It makes us capable of differentiating between the many aspects of society, the various memes, which tend to be aligned with different and opposing metamemes. Consequently, when we dispose of our temporal notions of pre-modernity, modernity and postmodernity, a much clearer and nuanced picture appears that takes the ambiguity and messy reality of the present world into account. At the same time, some of the so-called modern societies are struggling with a painful transition from a modern to a postmodern way of thinking and behaving. Many parts of the world are yet to become modern, and many issues in the world today revolve around the troubles of putting the pre-modern way of living and thinking behind us and embracing modernity. We may in the historical sciences say that the world entered the modern era about 250 years ago, but that doesn’t mean that the world back then became modern in the qualitative meaning of the word. Modernity is, as pointed out by Adorno, not just a historical period. It’s crucial to understand that a metameme is not a temporal entity, but a qualitative one. But if we go further back in history, we’ll see that there have been several other metamemes, that it does not suffice to put everything before the modern era under the concept of “pre-modernity”- and, that in today’s supposedly modern world, the older metamemes are still alive and kicking. Modernity and postmodernity are well-known examples of metamemes that have been described in academic literature. The subject of this book is ultimately the emergence and development of these metamemes: large collections of complex hierarchical ordered memes that manifest themselves in human consciousness as cultural, scientific and political expressions throughout history. The workings of this will be explained in detail in The 6 Hidden Patterns of History. A “metameme”, such as modernity, is thus one of the largest collections of memes conceptually possible-it is the final step before ordering all memes into some vague undifferentiated notion of the “human mega-meme”.įor example, democracy and the scientific method are two memes that show up under the umbrella of the modern metameme they walk hand in hand, just as other memes such as queer-feminism and environmentalism do within the postmodern metameme. On a higher level of abstraction, industrialism together with other memes such as capitalism (in its state- or free-market variant) and human rights are part of what has been known as “modernity”, or in my language, “the modern metameme” and Christianity, or any other similar traditional religion, together with memes such as divine law (in one form or another) and the notion of a holy text are mere constituents of the “pre-modern”, or postfaustian, metameme. But neither capitalism nor Christianity, vast and complex as they are, make up the most comprehensive collections of memes imaginable. Both contain minor constituents, for instance the “corporation-meme” or the “God-meme” (which again can be torn apart into even smaller constituent memes if one wishes). Many memes often come bundled together so as to make up larger and more complex memes such as industrialism or Christianity. Thanks to our monthly donators we can buy time to work on the book, so if you have a couple of bucks to spare each month, we would be very grateful if you could donate to Hanzi. It takes on a developmental approach to world history and does so through the lens of six overarching developmentally derived patterns that Hanzi refers to as “metamemes”. This is the third book in Hanzi’s metamodern guides series. The following is work-in-progress and is based on a few loose notes from Hanzi Freinacht’s work on his upcoming book ‘The 6 Hidden Patterns of History’. It’s these umbrella memes that I have chosen to dub “metamemes”. (With “meme”, I’m not referring to the illustrated jokes kids pass around on social media these days, but rather the original idea proposed by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene from 1976.) One of my major theses in The 6 Hidden Patterns of History: A Metamodern Guide to World History is that memes come bundled in non-randomly ordered collections of developmentally determined “umbrella” memes constituting overarching stages. “Metameme” is thus an overarching term for groups of other memes that helps us understanding the relation of one meme to another. A metameme is a collection of interconnected, mutual dependent, non-arbitrary memes.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |