The Flip, the Formation, and the Fun: A Metamodern Framework for Human Futures with Jonathan Rowson
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
Nate Hagens
4.8 • 552 Ratings
🗓️ 26 June 2024
⏱️ 96 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
(Conversation recorded on April 24th, 2024)
Show Summary:
Engaging with the human predicament requires new ways of understanding the world - novel perspectives that are rooted in a more holistic and interdependent mindset than those dominant in the industrialized society of the past few centuries.
Today's conversation with philosopher and social scientist Jonathan Rowson dives into the emerging ways of being that could serve us as we move toward a post-growth world, including what he has found particularly helpful in his decades of work studying the metacrisis.
In a world of (often siloed) hyper-specific experts, how would valuing the role of the "expert generalist" both change the face of academia and help us understand the world from a more holistic systems perspective? How does metamodernism merge the best of modernism and postmodernism to create a more comprehensive and constructive view of reality? How do we find and embrace our calling in the context of the metacrisis in order to take purposeful action forward?
About Jonathan Rowson:
Jonathan Rowson is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive of Perspectiva, a publishing house and praxis collective based primarily in London. Perspectiva describes itself as an urgent one-hundred-year project to improve the relationship between systems, souls, and society in theory and practice. Jonathan is a philosopher and social scientist by academic training and has degrees from Oxford, Harvard and Bristol Universities. He has written extensively on the idea of metacrisis as our multifaceted delusion, and he is increasingly focused on experiments in community and spiritual praxis to help shift socio-economic immunity to change. He is an Open Society Fellow and a Fellow at The Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity at the University of Surrey. In his prior role as Director of the Social Brain Centre at the Royal Society of Arts he authored influential research reports including A New Agenda on Climate Change, Money Talks, and Spiritualise. He is also a Chess Grandmaster and three-time British Champion (2004–6) and views the game as a continuing source of insight and inspiration. His book, The Moves that Matter – A Grandmaster on the Game of Life was published by Bloomsbury in 2019.
Watch this video episode on Youtube
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | I do believe that the metamortarine sentiment takes you beyond critique in that you begin |
| 0:04.6 | to see the enemy as more human. |
| 0:07.5 | And you begin to see that while there are some people who are just callous liars and bastards |
| 0:12.7 | frankly, mostly that's not the case. |
| 0:15.9 | Mostly there are people trying to get through the day. |
| 0:19.1 | And when you see them at that level as parents, sometimes as artists in their spare time, sometimes as chess players, it's much easier to connect with them and say, they're often like, I don't know what to do. I've got this job, I've got this family, I'm caught in this system. I think you have to get the conversation to that level, more as meeting as equals, recognizing we're all somehow, to a greater or lesser extent, complicit. |
| 0:45.4 | You're listening to the Great Simplification. I'm Nate Hagen's. On this show, we describe how |
| 0:51.2 | energy, the economy, the environment and human behavior all fit together |
| 0:55.9 | and what it might mean for our future. By sharing insights from global thinkers, we hope to |
| 1:01.3 | inform and inspire more humans to play emergent roles in the coming great simplification. |
| 1:11.4 | Today I'd like to welcome Jonathan Rousen to the program. |
| 1:15.7 | Jonathan is the co-founder and director of UK-based Perspectiva, which is a research |
| 1:22.1 | organization examining the relationship between complex global challenges and the inner lives of human beings. |
| 1:30.3 | Jonathan is an applied philosopher with degrees spanning a range of humanities and social sciences. |
| 1:36.9 | He is also a chess grandmaster and British champion, and also the author of several books, |
| 1:43.0 | including dispatches from a time between worlds. |
| 1:46.9 | This was an engaging conversation. We touched on themes frequently brought up in the show, |
| 1:53.1 | such as the metacrisis, metamodernism, what it means to live and reside in the post-tragic. |
| 1:59.7 | We discuss how the average human can learn and think about navigating the human predicament. |
| 2:06.6 | I hope you enjoy and learn from this conversation with Jonathan Rousen. |
| 2:12.6 | Jonathan Rousen, welcome to the program. |
| 2:21.5 | I feel like I've made it, Nate, to finally be here. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Nate Hagens, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Nate Hagens and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.