Enlightenment, Benightment, & Metamodernism
"The world is lazy, but you and me, we're just crazy. So when I'm with you, I have fun." —Best Coast
I. Enlightenment
“The bullshit asymmetry: the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.” —Brandolini’s law
Along with Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose, James Lindsay was responsible for the Grievance Studies Affair. This was a hoax from 2017-2018 to bring light to the poor scholarship occurring in academia, specifically within humanities departments and critical social justice disciplines (i.e. cultural, queer, race, gender, fat, and sexuality studies). Together under pseudonyms, they wrote 20 articles, topics of which included: Hitler’s Mein Kampf rewritten with radical feminist language, the occurrence of “rape culture” in dog parks, fat bodybuilding, feminist astronomy, and more. Of these papers; 4 were published; 3 had been accepted but not yet published; 6 had been rejected; and 7 were still under review. The one about dog parks even won a special recognition from the journal it was published from. This cynical look at our intellectual institutions is eye-opening to their corruption. Universities, which are intended to produce research based on evidence, reason, and honesty, are shown to have declined into fraudulent clubhouses for a cultural elite. These three, amongst many others, have chosen to leave their posts at universities due to the current lack of academic freedom and free speech on campuses. Many of whom, choose to participate and disrupt the evolving information economy via podcasting, substack, discord, even based trolling via Twitter/Instagram, and other alternative methods of disseminating information.
In one of the episodes of his podcast, New Discourses, James discusses how the development of the internet and social media parallels the invention of the printing press similarly to how new methods of production decentralized information and destabilized existing powers that previously controlled information, thus controlling and structuring the public. This decentralizing and destabilization was a process of breaking away from feudalism, making way for the enlightenment. Though, existing powers never give up their power willingly, he attempts to “white-pill” us by theorizing that this moment of societal turmoil, may in fact be a precursor to a second enlightenment. Perhaps it is a theory of the natural swaying cycle of humanity, or perhaps it is utopian thinking.
It is not a secret that we are living in divisive times, and as I have previously written about, one factor is likely due to the way our online algorithms have been created, perhaps causing censorship and even social engineering to occur, or what I like to describe as “information apartheid”. Jonathan Haidt even found in his research that the current state of our political dysfunction can be correlated to when Facebook introduced threaded comments in 2014, as people could now continue arguing back and forth. James has said, “Our cognitive ability lies at risk through what we might be ruled by algorithms. The algorithms only allow us to access the information that it deems we need to know”. And it is my personal hope, that we can live to see the day when the algorithm falls, much like the Berlin Wall. He continues, “We must fight for our cognitive liberty, we must fight for our liberty to do our own research, we must fight for our liberty to draw our own conclusions and communicate those with other people.” He makes a point that at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, so much of what was deemed misinformation, was later to be proven to hold some truth. And some of the things that the institutions were telling us, were later seen as misinformation.
Earlier this year, Lex Fridman warned, “The term ‘misinformation’ is in danger of becoming like the term ‘hate speech’, over-used by people to carry out political & personal attacks, embodying the very thing they had hoped to fight. Please lead with humility & use these words cautiously, knowing the damage they can do.” This makes me pause and ponder, if what is and is not considered misinformation continues to evolve and change, then how is misinformation even measured? And who is determining this? I am not suggesting that there is no universal and objective truth or conspiracy-like thinking, but that distrust for our destabilized and declining institutions is a natural consequence of the decentralization of information.
II. Benightment
“That's what we had in the 80s and the 90s, we had a commitment to apathy while our leaders ran around pillaging the earth, and we made great movies and great art, and it was fine. Yes people got killed, but people always get killed, but now we're at war with each other…anyway that's the truth, that's the real truth, nobody wants to hear it…if there's a hell we’re all going and if there's not we get reincarnated when we're uh beetles or something but just enjoy it and nobody wants to enjoy it, and that's what makes me upset is that we used to have a country built on enjoyment, built on fat stupid people, enjoying the work of a small group of demons, and now we can't even enjoy it, can't even have fun…it helps people who want to just continually operate in the system as it's constructed and whether that is the system of perpetual war or the system of the banking sector the dominance of the financial sector or the system is tech companies set up to have these political relationships how they're presently constituted, people who are thriving in this system and using it to their ends do not want it changed and people hating each other helps them...we all know everything's fucked, but we're mostly powerless to change it and that's when society start to decay past a point and everybody just kind of sits back and watches it like a show, and it just descends into eventually something that becomes more and more unmanageable and then either a strong man dictator type comes in or there's some massive war that resets things or there's some natural disaster, but it feels like we're kind of at that point” —Tim Dillon, The Joe Rogan Experience
James makes a compelling argument with this optimistic prediction of a second enlightenment. It is true that we have been experiencing a digital revolution, making great technological advances. So much is possible. Even scientist, Steven Pinker, argues that data shows that things are actually getting better. However, we are still teetering on the edge of existential times, with threats of economic and climate crisis, as well as a war in Europe, after two years of a global pandemic. Comedian Tim Dillon recently expressed during an interview on The Joe Rogan Experience, that we should be grateful for what we had and what we’ve achieved, but also to accept the inevitability of the demise of America, and thus eventual fall of the West. It is a nihilistic reality, but at least we will go down as a dystopian absurdist comedy full of grifters and tyrants, laughing at the Donald Trumps and Caitlyn Jenners of the world. With a carpe diem, YOLO attitude to a cynical situation, his message is dark and apathetic, it celebrates abundance and accepts defeat. Lastly, he admits with sincerity that he is not above making the most of it and making a bit of money along the way. Can you please watch his special and subscribe to his podcast?
