What is to be the epistemological regime of the Second Renaissance?

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I am new to this community, but I am not new to its subject matter. Since I finished my philosophy degree in 2008 (aged 36) I have been trying to find a way to both define the new paradigm (and the old paradigm) and figure out a way that it can actually become reality – how to bring enough people together to actually enact this paradigm shift. For me this involves two main factors. The first is the inevitability of collapse and the need to turn a process of collapse of civilisation into a process of transformation into something truly sustainable, and the second is to resolve the science-spirituality conflict in the West.

As things stand 2R is not a coherent movement. It consists of a bunch of different movements, people and ideas. It is clear enough to bring together as a nascent paradigm shift – something is trying to be born. But there’s already too many people trying to take the movement off in different directions. It currently doesn’t have enough structure to become a paradigm shift worthy of the name “Second Rennaissance”.

I am seeing something I believe to be a fundamental mistake, and it is particularly clear in the work of Hanzi Freinacht. That is the idea that 2R must be thought of as a synthesis of modernism and postmodernism, and that it is absolutely essential to incorporate postmodern thinking in the new paradigm. The idea is of a progression: ancient → modern → postmodern → metamodern. We need to “hold on to the core insights and values of postmodernism”, as an integral part of the new paradigm. That is not how the first Renaissance happened. Galileo and Descartes didn’t ask themselves how to synthesise Aristotle and Aquinas because it was so important to hold on the best of their ideas. No. They started again – in terms of epistemology, it was a new beginning.

I think we need to view Western history in terms of epistemic paradigms. The “first age” was ancient and its epistemic starting point was Plato and Aristotle. That age ended with the rise of Christianity and the decline of the western Roman empire, at which point an epistemic regime dominated by Aristotlean cosmology was replaced the Catholic Christian synthesis. This “second age” was epistemologically a continuation of Aristotle, but combined with Augustinian and Thomist theology.

The Rennaissance was the beginning of the “third age”. What was the epistemic regime of this third age? We need to split it into sections. The first section runs from Galileo/Descartes to Hume and Kant. This was characterised by an epic epistemological battle between Rationalists and Empiricists – a big argument about where we should start. Pure reason? Or empirical observation? This argument was brought to an end at the pivotal moment for modernity, which was Hume’s attempts to find a secure starting point for a science of the mind (“moral subjects”) and the subsequent publication of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. And the relevance of the CPR was, again, its new starting point – the key component of which is the splitting of reality into phenomenal and noumenal (reifying the Cartesian split) . Epistemologically Kant starts by defining concepts referring to the world as it is experienced by us and the world as it is itself, and he declares that science can only tell us about the former, and that about the latter we can know nothing at all. It was all about epistemology, and it was the beginning of a great fracturing of Western thought.

This “third age” I call “the Age of Disjunction”, because it is characterised by an ever-increasing array of mutually-incompatible epistemic systems. These include scientific materialism, various strains of idealism, growth-based economics, Marxism and most recently postmodern antirealism and cynicism. Postmodernism defines itself in opposition to all those other things, which it dismisses as “totalising metanarratives”. It is a sort of “anti-epistemology”, because its only starting point is to declare that there are no privileged starting points – it takes Kant’s division to its absolute extreme: there is no such thing as objective truth, everything is a perspective, all if which are valid unless we declare that they are immoral. Or something like that. So rather than seeing postmodernism as the “next stage up” from modernism, I see it as the final epistemological bankruptcy of the Age of Disjunction – the point where we are as far away from a coherent epistemological starting point as it is possible to be. The whole Age of Disjunction has been a descent ever further into left hemisphere domination, and postmodernism is the ultimate conclusion – it is what happens when the left hemisphere starts eating itself. If this is correct, then trying to incorporate this into the new paradigm is a serious error. It simply won’t work.

My point is this. I think in order for the Second Renaissance to actually happen, what is needed is a new starting point. Instead of asking how we can synthesise modernism and postmodernism, we need to ask ourselves where we are now, and where we can agree to start in terms of epistemology. How can we build a movement with sufficient agreement about what is true or real that we can start asking the right questions about what the rest of the new paradigm needs to look like? We need to start with the question “What do we know?” instead of “What is important?”

