The Planetarity Syllabus. Governing the Planet, Part 2b: Blake and Gilman's "Children of a Modest Star"
Introductory Note
Like last time, I have way too many notes on Blake and Gilman’s book to cover it from end to end; I have focused my remarks on the principle of planetary subsidiarity, which, along with a call for functionally delineated planetary institutions, is the most important contribution of the book IMHO. At any rate, this is not a book review, but a record of my thoughts as I was reading it. I am going to postpone my reading of the Gilman edited volume on “The Planetary” to next week, since its chapters connect themes raised by “The Stack” and “Children of a Modest Star.”
Narrow Planetary Institutions
Once upon a time, when the Gold Standard reigned over the world, every currency was pegged to gold. If I had gold reserves, it didn’t matter whether my currency was the rupee or the baht or the pound; I could buy something from you as long as I was willing to hand over an equivalent amount of gold to you. No need to convert my currency into dollars and send you a check in that denomination.
It wasn’t a perfect system. Far from it, for what if you didn’t have gold reserves? You were out of luck; when India became independent in 1947, it was owed a substantial amount of sterling debt (about 1.6 billion pounds), most of which Britain refused to pay in convertible hard currency - either gold or dollars - so India was unable to use what it was owed to buy machinery from the Americans, who were the only producers at that time. Then Britain devalued its currency by 30% in 1949, India’s capacity to import also dropped 30%, despite having no say in the decision. By the time the debt was repaid, devaluation and post-war inflation had reduced the value of the sterling debt to a fraction of its original amount. Not only did the British war effort cost India millions of lives (the Bengal famine was in part due to inflation caused by the RBI’s printing money to pay for the war), it perpetuated Indian poverty after independence. That great ‘liberal’ economist, Keynes, was adamant that Britain shouldn’t pay India back right away.
Never forget that the so-called defenders of freedom didn’t bat an eyelid as Indians starved by the millions, and their successors sent bomb after bomb to another defender of freedom committing a genocide of Palestinians in plain sight.
The Gold Standard is gone, and good riddance, but there’s still the dream that trade and finance should be denominated in something truly valuable. Wearing a planetary hat, we might consider pegging currencies to a commodity of some biogeochemical significance. What about carbon? Wouldn’t it be nice if currencies were backstopped by carbon? I thought so, and some years ago, I worked with my colleagues on a piece of design fiction called Carbonomics (now there’s a book on the carbon currencies!). Several iterations and modifications later, it became a private members bill tabled in the Indian parliament, but sadly, it never became the law.
Nevertheless, if adopted, a carbon standard - or a global carbon accounting system - would instantly embed our economies into planetary processes, and a global institution designed to manage that standard (and that standard alone) would be an example of a narrow functionally defined planetary institution that Blake and Gilman (BG henceforth) write about in their book. A carbon standard will likely violate their principle of subsidiarity, for money penetrates every scale from neighborhood to planet and - for example - devaluation of the carbon standard for planetary reasons will have knockdown effects on every village in the world, but that’s all the more reason to take BG’s architectural patterns seriously. Monetary tyranny is one of many forms of long-distance control and a legitimate fear if we ever create planetary economic institutions.
TLDR; The planet needs to be governed as a planet. We need institutions with teeth that can tackle planetary challenges at the only scale they can be tackled: at the scale of the planet.
But how? BG have some suggestions.
Excerpts from BG
In the previous essay on the Stack, we took a winding route to planetary governance, stopping to view several computational scenes along the way. Not so this time; we are going to make a direct assault on the peak, or as BG say:
What would governance look like if our planetary condition was central rather than ancillary to our political self-conceptions? What issues would become paramount, and how might this change our views?
Which would be a marked improvement over our current situation where
The present global system...was and is designed, therefore, to represent the interests of its member national states in international forums. It is fundamentally not geared toward addressing planetary challenges like pandemics.
I don’t want to keep you waiting for their answer, which they deliver before the asked the question:
The answer that we come to—a reconstructed governance architecture for the planet, or “planetary governance,” guided by the principle of planetary subsidiarity—is not meant to provide a quick fix. If realized, it will represent a thorough structural transformation of the means of governance from the largest scale, the planet itself, to hyperspecific, localized scales.
