Nordic Ideology

by Hanzi Freinacht

  Questions might be: Should society support democratic and tolerant val­ues; how intolerant should it be to intolerance? Should there be a mul­ti­cultural back­drop or a trans-cult­ural one? Should natural science be coupled with an appre­ciation for the humanities and for spiritual con­cerns? Should we have a materialistic-red­uct­ionistic or holistic-emergent­ist “default onto­logy” (the first is today’s mainstream)? How anthropo­cen­tric should our worldview be? (current discourse: very!) What general timeframes should we identify with: here and now, or ten years, or a century, or even longer? Each of these questions can be answer­ed at mul­ti­ple levels; what ranges of answers should be taught and discussed, and to what extent?

  These underlying suppositions—including and especially the metaphy­sical ones—will affect news reporting, the arts, our pastime inter­ests, our basic frameworks for political thinking, which questions that can be asked and seriously discussed in respectable settings, and so forth. Remember the norm-system we discussed earlier? Well from now on it won’t be up to power struggles in the shadows to decide upon their evolu­tion. It will have become a conscious process.

  In Book One I discussed four different developmental dimensions: cog­nitive complexity, subjective state, inner depth and cultural code. What we are dealing with here is the active and purposeful development and adjust­ment of our shared cultural code. Code systems come in different “symbol-stages” (assigned letters A-G, such as E Modern, F Postmodern and G Meta­modern) but each symbol-stage can of course take many diffe­rent forms, hence “developing” such code doesn’t always mean to try to get to a “higher” stage.

  Bluntly put, today’s society brainwashes people to accept symbol­-stage E Modern and, at some university campuses, F Postmodern, whereas fut­ure society should brainwash us with some symbol-stage G Metamodern stuff to go with that.

  In practice, of course, people will disagree vehemently about how to rank different worldviews in a developmental sequence, or whether or not such ranking is possible in the first place, or what it means for a certain world­view to be developed. And that’s alright.

  The point isn’t that there should be an elite of meta­mod­ernists who read a few Hanzi books and then brainwash everybody else; the point is that this process of deliberate discussion of our worldviews gets to materi­alize in the first place. From there on, it’s up to all storytellers of society to try their best to make their story about reality the one supported by the public and its instit­utions. Today we cer­tainly have stories that are sup­por­ted by society’s institut­ions, but we don not have organs to deal with such deep and funda­mental issues in an open and transparent manner. We lack a Politics of Theory.

  If such a process were to exist, this would dramatically increase our col­l­ective capacity to critic­ally reflect upon our own worldviews, upon those of one another, and upon finding ways to co-exist and ideally devel­op toge­ther. All political parties would need to specify which worldview they subs­cribe to, and this would spur a much greater philosophical depth through­out the political discourse. Politics gets married to philosophy. In a very non-linear way, we will have vindicated Plato’s old adage “until philosoph­ers become kings”:

  “There will be no end to the troubles of states, or of humanity itself, till phil­osophers become kings in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers, and political power and philo­sophy thus come into the same hands”. [112]

  Or rather, through the process of self-organization and deeper govern­ance “the people” become philosophers, and in that instance, we also be­come kings. We begin to deliberate at a new level; we open the doors of collective perception, and we become masters of our own culture, and the fractal of mind-and-self-and-society cracks open to us as a co-created pro­cess of conscious evolution.

  Doing this is risky because such institutions can be used by reactionary and anti-scientific forces (let’s say Trump or Erdogan gets to brainwash the rest of us), but it is necessary as our technology and envir­on­­ment change at an accelerating pace, and that raises the stakes of life accord­ingly. If we don’t find ways of becoming nimble self-trans­formers at a deep, collec­tive level, we are bound to be stuck in the stories of yesteryear and get hit by an end­less cascade of catastrophes as we are always one step behind the society we ourselves have created. If we recreate our environ­ment, we must also recreate our culture and ourselves.

  Seriously—we need to have institutions that make culture itself tran­s­form­able because our life conditions will change again and again. So it’s not about finding “the right answers” about life, the universe and eve­ry­thing (let’s say we come up with the answer “42”) and teach it to every­one. It’s about finding ways of tearing down culture again and again, to always see what lies underneath and beyond. It’s about making our shared narratives more adaptable and more flexible to changing life con­ditions.

  Example: Big History in Schools

  So, what would be a good place to start if we were to develop our shared narra­tives about the world? How about the way history is taught in our educational system? After all, our understanding of the past determines how we make sense of the present, and how we intend on shaping the fu­ture; our sense of what kind of society we live in, and where it ought to go.

  It is therefore no coincidence that historiography remains one of the most hotly contested fields of all the sciences and frequently has become subject to political interference. In the past, history curriculums were larg­ely concerned with Biblical accounts and the good deeds and glorious vic­tories of kings and nobles so as to ensure people became good Christ­ians and loyal subjects of the monarch. Later, as part of the nation-buil­ding effort, school curriculums came to focus more on the histories of the nati­on and the state. And as societies democratized, past struggles for political eman­cipation and victories over authoritarian dictatorships were high­lighted in these national narratives so that pupils would become good, demo­cratic citizens. Such nation-state centered narratives still re­main do­min­ant in most schools today.

