BOHM DIALOGUE
Lene Rachel Andersen, Julia Ovcharenko, Chris Keulemans, Demyan Om Dyakiv-Slavitski
vol. 3 | May 22, 2022
Copenhagen—Vienna—Amsterdam—Kyiv
Summary
How does metamodernity relate to war? Why do we believe metamodernity is a good worldview for Ukraine after the victory? Ukraine is a powerhouse of creativity and cultural output. If the concept of metamodernity is about including the best products of the past into the future, how can the nation-state past be carried forward? Is a world beyond wars also a world without nation-states and, possibly, organized religion? Religion is a pre-modern invention and a pre-modern political institution. War makes visible the threats that are already there to our societies, e.g. dependence on fossil fuels. Metamodernity is a way of imagining the future that reconciles scientific and technological advancement with the anxiety of people who feel left unmoored by it. Humanity needs a new economic model, not based on growth. The future needs a better narrative, and the war in Ukraine sheds light on what is unsustainable.
Key words
Bohm Dialogue, democracy, emergence, future, metamodernity, nation-state, russia, religion, Ukraine, war, wars
Timecode
02:35 Ukraine as a borderland
10:30 metamodernity vs. hyper modernity
16:42 the argument for the nation-state
21:16 positionality of Ukraine: edge vs. center
22:27 the potential of the struggle in Ukraine
23:56 metamodernity beyond “Western culture”
25:16 metamodernity as inclusivity
28:31 society beyond war
31:43 religions and their survival
33:46 religion vs. democracy
41:08 the transformative energy in war
44:47 the revelatory function of war
46:05 russia
51:30 the argument for metamodernity
56:02 the future
01:02:49 the war in Ukraine as a war in Europe
01:12:16 changing the investment into democracy
01:15:46 the narrative of the future
01:18:25 personal responsibility and the future
01:22:47 complexity and truth
Participants
C: Chris Keulemans
D: Demyan Om Dyakiv-Slavitsky
J: Julia Ovcharenko
L: Lene Rachel Andersen
THE DIALOGUE
J: We have just briefly discussed the metamodernity as a concept from the white papers. The war in Ukraine could be discussed as a reality check for this concept. How does metamodernity relate to war? Can it survive this war? And the second question would be — why do we believe metamodernity is a good worldview for us after the victory?
[02:35] Ukraine as a borderland
L: I’ve not been to Ukraine. I only know Ukraine from the outside; it was not on my radar until the war broke out, but I have friends who’ve been to Ukraine and I’ve heard about Ukraine. I visited russia, actually, as well as Estonia and belarus. I have been to that part of the world and what I have learned about Ukraine particularly over the past two and a half months is that it is very much in a border situation between cultures. Or to put it in another way, there’s a sort of a faultline running not through the country but through the culture. There’s much cultural heritage, the east and west, the modern and the postmodern, and a lot of tradition — many layers in Ukraine that, I think, could be there in the rest of Europe. But we’ve not been challenged in our existence and our worldview in Europe for a long time. I wasn’t aware of russia’s constant attempts to either harass or attack Ukraine, it simply didn’t reach my news feed. This was part of my steep learning curve the past two or three months but what I see now in Ukraine, with the winning the Eurovision this year and also last year Shum, is much cultural self-awareness. I think it comes from the outer pressure and of course the process after the collapse of the soviet union with Ukraine having a really strong cultural tradition of self-organization, education, and freedom, and the Prosvita tradition, which I didn’t know about until a year ago. There are all these elements in Ukrainian heritage and culture that I can totally identify with at the structural level. But I don’t know the language, I can’t read your news, I can’t follow your theatrical plays or any other things going on in Ukraine if they are not translated into English.
I really look at it as an outsider, but what I see in Ukraine right now is an enormous creativity, cultural output, philosophy and thinking about the meaning and purpose of all this. One of the interesting things is that Wilhelm von Humboldt wrote that “War is the big promoter of Bildung”, and no wonder because you’re facing existential choices every day. You’re constantly confronted with what is important, how do I survive, how will my family survive, how will my society survive, and a wrong choice can have really disastrous consequences. That sense of being on the edge, I think, matches the Ukrainian geographical being on the edge and the historical being on the edge, and then all of us being on the edge with regards to climate change and food security where Ukraine plays a huge role.
