The Problem with Double-Framing
Why we should be careful using terms like ‘meta-crisis’ or ‘meaning-crisis’
by Tom Amarque
Broadly speaking, philosophy as a methodology can be historical or systematic. To put it simply, the historical approach is used when you are concerned with historical epochs or with the philosophers of the past or present, or comparing them and looking for commonalities and differences in their models, theories or ideas. The systematic approach is when you create an entirely new system or idea. Ken Wilber, for example, was never utterly convincing as a systematic philosopher. He shines as a historical one. Even his ‘quadrants’ and ‘tenets’ are probably somewhat inspried or lifted directly from systems-theory (compare with Talcott Parsons AGIL-scheme for that matter), and Wilber found his very own approach by literally attempting to integrate everything that came before. But comparing his works to those of, say, Giorgio Agamben or Ludwig Wittgenstein, one instantly knows and understands what systematic philosophy means.
Both approaches obviously have their use and purpose, both are necessary for the overall discourse, and of course, they are overlapping at times. In the best-case scenario they are employed to find the ‘right’ framing for societal, scientific or ethical issues and questions (or the role of function of, let´s say, science per se). Science, for example, is never really concerned with the narrative framing of it´s own findings. The scientific search for data results in, well, data, and you need narrative and framing to understand what a specific set of data ‘means’. Data itself doesn´t ‘mean’ anything, it´s mostly just numbers. Story, on the other hand, does. (That’s why we needed an ethical committee three years ago in order to deal with the findings of certain virologists, and we saw what happened when the lines got blurred and the committee was composed of that very scientist, but I digress). As we saw this year in the cinema, Oppenheimer technically left science and became somewhat of a philosopher right AFTER the bombs went off, and he suddenly became concerned with the meaning of the nuclear bomb (or, in Niklas Luhmanns words, science and philosophy are different set of systems, run with different codes and enable different forms of communication). Because of that the greatest philosophers – just look at the works of Giorgio Agamben, Peter Sloterdijk or Friedrich Nietzsche or GWF Hegel – are also great storytellers and question our understanding and narration of the world.
Now, a problem always appears when historical philosophers start to frame the framing (or ‘Double-Frame’) of different data-sets or problems and purposefully omit that they entered the realm of pure fantasy and speculation. And exactly that happened with the strange ideas of the ‘meta-crisis’ and the ‘meaning-crisis’. They are faulty fantasies, or to use a more appropriate term, zombie ideas, that somewhat capture the mind like a virus, although by closer inspection show their true nature and the very mind-sickness they induce. Let me explain.
The meaning-crisis
Before we give any form of definition and look at the term at face value – that is, how somebody new encounters the term, forms his pre-conceptions before he is confronted with any definition – we are instantly confronted with a paradox. Obviously, to use and stretch a common metaphor, we as humans are meaning making machines, our cognitive apparatus can´t operate without narrative or meaning, and only in the rarest of instances – let´s say some specific peak-states of meditation - we are not compelled to frame raw sensory or cognitive data with narrative. Even or especially if we frame something as meaning-crisis, then there instantly is meaning. (Baudrillard used the term ‘synthom’ to point to these singular and rare moments when we are confronted with data or phenomenons that don´t fit to any particular wordview that we employ. It is confusing.) We are god-like in this respect, constantly creating narrative, even in our dreams. So there can´t never be a real meaning-crisis per se, independently on which layer you look at, contrary to the statement itself. Alas, at least this conundrum might urge us to look into the definition of the meaning crisis itself.
John Vervaeke, in one of his more recent videos, defines the meaning crisis as follows:
“ The very processes that makes us intelligently adaptive to self-destructive behaviour, and across cultures and historical epochs … people have found ecologies of practises, practice that have a dynamic relationship to them, like the 8fold path of Buddhism. In order to try to ameliorate the self-deception without ham-stringing the adaptivity, and getting that which has nuance and complexity and adaptive fit to a variety of environments and try to enhance the way our cognition is fitted to the world, this combinations of things has been typically called wisdom. And one way of understanding the ‘meaning crisis’ is that these ecologies of practise have to be situated in some kind of homing environment – a temple or a dojo, and this homing environment has to be legitimated by worldview. I am not advocating any kind of nostalgia or utopia. But was has happened in the west is we lost this sacred canape, all of these institutions have come into question and the places where people go to cultivate that wisdom are becoming less and less viable. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqVOwpag4IA)
So, in others words, what Vervaeke is referring to here is the notion that the old systems that provided wisdom are rendered dysfunctional in our time, leaving the individual hanging without proper spiritual or sacred orientation or canape. That of course is – historically viewed - quite the distortion. The religious and spiritual systems were in large never really concerned with empowering or enabling the individual with any form of wisdom. Contrary to these beliefs religion (and spirituality) was always for the masses, and which always was more like an exoteric carnival in nature that never amounted to anything from a viewpoint of achieving wisdom, individuation and the sacred. More than anything else it was a way to organize a people.
There was also the esoteric or secret part of religion and spirituality (to anachronistically use that term), which was suitable only for a tiny minority of people who were allowed to enter the Barred Absolute, that temple behind the temple. Think of the Rites of Eleusis, which were so secret initiations that even mentioning them publicly was punishable by death. They were conducted after the masses went home after the exoteric, public and empty rituals already had taken place. Or the secret Mithras-cults, that existed parallel to the emerging Christianity and were conducted in underground temples. Or the secret orders of British and German Hermeticism in the turn of the 20th century. You get the point. Wisdom never was for the masses, and it is still not today. (The world would be quite different if the spiritual/religious systems of the past actually did anything for acquiring lasting wisdom for the vast amount of population). Here, obviously like anywhere else in nature, the Pareto-distribution applies: And those very, very few who truly want to enter the temple behind the temple, the Barred Absolute, where the true initiation into wisdom takes place, still find their way into it today. The temple behind the temple is still there. But for the majority, the 99%, a prayer or meditation a week or some occasional shadow-work is completely sufficient.
On a side-note, true wisdom is, like other commodities like genius, true mastery of a faculty, being a true visionary and especially true spiritual enlightenment - an evolutionary very rare occurrence (Pareto!), and an very unlikely one for that matter. We think of Marc Aurel or Seneca or Buddha as such rare occurences, and even Buddha had dietary problems. For as much as the American spirit (or Capitalism) tries to produce these things at will, they are historically spontaneous emergences from truly driven or gifted single individuals, which means the whole thing is not predictable. They are true outliers, rendering the notion of historical systems that provide wisdom as inept and dysfunctional. More likely than not the wisdom that might have been accrued by an individual over his or her lifetime was the result from more profane conflicts and crisis, which were mostly economical and marital in nature. The broad population simply does not have a spiritual crisis like St. Francis of Assisi.
So, it´s obviously not that the systems or institutions nowadays fail to provide a spiritual or sacred homing canape. They never have. They always provided a time-consuming carnival, to this day. And just because everybody seems nowadays to practising spirituality in Ibiza or Costa Rica or Burning Man or Boulder doesn´t mean they actually strive for wisdom, initiation, maturation or enlightenment (whatever that means). They were, on the contrary, most probably sold on some exoteric spiritual ideas by Neoliberalism and Capitalism itself (and it´s not my intend to argue if that’s a good or bad thing).
But the deeper issue obviously is, paradoxically, that the term ‘meaning-crisis’ enables still some sort of superficial spiritual ‘meaning’. We can feel now the direness of our time. Proclaiming that the old systems of wisdom don´t work becomes a sign of cultural dark night of the soul. The term becomes, therefore, a performative contradiction, which itself is firmly situated within the more postmodern context of New Age. It proclaims a crisis while – through the backdoor – enables it´s solution and a ‘homing canape’ for the spiritual inclined. Think of that manoeuvre what you will. But there is even a deeper issue with the framing as ‘meaning-crisis’, and it will become clearer soon.
The meta-crisis
To dig into the zombiness of a term like meta-crisis is like having a fat Christmas meal, you don´t know where to start. But you are sure it will be delicious no matter where you start.
