Metapolitics
= "Metapolitical practice involves questioning the very frame of “politics” itself; it is a discourse about what counts as political". [1]
Description
1. Zak Stein:
"Metapolitical practice today should be about arranging new ways for people to meet “outside” the “political,” in a new place, a “meta place,” where a future and truly new politics can be built. Among other things, this involves knowing when and how to stop “going meta” in order to simply meet. This requires a return to metaphysics as a practice of creating a shared world."
(http://www.zakstein.org/be-careful-going-meta-metapolitical-practice-ii/)
2. William Irwin Thompson:
The term “metapolitics” was coined by the poet and cultural historian Peter Viereck in his 1941 book, Metapolitics: the Roots of the Nazi Mind. Politics is expressed in ideologies that are territorially based, but when an ideology is lifted from one location to become a universal ideology, it becomes more messianic and its leaders become avatars of a new world view. Think of Che Guevara. For me, the cultural shift from an identity that is based upon a nation or a territory to one based upon a state of consciousness—indeed even a seizure of consciousness — expresses the transition from politics to metapolitcs."
(https://www.academia.edu/26045242/Metapolitics_of_the_Noosphere)
See: Metapolitics of the Noosphere
Contextual Quote
1.
"“Going meta” refers to an act that initiates a certain kind of discontinuity in the conversational continuum. This is why we need to be so careful when, where, and with whom we choose to “go meta.” In my first post on metapolitics I stated that we are now put into a position where metapolitical reflection has become necessary. This means in fact that we have to “go meta” in order to go anywhere. And yet, I also discussed the inherent danger involved with “going meta”—pointing to the arrogant power play of “going meta.”
- Zak Stein [2]
2. William Irwin Thompson on the shadowside of metapolitics:
"The term “metapolitics” was coined by the poet and cultural historian Peter Viereck in his 1941 book, Metapolitics: the Roots of the Nazi Mind. I confess that this book had a strong influence on me as I was writing my first book, The Imagination of an Insurrection: Dublin, Easter 1916, A Study of an Ideological Movement (Oxford University Press: New York, 1967). Politics is expressed in ideologies that are territorially based, but when an ideology is lifted from one location to become a universal ideology, it becomes more messianic and its leaders become avatars of a new worldview. Think of Che’ Guevara. For me, the cultural shift from an identity that is based upon a nation or a territory to one based upon a state of consciousness—indeed even a seizure of consciousness—expresses the transition from politics to metapolitics. In several of my other books, I have called this kind of movement a shift in individual identity from territorial nation-states to noetic polities. ISIL, Al Qaeda, and Boko Haram are current examples. I have also maintained before in more than one of my books that: “Evil is the annunciation of the next level of organization.” ISIL, Al Qaeda, and Boko Haram are the evil forms of planetization that use the Internet to attract followers, but other forms like science are also noetic polities. New forms will emerge as new global institutions come forth to deal with the crisis of industrial civilization and climate collapse. [1] Nations will increasingly become like organelles within the cell. Our present planetary system of communication satellites that supports our new social media has become what printed media and the railroads were for the spread of modernism. In this blog I am trying to take a few more steps in this exploration of an unknown new world."
- William Irwin Thompson [3]
Characteristics
Zak Stein:
" I address three of the areas where metapolitical reflection is required during our historical moment:
1): the metapolitics of planetary-scale computation and measurement;
2): the metapolitics of existential risk;
3): the metapolitics of human nature.
To foreshadow:
1): Humanity has been slowly building a planetary-scale measurement meta-structure for thousands of years. Generations living today will likely witness a 1.0 version of this perennial ambition as part of the newly emergent (and largely accidental) planetary computational stack (Bratton, 2015). The first manifestations of planetary-scale computation have resulted in measurement systems that are encircling the Earth in unprecedented matrices of abstract representation. Much of what is measured remains what has always been measured, including materials, commodities, and their price. But the Internet of Things is also becoming an internet of people, who are being turned into things after being objectified through measurement. The measurement of psychological traits (including beliefs and values) has emerged as a powerful vector in the proliferation of sensors, assessments, and behavior tracking backends. I propose a framework for a metapolitics of planetary measurement, which is based on my previous work building an integral metatheory of measurement (Stein, 2015). Examples from efforts underway in the so-called Global Educational Reform Movement (GERM) serve as signals of a hyper-measured future in which no person, thing, or movement escapes measurement. I argue that the implied idealized state of totalized planetary measurement (i.e., of an omniscient measurement meta-structure through which the entire Earth is “seen and tagged”) is both absurd logically and undesirable on ethical grounds. I then propose specific metapolitical parameters that could help to ensure humane futures for planetary measurement meta-structures.
