Here’s a draft of a piece I’ve been working on. Feedback very welcome before I share it more widely - particularly on any influential scientific grand narratives I’ve omitted to mention!
[Edit: now posted on my substack here - with additional section on climate change and anthropocene]
Whereas for most of history the great stories of the journey of humanity as a whole have been religious or philosophical in nature, there’s recently been - I suggest - a trend towards scientific grand narratives.
While this trend is interesting in it’s own right, it’s especially interesting given the way the idea of grand narratives has been key in defining postmodernism.
As we’ll see, defining postmodernism in terms of philosophical grand narratives makes it quite plausible as a description of late twentieth century intellectual life as whole.
From this vantage point we can see how the rise of scientific grand narratives is a logical step for transcending the postmodern condition.
Lyotard on Grand Narratives
In his book The Postmodern Condition the French philosopher and sociologist Jean-Francois Lyotard famously defined postmodernity as a disbelief in grand narratives. But what precisely he meant by grand narratives is hard to pin down.
Grand narrative is described, first of all, as a meta-level, philosophical discourse that serves to justify or ‘legitimate’ science:
I will use the term modern to designate any science that legitimates itself with reference to a a metadiscourse of this [philosophical] kind, making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth … I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.
(Postmodern Condition, xxiii–xxiv)
As this quote indicates, one thing Lyotard has in mind here is the sweeping philosophies of history found in Hegel and Heidegger.
Hegel (‘the dialectics of spirit’) told of a metaphysical spirit of the ages evolving through cultural shifts into the liberal nation-state as the ‘end of history’.
And Heidegger (‘the hermeneutics of meaning’) dug even deeper, seeing technological evolution itself as merely a symptom of shifts in the meaning of ‘Being’, whose mysterious destiny offered hope for profound cultural renewal.
Each of these thinkers conceived of philosophy as having a unique capacity, distinct from those of the sciences, to encompass the long-term development or destiny of humanity as a whole.
And Lyotard insightfully looks at the ways that such views have been used to understand and ‘legitimate’ scientific activity in the context of the history of the modern university as an institution.
On this view of grand narrative, a postmodern society is one in which this kind of overarching philosophy of history is no longer credible.
So far, so good. But what complicates Lyotard’s account, is that he then says that this kind of philosophical grand narrative is only one of “two major versions of the narrative of legitimation”.
The second kind of grand narrative is said to be ‘more political’ rather than philosophical, and is introduced as giving priority to prescriptive rather than descriptive language games:
The important thing is not, or not only, to legitimate denotative utterances pertaining to the truth, such as “The earth revolves around the sun”, but rather to legitimate prescriptive utterances pertaining to justice, such as “Carthage must be destroyed” or “The minimum wage must be set at x dollars”
This second conception of grand narratives is more radical. If any system of political or normative language can potentially count as grand narrative, then the postmodern condition becomes one in which ethics and politics are no longer possible. So it’s this second conception of grand narrative that leads to the stereotypical view of postmodernism as nihilistic and apolitical.
So in short we can see Lyotard’s work as the source of two very different conceptions of grand narrative and therefore postmodernity.
PM1: Postmodernity as disbelief in grand philosophical narratives of world history
PM2: Postmodernity as a nihilistic disbelief in ethical and political systems
In the rest of this article I’ll try to show the benefits of narrowing the focus on the first of these (PM1), especially in the context of thinking about what might come after postmodernism.
Disbelief in Philosophical Grand Narratives
An important difference between these two conceptions, is that the second (PM2) is a lot more controversial than the first (PM1) as a description of society as a whole. While there certainly were nihilistic and apolitical dimensions of late twentieth century culture, ethical and political discourse still featured prominently in the intellectual life of the period.
By contrast, if you had to choose one thing that was shared by not only philosophers, but diverse streams of thought across the humanities and sciences of the post-world-war-two Western world, you’d be hard-pushed to find anything that stands up as well as the disbelief in philosophical grand narratives.
A whistle stop tour of twentieth century thought will I hope help make this plausible. Let’s start with the discipline of philosophy itself. The major faultline in twentieth century philosophy is usually said to lie between the ‘continental’ tradition prominent in France, Germany and Italy, and the ‘analytical’ tradition dominating the UK and US.
While analytic philosophy from logical positivism to contemporary ‘naturalism’ takes its steer from mathematical logic, physics and neuroscience, continental philosophy has looked more to linguistics (eg in poststructuralism), sociology (eg in the Frankfurt school), and history (e.g. Michel Foucault) for inspiration.
It is not surprising therefore that Lyotard’s idea of postmodernism as a sociological and historical concept arose in, and became highly representative of, the continental tradition. Similar ideas can be found in the work of Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, and many others.
