Part II - Accountable Agents and Epistemic Engines

6 Weberian and Relationalist Worldviews: What Is at Stake?

Henry R. Nau

This volume challenges us to stretch our imagination and rethink the world of international relations. It engages modern substantialist, Weberian approaches to social science with new postmodern, relationalist or quantum approaches and concludes that substantialist views which emphasize the individual are outdated.¹ This conclusion is premature. Stretching our imagination is one thing; tearing it up is another. As we proceed, we need a clear picture of what we are stretching and potentially tearing up; it could be the reasoning individual and the human capacity to imagine itself.

This chapter offers a full-throated (albeit limited) exposition and defense of the Enlightenment/Weberian worldview that underlines modern social science. The Enlightenment worldview gave form to the aspiration for individual freedom and choice. It rescued humanity from the stultifying clutches of mysticism (Nature) and religion (the Divine). It dethroned philosopher kings and papal elites and empowered ordinary, individual human beings, equipped with reason, spirit (emotion, faith), and education, to create, assess, debate, and pass judgment on alternative worldviews. Natural science exploded under Isaac Newton’s vision of an orderly universe fixed in time and space following predictable laws. And social science spawned a virtual cornucopia of modern worldviews, both individualistic and authoritarian. Liberalism (John Locke), capitalism (Adam Smith), humanism (Max Weber), communism (Karl Marx), and fascism (Friedrick Nietzsche), among others, competed (and fought) to organize and direct social and scientific life.² In the West, through struggle, humanist and capitalist worldviews prevailed, fueling material progress, the spread of republican institutions, and gnawing anguish about minorities left behind.

Now, postmodern worldviews of relationalism and hyper-humanism (unity of human beings and nature) challenge Enlightenment worldviews. They reject the individualistic ontology of human affairs in favor of a wholistic or cosmological one. Milja Kurki writes: “The relational perspective explored here suggests that the sciences – natural and social – are undergoing a ‘relational revolution,’ moving from Cartesian, Newtonian, and empiricist ways of knowing toward more relational ontologies and epistemologies in line with not only quantum science and relativity theory but also with ecological thought and decolonization of the sciences.”³ Relationalist views envision a world of intense and entangled relationships deeply embedded in historical and cosmological context, in which substantialist things such as individuals and institutions do not exist or exist only in emergent form when they are investigated. In this holistic and processual universe, individual human beings have no location (position), no alternative (choice), and no escape (only one observed universe). The relationalist worldview draws from quantum science, in which reality is not fixed in time or space but appears simultaneously and unpredictably in multiple places and dissolves the distinction between the observer (individual) and the observed (universe).

These different worldviews not only reflect different ontologies, they prescribe different world politics. As Kurki infers, the relationalist turn entails a political agenda – a broadside assault on western rationality (reason), individuality (freedom), capitalism (growth), and colonialism (control/hierarchy).⁴ In place of Enlightenment goals, relationalism advocates a future agenda of environmentalism that prioritizes climate change, hyper-humanism that relinquishes human control of nature, and egalitarianism that flattens material and moral differences. Much more is at stake than abstract intellectual discourse. The relationalist turn may imperil the very notion of free, reasoning individuals capable of self-conscious thought and choice in human affairs.

This chapter insists that individual human beings remain at the epicenter of social science inquiry. Quantum science does not mandate an epochal transformation of worldviews from rationality and individualism to relationality and cosmology.⁵ Modeling the social sciences after the natural sciences is, in fact, a cardinal mistake. Relationalists highlight that mistake when they argue that Enlightenment science under Newton hijacked the social sciences and created a disenchanted modernity of atoms (individuals) and laws (causality) devoid of spirit and meaning. Now they make the same mistake by modeling the postmodern world after quantum science. But the Newtonian world was never just a billiard ball world of fixed entities, time and space. It was inspired and limited by Christian beliefs that the divine did not roll dice (a predictable world) and human beings were made equally worthy in the image of the divine. And the quantum worldview today is not just a mathematical model of entanglement and uncertainty; it is also a social vision to reimagine the political world as harmonious, contingent, and relationally or group-based (identity politics, multiculturalism, etc.), rather than as competitive, progressive, and individually based (markets, individual human rights, etc.).

The Enlightenment produced good and evil. This chapter does not claim otherwise. The Enlightenment’s crown jewel, however, was the emancipation, for better and worse, of the individual human being as a reasoning, responsible, and rights-seeking agent in society. On balance, this secular, individually driven humanist worldview was progressive, materially and socially. Despite all of its wars and warts, the Enlightenment era superintended unparalleled expansion of material prosperity, human longevity, public education, political freedom (yes, more democracies than ever before), and global equality (yes, half of the world’s population is now middle class).⁶ Any post-Enlightenment worldview that challenges the individualist ontology of the Enlightenment has a high bar to meet.

The chapter proceeds in four parts. The first part explores the relationship between the individual and the whole, the timeworn conundrum of agency and structure. It contends that the individual remains primary over structure in several principal ways: as a source of endless diversity, a repository for the capability of reason, a portal of entry for human conversation, and the only species thus far that practices science and is capable of representing and studying itself. Individuals are not autonomous, but they have space in their embedded situation for choice and change. The main issue between this chapter and others in this volume is how much space they have and where that space resides. Relationalist accounts tend to discount agency at the individual level, Weberian accounts at the structural level. We risk a lot by disregarding either.

The second and third parts address the content and juxtaposition of competing worldviews. How do we compare and test them? This part holds fast to the notion of a universal capability of individual human beings to reason and a universal method of science to test alternative propositions (worldviews) by experiment against an outside physical and social world. To be sure, the content of reason and science is parochial and differs by culture. In some worldviews, rational and individualistic factors play the larger role, in others nonrational (e.g., emotion, intuition) and holistic factors.⁷ If these multiple worldviews are incommensurable, however, we have no way to evaluate and test them. Worldviews become religious not scientific undertakings, adopted by faith not reason. On the other hand, if we retain science as a common method (mathematics, experimentation), we can compare and evaluate worldviews across different cultures. In this section I assume that all worldviews incorporate two elements: content, or their relative emphasis on rational vs. nonrational factors; and scale, or their relative emphasis on individualistic vs. structural levels of analysis.⁸

The fourth part addresses the ethics of different worldviews. Worldviews have consequences – some horrific, such as the Holocaust. Who or what is accountable for these outcomes? If Weberian worldviews have moral shortcomings – and they do – relationalist worldviews do as well. Calling for openness and multiple worldviews (modernities), relationalist views are at times quite dogmatic. They pass judgment on worldviews as “right” or “wrong” not as “false” or “not false,” and speak of the pursuit of “truth” against which, they claim, resistance is futile.⁹ They downplay individual agency and emphasize entangled relationships, conjuring up a “totalizing” worldview that marginalizes individual rights and privacy. They blur distinctions between science and religion and argue that worldviews “are inescapably normative.”¹⁰ Yet, curiously, relationalists say little about the substance of relationalist norms. They pass over the question of how a relationalist world, in which all possibilities are welcomed, defends itself against the barbarity of an Adolf Hitler or a Joseph Stalin; they infer that other religions (Hinduism, Buddhism) are more in tune with nature than Christianity; they refrain from spirited criticism of worldviews that discriminate against women (Saudi Arabia, India) or Muslims (China); and they blame America and the Enlightenment for elevating European worldviews and marginalizing others. Weberian worldviews, by contrast, with their individualistic and disaggregated ontology, accommodate alternative worldviews as long as these worldviews submit to objective falsification and do not claim that their world is the only world which cannot be tested or resisted.¹¹

6.1 The Individual and the Whole

As noted, Enlightenment worldviews are multiple. Where do we start? Michael Barnett provides a pretty good definition of liberal Enlightenment worldviews: “By privileging reason over superstition, change over tradition, science over religion, and, most importantly, humanity over discrimination, enlightenment thought held that people should be judged as individuals and on their achievements, not their religion or other discriminating factors.”¹² In this world, individuals are not only real and significant, they are morally and ethically accountable! They do not disappear, along with other “things,” from a Newtonian/Weberian world of “essence and identity” to join a relationalist world of “different kinds of dances.”¹³

Where did this emphasis on individualism come from? In the early Enlightenment, it came from Isaac Newton and his application of individual reason to the study of nature. “Think of it,” Gale Christianson writes, “a lone human being bent low over a desk, supplied with nothing more than a quill pen, a pot of homemade ink, and countless sheets of blank paper, calculating precisely how the cosmos goes.”¹⁴ In the late Enlightenment, Max Weber generalized this application of reasoning to the study of human as well as natural sciences. Individual human beings, not the divine or prophets, interpreted reality. In Weber’s sociology, according to Stephen Kalberg, “individuals are genuine actors capable of interpreting their social realities and of initiating creative action.”¹⁵ (Note the word “creative”: the capacity to imagine something that is neither embedded in the past nor represented in the present.) Kalberg continues: “Weber welcomed emphatically the freedoms and rights the modern world bestowed upon the individual¹⁶ … Individuals act, for Weber, not social organisms or collectivities … meaning is found only in the consciousness of human beings.”¹⁷ In their introduction to From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, Gerth and Mills concur: “His [Weber’s] point of departure and the ultimate unit of his analysis is the individual person.”¹⁸ In Weber’s own words, “action in the sense of a subjectively understandable orientation of behavior exists only as the behavior of one or more individual human beings.”¹⁹

Weber considers four types of social action rooted in individual behavior: means–ends rational action (rational choice), value-rational action (idealistic or ideological), affectual action (feeling or emotional), and traditional or customary action (habitual).²⁰ Only one, means–ends rationality, is materially based. He does not conflate the social world with the natural world. Reality is not dead matter, disenchanted. It is both material (means–ends) and ideal (value-rational), emotional (affectual) and habitual (practices). Enchantment persists. It just doesn’t rule human minds at the expense of reason, as it did in pre-Enlightenment thought.

