Try Anyway: A Metamodernist Approach To The World
Maps and Territory
The raw substrata of reality. Capital-T Truth. The factual events of objective history. The ethically correct answer. These are examples of what we might call “territory.” It is the thing—everything and anything—we are trying to understand, navigate, and act within on a daily basis. It is also too vast, too complex, too multidimensional to ever access directly.
So we build maps in order to reduce the territory into something navigable. These are ideological frameworks, political narratives, historical interpretations, personal stories, genre conventions, scientific models, moral codes, and more. They are not, to be clear, failures of understanding. They are the condition of understanding. They are how we interface with territories. Yet, the moment you try to describe the reality of these territories, you have already begun reducing it. That is because we operate at the level of the map. It is how we make sense of the world, solve difficult problems, coordinate with other people, and act. Maps are simply the world we find ourselves in.
The problem is not the map. The problem is mistaking the map for the territory.
This happens in specific and predictable ways, because maps are socially transmitted and socially maintained in ways that the territory is not. The territory does not care whether you believe in it. A map requires other people to share it in order to propagate. Which means maps develop their own social survival logic that is partially independent of their accuracy as descriptions of the true territory.
For example, a map that gives comfort gets shared for its comfort, not its accuracy. A map that signals tribal belonging gets shared for the belonging it produces. A map that confirms what people already believe gets shared because confirmation feels like truth. A map that is accurate but unpopular produces social costs for the people who hold it. Over time the social incentive consistently favours map-sharing over map-accuracy. The map drifts from the territory through the accumulated pressure of social incentives selecting for sharability over truth.
Maps also get corrupted from the inside. Ideology bends the map toward its conclusions before the investigation begins. Personal narrative shapes what evidence gets noticed and what gets ignored. Political convenience determines which anomalies get absorbed and which get explained away. Convention dictates what questions are worth asking and what questions are considered settled. The motivating force behind the map stops being truth and becomes something more readily available, like comfort, belonging, power, or identity.
The result is familiar. Camps form around maps of incomplete truths. Tribal defence of the map becomes the dominant intellectual activity. Vigorous attack on the other side’s similarly incomplete map becomes the primary mode of engagement. And a systematic blindness to the basic goal of the map—an honest desire to represent territory—becomes the norm.
The mechanism appears everywhere from political analysis to academic institutions and popular culture, in geopolitics and history and in film. The specific content of the map changes. The mechanism is constant.
The cure is not to do away with maps. That is impossible. We cannot live at the level of the territory, and maps are the world we find ourselves in. We also can’t fully embrace the subjectiveness of the map, either, as what results is the false equivalence of map equality, or the paralysis of action over our partiality of truth.
The cure is to bake the problem into the foundation. To choose, as the first principle of any map you build, the acknowledgment that the territory exceeds it. To make the incompleteness constitutive, a flaw to be recognized with humility not defence, as a ground on which the map stands and against which it is perpetually tested.
The first principle is this:
The world is entirely too complicated to make a fully confident, actionable map, plan, and narrative. But we should try to, anyway.
Modernism: The Worthy Hubris
Modernism’s epistemological claim was not simply that we could understand everything. It was both more careful and more ambitious than that.
It claimed that the method—the map—merely be sufficient, and that empirical investigation, accumulated rigorously over time, would inevitably converge on an accurate description of the territory, on truth. That enough examination, enough honest engagement with the evidence, would progressively close the gap between maps and territory.
This was intellectual hubris, of course, but it also produced genuine and extraordinary knowledge. Germ theory. The structure of DNA. The mechanics of markets. Airplanes. Effective government policies. In domain after domain, rigorous investigation produced maps that were genuinely more accurate than the ones they replaced. Suddenly, people lived longer, suffered less, understood more. The method worked. One only had to follow the history of development to its logical conclusion, and you would be hard-pressed to say anything but the gap was closing.
This confidence expressed itself politically as the conviction that the right application of sufficient expertise could solve any problem. Manage the economy. Engineer the ideal society. Produce justice through the correct institutional design. Each of these projects produced genuine partial achievements. Each also produced catastrophes proportional to the confidence with which the maps were treated as territory. World War 1 wasn’t a failure of science, but the application of industrial progress without moral constraint. Eugenics wasn’t anti-rational, but a rational method applied to a map that was wrong about human hierarchy, without ethical oversight, without the territorial humility to recognize the limits of your only recently discovered map. Then these same misapplied maps only accelerate into the 20th century, culminating in the horrors of World War 2, the atomic bomb, and the Holocaust.
Postmodernism: The Necessary Corrective That Went Too Far
Postmodernism arrived as the necessary corrective to this overreach. Its foundational move was to shift the question from epistemology ( how do we know things?) to ontology (what is the nature of the things we claim to know?).
