Date: July 2022
1 INTRODUCTION
1.1 The aim of the paper
This paper asks the following question: how can the metamodern project become a reality? In order to answer this question, we need to, first, explain how “metamodernism is an attempt to give rise to the next phase of the dialectic [of modernism and postmodernism], or to advance the movement of thought in Hegelian terms” (Storm, 2021). The justification for dubbing and adopting the metamodern route is the proposed observation that modernism and postmodernism have failed to deliver us satisfactory results philosophically, academically and politically (as I’ll explain further in § 2 and 3). I’ll acknowledge, and even accept, some postmodernist and poststructuralist criticisms and deconstructions of modernism, but then move on to something more fruitful.
The paper tries to answer this question by articulating the metamodern project as one project with multiple dimensions to enable its reification and actualization. It does this, firstly, by applying the metamodern philosophy of Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm (hereafter referred to as Storm) to the metamodern political project (Protopia), secondly by borrowing concepts from Jurgen Habermas’ deliberative democracy theory and its subsequent theoretical developments, and, thirdly, by presenting Protopia as a community-based program that embraces spirituality as means to Happiness and wellbeing. That is, to mobilize the metamodern project as one automobile with its philosophical engine and political and social wheels.
Here, it’s crucial to indicate that the three dimensions of Protopia that the paper adopts and addresses — the philosophical, political, and spiritual dimensions — are just the immediate and apparent domains of research that would enable laying the foundations of the metamodern project. The three initiatives that I present here (toward Storm, Habermas and spirituality) are just pointers or suggestions toward what could be a living project. So, none of the suggestions are strictly assertive conditional statements, but more of a contribution to the ongoing metamodern dialogue that could add some value either by adopting or refuting a number of its proposals.
1.1 Overview
I start first by addressing the limits of postmodernism manifested in New Age wisdom and Western Buddhism. My choice of those manifestations is based on their connection with the domain of human sciences and the paper (i.e., politically and socially). Presuming Wisdom as the intellectual and philosophical engine to the New Age movement and Western Buddhism, I criticize the fundamental premises and tactics of Wisdom. Then, I will investigate the goals of the New Age movement and Western Buddhism to explicate their motives and, therefore, judge if their goals align with their practices and methods to reach these goals.
As I hope I’ll have demonstrated sufficiently in this paper, the metamodern political and social project can’t exist and flourish without its philosophical engine. This is because, as Storm has said, “understanding sources of skepticism about climate change, the causes of anti-Black racism, secular hegemony and their entanglement requires a broader understanding of the social world.”
Thus, the second step is to adopt a philosophical system that would sow the seeds of the entire metamodern project. Accordingly, I’ve presented the work of Storm as this philosophical engine because it’s the only serious metamodern philosophical enterprise that I know of at the time of writing. To carry out this task, in sections 3.1–3, I start first by defining metamodernism and then present and summarize the philosophical system that Storm initiated. Afterwards, I’ll put forward Storm’s Zeteticism, abduction, critical virtue ethics, and Revolutionary Happiness.
In section 3.4, I’ll present Habermas’s deliberative democracy as the foundational political scheme that would (1) apply the principles that Storm’s theories entail practically and politically, and (2) provide the basis for further development of the other dimensions of the metamodern project (e.g., economic and judicial dimensions). To do that, I explore some primary concepts in the Habermasian theoretical system, such as the public sphere, communicative and instrumental rationality and action and Discourse Ethics.
In section 3.5, I will look into the spiritual and communal nature of the metamodern project by, first, differentiating between spirituality and religion. I do so not to exclude religious believers but to, hopefully, include more people from the atheist, materialist and spiritual-but-not-religious camps in the metamodern dialogue. Subsequently, I’ll present two models of spiritual community-based programs: Alcoholics Anonymous and Stoicism. Moreover, though I don’t delve deeply into what kind of spiritual practices they implement, I try instead to analyze the premises on which they implement spirituality in the first place, and, in the case of AA, the gained positive impacts from these spiritual practices on their members.
That is all, just to remind us of our essential goal in human sciences [1], to provide “ a positive vision of a possible ethical and political goal rooted in compassion and multispecies flourishing, a vision of how we might struggle together toward [Protopia] in dystopian times.” The paper aims to help us regain our belief in “the possibility of progress or knowledge” (perhaps with new revised definitions), whether in the academic or the political realm, “ because the alternative to progress is being caught in the same [modern and postmodern] impasses that have ensnared us for so long.”
[1] In this paper, I am using the term “human sciences”, as Storm has in his work, to refer to “ humanities plus social sciences”. However, the reader shouldn’t assume that it’s an anthropocentric endeavor. The goal is to study “ our multispecies ecology and environment” to enable its flourishing.
2 THE LIMITS OF POSTMODERNISM: NEW AGE, WESTERN BUDDHISM AND EUTOPIAS
Postmodernism has affected the social and “spiritual” world by rejecting old political and religious schemes. As with the case of philosophy and human sciences, there is a merit in its critique of modern schemes. However, as could be predicted from the flow of this research, the postmodern alternatives cannot be sufficient or sustainable in themselves. Those postmodern political and social alternatives would be put in this paper under the category of Eutopias. As Freinacht puts it, ‘“Eutopia” . . . is an increasingly popular neologism that seeks to replace Utopia; it means “the good place.”’ He summarizes where it falls short by saying: ‘Arguably, it suffers from similar problems as Utopia: it’s ultimately impossible, it’s static, and what you deem as “good” I might find “bad”’ (Freinacht, 2022a). The discussion here would shed light on the limits of New Age wisdom and Western Buddhism as recognizable postmodern Eutopias or means of Eutopias (through which their attribution to postmodernism will be demonstrated by engaging with them further in this section), and their relationship with the political and social realm in today’s world.
2.1 Wisdom: Eutopia’s Philosophical Engine
To start with a fundamental attribution to New Age Wisdom, as Wallis says, “Wisdom is the unconcerted Truth that floats free from any sort of contingency — linguistic, doctrinal, historical, subjective, and beyond. That is why its truths pertain ‘not only to Buddhists, but also to the ever-growing demographic of spiritual-but-not-religious, who seek a spiritual life outside the structures of religion’” (Wallis, 2018). The idea of “spiritual” Wisdom has attracted a lot of people since it “blooms eternal, and eternally pure, untainted by the muddy materiality of religious or any other kind of ideology”, unrestricted by any dogmatic belief structure. Wisdom tries to help its seekers with psychological strategies that would help them cope with their capitalist consumerist society (e.g., to be in “the present moment”). However, if we try to engage Wisdom in a serious inquiry of any rational or philosophical sort, it will fail justifiably because of its detectible defective modes of responsiveness due to the “tautological emptiness . . . exemplified in [its] inherent stupidity of proverbs” (Žižek & Schelling, 1997). Drawing from that, as Wallis has observed, “The tautological nature of such statements alone should put an end to the discussion of their perspicacity”. That is, despite their pervasiveness in contemporary society, postmodern alternatives have serious issues in their internal inconsistency.
