Listening Society

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* Book: The Listening Society. A Metamodern Guide to Politics. Book One. By Hanzi Freinacht. Metamoderna ApS, 2017

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Review

Elke Fein:

1. General Comments:

"The book is definitely inspiring reading to anyone interested in integrally informed politics and probably a long overdue wake-up call for postmodernists, with its convincingly laid out claim that “there is no safe political position” (p. 151) and that it’s time for postmodernism to face its own inner contradictions. It also contains convincing pieces of analysis when it comes to reinterpreting the evolution of political governance and socio-economic conflicts over the past 2-3 centuries (finally an integrally informed sociologist!), as well as numerous worthwhile ideas helping to conceive ways for transcending the left-right divide and other challenges of metamodern/integral politics (p. 45). Part of the more concrete sections is Hanzi’s description of the Danish political party Alternativet (The Alternative) which is trying to put elements of these new approach to politics into practice since 2013 (chapter 5)."


2.Detailed Review:

"The term “listening society” refers to the idea of a societal culture of awareness that listens – and responds to the needs of its citizens in a deeper and more holistic way than the current materialistic one, including the deeper longings of body, mind & soul. The book spells out elements of a vision revolving around how we could “create and reproduce a society in which the average human life experience is more emotionally satisfying and spiritually productive” (p. 95), assuming that more happiness, in turn, will cause people to give something back to society and thus lead to better communities, more sustainable economies and a healthier planet. The basis for this is a world view and epistemology which Hanzi chose to call “metamodern,” drawing on theorizing in the fields of art, aesthetics, philosophy and culture theory. Even though the book’s major resources and inspiration come from Ken Wilber’s integral model (as one of the authors acknowledged in his presentation of metamodernism at the IFIS Online Colloquium in April, 2019), this choice of terminology is presumably also motivated by the consideration to reach a wider audience in the academic mainstream this way.

The term “metamodern” is borrowed from the Dutch art scholars Timotheus Vermelen and Robin van der Akker who noted a new trend of “pragmatic idealism” in arts already two decades ago. They also describe it as both a product of and a reaction to postmodernism, embracing “doubt, as well as hope and melancholy, sincerity and irony, affect and apathy, the personal and the political, and technology and techne." (Levin, 2012). “Hanzi” now sets out to add more specific meaning to the term, in particular that of a developmental stage and related philosophy, thereby aiming at making the concept travel to the social sciences and political practice.

So what is the essence of this socio-political metamodernism and how is similar to or different from “integral”? To what degree are its contents borrowed from integral or actually go beyond the latter in substantial ways? Even though these questions are not explicitly addressed in the book, they were at least ever present in my reading.

Hanzi himself proposes three different definitions of metamodernism (a cultural phase, a developmental stage, and a philosophical paradigm, p. 362f.). Readers interested in terminological fine-tuning will have to go into Hanzi’s appendix where he offers a condensed version of his conception of the metamodern paradigm (p. 363 ff.). My own reading is that metamodernism as outlined in “The Listening Society” is one possible interpretation, expression and/or application of integral thinking – even though the author(s) might not subscribe to this reading.

Given the Hanzi authors’ background in the social sciences, what they do offer beyond the integral model per se are elements and foundations of a vision for a more integral society and some political choices and changes of perspective that could help to bring it about. On the level of modeling strictly speaking, there are some interesting terms and categories that one has not seen or that are used differently in Wilberian models. However, I don’t see these pointing at completely new dimensions that integral philosophy would not have been aware of before. Hanzi’s metamodernism rather comes across as a “reframing” of integral for a post-modern (academic) audience, which it explicitly speaks to in both tone and style, and in view of addressing more specifically socio-political challenges. That, of course, is of value in its own right, given that much of the academic mainstream is currently struggling with late forms of modernism (for part of the sciences) and post-modernism (for the humanities and much of the social sciences), as well as with their paradigmatic contradictions and limitations preventing more efficient action on pressing global issues.


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Giving a complete summary of the book’s rich content would go beyond the limits of this review. I will nevertheless try to give some insights into Hanzi’s core ideas and some of the inspirations I have gained from the reading.

The Listening Society is conceived as the first book of an envisioned series of several more to come. In the book itself, two more volumes were announced, a developmental perspective on history, including core principles of metamodern politics (n° 2), and a volume on “the Nordic ideology” (n° 3 – this has actually just been published in May 2019 as number two), featuring developments in the Scandinavian countries. According to the author, the latter have come particularly close to a metamodern political culture, and are thus particularly well prepared for implementing it. Meanwhile, however, the main Hanzi author has also been talking about a series of up to six books that seem to be taking shape in Hanzi’s mind. Well, let’s see what comes next.

