A Modest Introduction to Metamodernism

Writer's Commentary

What is Metamodernism?  Is probably the first question one is going to ask themself upon looking at this little blog of mine. After all, you can’t have a Modest Metamodernist without a Metamodernism to which such a person belongs.

[Commentary: The Modest Metamodernist is sort of a joke name in of itself.  A genuinely modest person probably wouldn’t genuinely call themself a Metamodernist, if they fully understood the meaning of the term, which I do.]

Let’s try to situate this question a bit.  What is Modernism?  That one’s relatively easy.  Modernism is a system of systems.  A system, as I speak of it in this sense, is a grouping of abstractions into a coordinated set; abstractions in of themselves being rules that describe groups of concrete reality.  

In this sense, Modernism is a set of philosophies and practices that started around the turn of the Renaissance in the 1500s. Humanism, Individualism, Capitalism, modern science, modern democracy, and more obscure philosophies, such as Objectivism; all of these systems of thought were born within Modernism.  One can call a system of systems a paradigm, and Hanzi Freinacht and other researchers in the Metamodern community call this specific type of paradigm a Metameme.

All sorts of ideas, or memes, were born and are contained within the Modern Metameme.  But a Metameme isn’t limited to just politics or philosophy.  It is also an overall structure of feeling for an age, and as such can be reflected in the arts-Impressionism, Cubism, and Fauvism could all be considered examples of Modern art.

[Commentary: An early attempt on my part to synthesize the cultural and political schools of Metamodernism at the time.  I feel that the word ‘paradigm’ could use a simpler explanation-but I can’t seem to find one that does the Model of Hierarchical Complexity proper justice.  Oh well. ]