This is a rambling meditation on the interregnum; if you remember, a few months ago (see link in the inset below), I started writing about the time of monsters and how the rules-based international order is dying. But that's just one aspect of the headlong fall of liberalism and liberal values.

As I experience that fall, I also find certain types of public discourse more puzzling than I would have a year ago - moves that make sense only against the background of liberal hegemony have started becoming questionable.

Questionable not in a bad/good kind of way, but in a ‘it’s time has come and gone’ kind of way.

Where I introduce monsterology 👇🏾

There was a time when I used to be a keyboard warrior, but COVID ended those ambitions; I just didn't have the appetite for telling people they were wrong and I was right. Since then, I have more or less stopped writing about contemporary politics, especially that of countries of which I'm not a citizen (with the genocide of Palestinians being an exception).

The recent murder of Charlie Kirk woke me up.

I must admit that I didn't know much about him. I'd heard his name, and I think I'd heard about Turning Point USA, but I had no idea that this was an influential man. That tells you less about Charlie Kirk and more about me and how I grasp U.S. politics. If you name a senator, chances are I would have heard of that person. I know who Tommy Tuberville is, but I often draw a blank when it comes to cultural figures that orbit around politics, sometimes with great influence. The Billy Grahams of the world - religious figures with secular influence - are the only exception. Maybe it's an age thing for Steve Bannon shows up on my TL while Charlie Kirk didn't. But mostly, it's because I don't pay attention to the informal cultural politics surrounding formal institutional politics. I didn't grow up in the US and I don't have friends who are sending me hot-takes on YouTube. In contrast I have heard about the Indian counterparts of Charlie Kirk and Tommy Tuberville and many more such creatures.

Anyways, the man was murdered and that is a bad thing, as much gun violence as it is political violence. I see it as murder, not an assassination; it doesn't matter whether that person was murdered for being a political enemy or shot while being mugged. Murder is murder, and that's wrong, and I hope the perpetrator is brought to justice.

I don't want to talk about the murder as political violence for several reasons - one being that Charlie Kirk is already being mythologized for welcoming opportunities to sit across the table from his opponents and having a good old fashioned debate. Others dispute the mythology, saying his method of arguing with his opponents was one of bad faith, of bullshit, one that did not care about the truth at all, that he used the debating podium as a way of scoring political points that can be spun later on social media.

Both might be true, but I have a more fundamental question:

Is one of the best things about democracy that you can argue with your opponents, have fierce debates, and then go back home and not kill each other?

Not killing each other is a good thing, but is the apocalypse being held at the breach by speech? Like if we stopped talking, the guns will come out blazing? Is talking to people who aren’t like you a guarantor of peace?

I am not convinced TBH.

Debates play a much bigger role in American politics and maybe in some other Western countries (I don't know much about the public spectacles that inform their politics) than they do in Indian politics. Speech, especially oratory, is central to Indian politics, but Indian politicians don't conduct campaigns that end in debates.

But that's not my point either.

Indian politicians do all kinds of things that American politicians don't. We are not here to perform comparative analyses of political speech. Let's get back to debate. Debates are important in American politics. Not too long ago, Joe Biden was forced to end his campaign for the presidency because of how he performed in a debate. But here too, maybe the debate is not the important thing. It's not that he lost the debate on substantive grounds or even that his opponent was able to twist the rules of debate to win in the eyes of public opinion.

Actually, the truth was quite different, which is that Biden came across as old and senile and therefore incapable of running for president. It had nothing to do with the substance of the debate at all and everything to do with the mental state of Joe Biden.

Which brings me to a bigger issue: is the ability to talk it over with your opponents somehow the best thing about a democracy? That if we ended civil debate, we would be on the road to autocracy before you know it? That of all the ways in which politics reconciles cooperation and competition, debate and other forms of argumentative speech are the most important?

I am skeptical.

Compare debate as a non-explosive form of disagreement with other ways of being with people with whom we disagree. Let's take eating a communal meal. Suppose we replaced debates with people of opposing views sitting at a table and having a meal. Would that lead to a better political culture? I don't know. But all of us have experience of food diplomacy. My family doesn't agree with me on politics, but I sit at a table and eat with them all the time. And the solidarity created by food keeps me going back to that table. If I have to make a choice between debating and eating, I stop debating. Food is a greater binding element than the ability to disagree.

These visceral aspects of democratic life: eating at the same table, occupying the same spaces, going to the same schools - these factors also have the quality of reducing violence, perhaps more so than the ability to sit across the table and debating your opponents.

Hat-tip to A.O. Hirschman, who pointed out that ‘let’s make a deal’ was the original defense of capitalism, deals being much preferred to duels.

Debate is only a small part of the story of language in social life - take one look around you and notice how speech has become a semi-mystical wellspring of democracy. It isn't surprising, because modern technology allows one to 'speak' to millions while we can only eat at a table with ten, maybe, a hundred people.

I am skeptical of speech in the public sphere; it runs to demagogy even when it claims not to.

In the United States, the veneration of freedom of speech is an interesting thing. Don’t get me wrong: it's a good thing, it's good to have freedom of speech. I would rather be in a place where you could speak freely. But even then, is speech at the foundation of freedom? Is freedom flowing out of the nature of language or is it coming from somewhere else? We have a tendency to think that language like institutions - laws, constitutions, contracts etc - are the building blocks of collective human life. Of course everyone admits they are idealizations, but note that:

1. We idealize by reducing messy reality to a rule bound linguistic model and argue that the idealizations capture an essential truth.

2. There's a sense in which ideologies are nothing but clusters of propositions that hang together.

3. At its extreme, all of social life becomes a language game.

Debates and other language-game negotiations are reasonable idealizations when the world has already been brought to a stage where the conflicting parties accept the terms of the debate. We might think that paints a nice, liberal picture, but what happens when the debate’s terms are enforced by men with swords? Instead of treating language as an autonomous sphere, recognize that it’s embedded within many other conflicts (and cooperations). I am reminded of a famous debate between Buddhists, Daoists, Christians and Muslims organized in Mongke Khan’s court (MK was Genghis’ grandson):

This first face-to-face exchange on religious doctrines between East and West took place a few days later, on May 30, 1254, the eve of Pentecost. On this day, Rubruck represented Christianity, engaging in debate with Nestorians, Saracens, and Taoists within the church. Möngke appointed three arbitrators—a Christian, a Saracen, and a Taoist—and prohibited any claim that another’s view was inconsistent with God, banning insults and noisy disturbances.

Nevertheless, the debate did not end well for some of its participants. Daoists found themselves facing the sharp end of the sword while Tibetan Lamas found favor at the court. I doubt if the loss of favor was for purely scholarly reasons - sometimes you’re playing a game for fun, sometimes you’re playing to win a prize and sometimes you’re playing a game with death! You better know which one you’re playing. Otherwise, you’re like Neo trapped in the Matrix, enjoying the pretense of freedom while robots rule the world.

It doesn’t surprise me one bit that across the world, tricksters are celebrated for breaking the rules of the game - from Oedipus to Birbal, they recognize that the pen sits athwart the sword and you need to keep an eye on both.

TLDR; As long as the liberal hegemony holds, we can conduct our social affairs as if they are language games, that we can trade arguments and commodities, as if an equilibrium could be reached through the rules of the game - sometimes with a market in the middle, sometimes with a voter in the middle.

But if that liberal hegemony falls apart, it's not clear that these games can be played uninterrupted or when they aren’t interrupted, whether the outcomes have meaning. As infrastructure replaces ideology and metabolics replaces economics, should we also expect speech to be replaced by....?

