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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.
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.
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?
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