One approach to resolve Wisdom’s tautological contradictions is by arguing that “Language deals with concepts and therefore what cannot be conceptualized is beyond the reach of language. When language is forced, it gets crooked, which means that it becomes illogical, paradoxical, and unintelligible from the point of view of ordinary usage of language or by the conventional way of thinking” (Suzuki & Jaffe, 2015). However, this presents us with a more fundamental problem that arguably is what this spiritual project was built upon in the first place. That is, “because of the demonstrable implausibility of avoiding ‘adherence to any kind of ideology’ that Wisdom bears an impossible burden: its protectors simply cannot fend off the cruel intrusion of contingency into its Edenic domain” (Wallis, 2018). Following the footsteps of postmodernism in human sciences (as will be explained further in section 3.1), “Wisdom’s exclusion from the economy of linguistically symbolic exchange enables it to generate an endless stream of unassailable, if discordant, statements” (ibid:26).
2.2 Western Buddhism’s Goal
After I’ve indicated where the basic rational premises of New Age Wisdom (supposedly also Western Buddhism’s apologetic and philosophical engine) justifiably falls, now we need to explicate the values and motivations of the engaged project (which section 3.3 will discuss why it’s needed in detail) to enable us to examine it holistically and, consequently, adopt and/or improve it. If we assessed New Age spirituality and Western Buddhism, their goal would appear to be: “wellbeing”. Nonetheless, the different terms we use interchangeably in everyday language to describe this state of pleasure, joy or happiness can mean different connotations depending on what intellectual scheme one follows.
To define New Age wisdom and Western Buddhism’s wellbeing, we need to investigate where, how and why these terms are used. At the 2014 World Economic Forum in Davos, it was remarkably observed that the world’s bossiness and political leaders have endorsed mindfulness and some Wisdom techniques in the contemporary workplace, in hope of increasing “worker productivity”. They do this by inducing the “Utilitarian formula” into the belief in the omniscient invisible hand of free market capitalism; “the best action is the one that procures the greatest happiness for the greatest number of citizens, becomes, in the hands of these modern bosses, something like the most productive business is the one that procures the greatest happiness for the greatest number of employees(Wallis, 2018)” . The motivation of the bosses is not, as it has been during the last century, the fear of “insurgent hordes of workers violently seizing the means of production”, however it’s the fear of the diminishment of their capital because of “employees who are regularly absent, unmotivated, or suffering from persistent, low-level mental health problems” (Davies, 2015). Moreover, as Wallis has stated, that those same bosses, and the whole neoliberal capitalist system, are the ones who “created the problem [in the first place] by erecting a brutally competitive work environment staffed by a fundamentally insecure, unequal, underpaid, yet enthusiastically materialistic, populace.”
“Western Buddhist doctrines, coupled with practices such as mindfulness and meditation” would increase “worker productivity” by enabling “the practitioner to: ‘let oneself go,’ drift along, while retaining an inner distance and indifference toward the mad dance of accelerated process, a distance based on the insight that all this social and technological upheaval is ultimately just a non-substantial proliferation of semblances that do not really concern the innermost kernel of our being” (Žižek, n.d.). A crucial consequence here is that by cultivating “non-judgmentalism, non-reactivity, and letting-go, then there is obviously no compulsion to change the very material conditions that made necessary such a destressing practice in the first place” (Wallis, 2018). As Wallis has elaborated:
Search inside yourself, worker, but certainly not into the nature and conditions of your work, and certainly not into the backroom maneuverings and ulterior motives of the company. And by all means do not search into the farther-reaching social practices that produce the soul-crushing malaise that drives your longing to “let go” in the first place (ibid).
So, we could conclude that recently New Age spirituality and Western Buddhism have been used and adapted to be found specifically “at work” and “its sole destination is to meet work challenges ‘with more resilience, more engagement, and more happiness,’” and its key message is that “workers’ unhappiness lies inside themselves.” This is all in hope of “something like trickle down happiness [waiting] on the horizon” by applying Utilitarian happiness/pain calculus in the workplace and, wishfully, in the market as a commodity as well. This produces, as Žižek puts it, a subject whose “meditative stance is arguably the most efficient way for us to fully participate in capitalist dynamics while retaining the appearance of mental sanity,” however, by trying to remain blissfully “unaware that the ‘truth’ of his existence [at least partially] is in fact the social involvement which he tends to dismiss as a mere game” (Žižek, n.d.). This is, as the reader would conclude by the end of this paper, because New Age Wisdom and Western Buddhism’s “wellbeing” are different and even contrary to abductive Zeteticism and Revolutionary Happiness’s tools and goals respectively (which are our adopted positive models in this regard and which will be presented in section 3.2–3).
3 THE REIFICATION OF THE METAMODERN PROJECT
3.1 Metamodernism
“[The] metamodern [is an] extension of and challenge to modernism and postmodernism”.
The term metamodernism, here, is used to indicate “a positive philosophical” project, not as cultural periodization or an artistic genre. Following Storm, ‘[The] “meta-” prefix here is primarily meant to suggest a higher- or second-order position beyond (post)modernism. Put differently, the main emphasis in metamodernism should be on this “meta” and not the “modernism.”’ Here, I will present Storm’s philosophical initiatives and, as the project unfolds, we will build to a broader understanding of what metamodernism entails. Occasionally, in order to do so, I’ll have to present the contrastive modern and postmodern viewpoints to engender a foundation for the metamodern project. Here is a summary of Storm’s “new system” in Metamodernism: The Future of Theory as Harper has presented:
1. The critiques and deconstructions of postmodernism are all valid to some degree but languishing in epistemological and ontological anarchy is unproductive and untenable.
2. To get past the devastation that postmodernism has caused to the human sciences, these disciplines need to switch from a substance (in the Aristotelian sense) view of natural kinds and reorient toward processes (what Storm calls process social kinds).
