We Need a Science of Flourishing Built on Metamodernism

Do you know the story about Father on the day they firsted tested a bomb out at Alamogordo? After the thing went off, after it was a sure thing that America could wipe out a city with just one bomb, a scientist turned to Father and said, “Science has now known sin.” And do you know what Father said? He said, “What is sin?”

-Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

Imagine: at the campfire, a grandfather tells his grandson there are two wolves within each of us, constantly fighting for our soul; one angry and greedy, the other loving and kind. The younger asks the older, which wolf wins? The older replies: The one you feed. The younger takes in this wisdom slowly, smiling. But then, a ghostly figure materializes, and the grandfather, shocked, recognizes him as his own father, long dead.

The figure booms: “Begin now a program to study the wolves within, for the sake of future generations. Can you feed them both, absorb their respective powers, and embody them when appropriate? Can you learn from how those around you feed them, with what, and when, and to what end? Are there only two wolves? Learn to birth many more, learn how to guide them together to serve an ever-deepening purpose, but treat that purpose lightly, with both sincerity and skepticism.”

 He pauses, then looks the grandson in the eye, “If you remember only this: Do not trust not these words as final, no answer in science ever is. What we call science now is surely lower than the perfect Science we can never confidently arrive upon. That Science lights our path as a playful and impossible aspiration: we seek the self-critiquing process that best unifies the search for knowledge with the flourishing of all sentient beings,” and dances off into the darkness.

The core of this essay is that it’s a mistake to pursue progress for its own sake, as it can only ever be instrumental to something deeper; and we should center on that deeper thing, flourishing. But a naive movement focused on flourishing would run into the same problems as the endless debates between techno-optimists and pessimists — who both deeply believe their stance on progress leads to flourishing.

No, we should feed both wolves and find the synthesis that goes beyond the thesis (progress is good) and antithesis (progress is bad). We need a deeper philosophy from which to pursue flourishing, one capable of confronting the complexity and nebulousness of the modern world, and the complexity and nebulousness of important concepts like progress or flourishing themselves.

The philosophy of metamodernism (described in more detail later) squares the circle between modern and postmodern thought, embracing both the beauties and tragedies of progress. It directly confronts the psychological origins of tribal battles masquerading as intellectual debates and points us beyond them towards more practical and nuanced ways of pursuing flourishing.

The main consequence of this argument is that we need something beyond progress studies, which itself is an exciting, growing, new field, one seeking to understand and accelerate progress. What lies beyond is a scientific field focused on what matters, grounded in nuance, with progress as one powerful lever: flourishing studies.

Note: This essay owes much to the metamodern writings of Hanzi Freinacht.

Civilizational Bipolar Disorder

Cultural debates are often a battle between two poles: gun control vs. the right to bear arms; pro-life vs. pro-choice; social progressives vs. social conservatives; and most central to this essay: techno-optimists vs. techno-pessimists. Take whichever of these issues trigger you the least, and you likely can see the need for nuance to move forward — the futility of clutching a binary view.

We might want gun control to curb violent crime, school shootings, and suicide; and yet, what in our culture produces youth so desperate that they rampage? There are countries that have high gun ownership (Switzerland) but where mass shootings are much less common — are there deeper conditions we should address, which might be more effective than gun control? On the flip side, the right to bear arms has historically been important so that US citizens can overthrow a tyrant, but weapons technology has advanced such that it seems dangerous to allow an individual citizen access to its destructive power (e.g. tanks, RPGs, nukes, armed drones), and so we may need to find new mechanisms to enable citizens to overthrow an oppressive government.

Stuck in the surface binary, we miss win-wins: There may be policies that help reduce gun violence without much added gun control; or policies that help citizens resist tyrants that rely less on guns. The world is complex; nuance is needed. While this may be obvious when dealing with an issue you feel little stake in, it’s incredibly difficult to remain ‘objective’ when dealing with a polarized issue that triggers strong feelings. It’s human to mistake feeling right for being right; yet, this mistake is what causes the civilizational bipolar disorder that impedes better outcomes. In other words: Our ability to have constructive dialog often depends on our emotional self-awareness. Or put another way: Rationality is strongly interdependent with emotional intelligence.