  But despite its many merits, this kind of history teaching has increasin­gly begun to be at odds with the inter­ests of our emerging global civiliza­tion. It teaches us to think too much in accordance with linear and perio­dical history; it fails to em­phasize the truly global aspects of societal and technological dev­elopment; it overemphasizes the con­struction of natio­nal identities and mythologies; it overemphasizes the role of states and ethn­icities in our present era; and it provides too limited understandings of the inter­actions between humans and the rest of the bio­sphere.

  In recent years, postmodernism, mostly in universities, has chal­lenged the national approach to history by focusing on topics such as the lives and histories of those who have been largely ignored or been subject to the biased perspectives of the powerful: ethnic and religious minorities, indigenous populations, women and sexual minorities, the colonized, the enslaved, the vanquished souls who never got a chance to write their per­spectives into our history books.

  This is arguably more in tune with the multi­cultural societies of today’s post-colonial, global world, but it still suffers from a number of inadequa­cies: it’s overly preoccupied with details and smaller histories, more con­cerned with picking apart established conce­ptions than creating new ones, and it offers little help to navigate a hyper­complex, ever more technolo­gical advanced and increasingly interconnec­ted global civilization on the brink of ecological collapse.

  Although postmodern historiography is better than the conventional, nation-centered one, as it does acknowledge different histories and per­spec­tives, it has no principle by which it can coordinate and compare this multi­tude of histories. It simply “smashes” them together. This is obvio­usly more inclusive than just favoring one history or one perspective, but the post­modern “smash approach” leaves us with a “history in pieces”. It urgently lacks me
ta-narratives to link the many pieces together.

  Unfortunately, the “smash perspective” seems deeply embedded in the postmodern DNA. Jean-François Lyotard once wrote that “Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity towards metanarrati­ves”, [113] by which he meant teleological stories that guide or structure our explanations of social reality. And truth be told, postmodernists tend to passionately dislike all such grand overarching explanation models—be they religion, modern science, liberal democracy and whatnot. After all, haven’t all such narr­atives eventually proved erroneous, if not downright evil; nothing more than deceptive means to oppress the weak?

  But without any meta-narratives, we are left with is a fragmented and parochial view of history, too absorbed in details and devoid of any attem­pts at fitting them together into a greater, coherent worldview; in effect ren­dering history lessons into a random presentation of ODTAA, “one-damned-thing-after-another” [114] , to quote the historian Arnold Toynbee—which makes it difficult to explain why anyone should bother studying history at all. How is all of this connected to my life? one may ask. One learns his­tory, but does not develop one’s relationship to history as a whole.

  This can be harmful since it creates a fragmented and estranged view of ones place in the world that may contribute to a subtle but pervasive feel­ing of disorientation and not “fitting in”, what Émile Durkheim refer­s to as “anomie” (the breakdown of social bonds between the individual and her community).

  A way of tackling this lacking sense of belonging and direction, and a more suitable approach to history teaching in today’s world—one more in tune with the emergence of a metamodern society—is, I believe, what has been proposed by David Christian, Fred Spier and Cynthia Stokes Brown as Big His­tory . [115]

  Big History is an emerging historiographical discipline that spans the entire history of the universe: from the big bang, to the creation of stars and planets, to the origins of life and on to humankind and the present. And as such, it is a multidisciplinary approach that seeks to present a more universal and seamless narrative that bridges traditional world his­tory with both archaeology and anthropology, as well as natural sciences like physics, cosmology, evolutionary biology, climatology and environ­mental studies, all viewed as historical sciences.

  Big History is thus an attempt to overcome the perceived division between humans and the natural world prevailing in both modern and postmodern thinking. Whereas postmodernism does avoid the nation-centrism of conventional historiography, it is still, for the most part, large­ly anthropocentric. Big History, however, sees human culture as part of nat­ure, not separated from it. It strives for a world-centric perspective that emphasizes universal themes and patterns without a sharp distinction bet­ween the human ex­per­ience and the earlier and ongoing evolution of the physical and biological world.

  In Big History, humans do not take the center stage. The central agents are the patterns of self-organization that occur both in nature and culture. Hence, it is not we who are to be seen as the driving force behind change, but rather the patterns of change per se which simply manifest them­selves through human beings and their culture. Big History thus expands the reach of historiography: It sees nature in history and it treats the natural world as a historical development.

  This cosmological approach to history is capable of giving students a more secular, scientific and above all a more comprehensive and inter­connected view of life and society than most history courses can offer; and it per­mits asking the very large questions and encourages searching for greater meaning in the past.

