Apart from the observation in the title, it seems obvious to many: 1) people's lives improved fairly drastically (health, security, etc) and 2) education, most of all scientific/scientific-adjacent.
Religion still thrives most where people must perpetually fear death, sickness or misfortune. See 3rd world religion predominance.
I strongly disagree. There's postmodern philosophy, which was a fad coming out of France in the late 20th Century, and there's the kind of postmodernity described by Lyotard which deals in the fundamental social conditions of late capitalism. The philosophical fad has gone away, but as Smith points out, the cultural conditions, the nature of late capitalist society, has not fundamentally changed. Social fluidity, pluralism, lack of foundations, loss of truth, epitemporal historicism, the kind of "things hang until they don't" mood that Frederic Jameson describes is still the main feature of modern social relations.
Metamodernity is an intellectual fad that describes a coping method that upper-middle class people developed under the conditions of late capitalist society. Metamodern thinkers are horrified by the consequences of late capitalist modernity and so they perform a "retreat from insight" in the language of Eric Voegelin, falling back into a gnostic denial of material conditions because they refuse to accept what has to be accepted. This is why the return to moral sobriety among the upper-middle class continually collapses into cynical attempts to plunder the public realm and further segregate the upper-middle class away from the dysfunction of their left-behind society. They can't even hold their frame long enough to pretend that social justice or environmentalism is anything more than a scam to enrich the same old corrupt actors. They're postmodern in their bones, and so they can't help but turn every fact into a tool of power, every truth into a means to enrich themselves. Al-Gharbi's book, reviewed on this site several months ago, shows that there never was a transition to post-postmodernity. We have never been woke.
Until we accept that the conditions of postmodernity are with us for the foreseeable future, we're not going to be able to do anything about it. There are ways to be morally serious in a postmodern society, but it won't be the upper-middle class who does it and it certainly won't be academic philosophers. It will be inside of the fragments of subcultures that build bubbles within a barren, stagnant, vicious mainstream society; oases of social capital kept sequestered away from the wandering masses amidst the societal desert.
You don't understand the meaning of Grand Narratives in Lyotard, then. The point is not that they don't exist, that's absurd. Ricouer is great at pointing out the way that even in people like Sartre and Derrida, they deny narrative while quietly creeping back in through the back door when they want to be intelligible.
The point of Lyotard's notion of Grand Narrative is that no single narrative is credible to enough people to sustain a social consensus. You've completely glossed over Lyotard's discussion of micronarrative fragments, which are a key element in Ricouer's analysis in Memory, History, Forgetting. Ricouer's discussion of group identity and its connection to fragmented narrative, or the patchwork style of connecting unrelated pieces of stories into a Frankenstein monster ideology are perfect evidence of the failure to go beyond the postmodern milieu. You're right, the Left does stitch together random bits of narrative and call them the same thing. You might as well have cribbed that straight out of Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.
The claim that we are more ideological than the 90's requires that you use the popular terminology and label anything remotely political as ideology. Yet you just negated yourself by pointing out the way that political "ideologies" today are random patchwork of temporary, contingent interests packaged together to satisfy the immediate needs of a political coalition. That's not ideology, that's just good, old-fashioned Machiavellian power politics. Where's the political parousia? Where's Heidegger's god-becoming-God to save us all in modern politics? Where is the immanentization of the eschaton? Your best possible answer is the transgender movement, one of the few political movements today that preserve the modern dream of transmogrifying Being out of Mind. For everyone else, ideology is dead. We lie about beliefs to justify interests. That has nothing to do with modernity, post, or meta. We fight like Guelphs and Ghibillines, not like Phalangists and Communists, which points to another error metamodern philosophers made: the neglect of epitemporality. Epitemporality still lives on strongly in our society as evidenced by Black Lives Matters, but that's a whole other discussion.
Smith said that the intellectual fashion of French postmodernism is over, but explicitly states throughout that the cultural mood of postmodernity, or the fundamental social conditions of postmodernity, are still present and deeply embedded in our society. The entire second half of the interview is studded with references to pluralism, cultural disjunction, rootlessness, capitalism dislocation of populations, the breakup of institutions, and the other root material causes of the postmodern cultural attitude. It's easy to ignore these things from the privileged station of upper-middle class enclaves because the world is made to protect the sensitive eyes of the UMC from the wreckage they leave behind. That's basically what metamodern myth is about: coming up with excuses for why the UMC shouldn't have to deal with the mess they left behind after globalism.
As to the politics of antagonism, Ricouer already addressed it. It is absolutely still local, still within the realm of micronarrative because intersectionality is a top-down imposed structure of partisan politics which doesn't exist at the level of personal identity. It's a fraud that is trotted out at election time but always collapses in practice. Nobody is opposed to "white, cis-het, male, patriarchal, Christian, capitalists" in reality. That's a talking point used to forge temporary factions for short term action. In practice, each group is a solipsistic, navel-gazing onanism. Each group hates their personalized, inverted-self Other which leads to all kinds of hilarity when the feminists run into the transsexuals and BLM runs into white homosexual gentrifiers. This is one of the failings of right-wing "anti-woke" (hate those terms, btw) movements is that they are seeing a pattern where it doesn't exist. Your universal antagonist just happens to be a sweet spot where a plethora of unrelated jealousies, hatreds, and ressentiments converge. Experiencing life in a majority-minority polity is a useful exercise, to see how quickly the old left-wing solidarities fall apart the moment their old scapegoat becomes unavailable.
I'll use your example because it works well for me. "The Science" isn't an entity. It's an entirely vacuous legitimizing symbol. Much like "The People," these symbols have no inherent meaning. As described by philosophers and social analysts as varied as Voegelin, Rorty, Lasch, Turchin, and Mosca, the use of these terms creates a tautology. The Science Says it is True or the People Say it must be Done can both do away with the first clause and be entirely complete in their meaning. Both are ways of asserting final legitimizing authority by a ruling elite. The point of the Science narrative and how it differs from Modernist attitudes is that the Modernists were the last to care about whether those legitimizing symbols conformed to an outside, ontic standard. The Pomos didn't care whether The Science was true. If you want to make a distinction between Pomo attitudes about The Science and the COVID example, the best argument you could make is that the Millennial Generation has lost the capacity to even ask the question of whether the Science conforms to reality. Believe the Science rhetoric is something right out of Richard Rorty's playbook, delivered with a smirk at the rubes, or alternatively a mindless regurgitation of a sacred creed whose meaning has been forgotten by the Millennial generation. Likewise, in the anti-vax rightists, I think you're underestimating the degree of simple Middle American noncompliance. A handful of wierdos "went deeper into the science," while the bulk simply said that Biden could go to hell out of an instinctive understanding that the Science is just another way for authority to say "do what I say." Most people who rejected the COVID vax were not terminally online wierdos. Keep in mind the high correlation between vax rejection and the Oxy epidemic, which is an interesting rabbit hole I don’t have time to get into.
So yeah, you got me on Machiavelli. I was using the word in the popular sense and not the technical sense. But ideology has to be placed into its proper context, as both Mannheim argues in Ideology and Utopia and Ricouer in Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, else you're just throwing out an empty symbol again. Ideology as a term representing something real got blasted on both sides by the older Marx's use of it as a term for any deviation from Marxism, and then by non-Marxist use of it as a catch-all for political concepts in response to the Marxists. Now, of course, it has degenerated into a simple pejorative. Ideology as a robust, meaningful category has to connect back to its origin in Idealist Theory, its connection to the utopian themes of parousia and transformation, and most importantly, its function as ersatz religion providing intramundane salvation and sanctification. Any other use of the term is just a popularization that lacks philosophic specificity, like my misuse of Machiavellian.
Relatedly, no, DEI and Alt Right are not particularly ideological positions. They’re simple friend-enemy dichotomies. Nothing is happening in American politics that isn’t simply a playing-out of the logic of Schmittian competition. There is no particular *idea* that is outside the bounds of either the “woke” or “anti-woke” factions other than the idea that the other side could possibly be right about anything. Both can be explained purely in terms of political psychology: in-group and out-group dynamics, envy and ressentiment, transgression as boundary-marking. Those very examples are examples of the death of ideas as meaningful in contemporary society and their replacement with more tribalistic approaches to social conflict. It’s the logic that Lyotard bemoans at the end of Postmodernity, where the very idea of the idea has become so discredited that people lose the capacity to practice politics beyond the bare minimum of group interests. That’s why it’s so hilarious to see the “DEI for Whites” rhetoric coming from the left. What did they think the Trump Movement was about? Rules for thee and not for me – that’s the common meaning of both sides and the principle of what you’re calling “overpoliticization.” It's only overpoliticized in Schmitt’s usage of the word, otherwise it’s just democracy in a multicultural society.