Per Weber, ideal and material interests intersect to yield patterning action. This patterning action is shaped by both individuals and structure. Structures exist, to be sure. Weber speaks of “value spheres” which prescribe obligations in various life spheres and “are not created by individuals.”²¹ But value spheres conflict; there are no universally valid value spheres; and the individual adjudicates among them: “Torn between conflicting obligations derived from different value spheres, the individual must simply choose.”²² For Weber, this choice is free, not determined by science or higher norms. As Gerth and Mills write, “He [Weber] felt that freedom consists not in realizing alleged historical necessities but rather in making deliberate choices between open alternatives.”²³ For Weber, “choice is the task of life itself.”²⁴ While Weber accords a role to structure, he warns against the holistic, all-encompassing notion of structure that Grove emphasizes in relationalism. As Kalberg writes, “organic theories, according to Weber, are helpful and indeed indispensable, yet, if utilized other than as a means of facilitating preliminary conceptualization, a high risk of ‘reification’ arises: ‘society’ and the ‘organic whole’ rather than the individual may become viewed as the single important level of analysis”²⁵

Relationalists reject this Weberian view of individualism. They indict individualism as “the inability of man to see itself as part of nature due to a Christian legacy of seeing humans as ‘lifted’ above nature.”²⁶ The original sin is hierarchy, “the ‘human’ standing over the ‘environment’,”²⁷ free and separate from nature (animals, plants) and other human beings (society), able potentially to surmount heritage and context, dethrone the architects of authority (church and state), and shape, in part, the world of the future. As Kurki suggests, this heresy of hierarchy derives from the Protestant worldview that human beings are called upon by reason and faith to explore, master, and grow the natural universe around them. By fostering such heresy, Christianity did not unleash freedom; it unleashed the master-less man, the rapacious capitalist, and the relentless colonialist.

Relationalists minimize the role of individual reason in human affairs and categorically reject any universal principles derived from reason. As Kurki writes, “knowing through reason is a particular way of materializing the world, not a universal manifestation of some abstract principles.”²⁸ Nevertheless, the capability of individual human beings to reason and give meaning to the world around them is universal, even if the content of reason and its multiple manifestations are parochial and differ by culture, religion, and other factors. As Allan points out,²⁹ the application of reason or rationalization takes many localized forms. Individuals are endlessly diverse and wrapped up in many parts: heritage, race, class, nationality, emotion, psychology, intuition, charisma, character, reason, religion, civilization, cosmology, and so on. Many of these parts are deeply embedded and constitute the historical antecedents or “inheritance” that Allan emphasizes; they anchor individuals in place. Reason, however, is the one part that offers the human being a potential escape from this procrustean embeddedness.³⁰ Incorporating self-consciousness, reason “lifts up” the individual human being to investigate, organize, study, and influence nature and society. Reason facilitates reflection, discussion, and self-study, offering a portability across differing worldviews that emotion, intuition, and religion do not. In some worldviews, reason plays a bigger or prior role; in others, intuition or religion does.³¹ But in all cultures reasoning is present if individuals choose to apply it. To argue otherwise is to discriminate, to endow a particular individual or culture with a capability of reason that other individuals and cultures do not possess. And to ascribe reason to nonhuman beings (plants and animals) ignores the obvious fact that they do not have that capability yet, at least not in sufficient measure to permit self-study. When they do, they will join the world of humans and represent themselves. Hyper-humanism will have arrived.

In a sense, the capability to reason is the agency of modern human life. This agency is distributed at all layers or scales of human activity, individual and collective. It is perhaps most accessible on the individual scale; but without the structures of schools and free societies that educate and protect it, reason soon withers, locked up in monasteries, gulags, and samizdats. Thus, individuals and the groups they form are never completely autonomous from society. Indeed, at birth, they are relationally constituted without choice. But subsequently, based on the Weberian worldview, individuals may be educated by reason and reasoning communities (that’s us, the academy) to determine meaning for themselves and to choose practices and communities that meet their standards of reality and morality. Relationships are important, but relationships, unlike individuals, are not self-conscious and do not exercise reason. Somewhere in the relationalist world, therefore, agency – by which I mean self-conscious, reasoning individual human beings and the inter-actional (not intra-actional as in relationalism) communities they join and leave – is the starting and enduring point of reflective inquiry. For Weberian thought, the bottom line is that human agency, at whatever level it may exist, is sufficient enough to provide meaningful choice.³²

Individualism is indispensable for several other reasons. First, individual human beings are the only actors that can represent themselves. The kind of discussion we are having in this volume would not be possible without individuals. Notice there are no institutions authoring a chapter, no representatives of the embedded world we inhabit – no community practices, background or tacit knowledge, cosmological elements, religious communities, relationalist bundles or folds, quantum worlds, or any other holistic entity. Not even AI (artificial intelligence) – that is, no robots equivalent to the individual human being, at least not yet.³³

Second, individualism is the source of endless diversity in human affairs. No two reasoning individuals are exactly the same! This is a remarkable feature of human evolution and distinguishes “human” particles studied by the social sciences from “natural” particles studied by natural scientists. Being “unlike,” human beings do not equate with “like atoms” in a Newtonian world or “like particles/waves” in a quantum world. To impose the natural science model on the social sciences commits the second sin of Aristotle’s understanding of equality: it treats unequal things – natural particles and human beings – equally.³⁴

Third, human particles seem to be, again so far, the only specie that can conceptualize and study themselves, the only specie that is self-conscious and can practice both natural and social science.³⁵ If nonhuman beings (animals) were included in this exercise, how would they communicate and represent themselves? They would have to depend upon human beings. But who gave human beings that right? As Kurki acknowledges, “we represent them even at present, but often badly: we can learn to represent them and ourselves and our symbiotic relations better.”³⁶ Maybe so, but isn’t the presumption that we can represent them at all without their consent an exercise of hierarchical or colonial control? I’m not arguing against speaking out for animal rights. It’s a good thing, in my worldview, when human beings take care of all living things and nurture nature. I’m suggesting instead that human beings are the only creatures that raise these questions. Nonhumans are not yet at the table or, as far as we know, clamoring for a seat.

Finally, even if individuals are totally entrapped in the embedded features of their environment (that is, not autonomous at all), they are still the only channels by which we learn about worldviews, including holistic ones that deny individuality. Worldviews don’t emerge out of the ether. They emerge from the mind and experience of a single individual.³⁷ We can get to the “real” world of relationalism or any other “real” world only by starting in an individualist world. The individual remains the portal of entry for worldviews and intellectual discourse about them.

6.2 Multiple Worldviews

There seems to be, at least to me, a consensus in this volume as to what worldviews are. They are a combination of values together with methods by which we navigate the world around us.³⁸ Without methods, worldviews become pure ideals or truth. They cannot be tested; they can only be accepted, like religion. And without values, worldviews become meaningless methods leading to anomie, the ultimate disenchantment. Critics like to characterize Weber’s approach as “methodological individualism,” but they ignore the prior value he placed on the reasoning individual. The individual was not a tool of analysis; it was the valued agent that gave meaning to analysis.

One way to compare worldviews, therefore, is to examine the relative content of worldviews – that is, the relative role of rational (reason) vs. nonrational (religion, emotion, etc.) factors in various worldviews, and the relative level of analysis being emphasized (i.e. individual vs. structure). Weberian worldviews tend to be heavy on reason and the individual level of analysis, relationalist worldviews on nonrational factors and the holistic level of analysis.³⁹

In this volume, Milja Kurki, Peter Katzenstein, and Jairus Grove make the case for a strong relationalism that minimizes rational factors in human behavior and adopts a deeply historical and holistic level of analysis. Katzenstein highlights the nonrational aspects of reality: “The interpretation of reality as consisting only of risk is not readily open to rational reconstruction or refutation.”⁴⁰ Kurki emphasizes the interconnectedness of everything: “nothing in the universe is outside of relational unfolding of the universe – not even the scientists or the laws of the universe which are also made relationally.”⁴¹ Grove prioritizes intuition over reason (see footnote 31) and, while acknowledging that some layers or scales of agency may exist within the holistic structure, argues that such agency does not equate with a rational subject or individual human being. Instead, agency is relational at all scales: “We are not constituted by relations. We are relations.” The individual “comes from the unity we ‘feel’ as an ‘I’.” Actors become assemblages, ensembles, and folds that exceed the particular human subject and appear depending on “at what scale one asks the question.” “The scale of the investigator,” Grove adds, “radically alters what appears as a part and what appears as a whole.”⁴²

Bentley Allan’s worldview is slightly less holistic and more attentive to creative elites, albeit still acting at a deeply embedded level of analysis. He starts with cosmological elements – ontology, episteme, temporality, cosmogony, and human destiny – that provide the ingredients for worldviews and exist outside worldviews in the sense that they come first.⁴³ Then, according to Allan, “creative actors” mix and match these elements in various ways to produce worldviews or “local stabilizations of cosmological elements.” The content of these stabilizations is not universal and depends on the history and experiences of different cultures. In the case of western thought, rationalization produced a localized worldview of “materialism” and “object-orientation.” This combination gave rise to “modernist values of rationality, control, and growth which serve as the basis of world politics today.”⁴⁴ In other civilizations, rationalization created nonmaterialist and “subject” oriented worlds (Haitian Iwa, Buddhism). Allan creates more space for individual agency: “Agency is always possible but never omnipotent. Creative agents must work with and against the cosmological and institutional resources at hand.”⁴⁵ The question is whether contemporary elites can interpret or reinterpret their inherited experience and alter it in any way that significantly affects the future. Who are the creative elites today that become the embedded historical elites tomorrow?

