Dear friends,

I am absolutely thrilled to begin to introduce you to our newest members of the IAM Network, which we’ll be doing over the coming weeks as we announce the awardees of the first IAM Foundation Incubation Grants. Many of these people are well-known experts and luminaries in the integrative metatheory field, and we have been grateful and extremely enthused to select these projects from the more than 50 proposals we received from around the world.

Over the coming months, you will see an acceleration of the activity and knowledge flow through the Institute after the relative quiet of foundation-building we’ve been doing, and I’m excited to be able to announce more of our Applied Metatheory Initiatives (AMIs) in the coming weeks and months. Needless to say, each AMI we’ve chosen meets the criteria we set out when we began, holding the potential to make an extremely transformational impact to a critical dimension of the modern lifeworld—with the possibility to grow from a small, incubated idea into a toolkit into a program and perhaps even into a full-blown institution—while also being led by exceptional, mature and embodied leaders in their respective domains.

With that, please join me in welcoming Brendan Graham Dempsey to IAM. Brendan will be leading the Cultural Complexity Index project, a vision that, like Brendan, I’d been dreaming about for years and was eager to help support:

The Cultural Complexity Index (CCI) targets the significant yet under-researched issue of human cultural complexification by offering quantifiable data to support theories and visibility of cultural evolution and civilizational analysis. This project addresses the need for sophisticated, integrative metatheoretical models to tackle today’s complex global challenges, aiming to move cultural complexification theories from speculative sociology to a robust social science. Utilizing the Computerized Lectical Assessment System (CLAS) to analyze hierarchical complexity in historical and contemporary texts, the CCI will produce reliable data to inform academic discourse, promote integrative thinking, and challenge the prevailing academic paradigms rooted in cultural relativism. The failure to consider the non-arbitrary relationships among cultural systems and their potential for coordinated integration has led to confusion around values and meaning in pluralistic societies. This well-intentioned relativism fuels nihilism, radical post-truth ideologies, social decoherence, and political tribalism. To address these issues and advance complex, integrative perspectives essential for tackling today’s complex problems, it is crucial to shift knowledge-generating paradigms toward a quantifiable understanding of cultural complexification. By generating multiple academic papers and a comprehensive book, the project aims to catalyze a paradigm shift in how cultural evolution is understood and valued, providing essential insights for addressing the complex problems of our time.

About Brendan:
Brendan is a writer, poet, farmer, and the director of Sky Meadow Institute, an organization dedicated to promoting systems-based thinking about the things that matter most. He holds a BA in religious studies from the University of Vermont and a master’s in religion and art from Yale University. He is the author of the 7-volume Metamodern Spirituality Series and, most recently, Metamodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Cultural Logics. His primary interests include theorizing developments in culture after postmodernism, productively bridging the divide between science and spirituality, and developing sustainable systems for life to flourish. All of these lead through the paradigms of emergence and complexity, which inform all of his work.

Please join me in welcoming Brendan to the IAM Network. Expect to hear more about the progress of this initiative in the coming months.

If you are inspired by initiatives like the Cultural Complexity Index and want to support IAM’s mission, please consider making a donation to the IAM Foundation. Your financial support directly fuels these groundbreaking projects. To contribute, email us at iam@appliedmetatheory.org.

We look forward to sharing more exciting developments as we work together to advance integrative metatheory and address the complex challenges of our time.

Thank you for your continued support and enthusiasm.

Best regards,
Robb Smith