Metanarrative

A metanarrative is a theory of history that is said to move in a specific direction and, on the strength of which, confident predictions about the future can be made. Metanarratives have also been called Grand Narratives, or Master Narratives (usually complete with capital letters) and the philosopher Karl Popper spoke of historicism in the same context. The critical factor in a metanarrative, and what distinguishes it from a historical perspective, is the blending of the historical account into an assertion about how the future will unfold.

Several great systems of thought have articulated, or at least assumed, a historical narrative. Marxism and Christianity, for instance, both involve a metanarrative. For example, Christianity speaks of a creator God who made the world and then placed Adam and Eve in it as the most important products of that Creation. Eve's sin meant the expulsion of them and their progeny from paradise and into the world of sin, suffering, and death. People were then offered a way out of this condition when God sent his only son as savior, so those who believe in his salvific efficacy would be saved from death and live in bliss in heaven for eternity. Eventually history will be brought to a close when, at some time in the future, Jesus Christ returns (the Second Coming) to judge the living and the dead and confer punishments and rewards as appropriate. This is a metanarrative in that the theory of history blends seamlessly into a prediction about the future.

Metanarratives have been around for a long time. Ancient and medieval writers frequently spoke in terms of history being a succession of ages. In 725 CE, the Venerable Bede (673–735 CE) wrote of the ages of man in his De Temporum Ratione (On the Reckoning of Time). Bede followed the most popular route, thinking in terms of the four ages of man. This goes back to the Pythagorean numerology and to the association of the number four with the four seasons, the four cardinal directions, and the four original elements as outlined in Greek philosophy.

In the 12th century, the idea that human history is in fact punctuated by seven ages became more popular. Unlike the four-ages theory, the seven-ages theory was astrological in origin, working on Ptolemy's seven-planet (including the sun and moon) cosmos. It is most memorably recalled for us now in Shakespeare's As You Like It (act II, scene 7).

The extraordinary appeal of Marxism in the 19th and 20th centuries lay in the secular treatment it gave to what was fundamentally a religious metanarrative, with its confident belief that socialism would, in the future, be replaced by communism, which will mean that all material contradictions and inequalities will have been resolved.

Metanarratives found their most enthusiastic critics in postmodernist thinkers. Postmodernism was not so much a coherent philosophical movement as a diffuse mood. It remains influential in some humanities' disciplines but, since the second half of the 1990s, has faded from prominence in most areas. The classic definition of postmodernism was given by the French thinker Jean-François Lyotard as “incredulity toward metanarratives.” This seemingly reasonable idea was promptly undermined, however, when Lyotard made it clear he did not mean incredulity at all, but outright opposition. It was also apparent that Lyotard was, if unwittingly, assuming a metanarrative of his own. A few sentences after talking of incredulity, Lyotard spoke of “the obsolescence of the metanarrative apparatus” and the time “after metanarratives.”

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