The modernist said: here is the territory and here is our increasingly accurate map of it. The postmodernist replied: what you call “the territory” is itself a “map” of your purported “territory” because it has been constructed through a series of “maps” like language, ideology, history, genetics, etc. It’s, in fact, maps all the way down.
This was genuinely important. We are subjective, map-making creatures, bumbling through the world by way of our insufficient half-truths. It is also why the question “what is a chair?” exists. Because we can only build an approximate map of a chair, not engage with the base reality of chairness, because there is, in fact, no “chair” out there. “Chair” itself is a map we created. At a fundamental level, there is little difference between the atoms of chairs and not chairs.
That is to say, postmodernism’s deconstruction of grand narratives as subjective maps was largely correct as diagnosis. The Enlightenment progress narrative, the march of reason toward a final understanding, the steady improvement of human conditions through the accumulation of knowledge, could not survive honest contact with the 20th century’s evidence. The same rationalist tradition that produced antibiotics and democratic institutions also produced industrialised genocide and nuclear weapons.
But postmodernism made a mistake that its own internal logic should have prevented. Having correctly identified that all knowledge claims are situated and partial, based on incomplete and subjective maps, it treated this as a terminal conclusion instead of a beginning.
If the observer is always inside the territory, if every map reflects the position of its maker, if grand narratives serve power, then what? The postmodern answer, too often, was: deconstruct further. Point to the map. Name whose interests it serves. Refuse the grand narrative.
The problem is that there aren’t, in actuality, only maps. And modernism was correct, in that maps were getting more accurate at—if not the territory, then simply what the maps were purported to be getting more accurate at. And it’s self-evident that, if you are building a map to describe reality, like “how do bacteria interact with the body?,” some maps are more accurate than others, even if they’re always imperfect, partial, or contextual.
When deconstruction becomes the terminal activity, when pointing to the map—as a map—is offered as a substitute for engaging with the territory, the result is a specific kind of paralysis that mistakes analytical sophistication for moral seriousness. To identify Western colonialism as a map serving specific interests is a genuine insight. To leave the analysis there, to treat the deconstruction as the complete intellectual and political task, is to abandon the people for whom the territory was never a theoretical question in the first place.
And it’s worth noting the irony of the postmodern critique of the grand narrative: it is itself a grand narrative. It has a hero, which is generally the marginalized, and a villain, colonialization, western hegemony, and whatever power structures exist in society. It deconstructed the map, only to replace it with a grander one, then forgot it had done so.
The Signal Era: Postmodernism as Political Failure
The postmodern collapse into deconstruction as terminal activity found its political expression in what might be called the signal era, roughly 1994 to 2016, in which the demonstration of correct values became the primary political product. Having correctly identified that grand narratives serve power, the political culture of this period substituted the performance of awareness for the delivery of change.
The micro-agressions. The consultation boards. The diversity statements. The elaborate bureaucracies of inclusion. These were not produced by people who didn’t care. They were produced by people who had internalised the postmodern insight that language shapes reality, that naming matters, that the categories we use constitute the world, and elevated it into a complete political program. If the map is what matters, then producing the right map is the sole political act.
But the territory did not cooperate. The housing crisis was not solved by statements about housing as a human right. The distributional consequences of globalisation were not addressed by diversity initiatives at the senior management level. The Indigenous communities whose dispossession of the land was not solved by a simple land acknowledgment. The people paying the cost of the signal era’s failures were the people for whom the territory, the actual conditions of actual lives, was never a theoretical question.
The specific institutional consequence was paralysis. When signal is the metric of success, attempting something and failing is catastrophically worse than not attempting it at all. The attempt would create a record, and visible failure becomes measurable failure. Whereas producing the signal—which might come in the form of layers of bureaucracy, powerful slogans, approval of approvals, statement of intents, consultations that never conclude—produces no such record. Success is instantaneous and unfalsifiable. There is nothing to fail against.
Rational actors within signal-metric institutions correctly learned that attempting things is dangerous and producing signals is safe. The accumulated result was a governing culture that had perfected the demonstration of caring while losing the institutional capacity to deliver the things it claimed to care about.
The world’s exhaustion with signal is not a turn toward cynicism or away from the underlying concerns the signal claimed to represent. It is a turn toward falsifiability. The demand for action, for things to actually happen, for problems to actually be addressed, for the record to exist and be measurable. It is the demand that the world return to the maps that try to describe territory rather than the maps of maps of maps.