Why is this important? Because progress is a polarizing concept — modernists tend to believe in a narrative of positive progress (build and disrupt), while post-modernists (Silicon Valley disruption as colonization) and traditionalists (bring back blue-collar jobs, curb globalization) tend to be skeptical of it.

The temptation is to align ourselves simply with “progress is good,” or “progress is bad,” when obviously there are shades of gray: What kind of progress? And to what end? One metamodern move is to commit to “both/and” rather than “either/or”: Progress as a monolith has and will cause things both amazing and horrific.

The Binaries of Progress

source: wikipedia

The above plot is familiar to techno-optimists, and should rightly amaze us: Economic progress has grown exponentially in the last few centuries, largely as a product of progress in science and governance (liberal democracy); and that means amazing material wealth and abundance for society. Take for instance a quote from less than 200 years ago, and imagine inhabiting that world: "To see individuals well in the morning and buried before night, retiring apparently well, and dead in the morning [from Cholera], is something which is appalling to the boldest heart." [from: Diary of a Young Man in Albany, 1832].

This essay is mostly aimed at techno-optimists, who are already in touch with progress’ incredible gifts, so we will focus less on the positives without diminishing them: Diseases once death sentences rendered impotent, ready availability of incredible experiences (global travel, movies, virtual reality, video games, the internet, cell phones), wildly expanded possibilities for work (more musicians, artists, philosophers, poets) and life (civil liberties, sexual freedom) and a vast expansion of life comfort (dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, meals on demand). Progress is good.

Yet it’s not all gravy. The economic gains that systemized slavery granted plantation owners were of no relief to those who suffered its moral horror. Nor were those who died in gas chambers appreciative of the logistics and supply chains behind their efficient chemical murder. Nor would the ravaged survivors of nuclear armageddon have been much comforted in knowing, had we fallen off the knife’s edge we danced more than once during the Cold War, that “at least we had progress.” Even today, for those who believe in animal welfare, it’s plausible that for all our forward progress, the ongoing expansion of factory farming, which achieves efficiency through inhumane treatment, ranks among humanity’s greatest atrocities. Progress is bad.

Neither Good Nor Bad

It’s lazy to paint progress as either good or bad; how could it be just one or the other, for all time, in all contexts? Logically, progress is a tool that can serve many ends. And it’s not just a singular “tool” — there are diverse flavors of progress (economic, scientific, moral, psychological, artistic) and countless levers we might pull to influence any of those dimensions. For example, to differentially fund some fields of scientific progress, as governments have commonly done, like when Nixon declared war on cancer or when JFK aimed to reach the moon in a decade; or countries can subsidize domestic manufacturing of computer chips, in service of economic progress; or to serve psychological progress we might mandate that health insurance cover mental health as well as physical health.

Our attempts at progress have no intrinsic moral directionality and unfold divergently depending upon context. Institutions, such as government, news, and education, heavily influence in what direction we progress. For example, the values of individuals are in no small way shaped by how they are raised, what news they consume, and what they are taught, which impacts what they buy. And their purchases in turn steer the economy: What products and businesses fail and succeed. The values of nations are shaped by their citizens (who are also shaped by government policy), and a nation’s values impact what research is funded, what new economic products become commonplace, and what wars the nation provokes or avoids.

The point is not to obsess over the interdependent complexity of our society, but instead to highlight that while progress is a powerful ingredient of our flourishing, its beneficence is deeply contingent — in particular, upon the aims and wisdom of the society and institutions that pursue it. There’s a big difference between the horrors done in the name of progress and scientific progress successfully deployed to save many lives.

So if progress is a tool and not our fundamental goal, what then is our goal? The qualitative answer is simple: We’re trying to flourish, to live well, as individuals, and as communities, countries, and a world — to build better lives for our children and grandchildren, and most ambitiously, all sentient beings, if we can. What exactly that means and how to achieve it in practice is complex, as it always has been. I won’t try to pin-down a definition of flourishing, but it encompasses at least our emotional, physical, mental, and relational wellbeing — do we enjoy our lives, do we find them meaningful, does our society provide the institutions and conditions that help us to live well? 