And this is where I would argue Al-Gharbi is helpful. He shows in his book that even as the Millennial-generation, upper-middle class of “cultural capitalists” strives to achieve that “meta-modern” renewal of moral earnestness, to be serious about serious things despite them being contingent, they are incapable of carrying it out. He doesn’t deny that they want to be good, want to care about the environment, and want to be socially aware of injustice. It’s just that they can’t seem to escape their postmodern destiny: to turn it all into a self-serving, corrupt, perpetuation of the existing system of political disorder. He says “we were never woke” because of the pages upon pages of evidence that every morally earnest step toward a renewal of serious values involved two steps back toward class privilege, self-dealing, corruption, and entrenchment of elite power. Being “woke” was the most “anti-woke” position one could take in the mid-2010’s: how delectably Derridean.
In a way that would have simultaneously pleased and horrified Hannah Arendt, we’ve come to a place at the end of postmodernity where people cannot Will to be Good despite the fact that they wish to will the good. Her old friend, Augustine, returns to carry out his revenge on a society that has forgotten his truths. Contemporary Man is *predestined* to be postmodern in his bones, to be incapable of escaping the whirlpool and ultimately to cease even being capable of asking the questions that might provide a way out. The roots of this can be seen as far back as Ortega y Gasset's psychological diagnosis of the Mass as a product of the material conditions of the 20th century. A social milieu, in the sense used by thinkers like Ortega, Husserl, Scheler, Voegelin, Heidegger, and others, is a deeply embedded structure that is tied to the nature of the Lived World and the life processes therein. These things don't just change randomly, but alterations in one aspect reverberate in all others. Modernity came to a screeching halt on the bloody fields of Verdun. Pomo came of age in an era of globalization, economic liberalization, decolonization, Cold War and the collapse of Communism as a viable alternative to the West. These thing shook the world, not just the lives of individuals, which is why we see such stark transitions in world-milieux.
The key to understanding why metamodernity isn’t real is because the metamoderns can’t define what changed in the 90s from Lyotard’s account of the sources of postmodernity. Did our society suddenly become less pluralistic? Less fluid? Did people start settling down and stop moving? Did employment become stable and people began taking jobs they’d hold for the rest of their lives? Did people suddenly stumble into a fixed source of meaning in their lives? Did the intellectual horizon of ideas suddenly contract into something capable of being meaningful to the average man? Or alternatively, have we magically overcome the human need for meaning and identity, and found ourselves content to float in a world so wide that we can’t possibly grasp the smallest part of it? Did Man change so drastically that he can “own nothing and be happy” in a world where he has no assurances of anything any longer?
Apart from the observation in the title, it seems obvious to many: 1) people's lives improved fairly drastically (health, security, etc) and 2) education, most of all scientific/scientific-adjacent.
Religion still thrives most where people must perpetually fear death, sickness or misfortune. See 3rd world religion predominance.
I strongly disagree. There's postmodern philosophy, which was a fad coming out of France in the late 20th Century, and there's the kind of postmodernity described by Lyotard which deals in the fundamental social conditions of late capitalism. The philosophical fad has gone away, but as Smith points out, the cultural conditions, the nature of late capitalist society, has not fundamentally changed. Social fluidity, pluralism, lack of foundations, loss of truth, epitemporal historicism, the kind of "things hang until they don't" mood that Frederic Jameson describes is still the main feature of modern social relations.
Metamodernity is an intellectual fad that describes a coping method that upper-middle class people developed under the conditions of late capitalist society. Metamodern thinkers are horrified by the consequences of late capitalist modernity and so they perform a "retreat from insight" in the language of Eric Voegelin, falling back into a gnostic denial of material conditions because they refuse to accept what has to be accepted. This is why the return to moral sobriety among the upper-middle class continually collapses into cynical attempts to plunder the public realm and further segregate the upper-middle class away from the dysfunction of their left-behind society. They can't even hold their frame long enough to pretend that social justice or environmentalism is anything more than a scam to enrich the same old corrupt actors. They're postmodern in their bones, and so they can't help but turn every fact into a tool of power, every truth into a means to enrich themselves. Al-Gharbi's book, reviewed on this site several months ago, shows that there never was a transition to post-postmodernity. We have never been woke.
Until we accept that the conditions of postmodernity are with us for the foreseeable future, we're not going to be able to do anything about it. There are ways to be morally serious in a postmodern society, but it won't be the upper-middle class who does it and it certainly won't be academic philosophers. It will be inside of the fragments of subcultures that build bubbles within a barren, stagnant, vicious mainstream society; oases of social capital kept sequestered away from the wandering masses amidst the societal desert.
You don't understand the meaning of Grand Narratives in Lyotard, then. The point is not that they don't exist, that's absurd. Ricouer is great at pointing out the way that even in people like Sartre and Derrida, they deny narrative while quietly creeping back in through the back door when they want to be intelligible.
