What the heck is "Emergence" and why is everyone talking about it?

An alphabet of 26 letters can yield a vocabulary of 50,000 words, which can then be recombined in a functionally infinite combination of fiction, nonfiction, treatises, blog posts, and tweets.

The Enlightenment

My journey into philosophy began in late 2019 when I met my would-be wife, Anna. We were touring Sarah P. Duke Gardens as the days grew shorter and colder.

“What is postmodernism anyways?” I asked.

Anna rolled her eyes and let out a knowing groan. She is a librarian who has also studied rhetoric. You know, the Greek and Roman classics, and she’s actually translated a good portion of the Aeneid directly from Latin.

Sarah P. Duke Gardens are the legacy of the Duke family, with their eponymous Duke University and Duke Energy and Duke Medicine. Basically the Duke family built Durham, NC.

We lounged on some big rocks as the sun set and the air grew cold. She walked me through the historical context from the Enlightenment to Modernism, which then disintegrated into Postmodernism (capitalized as the name of periods and movements, not just a philosophical framework).

Now, I know most people are going to glaze over and start having seizures if I perseverate too much on these ideas, but you do need to have some historical context for the rest to make sense.

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) is probably the most famous Enlightenment figure, particularly here in America. He loved the women. And by all accounts, women loved him, too. Particularly during his time as an American diplomat to France (1776-1785) and was instrumental in securing French aid for the American Revolution. Interestingly, this French aid was one of the things that sparked the French Revolution in 1789. He is perhaps not the most influential Enlightenment figure, but certainly the most famous. I’m deliberately glossing over Locke, Smith, Voltaire, and others because they are just too obscure for general audiences.

Alright, fine and dandy. But what the heck is Enlightenment anyways? The core referents of the Enlightenment can be articulated simply:

• Rational Authority: Reason, not tradition or divine revelation, is the ultimate source of truth and legitimacy. Truth claims must stand up to rational scrutiny and empirical observation. Human beings possess the intellectual capacity to understand the universe through systematic investigation and logical analysis.

• Progressive Advancement: Human society and knowledge naturally tend toward improvement when guided by reason. Progress is not only possible but inevitable when superstition and arbitrary authority are replaced with rational inquiry. Knowledge accumulates across generations, leading to both scientific and social advancement.

• Natural Rights: Humans possess inherent, universal rights that exist independent of any government or social structure. These rights (life, liberty, property) are discoverable through reason and form the foundation of legitimate political order. No authority can justly violate these fundamental rights.

• Natural Law Universe: The universe operates according to consistent, discoverable laws that can be understood through systematic observation and experimentation. These natural laws govern everything from planetary motion to human society, and supernatural explanations are unnecessary and invalid. The scientific method is the key to uncovering these laws.

• Individual Autonomy: The individual is the fundamental unit of moral and political concern. Humans are naturally rational beings capable of self-governance and should be free to exercise their reason without undue constraint. Traditional authority structures must justify themselves rationally rather than relying on custom or force.

A lot of this probably sounds familiar! That’s because it’s the bedrock philosophy of the American Constitution as well as science! It’s all very patriotic and historical.

America is awesome and all that jazz. Etc. etc. You know the drill. Freedom!

George Washington, the first POTUS. Peak Enlightenment.

Alright, so if you press fast-forward by about a century, you end up with Modernism.

Transition to Modernism

The chief evolutionary pressure between Enlightenment and Modernism has to do with systems and control. Einstein, Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx are all Modernists. While I am a huge fan of systems thinking, an immature understanding of systems can result in epic disasters. In other words, if you jump to conclusions and trust your rational intellect more than, oh say, actual evidence, you’re liable to kill a lot of people.

Stalinism and Maoism are both examples of Modernist thought taken too far. Here’s a more specific example: Lysenkoism.

Poor Lysenko. He was just a hapless Russian agronomist who, in the spirit of Modernist thinking, thought that you could directly impose your will on crops and force them to adapt to suboptimal climates and soil conditions. Don’t take my word for it, just check out his Wikipedia, it’s ultra cringe.

In 1948, genetics was officially declared “a bourgeois pseudoscience”. Over 3,000 biologists were imprisoned, fired, or executed for attempting to oppose Lysenkoism, and genetics research was effectively destroyed until the death of Stalin in 1953. Soviet crop yields declined.

From 1934 to 1940, under Lysenko’s admonitions and with Stalin’s approval, many geneticists were executed (including Izrail Agol, Solomon Levit, Grigorii Levitskii, Georgii Karpechenko and Georgii Nadson) or sent to labor camps. The famous Soviet geneticist and president of the Agriculture Academy, Nikolai Vavilov, was arrested in 1940 and died in prison in 1943. In 1936, the American geneticist Hermann Joseph Muller, who had moved to the Leningrad Institute of Genetics with his Drosophila fruit flies, was criticized as bourgeois, capitalist, imperialist, and a promoter of fascism, and he returned to America via Republican Spain, who worked on mutagens, refused to publicly repudiate chromosome theory of heredity, and suffered several years as a geological lab assistant. Dmitry Sabinin’s book on plant physiology was abruptly withdrawn from publication in 1948. He died by suicide in 1951.