“Children of a Modest Star” isn’t lacking in ambition, but is that ambition realistic? What will it take to make it real? Not the right question; while BG aren’t utopian (“We have not set out to write some “kind of hope- lessly utopian ideal political theory [that] orients us toward an ideal regime that has no likelihood of being brought into being,””), they are also not afraid to be at the bleeding edge (“Yes, we push things further than they are currently willing to go, and critics will likely place us, with Landemore’s good company, “in the camp of . . . utopian and hopeless dreamers.” So be it.”). I read “Children of a Modest Star” as a form of design fiction, painting a future that could come to pass in our lifetimes. Or not. But like the Stack, it’s naming a development that can’t be unnamed once we have spoken it.
The reigning structure of multilevel governance is no longer adequate to the challenges of our current age, an age that some scholars have come to refer to as the Planetary....At the heart of the idea of the Planetary is a holistic vision of the planet as consisting of an almost infinitely complex interlaced and nested array of dynami- cally interacting biological, chemical, energetic, and geological systems.
That vision, which is fleshed out by an unprecedented explosion of knowledge about the Earth’s interconnected systems (Planetary Sapience, which we read about in the previous essay too), leads them to an ethical imperative:
our governance institutions must promote habitability in order to enable multispecies flourishing.
What’s the architecture of these habitability and multispecies flourishing promoting institutions? Much of BG’s book is devoted to answering that question. The key architectural principle is that of planetary subsidiarity:
The principle of subsidiarity states that authority within a pluralistic system of administration should be allocated to the smallest-scale governing institution capable of managing the task effectively.
And in its planetary avatar:
A key argument of planetary subsidiarity is that the condition of planetarity makes clear that the smallest scale at which planetary issues can be governed effectively is the planet itself.
The language of administration, tasks and scales suggests a form of planetary technocratic management, but BG deny that, though I am not convinced their architecture encourages politics instead of merely tolerating it. Regardless, politics isn’t their main concern:
In the end, of course, there is no escape from politics....And so this book, while primarily concerned with planetary governance, also underscores the need for a new form of planetary politics.
As not-so-utopians, BG want to arrive at the planetary by arguing that it’s possible to extricate ourselves from today’s suffocating governance architecture, of which the nation state is the dominant element.
Indeed, the position of the national state is “so dominant,” observed the sociologist Charles Tilly in 1990, “that anyone who dreams of a stateless world seems a heedless visionary.”
Let’s nod our heads in agreement, but if it’s design fiction we are after, why not start at the planetary scale? Do we still believe we can tame nature and subdue the Earth? Do we still believe we can flatten the planet with no consequences? -- no we don’t, so let’s roll up our sleeves and design for the planet.
First stop: the planet isn’t humanity’s inheritance to squander. If we want to promote habitability and multispecies flourishing, we have to start with a planet that belongs to all of life:
The global of global climate change, by contrast, frames Earth with-out specific reference to humans. This globe references a vast, unified system fueled by solar rays, whose most salient features are physical and biogeochemical processes: fluxes of gases, liquids, solids, and energy on and around the third celestial object from the Sun. This vision of the globe makes plain that Earth is not humanity’s alone.
Schmitt’s nomos is physical (previous essay), with boundaries made clear by walls and fences. But there’s no wall separating humans from other species; even our bodies aren’t ours alone - our gut microbiome contains more bacteria than there are cells in the human body, and the microbiome affects everything from our mood to our metabolism.
Not only is the appropriation of the Earth by humanity wrong, it is also a contradiction.
BG narrate how the planet emerged as a scale of concern, starting with Vernadsky’s Biosphere and with increasing urgency after the Club of Rome’s report on “Limits to Growth.” Here’s a representative sample of their reasoning:
Their prediction of “sudden and uncontrollable decline” generated a shockwave among those accustomed to the seemingly limitless growth of the postwar boom.The report helped to define a set of world-scale problems and problems of the world itself: it turned attention to “the carrying capacity of this planet” and whether human behavior at a global scale could “overshoot” it. But behind the environmental anxieties that Limits to Growth unleashed was an innovative perspective on the world. The report’s findings presented “the alternatives confront- ing not one nation or people but all nations and all peoples.” That is, they imagined the “planet as a whole.” And by doing so, they opened the possibility for, in the words of an endorsement on the book’s back cover, “planetary planning.”
The culmination of these developments is the crowning of humanity’s domination of the earth as a geological age, the “anthropocene.” Geologists rejected that label in 2024, but the phrase continues to live an unofficial life, and even if the anthropocene is purged from geology textbooks, it opens the door for planetary issues to take center stage in the near future.What are these planetary issues exactly?
Planetary issues are, at their base, defined by four core characteristics: they are critical to multispecies flourishing; they are enmeshed in the history of life on Earth; they operate on scales of time or size that are beyond direct, individual human experience; and they exhibit some degree of human involvement.
BG offer an institutional architecture for addressing planetary issues through their principle of planetary subsidiarity, which is a principle regulating multilevel structures from the local to the planet. They note that multilevel systems aren’t new:
multilevel structures have been increasingly common forms for the organization of governance within national states. Likewise, the current global governance system that coordinates among national states is itself a multilevel system. For nearly every important policy area today, decisions are made and poli- cies are implemented at multiple levels of government institutions and nonstate actors, with varying degrees of authority.
But an important level is missing!
Today, in particular, we lack planetary governance institutions—that is, institutions tasked with and capable of managing planetary challenges.
We can’t ignore that level because:
planetary institutions are the minimum viable organization for the direct management of planetary challenges. These are institutions with specifically delimited authority at the planetary scale over specific and specifically planetary phenomena.
Absolutely, but does this mean we need to be thinking about a governmental unit at the planetary scale, like the nation state is at the national scale? That would threaten a lot of entrenched interests at the national and sub-national scales, and besides the push-back from the current lot in power, a planetary Leviathan could easily become a tyranny with no hope of exit.
BG’s greatest design innovation, in my opinion, is to turn this challenge - of planetary governance without a planetary government- into an opportunity, and to argue that instead of planetary institutions being units (say a planetary government that has monopoly over violence over the entire planet with sub-units governing the land surface, the ocean surface and the atmosphere) we should conceive of planetary institutions along functional lines - i.e., institutions that perform a narrowly scoped function such as regulating a carbon currency. Instead of appropriating the Earth’s territory (thereby triggering nomos fears in the way Schmitt and Bratton argue), planetary institutions should address one planetary challenge well, and use the principle of planetary subsidiarity to devolve power to smaller scale governance units as needed:
we must learn to prioritize governance functions over governance units....Our argument, by contrast, is to begin with the issue or problem in need of governance and then consider all governance units that might have a role in the matter. The result of this fundamental rethink is that national states should give up many of their governance functions, tasks, and decision rights: planetary functions should move to planetary institutions, while many other functions should move to local institutions. The allocation of authority isn’t a one-time event, however; the system must be dynamic. Putting function first means recognizing that the appropriate unit or scale can change over time.
In the future, our idea of scale might shift away from its current administrative (district → state → nation) or Cartesian (millimeter → meter → kilometer) units to more ecologically or geophysically relevant units so that a watershed or a bioregion is the right unit of subsidiarity. Once we recognize that functionally defined institutions are not just for humans, but for multispecies flourishing, we will be led towards new entities - for example, should planetary institutions intervene between lions and zebras on the savannah, brokering what constitutes reasonable hunting? Don’t laugh at me, I am being serious!
Planetary institutions cannot and should not be confined to solving anthropogenic challenges.
It reminds me a lot of urban governance, which privileges functional service provision like waste collection and policing and differential of space by function - let’s say business district or green space - over territorial sovereignty. Mayors have a different job from chief ministers and presidents - it’s rare for a mayor to become a national leader in most countries with only three US presidents having ever served as a mayor. If design is what works, as Steve Jobs famously said, we want to design planetary institutions that work and get out of the way, instead of aggregating power. Perhaps what BG should have said, but didn’t is: let’s govern the planet as if it were a city, with citizens of all species.