I don’t know the answer to that question, but we need to channel some of that trickster energy to get there.

As you can see, I started with Charlie Kirk, but then meandered my way into puzzles about language in the social sphere. That's the power of the interregnum, when sometimes an event is just an event, and sometimes an event is an EVENT.

I am going to keep it short because I want to switch to writing long. I have been nibbling at the edges of the Globe, trying to figure out what’s worth writing about at length. That problem has been solved, for I know what I am going to focus on:

Global Risk.

Global risk can mean many things. As existential risk, it usually means the kinds of risk that can end civilization, i.e., even if some of us survive, we will have lost the capacity to sustain ourselves the way we are right now. That might be because:

1. Asteroid strike

2. Runaway climate change

3. Superbug

4. Nuclear war

The usual suspects.

Global risk can also mean the risk that comes with being global and/or the risk inherent in being global. Pandemics and climate change fall into that slot as well. These two are globe sized forms of risk. There are also risky forms of the Globe, like drawing the globe only around the human.

Of the three, I am most interested in how the Globe is inherently risky, and how the riskiness of that enterprise is presupposed

In the previous essay, I said that one way to grasp the risky globe is to risk-ify some major thinkers and their texts. Descartes was mentioned as someone who built his philosophical system on the basis of elements that are risk-proof. He was (metaphorically, if not literally) concerned about the Devil making him see and hear things that weren’t there. It’s a risk we all take, but if I may say so, the real problem here is not of risk but of trust.

Do you trust your senses? Do you trust your mind? Do you trust the world?

If, like, Satoshi Nakamoto, we are zero trust, then yes, we have to engineer systems that ensure certainty without trust. And as we are seeing unfold in front of our eyes, that so-called trustless solution has infused enormous risk into the financial system while claiming to be the opposite.

Our counterfactual Descartes should accept risk while doubling down on trust.

Let’s add Global Trust to Global Risk as the headline topic for a few months. But there’s also the converse: globalizing some risky thinkers. I am particularly interested in the Buddha’s analysis of suffering and how suffering pervades individual life. The Buddha recognized that life is risky and there’s no retreating to some cave or stove to make the risk go away. But what about suffering at the global scale? How might we experience it if we wore a Buddha hat?

Note that I said “Buddha hat” not a “Buddhist hat” - I am not as interested in what the religious tradition has to say about Global Risk as much as what it might be like for us to confront Global Suffering in the way the Buddha (as Siddhartha Gautama) confronted sickness, aging and death before he left home to seek the truth. We can only speculate, but global risk is an existential condition the B-man would have felt keenly if he were born today.

Summary of where I am going

By looking at global risk through different lenses, we can begin to understand it in a deeper way. We can see how global risk is an existential condition that must be addressed, and how trust and risk must be balanced. This exploration of global risk will give us a better understanding of its various dimensions.

1. It can mean the risk of ending civilization, either through asteroid strikes, runaway climate change, superbugs, or nuclear war.

2. It can also mean the risk associated with globalization, such as pandemics and climate change, which affect everyone regardless of where they live.

3. The third way of looking at global risk is to risk-ify some major thinkers and their texts.

4. Finally, the fourth perspective is to look at global risk through the lens of the Buddha's analysis of suffering, and to consider what global suffering (risk being the potential for suffering) might look like if we were to approach it with the same kind of insight.

There’s no coherent argument that connects all four perspectives; my goal is to find one or to admit defeat. But even they are four unrelated viewpoints, looking at global risk from these different angles will help us gain a better understanding of its complexities and develop ways to create a more better world.

These speculations and more after a break. Might take me a week, might take me a month to get my act together.

A gruesome logic puzzle goes thus:

A man has been condemned to death. His jailer knocks on his jail cell and says: you will be executed sometime this March, but whenever it happens, it’s going to come as a surprise.

The prisoner goes back to his bench while the other prisoners in his cell mutter their sympathies. Five minutes later, the condemned man is jumping up for joy. The other prisoners are aghast: why are you so happy you idiot? Don’t you know you’re going to be hanged next month?

The man retorts: don’t you get it? They guaranteed it will come as a surprise. Do you know what that means?

Other prisoners: no, we don’t.

P: If I am not executed by March 30th, then I will have to hanged on the 31st, so it won’t be a surprise. If I am not hanged by the 29th, then by the previous reasoning, I can’t be hanged on the 31st, so I will have to be hanged on the 30th, and therefore, there’s no surprise. The same for the 28th: if I am not hanged by then, I can rule out the 31st and the 30th so I am left with the 29th and there’s no surprise left.

You see where I am going? It will never be a surprise! I can never be hanged!

After which, the man falls asleep and stops worrying. Until the morning of the 14th, when the jailer comes to him and tells him to get ready.

P: but you told me it was going to be a surprise!

J: tell me, aren’t you surprised?

P: I am indeed.

J: well then…

Lesson: a risky event can be preceded by a retinue of events we don’t care about but somehow, they produce this event that we care about a lot. How is that possible?

While much of the technical literature is on how we get to the meaning of ‘cause,’ ‘probability,’ and ‘expectation,’ I want to pay attention to the ‘unwanted’ side of things.

What does it mean for an event to be unwanted?

The interesting thing about unwanted is that it needs a subject who wants. Causation, probability and expectation can be defined without a subject in the calculations, but you can’t have unwanted outcomes unless they are not wanted by someone. We assume without much thought that Scheherazade did not want her head chopped by her husband, which, therefore, was a risk. At lesser risk, but of more importance to those who live in the United States, Democratic pollsters who predicted Hillary’s win over Donald took a big risk. Republican pollsters did not, because - presumably - Trump’s win was not an unwanted event.

But where do we draw the line between events registered in the book of wants and events that pass by without notice? Let’s call events that we have no opinion about (good or bad) agnostic. Unwanted and wanted events are a small drop in an ocean of agnostic events.

Let’s say you’re opposing captains of a cricket match waiting for the coin toss to decide who bats and who bowls. You’re both taking a risk because you want to bat first - the pitch is known to deteriorate as the match enters day three and by day five it might be unplayable. You want to win the toss. So clearly the outcome of the toss is a risky event. But there are any number of factors that influence the toss: the wind on the playground, the spin the umpire puts on the coin, the weight of the coin and so on. Are these enabling events risky or agnostic?

The latter isn’t it? I mean, I don’t have an opinion on the clouds in the sky before the coin toss (OK, I might care about the clouds because they shield me from the Nagpur sun, but I don’t have an opinion as far as the outcome of the toss is concerned) but like the proverbial butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon, these environmental factors influence the outcome of the coin toss.

How do purely material events, events too small for our senses to register, suddenly burst into our consciousness as ‘risk’ or as ‘reward’?

Just as with the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ there seems to be a complete mystery as to how agnostic events - which can be modeled as purely physical phenomena such as the roll of the dice - become risky events.

Coming up: Risking Certainty

From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s article on certainty:

Certainty, or the attempt to obtain certainty, has played a central role in the history of philosophy. Some philosophers have taken the kind of certainty characteristic of mathematical knowledge to be the goal at which philosophy should aim.

What if we turned that goal on its head? What if we embrace risk, not just as a flaw to be minimized, but as a virtue to be embraced? And how might we do it?

Riskify: start with a canonical text on certainty and turn it into a monument of risk.

As the mountains of certainty go, Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy is a prominent peak. Let’s riskify it.

Risk is life. Every living organism has to take risks. That mound of grass out there sure looks appetizing, but what if there’s a tiger crouching on the other side? If I stop grazing because I am afraid tigers will get me, I will starve to death in a few days, but if I am killed by a tiger, I am dead in the next ten minutes.