Ukraine is just on the edge of everything, and the edge is where a lot of frustration, fear, laughter, and creativity comes out. Then you look at Europe which has been sleeping for a while, and you look at russia which is shutting down on all levels and all kinds of aspects of life, which is the exact opposite, and I see a fault line between this immense flowering of culture, ideas, and struggle, and the kind of death of everything in russia. And that is a radical fault line, it’s also a dangerous fault line, is also a fault line that Ukrainians can eventually grasp but where russia will have a hard time grasping what is going on because they’re shutting down their production of new symbols or the symbols they are producing, their symbolic world is being reduced to the Z and death. Whereas the symbolic world of Ukraine is going in all kinds of directions with all kinds of colors, tunes, and tones, and tonalities. I don’t know if wars were always like this, they may have been. That is another realization: that maybe the 1940s also had this kind of current under the war or parallel to the war, that maybe the same thing happened during the First World War. Seeing the war in Ukraine from the outside and comparing it to history brings out, I think, many aspects of other wars. I don’t know what to do with it, because I don’t know if I’m seeing something that I’m just imagining because I’m interpreting things into history and into what is going on in Ukraine, or if we’re actually seeing aspects of what it means to be human that have always been there.
D: Thank you.
[10:30] metamodernity vs. hyper modernity
L: Just one more thing — one of the big fault lines that I also see is the difference between the two paths: one is metamodernity, which has all this cultural richness and where we can actually thrive; and the other one is hyper modernity, which is technological development gone haywire and where its death and destruction and where our humanity is lost. It’s just incredible that russia could sink into that hole. I know that putin has been working on it for years but still it suddenly went incredibly fast. Right before the war started, I was in contact with three young russian women. I don’t know if they were teenagers or in their mid-20s, but they invited me to play a game online that they had developed. It was actually fun and I won. But after the war started I wrote one of them and asked her how she was doing. I was very careful not to write anything that could be misinterpreted in any way. When she wrote back, it was almost like a cry: “I just saw my future disappear and now we’re going to live in the same poverty as our grandparents, and I thought that my generation would be spared it.” There was this sense of being completely screwed by history again, and it was heartbreaking.
I don’t, and I guess nobody really knows what goes on in russia, which is also terrifying. I’m shocked and appalled at the atrocities committed in Ukraine towards the Ukrainians but also towards the russian soldiers. Why would any government do that to their own people?
J: There are lots of moral questions that appeared after this period of war as it became very visible. The war started in 2014 but on very small territory and even people from other big cities, from other parts of Ukraine were not really much aware of what was happening there. Now it’s visible on a very big territory, and the war is also online in our smartphones, where every day every fact appears minutes after it happens. And we can see all the developments, and we can be empathic even with the people we don’t know. The war is an experience we are having on lots of levels: on the personal level, on the local community level (how different communities feel), on the national Ukrainian level. It’s clear that Ukrainians are very actively thinking about their identity, the national issues, and the governmental issues: who we are, how we should be organized. It’s all around the cultural decision to stay in the European context which was a Ukrainian state decision years ago. That bothered the russian side, it was like a declaration of we are not you, we are different and we are going in another direction.
And the highest level is the global, the international level, where we think of what the war means for other countries. If the concept of country is still livable with this war on a national level then nationality or nation-states are the product of modernity that we accept as a cultural heritage. Still we see lots of reasons for war, for this particular war and other wars in the background of nation-states.
For me the question is, if the concept of metamodernity is about including the best products of previous times and taking the positive sides into the future, how can we take the good from nation-states into the future but not take the side that causes wars?
[16:42] the argument for the nation-state
L: I would say that my biggest argument for the nation-state is that, yes, it is a product of modernity in the modern industrialized economy. Capitalism is also a product of history and of, in many places, ethnic cleansing and of conflict with neighbors. But the argument for it is that for most of us it has produced functioning democracies and functioning institutions. It’s the biggest legal entity, where everybody speaks the same language. And one of the big problems in the EU is that we can’t talk to each other except through English, those of us who are capable of doing that. I bet Chris and I could not speak to each other in our own language. Not everybody can participate in this conversation. The EU is democratic, but it’s a very different kind of democratic construction where the citizens cannot meet and talk to each other. I think that’s a huge democratic problem. There is no joint public sphere in the EU where everybody can watch the same news and refer to the same things except Eurovision. It’s really silly, but it’s the one thing that I love about Eurovision. Europe used to be at war in all different directions. Now we meet once per year for the silliest of events, and I have a big party, and we all discuss what song everybody hated, and the costumes and everything. It’s bringing us together and it’s one of the only things, if not the only thing that’s not sports.
And when we look at the nation-states, that is where we have the ability to communicate with the others that are under the same legislation and where we create new symbols. And when we’re facing new challenges and creating new technologies, encountering people around the globe through social media, it isn’t our local language in which we start talking about this and in which we can joke and connect, and have a drama series on television and cartoons, and comic books, and songs and stuff, where we deal with all of this. We do of course have a lot of cultural input from the US because English has been the language that most people have as their second language, and we, of course, get pop culture from the US, and it’s through that pop culture that we do get this second language. So, yes, if we are going to have functioning democracies, we are stuck with nation-states for now, and I’m very happy about it actually, I don’t see it as a problem.
