Metamodernity, religiosity, and the rebuilding of meaning and value

I am thinking a lot these days about how maps of meaning are created i.e. culture, but specifically culture that sustains values and especially ethical values inter-subjectively. I am interested in this because maps of meaning are critical to well-being. You need maps of meaning to secure a sense of meaning and purpose (M&P) because M&P requires you to pursue goals that you think are valuable. Most people also need maps of meaning to satisfy their basic psychology need for relatedness, because most people want to feel part of a community and a community is defined in terms of the values that it practices and manifests in collective ritual. An enduring research question of mine is how to replace the religious maps of meaning that have decayed over the past few centuries with secular maps that are grounded in liberal values. These must emerge organically from the spontaneous expression of value on the part of individuals. This expressions then attract others until a community emerges. Now many people think that secular replacement for religion cannot exist because religion (purports to) connect you to something greater than yourself. In thereby imparts to its values a weightiness (or seriousness) that is lacking in secular systems. I dispute this, but it's an important debate and worth exploring.

    

Let me make some assumptions that you may disagree with but that I don't want to spend time justifying in this blog post. For most of human history, both metaphysical and normative wisdom was sustained, communicated, socialised, and instantiated through religious practice. That is to say, both our understanding of how the world works and what is valuable were expressed religiously. For example, Pythagoras, famous for his theorem about the sides of a triangle, led a cult that saw mathematics as a manifestation of the divine. Patriarchal values are manifest in Christianity in the preeminence of the father and the son over the mother. For all the horrors of religion, this approach actually worked pretty well to maintain order and give people a sense of 'understanding' why things happened to them. In many cases, this understanding is psychologically (though perhaps not practically) superior to modern scientific explanations. For example, celtic tribes described what we now call post-natal depression as a new mother being spirited away by the fairies, only able to return if her family and community showed her love and support that would coax her spirit back. A load of superstitious nonsense, but a very accessible way for people to understand what behaviours would be beneficial in the circumstances. Certainly much more accessible than talking about serotonin uptake inhibitors. 

The first cracks in this religious approach to meaning came with scientific breakthroughs. By the late 19th century we knew an awful lot about the physical world that contradicted religious dogma. The Copernican/Galilean structure of the solar system was a major upheaval, for example. The revelation that religion led us astray regarding physical reality made intellectuals desire a secular foundation for prevailing norms as well. Kant's work on morality is the archetypal example. The geniuses of this era all thought that they could 'prove' religious ethics through cold logic, but by the time of the existentialists (1950s) it was relatively clear that this was not the case (as Dostoevsky noted in horror 'if God does not exist then everything is permitted' - not quite, but it's a very hard problem to solve). 

To this day, even as our scientific understanding of the physical world has advanced inordinately, we continue to struggle to replace religious foundations for ethics. This is perhaps because the psychological architecture on which religious belief is foisted appears to have evolved precisely to help us cooperate i.e. to engage in 'moral' behaviour. I don't have time to get into this, but an accessible book is Harari's Sapiens, a less accessible book is Gintis' Individuality and Entanglement. 

Nonetheless, once you know that religion is 'made up' it is hard to take it seriously even if you think it would be beneficial to do so (many people still succeed of course - the popularity of Mormonism is amazing). So what's a secularist to do?

My argument is that we can build maps of meaning and sustain systems of serious norms inter-subjectively through compelling reasons, integrity, and cultural forces like social admonishment and encouragement. I am studying secular examples of this in communities like Effective Altruism, Sunday Assembly, and Hobby Groups. The contemporary period of 'meta-modernity' is basically about this. Modernism took humanist values for granted and argued that we could build a better world. Postmodernism critiqued prevailing values so hard that it eventually undermined the basis of any values in reason and made everyone super skeptical. All attempts to impose values is just power and can't be justified as benevolence - people can only legitimately be brought into value systems if they do so consciously, willingly, and freely, with agency. It's hard to rebuild from or respond to postmodernism because postmodernism is correct. Metamodernity mixes modernism and postmodernism. It acknowledges the cynical insights of postmodernism that all value systems are social constructs, but also appreciates, as modernist idealism did, that humans want to feel like they are building a better world. Where it differs from earlier modes of value building is that it replaces top-down, authority-led socialisation into value systems with bottom-up, individual-led creation of value systems. Someone decides they they value something, so they create it and put it out into the world. Other people also value it and so participate with that original person in creating more of that thing. Gradually they develop rituals and customs that perpetuate and worship their values. A simple if weak example is retro videogaming groups, beautifully documented in King of Kong. These are random people who love retro games and have erected a cultural system that allows people to celebrate this love communally.  

Now the concern that everyone has with replacing religious systems of meaning and value with these sorts of secular one is that the secular ones lack the weight and seriousness of the religious ones. 'New Age' spiritualism exemplifies this concern, with shallow wankers dressing like fools and pretending to connect with the universal om through crystal healing and ritualistic tea ceremonies. 

A tea ceremony outside Los Angeles, as reported in the New York Times. 

An alternate approach is to dress your new secular value system in the garb of the old religious system. Jordan Peterson does an admirable (and I mean that literally) job of this. He shies away from saying that he believes in God and constantly interlaces his biblical analysis with links to empirical psychology and sociobiology. But ultimately what he's arguing is that we should follow traditional morality beacuse it works and has weight because of all this rich cultural material that it developed. I totally get it when I'm sitting in old cathedrals looking up at the breathtaking art and architecture that adorns them. This solution doesn't work for me because I think religious values are too flawed and religious belief is just a bit too bullshit. But I don't dismiss it. Certainly I do not dismiss theism. 

So what's my response to claims that metamodernism cannot produce thick cultural systems and serious values? Well you just need to look beyond small acts of metamodernism to notice the great secular cultural systems of the world. As an example, I present 'America'.

American culture is a collection of values that are quite new in many ways: liberty, opportunity, rule of law, democracy, etc. It is practiced through regular community rituals: parades, singing the national anthem and unfurling the flag at sports games, national feast days, Hamilton the Musical, etc. People select into it via immigration. It has heroes and legendary figures - Abe Lincoln (Jesus), the founding fathers (the disciples), the President (the pope), American soldiers - holy texts (the constitution, the canon of American literature), and holy symbols (the flag, the statue of liberty, the supreme court building, etc). It even has houses of worship of a sort (the football field, town halls, etc.). And these rituals and the wider culture they are a part of are effective at promoting certain behaviours and making American values feel palpable and serious, even though, judging by how young they are, American values are as 'made up' and mesopotamic values, or any other set for that matter.

The reason why people are skeptical of metamodernism is because building something palpable like 'America' takes a long time. But not that long! Even starting with 1619 it's only been 400 years. The blink of an eye in historical time. And America has mostly been growing in seriousness as a value system over that time period such that it could function as a secular religion long ago.

Now there's a lot wrong with America as a value system. It is built on materialism, a hollowed out Christianity, imperialism, and unsustainable consumption practices. An exquisite literary exploration of its shortcomings as a means of giving people meaning and purpose is The Day of the Locust by Nathaniel West, America's Dostoevsky. But America is an ongoing project that can be updated and renewed. This is the advantage of secular systems - they are much more amenable to reason and cultural change that religious systems, which by their nature must appeal to an unchanging cosmic order.