So why focus on a crisis per se? We already know from Freud that every generation suffers from ‘annihilation-anxiety’ which is always exploited by the priests of their time. And we can´t shake the feeling – or the insight –, that as soon as one side exists, the opposite side appears. When a scientific factotum like Sapolsky proclaims absolute determinism he is blind towards the fact that this idea can only exist in relation to it´s opposite, that is: absolute indeterminism. So ironically he brings free will into life, contrary to his intentions. (C.G. Jung would argue that this was his true intention). And an abstract notion like ‘meta-crisis’ automatically invokes it´s linguistic opposite, namely the ‘meta-possibility’, and sure enough we have entered again the realm of religion, of apocalypse and ascension.
Which would be fine if the proponents of the meta-crisis understand and label it as that. But they act with the solemnity of the truth-tellers of the scientific priests (like Neil deGrasse Tyson, but with the verve of Silicon Valley), and here we get to the meat of the turkey:
Only a few idiotic people today would reject the fact that scientific data show – for example – that something big is afoot in regard of our climate. What we are currently discussing culturally is how we should frame these findings, and in fact culturally we still haven´t agreed on this framing. The problem of course is the farther we look into our future, the less precise our predictions, and the more fickle our framing of these data. Just to give you an idea: 99% of all animal-species went extinct without any of our wrong-doing. And it seems that what we are destroying is not necessarily our planet, but our very niche of survival. The planet might be just fine without us in the next 100 years – just a second in planetary time. Climate itself is a complex-, or a hyper-object, impossible to fully and accurately predict. So what does climate-change really, well, mean in the long and the short term? What are the appropriate actions? Keep the nuclear power plants running? Shut ‘em off – like in Germany – to everybody else´s chagrin and laughter - dependent from where you stand? Blow up the gas-pipeline in the Baltic-Sea so the Germans have to go back to coal? (sorry, I went political here). What is Germany to do anyhow, considering the United States and China are the two main polluters and Germany contributes relative little to climate change?
Beware, there isn´t even scientific data in regard of the advent of A.I. and how it will transform our culture. While it ‘seems’ certain that a whole slew of jobs will just disappear in the next few years – translating, modelling, programming, forms of therapy, classical teaching and ‘so on and so forth’ – it is more or less completely up to futurists and philosophers to find a footing on what that might mean for our western culture, to find the proper framing. Maybe it will be not so bad after all? We all do enjoy our cars and smartphones, right? But do you know what happened to the horse drawn carriage a hundred years ago, and the industry that was attached to it? Also worth noting that the US is also one of the main drivers of A.I. development … what does that mean for the Europe?
Same goes for basically every current problem (or possibility) that we face at the moment. Industrialism and capitalism brought us here. Yet Pinker´s positivist vision gets trampled upon by the utopian leftist. We all get richer, historically speaking, and yet the law of the Pareto-distribution went into overdrive, enabling a few group of psychopathic people to own nearly everything. What is the correct framing here? How do we frame and act towards a sort of ‘natural’ law like Pareto anyhow? And what does ‘correct’ even mean? (And again, the US is here the main driver of turbo-capitalism. What is the rest of the world to do if the US doesn´t change it´s pace?)
I might be wrong about all of this (I certainly am). But: to use these in themselves uncertain framings and bundle them together in so called ‘meta’-framing – that is, to create a double-framing – has nothing to do with science or the world or the issues at hand. It´s pure speculation – double the uncertainty –, ideological gambling masquerading as ‘American philosophy’. The same is true for the term ‘meaning-crisis’, which is a huge and, as we have seen, dysfunctional generalization about systems, people, cultural values and wisdom – who is in the god-like position to observe this large scale cultural trends accurately anyhow? Don´t get me wrong, I like the Americans and their ideas as much as the next guy. But why would you insist of double-frame the multitudes of problems (or possibilities) as ‘crisis’ anyhow? That´s as if you give a depressed person a sermon on how bad his life is. He knows this! And you will probably worsen his life. Instead we should take the state of affairs the worlds is in right now, try to find the optimal framing – how about Bucky Fullers ‘Critical Path’ for example, invoking images of forward movement? – and try our best to make it better. We have a real chance here.
