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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.
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.
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.).
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.
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