  According to David Christian, the ambition of Big History is to assem­ble all the disconnected fragments of science into a coherent and accessi­ble account of origins, “a modern creation myth” in his words. Both science and myth. I take it the good professor is being ironic and sincere at the same time. How very metamodern of him. Yet, is there any better way to provide us with an overarching narrative of creation itself?

  Postmodernism has taken us to the end of the road in terms of diffe­rentiation and reductionism. Modern science became such a powerful tool of explanation by reducing the objective world to its smallest and most easily comprehensible parts. This development of increasing analytic dif­fe­rentiation continued with postmodernism by chopping reality down to even smaller pieces by ripping the formerly coherent neutral observer apart. What we ended up with was an extraordinary understanding of the pieces themselves, and a critical stance towards the subjective observer, but at the expense of grasping the whole. We have successfully decon­structed the world like a kid taking apart a tape recorder in order to understand how it works, but we are yet to engage with the task of putting it together again so as to hear the enchanted tones it once used to play.

  In view of this postmodern condition, David Christian has argued that “construction must precede deconstruction.” [116] This is not far from the metamodern dictum, that reconstruction must follow deconstruction. But to achieve this, we must acc­ept the postmodern critique, namely that we will never obtain the truth in any ab­solute meaning of the term. The quest for truth can only be stated in provisional, playful terms: only a Proto-Synthesis is possible. The attempt to (re)construct a coherent and mean­ingful overview of world history in a cosmological context can only gene­rate a provisional synthesis, a syn­thesis that can never be considered final or as absolute truth. So Big History grasps this proto-synthesis and holds it with self-conscious nai­vety.

  Does a “creation myth of our time” sound a bit naive and fantastical? Perhaps, but at least we are dealing with “infor­med naiv­ety” and “mag­ical real­ism”—at “the crossroads of fact and fic­tion”. The endeavor to con­struct a new meta-narrative, stated in mythic form, is as idealistic as it is pragmatic. After all, despite all our modern knowledge and reasoning, we still seem utterly incapable of eradicating the poorly composed myths that each of us spontaneously constructs nevertheless. So why not deliberately create a better myth and have it out in the open so that we can criticize it and improve upon it?

  It is a relevant question to ask if this kind of historical understanding should replace the prominent position of national histories. Would that affect political opin­ion and the deep frameworks of understanding shared by generations? Yes, certainly. Is it a good idea? Probably, but there is much that needs to be tried and discussed. It is no mere question of edu­cational politics, it is more than that: it is Politics of Theory.

  You can go on with similar questions: What about environmental aw­are­ness and systems’ views of life? Should panpsychism (the idea that com­petes with materialism, arguing that consciousness is ubiquitous in the uni­verse) be discussed in school? Or how about animal rights? We can set the stage for how people will create their world­views. Let’s make sure we do this well, and that we arrive at the “best” (or least bad) solution through the best possible communicative processes.

  Of course, some people are going to think we should eliminate all trad­itional religion and superstition. Some are going to think that we should make everyone believe in Jesus as our savior. Some will think that every­body should be supported in critical thinking and resistance against capi­talist power struct­ures. And that’s fair enough; there will remain any number of worldviews side by side in society, and people will cling to these narra­tives. In a demo­cratic, free and fair process of Politics of Theory, these factions will need to fight it out in a civilized manner and affect the overall sanctioned narrative.

  Those who disagree with the prevailing narrative and its balance bet­ween different worldviews will at least get to relate to an open, transparent structure, and they will be offered democratic means to state their case and to change it.

  Methods for Worldviewing

  You can’t have empirical results without theory; you can’t interpret data without theory; you can’t have scientific method without (methodologi­cal) theory. Nor is pure theory much good without emp
irical know­ledge. Empirical Politics cannot stand alone—ultimately it must have a Politics of Theory to dance with. Takes two to tango.

  Science will always rely upon the theories of everyday life and vice versa, and so we must make certain that we as a society have the best poss­ible understanding of our own theoretical understanding. I will be keep­ing this one short so as not to get overly theoretical. But I should at least list some ideas, research tradi­tions and key con­cepts that may be relevant to describing how people’s “theories about reality” may be studied—and which a Politics of Theory could draw upon, if and when such a thing materializes.

  If there were a Mini­stry of Theory, it should gather expertise within:

  Weltanschauung (worldviewing), as first described by the Prussian philologist Wilhelm von Humboldt in the early 19 th century. Basically, you try to map and study the internal logic and structure of a person or a group’s worldview, particularly a certain linguistic or ethnic community. Such descriptions should be as free from one’s own biases as possi­ble and be describable to people who subscribe to other worldviews.

  Study of value memes (and metamemes) . People tend to stabilize their worldviews and values around certain discernable equilibria I call “value memes”. These, in turn, depend upon both social (or environmental) and psychological factors, which can be studied as large patterns or “metamemes” (modernity, postmodernity and so on). There should be good data about which value memes are present in the population and what seems to drive different developments. This is a difficult and contentious issue, naturally, so it will require both a strong empirical program and cultural sensitivity.