Really only the Russians could pull something so spectacularly boneheaded off and still have a functioning nation. Utmost conviction, plus stupidity, plus a lot of vodka can move Heaven and Earth.

But it doesn’t end there. The Great Chinese Famine was directly caused by this kind of thinking. Lysenko managed to kill millions with his backasswards ideas about biology and running against scientific consensus.

The Great Chinese Famine was a famine that occurred between 1959 and 1961 in the People's Republic of China (PRC). Some scholars have also included the years 1958 or 1962. It is widely regarded as the deadliest famine and one of the greatest man-made disasters in human history, with an estimated death toll due to starvation that ranges in the tens of millions (15 to 55 million). The most stricken provinces were Anhui (18% dead), Chongqing (15%), Sichuan (13%), Guizhou (11%) and Hunan (8%).

We can trace a straight line between Modernism to Xi Jinping. He survived the Great Famine, the trauma of which (combined with other Modernist nonsense going on at the time) fuels Xi’s pathological need for power and control. The irony is that it was a previous attempt at control that led to his trauma, which he is now passing onto his people. Trauma is propagated across generations by traumatized power-seekers.

Okay, so I did cherry-pick the worst result of Modernist thinking, but what about this shiny new philosophy led to such catastrophic outcomes?

Here are the chief referents of Modernism:

1. Scientific Materialism: Reality is fundamentally material and can be fully understood through scientific investigation. Expert knowledge and empirical methodology are the only reliable paths to truth. Subjective experience must be validated through objective measurement and verification. I have science, therefore your argument is invalid!

2. Progressive Disruption: Progress requires breaking decisively with the past. Society advances through revolutionary changes in technology, social organization, and consciousness. The new is inherently superior to the old, and tradition is an obstacle to be overcome. Seize the means of production, comrade!

3. Systematic Control: Human beings can and should exert rational control over both natural and social systems. Through proper scientific management and technical expertise, we can optimize society and solve human problems through systematic intervention. Can anyone say central planning?

4. Mass Organization: Modern society requires large-scale coordination and standardization. Individual experience is secondary to collective efficiency and systematic organization. Bureaucracy and institutional expertise are necessary for managing complex societies.

5. Universal Standards: There are objective, universal standards for truth, beauty, and progress that can be discovered and applied across all cultures and contexts. These standards emerge from rational analysis rather than tradition or local custom. Beauty was not in the eye of the beholder, but up to Parliament or Congress! (Also being gay is scientifically evil therefore kill all the homos)

6. Technological Solution: All significant human problems can ultimately be solved through technological and systematic innovation. If a problem persists, it's because we haven’t yet developed the right technical solution or system to address it.

7. Professional Specialization: Knowledge and authority should be organized into distinct professional disciplines and expert domains. Progress comes through increasing specialization and the development of expert knowledge systems.

While, on the surface, a lot of these principles seem good, you can easily see how they’ve been taken to extremes. And, once again, things had to break. Specifically, Western colonial mindsets and the “White Man’s Burden”

Western colonialism and the “white man’s burden” was peak Modernism. “Ugh, I guess it’s up to us to bring civilization to all these savages and teach them what’s what!”

We were really convinced that we had the right of things, and that because we had the institutions of science and reason on our side, it was up to us to bring the rest of humanity into the modern age. Forcibly, if necessary.

Yes, it’s every bit as cringe and yikes as it looks. So… yeah we threw Modernism out. Modernism had that universalist idea that there is an objective truth out there, particularly where humanity is concerned.

The late 19th century, which saw the height of the British Empire and early-to-mid 20th century were extraordinarily bloody. Between Lysenkoism, World Wars, and waning imperial powers, Modernism just sort of… disintegrated.

The Rise of Postmodernism

Western intelligentsia had to come to terms with just how spectacularly wrong they had been, and so they categorically threw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak. Maybe no one is the arbiter of truth! Maybe truth doesn’t even exist! Maybe we’ve been wrong all along! (Side note, if you read the opening 30 pages of The Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow, it is nothing but pre-apologizing for Western imperialism and postmodernist self-flagellation, which is personally unbearable to read as it drips with false humility and this wry self-aware effacement that just reads as self-hatred)

This is all a natural backlash to just how pigheaded and destructive the universalistic Modernist institutions had been. Skepticism of the Establishment and agencies was now fully en vogue. If the so-called “experts” had been wrong about Communism and Lysenkoism and imperialism, and all that, what if they are wrong about everything? Suddenly minority opinions and fringe viewpoints were on the menu again. From my viewpoint, Postmodernism is primarily about two cardinal forces:

1. Skepticism

2. Deconstruction

After all, it seems somewhat justified. Mass famines, world wars, and the exsanguination of indigenous cultures based on some vaunted idea of a civilizing mission, the net result of Modernism was patently cruel and inhumane. Just read the stories about indigenous children being indoctrinated into religious schools and their infants thrown into furnaces (who were sired by priests no less). Oh yeah, and eugenics is another result of Modernism. The notion of “superior Aryan genetics” is predicated upon the idea that there is a “singular best universal Übermensch.” Thus, we threw out notions of universalism.