This starting point cannot possibly include postmodernism, or anything derived from it. That is because postmodernism itself is anti-epistemological – it allows everything in by default and then starts by asking questions about morality. Who has power? Who is oppressed? What concepts do we need to change in order to change the narrative and redistribute power? The problem with this is not just, as Hanzi says, that people don’t like it because they have different value systems. The problem is that it doesn’t care enough about the truth – it doesn’t value truth. It tries to put morality before truth.

So my question is this:

Is anybody in the 2R ecosystem offering a new epistemological starting point? The question is not just which starting point is valid, but which starting point can build a large enough consensus to make 2R a reality. Is there a starting point that is both epistemologically defensible and capable of sustaining the Second Renaissance?

This is the question I have spent the last 16 years trying to answer. I believe I have that answer. But right now I’d like to explore other people’s answers.

Where do you think 2R needs to start? What is going to be the epistemological regime of the fourth age?

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Interesting question(s) and I think you raise a theme that should be explored further. Some thoughts occurred to me, but I’m not a philosopher, so I apologize in advance for possible naivete in my musings. I’ve encountered some concepts in learning about qualitative research, but I don’t have deep knowledge about these matters.

To begin with, instead of only thinking about epistemology, I wonder whether it makes sense to frame the questions using the concept of paradigm which I think links ontology, epistemology and methodology together. You also referred to paradigms in your post.

From my understanding, there are many different positions between the modern positivist (assuming an objective reality that can be known via value-free observations and which sticks to phenomena that can be observed while considering anything else “unreal” or irrelevant), and postmodern (assuming there is no objective reality, and since there are no authorities on knowledge, there is no common ground for acquiring objective knowledge) paradigms, such as critical realism and hermeneutics. For example, AFAIK critical realism assumes an objective reality but that knowledge about it is socially constructed and cannot ever be absolutely known. So, I wonder if this is already some kind of a mix of modern and postmodern paradigms. And if yes, I would at least consider postmodernism a valuable ingredient, because without it, could we have turned the focus from the observed to the observer, and (among many things) start discussing matters of power which (at least in my opinion) have a pragmatic use in everyday life?

One perspective discussed in the book “First Principles and First Values” is that values are assumed to be real, in the sense that physical matter is assumed to be real. Especially the value of Eros, or intimacy. I think this is also a bit novel perspective that combines modernism and postmodernism.

I won’t discuss other phenomena and narratives (e.g., cultural evolution, or whether there’s a logic in evolution of the universe, etc.) because I assume that questions of ontology, epistemology and methodology are more fundamental.

Anyways, I would also be interested in 1) knowing what kind of paradigms underlie liminal web movements such as 2R, 2) whether there is a need for a completely new one to emerge, and 3) if yes, what could that look like.

Thanks for starting the discussion.

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2R is a paradigm trying to be born. It doesn’t know exactly what it is yet. It only exists at all in the sense that there are certain “themes” running through various contributory ideas (such as teleology, and the need for coherence and understanding of context). But in terms of epistemology it is a bit all over the place, and I believe the reason for this is what I explained in the opening post – at the most fundamental level our problems are epistemological. Yes, they are also connected to everything else – the new epistemic paradigm must be properly joined up with ontology and methodology. But I believe it does need to start somewhere.

Your questions 2 and 3 are the critical ones. Yes I think something new has to emerge, but it doesn’t have to be completely new. In fact, I believe all of the critical pieces already exist – its just that until now I am not aware of anybody having put enough of them together for the gestalt shift to occur – for the picture to leap out at us — the “aha” moment when it all clicks. Until we get to that point, the shift can’t properly happen.

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Definitely not trying to just synthesize modernism and postmodernism but rather integrate them and everything before into a new “holon” – so transcend and include rather than synthesize.

This is an important question and i’d like to say more … and for now …

The most important point would be to focus on Integral/Wilber and his sources e.g. Gebser, Habermas etc. A whole good chunk of Sex, Ecology and Spirituality is on this.