2): The essential causes of existential risk have been identified as deep structural properties of our contemporary civilization. Day-to-day “politics” is self-terminating by design (Schmachtenberger, 2018). Threats to the survival of the species as a whole and the biosphere itself are metapolitical by their very nature, as they threaten to disrupt the basic assumptions of modern “politics.” History is about to deepen as catastrophic and existential risks of planetary scale will provoke unprecedented widespread questioning of a metapolitical nature. We will see strong arguments in favor “getting over human rights,” because what rights can individuals really claim during climatic cataclysms in which choices will need to be made that amount to planetary-scale trolley problems? We will also see “political” arguments for suicide, slavery, and genocide issue from the mouths of leaders in the first world. And we will see profound acts of self-sacrifice and compassion, going viral in a metamodern planetary public sphere racked by tragedy. Metapolitical practice in this domain involves getting out in front of the cultural and political crises that seem to be simply waiting to happen (they are actually already happening in slow motion). Groups need to begin foundational metapolitical theorizing now about key scenarios involving a range of risks. This work needs to be made public as part of fostering a metapolitical consilience between key geopolitical actors. Getting beyond today’s “politics” requires creating a new and unprecedented form of planetary metapolitics from which can emerge the innumerable local innovations that must somehow be woven together into the fabric of an anti-fragile civilization.
3): As already mentioned above, specific sciences are continually breaking down the underpinnings of our most basic intuitions about humans and the universe. Modern humans have ended up dissecting themselves to death. Once psychologists put the human soul on the examining table it was only a matter of time until humanity itself was disenchanted entirely, and along with it, humanism, democracy, and other modern “political” staples. Evolution as understood by neo-Darwinians contradicts the idea of human rights point blank, as social Darwinists have been arguing since the Origin of Species was published—hence the current “political science,” which would justify human rights in terms of game-theoretical calculations. While there are evolutionary arguments about group selection that appear to support the idea of protecting certain individual rights, these arguments mostly fail. But they are beside the point anyway. In a universe that is supposedly totally meaningless matter in motion with no natural moral law or God, what are we really doing when we speak of protecting our humanity, or of “crimes against humanity?” (We are lying, Carl Schmitt would say). But even trying to reconcile Darwinism with human rights is beside the point if all human action and awareness is reducible to causal mechanisms in the nervous system. The problem of free will has also been put on the examining table thanks to recent advances in neuroscience and genetics. The point is not that some scientists will convincingly solve the problem of free will with an fMRI scanner (they won’t). The point is that some scientists will convincingly claim to have done so and this claim will reverberate throughout the lifeworld, setting off a cacophony of metapolitical reflections. At this point modernity has come so far that the “human” itself is a problematic category; modern science is displacing the abstract self-interested individual currently at the center of our modern “politics.” I propose metapolitical practices based on an explicit “return” to metaphysics in search of new frameworks for understanding humanity and the universe (Stein & Gafni, 2015; 2017)." (http://www.zakstein.org/metapolitical-practice/?)
Example
A negative example, where going 'meta' is counterproductive, by Zak Stein:
"Another example: imagine you attempt to make a constructive contribution to group discussion, but I step in to disallow this on the grounds that you are part of a particular subgroup. It could be that you are a white male attempting to help a group of female activists or that you are a black female activist attempting to be heard by a group of white male chauvinists. In either case, what you take as your right to speak is re-framed in terms of a very different set of assumptions. Your objections to being silenced only reinforce this reframing because I have “gone meta” on you by discounting your way of viewing the situation in favor of my group’s frame. I say to you on behalf of my group: “of course you would argue like that! You belong to that subgroup that is always demanding to be heard.” You are now performing your objections as set in my meta-narrative; hermetically sealed off from offering reasons that matter. Of course, you then respond by escalating your objections, perhaps eventually making equally severe condemnations of my group. We are taking up such different frames on the situation that we end up mutually undermining the legitimacy each other’s views. It is not that we disagree about a particular issue; it is that we cannot agree on how to even begin a serious discussion. “Going meta” in this case eventually destroys the possibility of discourse itself." (http://www.zakstein.org/be-careful-going-meta-metapolitical-practice-ii/)
History
Zak Stein:
"Timothy Morton (2013) shrewdly pointed out in his important book Hyperobjects (to which I will return) that “going meta” is exactly what modernity did to everyone and everything. Modernity says: “Anything you can do I can do meta” (p. 146). People have been “going meta” since the preverbal invention of fire and the wheel. But modernity took “going meta” much more seriously, so seriously in fact that we started retreating all the way “back” into pure mathematics and matter. Physicists and biologists started “going meta” on all of the other disciplines, claiming that everything reduces down to physics in the end. Ultimately, modernity has been trying to reframe what psychologists and philosophers are talking about in terms of fundamental physics. Modernity is Zen and the art of “going meta.” Modernity gave us feats of heroic mathematical abstraction, including a single global measure of value (“money”) and a unified system of measures and standards for everything (e.g., the ISO, see: Stein, 2015). Modernity sought to replace kings with a process (democracy) while also replacing religious dogma with a process (science). Modernity says: “History just keeps getting meta and meta.”
