Lene Rachel Andersen


Lene Rachel Andersen, Danish author, indie publisher, economist, futurist, and philosopher. She was born and raised in Taastrup, a suburb west of Copenhagen, Denmark. Her first books were the series Baade-Og, her latest books are The Nordic Secret, Metamodernity and Bildung. In 2018, Andersen co-founded the Copenhagen based think-tank Nordic Bildung and the folk-Bildung association Fremvirke. In 2019, she was the main initiator of European Bildung Day and in 2020 the co-founder of the European Bildung Network. Since January 2019, Andersen is a member of the Club of Rome.

Biography

From age 16, Andersen produced radio programs and wrote scripts for radio- and television satire.
After studying business economy for three years, Andersen worked as a temp teacher and a temp secretary for two years before she studied theology for four years with the specific goal become a pastor in the Danish Evangelical Lutheran church. During her years of theology studies, she wrote entertainment for Danish television, in 1993, she had a religious crisis and quit her studies when she decided to convert to Judaism
Andersen's debut as an author was in 2005 when she published the first book in the five volumes, 2,300 pages book series Baade-Og. She has since written several books, among them Democracy Handbook, which is also a website www.democracy-handbook.org. The Nordic Secret – A European story of beauty and freedom, she wrote together with Tomas Björkman. Her latest book is Metamodernity: Meaning and Hope in a Complex World.
As an indie publisher in Denmark, Andersen's Det Andersenske Forlag has focused on popularizing philosophy and topics essential to democracy.
In 2011, Andersen was appointed as a member of the Danish government's short-lived Værdikommissionen.

Baade-Og

The book series Baade-Og, consists of five books with the subtitles Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. They are written as a dialogue between the retired television producer Cornelius Magnussen, who is highly erudite and currently admitted to the psychiatric ward, and a lifestyle journalist, Tenna E. Rasmussen, who interviews him for five days.
Over the course of the five days, they cover big history and a number of scientific theories explaining how nature and culture evolve: scale-free networks, thermodynamics, chaos theory, complexity theory, the concepts of memes and meme-plexes, and evolution itself plus a host of other sciences in order to explore how culture and civilization evolve. It is all connected in what Andersen calls Global Existentialism: what kind of species do we want to be?
The scientific theories are thus linked together and put in new contexts, e.g. Darwin's evolutionary theory being compared to Kierkegaard's teachings about the three stages in life. In the Wednesday-part, the protagonist Magnussen formulates a declaration of "global existentialism" which departs from the old perception of the world characterized by the linear, absolute and inflexible. Instead, the proposed new world view takes into account relativity, complementarity and quantum theory, posing that everything is unpredictable, complex and cannot be described in absolute terms. Here the concept of "Homo Liquens" is introduced, as opposed to being "one or the other", which refers to Kierkegaard's Either-Or. Global Existentialism must also be political since human beings have a universal civil obligation. In order to preserve the rule of law, humanity, democracy and pluralism, approaches that embrace "both and" are needed for global and complex solutions.
Andersen's later books in Danish, such as italic=no from 2014, also approach the complexity of the future and how we can prepare for it.

The Nordic Secret

The Nordic Secret – A European Story of Beauty and Freedom. A book by Lene Rachel Andersen, written together with Tomas Björkman and published November 2017.
The Nordic countries are repeatedly in the top-ten of happiest countries, best for business etc. Andersen and Björkman explore why and trace the success of the Nordics back to the invention of the folk high schools that were invented in Denmark in 1844. The schools did not become an immediate success, but after the Danish military defeat to Bismarck’s Prussia in 1864, a movement started in Denmark creating folk high schools. The 1860s was also when the concept of the folk high schools was copied in Norway and Sweden, later folk high schools were started in Finland as well.
Through the folk high schools, the Nordic countries have created a culture of civic responsibility, cultural self-awareness, and high expectations of individual moral and emotional development.

Metamodernity

In 2019, Andersen wrote Metamodernity: Meaning and Hope in a Complex World. Contrary to most versions of metamodernism, which generally integrate only modernity and postmodernism, in Metamodernity Andersen explores the possible integration of indigenous, premodern, modern, and postmodern cultural code into one future cultural code that can serve as a model for meaning-making in the 21st century. The advantage of integrating all four cultural codes into metamodernity rather than just two cultural codes into metamodernism, is the much deeper potential for meaning-making that this offers.
Metamodernity thus provides us with a framework for understanding ourselves and our societies in a complex way that matches the complexity of the globalized world in which we already live. By integrating both indigenous, premodern, modern, and postmodern cultural elements, metamodernity provides social norms and a moral fabric for intimacy, spirituality, religion, science, and self-exploration, all at the same time. It is a way of strengthening local, national, continental, and global cultural heritage among all and it thus has the potential to protect cultures as the economy as well as the internet and exponential technologies are disrupting our current modes of societal organization and governance. Metamodernity, according to Andersen, will thus allow us to be meaning making at a deeper emotional level and a higher intellectual level compared to today; it will allow us more complex understanding, which may match the complexity of the problems we need to solve.

Bildung

Andersen’s latest book is Bildung: Keep Growing. The first half of this 171-page book is a condensed version of The Nordic Secret, the second half offers both a theoretical exploration of why and how folk-bildung affected Scandinavian youth and society as of the 1860s, and a new and more concise vocabulary for dealing with bildung in the 21st century.
Among the models used as analytical tools in the second half of the book are the cultural codes explored in Metamodernity, Circles of Belonging and The Bildung Rose.
The Circles of Belonging model explores 10 circles or spheres of consciousness, belonging, identity, solidarity, conscience, and sense of responsibility. The ten Circles are: 1: Self, 2: Family One, 3: Peer groups, 4: Family Two, 5: Local communities, 6: Nation and/or religion, 7: Culture Zone, 8: Humanity today, 9: All life on the planet now, and 10: Life as such, now and in the future. Circles 2-5 are real communities, whereas Circles 6-10 are what Benedict Anderson referred to as imagined communities.

The Bildung Rose

The Bildung Rose explores how societies evolve, grow and become more complex across seven domains: 1) production; 2) technology; 3) knowledge/science; 4) ethics; 5) narrative; 6) aesthetics, and 7) power. Since we need to understand our society in order to thrive, the model thus connects our inner worlds to society. Understanding the relationship between self and society is increasingly crucial as societies become more complex.

Awards and recognition

Andersen has received two Danish awards for her books:

Baade-Og