3. This “process turn” can be achieved with a theory of language that focuses on homeostatic property clusters. The theory that Storm proposes as a candidate is hylosemiotics.
4. With a focus on process social kinds, the human sciences can be better served by using abductive reasoning instead of deductive or inductive reasoning.
5. Instead of trying to eradicate values from the human sciences in the impossible pursuit of neutrality and objectivity, we should instead recognize where values inevitably enter our scholarship and turn them toward human flourishing. (Harper, 2022)
Now, this holistic philosophical project that Storm initiates covers a range of fields and topics that go beyond this paper’s focus. That is, because this paper aims to establish an intellectual, discursive and deliberative foundation for the metamodern project that, admittedly, considering Storm’s other theories of metarealism, process social ontology, social kinds and hylosemiotics could be of great advantage and prospect to the metamodern project, but would also be redundant and excessive in the current paper. So, I’ll merely present here Storm’s theories of Zeteticism and abduction, and Critical Virtue Ethics and Revolutionary Happiness which could be viewed as directly related to the Habermasian Public Sphere and the spiritual community-based program.
3.2 Zeteticism and Abductive Reasoning
3.2.1 Critique of Postmodernism
Storm claims that, while not justified by the original postmodern philosophers’ intentions, postmodernism has become associated with radical kinds of skepticism within academia (and by the general public). Storm says:
All that said [about Cartesian skepticism], “postmodern skepticisms” have had a distinctive profile. For the last several decades, to be a skeptical academic has generally meant agreement with some subset of the following propositions:
· Essentialism is a kind of violence.
· Science is illegitimate and suspect.
· Scientific facts are constructed by extratheoretical interests.
· Knowledge is just an expression of power.
· Power is domination.
· No truth claims can be grounded.
· There are no facts, only interpretations.
· Every perspective is equally legitimate.
· All knowledge is relative to an individual’s standpoint.
· If a term or concept was formulated in a colonial context, it must be false, and deploying it is a kind of violence.
· Classification is a form of conceptual imperialism.
· All binaries are violent hierarchies.
· Every system or structure is established on the grounds of something that it both excludes and presupposes.
· Concepts are fundamentally fraught.
· Every abstraction is a loss.
· Everything is discourse.
· Meaning is deferential.
· Meaning is constantly deferred and can never be stabilized.
· Language determines thought.
· Being is always already before language.
· Philosophy is phallocentric or logocentric.
· Logic is merely the codification of heteronormative, white, male thinking.
· There are no metanarratives.
· History is over.
· Knowledge is impossible.
Storm says that these are not doubts but declarations.
Sextus Empiricus begins Outlines of Pyrrhonism — the most important surviving work of classical Greek and Roman skepticism — by distinguishing between three groups of philosophers: Dogmatists (like Aristotle) who think they have discovered the truth, Negative Dogmatists (like the Academic Skeptics) who believe that knowledge is impossible, and true Skeptics (such as Pyrrho) who suspend judgment and keep on investigating and doubting. From Sextus’ vantage, the problem with the Academic Skeptics is that those who confidently reject the possibility of knowledge are just as dogmatic as those who confidently assert that they have discovered the truth. Thus, “self-referential skepticism leads not to the impossibility of knowledge, but to doubts about whether knowledge is possible.”
These postmodern claims belong to the Negative Dogmatists, one of the three groups of philosophers named by Sextus Empiricus (Dogmatists, Negative Dogmatists, and True Skeptics). According to Sextus Empiricus, a True Skeptic suspends judgment and continues to seek the truth. Those who adhere to the aforementioned (mutually incongruent) claims have stopped suspending their judgment and have settled on orthodoxy or dogma. A true skeptic will even question their own doubts rather than accepting “knowledge is impossible” as the only knowledge (as in the case of the Negative Dogmatists). Thus, the True Skeptic does not acknowledge the impossibility of knowledge; rather, they dispute its possibility (but also, one could say, they doubt the impossibility of knowledge).
3.2.2 Knowledge without Certainty
Storm claims that Descartes’ goal of acquiring irrefutable knowledge is unrealistic. We will never have a certain knowledge of anything. However, Negative Dogmatism can be turned on itself, causing it to fall in the face of its own machinations. And, because nothing (except perhaps authoritarianism, i.e., might-makes-right) is possible without some level of knowledge, wallowing in Negative Dogmatism is unsustainable. And so, Storm says, “We need humble, emancipatory knowledge — not all-consuming doubt. Succinctly put, we need a form of knowledge that has learned the lesson from critiques of both dogmatism and negative dogmatism alike.” Storm presents Zeteticism as a solution:
Zetetic. ze-’tet-ik, adj or n (Greek zetetikos, from zeteein to seek) Proceeding by inquiry; a search or investigation; a skeptical seeker of knowledge . . . it has come to mean both the process of inquiry and one who so proceeds. A zetetic is thus a sort of intellectual agnostic who, while seeking greater truths, is always wary of falsehood.[1]
The Zetetic, according to Storm, abides by two principles:
· Pluralism: there are multiple possible descriptions for anything
· Epistemic Humility: one must always consider that, on any given knowledge claim, they have some possibility of being wrong
The Zetetic, then, seeks knowledge that is most probable, or the best explanation given current evidence, or knowledge that is good enough to implement, rather than knowledge that is indisputable or certain. Thus, we are in the humble realm of levels of confidence, rather than the impossibly high standard of perfect certainty. As a result, the Zetetic is always open to new information and, if necessary, willing to change their mind. Furthermore, the amount of evidence required for a specific belief should be balanced against the implications or prospective consequences of the belief — as Storm says, “More significant consequences lead toward higher practical standards of confidence.”
The list of postmodern skepticisms above, Storm says, should not be taken as dogma, but as “operative suspicions” — he elaborates, “From the vantage of Zeteticism, many postmodern skeptical doxa are transformed into cautions. It makes sense [for instance] to be more skeptical of someone’s assertions when they seem to coincide cozily with their self-interests. It makes sense to be more cautious about knowledge claims that seem to benefit those in power.”
Furthermore, Storm argues, we ought to think of epistemic communities rather than personal knowledge, given that an individual knows much less than a collective of people, all of whom know a little bit. That is, “This community of the unknowing consists of people who have given up on the autonomy of their individualistic and egotistical forms of reason to work together in pursuit of limited reason and humble knowledge.” Thus, knowledge should be viewed as collective and cooperative rather than individualistic, a goal that Habermas’ theories of public sphere and communicative rationality and action could achieve.
3.2.3 Zetetic Abduction
According to Storm, the Zetetic methodology is abduction rather than deduction (arriving at a conclusion that follows from premises) or induction (generalizing based on samples of data). This type of reasoning seeks the best explanation possible based on the available data. This is how Storm puts it:
1. D is a collection of data (evidence, observations, givens)
2. Hypothesis H explains D
3. No other available hypothesis explains D as well as H does
4. Therefore, H is probably correct
Another formulation of it, as Thomas Harper has noticed in his review of the book, is a sort of reverse modus ponens (Harper, 2022):
1. If H1 is true, then D&W will be observed
2. If H2 is true, then D&X will be observed
3. If H3 is true, then D&Y will be observed
4. . . . .
5. If Hn is true, then D&Z will be observed
6. We observe D&X
7. Therefore, H2 is probably true
Where H1, H2 , H3, …, Hn are candidate hypotheses (the Pluralism principle of Zeteticism) or explanations, and D is a set of data or observations shared by all the hypotheses and W, X, Y, …, Z are sets of data or observations unique to the specific hypothesis (i.e., are much more likely to be true if the particular hypothesis obtains). A detective or scholar doing an investigation will search for the W, X, Y, …, Z data to determine which hypothesis is most likely (and/or to rule out specific hypotheses). So, for instance:
1. If it rained, then it will be wet outside, and it will be wet everywhere outside.
2. If someone ran the sprinkler, then it will be wet outside, and it will only be wet on my property.
3. If a watermain breaks, then it will be wet outside, and water will be coming up from the ground.
4. It is wet outside.
5. Go searching and discover:
· that water is not coming up from the ground. (rule out 3)
· it is wet everywhere outside. (confirm 1)
6. Therefore, it probably rained.
The advantage of abduction over induction and deduction is that induction can only generalize from phenomena that have been observed, whereas abduction can generalize from phenomena that have not been observed (in the example above, the person did not actually see the rain falling when it was raining but inferred it from what was observable). Furthermore, there are no acceptable criteria for determining how good an induction is — how many instances of an occurrence contribute to our confidence in the induction?
Deduction is in a sense tautological or “truth-preserving” and so, as Storm puts it, “ Deductions are best understood as producing conclusions by extracting implicit information from their premises. In that respect, deductions are tautological, or “truth-preserving.” Therefore, no new information that wasn’t already implicit in the premises is learned.
Abduction, on the other hand, is ampliative, “ that transcends its premises to produce new information” (such as that it rained, which cannot be deduced from the premises “it is wet outside” and “it is wet everywhere outside”).
By providing an explanation or process for the observations, abduction can be utilized to strengthen and justify induction. The claim that “the sun has risen in the east on every morning I’ve witnessed” strengthens and justifies the observation that such observations are generated by the way gravity and orbital mechanics function, as well as the peculiarities of the earth’s rotation. Storm also observes that in the limit, abduction transforms into deduction. As an example:
1. Some explanations must be true
2. All possible explanations are considered
3. All except one are ruled out
4. That one must be true
The word “must” indicates that this is a deduction (where the conclusion must be true if the premises are true).
Storm proposes that, rather than an induction-deduction dichotomy, because both can be classified as abduction in some ways, we should have an abduction-prediction split, because prediction is the reverse of abduction. An abduction infers a hypothesis from observations; a prediction infers a hypothesis from (potential) observations. Abduction and prediction can go hand in hand, where a hypothesis is abduced from observations (perhaps the posterior probability in Bayesian terms), the hypothesis is then used to make predictions about observations (perhaps the likelihood in Bayesian terms), and the success or failure of those predictions is used to confirm or rule out the hypothesis.
3.3 Critical Virtue Ethics and Revolutionary Happiness
Here, Storm argues for acknowledging academic scholarship’s values and making them explicit. His reasons for this are: First, that postmodern scholars have values in the first place. He supports this by admonishing those who accuse postmodernism of being without values or morally relativistic or morally nihilistic; or, accusing it of having begun as morally relativistic and only in recent times having pivoted to being overly moralistic (e.g., overly concerned with Social Justice). Storm says, postmodernism has been a moralistic program from the very beginning. Storm says, however, that this moralizing is often unfavorable (pointing out things people should stop doing) rather than positive (describing those things people should be doing).
Second, by explaining that Max Weber’s notions of value-neutrality are not a call to expunge values from the humanities and social sciences, Franz Boas’s call for value-neutrality is misinterpreted as moral relativism. Then, he explains how Hume’s is/ought dichotomy is “incoherent” by referencing Allan Gibbard.
Storm argues instead for a hypothetical imperative and not a categorical imperative to accept that holding correct beliefs is good. Gibbard, however, says (Gibbard, 2005):
Alternatively, we might try construing the oughts in the statements that worried us as implicitly hypothetical: ‘‘If truth is to be the only object, then this is what one ought to accept.’’ And in a way, indeed, that will be my explanation of the paradox. There’s no special is/ought problem when the ought is hypothetical; hypothetical oughts can follow analytically from the facts. Think of oughts as equivalent to imperatives of a special kind; then hypothetical oughts are equivalent to hypothetical imperatives. And the validity of a hypothetical imperative can be fully a matter of fact. For example, from the is statement
If you were to climb out the window, you would escape the fire, and otherwise you wouldn’t,
follows the hypothetical imperative,
¡If you want to escape the fire, climb out the window!. (1)
Hare has taught us to see a hypothetical imperative like (1) as a conditional with an imperatives [sic] both in the antecedent and in the consequent:
If ¡Escape the fire! then ¡Climb out the window!.
(I indicate imperatives with a fusion of German and Spanish language punctuation.)
Storm uses the notion that there is no is/ought dichotomy to argue that it’s impossible for scholars not to bring values into their work (and perhaps in some instances, it is even appropriate to do so).
Storm finishes his argument by proposing a positive vision of what the human sciences ought to promote: a virtue ethics geared toward a capital-H type of Happiness based on eudaimonia, nirvana, lekil kuxlejal, flourishing, meaningful existence, happiness, or well-being. This Happiness can be justified based on four things:
1. Most of us want to be happy.
2. Most of us want psychological and physical well-being.
3. Most of us do not want to suffer unnecessarily.
4. Most of us also want to live a life worth having lived, a meaningful life.
The way that the capital-H version of Happiness is distinguished from the normal, everyday lowercase-h sense of happiness is as follows:
· Happiness is not something that one finishes as if reaching a point of saying “this is Happiness and I need not continue working toward it”; rather, it is something one achieves by working toward it over the span of a whole life.
