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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   26603 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 15, 2025

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What will come after post-modernity? From my perspective we are already seeing the postmodern lens break down a bit, as religion is getting a bit of a upswing, and many leading intellectuals are turning away from the post modern lens, or rather incorporating it into their thoughts. Examples here are John Vervaeke, Charles Taylor, Jordan Hall, David Chapman, and many others.

In addition, there seems to be a tacit admission amongst the secular humanist crowd that their worldview no longer has the appeal or swing it once did. Tyler Cowen and Steven Pinker, in a recent podcast discussion, went over how humanism seems to be somewhat dead and there aren’t many bright young humanists out there. Cowen also said the same thing about young liberal thinkers with another podcast guest recently, Cass Sunstein.

If you look at the death of the effective altruism movement, and the shift from rationalist to post rationalist, I believe there’s a similar trend.

To me the question becomes less “will old school meta-narratives” return, and more: what will be the ground of future exploration?

Will we adopt “metamodern” stances as they become useful and abandon them just as quickly, as Chapman suggests? Or instead will we rescue the transcendentals, and understand classical theism & morality through a more relational and dynamic lens, as Vervaeke and others are working on?

While the modern chaos can be exhausting at times, it’s also a moment of great opportunity. I’m interested to see what comes next.

"After" Postmodernism is a little difficult, as can be inferred from the name (and the many gravestones with stuff like "postpostmodern", "metamodernism", "new sincerity", etc. written on them). A very simple definition would go something like this: Modernism was the initial recognition that all the grand narratives of the old world have been smashed to pieces by technology and the War, Postmodernism is living in that "heap of broken images" and trying to have fun throwing the pieces around, and the "post-Postmodern" movements since then have been trying to will a grand narrative back into being. I see the modern rise of intellectual religiosity as fitting in just fine with the Postmodern schema, in that none of these movements have any chance to take over society, but recreate grand narratives for individuals that give them real existential satisfaction (I like Justin Murphy's term for these movements: "Reality Entrepreneurs"). The key is that it doesn't change the wider narrative anarchy, and doesn't salve the pain for people who feel the need for a societally-shared grand narrative, but constructs a refuge within that anarchy. So I wouldn't call it truly post-Postmodern, more a way of living within Postmodern anarchy.

To address @FiveHourMarathon 's point about capitalism, I believe that this was all downstream of modern technology, and that whatever comes next will probably be determined by the development of technology - currently, it looks like AI will be the decisive change, if there is one coming. The only post-capitalist future which is not a return to 20th Century totalitarianism/hellwars is some kind of AI future. Intelligence begins in humans, leaps off into technocapital, and then discards that inefficient substrate to become truly disembodied. Once intelligence is autonomous and ahuman, and we no longer have the historical task of being its bootloader, what do we do? That's the sort of question that can reignite a grand narrative, perhaps.

A very simple definition would go something like this: Modernism was the initial recognition that all the grand narratives of the old world have been smashed to pieces by technology and the War, Postmodernism is living in that "heap of broken images" and trying to have fun throwing the pieces around, and the "post-Postmodern" movements since then have been trying to will a grand narrative back into being.

Modernism drew deep on the coffers of civilizational history and set out to build a glorious cultural edifice.

Postmodernism noted that the work was not going well, but assumed that we might draw deep again so that the work might continue and something like the original goal might be reached.

We now recognize that the coffers are empty and that the work has failed, that the creditors are beating on the door and that there is nothing with which we might pay them.

Put another way, it seems to me that one of the notable features of Postmodernism was that, for all its critiquing, it appears to have assumed that the conditions in which it was born would obtain indefinitely, that the cultural assumptions and material realities it framed itself would ensure its own relevance. One might say that it did not take its own arguments seriously enough.

Modernism drew deep on the coffers of civilizational history and set out to build a glorious cultural edifice.

Ehhh I mostly agree with you on that but I would say "rebuild". The Modernists had great educations from the old world, and remembered glorious culture, but they were also deeply conscious that modernity and the War had changed things forever, and what they built would have to be built anew.

On Postmodernism, I think much of Postmodernism abandons that Modernist goal as unworkable. Hence you get, for instance, the work of art as a joke. The Postmodernists who didn't abandon the Modernist dream tended to reach for some sort of post-Postmodern thing (the Oulipo, imo, was the first of these, and the most understudied inspiration for DFW, New Sincerity, etc.).