But the disbelief in grand philosophical narratives is there right from the start of the analytic tradition as well. Bertrand Russell’s views on mathematical logic, for instance, developed alongside his rejection of the grand narratives of his early neo-Hegelianism. Karl Popper’s influential philosophy of science was accompanied by a critique of the ‘historicism’ of Hegel and Marx. And Rudolf Carnap’s logical positivism confronted the perceived illogicality of Heidegger’s mysterious Being.
In later phases of Analytic philosophy, we have Ludwig Wittgenstein’s attempt to dissolve the traditional problems of philosophy by an analysis of language games (which influenced Lyotard, as it happens), and Richard Rorty’s rejection of grand narratives that aspire to provide an objective ‘mirror of nature’.
More pervasively, there’s a methodology of philosophy that shifts over time from painstaking conceptual analysis to a methodological ‘naturalism’ that views philosophy as continuous with science - in each case with a hope of achieving the rewards of narrow specialisation in place of obscure, sweeping synthesis.
Looking beyond philosophy, the postmodern ‘theory’ of continental philosophy came to dominate literature, sociology and anthropology departments, spawning the field of cultural studies as it did so. Even in those departments that were less affected by these philosophical influences (departments of history, say) grand explanatory narratives were increasingly seen as having been superseded by patient and rigorous research based on primary sources.
In physics, chemistry, biology, neuroscience and the other ‘hard’ sciences the situation was similar: the average working scientist in these fields had little interest in larger philosophical or social questions, often due to a sense of their intractability, when compared to the clear metrics of progress within their specialised fields.
There were exceptions of course, to this widespread rejection of metanarrative. Hegel and Heidegger still had their followers, particularly through the lens of Hegel’s student Karl Marx: though the increasing difficulty in supporting Stalinism and Maoism forced the intellectual Left into increasingly contorted variants of the original narrative.
Liberal economics too displayed shades of Hegel in its application of rational methods to large social questions, and its implicit defense of liberal capitalism as the pinnacle of development - though here too only a few, like Amartya Sen, would dare lift their heads from the much more specialised work within much of the field.
And thinkers like Jurgen Habermas in Germany, and Charles Taylor in Canada managed to craft and preserve more modest yet still distinctly philosophical narratives of cultural evolution, though such efforts stand out all the more starkly against an intellectual backdrop that was sceptical of such efforts.
All of which is to say: if we define Postmodernity as a scepticism toward philosophical metanarrative, we have good reason to call this a characteristic intellectual attitude of the second half of the twentieth century.
From Philosophy to Science
Let’s be clear: this same attitude continues to dominate. Postmodernism in this sense has not gone away. But there are signs - which I’ll trace in what follows - that the mood is shifting.
Grand narratives are slowly returning, but in a new form. Instead of the metaphysical visions of modernity, the new-style grand narratives are emerging from science instead of philosophy.
There’s a logic to this. As Lyotard noted, the reason grand narratives became unbelievable was because of the success of the sciences. The methods of science had seemed to deliver the secure practical knowledge that philosophers could only dream of.
By comparison, philosophy seemed untethered and useless. While science made progress, philosophy produced seemingly endless disputes.
This science-envy led to the rise, mentioned earlier, of late Analytic philosophy’s ‘methodological naturalism’: the view that the best way to address philosophical questions was to just look at the relevant science. The sciences might require some interpretative and conceptual tidying, but essentially philosophy just is science, on this view.
Analytical naturalism was, as the name suggests, especially close to the natural sciences. Within Continental philosophy the analogous move was to merge with the social sciences. Bourdieu does aesthetics with sociology. Foucault turns morality into history. Derrida merges philosophy with literary theory.
Once we understand how the postmodern scepticism towards metanarrative was also scepticism of the idea of philosophy as a way of grasping world history distinct from the sciences, we can see why any new metanarratives would have to emerge within science itself.
Such scientific grand narratives would not only be exempt from the postmodern scepticism that targeted purely philosophical narratives; they could draw on the respect for the sciences within both analytic and continental approaches.
Physics and Cosmology
Ever since the ‘Big Bang’ theory was given support by the detection of the Cosmic Microwave Background in 1964, increasingly sophisticated cosmological models have generated cosmic narratives that place human concerns in the grandest possible context. Recent examples by physicists include Sean Carroll’s The Big Picture (2016) and Lawrence Krauss’s The Greatest Story Ever Told…So Far (2018).
In recent years this physics-based narrative has been expanded and extrapolated into the future in ever more imaginative ways. Books like physicist Michio Kaku’s The Future of Humanity (2019) and articles by interdisciplinary futurist Anders Sandberg (working towards a book called Grand Futures) consider the implications of current physics on humanity’s future development.
Evolutionary Theory
Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution was perhaps the original scientific grand narrative.