Presenjit Duara takes one element of Allan’s cosmological menu, namely temporality, and links it, via the “epistemic engine” of the nation-form, with the Enlightenment worldview of modernity. Like Allan, he is sensitive to the multiple content of Enlightenment modernity – autocratic, emphasizing nonrational and holistic factors, as well as liberal, emphasizing reason and individualistic factors – and regards agency as weak even at collective scales. That leads him to wonder if the agentic force of civil society, which he sees as the most hopeful challenger of the Enlightenment nation-form, is ultimately too weak, too diffused to succeed.⁴⁶

Timothy Byrnes drops down below the cosmological level of analysis and starts with religions, not cosmological elements, as foundational to worldviews. Religions have moral content, are multiple, and are concerned with truth not just process, interaction, or inanimate cosmological elements. He raises the interesting question of how we can know separate religions. Because religion is not only a way of seeing the world but also a way of being in the world, how do we bridge different worlds of being? He advocates a path of “informed empathy.”⁴⁷ You stand outside other religions and become informed, and then you try to imagine that other religion by moving as close as you can to it without assuming or usurping its identity. But how close is too close? When do you invade or take over the other religion? Here Byrnes acknowledges a role for agency. Religions exist separately; they do not smear into one another like wave functions. On the other hand, religious communities are deeply embedded in the historical process. They are mutually constituted with other factors like politics, such that “a separation of religion and politics is a chimera.”⁴⁸

Michael Barnett disaggregates the analysis still further. Unlike Byrnes, he does not see religion and politics as mutually constituted (holistically entangled) and thus explores a critical possibility – rooted cosmopolitanism – in which the two variables are separated – namely a Jewish community in America committed to a cosmopolitan theology and humanism, but rooted in a non-Jewish territorial state. By moving to a lower level of analysis, he retrieves a variable and a degree of freedom that is otherwise lost when variables are mutually constituted.⁴⁹ For Barnett, Jewish worldviews derive from independent forces of religion and politics (territoriality) and have distinctive qualities that define “who is and can be a member, and what are the boundaries between themselves and others.” These worldviews worry about borders where entanglement may threaten security. They also have “core tenets.” A worldview may change not only from external entanglements but also from internal tensions when members of the community begin to debate its core characteristics.⁵⁰ To be sure, external circumstances still matter. Interacting in America, the Jewish community by and large favored an open, civic nationalism of cosmopolitanism; interacting in the Middle East, it chose a closed, ethnic nationalism of separateness. Yet value commitments or agency may hold the key to future outcomes. Barnett speculates that Jews in America and Israel may drift apart “if American Jews continued to orbit around a rooted cosmopolitanism; and Israeli Jews migrated from a prophetic Zionism to ethnonationalist Zionism.”⁵¹

In adopting a Weberian worldview, Mark Haas and I accord the greatest emphasis to the role of reason and the individual level of analysis. To some significant degree, leaders (elites) act independently in the present both to reinterpret the past and to shape the future. While they form groups and adapt to social circumstances, they also change those circumstances and ultimately create over time the structures that define a particular historical experience.⁵² Some structures may be harder to change than others. Some may never change – in most cases not because they are unchangeable, but rather because human actions and interactions have not yet become aware of them or mobilized sufficient effort to engage and transform them. From the perspective developed by Haas/Nau, most structures are susceptible to change, not by one action or one human being (or even by one generation or one nation) but by a train of actions and interactions moving across time in a similar direction. Agency is distributed across all levels and time but it is strongest at lower levels and contemporaneously where it constantly “stirs the pot” to inhibit, shape, or diffuse subsequent structures at more holistic levels.⁵³

I entered the investigation of worldviews by trying to find a framework to compare foreign policy debates in aspiring powers (China, India, Iran, Japan, and Russia) and determine whether those debates were moving away from or toward the foreign policy debates in the United States.⁵⁴ I was reaching for a structural level of analysis that would go beyond individual events and leaders (the focus of quotidian foreign policy) but not ossify in incommensurable cultures and civilizations. I created a framework of four schools of foreign policy thought – nationalist, realist, liberal internationalist, and conservative internationalist. To be as objective as possible, I defined these schools in neutral terms of scope (limited, expansive), means (military, diplomatic/economic), and ends (accept or transform world) of foreign policy, rather than ideological or substantive terms of liberalism, fascism, Islamism, communism, culture, and the like. I started, in short, with a set of rationalist categories (science as method) presumed to be accessible to all cultures through a universal human capacity to reason (reason as universal). The country specialists in the study said the framework could not be applied across cultures. Categories don’t mean the same thing in different cultures. Well, we persuaded them to try anyway, and they were surprised at the extent to which it did illuminate the respective movement of debates among the countries.

Thus, it is possible, I concluded, to study the behavior of alternative cultures/religions/worldviews without either essentializing those worldviews (danger of the Weberian approach) or shackling them in a structure that can be challenged, if at all, only from within (danger of the relationalist approach).

6.3 Worldviews and Science

To do this, however, we need standards. The Enlightenment gave us the standard of science as a universal method: mathematics, experimental practice. That method depends upon the assumption of a real “objective” world even if we can never know that world. We ask and test how that world works, based on the values we hold (e.g., world is predictable or uncertain), and the real world pushes back against our experimental inquiries and tells us which worldviews are consistent with it and which are not. Notice science as method tells us only which worldviews are not false (i.e., not inconsistent with reality); it never tells us which worldviews are true (i.e., the actual reality).

This is a crucial point, at least for me. Truth lies not in the universal method of science but in the multiple values that inform science as method. Newton’s Christian views led him to expect and practice a “predictable” science; Weber’s human-centric views led him to anticipate a “progressive” science; the values held by Weber’s critics led them to expect a “disenchanted” science; Hitler’s fascist and Stalin’s communist worldviews led them to promote “racist” and “pseudo” sciences (Mengele and Lysenko). Relationalists value conjunctive relationality (not individuals) and pursue a science of local not universal knowledge. Values inform all worldviews, but science as method tells us which worldviews fare best against an assumed objective world.

Strong relationalists reject science as a universal method of testing against an objective reality. They talk about “different sciences”⁵⁵ and argue that “science … is not defined by a ‘method’.”⁵⁶ Quoting Roberto Unger and Lee Smolin, Kurki concludes: “There is no scientific method, science is fundamentally defined as a collection of ethical communities.”⁵⁷ Here we come very close to worldviews as pure values (ethical communities) with methods being anything – scientific, magical, religious – that values dictate. Each community defines its own value and methods, and presumably the “real” world accommodates them all because there is no common method to determine which worldviews are not consistent with an assumed “real” (i.e., objective) world.

There are three layers of uncertainty involved in this issue of scientific objectivity (universality). Newtonian science studies the natural (nonhuman) world: objects such as planets and particles which cannot change their characteristics and which scientists neither like nor dislike. Laws are fixed and cannot be affected by the scientist. The human observer is also situated outside and independent of the natural world. In Newtonian science, the observer can be mostly objective even though scientists still operate in an intersubjective, ethical (social) community (for Newton, the Church of England) that defines what is or is not to be investigated and expected.

Weberian science studies not only the natural but also the social world in which human beings are involved and can change their minds. Laws are no longer fixed, and the observer, though still distinct, studies things it likes and dislikes, such as churches, trade unions, markets, political parties, etc. While Weberian scientists assume they can strip their social preferences from their scientific pursuits, they are human, not superhuman, and can succeed only up to a point. Objectivity is more elusive.⁵⁸

Quantum science adds a third level of uncertainty.⁵⁹ It assumes that the human observer is not only studying itself but is now inextricably entangled with the world it is studying. The observer, the observed, and the background exist only together (there is no separate individual, observation, or background), and emerge only when a particular question (measurement) is asked (made). Observation triggers or collapses the entangled quantum world and reveals the only world we can know. There is no world behind the observed one. Objectivity, in short, is now out of the question. The world depends entirely on the questions the observer asks.

Relationalism in general pushes us toward this quantum level of uncertainty. But a strong relationalism goes beyond quantum science in two ways: it drastically reduces (if not eliminates) the role of the observer (the individual investigator), and it gives up the universal method of experimental science in favor of a localized and diluted method of “trial and error.”⁶⁰ Quantum science does neither. In the case of the observer, it elevates, not eliminates, the significance of the observer (individual). Through the act of measuring, the observer now literally “creates” (“gives meaning to”) the world we observe, which is the only world we can know.⁶¹ As Steven Weinberg muses, “Man may indeed be the measure of all things.”⁶² That seems to reinforce the Weberian worldview that individuals are a significant location of agency. But in quantum physics the observer now has no way to test observations against an objective world because there is no objective world. The universal scientific method is no longer available, and we have to settle for a localized form of experimentation based on trial and error, yielding results which cannot be generalized. That point seems to reinforce the relationalist worldview.

But wait a minute. Some Newtonian (classical) physicists still contest the quantum proposition that there is no objective world. They argue that wave collapse is going on all the time objectively in a real but unknown world behind the observed world. They seek evidence of such “objective” wave collapse, independent of “subjective” measurement.⁶³ Interestingly, in these efforts, Newtonian and quantum scientists use the same methods of science, mathematics and experiments, but derive very different content from those methods. Neither, however, has given up on the idea of science as a universal method. Quantum science may still prevail, but if it does it won’t prevail forever, any more than Newtonian science did. Science advances from one falsified theory to another “not yet” falsified theory, not from false to true (at which point science ends).⁶⁴ And, since scientists tell us that we know only about 4 percent of the universe as we see it, the real world that we don’t see is likely to remain elusive for a very long time to come. Scientists therefore should not speak about “the reality” let alone “the truth” of their findings, only about a method that tells them which findings are not false or not yet false.

In the meantime, quantum science raises some harrowing ethical issues when applied to the human world: the potential of unhinged human observers playing the role of creator, and the absence of any common moral standard by which to hold varying worldviews accountable.

6.4 Worldviews and Ethics

Having downsized if not eliminated the role of the reasoning individual in shaping worldviews, and having adopted a quantum view that the world we see is the only one there is, relationalism in this volume has surprisingly little to say about ethical and moral responsibility, either individual or collective. This neglect follows from relationalist logic. Because the world is holistic and incorporates all possibilities, there is little or no choice, and hence little or no responsibility. We have removed practically all degrees of human freedom to act and change the world. What’s left are different values or religions and related methods of science which are compatible but not commensurable, harmonious but not integral, and equivalent but not competitive. Katzenstein writes:

both science and religion are variegated practices of different ways of knowing … Both inquire into the possibility that the world might be different than it appears. Both are instances of us living in multiple realities and thus are examples of the profound human capacity of meaning-making … Religious and scientific practices are rooted in the world of play.⁶⁵

Play is an interesting term, implying a game or imaginary reality. In that game, however, what are the rules, and who makes them? Maybe no rules are needed. Science and religion are drawing closer together: “the border between quantum mechanics and religion is porous.”⁶⁶ Religious values and scientific methods do not collide, they resonate. Multiple beliefs and realities cut or “smear” into one another like quantum waves. They blend, harmonize.