One of the tasks for all of us is not just to love our country but also to be open to the fact that other people love their country and they’re entitled to the same freedom and functioning institutions that I am. What I see is a problem with national chauvinism and the sense of, oh the others don’t have a right to have their nation-state, it’s only me and my people. That’s the problem. And that’s a Bildung problem, that’s an emotional development problem; it’s a cultural problem and an existential problem; it’s not a political problem.
[21:16] positionality of Ukraine: edge vs. center
C: I have one question actually. Lena, you opened this conversation with a wide range of connected observations and questions. At certain moments you said Ukraine is on the edge of many developments right now which also creates energy, identity, etc. How would we discuss these large questions if we don’t regard Ukraine as being on the edge, but in the heart of all these current questions? I think at this moment we could speak about all the big questions facing this world and our societies, when we take Ukraine as the heart of where the biggest questions are at stake.
[22:27] the potential of the struggle in Ukraine
L: Yes, absolutely. I think in that respect the two go together. Because all these fault lines are where the action is; that’s where the pain is, and that is where the new realization is. All the major struggle is in Ukraine. And it sounds completely wrong but, yes, there’s an enormous potential in that. And it’s a moment in history that should not be wasted. It opens up for new awareness, for learning; for people to see new things.
C: Which is exactly why Julia and Demyan are organizing these conversations.
J: We would like to broaden our perspectives and also take a reality check: how are the things that we experience and see inside our society seen or understood in other cultures.
D: “Other cultures”?
[23:56] metamodernity beyond “Western culture”
J: Are we in the same culture, are they not quite the same but a bit different? And how can we see the cultures broader? We always talk in terms of “Western culture”, that is very natural for us, but still we have a world that is much bigger and has different cultures that metamodernity is also based on. Metamodernity is a Western concept, and we are used to a Western-centric worldview. We think the western culture is global; we think metamodernity is global. And yet, it must somehow include non-Western cultures that have different values and worldviews, for example the cultures of China, India, or the Persian Gulf. We are used to thinking that we are progressive, that we are on the top of civilization. That the Western priorities are the best: democracy, freedom, emancipation all of these. And then we find someone and they’re huge numbers of millions, billions of people, who might think differently. And that’s an uncomfortable moment.
[25:16] metamodernity as inclusivity
D: I think about the very old Indian culture, and I know there are about 2000 languages in India now. 2000 languages. Living languages, not dead. And, for example, the oldest language in the world is Sanskrit, and it is alive now. We have all these philosophy books in this language now, and it is not part of Western culture. But we have these ideas and we can understand them. Maybe if metamodernity prepares us to include different ideas from other people, maybe now we can include not only the Yoga exercises from India, maybe we can read ancient texts in Sanskrit, maybe we can look there for much wisdom. We read our modern texts, we write these texts, but do we understand the oldest texts of humanity? This is my question. Because I don’t like the Bible, in this context. For many people this book is important, and they have a practice with this book, but what about the church? What about these institutions? My question is — what is the problem with Christians, with Christian philosophy? And why do we have the Western civilization based on these values?
[28:31] society beyond war
C: If we’re discussing a society beyond war after victory are you also curious about a society beyond organized religion?
D: I don’t know but I have the second question about God and looking for where it is. Where is he?
J: She?..
D: She, okay. Inside us, I think, because I know what capital-G Genius means, and I want to live with my Genius, and I wish other people did too. Genius is about God and we don’t require institutions to talk with God, as I understand it. But if we talk about society, about political nations, I see they need very conservative institutions, for example, churches, and in Ukraine we have a very strong church and a very russian church. It is not about God, however, but this is the next big problem after corruption. Corruption is not the problem…
J: To compare with church.
D: To compare, yes, in Ukraine.
[31:43] religions and their survival
L: With regards to religion, I would say the religions that we know today, the reason why they survived is that they did change and evolve, they came up with what was the frontier of thinking, and realization, and struggling with existential issues, and bringing it together in a collective organized form. They gave one kind of answers that were the best answers at the time. And then we invented science that came up with completely different kinds of answers to many of the same questions, and they became better answers. Smallpox, bacteria, viruses, child mortality, hygiene — there’s all these really good answers coming from science, where religion cannot give better answers. Religion is a pre-modern invention and it’s a pre-modern political institution. In the modern world we created the democratic institutions along with science. And if we try to take the pre-modern answers into the modern institutions they’re not going to be good answers, they’re simply not going to be appropriate or even functioning answers to modern questions. And as long as religion is a personal family matter and where it relates to, for instance, childbirth, funerals, weddings, big transitions in your personal life that is where religion has a lot to offer, but democracy does not have a lot to offer. Let’s vote about the funeral — it doesn’t work.