· Happiness is not primarily an emotion (i.e., hedonistic pleasure).
· Happiness is not constantly being cheerful, or never unhappy or disconnected. When suffering does occur, though, people can learn from it and not be broken by it.
· Happiness is living the kind of life our future selves (perhaps even our deathbed selves) can look back on with fondness and with as little regret as possible.
· Happiness is striving to reach our full potential and develop ourselves as human beings.
However, as Thomas Harper argued, that:
revolutionary anything is by its very nature disruptive and will inevitably lead to a reduction in Happiness for some portion of the population. In other words, in order for a new set of social, political, and economic conditions to allow for maximal Happiness, the people who would find those conditions antithetical to Happiness must grow old, obsolete, and fade into history (as opposed, hopefully, to just having anyone who disagrees with the revolution murdered or imprisoned, as communist regimes have often preferred to do) (Harper, 2022).
We need to promote critical virtue ethics in a way that would enable the principles and values of Zeteticism and positive skepticism and that wouldn’t end up creating “a state whose function is to tell you when you’re experiencing false consciousness about your own Happiness and that you should (or indeed must) instead pursue some other form of state-sanctioned Happiness.”
3.4 Protopia
Freinacht defines protopia as “the best term for the massive set of interlinked projects of activists, thinkers, and practitioners around the world who seek to contribute to the necessary and desirable transformations of societies around the world.” Here, I am using the term ‘Protopia’ as an indication of the metamodern political project, as Freinacht has been using it on his blog but not in his academic writing. Here, I assume the Protopia I envision doesn’t resemble to a high degree Protopia as formulated by Freinacht in his recent blog posts. He doesn’t, for example, relate explicitly to the works of Habermas or Storm (as far as I know at the time of writing). On the other hand, I neither draw so much on, for example, the works of Ken Wilber nor do I specify here paradigms for economics, education or the justice system. However, I believe we share the core idea that encompasses the metamodern Protopia (as there are similar themes, e.g., in Freinacht, 2022b).
One criticism that people like Freinacht and the One Project founders receive is that mainly they offer, as one reviewer of the One Project book, The New Possible, pointed “a laundry list of maladies facing the world (all true, but hardly inspiring or new) followed by a litany of ‘musts’, ‘shoulds’ and ‘needs’ statements. We must do X to solve Y (giant problem) now. That kind of stuff”, or as another one said, their works “read like religious tracts.” [2] This problem, I believe, stems from the fact that their work goes without regarding some of the principles of Zeteticism, communicative action and Discourse Ethics in the foundation of their work, even by using them in different designations not directly related to the authors I am using. In the following sections, I will try to summarize the huge corpus of the Habermasian theoretical system that in order to reify and actualize Storm’s theories practically. That is, the public sphere plays is the “where” of the metamodern project. Communicative rationality and action are the force of the metamodern project. Discourse ethics is the “how” of the metamodern project. Deliberative democracy is the structure of the metamodern project. To give credit to where it is due, I relied a lot on the summary that Simon R. B. Berdal gave in his Public deliberation on the Web.
3.4.1 The Public Sphere
The key notion that, most likely, underpins all of Habermas’ theoretical work is that of the Public Sphere, which he introduced in his 1962 Habilitationsschrift, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: an Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (hereafter referred to as Structural Transformation). This text provides a historical-sociological account of the formation, brief flourishing, and collapse of a rational-critical debate and discussion-based public sphere. According to Habermas, a new civic society formed in the eighteenth century as a result of certain historical circumstances.
A separate domain from ruling authority began to emerge across Europe, driven by a demand for open commercial arenas where news and topics of common concern could be openly exchanged and discussed — accompanied by rising literacy rates, access to literature, and a new sort of critical journalism. “In its clash with the arcane and bureaucratic practices of the absolutist state, the emergent bourgeoisie gradually replaced a public sphere in which the ruler’s power was merely represented before the people with a sphere in which state authority was publicly monitored through informed and critical discourse by the people” (original emphasis, Habermas, 1989, p. xi).
In his historical analysis, Habermas identified three “institutional criteria” as prerequisites for the creation of the new public sphere. The discursive arenas, such as coffee houses in the United Kingdom, salons in France, and Tischgesellschaften in Germany, “may have differed in the size and compositions of their publics, the style of their proceedings, the climate of their debates, and their topical orientations”, but “they all organized discussion among people that tended to be ongoing; hence they had a number of institutional criteria in common” (ibid, 36 ff.). In short, these “institutional criteria” state that 1) status was disregarded altogether, 2) that the domain of discourse was that of “common concern”, and that 3) members of all levels of society were included.
The core criticism at a conference on the occasion of the English translation of the book, at which Habermas himself attended, was directed towards the above-stated “institutional criteria”:
1. Hegemonic dominance and exclusion
2. Bracketing of inequalities
3. The public sphere (singular vs. plural)
4. The problematic definition of “common concern”
5. Material support for participation
3.4.2 Communicative and Instrumental Rationality and Action
The underlying rules of the system are governed by instrumental rationality, that is, they are determined by a need for efficiency in realizing given objectives. Communicative rationality, in contrast, is “reason based upon the evaluation of language and statements exchanged amongst at least two actors, grounded in claims of truth (of facts), rightness (of norms) and sincerity (of actors)” (Berdal, 2004). While instrumental rationality aims toward the realization of a given intention, by employing predictions of cause-effect causality, the intrinsic purpose of communicative rationality is to build inter-subjective understanding and consensus. Actions based upon these rationales are labeled correspondingly.
The system’s basic rules are regulated by instrumental rationality, which means they are determined by the requirement for efficiency in achieving specific goals. In contrast, communicative rationality is “reason based on the evaluation of language and assertions exchanged between at least two actors, grounded in claims of truth (of facts), rightness (of norms), and sincerity (of actors)” (Berdal, 2004). While instrumental rationality seeks to realize a given intention through predictions of cause-effect causality, communicative rationality seeks to generate inter-subjective understanding and consensus. Actions based on these rationales are labelled appropriately.
