The series of essays included on Faith Seeking Action’s Metamodernism page form a part of a larger initiative, The Metamodern Project, which is a work in progress to describe a vast and growing transformation of our Western societies, and its global effect. The project represents my attempt to identify and interpret the broad and crucially important historical changes taking place in and around us today in politics, economics, culture, and public life generally.

A new historical age dawns upon us, and it requires a fresh conceptualization and a new name—Metamodernity—to describe it. The dawning of this new historical reality makes our emerging metamodern age qualitatively different from the past of even a few years ago. We will struggle to grasp these changes and challenges ahead, not least to grasp the profoundly changing consciousness happening inwardly within ourselves. It is essential to understand the emerging metamodern transformation of our Western societies in order to: interpret the reigning confusion of our chaotic present (in politics, economics, and culture); to enable us to understand ourselves as we change inwardly in response to a changing life-world; and to prepare ourselves for a difficult ride (as we will see) into the future.

My exploration of metamodernity, the Metamodern Project, is sketched out in a series of essays to be posted here as they are completed. Each one is a summary of research and a discussion of an individual aspect of metamodernity’s rise from within our recent past and the meaning that we can take from it.

Regarding the recent past, some call it the “age of fracture,” or the “age of nihilism.” But I will refer to it throughout by the more commonly used name “postmodernity,” which refers roughly to the immediately past fifty-years that define our present experience of life. Postmodernity is the age that we are now leaving behind, and we will need to understand postmodernity as we determine what is new in our emerging metamodernity.  

About 15 essays in all are planned to describe, explain, and interpret metamodernism, but also to address the question on everyone’s lips: What are we to do about it? Some essays are conceptual in nature, defining ideas we need to understand. But these ideas are essential because they create a framework for thinking about how our lives are in fact lived in the metamodern age. The last set of essays will provide practical steps forward.

A few essays have been posted; the rest are in process—some finished in draft form and about ready to post, others at this point just piles of notes. But every journey starts somewhere.

The essays are grouped in three sections. Here’s the basic outline:

Introduction: Essay 1 provides an overview of the concept metamodernity and describes the basic experience of living in our new the metamodern reality. It defines metamodernity as a new historical age that has grown out of our past reality which is commonly called postmodernity.

Section I: Postmodernity’s Shadow. Four essays (essays 2 – 5) look back over the past fifty years, and even longer, to trace out the major trends defining postmodernity and explain the crucial issues we must understand as we move on into the metamodern future. In many ways, postmodernity has crippled our vision and inward motivations, and splintered the collective political resources we need to move forward. This was not intentional, but it is real, and we need to understand it before moving on. 

Section II: Metamodern Dawn. Five essays in this section (essays 6 – 10) turn to the subject of metamodernism proper: its emergence; growing consciousness; meaning for culture, politics, economics, the environment; and prospects for the future as the future closes in upon us. Metamodernity is unmistakably shaping us into a new kind of people with new attitudes and possibilities. We can cooperate with what are, at root, inevitable historically-generated changes, or we can resist them, but we need at least to understand the terms of our new historical situation. Section II explains what it means to change the subject, that is, to emerge from our postmodern past, including changes in our inner sensibilities, ways of thinking about the world, the reconstruction of values (particularly democratic values), and the embrace of our common humanity. 

Section III: Into the Future-Present. Five additional essays (essays 11 – 15) will set direction for a metamodern transformation of politics, religion, culture, economics, human relations, and the earth. What will be proposed is nothing less than a renaissance of citizenship in public life, a recovery of our collective energies to cooperate for the good of our future and for those who follow us. Humanity will continue its historical course, likely finding its way somewhere between catastrophe and utopia—like it always has—but our own actions, together, in our new metamodern reality, will determine how.

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Now for two personal disclosures to set my point of view in perspective and to give credit where it is due. First, my exploration of metamodernity proceeds from my own social location, and like any writing it will betray the limits and biases of my culturally-defined context and starting point.

As much as I have traveled and as much as I would wish to provide a neutral, global view of the world as it changes, sadly no-one can. So, the following essays represent my thinking from the inside out. Meaning, I begin my thoughts and observations in my home setting in North America as a white man of European descent and radiate outwardly to include the wider West that has grown from European roots. My discussion centers mostly on the West, although in a global age it is not, for obvious reasons, disconnected from a much wider picture. If push comes to shove, I can be faulted for providing only a North American perspective, or (hopefully) credited for a sensitive Western one. But I hope also to treat the many cultures and civilizations outside the West with the respect, recognition, and dignity they deserve. 

Secondly, to be as clear as I can, I didn’t by any means coin the term metamodernism. Indeed, I have adapted it from the work of others and wish to credit some of them for their path-breaking work.

Since the 21st century began, there has been a growing consensus that whatever it was that defined the art, culture, politics and economics of the last third of the 20th century especially—most often called the “postmodern” period—it was no longer holding steady and was quickly disappearing. With postmodernity in retreat, what then shall we call the “post-postmodern” period emerging in its wake? At first, this was a head scratcher. Several names, not particularly workable ones, were proposed: among them “hypermodernism,” “digimodernism,” “altermodernism,” “transmodernism,” “the Anthropocene (an important and well-accepted framing of long-term global change, but too broad for a particular historical period),” and so forth.  

The name metamodernism finally took hold and stabilized the consensus since the appearance of an oft-quoted 2010 publication by Dutch cultural theorists Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker titled “Notes on Metamodernism” (Journal of Aesthetics and Culture, Vol. 2, 2010). Use of the term in other academic disciplines is growing—if not exactly as a groundswell, it’s more than a trickle (more on this later).

As we will see later, the prefix “meta” in meta-modernism is drawn from the classical Greek concept “metaxy.” Metaxy is a historical and substantive concept in its own right, and not just a pop label to stick on the next new cultural fad. Its substance and depth are richly elaborated by philosopher William Desmond in his “metaxological metaphysics” (The William Desmond Reader, Ben Simpson, ed., SUNY 2012).

Taking Desmond together with Vermuelen and van den Akker in particular satisfied my curiosity about whether “metamodernism” was a durable enough concept to bear the weight I wish to put on it as I push it in my own research directions.

I first applied the term “metamodern” publicly in my 2016 presidential address to the American Society of Missiology—“The Missiology of Trouble: Liberal Discontent and Metamodern Hope” (available here), and have used it in subsequent lectures. Also see my 2018 openDemocracy article “Will Cuba Become a Test Case for a Post-postmodern Future?” here.

All work published on this website is © Gregory P. Leffel and FaithSeekingAction.org on WordPress.com. For details click the Gregory Leffel page on the website menu.