The difficulties of defining flourishing will be discussed later, and ties into the philosophy of metamodernism. In short, part of our pursuit of flourishing has always been to explore and develop what it means —- our pursuit is open-ended and nebulous; this is no different than how our pursuit of moral progress requires us to explore different moral visions and understandings.

Precise definitions aside, our collective flourishing, over the short and long term, provides the normative ground for all human endeavor. How could it be otherwise? To encourage flourishing is a deep mission that cuts across disciplinary boundaries, and this essay argues that we need an interdisciplinary field of study — flourishing studies — that aims to understand and translate it into practice. Flourishing studies provide a needed corrective to a societal obsession with progress as an end in itself, which from a scientific and philosophical perspective is naive: Progress is not flourishing.

Indeed, in recent decades, despite astounding economic and technological progress, our flourishing has become no easier. The statistics on mental health, wellbeing, and societal health converge upon that fact. This is a tragedy, and should be a neon cue that we’re in need of reflection — the whole point of progress is to help us live better. So if recent progress hasn’t helped us flourish, why is that, and what should we do?

Why have Progress and Flourishing Come Apart?

source: “Happiness: Lessons from a New Science” by economist Richard Layard

The distinction between progress and flourishing matters. In the past decades, economic progress and wellbeing have become decoupled (a robust finding in the field of wellbeing economics; see also the Easterlin paradox). The above plot highlights that we are materially better off, but no happier for it — that is a tragedy: What is the point of progress if not to help us flourish? The deal was supposed to be that the drive for efficiency that often alienates us from our work at least ends up benefiting us in the end. But if we don’t even get that benefit, what’s the point?

It’s important to understand the reason for the decoupling of progress and flourishing. In short, it’s a byproduct of our myopic focus: We are getting what we are optimizing for — narrow progress at the expense of what is important. That is, the very nature of optimization is to decouple, a principle known as Goodhart’s law. Money is not flourishing. Technology is not flourishing. If we do not consider flourishing itself, we will indeed get the economic and scientific progress we optimize for, at flourishing’s expense — as statistically seems to have happened in recent years in many developed countries.

What makes now different from past eras is that our ability to optimize for economic outcomes has greatly accelerated. Advances in computing, machine learning, the theory of optimization and logistics, have all contributed to radically increased efficiency in optimizing for simple outcomes, like profit or engagement. And AI is being deployed largely as a tool to further accelerate such optimization, meaning we shouldn’t be surprised if economic progress and flourishing further diverge. 

In short, there is no intrinsic connection between (1) flourishing and (2) economic and scientific progress; you could have a booming economy in an authoritarian dystopia, or invent a technology that brings downsides much vaster than its benefits. The job of society is to channel progress into flourishing — and our ability to make progress seems to have outstripped our ability to channel it.

Progress Studies as the Solution to Problems of Progress?

“Fanaticism consists of redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.”

-George Santayana

One response is to double down on progress as the solution. This isn’t crazy, as changing course requires some flavor of progress to diagnose the problem and uncover its solution, just as scientific progress yielded Ozempic, a partial solution to obesity (a disease of progress). Yet if the root of our current challenges themselves result from progress, prescribing the disease as the remedy also seems suspect: What if the jet engine is doing fine, but it’s the steering that needs work?

This tension captures a significant chunk of the current culture wars, as technology is increasingly pervasive in our lives. Those of the Silicon Valley mindset are optimistic about technology: progress is the necessary antidote to the problems of progress, and it is immoral to slow down. Such optimism underwrites the recent progress studies movement, as well as the more extreme effective accelerationist movement, both of which seek to understand and accelerate progress. 

In contrast, those of the postmodern-left mindset tend towards pessimism about technology and doubt the narrative of progress itself. Rather than driven by some objective truth, they claim, we’re often drawn to ideologies and perspectives that benefit us, that more reflect our personality and lived experience than some deeper truth. This is an ideological divide: techno-optimists vs. techno-pessimists.

Progress Studies Gets Much Right

While we need something deeper than a science of progress, this essay does not subscribe to the postmodern school of thought. There is much to admire about the pursuit of progress. All things equal, we should accelerate technological and economic growth, given that they make possible better living conditions and lift those in poverty from it.