Those are the originating thinkers and Wilber is the great synthesizer who generally does a pretty decent job of citing and summarizing others. (Freinacht and the MM stuff is largely derivative Integral). I emphasize that it will be hard to say precisely because it is emerging and it will also be difficult to see if we are still inside the previous paradigms (which most of us still are at least to some extent).

BTW there is an epistemology line in Cultural Paradigms and how they show up against key features e.g. art, epistemology etc – though that’s just a summary and very vague. What you want is the “meat” of that.

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BTW there is an epistemology line in [Cultural Paradigms and how they show up against key features e.g. art, epistemology etc]

OK. So that says:

Pre-modern: revealed truth and religion
Modern: reason and science
Post-modern: multiple perspectives – no truth
2R: Transrational / “there is up”/ Truth again, but nuanced. Integration of rational and revealed.

What did you think of my own version of this posted above?

For your “modern” period, all we see is reason and science. But that is not all that was going on in the West at that time. It ignores the whole line of intellectual thought from Kant to Nietzsche, which eventually led to postmodernism. Idealism is every bit as modern as science and materialism. And yet idealism and materialistic science were completely incompatible – for example, Hegel dismissed the possibility that evolution could be true, because it contradicted his own system.

I think that without acknowledging this, then the whole summary of the history of Western ideologies/epistemologies is fundamentally incomplete or wrong. We need to ask ourselves how it was possible for these two (and eventually more) different ways of knowing reality (or claiming to) can have co-existed in such spectacular fashion. Neither of them was peripheral. Both are central to Western history.

The reason I am focusing so strongly on this is because I believe it holds the key to understanding how “integration of rational and revealed” needs to actually work. We need to understand what was wrong with modernism and postmodernism. How was it possible that reason and science could have led to two directly contradictory totalising grand narratives (scientific materialism and Hegelian idealism)? Why did Western philosophy split into two? We need to be able to understand that, because ultimately we need to bring these two traditions back together. As things stand I can see people making noises in that direction, but I am not seeing any actual bridges being built back towards naturalistic science and analytic philosophy. And that is not because there is no work going on on the other side – Nagel has provided the foundations for the other end of the bridge, but he’s not even on the radar of most of the people around here. All the construction work I can see is going on is on the idealistic/continental side.

EDIT: What I am saying is that in the timeline specified above it looks like the fracturing of Western ideologies/epistemologies happened at the end of the modern period and the beginning of postmodernism – ie with Nietzsche. But in fact that fracture can be traced back to Kant – if we want to understand what went wrong then we need to understand where Kant went wrong. I don’t see many people asking this question. And I think the reason for this is because almost nobody on the “continental” side thinks Kant did go wrong. Why would they, given that until very recently it looked like their tradition had led us to a postmodern “end of history” (that there can be no escape from postmodernism)?.

Sorry if the answers are there in Wilber’s work. For me, it is just not worth the effort of going there. It feels like Integral Theory is already in the past. It didn’t change the world. There’s too much negativity associated with it and him. Too much division. Too much politics. And personally I have experienced too much of integralists sneering down their noses at me, because they are convinced I’m not as “advanced” as they are. I think we need something that works for everybody, not just those who are seeking “enlightenment”. I’m interested only in making sure people know there is a door, rather than trying to lead them through it and offering guided tours of what lies on the other side.

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I take issue with the premises.

You write,

Holding onto the core insights and values [of prior traditions] is not how the first Renaissance happened. Galileo and Descartes didn’t ask themselves how to synthesise Aristotle and Aquinas because it was so important to hold on the best of their ideas. No. They started again – in terms of epistemology, it was a new beginning.

I’m not sure in what sense you mean to argue there was some entirely new beginning. “Renaissance” (French) literally means “rebirth” — while this term was only applied as a term for the period retroactively by historians, Giorgio Vasari contemporarily called this period of cultural revival “rinascita” (Italian). This signals the way Renaissance figures themselves considered their activity moreso continuity than rupture — they were bringing something back to life, not creating ex nihilo. The very scholars who championed classical learning were often deeply versed in scholastic philosophy & Christian theology. Many maintained religious commitments while expanding intellectual horizons.