The series’ overall focus is on politics and transforming society based on an integral, or, in Hanzi’s terms, metamodern paradigm. This includes an analytical perspective on historical and present socio-economic developments and a multidimensional vision of how (a metamodern) society could take responsibility for the development of its citizens. As Robert Kegan has coined the vision of a “Deliberatively Developmental Organization,” The Listening Society spells out the first steps towards the vision of a deliberatively developmental society.

In this context, considerable space is dedicated to the idea of personal happiness in a broad sense of the term (p. 73ff.), which is conceived as a worthwhile socio-political goal. This is because happy people whose immediate and deeper needs are met, are more likely to take responsibility for others and the society as a whole. “Happy people are more productive in profound and complex ways” (p. 78). Moreover, the term listening society refers to a new, more complex notion of welfare – one that by supporting peoples’ development not only facilitates better choices and healthier, happier lives of its members, but thereby also helps to actually saves costs which would otherwise be generated for various kinds of treatments and by a considerable number of collateral damages (p. 84). In Hanzi’s words: By “deliberately and carefully cultivat(ing) a deeper kind of welfare system that includes the psychological, social and emotional aspects of human beings (…) the average person (…) becomes much more secure, authentic and happy (in a deep, meaningful sense of the word); (…) such people can then recreate society in a myriad of ways, solving many of the complex, wicked problems that we are facing today” (p. 72).

While the book does give some examples as to how this could happen, drawing on happiness research and an impressive list of references from meditation research documenting meditation’s multiple benefits (pp. 96-103), it seems to be primarily concerned with laying the groundwork and seeding the broader, overall vision than with defining concrete strategies and steps."


The Metamodern Model

"In a nutshell, the metamodern model is essentially introduced as a combination of four dimensions that Hanzi presents as independent of each other: cognitive complexity, cultural code, subjective state and depth. The first two dimensions: personal (individual) cognitive development and socio-cultural development (or “code”) come across as elements from the Wilberian integral model. Cognitive complexity is essentially presented based on Michael Commons’ Model of Hierarchical Complexity (MHC); cultural code appears to be a modified version of Spiral Dynamics. The two other dimensions, state and depth (p. 158), differ from the Wilberian integral model to some degree, even if probably less substantially than with regard to their relevance and positioning in the Hanzi model. (Unfortunately, Hanzi’s model is not visualized anywhere in the book, so that the reader has to mentally build it up from the text on her own). Let’s look at each of the dimensions successively, with the two developmental ones going first.

Cognitive Complexity: The fact that Michael Commons’ MHC is given a particularly prominent place as “the by far most scientifically viable and consistent [model], and the one that indisputably has the strongest empirical evidence” (p. 171) is less surprising, given that the Hanzi author has spent several months working with Commons in the US after completing his dissertation. Since the MHC is well known to IR readers, I will not bother summarizing its merits and contents, but rather report some of the dissonances I stumbled over during my reading. While there is no doubt about Hanzi’s assertion about the solidity and mathematical basis of the MHC, I had to read twice when it comes to some of Hanzi’s other claims. For example that “Commons is the only one that has discovered one [i.e. cognitive complexity, E.F.] of the [Hanzi’s] four fundamental dimensions of development” (p. 173) – what about the Piagetian founda tions of cognitive developmental research in the 1930s? Equally irritating is Hanzi’s treatment of essentially “all of the (other) holistic adult development theories” as “fail(ing) to grasp quite what it [development] is” (p. 172). Without any mention of the specific goals and approaches of the respective theories, Hanzi somewhat seems to criticize everything that is not MHC, precisely for not being MHC. For instance, he claims that renowned researchers of ego development such as Robert Kegan, Jane Loevinger and Susanne Cook-Greuter “mix things up” or “blend in issues of personality into the different stages and spice it up with a bit of psychiatric diagnostics (where the lower stages are described as psychopaths, more or less),” p. 173. – Excuse me?! Several similarly bold claims about other authors are based on similarly fluffy grounds that often raise more questions than they answer.

There is no discussion of the distinction between hard and soft stage models and related debates on measurement (see Stein & Heikkinen, 2009), nor of their respective merits and limitations. Just plain judgement. What’s worse, Hanzi claims that “the main problem of many of the adult development theorists, from Jane Loevinger and Susanne Cook-Greuter to Robert Kegan, stems from the fact that their authors are at this [the MHC systematic] cognitive stage” (p. 201) (sic!).

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The second developmental dimension in the Hanzi model of metamodernism is sociocultural development or, as he puts it, cultural code, evolving through a range of symbol stages from A (archaic) to G (metamodern). Here again, the author draws heavily on work by preceding researchers, namely Jean Gebser, Clare Graves and Don Beck/Chris Cowan’s Spiral Dynamics. Even though he slightly modifies some of Beck/Cowan’s stage names (“Faustian” for “Red” or “Imperial” and “Post-Faustian” for “Blue” or “Mythic/Traditional” and calls the overall stage category of the cultural code dimension “meta-memes,” there is no substantially novel quality claimed for these stages description-wise. Given that the Hanzi model is not based on evidence of its own, this is not surprising.