On a more primal level: leaning into the wild spirit of unfettered human creativity speaks to the soul — to adventure pragmatically forward and build, rather than merely judge and critique; this attitude seems particularly appealing to the young and ambitious, and it is an important role of society to channel that ambition with care. In other words, the adventurous spirit of youth is beautiful if tempered by wisdom (traditionally the role of wise elders; and in a modern context a responsibility of worthy institutions).

Progress studies also offer a potent reminder that the products of modernity are incredible and that the conditions underlying those bounties are fragile. For revolutionaries who would wholesale tear down capitalism or enforce degrowth, it’s likely that as in the past, the medicine may be far worse than the disease (like the Great Chinese Famine resulting from the communist revolution there). We do need such grounding reminders. 

One merit further is that the progress studies movement has been successful, much more so than the typical call to found a new field. In part, this is because it has an exciting positive vision, and seeks action. In its own words, it aims to be more like medicine than biology. The field offers its recruits an engaging and noble mission: Help propel humanity forward. We should indeed help our youth find such grand positive missions.

Yet, We Need More Depth and Nuance

However, while its mission is sometimes framed around human flourishing, progress studies equate flourishing with economic and technological growth; or at the very least, it heavily blurs those concepts together and is unabashedly techno-optimist in perspective. This is an ideological move, and a mistake: the field unnecessarily centers a proxy for what matters (progress), and takes as given (techno-optimism) what is central to the debate.

Flourishing is deeper than economic and technological growth, as is the notion of progress. To explore those kinds of questions rigorously, this essay argues what we need is a deeply transdisciplinary science of how to support human flourishing across the short and long term, and across scales from the individual and community to the nation, its institutions, and the globe.

Seemingly the ultimate sensical motivation for our institutions is that they should serve us, and meaningfully cohere to robustly support ongoing individual and collective flourishing. But as fields of study have become atomized, our individual interests become more narrow, and our institutions have decayed and stagnated, we have collectively forgotten this primordial fact, or at least forgotten its primacy and moral weight.

We do desperately need an energetic interdisciplinary movement to study and advance humanity’s flourishing, but we should do just that. How then would a study of flourishing be different from a study of progress? Most foundationally, its central object of study would be something important in-itself (flourishing); and secondly, it would have at its basis a deeper philosophy (metamodernism).

From this foundation flows many new possibilities, and changes in focus and priorities relative to progress studies. However, these new possibilities are entangled with the field’s underlying philosophy. To deal with this entanglement, the rest of this essay will intersperse a deeper dive into metamodernism with examples of how flourishing studies would concretely differ from the study of progress.

Beyond the Modern/Postmodern Divide

What we need to square the tensions between the techno-optimists and skeptics, is, perhaps surprisingly, a deeper and more nuanced philosophy. Where progress studies largely hail from the modern school of philosophy (characterized by a belief in enlightenment ideals, like rationality, empiricism, and humanism), many of its critics hail from a postmodernism (characterized by viewing systems through the lens of power, deconstructing ideologies, and questioning the narrative of progress itself).

That kind of postmodern critic would point out that techno-optimists are naively optimistic, that scientific progress is obviously a mixed-bag (e.g. the novel threat of instantaneous apocalypse during the Cold War, and that the Cold War could easily have ended in civilization-ending catastrophe). Further, they’d add that techno-optimists lack self-awareness around how their belief serves their self-interest, both psychologically and materially: Techno-optimists tend to be the ones who enjoy building new technologies, and benefit in money and status from them. More deeply, it provides a simple but compelling answer to what should I do with my life? Support progress.

Finally, the post-modernist would claim that framing “progress” as an undifferentiated lump serves as a power-seeking political act. Language itself is a battle-field, and we of course could become more nuanced about what particular flavors of progress help or harm us, and think more imaginatively about social progress as systemic change, not just acceleration of our current systems. 

No doubt, the modernist would have cogent replies to each of these concerns; but ultimately, such discussions rarely end in mutual learning. The central reason is that both sides cling to opposing axioms. Both sides are dug-in, as axioms cannot give way to new evidence.

The Metamodern Synthesis

Metamodernism provides the needed nuance to bridge the optimists and skeptics. It synthesizes their world-views, and arrives at a deeper perspective, one that centers what matters (human flourishing) without denigrating the magic of progress. It is this kind of deeper philosophy that would form the basis of flourishing studies, providing it with firmer ground, and enabling it to sail above the simplistic binary between optimism and pessimism, toward more nuanced (but always tentative) truths.