Such a harmonious concatenation of multiple worldviews expresses an aspiration that we all share. If relationalism is nothing more than an appeal for curiosity, openness, and tolerance, it is welcomed. But what if multiple worldviews do not harmonize? What if some worldviews condone slavery, deny individual human rights, justify genocide, discriminate against women (Islam in Saudi Arabia) or minorities (Uighurs in China), wage holy war against the infidel, and so on? In the flattened ontology that relationalists advocate, are all worldviews “true” or “moral”?

The issue here is not whether human beings are entangled but what the content of that entanglement is. The content of entanglement is what Haas and I try to get at with the concept of “ideological distance,” whether worldviews are converging or diverging.⁶⁷ According to relationalists, the quantum social world is cooperative; ideological distance is always at or near zero. Conversely, the Weberian world is conflictual; ideological distance is always positive and sometimes large. As Alexander Wendt explains:

If your starting premise for thinking about social life is atomistic, then conflict is the natural starting point for life – every organism is out for itself, they’re all selfish, it’s all about survival of the fittest. Cooperation is very difficult because we’re all separate and all trying to survive and do our own thing. On the other hand, if your starting point is holistic, where everything’s entangled, then cooperation may be much easier to achieve. It may even be the default situation, and conflict is the exception. So it turns upside down a lot of the foundational assumptions, I think, of mainstream social science.⁶⁸

Whether social life is atomistic or entangled, however, does not tell us much about outcomes. The master–slave relationship is entangled but not cooperative. The relationship between liberal states in the democratic peace is separate but not conflictual. No conflict in either case may mean no freedom to challenge slavery or democracy, and therefore no moral accountability – a totalitarian entanglement for which no one is responsible and which, apparently, no one can change.

Over time, of course, the content of social entanglement does change. Outright slavery is no longer acceptable. Communism, at least in the Soviet form, is gone. How does such change occur, and who is responsible for the original conflict and its eventual outcome? Katzenstein writes: “Divergent worldviews do not get resolved by appeals to logic and evidence but through individual experiences and social processes.”⁶⁹ So, how do “individual experience” and “social processes” accomplish this resolution? If logic and evidence are ruled out, what are the means of resolution – emotion, habit, intuition, etc.? Are these means peaceful or violent? Practically everyone agrees that Nazism had to be defeated by rationalist instruments (Grove might say assemblages) of power; Nazi ideology could not be blended or accommodated by relationalist effects of norms.

The relationalist worldview lacks any ethical standard for evaluating or resolving divergencies in the content of alternative worldviews. Everything is local and specific even though the world itself is holistic and entangled. And all events are uncertain even though the quantum model itself is certain and can’t be challenged. The combination of the loss of objectivity (no real world behind the observed one) and the multiplicity of incommensurable but equivalent worldviews leaves almost everything up for grabs. A flattened ontology leads to a flattened ethical landscape as well.

Kurki seeks a relational ethic of response-ability: an ability to respond sensitively, openly, and thoughtfully to human and nonhuman relationships.⁷⁰ It is an appealing insight. But in a world in which there are no things (individuals) or backgrounds (objective world), where exactly is this responsibility located, and what is its substance? Grove, for example, sees violence as relational but not easily overcome by consciousness-raising.⁷¹ You can become aware of relations, he points out, without coming to a sense of the common good. Kurki ponders the same point about knowledge: science “is part of becoming … what this means is that we do not have clear criteria for good or bad knowledge.”⁷² The substance of ethics or knowledge, what is good and what is bad, is hard to pin down. Even harder to pin down is the location of ethical responsibility. In Grove’s examination of presidential powers and nuclear weapons, he admits that the president is ultimately unaware of who or what is in control.”⁷³ And if no one is in control, no one has responsibility.

Responsibility is not merely the “ability to respond.” It’s the ability to respond “by someone or something” in a “substantive” way toward some moral “end.” Weber distinguished between an “ethic of responsibility,” which Kurki’s formulation might capture, and an “ethic of ultimate ends,” which Kurki does not consider.⁷⁴ Perhaps this is because an ethic of ultimate ends requires more than a relationship; it requires a direction, an arrow, not simply a flat surface or “fold.”

As noted earlier, Grove suggests that “the scale of the investigator … radically alters what appears as a part and what appears as a whole.” If that’s the case, the individual investigator, the individual, is back at the heart of a quantum-based social science model.⁷⁵ The Weberian commitment to the individual human being as the source of meaning and morality in a multiscalar world remains indispensable. That does not rule out agency at other levels. Relationalist factors are multiple, real, and often confining. But, to a meaningful extent, they form out of the interpretations and interactions of reasoning individuals, they change because of individual initiatives, and they dissolve because individuals leave and join other relationships. The only “authenticated” actors beyond the individual in a Weberian worldview, therefore, are those groups, institutions, classes, etc., that are chosen or affirmed voluntarily by the consent of individual human beings acting in a setting where they have a meaningful degree of choice. Holistic worldviews diminish that degree of choice and consent, however well-meaning they may be by embracing all possibilities.

The Weberian view judges and chooses. That is neither easy nor pleasant. No one wants to be accused of being judgmental. But we all do it.⁷⁶ Indeed, how does one avoid it? The Holocaust was a monstrous act of evil. How do we understand it in a world that blends religion and science? As Barnett (Chapter 5) shows, the Holocaust poses a wrenching question of existence, not just a vague smearing of relationships and “response-ability” to change or becoming. If such a question can be answered only in a specific situation (when the quantum wave function collapses), then we have abandoned both our humanity and our influence on world affairs.

Am I forcing everyone into a Weberian worldview?⁷⁷ Possibly, but I am not saying that the Weberian view is the only view. I am saying that I can find a location in the Weberian universe to host an alternative point of view (and do so when I compare the worldviews in this volume; see earlier in this chapter); I cannot find such a location in a relationalist universe. At the beginning, this project postulated a revolution in natural and social science thought rejecting Enlightenment and Newtonian worldviews. In later stages, Katzenstein emphasized complementarities among Newtonian and Post-Newtonian worldviews.⁷⁸ By complementarity, however, Katzenstein forces the Newtonian view into the relationalist universe where “the determinist or probability-inflected Newtonian world can be thought of as a special case that reveals itself when the quantum world of infinite possibilities and radical uncertainty collapses.”⁷⁹ Bottom line? There is no location in the relationist world for dissent. Alternatives either fit into the quantum world or are patently false.

Moreover, understanding another worldview does not mean accepting it or making it equivalent. Would the world be better off today if the Reformation and Enlightenment had not occurred, or if the Haitian lwa not the Weberian worldview had dominated world politics after 1600?⁸⁰ Best, you say, if neither dominated? OK, but spell out the global consequences of the Haitian worldview or the specific parameters of equal coexistence which makes all worldviews (fascism, communism) acceptable and worth learning from. Unless we specify “what” we learn from “which” worldview, we are simply treating worldviews like souvenirs, collecting and trivializing them. Worse, we are opening the floodgates to any worldview with no standard for judging good and bad. Maybe the relationalist turn pops open an irresistible, new window of a more harmonious world that we have missed because of the atomistic and competitive frame of western modernism. But maybe it doesn’t. And if it doesn’t, not only material progress but individual freedom is at stake.

Which leads to a final question: where do relationalist cosmologies place the divine? What lies behind the Big Bang? Relationalists are eager to unify the human and natural worlds and see a growing commonality between science and religion. The obstacle to unifying the human and natural worlds, however, is an understanding of consciousness which humans have and nonhumans do not. And the obstacle to uniting the scientific and religious (supranatural) worlds is an understanding of the soul, the human capacity to imagine the divine.⁸¹ Separating these three worlds – nature, humanity, and the divine – has led to abuse: humanity masquerading as gods (the Church before the Enlightenment) or humanity “lifted up” to control nature (the critics’ view of the Enlightenment). But uniting them may lead to even worse abuse. What stands in the way of a science that poses as a religion or a nature that restrains prosperity?⁸² By blurring the distinction between religion and science, nature and humanity, relationalism weakens Enlightenment institutions that separate state and church, markets and feudalism. It enables potentially powerful new gods of unchallenged expertise and science to take the stage (because, remember, there is no objective universe). We could wind up again in a pre-Enlightenment world wherein scientists and their authoritarian enablers usurp the power of privilege to suppress the rights of reasoning individuals. Resistance would be anti-science and futile, as it was anti-God and heresy in pre-Enlightenment times. As Timothy Byrnes writes, “if a relational cosmology is grounded in faith or in the pursuit of what is ‘really real,’ then the unknown itself is the basis of Truth and the human propensity to resistance is ultimately futile.”⁸³ And if the unknown is truth and cannot be resisted, the Dark Ages may be upon us once again.

6.5 Conclusion

I come back to the need, therefore, to maintain a Weberian worldview, whatever the debate in physics, if only to retain a “critical” perspective on the totalizing tendencies of the relationalist school of thought. As Mike Barnett concludes, “Without worldviews we would not know how to go on, and would be lost in the wilds until a charismatic leader arrived to provide guidance.”⁸⁴ In the barren “wilds” of relationalism (the jungle), that charismatic leader would probably be a totalizing ideology, one admitting of no alternatives – radical Islam under the Caliphate, Medieval Christianity under the Inquisition, totalitarian atheism under fascism and communism, or scientific elitism under a relationalist banner that substitutes expertise for politics and human choice. The Weberian worldview is still a necessary defense against that sort of evil.

7 Oceans, Jungles, and Gardens World Politics and the Planet

Prasenjit Duara

As a historian attentive to global trends, I have appreciated the opportunity to participate in the workshops leading to this volume on World Politics and Worldviews. The recent decades appear, as in several other fields, to have witnessed an explosion of methods and scope in the study of International Relations. Going well beyond the study of state-to-state and the varieties of cross-national relations, these approaches take on the vital issue of agency, common to all sciences. Do we conceive of agency as human activity, whether individual, collective, or sensory (especially visual media), or should we adopt a more distributed concept of agentive beings, human and nonhuman? Since the latter have significant demonstrated effects on world politics, they are legitimate fields of inquiry. Particularly concerned by the Anthropocene as I am, I explore how worldviews and cosmologies do or do not, can or cannot, help us understand not only the politics of the world, but also of the planet.

The same relational, processual, and widened scope to be found in Kurki, Grove and Allan in the volume has also prompted me to inquire about the relationships between worldviews and cosmologies.¹ Committed philosophically to a processual perspective, I develop a schema of layered and interactive temporalities to grasp the mediations that result in world politics and to probe the possibilities of alternative worldviews and cosmologies. To prefigure the argument: Enlightenment ideas, assumptions, and projects have constituted temporally the most durable cosmology underlying world politics over two hundred years. These assumptions and associated historical processes have generated a dynamic, circulatory system of nation-states driven by what I term the epistemic engine of the nation-form. In turn, this engine has had globally transformative consequences, but also generated colossal counterfinalities on the planet. Worldviews derive from the epistemic engine, but also from historical, religious, and personal and collective experiences not reducible to the engine. A principal goal of this chapter is to explore the extent to which, and how, experiential worldviews can penetrate or negotiate the epistemic engine to influence the world order and world politics.

In the Section 7.1 I develop a conceptual framework around the “epistemic engine” which organizes and circulates the cosmological dimensions of Enlightenment modernity, usefully described by Bentley Allan (Chapter 8, this volume). In Section 7.2, I explore how the imperial Chinese world order – functional until at least the late nineteenth century – reveals a different cosmology shaping a different “world” order and politics. I go on to explore the contemporary PRC view of the world order, probing the extent to which its historical experiences can be seen to reshape the hegemonic epistemic engine. In Section 7.3, I draw from a paradigm of “oceanic temporality” to grasp counterfinalities generated by the epistemic engine on the earth and the ocean itself. Can the counterflows of social movements allow us to imagine what Katzenstein calls a post-Enlightenment, hyper-humanist cosmology?

7.1 The Epistemic Engine and the World Order

Regarding the ontological and epistemological conditions described by Allan, Newtonian physics furnishes the conception of nature as governed by mathematically apprehended laws.² Based significantly on the Cartesian conception of duality of the mind and the external world, humans are capable of knowing and using these laws. Regarding temporality, the Newtonian view holds an absolute conception of time as linear and irreversible and space as an empty container within which movement occurs. We are reminded of Benedict Anderson’s application of Walter Benjamin’s “empty, homogenous time” to the nation.³ Post-Newtonian cosmogony does not seem to have significantly affected the worldview of global political actors or of mainstream IR scholarship beyond the operative principle of the disenchantment of the world.

The Enlightenment was, like all powerful historical developments, a complex one with important alternative currents – such as Spinoza’s monism or Humean skepticism – that challenged some of the cosmological underpinnings. Moreover, as Katzenstein shows, quantum physics and evolutionary complexity cannot be seen to operate within this paradigm.⁴ Most of all, the bulk of the world’s population can scarcely be said to subscribe to such a disenchanted cosmology. Yet the alternatives have not yet figured as a major force in world politics. For much of the social sciences, and especially for the major actors in world politics, the cosmology bequeathed by the Enlightenment remains the hegemonic doxa of our time.

Arguably, the greatest complexity arises when we consider the conception of human destiny. The optimistic view of human progress celebrated by Enlightenment thinkers was subject to a more pessimistic view in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, represented in scholarship – perhaps iconically – by Max Weber’s recognition that science could no longer be universal but would have to yield ground to the determination of ultimate values by forces beyond rationality, by a certain polytheistic re-enchantment. “Fate, and certainly not ‘science,’ holds sway over these gods and their struggles. One can only understand what the godhead is for the one order or for the other, or better, what godhead is in the one or in the other order.”⁵ In other words, rationalization cannot overcome the politicization – beyond individualization – of values.

The philosophical deflation of the optimistic stance reached a peak toward the end of World War I – Weber’s speech “Science as a Vocation” was penned in 1917– when thinkers around the world railed against the barbarous consequences of modern technological civilization. The roughly simultaneous advent of relativity theory and quantum mechanics also displaced Newtonian science as the reigning paradigm within scientific and philosophical circles. But even as the moral and cosmological foundations of the Newtonian Enlightenment project begins to come apart, conventional knowledge of world leaders and mainstream social sciences continues to function within that paradigm. Just as most of the world continues to follow a cosmology founded on enchantment, so too do world politics and its scholarship follow a paradigm that may be out of synch with further advances in scientific philosophy. At the same time, let us remind ourselves that cosmologies are themselves chartings through unknowable planetary processes.

If we take the Newtonian Enlightenment project to be the cosmology of modernity, I view the world order that derives from – and is legitimated by – such a cosmology to be the evolving Westphalian–Vatellian–UN order as, perhaps, what Carl Schmitt called the European nomos.⁶ This world order has been cultivated as a garden, patchily and erratically over the centuries, keeping at bay the ever-encroaching jungle both from within and without. The relationship between Enlightenment cosmology and the world order and world politics is mediated by an epistemic engine.

I draw the category of the episteme from structuralist and post-structuralist ideas, but add the term “engine” to denote its dynamic and circulatory temporality. By circulatory I don’t mean circular, but a process whereby not all aspects of the nation-form are equally adopted but are successively adapted and recirculatated. The epistemic engine is structured by conventional economic and political power driven by accumulation strategies and state territorialization following Arrighi’s diagnosis that global capitalism is made possible “by the capture of mobile capital for territorial and population control, and the control of territories and people for the purposes of mobile capital.”⁷ At the same time, the epistemic engine embeds Foucauldian forms of power within knowledge and as knowledge (power/knowledge). Foucault’s notion of the episteme is the “apparatus” or “regime” which governs the separation not of the true from the false, but of what may from what may not be characterized as acceptable knowledge – the conditions of possibility.⁸ We might say that it is this epistemic dimension of modern (secular) cosmology that works to bracket religious and nature-centric views from occupying center-stage in the world order.⁹

How might we grasp the vehicle or vector by which the episteme circulates and functions globally? I suggest that the vector is none other than the nation, or, more precisely, the nation-form.¹⁰ The nation is the epistemic engine that powers the circulation of the cosmology embedded in worldviews and generates the legitimacy of the world order. The nation-form embeds the relatively durable ideas of popular sovereignty, militarized territoriality, and Enlightenment progress. Temporally, it is expressed in a linear and teleological history of self-same subject which realizes its glory through struggle and competition. The Subject is exemplified in the Spartan song “We are who you were, we will be who you are.”¹¹ The nation is able thus to reconcile its requirement for a timeless essence (to claim territory and sovereignty) while promising progressive change. As the ur-form of all identity politics, the foundational sense of the Self in nationalism requires a strong sense of the Other, and under certain circumstances, like the present, flares up with extraordinary virulence.

There is an isomorphism, and perhaps homology due to shared ancestry, between this conception of the nation and the individual and methodological individualism discussed by Henry Nau in this volume.¹² While Enlightenment liberalism enshrined individualism as a value through notions of equality and inalienable rights of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” the rights-bearing individual also came to be the model of the subject or agent in society. This individual is abstracted from the processual relationships through which identity evolves. Although Weber sought to distinguish individualism as a value from the abstracted idea of methodological individualism as the model of rational human action, the latter presupposes an ontological and normative individualism as a prerequisite of sociology.¹³

The point I want to make here is not about the rationality of individual action, but the transfer of this mode of individualization to transform a society into the singular collective of the nation. Note that Article III of the French Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen deposits the ultimate right – of sovereignty – hemming all others, in the Nation. Since then, the rights of “nations” over two and half centuries may well have been asserted more than the rights of individuals. The presumption of so much IR work that world politics is conducted by personified nations reflects this kind of methodologically individuated nationalism and reproduces the engine of the nation-form.

The epistemic engine, grounded in the cosmological dualism between subject (human) and object (nonhuman/nature), is propelled by the goal of conquering nature. Historically described as “progress,” the goal is to be achieved within the nation largely in competition with other nations over the control of global resources. The engine references both the material and the epistemic. It absorbs and reproduces Enlightenment axioms; it thus allows the unlimited consumption of energy and nature while discharging its exhaust on environment and society. Note that the history of twentieth-century socialism reveals that it was not only capitalism but the Enlightenment idea of the progressive mastery of nature that drives increasing control over nature.

The circulation of the nation-form is equally propelled by notions of competitive efficiency – in the manner of contemporary corporate firms – learning, copying, adapting, and stealing from nations that are more successful in the productivity of its population and in garnering global resources. The history of the twentieth century in Asia is one of the overhaul of older empires and polities to build nations because it seemed to them to be the only means of resisting imperialist competition and domination. They could only lick ’em by joining them. In the process, the epistemic engine has generated a runaway global technosphere with cascading consequences and counterfinalities described herein.

Nations are also interdependent for economic and other purposes, and rules are created to save them from mutual destruction (as almost happened during the two world wars). The Westphalian–Vatellian system, the League of Nations, and the United Nations have been tasked with maintaining those rules and protocols. This nation-state system that frames the world order sustains the nation-form, which is a condition of political participation. Of course, the interests of individual and groups of powerful nations can and do supersede those rules.

While the nation-form perhaps dates to the French and American revolutions, it also has European roots in what Carl Schmitt called the “nomos”: a long-durée historical conception of the spatial, political, and juridical principles and rules of a political community governing land appropriation (including by conquest), division, and distribution.¹⁴ The nomos was adapted from Greek and Christian conceptions, but its global significance arose from its refiguration as a project of order and domination after the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia.

For Schmitt, the nomos refers to the interstate system organized in Europe, which served at once as the anchor of and the blueprint for modern international law. By bracketing certain spaces of war and domination between these powers, it sought to regulate relations among the European states. It represented the means to contain this violence from becoming anarchic, as, for instance, through the Treaty of Tordesillas.¹⁵ As a doctrine that only applied to European lands, the nomos also enabled these states to dominate, occupy, and ravage the people, the resources, and the open seas beyond the European nomos. Schmitt remained avowedly Eurocentric in Nomos of the Earth, published in 1950, mourning the loss of its European character as it was being overtaken by America and the United Nations.¹⁶

The nation-form of the epistemic engine drives the world order as it recruits and organizes the different forces and factors making the modern world. Its leaders and representatives pursue their goals through modes of knowledge whose conditions of possibility are governed by the ontology and epistemology of the Enlightenment and, more particularly, the Newtonian worldview. What is the relationship between other worldviews and the epistemic engine? Katzenstein draws on Dilthey to describe a worldview as a combination of ideas, values, faith, dispositions, morals, and, not least, historical and lived experience.¹⁷ In this volume, Tim Byrnes and Michael Barnett make a strong case for showing how religious worldviews shape world politics.¹⁸ Worldviews are clearly also of great significance to human concerns and political priorities and are not reducible to other imperatives. I argue that since the epistemological engine is hegemonic (not totalistic) and simultaneously drives the episteme and the levers of the global political economy (such as the IMF, the WHO, the WTO, the US military, and financial corporations), worldviews tend to be expressed in world politics in negotiation with or through the filter of the hegemonic engine.

There has been a proliferation of nonstate actors on the global stage and media in the last few decades. The recent movement of young people, frequently below the age threshold of citizenship, protesting the inactivity of world leaders regarding climate change, may well represent such an intervention based on their collective experiences and expectations. To be sure, they too have to rely on the stage of world politics underwritten by the epistemic engine to have their voices heard. I think here of the young Greta Thunberg, whose career trajectory we might follow. In the last section of the chapter I will assess the possible pathways whereby social movements, old and new, seek to forge a practical vision for a new order.

To date, no nation has been able to challenge or function successfully outside the prescriptive nation-form, which involves among its central features territoriality, the self–other binary, progress, competition, and the pursuit of increasing control over natural forces. The Panchashila movement of the decolonizing nations presented a brief flash of alternative visions of a new order, but rapidly gave way to territorial and identitarian competition. To be sure, its religious and historical experience and vision has made the Islamic Republic of Iran an outlier in the Enlightenment-based epistemic engine, but Iran conforms to the principal precepts of the territorial identitarian state, including a competitive modernization agenda. The same could be said of Saudi Arabia.

Perhaps the imperial Chinese world order, which emerged from a different cosmology and functioned in a radically different way from the Newtonian world of politics, represented the most powerful alternative since the rise of the Western order. I now turn to it and its successor state, the People’s Republic of China.

7.2 The World Orders of Imperial and Contemporary China

The world order of late imperial China (circa tenth–nineteenth centuries) was another kind of garden that it is difficult to characterize, in significant part because our terminology is suffused by the contemporary assumptions of international relations. This order represented a complex set of Chinese imperial tribute practices which I treat as a Wittgensteinian “language game” that is distinguished from the idea of a system which presupposes rules, abstract principles, and essences.¹⁹ Language games are not well-bounded systems constituted by a single principle or doctrine – say, of sovereignty or the nation-form – but open-ended. Norms, rituals, and codes (which are learned) are provisional, capacious, and flexible.

Figure 7.1 Conceptual map of cosmologies, worldviews and world politics

The Qing imperial order was not one of theoretically equal states, but a paternalistic, hierarchical order, principally based on tribute. The Westphalian system was formulated theoretically on equality and noninterference between recognized states; in practice, these states were highly intrusive in each other’s affairs, territorially competitive, and globally expansive. Through Schmitt’s Nomos, we see that with the discovery of the Americas, the jurisdiction of European international law produced an extra-European frontier which became the outside – a space of exception for their European masters. Imperial Chinese rulers were largely uninterested in ruling or controlling spaces beyond the imperial frontiers, whether for accumulation, conversion, or political power.

In the imperial Chinese rhetoric, tribute, paid by states and communities peripheral to China, was an expression of the subordination of these groups to the imperial state. In return, the emperor bestowed gifts – including the all-important license to trade – upon the tribute bearers. In practice, it represented a wider web that did not involve merely the relationship between China and the tribute bearer, but a host of “several other lesser or satellite tribute relationships not directly concerning China and forming a considerably more complex system of reciprocal relationships.”²⁰Through most of the second millennium, trade became the most prominent feature of the tribute system.

Different games do not have the common essence of “games” but are recognizable by family resemblances of overlapping codes and practices. Thus, for instance, when the Qing emperors performed the roles of both the Boddhisattva Manjusri as well as the patron who descends to meet his spiritual mentor, the Dalai Lama, half-way, the Tibetans and Qing were engaged in overlapping language games (the ambiguity of which would become problematic in a different epistemic context of sovereign states). All this is, of course, different from his role as the Son of Heaven or having treaties signed on his behalf (such as the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689, which approached the principle of Westphalian sovereignty). We may think of the East Asian tribute order as a complex language game which incorporated various modes of ritual and other performative procedures with diverse and changing roles for the players. For instance, the Chinese Song dynasty (tenth–twelfth centuries) also had to deliver large values of tribute to the Khitan (Liao) and the Tanggut (Xi Xia), although it profited more from its trade surpluses with these states.²¹

Military violence was not absent. Most famously, the Ming naval expeditions led by Admiral Zheng He in the first third of the fifteenth century, forced tribute, captured slaves and even a king in Sri Lanka in a bid to demonstrate the power of the Chinese emperor. However, such military authority over the sea route was not maintained beyond a brief window in the fifteenth century. Nor did China control the land routes over Central Asia. Rather, one might say that Chinese military power outside the empire was mostly an equilibrating operation. Expeditions were undertaken as punitive measures against bordering states, including Korea, or tribes who often harassed and threatened the empire at its periphery. For example, during the eighteenth century, the Burmese Konbaung state conducted raids along the southwestern frontier. This prompted several punitive military expeditions, with mixed results. Military campaigns were expensive and were designed principally to stabilize the tribute order and manage the bordering states, rather than for colonial and territorial expansion beyond the empire.²²

The contemporary Chinese state operates under the obviously very different conditions of capitalism, nationalism, and statism. At the same time, its own historical narrative and rhetoric has been deeply mindful of the violence and plunder wreaked by imperialist nation-states. In recent years, it has also glorified its historical relations with neighboring states and kingdoms as an alternative order, conducted harmoniously under the ideals of tianxia (all under heaven) and wangdao (the kingly way). This rhetoric of harmony or “win–win” has been extended to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) publicized with much fanfare as the revival of the landed and maritime Silk Roads connecting China with the world. To what extent does the historical experience and rhetoric of China – its worldview – challenge the world order undergirded by the epistemic engine? Does it merely replace or supplement one great power with another?

The most publicized scholarly position on the relevance of tianxia, related to the tribute order, to the contemporary world order has been developed by the philosopher Zhao Tingyang. Historically, he argues the tianxia worldview emerged in the transition from the Shang to the Zhou at the beginning of the first millennium BCE. A limited power that succeeded a much larger empire, the Zhou devised the worldview to control the larger entity by making global politics a priority over the local. As such, it was a strategic act that eventuated in a long peace governed by a global worldview harmonizing differences in the world.²³

The contemporary extension of the tianxia model would involve a “world institution” controlling a larger territory and military force than that controlled by the autonomous substates. These substates will be independent in most respects, except in their legitimacy and obligations for which they depend on the recognition of the world institution. Rather than being based on force and self-interest, the cultural empire would use ritual as a means to limit the self and its interests. Tianxia is a hierarchical worldview which prioritizes order over freedom, elite governance over democracy, and the superior political institution over the lower levels.²⁴

The anthropologist Wang Mingming presents us with a different view of tianxia, which he argues cannot be grasped in a singular manner. He differentiates the historical role of tianxia before and after the first unification of China by the Qin in 221 BCE. In the classical pre-Qin period, tianxia represented a religious cosmology without strict demarcation of the human, natural, and divine order. Tianxia encompassed the different kingdoms or guo according to a theory of concentric circles around a cosmic–moral core of closeness to a transcendent Heaven. The Zhou emperor himself, as the Son of Heaven, was subordinated to Heaven in the name of tianxia, and order was sustained by a reciprocity of ritualized relationships within this concentric world.²⁵

After the imperial unification, Wang argues that tianxia cosmology became subordinated to the centralized imperial state (guo), and the earlier distinction between the Zhou state and the realm of tianxia began to disappear as tianxia became effectively a project of imperial order and control. Imperial tianxia was also creatively deployed to create a Sino-centric order of hierarchy in the empire and superiority to manage foreign tributaries and vassals, as described earlier. Access to the transcendent power of Heaven became increasingly monopolized by the imperial center through its elaborate and synchronized system of official sacrifices and rituals in authorized ceremonial centers through the world. The concept of “all under Heaven” now became manifested in the idealized perfect union between Heaven and Earth by the central role of the Son of Heaven in it.²⁶

While Zhao acknowledges that the post-Qin ideal of tianxia is transformed, his conception still offers a top-down method of political ordering as the essence of the tianxia system. Zhao believes that political leadership must emanate at the highest level – the tianxia political institution – which must then be “transposed” to the lower levels (how the top controls the bottom is not clear) and not vice versa. This is a thus a descending order from “all under heaven” to nation-states to families. At the same time as political order or control descends, an ethical order ascends from families to states to tianxia. Thus, this results in a relationship of mutual justification, but would presumably also act as the system of mutual checks.²⁷

I do not find this model to be a suitable alternative. Do we not presuppose a highly idealized conception of humanity and a literalist reading of rhetoric if we think that ritual-familial order alone will restrain the politically superior to act benevolently? If it did work well in the Zhou, we will need to consider a multiplicity of factors, including kinship ties, a differentiated control of resources, and a complex balance of power. With regard to the contemporary utilization of tianxia, it seems rather odd to be applying an ancient system quite so mechanically to an entirely changed world. Moreover, since the political system is not based upon democratically elected leaders, we don’t know how world government will be constituted. Yet, it may not be unreasonable to see in it strong elements of a future Chinese-dominated world order.