At the same time, Hanzi uses and introduce several terms, namely value memes, symbol stages, “meta memes” and, later in the book, “effective value memes,” the definition – and distinction of which remains somewhat unclear. While the contents of the seven memes/stages appear to be what we know from the SD/Wilberian models, the almost synonymous use of some of these terms adds some conceptual confusion. For clarification, Hanzi, as often in the book, refers to further forthcoming volumes with a promise of more detail. (In this case, The 6 Hidden patterns of World History is announced to discuss “the historical development of meta-memes, i.e. the overall patterns that set the logic for what memes can be expected to show up at a certain stage of societal development,” p. 213). Later on, we learn that the concept of “effective value meme” is in fact a new, way more complex variable, first mentioned, but only vaguely explained on p. 174 as an “overall pattern” generated by the relationship between Hanzi’s four dimensions complexity, code, state and depth.


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So let’s now turn to the two other dimensions that are introduced as core elements of the metamodern model besides cognitive complexity and cultural code: subjective state and (psychological) depth. To readers familiar with integral modelling, it comes as a surprise that Hanzi presents these as the “inner dimensions”, as opposed the two former ones. According to the author, the developmental dimensions describe “a kind of ‘exterior’ reality, meaning that they can both be intersubjectively recognized and, in some sense, ‘objectively’ studied” (p. 249). While he sees the two developmental dimensions as referring to “the organism’s behavior”, he refers to state and depth as “the organism’s own inner experience”. This, then, is suggested as a cure to a claimed “inner dimensions blindness – the failure to recognize and understand the primary importance that peoples’ inner lives have in society” (ibid.).


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By “subjective state,” Hanzi refers to “higher” and “lower” inner states of being. They are claimed to be different from emotions, but rather something “more fundamental” that includes “some kind of sum or totality of how we feel” in each moment (p. 254). As an ordering principle for subjective states, he then comes up with a scale from 1-13, reaching from lower states (“hell,” “horrific,” “tortured,” “tormented”) to medium states (“very uneasy” to “joyous, full of light”), up until the high states (“vast/grand/open,” “blissful/saintly,” “enlightened,” p. 260).

Reading chapter 12 on subjective states, one starts to sense that this (and the following) dimension are of particular importance to the author for personal reasons, and that these insights are the product of his own inner growth process. In fact, he does share some biographical and family background in this regard: “During most of my adult life, I have been followed by a sense of tragedy, a subtle but pervasive sadness… (…) the aching heart became the main engine of my life’s work” (p. 6). So while he has a whole backpack of deep difficult experiences here to draw on, that have apparently not been adequately addressed by other/integral models, Hanzi also concedes that “these fields have yet to produce a systematic theory of development equaling the MHC” (which, as mentioned above, he considers as the most scientifically reliable model, p. 249).

Different from the stage descriptions in the first two developmental dimensions of the model, there is no comparable description of the 13 states, either from personal experience, literary accounts or other sources. Moreover, Hanzi suggests that one can only really understand states that one has experienced oneself (p. 272). This, of course, not only makes it difficult to come up with “objective” scaling and modeling strategies regarding the different states. The author limits himself to the assertion that “even if my scale isn’t proven, it is certainly testable: you would need to device a way of measuring physiological correlates and perhaps peoples’ self-described experiences” (p. 395, fn. 129). In any case, the question remains open, on which grounds the 13 state model has been built by the author. Has “Hanzi” himself – or people he draws on – actually experienced the full spectrum that he so clearly (yet vaguely) lays out in his book? Or, since at some point, he admits that he hasn’t, do they come from “common sense,” single intuitive examples, or solid scientific research? Based on his own premises and standards at least, it becomes close to impossible to verify Hanzi’s model of 13 subjective states empirically.

But anyway, let’s assume they were meaningful categories. Because we need them to understand the fourth fundamental dimension of Hanzi’s model, the idea of a spectrum of states that a person has experiential access to, which he refers to as “depth.” Even though Hanzi claims that the four dimensions are independent of each other, depth obviously has an immediate relation to subjective states. He conceives depth as a product of the range (and thus number) of subjective states that one has experienced out of the above described spectrum. The more states an individual has experienced, the greater their psychological depth. Depending on whether one’s experience includes more of the lower or more of the higher states, Hanzi speaks of “dark” versus “light” depth. Just like for states, he stresses that “we are generally only capable of recognizing the forms of depth that we have developed ourselves” (p. 298). At the same time, the empirical basis of the emergence of this dimension of the model remains unclear."

(https://integral-review.org/pdf-template-issue.php?pdfName=vol_16_no_2_fein_review_of_freinacht_the_listening_society.pdf)


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