“This absence of absolute truth was absorbed into the defining circumambient mythos of the late twentieth century.
This postmodern world view peaked during Generation X, and it explains a lot about the nihilistic slacker culture that followed.
What, though, has replaced it? If the influence of postmodernism started to fade as we moved towards the twenty-first century, what can we say about the world view it evolved into?
There have been many attempts to name what came after postmodernism, including, naturally enough, post-postmodernism.
Other suggested names have included ‘post-digital’, ‘performatism’, ‘altermodernism’, ‘post-irony’, ‘cosmodernism’, ‘New Sincerity’, ‘digimodernism’ and ‘post-humanism’. The name that seems to be sticking, however, is ‘metamodernism’. One problem with this name is that it is easy to assume the ‘meta-’ prefix implies a self-referential aspect. This is not the case. Instead, it comes from the Greek word metaxy. Plato defined metaxy as being between two contrasting poles.
Mankind’s metaxy, Plato explained, was to be between the animal world and the immaterial world of spirits and gods.
The idea is an important one in ancient Greek thought. The political philosopher Eric Voegelin described Greek heroes as oscillating ‘between life and death, immortality and mortality, perfection and imperfection, time and timelessness, between order and disorder, truth and untruth, sense and senselessness of existence.’
The way that post-Millennials can oscillate between being childlike and sensible, or being conservative and liberal, is a more contemporary example of metaxy.
Another metamodern attitude is accepting that individual data is flawed and Big Data is still useful.”