Meanwhile, society continues making dramatic oscillations between the right and the left as we descend into chaos and unlivable circumstances. At least we’ll be pacified by propaganda, Netflix, and UberEats. With President Emmanuel Macron’s recent announcement to France that we are at the end of abundance, and the World Economic Forum’s prediction that in the future we will own nothing, and we will be happy, he might not be wrong. While James’s intent is to motivate us to think for ourselves and fight against this, Tim’s is to accept the inevitable that we do not have a choice. Our every move might be constantly tracked, our bank accounts seized, we may run out of natural resources, and perhaps end up mining data for our eventual (or current?) oligarchs. Maybe it will happen after we are gone, and as Tim said more eloquently than myself, at least we will be the last ones to remember a time of true liberty and freedom. Like Lana del Rey, he believes in the country America used to be, and if things find a way to turn around, then God Bless.
III. Metamodernism
“Secular humanism has failed. As an atheist, I have argued that if religion is erased, something must be put in its place. Belief systems are intrinsic to human intelligence and survival. They ‘frame’ the flux of primary experience, which would otherwise flood the mind. But politics cannot fill the gap. Society, with which Marxism is obsessed, is only a fragment of the totality of life. As I have written, Marxism has no metaphysics: it cannot even detect, much less comprehend, the enormity of the universe and the operations of nature. Those who invest all of their spiritual energies in politics will reap the whirlwind. The evidence is all around us—the paroxysms of inchoate, infantile rage suffered by those who have turned fallible politicians into saviors and devils, godlike avatars of Good versus Evil. My substitute for religion is art, which I have expanded to include all of popular culture. But when art is reduced to politics, as has been programmatically done in academe for 40 years, its spiritual dimension is gone. It is coarsely reductive to claim that value in the history of art is always determined by the power plays of a self-referential social elite.” –Camille Paglia, Quillette
Throughout history, civilizations rise and fall, developing ideas and technology to move humanity through transitory periods, building upon one another and tearing each other down. The 14th century countered traditionalism by bringing us the rationality of modernism, and the 19th century countered modernism with the irrationality of post-modernism—and the late 20th/early 21st century brings us into post-post modernism, i.e. metamodernism, to counter what came before. Luke Turner describes metamodernism as “oscillating between sincerity and irony, deconstruction and construction, apathy and affect, attempting to attain some sort of transcendent position, as if such a thing were within our grasp. The metamodern generation understands that we can be both ironic and sincere in the same moment; that one does not necessarily diminish the other.”
At the moment, it feels like we have the worst of all worlds. The left and the right of our societies have diminished into cults of identity with tribal religiosity. Our policies have devolved into utter absurdity and contradiction. No one seems to be able to have a coherent and honest discussion when each tribe seems to have totally different definitions to various vocabularies, rendering certain language utterly meaningless. No matter how much time it takes for tribes to confront these truths, reality will always win the debate. And yet, it is still pretty annoying and stressful to keep hearing from these tribes. Even Jaron Lanier, one of the creators of the internet, has remarked that the internet has permeated an anxiety in the subconscious of society, no matter which country you may travel to, it cannot be escaped. Though he has also said that like capitalism, the internet is a powerful tool that we just haven’t been able to resolve how to get the most out of its potential yet. Despite living in an era of information anxiety and chaos, my information optimism holds onto the understanding that even if tribes never leave the comfort of their information quicksand, they will eventually sink. Though the digital dark ages are upon us, it won’t last forever, and at least we have this well curated IMDB list of metamodern films and perhaps will even be able to find a website in order to stream them illegally.
But when will we be able to acknowledge universal and objective truths, while simultaneously sympathizing with subjective experience? Is there a way to honor both the accomplishments and horrors of the past, without regressing our present? Is it worth yearning for both societal progress and personal development? Are there multiple truths, and were we better off ignorant? Can we be nostalgic for the past, while still making progress for the future? Will we ever be able to properly mediate between nature, technology, and humanity? Can we both be sincere and cynical, hopeful and ironic? Only time will tell.
& I will end this with one final quote:
“Stand firm for what you believe in, until and unless logic and experience prove you wrong. Remember, when the emperor looks naked, the emperor is naked. The truth and a lie are not ‘sort of the same thing.’ And there is no aspect, no facet, no moment of life that can’t be improved by pizza.” —Daria Morgendorffer
Hi, I am from Australia.
Please find an Enlightened (metamodern) Understanding of Reality as Indivisible Conscious Light via these references:
http://www.daplastique.com/essay/the-maze-of-ecstasy
http://www.adidaupclose.org/Art_and_Photography/index.html
http://www.adidafoundation.org/essays/the-eternal-war-between-orpheus-and-narcissus
http://beezone.com/adida/narcissus.html
http://beezone.com/2main_shelf/stresschemistry.html
http://beezone.com/1main_shelf/death_message.html
http://beezone.com/whats-new
http://fearnomore.vision/human/what-man-represents
http://www.adidam.org/teaching/gnosticon/religion-scientism