It’s true Descartes’s methodical doubt & mind-centered epistemology represented a radical departure from those scholastic approaches that began with external reality and sensory experience. His mechanistic worldview likewise fundamentally contradicted Aristotelian teleology.

However, his thought retained clear Augustinian elements, particularly in his introspective method and the certainty of self-knowledge. Descartes preserved God as the guarantor of clear and distinct ideas, maintained the soul/body distinction central to Christian thought, and employed scholastic vocabulary even while redefining its meaning.

Similarly, Galileo’s mathematical approach to nature fundamentally challenged Aristotelian physics by prioritizing quantitative description over qualitative explanation. His insistence on experimental verification displaced traditional appeals to authority.

Yet he remained deeply conversant with Aristotelian arguments, addressing them directly rather than dismissing them wholesale. He maintained theological commitments compatible with Augustinian perspectives, particularly in his famous argument that scripture teaches “how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.” Galileo presented himself not as abandoning Aristotle but correcting him, working within existing institutions while transforming their intellectual foundations.

I’m curious about how you’ve arrived at this framework of discrete epistemological shifts. The historical record suggests more complex patterns of continuity and transformation. You mention having spent 16 years developing an answer to the question of an epistemological starting point for a Second Renaissance. I’d be interested to hear more about the specific approach you’ve developed, as it’s not entirely clear from your post what that new starting point might be.

You summarize this in your follow-up question —

Why did Western philosophy split into two?

You suggest that

it looks like the fracturing of Western ideologies/epistemologies happened at the end of the modern period and the beginning of postmodernism – ie with Nietzsche. But in fact that fracture can be traced back to Kant – if we want to understand what went wrong then we need to understand where Kant went wrong.

The problem with this frame is that Western epistemology didn’t split at Nietzsche, Kant, or anything close. This split represents something far deeper, originating in what in my work I set out to demonstrate as an expression of something metaphysical.

But, whatever we wanna say it is, it’s represented as early in philosophy as one cares to look. In pre-Socratic Greece, we find Thales, Anaximenes, and later Democritus proposing materialist explanations for reality, suggesting that the world could be understood through physical principles and observable elements. Democritus’s atomism, proposing that reality consists of indivisible material particles moving in void, represents perhaps the earliest sophisticated materialist theory.

On the other side, Pythagoras, Parmenides, and their followers developed approaches that emphasized abstract mathematical principles, logical reasoning, and the limitations of sensory experience. Parmenides famously argued that true reality must be unchanging and unitary, despite sensory appearances to the contrary.

This fundamental tension reached its classical expression in the contrast between Plato and Aristotle. While Plato’s theory of Forms established the primacy of ideal, non-material reality over sensory experience, Aristotle’s more empirically-oriented approach emphasized observation and the study of particular things, even while maintaining a role for formal causes.

This runs deeper than historical contingency, in my view. The point, though, is that, rather than seeing this as a “fracture” that needs healing, we might better understand it as a productive dialectic that has driven philosophical development for over 2,500 years. These competing approaches have continuously challenged and refined each other, preventing any single perspective from becoming dogmatic.

The persistence of this philosophical tension suggests it reflects something fundamental about human experience itself — our capacity to engage with the world both through direct sensory experience and through abstract conceptual thought. Perhaps the goal isn’t to eliminate this tension but to develop more sophisticated ways of navigating between these complementary modes of understanding.

I think we need to view Western history in terms of epistemic paradigms. The “first age” was ancient and its epistemic starting point was Plato and Aristotle. That age ended with the rise of Christianity and the decline of the western Roman empire, at which point an epistemic regime dominated by Aristotlean cosmology was replaced the Catholic Christian synthesis. This “second age” was epistemologically a continuation of Aristotle, but combined with Augustinian and Thomist theology.