One way of motivating metamodernism is that it is what happens when modernism takes itself and its critiques seriously: when science aims its lens back upon itself with full rigor. The central postmodern complaint about modern science is that science is flawed: The messy process of science is done by flawed and political humans, acting within a hierarchy of power — academia influences society and legitimizes some ideas over others.

As a result, science itself is political and ideological — for example, racism at one point became “scientific” because the study of head shapes (phrenology) was legitimized by academic institutions and scientists. More generally, the veneer of science or math can give political force to questionable ideas; and though it is uncomfortable, there is no firm boundary between science and politics; ideas have power and science differentially amplifies ideas.

Metamodernism can be seen as saying that the answer to bad and messy science is simply to do more and better (and self-reflective) science. This means we must adopt a worldview that integrates across different fields of science, rather than pretending the world really can be neatly divided into distinct abstract kingdoms such as the economic, the scientific, the political, and the psychological.

Flourishing studies require this kind of self-reflective science because its aims include reframing science itself. Meta-science, for example, is an exciting and important nascent field that explores how to make science more productive — a noble aim. But rarely spoken about in meta-science, is that the highest aim in meta-science is ultimately to make science more productive in service of flourishing. While this might seem pedantic — it matters. It is one thing to study how to improve science, it is an altogether more complex and important endeavor to understand how we can improve science such that we can glean as much of its benefits without destroying ourselves (which is highly relevant in the age of nuclear weapons, and other potentially existential technologies such as biotechnology or artificial intelligence).

In other words, flourishing studies take on the task of reprioritizing, revitalizing, and humanizing scientific fields. Perhaps it goes without saying that we do science for the benefit of humans, or that economics is about how limited resources can best serve human flourishing — but when things go without saying for too long, they slink from substance into shadow, and fields calcify in ways divorced from this underlying sanity. 

Flourishing studies seek to restore this forgotten context to scientific fields of study that otherwise might evolve under their own drifting inertia. Note that this cannot be done simplistically, as in to only fund research that has clear human benefit; that is not how fundamental advances in science occur. Basic research is non-linear, and many seemingly-useless research directions yield profound and life-enriching discoveries, yet that complexity doesn’t mean that all is futile and we should have no opinion about how we allocate research funding. We must again be comfortable with complexity and nuance (something metamodernism enables).

In summary, metamodernism views science as both a beautiful aspiration to uncover truth (modernist) and an imperfect human political process (postmodernist); and we can have similarly nuanced views about other institutions such as the market, our educational system, or our political processes.

The next two sections highlight how metamodernism helps us see beyond the rigid boundaries we map over a complex, nebulous world, and how such seeing is integral to a robust science of flourishing; this will then draw us to our conclusion.

Disciplinary Boundaries are Not Real

Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.

-John Maynard Keynes

Metamodernism embraces that the categories we superimpose on the world are porous. While it’s convenient (and often useful) to treat them as two distinct buckets, philosophy and psychology are intricately intertwined: Our intellectual beliefs are not independent of our own psychology. It’s unlikely that we decide to be a techno-optimist or skeptic rationally, as much as we would like to believe so. 

Most often, a worldview resonates with us in our current understanding of the world, and our current ideas of who we admire or what we feel excited to do. The opposing worldviews feel wrong and unappealing (and often triggering), a sense that sweeps across us intuitively in a blink. If an idea (like effective altruism, or effective accelerationism) triggers us, that does not mean it is wrong — and indeed, nearly all views have some wisdom we can integrate; yet it is human nature, nearly always subconscious, to rationalize as wrong that which triggers us. 

Similarly, philosophy and politics are intertwined: Ideas have power. Progress studies cannot help but contend politically with other competing ideologies, and has done so impressively: Many talented people are devoting their lives and energies to it, in lieu of other projects. This may in large part be because progress studies serves a psychological need — it is comforting to believe that progress is the answer, when we live in an overwhelmingly complex world where simple answers are rarely to be found. 