As a result, instrumental action is aimed at effectively and efficiently achieving specific goals (for example, downsizing the workforce and outsourcing labour may be profit maximisation tactics, which are aimed at raising “shareholder value”). Meanwhile, communicative action aims to achieve common agreement and comprehension of social norms, meaning, and values, as well as to preserve inter-personal relationships within the lifeworld. “Like the lifeworld as a whole, so, too, the public sphere is reproduced through communicative action, for which the mastery of natural language suffices…” (Habermas, 1996, p. 360).
Of course, Habermas’ typology of rationality and action is more sophisticated than this — and thus, sadly, outside the scope of this paper. However, his key point of relevance is that instrumental rationality has gained too much ground at the expense of communicative rationality, resulting in a “systemic colonization of the lifeworld” that is directly tied to the demise of the bourgeois public sphere. It is not that instrumental reason is inherently “evil,” or that there cannot be a constructive coexistence of instrumental and communicative reason, as Berdal puts it:
Rather, it is the relative balance between the two that is decisive. Systemic colonization of the lifeworld occurs when instrumental rationality dislocates communicative rationality to such an extent that social agents no longer can understand or question the rules that govern their actions (similar to the better-known concept of “alienation”, as used by Karl Marx in Das Kapital, and in contemporary sociology).
I am more interested in Habermas’ evaluation of history and the critical peer review that comes with it than in Habermas’ judgment of history. Although the Habermasian view of the public sphere had shortcomings, this does not negate its emancipatory potential. As we enter the realm of ethics, the reader should be aware of how the previously mentioned critique of Habermas’ “institutional criteria” is implicitly addressed by Discourse Ethics’ normative ideals.
3.4.3 Discourse Ethics
With the Discourse Ethics theory, Habermas focuses on normative philosophy. Discourse Ethics are constituted by a set of universalistic and practical guidelines. Habermas seeks to overcome moral challenges of relativism and pluralism (a theme that corresponds heavily with Storm’s work). It is through the process of open and reflexive discourse, by reaching inter-subjective understanding, that validity claims and decisions may get moral authority. As Manin puts it:
[A] legitimate decision does not represent the will of all, but is one that results from deliberation of all. It is the process by which everyone’s will is formed that confers its legitimacy on the outcome, rather than the sum of already formed wills [-in contrast to, say, some forms of rational choice theory] (Manin et al., 1987, p. 352).
Thus, “the unforced force of the better argument is to prevail” (Berdal, 2004). But, as any claim at any time may be challenged by potentially more convincing ones, any serious discourse inhabits a natural “unresolved openness.” Habermas expresses specific conditions for reaching universal norms through discourse by formulating three principles (Cavalier, n.d.):
1. The principle of universalization (U): “All affected can accept the consequences and the side effects its general observance can be anticipated to have for the satisfaction of everyone’s interests (and these consequences are preferred to those of known alternative possibilities for regulation). (Habermas, 1990:65, original emphasis)
2. The principle of Discourse Ethics (D): “Only those norms can claim to be valid that meet (or could meet) with the approval of all affected in their capacity as participants in a practical discourse” (ibid:66, original emphasis).
3. Consensus can be achieved only if all participants take part in discussion freely: we cannot expect the consent of all participants “unless all affected can freely accept the consequences and the side effects that the general observance of a controversial norm can be expected to have for the satisfaction of the interests of each individual” (ibid:93, original emphasis).
To clarify the application of these principles, Habermas adopts the “Rules of Reason” proposed by Alexy (1990). These procedural rules are in Habermasian terminology commonly known as the criteria of the Ideal Speech Situation (ISS), and are restated as follows (Habermas 1990: 89 — Berdal’s numeration):
1. Every subject with the competence to speak and act is allowed to participate in a discourse.
2a. Everyone is allowed to question any assertion whatever.
2b. Everyone can introduce any assertion into the discourse.
2c. Everyone is allowed to express his attitudes, desires, and needs.
3. No speaker may be prevented, by internal or external coercion, from exercising his rights as laid down in (1) and (2).
The reader should now be able to see how the ISS reflects flaws in the bourgeois public sphere, as presented in section 3.4.1: ‘The realization of the ISS would effectively eliminate the problems concerning hegemonic dominance and exclusion, bracketing of inequalities, the problematic definition of “common concern” (that is, the agenda), and material support for participation. However, as the name suggests, the ISS is a set of ideals — and therefore difficult, if not impossible, to implement’ (Berdal, 2004).
3.4.4 Deliberative Democracy and Communicative Action
Discourse Ethics of Habermas proposes explicit standards for all forms of discursive processes with the goal of achieving intersubjective comprehension and morally binding decisions. Consider the definition of deliberative democracy given below (Cohen in Bohman and Rehg, 1997: 72):
[…] democratic association in which the justification of the terms and conditions of association proceeds through public argument and reasoning among equal citizens.
Thus, the strong relationship between Discourse Ethics and Deliberative Democracy should be self-evident: “the shared pool of law is to be the result of public discourse among all who would be affected by it.” If we rigorously interpret the ISS, “every subject with the competence to speak and act” is to be permitted access to public discourse — that is, without any sort of compulsion. As a result, it is somewhat unsurprising that some political philosophers refer to this concept as a complete form of Utopia (however, I argue here it could be Protopia). According to Habermas (1996: 307), public opinion is developed and articulated through an “open and inclusive network of overlapping, subcultural publics having fluid temporal, social, and substantive boundaries. Within a framework guaranteed by constitutional rights, the structures of such a pluralistic public develop spontaneously. The currents of public communication are channeled by mass media and flow through different publics that develop informally inside associations.”
In other words, public discourse occurs within an anarchic grid of overlapping publics that is securely embedded within a framework of constitutional rights (“freedom of expression,” “freedom of association,” and so on). According to Fraser (1990), Habermas now differentiates between weak and strong publics. Weak publics’ “deliberative practice consists exclusively in opinion formation …”. Strong publics, on the other hand, include both will formulation and decision making (represented by parliaments and other discursive institutions with decision-making competence or influence). According to Habermas:
On account of its anarchic structure, the general public sphere is, on the one hand, more vulnerable to the repressive and exclusionary effects of unequally distributed social power, structural violence, and systematically distorted communication than are the institutionalized public spheres of parliamentary bodies. On the other hand, it has the advantage of a medium of unrestricted communication. Here new problem situations can be perceived more sensitively, discourses aimed at achieving self-understanding can be conducted more widely and expressively, collective identities and need interpretations can be articulated with fewer compulsions than is the case in procedurally regulated public spheres (Habermas, 1996, p. 307).