And that’s the true heart of the issue. Proponents of the meaning-crisis or meta-crisis deepen the problem they set out to solve. (In other words: It´s a confirmation bias - but it´s also a ‘conformation’-bias, that is a belief that is set up to design a certain future) They operate within the same parameters that brought us here. In any case, these ‘American philosophers’ should know that the ‘is-ness’ of the world is translated to us through neurological, social and cognitive filters. The myth of the given, as Wilber puts is, has been debunked. You can´t proclaim that the world is in meta-crisis and omit that’s a purely arbitrary and speculative concept made up by yourself. There is no indication that these layers of framing really stack up properly. At best, it´s a fairy tale to sell some books or seminars. You can´t just omit postmodern philosophy and claim that the world ‘is’ in crisis. It might certainly appear so to you (why?). You might draw these observations and distinctions. But you might have to ask yourself if there are not better ways to address these issues. And you should certainly not generalize your idiosyncrasies and confuse those who follow you.
Last but not least, the meta-crisis also feeds off from a historical distortion. To get spiritual: ‘The world’ is always in crisis and possibility at the same time, and there is nothing novel about our generation. Quite the contrary: It seems that our cognitive complexity and the complexity of the worlds challenges grow hand in hand. (This is the whole idea of co-evolutionary drift) We might feel overwhelmed by today ´s problems. But who are we to say that the generations before us didn´t feel their respective worlds collapsing and felt an equal amount of anxiety? Do you really understand that the world was on fire in 1943? Just imagine being born in 1900 and the amount of crisis that are set to invade you in the next 70 years. If there is something to be learned from the past, then it´s that we need to change the framing of the present. Only then we can create the future that we desire.
Whose meta-crisis is it anyway?
You may not have noticed, but you can´t really have a meta-crisis and a meaning-crisis at the same time. If we take these terms at face value, they are mutually exclusive concepts. Either you have a meta-crisis – then you can´t have definitive meaning. Or you have a meaning-crisis – than you can´t have a meaningful meta-crisis. So let´s reframe that problem, and for the sake of the argument let´s call the ‘meta-crisis’ a ‘complex set of challenges’ – or CoSeCs as a shorthand for the purpose of this writing – bear with me for a second.
It is obvious that there is no unifying meta-crisis. How the ‘meta-crisis’ appears or is viewed depends obviously on cultural background and differs form continent to continent, country to country, city to city, individual to individual. What we all do have in common we all face different CoSeC´s, all the time. Always have, always will.
The Europeans face different CoSeC´s than the Americans, just think of the enormous streams of migration that are bound to happens if and when the climate change really takes off in the Mediterranean), so the whole set of complex challenges will be different.
These CoSeC´s will be different for the Americans, the US being the capital and the main driver of pollution, A.I development and turbo-capitalism - and I haven´t even mentioned their constant scheming and war-mongering of the last 70 years (btw, isn´t it kind of rich from these American philosophers to preach about the psychological drivers of the meta-crisis? That is somehow like listening to a toxic girlfriend to rationalize or projecting her misdeeds onto everybody else. I´ll tell you what the psychological driver is. It´s greed, folks. It´s greed)
Anyhow, the point with CoSeC´s is that these very global challenges are complex, meaning, not all dots can be connected meaningfully – be it politically, ethically, spiritually etc. That’s the very meaning of ‘complex’. But the point is, if we stay with systems theory:
THEY DON`T HAVE TO.
In order to solve a CoSeC at a given time, not all dots HAVE TO be connected meaningfully. It is sufficient to solve one problem at a time, and the systems-dynamics will ensure that these new solutions will be distributed within the whole system, across layers and stratas and areas, across religion, science, ethics, economics ‘and so on and so forth.’ The problems and challenges always work to our advantage. This is exactly what the concepts of ‘meaning-crisis’ and ‘meta-crisis’ obscure: That we – on which strata of culture or social life whatever – just need to plough ahead and work to the best of our abilities to solve the direct problems at hand. There is literally no other way then to look for new solutions in our very personal lifes, right here and now. There is no big bad meta-crisis looming in the background.
If that apporach fails, then we fail, if we don´t find solution, then we will perish, like everything else in the universe, like countless cultures and stars and star-systems and people before us. That happens, that is also normal. So don´t give in into the fear of death. Say yes to the challenges of living. Have a hopeful and positive attitude: There is liertally nothing that indicates that we are not able to solve todays CoSeC´s - quite the opposite - except to fall prey to those that get off of apocalyptic thinking. Cheers.
If you liked this article, please subcribe to our Newletter: