Metamodernity

The following is a Pub Theology primer and conversation-starter, taken from the book Based on a True Story, by Paul Anleitner.

METAMODERNITY

Modernity, Postmodernity, and What Comes Next

Prologue

What makes up “you”? Is it your body, your cells? Or is it your story? The stories that make us matter. In the last few decades, religious affiliation has cratered, while deaths of despair have dramatically increased. By the 2010s we spoke of a “crisis of meaning.” More recently, however, we hear rumblings of reënchantment. Time shall tell.

Break Stuff: A Culture in Collapse

1990s saw Seinfeld, The Death of Superman, Fight Club, The Matrix, Rage Against the Machine at Woodstock ’99, all telling the same story: The world that you’re born into is a sham. For those born after 1990, it’s hard to imagine unironic patriotism. Postmodernism had gone mainstream, shifted the zeitgeist.

“In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship … is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.” —David Foster Wallace

You Live in a Story and a Story Lives in You

We pass on guiding stories for centuries, millennia. Your narrative identity is the internal story that you tell yourself about yourself. Those stories matter; they need meaning. Good stories have coherence (make sense of the world), purpose (the endgoal of that pattern), and significance (the role that we play within it). We’re all looking for an ultimate guiding story, a story of stories, to hold it all together.

The Modern Story

On 31 October 1517, Martin Luther broke the traditional story. Tradition involved hierarchy and set roles. Luther bypassed the Church, in a sense—though he would never put it that way. Descartes bypassed all but the mind. All beliefs should be questioned rationally, segregating the spiritual from the rational (dualism). The Reformation led to the Enlightenment.

What matters to the modern story is what you make of yourself. Right and wrong are reasonable. Religion is a private, imaginary matter. The modern story is very good at discerning coherence. But purpose becomes a nebulous, subjective “progress,” undone by 20th-century horrors. And what significance do we play in an up-by-your-bootstraps world? Have we all just become cogs in a machine?

The Postmodern Anti-Story

What happens when we’re not heroes in the heroic modern story? Without God, Nietzsche knew, there is no truth, only the will to power; no facts, only interpretations. Is that our modern world, just a quest for meaningless (rich male WASP) power? The antihero of the anti-story is the one who can “see through it all,” to reveal the game as rigged, “a con told by winners to justify why they keep winning.”

Here we have the death of sincerity and the rise of irony: don’t be cringe. Religion is no longer just irrelevant; it’s oppressive. The best we can do is to “see through” the nonsense and reveal it as a power-play. We abandon organized religion—for nothing. Behold the rise of the Nones. We’ve committed domicide. But “all stories mask power” is itself a story, just not one you can live in.

The Metamodern Story

Postmodernism relies on the moral memory of a better, truer story before it. “Seeing through” is pseudo-meaning. Antiheroes just won’t do. The sledgehammer destroys oppressive structures, yet builds nothing. You have to live somewhere, some home. We must see through the anti-story, to deconstruct deconstruction. We return to sincerity on the far side of irony.

“Wisdom is the recovery of innocence at the far end of experience; it is the ability to see again what most of us have forgotten how to see, but now fortified by the ability to translate some of that vision into words, however inadequate.” —David Bentley Hart

How Does That Make You Feel?

At the turning point between the postmodern and metamodern, we see the rise of therapy culture, with the self-aware therapeutic hero guided by a neutral secular therapist. How do we leave perpetual deconstruction for some sort of reconstruction? If we’re all self-authored, what shall we even self-author toward? There has to be a better option than critiquing every story or inventing our own. The story must transcend us. Ironic, self-aware snark is self-protection, not salvation. We need an archetype.

A Higher Story

Post-ironic sincerity as a movement toward something better. We all deeply need connection, and detachment keeps us from it. Ritual, liturgy, connects us to communion, whether we’re talking about professional sports or Church. Soul formation rebuilds society; the stories that we inhabit shape the world in which we live. This might explain why nostalgia is big business. “Maybe kindness is the real punk rock.”

Can a Little Country Church Save the World?

Seen in this light, postmodernism becomes a positive, stress-testing traditions. We don’t invent the real stories; they’re eternal. We discover them. We see metamodernity rising in our pop culture, in publishing, and anecdotally in spiritual shifts among the least-religious generation. People need participatory knowledge, not just propositional. Science isn’t bad, and reënchantment isn’t always good. But we’re spiritually starved in a world without wonder. We re-story ourselves where the objective world meets the narrative—where myth and history merge—in the kenosis we call love.