modernity

At a time when the superstructures of human civilization seem terminally messed up – unable to address climate collapse, authoritarian capitalism, among many other wicked problems – I was thrilled to encounter a book that dares to imagine a fresh and compelling way forward. The book, Relationality: An Emergent Politics of Life Beyond the Human, is a big-hearted and poetic yet rigorous scholarly book.

On my latest episode of Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #68), I interviewed the three authors -- noted anthropologist Arturo Escobar and global studies professor Michal Osterweil, both at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Kriti Sharma, a professor of critical race science and technology studies at UC Santa Cruz. 

Relationality is not a treatise of policy prescriptions. It’s something more profound – an inquiry into the power of love and embodied presence as forces for liberation. It doesn’t look to politics, policy, or law as the primary levers for change, important as they are. Instead, the book confronts a more fundamental problem – our modern myths of the self and our dualistic assumptions about the separateness of everything. 

The book attempts to imagine how we might emancipate our very sense of identity, as forged by capitalist modernity, by focusing on our relationships with other humans and the more-than-human world. The authors argue that we moderns can reinvent ourselves and the world on very different terms, but this quest must begin at some deeper, inner places. 

They entice us into this process through poetry…  trying to imagine the “mind” of seagrass as it adapts to changing environment over deep time… describing the limits of cognition as a way of knowing….and exploring the ways in which modern capitalism actively produces individualism and nonrelationality.

I've always been fascinated by the striking affinities between commoners and Indigenous peoples, as well as their significant differences. Both are keenly aware of life as a deeply relational phenomenon -- one that Western capitalism, science, and market culture don't really understand. Both see commoning as a baseline for mindful living and presence, a process that can help transform the world in positive directions. 

And yet, while Western and Indigenous commoners share many values and practices, native cultures have subtle traditions and understandings that go back centuries, often millennia. They've grappled with some very different and dire challenges, including generations of horrific settler colonialism, genocide, and other traumas. Not surprisingly, Indigenous cultures are determined to reconstruct their cultures and, with the help of moderns willing to listen, heal the Earth. 

So while ancient and modern commoners may share a disdain for capitalism, ancient wisdom traditions bring much more gravitas and insight to the challenges we face than, say, politicians and political parties. That's certainly hopeful because personal transformation and cosmological narratives can be catalytic and lead to much-needed, broader transformation. There's a need for new bridges between Indigenous and Western ways of knowing. Humans will need to ground themselves in the Earth if they're going to learn how to arrest the planet's climate breakdown, and live more fully.

For all these reasons, I was excited to talk about these topics with Yuria Celidwen  on my latest episode of my Frontiers of Commoning podcast (Episode #57). Celidwen is an Indigenous scholar whom I met two years ago at the Garrison Institute, a center for contemplative practice in the Hudson Valley in New York State that also seeks to spur transformative social action. 

We moderns are so self-important that we’ve even named a geological epoch after ourselves, the Anthropocene. Sure, human civilization has massively transformed and destabilized the planet’s ecosystems. But Anthropocene is ultimately a misleading moniker because it implies that we humans are the driving force on Earth.  

How self-regarding! As a parade of wildfires, floods, droughts, and extreme heat are showing, it’s Gaia who is calling the shots. She’s making her own fierce, non-negotiable demands on us. She’s bursting the frames of order that humans have long used to shape civilization, capitalism, the state, and culture. That’s why Mihnea Tănăsescu, a brilliant Romanian-born, Belgium-based academic, urges that we instead recognize this geological era of Earth as the Ecocene.

Locked in our anthropocentric bubble, we humans have failed to see that we are deeply entangled with nature and not separate and superior to it. If humanity is to survive, it will have to learn how to get in sync with natural systems, culturally and economically, and actively contribute to the flourishing of earthly and human systems in tandem.

Hence the title of Tănăsescu’s 2022 book, Ecocene Politics. Our epoch is “characterized by the increasingly frequent intrusion of ecological processes into political life,” as the book puts it. If you can recognize this reality, it becomes clear that our politics, economy, and culture must actively learn new post-modern ways of being and doing, and adapt appropriately. That is the task ahead. Trying to shore up or restore the collapsing edifice of modernity is a fool’s errand.

Impressed by the precision and passion with which Tănăsescu addressed these issues, I spoke with him in Episode #43 of Frontiers of Commoning about his book. Tănăsescu is Research Professor of the Fund for Scientific Research at the University of Mons, Belgium, where he writes extensively about human relations with nature, drawing deeply on anthropology, sociology, politics, and law.

One of the big epiphanies that I had in writing Free, Fair and Alive with Silke Helfrich, was that a lot of political disagreements are not just about law, politics, or economics. They reflect fundamental clashes of worldviews. They are disputes about how human beings should or can relate to each other and to nature, and what types of societal institutions can support these relationships.

Seen through this lens, many public debates are actually about ontology – the way we understand human existence as it plays out in political and institutional arenas. Call it Ontopolitics – the ways in which basic conceptions about human life affect how we structure our political economy and culture.

For example, the climate crisis may register as a debate about international treaties and industrial practices. But these arguments are implicitly about the nature of human existence and community. Are we really rational, utility-maximizing individuals with no essential relationship to our fellow humans or the Earth, as standard economic theory claims (and as liberal political theory agrees)?  Or are we biological creatures nested within social collectives (“community”) with great capacity for cooperation and, as a species, deeply entangled with nature? Each conception of humanity implies very different sorts of institutions and norms. 

A number of us commoners wanted to probe this deeper, existential substrate of politics and policy.  So in September 2019, the Commons Strategies Group partnered with the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS) of Potsdam, Germany, to convene a deep dive workshop. The pre-pandemic event brought together eighteen activists, philosophers, policy experts, and commons scholars from eleven countries to meet for three days at Silke’s home in Neudenau, Germany.

We’re happy to report that a report synthesizing those conversations is now available. It’s called “Ontology as a Hidden Driver of Politics and Policy: Commoning and Relational Approaches to Governance,” by Zack Walsh and the Commons Strategies Group. Kudos to Zack for his primary role in pulling together the rich discussions into a readable summary! And a big thanks to the IASS for its support of this gathering and Silke for hosting it!

Five years ago, I agreed to speak on camera with Canadian filmmaker Céline Baril when I was in Montreal. It wasn’t entirely clear to me what the film was about except, loosely stated, the state of the world. I of course gave my overview of the commons. The film was released in 2017 in Canada, but it didn’t seem to be generally available otherwise, even on DVD. To my great pleasure, I recently discovered that Baril’s film, 24 Davids, has been picked up by Amazon Prime Video streaming.

I recommend the film, and not just because of my cameo role. It’s a compelling meditation on life with a deep emotional undertow -- a provocation to reflect on the hopes, anxieties, and realities of the world today as seen through the eyes of twenty-four people named David (or “Davide” or other variants) on three continents. I’m pleased to be among these other Davids, even if our shared first name is the mono-gender contrivance by which we’re connected. (Ah, but what was Baril’s methodology in choosing us?)

The trailer gives a nice sense of the tone and scope of the film.