The point of Lyotard's notion of Grand Narrative is that no single narrative is credible to enough people to sustain a social consensus. You've completely glossed over Lyotard's discussion of micronarrative fragments, which are a key element in Ricouer's analysis in Memory, History, Forgetting. Ricouer's discussion of group identity and its connection to fragmented narrative, or the patchwork style of connecting unrelated pieces of stories into a Frankenstein monster ideology are perfect evidence of the failure to go beyond the postmodern milieu. You're right, the Left does stitch together random bits of narrative and call them the same thing. You might as well have cribbed that straight out of Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.
The claim that we are more ideological than the 90's requires that you use the popular terminology and label anything remotely political as ideology. Yet you just negated yourself by pointing out the way that political "ideologies" today are random patchwork of temporary, contingent interests packaged together to satisfy the immediate needs of a political coalition. That's not ideology, that's just good, old-fashioned Machiavellian power politics. Where's the political parousia? Where's Heidegger's god-becoming-God to save us all in modern politics? Where is the immanentization of the eschaton? Your best possible answer is the transgender movement, one of the few political movements today that preserve the modern dream of transmogrifying Being out of Mind. For everyone else, ideology is dead. We lie about beliefs to justify interests. That has nothing to do with modernity, post, or meta. We fight like Guelphs and Ghibillines, not like Phalangists and Communists, which points to another error metamodern philosophers made: the neglect of epitemporality. Epitemporality still lives on strongly in our society as evidenced by Black Lives Matters, but that's a whole other discussion.
Smith said that the intellectual fashion of French postmodernism is over, but explicitly states throughout that the cultural mood of postmodernity, or the fundamental social conditions of postmodernity, are still present and deeply embedded in our society. The entire second half of the interview is studded with references to pluralism, cultural disjunction, rootlessness, capitalism dislocation of populations, the breakup of institutions, and the other root material causes of the postmodern cultural attitude. It's easy to ignore these things from the privileged station of upper-middle class enclaves because the world is made to protect the sensitive eyes of the UMC from the wreckage they leave behind. That's basically what metamodern myth is about: coming up with excuses for why the UMC shouldn't have to deal with the mess they left behind after globalism.
As to the politics of antagonism, Ricouer already addressed it. It is absolutely still local, still within the realm of micronarrative because intersectionality is a top-down imposed structure of partisan politics which doesn't exist at the level of personal identity. It's a fraud that is trotted out at election time but always collapses in practice. Nobody is opposed to "white, cis-het, male, patriarchal, Christian, capitalists" in reality. That's a talking point used to forge temporary factions for short term action. In practice, each group is a solipsistic, navel-gazing onanism. Each group hates their personalized, inverted-self Other which leads to all kinds of hilarity when the feminists run into the transsexuals and BLM runs into white homosexual gentrifiers. This is one of the failings of right-wing "anti-woke" (hate those terms, btw) movements is that they are seeing a pattern where it doesn't exist. Your universal antagonist just happens to be a sweet spot where a plethora of unrelated jealousies, hatreds, and ressentiments converge. Experiencing life in a majority-minority polity is a useful exercise, to see how quickly the old left-wing solidarities fall apart the moment their old scapegoat becomes unavailable.
I'll use your example because it works well for me. "The Science" isn't an entity. It's an entirely vacuous legitimizing symbol. Much like "The People," these symbols have no inherent meaning. As described by philosophers and social analysts as varied as Voegelin, Rorty, Lasch, Turchin, and Mosca, the use of these terms creates a tautology. The Science Says it is True or the People Say it must be Done can both do away with the first clause and be entirely complete in their meaning. Both are ways of asserting final legitimizing authority by a ruling elite. The point of the Science narrative and how it differs from Modernist attitudes is that the Modernists were the last to care about whether those legitimizing symbols conformed to an outside, ontic standard. The Pomos didn't care whether The Science was true. If you want to make a distinction between Pomo attitudes about The Science and the COVID example, the best argument you could make is that the Millennial Generation has lost the capacity to even ask the question of whether the Science conforms to reality. Believe the Science rhetoric is something right out of Richard Rorty's playbook, delivered with a smirk at the rubes, or alternatively a mindless regurgitation of a sacred creed whose meaning has been forgotten by the Millennial generation. Likewise, in the anti-vax rightists, I think you're underestimating the degree of simple Middle American noncompliance. A handful of wierdos "went deeper into the science," while the bulk simply said that Biden could go to hell out of an instinctive understanding that the Science is just another way for authority to say "do what I say." Most people who rejected the COVID vax were not terminally online wierdos. Keep in mind the high correlation between vax rejection and the Oxy epidemic, which is an interesting rabbit hole I don’t have time to get into.