And so too, politics is intertwined with flourishing: Progress studies may succeed at its aims, to accelerate progress, and it is an open question whether the flavor of progress it embraces will be good for us. Thus we can trace from our individual psychological biases to the philosophies we are drawn to, to the political impact those philosophies will have in the world.

Flourishing studies would take these understandings seriously: For it to be successful it must politically contend with other fields (like progress studies), but for it to be successful in the deepest sense (i.e. to actually serve flourishing), it must not take any of its axioms as precious, and must remain self-reflective. If it turns out that the best humanity can do to flourish is to unleash progress, then it should have a protocol for ending its own endeavor, and endorsing progress studies; not easy, as movements generally develop inertia, become protective of resources, and self-justify their existence. In other words, flourishing studies must practice what it preaches — it must remain self-critical and centered on actual flourishing in the face of many perverse incentives (academic prestige, power-and-influence, psychological comfort), which is far from easy. It thus requires robust self-correction measures and self-aware metamodern practitioners.

That is, being a “good” metamodernist requires cultivating self-awareness. It is a philosophy that goes beyond the raw intellectual to make demands upon our emotional intelligence and virtue. To see ideas clearly requires bringing together mental clarity, skillfulness, and desire. We must separate what we feel from what is true — without denying that what we feel is a powerful and important signal. It requires courage to sit with the discomfort of uncertainty rather than to seek solace in simplistic taglines (effective accelerationism claims: “Acceleration is life. Deceleration is death,” while postmodernists claim: “All morality is relative.”).

So too it requires courage to truly internalize a sad truth: We cannot help but be deeply mistaken about many important things given the complexity of the world. We must have intellectual humility and open-mindedness. We must internalize that in several years, even our deepest philosophical commitments are likely to shift and mature. For example, like many I read Atlas Shrugged in college, and my brief affair with Objectivism felt real at the time, but now it serves mainly as a background reminder of the importance and courage of those who enter the arena and build rather than comfortably judge from outside it.

In other words, we should have the open-mindedness to recognize that modernism, postmodernism, and metamodernism may be only pit-stops in our world-view journey; and that a field that earnestly and ambitiously aims to improve the world (like progress studies, or the proposed flourishing studies) requires a philosophy that contends with the nebulous complexity of the real world.

Flourishing studies would deeply integrate lessons from existing cross-disciplinary movements and their successes and failures: The energy and positive vision of progress studies; the breadth of effective altruism as well as its self-reflective and deep philosophical motivations (along with its notable issues); the rigorous focus on flourishing within well-being economics; and so on. 

Focusing on effective altruism in particular, flourishing studies would need to be psychologically and sociologically much more self-aware. In spirit (and often in practice), EA is a beautiful movement, yet it is left-brain over-dominant (emotionally impaired; overly analytic-philosophical), falls into its blind spots by not taking its own core principles seriously enough (like moral uncertainty), and through its biases often fails to engage with social change and messier facets of the world. Many EAs (including myself, when I more centrally identified as EA) are driven by a deep psychological fear of the world and a hero complex, yet do not recognize this, with problematic results; there is something triggering and partially-true behind the label of “doomer.” 

The World is Complex and Nebulous

Metamodernism also extends modernism into the nebulousness of the world. That is, the future is incredibly difficult to predict, and our global economy and online digital universe is unfathomably complex. Who’s to say what science will discover in twenty years: perhaps we will invent superintelligent AI that wrecks the world, or perhaps the current paradigm of AI will hit a wall. There is no reliable way to know — experts on AI have been wrong before, and it is hubris to imagine you can definitively answer the question one way or the other, when there are strong technical arguments on both sides.

This unpredictableness is intrinsic to the kinds of open-ended processes central to human life, whether art or science or literature, or the way in which we each as individuals seek for meaning and purpose, and attempt to secure love and status. We can’t know what the next great movement in art will be, nor what direction the stock market will go tomorrow, nor what the next big trend on TikTok will be, nor what career we might serendipitously end up in as a result of unforeseen opportunities. This is what it means to be in an open world.

In such a nebulous world, it makes little sense to fully commit to either techno-optimism or pessimism, because there can never be a hard law that introducing a new technology will bring more benefits than harms, or vice-versa. The calculus of benefit depends upon the technology itself (like AI or a cancer medicine), the culture that interacts with it (what laws and regulations exist, and the beliefs and education of the people within it), and chance events (what social network takes hold first, or who in particular develops the next killer app). There likely does not exist a perfect moral theory, nor a perfect way of organizing society, nor a perfect definition of the good; but we will discover better theories and falsify old ones.

