Author Archives: myonehorizon

Metamodernism, Essay 4: The Cultural Turn

In five or so remarkable years at the end of the 1960s the Modern Era’s balloon popped. Nineteen sixty-eight’s global revolutionary year sparked the chaotic beginning. Five years later, 1973’s Arab-dominated OPEC’s fist-pumping oil embargo announced the first clear sign that the West’s imperial run was over. Postmodernity, born in the period’s global turmoil.  

In between about 1968 and 1973 or so, the West wobbled toward breakdown. Its confidence deflated by one embarrassment, by one unresolved crisis after the next. Social revolution roiled democracies at home; assassinations, riots, bombings; US defeat in Vietnam; breakdown of the international currency mechanism, dollar devaluation, recession, failing industries, “stagflation”; Watergate . . . and on, setting off a decade of economic weakness and political malaise. Many among the “Rest” (the non-West) watched the muddle, made a reasonable assessment of it, and lost confidence in the West’s leadership and in its modern project as a model for development.

Long wearied by the West’s globe-straddling imperial power (at the onset of World War II, more than 80 percent of the Rest was directly colonized or controlled by Western powers), and now newly freed from colonial occupation, the Rest spoke up with stronger voice and vigor to criticize the West’s universalist modernizing project. They saw through the modern project’s narrative façade—the story that for centuries had bulldozed the world’s cultures flat—and pronounced it, as Jean-Francois Lyotard duly noted, dubious (see Essay 3). The West lost its triumphant swagger; its dominating cultural authority collapsed.[1]

Western modernity, its individualism, dualism, universalism, foundationalism, and faith in progress, fell under radical scrutiny. Its institutional keystones—the modern liberal states that commanded the power centers organizing Western life, not to mention much of the world—lost the public’s confidence. Governance slid into a half-century (and continuing) legitimacy crisis. What else can we call the January 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol but an exclamation point on a slow-rolling fifty-year Age of Fracture?

What changed all of a sudden at the 1960s’ end? Loss of faith in Western virtue.

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Metamodernism, Essay 3: A World Without Story

Our discussion of postmodernity thus far has been a collection of stories. Big stories. Stories that added up to an even bigger world-historical story that tells us how our modern world works, or doesn’t work anymore, and where it’s headed into a hazardous future.

Friedrich Nietzsche surveyed the West’s story from Christendom to the modern State’s collapsing cathedral of value and warned us of the nihilism to come. Francis Fukuyama hypothesized that we’d reached the end of history and find ourselves unsure about how to make meaningful sense of it; Immanuel Wallerstein, the evolution of the modern world-system, its ultimate bifurcation and painful age of transition. Jacques Barzun traced the 500-yearlong Modern Era from “dawn to decadence.” All these stories—and they run the left-right ideological gamut—share a common conclusion: Our great big Western world-story didn’t end well.

By the 1960s, the sensation that we’d reached the end of the world as we knew it felt like watching the curtain drop suddenly on a glitzy Broadway musical called The Modern Era! in the middle of Act III. As if the writers went out on strike, left the plot hanging, and our world-story unresolved. Could the replacement writers—postmodern writers—brought in by the producers to finish the show, repair the plot? Or must they write a whole new story from scratch?

What kind of postmodern story could they even write to capture our imaginations, to turn them toward a refreshed new age vision, and to restore our confidence in the world? Not a particularly good story it turns out. Given the time’s confusion—the time of transition from the Modern Era’s dramatic end to whatever will come later—the postmodern story remained at best garbled, a non-story story of sorts. It left us without a coherent world-story to tell about the great big world around us.

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Metamodernism: Postmodernity’s Shadow — Introduction to Section I (Essays 2 – 5)

Postmodernity, the slow-rolling “age of fracture” from roughly the 1960s to the 2010s, unmistakably draws to a close. We experience the end of it in a fog of frustration, polarization, insecurity, conflict, and confusion while we struggle to keep our institutions, particularly our democratic institutions, alive and functioning. And far too many of us struggle to escape poverty and discrimination to find the necessary resources and recognition to live full and dignified lives. To call our political vision crippled is an understatement; the cultural resources we require to move forward together are drained to exhaustion.

Yet we will live in postmodernity’s shadow for some time to come. It defines the starting point of our emerging metamodern now, and it also conditions the political resources and intellectual capacities we need to move forward into the future-present. So we need to understand postmodernity and how it has both enhanced and diminished us before we can begin to explore the path forward into (and eventually through) metamodernity’s Valley of the Shadow of Death—a discussion that we will pick up later in Section II.

Section I (essays 2 – 5), then, concerns postmodernity. In Essay 2 we will begin to look at it by describing postmodernity’s cultural underbelly, the source of our fractured present condition of life. To do this we must confront an ugly word: nihilism. Postmodernity is not unfairly labeled “the age of nihilism.” The very word nihilism congers up dark fears from the black abyss. But our purpose here is not to terrify; it is simply to describe nihilism as a phenomenon and how grasping it helps us to understand ourselves.

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Metamodernism: Essay Series Introduction

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.

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Metamodernism, Essay 2: A Nihilist Age

NOTE: See Section I Introduction, “Postmodernity’s Shadow” to put this essay in perspective.

Something’s afoot in our times, an ominous mood, a feeling throughout the West that its centuries-long Modern Era of exceptionalism, advance, development, and global influence comes to an end. A sensation of finality envelops us, our future purpose unclear. Our greatest days fade to the past; the future appears more mystery and threat than opportunity for continued progress ever upward and higher. What are we feeling, exactly? And from what perspective can we grasp this sensation of the ending of an era?

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What’s in a Name? On the Utility of Naming Periods of Time

As I work on research, thinking and writing about the historical age taking shape around us, I’ve developed the term ‘Metamodern” to identify our new Now as something historically unique. I didn’t invent this name; its use can be traced to the 1970s but has been popularized since publication of a seminal 2010 article, “Notes on Metamodernism,” by Dutch cultural theorists Timothy Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker. All that to say, ‘metamodern/metamodernism’ has become a thing, a term of art, a new name for our unfolding present time period, coined to help us interrogate and grasp what’s happening around us.

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Metamodernism, Essay 1: Naming the Now

For the first time in some fifty years, now is the moment to choose a new name to define our new age, the emerging now that we are now living in. A uniquely new dawn rises upon us; a new age of Western consciousness; a new chapter opens in the story book of our contemporary Western history. Our new now is sufficiently distinct from our recent past, even just a few years past, that it needs its own name and identity. Call our new age Metamodern. And its new condition of life Metamodernity.

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The missiology of trouble: Liberal discontent and metamodern hope — in 8 points

This post includes the full text and slides from my 2016 presidential address to the American Society of Missiology. My speech was given shortly before UK’s Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s election — both of which empirically validated several of the points I made. I make the case that the social (and even religious) liberalism — liberal democracy — that has defined American life through most of its existence has fractured, including its institutions and traditions, and is losing the public’s confidence. Much of today’s social confusion — I call it ‘post-political libertarianism’ — is the result. Can we restore healthy political and civic institutions, and mature public citizenship?

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Public missiology: A brief introduction

I, like many others, religious and secular, am deeply concerned about where our societies — and the planet itself — are headed as we look toward a mid-century time frame. A crisis, both ecological and technological, looms — one well-described by Bill McKibben in his latest book Falter, in my opinion one of the most important books of 2019. All fields of research and practice (I would hope) are retooling themselves to address this and other emerging crises. Missiology, my field, is no different. What follows is a public statement addressed to colleagues in our field, and a challenge to radically rethink what we are doing.

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