Put another way, it seems to me that one of the notable features of Postmodernism was that, for all its critiquing, it appears to have assumed that the conditions in which it was born would obtain indefinitely, that the cultural assumptions and material realities it framed itself would ensure its own relevance. One might say that it did not take its own arguments seriously enough.

I think about this a lot reading Deleuze and Guattari. They were prophesying the great crack-up, but now that crack-up has happened some of their work reads very differently, and I can see how it births figures like Land once it's no longer in the rigid context of Trente Glorieuses France.

Rather than sprouting from an intellectual movement, I could imagine the next meaning making system arising from something like Crossfit tacking on a thin mindfulness/wisdom/virtue ethics layer. It can offer community, identity, practice, and status hierarchy without weird metaphysical baggage or violations of current cultural taboos. It hasn't taken off yet, but I can imagine a turbulent AI future producing a more fertile ground.

What will come after post-modernity?

We first have to answer what comes after Capitalism. Capitalism is universal solvent, it slowly melted through every ethnic or ideological or traditional or religious barrier that tried to hold it back. It ate ethnicity, it ate religion, it ate nationalism, it ate gender, it ate the narrative of progress itself.

It will not be possible for a new narrative to assert itself until it first slays Capitalism.

And even within our science fiction, we can imagine the end of the world more easily than the end of Capitalism.

It depends on what you mean by Capitalism. I heard Marxists excusing failure of Stalinists planned economy, because it was actually a state Capitalism and thus not true Socialism.

To me the word Capitalism is often used as anything opposing to fabled Socialism so that Socialism does not have to be defined, it is something like a unicorn. Funnily enough, it is a very postmodern way of looking at things - socialism and capitalism are Hegelian opposites and they need to be abolished in order to usher an era of communism. Which I think is a very unhelpful way of looking at things. It would be like adopting some heretical doctrine of Heaven on Earth (Communism) as some ultimate utopia, and then declaring everything else as Hell on Earth (Capitalism), until we come to finally immanentize the eschaton in some Gnostic way. Just a bunch of nonsense.

If in order to discuss Capitalism I'm going to have to defend the most ignorant thing you've ever seen on Twitter referring to Capitalism, we're already lost.

Capitalism as a system is defined economically by the investment profit motive, by taking investment capital and putting it to work to earn more capital, which will be invested again to earn more capital, and so on and so forth to eternity.

This is distinct from Feudalism, from Mecantilism, etc.

Until we can successfully imagine something beyond Capitalism, there is no way to imagine a worldview that privileges other terminal values than profit.

Capitalism as a system is defined economically by the investment profit motive, by taking investment capital and putting it to work to earn more capital, which will be invested again to earn more capital, and so on and so forth to eternity.

Absolutely unhelpful definition. A peasant under feudal lord can set aside and sell surplus of his harvest in order to purchase a cow or a new plough, which will bring him more profit next season. Stalin also invested into steel and concrete production in order to produce dams and other infrastructural investments.

Investment and profit are innate to social structure, they existed in all forms of government.

Man, what the fuck is water?

Water is H2O. Or wait, maybe it is a capitalist scam. Who knows, right?

While Capitalism is in the causal chain that ate those things it is the massive amounts of wealth created by capitalism that actually eats everything.

Yeah fair points. Capitalism is indeed a mighty beast, slouching towards Bethlehem. Sigh.

as religion is getting a bit of a upswing

Not a thing, source 1 source 2 source 3. At most you could say that the decline has levelled off by some metrics, but statistics keep showing that the importance of religion in peoples' lives is slowly but monotonically going nowhere but down.

I'm not really sure what you mean by "postmodern" here other than as a vague gesture at a blob of liberalism-wokism-rationality etc. Perhaps the Right will come to dominate. Currently, the Right is dominated by conspiracists like Candace Owens, Just Asking Questions connoisseurs like Tucker Carlson, and shitposters like Catturd. As bad as it is right now, I have faith that it will eventually be replaced by something even worse.

The spike in religion-talk seems to be coming from the small subset of already-religious (in a very meticulous, autistic way) men talking more about it, plus aesthetic posturing about Based-ness. So, the talk is all talk.

Compare red-pill Islam- that's just peddling redpills to the existing Muslim online young men.

Yeah as far as I can tell based on statistics. The increasing popularity of religion online in certain spaces hasn't had much real world effect.

I think you may be using the term "post-modern" in a nonstandard/confusing way. AIUI postmodernism is specifically a rejection of the "modernist" ideology that flourished in the early part of the 20th century. We can vaguely gesture at some word associations:

  • Modern: science, reason, secularism, progress, legibility, imperialism, hegemony, technocracy, evenly-spaced rectangular grids, communism, capitalism, centralization, globalization
  • Postmodern: mysticism, ways-of-knowing, holistic, degrowth, localism, populism, -core/-punk, stuff like this, decolonization, marginalized voices, identity politics

So it seems what you're gesturing at is more accurately binned with the "modern -> postmodern" transition, which has been going on for a while now. Or do you claim we're entering a new stage, of "post-post-modernity"?

I am referring to postmodernity as basically, the falling away of beliefs and overarching, meta narratives and more broadly the idea that there is any sort of objective truth. Another way to put this is the turn away from cultural relativism, identitarianism esp wrt trans, etc is what I’m broadly referring to. I could be more precise.

I am referring to postmodernity as basically, the falling away of beliefs and overarching, meta narratives and more broadly the idea that there is any sort of objective truth

I think this never existed. There was an academic project for this in the 60s but practically nobody bought in and its immediate successors constructed their own overarching metanarratives (identity politics, gender, decolonization, etc). People sometimes call this postmodernism, because it refuses to give itself a name, and I'm fine with doing that as long as one doesn't also bring up the core tenets of "real" postmodernism, as you do here.

My opinion is that postmodernism instantly died because it's an unserious intellectual exercise. It's woke descendent isn't postmodern, it's pre-modern, specifically it's christianity without the bible, it's "we can be more pious without the bible".

The first sentence contradicts the second - cultural relativism and identitarianism assert that we are inescapably bound to the particularities of who we are, and are therefore precisely a rejection of overarching metanarratives and objective truth. So it's not clear what stage in the process you think we're undergoing now.

Well yes, much of the postmodern corpus is inherently contradictory and illogical. That’s a part of the whole thing. Didn’t stop it from dominating higher levels of the academy and culture for much of the last few decades.

Is religion really getting an upswing? Every statistic I've seen suggests a huge drop in the number of practicing religious people in most developed nations in the last decade. There seems to be a small number of right-wing young men going back to church, but it's not large enough to counteract the overall decrease in religiosity, which is especially pronounced in women and people left of centre. I've personally seen more an increase in a sort of generic spirituality than organised religion.

Religion seems largely stabilized by generational cohort overall in the US- but plenty of churches are still dying. Gen Z isn’t any less religious than millennials, but they’re both less religious than their silent gen great grandparents. As older people die off congregations shrink, but they’re stabilizing at a lower level.

Theres also denominational shuffling, where some groups gain at the expense of others.

Btw theres not really a good way to get actual church attendance rates- surveys are biased upwards and cell phone tracking is biased downwards(phones ping more often when people are on them). Internal records from churches are probably pretty close to accurate but can only tell you absolute numbers, not rates.

To clarify, I’m looking more at the leading edge of academia / the intelligentsia as a whole. Overall population numbers with religion are extremely sketchy, especially given that many people will nominally identify as religious while not holding genuine belief. I may be in a bubble regarding the intelligentsia as a whole, but this still seems to be the case. Let me know if you think I’m wrong.

However FWIW, I have read from Ryan Burges who specializes in this field that the falling numbers of religious identification have been arrested, while trans identification is sharply down in the last few years. Again I wouldn’t update too far on these major pop numbers but it’s something to go on I suppose.

The rise and fall of trans self-ID was a phenomenon that happened entirely within the subset of the Blue Tribe who might use tumblr to share something other than cat pictures or pr0n. I don't think these people have gone away, I just think a lot of them are identifying as something other than trans. In the educated British circles I move in, "neurospicy" people (and particularly "neurospicy" people with vaginas - noughties autism advocacy was a bit boy-centric) can now identify with and be proud of their "disability" without needing to question their gender identity.

[The more cynical would say that this is because the Yookay will give you a subsidised Motability car for having a mild mental illness but not for being transgender, but as far as I can see the same vibe shift is happening among people who wouldn't think of rorting Motability]

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