So yeah, you got me on Machiavelli. I was using the word in the popular sense and not the technical sense. But ideology has to be placed into its proper context, as both Mannheim argues in Ideology and Utopia and Ricouer in Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, else you're just throwing out an empty symbol again. Ideology as a term representing something real got blasted on both sides by the older Marx's use of it as a term for any deviation from Marxism, and then by non-Marxist use of it as a catch-all for political concepts in response to the Marxists. Now, of course, it has degenerated into a simple pejorative. Ideology as a robust, meaningful category has to connect back to its origin in Idealist Theory, its connection to the utopian themes of parousia and transformation, and most importantly, its function as ersatz religion providing intramundane salvation and sanctification. Any other use of the term is just a popularization that lacks philosophic specificity, like my misuse of Machiavellian.
Relatedly, no, DEI and Alt Right are not particularly ideological positions. They’re simple friend-enemy dichotomies. Nothing is happening in American politics that isn’t simply a playing-out of the logic of Schmittian competition. There is no particular *idea* that is outside the bounds of either the “woke” or “anti-woke” factions other than the idea that the other side could possibly be right about anything. Both can be explained purely in terms of political psychology: in-group and out-group dynamics, envy and ressentiment, transgression as boundary-marking. Those very examples are examples of the death of ideas as meaningful in contemporary society and their replacement with more tribalistic approaches to social conflict. It’s the logic that Lyotard bemoans at the end of Postmodernity, where the very idea of the idea has become so discredited that people lose the capacity to practice politics beyond the bare minimum of group interests. That’s why it’s so hilarious to see the “DEI for Whites” rhetoric coming from the left. What did they think the Trump Movement was about? Rules for thee and not for me – that’s the common meaning of both sides and the principle of what you’re calling “overpoliticization.” It's only overpoliticized in Schmitt’s usage of the word, otherwise it’s just democracy in a multicultural society.
And this is where I would argue Al-Gharbi is helpful. He shows in his book that even as the Millennial-generation, upper-middle class of “cultural capitalists” strives to achieve that “meta-modern” renewal of moral earnestness, to be serious about serious things despite them being contingent, they are incapable of carrying it out. He doesn’t deny that they want to be good, want to care about the environment, and want to be socially aware of injustice. It’s just that they can’t seem to escape their postmodern destiny: to turn it all into a self-serving, corrupt, perpetuation of the existing system of political disorder. He says “we were never woke” because of the pages upon pages of evidence that every morally earnest step toward a renewal of serious values involved two steps back toward class privilege, self-dealing, corruption, and entrenchment of elite power. Being “woke” was the most “anti-woke” position one could take in the mid-2010’s: how delectably Derridean.
In a way that would have simultaneously pleased and horrified Hannah Arendt, we’ve come to a place at the end of postmodernity where people cannot Will to be Good despite the fact that they wish to will the good. Her old friend, Augustine, returns to carry out his revenge on a society that has forgotten his truths. Contemporary Man is *predestined* to be postmodern in his bones, to be incapable of escaping the whirlpool and ultimately to cease even being capable of asking the questions that might provide a way out. The roots of this can be seen as far back as Ortega y Gasset's psychological diagnosis of the Mass as a product of the material conditions of the 20th century. A social milieu, in the sense used by thinkers like Ortega, Husserl, Scheler, Voegelin, Heidegger, and others, is a deeply embedded structure that is tied to the nature of the Lived World and the life processes therein. These things don't just change randomly, but alterations in one aspect reverberate in all others. Modernity came to a screeching halt on the bloody fields of Verdun. Pomo came of age in an era of globalization, economic liberalization, decolonization, Cold War and the collapse of Communism as a viable alternative to the West. These thing shook the world, not just the lives of individuals, which is why we see such stark transitions in world-milieux.
The key to understanding why metamodernity isn’t real is because the metamoderns can’t define what changed in the 90s from Lyotard’s account of the sources of postmodernity. Did our society suddenly become less pluralistic? Less fluid? Did people start settling down and stop moving? Did employment become stable and people began taking jobs they’d hold for the rest of their lives? Did people suddenly stumble into a fixed source of meaning in their lives? Did the intellectual horizon of ideas suddenly contract into something capable of being meaningful to the average man? Or alternatively, have we magically overcome the human need for meaning and identity, and found ourselves content to float in a world so wide that we can’t possibly grasp the smallest part of it? Did Man change so drastically that he can “own nothing and be happy” in a world where he has no assurances of anything any longer?
Thanks, Shawn