Weak publics thus function as “sensors,” identifying and expressing new challenges arising from the lifeworld. Strong publics, on the other hand, filter issues from weak publics and process them within their discursive decision-making apparatuses — the public “sluices” fresh issues towards and into the state machinery. Habermas adheres to the “sluice model” developed by sociologist Bernard Peters (1993), which depicts the political power circuit as having a center-periphery structure. The center is made up of formal political institutions that have a direct impact on collectively binding decisions (that is, strong publics, such as parliaments, specialist committees, ministries and political parties). The periphery includes a plethora of weak publics that are in direct or indirect relation to the center.
3.5 Community-based Project and Spirituality
3.5.1 Religion and Spirituality
Spirituality could be an emancipatory tool to any humanist social or political emancipatory program. I’ll support my claim here by first defining spirituality and differentiating it from religion, since, unfortunately, ‘words like “religion,” “religious,” and “God” are burdened with a tremendous amount of baggage which causes many people to recoil almost instinctively from them. Therefore, it is important to clarify what we mean by the religious and spiritual nature of [the metamodern project] and how it differs from what commonly comes to mind with such words. The word spiritual applies equally well; however, it also carries baggage from many “new age” forms of spirituality’ (Fisher, 2018).
Psychiatrist George Vaillant, has described spirituality as being biologically based (as positive emotions such as gratitude, hope, forgiveness, ecstasy, bliss, compassion, awe, and empathy lie within the biology of the human brain’s limbic system), while religion is described as being entirely culturally-based (Vaillant, 2008). Vaillant compares spirituality and religion to music and lyrics; spirituality being like the music and religion being like the lyrics. Extending this idea, as Kelly noticed, perhaps what mankind through the millennia has sought to achieve through religion, is a way to access “the music” of these positive emotions by writing different “lyrics” (Kelly, 2017). These many different sets of lyrics developed over the centuries, manifesting as different religions, have had the same types of goals: to allay anxious curiosity by explaining where we all come from (e.g., the story of Adam and Eve), what happens when we die (e.g., the middle way between eternalism and annihilationism), and to prescribe beliefs and practices that can elicit the human experience of these positive emotions and experiences.
Another useful way to distinguish between religion and spirituality is, as Roger Walsh indicates, that:
The word religion has many meanings; in particular it implies a concern with the sacred and supreme values of life. The term spirituality, on the other hand, refers to direct experience of the sacred. Spiritual practices are those that help us experience the sacred — that which is most central and essential to our lives — for ourselves. (Walsh, 2000)
That is, the spiritual communities that we examine in this paper offer a direct experience of the sacred through the recognition that God, as pneuma, is immanent in all of Nature (as in Stoicism and Living God Pandeism) and the logos (Universal Reason) is shared by humankind. Then, to emphasize, Stoicism can be reasonably considered a personal religious or spiritual practice.
3.5.2 Alcoholics Anonymous
I’ll present the example of Alcoholics Anonymous program as a modern spiritual community-based model. Though its primary focus is more on addiction recovery, it has long-term empirical impacts on the social lives of its recovering members. I chose the AA model for two reasons: first, it has the ability to mobilize therapeutic mechanisms similar to those mobilized in formal treatment, but it is able to do this autonomously for free over the long-term in the communities in which people live. Second, it is a positive example of a community that prioritizes spirituality over beliefs. That is, ‘given the enduring challenges related to defining what “spirituality” actually is, one of AA’s key strengths aiding its growth and survival for the past 80 years may be this pragmatic willingness to use the “God idea” but accept that each member self-defines what “God” and spirituality means to them, including not to self-define as spiritual at all’ (Kelly, 2017):
“AA spirituality might be considered unadorned distilled religion without the fancy bottle or label; a recognition that the “God idea” can work for anyone even if they make up their own notion of it and even if some of the essential mechanisms of formal religions such as hope and faith, come from belief in a different type of “G.O.D.” — (“Group Of Drunks”). It is a self-constructed self-defined spirituality that is all inclusive. AA tapped into, translated, and redirected this evident transforming power by creating a space and scaffold for the development of these elements, but chose not to take any limiting, dogmatic or prescriptive, denominational approach. It was perhaps implicit recognition of a universal truth that humankind needs to find a way to access these positive emotions, taking the “God idea”, and opening the door to anyone who wanted to make use of it.”
Evidence for AA’s prioritizing spirituality to enable recovery over beliefs is, by examining their publications, the fact that “ after just over 20 years of growth, AA moved away from the necessity of a sudden spiritual ‘conversion experience’ and formal belief in God, to recognizing recovery can happen without it” (Kelly, 2017). However, we need to acknowledge that for some, there appears to be transformative power in adhering to specific faiths and religious ideas and practices, and these may provide new meaning and purpose in life (Leamy et al., 2011).
To extend the “words and music” metaphor, unlike formal religions which might say, “You have the music within you and here are the lyrics that you must sing to access it”, through allowing AA members to choose or construct any form of belief that makes sense to them, even merely having a faith in the AA group, it appears to have said implicitly, “You have the music within you” but instead of saying, “Here are the lyrics that you must sing” AA says, “You get to write your own lyrics”. In tapping into the “God idea” and borrowing some religious concepts, language, and practices (e.g., faith, prayer, meditation, confession), arguably AA might be considered “relig-ious” [to engender spirituality], but not a relig-ion (Alexy, 1990).
The positive impacts that AA has on the lives of its members have been measured empirically using tested mediation models of AA, using multiple mediator analyses as well as “moderated multiple-mediation” analyses in order to help clarify both the relative importance of these many different potential mediators and also to elucidate whether different people (e.g., more or less severely addicted; men and women; young and old) benefit from AA in different ways.