All this made for an academic climate wherein each of the various fields of research gave up on cooperating towards synthesis and instead started reciprocally “going meta” on each other.
...
Postmodernism is only modernity’s greatest student in the art of “going meta.” Postmodernity works with a perfected tool box of disruptive and combative strategies for “going meta.” We are left with pure deconstruction and only our personal identity as a locus of power. Moreover, postmodern socio-economic conditions within late-stage capitalism simply continue the trends modernity started in “going meta” on cultures and people, specifically by using processes of hyper-quantification, over measurement, and near total financialization. Soon everything I do, say, and write will be given a number and value whether I like it or not. More on this issue of planetary-scale measurement in a moment.
It is important to realize that civilizations have evolved because of our ability to “go meta.” Historically the critical and deconstructive moment of “going meta” on a set of social norms was often followed by a reconstructive moment that involved creating and then entering into a new set of social norms. Out with the old narrative and leaders and in with the new narrative and new leaders. This has generally been what we call “history,” although also an obvious oversimplification. It appears that modernity’s unprecedented play for all the meta-marbles resulted in the postmodern desire to do away with narratives and leaders all together. Postmodern culture is “going meta” with no intention of stopping. At its worst this looks like a desire to critique social norms without the thought of reconstructing new ones. Therefore “going meta” is not a solution to the challenges of our historical moment. “Going meta” is what you do to prepare to work towards a solution, you need to “go meta” when discussing what counts as a “solution.” Then you need to come back to Earth by entering into the new assumptions, norms, frameworks, values, and other results stemming from the reconstructive work done after “going meta.” Postmodernists just plan on “going meta” forever. This is a bad plan, impossible even. Let me explain more carefully why “going meta” endlessly is so dangerous.
If I “go meta” one time I have disrupted things. " (http://www.zakstein.org/be-careful-going-meta-metapolitical-practice-ii/)
Discussion
Zak Stein:
"The widespread and growing emergence of metapolitical practices heralds a major epochal shift in the history of consciousness and civilization. Recall the wide-ranging and radical metapolitical reflections that characterized the transition into modernity solidified during the French and American Revolutions. The constitution of the United States transformed what was a modern metapolitical conversation into a new form of real politics. The revolution that created the Soviet Union did the same only more briefly and with a different emphasis. Neoliberalism encoded new hyper-modern metapolitical assumptions into the structures and habits of post-Cold War day-to-day politics, and thus life itself was set adrift on seas of fictitious capital.
...
“Metamodern” is not a term of praise, like “integral,” but rather marks structurally identifiable aspects of current cultural evolutions occurring chronologically after the exhaustion of modernity and postmodernity. Metamodern metapolitical discussions are slightly different than the ones that preceded them. Today metapolitics is expanding out beyond the halls of rogue power elites where it has traditionally taken place (i.e., historically metapolitics has been the province of Turchin’s (2015) “counter elites”). Things have changed: counter elites used to secretly engage in metapolitical planning; now they are openly inciting widespread metapolitical reflection among the masses. Cases in point are QAnon, cryptocurrencies, and “post-truth” journalism, all of which appear to be explicitly deployed by political power players as a means to disrupt politics as usual. Metamodern political innovations are occurring in metapolitical spaces where power is wielded “outside” of normal political channels, with the explicit intention of eventually changing the nature of those channels themselves (for better and/or for worse)."
(http://www.zakstein.org/metapolitical-practice/?)
Its the Hyperobjects that make us go 'meta'
Zak Stein:
"We know not what we do. We are basically being made to fight because of the mysterious hyperobjects all around us—the massive and yet invisible objects that are so hard to speak of, but which are looming behind every conversation. Global warming, global capital, dark energy, superstorms, planetary-scale computation, genetic code—the list goes on and on of the new and amazing things that make us scared and thus more likely to prefer fighting over talking about our actual situation.
It is not my fault I am “going meta”—the hyperobjects made me do it
I almost can’t have a simple conversation anymore about things like the weather. There is no shared framework in the public culture because everyone knows meta than me. They don’t know better, just differently in such a way that there is no clearly shared frame of reference. Something I hold as dear you can easily “go meta” on, such as “global warming.” No, “it’s called climate change, and it is much more complex than just warming.” No, “it is called a massive hoax pulled off by elites to usher in a global government.” Really? All I wanted was to talk about the weather, but I end up talking about something meta.