Metamodernism: The Donkey and the Carrot
Metamodernism, simply put, does not resolve the tension between modernism and postmodernism. It holds it. It accepts the postmodern insight that complete knowledge of the territory is impossible, that the observer is always situated, that all maps are partial, and then proceeds to act as if the modernist project were achievable, anyway.
Think of a donkey chasing a carrot on a stick. The donkey will never catch the carrot. This is the postmodern moment, the recognition that the terminal goal is unreachable, that full knowledge of the territory is not available to a situated observer using partial maps, but the donkey chases, anyway. Not because it has forgotten the impossibility. But because chasing is the only available response to a world that requires navigation regardless of whether perfection is achievable.
The philosopher Hans Vaihinger called this the “as if.” We act as if our maps are adequate because acting requires maps and maps require the as if. The as if is not self-deception. It is the conscious adoption of a useful fiction whose utility justifies its adoption even in full knowledge of its incompleteness.
Albert Camus called it “The Absurd” in The Myth of Sisyphus. The prescription he comes to, through Sisyphus and his eternal boulder pushing, is to acknowledge that life is meaningless, but go on pushing the boulder, anyway, and be happy to do so. This is not self-deception, as the point is not to trick ourselves into believing meaning can be created, because it is impossible, but he admits, you’ll go on trying, because that is the human thing to do.
Metamodernism asks us to do the same: to hold both the hubris of modernism and the corrective of postmodernism simultaneously. To act with the conviction that our investigations of the territory can produce genuine knowledge, that some maps are more accurate than others, that the effort of investigation is worthwhile, that conclusions can be reached and acted upon, while retaining the postmodern awareness that every map is incomplete, every conclusion provisional, every confident certainty a potential site of the map-defence failure.
This is not comfortable. It does not provide the certainty of either fully committed position. It requires holding your conclusions lightly enough to update them while holding your commitment to the process of honest inquiry firmly enough that no social pressure, tribal loyalty, or epistemic comfort can compromise it. The modernist says: act, because the map will continually improve. The postmodernist says: do not act because the map is incomplete. The metamodernist says: act because the territory requires action and the incomplete map is the best available tool for navigating it, knowing it will need updating, accepting the record of the attempt. In this way, Metamodernism is both modern and postmodern, yet, because it holds both simultaneously, it is neither, too. The metamodernist calls this the “both/neither.”
The Anyway as Moral Stance
The first portion of the metamodernist position holds that the territory is entirely too complicated to make a fully confident, actionable map. This might suggest relativism, but it is not the claim that all positions are equally valid. It is the honest acknowledgment that the territory exceeds the map, that the reduction is always incomplete, that confident certainty in any strong ideological position is a signal that an incomplete truth is being defended rather than the whole truth being sought.
The second part of the sentence, “but we should try to, anyway,” is where the position becomes something other than sophisticated shoulder-shrugging.
The “anyway” contains several things simultaneously. It contains the acknowledgment of failure in advance. You are not acting because the map is adequate, but because the territory requires action and the incomplete map is the best available tool. The failure is already built into the justification. When the territory contradicts the map you have somewhere to go that is not catastrophic identity-defence.
It contains the commitment to action, in the face of certain failure. The “anyway” is that choice. Not optimism. Not hubris. Not confidence—except confidence of failure. The full weight of the complication acknowledged, and the action taken in full knowledge of it.
It contains the commitment to falsifiability. The action creates a record. The record can be measured against the promise. The failure is information rather than catastrophe. The try-fail-learn cycle rather than the signal-receive-approval cycle.
Every map has first principles. The signal era baked in demonstrated values equal political success. The colonial narrative baked in Western power as the primary explanatory variable. These first principles are not conclusions the map reached. They are foundational, and for that reason largely invisible in the conclusions themselves.
The metamodernist move is to choose what to bake into the foundation. Not a new grand narrative. A meta-map about how to use maps. The first principle is: reality is more complicated than any map can capture, and any map that does not build that incompleteness into its foundation will eventually defend itself against the territory rather than serve it.
The person with this first principle baked into their foundation lives in a world of both/neither as ground rather than destination. They have already made the foundational commitment that tribal certainty is epistemically inferior to the uncomfortable middle before the specific social pressure arrives.
The tension between map and territory does not resolve for them. There is no synthesis that eliminates it. There is only the practice of managing it, holding the map lightly enough to update it, acting from it while remaining aware of its incompleteness, being willing to say this reduction served us here and misled us there.
Not the confident modernist who acts because the map is correct. Not the paralysed postmodernist who cannot act because the map is incomplete. The metamodernist who acknowledges the incompleteness fully, takes up the incomplete map, and tries anyway.
The world is entirely too complicated to make a fully confident, actionable map, plan, and narrative.
But we should try to, anyway.