At least since biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term ‘meme’ in The Selfish Gene 1976, there’s been increasing interest in applying the theory’s basic dynamics of variation and selection beyond biology, and into the realm of physical processes on the one hand, and human culture on the other.
In this vein, the philosopher Daniel Dennett, in works such as Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995) and From Bacteria to Bach and Back (2017) has refined the basic concepts of cultural evolution, creating a grand narrative with implications for the human search for meaning and the nature of consciousness.
Still more ambitiously, physicist David Deutsch has sought (in The Fabric of Reality, 1997, and The Beginning of Infinity, 2011) to integrate evolutionary theory with the grand narratives of physics, and with Popper’s evolutionary philosophy of science, resulting in a scientific perspective on the future of humanity that - by emphasising the unpredictability of future science - resists Popper’s critique of historicism.
Integrating Deutsch’s work with the field of complexity science, cognitive scientist Bobby Azarian’s book The Romance of Reality (2022) defends a scientific and probabilistic idea of teleology within evolutionary processes, creating a narrative in which complex systems tend to self-organize in ways that tend to increasing levels of intelligence and agency.
Like psychologist Gregg Henriques’ Unified Theory of Knowledge (2024), both Deutsch and Azarian explore forms of evolutionary epistemology, in which the capacity for scientific knowledge is understood by placing it in its evolutionary context.
In this way evolutionary grand narratives escape Lyotard’s false assumption that science needs non-scientific legitimation: since the philosophy of science and epistemology can also be ‘naturalised’, scientific grand narratives resist the postmodern critique of metaphysics.
Big History
Grand historical narratives can be found in the works of historian Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens, 2011; Homo Deus, 2016) who traces the development of human culture from prehistory through to a technological future, and anthropologist Joseph Henrich (The Secret of our Success, 2016; The WEIRDest people in the world, 2021) who applies evolutionary ideas to explain the development of religious and moral norms.
Like Jared Diamond’s earlier Guns, Germs and Steel (1997), Ian Morris’s book Why the West Rules - For Now (2010) derives the outlines of the story of world history from humanity’s relation to its geographical environment. In his companion volume The Measure of Civilization (2013) Morris develops a ‘social development index’ that allows him to quantify cultural evolution - and extrapolate into the future with surprising results.
Cognitive Science
In cognitive science, John Vervaeke’s Awakening from the Meaning Crisis (2024) reinterprets the history of Western thought from the perspective of a cognitive science of meaning and transformative experience, resulting in a narrative that recounts the emergence of a contemporary ‘meaning crisis’, along with a response to that crisis.
Similarly, neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary (2020) tells the story of Western Civilization through the lens of the brain’s left and right hemispheres and their differences, and how these are expressed in major cultural shifts.
The work of another neuroscientist, Karl Friston, on predictive processing and the “free energy principle” also offers a unifying framework that relates cognition to statistical physics and information theory. This has in turn inspired physicist and entrepreneur Guillaume Verdon to sketch a cosmic narrative of ‘effective accelerationism’ in which technological acceleration is seen as both physically and morally mandatory.
Artificial Intelligence
Among the most prominent of the new scientific grand narratives are those around the emergence and potential future dominance of artificial intelligence, which is often thought to make previous models of cultural evolution irrelevant.
The more ambitious of these include futurist Ray Kurzweil’s optimistic visions of an expected merging of humanity and AI, and Eliezer Yudkoswki’s pessimistic forecast of the inevitable extinction of humanity due to advanced superintelligence.
These scientifically-based narratives put us at a pivotal moment in human history—one that could either lead to utopia or catastrophe, depending in part on our actions. Movements such as Effective Altruism and Longtermism draw out the ethical implications of this situation, recommending that more resources be allocated to resolving the ‘existential risks’ of AI and other technologies, whether by addressing the problem of ‘aligning’ powerful AIs or by means of a global slowdown or pause of AI research.
The Rise of Scientific Grand Narratives
Since Lyotard broadly embraced the postmodern condition, the term ‘grand narrative’ has a vaguely sarcastic ring to it. The extent to which we still hear the term as deflating philosophical pretensions, is a reflection of the extent to which we are, in this respect, postmodern.
It’s time to wrest the term back from postmodernism. It need not refer only to obsolete philosophical or religious grand narratives. Any temporally structured account of humanity - including a scientific account - that seeks to be maximally expansive in both space and time, can reasonably be called a grand narrative.
Religious and philosophical grand narratives have long been a foundation for experienced meaning and purpose for those who were moved by them. The postmodern meaning crisis was due to the death of God and ‘the end of philosophy’ as a source of meaning. The new scientific grand narratives offer much-needed orientation in a time where increasingly global and systemic problems seem to call out for wider perspectives.