The other, more recent historical past is the modern Chinese revolutionary experience. The communist revolution in China produced a mighty party-state and a revolutionary sense of purpose and agency that not only defied the world order but also broke away early from Soviet dependence and became a nuclear power by 1964. The People’s Republic of China was not represented in the United Nations until 1971. But even as its worldview challenged the world order of capitalist states, it remained a child of Enlightenment modernity and was bound in myriad ways to the epistemic engine of the nation-form. Particularly evident, these bonds were the imperative to conquer nature for human ends and, more complexly, the self–other form of national identity.

Communist ideology and Maoist thought were committed to the liberation of the world, but the ideology of class conflict and the imperatives of state power (particularly in a hostile world) converted class identity into a nationalist one. To be sure, the Maoist revolution always had a strong nationalist component, but in this worldview the nation was seen as a necessary step toward a nationless and classless communist utopia. During the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese nation came to be seen as the only revolutionary proletarian nation (barring Albania) confronted by bourgeois and revisionist nations around the world. Class and nation became one. Today, of course, as communist ideology has ebbed in China, nationalism has become the overwhelming form of identity expression in China.

Let us consider the rise of China, a nonliberal, authoritarian state power, to superpower status in the world order. I do not believe that China will necessarily erode the cosmological foundations of Enlightenment modernity. Enlightenment thought has always contained a significant strain of nondemocratic thought. Rooted in rationality, science, the ideal of progress, natural law, human rights, and humanitarianism, the Enlightenment was characterized just as much by what one author calls “proto-totalitarian” ideas of politics and governance as by what we would today call liberalism and individual rights. The possibility of rationally channeling and even coercing humans to follow scientific laws of behavior (eg. Rousseau’s morale sensitive) encouraged many continental Enlightenment thinkers to support enlightened despotism.²⁸ The ideas of Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Voltaire, as well as John Adams and James Madison, also shaped the Enlightenment project.

Many Chinese thinkers look to this tradition, and particularly to the more recent ideas of Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss, to trace their affiliation with a nonliberal Enlightenment project.²⁹ Chinese thinkers are also attracted to Joseph Nye’s idea of soft power or a “win–win” strategy of engaging the world. These ideas would be quite compatible with Zhao’s proposed blueprint of tianxia, and one could conceive of a Chinese world order that was formed from a mix of authoritarian Enlightenment rationality with an affective – if not quite fictive kinship – model of hierarchical loyalty and reciprocity. We do not have space here to explore such a strategic mission, but I will undertake a brief analysis of BRI, which may be viewed as a practical expression of the worldview of the Chinese state possibly informed by its historical experiences.³⁰

As is well known, BRI represents a massive expansion of Chinese economic investments in infrastructure partnerships, including high-speed railroads, telecommunications, new ports, energy cooperation, and, indeed, the technosphere. Chinese investments abroad – whether state-owned or private – have been driven by the search for outlets for excess capital, labor, and older, especially coal-mining, technology within China. The investments also tend to be extractive and energy hungry. Many countries engage with the BRI because they require capital for infrastructure development not easily available to them. Moreover, they can also partake of advanced digital technologies such as 5G, Beidou, the Chinese geophysical positioning system, and other technology connected with the Digital Silk Road that is accompanying infrastructure building.

The BRI is publicized as inspired by principles of harmony and authority that are noncontentious and not liberal. Chinese state policies follow the Panchashila principles of noninterference in the internal matters of sovereign states. Hence, in its dealings with governments in Asia, Africa, and elsewhere, it responds to the kind of regime that is operative. Where civil society groups are well developed, the Chinese representatives can be responsive to demands made by them. Where civil society is weak, Chinese investors are willing to deal with governments regardless of issues of transparency and corruption. A Chinese rhetoric of affective, historical relations and loyalty – including some instances of debt forgiveness– are very much in evidence in these relationships.

While there are functions and dimensions of the BRI that are useful and palatable to the countries engaged with the projects, BRI projects and contracts are not subject to the protocols and procedures of Western principles of international commercial contract and legal regimes. BRI policies privilege development and order at the expense of transparency and the rights of people. “Asian-style mediation” and customized arbitration mechanisms are preferred. This modality, given the vast scale of BRI projects (more than 300 billion US dollars already invested) and the complexities of Chinese decision-makers, goals, and interests, has generated tensions and problems not only in host societies but also for the Chinese side in the contemporary world. I identify three sets of issues that represent fields of power and contestation.

The first of these is debt. African countries’ debt to Chinese loans and investments is more than $140 billion, and a similar amount is owed by Latin American and Caribbean countries. The debt of Asian countries is probably higher still; Sri Lanka’s inability to repay China the high costs of constructing the Hambantota port has led to the leasing of the port to a Chinese company for 99 years. While many Chinese investments are productive, the Center for Global Development’s report concluded that eight countries are at risk of debt distress on the basis of available data on debt-to-GDP ratios.³¹ Although debtor countries certainly suffer, the creditor countries also bear considerable pressure from resistance and instabilities in the debtor countries and pressure from international agencies.³² More recently, China has had to redraft many BRI contracts under terms less favorable to it, and will presumably confront more severe problems due to the current COVID-19 crisis.

The second is the problem of environmental degradation and distress. Between 2014 and 2017, six Chinese banks participated in US$143 billion worth of syndicated loans to the BRI region’s energy and transportation sectors. Almost three-quarters of the total volume of this finance went to the oil, gas, and petrochemical industries.³³ While China has recently emerged as a leader in the production of renewable energy, and still more recently in environmental conservation, it is doing so by outsourcing its natural resource requirements. Civil society movements in many parts of the globe are responding by applying pressure on their governments and the projects.

Finally, there is the matter of “digital power.” Artificial Intelligence, 5G networks of intermechanical communication and action, sophisticated geo-satellite navigation equipment, and new ways of combining surveillance technology with social credit systems are part of this digital power. To be sure, all major powers are developing digital technology for military purposes. However, China is a global leader in civil surveillance and has been selling its pioneering technology to authoritarian regimes abroad, who will seek to use it to deter popular movements against unpopular projects.³⁴

What does this highly provisional assessment of the BRI tell us about China as the most prominent global power with an alternative, nonliberal worldview? First, by provisioning development finance to countries disregarded by the West, it demonstrates anti-imperialist solidarity. Just as important is the rhetoric of Silk Road historical and affective ties. However, I believe that, as a capitalist and firmly nationalist power, it is deeply implicated in the epistemic engine and invested in the nation-state system. As such, it also faces challenges from the nationalisms of states and/or their populations. But the dimension that could most destabilize the global order is the state’s capacity of digital power to surveil, disrupt, and hijack civil society. This has profound consequences not only for the world order, but also on the channels through which civil society seeks to bring about a more just worldview based on an alternative cosmology. In my view, while a Chinese world order could mitigate some and exacerbate other features of the Enlightenment, it appears to be too highly invested in the epistemic engine to be able to develop a more capacious alternative order.

We do not know what channels another worldview might give us to address our deepest problems, but the channel of social activism – with all its faults – is one we know. At same time, the present epistemic engine – whether liberal or not – is ill-equipped to address the crisis of the Anthropocene – the greatest challenge human society has known.

7.3 Oceanic Temporality and Alternative Worldviews

Enlightenment cosmology may have nurtured orderly gardens so humans may develop their potential ultimately, even universally. But the epistemological engine that conditions this order fueled by strategies of accumulation, appropriation, and creative destruction has produced counterfinalities – and not only through fossil-fuel consumption – of an order that human society as a whole has perhaps not witnessed before. According to some, it has led to an autonomous global “technosphere” comprised of human and technological systems, including infrastructure, transportation, communications, power production, financial networks, and bureaucracies, to name a few.³⁵ The epistemic engine drives this accelerating technosphere at a pace where it is not human agency that serves as a brake, but rather pandemics such the current COVID-19 outbreak, and, more certainly, the climate crisis that is ravaging the planet.

If the prevalent cosmology has played a major role in this global crisis, it is not the metaphor of the jungle but that of the ocean that is more compelling. The raging oceans today incarnate the unknowable planetary processes that challenge our cosmology. We can say that this unknowability is swelled by cascading counterfinalities of our interventions. Jean-Paul Sartre described counterfinalities thus: “in and through labour Nature becomes both a new source of tools and a new threat. In being realized, human ends define a field of counter-finality around themselves.”³⁶ We have possibly tamed the jungle sufficiently, so that it appears in pockets, patches, and periodic conflagrations. Not so the ocean, which through ocean-atmospheric activity has the capacity to destroy the conditions of life as we know it.

Elsewhere I have tried to show that oceanic and ocean-atmospheric flows and circulations represent a paradigm for natural and even historical processes. For most of human history, conceptions of time were continuous with natural flows or, at least, did not severely disrupt the designs of natural flows. At a fundamental level the historical process engaging humans is also natural. Intertemporal connections and communication among humans both resemble and are indissolubly linked with other beings – organic and inorganic.³⁷

Biological organisms are constantly registering and responding to environmental changes. The Star Moss Cam is a sensor technology that does not merely sense mosses over time but observes how the moss itself is a sensor that is detecting and responding to changes in the environment – to which humans have contributed.³⁸ More directly, Timothy LeCain describes how ecologically careful breeding of silkworms in Japan and cattle in Montana as coevolution between creature and human over generations were destroyed by arsenic released from modern copper mining in both areas.³⁹ Intentional processes generate other processes. Some die away or confluence with other generative processes, others produce deadly counterfinalities.