These analyses’ results suggested that AA helps different people in different ways. Or, another way of saying this is that people may use AA differently to help them cope with the different challenges that are particularly salient to them in their lives at that time in their recovery (Kelly et al., 2012). Noteworthy from these moderated multiple-mediational analyses was the relatively small or non-significant mediational effects carried by spirituality. Given that spirituality is AA’s chief purported mechanism of behavior change, at first glance, these findings would appear to be at odds with AA’s own theory of change as explicated in its 12-step program and original text (The Big Book). Moreover, in a single mediator analysis using this same measure of spirituality in the same sample, as well as other samples, spirituality was indeed a significant mediator of AA’s beneficial effects. It is when spirituality is competing for explanatory variance amidst all the other multifarious mediators, however, that it does not shine through; the only exception being among those AA participants with more severe addiction problems (Kelly et al., 2012). However, one could conclude that:
“AA draws upon multiple ideas, including medical (i.e. the need to abstain completely in order to avoid triggering and kindling craving and compulsive use), behavioral psychology and group dynamics (i.e. through group meetings/helping others) and religious/spiritual concepts. In keeping with this range of potential therapeutics, the research findings indicate that AA provides a variety of pathways to recovery including, for some, through boosting spirituality. Results suggest, however, that AA’s salutary effects are more consistent with what call Carl Jung termed: ‘the protective wall of human community’, as it appears to help individuals to attain and maintain recovery through its ability principally to mobilize recovery-supportive social, but also cognitive and affective, changes” (Kelly, 2017).
3.5.3 Stoicism
Another spiritual community, though relatively ancient, that had implemented spiritual practices to cultivate a moral life and obtain a state of wellbeing (Eudemonia) is Stoicism. Stoicism, as Fisher argues, “is not a religion in the traditional sense; however, it is a deeply spiritual way of life designed to transform the practitioner. It does so by changing our conception of good and bad and teaching us to live a life of moral excellence in agreement with cosmic Nature” (Fisher, 2018)
In the example of Stoicism, however, the existence of an “all-pervasive, immanent, active force in the cosmos” (God or Logos) is a very integral tenet in the whole Stoic ethical project. As the German ethics professor Christoph Jedan explains:
“There must have been a core of common beliefs and a common outlook that defined what it was to be a Stoic, even if stances on practical ethical questions were radically contended. That core, I suggest, was formed pivotally by the religious orientation of Stoic ethics. I am convinced that religion is the single most important perspective from which we can understand the specific shape and coherence of Stoic virtue ethics” (Jedan, 2009).
A legitimate question one would ask now, why Stoicism needs “God” (even if it is different than the Abrahamic God) in order to function, given that a cluster of varieties of virtue ethics like Platonism and Aristotelianism didn’t put emphasis on such a “providential cosmos”. To answer this question, we need to explain the stoic aim and way:
“The aim of Stoic practice is to establish agreement between our human reason, which is a fragment of the logos, and Universal Reason (Logos), which permeates and orders the cosmos. That agreement is personal, internal, and it cannot be mediated by any priest or intermediary. A Stoic teacher, like Epictetus, can only point the way. It is the practitioner who must make the individual choices that keep them on the Stoic path . . . In other words, a Stoic is one “who wants to be of one mind with God” (Fisher, 2018)
To conclude, Stoic spirituality, though it doesn’t adopt a transcendent conception of God, relies heavily on the imminent pantheistic Logos. That is all to provide the theoretical foundation, that ranges from theology and physics to logic, for the Stoic practitioner (Prokopton) to enable them to master their spiritual exercises: the practice of attention, the discipline of assent, the discipline of desire and the discipline of action, and live a happy fulfilling life.
[1] Source: http://phrontistery.info/favourite.html. Zetetic has sometimes been associated with Flat Earthers. However, I don’t mean it in that sense. For the classical Greek, see Sextus Empiricus, “Pyrrhoniae Hypotyposes,” in Sexti Empirici Opera, ed. Hermann Mutschmann (Leipzig: Teubner, 1984), vol. 1, esp. 7. Also, references to a “zetetic” method appear in Kant and Schelling.
[2] See the book’s reviews on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/55526179
4 CONCLUSION
Here, I provide a summary and overview of the whole paper that some readers will find necessary and helpful in order to connect the overlaps of the (perhaps seemingly divergent) topics that have been covered in this paper.
The critique of the postmodern social and political alternative to Utopia — Eutopia — I provide is based on two premises: First, that its philosophical engine, New Age Wisdom, isn’t capable of providing the concrete foundation that an emancipatory political and social project requires due to its internal inconsistency and its inability to engage with the occurring broader philosophical and intellectual exchange. Second, that the means that Western Buddhism uses to achieve its adopted goal, namely “wellbeing”, are inherently therapeutics to fix the worker’s emotional and psychological conditions without really trying to fix their social and political habitat that caused these conditions in the first place.
Furthermore, I present metamodernism as the logical synthesis of the modern thesis and the postmodern antithesis by highlighting the shortcomings of postmodern philosophy. I call the one who adopts postmodernism here, following Sextus Empiricus and Storm, a Negative Dogmatist. A Negative Dogmatist is a person who holds that “knowledge is impossible”, which is as much dogmatic as the position that the Dogmatist holds. I present here an alternative stance, the Zetetic stance, which embraces a pluralism of possible explanations, the fallibility of any knowledge claim and suspending judgment in the case of insufficient data. The method of Zeteticism is abduction, which is preferable to deduction and induction because abduction can generalize from phenomena that have not been observed (which would be more helpful if it was recognized and used as a fully bloomed logic in human sciences).
The second theory that I implement from Storm is critical virtue ethics and revolutionary Happiness. That is, values have been part of the postmodern project from the beginning and the notion of the is/ought dichotomy is not at least as definite as it seems. Thus, it’s impossible to not bring values into scholarship and into the broader philosophical and political enterprise, and and it would be more profitable if we admitted and acknowledged it. The values he adopts are called critical virtue ethics, as they are goals in themselves, and they aim at changing the political and social world. Revolutionary Happiness is the ultimate aim of these critical virtue ethics in society as opposed to short-term pleasures or Stoic-defined emotions.
After laying the metamodern philosophical system, I look into political theory. I propose Protopia as the proper complement to metamodernism as it takes the best of both worlds (the modern and the postmodern). I address Habermas’ concepts of the public sphere, communicative and instrumental rationality and action, discourse ethics and deliberative democracy. The public sphere plays is the “where” of the metamodern project. Communicative rationality and action are the force of the metamodern project. Discourse ethics is the “how” of the metamodern project. Deliberative democracy is the structure of the metamodern project.
Moreover, in the bosom of deliberative democracy, to fully achieve Storm’s critical virtue ethics and revolutionary Happiness, I embraced a paradigm of community-based spirituality. That is, achieving political and social emancipation isn’t, however, capable of achieving Happiness; and I could argue that political and social emancipation couldn’t even be thoroughly achieved without a spiritual basis. Thus, I provided two examples of programs that tried to implement spirituality without supernatural transcendent goals but immanent earthly ones.
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