Here are the key referents of Postmodernism:

1. Power-Knowledge Inseparability: Knowledge claims are inherently tied to power structures and cannot be separated from them. What counts as “truth” or “fact” is largely determined by who has the power to define it. Scientific and academic knowledge are not neutral but deeply embedded in power relationships.

2. Skepticism of Grand Narratives: All comprehensive explanations of history, progress, or human nature are suspect. Large-scale theories that claim to explain everything (like Marxism, religious doctrines, or scientific materialism) are actually forms of power masquerading as universal truth.

3. Cultural Relativism: Values, beliefs, and knowledge systems are culturally specific rather than universal. Western claims to universal rationality or morality are just one perspective among many equally valid worldviews. No culture can claim superiority over others.

4. Deconstruction of Categories: Traditional binary categories (male/female, nature/culture, objective/subjective) are social constructs that can and should be questioned. Reality is more complex and fluid than our rigid categorizations suggest.

5. Linguistic Construction of Reality: Language shapes rather than simply describes reality. Our understanding of the world is mediated through language and discourse, which carry hidden assumptions and power relationships.

6. Multiplicity of Narratives: There is no single “true” version of events or reality, but multiple valid perspectives and interpretations. History is written by the winners, and suppressed voices need to be recovered.

7. Rejection of Progress: There is no inevitable march toward improvement. “Progress” is a culturally specific narrative that often masks oppression and destruction. Change happens but isn’t inherently positive or negative.

8. Hyperreality: The distinction between reality and simulation breaks down in modern media culture. Representations become more “real” than what they represent, leading to a world of simulacra.

One of the key phenomena that emerges from Postmodernism is the “era of alternative facts”

This is it folks, this is when we hit peak Postmodernism.

Isaac Asimov, of all people, perfectly captures the spirit of Postmodernism’s dark side:

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’”

As an aside, this is why I block most people who want to debate me. Postmodernism plus democratic/egalitarian ideals means that everyone with an internet connection and opinion think they’re an expert. Postmodernism explicitly casts “expertise” in doubt, which leads directly to internet trolls like Eliezer Yudkowsky getting invited onto the TED Stage, because again, the scientific establishment might be wrong! They have been in the past!

Pivot to Metamodernism and Emergence

People are getting tired of postmodern pedantry. When famous YouTubers like Sabine Hossenfelder unironically say “maybe suffering is actually good” you know you’ve had enough Postmodernism, it’s time to put the bottle down. (yes, she actually said this about Vincent van Gogh, that perhaps his suffering was justified because he made some good art, and we shouldn’t seek to cure depression and stuff… yikes man… physicists clearly have an expiration date)

There’s actually a SMBC comic about this phenomenon. Eventually, physicists seem to think they are qualified to talk about anything just because… I guess because physics underpins everything? Ah, but we’re getting close to the end! Physics might give rise to everything else (which is a debatable assertion in itself) but that doesn’t mean they can predict all emergent phenomena.

This is how you know it’s time to put your physicist down. It’s for their own good. The deepest irony is the self-awareness here.

With Postmodernism, we’ve whittled away truth to the point that it’s utterly meaningless, and no one is allowed to know anything, all truth claims are suspect, and there are no facts whatsoever.

Well, that’s not a particularly useful epistemic position to have.

Before we proceed, here’s a quick recap of the prime energies of each movement:

1. Enlightenment: Reason

2. Modernism: Universality

3. Postmodernism: Relativism

You can see this flow. The Age of Reason morphed into the age of Universality, which was somewhat catastrophic for humanity, and so there was a social backlash that railed against everything that Modernism stood for.

And now we arrive at Metamodernism, which has the cardinal energy of emergence.

4. Metamodernism: Emergence

But what does “emergence” mean?

Here’s an example.

“An alphabet of 26 letters can yield a vocabulary of 50,000 words, which can then be recombined in a functionally infinite combination of fiction, nonfiction, treatises, blog posts, and tweets. This is emergence in action.”

As I’ve been studying this stuff for a few years, I arrived on this handy dandy graphic to illustrate emergence:

Voila! You have now seen metamodernism and emergence in a single image. We can just go home now.

