The following is a short extract from the introduction chapter in Hanzi Freinacht’s unpublished book ‘The 6 Hidden Patterns of History: A Metamodern Guide to World History’. The full chapter can be accessed here. The book is not coming out anytime soon, but a webinar on the topic of world history and the six metamemes will be held this autumn, four weekends in a row November 2–25. More details about the course can be found here.
Q: Okay Hanzi, let’s get right at it. You claim to have discovered these patterns that explain much of world history—“metamemes” you call them.
But when I look at your theory it seems like just another wildly speculative “stage model”, where one stage of society builds upon another—and civilization “rises” to new heights. This is denigrating the richness of history, reducing human experience, flattening cultures past and present. Cultural history is much more than that.
Over and over again, history has taught us that, in the end, every such grandiose metanarrative comes crashing down under the weight of its own incongruities. How can you be sure that your model eventually won’t go down like all the rest?
HF: Hopefully, my model will go down some day. It will be obsolete, proven incorrect. If not, it would indicate that humanity had ceased improving upon her models of reality, and that would be bad news. I sincerely hope that all the errors I’ve made will be discovered, and that my model will be replaced by better ones. For now, however, I’m convinced this model is one of the best currently available metanarratives about world history.
But alright, I sense you don’t like the very act of creating what I call “metanarratives”, or any versions of grand histories. So let me stay a moment on that topic.
A metanarrative is “a narrative about narratives”; it’s a wider story that connects the different stories around you. These can be the stories of nations, of dynasties, of civilizations, the stories of technological progress, the stories of oppression and liberation, the stories of genders, of humans and the environment, and so forth. A metanarrative is a way of organizing and interconnecting the different accounts of the world and how it works, and—in the case of history—what actually happened. There are many stories about world history, but how do these fit together, if at all? A metanarrative shows how the different ways we have been taught to “listen to the melodies of history” form a larger whole, one that is not just a jumble of contradictions.
Metanarratives are a bit like world maps; they don’t show a lot of detail and are rather inaccurate when you zoom in, but they are still indispensable when we need an overview on a global scale. It’s alright if you don’t like my world map. But let me ask you, once you’ve seen and understood the one presented in this book: do you have a better one? Implicitly and unconsciously held maps are maps nonetheless.
But, sure, there are reasons to be suspicious of metanarratives, to be incredulous of “grand histories”.
One reason that many people are “against metanarratives” is that they feel these come with a risk of being totalizing: i.e. when you try to understand how things fit together, you also tend to squeeze everything into one and the same framework, ignoring the subtleties and details of each unique and surprising part of history, and as such metanarratives can even be used as instruments of control or the legitimization of unjust power. You force your intellect upon the richness of reality, as it were. Think Marxism and its story of how history evolves (from “primitive communism”, to slave society, to feudalism, to capitalism, to communism). Consider how it has been used as a blatant instrument of oppression. Or why not stop to consider how Western mainstream history of “increasing freedom” (so-called Whig history) still to this day serves colonial and supremacist purposes against indigenous populations, the Global South, or even against the environment and “nature itself” (that last term I use only with caution). Totalizing visions can be dangerous, even evil. Granted and agreed.
But, if you think it’s better to not use a map at all since it’s certain to have inaccuracies and one day will become obsolete, go ahead, navigate the world’s oceans without one, burn all the maps you like. For my part, if I was a 17th century sailor, I’d still prefer the crude maps of the time, sea dragons and mermaids and all, over sailing out blindly or waiting around for the GPS to be invented.
Q: Sure, if you were a 17th century sailor. But let’s bring this closer to home: If I was a respected scholar, I certainly wouldn’t risk my academic credibility by making up such far-fetched lofty “theories about everything”.
HF: Of course you wouldn’t, dear Q for Questioner. It’s much safer to merely critique, isn’t it? But there’s a word for that: cowardice. Or two words: intellectual cowardice.