Life is always a roll of the dice.

But systems of risk are relatively new. Imagine if the deer and the tigers came to an agreement: we will select two or three of our clan every day for you to eat and in return, you promise not to spring at us from every corner.

This way, the tiger gets her supper while the deer get to plan their lives until the moment they are the meal. Not the ideal situation for the deer, for they would prefer not to be eaten at all, but it’s more predictable and less stressful until the day flesh meets claw. And it’s a great deal for the tigers, who don’t have to hunt any more. It’s an unequal system but one that offers some advantages to both parties.

The modern world is full of such risk mitigation agreements, institutions, technologies etc.

But the story of risk doesn’t end there, for risk never goes away. Efforts to reduce risk at one level may bring it back in catastrophic form at another level. Now that deer can plan their lives, they start having more kids. Everyone’s happy for a bit. The deer are happier because they can have a carefree time with their children until they’re dinner and the tigers are happier because there are more deer to eat. They too start having more children.

The more tigers there are, the more deer they eat. Of course the deer resent the tigers’ easy life backed by deer bodies. Why should we keep sending ourselves for slaughter when the tigers give us nothing in return? Why participate in this one sided market?

Why indeed?

The deer go on strike. No more fresh meat deliveries they say. The tigers aren’t happy but being the generous killers they are, the cat council gives the deer a week to come to their senses. But the victims love their newly found freedoms. The deer authority adopts “we are winners, not your dinners!” as its official slogan.

The tigers aren’t going to stand for such an insult! They attack the deer en masse one evening. Unfortunately, the tigers have forgotten their hunting skills. The deer avoid their predators with ease. Not just that first time, but every subsequent occasion as well.

End result: The tigers starve to death.

With nothing left to check deer population growth, the deer eat all the grass in forest. With nothing left to graze, they too starve to death.

OR

A roving band of hyenas notices the profusion of deer and muscles into the tiger’s territory. The deer aren’t as quick on their feet as they used to be. The hyena gorge themselves on deer meat for a month before moving on. The deer population never recovers. With no meat left to eat, the tigers….starve to death, of course.

Moral of the story: those who can ride out a storm might find themselves blown away by a hurricane.

A risk management system can make our lives easier by smoothing out small bumps, but leave us defenseless against large variations. Which would be fine as long as the large variations are exceedingly rare, but what if the risk management system increases the probability of large variations? Like how the plentiful deer attract hyenas, or how globalized commerce and travel increases the probability of pandemics.

That would be an unintended consequence wouldn’t it?

There’s a vast literature on risk, from fields as disparate as philosophy and chemistry. No doubt we need to consult those texts, but we might also want to glance at risky literature, i.e., not literature about risk (often written by scholars who have never risked a thing in their lives) but literature that’s a form of risk taking in itself.

The most famous collection of risky literature is the 1001 nights, with the storyteller facing the knife every sunset, but there’s also the Pancatantra and its Arabic translation - the tales of Kalilah and Dimnah. I just learned the writer/translator of Kalilah and Dimnah - Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ - was employed by the first Abbasid Caliph’s uncle and executed by the second Abbasid Caliph for writing lines that criticized him.

He who lives by the pen dies by the sword. The martyr of Basra is one of the patron saints of risk, but he was writing before the stock market and the insurance policy. Premodern literature was typically a hero’s journey, a story about an extraordinary individual. Only they had the capacity for risk taking. The modern system isn’t just about the commodification of labor and material goods. It’s also about the commodification of risk - the stock market and health insurance has made risk takers of us all.

Every culture I know(of) has origin stories as well as extinction stories. What’s different about the modern world is in the role of risk in our calculations of flourishing and catastrophe.

A traditional Christian or Hindu might believe in the end of times (and the role of human sin/karma in making those time arrive) but they would do so against the background of eternal life and divine perfection in heaven or some other ideal world. Religious life means membership in the ‘certainty society,’ which is a society in which there’s some ultimate source of truth, value, faith etc.

In contrast, we moderns take the risky life to be the only life we’ll have; the goal isn’t to negotiate risk in preparation for a better world in the afterlife, but to optimize one’s chances in the here and now. The horizon isn’t heaven. There may be no horizon, and even if there’s one, it’s not supernatural.

Required reading: Ulrich Beck - “The Risk Society”.

The Risk Society is an essential feature of the Globe

Risk; Extinction, Uncertainty, Contingency. These terms and their cognates are the first cluster of concepts I want to explore in the glexicon. Extinction lies at the limit of risk. I don’t want to be a downer, but in the long run we are all dead - and that’s as true of the species as it’s true of the individual. Extinction is inevitable, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to prevent it when we can (like keeping track of asteroids) and certainly prevent ourselves from being its main cause. '

Required reading: Toby Ord, “Precipice.”

Required reading doesn’t mean I agree with the text or even consider to be important. It just means the book/article represents a viewpoint that must be considered. Of course, I would rather read something I like and whose importance is undeniable but that’s the risk we take when cracking open any book, don’t we?

But we should also prepare for the worst and ask how some of us might survive the apocalypse.

Required reading: Hermann Kahn’s “On Thermonuclear War.”

Caveat Venditor: everyone and their mother has written a book on risk so I’m taking a big risk by devoting time & energy on a topic where the barrier to originality is high. But if I may be so bold: the systematic cultivation of risk is the driving force of modernity, the source of much of its good and evil, order and chaos.

Risk doesn’t stop with war or society; sooner or later, we have to acknowledge the possibility of risk everywhere, including our ways of knowing and arguably, in the fabric of the universe itself. Probability has become the preferred framework for reasoning about risk.

Optional reading (not required because it’s technical and dense): Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Probability.

And finally, we come to the primary instrument of risk: both the means through which make our bets and assess their consequences. You guessed it: 💰💰💰. The scolds complain that money has become the source of all meaning - replacing God and Family and everything good and true. That complaint makes sense in a certainty society where God (or the axioms of set theory) backstops every decision. But citizens of a risk society intuitively know there is no court of last appeal with a kindly judge who will take our foibles into account before pronouncing judgment. Might as well pray to the only lever that moves the world: 💰💰💰.

Required reading: Eugene McCarrahar, “The Enchantments of Mammon.”

👉🏾 👉🏾 : the Glexicon (such as risk) reveals itself everywhere - economy, society, philosophy…..

The first step in understanding the Globe is to name its parts. I am going to spend a few weeks months carving a dictionary of concepts designed to help us grasp the Globe: the global lexicon or glexicon for short.

Fair warning: the global lexicon could end up closer to the Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge than Diderot’s Encyclopedia.

The glexicon will have respectable entries like: machine, but also disreputable ones like influencer marketing, and in recursive fashion, its first entry is itself.

The Globe is subject and object, dream and reality. It’s too big to be encircled by facts. We need to send a myth or two to its kingdom as our ambassadors, and if the myths are unconvincing, off with their heads! The taxonomy of the world is a risky business.

It is said that Prajapati, the creator of the world, was all alone before he created the gods. They were his children, but they flew away from his grasp the minute they were born. And one day, in a fit of revenge, they killed their father, dismembered him and scattered his remains across the world.

Why revenge?

Because. Which child isn’t angry at its parents for bringing them into the world? Anyone who loves freedom must rue this original act of bondage. Even a god. But my concern is not with the gods, but with Prajapati. He who was alone at the beginning and alone at the end. He whose bones are the book of the world.

The Globe, of course, is Prajapati, and as for the Globe’s children: take a look in the mirror.

Let’s go looking for his bones.

If I were to summarize everything I’ve written in the last five years in one line, it would be:

The Globe is the human bubble.

