The return to a metanarrative: a comeback to ideology
Sebastian Pereira
2014-04-10 00:00:00

From chemistry to physics natural laws were uncovered throughout modernity and advanced humanity’s capabilities in a clear and tangible way, such achievements inspired, in turn, thinkers from the social field, thus many also claimed that humanity was governed by objective laws, perceptible to reason, and that gave birth to what later be called metanarratives.



Thinkers like Adam Smith and Karl Marx were at the forefront of such revolution. This is how the invisible hand, self-interest, material history, dialectics and many other ideas came to be at the center of the intellectual circles of the time, constituting the backbone of the metanarrative, shaping the destiny of nations and transforming civilization.



In one group, natural laws would lead to an era of endless material progress; while for others, it would bring an end to exploitation and material differences, this came to be known as the “great promise” or “master idea”, an ultimate end scenario, not yet attained, justifying the narrative in question, the essence of ideology.



This was the age of ideology, where the world was divided along intellectual fields, and almost plunged our specie into a final global conflict, but alas that was not the case, and history ended in the last two decades of the past century, negating a single universality by post-modernism.



Leaving us in our fragmented age, where there is an “expert” for every field and no one knows anything, but merely has opinions. A shattered reality, the final result of the negation of a transcendental universality, is what is left for us to experience? Or is it?



So what was all that exposition necessary for? Well I claim that we are going back to an age of ideology, our metanarrative is the technological one, where advances in science will eventually lead to a fundamental transformation –the singularity- and humanity will enter a time of peace, prosperity and almost god like existence, the new “great promise”. How is this possible? After all didn’t postmodernism negated universality?



Well it did and it didn’t in the usual ambiguous way of our times. For a very tiny percentage of postmodernist there is no universal truth, but the majority was never so blunt. Most of the postmodernist simple stated that such universal truth was unattainable by relative finite beings, such as us, thus we could only know parts of the story and not even understand completely any of those pieces, that is why there is an expert for every question, and an opinion for every answer.



Is in that opening that postmodernism left, that our new age of ideology is being born. The universal truth is beyond us petty humans, but it may not be for our creations. The new key to the future is not reason, it is a new being, and the favorite candidates are: an augmented human or (the tech mystics choice) A.I.



Any of the two contenders will guide civilization to a new age, ending all our current problems and creating a new magnificent world, or so goes the story. Clearly my juvenile sarcasm is indicative of a skeptic, mainly because the current metanarrative is the same as the old one, but with new and improved settings and characters, it is no longer something as ambiguous as reason, or logic forbids philosophy, at the helm of change, but science.



Yes, cold verifiable science. The realm of facts and charts, where everything is a statistical possibility and all is possible eventually. This automatically transforms the justifying “final promise” from an unattainable dream to a question of time, and yet many of the objections made against the old metanarrative are valid for the new one.



First, ignoring the heterogeneity of human experience, ideas considered superior for some cultures may not be for others, negating a single path to augmentation. Second, grand theories tend to ignore or fail to account for singular events, which never occurred in the past and cannot be predicted mere statistics.



But mainly is how meta-narratives tend to be sustained by power structures. Ideology needs some frame to support it in a material world, which in turns leads to institutions enforcing the principles and ideas in order to assure the end result desire, and where there are humans there is power.



We can only imagine what new power structures the new ideologies will form, how will these new entities interact with the world and what forms of conflict will start as a result. The dawn of a new era is always a convoluted one and we may be living the prelude of a new form of war.