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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.
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.
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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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