We are trapped in the bubble even when we don’t know we are. Some might say there’s no escaping it even if we try. What else can we be if we’re not human: Butterflies? Klingons? The bubble accompanies us wherever we go.

Maybe.

I don’t know if we can escape the bubble (I hope we can, but hope isn’t a plan) but I am quite sure we can map the bubble and its interior. For example, we can answer questions such as: what kind of knowledge does it take to keep the bubble going?

Yes, there’s a special kind of knowledge that goes into creating and maintaining the bubble.

We can't cut down forests to make way for palm trees if we didn't:

1. Know how to cut trees en masse.

2. Had the energy and logistical supplies to bring fuel to cut the trees down and cart the logs away after the cutting’s done.

3. Manage palm plantations at scale.

4. Embed palm oil in global supply chains that delivers oil to agribusiness.

The capacity to create coupled complex systems of production, distribution and consumption is our system's core expertise, reflected in how we write software, draft contracts, organize scientific collaborations and so on. That knowledge leads to multinational companies, to the human genome project, to Google and Facebook and to clear cut forests, factory farms and concentration camps.

The bubble is grounded in managerial knowledge

Manageriality underlies the anthropocene; without it there would be no workable idea of humanity - say, through a system that implements the U.N charter on human rights. It’s through manageriality that the IPCC creates a report summarizing the effects of climate change. The CPC is manageriality with Chinese characteristics. The WTO and the World Bank are manageriality with American characteristics.

Manageriality runs the world.

One managerial system burst in the eighties - the Soviet system. Before we point to the capitalist system as the root of all ecological evil, let's take a look at the communist system's record in keeping forests intact - not very good. For a while there were competing bubbles but now there's only one, so it's going to be the target of people's anger.

What should I read? AI to the rescue:

Not bad, but not exactly what I was looking for. Maybe I asked the wrong question?

One more time:

Maybe tomorrow’s AI will give us subtle analyses of the Globe, but I am terribly disappointed with today’s robotic overlords. The show will go on with unpaid labor, i.e., me. Now contrast that with what Latour et. al., say about Planet Globalization:

The Globe has been in the making for the last five hundred years says Dipesh but it’s only in the last fifty that it’s become real.

Sorry - today’s essay is abstract even by my standards. Can’t be avoided :(

The Globe is both subject and object, transcendent and immanent. There’s no making sense of ‘humanity’ without the Globe; and what lies beyond is something else - call it non-humanity, call it post-humanity. There’s a famous saying of Kant that goes:

The Globe isn’t as big as the starry heavens and it doesn’t exhaust the moral law, but it has quite a bit of both, and therefore, it fill our minds with admiration and reverence. But there’s something unique about it:

We know there’s something beyond the Globe; but there’s no way for us to grasp that which lies beyond without running into contradiction. That’s either a cause for caution or a signal that we need to leap into the great beyond. I am inclined to practice my long jump.

The Globe is a limit: a limit of thought, a limit of politics, a limit of society….We will need to probe its limits, but before we do so, a word from our sponsor. At the beginning of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant says:

That’s Kant’s Copernican revolution in philosophy. One way to think about objects conforming to our cognitions: the world isn’t intelligible without an organizer. Kant argues that two kinds of naive views are untenable:

1. The "objective" view that there's a world out there independent of who's in it. This is the standard scientific view grounded in the physicist's perspective that there's a vast universe out there well beyond any human presence. Of course, paradoxically, the physicist also believes that the objective universe can be grasped through mathematics and in particular, is the material outcome of rational laws. Which, in turn, grounds the next naive view:

2. That reason can grasp the bare structure of the universe, that there's a special kind of knowing that sidesteps our finite, bodily condition and gets to the truth.

Kant denies both of these possibilities. If we agree with him, we also believe there's no such thing as bare existence, or even if there is, it won't make sense so there's no point in talking about it.

These are important insights, but I want to suggest a line of development that abstracts away from Kant's particular identification of the organizer role. Kant identifies the organizer with the rational (human) subject, and in doing so, gives the subject an active role in the constitution of the world. I am thinking: organizer, yes, but organizer as subject: maybe not. We can acknowledge the need for organization while abstracting it away from the subject.

What if we replace the subject with the Globe as the primary organizing principle?

What exactly does that mean? How does the Globe organize the world? The transition from the Subject to the Globe is a three step process:

1. Replace the subject with some other organizing principle - can be anything: society, biological evolution etc. We can just as easily say: it’s the state that helps us make sense of the world, or more abstractly, it’s the mode of production that helps us make sense of the world. Lesson 1: there are many organizers.

2. Turn the organizer slot into a variable. So far, we have only dealt with constants, i.e., each organizer - subject, society etc - is a fixed entity. Instead, assuming that the organizer slot is dynamic and can be filled by several entities and we don’t need to determine that entity beforehand. Lesson 2: the organizer is a slot, not an individual.

3. The Globe denotes the variable itself, i.e., it’s identified with the organizer slot per se, and not a specific occupant of that slot whether that be the subject, Dasein, the genome or society. Lesson 3: the Globe is the name for the slot itself.

The Globe is a whole, but a relational one: THAT which stands in the organizer relation to the world, whatever that might be. Having sketched that outline, we can glimpse the future of globalization:

Abstract a "science" of organizers from the various instances we have seen in the wild: from Kant’s Subject to Husserl’s subjectivity to Uexkull’s organism to Heidegger’s Dasein to Luhmann’s Society.

We have to start with a descriptive science of the essential features of organizing. The idea is to keep it simple (don’t laugh!): suggest an intuitive shift from a specific organizer to the class of organizers as a whole.

Once again, sorry for writing an essay that may come across as word salad.

Kant argued that we don’t have direct access to the world; we can only grasp it as filtered by our mental capacities. While his argument was directed at the individual human mind, philosophers such as Hegel who built upon Kant’s insights said that the proper setting for the ‘human potential’ is social life, what Marx might call our ‘species being.’

Man is a species-being, not only because in practice and in theory he adopts the species (his own as well as those of other things) as his object, but*and this is only another way of expressing it*also because he treats himself as the actual, living species; because he treats himself as a universal and therefore a free being

How universal are we though? Can we ever be the mirror of nature? What is the fullest expression of this species being? The answer to all these questions passes through the Globe, of which I said in last Friday’s essay:

What interests me is the regime change from the globe to the earth, where

1. globe = society + (nature as represented in society), while

2. the earth is life on the planet qua planet.

The Globe is humanus maximus (I just made that up, so don’t go searching for the phrase), maximal humanity, and it’s also a maximal contradiction, in that:

1. There’s an inexorable movement towards realizing the globe

2. That movement exhausts the very ‘nature’ it depends upon and in the process, creates the conditions of its own destruction.

But that’s not all there is to the globe. While it’s the fullest expression of ‘humanity,’ that humanity isn’t an abstract universal or an ahistorical essence. For example, there’s one claim, made by Steven Pinker among others, that imperial civilization (which is one way of bringing all humanity together as humanity) has been making our lives better in the long run:

and there’s the counter claim, made by Graeber and Wengrow:

While not explicitly global, there’s also ‘big history’ which situates human history in larger cosmological developments. I don’t think big history would make much sense if the Globe wasn’t available as an organizing principle. While we live in a truly global era today, that organizing principle can be (with some strain) extended to the full sweep of human existence, for it’s primarily an imagination of humanity in society with the non-human world as its ‘other.’ An other known only through media that society creates to grasp that alien landscape.

The Globe is both transcendent principle without which it’s impossible to grasp ‘humanity’ and the imminent web of connections, technologies and institutions that bind us together as an autonomous, collective being.