[33:46] religion vs. democracy
L: They are in two different realms and that is one of the things that is cool about metamodernity: you can actually separate things. Religion is really good at funerals and baptizing or giving names to children and democracy and modernity is really good at political institutions in a secular society where science comes up with the answers to health problems and all kinds of stuff. Once we try to apply the different power structures in the wrong place it doesn’t work, which is also why people say, for example, that’s a conversation that pops up in Denmark every 10 years, can we modernize the Danish Church, which is Lutheran Protestant. We need some more modern songs, and the service must be changed, etc, but once you start voting about it, it loses its roots, its deep connections, its symbolic world. You can have from time to time a modern service and do interesting things, but when you need to go to a funeral what you get in the traditional package is the structure that you’re familiar with and the songs that people have been singing for centuries. And it’s a different realm. And, I think, metamodernity allows us to say, okay, let’s keep the deep roots in one place for the emotional parts and the existential questions, and then let’s have the open democratic structure for the other kinds of problems, and the scientific process for health issues and dealing with climate change and all that. I was actually on a radio show at some point discussing climate change with different people from different religions and nobody, not even the most religious people, said we just need to pray to God to solve this. Everybody was modern in the way that they approached this, because they all talked about science solving the climate problem. They were modern, even though some of them were rather fundamentalized in other aspects. But none of them was just relying on God to fix this. That’s a good first step. I bet you have a church that wants to do politics and that’s a problem. And it’s hugely problematic with the russian orthodox church in russia, attempting to go back in time not just to the soviet union but to a pre-modern chapter of history that wasn’t there. But of course, like the taliban, with the latest technology, to serve a purpose that is horrible.
I do see a purpose for the different structures of thinking and grasping the world. And I think when we’re talking about, for instance, the Indian tradition, I’ve read the Bhagavad-gita, I’ve read some writings either by or about Buddha; I’ve read some yin-and-yang Eastern philosophy, and what comes from growing up in a tradition is that you get a sense of depth, and you can spend years and years as an adult learning about a different tradition, and you can get in very deep and you can also get in deeper than people who grew up in it if they’ve not paid attention to it. But in order to get the nuances, in order to understand why things are the way that they are, you really have to spend a lot of time in a culture or with a culture. My personal story is that I grew up Christian and converted to Judaism when I was 30, and Jewish culture is such a big part of the Christian heritage. I had the Bible with me but with a different interpretation and then there was a lot of Jewish culture, pop culture that I was familiar with. But exploring the religion from within was of course a completely different experience and that’s also why I realized that we need to bring this religion with us one way or the other because it provides a framework for some emotional needs that we haven’t found alternatives for. Many of the conspiracy theories that are out, exist because people’s minds are open to see connections because we have a longing for seeing connections even though they’re not there. And one of the things that religion does is that it does give you a different set of connections; it does glue things together. The previous Chief Rabbi in the UK Jonathan Sachs said that “science takes things apart to see how they work, religion puts things together in order for them to be meaningful.” There are other things that put things together in order for them to be meaningful, such as culture, for instance, and movies, and literature, but I think it’s actually a very profound insight. And we need this aspect of life, where things are not rational because we’re not rational. We need to gather around that as well. But I can totally follow the frustration and anger, or disillusion with a church that goes into politics.
C: Me too. Let’s go back to the starting question: what is the role of war in all of this? Because it challenges everything that is fundamental to society including institutionalized religion. This is a question maybe to Julia and Demyan because you’re living in wartime even more than we are.
[41:08] the transformative energy in war
J: The transformative energy in war comes at the moment when other methods are not really working or other approaches to solve some problems are not enough. This is where my thoughts go when asking if war may be needed: it highlights problems, poor solutions, breaks through the inertia. People tend to stay inactive or to keep the system that’s already established. The energy invested in building systems is really meaningful, and changing systems needs a lot of energy, and evolution seems to be too slow. The same with the climate, even if we all realize that fossil energy sources endanger our future, people keep using them, and they only deepen the crisis. One of the reasons for this war is energy sources as well, maybe the transformation to other energy sources can go through this war as well. Maybe it is one of the layers, one of the problems to be solved. So that we don’t have a situation where one country, which has territorial access to some energy sources, can use energy to terrify others. We are depending on each other more than we are independent, and on this edge we come to the question: If our energy sources bring us to that big trouble, this might be the reason why we should change them, not go after our commercial interest or tell ourselves, oh this is the security we have, this is already working, this is functioning. Why change anything if it’s working well? War can be the reason why. It is there, it is very visible, it is horrible. On the material level we can see all the effects of war but we cannot see the effect of climate change, it is too slow, it is too mild, too invisible to make us act, to bring big communities together, to make them find solutions for the invisible changes, invisible threats to our life, life in general but saving these particular lives.