I think there is value remaining in more macrohistorical periodization, as you begin to lay out here, though I think if we are restricting ourselves to the West we are already losing out on the natural limit of our mission : consciousness at the scale of humanity per se…

But, even if we want to perform such an analysis, I think positioning the “First Axial Age” aligned with the conventional Jasperian dating of the Axial Age at 800 BCE is right for many reasons (which we can get into if you like). From there, I think I see two interpretive frames we might then develop :

The first views the period from post-Axial to pre-Enlightenment as a discrete period we moved out of along with the advent of the cultural elevation of rationality, which I think aligns with your argument holding Kant as a sort of extremum, demarcating the shift. Under this view, I think we might discriminate the first half as a sort of Axiological Unity, where humanity is primarily concerned with coherence within & between systems of meaning & value. This, then, gives way to shift in the latter division to what is more of an Epistemological Unity, where the focus moves from “what is important?” to “how do we know?”.

The first view sees history divided into distinct periods, with a major shift occurring around the Enlightenment when rationality became culturally dominant. This aligns with your argument about Kant marking a crucial transition. In this framework, the earlier period (roughly from Axial Age to Renaissance) primarily concerned itself with questions of value and meaning - what we might call “Axiological Unity.” The later period shifted focus toward questions of knowledge and methodology - an “Epistemological Unity” - moving from asking “what matters?” to “how do we know?”

(what is a side note in my view but perhaps may feel more significant for you — I actually believe a better extremum symbolizing this Promethean handoff is actually found a bit earlier, in the Copernican revolution, the “cosmological wound” per Freud. Humanity’s decentralization in the cosmos fuels the objectification of the rationalist frame.)

The second view instead views the entire period from the Axial Age to now as a single arc — remembering Whitehead’s famous quotation :

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.

Now, while the Axial Age was a polymorphic, civilizational phenomenon (rather than distinctly Western), if we allow Plato to personify the central thrust of the Axial Age, I think there is a meaningful sense in which the consequences of Post-Modernism you recognize are ultimately reducible to the natural, parabolic end to the arc of the stone that Plato threw.

In this view, the “Axiological Unity Period” — of the singular, coherent, “Axial Age” —may instead be viewed as representing as something more like the natural sunset of the theological-mythic pre-Axial frame, with its gradual decommissioning occurring over its first two millennia, with Aristotle, through Ptolemy to Copernicus, all simply facilitating the eventual apogee in Kant of the three-millennia-long Axial Age, which we are only now in the process of exiting.

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Now, this is getting entirely too long so I’ll just cut out a bunch of the other elements floating around in my head and return to the fact that we are having this discussion on a 2R forum… this naturally supports a grounding in the first view, where the demarcation between the Axiological & Epistemological is reified in the Renaissance, and sought to be reflected in the 21st century through the whole metamodern et alia movements.

I think key is to look at that after which we wish to pattern this emergent “Great Turning”, and lay out what it is that made the original Renaissance so successful. A brief treatment of that might be :

…

Actually I have a rough draft of the rest but whatever. I think I’m leaning toward going a different route in where I invest energy anyway.

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Thankyou for that extensive and interesting post. I do understand what you are saying, and broadly agree with most of it.

However, it doesn’t really answer the crucial question I was trying to ask, which is about where 2R needs to start in terms of epistemology. You agree with my assessment that Kant was a pivotal moment, and presumably you agree that in our current age there is radical disagreement about epistemology. You seem to be saying “this tension is always going to be present”. But I think if that is true then there is no way out of the current situation – we are stuck with something resembling postmodern epistemological chaos forever more, because there can be no escape from postmodernism. I don’t think this is true, because I think we can now put all the pieces together without all the chaos. The reason I think this is because we now have a physics (quantum theory) which actually implies an observed/unobserved dualism in the nature of reality – a dualism which we currently don’t know how to interpret. In fact, it can be used to “cancel out” the other dualisms and leave us without the conflict.

Do you think that is possible?

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Interesting questions in the post, and although I don’t frame it in exactly the same way, I explored some of these questions in a research call, which, when the recording is posted, will put here. One question that which feels important on my end is: is the ‘transition’ in epistemology one which shifts from a ‘greater understanding’ towards ‘depth of being’?

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Does this map to any of Vervaeke’s work by chance?

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And another point, just agreeing that sometimes it does feel that not only meta modernism is the ‘perfect synthesis’ but along with this, it has at times an air of superiority, that meta modernism is not only a perfect synthesis but also ‘better’ and ‘beyond’ modernism and postmodernism. I bring this up because importantly, some ideas/thinkers/concepts seem to just be dismissed as ‘post modern’ without being deeply understood or engaged with, and then this ‘modern’ ‘post modern’ and ‘metamodern’ becomes a talking point which limits a more critical perspective; not to mention, it feels a bit like a broken record, if not a bit self-absorbed, to hear that meta modernism is the answer to everything. I don’t have the same feeling with ‘integral’, for example.

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It could, although not explicitly; my only experience of Vervaeke when it comes to epistemology is the typology of ‘four ways of knowing’, which I think is an interesting way to think about ‘different ways of knowing’, and certainly a good way to frame or talk about an ‘epistemic transition’

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That’s what I was getting at. I’m trying to come up with a concrete idea of what your “depth of being” might involve, and Vervaeke’s participatory knowing seemed like at least at good first approximation.

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Supposedly “second tier”, “teal”, “integral”, or “metamodern” provide access to all prior developments. In practice, it seems many wish to claim those skills and perspectives without much experience in the prior developments that are now supposedly to be integrated. It’s like having a shiny new high-powered OS with no apps. In considering how to help younger students, especially, grasp the metamodern, much of what is required seems to involve lots of backward-looking training to understand (at least by way of overview) everything that came before.

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Except I still have the same problem with this. From my perspective there is no way to interpret this other than that postmodernism is both an advance on modernism, and an unavoidable “stage” – that it is necessary to go through postmodernism to get from modernism to metamodernism. This will alienate – will “lock out” – anybody who feels they have good reason for never having let postmodernism get its foot in the door in the first place. I do not accept for one moment that postmodernism was an improvement on modernism. As far as I am concerned it was a regressive – it was a step backwards which has had devastating consequences for the whole of Western society, and which needs to be rejected wholesale.

I do not see any mea culpa. What I see is “Postmodernism has failed…but we were right anyway!!”

This is not going to fly. I do not believe it can provide a workable foundation for the new paradigm. Instead, I think the message needs to be “Postmodernism was a mistake. We can learn from mistakes, this is what we can learn from this particular mistake, but you don’t have to accept our mistake in order to become part of new paradigm.”

There is no future where people like myself, JK Rowling, Thomas Nagel or Noam Chomsky ever accept that (for example) that gender ideology was legitimate. We are never going to accept that (for example) the Scottish Green Party was justified in trying to force people accept the need to recognise 26 genders, or that “the patriarchy” was ever anything but a figment of the imagination of the woke ideologues.

Postmodernism didn’t fail because the world was ready to move on to metamodernism. It failed because it was founded on a false premise: it claimed that reality is a social construction, and it isn’t. It failed because it was defeated: intellectually, politically and ethically. It was both epistemologically and morally wrong. (Also…dualism and materialism were wrong, but we’ll keep shtum about idealism…that gets a free pass because it was wrong in the right way…our way…).

Do you see the problem? The new paradigm needs to belong to everybody, not just ex-pomos.

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Here is a practical example. My current change management model incorporates the work of Dave Snowden’s Cynefin. Snowden is a metatheory skeptic. He has attacked metamodernism, Henriques, Vervaeke, integral, SD, and many systems attractive to lots of people in 2R. Snowden has also borrowed ideas from Deleuze, one of the leading names in postmodernism. None of this is at all related to gender ideology. Snowden would find it utterly laughable to be lumped in with the “woke”.

Beyond that, my change model also allows the user to explore metatheory, under the key proviso that metatheory is a user-added ingredient to the analysis, No given metatheory or grand narrative is a mandatory requirement or prerequisite. This is all on purpose. It forces the user to think generatively and genealogically about where values come from, which again is another common postmodern move.

Why am I doing this? Best tools for the job. Lots of PM technique aimed at MM outcomes. Perfectly legitimate from a MM POV. PM ideas and techniques are just tools to use situationally. Because PM is included in MM. But MM is not limited to PM, so anything not useful from PM can be discarded like bones from a fish.