Morton (2013) points out that this is what hyperobjects like global warming do: they force us to “go meta.” This is why hyperobjects will be a recurring theme in metapolitics going forward. They can be described as the “objects” that our culture is just becoming aware of thanks to advances in science and philosophy. They are hyperobjects because they are so large, complex, long-lasting, and beyond human proportions that they disrupt our collective sense-making and individual self-understandings. Yet hyperobjects are not rare despite having these remarkable qualities; they are everywhere depending on how you look. For example, we used to agree about what the “ocean” was. Now we are trying to figure out what the ocean actually is and how it works. The once and former “ocean” was a sometimes scary and often beautiful thing that everyone could relate to easily by seeing it, swimming in it, surfing on it, sailing on it, or navigating it. You and I understand that ocean. But the Earth’s oceans have now come to be understood as a massively complex hyperobject with trends and tendencies such as temperatures, currents, and salt levels, the future of which will impact the biosphere profoundly.
The ocean is caught up in global warming, which is another and even larger and more complex hyperobject. Global warming has turned the “ocean” into something it never was before: a politicized scientific hyperobject that has become the focus of billions of dollars of research. I know that this other “hyper-ocean” is more real and somehow exists somehow inside my sunset view of the “ocean,” but I don’t understand or experience this other ocean. The “hyper-ocean” is an uncanny reality forced into my awareness by (post)modernity, and it is ruining the view. Moreover, so far as we can tell, our future depends on the quality and trustworthiness of the research about this bigger, massively complex “hyper-ocean.” So it is stressing me out too, when the sunset view of the ocean I knew before was simply relaxing.
The ocean was not political before today except perhaps as a theater of war and as a kind of territory. Indeed, it was only valuable as territory in relation to our use of the land. Now people engage in activism and stage protests to “save the ocean.” They argue it is valuable in new ways and that I need to see the ocean from a totally different perspective (i.e., as a thing tied up in the process of global warming). But which “ocean” are they talking about? How absurd it appears to one view: the modern “ocean” is basically a theater of war and fishery and will remain so as long as possible. And yet, there is another ocean that is the source and sustainer of the biosphere as we know it, and it may only be around for another decade. The ocean as a hyperobject has become a cause for metapolitcal reflection; the future of this “hyper-ocean” will likely force us to change “politics as usual.”
The hyperobjects revealed and created by (post)modernity become political because they appear to impact us (“we need the fish/oxygen/algae!”) and yet they are so large and complex in and of themselves that they embarrass our cognitive frameworks (not to mention that our access to them requires so much mediation that we often have to simply trust the experts and their scientific apparatuses). Therefore, something very close to home begins to appear uncanny and far away; the metamodern awareness of hyperobjects makes everything just kinda look meta. The biosphere unfolds over massive, mind-boggling scales of time and space. Scientists diligently report on trends going back only decades and only in a certain region; they work to piece together the shadow cast by a hyperobject that extends centuries backwards and forwards in time: “global warming.” The mystery of what is really going on eludes everyone and yet it is precisely everyone who is implicated in the mystery. Moreover, consider the sensor and computer networks now involved with climate change research. We have to “trust” these and the experts who use them. This is an important case of planetary-scale computation and measurement that is highly politicized (Stein, 2015). The point here is that because (post)modernity created these hyperobjects, and/or created our awareness of them, there are deep “political” stakes involved in disagreeing about them.
This is all just to say that questions such as, “Do you believe in global warming or not?” are a major metapolitical problem. Let me be clear: it is the question that is the problem; it is not what the question is about (i.e., “global warming”) that is the problem. It is also not a bad question because we “already know the answer;” I am not saying that we have already answered it and our problem is that the question keeps lingering. Rather, it is the form of the question itself that is the problem, as it does the classic (post)modern maneuver of forcing us to “go meta.” Why force me to talk about a hyperobject like “global warming” (or “systemic oppression,” or “global capital”) instead of asking me about something we are both actually looking at and can understand? For example, “do you care about this lake?” is a much better question to ask—no need to “go meta.” But it is only a good question if it is not a trick question that will eventually lead to the “real question” about global warming.
As it turns out, the best questions are about our shared valuing (or not) of the lake. Seeing this allows us to stop “going meta” for awhile and think together about the value of the lake. Instead of “going meta,” we meet. " (http://www.zakstein.org/be-careful-going-meta-metapolitical-practice-ii/)