Humans are uncomfortable with nebulousness, and characteristically we tend to avoid it, often by committing to simple, confident views of the world. Thus metamodernism encourages us to accept experientially what science has long told us: We never have ultimate confidence in the truth of any theory or statement, though of course we can be fairly sure about the reliability of such things as gravity and arithmetic. 

Nebulousness is especially relevant when it comes to important but qualitative and contentious concepts like human flourishing: We’ve been arguing about what it is for thousands of years, and may never definitively pin it down, even as we learn more and more about our psychology and how to organize society. Modernism pathologically pursues hard definitions, even when what we care about is often qualitative; metamodernism asks us to use formalisms when useful, while being aware of their many fuzzy edges.

But nebulousness need not paralyze us; we can take our multiple perspectives and our uncertainty into account as we attempt to be of service to flourishing. To that end, beyond the nebulousness in pinning down human flourishing, metamodernism also encourages us to embrace the nebulousness in how we affect change. That is, modernism tends to, in effect, treat rough proxies as real, or as the best-we-can-do: think of GDP, or the idea of economic man as perfectly rational and self-interested. Yet flourishing is deeper than GDP, and human nature is more complex than homo economicus — and so of course, pretending we aren’t may have have dramatic side effects; as Hannah Arendt said: “The trouble with modern theories of behaviorism is not that they are wrong, but that they could become true.”

We know that good-intentions-gone-astray is more often the rule than the exception when it comes to optimization in complex systems. The aim of accelerating science and the economy will no doubt have unintended side effects. Metamodernism and flourishing studies would embrace this nuance, and not require as a central axiom that the benefits of progress always outweigh the negatives in the long run, or to ignore that progress does indeed often bring enormous dividends. If we seek to optimize human flourishing, we should do so with humility and nuance.

Concretely, flourishing studies must structure itself as an open-ended search process; it must cultivate a diversity of conceptions of flourishing, and integrate the views of many different fields, and take seriously that interventions have unexpected externalities. It would not seek to globally roll out a large change, but explore its impact on smaller scales before scaling them up (like the idea of laboratories of democracy). It would seek interventions that help individuals to flourish, as well as those that aim at communities and institutions; it would not shirk from the qualitative, nor tie itself to the randomized control trial as the end-all-be-all for scientific evidence. It would not pretend that its current abstractions or formalisms are final, nor would it shy away from using them when useful (e.g. homo economicus is a useful formalism sometimes, but we must know when it leads us astray). In short, it would attempt to take itself and science seriously, in how the field is structured, how it pursues research, and how it aims to effect change; the field itself must retain humility and cultivate wisdom.

Metamodernism is Not the End

Of course, there are likely other philosophies beyond metamodernism, and that is embraced rather than denied by metamodernism itself, as a part of the nebulousness of the actual world. That is, our search for improved philosophies is open-ended and nebulous, just as science is, and of course metamodernism cannot claim itself as the final stop. The larger point is not to advocate for metamodernism per se, but to highlight that a real science of human flourishing requires this kind of deeper self-reflective philosophy.

For one, because human flourishing is itself a nebulous concept, and its optimization is not straightforward, and seeing it clearly requires integrating across many disciplinary boundaries. But more deeply, because human flourishing is deeply entangled with philosophy, in that for society to go well we must have productive societal movements, which are nearly always driven by philosophy (e.g. progress studies reflects the assumptions of modernism). But simplistic philosophies create simplistic movements, and the world we’ve created is complex, and getting more complex year over year.

Conclusion

Overall, at core, what we want is to live happy, meaningful, lives, and to secure them also for our children, and for theirs. Whatever each of us says we want, including various flavors of progress, in some way it tracks back to our wellbeing or others’, in the short or long-term, through the complexities of our psychology and the institutions that shape it. This essay argues that we’ve forgotten what is central: We need a movement, flourishing studies, that places human and societal flourishing at its core, with progress as its proper servant, and a deeper philosophy as its ground foundation.