticisms of democracy is that the feedback cycles are, in fact, too long. In the US, for example, voters have to wait four years to boot a presidential administration. The infamous philosopher Nick Land put this well when in, The Dark Enlightenment, he wrote:
Social solidarity, in precise contrast, is the parasite’s friend. By cropping out all high-frequency feedback mechanisms (such as market signals), and replacing them with sluggish, infra-red loops that pass through a centralized forum of ‘general will’, a radically democratized society insulates parasitism from what it does, transforming local, painfully dysfunctional, intolerable, and thus urgently corrected behavior patterns into global, numbed, and chronic socio-political pathologies.
Reference to Land’s work doesn’t make one a neo-reactionary, but this description of democracy is bang on, as the English say.
I’m not seeking to catch Hanzi in a contradiction here. Deep feedback cycles are important. It is rather an invitation for us all to describe and then operationalize just the sort of feedback loops a human system needs to be healthy. After all, Hanzi agrees that we don’t need to make governance “more democratic.” I read him as saying we need to create incentives to attend to system health over longer timescales, not just quarterly reports, for example.
That said, I don’t think deep feedback cycles are the same as “sluggish, infra-red loops.” The feedback should fit an array of circumstances and cycles.
Broadly speaking, I see recurring themes in Hanzi’s work that make me think that there is a kind of umbrella synthesis here. Even though I can’t help but be rooted in the Anglo-American philosophical tradition—while Hanzi’s influences are more continental—metamodernism is a big tent.
Hanzi sees the benefits of decentralization, networks, and experimentation within cultural and governance niches, which are the currency of Underthrow.
Fun in the Overlaps, Devil in the Details
As we move forward, Decentralists and Metamodernists will need to come down some from our sky castles. Abstractionland is our preferred haunting ground, but we will have to go deeper into areas of overlap and get more detailed in terms of operationalizing our ideas. But we cannot be like the rationalists—ghosts inhabiting managerial machines. We must be embodied agents of a constructive enterprise, capable of discovering adjacent possibles and carving out new niches.
Systems start with rules. And progress toward a consent-based order will depend on a rules-based substrate. None of these systems will be perfect, but metamodernism is not about perfection. Instead, systems get started on rulesets, animated by adherents, and tested in the unfolding vicissitudes of a great evolutionary fitness landscape.
Here are some sketches of systems that qualify as metamodern:
Variations on Paul-Emile du Puydt’s panarchy, such as that by Bruno Frey.
Experiments with Fred Foldvary’s cellular democracy.
Proto-nations formed in the interactions among people realizing common values, first in the cloud, then as Balaji Srinivasan’s “network states.”
Micro-nation experiments realized through an open-source constitution that resembles Robert Nozick’s “Framework” for a “Utopia of Utopias.”
As we explore ideas together, we must remember that exploration can’t be open-ended, any more than criticism and deconstruction can continue eating at the scaffolding of our creative projects. At some point, we have to seek, to strive, and to try. I believe such an impulse defines the metamodern man whose mantra might as well be “criticize by creating.”