Here’s a more formal definition of emergence:

Complex systems and phenomena arise naturally from simpler underlying components, creating new properties and behaviors that cannot be reduced to or predicted from their constituent parts. Each layer of reality builds upon and transcends the previous layers, forming distinct but interconnected levels of organization. True understanding requires recognizing both the fundamental building blocks of a system and the novel properties that emerge from their interactions. While individual elements follow simple rules, their collective behavior generates entirely new patterns and possibilities that transcend their origins. Just as consciousness emerges from neurons, and social systems emerge from individual humans, each level of reality creates something genuinely new from its foundations.

Letters give rise to words, which give rise to blog posts here on Substack. Bits and bytes give rise to data and networks and cat gifs. Atoms and molecules give rise to living organisms, which give rise to humans and brains, which then give rise to epistemic tribes and Democrats.

It is actually this understanding of emergence and Metamodernism that led directly to my understanding of epistemic tribes with their core referents. Metamodernism is still pretty new, so let me take a stab at articulating our core referents:

1. Emergent Reality: Reality is fundamentally layered, with complex systems and phenomena arising naturally from simpler underlying components. Each layer transcends but includes its foundations, creating new properties and behaviors that cannot be reduced to their constituent parts. Physical laws give rise to life, which gives rise to consciousness, which gives rise to culture and narratives. This both explains and situates relative versions of truth with underlying taxonomies of reason.

2. Narrative Construction: Humans make sense of reality through shared narratives that emerge from collective sense-making. These narratives are neither purely constructed nor purely reflective of reality, but emerge from the interaction between minds, culture, and the material world. Different epistemic tribes form around different narrative frameworks, each valid within its own context and layer of emergence. Democracy, capitalism, and science are all global coordination narratives.

3. Ontological Stratification: Different truths and phenomena exist at different layers of reality, each with its own properties and rules. Lower layers provide the necessary foundation for higher layers while being transcended by them. Understanding any phenomenon requires recognizing both its fundamental components and the novel properties that emerge at its level of organization. Atoms » Molecules » Cells » Organisms » Minds » Society. You get the idea.

4. Epistemic Pluralism: Truth claims can be simultaneously relative at higher emergent layers (like culture and narrative) and absolute at lower layers (like physics and chemistry). This resolves the tension between modernist universalism and postmodern relativism by recognizing that different types of truth operate at different levels of emergence. Nobody debates about the validity gravity and even the most boneheaded postmodern absolutist would have a hard time saying “Gravity is just a social construct!”

Now, let’s touch on a completely benign debate topic that I’m sure no one has strong opinions about (and all of you are wrong, by the way). The “trans debate”!

Transgenderism is a total non-issue to the metamodernist

Dipshits like Jordan Peterson whine about “muh freedom of speech” and appeals to social constructs. He is terrified of the same thing that many other Postmodernists have been afraid of: the total unraveling of social fabrics. We’ve lost all epistemic and ontological grounding, and so, to them, we must return to traditional structures. This is why he, and others like him, have started talking about the teachings of Jesus Christ.

In what universe is this “rational” behavior? Praying to an imaginary friend? I’m not poking fun at Christians, I’m calling JP out for his intellectual hypocrisy. Is it just me or does JP look like he’s really constipated and uncomfortable?

The problem with people like Jordan Peterson is that he overly privileges social constructs and forgets that individuals exist. Society and narratives, if you recall from my handy diagram, are level 5 ontological phenomena. In other words, they are predicated upon the underlying systems, namely real life people.

The dumbest part about this argument is that many cultures around the world have a much more relaxed view of gender. Many indigenous cultures have three or five genders, and it’s just an accepted fact of life for many Pacific and Asian cultures that some people are transgender. Ironically, Jordan Peterson has to appeal all the way back to Modernist nonsense that he, and only he, as an Enlightened Western Man with a PhD has the right of things.

So, is he going to go lecture the Thai that they clearly just don’t know anything because they are ignoring “biological reality” and that there are only “two genders”? Guys, we already hashed this out a century ago. Let the White Man’s Burden go!

Here’s a diagram they make for children to understand this stuff:

Interconnected systems that recognize the bio-pscyho-social complexity of gender, sexuality, and expression! This is peak metamodernism!

Now, some people will say “Yes, but science is just a social construct, so you can’t trust it!” And they will say the same thing about IQ. But the fact of the matter is that gender, IQ, and even science, all connect to something deeper, some underlying reality that is true even if the interpretation and narratives are imperfect.

So when Jordan Peterson says “there are only two genders!” he is appealing to both the social construct (specifically the Judeo-Christian tradition of Man and Woman) as well as the oversimplified biological “truth” of male and female. He, of course, is dramatically oversimplifying the biological truth.

So with that I’ll end with Robert Sapolsky.