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OK. I don’t have a problem with that. To extend your fish metaphor, what I am saying is a necessary step is that we begin by throwing the fish out completely, because it stinks to hell. We then need to establish the starting point of the new paradigm, from first principles. Then, if you want to make use of methods associated with pomo, there is nothing stopping you from disassembling the stinky fish (at a safe distance) and then taking something non-stinky from it and using it in the new paradigm.

I have no problem with that. My problem is with people who claim that pomo can be integrated into the new paradigm, or that it is a necessary stage on a personal journey from modernism to the new paradigm.

I have my own “change management model” and it involves guiding people straight from what pomos call “modernism” to the new paradigm, and this path involves making it crystal clear to those people that it has been acknowledged that postmodernism is one of the problems we need to solve and there is zero expectation on them to accept any postmodern bullshit. This is not optional, in the same way that mine clearance after a war is not optional.

My impression is that most of the people involved in 2K, and nearly everybody involved in metamodernism, views anti-pomos as their enemy. Hanzi Freinacht certainly does – he calls such people “neo-reactionaries”. His proposed idea for this paradigm shift is to “move as many people as possible to the postmodern value system” as a precursor to moving them onward to the metamodern. I am not certain, but I believe he suggested my views amounted to nazism. The comment was “We have a nazi problem in the metamodern community”, and somebody told me this was a reference to myself.

The question people round here need to be asking themselves right now is whether they want somebody like me fighting for 2R alongside them, or whether I end up effectively promoting and leading an alternative version of 2R which doesn’t equate anti-postmodernism with nazism. In other words another culture war started by the postmodernists, but this time with even higher stakes because they are dressed up a metamodernists and telling everybody they’ve changed.

It all boils down to one thing, and that is that this nascent movement has not fully come to terms with what went wrong with postmodernism and the extent to which this has contributed to the metacrisis. Every time I see words to the effect of “the root causes of this crisis lie in modernism”, with no reference to contribution made by postmodernism, I see this specific problem.

I have spent many years trying to move western society in the right direction. I’ve spent thousands of hours trying to debrainwash Christian fundamentalists, Dawkinsian/Dennettian materialists and all manner of believers in growth-based economics and “progress”, but the group of people which has proved hardest to get through to, and who have responded in the most intolerant, aggressive, vicious and dishonest way have been the woke postmodernists, their bellies filled with irrational hatred for anybody who gives a sh*t about the truth.

I am not angry. I’m fully focused on the future. We have a golden opportunity now to lay the foundations of a brighter future for humanity. Let’s not screw it up this time.

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So I think what most metamoderns/2R folks would agree on is that we need to move beyond both modernism and postmodernism. So in that sense they agree with a lot of the points you just made (so no need to start a new movement :grinning:)

What there is disagreement on within the movement, I’d say, is whether postmodernism is a necessary step on the way to the next phase. The reason this is so hard to discuss is because postmodernism itself means so many things to different people (e.g. scepticism of grand narratives, cynicism, nihilism, relativism, identity politics…)

This is partly why I wrote The Rise of Scientific Grand Narratives - in which I tried to clarify at least one way in which postmodernism (in a very specific sense) could be a logical step towards metamodernism. But it’s a big area that I think could benefit from more research and discussion.

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I am sure there are ways that things associated with postmodernism could be a logical step towards 2R. But I don’t think those are the things that matter. The things that matter are the things which are show-stopping problems – the things which are preventing 2R from becoming what we want it to be. And these can be defined relatively simply. They are anti-realism (ie the belief we are free to reject the “framing” of objective reality if we don’t like it) and the refusal to accept the legitimacy of grand narratives or great societal goals. If those two assumptions are rejected then anything else (anything which can survive the removal of those assumptions) is potentially of use.

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Doesn’t Iain McGilchrist’s carefully worked out epistemology in “The Matter with Things” provide a thoroughly-researched epistemology based in both philosophy and neurobiology?

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Probably. I haven’t read it. I have read The Master and his Emissary and couldn’t find anything to disagree with. For me, McGilchrist is the single most relevant person to 2R. He agrees with me about postmodernism – McGilchrist sees pomo as the last gasp of left hemisphere dominance – the point where the left hemisphere starts attacking its own creations, without any attempt to create a coherent picture.