Metamodern Futures: Prescriptions for Metamodern Foresight

owing to the fact that behind the many interconnected problems of the metacrisis there is a deep ideological problem (i.e., a lack of unified narrative), metamodernism can be defined as a new collective value system1 that incorporates, contextualizes and transcends all previous value systems while resolving the conflict between them in an integrate

Also above and beyond other “candidates” – and in line with futures studies - metamodernism promotes an anticipatory and proactive thinking about alternative futures (Baciu et al., 2015), and is interested to convey a newly born optimist metanarrative that would unite and reconstruct the broken identity pieces after postmodernism (Abramson, 2015b).

What does the future hold looking ahead from the third decade of the third millennium? Despite unprecedented economic and technological progress, the world as we know it is unraveling, sharp social and wealth inequalities persist, political ideologies abound, and climate change is overdetermined. Because these socio-economic, political and ecologic

Metamodernism is thus also more optimistic than modernism as it strives to go beyond its shortcomings, and thus inherently more optimistic than postmodernism, which lacks faith in modernity and its metanarrative of progress.

This new collective value system is apparent by looking at several intersecting trends: new cultural, spiritual, political, scientific, and social movements which point to a neo-romantic, post-ideological, open source, globally responsive, and paradox resolving grand narrative

Indeed, even if one could apply the notion of oscillation between

polarized features proffered by current political ideologies, a normative choice to affirm a paradigmatic project beyond such oscillation is more advisable. This normativity is rooted in compassion, care, cohesion, solidarity, social responsibility, universal healthcare and education,

Amidst these many “candidates” to transcend modernity and postmodernity, what perhaps distinguishes metamodernism the most regardless of its different schools of thought within it, is its emphasis on an emerging or newly born collective sensibility or “feelings’’ pointing towards a new cultural milieu which reflects the current late stage of global