Metamodern Spirituality | Updating Religion (w/ Lene Rachel Andersen)

Brendan Graham Dempsey talks to Lene Rachel Andersen, author of Metamodernity: Meaning and Hope in a Complex World, about navigating different cultural codes, updating traditions, and sense-making in today's world.

0:00 Introduction
3:20 Metamodern-ism vs. Metamodern-ity
5:34 Seeing All Four Previous Cultural Codes
11:15 Updating through Addition
13:01 Metamodern Oscillation between Postmodern and Pre-postmodern (Indigenous, Classical, Modern)
18:08 Cultural Code-Switching
27:02 Code Antagonism and Limits
23:29 Code Pluralism and Sense-Making
34:44 A Corner of the Iron Age in 2021
39:03 Premodern Beliefs in a Metamodern World?
47:07 Invention and Religion/Inventing Religion
57:53 Transcendence in the Cultural Codes
1:04:11 Making Meaning, Sense, and Identity after Postmodernism

More on Lene's work at:

[elenchikos]

Time index 42:41: It's not true that in the catholic (pre Luther which includes Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox and even some non-Orthodox churches like the Coptic) church, faith was not important. Christianity was founded, contrary to earlier pagan traditions, on the importance of what you believed. There were creeds and councils that dealt with the content of belief at length. It's true, that Luther made faith much more important because he wanted to say that you didn't have to do good works to get to heaven. It was Calvin and the Calvinists and Anabaptists who were the ultra-iconclasts. It's true that in Protestant Christianity, if you don't have certain beliefs, there is not much left. The problem that the Post-Faustians (traditional religionists) have is that science undercuts most of their most important beliefs.

[mctaguer]

This is the most useful epistemological content I've come across in years (for me, personally). As an artist, this is important to me. I have some other thoughts about Lene's religious journey--mine has some striking similarities (she and I are the same age as well), and I've confronted some of those same challenges over the past 30 years, but I'll think some more before making those comments. Great and useful discussion, Brendan; thank you.

[elenchikos]

Time index 1:10:36 - It occurs to me that individualism has just about reached the limits of it's development in the west (especially in the US). For there to be a new metamodern religion, some kind of trans-individual consciousness would have to arise, it would seem. Right now, people who need some kind of spirituality and who can no longer believe in traditional religion often construct something idiosyncratic by taking elements from different religions and from New Age belief and end up with a hodge-podge that might work for them or might actually be dysfunctional in ways they can't see.

It might be that where we have gotten in terms of individualism means that there can't anymore be grand narratives such as we had in traditional religion because people are too individual to subscribe to them. Then the question becomes what will unify societies. I think it's by holding these questions and contemplating them that answers and insights will arise. We are pushing out into terra incognito (unknown territory) on the cutting edge where new forms and new ways of understanding are emerging. So, I think we just have to keep asking the questions and see what arises.

This kind of discussion is really valuable for me because it pulls these idea out of me whereas when I don't have this sort of stimulation, it's harder to produce the thoughts.

[elenchikos]

I stopped the video at time index 21:25 because I want to take a stab at answering the question Brendan brought up about how to reconcile the different cultural codes' ways of viewing the contents of religions such as the soul. I don't know what Lene is going to say, but here's what occurs to me.

I think the progression of the cultural codes proceeds dialectically by addressing and remediating the absence, contradictions, and perceived faults of the previous cultural code. So for instance, modernity included scienfitic investigation of the world in it's own right rather than just saying that the creation's functioning was based on certain a priori ratios and relations. Modernity brings a different perspective on the world and ourselves. The problem, as I see it, is that modernity was still operating with formal logic (rather than dialectically), and so it said that the traditional religious perspectives were just wrong rather than actually including them in a higher synthesis that added to, but did not take away from elements such as ritual and so on that are needed, as Lene said.

When the mind is operating dialectically, it is able to shift rapidly between different perspectives and realize that those perspectives are part of a whole Gestalt and that they do not cancel each other out. It's possible to switch cultural codes at need. We do this all the time, but are usually not aware of it unless we've trained ourselves to watch closely how we think and how our mind operates.

So, the challenge is this: to develop a mode of cognition that goes beyond the law of identity that says that A is always A and not non-A. In fact, A is alway already dependent on non-A and cannot remain A without disappearing into non-A. This kind of cognition allows us to co-exist with the different cultural codes without seeing them as opposed to each other.

[elenchikos]

Okay, I'm stopping again at time index 29:30. I grew up in a fundamentalist/evangelical area in the American south, and was steeping in the kind of belief Brendan mentioned. I know exactly what you mean about the literalness of Resurrection being crucial to these peoples' understanding. Even a formidable intellect like C.S. Lewis's (Lewis knew ancient myth forward and backward) argued that what made Christianity different from the pagan myths of resurrection was the fact that, in Jesus, the myth became historical fact.