Communities more directly dependent on nature developed cosmologies that were more attuned to natural patterns even in large-scale empires such as the pre-modern Chinese or Indian polities. Gargantuan projects of imperial ambition such as the Great Wall of China still followed natural contours seeking to demarcate the steppe from the sown. To be sure, these ideals could not prevent their violations, but without the ideal we can scarcely hope to be sustainable. Communities that lived and worked on the oceans, whether on coastlands or small islands, were of course more adaptable to oceanic forces. The early oceanic travelers, most famously the Polynesians, reveal how their techniques could generate great and sustainable achievements by following the movements of the oceans.

Today, we know better how oceans condition life on the terrestrial landscape. The route of the Gulf Stream explains why Canada’s east coast is frozen much of the winter whereas England’s is not, and why Western European shores, including the Norwegian coast, are milder than similar latitudes to the East and West.⁴⁰ The slowing of the thermohaline, deep-ocean conveyer belt due to polar ice melt is now contributing to colder European winters.⁴¹ Asian agriculture remains heavily dependent on the monsoon rains. Scientists have reported that the monsoons in Asia and Africa appear to correlate with reversals in the pressure gradient across the Pacific Ocean. Accelerated global climate change has destabilized the monsoon, and there are dire predictions of desertification across south and west Asia.⁴²

Well into the twentieth century, Carl Schmitt believed that the European nomos could not be conceived to extend over the oceans. After four centuries of deep-sea navigation, Schmitt continued to describe the “antithesis of land and sea as an antithesis of diverse spatial orders.”⁴³ In contrast to the territorial sovereignty over land, the sea was free: “It could be freely exploited by all states … it had no borders and was open. Naturally, it was decisive that the freedom of the sea also meant the freedom to pursue wars.”⁴⁴ In other words, the seas were beyond the pale of civilization.

Even if it was beyond the pale, the bloody contests on the ocean not only produced conquest and colonies, but also underwrote conceptions of sovereignty in Europe. In this new watery wilderness, pirates and navies were difficult to distinguish. Privateers such as Sir Francis Drake commanded warships in the service of the Queen of England. One’s status on the seas depended on the backing of power. Laurel Benton has suggested that as royal commission holders, adventurers, and pirates staked claims over territories and waters in the New World and in Africa and Asia against other European claimants, they made sovereignty claims in the name of the king in legal courts in Europe, thus circling back to consolidate conceptions of sovereignty in the new order.⁴⁵

Unsurprisingly, the conception of history as linear and tunneled, and of a progressing Subject, whether religious, imperial, or ultimately national, arose roughly simultaneously with Newtonian cosmology and growing confidence about oceanic control toward the end of the eighteenth century. The epistemic engine concresces the process where ideas of sovereignty, overseas conquest, scientific advances, and the idea of progress coalesce.⁴⁶ The circulatory idea of the nation expressed through a roughly isomorphic historical form was picked up across much of the world by the end of the nineteenth century. Most national histories were constituted by a sequence of ancient, medieval, and modern periods, with some kind of “renaissance function” that enabled the recovery of an ancient past to join the modern. In this way, the nation was ancient or timeless while also launched on a modern progressive future. At the same, the bracketing of the medieval or the intermediate as alien, often both aesthetically and ethnically, spurred the self–other tribalism of the nation.⁴⁷

Between World Wars I and II, this Eurocentric nomos of the earth ended. In the Panama Declaration of 1939, the United States was the first to declare its specific security zone extending 300 nautical miles into the Atlantic and the Pacific. The theorist of Lebensraum, Friedrich Ratzel, declared that space had protruded into the expanse and evenness of the sea. Technological developments such as submarines and air-power added to the spatialization or, as we say today, the “territorialization” of the oceans and have robbed it of its elemental character.⁴⁸ Although Schmitt ends his inquiry with the hope of a new global nomos, the thrust of his final chapter, written during the Cold War, was not promising.

If oceanic violence was restricted mainly to surface waters and sea-catch until the end of the nineteenth century, in the twentieth century and our present time humans are penetrating the volume and depth of the ocean, leaving us with a predictable disaster scenario. The colonization of the ocean over the last hundred years or so has been an industrial and technological colonization, battering it with massive commercial traffic and fishing, nuclear testing, constant bombardment for oil and gas explorations, and militarized island buildings, among other invasions. Not least, it is being strangled as the dumpsite of the terrestrial planet.

Meanwhile, the epistemic engine has continued to propel the territorialization of the ocean. In 1982, the majority of the nations agreed on a nation’s extension of its exclusive economic zone (EEZ) to 200 nautical miles (nm). It has been estimated that should every coastal state make this national jurisdictional claim, it would cover 43 million square nautical miles, or approximately 41 percent of the oceanic area. Not satisfied with this, coastal states demanded that EEZ of 200 nm be extended from the edge of the coastal state’s continental shelf, leading to further jurisdictional cover. Not only is this new edge difficult to measure, the extensions have also led to overlapping national claims generating potential and real conflicts.⁴⁹ Other principles evoked by the states, such as the (contestable) claims of “historical” maritime jurisdiction, make the fraught situation more warlike. The contemporary cases of China in the South China Sea and Russia in the Arctic Circle are simply the most prominent of these.

The hubris that human activity can destroy, negate, and transcend the medium of its sustenance is the mad thought that we face. The modern idea of the conquest of nature and the institutionalized and technological modes of exhausting it are unprecedented. Whether or not human agency can prevent the “slow death” facing much biotic life on the planet, it is not likely to happen without radical changes in the epistemic engine and the cosmology that have contributed significantly to it. Indeed, adaptations and changes to the cosmology which are perhaps not intrinsically impossible are made much more difficult by the entrenchment of the epistemic engine.

Over recent decades there has been considerable civil society activism regarding the environment that is converging – albeit from radically different and even conflicting perspectives and interest – upon a holistic philosophical attitude that rejects the God–world, subject–object, human–nature dualistic assumptions of the Enlightenment project. These movements represent widely different communities and civic associations, from the world’s marginalized precariate whose livelihood is most directly threatened by climate change, to modern civic, religious, and scientific groups and agencies committed to environmental protection and justice. Forest dwellers, indigenous peoples, small island societies, and threatened rural communities, among others, often turn to their more holistic cosmologies and religious resources and leaders to resist corporate and state expropriation of the commons upon which they depend. They are often joined by – or coalesce with – NGOs and other civic groups of professionals, scientists, and various local and transnational agencies in the effort to protect the environment. While this is a weak historical force, it is poised on something globally significant.

I have argued that this coalescence converges on a loose notion of the sacrality of nature with social, discursive, and legal underpinnings. While for many of the threatened subaltern communities this sacrality is part of the ecology of life and livelihood, for the more disenchanted moderns, the sacrality of nature is expressed through the notion of legal protection as the “common heritage of humankind.” Legislation and judicial decisions of this kind have often been initiated, advocated, and pushed through by civic groups. I call these natural spaces sacred because they represent an inviolability arising from the elemental urge to protect the sources of life. There are more than 160,000 legally protected areas in the world (national and international), including almost 1,000 World Heritage sites (cultural and natural), which cover over 12 percent of the land area of the world. On several occasions, these expressions have begun to converge – for instance, in the Eastern Himalayas protected zone in Yunnan, which is the home of many minority groups as well as the cradle of NGO activism in China. In India, New Zealand, and Ecuador, to name just a few countries, indigenous communities have initiated movements to protect the commons that have succeeded in securing legal “rights of nature” sanctioned by the highest courts in the land.⁵⁰

As is evident, this conception of sacred nature mobilizing older conceptions, fragments, and inventions is an emergent one and depends to a considerable degree on the contemporary framework of the epistemic engine. Not only does it depend on national and transnational legal institutions, it also mobilizes the classic Enlightenment ideal of rights. What we find, and what I believe, is that we cannot ignore the past to build the future. Whitehead tells us “The novel entity is at once the together of the ‘many’ which it finds, and also it is one among the disjunctive ‘many’ that it leaves; it is a novel entity, disjunctively, among the many entities which it synthesizes. The many become one and are increased by one.”⁵¹ Hence, it is necessary to join the most ethically defensible elements of Enlightenment cosmology with the alternative futuristic visions to arrive at the novel entity.

To be sure, this is easier said than done. There are debates among these groups over whether the argument of rights negates the religious and ethical worldviews of many groups in the world. One such debate is reported from the Buddhist groups in Taiwan, and particularly in the view of the philosopher-nun Shih Chao-hwei. For Venerable Shih, the most fundamental principle of environmental conservation is the equality of all life because all life is interdependent (dependent arising) and because suffering, not necessarily “rights” reasoning, is the standard for ethical consideration.⁵² Empathy and compassion for suffering is a basic element of many religions, not least in the figure of Christ. Arguably, it is (or can be) the ethical baseline for worldviews.

However, Venerable Shih’s worldview about all sentient life is not shared by the indigenous hunter communities in Taiwan. The latter have objected to the Wildlife Protection law, which Buddhist groups have supported, on the basis of their human rights. Nonetheless, the indigenous groups continue to be interested in natural and environmental rights. Noting that rights of nature have been legislated and implemented in several parts of the world, Jeffrey Nicolaisen suggests that a space of agreement or compromise between the two groups and their political representatives has opened up.⁵³ A fundamental task for the environmental, civil rights, and religious groups is to generate a sustainable planet by mediating between the biocentric and anthropocentric views.

It is clear that those worldviews and historical cosmologies invoked to create an alternative world will likely need to pass through the channels of the epistemic engine. To what extent can the rights discourse be turned against some of the most fundamental functions that have made it the privileged instrument of the engine – that is, private property rights and sovereign rights? And if it can, can the civic activists who are the most important agents of its transformation play the role when their human – individual and collective – rights are weakened or abolished? In the end, there is work to be done on both ends: protecting human rights, and protecting our world where it is endangered by the very engine of these rights. Perhaps this is the multiverse that we will have to learn to work in.