Now UTOKing: Metamodernism
In this blog and video series, we present you with a curated set of definitions to better understand our place in today’s world through the lens of the UTOK system. In the previous blog and video, we discussed the concepts of ontology and epistemology. Here, we discuss metamodernism, how it is related to the UTOK system, and why it is a useful concept in the current societal zeitgeist.
In the 1980s in the United States there was a major push to have psychotherapies be empirically tested to demonstrate their utility and effectiveness in generating outcomes. This reflects an intellectual sensibility that truth is “out there” and can be tested and found, independent of human bias. A recent president of the Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology proclaimed that the primary goal of the society was to help “historically marginalized and ‘othered’ groups have access to gatekeeping practices and disciplinary resources.” The search for empirically supported treatments represents an exemplar of the modernist intellectual tradition in psychology, whereas the focus on increasing representation from historically marginalized populations represents an exemplar of the postmodern tradition. The postmodern tradition emerges out of the modernist tradition to critique its limitations. Given this, we can then ask, what comes after the postmodern sensibility?
In the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the prefix meta- refers to that which shows explicit awareness of itself, that is, a subject that transcends its own limits to consider itself as the very object of reflection. Think of when characters in a movie break the “fourth wall” to make a self-referential point. The concept of metatheory, for instance, refers to theoretical work that is reflective about theories themselves. What is metamodern then reflective about? There are different lenses from which to consider this question, including artistic, developmental, spiritual, philosophical, political, and sociological lenses. These aspects are brilliantly covered in Brendan Graham Dempsey’s recently released book, Metamodernism: The Cultural Logic of Cultural Logics.
To understand what metamodern means from a sociocultural lens, we can turn to the work of Lene Rachel Andersen (2019) in mapping cultural codes. Metamodernity: Meaning and Hope in a Complex World positions metamodernity as an aspirational cultural code that effectively integrates the key features of the four cultural codes that have preceded it. The first is the oral-indigenous epoch that was in full force approximately 50,000 years ago. It was structured by the hunter-gatherer lifestyle in small, intimate groups of 50–150 people, generally characterized by a functional relation with nature, and communal yet autonomous group dynamics. With the emergence of ancient civilizations approximately 5,000 years ago, we see the development of a second cultural code, called traditionalism. The traditional cultural code is characterized by technologies (i.e., ships, roads, writing, money, etc.) and refined knowledge systems developed by intellectuals that allow for the institutionalization of power and the construction of large-scale worldviews that coordinate populations that, for some civilizations would reach into the millions.
The modern cultural code emerged approximately 500 years ago, and was marked by the European Enlightenment, and included the birth of modern empirical natural science, the Industrial Revolution, capital labor markets, democratic governance, and accompanying beliefs and values, such as progress, reason, scientific thinking, and rationality. The postmodern cultural code has emerged in the last 50 years. It is about cultivating a critical attitude in response to the truth claims of modernity, especially challenging the latter’s aptitude and authority to generate incremental progress through power relations and capitalism. Postmodernity challenges hierarchical structures and emphasizes a pluralism of perspectives that questions the idea of science as a vehicle for objective truth, as it claims that our socially constructed narratives and cultural biases influence all endeavors that take place in the Culture-Person plane.
As the fifth and aspirational cultural code, metamodernity appreciates and seeks to adaptively integrate aspects of each preceding sensibility. It aspires to embody the indigenous-oral sensibility in a more intimate and functional relation with nature and with one’s community, integrate the emphasis of the traditional period on establishing well-functioning institutions to coordinate actions and regulate society in accordance with the orientation of the time, assimilate the modernist values of scientific progress, reason, truth, and individuality, as well as the postmodernist attention to the sociocultural biases and narratives that influence our justification systems and our actions in the world. More than simply combining the main points of the preceding cultural codes, the metamodern sensibility seeks to zoom-out and gain a coherent outlook for a new sensibility to guide our endeavors.
UTOK as a Metamodern Knowledge System
Early in the 2011 book A New Unified Theory of Psychology, Gregg characterized the unified theory of psychology as offering a “post postmodern grand meta-narrative” (p. 4). This was written almost a decade before he had heard of the concept of metamodernism, but it nonetheless clearly reflects the sentiment. His 2022 book, A New Synthesis for Solving the Problem of Psychology: Addressing the Enlightenment Gap, explicitly frames UTOK as a metamodern project. Its core structure enables it to include and transcend modern and postmodern sensibilities. Consider, for example, that the Tree of Knowledge (ToK) System has a vision logic that frames both the modernist claim about science (i.e., that it can transcend cultural contexts to reveal objective truths) and postmodern critiques (i.e., that it is a cultural system of justification that emerges in a particular context and is shaped by power and influence and is normatively structured in a biased way).
With its cones of complexification, the ToK maps the emergence of behavioral patterns in nature from Matter, to Life, to Mind, and to Culture, and identifies science as a large-scale system of interconnected justifications arising out of the Culture plane. Science’s justification system legitimizes the modernist way of knowing about the world, mapping behavioral patterns in nature by factoring out the biased human knower to achieve transcendent objective truth claims. As a system of justification, science abides by the implicit sociocultural norms of the Culture-Person context it is embedded in, legitimizing the postmodern considerations of the influence of socially constructed knowledge in our endeavors in the world. Specifically, UTOK’s Justification Systems Theory (JUST) offers an explanatory metatheoretical account of our human context of justification. That is, of how we evolved from primates to cultivate a plane of shared propositional narratives and meaning-making that is uniquely human.
Lastly, the Garden of UTOK offers a framework for embedding our knowledge in a dialectical scientific-humanistic way of knowing, fostering wise living in the collective in a value-laden, communal yet autonomous connection with nature and each other. It is oriented toward the cultivation of wise institutions that adaptively educate, structure, and organize our collective systems in a metamodern coherent integrated pluralism. It also should be noted that the feel and sensibility of the UTOK Garden is that of a sincerely ironic representation. It is a cartoon made of PowerPoint clip art that attempts to pull together the great insights from the sciences and the humanities into a coherent, holistic worldview. Sincere irony turns out to be an excellent way to frame the metamodernist sensibility, and when Gregg learned of it, he immediately recognized that the Garden was a manifestation of a larger cultural movement of which he was completely ignorant, but nonetheless unconsciously drawn into.
This blog was authored by Marcia Gralha, MA.