The reason we have culture wars is because there has never been such a wide spectrum of different and competing cultural codes as we have now, and short of Metamodernism, each successive code (modernism, post-modernism) thinks that the previous codes are garbage (despite post-modernity's pretense to be inclusive). If you are a fundamentalist/evangelical Christian, you feel that those liberals are out to destroy "our way of life."

My thing about dialectical thinking works only if you are a dialectical thinker. How you can actually include Post-Faustian (Hanzi Freinacht's term) cultural code in such a way that it's adherent's don't feel threatened or patronized - that is the challenge. I don't know how to do that at this moment because it would seem that the only thing that would satisfy the Post-Faustian would be for society to revert to Post-Faustian cultural code exclusively. I hope you and Lene have some ideas.

After listening to Lene's answer:
The approach she takes of saying that the Post-Faustian has to accept science in public discourse (politics) - that is exactly why the Trump supporters were supporting him so mindlessly - because he was telling them they could have their beliefs in politics, which is, after all, what the Moral Majority has been working for for 40 years or more. They just aren't satisfied with such an approach as Lene proposes. I almost want to say (jokingly of course) what a philosopher friend of mine said, "Let them have Texas!" Let them go somewhere and form their own country and try to live in the past and find out what the problems are with that in a world that is controlled by modernity and post-modernity.

[mctaguer]

Brendan, your conversation with Lene about literal interpretations of myth brings back some thoughts of mine from the 90s. I was raised non-evangelical (liberal wing of Methodism) but lived in the West and Southwest, among many fundamentalists and evangelicals. One of my carry tomes of that time was Spong's Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism (boy, that got some reactions from The Faithful). One thing I realized, while studying with an annotated (Catholic, actually) Old Testament and reading Spong was that Modernity and PM had REINFORCED (in a couple ways: reaction to perceived threat and in mode of thought) the need for literal interpretation of the Bible by people of faith. As Lene mentioned, we don't really KNOW how people in indigenous or even pre-modern societies really thought about these things. It struck me then that, there's NO WAY these people conceived of The Torah as, say, a science text book (but I know people now who think it does EXACTLY that)--you might as well have tried to explain Einstein's General Relativity to them. The fact we live in (still, and will for a while) has galvanized this (while people are largely ignorant that -ity itself has boiled the frog: they unwittingly THINK in ways that are distinctly modern and post-modern).

[lenadiveeva]

It’s music about this, movie also, for example Star Wars, it’s about science and moral

[CrowMagnum]

Understanding the poetic metaphor of religion is the path for the modern to accept the premodern. I think the opposite direction requires experiencing the personal truth of the myth and connecting with people from other traditions who use a different story to describe the same personal truth.

[kirklazenby]

Was the shooting yesterday at the Oslo's Gay Pride festival and example of on the Hegelian dialectic?

[CrowMagnum]

If you think of modernity as mindfulness and postmodernity as insight, the transcendent moments are detached awareness in the former and letting go of attachment to self in the latter. It is important to see the stages as processes rather than states. The process of getting to the transcendence often involves experiencing the limit of that worldview.

[elenchikos]

Time index 32:46: Why is it a problem holding different cultural codes? Why is there cognitive dissonance about that or a feeling of being schizophrenic? If you really hold this question and contemplate it like a koan eventually you will get an insight that will show you how it's possible.

If you like, we could talk, and I could show you how I would examine this question dialectically.

[nikolatosicphilosophy]

Thank you for this interview. The biggest value it offers is reduction of resentment in existing conflicts between premodern, modern, and postmodern followers. Unfortunately, while this discussion is highly valuable for everyone, it is not known.

[elenchikos]

Time index 50:35 Generating new Symbols from within Metamodernity
I'm dubious about this. First the consciousness during the Axial Age (early Iron Age) was very adept at symbolic cognition. I think we lost that to a great extent during the modern age. The very idea that you could "generate" a symbol is, I think coming from a modern perspective. I don't think true symbols are generated, let's say, like a car is generated (i.e. manufactured). I think true symbols are discovered through intuitive cognition (or as a depth psychologist like Jung would say, from the Unconscious). True symbols contain more layers of meaning than the conscious mind can ever encompass. Maybe I'm mistaking your meaning, but I prefer to answer the questions before I hear the response.

[josephanglada]

It seems all ideologies have a singularity where they fail to reality.
Religion may fail in describing natural reality, but so does ideas like Gender perspective or Racial equality.
Trans ideas are basically woke creationism.
Biologically we are all different and there are biological things we cannot change. Until ideas become more honest and flexible, no conversation can even start.