The metamodern value meme

The primary characteristic of people of the metamodern value meme is that they value qualitative development of human beings: that people go up in stage, that psychological development is supported and that you work to create a new society beyond the modern one. Because they have a more developmental perspective, they also accept, learn from and try to include all of the former value memes. This is quite unlike any of the other value memes, all of whom believe that they alone have the right path. The Metamodern value meme is less judgmental; it seeks to integrate elements from all the former ones; it sees partial truths in all of them; it wants to integrate them in one grand synergistic scheme, and seeks to accommodate them — to create a society in which traditional, modern and postmodern people live together harmoniously.

The second characteristic is that they value inner dimensions much more. So you will find that people of this value meme seek to create more authenticity and intimacy in work organization, to democratize institutions with clever social innovations, to promulgate mindfulness and meditation practices, to emphasize more philosophical and existential issues in their work. They will tend to be very process-oriented, trying to involve people in interactive processes a lot more.

Since the Metamodern value meme almost doesn’t exist yet, you may have to look for it in the one place where a value meme always shows up first: the arts. The work of arts scholars like Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van der Akker, who study art and architecture. But we needn’t go into details about their work. Let’s just take some very simple examples. Metamodern artists will go beyond the postmodern irony and critique and instead focus on things like authenticity and existential growth (I discuss the relationship between authenticity and postmodern irony in my history book). In the movies, you may have seen Darren Aronofski’s The Fountain (from 2006), a film about death, bereavement, acceptance of the inevitable, the limits of science and the importance of having multiple perspectives. Or maybe you saw Spike Jones’ Her (2013), which deals with how our love is socially constructed and the fact that love relations across too vast developmental differences may be tragically impossible. It also playfully highlights some sociological trends in society, what the near future might look like. If these movies play with irony, they also bring in some profound vulnerability through the back door. By and large, you can spot the Metamodern value meme in people who have successfully internalized all of the postmodern values and thinking, but also add a developmental perspective and begin to value inner growth and authenticity to a much higher degree. They also have a transpersonal perspective, seeing that root causes of social problems are generally to be found in the great fabric of relationships that constitute society and that this is inseparable from the depths of our inner selves. The Metamodern value meme also accepts the importance of elites and hierarchies — something to which the postmoderns are deeply allergic — and it accepts the fact that not all people can be included in all settings: for instance, that not all people can become metamodernists. And, most of all, metamodernists don’t judge the perspectives of others. The postmodern mind seeks to include all voices, but only insofar as those voices say things that are acceptable to the postmodernists themselves. The clarion call heard by all metamodernists is: solidarity with all sentient beings also requires solidarity with their perspectives.

— The Listening Society, by Hanzi Friedman