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.

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?

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.