An added bonus - if these planetary institutions work well as intended, there will be downward pressure to turn some nation state functions into standalone functional units (perhaps organized by bioregion or watershed instead of administrative boundary) and that will turn the state into less of a Leviathan - particularly important at a time when states are becoming more and more intrusive. Planetary institutions and their functionally defined responsibilities might offer a check against unit based tyranny at lower levels.
One can hope, though the desire to dominate never goes away.
Upholding the World
I’ll end these reflections with two thoughts:
First, a short speculation: are humans the right sapients to be running planetary institutions? We have poor attention spans; our capacity to ingest the massive amounts of data generated by satellites and other sensors is extremely limited. In contrast, AI is already good and getting better at the bureaucratic forms of reasoning we need to run planetary institutions - should they be the shoggoths who run the planet? Delimiting artificial institutions by functional goals will also prevent AGI overreach.
Even if these institutions aren’t entirely automated, the Stack must surely be repurposed to respond to planetary challenges? What kind of institution design do we need to make them happen? How do we fit other species into cybernetic institutions where nonhuman beings also have decision making power? What does a cyborg (in the sense of Donna Haraway) bureaucracy look like?
It’s very hard to predict, especially the future, but I just don’t see how to maintain metabolic order without cyborg institutions.
And a longer meditation: in turning the Anthropocene into a geological age, we highlight the deep impact of human activity on the earth’s biogeochemical systems - on nitrogen fixation, on carbon emissions, on biodiversity etc - but we also run the risk of naturalizing our planetary condition, of turning it into something that ‘just happens’ like the ebbing of the tides. Therefore, some authors like to call our age the capitalocene, emphasizing the role of the capitalist mode of production in the various compounding polycrises.
Both the anthropocene and the capitalocene are preceded by a primal act, the domination of the earth by humans; we can’t brush the brutality of this original act of appropriation in the name of a future law, or subsume that will to power under some system of exchange, capitalist or socialist. There’s no doubt that the planet needs governance, and some system of laws - or computational protocols - will constitute and constrain future planetary institutions, but we must first bear witness to what we have done first.
What does it mean to cut down forests in order to plant rows of palm trees or consign billions of sentient animals to a lifetime of cruelty in factory farms? Many centuries ago, the Mauryan emperor Ashoka looked on with horror at the carnage on the battlefield after his armies had defeated his Kalingan opponents. Ashoka did not hide the scale of the violence; instead, he immortalized his remorse in stone. In Rock Edict XIII, he admits that the war resulted in the killing of 100,000 people and the deportation of 150,000 others:
Directly after the Kalingas had been annexed began His Sacred Majesty’s zealous protection of the Dhamma, his love of that Law, and his inculcation of that Law. Thence arises the remorse of His Sacred Majesty for having conquered the Kalingas, because the conquest of a country previously unconquered involves the slaughter, death, and carrying away captive of the people. That is a matter of profound sorrow and regret to His Sacred Majesty.
We cannot erect planetary institutions without first acknowledging profound sorrow and regret for what we have done, of which destabilizing planetary metabolism is the greatest harm. The dharma of the future is metabolic as much as moral. I said this in the essay introducing the syllabus:
We are learning that social order depends on metabolic order: the maintained pattern of planetary and infrastructural flows that keeps a world habitable, and makes flourishing possible - not only for humans, but for the wider community of species entangled with us. Metabolic order is not an ideal. It is a working condition. It is what allows the social world to exist without constantly collapsing into emergency.
Thesis: The maintenance of planetary metabolic order is our primary collective task as a species.
It is literally the foundation for everything else. Habitability is no longer a background assumption. It is something that must be deliberately secured. Flourishing is no longer only a matter of rights, incomes, and recognition. It is also a matter of whether the life-support systems that sustain agency and experience can continue to function under stress.
That is what it is to uphold the world.