The Globe isn’t an egalitarian concept, at least not necessarily so. The Leviathan is a global concept. Binding all humans into one society doesn’t mean we are equally bound.

It’s only when positioned against the Earth does the Globe look like a smooth, internally homogeneous entity. Everything about the Globe is a matter of disagreement, and I am going to explore that roiling terrain for a bit while keeping the overall contradiction between the Globe and the Earth in mind.

There’s no shortage of myths of a harmonious past when all beings lived in peace. But the goods times never last do they? That glorious symmetry was fated to fall; greed and delusion take over and we live in a state of permanent strife.

Until…..?

Until the end of days, I suppose. Except that you and I may disagree on how that end plays out. Is it:

1. Jesus will reappear and lead the faithful to heaven? And consign the rest to eternal damnation.

2. Humans will burn themselves to death and the planet will slowly restore itself after a few thousand years?

3. Some of us will fly off to Mars and establish Anthropocene 2.0?

4. We come to our senses and reestablish that original state of harmony?

Which one is it going to be?

It’s very hard to predict, especially the future, but I am guessing none of the above. Edenic and apocalyptic scenarios are ahistorical - nothing happens when you’re living in harmony or when everyone’s dead.

Regime change is a bit different - it marks a transition from one historical condition to the another1. What interests me is the regime change from the globe to the earth, where

1. globe = society + (nature as represented in society), while

2. the earth is life on the planet qua planet.

The future being hard to predict, I can only paint a plausible picture of what’s happening but what’s clear is that the shift from the globe to the earth is both the next phase of globalized society and the greatest change ever. It’s the next step because the globe isn’t insulated from the earth; in fact, it’s embedded in it and we are awakening to that embedding. But

Linear exploration goes thus: you step out of our house and walk to the village center. Maybe it takes you ten minutes. Maybe it takes you two hours, but the end of the road is in sight even before you start your journey. It might not even feel like a journey, but that’s about as far as you want to go.

The next generation isn’t satisfied with the village. It wants to walk or ride to the nearest town. A day’s ride and they’re done. The next generation finds the town boring and wants to go to the city. It takes them a few weeks of riding through farm and forest and after an adventure or two, they’re ready to start their lives afresh.

Another generation, another journey. Why stop with the city? Why not cross the oceans into a new continent? That too shall be done.

By the time the fourth generation comes around, the water and earth are too constraining and the air beckons as the next frontier of exploration; beyond the air lies the vast expanse of space. There’s no air to breathe or water to drink, but the linear mind thinks space is merely an extension of land, water and air.

They would be wrong. We aren’t accidental inhabitants of the earth. It’s not merely our home. In fact, it’s our own Solaris and to assume that we can leave it for another world is the greatest error that linear thinking has ever fallen into. As the URL to this article on “There’s no Planet-B” says: we will never be able to live on another planet. Mars, for example:

While human-led missions to Mars seem likely in the coming decades, what are our prospects of long-term habitation on Mars? Present-day Mars is a cold, dry world with a very thin atmosphere and global dust storms that can last for weeks on end. Its average surface pressure is less than 1 per cent of Earth’s.

Do we really think we can go forth and multiply on this cold, desert landscape? You might have heard of the saying “growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.“ Expansion could be worse: “expansion for the sake of expansion is the ideology of the nuclear reaction.”

If growth is the essence of capitalism, expansion is the essence of empire. If I were forced to make a choice, I would say imperialism is worse. Infinite expansion on a finite planet is the contradiction at the heart of human imperialism. We know we have reached the limits of that ideology.

Nonlinear exploration is another matter: who knows what we might discover if we embed ourselves deeper into the earth as we also explore the stars.

Let’s say you were a progressive in the late 18th and early 19th century. You were - rightly - appalled at the slave trade and enraged that governments weren’t doing enough to stop the crime against humanity. You saw a glimmer of hope in how the transatlantic trade was coming to a halt, but worried that it was being replaced by internal slave markets.

One day, you go to a public gathering where a visiting speaker is talking about the evils of plantation capitalism and how the makers of cotton and sugar keep us hooked on their commodities (wouldn’t have happened, but humor me) and prevented governments from shifting away to better sources.

You notice a man way over there gesticulating wildly with his hands. He is visibly agitated and getting more so by the minute. Sensing a lull in the main speech, the man shouts from the back of the hall: the solution to this problem is simple - just replace cotton with petroleum fibers (which hadn’t been invented, but keep humoring me) and mechanize sugar production. Make the alternatives cheaper and more attractive and the market will take care of the rest.

And as a pragmatic progressive, you’re left with two choices:

1. Support a strong anti-cotton/sugar movement OR

2. Support market based alternatives to cotton and sugar

Now tell me: with hindsight, do either of these two positions appear as the right response to slavery?

And if they don’t, why do you think the current debate over fossil fuels and their renewable counterparts is the right characterization of our planetary crisis? Until we see the planet as the planet, and all its inhabitants as carrying moral worth, we are making that very mistake.

That’s not to say we shouldn’t aim to replace carbon based fuels with renewables, but to have that and many other decisions flow out of a grasp of the whole.

It may be possible for the current system to see the planet as a planet (some version of the choices presented in Climate Leviathan) or we may have to imagine entirely new forms of governance, but in both cases we start with the core problem: governing the Earth. Which takes a lot more than reducing atmospheric carbon.

Trotsky wanted us to live in a permanent revolution, but instead, we live in a permanent extinction. Yesterday it was nuclear holocaust; today it is climate catastrophe. Tomorrow what?

Maybe there’s no tomorrow?

Maybe, but let’s hope maybe not. There’s the distinct possibility we will lurch from one cause of extinction to the next in a game of planetary Russian Roulette until we trigger the chamber that has the bullet.

I have been thinking though: should we embrace extinction instead of rejecting it?

Ummmm, what?

Buddhists have always meditated on death. They have these vivid practices where you imagine yourself being a corpse eaten by worms. Tantric rituals take these practices to the next level. The point of these practices, of course, is not to become a murderer, but an enlightened being, that the severe contemplation of death can release compassion instead of fear.

Why not turbocharge that contemplation of mortality to the species level and meditate upon extinction?

Let me give the last word to Paul Edwards:

Of all the technologies built to fight the Cold War, digital computers have become its most ubiquitous, and perhaps its most important , legacy. Yet few have realized the degree to which computers created the technological possibility of' Cold War and shaped its political atmosphere, and virtually no one has recognized how profoundly the Cold War shaped computer technology. Its politics became embedded in the machineseven, at times, in their technical design- while the machines helped make possible its politics. This book argues that we can make sense of the history of computers as tools only when we simultaneously grasp their history as metaphors in Cold War science, politics, and culture.

What if the Cyborg is Kalki, the avatar of the apocalypse? And will remain so as long as we lie under the sword of extinction, whether nuclear, climate or some future catastrophe hidden behind the curtain.

The supreme irony of our planetary age is that the nightmare of the first phase - the nuclear winter - is the exact opposite of the nightmare of the second phase - runaway heating.

And we have mostly forgotten the fears and rituals of the cold war: no more emergency sirens and drills, no hiding in the basement. Much of the infrastructure of fear has gone underground, reappearing as the surveillance state on occasion.

Every once in a while you’ll hear someone talk about Climate Change as if it were a war; in particular, that we must mobilize against it like we did during the Second World War (we, of course, being the United States, from where I am writing this letter); the lament being why are we not all in like we were in the fight against fascism.

I have news for you: we may need that metaphorical war against climate change (and we may get that yet, if it’s combined with a real war against China) but we already live in the world created by the war: the vast machinery of destruction, surveillance and extraction set into motion by the Second World War and multiplied during the Cold War has never receded - it’s only found new enemies.

Confusing that machinery for its primary (negative) outcome, i.e., nuclear winter then, climate change now, is mistaking the woods for the trees. In fact, many of the deep insights of the past seventy five years, such as Lovelock and Margulis’ Gaia Hypothesis, flow out of the same knowledge regime that threatens us with nuclear winter and climate collapse. In fact, the Gaia hypothesis as well as the recognition of anthropogenic climate change were based on data collected under the surveillance apparatus spawned by the Cold War military-industrial complex.

We need to understand that regime, as a vehicle for insight and a force for destruction, for Gaia and for collapse.

Another way to think about the situation: the sciences that saw the greatest advances in the post war years weren’t physics or mathematics, both of whom had their respective revolutions in the first half of the twentieth century, but biology and the information sciences (computer science, cognitive science etc) and correlated developments in what might be called nonlinear dynamics, chaos theory, complex systems science etc. The thread that runs through all of them:

1. They are all ‘planetary sciences’ in the sense they deal with earthly phenomena we can experience with our senses.

2. They blur, if not erase, the distinction between science and technology. Studying the world and changing the world are part of the same package.

3. Literal and metaphorical uses of concepts such as ‘network,’ ‘system,’ etc.

How to grasp this system of knowledge? Because systems science has direct impact on our lives, it has received many treatments in what’s called ‘Science & Technology Studies,’ which isn’t surprising for modern science is a special system responsible for the production of knowledge. A good place to start is a couple of books by Paul Edwards, one on computing and cognitive science during the Cold War and the second on computer models of Climate Change. Edwards:

Of all the technologies built to fight the Cold War, digital computers have become its most ubiquitous, and perhaps its most important , legacy. Yet few have realized the degree to which computers created the technological possibility of Cold War and shaped its political atmosphere, and virtually no one has recognized how profoundly the Cold War shaped computer technology. Its politics became embedded in the machines- even, at times, in their technical design- while the machines helped make possible its politics. This book argues that we can make sense of the history of computers as tools only when we simultaneously grasp their history as metaphors in Cold War science, politics, and culture.

Not just the Cold War - computers are the hidden link between the nuclear winter and the climate summer. IPCC reports, with their synthesis of thousands of publications and the balancing of scientific, economic and political interests are the quintessential products of Cyborg Science.

Here Cyborg means many things: it means the specific machines we built to coordinate missile launches and model carbon emissions, and later, check the number of likes on a Facebook post. It means the abstract machines studied by Turing and his followers that probe the limits of finite, mechanizable calculation. It means the models of natural and artificial intelligence, theories that explain how the mind works and how cells reproduce. Cyborgs are models for both pointing 👉🏾 and pushing 🥊, both it and bit. The Cyborg is the avatar (Kalki?) of another old, mystical concept: ‘form,’ minus its Platonic associations of an ideal world separate from ours.

Form in the world, but not of it?

I am switching to a series of shorter essays on M/W/F as a way of mapping the terrain I will cover in greater detail once the basic contours are known.

Where I want to go 👇🏾

The most important development in the practice of science in the 20th century and continuing into ours was the systems/cybernetic revolution, in which we can include not only computing systems but also biological systems and social systems. The Manhattan Project, the Apollo Mission and the Human Genome project are all successes of this style of doing science and technology.

These days the wins arrive in the mail everyday - Alpha Go solving protein folding and so on. Every single one of these comes under the label of ‘big science’ and open to the criticism that a) it adds a large managerial layer to the practice of science and b) it is not suitable for blue-sky research, but for scaling up a knowledge system whose fundamentals are well understood.

I will use the term ‘cybernetics’ as a catch all phrase for the content of these new sciences, the social organizations that help us conduct such science and the technical machinery that goes into making it all happen.

Cybernetic science has a reputation for being dull and industrial; I was once told by a major practitioner that his institute, of which he was the chief scientific officer, wasn’t the traditional research institute where each PI runs their own lab. Instead, it was designed to be a corporation with an overall mission and everyone had work assigned in accordance with that mission. I am quite sure that’s how the Human Genome Project was run and that’s how Deep Mind runs internally. The model works for the knowledge industry, and why should that industry be any different from any other industry? Still, the romantic in me feels duty bound to ask:

What’s the alternative? How can cybernetic science be creative, going where no one has gone before?

For that to happen, we need to postulate an object of study that’s proper to cybernetics itself, i.e., an object that’s revealed only by the science of cybernetics, just as the atom is the proper object of study of physics (not atoms literally, but the quest for the smallest component of matter). Let me offer the ‘world’ as the proper target of study of cybernetics. In the study of worlds we hope to reveal an entity that sits uncomfortably with physics, even if there’s nothing supernatural about it.

Isn’t that exciting if true?

‘Society only makes sense in the light of the planet’ take one

For most of us, life is 'life in society’. No, that’s not the obvious claim we are social creatures who have always lived with others. Society is a lot more than communal living, for it introduces new ideas, ideals & institutions that influence our behavior. For example: long distance communication forms and media artifacts are a huge part of what life in society means for most of us.

PS: That’s why I said: ‘for most of us’ because all of us are communal creatures, but there are a few of us who don’t live in society in the modern sense of that term. It’s society in the Niklas Luhmann sense of that term that’s being subsumed by planetary life.

What can that possibly mean? I don't have a definitive answer, but here are some important new ways in which planetary life builds upon life in society.

1. We are much more aware of new 'circulants' such as carbon and covid, along with existing circulants such as money and information.

2. Our sense of history and geography expands to include a deep nonhuman past. This is not merely evolutionary history but the history of human BEINGS as one among many BEINGS that have inhabited one BEING, i. e., the EARTH.

3. The production of new cultural artifacts and artistic traditions that expand beyond the human. I can't imagine grasping 'humanity' without the novel or the movie. They are essential to the common experience of humanity. If the novel is the art form of life in society, what will be the corresponding art for planetary life?

The modern era saw the emergence of new systems of knowledge of life in society:philosophy, anthropology, sociology, economics etc and also new artistic forms that helped reveal humans as humans to one another. As part of this self-revelation of humanity, new institutions such as the nation state arose with characteristic ways of knowing their subjects- the census, income data, central banks etc..

What happens to this infrastructure of the social when you let the planet into the door?

Whether we like it or not, every one of us lives in the shadow of the Globe, the worldwide system of economics, technology, media and politics that delivers food to your stomach and disinformation to your brain. The German sociologist Niklas Luhmann simply called it ‘Society’ - note the use of the singular - to indicate an entity that contains all humans along with the material and communicative tissues that bind us together into an autonomous whole.

Aside: Luhmann is famous in ‘second brain’ circles for being a prominent proponent of a method called Zettelkasten, which was his way of taking connected notes on paper. Supposedly responsible for his prolific writing - over 50 books and 550 articles over a long career.

Luhmann’s assumption (or claim?) was that Society is an autopoietic system, i.e., a system whose primary activity is to create itself and lead an autonomous existence. In this view, what society does is primarily driven by its own internal processes and only incidentally affected by the world outside. Society, as the fullest expression of human autonomy, is also the mechanism through which that global human is constituted, a being connected to all other human beings, immune to predation, fear and and disease and that only answers to its own demands. How many of us worry about being bitten by a snake or eaten by a tiger? For Society, these creatures are objects, where an object is an entity outside an autopoietic system that the system uses for its own purposes.

But of course, the dream of Society was only a dream; we can no more seal ourselves off from the rest of the universe than we can live in an glasshouse for eternity. That we are connected to the non-human world around us is a commonplace observation: the real irony - as climate change and the pandemic are telling us - is that the very processes that sustain Society are the ones that have made it porous and vulnerable and brought it to the brink of collapse. Society’s need for autonomy from the Planet is the very thing responsible for ending its autonomy from the Planet. That contradiction is exhibit A for:

Society makes sense only in the light of the Planet

There’s no economy without ecology, there’s no politics without planetics. Even something as other-worldly as religion has to be reinterpreted against the backdrop of our planetary condition. There’s no going back to the Globe- whether our civilization collapses or whether we rise to the occasion.

The regime change from the Globe to the Earth is well under way, but its contours are mostly hidden from us. We will need to cast a speculative eye to discern the Earth’s features as they will reveal themselves in the near future. At the same time, the Earth can’t be studied as if it were ‘natural,’ a rock with a thin layer of life on its surface and nothing else. Studies of the social have revealed:

1. The metaphysical richness of the human animal, the Dasein, as Heidegger called it.

2. The material complexity that goes into the self-production of Society.

We need to bring that taste for diversity and subtlety to the study of the Earth. This is a romantic view, both in the small ‘r’ colloquial sense and in the big ‘R’ Romantic tradition sense. It’s the Romantics who first articulated an organic, holistic response to the mechanical tendencies of modernity. As Andrea Wulf says about the influence of the thinkers and poets of Jena:

Many of those who were inspired by the ideas coming out of Jena felt that they lived in a world ruled by division and fragmentation – they bemoaned the loss of unity. The problem, they believed, lay with Cartesian philosophers who had divided the world into mind and matter, or the Linnaeun thinking that had turned the understanding of nature into a narrow practice of collecting and classification. Coleridge called these philosophers the ‘Little-ists’. This ‘philosophy of mechanism’, he wrote to Wordsworth, ‘strikes Death’. Thinkers, poets and writers in the US and across Europe were enthralled by the ideas that developed in Jena, which fought the increasing materialism and mechanical clanking of the world.

Let me offer a romantic hypothesis:

Over the next year, I will explore how the visible and invisible hand of the planet helps us make sense of Society. In this exploration ‘trained speculation’ will have as much a role to play as the analysis of facts. My goal isn’t to to explain what’s happening or to predict the future1,but to paint a plausible picture of what might happen. I will be doing a lot of ‘reading for writing,’ i.e., reading books and essays written by others who have something to offer to our planetary turn, with the reading having a specific purpose: writing the planet into society. I don’t know how often I will write - once a week seems like a good rhythm to establish, but expect more frequent missives when I am on the trail of a particularly important idea.

Today’s update is the last one on Climate Leviathan - I am mostly done with the book and the remaining arguments are repetitive. The central conundrum the book poses is the following:

With Communism dead and buried, the only framework with global provenance is the liberalism. To paraphrase Tolstoy in Anna Karenina,

all happy nations are liberal while every unhappy nation is illiberal in its own way.

We can see the grip of liberalism in every international institution - from the UN to the World Bank and the IMF and the COP process, the only available frameworks for international cooperation and collective action are liberal and - tacitly - backstopped by American hegemony.

The transition from the global, whose flows are primarily economic, to the planetary, whose flows are primarily ecological, is an urgent need but the only muscle memory we have for doing so is what’s been created by the liberal hegemony of the past seventy five years.

Some think that hegemony is dead or dying, with a Chinese led authoritarian alternative rising by the day, with the pandemic followed by the war in Ukraine accelerating that process. The west is using finance and sanctions while China and others are using commodities as their currency.

The situation today is somewhat like decolonization in 1945, after the end of the World War. The colonists were leaving one by one but the only institutions the newly independent countries had at their disposal were colonial ones. Plus, the local elites were invariably absorbed into the (liberal) colonial apparatus, and yet, paradoxically, it’s their nationalist consciousness that drove independence struggles throughout the world. The nation as a political entity was imagined as a community by these elites. Similarly, it’s a section of the global elite whose changing consciousness helps imagine a planetary community and lays the grounds for a planetary politics.

A new Earth rises: How did the planet replace the nation-state to become the prime political object of the 21st century?

This elite speaks through a well recognized set of codes: belief in science and technology, global accords and other coordinating mechanisms, market and finance. Together, they form a way of knowing the earth and the liberal view of progress might say: we have the capacity to self-correct based on new data.

That claim is echoed by the most prestigious institutions of the liberal world. Here’s some publicity material from MIT’s new climate grand challenge initiative called “Computing our Climate Future”

That’s the neoliberal approach to the planet in a sentence: bring the best experts on climate science and climate policy in room, surround them with the best climate models and crank out future scenarios by the dozen. For the neoliberals, climate change is a very large but solvable crisis, i.e., a phenomenon well understood within the history of the capitalist system. Internal contradictions within that system (say, between energy needs and carbon emissions) prompt institutions to reconsider, correct their course and create new knowledge products and markets for solving climate change. However, crisis isn’t the only possibility - there’s also catastrophe, an event that ends civilization for good. It was the fear of catastrophe that prompted Keynes to imagine a different system:

The Keynesians are confident that a new class of philosopher kings are up to the task of managing the planet for everyone else

Is this possible? Can we all prosper in the now ‘traditional’ sense of material production and consumption while also remaining sustainable? That’s the premise of Green New Deal talk across the world.

The alternative view of the same developments: knowing, measuring and managing the planet is continuous with the colonial enterprise of measuring and knowing the populations and geographies they colonized and whatever imperial expansion needed to extract profit. Keynes himself was deeply implicated in the colonial enterprise and didn’t care much about Britain repaying its debts to the colonies or the human cost in the colonies of the wars started by the imperialists. During the Bretton-Woods conference:

We are no longer in the era of the climate crisis - climate catastrophe is looming over us, if it’s not already there.

If the planet has become a political object, it will be the most contested object in the history of humanity. Gone are the days when the planet is assimilated into the ‘natural,’ with its well defined boundaries and objective scientific predictions.

Neither the human nor the other planetary forces are unified - unity is always falling apart and neither the natural nor the social are wholes that signify holiness. The past seventy five years are to planetary colonization that the European conquest of the Americas was to settler colonialism: rapacious, ecocidal and utterly convinced about the superiority of our religion (Christianity then and Capitalism now).

The Climate Leviathan seeks to ‘civilize’ that impulse through liberal planetary governance, but it suffers from a major problem - it’s structurally organized to extract and exploit the non-human world. Capitalism is first and foremost a system of twisting and shaping nature for the purposes of accumulation. Attempts to pass welfare measures (conservation biology, environmental laws etc) can win a fight here and there, but they’re losing the war on a terrain constantly being reset by the Matrix.

What we really need is decolonization, not benign imperialism.

For what else is globalization but the colonizing of the earth by the market? What does decolonization look like and what means do we have at our disposal to do so? What inherited institutions from the global colonial era are useful for this new imagination of an independent planet?

Aristotle says ‘man is a social animal’ - a statement to which every reader of this newsletter is likely to agree, in that all of us experience our lives as being constituted by others, people (and sometimes nonhuman people) who occupy our minds and hearts.

In the previous essay, we say what ‘social’ means - it was a particular kind of relation between otherwise non-social beings. Further, we also saw that ‘political’ was a sub-genre of the social. Here’s the adapted version:

politics is the arena where social relations are worked out, especially relations of dominance.

What about ‘animal?’ Do we know what animal means? What can an animal be if it’s possible for some animals to be political? If we accept the claim that politics is the arena of dominance relations, then at the very least the animals we domesticate for food, entertainment and science are all political animals.