[44:47] the revelatory function of war
C: The way you describe it is that war in this case makes visible the threats that are already there to our societies. In this case, it makes the dependence on fossil energy very clear. Sometimes or at least for some people, war can be a spotlight on the things we need to solve if we want to get out of this alive. It shouldn’t be necessary, because I agree with Demyan’s note in the chat that war should be ended, of course, but we’re now in a situation where war brings to the forefront, the problems we need to solve if we need to save humanity, society and the planet.
[46:05] russia
L: It’s a strange argument because the war was started by russia and they’re not learning from this, they’re going in the exact opposite direction. I’m also wondering, let’s say that russia actually gets to keep Mariupol and other places. What is it they actually going to keep — they ruined everything. It’s just absurd and bizarre and horrible and what I see is that Ukraine was on a path towards a bigger, higher level of complexity as a part of the global world of the 21st century. And it takes a lot of education, and Bildung, and culture, and investment in people, and imagination for people to be able to handle that. And there has to be economic development where people experience things improving, see that the changes are worth being part of. And you only have that feeling if you can grasp what is going on, if you see opportunity in it, and if you don’t feel that your personal situation is getting worse because of it, and some of that has been lacking in russia. And as far as I understand it, it’s only Saint Petersburg and Moscow that have really been through some kind of economic development in the past 30 years. The educational system has definitely not caught up, the grasp of the world is definitely not caught up. When putin says, we’ll create our own digital industry and our own products and our own industries — like what planet are you from? You can’t produce anything that anybody else wants to buy. How can you, shut off from the rest of the world, produce anything that is worth keeping in russia? When I was a child, the joke was that they produced two things in russia that other countries were buying: one was caviar and the other one was grand pianos. I don’t know whether today it would be producing AKA 47s or something like that, and then there’s agriculture of course. But jokes aside, russia has not kept up on the cultural side with the development in the world, and I see this war as a reaction with violence to a world that they cannot grasp. They are trying to get Ukraine to comply with their worldview, and rather than changing their perception of the world, they use violence to try and change the people that are the closest to them and disagree with them. Which I have come to realize is probably what violence is generally about. It’s what two-year-olds do when the world does not behave they want it to behave. You react outwardly or you turn it towards yourself and get depressed but if you don’t want the depression you start using violence. And I see that in domestic violence; I see it in all kinds of violence, and I think that’s what is going on in russia. The world has moved on, the world is becoming a different kind of place, and russia cannot follow suit. And we, everybody, we need to deal with that; russia needs to deal with that but it’s probably not going to happen from the inside, at least not to a sufficient extent. There’s a huge task here for people who speak, and read, and write in russian to start producing that transitional symbolic world that can allow russia to join the 21st century. And I’m speaking from a country where we have pockets that are not exactly part of the 21st century either and those pockets are growing larger and larger. We see it in Hungary, we see it in Poland, we definitely see it in the United States. Who knows if there’s going to be a democratic government after 2024 in the United States? We’re really up against our own inability to grasp the world that we’re creating. And the people who feel the biggest anxiety and fear are at some point going to feel an urge to use violence, and I think that is what we’re seeing which is horrible, and extremely dangerous and it’s not just a russian problem, it’s a global problem.
[51:30] the argument for metamodernity
D: A question for Lene — What are we waiting for? Do we know how to prepare this system? Because philosophers, as we see them, can do it, can create, can be actors, and now I believe that the philosophers or thinkers as Chris says can be narrators. Are we waiting for the emergence?
L: One of the things that is also one of my arguments for metamodernity is all these people out there who seek comfort and solace in religion, and who grew up in a traditional society, and did not get a lot of education, and cannot grasp the 21st century, and will not become AI programmers and website designers and participate in the digital economy. One of the advantages with metamodernity the way I think of it, is that we can tell all these people we’re not going to take your religion away from you, you can still keep it. You can still keep your community, you can still go to services, but we would like to add something and here is a course in Internet security, here’s a course about Darwinian biology, and why it’s not in conflict with religion because it’s two radically different explanations of the same phenomenon. I think we need to calm people down and to create frameworks and institutions and political debates and public conversations, where we have room for these very different kinds of discourses. And to keep them in their appropriate places, and I think there’s a modernity, there’s game B, there is a solar punk, there are different visions of the future, and I think the more of these visions of the future productive, meaningful, sustainable, fun, ecstatic future that we can share with…
D: And wisdom humor, yes?
[56:02] the future
L: Yes, preferably. And with beauty. And there is actually a way of living in 2030 and 2050 that would be even better than we know today. It will not be with the kind of car you have today, it will be with something else and it’s going to be cleaner and the air is going to be fresher and maybe you won’t have to spend much time in a metal box on wheels. There will be Sunday dinners but they will not be beef or pork chops, and you will not be able to eat meat throughout the week but you may be able to grow your own stuff and actually meet with a lot of people and have dinner together and have more friends. There can be a lot of different ways of phrasing how we’re going to live and how we will go through a transition to something better that is different. And one of the big disasters right now is the mass extinction of insects, and I don’t think a lot of people are actually aware how bad things are. I don’t know what the situation is in Ukraine and in other places, but here in Denmark it’s like you can drive a full summer Sunday through the country and there will be one fly on the windscreen of your car. When I was a child you, and went for two hours, you had to stop and wash the windows. The flourishing of nature, and the birds singing, and the richness, the lush nature that we once had we could get that back. And we could have public fruit gardens and we could have vegetable gardens, and open street kitchens, and local neighborhoods producing their own honey, and there’s all kinds of richer and pleasurable ways of living. One of the mechanisms, the economy and the way that we literally capitalize on nature is a hierarchical consumption. The higher the productivity, the richer we are, the more we pollute, and the higher the contribution to climate change. Instead, we’ll actually have a 10 hour work week and learn to play the violin, hang out with friends, grow gardens, do all kinds of crafts, and sleep late six days a week. And we could be happy and just relax. Why are we in the industrialized part of the world still wanting to produce more and grow our economies? I know why: because we have not figured out how to have an economy that’s not based on growth, but that’s the flaw in the economic model. We need a different economic model and nobody has come up with it yet; nobody has figured out how we make the transition from a growth-based economy, where we need to pay interest on existing loans, to an economy that does not have to grow the money mass and where we could just pull the plug six days per week and then hang out and have fun and work the other 10 hours. That’s one of the things I really think we should address, and it will solve a lot of problems. The mental health crisis, crime, depression… We could all become teachers, we could all become students, we could just explore the richness of cultural heritage and of the human experience. And now we have a place like Zoom to meet with people from around the globe. We did it at the global Bildung Festival in March and we’ll do it again in September where we go around the globe on Zoom and hear about cultural heritage from around the globe. Nobody had the opportunity to do that before our generation. We can actively choose how we’re going to use these technologies and what we’re going to use them for. And then it’s not a human right to go from Europe or the United States to the other side of the globe to lie on a beach for two weeks and then fly back. There’s all this overconsumption that is just plain stupid. We can use our resources and our transportation much more wisely and I think we would all actually feel richer because of that. It’s also a lot of narrative: who actually thinks it’s fun to be at the airport but it kind of gives you status to say that you’ve been there and you traveled. We just need to change the narrative about what status is.
C: Lene, if we think about this future to use our resources, technology, and narrative in a wiser way, would you say that a war like this one is a bump in the road, a mistake, an unfortunate tragedy, an inherent mistake in the system, a reset, a possibility to reinvent the way we organize our society? How do you look at war in the middle of a development that you are presenting here very eloquently?
[01:02:49] the war in Ukraine as a war in Europe
L: I think the war in Ukraine is different because of the mere fact that it’s taking place in Europe. It’s taking place in one of the supposedly most developed parts of the world with the best functioning economy, technological development, cultural institutions, functioning institutions. I know there’s a huge problem with corruption and oligarchs in Ukraine as well. But the educational level was actually very high in the soviet union. We are in a part of the world, where there are a lot of resources and where nobody has to go to bed hungry. In other parts of the world where there are not a lot of resources and where we used to colonize societies, and where people do go to bed hungry, we’ve seen a lot of wars and I don’t think they’re less horrible but they are not the fault lines. The societies are different. And the inner cultural mechanisms of the wars there are different from the one we’re seeing in Ukraine and in that respect I think that Ukraine, the war in Ukraine, is the borderline between an old world order and a new one. And the new one can be metamodern, it can be solar punk, it can be game B, and can be many many different positive ways. There’s one major disaster which would be the hypermodern world, and the first step would be if Ukraine was losing this war because I have no idea what russia would actually do to Ukraine if they had won it. And I think we’re all better off for not even thinking that thought through, because I think that their idea of what ought to happen is just horrible, it’s not worth even thinking about it. And I don’t get how we could get to that point, and I say ‘we’ because that is part of our civilization as well. Why did we not see this development in russia? Why did our political commentators, journalists and others in russia not see this undercurrent taking place in the russian society? I know that Ukraine has warned us about it for years. Why did we not listen? Why couldn’t we imagine that what Ukraine was warning us about was true? And one of the things that I’ve realized because of this war is that you cannot warn people about things they cannot imagine. And Europe and the United States have not been capable of imagining what russia was ready to do, and even when they lined up all the military on the border of Ukraine, we still did not imagine that they were willing to go in. And when they went in, we were not willing to imagine the atrocities in Bucha and other places. And I think we’re facing the same problem with climate change and all the other disasters that we’ve created for ourselves as a species. So, I think, the war in Ukraine is a fundamental flaw in our imagination, our political structures, and our culture around the globe but particularly in the West where we also have known better not to be able to see what was coming. And that is our fault. And when we cannot communicate what is coming with regards to climate change that everybody understands it is our fault, and when we cannot communicate what is going on with mass extinction of species, and with global inequality, and the mental health crisis, a crisis that is really a crisis because we’re looking in the wrong places for solutions, we’re looking for the wrong kinds of solutions, and we are unable to imagine what is coming. Now we have a war in Ukraine. We even went through two years of a pandemic and at some point when everything was completely shut down for one or two months, we had all these wild animals on the streets of the cities and no airplanes in the sky at all. We didn’t even learn from that. People just went back to normal even though normal wasn’t sustainable or meaningful in the first place. I think as wake-up calls go, we can’t afford to waste the war in Ukraine and not learn from it. I don’t know how horrible it has to be before people actually wake up and I don’t think Ukraine deserves to pay that price. We should have been without that war, it makes no sense. Just watching the destruction that is taking place in Ukraine, it’s just insane. It’s one thing to start a war if you actually had had success with conquering the country and had been able to take over, install a puppet government and keep the buildings and the people and the country. But when you just end up destroying everything, when your plan is a complete failure and nobody wants you there — it makes no sense. It’s horrible, but it’s also stupid beyond belief. And the whole discussion about putin losing face or not losing face I think, of course, is wrong; the point is, is there any way that putin can stop the atrocities. And part of that would be if there was a way out without him losing face but I still think that to continue the war, and kick him out is a political choice, and it’s for Ukraine to make that choice. But by now any reasonable person would have realized that this was a bad idea and stopped because whatever they may win is just going to be a bunch of ruins. It is just beyond comprehension. And then it raises the question about all the other wars — were they equally stupid? They probably were, but why didn’t I realize that? Not that I’ve ever liked war, but now the stupidity of war stands out in a way that I’ve never seen before. It may be a wake-up call that actually can have an impact particularly if that whole creativity and thinking and cultural output that comes from Ukraine because of this can inspire the world and wake us up.
D: About waking up…
L: What are you doing to wake up people?
D: We have the war now but we have the situation before the war, and I think we will after the war have the situation with nurture, and with the sleeping mind. And in your practice maybe you can be the answer.
[01:12:16] changing the investment into democracy
L: What has happened here, and I speak from a Danish perspective and maybe you have experienced something similar in Austria, is people are extremely willing to help the Ukrainians right now, help Ukrainian refugees and send resources and military equipment to Ukraine. I know Germany is not exactly a first mover but the United States is there, and we’re also changing our investments into peace and prosperity and democracy here, and Sweden and Finland are joining NATO. People are waking up and it is up to those of us who see a bigger picture and who are discussing these things to expand that realization to something more. And to present a better narrative than “we just need to go back to the old ways and to what was before the war” because we need to move on to something else. I suggested or nobody disagreed with me that we will host the European Bildung day in Vilnius next year. There has to be people in Ukraine who have the mental capacity and resources to organize it and co-organize it with us and find a venue and stuff like that. But I would imagine that as soon as this war ends there will be a lot of tourists across Ukraine because everybody has been hearing about Ukraine in a way that we’ve never heard about it before and suddenly there’s like oh, there are these 40 million people who are really cool, I wonder what it actually looks like, and of course there are all these people who now have Ukrainians living in their basements or attics or with their neighbors. We have the Ukrainian flag all over Copenhagen. This is the irony. putin invades Ukraine in order to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO and becoming part of the EU, and the consequence is that across Europe people just by their own initiative start displaying the Ukrainian flag. And there is a longing for hope and there is a willingness to be woken up I think, but we have to create a stronger narrative. I think people will be curious after going to Kyiv and Lviv and other parts of Ukraine to see what’s it about, what does that country actually like. I’m one of them.