People are so afraid of being told they’re wrong or that they’ve made a mistake that they’ll rather spend their entire careers making microscopic additions to existing theories—or stay on the safe side of the fence and make a career out of tackling anyone who dares saying something novel, substantial, or, Zeus forbid, comprehensive.
In my opinion that’s not only gutless and boring; it’s also as dangerous as the misuse of large perspectives, since it discourages people from taking on the important task of connecting the dots. In our days, metanarratives have gone terribly out of fashion. At the very same time, people have reported epidemic levels of confusion and loss of meaning. Maybe that’s not entirely a coincidence?
Meanwhile, humanity is facing planetary-level issues of ecology, climate, security, and technology—which are all interconnected and can arguably only be resolved together. Or at least each of the issues interacts with the others. Responding to one inevitably leads to dealing with another. But we’re disallowing ourselves from asking how the problems interconnect, because that would mean we’re doing “grand histories”, right? Well, maybe it’s time we try on some new ways to tell the big stories. Metanarratives can save lives. They can save civilizations. Or, said differently, lack of metanarratives can kill off civilizations. And take ecospheres with them. It’s happened before that civilizations drive off a cliff because their people failed to see the bigger picture they were part of. It can happen again. Actually, it is happening again.
If you want to ignore the need to gain clarity in today’s world facing multiple interconnected crises, I’ll buy you a drink and we’re done. Go stick your head in the postmodern sands of relativism. Sure, you can be the noble rebel who exposes the great Hanzi Freinacht as a dilettante and a fraud. As long as you let me say what I have to say, it’s on the house.
***
Anyhow. The thing is, whether we like the idea of metanarratives or not, we all carry around some version of a crude and incomplete world map, or “universe map”, anyway. We just do it implicitly, even unconsciously.
That is, we all have some overarching narrative about “how the world works”. And every now and then we’re in situations where we need to use our implicit homegrown maps. So why not bring them out in the open, make the maps explicit, so that we together can improve upon them, and—who knows—maybe even turn those mermaids into anatomically correct sea lions.
Metanarratives are urgently needed since the existential problems we’re facing as a civilization can only be properly viewed from the grandest and most long-term perspective possible. We’re not looking for the biggest story just to feel important (even if it would be unwise to try to suppress the all-too-human drive for existential significance). It’s very obviously the case that events across the planet affect one another, that they are, again, interconnected. To change events means to see how they connect, how they emerge together. This requires us to somehow use and relate to “the story that connects all the different stories”.
Q: And you, Hanzi Freinacht, mean to tell us how “all things interconnect”?
HF: Maybe not how “all things interconnect”, but I am certainly outlining a model for seeing many interconnections that we would clearly otherwise miss.
So who do I think I am to even be allowed the pursuit of such a noble goal?
Well, who is anyone to take up such a task? What authority could we possibly defer to? I guess we’ll just have to make do with limited, wounded, mediocre people who pretend to be great philosophers, and then scrutinize their work.
Anybody really has the right to take a shot at it, don’t you think? Or should we just abstain from any discussion about the overall development of global civilization? What kind of humility would that be—one that silences perhaps the most important discussion we can have?
If you wish to read the full chapter it can be accessed free of charge on the Metamoderna page here.
Best wishes,
Emil Ejner Friis
A webinar on the topic of world history and the six metamemes will be held this autumn, four weekends in a row November 2–25. More details about the course can be found here.
Hanzi Freinacht is a political philosopher, historian, and sociologist, author of ‘The Listening Society’, ‘Nordic Ideology’ and ’12 Commandments’. Much of his time is spent alone in the Swiss Alps. You can follow Hanzi on Facebook, Twitter, Medium and the Metamoderna website, and you can speed up the process of new metamodern content reaching the world by making a donation to Hanzi here.
For anyone who hasn't had the opportunity to learn from Hanzi himself, I highly recommend this class. I rarely enjoy online events as much as I did his month-long Masterclass, and this one promises to be just as good!
You wrote that the book isn’t coming out “anytime soon”; would you be able to elaborate on that? I know projections are dangerous, especially when it comes to writing 😅 but I thought I’d pop the question anyway.