In the anthropocene, perhaps all living beings are political animals, including the virus that disrupted our lives the past two years. Except that in this case, there are mutual relations of dominance.

Which brings me to a modification of the Aristotlean claim:

Humans are planetary animals.

Remember that planet is a verb for us, which means that the ‘planetary animal’ is an animals constituted by planetary relations.

Natural History

Talking about animals, we are all used to depictions of their lives as natural history. I have always loved natural history - from reading dinosaur books as a child to watching David Attenborough breathe his syllabus into the Blue Planet. But we have a new conception of natural history that comes from a very different political quarter. Here’s Gramsci quoted in Climate Leviathan:

Marxists and other social materialists have always recognized the transformative power of labour working upon the material world and capitalists appropriating the surplus produced by that labor. What’s new in the left sphere is that the material world - which is dead and inert, mostly shapeless substance - is being replaced by nature, which has its own order. Indeed, one can historicize Gramsci by saying that getting to that relationship between society and nature where one can rationally plan for the future (hence making progress possible) is itself an outcome of millennia of human control over natural processes and bringing them to a stage where we can imagine the natural world mechanically and act upon it technologically.

In contrast, the climate leviathan will extend our domination of planetary processes, managing life on earth as a whole. We will do so through geoengineering among other interventions. Is that the future we want? Even more important, is this leviathan future capable of delivering a rational, planable world?

I don’t think so

Progress as a planetary scale is deeply ahistorical, forgetting that the plenty we currently enjoy was built on the backs of genocide and exploitation and ecological collapse. We need to historicize the climate leviathan if we are to imagine a truly better world. But what kind of history do we need?

Natural history, i.e., a history in which non-human natures have agency and power, and, in fact, a history in which what it means to be human is composed out of non-human elements.

How to do Natural History in a manner that draws from Gramsci as well as Attenborough? I have no idea right now, but it’s got to be done. Which brings me to the next book I will be reading after I am done with this one:

Wainwright and Mann’s answer takes them back to the foundations of the dominant political solution of the modern era - the state. Leviathan is the term coined by Thomas Hobbes to denote “Multitude so united in one Person” to form the “Commonwealth.” ‘Leviathan’ is a biblical term but Hobbes doesn’t use it as a mythical analogy. His speculations are trained upon a future reality, not a monster from the past.

on the basis of which M&W ask:

What will become of sovereign security under conditions of planetary crisis?

Note the use of the term ‘security’ and the conditions that lead to the need for security: crisis, risk, uncertainty. It’s these extreme conditions - this book focuses on climate change, but we can also add financialization, inequality, migration etc as well as non climate signs of ecological collapse- that prompt the new political order. And let’s not forget how the pandemic has made the crisis a lot worse.

The ‘reign of terror’ that started with 9/11 and led to several wars was fake in its inception (remember the infamous Colin Powell ‘evidence’ for WMDs in Iraq) but can now be read as an unconscious flex towards a future security regime. The authoritarian response to climate change is looking more and more attractive and I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a phase transition in the Republican Party in the US (and also from the Chinese and Indian govts) in which a permanent climate emergency is the basis for an explicitly fascist regime.

One of the constant complaints is that elites the world over - and most especially in the first world - have brushed aside the findings of the scientists. But the assumption is that their class rationality lies in listening to the data. I think that’s happening now, but not to the elite as a whole. One half of the elite is gearing up for the climate leviathan, a global technocratic climate politics that builds upon the capitalist system’s capacity to coordinate large technological shifts and political responses.

But the situation is so bad that the elite aren’t able to coordinate a joint response and instead are beginning to indulge in ‘end of times’ narratives. This wing of the elite may choose to let the crisis unfold before using the chaos as a pretext to create walled gardens around their interests. Pinkerton is selling private security services to the rich preparing for climate collapse.

Whether the Leviathan is liberal or authoritarian, planetary sovereignty is here for good.

Is sovereignty the right concept to generalize to the planet as a whole? M&W hint at another possibility:

Liberal, authoritarian and revolutionary span the spectrum of political responses to anything today. But what is this ‘politics’?

Got it: politics is where social relations are worked out. So what is ‘social’? M&W don’t answer that question, but we can cut and paste a paragraph from Latour’s “Reassembling the Social” to get to the definition of the social:

I like Latour’s definition of social because it doesn’t isolate a special regime called the social which lies over and above other regimes - mental, biological etc. Instead, it’s a type of connection between heterogeneous elements. Which brings me to the definition of planetary in planetary politics:

The planet is not a ‘thing’ which serves as a backdrop against which human politics is conducted - like when researchers use the term ‘don’t cross planetary boundaries’ when talking about human societies. Instead, the planetary is a form of connection, a way in which we are embedded in the world with many other beings. It’s the most expansive form of ‘being-with’ others.

Even better: it’s not planet, but ‘planeting,’ a verb that signifies how we connect one being to another in a planetary kind of way.

how do we live as inhabitants of this planet along with many many other beings? What institutions do we need to create to house our planetary selves?

We have never had to answer this question seriously before this century. Yes, many traditions, especially indigenous ones, have philosophies of respect when it comes to the non-human world, but it’s never been the case that our lives are so intertwined with those of so many other species in so many places.

Just as living in cities prompted us to cultivate civic virtues at scale - tolerance, for example - we will need to cultivate new virtues at a planetary scale. Restraint is an example: we have the power to eat up the resources of the earth but will we have the restraint to not do so? This new virtue only appears to be negative, i.e., a virtue that reduces our options - like telling someone to stop eating beef because of the emissions from cows. Just as the civic virtue of tolerance helps us live alongside strangers and by doing so, we enable new institutions such movie theaters that greatly enhance our lives, the virtue of restraint will help us create new planetary institutions.

Or so I think.

Nehru once said at the scene of an enormous dam:

Dams are the temples of modern India.

Back then we were building temples one by one in a few chosen spots. Being a progressive country, we have embraced decentralization in everything, including temple construction. Kedarnath 👆🏾 is one of the holiest of Hindu temple sites, way up in the Himalayas (~ 12000 feet), and many modern temples celebrate its holiness. Spot the temples in this picture 👇🏾

So many four wheeled temples celebrating the glory of the divine…..

I see why capitalism appears to many as a natural force - turn on the machine and parking lots fill up with cars in the remotest of places. In its overflow, capital leaves nothing untouched in its wake - some old bonds are broken and others are transformed beyond recognition.

Restraint is not one of capitalism’s virtues, for it assumes that greed and growth are unbounded; easier to imagine rover lots on Mars than a restrained life here on Earth.

The unstoppable force of capitalist ‘nature’ (which is really capitalist society….) needs to meet an immovable object, something that will tame its growth. There are two options:

1. Mother nature - i.e., the unleashed planetary furies that couldn’t care less if Amazon promised you a package within two days. Not a happy ending.

2. Some planetary institution that will broker an equilibrium between the force and the furies. Perhaps a Climate Leviathan.

In the Hobbesian imagination, nature is raw and cruel (should remind you of Tennyson’s famous lines: ‘Nature, red in tooth and claw’

‘Nature shrieking against the divine creed’ is one take on the relationship between humans and the non-human world. There are alternate visions. Traditional Hindus would have known of the awesome powers of nature, they would have hedged their bets by praying to animal, tree and mountain gods while also building safe harbors. But the Himalayan peaks were always present as the background against which we measure our lives. Who knows how many pilgrims died over the centuries on the long trek to Kedarnath from Soneprayag?

Will a Climate Leviathan continue to help us escape the state of nature? Will it be massive feats of geoengineering that a future Nehru will announce as the planetary temples? What planetary contract will form the basis of this new state?