Metamodernism
Time marches on
When I was young modern meant recent or contemporary and was a contrast to old.
I was 35 when I started art school and I got a shock - we were in a postmodern time now. I pondered what it meant to be post-contemporary but moved on. I didn't like post-modern thinking of art at all.
Lately Valibrarian has introduced me to the idea of metamodernism. Metamodernism isn't like post-postmodernism. Metamodernism is more a combination of opposing ideas. Rather than the ideas competing, there is an oscillation in our thinking from one idea to the other. The image is of a pendulum swinging between two extremes.
I've learned that modernism stood for all sorts of good (to me) things like sincerity and clarity and rationality rather than being pointing to the present state of affairs (as I thought). Postmodernism stood for things like irony and obscurantism and irrationality. With metamodernism our thinking oscillates - sometimes we're sincere for instance but other times irony gets the point across better for instance.
Full disclosure. I was initially aghast at the whole post-modern project but once I pushed past the obscurantism I found it was more congenial to important ideas like Darwinian evolution than modern thinking. Modernism seemed to fit with physical science until Einstein and Bohr came along. And yet I use rationality when I evaluate crazy ideas like relativity and quantum mechanics and find that they aren't crazy after all.
Who would have imagined that a photon could be both a wave and a particle at the same time? That doesn't seem rational yet I saw a simple demonstration of it in a high school physics class using a couple of slits in front of a light source.
The reading I've done on metamodernism presents it as a mix specifically of modernist and post-modernist thinking but it seems to me to be more general than that. In general, especially in human affairs, there is the metamodernist oscillation between the present and the recent past.
The famous predator/prey oscillation is perhaps a non-human example of metamodernism. For example, when there are few foxes then the rabbits multiply which creates a paradise for foxes who then multiply and eat most of the rabbits which causes the foxes to die off and the cycle repeats.
There seems to be an oscillation in a culture. Repression always is in tension with permissiveness and visa versa.
Not long ago in Canada (when I was a kid) there was this attack on First Nations people now called the Sixties Scoop. It was horrible. Kids were forcibly removed from parents and placed in residential "schools" where many died of disease and physical abuse. 70 years down the road we aren't hiding First Nations people. Now we celebrate their culture with new street names (sometimes in a language I can't read). The pendulum swings but it never returns to the past.
What do you think?
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.