D: What is your main narrative for the people now, Lene?
[01:15:46] the narrative of the future
L: We have to come up with something together. The overall narrative is that we can create an amazing future that brings the best parts of our heritage with us. And that heritage is, of course, always local but there is also a global one and there is one that is in between, there is a European heritage, there are things that we share in Europe that we do not share with people in Africa just as there’s a shared heritage in Africa across that continent, particularly in Sub-sahara — it’s a different experience than the one that we have here. There is such a thing as a continent; China and East Asia is a different civilization, and actually a lot of the russian states are probably closer to that civilization than what goes on in Moscow and St. Petersburg. We can, in fact, create a future that is more prosperous, that is more meaningful. That is the great thing about all the technologies that we’ve developed: we can use them in completely different ways. We just need to choose to do it differently and it’s really in our heads. And we can collaborate on creating a better story, a better narrative about what the future could be like. The whole thing about AI becoming smarter than humans and then a few billionaires continuing the human species on Mars or somewhere else, it’s like what is that about? What about the rest of us and why? Why would that be better than what we have? Don’t you want trees in that future? I just don’t know how those people ever get so much power.
C: Now that’s a relief to hear.
[01:18:25] personal responsibility and the future
D: Chris, what about your narrative? What is your main narrative?
C: The thing that dominates my days is the feeling of responsibility for me personally, to people like you all the others we talk to, to actually survive this war, to create a victory, and to never stop thinking about the metamodernity that we could create after this destruction. We should not be too innocent about it because the future beyond destruction will have to focus on repairing the most basic things first, just very basic things that make daily life for the general people livable. But that’s where the responsibility comes in; as Lena said it should never be a copy of what went before — it should be something new. It’s quite paradoxical but it’s also why I value these conversations so much — this is a moment of emergency of pure survival and at the same time this is also the moment that we need to look beyond, and that’s a responsibility for everybody, I think. So, yes, a simple practical idea that Lena mentioned, to do the world Bildung day in Kyiv next year is an act of responsibility, and it’s not a fantasy, it’s not an illusion, it’s possible. Ideas like that is where it starts.
D: Thank you.
L: The conversations like this, bringing people together and asking crucial questions. I think this is incredibly important.
J: I like it when the conversations bring up even more questions than before.
D: Yes.
[01:22:47] complexity and truth
J: This gives us a material for thought and hopefully expands the view. That’s what happened to me today, as well as before, and this is very productive. I am without a main narrative. That’s because all the questions I have lead on to even bigger questions, and I’m still seeking for the point when I can say now at this moment it’s enough. The moment when I can say I have enough information, enough knowledge, enough empathy, enough material to start bringing that together, all the bricks now ready, and I have enough material to say that my answers could be good. Hard questions and more complexity is what brings us to truth. I would like to bring truth back into our life. There must be some basics, some truths for us and from this point we can start construction of our future and be more safe for that.
Questions
Can the experience of organized religion be a democratic experience? What practice would need to be in place to achieve this? What practices would have to be abandoned?
Imagine you are hosting a friend from another culture. Would you invite them to attend a church service with you? Why, or why not? What would you expect the experience of attending a religious service in a different culture to be like for you? Why?
Chris Keulemans discusses personal responsibility. Do you think individual people have a personal responsibility to imagine and seek a better future for their societies? Where do you observe such narrative-creation taking place — in art, culture, politics? Why in those spheres and not the others? How do you personally contribute to the creation of a better future [for yourself, for your society, for a distant society]?
Resources
Andersen, Lene Rachel. “Metamodernity.” Nordicbildung, 10 March 2020, https://www.nordicbildung.org/metamodernity-paper/. Accessed 21 October 2025.
Andersen, Lene Rachel. Metamodernity: Meaning and hope in a complex world. Nordic Bildung, 2019.
Andersen, Lene Rachel. “The Bildung Rose.” Nordicbildung,
https://www.nordicbildung.org/the-bildung-rose/. Accessed 21 October 2025.
“Global Bildung Network.” Globalbildung, https://www.globalbildung.net/. Accessed 21 October 2025.
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Bohm Dialogue (also known as Bohmian Dialogue) — a method for philosophy, a free dialogue format in sociocultural anthropology studies.
Transcription Editor: Oleksandr Kukharchuk
Copy Editor: Nina Murray
Content Editors: Julia Ovcharenko, Natalia Babalyk
Programme Directors: Julia Ovcharenko and Demyan Om Dyakiv-Slavitski
First published within “Philosophical Garden” Programme on: 21.10.2024
