Pages showing how does Second Renaissance relate to … for example
- Effective Altruism
- Techno-optimism
- e/acc (effective accelerationism)
- Marxism / socialism
- Web3
- …
As a jumping off point, I copy/pasted the passage below from the “About” page.
“Second Renaissance’ is an umbrella concept covering a variety of emerging approaches to social and cultural renewal, including metamodernism, integral theory, teal, liminal web, game B, regenerative and others.”
The reason for that is I am relatively new to Second Renaissance but fairly deep in the weeds with most of what is listed under the umbrella. So it seems like this is good forum to pull together thought about how all these components work together (or not) with respect to a variety of other social trends.
To pick a convenient starting point, I am one of the co-authors on an open source introduction to information technology text. In that role, I needed to research techno-optimism (Ray Kurzweil, for example).
Mostly, I don’t think metamodern, integral or any of the others want much to do with Kurzweil’s trans-human vision. Is anyone here looking forward to having their guts replaced by nanobots? Mind uploaded to the cloud? Eternal life is a robot body? Me, not so much.
To me, the general liminal consensus involves a deeper investigation by humans of what it means to be human. Am I wrong about that? If so, please feel free to correct any misperceptions.
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Next up - Marxism/socialism. How does it fit with "metamodernism, integral theory, teal, liminal web, game B, regenerative and others?”
On a very superficial level, there are some family resemblances. Cultural evolutionary stage theories are fairly common in these spaces, as is some projected future society organized around commons, reciprocity, or sharing. Is this all down to Marx, though? There are plenty of reactionaries would who gladly stuff 2R and everything it encompasses into a generalized “left wing” pigeon hole. However, I consider such left-right polemics thoroughly tedious, so my recent grand tour of the world of metatheory was specifically in search of more inclusive and nuanced analytical frameworks. I’ll attempt to apply some of the most pertinent of these below.
Two theorists I admire the most are Peter Pogany and Kojin Karatani. Each of these point to some future society based on global collaboration and reciprocity. Each can broadly be considered cultural materialist. Karatani specifically unpacks Marx (along with Kant, Hegel, and all the great names in political and social sciences), arriving at what might aptly be termed a neo-Marxian framework, but without the cultish and totalitarian derailments of Marxism past. Pogany is an economist greatly informed by thermodynamics and complexity theory. Pogany does trace cultural evolutionary stages though, and provide material analysis for why these happen. These two, along with other key figures (Peter Turchin, Jürgen Habermas, Yuval Noah Harari, several others) provide the non-liminal framing for how I analyze liminal movements and most everything else. (Continued on a second response below).
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OK, so sources cited above, how do various 2R component movements align (or not) with Marxism?
Metamodernism is a diverse moment, but I’m engaged with many of its leading figures and have studied its major literature. What these writers share with Marx is an emphasis on material evolution in a physical world and some sense that culture goes through stages. Metamodernism, however, IMO grossly undertheorizes both politics and economics, which is why I went seeking Pogany, Karatani, etc. listed above. Metamodern theory was too thin in the social scientific areas I care about. MM knows or cares very little about topics like “means of production” or “working class”.
Integral. Wilber was influenced a lot by Jürgen Habermas. So Marxist influence by way of the Frankfurt School But of course, Ken Wilber was influnced by thousands of sources East and West, so IT is not Marxist in any direct sense. If anything, orthodox Marxists would find IT excessively idealist, individualistic, voluntary, and disengaged with objective social forces.
Teal. As in Laloux’s teal organizations, perhaps? Not really Marxist, but does share a vision of commons-based organizations. Similar to Wilber’s integral, I find Laloux’s work not sufficiently engaged with cultural-material processes. If teal organizations are the future, why? Purely voluntary adoption of such models by unconstrained agents? Or are there evolutionary pressures moving us in that direction?
Liminal web - that’s a very catch-all term. Lately Hanzi Freinacht is sounding the alarm against neo-fascism in the liminal web, so clearly the whole business is no Marxist project.
Game B - coming from a far more individualist place than Marxism. It has a lot to do with non-Marxist economics like optimization theory. Points to a more collaborative future, but generally vague about which tailwinds will push us there.
Regenerative - bioregionalism, permaculture, etc. are not really about class struggle or anything Hegelian-sounding. To situate them in Western cultural history, “romantic” comes closest. I participate in these movements, and I respect the need for them. But I am sort of house historian and political theorist when I show up in those spaces. The spaces in general are not driven by anything Marxian at all, except perhaps by a generalized distaste for capitalism and all its fruits.
Summary - Marx is in there - in all of those - but only bits and pieces here and there. I consider myself MM and hang out in those spaces a lot, but “scientific socialism” or the like is nowhere much to be found in any of them. In some ways, perhaps, I’m hard at work reinventing it! Or rather than “socialism”, which is overly polemicized by much bloody 20th century history, how about a cultural materialist social scientific analysis pointing to commons-based society as the most viable option for navigating what’s coming next? That’s a mouthful. It sounds vaguely like what Marx was up to. But of course, I hope we all would have absorbed quite a bit of additional information that Marx himself never had access to, and I likewise hope we are now capable of theorizing what Marx himself was unable to imagine.
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Thanks lots of great ideas to follow up there!
I tend to view Hanzi’s work as essentially metamodern Marxism - i.e. trying to do the same thing as Marx (using a science of fundamental social dynamics to ‘change the world, not just understand it’) but using new wave metamoden social science and developmental psychology. I think he sees himself as Marx to Wilber’s Hegel.
But I’m sure there are other ways of doing the same thing using alternative scientific models, will definitely explore Pogany and Karatani here.
I’m interested in Habermas too - can you give a reference for Wilber using Habermas as that sounds like an interesting link?
Here is something recent by Wilber going straight back to Marx. Habermas gets a glancing mention.
Also, from the quote, Habermas is in SES. Really, Habermas is all over the place in how Wilber handles the inter-subjective.
Agreed. Nordic MM is an effort to update Marx for the current world.
I’ve only been on Zoom once with Daniel Görtz, and that was him addressing a group, so not much direct relationship there. I am, however, heavily engaged with Lene Rachel Andersen (including lots of f-t-f time when she toured the states last year). So Nordic MM is on my radar.
I like what Hanzi was trying to do in the Listening Society, but I find myself needing to fill gaps and smooth things out. My engagement with Karatani, Pogany, Habermas, etc. came from that impulse. I like Lene’s work more broadly straight up, the challenge being how to apply anything Nordic to the US. A lot of my current theorizing is really to build a hard core systems theory under the bildung vision that Lene is promoting.
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